21 Nov
1999
21 Nov
'99
6:44 a.m.
I have to at
least partially disagree with you on this. Their
consummer PCs may be of mixed quality, but their workstations are
still the best you can get. We run a mixed shop with Sun, SGI, HP,
IBM workstations and some old DEC alphas. The HPs are by far the
most reliable. We have a high end SGI (a multi-pipe IR) that has
The HP's are the most reliable?!?!?! Guess you don't have many do you?
I'm so thankful that I don't have to deal with the HP's at work it isn't
funny! HP always seems to have people on site for repairs.
I worked with HP Workstations several years ago, and really liked them.
Although I found their habit of totally changing the way devices are
handled in HP-UX between different versions, more than just a little
irritating!
I take it you've never worked on SGI workstations. They like to
change things completely between maintenance releases. We won't
even put in an OS patch if we know there is an important demos
coming up within the next month, just too much of a risk.
All the Sun's I've had to deal with are very reliable, and the IBM's are
pretty good two, but considering the vintage of the one on my desk at work,
I can't say much either way on IBM's since I've not worked on a modern
system (it was old 3 years ago when I started working there, but I won't
give it up becuase it would be replaced with an NT box).
We have staff onsite for maintaining our Suns. The only workstations
we have onsite staff for, and its not because of numbers. In our Sun
labs we always have two spare workstation to handle breakdowns. We
don't need to do this in our HP labs. Unfortunately the number 2 is
a bit low, but we don't have any more extra space in the Sun labs.
--
Dr. Mark Green mark(a)cs.ualberta.ca
Professor (780) 492-4584
Director, Research Institute for Multimedia Systems (RIMS)
Department of Computing Science (780) 492-1071 (FAX)
University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, T6G 2H1, Canada