> Personally, I'd like to see a greater variety of
> processors in the market.. sharing the market. That is
> to say, no single architecture has an overwhelming
> dominance. (like Intel has today) And I'd like to see
> Alpha with a fair share of the market. I'd like to see
> all these different architectures compete against each
> other and accelerate their technological advances and
> push their prices down.
This was and still is a possibility. It all depends on the marketing of
the product. It's not the technical excellence of the product. Case in
point:
SGI Mips and DEC/Compaq Alpha
-vs-
Intel Pentium
Old and new DEC/Compaq and SGI hardware are excellent but they were not
marketed well. They niched themselves instead of going for a wider
appeal. Intel, with IBM's and Micro$loft's help, became the "chip for
the corporate world". This gave Intel processors mass appeal and thus
giving Intel a boatload of influence in the market. You know you're
successful when companies clone your product: AMD and Cyrix.
I'm not even going to get into the management and marketing fiasco that
has and continues to happen at Apple.
Then again . . .
Apple just doesn't seem to get it. Tangerine and Blueberry iMacs? Good
God! They continualy shoot themselves in the foot. The Mac concept and
the MacOS beats the crap out of Win/Intel technology but they corporate/
executive level misunderstands just continually drive Apple into the
ground. They need to start thinking of the wider/corporate appeal. Stop
with the cute cases and spiffy colors. Greys and tans are just fine.
Personally, the color of the case is not going to sway me one way or
another. They things that will sway are:
1. The technical excellence in the architectural design,
2. The quality of materials and construction,
3. The hardware support by the OEM and third party resellers,
4. The quality and support for the third party software developed for
the architecture.
5. Long term survivability of the EOM. (This means their marketing)
Apple does do well on 1 - 3. However, 4 is in questions and 5 is a joke.
Does anyone know what company pumped 200 million dollars into Apple
recently? Answer: MicroSloth! No prizes for figuring out why! :-)
Then again, perhaps I'm the Mr. Ford of my time: "You can have any color
you want as long as it's black". :-)
> And in the chaos of all these architectures being
> used, people start dumping OSes that can only run on a
> limited number of architectures. Linux and BSD become
> the OSes of choice for being able to run on so many
> architectures. In light of this, corporations decide
> to pool their technologies to help advance Linux and
> BSD to its fullest potential.
Micro$loth does understand this and will adjust to run on multiple
platforms (read: any and all) as soon as any of the following are
true:
1. Doing so is critical to the long term survival of MicroSloth or
2. It's politically expedient or
3. It's profitable.
Micro$loth is profit (read: market) driven. To them, it's not's whose
best but who seems and is preceived to offer the best, long term
solutions. Welcome to show biz. Politics, sales, and marketing are all
show biz.
> Then, Unix in general develops more user friendly
> interfaces, so that people have a choice to use an
> easy to use GUI that will shield them from the
> internals and command line. Oh, and since only Linux
> and BSD survive, the word "Unix" becomes public
> domain.
Hummm . . . maybe but we will have to overcome the high level of inertia
of X11. I'm not sure that X11 can do what is required to bring a GUI
Desktop that the novice can use. Remember the UNIX tenets stated in "The
UNIX Philosophy". UNIX is not easy to use because it can do so many
things and is very efficient. They technical level of UNIX users is
higher, by and large, than their Windows/MacOS counterparts. Get the book
and read it. I think there is a new edition of the book out that has soom
updates expounding upon more current events.
> As all this is happening, the OS becomes a shielding
> layer from the hardware... and people no longer choose
> hardware architecture because of available software,
> but only for raw performance. They all realise Alpha
> kicks ass... and eventually dump everything else for
> the Alpha. Of course, by this time, I've bought
> countless number of shares of Compaq...;-)
This IS where things are heading. Hardware appliances are the fad of the
future.
> I wake up yelling "Alpha ROCKS!!!" and fall out of my
> bed.... realising..... it's just a dream.
HA HA HA!
> D.
>
> --- Phillip Ezolt <ezolt@perf.zko.dec.com> wrote:
> > Hi All,
> > Alot of the questions/answers on this list are
> > problems/solutions to setup Alpha/Linux. Very good,
> > Very practical.
> >
> > I have a non-practical question for everyone.
> >
> > What is your dream of the Alpha/Linux future?
> >
> > One thing I would love to see is a rocking
> > Alpha/Linux game/demo page.
> >
> > We have source to games (Quake, descent, doom,
> > heretic).
> > We have source to the Voodoo chipset drivers.
> >
> > I would love to have a knock-your-socks off graphic
> > demo that I could
> > use to show off the alpha.
> >
> > Not speaking for Compaq,
> > --Phil
> >
> > Compaq: High Performance Server Division/Benchmark
> > Performance Engineering
> > ---------------- Alpha, The Fastest Processor on
> > Earth --------------------
> > Phillip.Ezolt@compaq.com |C|O|M|P|A|Q|
> > ezolt@perf.zko.dec.com
> > ------------------- See the results at www.spec.org
> > -----------------------
> >
> > --
> > To unsubscribe: send e-mail to
> > axp-list-request@redhat.com with
> > 'unsubscribe' as the subject. Do not send it to
> > axp-list@redhat.com
> >
> >
> __________________________________________________
> Do You Yahoo!?
> Talk to your friends online with Yahoo! Messenger.
> http://im.yahoo.com
>
> --
> To unsubscribe: send e-mail to axp-list-request@redhat.com with
> 'unsubscribe' as the subject. Do not send it to axp-list@redhat.com
>
-- To unsubscribe: send e-mail to axp-list-request@redhat.com with 'unsubscribe' as the subject. Do not send it to axp-list@redhat.com
This archive was generated by hypermail version 2a22 on Tue Feb 1 05:33:31 2000 PST
Send any problems or questions about this archive to webmaster@alphalinux.org.