Yeah... I said I was not a zealot. But, it is... mostly a RISC core.
And when did I ever mention P4s.
Am I not allowed to mention Intel's currently widely available finest (since you argue that Intels "CISC" design is better)? You said...
Myth: RISC is better than CISC
Take a look at those benchmarks I posted earlier. Now sort out the RISC and CISC machines.
What's that? They are ALL RISC based cores, bar the Pentium I?
The fact that Intel (the maker of the Worlds most successful "CISC" CPU's) has moved essentially to a RISC core (to exploit the easy pipelining benefits) with a CISC "frontend" (for legacy compatibility) starting with the Pentium Pro, kinda shows that RISC is better than CISC, don't you think?
CISC can theoretically do more per clock cycle than RISC.
Prove it.
If you said, "CISC can theoretically do more per instruction than RISC" and left it at that, I wouldn't be arguing with you.
Here is some reading that I think you'll be interested in, with your current course...
When we hit a performance ceiling due to minimum transistor size, we will have to exploit pipelining and multiple cores to the fullest and the easiest way to do that is to embrace RISC (due to predictable, uniform instruction lengths) as the better choice over CISC.
Personally I trust the network security of FreeBSD better than I do OpenBSD, but I believe it would be easier for a user to break root on a FreeBSD box than an OpenBSD one.
What? Can you make sense of this?
I also use OpenBSD as a desktop. It runs X11 and I like WindowMaker.
Open and Net a LOT slower than Free? Post some numbers please, because as a Free and Open user since Open 2.5, I find this rather exagerated.
Are you one of these people that equate a few percent as being a lot?
This wasn't a maintainence thing.
One very out of the ordinary incident and you've given up on OpenBSD "network security"? Talk about reactionary!
Lastly, I am supplying some information to people who know very little on the subject.
I thanked you didn't I?
If you want to write up a CPU Design FAQ for dummies, have at it.
I don't design CPU's, though I have been designing digital devices since the late 80's.
Furthermore, the CISC architecture is designed in a way where more work is theoretically done per instruction.
Careful wording there, impressive. More work per instruction. Well that is the basis of CISC. But whether this is an improvement over RISC is hard to quantify, with individual implementations of both giving differing results that cannot say one is better than the other overall. These CISC instructions that do more work, also require more clock ticks to complete. But then RISC instructions, which usually take only a single clock tick to complete, usually need to be combined to do the same work as a single CISC instruction. The P4 though, does some impressive magic with CISC->RISC processing that blurs the traditional concepts.
But how about work per clock tick, which is what matters if we're talking about the MHz myth...
I'm not saying a current model G4 is faster than a current model x86 based machine, BTW. But if the PowerPC 970 can get close to the clock rate of the P4 (or then P5), we might see "G5's" running "P5's" into the ground.
PS, I have an old 300MHz G3 iBook, after about 15 years of x86 (currently have P3-500 amongst my currently 16 something PC's). I'm not a zealot of either, but I hold high hopes for the 970.
Given the military's strong chain of command - and the near heresy of so much as thinking questioning thoughts, the techs implementing this won't dare mention what a Bad Idea it is.
Chances are, that the techs implementing are actually dock yard workers that don't fall under any military chain of command because they are civilian workers (which have proven time and time again to be a MUCH higher quality).
I've seen multi-million dollar ship systems DESTROYED after a brand new in-dock refit, by a moron sailor not remembering to extend the support legs on a crane truck.
The joke is, that the sailors don't even have to leave port to wreck the ships we used to fix.
My 500mHz iBook seems about the same speed as my old PII-166. I'm not talking about number crunching or actual app speed, I just mean the SUBJECTIVE experience... screen redraws, windows opens, etc.
Screen redraws have a hell of a lot to do with your video card and overall system speed will also depend on how much RAM you have (especially if you're at the minimum).
I have a 128MB 300MHz iBook with OSX 10.1. The performance is OK, the overall experience is better than anything I have ever used before though.
Max out your RAM and get Jaguar if you don't already have it. Paging to a slow 2.5" HDD can be very painful!
OK, I'm tired of all this stupidity about how nobody knows exactly what MHz means, and how its not really a measure of speed.
MHz is NOT an absolute measure of processor power.
Looking at my old Borland TASM x86 instruction breakdown book, I see each instruction with required number of clock ticks to complete (some variable). The same instruction is often done in less clock ticks on a i486 than on an i386 for example, meaning that a 100MHz i486 is usually faster than a 100MHz i386.
Therefore MHz is NOT a comparative measure (of CPU power) between a 486 and a 386, and they are so closely related (a 486 is not just a 386 with an integrated FPU). The difference between different CPU architectures is often HUGE.
The PPC IS usually faster per clock tick, than ANY x86 based CPU and when the Altivec shines it is blinding.
Here let me simplify your life:
A class of CPU design and you're simplifying our lives! Thank you!
Not to mention, a ship's structure is built entirely of steel and aluminum.
Absolutely krnlpanic. I think you and I both know, this is complete bullshit, at best.
Perhaps it's just a lame, ill conceived concept, thought up by a non technical higher officer, that somehow managed to get out into the wild to do nothing by embarass the Navy.
The facts are, that the Navy does not need radio remote control and wouldn't dare use it no matter how convienient it could have been.
I won't even bother reading this article, because as it is presented in the/. headlines, I know for a 100% fact, as an ex Navy electronics tech, that it cannot possibly be correct.
This must be one of the most ridiculous things I have ever heard in my entire life.
The Navy, as I KNOW it, employs only technologies that are required to get a job done properly, nothing more and nothing less. Often, this means developing technologies in-house, at PCB level and beyond if need be. When I worked for them in the 80's, their technologies were approximately 10-20 years ahead of commercially available technologies.
If they were going to do something so unbeleivably STUPID as having radio control over a destroyer (worlds most powerful crypto or not), there's not a snowballs chance in hell that they're going with 802.11b.
The Navy usually takes minimal risks at ALL TIMES.
PS, the parent is funny, in the same kind of way that a human smeared onto a highway for kilometres by an 18 wheeler is funny. Especially if this story is actually true. I hope the rocket scientists who thought this one up gets a military execution.
(apart from OpenBSD zealots, most of us will just run Linux instead, I guess)
I've been using Linux for more than 5 years, settling on Debian. I prefer OpenBSD and FreeBSD, but I am interested in Gentoo (and Debian I will always love, if just for apt)...
I think it's hard to gauge which camp has more zealots (% wise) because it's the zealots that rant and rave all the time. Many people who are actually deploying Linux and BSD's are quitely going about their business.
I would honestly think, with Linux being the current cool thing to be into, that there'd be a greater percentage of Linux zealots than BSD zealots. Hell, everyone has heard of Linux (and call it Line-icks and no I don't correct people but I hate people doing it to me), but ask most Mac OSX users about BSD and you get "BSD?" or even "oh yeah, Linux is cool".
: )
Now, as an independent consultant, you can get out there and do amazing stuff with commodity hardware and your own tailored solutions pulling from a wealth of great free server software solutions.
Yeah, today I was attending a Wintel/Apple site I set up with a Debian netatalk/samba/squid/dhcpd/apache server. A year later it's still going strong without a problem.
You better keep a tight rein on the Aussie Gov, they seem to think Australia is the southernmost state of USA (NZ Gov seems less prone to that, but you're all nice Echelon members).
I actually don't think they're stupid either. Rather, they seem to be quite self centred arrogant arseholes, in addition to the satire/subtlety problems...
Remember in South Park, when the kids went to play dodge ball against the Chinese... What do you call an American with a PhD in physics and mathematics?... STUPID AMERICAN!
As an example, recently I saw a small bit of the TV show Race Around the World (or whatever it was called). This loud mouth yankee said while in Vietnam that (loosely quoted) "I come from a generation of soldiers who lost 58,000 here". Christ, how many Vietnamese died in that war!? I can always pick the USA tourists in Sydney, they are both visually and verbally loud and bloody rude. They would seem to be quite ignorant of this though.
Once I was on a light rail going to the Sydney casino with my girlfriend, we saw a sign for "Ketchup". My girlfriend quietly asked me what Ketchup was, so I quitely replied "Tomato sauce". This did of course appear to offend to loud mouth arsehole American man seated opposite us, who loudly proclaimed that "Ketchup IS NOT TOMATO SAUCE". I felt like giving him a good Aussie punch in the mouth. Not because he contradicted me, because he didn't mind his own business and was very rude about it too.
I had an American boss. He was actually a really nice guy, but had THE most incredible ability to rub EVERYONE the wrong way. I think it's the pedestal they place themselves on (mass media provided pedestal). Problem with smart people, is that they can often let it go to thier heads, become arrogant and think they know everything better than everyone else (especially foreiners). So instead of thinking things through, they think they don't need to and go with thier first thoughts on any given subject. Then if they do realise thier error, so as not to loose face, defend that which they do not believe to the bitter end.
Examples like, thier "democracy", right to own semiautomatic pistols (designed to kill PEOPLE, not deer) and other "arms", etc. Just in case thier.gov gets tyrinical or something. Somehow, I don't think a 9mm or even 7.62mm is going to put up much of a fight against the 30mm coming from the AH64 Apache 10km away, hovering between trees at night time with you lit up like a soft glowing meat christmas tree. ; )
What is the statistic? 2.x guns per person in the USA and over 11,000 gun assisted killings each year? What's that, 1 in every 18 thousand USA citizens will be killed with a gun this year? In Australia that statistic is close to 1 in every 307 thousand.
Maybe he's one of those "audience" members in one of these bloody US "info"mercials, that other nations now must endure on late night TV.
You know the ones right? That bloody chicken rotisary thing with those dorks WOW'ing and OOHHH'ing and AHHHHH'ing when they see the guy stab the chicken with a sauce gun thing.
FUCK!
Are hollywood movies severely dumbed down because of the target audience or is it because Americans make the movies?
I've tried lots of data restoration software, from shareware to super expensive. Almost all of them worked pretty badly. Except one, and I mention it here if it helps someone who is desperate and thinks there's no hope, to go down a potentially fruitfull track...
I've tried Get Data Back for FAT and for NTFS on drives that were formatted, partially zeroed (both FAT's gone on a FAT drive) and new partitions partially used and they restored perfectly almost all files (luckily every file I needed). They cost money (frequently found on warez sites though) and the programs and web site don't look all that professional, but I've never found anything that worked as well. I rekon these guys deserve to be paid for this great software.
Using OpenBSD since 2.5, and now as a desktop system with a lovely WindowMaker setup... I've got to know what instabilities you've found. I can only make it crash if I blindly play with custom kernels.
The OS has never froze or blue-screened and gets rebooted only a few times a year (vacations)
I reboot my Windows 2000 Pro machine every day, only because I don't need it on when I'm sleeping. Just today, a potential client called me and I clicked start to open up notepad to jot details down... start would not respond, I could not alt-tab to another instance of notepad that was already running, etc. Luckily I had paper and a texta at hand...
Ctrl-Alt-Del did respond, Netscape was the culprit. What I would like to know, is how a misbehaving Netscape can wreak such havoc in Win2000. You would expect this (and worse) in a Win9x based OS, but not 2000.
PS, the law firm I was last contracting for used Dells exclusively. The Win2k machines did not crash often, but did crash. And I mean blue screens, not explorer.exe freezing.
I hope you're not attributing home built machines as being less stable? Because in my 12 years as PC/network tech, I've had the most trouble with brand names like Dell, Gateway, DEC, NEC, Compaq, etc, etc.
Even high end, expensive server lines have given me grief. The brand names tend to have the most strange quirks.
Slashdot Mirror
When I stated:
Myth: RISC is better than CISC
I did not imply the converse. You assumed it.
Right...
CISC can theoretically do more per clock cycle than RISC.
Itanium 2 is an Intel product correct?
t ml
m l
Yeah... I said I was not a zealot. But, it is... mostly a RISC core.
And when did I ever mention P4s.
Am I not allowed to mention Intel's currently widely available finest (since you argue that Intels "CISC" design is better)? You said...
Myth: RISC is better than CISC
Take a look at those benchmarks I posted earlier. Now sort out the RISC and CISC machines.
What's that? They are ALL RISC based cores, bar the Pentium I?
The fact that Intel (the maker of the Worlds most successful "CISC" CPU's) has moved essentially to a RISC core (to exploit the easy pipelining benefits) with a CISC "frontend" (for legacy compatibility) starting with the Pentium Pro, kinda shows that RISC is better than CISC, don't you think?
CISC can theoretically do more per clock cycle than RISC.
Prove it.
If you said, "CISC can theoretically do more per instruction than RISC" and left it at that, I wouldn't be arguing with you.
Here is some reading that I think you'll be interested in, with your current course...
http://www-compsci.swan.ac.uk/~csneal/HPM/index.h
http://www-compsci.swan.ac.uk/~csneal/HPM/risc.ht
When we hit a performance ceiling due to minimum transistor size, we will have to exploit pipelining and multiple cores to the fullest and the easiest way to do that is to embrace RISC (due to predictable, uniform instruction lengths) as the better choice over CISC.
Personally I trust the network security of FreeBSD better than I do OpenBSD, but I believe it would be easier for a user to break root on a FreeBSD box than an OpenBSD one.
What? Can you make sense of this?
I also use OpenBSD as a desktop. It runs X11 and I like WindowMaker.
Open and Net a LOT slower than Free? Post some numbers please, because as a Free and Open user since Open 2.5, I find this rather exagerated.
Are you one of these people that equate a few percent as being a lot?
This wasn't a maintainence thing.
One very out of the ordinary incident and you've given up on OpenBSD "network security"? Talk about reactionary!
Lastly, I am supplying some information to people who know very little on the subject.
I thanked you didn't I?
If you want to write up a CPU Design FAQ for dummies, have at it.
I don't design CPU's, though I have been designing digital devices since the late 80's.
Furthermore, the CISC architecture is designed in a way where more work is theoretically done per instruction.
Careful wording there, impressive. More work per instruction. Well that is the basis of CISC. But whether this is an improvement over RISC is hard to quantify, with individual implementations of both giving differing results that cannot say one is better than the other overall. These CISC instructions that do more work, also require more clock ticks to complete. But then RISC instructions, which usually take only a single clock tick to complete, usually need to be combined to do the same work as a single CISC instruction. The P4 though, does some impressive magic with CISC->RISC processing that blurs the traditional concepts.
But how about work per clock tick, which is what matters if we're talking about the MHz myth...
Here http://www.swox.com/gmp/gmp-speed.html are PowerPC's doing MUCH more work per clock tick than a Pentium 4. Seemingly many times (3.4?) more.
Hell even the old 603e seems to be substantially faster than the P4 per clock tick, in these tests.
BTW, the Itanium 2 would appear to be a rocket!
VCD encoding, G4 doing more per clock tick than an Athlon http://klicman.org/altivec/
I'm not saying a current model G4 is faster than a current model x86 based machine, BTW. But if the PowerPC 970 can get close to the clock rate of the P4 (or then P5), we might see "G5's" running "P5's" into the ground.
PS, I have an old 300MHz G3 iBook, after about 15 years of x86 (currently have P3-500 amongst my currently 16 something PC's). I'm not a zealot of either, but I hold high hopes for the 970.
Given the military's strong chain of command - and the near heresy of so much as thinking questioning thoughts, the techs implementing this won't dare mention what a Bad Idea it is.
Chances are, that the techs implementing are actually dock yard workers that don't fall under any military chain of command because they are civilian workers (which have proven time and time again to be a MUCH higher quality).
I've seen multi-million dollar ship systems DESTROYED after a brand new in-dock refit, by a moron sailor not remembering to extend the support legs on a crane truck.
The joke is, that the sailors don't even have to leave port to wreck the ships we used to fix.
Just out of curiosity, why is the military spending $30,000 on a cathode-ray tube?
I couldn't confirm nor deny that sum, but have you seen these CRT's? I worked in Navy RADAR in the late 80 and those CRT's are round and huge.
I expect economies of scale probably put a high price on these very low volume and specific CRT designs.
You're probably right about this. I think they're just trying to make sure the captain can still issue orders while he's in the head.
While he's getting head.
Did you know that if you go into the Navy with an ass hole, you come out with a port hole?
My 500mHz iBook seems about the same speed as my old PII-166. I'm not talking about number crunching or actual app speed, I just mean the SUBJECTIVE experience... screen redraws, windows opens, etc.
Screen redraws have a hell of a lot to do with your video card and overall system speed will also depend on how much RAM you have (especially if you're at the minimum).
I have a 128MB 300MHz iBook with OSX 10.1. The performance is OK, the overall experience is better than anything I have ever used before though.
Max out your RAM and get Jaguar if you don't already have it. Paging to a slow 2.5" HDD can be very painful!
OK, I'm tired of all this stupidity about how nobody knows exactly what MHz means, and how its not really a measure of speed.
MHz is NOT an absolute measure of processor power.
Looking at my old Borland TASM x86 instruction breakdown book, I see each instruction with required number of clock ticks to complete (some variable). The same instruction is often done in less clock ticks on a i486 than on an i386 for example, meaning that a 100MHz i486 is usually faster than a 100MHz i386.
Therefore MHz is NOT a comparative measure (of CPU power) between a 486 and a 386, and they are so closely related (a 486 is not just a 386 with an integrated FPU). The difference between different CPU architectures is often HUGE.
The PPC IS usually faster per clock tick, than ANY x86 based CPU and when the Altivec shines it is blinding.
Here let me simplify your life:
A class of CPU design and you're simplifying our lives! Thank you!
Not to mention, a ship's structure is built entirely of steel and aluminum.
Absolutely krnlpanic. I think you and I both know, this is complete bullshit, at best.
Perhaps it's just a lame, ill conceived concept, thought up by a non technical higher officer, that somehow managed to get out into the wild to do nothing by embarass the Navy.
The facts are, that the Navy does not need radio remote control and wouldn't dare use it no matter how convienient it could have been.
I won't even bother reading this article, because as it is presented in the /. headlines, I know for a 100% fact, as an ex Navy electronics tech, that it cannot possibly be correct.
This must be one of the most ridiculous things I have ever heard in my entire life.
The Navy, as I KNOW it, employs only technologies that are required to get a job done properly, nothing more and nothing less. Often, this means developing technologies in-house, at PCB level and beyond if need be. When I worked for them in the 80's, their technologies were approximately 10-20 years ahead of commercially available technologies.
If they were going to do something so unbeleivably STUPID as having radio control over a destroyer (worlds most powerful crypto or not), there's not a snowballs chance in hell that they're going with 802.11b.
The Navy usually takes minimal risks at ALL TIMES.
PS, the parent is funny, in the same kind of way that a human smeared onto a highway for kilometres by an 18 wheeler is funny. Especially if this story is actually true. I hope the rocket scientists who thought this one up gets a military execution.
(apart from OpenBSD zealots, most of us will just run Linux instead, I guess)
I've been using Linux for more than 5 years, settling on Debian. I prefer OpenBSD and FreeBSD, but I am interested in Gentoo (and Debian I will always love, if just for apt)...
I think it's hard to gauge which camp has more zealots (% wise) because it's the zealots that rant and rave all the time. Many people who are actually deploying Linux and BSD's are quitely going about their business.
I would honestly think, with Linux being the current cool thing to be into, that there'd be a greater percentage of Linux zealots than BSD zealots. Hell, everyone has heard of Linux (and call it Line-icks and no I don't correct people but I hate people doing it to me), but ask most Mac OSX users about BSD and you get "BSD?" or even "oh yeah, Linux is cool".
: )
Now, as an independent consultant, you can get out there and do amazing stuff with commodity hardware and your own tailored solutions pulling from a wealth of great free server software solutions.
Yeah, today I was attending a Wintel/Apple site I set up with a Debian netatalk/samba/squid/dhcpd/apache server. A year later it's still going strong without a problem.
Beware of sarcasm and devil's advocacy.
Is this a "get out of jail free card"?
coal (ain't that wonderful? a few more decades of coal burning!)
Hey that's great! The more of it we burn, the easier it will be to mine, as the ice around it continues to melt! Pure genius!
That coming from a country that gave us such culinary delights as McDonalds, Burgar King, and Kentucky Fried Chicken.
I, as an Aussie, agree that those three suck, baddly, but cold beer is the way beer should be!
Then again, usually ending up in one of those three establishments after many cold beers, you find that they don't suck too baddly at the time.
Warm beer on the other hand, always sucks and I never suck warm beer.
BTW, have you been affected badly by the bushfires?
Thankfully no. Thanks for asking.
I live in Bondi (suburban, east of Sydney CBD), so although my unit is surrounded by trees, there's little chance of them going up.
The only effect for me is really the emotion of seeing other Aussies (human and animals) suffering.
Keh-chup = Cantonese for tomato sauce.
That's interesting.
They can't get rid of their guns tho.
Oh absolutely. It's a lost cause alright.
You better keep a tight rein on the Aussie Gov, they seem to think Australia is the southernmost state of USA (NZ Gov seems less prone to that, but you're all nice Echelon members).
Tell me about it..
I actually don't think they're stupid either. Rather, they seem to be quite self centred arrogant arseholes, in addition to the satire/subtlety problems...
.gov gets tyrinical or something. Somehow, I don't think a 9mm or even 7.62mm is going to put up much of a fight against the 30mm coming from the AH64 Apache 10km away, hovering between trees at night time with you lit up like a soft glowing meat christmas tree. ; )
Remember in South Park, when the kids went to play dodge ball against the Chinese... What do you call an American with a PhD in physics and mathematics?... STUPID AMERICAN!
As an example, recently I saw a small bit of the TV show Race Around the World (or whatever it was called). This loud mouth yankee said while in Vietnam that (loosely quoted) "I come from a generation of soldiers who lost 58,000 here". Christ, how many Vietnamese died in that war!? I can always pick the USA tourists in Sydney, they are both visually and verbally loud and bloody rude. They would seem to be quite ignorant of this though.
Once I was on a light rail going to the Sydney casino with my girlfriend, we saw a sign for "Ketchup". My girlfriend quietly asked me what Ketchup was, so I quitely replied "Tomato sauce". This did of course appear to offend to loud mouth arsehole American man seated opposite us, who loudly proclaimed that "Ketchup IS NOT TOMATO SAUCE". I felt like giving him a good Aussie punch in the mouth. Not because he contradicted me, because he didn't mind his own business and was very rude about it too.
I had an American boss. He was actually a really nice guy, but had THE most incredible ability to rub EVERYONE the wrong way. I think it's the pedestal they place themselves on (mass media provided pedestal). Problem with smart people, is that they can often let it go to thier heads, become arrogant and think they know everything better than everyone else (especially foreiners). So instead of thinking things through, they think they don't need to and go with thier first thoughts on any given subject. Then if they do realise thier error, so as not to loose face, defend that which they do not believe to the bitter end.
Examples like, thier "democracy", right to own semiautomatic pistols (designed to kill PEOPLE, not deer) and other "arms", etc. Just in case thier
What is the statistic? 2.x guns per person in the USA and over 11,000 gun assisted killings each year? What's that, 1 in every 18 thousand USA citizens will be killed with a gun this year? In Australia that statistic is close to 1 in every 307 thousand.
All I can say is... WHAT-EV-ERRRR....
Just curious: are you a citizen of the US of A?
ROFL!!! ; )
Maybe he's one of those "audience" members in one of these bloody US "info"mercials, that other nations now must endure on late night TV.
You know the ones right? That bloody chicken rotisary thing with those dorks WOW'ing and OOHHH'ing and AHHHHH'ing when they see the guy stab the chicken with a sauce gun thing.
FUCK!
Are hollywood movies severely dumbed down because of the target audience or is it because Americans make the movies?
The answer is simple: IBM doesn't trust to non-scalable design of BSD.
All our filesystem are belong to you?
I've tried lots of data restoration software, from shareware to super expensive. Almost all of them worked pretty badly. Except one, and I mention it here if it helps someone who is desperate and thinks there's no hope, to go down a potentially fruitfull track...
I've tried Get Data Back for FAT and for NTFS on drives that were formatted, partially zeroed (both FAT's gone on a FAT drive) and new partitions partially used and they restored perfectly almost all files (luckily every file I needed). They cost money (frequently found on warez sites though) and the programs and web site don't look all that professional, but I've never found anything that worked as well. I rekon these guys deserve to be paid for this great software.
Sorry Bishop, my mistake.
Moz certainly has issues with OpenBSD.
I also found it a little unstable.
Using OpenBSD since 2.5, and now as a desktop system with a lovely WindowMaker setup... I've got to know what instabilities you've found. I can only make it crash if I blindly play with custom kernels.
???
The OS has never froze or blue-screened and gets rebooted only a few times a year (vacations)
I reboot my Windows 2000 Pro machine every day, only because I don't need it on when I'm sleeping. Just today, a potential client called me and I clicked start to open up notepad to jot details down... start would not respond, I could not alt-tab to another instance of notepad that was already running, etc. Luckily I had paper and a texta at hand...
Ctrl-Alt-Del did respond, Netscape was the culprit. What I would like to know, is how a misbehaving Netscape can wreak such havoc in Win2000. You would expect this (and worse) in a Win9x based OS, but not 2000.
PS, the law firm I was last contracting for used Dells exclusively. The Win2k machines did not crash often, but did crash. And I mean blue screens, not explorer.exe freezing.
I hope you're not attributing home built machines as being less stable? Because in my 12 years as PC/network tech, I've had the most trouble with brand names like Dell, Gateway, DEC, NEC, Compaq, etc, etc.
Even high end, expensive server lines have given me grief. The brand names tend to have the most strange quirks.
p.s. If you're top priority is how long an OS takes to install, switch to QNX. Five minutes!
I typically install OpenBSD in minutes. If I'm doing a local network install and using the whole of a fast smallish disk, it's less than 2 minutes.
People have serious problems if they hold install time as a high priority.