11 Jun
2009
11 Jun
'09
9 a.m.
2009/6/11 Josh Dersch <derschjo at mail.msu.edu>:
Liam Proven wrote:
Well, fair point... But is there a previous time when there was quite
such a single-vendor monoculture as there is now? Because /that/ is
what I find the really scary bit.
It's not that I hate Windows. I hate all OSs - it is, of course,
axiomatic that they all suck. I actually make most of my living from
Windows, I just happen to mostly run Linux at home, and that's because
my Mac's dead.
The thing that worries me is the uniform uninterrupted Windows
monoculture that MS has managed to create. I really do feel that that
is very unhealthy. You can't make an informed decision about the best
platform for the job - *any* job - when you only *know* one platform.
And there still are other viable, valid platforms out there. SPARC and
POWER are healthy, as are AIX and Solaris. IBM System i (the former
OS/400) is also in reasonable fettle and can run on pretty much all
the modern POWER machines - the only difference now between IBM POWER
servers is the OS they run. The old RS/6000 and AS/400 lines have
merged.
I'd say HP/UX was fine, except it is stuck on Itanium, which isn't
much cop. VMS could be a contented if HP pushed it, but it too is
stuck on IA64.
On the desktop, Mac OS X is a good solid system and it's a capable
server as well. Both IBM and Unisys are still making new mainframes -
there may be others, too, that I don't know about.
The architectural horrors of 8086, 80286 and x86-32 are lessened by
x86-64, which is ubiquitous now.
Things are not quite a *complete* monoculture, but everything that
isn't Windows is 5% of the market, and the non-x86 stuff is probably
only a tenth of that, in terms of machines. That's not a good balance.
Oh yes. ARM is selling billions of chips a year - many times more than
all the x86 chips from all vendors put together. But almost all is in
little battery-powered gadgets.
--
Liam Proven ? Profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/liamproven
Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/GoogleTalk/Orkut: lproven at gmail.com
Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 ? Cell: +44 7939-087884 ? Fax: + 44 870-9151419
AOL/AIM/iChat/Yahoo/Skype: liamproven ? LiveJournal/Twitter: lproven
MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? ICQ: 73187508
I reckon Zane is bang on the nail, actually.
*Most* "techies" now know nothing except the x86-32 PC and Windows.
DOS is a forgotten mystery; Windows 9x is historical and unknown. PCs
have always been 32-bit and the 64-bit transition scares them. They
have never seen or used any networking protocol other than TCP/IP (and
that is a mystery except to specialists). They don't know how to use
the command prompt and increasingly they have never used floppy disks.
...no floppy disks? SAY IT AIN'T SO!
Can I just say that the "everyone is an idiot (except me)" argument is
getting rather tired? ?Flash back 25 years ago and you'd hear the same
arguments, only it'd be former ITS/TOPS-20/LispM users complaining about
those upstart UNIX lusers.
Or go back to 1965 ... I have a book here on IBM 1620 programming that
states boldly, in the Preface, "There are too many programmers today who do
not really know what they are doing..."
I agree there are a lot of poorly educated tech guys out there. ?I'm not
going to be so bold as to state that *MOST* of them are ignorant idiots. ?At
least, not without evidence :).
Josh