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Technology Stocks : How high will Microsoft fly? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: jim shiau who wrote (9672)	7/26/1998 12:58:00 AM
From: ed	Respond to of 74651

Unix run on PC, so what ? If there is not enough application softwares to run with unix which is run on PC. I still can not forget the nightmare of the high expense of maintenance and and technical support chargedby SUN when I had my own SPARCII workstation couple years ago. The clock started to run when the technician left the company (SUN) to the job site which needed support, and you are charged by hour, and all minutes were rounded to hour , and even the technician did not do anything to hav your problems fixed, you are still being charged by the hours, and the charge is very high.

To: jim shiau who wrote (9672)	7/26/1998 9:30:00 AM
From: aeakos	Respond to of 74651

it's probably been posted but just in case: From... Researchers build flea-market supercomputer July 9, 1998 Web posted at: 12:20 PM EDT by Stan Miastkowski (IDG) -- Lots of advanced PC users--especially those handy with tools--build their own computers from standard parts and pieces. It's kind of the 1990s equivalent of tinkering under the hood of an automobile. And it does allow you to build powerful PCs at bargain-basement prices. But a do-it-yourself computer now working in New Mexico definitely sets a record. The computer--dubbed Avalon--was put together by researchers at Los Alamos National Laboratory, a U.S. government installation that conducts advanced scientific research. They assembled the system in three days using off-the-shelf parts bought retail. Avalon is far from a PC. It is, in fact, a true supercomputer, one of the 500 fastest in the world. Avalon uses 68 Digital Equipment Corporation Alpha processors connected in parallel, and its operating system is Linux, downloaded for free off the Web. Instead of the multimillion-dollar price of most supercomputers, Avalon came in at the bargain-basement price of $150,000. It's now crunching away on scientific data at 19.2 billion operations per second, many orders of magnitude beyond even the most powerful and expensive PCs. A Los Alamos spokesperson says that Linux is the key to Avalon's success. After six weeks of operation, stressed well beyond its theoretical failure point, Avalon hasn't crashed once.

To: jim shiau who wrote (9672)	7/26/1998 12:09:00 PM
From: Charles Tutt	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74651

Oh? See: wwwwseast2.usec.sun.com Times are changing. JMHO.

To: jim shiau who wrote (9672)	7/26/1998 9:02:00 PM
From: Mike Milde	Respond to of 74651

<< It isn't the hardware but softwares run on Unix are expensive. I used to be a Unix software developer, and I paid around 50k for a C++ compiler, a Sybase DB, and Frame word processor, and a purify debuger. >> Please compare apples and apples. How many developer seats, etc.? What was inadequate about the cheaper alternatives that run under many flavors of UNIX? How much of a load did you have to support? Was this a single user, lightly loaded system, or did you have to scale it to many servers and thousands of simultaneous users??? Mike