The C is dead, long live the C

[JD Runyan]

On Mon, Feb ,  at 09:58:12AM -0600, Tony Hammitt wrote:
> As long as your 'mainframe PC' is running Linux or another good OS.
> Fantastic stability would be wasted on those 'other' OSes that crash all
> of the time.
Ultimately the OS won't matter.  That is going to be a matter of preference
or decided by the manufacturers.
> PC's have a really really long way to go before they have the hardware
> stability that a mainframe has.  They're good, but not great.  If a CPU
> dies, the system goes down.  Not true in a mainframe.  And not cheap.

> We're back to motivation again.  Most people wouldn't pay an extra $20
> for being able to have their computer stay running through a CPU failure
> because it just isn't important to them.  A day of downtime is OK.  And
> they're the ones who buy the vast majority of PCs, so we in the Linux
> community who would like such hardware stability (because it's the only
> way we get any unplanned downtime) aren't going to get it because no one
> is going to make it reasonably priced.
The cost is in excess of $20, and the normal home user has no reason to 
desire a system that has 99.999% uptime.  They just don't rely on them
at that level
> And don't disrespect the processors in a mainframe, either.  They aren't
> slow by any stretch.  But I/O is the most important thing to computer
> speed and they have more of that than you can imagine in a PC.  More than
> you'd need, really.
This is only true when you view a PC as a workstation.  I/O is most important 
to server applicaations.
> So I prophecy that it'll be a really long time before we have PCs that
> are affordable and have hardware fault tolerance.  When we get to the
> point that everything in a home is running off of one server, we may see
> a market for fault tolerance.  But not until then, and that's a long way
> off...
The redundency is there, and even when CPUs fail. You pay top dollar for it
and once again I say the home user has no reason to seek this, and since
most home users have single cpu machines, the likely hood of them being
able to take advantage of this is slim to none.  I wouldn't need this on a 
workstation.  I would just go buy the new CPU and put it in.  The cost is
lower, and the downtime is minimal.  The average user who can't wait for 
gateway or dell to do this for them, needs to have a good pc tech available
to come take care of the problem for them.  Warranties are only good if 
you can wait to have your pc fixed on the manufacturers schedule, so 
some folks will just kiss the warranty bye-bye to have the PC fixed quickly.
> Later,
> 	Tony
> 
> 
> Brian Densmore wrote:

--
JD Runyan
		"You can't milk a point."
			David M. Kuehn, Ph.D.