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

[Shannon Hendrix]

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.

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.

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.

>   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

[ snip ]

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 am not looking forward to the day where a simple sysadmin
> needs the equivalent of a T-1 line just so he can deal with the
> GUI-only interfaces that are taking over.  Give me a nice simple
> serial interface (like OBP) any day of the week over glitz, splash,
> and flash.

Same here.

I love the convenience of something like my Mac's software update, but  
I hate the fact that I'm dependent on it and a fast network connection  
to make it work.

This is only the tip of the iceberg though... a good portion of  
software today WILL NOT EVEN RUN without a network connection.

That's just pure stupidity.

-- 
Shannon Hendrix
shannon at widomaker.com