[rescue] your next Solaris machine ??? (Sol/x86 booting on iMac)

[Patrick Giagnocavo]

On Fri, 2006-04-14 at 16:48, Micah R Ledbetter wrote:
> On Apr 14, 2006, at 11:11, Patrick Giagnocavo wrote:
> 
> > The PPC apologists are never going to admit the truth: PPC is
> > effectively dead as anything other than an embedded platform (and IBM
> > proprietary stuff is just as much embedded as anything else).
> 
> I don't understand why you consider IBM workstations to be the same  
> as other embedded platforms... You can run a real OS, have access to  
> a regular CPU/plenty of RAM/no disk constraints, and it's as  
> expandable as a Sun or HP or Alpha ever was. What's embedded about it?

IBM's focus is not on technology, they are about delivering a solution
to the customer. They have chosen POWER as the means to that end.  

The customer doesn't care what they run, it is about the solution that
is being provided.  That is why no one complained when they changed
later AS/400's to PPC; it wasn't a tech issue, just a business one, and
since they didn't break binary compatibility, "no harm, no foul".

I said "embedded" because IBM wraps proprietary stuff around POWER and
then provides a solution.  See how tight they are with OS/400 and AIX
media, especially for larger systems, if you are not the original
purchaser as an example.

Maybe it wasn't the best choice of words if you consider that sometimes
embedded means low-power or cost-reduced (which I did not intend to
imply).  

I meant "embedded" as "part of the solution, stuck deep inside and
essentially invisible to the user" - just like you don't care about the
PPC403 that is in your Ford.

No one (of any size) sells POWER based systems aside from IBM, unlike
Microway and Cray did with Alpha, Fujitsu, Cray, et al did with SPARC,
_____ does with x86 and x64.

My $.02 ,

--Patrick