'My favorite platform' debate (was: Rack Mount Servers)

[Tom Buskey]

bscott at ntisys.com said:
>
>  Just adding a bit more fuel to the fire...  ;-)
>

 How rare on the GNHLUG :-)  I think this a useful thread of course.

>
>On Sun, 11 Aug 2002, at 8:39pm, Tom Buskey wrote:
>> One advantage Sun (& Apple) have always had over PCs is quality.  They 
>> are well built.
>
>  With the IBM-PC platform comes choice.  That includes bad choices.  There
>are a great many OEMs out there selling all manner of crap products.  Some
>of it is so badly designed or manufactured it actually causes harm to person
>and/or property.  However, there can also be found fair, good, and excellent
>quality products.  With single-source solutions (like Sun and Apple), you
>always know what the vendor is giving you, since you only deal with one
>vendor.  Of course, if you happen to *dislike* what the vendor is giving
>you, you are screwed.  I might add that a similar situation exists in the
>software world today....

Absolutely.  Certain combos don't work well either.  For instance, 
Windows NT/2000 runs very poorly on VA Linux boxes.  Or it did on the 
ones we had ordered at work for our lone NT guy (of a group of 20 unix 
bigots^H^H^H^H^H^Hguys).

I'm just pointing out good brands :-)

>
>> My Sparc 20 had a memory error for a month because I was too lazy to shut
>> it down & reseat the simm.  Can PCs do error correction like that?
>
>  Sure, with ECC RAM.  :)

Which is in (just about?) every Sun system.  It's harder to find in a PC.  
Early Macintoshes didn't have parity ram, let alone ECC.

>> you can install with a serial terminal
>
>  Assuming you have hardware with serial console support, and an OS that can
>handle it, this is quite possible on IBM-PCs as well.

I've seen "Real Weasel" (sp?) for PCs.  It looked pretty cool.  It was 
also expensive.

I'm not sure, but I think NetBSD can do serial console (& install?) on 
a PC.  I think you still don't get the BIOS stuff.

Another advantage of Sun is no interupts.  I think Macs have this too.
  
There's advantages to different platforms.  PCs have the latest & 
greatest releases because that's what everyone develops on & uses.  I 
remember when, in the Unix world, SunOS was the most common.  
Everything else was ported from the SunOS version.

PCs usually give the best cpu/$$ for integer performance too.  Do they do 
it in floating point nowadays too?

btw - my desktop system, where I ssh to my servers, browse, read email,
etc. is a laptop running Linux fwiw.  I like to have all the toys
installed.

-- 
-------
Tom Buskey