[EMAIL PROTECTED] said: > > Just adding a bit more fuel to the fire... ;-) >
How rare on the GNHLUG :-) I think this a useful thread of course. > >On Sun, 11 Aug 2002, at 8:39pm, Tom Buskey wrote: >> One advantage Sun (& Apple) have always had over PCs is quality. They >> are well built. > > With the IBM-PC platform comes choice. That includes bad choices. There >are a great many OEMs out there selling all manner of crap products. Some >of it is so badly designed or manufactured it actually causes harm to person >and/or property. However, there can also be found fair, good, and excellent >quality products. With single-source solutions (like Sun and Apple), you >always know what the vendor is giving you, since you only deal with one >vendor. Of course, if you happen to *dislike* what the vendor is giving >you, you are screwed. I might add that a similar situation exists in the >software world today.... Absolutely. Certain combos don't work well either. For instance, Windows NT/2000 runs very poorly on VA Linux boxes. Or it did on the ones we had ordered at work for our lone NT guy (of a group of 20 unix bigots^H^H^H^H^H^Hguys). I'm just pointing out good brands :-) > >> My Sparc 20 had a memory error for a month because I was too lazy to shut >> it down & reseat the simm. Can PCs do error correction like that? > > Sure, with ECC RAM. :) Which is in (just about?) every Sun system. It's harder to find in a PC. Early Macintoshes didn't have parity ram, let alone ECC. >> you can install with a serial terminal > > Assuming you have hardware with serial console support, and an OS that can >handle it, this is quite possible on IBM-PCs as well. I've seen "Real Weasel" (sp?) for PCs. It looked pretty cool. It was also expensive. I'm not sure, but I think NetBSD can do serial console (& install?) on a PC. I think you still don't get the BIOS stuff. Another advantage of Sun is no interupts. I think Macs have this too. There's advantages to different platforms. PCs have the latest & greatest releases because that's what everyone develops on & uses. I remember when, in the Unix world, SunOS was the most common. Everything else was ported from the SunOS version. PCs usually give the best cpu/$$ for integer performance too. Do they do it in floating point nowadays too? btw - my desktop system, where I ssh to my servers, browse, read email, etc. is a laptop running Linux fwiw. I like to have all the toys installed. -- ------- Tom Buskey _______________________________________________ gnhlug-discuss mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss
