low-end octane2? (was: Re: [rescue] octane question)

[Big Endian]

>On January 21, Big Endian wrote:
>>  Its a sad day.  But fewer and fewer of the general populace will get
>>  out of M$ as the years go by.
>
>   Are you kidding?  They're taking it on the chin for their security
>and reliability problems.  Finally.  Apple is selling Macs as fast as
>they can make them, the latest stats show that 40% of the people
>buying Macs at the Apple retail stores are first-time Mac users.

And yet CURRENT mac owners are abandoning the platform for windows. 
My aunt(59 years old) bought a mac 4 years ago.  Her friends use 
windows PCs.  She went out and bought a PC to replace the mac because 
she couldn't read the outlook only .pst and .eml files her friends 
sent her.  She doesn't know that OE can read them, she doesn't know 
how to update her computer to later versions of the OS.  She is a 
typical American Computer user.  Its sad, its a pity but not everyone 
has access to someone like us (my aunt lives in boston, I live in DC) 
to help them with their consumer issues.  They want what works w/ 
everybody else.  I say thats a Mac because I *KNOW* macs and I grew 
up in the culture of mac shareware to fix anything.  The people who 
don't have that knowledge and lack motivation to learn are what is 
keeping M$ in power.  Its also keeping people from updating to newer 
versions, see below.

>   The PentiumIV is DOA (I know of exactly ONE person who actually bought
>one), Merced is *years* late, the Windows XP licensing crap is pissing
>people off all over the place, I'm seeing ads for "NT to Unix
>migration services" in local rags.  I've been wishing for this for
>years, and now the world is starting to recognize the problem.  It's
>slow-going, but it's definitely happening.

Yes but NT is marketed at consumers, and XP is following the trend of 
new version windows adoption.  people said the same thing about 2k, 
and even about NT4 (oh, its only a shell update....).  The fact that 
M$ is the current choice has *HUGE* weight and people who are on the 
fringe are adopting new technologies now.  How many of the Fortune 
500 are using Windows as the primary desktop and workgroup server os? 
How many of them will change?  It has to start small but it also has 
to overcome the intertia that it already has to stay put.  People 
*ARE* buying P4s *BECAUSE* of the MHZ Myth to "" Steve Jobs.  I sold 
a challenge DM to a *VERY* Intelligent man who has MULTIPLE PHDs. 
He's buying the P4s all over the place so he can run a data parsing 
app written in perl (I support his choice of perl for this job for 
various reasons)  faster than his 440 U10 can do.  It *DOES* have 
users, people *ARE* buying it.  He's begining to see the power of the 
SGIs he has (3x indigo2 and the 4x150/1mb DM) as they start to 
visualize the 100s of GB of data that he's parsed on the p4s.  He may 
even start to use the DM for parsing but we'll see.

daniel
-- 
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"Fragile. Do not drop." -- Posted on a Boeing 757.