PDP-8/L value

[Doc Shipley]

Dave McGuire wrote:
> On Jan 17, 2010, at 11:14 PM, William Donzelli wrote:
>>> I was talking about "new personal computers", not  cellphones, PDAs,
>>> servers, gaming consoles or derivatives thereof.
>>
>> Servers...beyond POWER and x86, what is there? Alpha and MIPS are
>> dead, the Unisys architectures are emulated, Itanium is stillborn, and
>> SPARC is on life support (with Larry reaching for the plug).
> 
>   You're right about Alpha, Mips, and Itanium, but you're badly 
> misinformed about SPARC.  It is neither on life support, nor is Larry 
> reaching for the plug.  In fact, he has publicly stated that SPARC 
> development will be *increasing*.

   The sad fact - and I currently admin more than a couple of Solaris 
servers - Sun is doing everything in its power to alienate its customers 
and become a casualty in the UNIX wars.

   Solaris 10 is a misbegotten joke, and Sun has changed the roadmap for 
the next version too many times for anyone to trust its placement in any 
large deployment. SXCE is dead as stone, and OpenSolaris is just Fedora 
with a different kernel and really shitty admin tools.

   As far as hardware goes, Fujitsu just might save SPARC, but if they 
do it will be in spite of Sun & Oracle.  As stands today, in terms of 
raw processing power, scalability, power/thermal management, and sane OS 
development, SPARC is 10 years behind POWER with no clear means of 
closing the gap.


	Doc