[SunRescue] Tim Ranting

[Tim Hauber]

rescue at sunhelp.org writes:
>  Not necessarily.  Comparing MIPS is almost as useless as comparing
>MHz.  My recollection of those days is somewhat faded, but back in
>1991 or so I had a 3/60 and an i386 of some sort (DX25, maybe?) on
>my desk...the '386 box ran 386BSD 0.1 (remember that?) and later
>Linux.  The 3/60 (running SunOS 3.5) was consistenly faster for my
>applications, which were software development in C and running SPICE
>to simulate analog circuitry.  I wound up using it almost all the time
>because of the speed and video quality.
>
>
>               -Dave McGuire
>>Warning, RANT<<

Comparing any numbers between architectures is like comparing RPM on a car
motor.  What I have seen of Sun stuff, any high end eqivalent age platform
can beat it doing normal stuff one thing at a time.  Even equivalent era
i86 stuff can beat the Sparcs for "home" level apps.  Of course, when you
throw in a couple users, and a dozen prcesses that actually do something,
the i86 stuff begs for mercy, and the Sparc just settles down to work. 
The differences in architecture make comparisons useless unless they are
very specific, such as "It takes 37 minutes to render xnumber of frames of
320x240 video, while FTP and HTTP servers are getting ~20 hits an hour and
I am eating a bologna sandwich"  change any of the variables, and your
comparison is no longer valid.  For example, my wife's new Athlon 700 has
the fastest click to run time for ofice type apps of any machine I have
ever seen (Win98 :-( ) but doing a simple 9 minute AVI to Quicktime
conversion too enough longer than realtime that I went and did something
else (and the Quick time codec shipped with the ATI all in wonder 128
suck!)  where I know other machines that would take longer to launch Apps,
but could have done the video conversion in real time or better.

For my basic email and web and word processing machine, I'll take a Mac,
or a PC, but I'll never run a full time server on either platform (well,
those G3 servers...) An old server machine from any of the good server
architectures, IBM, Sun, HP, DEC, still will outserve a much "faster"
desktop architecture machine, and much more reliably.

for desktop machines the biggest factor in usability is not performance,
but user perception.  I had a friend give me his fastest machine, (a P100)
and keep his faithful 486 because he liked it better,  had nothing to do
with performance, had everything to do with his emotional attachment.  I
knew a lady who used a C64 to generate puzzles for the Dell crossword
people for years, she actually had to run stuff through her printer twice,
once for boxes, once for letters.  She was happy, and liked it.  Can't get
too much less efficient than that.  

Look at the attachment most of you guys have to your preferred
platforms/OSs, we have guys that will give away Sun4 stuff because they
like their Sun3s, is it for performance?  Is it dumb? Well, those same
guys might be able to produce more volume on faster hardware, but it
wouldn't be better quality, and they would be less healthy.  

Now the point that has been growing through this:

How many people are emotionally attached to Win3.1?  How many people are
attached to MacOS8.1?  Win95?  Win98?  But there are people out there
happy on SunOS, or OS/2, or DOS3, or AmigaOS.

The difference is in the Companies attitude toward software.  Ever since
Bill Gates saw a mouse, he has been trashing and rewriting his GUI every
two years,  nobody has time to get proficient before the marketing monster
tells the world to upgrade to Windows xx.  Steve Jobs has caught it,
aren't you getting tired of  "a whole new Mac for $99" every time he
changes the Mac interface?  Of course Steve has hardware loyalty in his
favor.  A real OS never throws out the whole shebang, they constantly
evolve, and they evolve in the real world.  The OS in a box OSs also
evolve, but the do it in deep dark dungeons, and all we see are two years
worth of evolution without any user input  all at once.  

Linux. The poster child of  open developement.  Great OS, it can morph to
any platform,  it can solve any problem, there are enough users developing
it in enough ways that you can always find someone working in the
direction you want to go.  It can fit on a single floppy, it can span a
thousand servers.  Now redhat hires developers and puts them in a dungeon
and neatly boxes major releases for sale at Sam's Club.

I really think the whole problem started with mass advertising in the car
industry.  How many years did Henry make the model T without a significant
change?  How about the Beetle (the real one, not the flavor of the month
new one)  Now we actually have distinct half-model year cars!  How cheap
would a car be if they were still using body stamps from the 60s?  If 
instead of spending a bazillion dollars developing a new motor, they just
kept improving the old one?  I am not saying progress is wrong, I think
the desire for change is wrong.  A desire for improvement is great, but we
are obsessed with a desire for change for the sake of changing.  Sure, an
iMac is cute, but what if Apple had built it around the 5500 Chassis?  All
the sudden the $1200 iMac, is a <$1000  iMac, because they didn't have to
retool and do all the material design work.  And then, they totally
redesigned again, for the iMac rev. D or whatever it is.  Compare this to
Campbells soup cans.  They have made little changes over the years, never
a major rebuild, lets see, the metal is thinner, they are now stamped
cans, bottom is one piece, instead of a tube with two tops.  They still
open the same, they stack better, they hold the same label, they are
recognizable and have a loyal following.  They have never changed for the
sake of changing.  Pop cans same thing, they ditched the old pull off tab
for ostensibly safety and litter reasons (cheaper!) before that they went
to a one piece can with a top, like the soup people.  They went to a deep
domed bottom to prevent bursting in the freezer or on the dashboard in the
sun.  Now they are following the lead of the beer companies and going to a
wider opening, every change had a valid reason, some economical, some
ergonomic.  Why did GM change the styling so radically on the camaro? 
wasn't the 80s model ugly enough?  Why is every consumer computer company
coming out with radical rounded computer cases?  do they work better than
a rectangular case?  They do cost more, and break easier.

OK, you get the point.  How in the world did I get way out here?

Tim