[CentOS] Troubles for an non-IT beginner

> Wrong on the demise of the Sparc.     Oracle just posted a massively
> record breaking TPC-C benchmark using their new Sparc T3 servers,
> something like 30 MILLION TPM.

Oracle has very publically committed to keeping SPARC strong, which is good 
news for those of us believe in diversity in the compute-verse.  Even so, 
SPARC is also supported by Fujitsu, so as they... "[SPARC's] demise has been 
greatly exaggerated."


>
> There's also Power aka PPC, formerly used in Apple Macintosh computers,
> and still used on large scale IBM AIX Unix servers, the Power series.
> These also are very high performance.

Just a minor nit here, POWER is not the same thing as PPC.  PPC branched 
from POWER with strong influences from other vendors and technologies.  PPC 
has since evolved into a mostly embedded platform, though later POWER 
releases are (mostly) compatible with PPC.

One of my former employers (a fossilized System V UNIX vendor) was part of 
the alliance that worked on a common UNIX implementation for this processor 
family, which sadly, never came to fruition.