[rescue] Small servers (was Re: WTT: 1.5G of PC2700 for 1G of PC100)

[Mark]

On 4 May 2008, at 21:16, Shannon Hendrix wrote:
>
> On May 4, 2008, at 12:47 , Carl R. Friend wrote:
>
>>  I'm fighting a rear-guard battle at $PPOE to retain Solaris-on-
>> SPARC that I expect to lose in the next year or so.  Sun's pricing
>> on the SPARC gear is out of line -- performance-wise -- with what
>> can get done on an x86 system, and my argument about not wanting
>> to jump on the monoculture bandwagon doesn't seem to hold much water
>> in a world of completely non-technical Management.
>
> I fought that battle for a long time and basically lost.

Damn Apple, even thos bastions of supercomputing, Cray, are forming an  
Alliance with Intel:

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080429-in-depth-intel-cpus-gpus-and-upcoming-cray-supercomputers.html


> Even Apple has gone to the dark side.
> Pretty much 99.999% of the industry is clueless about exactly what  
> it means to lose multiple platforms.


where $fittest = "Makes most money" {
	$_Dominance = survival($fittest);
}

The old evolution thing works in mysterious ways when you warp it  
around business but it still works... Beta was better than VHS, HD-DVD  
had advantages over BluRay (not being owned by Sony was one). They  
didn't all survive for whatever reasons. The reasons are rarely  
rational, but always fatal.

x86 will dominate until something more viable springs up, like  
dynamically recodable CPUs (software as hardware).

> Almost no living programers today would even know how to write code  
> for a machine that was not based on 8/16/32/64-bit 2's compliment  
> CPUs and not too many more have any idea how to deal with a machine  
> that is not Intel based or running a video console.

Present company excepted, I surely hope ;)

>>  Sooner or later, some creative type *will* come up with an x86
>> piece of "malware" that's cross-platform and will target the under-
>> lying CPU; heck it might be in the wild already just waiting for a
>
> You know... in a way I hope someone does.  But them, instead of  
> learning from it, the world would probably react by making things  
> even worse.

I'll be able to check my e-Mail and browse the web from my RS/6000 or  
my U60 for a while yet, I'm not that worried ;)


-- 
Mark Benson

My Blog:
<http://markbenson.org/blog>
Visit my Homepage: <http://homepage.mac.com/markbenson>

"Never send a human to do a machine's job..."