| ??? 12/18/08 17:48 Read: times |
#161034 - work it Responding to: ???'s previous message |
Richard Erlacher said:
Using PC's for useful work is becoming increasingly difficult, as the PC drifts in the direction of the MAC, focused on entertainment rather than computing. Entertainment is a vital goal, but compromising the other useful characteristics of an otherwise powerful vehicle just to promote gaming, audio/video distribution, and communication is, IMHO, terribly shortsighted. So you don't consider high-end video editing and rending, and digital audio production to be "useful work"? Get over yourself, please. I have to agree with Andy, that additional hardware might be desirable. It's necessary, because the Cypress EZ-USB FX2 and other similar devices expose a simple SRAM-like interface, and it's doubtful that anything real is a simple SRAM. You have to add logic to actually do something useful. In fact, a wide parallel interface with wide bandwidth to the PC might be desirable for general purpose interfacing. Define "wide bandwidth." The reason for serial links is that at some highish frequency, it becomes almost impossible to send a parallel data bus any significant distance. PCI at 66 MHz is difficult enough on a PC board; forget about driving it out a cable. PC's are capable of processing such data links, but their interfaces to the outside world, particularly since the advent of USB, which is cheap, profitable for the manufacturers, but very limited in its applicability to "useful work", limits such practical usage. Dunno what world you live in, but there are a lot of useful products that connect to the PC (or Mac! or Linux!) over USB. Look at a National Instruments or Measurement Computing catalog. Just because YOU don't want to learn how to develop a USB device, and because it doesn't do what YOU want it to do, it doesn't mean that the concept is crap or that others aren't actually doing real work. Sorry, Richard, it's 2008. Stop wishing you lived in 1988. -a |
