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Date:      Sat, 25 May 1996 20:07:49 +0200 (MET DST)
From:      Philippe Regnauld <regnauld@tetard.hsc.fr>
To:        jkh@time.cdrom.com (Jordan K. Hubbard)
Cc:        hackers@freebsd.org (hackers)
Subject:   Re: The view from here (was Re: ISDN Compression Load on CPU)
Message-ID:  <199605251807.UAA07682@tetard.hsc.fr>
In-Reply-To: <8011.832959870@time.cdrom.com> from "Jordan K. Hubbard" at "May 24, 96 10:44:30 am"

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Jordan K. Hubbard écrit / writes:
> 
> Have I said enough bad things about PCs yet?  No, I don't think so.
> There's also the issue of Quality Control - two words you'll rarely
> see stuck together in the PC marketplace.  You've got SCSI controllers
> from Croatia plugged into motherboards from Togo talking to disk
> drives that were purchased during a $0.10-a-megabyte special the local
> discount merchant ran.  Several dozen failure-prone variables, at
> least half of which have probably never been tested in combination.
> 
> If you look at, say, an HP 735 workstation in contrast then the
> comparison is both striking and obvious - the HP was designed to work,
> the PC was designed to sell.
> 

	Just a word there: talking about 'serious' and industrial quality
	computers: even HP today does not offer the same robustness in its
	station/server casings: most of the stuff that comes out today
	looks like some kind of Mac case.  A friend of mine has got
	runnning, side by side, HP/Apollos and a couple of 715 and J800.
	How come the recent stuff looks like plastic, and *is* plastic ?
	There's not even half the shielding in those things that would
	make them qualify for industrial use.  Even their 'high end' servers
	look like they're desktop workstations (hell, they even have
	stereo outputs and hardwired mpeg decompression).  

	Just to say that it's not much better in the "Real Hardware" world --
	we *know* PC's suck (i.e.: I'm currently using a Tadpole pentium
	laptop machine - now, you know how serious their Sparc machines are:
	magnesium casing, heavy duty MB, etc.. - well this one is joke:
	we've already traded the machine twice(faulty parallel, dead battery
	controller), and they do NOT implement APM in any way! It's even
	shipped with Win95.  Ask Stefan the bogusness of their PCI 
	implementation).  But at least, while the 'serious' constructors
	are letting go on quality, PC makers are starting to make an
	effort, and you can see really usable industrial casings and
	components.  It's "only" a matter of where the hand-picking lies:
	you have to select the stuff yourself; there aren't many 
	people out there who offer quality-assembly/component PC's.

My 0.02 Euros. 

								-- Phil
	

-- 
+-------------------+---------------------------------------+-----------------+
| Philippe Regnauld |_______Herve Schauer Consultants_______| regnauld@hsc.fr |
+-------------------+FreeBSD - Turning PCs into Workstations+-----------------+






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