Re: 'My favorite platform' debate (was: Rack Mount Servers)
No, 2K is the lowest I've gone. We have a site license at work, but there is a problem with the key. I prefer Linux. [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Mon, 12 Aug 2002, at 9:09pm, Jerry Feldman wrote: You're probably correct. I don't see any benefit for a normal home user to get a 1.5Ghz Pentium 4 for $700. Heh. You've never tried Windows XP then. ;-) -- -- Gerald Feldman [EMAIL PROTECTED] Boston Computer Solutions and Consulting ICQ#156300 PGP Key ID:C5061EA9 PGP Key fingerprint:053C 73EC 3AC1 5C44 3E14 9245 FB00 3ED5 C506 1EA9 ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss
Re: 'My favorite platform' debate (was: Rack Mount Servers)
Early implementations of MS Windows were horrible. 3.1 was the first version of Windows that had any merit at all. All GUIs demand much from hardware. All are insatiable. Brenda A. Bell wrote: Since the introduction of Win95, absolutely... I was more thinking about the early 90's when Windows 2 and 3.1 demanded more from the hardware and everytime it got more, it was never enough... then comes NT which requires even more because its intended use is a business environment... none of these were really targetted for gaming platforms, but I believe their quickly increasing resource requirements paved the way. -- Jerry Feldman [EMAIL PROTECTED] Boston Linux and Unix user group http://www.blu.org PGP key id:C5061EA9 PGP Key fingerprint:053C 73EC 3AC1 5C44 3E14 9245 FB00 3ED5 C506 1EA9 ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss
Re: 'My favorite platform' debate (was: Rack Mount Servers)
[ This thread seems to indicate that the 'G' in GNHLUG actually stands for Geriatric... ] As for IBM and the 68K -- one of the initial PC specs was backward CP/M compatibility. The 8088 seemed a logical choice to fulfill this unfulfilled feature: everything the 8080 was, and faster, to boot. Those who ever wrote a CP/M program might appreciate this trivia: you can call 5' (the CP/M equivalanet of a syscall) in a DOS program and it will actually work because at offset 5 in the Program Segment Prefix (PSP, a reserved area) they were careful to code a jump to a jump to a wrapper routine that would leap off into some undocumented DOS code that eventually did something useful. I believe that a number of people had the notion that blind mechanical translation of CP/M binaries into 8088 binaries would be a less trautmatic way to transition customers onto the new platform so they arranged for certain hax to be introduced into DOS to support that. And I think there was also some effort to make some of the 8088 intruction formats, addressing modes and (damn them for eternity on this one) register sets similar to the 8080 to facilitate this same migration path... ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss
RE: 'My favorite platform' debate (was: Rack Mount Servers)
The 640 KB limit arose from the original IBM-PC design, circa 1980. Since the 8086 didn't even have a memory manager, hardware needed to be mapped directly into physical memory space, and IBM thought 640/384 was a good place to draw the line between software and reserved memory. Somewhere on the Internet there's an anthology of hilarious quotes... I believe it was someone from IBM who said why would anyone ever need more than 640K RAM in a personal computer. I don't think anyone knew what was going to happen in this space. As much as I hate to give them credit for anything, I believe Redmond is greatly responsible for the kind of PC hardware we have today... Windows 3.1 was a hog, but people wanted it and the hardware vendors did what they needed to to keep up. ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss
Re: 'My favorite platform' debate (was: Rack Mount Servers)
[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
Re: 'My favorite platform' debate (was: Rack Mount Servers)
On Mon, 12 Aug 2002, at 9:52pm, Erik Price wrote: I remember my first Macintosh. It did not come with a hard disk! Just a floppy drive. Why, back in my day, we didn't even have keyboards. We had to chisel the characters into the screen! And we liked it! ;-) -- Ben Scott [EMAIL PROTECTED] | The opinions expressed in this message are those of the author and do not | | necessarily represent the views or policy of any other person, entity or | | organization. All information is provided without warranty of any kind. | ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss
