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...

Let me over simplify this a little bit but cause where Windows
hardware support starts and stops is difficult to pi point.

Uhm Bill, Windows is not compatible with hardware. Hardware is
compatible with Windows. When I get a mother board I don't go
the the Windows site to get drivers I go to the vendors site to
get the driver. On the issue of AT bus, PCI bus and USB I think
Windows has hardware engineers that participate in the comities
but MS doesn't write the device drivers for the chip set.

-- 
Linux Home Automation         Neil Cherry       ncherry@comcast.net
http://home.comcast.net/~ncherry/               (Text only)
http://hcs.sourceforge.net/                     (HCS II)
http://linuxha.blogspot.com/                    My HA Blog
-- 
http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive
View/change your membership options at
http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist