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This ad reminds me of the way it felt to work at Sun Microsystems around 2002, when all the engineers knew that cheap GNU Linux boxes were the future. The mark

This ad reminds me of the way it felt to work at Sun Microsystems around 2002, when all the engineers knew that cheap GNU Linux boxes were the future. The marketing people had similar FUD-based ads about how the TCO of Linux was higher, how certain HPC jobs wouldn’t run well etc. super similar to this Intel ad today.

panick21_ 5y ago
If only Sun had continued with x86 in the early 1990s and Open Sourced Solaris. The world would look very different now I think.
- meepmorp 5y ago
  Sun did open source Solaris, though after the 90s.
  - panick21_ 5y ago
    Of course I know that, but they did it after Linux started to get broad adoption as a reaction, rather then proactively doing so.
    - guiriduro 5y ago
      and the world had to wait 10 extra years for containerised workloads to be popularised in docker instead of zones.
      - meepmorp 5y ago
        I remember seeing VMWare for the first time and thinking it was about time the non-mainframe world made it into the 70s.
      - panick21_ 5y ago
        Well even when Zones in Open Source existed almost nobody used them. That said they were only available in few places and Solaris Open Source never fully took off. I think the reason is that they thought of them as an operational tool. Its basically a cheap VM. However, led to crazy docker adoption was its use as a dev-tool and in development making it really easy to run simply stuff. Only then people started thinking about using this seriously deploy application on mass scale with docker. And then they realized that containers on Linux were just patchwork and the security story was a mess. Zones were developed to serve as VM replacements, so for them security and resource management was very important.
- oumua_don17 5y ago
  In 2030: If only Intel had continued with Xscale in 2000s and become an external foundry. The world would look very different now I think.
Nursie 5y ago
I remember all that! Wow, it's been a while. Yes there was a spate of things about - "Linux might be free but look at our sponsored study which says that actually our hardware gives you more uptime and our devtools are better and our patch system does this and our FS is faster and we can cluster this amount of cores and ..." But in the end the systems were still 5x or more what an x86 server would cost, and everyone was just having a go with linux at work and at home anyway, because they already had x86 hardware laying around. (IIRC Microsoft tried a similar TCO gambit a few times as well)

panick21_ 5y ago

If only Sun had continued with x86 in the early 1990s and Open Sourced Solaris. The world would look very different now I think.

meepmorp 5y ago
Sun did open source Solaris, though after the 90s.
- panick21_ 5y ago
  Of course I know that, but they did it after Linux started to get broad adoption as a reaction, rather then proactively doing so.
  - guiriduro 5y ago
    and the world had to wait 10 extra years for containerised workloads to be popularised in docker instead of zones.
    - meepmorp 5y ago
      I remember seeing VMWare for the first time and thinking it was about time the non-mainframe world made it into the 70s.
    - panick21_ 5y ago
      Well even when Zones in Open Source existed almost nobody used them. That said they were only available in few places and Solaris Open Source never fully took off. I think the reason is that they thought of them as an operational tool. Its basically a cheap VM. However, led to crazy docker adoption was its use as a dev-tool and in development making it really easy to run simply stuff. Only then people started thinking about using this seriously deploy application on mass scale with docker. And then they realized that containers on Linux were just patchwork and the security story was a mess. Zones were developed to serve as VM replacements, so for them security and resource management was very important.
oumua_don17 5y ago
In 2030: If only Intel had continued with Xscale in 2000s and become an external foundry. The world would look very different now I think.

Nursie 5y ago

I remember all that! Wow, it's been a while. Yes there was a spate of things about - "Linux might be free but look at our sponsored study which says that actually our hardware gives you more uptime and our devtools are better and our patch system does this and our FS is faster and we can cluster this amount of cores and ..." But in the end the systems were still 5x or more what an x86 server would cost, and everyone was just having a go with linux at work and at home anyway, because they already had x86 hardware laying around. (IIRC Microsoft tried a similar TCO gambit a few times as well)