Subject: Old Vs New (was Mac or PC for IP gateway?/Mac or PC for Samba?)
To: None <port-i386@netbsd.org>
From: Andy Ball <ball@cyberspace.org>
List: port-i386
Date: 07/09/2002 10:42:25
Hello Wojciech,

  WP> thinking that way - you should say support for other
    > platforms that PeeCees are waste of time. fortunately
    > it's not.

I'll second that for varous reasons: see the Subnotebook /
Palmtop thread.  I'm not convinced a PC processor would be
power efficient enough to give me the battery life I want.
Although I'm very happy to see some PC processors improving
in that respect- VIA C3 and Celeron Tualatin spring to mind
(and would probably make good desktop boxes), they're still
a lot more complicated and thirsty than a well-designed RISC
chip.

  CY> but buying 900Mhz machine for routing is a waste. even
    > if it costs a little (350$ isn't a little - depends on
    > country where you leave).

$350 was a lot (to me) in the country that I left ;-)
Seriously though, I'm about to build a firewall and I think
an inexpensive C3 would probably be more than adequate if I
gave it enough RAM.

  WP> there are enough people (mostly windows users but not
    > only) saying "why think, better buy new computer as
    > it's cheap". it's definitely the wrong way...

I have been helping out some non-profit organisations who
sometimes can't afford the luxury of new machines. It can be
tricky deciding whether to invesst time & effort in older
gear, but there are literally dumpsters full of old Pentium
and 486 based machines that thanks to NetBSD/i386 can be put
to good use.

Regards,
  - Andy.