Posted on 11/15/2004 9:29:24 AM PST by crushelits
Speaking of "free" operating systems how many of us actually "paid" for Windows? I got XP home with my Dell,98se with my HP,and the copy of 98se on this old clunker I fished out of a thrift store dumpster.All of which were easier than trying to download a copy of Linux off the web.
(snip)Who crashes these days?
I haven't for a while, but play around with multi OS booting or try to run a modern OS on a not so modern computer.Or if you really want to screw things up let the kids play with it for awhile.
"Servers and operating systems are like razors and blades. In fact, that's why we called 'em Sun Blades. And wait till you see Sun Shaving Gel and Sun Aftershave Lotion."
More competitive with os's that have 5% of the market - who cares?
Solaris 10 is for Sun SPARC hardware - not your homebuilt PC.
IE - real computers. ;)
Can you even run it on anything except a Solaris?
Solaris had a nice edge on high-end computing; that's gone now. They're dinosaurs.
Desktops are not the only computers.
The OS for Redmond is the only part of the PC that hasn't gone down in price over the years.
In 1990, an average PC cost about $1500 and a copy of DOS cost about $100. That's 15% of the cost of the PC.
In 2004, an average PC costs about $750 and a copy of WinXP costs about $150. That's 20%.
When Longhorn ships, the price of an average PC will be about $500. Longhorn is expected to cost about $250. That's 50%
And perhaps the OS is more capable now than then, but the PC is way more capable now than then and it's still dropped in price.
But the Microsoft monopoly isn't distorting the market, right?
Anyway, Win-XP is a piece of junk full of holes and can easily be compromised.
Linux is more reliable, but there are no many software progs. out threre.
On the downside, I read that the win operating system for hand held pc's has surpassed Palm soft. sales for the first time.
You're right about that! Kids or Executives.
Don't be an ignoramus. Sun sells $250,000 machines that run enterprise stuff. None of this has anything to do with the home market.
How do you keep it down to one a week?
actually, they also sell <$3K servers that run Solaris - and can literally go YEARS without a reboot. sometimes we look in amazement at "uptime" on our systems.
I agree. But then, there are plenty of operating systems for an x86 PC. Linux, IBM PCDOS, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Solaris x86, Minux, HURD and more.
Sure they factor in the cost of the OS just like they would the hard drive,motherboard,CPU or memory.
But most PC manufacturers give me some choices on all of those products. I can get an AMD or Intel CPU. I can get a Maxtor or a Seagate hard drive. An ASUS, Intel or Biostar motherboard.
Don't like Microsoft? there are alternatives but they certainly don't make it easy for you to switch do they?
Precisely. Microsoft has a gun to the heads of the PC manufacturers. They offer them Windows for a fraction of the cost of the retail copy, but they have to agree to put Windows on every machine they ship. That's one of the reasons why Linux PCs are not much cheaper than Windows PCs. The manufacturer charges you for a copy of Windows and then loads Linux.
If the manufacturer refuses to do so, Microsoft makes them buy the retail copy of Windows for every machine they sell. That eats up the razor-thin profit margin that manufacturers have to live with and they can't be profitable.
Having seen how XP performs on an older machine I'm in no great rush to upgrade to Long horn.
That's ok. Your current PCs won't run Longhorn. The minimum specs for Longhorn (and we all know that a minimum spec PC may actually boot a Microsoft OS, but won't do much else) is currently beyond the top-of-the-line PC. Things like a 3GHz CPU, 8 GB of RAM, 500GB HD.
But in 2008 when Longhorn ships, that won't be too bad. And Longhorn will be bundled with it. Whether you want it or not.
The prices for the current Microsoft OS have gone up over the years, not down. WinXP costs more than Win2K which cost more than WinNT which cost more than Win98, etc. And that's in real dollars. Adjusted for inflation, WinXP costs three times as much as MSDOS 5 did when it first shipped.
There are currently no market forces to cause this to change. As long as Microsoft can continue to threaten PC manufacturers into shipping Windows and only Windows, the price will only go up.
Historically, Microsoft has only had low prices when they enter a market, in order to undercut the price of the current leader. Once they crush the competition through this dumping, they raise prices. This has been true for every market that they now dominate. OS, word processing, spreadsheet, mid-range file and print servers, etc.
Linux is more reliable, but there are no many software progs. out threre.
My Debian apt repository currently has about 5,000 software programs available. No compiling, ready to install and go. I currently show 1335 packages installed on my laptop.
If you want to compile, or have someone compile for you, Freshmeat.net and Sourceforge have tens of thousands of software packages available for Linux.
One thing I've noticed is that almost no one trys to build a more efficient OS.Even the system requirements for the new alternative OSs seem to be only going up.I remember seeing something about a simple MSDOS "style" OS that could run an office suite with internet and email access on machines as old as a 486.Was this PCDOS? or DRDOS? I tried a couple of DOS based browsers on my beater when it was a DOS only system but couldn't get them to regognise my cable modem.It's a shame really cause this thing really screams in a DOS environment, but then why wouldn't it at 233mhz with 128 megs of ram it's got about a hundred times more power than DOS was designed to use.
My failover firewall (no IDS since it's a failover machine) is a Pentium 75 with 16MB.
Both hard drives are 4GB drives and are less than a quarter full. I used 4GB drives because I couldn't find anything smaller.
I was running a Pentium 60 for the failover, but the first generation Pentiums ran hot and needed a CPU fan. The P75 doesn't so I used that instead.
Oh, and they both run OpenBSD.
I could run on a 486, but it's hard to get parts that will work. 30pin SIMMS, hard drives under 3GB, etc. OBSD runs just fine on a 486, but it's not worth the maintenance effort for the hardware.
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