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

[Dave McGuire]

On January 21, Big Endian wrote:
> 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 

  Well I must admit that you took me by surprise with this one.  I've
not seen any evidence of this at all.  And if I do, the person in
question will get dope-slapped.

  It sounds like peer pressure to me.

> 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 

  I'm not saying that the PeeCee will die by the end of the week, Dan.
That's not what I said at all.  If it happens, it will take *years*.
But I believe it will happen.  The days of the PeeCee being
universally perceived as the end-all be-all of computing are over.
Lots of people still think that, but it's not *everyone* like it was,
say, three years ago.  A few years ago, for example, the Gartner Group
couldn't get Gates' dick in their mouths fast enough.  Now they're
slamming the crap out of them.  And suits tend to listen to those
folks.

> *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.

  Oh great...buy the *biggest* PeeCee and compare it with the
*crappiest* Sun. ;)

>  It *DOES* have users, people *ARE* buying it.

  The P4 is getting *nowhere near* the sales volume at this stage of
its life as the P3 did at the same stage.  While I haven't done the
research to get specific numbers, I'd be rather surprised if the
numbers even lined up when adjusted for the falloff of PeeCee sales in
general.

>  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.

  It's good to hear that this guy is learning.

      -Dave

-- 
Dave McGuire
St. Petersburg, FL         "Less talk.  More synthohol." --Lt. Worf