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

[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.