1 Jun
2006
1 Jun
'06
8:55 p.m.
I think that Sun's biggest problem is still residual from the UltraSPARC II debacle-
they angered management by lying aboug why the new $100k+ computer wasn't working,
and they really p***ed off sysadmins by alledging that they were incompetent. It would be
a while before I'd recommend a Sun after that . . .
The new product line looks good, but a bit confusing (TWO different processor
architectures sharing the same "Ultra" and "Fire" names?, Why???)
I wouldn't pooh-pooh OpenSolaris, either - if you were contemplating buying a
expensive computer, wouldn't SGI's financial issues give you concern about buying
a
Origin? OpenSolaris gives the stability of having potential third-party support up to and
including patches. Sun still is seen as the big player, and Sun Solaris will likely
maintain
an edge over OpenSolaris, while allowing Sun the option of (backporting? porting?
including? whatever. . .) bits from OpenSolaris, much as Apple has done with Darwin (but
OpenSolaris
will likely become more of a "serious" O.S. since it doesn't have the Mach
issues)
Some of this is probably wishful thinking - I do hope that Sun and IBM are both around to
provide an alternative to Itanium - but I do think that Sun is getting it's act
together
Now we need more people to really learn UNIX (it is rather scary the number of
"computer professionals" who don't know how to use anything except Windows
and perhaps Mac).
Scott Quinn