Dave Hodgkinson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
[..]
> How in gods name do Sun get away with charging so much for stuff?
Because they can and they have a brand people trust like IBM or
Microsoft. In fact you can buy far cheaper Sun clones from companies
like Transtec but the Sun name tends (rather irrationally) to carry
more weight in some circles (eg. telcos, ISP and City). Many people
use clones internally but Sun kit for the stuff customers see.
> We've erm, "acquired" an enterprise 420. this box has 2 CPUs, 4G or
> RAM and about 80G of disk. For the same money I could build a
> clutster of what, 30 linux boxes? Don't tell me programmer time has
> got that expensive? Or that thinking about what you're doing stopped
> happening? If it's good enough for Google...
You can't really compare Suns with standard PCs because they have
numerous advantages still -- 64 bit archecture, faster bus, SCSI
(although some use IDE now). It's still expensive to get PCs in 1U
cases and you can fit a lot of Netra T1s in a 19" rack. Although for
desktop use the framebuffers rarely have enough colours to be useable.
I suspect things like SMP probably still work better. And if I were
on call supporting a server I would probably still trust a Sparc
running Solaris over some dodgy PC desktop with Redhat stuck on it by
a hobbyist who has never used another UNIX.
Having said that I think they are probably doomed to occupy an
increasingly small niche and things like clustered Free UNIX clones
(PVM on BSD or Beowolf on Linux) certainly offer more bang per buck.
--
1024/D9C69DF9 steve mynott [EMAIL PROTECTED]
if you have any trouble sounding condescending,
find a unix user to show you how it's done.
--scott adams
