On Mon, Oct 03, 2005 at 10:22:17AM -0700, William Chops Westfield wrote:
> 
> On Oct 3, 2005, at 9:58 AM, Byron A Jeff wrote:
> 
> >>The breadth of hardware that windows will
> >>support with little user-side knowledge is impressive.  I mean, linux
> >>does pretty good, all things considered, but windows is AMAZING.
> >
> >I did miss the smiley right?
> >
> No, I'm quite serious.  For instance, cisco has at various times 
> considered
> building a router based on a generic PC-style platform (the last time I
> think was back when it looked like Novell might build such routers and
> be able to sell them much cheaper than ours; a long time ago.)  After
> some study, we decided that ALL the time (and more) that we would have
> saved by not having to design the platform itself would have been taken
> up by compatibility testing (motherboards, processors, bioses, network
> cards, etc.) instead.  Note to mention that most of the 
> cheap-off-the-shelf
> components that made such a platform attractive seemed to have a product
> lifetime measured in months, after which you had to start testing 
> again...
> The technology churn rate in PC platforms is mind-boggling...

All very true. But I still think you have it backwards. The hardware
manufacturers generates the windows drivers for the vast majority of
the hardware, not Microsoft. So while I agree that the Windows system
in toto has that vast amount of coverage, it's done in a distributed
fashion where each MB, video card, and peripheral manufacturer contributes
their driver to the pile. 

Linux OTOH has virtually no hardware support from the hardware manufacturers
with many actively hiding hardware specifications. And yet there is a wide
breadth of coverage for quite a bit of hardware. I would posit that a Knoppix
or DSL style CD configured for routing would work on the vast majority of
the hardware configurations that you could throw at it.

BAJ
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