Date: Sat, 12 Feb 2005 02:38:33 -0800 From: "Ted Mittelstaedt" <tedm@toybox.placo.com> To: <freebsd-questions@freebsd.org> Subject: Technically superior products WAS RE: Please don't change Beastie to another crap logo suchasNetBSD!!! Message-ID: <LOBBIFDAGNMAMLGJJCKNIEGCFAAA.tedm@toybox.placo.com> In-Reply-To: <768934056.20050212111306@wanadoo.fr>
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> -----Original Message----- > From: owner-freebsd-questions@freebsd.org > [mailto:owner-freebsd-questions@freebsd.org]On Behalf Of Anthony > Atkielski > Sent: Saturday, February 12, 2005 2:13 AM > To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org > Subject: Re: Please don't change Beastie to another crap logo > suchasNetBSD!!! > > > Ted Mittelstaedt writes: > > > Technically superior products are technically superior because they > > have MORE than the customary R&D put into them. That makes them MORE > > expensive than the median/mediocre products that dominate a market. > > Explain Intel. > Do you like giving me fish in a barrel or what? :-) Actually, I know you were making a joke. I did laugh. But this actually proves my point. Back in the olden days when the computer market still had the potential for accepting a better-but-radically different PC design, the Intel CPU family was pretty lame compared to many other designs (ie: Zilog Z80 for example) But, it was cheap. Today of course, there are only 2 CPU companies that matter, AMD and Intel. But, their products are completely tied to the current PC paradigm due to the absolute requirement for backwards compatability - and that absolute requirement exists because of the usual BINARY distribution of software. If you are willing to jettison that paradigm there are many far better and more exciting and more advanced CPU designs in the universities. Obviously since they have no economies of scale they would be horribly expensive. And since it's possible to get their performance with clusters of cheap, mediocre CPUs in commodity computers, the economics have pretty much dictated they will remain ideas only. One of these days if we are lucky, Open Source will prevail, and the day will come that for a program to support a completely different computer architecture, a simple recompile will be all that is needed. Since users will get source with the applications they get, doing this will be not impossible. At that time we may then see the computer hardware market go back to normal competition. But until then it is important to keep in mind that the computer desktop hardware market is in the middle of an anomaly. But, be afraid. The telephone handset market was in such the same anomaly for almost a century. Today we are seeing the beginnings of VoIP which may change the paradigm and reignight some real competition. But then again it may not. Television sets remained the same for about 40 years there also. Ted
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