Solaris 10 Released

AusG4 writes "Sun Microsystems has released Solaris 10 for both SPARC and Intel/Opteron. Downloading it is the usual 'register and get your free license' meandering; the Intel/Opteron version is 4 CDs and an optional language and companion disc (a bunch of pre-compiled GNU software in pkgadd format, I'm assuming, same as Solaris 8 and 9)."

Comments

Re:The hole in our Apple theories

[Anonymous Coward]

There are three kinds of people buying Apple computers. There are the OS interface junkies who love the "look and feel" of the interface. There are the media workers who buy Apple simply because it's still the industry standard in that field, in the same way that office workers invariably use MS Office. Finally, there are those who have been seduced by coloured, translucent plastic.

If OS X for x86 was available, I'd be willing to bet that a large proportion of the first two groups would immediately jump ship over to cheaper hardware. Mac OS hardware is nice (The G4 is a great chip) but being realistic, price is king.

The question, therefore, is whether the increased revenue in OS sales would compensate for the losses in hardware revenues. Personally, I'm not sure. Spoiler alert -- Charlie, the villain, is actually David's (Robert DeNiro's) split personality.

When it comes down to it, though, Apple won't listen to what we say. Pretty much every major decision will depend on what Steve thinks, and I don't think Steve likes the idea of open hardware - historically, he's shown himself to be very sensitive to physical appearance (the original mac classic, the iMac, the cube) and I suspect that he just doesn't want his lovely OS X running on ugly grey boxes. :)

Solaris 10 install hang at USB detection on VMware

[Thaidog]

My fellow coworkers and I at IBM ebiz operations were happy to see Solaris 10 come out about 2 months ago... so we tried to create a virtual machine with Vmware... on both the Linux version and windows version the install hangs at the USB hardware detection for some reason. I hope this has been resolved. (All done on different hardware for the host machine as well)

Re:The hole in our Apple theories

[Randy Wang]

Don't you think that the first and third of your categories should merged into one? That'd be the "Ooh, pretty" group, I suppose: the ones that care about appearance.

And you'd forgotten a third group, the ones that have used Macs in the past and are now used to them... to the point where it's simply easier to buy another one in the future when it's needed. This'd be something along the lines of, "I want a Buick cause that's what my daddy always bought", minus the Buick. It might not even be that extreme - it's just that, for them, there's no point switching to potentially cheaper hardware, because they're comfortable where they are (the reverse, of course, applies to people on x86 hardware and OSs).

So, your three groups become:

1) The Appearance Junkies
2) The Creative Crew
3) The Lifetime Users

Now, sure, if Apple were to sell it's OS then people would switch hardware. But what about the compatibility issues? You couldn't simply expect software bought for the Mac to just install and go on completely different hardware, could you? Aside from the infinitely more diverse selection of hardware, the challenges in getting *any* software to just move across hardware would be enormous.

So, you'd really have to buy new versions of the software. Would it be for Windows, or Max OS X86? Heh, who knows? Maybe we'd have something like the Classic Environment.

Or you'd have to download new updates to all your software, to make it actually run. I don't know about you, but that sounds like a whole barrel of fun to me. And this isn't mentioning the effort on the parts of the developers (both Apple's, and third-party) to convert their software to run at a decent pace on totally new hardware; and effort that could end up bombing out and losing millions in work.

In the end, even if Apple were to port OS X to x86 hardware, you couldn't really expect that many people to adopt it.

Re:And a fourth category

[Glock27]

They also realize that they work in a corporate environment where MS Office is King, and may have been burned in the past with OpenOffice not handling all MS documents properly.

Not just Microsoft Office, but a ton of commercial software. Almost none of it is on Linux or other Unix systems. Macs also make terrific development systems.

Apple is looking more and more attractive, enough so to easily justify the higher prices. Good stuff!