Bored at Work

So one of the major problems with coding is that if you have more than about a half a dozen brain cells at some point one of them will revolt and go out and get donuts and coffee and totally distract the rest of them. And then a conversation will commence...

Are we talking about office workers or brain cells?

Anyway here's the thought, with the costs falling so rapidly I think it would actually be possible to put together a small FPGA board together to act as a small virtual PC with only ethernet and SATA peripherals (this whole train of thought stems from attempting to find PCI sata cards, many are simply 2 ports or else rediculously expensive). Of course designing the hardware is one thing, adapting software is another. The beauty of course of using an FPGA is a great deal of IP is freely available from companies like Altera.

Of course the task would likely be rediculous hard and I won't think about this again but here's the list of major milestones that would need to be accomplished.

a) build hardware (hahaha... easier said than done)
b) adapt gcc to be aware of whatever soft core used in the fpga. If done correctly this should be a non issue (for example the NIOS development kit already comes with a c compiler)
c) adapt a micro core of a well known and supported OS (good parts of this are already done in different fashions in the RTOSes)