Yes, I rather think it would be better. PCs are great, but they have gotten to a point where they are stagnating the entire industry. Noone bothers with many other platforms, 99% of stuff is Wintel. (This isn't only because of PC modularity, I admit, a lot if it had to do with good marketing and aggressive advertising) So, are PCs good ? Brute performance wise, yes ... but all in all? No. There are 10,000 different manufacturers of chipsets, cards, components, etc, and somehow we expect that this mish-mash of components is supposed to just be optimised somehow. Unfortuantely, this is not the case. In reality, what happens is that PCs fall by default into the LCD mentality - lowest common denomenator, since there are so many different parts, brands, and components, it's impossible for them all to work 100% well with eachother.
A modern integrated scenario would arguably be a lot better. There'd be brands of computers for gaming (PS2 consoles etc already fall somewhat into this category), computers for scientific computing (Supecomputers, etc), and yes, of course there would still be PC-like computers for maximum flexibility.
What we have at the moment is a situation where integrated solutions do still exist, but are dwarfed by the PC market. For supercomputing, a lot of people are turning to clusters of PCs. For scientific stuff, a lot of stuff is being ported to the LCD platform: PCs. Yes, integrated solutions do still exist for games, science, and other departments, but slowly everything is being assilimilated into the LCD platform: The PC. This isn't a good thing, and it's the major part of the reason why I believe the computing industry is stagnating MORE than it would have if all this hadn't happened.
Still, though, the initial poster that responded to me had a point: Development is reaching a dead-end with PCs in any case. Speech commands/development might be a new avenue to explore, but I just don't feel that PCs in their current form will lend themselves to the maximum amount new ideas and innovation. Traditional PC mentality needs to be thrown out the window, and new systems need to be designed, as I explained in the first post, perhaps an idea would be to create a system accessible not only to humans, but to other species as well. This is just one idea. But the idea of a box on a desk with a keyboard and monitor has gone on quite long enough. For internet servers and mundane office work, I guess they're still the best (and economical) option, and *BSD and Windows are good choices respectively. For innovative stuff? Nope - let's see something new. Something that doesn't resemble the desktop PC at all. |
