On Wednesday 03 July 2002 03:10, Joshua 'Schwa' Gargus wrote:

> Intel and AMD don't need convincing, they're quite enthusiastic.  Is Cyrix
> still making chips?

As -- IIRC -- Via, sure. They're doing a lot of itsy bitsy teeny weeny PC 
boards with those chips embedded in now. They won't exactly make great gaming 
PCs, but may well collar the cheap workstation/PC based cluster market. The 
boards are about half the size of a micro ATX board (approx 17 x 17 cm) and 
run _very_ cool, so I'd expect someone to be thinking of cramming multiples 
of them in a 1U case.

>
> > all the x86 manufacturers
> > -- to shoot themselves in the foot, what's to stop Sun and Apple (and
> > Jecel!) turning up the hardware production lines and offering a far
> > better board/chipset to replace the whole Wintel PC concept?
>
> Well, Sun isn't competing in the PC space, so nothing is stopping them
> from doing so.  However, if Macintoshes were suddenly unable to read
> Word files, receive email from Hotmail users, etc., then Apple would
> be dead.  

OK, but let's not forget that Apple are not the only folk producing similar 
hardware: there is some production of boards (designed for Acorn, but they'll 
run Linux and -- perhaps -- OSX) based on the same chipset.

I think Hotmail and M$ Office are likely to die first: Hotmail is rapidly 
becoming a joke and Office is finding itself under a lot of pressure from 
Star Office and Open Office. 

I've read varying accounts of Palladium and I'm no longer convinced of the 
sanity of M$ management. To me it really does look like they're desperate for 
cash cows.

Consider: the Xbox is being blitzed by the PS2 and they're virtually giving it 
away. .Net is in some kind of trouble. Sales of XP are nothing terrific. 
They're starting to loose their end of the server market. Further, the only 
place PC expansion can really occur is in the underdeveloped world. M$ have 
pretty much lost China, Korea, Peru and there are good open source intiatives 
in Argentina and Brazil and a high uptake of Linux in South Africa.

Oh, and HP have sold Linux to Disney! 

I'm actually pretty optimistic for the future.But the evil empire still needs 
watching.

Cheers

John