🚀 go-pugleaf

tholen@newton.ifa.hawaii.edu (Dave Tholen) writes:
>Jim Frost writes:
>>>> In terms of features PCs have generally
>>>> lagged far behind the competition.  Performance?  Intel-based PCs
>>>> didn't start seeing good performance until just the past few years,
>>>> and they're still not the fastest things around.

>>> They're still not the most expensive things around either.

>> I guess the best way I can respond to this is "neither was a Yugo."
>> Or Hyundai.  You get the drift.

>A better way to respond would be to talk about price to performance ratio.

You miss the whole point -- price/performance only matters when the
performance is acceptable.  Most people didn't think the Yugo
performed acceptably, so they didn't buy it.

Would you buy a PC do to bill generation if you were Nynex?  Probably
not, because it would take longer to generate the bills than the
billing period.  So you buy ES/9000s, one of the worst
price/performers on the planet, because nothing else does the job fast
enough.

The same was true of many desktop applications (eg CAD/CAM).  It took
too long for a PC to do the job that it was worth the money to buy
something faster.

>> Anyway the last few years has seen an explosion in PC performance and
>> features, enough that I can no longer justify spending money on a
>> workstation.

>Does that mean you won't be investing in Windows NT Workstation?

Sorry I wasn't clear enough for you, but I was talking about hardware.
I pick the OS based on what I need to get done.  Sometimes NT is the
best choice, sometimes it isn't.  I use a mix of several different
OS's on a daily basis for this reason.

Today's inexpensive PC hardware has exceeded the performance levels of
most workstations that were available as recently as four years ago.
Assuming that the performance level of those workstations was
acceptable for a particular task, the PC should be acceptable too, and
may be the best buy where it wasn't a few years ago.

jim frost
jimf@world.std.com
-- 
http://world.std.com/~jimf