[rescue] OT: FeeCee rescue

[Derek Andersen]

Jonathan C. Patschke wrote:
> On Tue, 30 Sep 2003, Derek Andersen wrote:
<snip -- entirely too many (good) points>
> In short, it's an entirely different mentality.  You can take all the
> components out of a PC (arguably omitting the CPU or at least replacing
> it with a Xeon) and make a workstation out of it, so long as you dump
> the BIOS, leave back-asswards compatibility behind you, get off that IRQ
> brain damage, and modernize the expansion buses.  Theri's nothing about
> the x86 (aside from its abhorrent shortage of general-purpose registers)
> that makes it worthless in a workstation.

Fair enough.

> What Apple (and Sun and SGI and IBM) have going for them is that they
> sell you the total package.  The OS, the computer, and pretty-much
> everything you plug into it was either designed by the same company,
> designed under the supervision of the same company, or designed to a
> modern operability standard not dictated by the OS, but dictated by the
> people who designed the computing platform.
> 
> They sell you an experience.  PC manufacturers sell you a box of parts,
> and, if it breaks, you get to keep both halves.

Okay, I can understand why that would be attractive. However, at this 
point, I'm willing to put enough effort into my few PCs to make them 
worthwhile, if only because I can't afford to do otherwise (i.e., I can 
either have old/cheap Apple/SGI/Sun/etc. hardware or I can have 
occasionally annoying x86 hardware that's actuallly fast enough for my 
needs). I realize that many others either aren't willing to put up with 
that or can afford not to, but I don't really have much choice.

(Besides, I need *something* to play games on. :)

I've only gotten into SGI and Sun stuff fairly recently (I am, as I've 
mentioned in other threads, still in college), and only because I could 
get reasonably usable hardware cheaply (i.e., I could afford to buy a 
used O2); the only other real option for an 'experience' like the one 
you describe would've been Apple hardware, and I've had little real 
interest in that until recently (i.e., OS X). I'm slowly moving towards 
doing all of my 'real work' on non-x86 platforms, but I doubt that I'll 
ever be able to abandon the platform entirely.


Derek Andersen