Graham Lee, writing at De Programmatica Ipsum: Last month’s news that IBM would do a Hewlett-Packard and divide into two — an IT consultancy and a buzzword compliance unit — marks the end of “business as usual” for yet another of the great workstation companies. […] In high-tech domains, an engineer could readily have a toolchest of suitable computers in the same way that a mechanic has different tools for their tasks. This one has an FPGA connected by both PCI-E and JTAG to allow for quick hardware prototyping. This one is connected to a high-throughput GPU for visualisations; that one to a high-capacity GPU for scientific simulations. The general purpose hardware vendors want us to believe that an okay-at-anything computer is the best for everything: you don’t need a truck, so here’s a car. But when you’re hauling a ton of goods, you’ll find it cheaper and more satisfying to shell out more for a truck. Okay-at-anything is good for nothing.

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Source: Slashdot – The Untimely Demise Of Workstations