🚀 go-pugleaf

In <41adif$njj@nnrp3.primenet.com> english@primenet.com (Lawson English) writes:

>Dan Pop (Dan.Pop@mail.cern.ch) wrote:
>[snipt]
>: As usual, you're wrong.  If you want to buy a machine to run a single
>: app, you can benchmark that app and decide which machine is better.
>: If you want to buy a general purpose machine, SPEC is your best way to
>: compare the relative performances.  At least, this is the industry
>: consensus.  Of course, you know better.
>
>I've never heard the "industry" say that. In fact, most hardware design 
>texts suggest otherwise.

Hardware design texts aren't the "industry".  It is very easy to point
out the problems of a certain solution.  It's considerably more difficult
to come with a better solution.  Until now, nobody came with a better
solution than the SPEC benchmarks to the problem of evaluating the
relative performances of computers as general purpose systems.  If you
don't hear very often of the SPEC data for a Cray, it is because a Cray
is not a general purpose system.  Most Unix workstations and servers are.

If you have a better solution for this problem, please don't keep it for
yourself :-)

Of course, SPEC data are completely irrelevant to someone who is interested
only in running one or a few, very well defined, applications.  But this
is not what we're discussing here.  It seems to be a consensus that the
platform of choice for the PhotoShop-only user is the Mac and the one
for the Word-only user is the PC.  

Too bad some users have the absurd intention to run more than one
application on their computers.  Even worse, there are idiots who want
to run more than one application at the same time, with good
performance.  As if this weren't bad enough, they also want their
systems to serve more than one user at a time, using those stupid
thingies called X-terminals.  Are those guys crazy, or what?

Dan :-)
--
Dan Pop
CERN, CN Division
Email: Dan.Pop@mail.cern.ch 
Mail:  CERN - PPE, Bat. 31 R-004, CH-1211 Geneve 23, Switzerland