From a NY Times Bestseller

[Tom Buskey]

On 7/11/06, Christopher Chisholm <christopher.chisholm at syamsoftware.com>
wrote:
>
>
> Fair enough!  All of that makes sense to me.  Do you think that because
> the processors are now Intel perhaps more hardware will become available
> and thus damage the positive points that you've mentioned?  Or do you
> think that they will continue to use very proprietary hardware overall
> to maintain the same benefits they've always had?  Also, do you feel
> like cross-platform programming languages/APIs/etc could ever do as good
> a job at providing developers with an easy to work with solution across
> hardware and operating systems?


I think most vendors are trending towards more generic hardware.  The main
cost will be porting and certifying the drivers.

Sun uses ATI graphics cards.  Some of them the same as on PCs.  Also FC
cards, ethernet and SCSI.  There are also some 3rd party drivers for
OpenSolaris for certain ethernet cards that are not supported by Sun.  These
are much cheaper but I'm not sure I'd run them in production.  Of course,
90% of the Linux drivers are 3rd party :-)

I remember spending $1500 for an Adapted AHA-1742 EISA SCSI card for a
NetApp 1400.  The card was selling for $100-$200 at the time, but we needed
the certified card that NetApp would provide support for.  I saved that card
from the scrap heap when we upgraded to PCI based NetApps.

They might have some hooks in thier stuff.  Apple and Sun USB keyboards have
extra keys.  One for power on/off, alt-meta-apple-splat,
cut-copy-paste-stop, sound etc.

Other keyboards may work stock or require a setting in firmware.

It's really not much different from Linux drivers for hardware.  Someone
just needs to figure out the driver.  If it's not OSS, the cost depends on
how many will get sold vs the effort vs how much they can get away with.
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