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

[Joshua Boyd]

On May 4, 2008, at 4:16 PM, 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.
>
> 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.

Writing code for 18 or 36bit  may be mostly a lost art.  But there  
are many many programmers writing code for many platforms still.  I  
see no end of work being done on both 8 and 32 bit chips, and I see a  
lot of people working on non-x86 platforms with no graphics.

I would imagine that the leading platforms are probably actually ARM,  
PPC, x86, then MIPS.

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

I just saw an amazing example of that.  A box that should just be a  
video appliance, but it requires an internet connection to verify  
it's license with the manufactor every boot.  And this was a device  
that is supposed to be going into flight packs and mobile trucks.  Is  
every news truck that the local station puts out really going to  
supply an internet connection to a video processor?