Unemployment on the Rescue List? (was RE: [rescue] FS: SGI

[Devin L. Ganger]

On Mon, Sep 29, 2003 at 04:19:47PM -0400, Dave McGuire wrote:
 
> On Monday, September 29, 2003, at 04:13 PM, Devin L. Ganger wrote:

> >   The days of having to blindly reboot Windows to fix every little
> > problem are gone.
 
>    Well, the problem is simple.  Even if this is true, the user base has 
> been trained to do that for years. 

This, sadly, is true, and it is also true that too many problems that should
be fixable by stopping and starting the affected services really require a
reboot to clear bad state.

> The user base has also been trained 
> that "anything that's not x86 is bad", and hence the failure of 
> Itanium.

Oh, I think that for once, Itanium failed because it was a crap implementation
that didn't offer enough benefits to justify abandoning the x86 compatiblity
safety blanket.  It'll be interesting to see how Opteron fares in the market.

> The user base has also been trained that "anything that's not 
> Windows is bad" hence the otherwise inexplicable proliferation of the 
> platform.

There are lots of reasons for why Windows proliferated despite being
a less mature environment.  I refer to the Beta vs. VHS situation; in that
case, though, it was much simpler.  However, the same basic premise is at
work.

Mind you, I'm not going to extend the metaphor enough to identify the
killer app analagous to that which hastened the rise of VHS. :)
 
-- 
Devin L. Ganger <devin at thecabal.org>
"Aikido is based around the central precept of letting an attack take its
natural course.  You, of course, don't want to impede that natural flow
by being in its way." -- overheard on the PyraMOO