[Arm-netbook] ppcnotebook

[Christopher Havel]

Ugh, PowerPC? Whenever I hear /anything/ about that particular
architecture, my mind leaps (with a profound groan) to the old PowerMacs of
the late 1990s and early 2000s. IIRC the reason that line died was part
popular idiocy and part architecture limitations -- PowerPC couldn't scale
its clock cycles fast enough to match x86's stuff, regardless of actual
performance and comparisons thereof (to the extent that they can be made!),
and people wouldn't buy them as a result, because they thought that clock
speed in hundreds of MHz (and, eventually, in GHz) directly correlated with
performance and capabilities the way horsepower does (for the most part)
with a car, even though clock speed hasn't worked like that basically since
computers stopped being the size of file cabinets... as a local friend of
mine pointed out, a 1MHz 6502 can run rings around a 4MHz Z80 (and,
probably, a 4.77MHz 8086!) -- and that goes back to the mid- and
late-/Seventies/!

To be fair, the friend I mention is a Commodore /nut/ and thus rather
biased (as am I, in the same direction, albeit somewhat less so... I've
become rather more fond of the RCA CDP1802, as of late... ah, but *that*
architecture was weed-baked-sloth kinds of slow...).

So from my perspective, PowerPC was a flash in the pan, and now it's
basically irrelevant. Sort of like Ralph Nader, you know? He had his
fifteen minutes (a couple times over, really -- first with the Chevy
Corvair, and then again when he ran for President in 2000) but they're over
now and these days he's basically all alone in the corner by himself
because he's old news. I've not heard of anything both innovative and
relevant being done with PowerPC since Apple dropped it like the
radioactive potato that it was... so forgive the extreme skepticism here
and now as well.

Mind you, I'm not saying that that project should dry up and blow away -- I
don't think that, even for a hot minute -- but I really don't think their
choice of architecture is wise, nor do I think they're going to capture
even a meaningful portion of the /hobbyist/ computing market, and that's a
niche kind of a segment to begin with... not to mention that popular idiocy
with regard to technology is at an all-time high and climbing fast (ugh ugh
ugh)...

Hey, I've been wrong before. Maybe they're /totally/ the future of
computing and they start this huge revolution that completely changes
everything forever and kills off x86 and Windows the way x86 and DOS
knocked off CP/M and 8080/Z80-based computing. Or... not. /My/ money's on
"or not", and that they either fizzle out without anyone else really
noticing, or spend their efforts only to become instantly mired in
irrelevancy, or (most likely) some unfortunate combination of both -- but I
guess we'll just have to wait and see, to know for sure...

...good lord, I'm only 31 and I'm already turning into that
overly-opinionated uncle everyone has at their holiday table that just
can't shut up about, well, dang near everything... I'll pipe down for a
while now. (Sorry, everybody... maybe I really do need one of those
On-And-On Anon twelve-step meetings for people who just can't shut up...)

...we now return to your regularly-unscheduled programming...