Re: New Emacs with GTK!

[Tim X <timx@spamto.devnul.com>]

>>>>> "Daniel" == Daniel R Anderson <dan@mathjunkies.com> writes:

 Daniel> <snip>
 >> Well, SUN sells _slow_ hardware, so I still don't see how gnome
 >> would
 Daniel> </snip>

 Daniel> Out of curiousity if Sun's hardware is so slow why do so many
 Daniel> people use it and why are they the huge company that they
 Daniel> are?

I think, when talking about SUN's hardware, you need to distinguish
between server and workstation application. As a server, Sun has some
very nice features which make it very useful. In particular, Sun
serves are able to handle large memory models (e.g. +4Gb) a lot better
than Linux which has problems with large memory models. Sun servers
with multiple processors have the ability to continue working even
when one processor fails. At one place where I worked, the
air-conditioning in the server room broke down one weekend. The temp
got high and all the intel (Linux and Windows) servers died. The sun
servers continued to wrk even though some of them had lost processors
due to the heat. I also think Sun has a better bus architecture for
high end hardware and can obtain a higher through put.

I actually suspect Sun hardware is quite good and fast even on
workstations (though still very expensive) and its the OS which makes
it appear slow. Some years ago I was given permission to load Linux
onto a sparc station. We thought it was a real dog of a box because it
seemed about equal to a 486. It had been running solaris. We were
amazed at the performance increase once we put linux on it. The system
was a lot more stable and in fact, last time I visited this old
employer about 6 months ago, that sun box was still purring along with
Linux and had been up for over 12 months.

Tim
-- 
Tim Cross
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