Return to BSD News archive
Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.carno.net.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!news.mira.net.au!news.vbc.net!samba.rahul.net!rahul.net!a2i!olivea!news.sgi.com!news.msfc.nasa.gov!newsfeed.internetmci.com!netnews.nwnet.net!symiserver2.symantec.com!usenet From: tedm@agora.rdrop.com Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc Subject: Re: Solaris vs SunOs Date: 28 Aug 1996 08:18:24 GMT Organization: Symantec Corporation Lines: 230 Message-ID: <500vcg$a22@symiserver2.symantec.com> References: <4vabsr$4mt@usenet.srv.cis.pitt.edu> <4vf6dq$sgj@panix.com> <4vfist$kv@hermes.acs.unt.edu> <4vji3t$6f1@symiserver2.symantec.com> <4vsofi$ngd@qnx.com> Reply-To: tedm@agora.rdrop.com NNTP-Posting-Host: 198.6.34.2 X-Newsreader: IBM NewsReader/2 v1.2.5 In <4vsofi$ngd@qnx.com>, doug@qnx.com (Doug Santry) writes: >In article <4vji3t$6f1@symiserver2.symantec.com>, > <tedm@agora.rdrop.com> wrote: >>The one thing about HP and Sun though that people forget is that they are >>Unix hardware vendors. The real future of Unix is Unix running on Intel >>chips, not Unix running on somebodies idea of a super-risc proprietary as > >Can't agree here at all. Unix has a heck of a future running on everything >from Cray to Sun and SGI boxes. > Of course there are going to be those hardware vendors that are going to continue to sell closed hardware, and port Unix to it. However, those minority solutions are not going to displace the PC. You are confusing the premise of my arguement. I assumed from the original poster that their use of "computing" meant "desktop computing" My arguements make sense from that perspective only. Since FreeBSD is written for the PC it is by default a "desktop" OS, even though there are a lot of people out there (myself included) that routinely use "standard desktop style" PC's as servers. I think you know where I'm coming from so I'll suffice to say that my comparison is between the IBM-PC architecture running some form of Unix, against the so-called "Unix Workstations" such as Sparcstations and such. >>all get out hardware box. That's the old idea of Unix, and it is a terrible > >Why is Intel "open"? Because they sue people for reverse engineering their >instruction set? Because they sue people for using the x86 "name"? Why is >Intel "open"? They answer to no commitiees or any kind of public forum. > >>anchor in acceptance of Unix in the corporate arena. Did I say Intel was "open"? I believe those are your words, not mine. In so far as there is a commonly accepted definition of "open" in the computer hardware market, then yes I would say that Intel is "open" While you cannot buy clone Pentium chips, both Cyrix and AMD produce passable processors that apparently run the usual Intel binaries. (like FreeBSD) A long time ago the US Government forced Intel to get in bed with AMD so as to "second-source" processor chips. Well, maybe the government has given up on this idea, but it has no less validity. AMD and Cyrix exist because a lot of corporate types like myself buy their CPU's to save money. If Intel were as truly as closed as you say they would never drop their prices until they have wrung the last drop of blood out of their customers. > >>How many times have you talked to people who think that Unix cannot run on >>the 386, 486, 586, 686 chip PC's? I've talked to lots of people like that who's only >>exposure to Unix is some Sparcstation with a monitor weighing 200 pounds sitting >>on it that is totally incompatible with any VGA monitor ever produced. With > >VGA *sucks*! And one might argue that VGA is "incompatible" RGB type >monitor drivers. Why should the whole computer industry use VGA? Cuz IBM >kludged, er, developed it? Yes it sucks, but nobody these days runs a VGA monitor in VGA resolution (640x480) unless their in text mode. Once again your attempting to confuse the issue. The fact is that there are so-called "VGA" monitors for sale these days that are exactly the same size and better resolution than those 200 pound Sun monitors, and cost less. And, there's adapters to make them run on the Suns. At least, 2 years after I buy the computer I can go on to reuse the "VGA" monitor (assuming I get a good one to begin with) with a new machine. With the Sun monitor, unless I get a new Sun I throw the monitor away. Considering that probably only 10 companies on the face of the Earth make 99% of all Cathode Ray Tubes in all television sets and computer monitors these days I fail to see what the gain is to encase the identical picture tube in a box with a funny connector on the back. (unless you want to lock in your market I guess) > >>that kind of backing it is no wonder people are running to NT. > >Totally unsubstantiated. I've been hearing this for years and still don't >know anybody using it. Even os2 out sells it by a hefty margin. > The computer market has proven time and again sales mean shit, it's the perception, stupid. I use NT and OS/2 every day, as well as BSD. I dislike NT very much, it is about the most boring operating system there is aside from DOS. I have used OS/2 ever since version 2.0 and I have watched IBM's marketing people fumble around with commercials showing a french farmer walking in a pig field and very little increase of OS/2 sales result. Certainly not enough to inspire many major ISV's to develop for it. Right now Microsoft has far less sales, but there are more stupid Venture Capitalists throwing their money away on startups that are thinking they are going to make it big in the NT software market, then in the entire history of OS/2. The other bad thing that I see is more people are buying NT for servers than are buying OS/2 for servers. While OS/2 can be served the same from OS/2, Unix, NT, and Netware, if a companies entire server network is NT then that means that it's admins are eventually going to be all pro-NT, and in most companies excrement flows downhill. This didn't happen with Netware because there was no desktop OS from Novell. >>People like HP and Sun want to sell workstation hardware, nice, incompatible, > >"incompatible" with what? Intel is "incompatible" with SPARC and powerpc. >What is your point? > >>hardware that cannot be repaired by the local PC chop-shop, must be > >Those clowns couldn't repair a calculator. All they do is replace stuff, >not repair it. > >>carried under an expensive service contract, and is obsolete a year later > >And Intel PCs really hold their value too. What a joke. > >>necessitating an expensive upgrade to a new hardware box. They run Unix on > >Still using your 386? No, a 486? No? Pentium? Pentium Pro? *All* vendors >are constantly coming with new faster systems. > All I know is that I can call up any one of a hundred companies in Computer Shopper and have a new PC motherboard, memory and disk fedxed out the next day, and replace it _myself_ with an hours worth of work for a tenth of the cost of doing the same thing with a Sparcstation motherboard from one of those Sun resellers that specialize in such stuff. If I have a hundred PC's lined up that I want to do the identical thing to I can pay a local yokel to do it cheap. Even better, the obsolete motherboards are still valuable on the used market. Hell, the employees are usually tearing down the doors to buy that stuff off of you. Have you ever heard of anybody buying a used Sparc IPC motherboard? >>there because they were able to liscense the source from AT&T years ago, >>they are not software companies, understand. > >Sure they are. Ever hear of a little company called SunSoft? A whole >business division dedicated to software. HP, IBM etc. all are software >and hardware companies. In fact, companies that only sell the OS(not the >hardware) are a new phenom., a result of the Intel mass market. > There are Software Publishers, Hardware Companies, and hardware companies that want to be software developers. Actually, looking at the history of the desktop market at least, there has always been a separation of the hardware companies from the software companies. Part of this is because of the mentality of "if our hardware products go down the tubes we can always fall back on writing software" (as if software somehow magically writes itself), part of it is the lure of trying to lock your customers into your product. >>The fact is that the risc-vs-cisc processor arguement died a long time ago, > >You sir, are not well read. When did this happen? You might want to tell >all the jounrals and researchers working in this area so they can "get on >with their lives". > >>cisc has overwhelmingly won, and now with the advent of the PCI bus the > >Amazing! Really, truly amazing! What the hell are you talking about? > >>proprietary-workstation-hardware vs the Intel-IBMPC hardware arguement > >Why isn't "Intel-IBMPC hardware" proprietary? > >>is dead as well. > >What planet are you on? > CISC chips have taken most of the good stuff that gave RISC the advantage and so there is not as much difference anymore. In any case, the biggest advantage of all the RISC workstations was not the CPU, it was that they all used fancy high-speed busses that would run rings around the miserable speed of the ISA bus. >>It's like Apple Computers. Everyone knows that the day that the MacOS >>gets ported to the IBM PC is the day that Apple sells their last Macintosh >>computer, that is why a MacOS port to Intel will never happen. The same is > >Mac hardware is also tons easier to configure. You buy a print and you plug >it in. Easy. PC hardware is nightmarish with its IRQ conflicts and DMA >quagmires. > Of course, a closed proprietary solution is usually going to be easier to configure (unless it's designers are really stupid) because that is the biggest reason that people buy proprietary hardware - because it is easier to deal with. As far as the PC being hard to configure, so what? A corporation usually buys PC's in large lots. When every machine is the same it is cheaper to have a technician figure the configuration issues out on ONE machine and use it as a template for all the rest of them. >>true of HP/UX, at least Sun is making an attempt to leave an escape hatch > >You think people buy HPs to get HP/UX? But they really want Intel? They >buy HPs for power/$$$ and put up with HP/UX. > >>for themselves, although it's always interesting to me how much better >>Solaris runs on Sun hardware than the competition's. > >I'm going to guess that you are one of those folks whose exposure to computing >consists of word-processing and maybe some visual-basic programming. There >is more to the world. Not everybody is going to use Sun, nor is everybody >going to use Intel based stuff. Nobody has built a hardware/software >combo yet that does everything everybody needs. Till then, there is room >for lots of machine vendors and software vendors. > >DJS And I'm going to guess that you have little or no experience with large networks of machines, or large corporate installations of machines, basically anything where there are a lot of machines that are the same all together. I'm sure that you like your SGI, or Sun or whatever it is that you have. However, the cold hard facts of the matter are that people have a certain amount of computing that they need done, so many CPU cycles as it were, and their stupid if they think they can make a logical business justification for spending lots more money to do it. Maybe there are some protected industries, like the tennis shoe industry, or the soda-pop industry, which roll along on pure marketing, and have such obscene margins that they can afford to go out and isolate themselves from reality and buy everyone a brand new Sun or SGI every year. Most other businesses look at it from a pure cost justification, and if they can save 70% of the cost of the computer and lose 15% of the functionality they are going to do it. Fortunately for us Unix-lovers, the jury is still out on whether or not there is a definite, significant amount of savings on using one operating system over another, that is why Unix is still alive, it is in the running with all the other OS'es. However, the hardware market has definitely spoken, and it is Intel on the desktop.