I see the infosec industry has finally achieved security once and for all by shutting down every workstation connected to the internet
@cy @0xabad1dea windows machines by definition are not workstations.
@fedops @cy @0xabad1dea
Why not? My vintage Mac Pro is running Windows now and it has dual Xeon, ECC RAM, all that shit…
Well, maybe there is a different definition of workstation that I'm not aware of 🤔
@fedops
What exactly do you expect me to find there that would exclude Windows machines "by definition"?
The article states that the term is loosely-defined and this: "However, by the early 2000s, this difference largely disappeared, since workstations use highly commoditized hardware dominated by large PC vendors, such as Dell, Hewlett-Packard, and Fujitsu, selling x86-64 systems running Windows or Linux"
🤷
@m0xee I don't expect anything. I'm just saying that inflationary use of the term workstation is not useful. A unix workstation is a workstation. A windows PC is a PC. That's all.
@cy @0xabad1dea
@fedops
I don't remember it ever being about the OS — or software in general for that matter. At some point it was about RISC, but it became less relevant as Intel CPUs caught up in terms of performance and gained SMP capabilities. It was always more about field of application and hardware having greater performance and reliability, but that was still supposed to be operated by a single user — as opposed to servers.
@fedops
To me it still is that way, I consider ECC RAM mandatory and SMP-capable CPU os opposed to commodity one — no matter how many cores it has.
As for software, NT 3.51 came in Server and Workstation editions — and I don't remember anyone minding that naming even in the mid-nineties, they have revived it as separate Workstation edition of Windows 10.
The term UNIX workstation sure exists, but it was always denoted — just like you did, but never implied.
@fedops
BTW Mac Pro and PowerMac G5 are both undeniably workstations, but they run the same UNIX-like Mac OS X as every other mac did in their time, but it doesn't make every mac a workstation. Same way, calling HP's Z-series workstation running Windows a PC would just feel weird.
@cy @0xabad1dea