Date: Fri, 24 May 1996 10:44:30 -0700 From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com> To: "Louis A. Mamakos" <louie@TransSys.COM> Cc: dennis@etinc.com (Dennis), "Karl Denninger, MCSNet" <karl@mcs.com>, hackers@FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: The view from here (was Re: ISDN Compression Load on CPU) Message-ID: <8011.832959870@time.cdrom.com> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Fri, 24 May 1996 09:11:21 EDT." <199605241311.JAA04673@whizzo.transsys.com>
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> While I will not claim that my requirements are the same as very many > others, you cannot dismiss them at just the ravings of a lunatic. > I've put my money (more than $10M of it) where my mouth is. Sorry for > the long message; I'll take my UUNET hat off now, and go away quietly. Nope, sorry Louis, but, like Cassandra, you must now be villified and endlessly castigated for being correct. :-) I've never made *any secret of the fact that I think that PCs are nasty little pieces of silicon excreta. Ill designed, ill conceived, ill subsequently bred. I daresay most people who've spent any serious amounts of time trying to push the edge of the envelope with a PC feel the same way. There are also lists as long as your arm of all the applications to which PC technology should _not_ be put, and the road to success littered with the bones of those who would not heed their warnings. Pretty much all of the applications Louis (and Karl) describe would be on that list for me - give me a dedicated router with a fan as the only moving part any day. I don't like getting paged at 2am. 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. However, I think it's also fair to say that PCs have sort of become the plumber's tape of the computer industry. You know that heavy-duty grey plastic tape I'm talking about? You can use it for everything from repairing hoses in your car to sticking the neighbor's kid to the ceiling and, if you ever need to tame a temporary cable run across a carpet, it's positively a life-saver. Used in the appropriate situations, PCs are similar commodities. I can think of a dozen scenarios were a scrounged PC and a quick trip to the local computer store would have a smile back on my face (and, more importantly, the face of my employer) in less time than it would for me to navigate cisco's phone mail system. I can also think of situations where a cisco is just plain over-kill. For example, we have a PC here at WC which has 5 ethernet cards plugged into it and does all the 100Mbit & 10Mbit network routing for us internally. How does it work? It works just fine, and at much a lower cost than a similarly capable cisco box would have. Since the whole reason we _have_ 5 ethernet segments is to put machines that like to talk to eachother a lot on the same segments and reduce traffic to "inter-department" stuff only, this little router does the job and it stays up pretty much 24x7, just like our 2 ciscos. There's also DNS, NIS, WEB, FTP and all the other services you can host from such a box as "double duty" - things you can't usually do with a dedicated router. I hope that the PC hardware market will eventually come to its senses and start producing some real high-end commercial quality stuff to match the workstations. Hand-selected components done by people who actually know what they're doing, precision case design for both disk arrays and CPU (I'd like to see totally different MB designs where the PCI cards come in on rails), basically something done with fault-tolerance rather than low-cost in mind. Then maybe you'll start seeing more interesting custom PC setups (with fancy serial-aware BIOSes, no doubt) in the regional NAPs. Just remember the plumber's tape analogy for now - using it to run cables across a carpet is a fine use, taping together a substitute for cable trays in your machine room is not. :-) Jordan
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