Date: Sat, 1 Dec 2001 10:59:03 -0600 From: Mike Meyer <mwm@mired.org> To: "Anthony Atkielski" <anthony@freebie.atkielski.com> Cc: <chat@freebsd.org> Subject: Re: Feeding the Troll (Was: freebsd as a desktop ?) Message-ID: <15369.3159.548082.862287@guru.mired.org> In-Reply-To: <008901c17a30$7d084f40$0a00000a@atkielski.com> References: <15367.37543.15609.362257@guru.mired.org> <040701c179af$4bda25f0$0a00000a@atkielski.com> <15367.43943.686638.723011@guru.mired.org> <003301c179ea$8925d270$0a00000a@atkielski.com> <15368.2156.193643.17139@guru.mired.org> <005601c179f3$a4030640$0a00000a@atkielski.com> <15368.5624.255357.964607@guru.mired.org> <008901c17a30$7d084f40$0a00000a@atkielski.com>
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Anthony Atkielski <anthony@freebie.atkielski.com> types: > Mike writes: > > All else is seldom, if ever, equal. Once you > > get past "good enough", marketing is more > > important than the technology. In other words, > > the best marketed product that is "good enough" > > will win. > That's because once you get past "good enough," technology doesn't matter > (otherwise it wouldn't be good enough, would it?). That's a one-sentence summary of my "good enough is best" paper. MS is willing to keep trying until they reach "good enough", and has excellent marketing. Their technology is just barely better than "good enough" in almost every category. As such, there's usually better technology available from companies that don't have the marketing smarts that MS has. > > You can't build a reasonable Unix workstation > > using PC parts for PC prices today ... > Why not? A number of things, some of which have already been named. First, to get workstation performance and reliability out of your disk subsystem, you have to buy SCSI, though that is slowly changing. So you have to add the price of a SCSI disk controller and the SCSI disk markup to the cost of the base machine. You don't want one of the winmodems people throw into systems these days. You want a good ethernet card, so jack the price up a bit more. A workstation quality monitor runs $1000 or better, which is what you quoted as the cost of the PC. Finally, you don't want your workstation doing things like rendering bitmaps for the printer, so you need a postscript printer, which jacks the price up another few hundred dollars if you want a printer. As a general rule, Unix gets more use from full-speed cache than Windows (not sure about WNT), and the more the merrier. Finally, and just for grins, it's cheaper to buy a system with Windows installed than it is to buy an identical system without Windows installed thanks to MS's predatory practices. I built my first FreeBSD workstation in '98 just before the PIII arrived. I used workstation quality gear all the way through. I bought a system that supported the latest chips from Intel with full-speed cache, then bought the least expensive version of that chip I could find. I bought an SMP motherboard with one CPU on it, which raised the price somewhat. Add a good SCSI controller, a single SCSI disk, a CDROM burner, a good 10/100 ethernet, and a good 21" monitor. Since it was my first foray into building a Unix system from PC parts, I went through a systems integrator recommended by jkh. The total came to nearly US$6,000, with no printer. Later that year I bought a PC and monitor for about US$600. > > The Apple Lisa predated the Mac, and was a > > much better machine to own. > That was a machine I only heard about, never saw. They demo'd them to my employer when they first announced them. Think of a mac with a better display and a preemptive operating system. Now think of a US$10,000 base price tag. > > My time on Windows was running a machine installed > > by the IT department, with an MCSE. It still crashed > > twice a day, even though I put absolutely nothing > > else on it. and didn't twiddle with it at all. > Your "MCSE" probably installed a buggy driver, if you truly had virtually > nothing running on the machine. I didn't say I had nothing running on it. I said *I* put absolutely nothing on it. They installed MSIE, Netscape, MS Office, and some kind of ftp client. Those where the only things I used. > > XFree86 comes with source. Feel free to port it. > Who will pay me for this? Someone who wants it, which means not me. If you *really* want to display X clients on a Windows desktop, look into VNC. It's free. You run a VNC server on your Unix box, and it provides an X server to connect to. The X server doesn't talk to the hardware on the machine it's running on, so it should run at security level 3, though I haven't tried it. You then run the VNC client on your windows box and connect to the VNC server on your Unix box. The VNC client will open a single window that contains an X session running on the server. All your standard X tools will work, though those that use high-performance extensions probably won't. I know for a fact that fxtv doens't work on a VNC X server. Similarly but going the other way, DirectX doesn't work on a VNC Windows server. What's nice is that you can disconnect the session, and reconnect later and get the same state back. You can even reconnect from a different machine, such as your portable, any java-capable web browser, a Palm, or a Nokia 9000 cell phone > > If you want me to do that, you've got to > > pay for my time. > Sorry, but I understand. And aren't interested in pursuing this on your own, right? <mike -- Mike Meyer <mwm@mired.org> http://www.mired.org/home/mwm/ Independent WWW/Perforce/FreeBSD/Unix consultant, email for more information. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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