By the same logic, it should be no problem to discarded 386sx based PCs running FreeDOS as an operating system for all your computing needs.
Yeah, a modern PC is horribly wasteful in terms of memory, storage, and CPU cycle usage. But that waste buys features (usability, for one) that are actually pretty important.
(Speech synthesis is an interesting example. When I first started fiddling with microcomputers, there were these phoneme based speech devices. In theory, you could construct any word by string together basic phonemes, and there was effort aimed at converting text to the appropriate phoneme string, efficiently (very hard to do with english!) The idea that a computer might have enough storage and memory to simply keep recordings of essentially every word in a language (or even single sentences) was ... inconceivable. Yet that is pretty much how it is done today.)
You may be 13 but that gives you no excuse. This kind of attitude is that which gets people banned on forums.
The Arduino (spell it right) is a microcontroller running at 16MHz. One of my crappy desktop computers is 1.6GHz (1600MHz). You think you can get an arduino to do the same things as that old thing? No?
The Arduino also has about a 500-1000 times less RAM than most people's computers.
You cannot create any kind of decent OS for it, it's hard enough doing a simple scrolling menu on a VGA monitor, let alone rendering even an image of a windows desktop.
Grow up a little, scrub your mind of this stupid idea and come back and think a little before posting.
yeah! he seems to post a lot without actually doing stuff
[edit]hmm just seen the profile 0 days since joining 48 posts that dont make much sense [/edit]
FYI: I have a good income and years of experience and even I cannot realistically afford an IPAD or XBEE's to be tinkering with.
Makermann: Be happy with what you have... and teach yourself how to use it.
Agreed.
I do have two series 1 XBees but they were second hand. I also currently have two of the brand new XBee Pro-ZB modules (which are cheaper than the older XBee Pro and better but they haven't been purchased for me, they're for a project I'm being funded for.
Yeah an iPad would be quite nice to fiddle with but I couldn't ever justify spending that much money on something electronic atm, especially as it's not something I need.
FYI: I have a good income and years of experience and even I cannot realistically afford an IPAD or XBEE's to be tinkering with.
True, but give it four or five years and he's likely to have more disposable income than most of us. First full time job whilst still being looked after by your parents is a magical time of 100% disposable income.
No, I'm afraid its a what-you-reap-is-what-you-sow situation. Your postings will forever to a permanent record here, even after you become a millionaire genius dot.com CEO.
The Arduino also has about a 500-1000 times less RAM than most people's computers.
I think you missed by a factor of 1000 or so. 1k-2k byte (~1e3) on an Arduino, 1 to 4 GB on a typical desktop computer (1e9) That's a million times more RAM.
Mind boggling, if you were around when 64K was "a lot" of memory. But not so much as disk space. At my previous job, we had put together a "BIG" fileserver (the "labrea" tar-pit) that had a whopping 4GB of disk space. Most of the 100-concurrent-user mainframes of that era (about 25 years ago, now) had maybe 1 to 2GB of disk.