I think this has been done, but ut wasn't a PC. . .
In the late 80's, Banyan made a whizzy NOS that ran circles around Novell 3.x . . then, because the IBM compatibles of the day didn't have the oomph to run the OS, Banyan made a box called a Banyan Network Server (BNS).
Okay it was really a Unix box (which is what Banyan was) but it was tower sized, and had an internal UPS. Among other nifty features.
Anyone left who knows Banyan can correct me on the details.
Believe it or not, I think many small/medium and even large size companies like the idea of subscriptions. The cost of software can be easily predicted, they won't have to worry about
deploying/managing updates and upgrades, etc etc.
You _think_ - I know. Small company sys admin here - we MUST use 3 popular PCB CAD tools in our business, all of which are paid for on a plan similar to the one proposed . ..you can use the software forever, but to be eligible for maint. or upgrade, you must pay an annual licensing fee.
Now, I don't begrudge that for the tools - they are complicated apps, and the authors deserve to be compensated.
But our lic. fee gives us access to efficient tech support, a not bad set of knowledge bases, etc. etc.
And the annual hooraw we go through each year (3 diff. times) just to make sure we're purchasing the right tool sets for our needs, and keeping all of it straight . . . it's not pretty.
I've had to deal with micronpc, Dell, HP, several software companies (Cadence, Mentor AND Valor) in the past month or two, and they *all* responded quickly and, more to the point, their advice was always spot-on. I've had nearly 0 wait time on hold, the longest was maybe 5 minutes.
Why in the world should WE always have to understand THEM? I'm not saying it should be a one way street - just that we should meet in the middle.
The US pilot loosing his temper is very unlikely - a P3 isn't agile at all, not enough to ram a fighter . . unless the Chinese pilot was looking at a map or something.
1. When a very gung ho captian brought up the idea of putting wireless NICs on our PCs (to eliminate the miles of coax in a LAN) in 1992 the electronics officer shuddered, pointed out that each attenna would be a big beacon saying "Command and Control target . . HERE". Wonder how they're getting around that?
2. Heavy brigades are well and good and look real pretty. Given that log support a heavy brigade needs, and the time to deply, how many times is this going to be used in the real world?
3. Those new berets the army doggies are wearing look pretty damn stuipid.
Is there anything to the fears of the submittor's IT department? Or is this just a bunch of hot air?
Nothing that can't be handled technically - it's (likely) some combination of the following:
Underpaid and Overworked IT staff
Far too many problems/challenges on their network without having to spend time/energy/funds
Don't underestimate that last. The time fighting any hassles getting your three Macs networked is time taken away from several hundred other pressing problems.
I've supported Macs in two different places - one the artists supported themselves, and we managed the connect to the rest of the LAN. The second, the user's managed themselves, and didn't pester us for support.
I enlisted in '85, Marines. Spent four years in the infantry, then lateral moved to Data Processing, for another four years. Then I got the heck out.
Our data processing equipment was nearyly state of the art - we didn't always have the latest and greatest in huge numbers, but we usually had enough. About what you'll find in a typical busines as far as that goes.
When I seperated in '93, I didn't notice any kind of skill gap between my knowledge and my hypothetical peers who elected to go to college or go directl to work. In some/most cases, I was light years ahead of them in practical experience.
An aging Space Truck that costs bazillions to launch, and they cancel it's replacement, but not before driving any competion into the ground. Your tax dollars at work, friends. Check out the mess at
Love and Rockets
I agree with about needing to drop your target but
I don't remember a thing about "aiming to wound" in boot camp - later while on Barracks duty there wasn't any indoctrination about aiming to wound, you dropped the target w/ a well aimed series of rounds and that was that.
For all of that, I also participated in a one week course for Riot Control - great fun, stomping around Camp Usher with masks, bayonets and tear gas. Having experienced first hand how an ineptly deployed CS grenade can really mess up your day (hey, Capt Vlandingham, hope your throw imporved! And next time, don't forget to order your platoon to mask up first. AND check the wind - into your face is a good indication a thrown CS grenade won't do much good) I'm all for toasting a mob from a distance.
At the very least, the weak-willed will disperse, leaving the fanatics and hopheads a little more exposed.
I'll add my 2 cents as a former enlisted (Marines).
You'll have very little say so over where you go or what you do, aside from being likely to work w/in your assigned specialty.
You WILL have hands on experience with the technology, as opposed to general supervision (see the officer guy above).
You WILL have an opportunity to travel, to visit places that are, to say the least, off the beaten track. You'll never get that opportunity in your run of the mill civilian job.
You WILL gain valuable cred points with any future employer, provided you can word it correctly on your resume.
You WILL be p**sed off, rained on, cold, dirty, hungry, tired as hell - you may get shot at. You'll miss it when you leave, oddly enough.
Worked as a contractor supporting the FDIC Local Area Network for a long 2 and 1/2 years, in the Dallas regional center.
Aside: The contracting company was, of course, the low-bid on the project. But the training they provided wasn't bad, so we stuck, and the core group (of contractors) was very good - the type to be attracted by training. Pay was far below the average for this area. When the training dried up, most of the best bailed, and as sure as apples roll down hill when that compnay lost the bid, we were offered the same jobs, at a substantial cut in salary, and no training. You can imagine the carnage.
Your mileage will vary by organization.
The IT staff quality varies - the best are very good and attracted to the job for the best reasons. The worst - well, they're hanging on until retirement, and firing a gov't employee for anything less than fraud or murder is too difficult - they just get reassigned at grade. When a drone was assigned to fix a problem, it was usually easier for one of the contractors just to do the damn work, and get it right, rather than wait a week or three for the drone to screw it up. Bitter? Not me.
Can't speak badly of the equipment - we always had what we needed to accomlish the mission. Not cutting edge, but not bad.
The politics, though were B.A.D. The government employees union is all over things like seating assignments, cube sizes, who gets a window etc. Very frustrating.
Mind you, that was for the FDIC SW Service Center, mid 90s.
Yes and No. It's not all about benchmarks and raw speed.
It's about what you do with what you've got. My end users require several different applications to work on a nearly 24x7 basis, some ported from Unix to NT, some not. Some of the ports just don't work worth a damn, regardless of the benchmarked speed of the host system.
This, for me, is a great chance to halt the false economy introduced by corporate, that is, that Intel+Windows equals a much cheaper system. It may on their balance sheet, but not in the design bay where GPF errors and junky ports rule the day.
I stayed in the Dallas Fort Worth area because there are numerous and varied industries and quite a bit of opportunity. As a place to live, it's average or below average, though.
Contrast that with the town I came from (Tulsa, OK) where, at the time, there was NO other option if you were (as I was) laid off - you had to leave town just to secure a job.
As to the underlying culture and laws promoting business, I dunno, he MAY have a point. But, I'm here because the jobs are.
format just really seems to make the data go away, but it's still available w/ the right tools - just like deleting a file doesn't really make it 'go away' but removes the first letter of the file name, making the space available to the OS (okay, okay, that was how it is/was under FAT16) I'm sure other file sysetm types are similar.
wipedisk - old Norton applet writes 1s and 0s to the disk in alternate patterns. Read more below.
I can't speak for how it was done other than 1990 - 1993.. I was enlisted with an MOS (Military Occ. Speciality) of 4063 (programmer) with a secondary MOS of 4066 (small systems specialist). Oddly, I never programmed, and spent all of my time as a PC specialist and LAN guy.
Norton (pre buyout) had a nice tool called wipedisk. Put this on a bootable floppy, set it in the autoexec.bat to execute and let it go to town. The app wrote 1 and 0 in alternate patterns to every byte on the drive.
If memory serves, our standards were to write in 1s, then 0s, then 1s again. This was standard practice for all drives that held classified data, including the unix servers (long story behind THAT bit o' weirdness).
Suspicion, sure, but I've been places where such would have been a great help.
As a learning tool for new-hires/contractors/temps it would be invaluable. A production supervisor in one city might be a bit hazy about exactly those people *do* in the new division, or who his peers might be for reference to problem X - this would help.
Maybe I miss the military a bit too much. When we first gave them Banyan Vines based Email we assigned email addresses by function - AirOpsOfficer@G3@III MEF for example - and the billet holders name/rank in the description field. AirOps could quickly sort through the directory to find other AirOps at diff. levels and functions, and address them directly and informally.
This would be a great tool for those guys, as well. Maybe also reinforces your comment about self-absorbed with class hierarchy. Maybe I'm just pretty damn tired.
Side Note - I'll bet some genius has gone and installed Exchange world wide in the Marines and really screwed up what had been a damn fine mail system.
Your arguments DO sound like IBM, Data General, DEC etc. from the mainframe era. As thing are 'right now' you are correct. Given a few advances in material and technique, who knows what is possible?
We're moving offices - our PBX guys (this after years and years of business) wanted 50% down. The ops mgr. suggested to their sales guy that, as we were long-time customers, that wasn't needed. Sales guy agreed. Then yesterday he came back and said that his corporate office required the 50% down. We started looking for a new provider that morning.
The winner was one of three organizations, two local, one a nationwide company - the winner came to our office first thing this a.m., impressed the ops mgr. w/ his people skills, and showed us a nifty trick w/ the phones we didn't know about.
Back of the envelope figures; most of my end users are PCB designers and charge a pretty hefty sum per hour worked.
When a 'worm' or other VBS mayhem is rampant:
$ 110 per billable hour (average)
x 10 minutes per hour to wade through excess mail
$ 11 dollars per end user per hour.
x 15 end users
$ 165 per hour
+ 30 bucks an hour for my services
= 195 per hour.
That's when there is an active.VBS worm running loose. These prolems have seldom lasted longer than 2 hours - and that is due to the mail admins living on the West Coast and not being available as soon as the East Coast facilities are hit.
Otherwise, I'd guestimate that I spend at the most 2 work hours per week on virus and work related issues - that's average. Some weeks more, some weeks less, some weeks none at all.
Above figures are for a small part of a larger manufacturing concern.
We're a PCB design bureau, I'm the system admin for a regional office.
We use Cadence's Allegro, Mentor, Veribest.
Veribest has been purchased by Mentor, and rebadged Mentor Expedition.
All versions are available in NT and Unix. We have Allegro in NT/Unix, Veribest in NT, and Mentor in Unix.
You don't say _why_ you have such a passion for converting to Linux (grin), but as regards your PCB Design software, my info is that, Mentor Graphics aside, nothing really works with Linux, yet. Someday, I'm told, but the big push seems to be porting everything to NT.
Editorial Digression: You can, I'm sure purchase a number of 'almost good enough' CAD solutions for PCB design. But the good stuff that allows quick and easy PCB design, that doesn't trip your designers, and works well, costs $$$$.
It's so expensive, that at our place we use Solaris, despite the drawback of expensive machines and software, when NT/Intel is so much cheaper. Why? The cost of the license and maintennance is so damned high, that the price of the OS/Hardware just doesn't factor in.
As an alternate - have you considered farming your design work out to a 3rd party? Give me a buzz, and I'll hook you up with our sales guy. (grin).
Technology where it is appropriate. The doctor's office ain't it.
I didn't choose my doctor based on how fancy his computer setup is. I choose him because he comes recomended, has a great bed-side manner, and I get a good vibe when I see him. And I've NEVER had to wait longer than 10 minutes. IMHO, being seen promptly is a matter of proper scheduling up front, and a dedicated nurse who will remind the doctor when he needs to move on.
I don't need to see my med records on-line (I have paper copies, thank you much) and I doubt that you really can pay enough to keep such secured from a determined attacker. I don't need to chat with other people who are sick (if I have a chronic disease, there already ARE chat rooms for such. Video conferencing? With who? *I* don't have a video phone.
You are really ( I think ) confused about the issue of the California power 'crisis'. It's not a defecit of power available, else the entire western US would be having problems, but typical california muddle headed political thinking - they deregulated half-way - which was a disaster waiting to happen. Either all, or none, it's like being a little bit pregnant - you can't do it.
1. The (server) drives aren't really meant to be spun up/down - it's a hardware thing.
2. The latency it would cause, slowdown in business processes etc. would, I'd bet, cost more than the saving in electricity. Don't know about *your* company, but my users require their files _now_, not after the drives spin up, plus transmission time across the LAN/WAN.
3. I think my shop is typical. I have people on my machines nearly 24x7 - there is always some activity on the servers - and if it ain't the users, it's my maint time, including backups.
yes software should be created using similar practices that have been used for years that make bridges not fall down and ships float.
But, how long were people building houses that didn't collapse and bridges that didn't tumble before masons discovered through trial and error the basics of design that work, vs. those that don't? and how long before such was codified into professional code and civil law?
And, how many civil construction firms force designers and builders to finish a highway bridge with a sub-standard design or poorly chosen material? Not too many, and if they did, it wouldn't be certified for use, and they might find themselves in jail for their trouble.
In Addition, the properties of the basic materials used in construction don't change. Materials scientists will for sure create new ones, but I doublt you'll see a construction crew forced to discard all their hard earned knowledge in 'how to frame a house using 2x4 timber' just because MicroWood released a new version of wood that is incompatible w/ previous releases.
Take the followig with a grain of salt - I *was* active duty for eight years, never a reservist. I'm also not in a management position.
Most employers you'll want to work for will honor the reserve obligation, and value the extra skills you'll pick up. Your reserve time won't be a surprise, as it's scheduled and can be worked around.
Having said that - you'll probably spend more time active than the recruiter promised. I'm not trying to disuade you (far from it) but remember all the thousands of reservists in '90 and '91. We got a shipment of reservists in Japan during Desert Shield who were cheesed off because 1) they were called to active duty for the duration and 2) they were in Japan, not Saudi. Go figure.
A 'modern high spec Athlon system' may beat it's equivl'nt Sun system, but you'd be hard pressed to beat the stuff hiding in the machine room - said Athlon can't beat what I've got at work in the server room for reliability and service.
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In the late 80's, Banyan made a whizzy NOS that ran circles around Novell 3.x . . then, because the IBM compatibles of the day didn't have the oomph to run the OS, Banyan made a box called a Banyan Network Server (BNS).
Okay it was really a Unix box (which is what Banyan was) but it was tower sized, and had an internal UPS. Among other nifty features.
Anyone left who knows Banyan can correct me on the details.
You _think_ - I know. Small company sys admin here - we MUST use 3 popular PCB CAD tools in our business, all of which are paid for on a plan similar to the one proposed . . .you can use the software forever, but to be eligible for maint. or upgrade, you must pay an annual licensing fee.
Now, I don't begrudge that for the tools - they are complicated apps, and the authors deserve to be compensated.
But our lic. fee gives us access to efficient tech support, a not bad set of knowledge bases, etc. etc.
And the annual hooraw we go through each year (3 diff. times) just to make sure we're purchasing the right tool sets for our needs, and keeping all of it straight . . . it's not pretty.
I've had to deal with micronpc, Dell, HP, several software companies (Cadence, Mentor AND Valor) in the past month or two, and they *all* responded quickly and, more to the point, their advice was always spot-on. I've had nearly 0 wait time on hold, the longest was maybe 5 minutes.
The US pilot loosing his temper is very unlikely - a P3 isn't agile at all, not enough to ram a fighter . . unless the Chinese pilot was looking at a map or something.
2. Heavy brigades are well and good and look real pretty. Given that log support a heavy brigade needs, and the time to deply, how many times is this going to be used in the real world?
3. Those new berets the army doggies are wearing look pretty damn stuipid.
Nothing that can't be handled technically - it's (likely) some combination of the following:
Underpaid and Overworked IT staff
Far too many problems/challenges on their network without having to spend time/energy/funds
Don't underestimate that last. The time fighting any hassles getting your three Macs networked is time taken away from several hundred other pressing problems.
I've supported Macs in two different places - one the artists supported themselves, and we managed the connect to the rest of the LAN. The second, the user's managed themselves, and didn't pester us for support.
I enlisted in '85, Marines. Spent four years in the infantry, then lateral moved to Data Processing, for another four years. Then I got the heck out.
Our data processing equipment was nearyly state of the art - we didn't always have the latest and greatest in huge numbers, but we usually had enough. About what you'll find in a typical busines as far as that goes.
When I seperated in '93, I didn't notice any kind of skill gap between my knowledge and my hypothetical peers who elected to go to college or go directl to work. In some/most cases, I was light years ahead of them in practical experience.
An aging Space Truck that costs bazillions to launch, and they cancel it's replacement, but not before driving any competion into the ground. Your tax dollars at work, friends. Check out the mess at Love and Rockets
I don't remember a thing about "aiming to wound" in boot camp - later while on Barracks duty there wasn't any indoctrination about aiming to wound, you dropped the target w/ a well aimed series of rounds and that was that.
For all of that, I also participated in a one week course for Riot Control - great fun, stomping around Camp Usher with masks, bayonets and tear gas. Having experienced first hand how an ineptly deployed CS grenade can really mess up your day (hey, Capt Vlandingham, hope your throw imporved! And next time, don't forget to order your platoon to mask up first. AND check the wind - into your face is a good indication a thrown CS grenade won't do much good) I'm all for toasting a mob from a distance.
At the very least, the weak-willed will disperse, leaving the fanatics and hopheads a little more exposed.
You'll have very little say so over where you go or what you do, aside from being likely to work w/in your assigned specialty.
You WILL have hands on experience with the technology, as opposed to general supervision (see the officer guy above).
You WILL have an opportunity to travel, to visit places that are, to say the least, off the beaten track. You'll never get that opportunity in your run of the mill civilian job.
You WILL gain valuable cred points with any future employer, provided you can word it correctly on your resume.
You WILL be p**sed off, rained on, cold, dirty, hungry, tired as hell - you may get shot at. You'll miss it when you leave, oddly enough.
Aside: The contracting company was, of course, the low-bid on the project. But the training they provided wasn't bad, so we stuck, and the core group (of contractors) was very good - the type to be attracted by training. Pay was far below the average for this area. When the training dried up, most of the best bailed, and as sure as apples roll down hill when that compnay lost the bid, we were offered the same jobs, at a substantial cut in salary, and no training. You can imagine the carnage.
Your mileage will vary by organization.
The IT staff quality varies - the best are very good and attracted to the job for the best reasons. The worst - well, they're hanging on until retirement, and firing a gov't employee for anything less than fraud or murder is too difficult - they just get reassigned at grade. When a drone was assigned to fix a problem, it was usually easier for one of the contractors just to do the damn work, and get it right, rather than wait a week or three for the drone to screw it up. Bitter? Not me.
Can't speak badly of the equipment - we always had what we needed to accomlish the mission. Not cutting edge, but not bad.
The politics, though were B.A.D. The government employees union is all over things like seating assignments, cube sizes, who gets a window etc. Very frustrating.
Mind you, that was for the FDIC SW Service Center, mid 90s.
It's about what you do with what you've got. My end users require several different applications to work on a nearly 24x7 basis, some ported from Unix to NT, some not. Some of the ports just don't work worth a damn, regardless of the benchmarked speed of the host system.
This, for me, is a great chance to halt the false economy introduced by corporate, that is, that Intel+Windows equals a much cheaper system. It may on their balance sheet, but not in the design bay where GPF errors and junky ports rule the day.
Contrast that with the town I came from (Tulsa, OK) where, at the time, there was NO other option if you were (as I was) laid off - you had to leave town just to secure a job.
As to the underlying culture and laws promoting business, I dunno, he MAY have a point. But, I'm here because the jobs are.
format just really seems to make the data go away, but it's still available w/ the right tools - just like deleting a file doesn't really make it 'go away' but removes the first letter of the file name, making the space available to the OS (okay, okay, that was how it is/was under FAT16) I'm sure other file sysetm types are similar.
I can't speak for how it was done other than 1990 - 1993 .. I was enlisted with an MOS (Military Occ. Speciality) of 4063 (programmer) with a secondary MOS of 4066 (small systems specialist). Oddly, I never programmed, and spent all of my time as a PC specialist and LAN guy.
Norton (pre buyout) had a nice tool called wipedisk. Put this on a bootable floppy, set it in the autoexec.bat to execute and let it go to town. The app wrote 1 and 0 in alternate patterns to every byte on the drive.
If memory serves, our standards were to write in 1s, then 0s, then 1s again. This was standard practice for all drives that held classified data, including the unix servers (long story behind THAT bit o' weirdness).
As a learning tool for new-hires/contractors/temps it would be invaluable. A production supervisor in one city might be a bit hazy about exactly those people *do* in the new division, or who his peers might be for reference to problem X - this would help.
Maybe I miss the military a bit too much. When we first gave them Banyan Vines based Email we assigned email addresses by function - AirOpsOfficer@G3@III MEF for example - and the billet holders name/rank in the description field. AirOps could quickly sort through the directory to find other AirOps at diff. levels and functions, and address them directly and informally.
This would be a great tool for those guys, as well. Maybe also reinforces your comment about self-absorbed with class hierarchy. Maybe I'm just pretty damn tired.
Side Note - I'll bet some genius has gone and installed Exchange world wide in the Marines and really screwed up what had been a damn fine mail system.
Your arguments DO sound like IBM, Data General, DEC etc. from the mainframe era. As thing are 'right now' you are correct. Given a few advances in material and technique, who knows what is possible?
We're moving offices - our PBX guys (this after years and years of business) wanted 50% down. The ops mgr. suggested to their sales guy that, as we were long-time customers, that wasn't needed. Sales guy agreed. Then yesterday he came back and said that his corporate office required the 50% down. We started looking for a new provider that morning.
The winner was one of three organizations, two local, one a nationwide company - the winner came to our office first thing this a.m., impressed the ops mgr. w/ his people skills, and showed us a nifty trick w/ the phones we didn't know about.
I rambled, but it is about the personel touch.
When a 'worm' or other VBS mayhem is rampant:
$ 110 per billable hour (average) x 10 minutes per hour to wade through excess mail $ 11 dollars per end user per hour. x 15 end users $ 165 per hour + 30 bucks an hour for my services = 195 per hour.
That's when there is an active .VBS worm running loose. These prolems have seldom lasted longer than 2 hours - and that is due to the mail admins living on the West Coast and not being available as soon as the East Coast facilities are hit.
Otherwise, I'd guestimate that I spend at the most 2 work hours per week on virus and work related issues - that's average. Some weeks more, some weeks less, some weeks none at all.
Above figures are for a small part of a larger manufacturing concern.
We use Cadence's Allegro, Mentor, Veribest.
Veribest has been purchased by Mentor, and rebadged Mentor Expedition.
All versions are available in NT and Unix. We have Allegro in NT/Unix, Veribest in NT, and Mentor in Unix.
You don't say _why_ you have such a passion for converting to Linux (grin), but as regards your PCB Design software, my info is that, Mentor Graphics aside, nothing really works with Linux, yet. Someday, I'm told, but the big push seems to be porting everything to NT.
Editorial Digression: You can, I'm sure purchase a number of 'almost good enough' CAD solutions for PCB design. But the good stuff that allows quick and easy PCB design, that doesn't trip your designers, and works well, costs $$$$.
It's so expensive, that at our place we use Solaris, despite the drawback of expensive machines and software, when NT/Intel is so much cheaper. Why? The cost of the license and maintennance is so damned high, that the price of the OS/Hardware just doesn't factor in.
As an alternate - have you considered farming your design work out to a 3rd party? Give me a buzz, and I'll hook you up with our sales guy. (grin).
I don't need to see my med records on-line (I have paper copies, thank you much) and I doubt that you really can pay enough to keep such secured from a determined attacker. I don't need to chat with other people who are sick (if I have a chronic disease, there already ARE chat rooms for such. Video conferencing? With who? *I* don't have a video phone.
1. The (server) drives aren't really meant to be spun up/down - it's a hardware thing.
2. The latency it would cause, slowdown in business processes etc. would, I'd bet, cost more than the saving in electricity. Don't know about *your* company, but my users require their files _now_, not after the drives spin up, plus transmission time across the LAN/WAN.
3. I think my shop is typical. I have people on my machines nearly 24x7 - there is always some activity on the servers - and if it ain't the users, it's my maint time, including backups.
But, how long were people building houses that didn't collapse and bridges that didn't tumble before masons discovered through trial and error the basics of design that work, vs. those that don't? and how long before such was codified into professional code and civil law?
And, how many civil construction firms force designers and builders to finish a highway bridge with a sub-standard design or poorly chosen material? Not too many, and if they did, it wouldn't be certified for use, and they might find themselves in jail for their trouble.
In Addition, the properties of the basic materials used in construction don't change. Materials scientists will for sure create new ones, but I doublt you'll see a construction crew forced to discard all their hard earned knowledge in 'how to frame a house using 2x4 timber' just because MicroWood released a new version of wood that is incompatible w/ previous releases.
Or something like that.
Most employers you'll want to work for will honor the reserve obligation, and value the extra skills you'll pick up. Your reserve time won't be a surprise, as it's scheduled and can be worked around.
Having said that - you'll probably spend more time active than the recruiter promised. I'm not trying to disuade you (far from it) but remember all the thousands of reservists in '90 and '91. We got a shipment of reservists in Japan during Desert Shield who were cheesed off because 1) they were called to active duty for the duration and 2) they were in Japan, not Saudi. Go figure.
A 'modern high spec Athlon system' may beat it's equivl'nt Sun system, but you'd be hard pressed to beat the stuff hiding in the machine room - said Athlon can't beat what I've got at work in the server room for reliability and service.