[rescue] RE: Sun / Linux LX50 -Rebuttal

[Gavin Hubbard]

[ On Thursday, September 19, 2002 at 14:16:40 (-0600), Charles J. Killian
wrote: ]
> Subject: RE: [rescue] Sun / Linux LX50 -Rebuttal
>
> I think that we all have to be very careful here.  You, I, and
> everyone else on this list are techies.  Things that matter to us are
> of no consequence to others.  Most everyone I know simply care that
> they can get their daily work done.

True enough -- but most of those people could probably get their daily
work done with the equivalent of a modern Apple ][/e if not less,
especially if infrastucture upgrades had kept in line to provide the
centralized services necessary to really make efficient use of such
simple hardware and software.  Heck lots of people do get buy with PDAs!

> I agree that from a pure technical view, and maybe politically, the
> average user of a PC/Windows box is getting screwed, blued, and
> tattooed.  OTOH, if documents get typed, emailed, printed or whatever
> successfully most folks simply do not give a rat's behind how, or if
> the technology is old, broken, bent or whatever.

The problem isn't really the broken technology that everyone uses.  Even
the ordinary folks mostly agree that it's nowhere near as good as they
think it should be, especially once they're shown where the problems are.

The problem is they just go out and buy a bigger newer model with even
more complicated and broken stuff in it.  I.e. even when people upgrade
they never move to something better -- they always seem to move to
something even more complex, more error prone, and less productive!

Those "trillions of dollars of waste" aren't my own figures -- they come
from several different and all highly respected people.  So far as I
know the industry doesn't really dispute them either (other than with a
lot of hand waving, smoke, and mirrors).

> The best example I can give is the family car.  Other than a few
> purists, and I am one, most folks do not care if they have the latest
> Burpfire 2000.

But the waste doesn't come primarily from the family computers -- it
comes from the orders of magnitude more computers on the desktops of
corporate America.

It's as if every company gave every work an SUV to drive and they
upgraded them to the latest model every year or two and instead of
selling the off-lease models they crushed them!

Now admittedly the newer computers are ever more energy efficient than
even newer SUVs might ever be, but still....

>  All they want to do is get in, turn the key, and go
> to where they want to go.  The same holds for users of computers, and
> most other things too.  Frankly, most users of computers would do
> well with a Pentium running at 266 mhz running Windows 98 (gawd, that
> is ugly!).  All they have and want is a glorified typewriter.

I happened to be doing some contract programming at Canadian Pacific
Computers & Communications back when they were successfully runing one
of the first truly paperless offices on 8088's and 286's with MS-DOS and
some of the first true client/server applications I helped work on.  I
remember the day the VP of C&C rented a big conference room at a local
hotel and had all the employees over for a big pep talk about technology
and that's when he announced they'd be upgrading everyone's desktop PC
to a 386 and eventually moving to the then-new M$-Windows.  Now
admittedly the 386 was a much better platform -- it could have run Unix!
However they didn't have to do it in one fell swoop, and in the end they
mis-used it to the N'th degree and the users wasted enormous amounts of
time re-training on software that made their jobs even harder to do.
That scenario has since been repeated almost verbatim several times over
in almost every corporation on the continent, if not on the planet.

You'd think we in the computer business would have learned something
from the mistakes of the automobile business.  After all we have managed
to "improve" the raw computing power and energy efficiency of our tools
by many orders of magnitude more than has happened with personal
transportation technology.  However at the same time the computer
industry has "improved" on the auto maker's idea of planned obsolescence
by similar orders of magnitude!

The contrast between the managability and ease-of-use of Sun's own LX50
and SunFire-V100 is a perfect example of how much better things could be
if people really wanted them to be.  Even if the LX50 has the Pheonix
ServerBIOS with it's so-called serial console support, it'll either cost
the $300 for a PC-Weasle card to make it come anywhere even remotely
close to being as managable as any sparc server, and especially the
likes of the V100 and V120 with their always-on LOM processors, or it'll
cost whatever it takes in KVMs and other headaches.  The stupid thing is
that the LX50 and the similar machines it competes against in its class
are designed for high-density server applications where remote
managability is an absolute 100% necessity!  Oddly it seems the SF-V120
is similarly priced against the LX50.  :-)

Now if only NetBSD would boot on the SF-V1x0's -- then we could also get
rid of the unnecessary overhead and complexities of SunOS-5.9 too!  :-)

-- 
								Greg A. Woods

+1 416 218-0098;            <g.a.woods at ieee.org>;
<woods at robohack.ca>
Planix, Inc. <woods at planix.com>; VE3TCP; Secrets of the Weird
<woods at weird.com>

--__--__--



Greg

Although I agree with most everything you say above, I will add my 0.02 to
one thing:

<<
However at the same time the computer industry has "improved" on the auto
maker's idea of planned obsolescence by similar orders of magnitude!
>>

Planned obsolescence is what makes the rescue list so exciting. If
computers retained value in proportion to their worth, I know for sure that
I wouldn't be able to get the deals I do. 

You've probably seen some of the posts where I've found some amazing stuff
e.g. HP V2500s, DEC AS8400s, SGI Origin 2000s. All are wonderful systems
and I feel extraordinarily privileged to have personally owned and
maintained some of them. 

As my grandmother says - please be careful about what you wish for. You
never know, it might come true (-:

Regards,

Gavin