[rescue] Compaq Proliant 8000

[Charles Shannon Hendrix]

Thu, 29 Apr 2004 @ 15:17 -0400, Dave McGuire said:

> On Apr 29, 2004, at 2:59 PM, Sheldon T. Hall wrote:
> >PCs aren't very good, but they are inexpensive, popular, and hard to 
> >compete
> >with.
> 
>   I don't have to compete with them.  I just exercise my own judgment 
> and free will, and I....[wait for it]...
> 
>   DON'T BUY THEM.

Works great for servers, because you can get decent UNIX servers
relatively cheaply.

I think it is much harder to get a non-PC desktop though.

Desktop software eats a lot of CPU, video, and sound processing power.
That's what people want, and even I make use of quite a bit of it these
days.

I have a shit-box PC: 700MHz AMD K7, 256MB RAM, dual Adaptec 2940 SCSI,
nVidia graphics, emu10k sound, and misc other pieces.

A "real" workstation with even this much outdated power would cost
quite a bit.

You *can* build a PC that won't crash if you chose your parts carefully,
and in general it will run circles around any used workstation in its
price range, and even quite a few that cost a lot more.

Desktop power outside of the PC/Apple world is *very* expensive.

One thing that might help introduce people to alternative desktops
would be for people like this group to maintain a website listing
good workstation desktop setups.  Rate them in terms of their desktop
computing power, and try to keep tabs on the prices, what hardware to
avoid, etc.

Kind of like a low-end-mac for workstations.

There are a lot of workstation pages out there for course, but few give
you any sense of how the hardware compares with a PC running Linux or
*BSD.




-- 
shannon "AT" widomaker.com -- ["Meddle not in the affairs of Wizards, for
thou art crunchy, and taste good with ketchup." -- unknown]