Cognitive Dissonance and Linux

[Christopher Browne]

On Tue, Nov 16, 2010 at 6:15 PM, Tyler Aviss <tjaviss-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> Those that complain about modern stuff being crap compared to old
> stuff often either have rose-coloured glasses or they're buying
> cheap/disposable stuff :-)

There's definitely a mix, sometimes for better, sometimes for worse.

Back in the "olden, golden" days, when a fancy machine might cost a
million dollars, it wasn't a big deal to spend a substantial amount of
money engineerinqg the case (and PSU and cables and ...).

Whether we go upscale or downscale, there were some splendidly
engineered pieces of hardware where that extra cost allowed making
Mighty Nice cases and such.

My favorite downscale example was the Digital Multia.
<http://www.obsolyte.com/dec/multia/> It wasn't terribly powerful
(there were effectively some design errors), but it fit a lot of nice
hardware into a well-packed little box.

When Russell Crook did his talk on the Sun Niagara/Rock
<http://gtalug.org/wiki/Meetings:2008-07> it became pretty clear to me
that Sun was going to get badly slammed on their product line.  The
Niagara was very interesting; a 8-way massively threading CPU on a
chip.  But there's a downside to having a $50K box that is powerful as
what used to cost $500K - Sun can't afford, on $450K less, per box, to
cover:
  - A fancy case
  - Bulletproof power
  - Flying out engineers to fix issues
  - Flying out engineers to help you install it

Mind you, for $500K, you could buy 10 of them, and cover reliability
by different means.

But in any case, a $50K box is going to be a whole lot more
"disposable" than a $500K box, and that sort of thing is likely to
extend up and down the price chain.
-- 
output = reverse("gro.mca" "@" "enworbbc")
http://linuxdatabases.info/info/slony.html
Rules of the Evil Overlord #18. "I will not have a son. Although his
laughably under-planned  attempt to usurp power would  easily fail, it
would provide a fatal distraction at a crucial point in time."
<http://www.eviloverlord.com/>
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://gtalug.org/
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://gtalug.org/wiki/Mailing_lists