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Technology Stocks : All About Sun Microsystems -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Stormweaver who wrote (18493)	8/5/1999 9:32:00 PM
From: QwikSand	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 64865

I just ordered a DSL line for my house, to replace my ISDN line that has never worked very well during the six years I've had it. I'm going to have 768kbit download speed and 384kbit upload speed (and the upload speed doesn't really matter much anway). Now, as it happens, this line will be shared using an inexpensive Cayman 2E500 router among the 6 computers in my house, including my Solaris, Linux, NT and Win98 boxes. I'm getting rid of all my ISP e-mail addresses (well most of them) and I'll finally get a domain name and run my own DNS and mail servers (on Solaris, by the way, not NT: I want to feel confident of getting my mail). So for my particular techie/geek needs, 768k bits is not a huge excess of bandwidth from the outside world. But it ain't chopped liver, and I can raise it to T1 speeds by paying a few more bucks a month (which I can afford since I own quite a bit of SUNW stock <g>). But imagine if I just had a standalone PC with 768k coming in. The cost for the DSL ISP account is on the same order as a 56k modem. If I were putting together a setup for an ordinary user who had 768kbps coming in, I would be thinking: if only an ISP would hold my file space securely, and provide downloadable Java apps, servlets and web-based applications, then an NC with a powerful CPU and a USB port and a little printer would be all I would ever want. No local hard disk here, no rescue floppies, no tape drives, no IRQ's, no defragmentation, no "FAT'S", no bus slots. No more phone calls "Oh hi Grandma...what? You have a dialog box with the word 'error' followed by some hex digits again? Are you sure you remembered to take your pills this morning?" James, you account for half the posts on this thread (which in all sincerity you should really stop doing, by the way), and you simply don't have an argument at all. All the stuff you defend is like everything else in the history of computing: done wrong because when it was invented resources were too expensive to do it right. The PC is not something you would design if you started from a clean sheet of paper today...it's a super-suboptimal artifact of past limitations. It's a sculpture crafted from a series of low points on various cost-performance curves. Whether the SUNW "Corona" turns out to be a piece of crap or not (and yes, I certainly do have my doubts), this change is happening because it has to happen. It is inevitable. You can reiterate the same list of attributes of the past and/or the status quo as many times in as many posts as you want. It won't stop the world from turning. Give it a rest already. You really should. Regards, --QwikSand