| ??? 12/19/08 00:02 Read: times |
#161042 - Yes, times are changing. Responding to: ???'s previous message |
Andy Peters said: Those are all applications in which a substantial interruption in input data flow is tolerable. If I have to receive a modulated signal, demodulate and decode it the PC, operate on it, modulate the result, and transmit it back to the channel corresponding with that from which it came, all within a predefined window, those pauses are totally intolerable.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. It's difficult to drive over a cheap cable, but since there are cables capable of being driven at 10 Gbps, it would not be inconceivable to drive 32 of them. That wouldn't necessarily be at 10 G cycles per second, but certainly at 25-50 MHz. They were able to do that with SCSI! 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. I've looked at 'em. I even have some of NI's stuff on hand. I certainly didn't mean to suggest that there are no useful products that use USB. Yes, lots of useful products connect via USB. I've not seen any that have to have the computer's attention for more than a fleeting moment, however. I'm thinking that it may take two USB channels, one in and one out, and a really large FIFO buffer to compensate for those half-minute pauses. 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 ...but I liked the way things worked in '88 ... which, BTW, was before Windows3.x. BTW, we tried scan-rate conversion between a truly high-end video display system and NTSC, using a MAC, and we could do the job using a 68012 with the aid of a DSP, but not on the MAC of the time, which had a 68030 (?) and a DSP on a NuBUS card. The MAC implementation relied on software in place of hardware so much that it only ran at applications an equivalent rate of about 2 MHz. When we ran it on the 68012 at full speed, ( the 68012 had a few more address lines that the 68010 lacked ) we were able to make the conversion in real time. It was a onesie, and it worked to the customer's satisfaction. That experience, in combination with many other experiences with Apple products, persuaded me to ignore Apple products in the future. They always seem to lean toward play rather than useful work. I haven't had any cause to change my mind ... yet. It's sad that there's such a big market for that sort of thing. Those who like that stuff get what they deserve, I guess. I hope they enjoy it. I just wish it didn't impact the PC vendors and Microsoft so much. The PC was, for a decade and a half, quite a useful tool. RE |
