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

To: Stormweaver who wrote (16314)	5/12/1999 4:02:00 AM
From: QwikSand	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 64865

This is why PC's are used in most offices Charles; because they are cost effective and allow people to be productive. If this is true, then why is Windows famous for crashing often, and Unix boxes famous for crashing almost never? That's the whole story. PC's allow people to waste as much time as they save: trying to reconcile buggy software and drivers from a million sources that by simple arithmetic can't possibly have been tested together, figuring out what to do when you run out of interrupts, dealing with "lost clusters", defragging disks, rebooting out of hangs, re-installing Windows when the so-called "registry" gets screwed up, and on and on. Go into Fry's and CompUSA and see half the "high-quality components" on the shelf with re-stock stickers on them. People can't make them work. The most amazing thing about PC's is that they work at all. They are what they have been from the beginning: pieces of shit, and that goes double for the M$ software that runs in them. I apologize for the foul language, but it's "le mot juste" in this case. Unnecessary failures of PC's from various infelicitous combinations of crappy hardware and crappy software is in fact an enormous net drain on productivity. Unix boxes use a smaller number of higher quality components (faster busses, better memory subsystems, tighter timing tolerances) that are all designed to work together at design time, not screwdrivered together and "burned in" for 20 minutes. They use software that is actually professional software, rather than the toy software that allows a program to crash the operating system. Is that quality, James, when a program can hang the machine or crash the operating system? Pet rock? Comparing a PC to a Sun workstation is like comparing a totalled Yugo to a new BMW. I myself saw an article on the front page of the Wall Street Journal a few years ago about it costing $25,000 per year per seat to maintain a PC in a corporate setting. Not compared to anything, that was just the cost. I also read an editorial in PC Magazine last year (which, it being 1:00am I'm not going to take the time to hunt for the reference, you'll just have to trust me) in which the writer, one of the honchos at PC Magazine, said in effect, "You know, it's just a good idea to reinstall Windows every once in a while to clean things up, because every Windows installation just naturally degrades over time." Does that sound wrong to you? It sounds right to me, and this came from a leading Wintel cheerleader. I've never heard anybody say that about Unix, at least not in the last 20 years. Your "logical" numbers are simply wrong. You ask others for sources, and then when you are asked for them you claim to have arrived at your numbers by "logic". Doesn't sound very logical to a person like me who has used PC's since the day they came out. Regards, --QwikSand

To: Stormweaver who wrote (16314)	5/12/1999 4:33:00 AM
From: Charles Tutt	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 64865

Logic is fine, but it has to proceed either from facts on which we agree, or at least from alleged facts that are supportable; you have not presented either, IMHO. Logic is not simply restating a foregone conclusion over and over in the hope that somehow it will eventually be accepted by those with contrary views. The TCO of a PC is (using your word, as defined by you) outlandish; the support for that conclusion is in the Gartner numbers. You have not presented any evidence that the components in a PC are equal to or better than those in a Sun workstation, and you have not addressed design issues (such as memory bandwidth) or software reliability that are important in a workstation context. What you present are nothing more than your opinions. Too bad, so sad. Frankly, I find most of what you post unworthy of a reply. PC's in offices for the most part replaced typewriters and early word processors which were also cost effective and allowed people to be productive; your assertion is empty vis-a-vis Unix workstations. JMHO.