The C is dead, long live the C

[Tony Hammitt]

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.

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.

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.

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...

Later,
	Tony

Brian Densmore wrote:
> 
> >-----Original Message-----
> >From: Adam Turk
> >
> >The mainframe has its place and I respect that. But it is not the 'up
> and coming'. Mainframes >would not have evolved as quickly if PCs did
> not threaten their very existence.
> 
> Behold I prophesy!
> 
> <prophesy>
> Ahem. Not to obscure the point, but mainframes aren't ever going to go
> away. They're just going to continue to get smaller. IBM just made a
> computer the size of and index card that is more powerful than the
> computer I use here at work! You're computer is as powerful as many
> mainframes. And "PC servers" are more and more adding the hardware
> stability and complexity of mainframes. Sorry to burst your bubble,
> mainframes aren't going to die. PCs are. PCs can't compete with the
> current state of the art mainframe. They will still be called PCs in the
> future, but in actuality they will be mainframes. This is a good thing.
> Mainframes have fantastic stability.
> </prophesy>
> 
> IMHO,
> Brian
>