Andy R said:

>Well, there are more and more products for Linux
>popping up all the time, the ones you don't see in the
>headlines. It's happening. I think the marketing
>people are a bit out of control though (as usual). Now
>what annoys me is, there are plenty of things they
>could really expand market share with (smaller
>products), if they just compiled them for *BSD. I
>don't think they will do it.

And meanwhile Linux 2.4.x has scalability and load issues that would
prevent me from using it commercially. And Linux is still being shipped
in distributions with asynch mounts and the ext2 filesystem as the default.

Note that IBM doesn't actually do anything to fix Linux issues, it just
recommends Redhat. If you want JFS on Redhat you have to compile it in
yourself.

>Agreed, but I still hate it.

I don't like SYSV all that much, but I get paid to support it. :-)

>Speaking of that, what have they been thinking the
>last few years? Phasing out the PA-RISC seems
>stupid...

Well, they worked with Intel on Itanic. I understand that they are now
working on PA-RISC again, since the Intel 64bit solution is a bust.

>I know. Kill the Alpha? Are they nuts? It's been the
>best server processor for a long time now. Why the
>hype over Intel 64 bit? The others have been 64 bit
>for a long, long time now.

Well, Compaq sold Alpha to Intel. Intel now has a lot of the Alpha designers,
although a bunch also went to AMD. There are now rumors of Alpha technology
in future Itanic chips.

Although there has been a lot of hype, Intel only shipped 2300 chips in the
last quarter of 2001. And 2000 of those chips went to IBM for a contract
that they have with NCSA for an Itanic cluster.

Compaq is not shipping Itanic boxes as they have had problems with their
benchmark tests. Dell has a machine on their webpage, but no price. HP
lists a 2 processor box for $7000. A box that is slower than a single
processor Pentium III Xeon. Of course, the Pentium IV also loses to the
Pentium III Xeon, it just has a really fast clock.

I think AMD is doing the right thing with Hammer. Once SMP gets squared
away on NetBSD, a 64bit multi-processor server running NetBSD at a low
end price will look pretty good.

As ever, *BSD needs to get the word out about stability, security, and
reliability.

-- 
Rick Kelly  rmk@rmkhome.com  www.rmkhome.com