On Fri, 19 Dec 1997, Michael J. Miller Jr. wrote:

| SGI integrates new technologies at a very impressive rate, and I wouldn't
| touch them with a ten foot pole.  To many people I know have way less
| hair and/or ulcers from dealing with the bugs and flakiness.  :-)

Have you checked out 6.4 or any of the Origin machines? So far (from an
operational standpoint) the ORigins that I have been running (o200, o2000)
have worked near-perfectly, and have outperformed solaris on comperable
(well, as close as you can get) Sun hardware. Even the 6.5 alpha, which
I've been lucky to get ahold of, seeems to have some even better
features/performance (but I havnt been able to realy sit down and beat on
it yet). FWIW, I'm using them for news servers, and their I/O capability
is incredible...

| Here I disagree.  The product may not be the best or great, but it
| has to meet a certain quality point or it just won't make it.  To
| be successful you have to balance a lot of different factors.  The 
| cold hard reality of the world is that technical superiority doesn't
| matter.  I've seen dozens of technically superior products come
| and go over the last fifteen years.

Quite true... the sad thing I see in this area is that people tend to look
at the price versus the operational/technical virtues of a product. That's
why there's ISPs out there who are 100% NT/peecee (NT == Nice Try).

| In my opinion I'm not of shaky ground at all.   Sun is showing interest
| in FreeBSD, and has offered documentation and help to NetBSD and you're
| posting to this list saying that their OS is shit. 

Ah.. their OS is <insert std excplicative>... but they do make nice
hardware. I believe they are willing to offer help to *BSD in the hardware
area so we can make a OS that will kick their OS's ass, and still support
the things s-s-s-solaris supports hardware-wise, no?

			-Dale