| William H. Magill on Mon, 10 Feb 2003 19:07:04 -0500 |
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On Monday, February 10, 2003, at 02:46 PM, Paul wrote: Is this a trend? Buy an entire computer for a single purpose such as video editing, another computer for office use, and another for technical exploration? This is NOT as farfetched as it sounds. It is quite reasonable and to be desired. Not that long ago, we had "the one computer that was all things to all people." It was called a mainframe. Then along came the Workstation Group. It begat RISC machines and suddenly we had a "cheap" high-performance machines that we could deploy on a one-to-one, application-to-processor, basis. We used one machine as a name server, one as a time server, one as a news server, one as a web server, etc. Not only was this extremely cost effective (RISC boxes were MUCH cheaper than a "mainframe" -- aka VAX 780, Sun didn't exist yet; they were the product of this Workstation "revolution") but they made maintenance and upgrade process much more reasonable and simple. You no longer had to worry that if you took down the name server, you also took down all of the rest of the services you were providing. Similarly, if you wanted to upgrade the webserver, you didn't need to worry that the version of some module (like perl) would break everything else that depended upon the old libraries. Oh yeah, I almost forgot the other MAJOR benefit -- "technical exploration" -- better known as testing out a new version of software before you put it into production. In a commercial environment where 24x7 access is expected, you CANNOT put up a new version of, say perl, only to discover the next day that all of your web apps no longer work (and haven't worked for the past 24 hours) and that your company can no longer take web-based orders until you fix it. Then along came PCs and Linux, and suddenly we were headed back to the MainFrame class machine philosophy -- one machine that did all things for all people. And besides, how many of you have a Palm, an iPaq, a Blackberry, a DVD player, a CD player, a cell phone and a television in addition to your PC? Just the other day, somebody was complaining -- why get PVR software for your PC, just buy a TiVO. T.T.F.N. William H. Magill # Beige G3 - Rev A motherboard - 768 Meg # Flat-panel iMac (2.1) 800MHz - Super Drive - 768 Meg # PWS433a [Alpha 21164 Rev 7.2 (EV56)- 64 Meg]- Tru64 5.1a magill@mcgillsociety.org magill@acm.org magill@mac.com _________________________________________________________________________ Philadelphia Linux Users Group -- http://www.phillylinux.org Announcements - http://lists.netisland.net/mailman/listinfo/plug-announce General Discussion -- http://lists.netisland.net/mailman/listinfo/plug
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