[Sussex] SPARCBooks, Powerbooks and bog standard laptops

[Geoff Teale]

Steve wrote:
------------
<deletia>
> That price looks a lot better than want I remember.  My memory is 
> a little off here because:
>   1). First I didn't spec or get a quote on the box,
>   2). It was five+ years ago, and mainly because
>   3). A lot of alcohol has flowed since then.
> But the spec on our box was more like: SparcV6 50mhz, 128MB RAM &
> 2GB disk.  The price was somewhere around £10,000 - £12,000.

Yup.. Tadpole SPARCBooks (the first to market) are now 10 years old - they
even have a birthday draw in which you can win one (Which of course, I've
entered).

<deletia>
> > I was kind of hoping they'd come in at slightly above £2000 
> 
> ...and in the real world...

... in the real world I was given false hope by the evey falling costs of
Sun Workstations - A Blade 100 is about £1300 for a decent spec these days -
I was working from that price - unfortunately, as you say, the market for
SPARC laptops is a small one.

> That's not surprising.  I read an article a while back saying 
> that Intel
> was the only real chip maker left.  I wouldn't go that far, but in the
> slow down they do have the more income so can still afford to develop 
> more.  Or maybe that's what the market expect so Intel have to keep 
> pushing.  If they didn't come up with something new the 
> market would still
> expect the top of the range chips to become cheaper.

Hmm.  Sun are still developing things in the very high end space and I think
that may end up being a niche market they share with SGI - to some extent
LINUX combined with cheap x86 power spells the death of propreitary UNIX in
the low to mid range systems market - at the high end the cost savings
become less relevant, you're looking at SGI (who basically can't afford to
keep IRIX up to date) moving towards LINUX versus SUN who'll stick with
Solaris if it kills them.

<snip> 
> > Hmm.. www.novatech.co.uk or www.dnuk.com will do that for you !
> 
> I wish I'd know about these before.

Another one to look at is www.europc.co.uk they have some good deals -
though keep an eye open as some are refurbished machines - they ship
LindowsOS by default.

> Funny we wee agree on stuff like this.  And to me this is a 
> kernel hacking
> problem.  Okay the X system is user-land based, but it the 
> kernel is giving 
> direct access to the hardware for performance.
> 
> So, as you say, if you're going to be hacking the kernel, X, 
> or any other
> system that talks directly to the hardware, is the extra cost 
> of a 64-bit
> system worth it.  For me it is not (as much as I would like 
> one), for you
> I leave you to have the argument with your wallet.

My wallet is really not in that league I'm afraid.  I'd have liked the kit,
but it just isn't worth it - there another side of me that might just buy a
cheap desktop PC and be done with it - getting the job done is what matters.

-- 
geoff.teale at claybrook.co.uk
tealeg at member.fsf.org

"Windows is for cheaters"
- Bruce Springsteen "Rosalita"



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