1> The government, military, and many companies do not like unix due to its
lack of installation support, ie no installation manager. I saw a couple
of demos for X-based managers, and have heard much about Red Hat's, but have
never used any. This might be something to consider.
2> Microsoft is doing some interesting things with their products. They
will almost definitely be moving into something like Broadway (the future of
X) with their Internet Explorer. Look for an Internet Update from
MS in the near future. They claimed NT 4 by middle of July.
3> Digital's 64bit UNIX is very nice. The transition to 64bit overcomes
many barriers to high-end servers, allowing on their system (and they claim
) 12 SMP processors and 28GB of RAM. They also have built a lot of NT 4,
and have built clustering support for it. They also use something they
call a "spiralog filesystem" that looks a lot like what I believe a
journaling filesystem is. Something else to consider. The Digital
rep mention linux 3 times (once or twice in slides) during his lengthy
presentation.
4> Alpha's look like pretty good machines. I would like to see some
comparisons between almost equal Intel and Alpha machines.
Hope this information can be useful for anyone, the Network computer I
saw was built by JavaSoft, Suns spinoff, and otherwise I have no idea
besides what I mentioned earlier. Thanks again for the mail.
Thank.
hartlw@rpi.edu
Matt Hartley
http://www.rpi.edu/~hartlw