On Fri, 03 Oct 2003 08:32:12 -0500 Kent West <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Desktop usage/tinkering. I wanted Solitaire to have the cards fly by > faster than a speeding bullet; I wanted Mozilla to pop up faster than IE > on their dorm computers; I wanted zippiness. The card motion in the solitaire game is probably moved at a fixed rate using timers. There's probably an option in the preferences to turn off the fancy card motion or make it faster. But anyways, using an ATI graphics card in a sb1000 is like putting tricycle tires on a Ferrari. Stick a creator3d in there if you can. > It's apparently just a matter of unrealistic expectations. I haven't had > a lot of experience with Sun; a couple of years ago when I started > working with Sun/Solaris/the SB100s, I was expecting great machines; > after all, this is Sun! It's got a 600mhz cpu in it, what in the world do you expect? For ~$300.00 USD it's very easy to put together a P4 multi-GHZ little desktop machine that's going to blow your sb1000 away. And you're going to be able to use a bazillion more apps than on your Sparc. That's the facts of the market today, everthing is commoditized to the tilt. Sun's still asleep at the wheel, and while McNealy continues to complain about how Dell and others are "parts suppliers" his company's market share and technology slowly sinks into a black hole. > "Like wow! Why didn't we just purchase much cheaper Athlon boxes > and get more for our money?" Like wow, why didn't you. I'd never waste my own hard earned money on Sun hardware, the only reason I have so many boxes is that I've gotten them all for free during my years of development. Look, do the math, the cheapest lowest end Athlons you can even buy on the market today are in the 1.2GHZ range (and these are for laptops). This means that even if your 600Mhz UltraSPARC-III could execute twice as many instructions per cycle as the Athlon (btw it can't), they would perform about the same. I only hack Sparc64 for two reasons: 1) I find it aestetically pleasing to hack it in assembly. 2) Continuing to maintain the sparc64 kernel helps quickly find portability problems in changes that are made to Linux in general. My 2-processor sb1000 is fast enough for my work, all I do is edit code and crank out kernel builds all day long.
