What Would Be Your Dream Machine?

isaachulvey asks: "If you could put together your dream machine with any components you want, what would it be? Obviously price is not a factor here or we'd all be putting together 800 MHz systems with 128 MB of RAM. This is your dream machine, so be creative, go as over the top as you need, remember overkill is not a crime."

Linux compatible

[linvir]

All I want is a machine 100% compatible with my Linux distro of choice. If I can have that, I don't care about the specs.

talking computers ftw

[uber-human]

I would want it to talk, kinda' like HAL, only without the killing people part. Oh, and it would have a sexy female voice.

Re:The absolute ultimate dream machine.

[NayDizz]

Yeah, and output it to two of these [gizmodo.com]

big apple

[St. Arbirix]

Go max out a Mac Pro on Apple's site... it's $20k.

I could use that.

Re:800 mhz?

[Soul-Burn666]

A friend of mine just recently upgrade his P2 266mhz to a P3 667mhz and he's quite happy with it.
Guess what? It runs WindowsXP quite well, he can surf the web no problems and play the awesome games that were released at that era and a great number of new small games you can get from the net, including his mmorpg of choise (runescape).
I don't really understand it, but I guess he knows what he's doing.
He does have PS2 and a couple of really cool board games tho.

Yeah; my dream is for someone else to spec it

[JavaRob]

My dream machine has exactly the hardware, peripherals, network connection, etc. that I would come up with, if I put in the enormous amount of mind-numbingly boring time to track down the indisputable best combination of components (and they all have to be compatible with each other...) for my future usage patterns.

It would run the OS that I would select after having tested perfectly-tuned and personally-configured versions of every OS and variant, plus all possible OS extensions, add-ons, enhancements, etc. that are out there.

It would have all of the software that I would select after exhaustive testing, preinstalled and configured just the way I'd like it, if I spent the time tinkering with all the options and exploring every little subfeature and 3rd party extension.

I'm dead serious. I spec'ed out a new computer a couple of years ago, and I'm enough of a perfectionist that it damn near sucked the life out of me doing all the research. And I love the configuration flexibility of many OSes and development tools, but the sheer effort required to *find* that perfect configuration is horrific.

Re:Motorola 88K Harvard Architecture Data General

[networkBoy]

I too was thinking retro. I'm torn between wanting a fully loaded and totally decked out (functional) PDP/11 or a Cray Y/MP . . .
but if you want the imagination station:

I want a computer with the following specs:
numa memory
1024 bit vector math units (128 of em should do)
64x64bit CISC processors (core two duo EE)
a couple dozen of those multithreading jobbies from sun
and a full memory addressable array of spartan FPGAs ready to go.
For disk I would like 1TB of DDR2 ram battery backed with redundant controllers with lazy write back to FC disk as working disk and 64TB as archive disk.
64GB of numa flat memory should do the trick for all those CPUs (give each one a dedicated gig as well)

That, along with a really cool OS (open BSD perchance?)
oh, and I want a wall o monitors (6 or 12 [2x3 or 3x4 array] 22" wide screen deals).
-nB

just one more thing....
remember those really old memories that used the persistence of phosphor as memory in a CRT? I want one of those glued on capable of showing the stack of any given CPU as a bitmap, cuz that'd be cool.