mefull wrote:
As for IBM, HP, Sun etc. I don't know maybe we should say "count the days." Their market seems to be going going gone. Even though CAD is a bigger market than 3D Fx I don't think its a big enough market to support new hardware development by itself.
Sun and HP, who knows ? (Itanic seems to be tanking tho
) but the PowerPC doesn't look like it's going away any time soon ... All this talk about "markets" and other salesman-speak - Gack ! Look at the figures unixmuseum posted a while back. For FEA work on largish models the whizz-bag peecee was four minutes faster than an antique Octane. Wow. There is
so much
hogwash in the computing world. I don't think you'll see the people with brains changing to peecees until the companies supplying Unix workstations quit making them due to believing other people's marketing hogwash more than their own marketing hogwash. (Although I've been known to overestimate the intelligence of the American public before.) Marketing is going to have a lot to answer for in the next life.
Then we'll have no choice - but until then
no one
with a brain wants to run a Windows operating system in a professional capacity.
Let's not even discuss the crappy quality of commodity peecee hardware and/or the never-ending driver upgrade treadmill or the fact that you can't
find
the drivers for two-year old hardware half the time or the way that the hardware changes without warning so that driver A doesn't work with hardware A unless you have rev 16.39678B-12971 but that's been removed from the website (or was never there) because we "don't support legacy hardware due to cost considerations altho we were plenty happy to take your hard-earned money just last week for this card which we touted as the best thing since sliced bread and the Operating System for the Nineties but that was when we believed we could sucker you all in - since that didn't work, tough luck" etc etc ad infinitem. And the OpenGL issues ! Look in the Pro/E newsgroups. At least once a week someone asks a question which gets the response "you need a professional-grade graphics card for $2,000." So where's the fricking cost advantage to peecees ? You've just stuck a $2,000 agp2 card into a $50 piece of crap ? An agp2 card that's gonna be "legacied" into oblivion by agp4 in three weeks ? Did y'all know that perfectly good AGP cards won't fit into newer motherboards
already
? WTF ? this happened within just a couple years of the introduction of AGP ? Who wants to spend all their time buying and maintaining hardware ? And how cheap is it if you have to spend two months per year fiddling with it and replacing it? And who the hell wants to depend on what Microsoft has up its sleeve for the next Windows release ? "All your data are belong to us." Oh
goody
. The bad-drives-out-good syndrome is at work within the peecee world just as it is in the peecee-workstation conflict.
If there's no place in the future for quality Unix workstations we'll all be a lot poorer.