Yeah, that's more or less the argument I was making - (though I seem to recall that it wasn't until the late 90's that the sun user land was 64bit, it was all s

Yeah, that's more or less the argument I was making - (though I seem to recall that it wasn't until the late 90's that the sun user land was 64bit, it was all still 32bit) I don't consider Windows Server a really good general purpose server system, its excellent at some workloads though. IA-64 was a mistake, it has hurt everyone who touched it, I believe it killed VMS (beyond the crazy way VMS is licensed) (and did no favors for HP-UX either.) - it is and was too hard to build a really efficient compiler for - thankfully microsofts porting effort to IA-64 got the codebase set up to go to AMD64. In many ways though, as much as I'd like to see other microarchitectures, x86 is the UNIX of hardware, it's good enough for most applications, and in the long run, good always beats perfect.