Sun Announces Its First Laptop

boarder8925 writes "Enterprise computer maker Sun Microsystems announced its first-ever laptop yesterday, saying the machine was designed to let engineers and scientists perform demanding computer tasks away from their desks. Sun, which has seen sales fall for the last four years, said that it was also lowering prices for some of its computers by up to 40 percent."

Comments

Partnering with Sun?

[XorNand]

Running my own small VAR/intergrator shop, Sun has really piqued my interest recently. Right now, I'm kinda in limbo as far as aligning myself with a server vendor.

I can't stand dealing with HP on a number of levels, one being how they've handled the Proliant brand of servers. Dell couldn't possiblity have a decent channel partner program since their whole business model is focused on direct sales. IBM is an option, but it's apparent that they're trying to get out of the hardware business and further into the more lucrative services biz. The (obvious) alliance between IBM Global Services and IBM's hardware divisions would make me feel like I'm sleeping with the devil. The big selloff to Lenovo was the real wakeup call for me. And rounding out the bunch: Toshiba seems to only be half interested in playing in the space, and their lackluster offerings reflect that.

Sun interests me because they have brand recognition and seem to be increasingly investing in the market. Until rather recently, I didn't even know that they sold wintel boxes. However, news such as the release of this notebook further shows their intent on being a contendor. My biggest concern is that Sun gear tends to overly pricey, but if they're addressing that I might just start buying from them. Does anyone have experience with partnering with Sun on the hardware end of things? What kind of reputation do they have? Or can anyone suggest another server vendor that I could investigate? I realize there are a thousand white box vendors out there, but I'm more interested in a mature partner program: coop marketing opportunities, top-notch support resources, etc.

Re:Partnering with Sun?

[Anonymous Coward]

My biggest concern is that Sun gear tends to overly pricey, but if they're addressing that I might just start buying from them.

While Suns tend to be pricey, it's because their built like tanks (both in terms of chasis/frame, and from CPU and internal layout). Like Macs, they're designed to work well, and you have to pay the designers.

A while ago AnandTech had a review on Sun's V40z.

You could also call up Sun and ask them for a loaner. They frequently let let people try out machines for a couple of weeks to run them through their paces. You can get either Solaris or Linux installed. BTW, make you open the box up and look at the internals: they're very well designed from a space, air flow, and maintenance point of view (part of the cost).

Re:Partnering with Sun?

[ericspinder]

Until rather recently, I didn't even know that they sold wintel boxes.

Because, until recently, they didn't. I've worked with applications running on Sun boxes for a number of years, at one point during the tech boom, they were a must have, but now they are just over priced. Sure this article talks of some lower prices (for wintel desktops) but I'm sure they still want big money for anything that can be called a server.

If you are looking for a partner, choose a Linux builder, there's plenty of them out there,many with the warrenty and service plans which I am sure your customers are looking for, don't be afraid to 'go local' with a white box builder. Some are really good, and they might even be able to throw some business your way.

Re:Partnering with Sun?

[brighton]

Why don't you just build them yourself? It takes me less than a couple hours to build them and I can charge at least $100 /hr for that time and still way undercut the markup of the main server vendors. As an added bonus, I get to choose the parts I like working with , and can fix them much easier if/when they go down.

Re:Partnering with Sun?

[alienw]

If you want to have every problem imaginable, go with a white-box builder. Hardware these days usually has very poor compatibility, produces lots of heat, and has other issues. A shop that slaps together PCs with no regard for quality assurance, engineering, and compatibility testing will sink your business in no time, and most local shops are exactly like that.

Unlike Sun or Dell or any other large commercial maker, a small shop won't have a compatibility testing lab where machines are subjected to hundreds of tests to verify performance. They are generally happy if the box gets to the POST screen. When compounded with the fact that Linux is rather picky about hardware (due to varying driver quality), you really don't want to buy an untested, unproven solution from some garage-based PC builder.

Re:Partnering with Sun?

[IANAAC]

While Suns tend to be pricey, it's because their built like tanks (both in terms of chasis/frame, and from CPU and internal layout).

While that used to be true, I don't think it's true anymore. You can still find good, solid boxes, but the parts inside fail every bit as much as our Dells and Proliants. Everything from disk drives, to backplanes to memory. All of these have failed on me at some point in the last year with three year old boxes. Truth be told, our IBM x-series cluster has outlasted any other piece of hardware in our shop.

Re:Partnering with Sun?

[Anonymous Coward]

No better way to assure your failure as an integrator than to sell unsupported white boxes to important customers. Particularly those who are looking for 99.9% uptime with somebody to blame when they don't get it. Or, much more importantly, somebody with hardware and software service techs on-call 24X7 and who can be on-site in an hour or so essentially any place in the world.

Re:Partnering with Sun?

[Johnboi Waltune]

I'm just an average geek, and over the years I've built dozens of systems using various Linux distros, all versions of Windows, and hardware from hundreds of manufacturers.

Many of them I have built for friends and family for only the cost of parts and maybe some barter. (I don't do that too much anymore because it's cheaper and easier to order a system from Dell, plug everything together, and just migrate their files and settings.) Recently, I've built a few PVRs after someone sees mine and simply must have one of their own.

Anyway, all of the machines I've built have been rock-solid stable and none have come back to me because of some goof up I made deciding on a configuration. If I'm not even in the white-box business and I can do that, you have to assume white-box builders have a dozen proven configurations that meet the assorted needs of almost everyone who walks into their shops. Maybe they use their customers as beta-testers, but if they couldn't deliver a solid configuration, they'd soon be out of business.

The real problem with white-box builders is something you totally failed to mention: they can't really compete with Dell et. al. in price anymore. PCs have become a commodity and margins are so slim, companies that deal in massive volumes are the only ones that are competitive on price.

I can't really say for sure, but I suppose the whitebox PC builders -- those of them that are left, in my town there are only a few remaining -- survive on jobs that are very customized to a customer's unusual needs (PVR, uber-gaming rig, case modding, selling hard to find or import parts, etc...) I don't really know for sure how those guys stay afloat since I haven't done business with any of them in several years.

Re:Partnering with Sun?

[muhgcee]

There was actually a new review on Anandtech this morning about Solaris 10 with the Sun dual core Fire V40z. A few hours later, it was taken down. I have the RSS sitting in Thunderbird as evidence. Anyone else notice this?

Re:Partnering with Sun?

[vegetasaiyajin]

While Suns tend to be pricey, it's because their built like tanks (both in terms of chasis/frame, and from CPU and internal layout).

That's crap. In my server room I have 4 servers.
-An Intergraph Dual Intel Pentium III 700 bought in 1999. That's solid. It has never given any problems.
-Two IBM PC Server Dual Pentium II 300 from 1998 I think. These have never failed. Solid as a rock.
-A SunFire 280R 750MHz from 2001. It was extremely expensive and it stopped working last December. Total crap. Expensive and crappy. Our decision was to not buy Sun computers again. A lot of money lost.

Poor Sun. They fucked up Java, they fucked up their hardware. The only thing left is Solaris, and it's not going to make much money for them.

Re:Partnering with Sun?

[ericspinder]

If you want to have every problem imaginable, go with a white-box builder.

Uh, are you speaking from experience (I doubt it).

Hardware these days usually has very poor compatibility, produces lots of heat, and has other issues.

Sure, I've built all of my own machines for like the last 9 years, often just adding one or two parts at a time and I have found that not to be true. The rare occasion which I have had problems they were obvious quickly and easily solved.

A shop that slaps together PCs with no regard for quality assurance, engineering, and compatibility testing will sink your business in no time, and most local shops are exactly like that.

Ok, how about a disk failure, actually make that two of them, in the space of less than 2 months. My work machine, under lease from a *major* company, and according to the desktop support guys, they lose them all of the time. Small shops learn after one or two failures, big 'shops' have failures by the shipping container.

I never said to just 'pop in' to some random shop and pick up a couple of machines with cash.

Re:Partnering with Sun?

[bhtooefr]

Just don't order from a whiteboxer that's cheaper than Dell.

That's a Really Bad Idea(tm), as they're the ones that DON'T do the QA checks, and use the BAD PC Chips motherboards.

Re:Partnering with Sun?

[AstroDrabb]

Why did mods mod up the GP and not this? I always hear about how "Sun boxes are tanks". However I have not seen that to be the case. Sun boxes fail as much as any other box. A Sun server will have redundant parts, just as any other real server should have. I work at a fortune 500 and all of our Oracle and PeopleSoft servers are running on Sun/Sparc boxes (though I pushed for x86 Linux which was 1/3 the cost and at least twice the performance, though I digress). In the past year we have had two processors fail, some memory sticks fail and about 8 NICs fail on our Sun boxes. So exactly _where_ is this great Sun/Sparc reliability? I will admit that Sun has very good enterprise class support, though so do many other big vendors. Sun doesn't make all the internals, just like no other major U.S. computer vendor does. So your are really not going to get any more hardware reliability from a Sun/Sparc server than you would get with a _much_ faster and far less expensive x86 based server. Heck, if you don't need more than a 2-way box, you can get better price and performance from an Apple Xserve G5.

Your not going to get any more reliability out of a Sun server than you would get with an equivalent, yet less expensive, x86 based server.

Oh, and to get back on topic, why would someone want a dog-slow Sparc for a laptop? Is there really any software out there that _only_ runs on Sparc Solaris and not x86 Solaris or Linux? Your going to get far more performance and a much better price out of an x86 laptop than a Sparc based one. Just RTFA! The Sparc laptop is $3,400! The specs on it suck. 512MB and 40GB? For $3,400 for a laptop, I better be getting some state-of-the-art hardware and not some dog-slow sparc with poor specs. ; )

Re:Partnering with Sun?

[rtb61]

Surely pricey would have nothing to do with the 40% they were able to take out of the profit margin, unless they are now selling way below cost. Oh yes I know that cost for computer hardware fall over time but not by 40% from yesterday to today.

Re:Partnering with Sun?

[illumin8]

Does anyone have experience with partnering with Sun on the hardware end of things? What kind of reputation do they have? Or can anyone suggest another server vendor that I could investigate? I realize there are a thousand white box vendors out there, but I'm more interested in a mature partner program: coop marketing opportunities, top-notch support resources, etc.

As a former Sun Systems Support Engineer (SSE, basically onsite hardware/OS support), I can probably answer this for you.

First of all, you're right about the price. Sun servers, especially the UltraSparc line of servers tend to be much more pricey than your average x86 server vendor. They also tend to be relatively slow in CPU-speed, but make up for this in spades with I/O throughput and memory bandwidth. You see, Sun was one of the first server vendors to have the full 64-bit support necessary for large enterprise databases that banks, telcos and other high-end OLTP outfits require. For the first time you could run an Oracle instance on a single server with up to 106 CPUs and 512GB (that's half a terabyte) of physical memory. Of course there are only limited market segments that need this technology, but during the .com days, everybody thought they needed it and this is how Sun got away with charging ridiculous prices for this type of servers.

Now that the reality of the IT market has been back in effect, Sun has realized it can't keep up with Intel and AMD on the CPU speed front, so Sun has decided to focus on its great operating system and Unix that can scale so well and perform on such a large number of processors, and hopefully sell some nice AMD Opteron servers to run their great, full-featured Unix OS on.

One of the benefits that Sun can offer is true enterprise, 24/7, international on-site and telephone support. If you have an investment bank that's located in 10 countries worldwide, at stock exchanges in London, NY, Singapore, etc., and you want a single 1-800 number to call for a 2-hour onsite response, 2 hour fix time repair on your Oracle database cluster, Sun is a great choice. They are truly on the level of IBM Global Services and only a couple others when it comes to knowledgeable onsite support.

Their newer AMD Opteron server offerings are starting to be much more competitively priced than HP or Dell in the x86 arena. You also have the advantage of natively running either Solaris 10 x86-64 or Linux on the same hardware, with enterprise level onsite support.

Whether Sun can turn themselves around in the market or not is one question, but they provide so many services to government agencies and fortune 500 corporations at the highest levels that their continued survival (in however small a role that might be) in the computer industry is pretty much guaranteed. When their systems are used on a lot of military installations, do you really think the US government would let them go out of business or sell off their assets to a foreign corporation?

Anyway, Sun is a solid choice and reliable server provider, with a true enterprise level support channel. I no longer work there, but I know enough people that do to know you can't really go wrong recommending them.

Re:Partnering with Sun?

[jc42]

So, for comparison with the linux builders, has anyone found detailed specs for this Sun laptop? I browsed around the sun.com site and couldn't find much actual info, or a place to order it.

Maybe it's just too new and their web-site folks don't know about it yet?

I'd like to know how it compares with, say, the emperorlinux laptops.

Re:Partnering with Sun?

[ryanov]

Sun has been disappointing, to me, in recent months. Being that I attended a lot of the Solaris 10 brouhaha in NJ, I was pretty excited about the prosepects of what it could do, and I had 4 V20z boxes to try it out on.

Come to find that Sun's own support for Solaris 10 and indeed for Solaris x86 is sad to say the least. Many of their management apps/tools do not support Solaris x86 or Solaris 10 yet. Major issues with, say, disk drives... patches are out for 9, but not for 10 yet. C'mon, folks, get with the program.

Their hardware's been OK, but frankly, that doesn't make up for the rest of the hell that is dealing with them. Don't get me started on their documentation.

Re:Partnering with Sun?

[asbjxrn]

Heck, if you don't need more than a 2-way box, you can get better price and performance from an Apple Xserve G5.

But how about a Sun opeteron box?
Sun v20z: 2x Opteron 248, 2GB Ram, 1x73GB disk, $3000: http://store.sun.com/CMTemplate/CEServlet?process= SunStore&cmdViewProduct_CP&catid=111394
G5 Xserve: 2x G5 2.3Ghz, 1GB Ram, 1x 80GB disk, $4000: http://store.apple.com/1-800-MY-APPLE/WebObjects/A ppleStore.woa/70902/wo/Oo1dIs4kylfo25YF33W1KKyrgua /0.0.11.1.0.6.15.0.3.1.3.0.3.1.6.1.1.0

Re:Partnering with Sun?

[Anonymous Coward]

the parent is an amazingly ignorant post.

you make it sound like the person buying a sun is going to replace an aging 286 with it or some such.

no, people buy sun because of rock-sold failover across servers, services, hardware, etc.

i've seen sun demo their high availability stuff. there are no dells or hps that come even close, or anything on windows, period.

on a single-server comparison, running a couple of services, on linux, i'm sure you are right. but that's not usually why people buy suns.

Re:Partnering with Sun?

[veldstra]

SUN may not build tanks anymore, but I think they're building the mercedes'. When going for SUN you get a machine that will do an exceptional milage, maybe not with the biggest bang for the buck, but with an extreme reliability. I've seen computers from just about every brand available on this planet, and what amazes me most with SUN is their eye for detail. With rack servers for instance, you always get an extra screw and casenut because they know that sooner or later one of them falls from your hands when installing them... I know it's most of the time a meaningless detail, but I still need to find another manufacturer that thinks of this.

Re:Partnering with Sun?

[Jim_Maryland]

I'm sure we could all point out cases where one vendor or the other failed more often in our labs. For servers in my labs, I have a mixture of Sun's, SGI's, Dell's, IBM's (PC, not mainframe), and HP's. Out of all of them, I've had to contact Dell the most for failed hard disk, power supplies, and even the motherboard in one. The Sun's, SGI's, and IBM's seem to have the lowest failures (I'll admit though that many of the systems are over 3 years old so maybe the newer equipment fails more frequently but even on the few new ones, I haven't had any problems in my labs).

I'll bet that every system administrator here will have a vendor that has let them down and you'll find other system administrators who will swear by that equipment. Me, I still prefer the Sun boxes for UNIX and I'm sort of neutral on the Win32 vendors.

They fucked up Java

How so? My group does a fair amount of development in a variety of languages (C/C++/Java/VB/C#/and various scripting languages) and by far, the developers prefer Java. I guess I don't see how Sun messed up Java as you indicate.

Re:Partnering with Sun?

[segfaultcoredump]

A sample size of 1? that's great.

I'm currently managing 3 SunFire 280R's that were purchased in 2001 (among other systems). Total number of failures during 12+ 24/7/365 operational years: 0. Not even a single hard drive or dimm failure. Given my sample size (3x yours), Sun is more reliable than anything else. Do I think that are the best ever? No way. I have a PII gateway desktop in my basement running as a server. It has been running since '98. Mine has been perfect, yet where I work I've seen dozens fail.

Want to know the most unreliable box I have? A Dell 1650 that randomly reboots at least once a week (its running linux). Dell refuses to do anything about it because "the diagnostics dont show anything". Just what I dont want to hear from the support folks.

In general, sun servers have declined in quality simply because nobody was willing to pay the $100,000 it takes for a totally custom box. The memory in a new sun system? Micron or Kingston. The hard drive? Hitachi, Fujitsu, Seagate, etc. The cpu? AMD (for the Z line). NIC? broadcom.

What does IBM or HP put into their boxes? Yup, same parts. Do you really think that they will spend R&D resources on designing and testing their own ethernet chips? Not at under $400 for a quad gig pci card they wont.

In general, you get what you pay for when it comes to reliability. A $4,000 sun box will not be more reliable than a $4,000 IBM/HP/Dell/whoever box. A $2,000,000 SunFire 25K will be a lot more reliable than a $4,000 Dell box (is it worth it? depends on your environment).

So how do I choose vendors? Simple, their proven ability to support me when something does go wrong over the full lifetime of the box (5+ years). All vendors have their 'lemons' (Sun 420R anybody? how about Intel's floating point bug that impacted every intel vendor?). It's how they deal with them that makes the lasting impression and determines if it is time to go look for another vendor.

When a vendor fails to fix any problems, thats when I start to walk. So far, I'm staying with sun because their support has not let me down. When they decide to cut corners on support and it impacts my operation.... Well, that is the day I'm going to be an ex-sun customer.

Re:Partnering with Sun?

[vegetasaiyajin]

How so? My group does a fair amount of development in a variety of languages (C/C++/Java/VB/C#/and various scripting languages) and by far, the developers prefer Java. I guess I don't see how Sun messed up Java as you indicate.

Java was a good language until 1.4.x.
With Java 2 5 1.5 they turned it into a crappy language. Almost all the features they added are badly designed, especially generics.

Re:Partnering with Sun?

[Anonymous Coward]

In my server room I have 4 servers.

That's great. Thanks for sharing your wealth of experience on the subject.

You often hear this stuff from windows users who probaby wouldn't know RSC from OpenBoot. Could there be a pattern?

I recently worked at a site with approximately 40 racks of equipment. The site suffered a UPS malfunction which resulted in horrible spikes and phase variations being delivered to the data centre. Even IBM zSeries and pSeries systems had to have power supplies replaced, let alone Dells and HPs with with cooked system boards.

Their Suns all came back up without even an fsck. The SF4900 & 6800 didn't even go down.

What does this prove about the relative reliability and build quality of Sun systems?
Nothing.

Re:Partnering with Sun?

[macdaddy]

Dell couldn't possiblity have a decent channel partner program since their whole business model is focused on direct sales.

My employer is a Dell Partner and reseller and we have no complaints. That's our ONLY PC hardware partner.

Re:Partnering with Sun?

[ag-gvts-inc]

Perhaps they're like my company (which is just starting up, really) and are trying to focus primarily on the services side of things. I get more spyware removal jobs (on those Dells, HP's, eMachines, etc that I can't compete with) than I have customers (they often require several 50 or 100 dollar invoices to remember my instructions.)

That was a rough sentence, but I hope you see what I meant. Also, don't underestimate what being a member of the local Chamber of Commerce can do. There are some people who refuse to buy from a big company when they can support a local business. While I let them know I can't compete with Dell, etc on price, I can definitely top them in quality and customer service/support.

And so far, no one's asked me for a PVR :(

Re:Partnering with Sun?

[Axe]

With Java 2 5 1.5 they turned it into a crappy language. Almost all the features they added are badly designed, especially generics.

Quite the opposite, in my opinion. They finally fixed all the stupid stuff.

If you say that type-unsafe containers, no enums and no normal library for various threading feature was somehow a better state of affairs, then you do not know what you are talking about.

Re:Partnering with Sun?

[Axe]

If you want to have every problem imaginable, go with a white-box builder.

Reportedly, Google did just that and they are doing fine, it seems.

Depends on what you.

Re:Partnering with Sun?

[joib]

First of all, you're right about the price. Sun servers, especially the UltraSparc line of servers tend to be much more pricey than your average x86 server vendor. They also tend to be relatively slow in CPU-speed, but make up for this in spades with I/O throughput and memory bandwidth.


Yeah? That must be why SPARCs gets pummeled so completely in the STREAM benchmark which measures memory bandwidth. For example, their current highend system (F25K) in a 24 cpu configuration is beaten by a 4 cpu Opteron. Or the IBM p5-595 at 64 cpu:s has more than twice the memory bw than a 144 cpu F25K. Go figure...

Re:Partnering with Sun?

[Anonymous Coward]

What's all this about white boxes having problems? The only x86 machine of mine that I have problems with, is a name brand laptop. My generic built-from-parts boxes are running strong, year after year. Even my Maxtors don't fail.

Maxtors!!!

And please don't perceive this as bragging; it's not. I'm not a hardware guy. And if I can build machines that don't have problems, and if I can pick components that have drivers, then someone who actually has experience and to whom it is routine ought to make my boxes look as shitty as Dells.

It's true, I don't have a compatibility testing lab. Why would I need one? Stuff is always compatible. If I ever put a machine together and -- uh, just what are you expecting? My video card doesn't work with my SCSI card? Ok, well, if I build a box where the video card and the SCSI card don't work together, then maybe I'll "realize" that compatibility testing is necessary. But that just doesn't happen.

And Linux picky about hardware? "Yeah, Linux has drivers for the Matrox G400, but it only works with 98 out of 100 of the cards. The other 2% have minor defects that Linux's picky drivers can't tolerate. The Windows driver has workarounds." WTF?!

Re:Partnering with Sun?

[wandering_nomad_101]

If you partner in the US its cool but if you are dealing in Asia you had better think twice. Sun is not a vendor of choice out here. Sun is full of shit and is throwing products on the market hoping something will stick to the wall, don't get sucked in, no products, no support no nothing.

Re:Partnering with Sun?

[utnow]

If you silly people would just use windows (Windows ME is GREAT) you would never notice hardware failures.... In fact my WinME server automagically reboots itself every few hours. The documentation say that this is one of Microsoft's innovations to clear out the RAM so it can perform faster and reduce the amount of power it takes to operate the server. I bet none of your Linux and Unix boxes do that! ;o)

Re:Partnering with Sun?

[Kyusaku Natsume]

The key advantage of Sun is by far its support.

Now, if your application is I/O bound, like ERP, Sun's servers are perfect. In our oldest Sunfire 15K, the processors are iddle 85% of the time running SAP; I'm talking about ancient UltraSparc III running at 900 Mhz serving thousands of users. On the workstation side, the machines are (were?) very overpriced, but extremely reliable.

Re:Partnering with Sun?

[Anonymous Coward]

Posting anonymously for obvious reasons.

Do you want to buy a laptop from a company that might not have anyone to support it in another year or two? (Sun laid off between 5,000 and 7,000 employees less than two weeks ago).

If you have problems with your laptop, do you want to have to call India or Singapore for support? (There are at least a couple thousand open positions if you look in employment resources for those areas. Just look online at Sun's employment section or take a look in the local version of Yahoo jobs).

Do you want to have people who have never touched one of the laptops to be your only support? No way in hell tech support people will ever get closer to the laptop they will be supporting you on than some photos online and maybe a PDF of the manual unless they buy the laptop on their own dime).

Re:Partnering with Sun?

[rpdillon]

Talk about crap.

Four (4) servers? Are you joking? The plural of "anecdote" isn't "data".

Don't say someone's post is crap because you have 4 data points.

At Google, they keep track of how many computers fail PER SECOND in their server rooms. Failure is normal, and unless you're running a few hundred servers of different brands and models, you can't really use your personal experience to say one brand has "fucked up their hardware." Have you even looked at their high end Ultra 20s? Or the new SunFires? Sun makes a pretty decent product these days.

Oh, and by the way, how did Sun "fuck up Java"? I think I missed that article...

Re:Partnering with Sun?

[rpdillon]

Generics are key - they move what would be a lot of runtime errors to compile time. As any developer knows, its a whole lot easier to debug compile time errors.

J2SE 5 actually is quite a good platform - they have improved performance, and almost all the sytactic sugar features they implemented are "free" from a performance perspective, while streamlining the code.

The only exeception I know of is the enum's .values() call, which can be expensive if you put it inside your loop.

I guess we just disagree.

Re:Partnering with Sun?

[Builder]

Here's some anecdotal evidence for you...

The bank I work for started their Linux initiative, so we bought in boxes from Dell, HP and Sun to trial Linux on. 2 Dell 2850's, 3 HP DL-380's and 3 Sun Fire V65x's.

Firstly, the sun's don't ship with hardware RAID by default. As soon as you add this, they start to look more expensive than all of the competition.

Within the first 6 months I had one critical hardware failure PER MACHINE! And even though these machines were under maintenance, Sun considers a motherboard in a V65x to be a user servicable component. So when the board blew, I had to swap out the memory, the disks and the CPUs into another box. This is NOT what I pay maintenance for!

We had no problems at all with the HPs or the Dells.

On the enterprise hardware front, I've had two major failures in the last 2 days. For one of them, sun advise that I leave a terminal connected in the data centre and run down and see what messages are on the screen when it crashes. This is what you pay sun for!

Re:Partnering with Sun?

[16K Ram Pack]

I'd like to know what you base this on.

As the person that often gets called on for tech support from neighbours and friends, this is just not the case.

Now, some friends of mine have PCs from certain brands that are very reliable. But there's at least two well-advertised brands in the UK that I tell people to avoid like the plague.

Why? Because they put garbage in their machines. They put in the cheapest stuff they can find that meets their advertised specification. Then, when something goes wrong (because they bought the cheapest HDD they could get), you spend an hour in a queue to speak to someone.

Re:Partnering with Sun?

[Anonymous Coward]

Total number of failures during 12+ 24/7/365 operational years: 0. Not even a single hard drive or dimm failure.

I've got a Mr. Murphy on the line for you. I think he's some kind of Policeman.

Re:Partnering with Sun?

[Anonymous Coward]

In the past year we have had two processors fail, some memory sticks fail and about 8 NICs fail on our Sun boxes. So exactly _where_ is this great Sun/Sparc reliability?

if a machine still runs while some of its components failed (and allowed you to fixed things without the interuption), that's _exactly_ reliability.

Re:Partnering with Sun?

[Bert64]

Well, your comparing to Intergraph and IBM, who are both also reputable vendors who make decent hardware, atleast their "server class" hardware..
Still, you had 1 machine go bad, which can happen with any vendor.. even the best hardware goes bad sometimes, but for what it's worth heres my experience..
We have about 20 sun machines currently in production ranging from a Sparcstation 20 (circa 1995) up to a SunFire v20z (2004 i think, still a current supported machine) and of those machines, the only failure we had was an ultra 5 (workstation class machine, used to be sun's lowest end) that died due to aircon failure..
We also have 8 DEC alpha machines, none of which have failed, and a few IBM and SGI machines which have also proved very reliable...
We have had various disk failures across some machines, but most of our machines have redundancy for the drives, and all these manufacturers use a mixture of the same vendors for their disks...

Now onto the bad, we have about 4 dell machines all of which have needed some kind of repairs in their lifetime, and despite being 1U servers need to have a 1U gap between them otherwise they overheat anyway... We also have an old compaq proliant that's dying (keeps crashing, cant diagnose the problem.. planning to replace the machine ASAP) and it's connected to a compaq RA4000 disk array which also has some kind of weird error (the configuration tool won't let us reconfigure it, but the array works as it is.. the error is uselessly nondescriptive)

Re:Partnering with Sun?

[Bert64]

Actually, do you still have the sunfire? would you consider selling it cheaply for parts?

Re:Partnering with Sun?

[BridgeBum]

I agree with most of your points here, but I had to ask this question. What's wrong with the 420R? At my last job, we had a large deployment of them (hundreds) with no particular issues that I'm aware. Typical onesy-twosy things like you posted above, but hardly enough to classify the whole architecture as a lemon in my experience.

Just curious, looking more for your experiences than anything else.

Re:Partnering with Sun?

[andyr0ck]

being a sys admin in a place where Solaris/SPARC is the platform, i've seen the quality of the machines go down in the last year or so. with the advent of Linux becoming a viable platform, Sun have felt the pinch of cheap x86 boxes and have responded with their own commodity boxes. you can see some of them (sunfire v240 for e.g.) have ALI chipsets in them, etc and other stuff you'd expect to see in x86 kit. i can't say we've had many, if any, components fail in them but we haven't had them longer than approx 18 months so maybe we'll hit the curve soon :-)

for real Sun engineering, you need to look to the older models, like the sunfire 280R. we run those too and you can see the difference when you open them up. and in the performance.

my point being; if you look at any of Sun's webcasts, you'll see Jon Schwartz go on about 'the era of commodity computing'. cheaper boxes is Sun's response to that trend. dunno 'bout this laptop, though!

Re:Partnering with Sun?

[Anonymous Coward]

But how about a Sun opeteron box? Sun v20z: 2x Opteron 248, 2GB Ram, 1x73GB disk, $3000:

In the UK, I found it would be cheaper to buy the same Newisys chassis as used in the v20z and v40z from a reseller such as Rainbow IT than to buy from Sun. Even with my employer's education-sector discount.

Re:Partnering with Sun?

[cowbutt]

So, for comparison with the linux builders, has anyone found detailed specs for this Sun laptop?

here. Edited highlights:

Power supplies: Built-in li-ion battery pack with approximately 2-3 hours of battery life (depending on model).

Width: Approximately 128-inch [sic] (exact width depends on model)

Weight: Approximately 7 lbs. with battery (exact weight depends on model).

Not exactly a lightweight G4/Pentium M, is it?

Re:Partnering with Sun?

[Bert64]

Actually, i wrote a small tool called rebootd for unix systems, designed to make windows users feel more at home.. It will simply crash or reboot the system at random intervals.

Re:Partnering with Sun?

[Anonymous Coward]

Indeed. Older SUN machines (Say ultra 1, 2,...) were beauties inside. At our university campus they also had the highest uptime of all servers (obviously also due to the OS, SunOS/Solaris). I don't know about the newest machines, but e.g. the ultra 5 is just a glorified PC: PCI bus, IDE drives... not a 'real' workstation.

Re:Partnering with Sun?

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's see..
You don't partner with Sun, HP, Dell, or IBM?

Doesn't sound like you're much of a VAR after all.

What do you sell? Alienware?

Go back to playing video games, kiddy.

Re:Partnering with Sun?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, you might be a Sun Engineer, but have you ever built 5 machines from clone parts for your friends like the slashdot know-it-alls in this thread?

Re:Partnering with Sun?

[dlZ]

This is what I do for a living. I own a PC shop, and sell quite a large amount of machines. Many of our machines are branded through our wholesaler, Seneca Data (systems are branded Nexlink, wholesaler has been around for 25 years.) They are a lot stricter than Dell is with compatibility, and as a small shop, maybe I don't have the ability to do this testing, but they do. Any decent white box builder can go this route. Oh, it's cheaper in the long run, too, because they provide the warranty, so even if the worst happens, and we aren't around, the customer can take the machine directly to the wholesaler (with the way our company is growing, I really don't see this as a problem.) Of course, we handle any warranty issues ourself, the client doesn't need to see the wholesaler, and I'm sure our showroom is a lot nicer, with better coffee.

The most reliable servers I have ever worked on are also from them. There are actually two of them that come to mind immediatly (I work with this client on a daily basis,) both Wintel boxes running Server 2003 (not my choice, customers is very Wincentric.) I've had no hardware issues with these at all. Really, Windows Server 2003 has been pretty decent.

I'm to the point that the only machines I really put together completely at the store myself are high end gaming rigs, and that's because I do very custom machines, including all the bling bling and lights that the kids seem to love.

Re:Partnering with Sun?

[vivtho]

Mod parent funny. Where are my Mod points when I need them?

Re:Partnering with Sun?

[illumin8]

Yeah? That must be why SPARCs gets pummeled so completely in the STREAM benchmark which measures memory bandwidth. For example, their current highend system (F25K) in a 24 cpu configuration is beaten by a 4 cpu Opteron. Or the IBM p5-595 at 64 cpu:s has more than twice the memory bw than a 144 cpu F25K. Go figure...

Show me proof. I haven't seen any of these memory bandwidth benchmarks, but I'm pretty sure you're talking out your ass because the MINIMUM configuration for an F25K is 36 CPUs. Also, show me the benchmark of an Opteron server that puts out up to 25.2 GB/sec sustained I/O bandwidth. Such a beast does not even exist right now.

Oh, right, you were just trolling and spouting the typical anti-Sun pro-IBM Slashbot FUD.

Re:Partnering with Sun?

[illumin8]

In the past year we have had two processors fail, some memory sticks fail and about 8 NICs fail on our Sun boxes.

This might sound a really high rate of failure, but this is typical with all manufacturers of computer equipment. Let me ask you how many servers you have, and also, how many CPUs are in each server? Now, how long do you expect a CPU to last? You need to do the math here to determine how often one will fail. I've done large enterprise support and this is why you can't base your analysis of the reliability of a particular vendor without a lot more data than you've given us:

1. Let's say I have 500 servers, each one has 2 CPUs.
2. Let's say that the MTBF (mean time between failures) of a given CPU is rated at 100,000 hours (that's 11.4 years).
3. Now, given that there are approximately 594 weeks in 11.4 years, divide that by 1000 total CPUs (2x 500 servers), and you can see that:

You will be replacing 0.59 CPUs a week on average.

This is not abnormal. People get freaked out when they hear that you have to replace a CPU or a couple memory DIMMs every couple of weeks, but this is totally normal. The fact that you only had to replace 2 CPUS in a whole year, given a whole slew of servers, seems to indicate to me that you've gotten great reliability from your Sun servers.

Re:Partnering with Sun?

[suezz]

they may be built like tanks - like hard to move and heavy - but they still fail just as often if not more than my handbuilt servers.

this is a myth that may of been true a while back but their so-called enterprise hardware (i.e 6800 or above) seem to fail an awful lot for us -

I have hand built some server using high quality parts bought separately running linux that run forever have have hardly failed. One bad memory chip in the last two years - not bad - in the meantime we have had numerous sun memory, hard drive, cdrom drive, and cpu's replaced.

so I think the pc world is definitely catching up and this what has sun so worried and has a troubling future and seems to be trying to find itself of lately.

Re:Partnering with Sun?

[vegetasaiyajin]

Quite the opposite, in my opinion. They finally fixed all the stupid stuff.
If you say that type-unsafe containers, no enums and no normal library for various threading feature was somehow a better state of affairs, then you do not know what you are talking about.


It is clear you the one who don't know what you talk about. They didn't fix anything.

Java Generics ARE NOT type safe and that is why they are badly designed.
They are designed only to hide casts, but introduce a lot of new subtle errors because they are not typesafe.
If they are as typesafe as you say, then why do the new checkedList, checkedMap, checkedSet, etc. methods exist in java.util.Collections?

Very simple, because Java generics are not type safe.

The purpose of generics in most programming language is to provide type safety and enhance performance through the elimination of casts. Java generics do neither. They only hide casts and force you to used stupid methods like checkedList,etc. to achieve type safety. These methods could have been added to the old language version without problems. It's a disgrace that a language with "generics" requires that kind of method to achive type safety.

Regarding enums. They are the worst implementation of enums I have seen. They are implemented as classes and as such they are prone to very strange errors if several ClassLoaders are used, as is the case in most application server environments.

The worst part of the new Java language changes is that they are designed so that ignorant people like you, who do not know their implications, believe they are achieving type safety/better performance when in fact they are not.

Re:Partnering with Sun?

[xdroop]

Here's some counter-annecdotal evidence.

We purchased 40 V60x servers (the 1U equivilent to your V65x) 18 months ago; we also have one V65x, which is statistically uninteresting. We also don't care about RAID.

Of the 40 V60x servers, I've had one failed mainboard and one ethernet jack that doesn't hold onto its ethernet wire properly. That's it. Oh, and Sun sent a guy to fix the mainboard for me. Regular warrantee, no extra service.

Of course, since I'm Canadian, I might be more special than you Americans.

What really annoyed me is that we bought into these computers, and then Sun goes and EOLs them for the Opterons, which are not immediately suitable for what we are doing with them. We are looking at the Opterons, but these V20z systems are rebadged computers, not Genuine Sun Things. (For the record, yes the V60x computers are also rebadged computers, but they work pretty well.)

Re:Partnering with Sun?

[vegetasaiyajin]

Generics are key - they move what would be a lot of runtime errors to compile time. As any developer knows, its a whole lot easier to debug compile time errors.

I'm not saying the concept of generics is wrong. I am saying the java implementation of generics is broken. This implementation introduces a lot of subtle runtime errors because they are not typesafe, as many believe.
These generics only save you from a a few casts.
The only runtime errors that will be moved to compile time errors are very stupid errors not common to most programmers (even not so good ones). Anyone who creates a List for storing Strings usually doesn't wriite code for adding ints to it. The use of collections is usually wrapped in more application specific classes.

J2SE 5 actually is quite a good platform - they have improved performance,

They improved the virtual machine, but they damaged the language. The best option is to compile with -source 1.4

Re:Partnering with Sun?

[joib]

Show me proof.


Well, since you apparently are too lazy to use google, I guess I'll have to do it for you then. Here you go, champ. Or specifically, see the table here for the actual results.

There you'll see that a 24 cpu F25K scores 11631.1 MB/s in the TRIAD benchmark (you can choose COPY, ADD or SCALE instead for that matter, the results are similar), a 144 cpu F25K 76097.8 MB/s, a 4 cpu Opteron (called AMD_Opteron_848) 15921.0 MB/s, and finally a 64 cpu IBM p5-595 173564.2 MB/s. And just like I said in my previous post, those numbers show that a 4 cpu Opteron beats a 24 cpu F25K, and a 64 cpu IBM beats the highest end 144 cpu sun pretty badly.


I haven't seen any of these memory bandwidth benchmarks, but I'm pretty sure you're talking out your ass because the MINIMUM configuration for an F25K is 36 CPUs.


Well, nobody said that you have to use all the available processors when running the benchmark. Actually, looking at the email where the Sun engineer submitted the benchmark results, it looks like all the benchmarks where run on the same machine. Running with different numbers of cpu:s is actually a pretty interesting benchmark, since it shows how well the bandwidth scales with increasing cpu numbers. In this case, one can see that the bandwidth per cpu scales almost linearly for the F25K, which is a good result for a big shared memory box. Unfortunately that doesn't really change the fact that the bandwidth per processor actually isn't that impressive.


Oh, right, you were just trolling and spouting the typical anti-Sun pro-IBM Slashbot FUD.


Oh right, you were just spouting the same old "Sun computers are better since they have much more memory bandwidth than pc class computers" that was true in the early 1990:s, without actually checking whether it still holds (Hint: it doesn't).

Re:Partnering with Sun?

[Anonymous Coward]

> Their newer AMD Opteron server offerings are starting to be much more competitively priced than HP or Dell in the x86 arena. You also have the advantage of natively running either Solaris 10 x86-64 or Linux on the same hardware, with enterprise level onsite support.

Sun's prices for Opterons are great compared to Dell, who is Intel's whipping boy and doesn't sell them at all. ;)

Their prices compared to HP and IBM aren't so great...they're about $1K more for a comparably equipped server on the low end. There may be a price advantage when you get up to the bigger servers with 4-8 CPU's, but those are out of my needs at this time.

Unfortunately, there's not much differentiation on the low end Opterons from different vendors. The hardware mght be "built better", but it's got the same features, including the plain-jane IPMI management as everyone else's low end servers. I might be willing to spend the extra $1K if they came with something like ALOM (which even comes on their cheaper low end sparc boxes)...

And NONE of the major vendors sell a 1U with redundant power supplies. Argh...

Re:Partnering with Sun?

[kenji_watanabe]

The Sparc laptop is $3,400! The specs on it suck. 512MB and 40GB? For $3,400 for a laptop, I better be getting some state-of-the-art hardware and not some dog-slow sparc with poor specs. ; )

Thank you! What amazes me is that there target market is "engineers and scientists perform[ing] demanding computer tasks away from their desks" and they only have 512MB of RAM. In my experience, heavy load engineering tasks are often bottlenecked by memory and not the processor or a CISC/RISC debate. Thus a Linux/x86 laptop with 2GB of ram may outperform the SPARC system for a significantly lower cost.

Further, in response to all of the "sun makes rock solid servers": anyone who is doing heavy engineering mobily will generally be more concerned about data throughput than hot swapping video cards. If people wanted a server in the field then: a) it probably doesn't need to sit on their lap; b) they are probably in a location where it would have been easier to just ship an Ultra and a flat panel.

Re:Partnering with Sun?

[Anonymous Coward]

As an employee for IBM Global Services, I must thank you for the compliment. We do try to be available 24x7 and are very knowledgeable. I work for iSeries printing support and have no problem getting calls at any time of the day or night, though that happens VERY rarely. We have experts available all the time.

Thanks again.

- Kurt

Re:Partnering with Sun?

[illumin8]

There you'll see that a 24 cpu F25K scores 11631.1 MB/s in the TRIAD benchmark (you can choose COPY, ADD or SCALE instead for that matter, the results are similar), a 144 cpu F25K 76097.8 MB/s, a 4 cpu Opteron (called AMD_Opteron_848) 15921.0 MB/s, and finally a 64 cpu IBM p5-595 173564.2 MB/s. And just like I said in my previous post, those numbers show that a 4 cpu Opteron beats a 24 cpu F25K, and a 64 cpu IBM beats the highest end 144 cpu sun pretty badly.

You are obviously cherry-picking data to prove your point. I'll give you the fact that it looks like the 64-way IBM eserver has more memory bandwidth than the F25K (now show me $ per MB comparison and we'll see who is more cost effective), but how is 15921.0 MB /s (Opteron 4-way) more bandwidth than 76097.8 MB /s (F25K)? Your numbers seem wrong to me.

Also, you seem well educated enough to know that you can't compare a 4-way box to a 144 way box. Cost becomes exponentially greater for non-exponential increases in performance. If you really need over 100,000 MB /s of bandwidth, you're going to pay through the nose for it, no matter who you go with.

For a more valid comparison, why don't you compare the SunFire V40z 4-way Opteron servers with whatever IBM and HP's 4-way Opteron offerings are?

Re:Partnering with Sun?

[Anonymous Coward]

My experience with Sun in the x86 environment is that while they're serious about being an x86 OS vendor, they're not quite ready for prime time as an x86 hardware vendor.

I've worked with V20z and V40z boxes, and the hardware works great when it works. It's got some excellent features for a "wintel" server in the enterprise (such as remote console features that smoke Dell's offerings). But, if something fails and you need help from Sun support to identify and fix the problem, be prepared to spend a lot of time on the phone with techs who don't know much at all about the x86 product line.

Sun's future as a hardware vendor is obviously tied pretty closely to AMD-64, and I think that in the long run Sun's AMD servers are going to be a great choice for shops that use the Solaris operating system. But I've seen this time after time over the years -- Sun's entry into a new technical area (blades, SAN, Linux support) always leaves their front-line support organization lagging behind, sometimes for a _long_ time.

As a VAR, none of this is directly your problem, but I'm sure you don't need anyone to tell you that you shouldn't sell kit that the vendor isn't prepared to support. My recommendation? Wait a year or two, until early-adopter customers have had to work the kinks out of Sun's support organization for you.

Re:Partnering with Sun?

[himself]

Former SSE illumin8 writes:
>
> [Sun support] are truly on the level of IBM Global Services and
> only a couple others when it comes to knowledgeable onsite support.
>
Amen: field engineers -- Decision One employees in my area, I understand it, as well as the actual Sun employee I've dealth with, the miracle-working SSE Paul Connell -- are teh amazing.
The phone support people, however, are uniformly, jaw-droppingly bad. An embrassment. An affront to anyone who takes pride in their work. A near-sub-contractual waste of my employer's money. Destructive to Sun's corporate image and reputation. "SHAMEFUL, SIR!" as they say in the House of Lords, or "preliterate," as I told one of them to his face last week, when he left my case in limbo for 14 hours overnight after _calling_ me when I specified twice that I wanted only email communication since I'd be without a phone. A finite number of monkeys with Plantronics headsets working out Kafka on my dime, if you will.
The outsoured phone shops want only to dot Is and cross Ts, and care nothing for actually solving customer problems. Even Gold contract calls, occasinally even handled domestically, still don't elicit actual fixes on time, every time.
Oh the joy when someone finally shows up at my data center with a box of parts and some paperwork: I know my ship has come in! But those chimps on the phone: they're really wearing me down.

Re:Partnering with Sun?

[Anonymous Coward]

bollox.

pure unadulterated bollox. It is NOT normal.

if i have 500 servers and each one has 2 CPUs and the MTBF for EACH unit is 100K hours then mathematically speaking I should not EXPECT any REASONABLE number of failures to start occurring for a minimum of 30K hours and then I should ramp up my expectations as I approach the MTBF point.

I had a guy working for me like you (we have >1K servers) and he (in conjunction with the vendor) tried to use the same logic. I fired him, for being a moron on that and other issues, and phased in a new vendor. Logic such as that is puerile but it makes people who profess it's "sanity" feel good so I suppose it has its use. Just not where my five nines are on the line.

Re:Partnering with Sun?

[ignorant_coward]

Ironic that other companies pay Microsoft for their Windows OEM entrenchment...but in Democratic America Microsoft pays Sun!

The key: Sun has no Windows OEM agreements like Dell and HP do. That, right there, gives Sun tons of freedom in giving customers what they want. Linux? No problem. Solaris? No problem. Windows? Just use your corporate site license, again no problem.

Re:Partnering with Sun?

[ignorant_coward]

It doesn't matter that Sun EOLd their Xeon servers. You'll get a couple years service out of them in your cluster or whatever, then as you rotate in new servers, the older ones will get repurposed as printer servers and mail servers like all older hardware does. Hell, stick a video card in one and bolt it on the side of your desk. Instant dual CPU SCSI workstation.

Re:Partnering with Sun?

[illumin8]

The outsoured phone shops want only to dot Is and cross Ts, and care nothing for actually solving customer problems. Even Gold contract calls, occasinally even handled domestically, still don't elicit actual fixes on time, every time.

I agree 100%. The onsite support people are great, and I've worked with enough of them to know that they are very qualified and talented people. Unfortunately, everyone in the industry has outsourced their support to India. Sun has to do this just to keep costs in line with what the rest of the industry is paying. I've been pretty disappointed with the results myself, but the entire industry thinks this is acceptable now, so I don't think it will change anytime soon.

Customer support on every product imaginable has been outsourced to India. It's unfortunate, but what can we do?

Re:Partnering with Sun?

[vegetasaiyajin]

That's great. Thanks for sharing your wealth of experience on the subject.

We do not have more servers because we do not have as much money. We received a grant a couple of ays ago and will aquire 12 servers. You can be sure not even one of them will be from Sun.

You often hear this stuff from windows users who probaby wouldn't know RSC from OpenBoot. Could there be a pattern?

None of our servers or workstations run Windows.
We use linux mostly, but we are also testing solaris. I, particularly think solaris is much better than linux for servers.
I have seen the quality of linux distributions to decrease consistently.


I recently worked at a site with approximately 40 racks of equipment. The site suffered a UPS malfunction which resulted in horrible spikes and phase variations being delivered to the data centre. Even IBM zSeries and pSeries systems had to have power supplies replaced, let alone Dells and HPs with with cooked system boards.

Their Suns all came back up without even an fsck. The SF4900 & 6800 didn't even go down.
What does this prove about the relative reliability and build quality of Sun systems?
Nothing.


Well, my experience with Sun hardware is bad, and it is consistent with what many people say.
We paid about 18.000 $ in a Sun server believing we were buying top qulity. We were wrong.

The fatc that my Sun server failed miserably does not mean that every Sun box will fail, but it means there is no guarantee of high quality to have sun servers. If we had bought 10 sevrers from Sun and only that one failed, we would still have had a 10% failure rate, and I somehow don't believe there would have only be a .

BTW, I forgot about a fifth server we almost do not use. A digital ALphaServer 2100 from about 13 years ago. Now that's quality. It is still up and running Debiean Linux and we do not even plug it to the UPS because it consumes too much power.
It has never failed. That was the kind of quality I was expecting when I purchased a Sun server for 18.000 US$.

Re:Partnering with Sun?

[vegetasaiyajin]

In general, you get what you pay for when it comes to reliability. A $4,000 sun box will not be more reliable than a $4,000 IBM/HP/Dell/whoever box. A $2,000,000 SunFire 25K will be a lot more reliable than a $4,000 Dell box (is it worth it? depends on your environment).


We paid $US 18.000 for the Sun box and it has been significantly less reliable than $US 7000 servers from other manufacturers

Re:Partnering with Sun?

[vegetasaiyajin]

Actually, do you still have the sunfire? would you consider selling it cheaply for parts?

Actually, I would love to sell it, but can't since it belongs to the place I work.

Re:Partnering with Sun?

[mlrtime]

OT

Good analogy, Mercedes went from being #1 in terms of reliability in 1990 to the bottom of list in 2000. In a ten year stretch the company went from releasing cars when the engineer said they are ready to releasing on a deadline and sacrificing reliability.

Add to this the fact they are trying to push more electronic gadgets in their cars, this adds to the common breakdowns in their top model cars. .02

Re:Partnering with Sun?

[No One You Know]

I always hear about how "Sun boxes are tanks". However I have not seen that to be the case.

I think this *used* to be true, back in the pizza-box days, and the sentiment has just kind of stuck around even though it is no longer valid. Back in the days of the sun4m architecture (basically all pizza boxes up to and including the sparc 20), Suns had a very low failure rate. The bigger cabinet systems (Sun x500) were solid too, but also more complex, and therefore more prone to failure. At my last job we had sparc IPCs that were running just fine after 10 or 15 years of service.

Beginning with the SunFire line, however, it all changed. My impression was that Sun pushed the SFs out the door too quickly, as they were already in financial trouble at that point. The result was a LOT of failures, often on delivery! I haven't considered Suns to be any more reliable than PCs for at least four years. I think the "tank" days are long gone.

Re:Partnering with Sun?

[vegetasaiyajin]

Four (4) servers? Are you joking? The plural of "anecdote" isn't "data".

When you spend lots of money on a server, you expect it to have better reliability than cheap clones. Especially if you keep the server in a proper room with controlled temperature and plugged to an UPS. Like the old AlphaServer 2100 we have 13 years ago, which is still up and running.


Don't say someone's post is crap because you have 4 data points.
Well, I may have only 4 servers, but we have over 60 computers and there are very few that have been as unreliable than Sun's.

At Google, they keep track of how many computers fail PER SECOND in their server rooms. Failure is normal, and unless you're running a few hundred servers of different brands and models, you can't really use your personal experience to say one brand has "fucked up their hardware."

If failure were that normal, then they shouldn't put such a high price on their computers.
I thought they were that expensive because failere was not normal with their hardware.
Thanks for illuminating me. Then I don't know why they are more expensive (speed surely isn't the reason).

Have you even looked at their high end Ultra 20s? Or the new SunFires? Sun makes a pretty decent product these days.
Well, maybe you are right. But we gave them the chance with the most expensive computer we have bought (and I was a big sun defender) and it failed miserably.


Oh, and by the way, how did Sun "fuck up Java"? I think I missed that article...
Yes, maybe you missed it.
It was a great language, but now it is a badly designed language. The JVM is still good , though. I'm using -source 1.4 with javac.

Re:Partnering with Sun?

[acsinc]

We had some Dell 1650's that were terrible! One of them had the integrated VPU catch on fire. It wasn't even warm in the server room that day. Another 1650 burnt up its RAM. A few months ago we had to replace all of the 1650's with 1850's. Why we didn't switch to a different product line I will never know.

Re:Partnering with Sun?

[Axe]

when in fact they are not.

In fact they do make it a better designed language as opposed to what was in 1.4, what you so ignorantly stated.

Of cause they are not perfect. All imporvements had to be compatible with zillions of existing applications.

The fact is - they made it for a better and easier to use language. If you think that knowing about a few caveats makes you an expert - it just makes you arrogant.

It is not about perfection. It is about making some well designed improvements upon one of the most widely used languages. It is about practicality, not theoretical goodness.

Re:Partnering with Sun?

[vegetasaiyajin]

In fact they do make it a better designed language as opposed to what was in 1.4, what you so ignorantly stated.

java 2 5 1.5 It is not a better designed language.
It IS a badly designed language.

Of cause they are not perfect. All imporvements had to be compatible with zillions of existing applications.

They could have made right and at the same time compatible.
Besides, java 2 5 1.5 is not even binary compatible with old versions. If you compile with 1.5 it will not run under 1.4, so compatibility was not really a valid reason.
In fact, being able to run old code has never been completely compatible. For example, most pure Java application servers designed for 1.3 did not run in 1.4 and the same happens from 1.4 to 5/1.5.

So stop saying the reason for the bad design was backwards compatibility, because if it was, then it is worse than I thought.

The fact is - they made it for a better and easier to use language. If you think that knowing about a few caveats makes you an expert - it just makes you arrogant.
It is neither better nor easier to use. It is not even good. And the problems are not a few caveats.
The new language is fundamentally flawed. It is totally inconsistent.

For example, Java used to be a reflective language. Now it is not. You can have a List variable, but you are unable to dynamically build a variable of that type using reflection. This is bad design.
You have la List and you would think it can only contain Strings, but NO, it can contain anything (except primitives).
What kind of language supports generic programming without type safety?
They could have designed an excellent support for the generics, but after having designed a broken implementation that didn't support primitives (which comprise a large portion of the things you want to include in a collection), they added another broken feature to provide the illusion of support for primitive types. As a result you can have additional errors like i>=2 true, i
It is not about perfection. It is about making some well designed improvements upon one of the most widely used languages. It is about practicality, not theoretical goodness.
Java has never been a perfect language, but it was a GOOD language. The "improvements" are not well designed, as you say. They are badly designed.
And the supposed practical value of those "improvments" is very debatable. I, particularly, see many more disadvantages than advantages.

Re:Partnering with Sun?

[CaptainAvatar]

Yes, but the point is, it's only 1 machine. You can't meaningfully extrapolate from your experiences with 1 Sun, no matter how much you paid for it. Sure, I understand that you are hardly going to commit to buying more Suns based on your experiences, but still you can't be sure your experience is not a statistical outlier. That's why when people who've rolled out hundreds of these machines tell you that Suns aren't that bad, you should at least recognise that perhaps you were just unlucky with that particular machine.

(Myself, I'm in the middle, have managed a few dozen Suns over the years, from SPARCstations and IPCs up to Blades and E3000s and I would say they are very reliable. A bit too reliable perhaps ... if they don't die there's no pressure to replace them, so we end up with a lot of ancient and slow Suns around the place!)

Re:Partnering with Sun?

[joib]

...but how is 15921.0 MB /s (Opteron 4-way) more bandwidth than 76097.8 MB /s (F25K)? Your numbers seem wrong to me.


Obviously comparing a 144 cpu box to a 4 cpu one is tedious at best since you obviously don't buy them for the same tasks, but the point was that in terms of bandwidth per cpu the SPARC isn't really impressive at all (about 500 MB/s per cpu for the F25K vs. 4000 MB/s for Opteron and 2700 MB/s for power5).


For a more valid comparison, why don't you compare the SunFire V40z 4-way Opteron servers with whatever IBM and HP's 4-way Opteron offerings are?


Since the Opteron has an on-die memory controller, I think you won't see any difference between these due to different chipsets etc. From what I've heard the Sun has good diagnostics, is relatively cheap and has good support, so certainly it looks like a good buy.

Re:Partnering with Sun?

[Axe]

The new language is fundamentally flawed. It is totally inconsistent.,

Blah, blah, blah. I can not count how many times I have heard that sort of rhetoric. Especially from people with some favorite obscure language to promote. I am actually a memeber of two industry committee defining a couple specialized languages. Those organizations are filled with people like that.

There is NO inconsistency. You can write a Java program and it will work exactly as described. With new improvements, writing such a program became easier and more practical.

That ALL that matters.

Re:Partnering with Sun?

[vegetasaiyajin]

Blah, blah, blah. I can not count how many times I have heard that sort of rhetoric. Especially from people with some favorite obscure language to promote. I am actually a memeber of two industry committee defining a couple specialized languages. Those organizations are filled with people like that.

I do not have any obscure language to promote. Java was the language I used to promote, but now I can't. Maybe I have to look for an obscure language to promote.....

There is NO inconsistency. You can write a Java program and it will work exactly as described. With new improvements, writing such a program became easier and more practical.
Let me see, you say there is NO inconsistency, but:
-A List can contain things that are not Strings.
-The reflection mechanism cannot let you create objects of any type (as it did in the past). For example, you cannot reflectively create a List.
-The Collections framework in the standard library is not implemented internally using generics because they know generics are crippled.

Your definition of consistency is very different from mine.

That ALL that matters.
You say there is no inconsistency, but you fail to provide any specific technical argument to prove it. Instead you resort to rehoric and even say that I, who provided very specific examples of the inconsistency, am the one using rethoric. You even say that I am trying to promote obscure languages.

Re:Partnering with Sun?

[vegetasaiyajin]

I forgot about the use of angle brackets. In the previous posts it should have said List instead of List

Re:Partnering with Sun?

[alienw]

Uh, are you speaking from experience (I doubt it).

I've dealt with my fair share of flaky drivers and incompatible hardware. I've seen videocards fry motherboards and power supplies. I've seen soundcards that would crackle and pop because of PCI incompatibilities. I've seen network cards that would prevent a machine from turning on when inserted into a particular PCI slot. I've seen systems that would crash every couple of days because of driver interactions. Some hardware combinations are just flaky.

Sure, I've built all of my own machines for like the last 9 years, often just adding one or two parts at a time and I have found that not to be true.

Most people would never notice hardware flakiness. They would just assume it's an operating system fluke, reboot, and forget about it. The situation changes quite a bit when you have a mission-critical system and a pissed-off customer.

Ok, how about a disk failure, actually make that two of them, in the space of less than 2 months.

Cheap hard drives have a high failure rate. It's a well-known fact. If you have a few hundred computers, you'll be replacing a couple of them every week. Nobody would ever use them for anything important, at least not without redundancy.

Re:Partnering with Sun?

[alienw]

Let me clarify my position: I am not saying that slapping a brand name on a box makes a PC good. What I am saying is that PCs for serious applications need to be made by a serious company. Obviously, you will have crappy companies that slap together crap to make money. That's the category almost all small shops fall into.

Any serious manufacturer should be ISO9001 certified, should have an engineering department, a product qualification department, and so on. They should be able to tell you, for example, in which temperature and humidity range the computer will run reliably. They should have a list of known-compatible hardware and software, and a database of known issues. They should have extensive procedures for making sure their computers are reliable.

This is the main reason companies often buy "overpriced" computers from Sun instead of Dell or some random local guy. Of course, I'm sure most people on Slashdot have never had to maintain a certain level of reliability. Of course, this may change with the advent of things like VoIP -- at least people still expect reliability from their phone provider.

Re:Partnering with Sun?

[BJH]

We've got a few 420R machines at work, and what I found most irritating about them was that for the size of the box, only being able to fit two internal drives is goddamn stupid.

Otherwise, they've been OK.

Re:Partnering with Sun?

[16K Ram Pack]

You are wrong. I know a lot of guys running on PCs made from small shops. Reliability from them is high.

All the PCs I've built have fun nearly flawless over 7 years. It's much easier than people think. The first rule is - buy good quality components.

Having worked in companies with and without it, ISO9001 means nothing.

$3,400

[thzinc]

Geez, if they really want to coax developers, they should target the sub-$2,000 developers, though, I'm no marketing genius...

Re:$3,400

[AKAImBatman]

You think $3,400 is bad? You obviously haven't shopped for a Sparc laptop from Tadpole!

Re:$3,400

[BrookHarty]

Its not even a Sparc its an AMD running x86 Solaris 10...

But then, I'd rather have a x86 CPU, so I could use boot into linux and windows.

Re:$3,400

[Anonymous Coward]

Its not even a Sparc its an AMD running x86 Solaris 10...

That's not correct. The $3,400 laptop is Sparc. The $895 workstation is AMD. From TFA:

"The Ultra 3 Mobile Workstation will list at $3,400 and is equipped with Sun's Ultrasparc processor, the Solaris 10 operating system, 512 megabytes of memory, a 40 gigabyte hard drive and WiFi connectivity."

Re:$3,400

[afidel]

I remember when you could get a luggable from Tadpole that had more power then a 4x Intel server. Man those were the days, before Intel's marketing killed off all of the superior chips.

Re:$3,400

[Proc6]

I think you mean "before Intel's superior chips killed off all the marketing hype".

I remember buying a 180 Mhz Pentium Pro that rendered Softimage scenes about 5x faster than a 100Mhz INDY that cost 5x as much.

Re:$3,400

[enigmatichmachine]

and it weigh's over 20 LBS and has no battery, I would call a tadpole a "laptop form factor computer", kinda like how kraft has to call that stuff it makes "processed cheese food"

Re:$3,400

[WillAffleckUW]

Geez, if they really want to coax developers, they should target the sub-$2,000 developers, though, I'm no marketing genius...

Sadly, you're right.

I could even see somethin around $2500 price mark, but this is a tad too high.

Re:$3,400

[Spazmania]

I remember getting a Tadpole Sparcbook once... It was thrown out because it had the classic problem with the Sun time(bomb) chip. I fixed it, and what a sweet notebook is was. 33mhz cpu, dual scsi drives, active matrix color screen, 64 megs of ram... Typical laptop at the time was grayscale with 16 megs and a 386. Finally went bad on me when I left it in the trunk of my car one summer...

For those not in the know, Sparcs back in the day had an timebomb "idprom" chip with its hostid, ethernet MAC address, boot instructions and time of day clock. An integrated lithium battery lasted up to 10 years if the machine was kept powere on, but usually only three or four if it wasn't. Battery dies, lose your bios settings. Unlike a PC, it won't reset the settings to sane values when you put in a new chip. No, you have to program it with a forth-like language via the openboot prom.

Anyway, Sparc laptops have been around for some time; they just havn't been manufactured by Sun. What we're seeing now is little more than the begnning of Sun's death throes. So starts the spasm of irrelevant products as Sun attempts to reinvent itself without first finding a cogent vision for the future.

Re:$3,400

[Zemplar]

Apparenlty you haven't seen their Ultra 20 Workstation!

It starts under $900, free for 90-day trial, or own if free with Sun Services subscription.

http://www.sun.com/desktop/workstation/ultra20/ind ex.jsp

Re:$3,400

[Anonymous Coward]

"processed cheese food"

Cheese can eat?

Re:$3,400

[Anonymous Coward]

But those SPARCs.... I don't think they support accelerated Internet features.

Re:$3,400

[Elminst]

"What we're seeing now is little more than the begnning of Sun's death throes."

So they'll last another 12 years or so? ;)

Re:$3,400

[quarkscat]

SUN's new laptop is interesting, but if I truly
needed a transportable UltraSPARC workstation, I
would still look first at the Tadpole "laptop".

You can spec this laptop with dual UltraSPARC
processors, dual hard disks, and 2 GB of main
memory. As an added bonus, you can also run
SUNs very capable Open Solaris 10 on it. Of
course this configuration is heavy, and a real
power hog. In the best case scenario, battery
life untethered is about 2 hours. Still, the
Tadpole is a very capable transportable computer.

Great, a $340 Sun Laptop like my Linux Laptop

[WillAffleckUW]

oh.
wait.

um, $3400?

oh well ...

Re:Great, a $340 Sun Laptop like my Linux Laptop

[Anonymous Coward]

Where did you get this $340 laptop? I'm not kidding. Linkage much appreciated.

Sun laptop? Isn't that an oxymoron?

[caryw]

Sun has never been super keen on the design aspect of the computer world, not that I agree there should even be a design aspect in mind when it comes to computers. I hope they don't expect to put an E450 in a backpack and call it a laptop.

Any guesses as to how much this behemoth is going to weigh?
--
Fairfax Underground: Fairfax County, VA forums and chat

Not as heavy

[The_Rippa]

It doesn't seem big enough (dimension-wise) to fulfill it's purpose.

I mean, in two years will it be able to hold down as much paper from blowing away as a full-size SparcStation does?

Re:Not as heavy

[Dolda2000]

fulfill it's purpose

I was going to mod you up as Funny, but being a true to heart grammar nazi, that typo made me feel it was more important to reply than to mod.

To bad, eh? ;-)

Re:Not as heavy

[kv9]

yes indeedly-doo, very *to* bad.

Re:Not as heavy

[Anonymous Coward]

Not only that, but I don't see how I could prop the server room door open with one of those...

does anyone still care?

[Anonymous Coward]

After the whole push for servers and "we are the network" does a solaris laptop really matter anymore?

Not the first SPARC laptop though

[Anonymous Coward]

There was a company called Tadpole that made SPARC laptops before. Dunno if they're still around.

Re:Not the first SPARC laptop though

[Niddix]

Yes they are still around. http://www.tadpolecomputer.com/html/products/mobil e/sparcbook/

Re:Not the first SPARC laptop though

[Agent Green]

Tadpole is still around. Lots of goodies here:

http://www.tadpolecomputer.com/html/products/mobil e/

No prices listed, but they have SPARC laptops!

Re:Not the first SPARC laptop though

[javaxman]

Funny, I always thought Sun resold the Tadpole laptops. Does this mean they're reselling them now, or are these not Tadpoles?

Re:Not the first SPARC laptop though

[Anonymous Coward]

In fact, the Sun laptop looks like its just a Tadpole according to this page.

Re:Not the first SPARC laptop though

[keesh]

The SPARC laptops start at around five thousand dollars. Oh, and they won't boot Linux, and Tadpole have repeatedly refused to provide access to hardware or documentation despite customer demand and offers from various high profile kernel hackers to do a port.

Re:Not the first SPARC laptop though

[bodgit]

No prices listed, but they have SPARC laptops!

"If you have to ask how much, you probably can't afford it" ;-)

Re:Not the first SPARC laptop though

[myowntrueself]

"There was a company called Tadpole that made SPARC laptops before."

And then theres the SPARCstation Voyager, actually made by Sun. If you can call it a 'laptop'. It can be battery powered and has an LCD screen.

Might be a bit incomfortable on the lap though...

Re:Not the first SPARC laptop though

[OverCode@work]

I bothered to track down the prices a while back, and they were INSANE. $20k was around their low end, if I recall.

Re:Not the first SPARC laptop though

[suitepotato]

Might this have anything to do with Sun resisting Linux and trying to save Solaris the usual way many companies do, by not inovating and by "encouraging" partners to resist other platforms by way of strong-arm tactics? I seem to recall SGI being similarly oblivious to their workstation space being slowly eatent by WindowsNT years back, instead doing everything they could to jawbone customers into staying with them rather than giving them exactly what they wanted at the price point they wanted.

Oh well. Wait a few years and you'll have 64-bit processors in your iPod multibooting six kinds of Linux and two of Windows and maybe even OSXXX. Forget a laptop. I want a PDA that does what a workstation can. Given rates of advancements, I won't be waiting long.

Re:Not the first SPARC laptop though

[davecb]

They're very much still around: I have a Tadpole SPARC, a 750 MHz Ultra IIi that my wife bought me for a christmas present 2.5 years ago, for roughly $US 3,200.00. More in $CDN (;-))

It runs Solaris 9 and Frame, which is the most important thing, as that's my publisher's typesetter. Secondarily it runs all the Sun stuff I use at work.

I'm just waiting for a Solaris 10 keyboard driver and I'll update my second boot partition to 10. It also plays terminal to my Dell Linux box which runs Win4Lin and that Last Remaining Windows Program*, Canadian. QuickTax (;-))

--dave
* See http://www.linuxdevcenter.com/pub/a/linux/2004/06/ 10/win4lin.html

Re:Not the first SPARC laptop though

[TrevorB]

I should ebay mine then. It's one of the wimpier ones, but it does run Solaris 2.5. I think I picked it up for $50 years back when the bubble burst.

Re:Not the first SPARC laptop though

[norwoodites]

This laptop is not even a SPARC so why even your comment?
And yes I would rather have a SPARC than a x86_64 or a x86 since they are just generic laptops.

This is one of the reasons why I like Apple's PPC laptops. I actually like RISC ISAs than CISC ISAs.

Re:Not the first SPARC laptop though

[SA Stevens]

I have a Sparc 'portable' system that is a huge military box with Sparc hardware on VME cards inside it. It has a huge full-side-of-the-case keyboard/trackball interface and LCD screen.

It is hellaciously large for a portable machine, but, then, it has 8 VME slots.

Re:Not the first SPARC laptop though

[Anonymous Coward]

gotta love supply and demand, they were the only real supplier for many years, and the govt demand for these machines was enough to justify that price, and they were indeed in the 20k range for a low end machine(I researched an coordinated a few purchases of these when I was in the military).

Re:Not the first SPARC laptop though

[Anonymous Coward]

Thx!
About 10 years ago I recall seeing someone giving a presentation using a Sun laptop. They had it hooked up to an LCD screen which sat on top of an overhead projector. Those weren't cheap back then...

Re:Not the first SPARC laptop though

[Shanep]

There are lots of different companies making SPARC laptops. I think even Acer makes some.

Do a search for SPARC notebook or laptop from Google. Unfortunately, they are expensive. I was considering getting one until I saw the prices. $6,000 - $30,000 Australian dollars.

The $30,000 unit would be many times slower than some of Dell's cheapest, nastiest boat anchors.

I like the UltraSPARC and don't mind a performance hit to be able to have OpenBSD sparc64 in my backpack. But the prices are not worth it for the mere tinker value which I would like.

If a decent UltraSPARC II based unit was the cost of a Powerbook, I'd probably buy it.

Re:Not the first SPARC laptop though

[Anonymous Coward]

There was a company called Tadpole that made SPARC laptops before. Dunno if they're still around.

Well, if you go to Sun's site and look at the picture they have of the Sun SPARC laptop, it has Tadpole's logo above it. So I'm guessing they might be around. :)

Re:Not the first SPARC laptop though

[theManInTheYellowHat]

Check out the dual processor dual disk notebook at Tadpole!!

Tadpole Bullfrog Dual Processor
How much does that thing cost???

Re:Not the first SPARC laptop though

[plasticpixel]

Not the first Sun Laptop either.

Sun also had a laptop design called "Hawaii" back in 1997. Not to be confused with the Voyager portable workstation though. Hawaii never made it to market though. Sun decided to go big iron instead of little gadgets.
The Hawaii laptop was based on the MicroSPARC-II 100MHz chip. Had a 1024x768 15" display. 24-bit graphics. Four PCMCIA slots. Touch Pad. 800 MB SCSI drive. We had 802.11 wireless running on it as well.

It was born out of a SPARC tablet project that an advanced development group was working on.

Only about 20 were ever built. One freind used one of them for about three years.

Already do demanding tasks away from the desk

[77Punker]

When I need my computer to do a really demanding task when I'm not at the desk, I usually start the task, go do something else, and then come back and hope it's finished!

Re:Already do demanding tasks away from the desk

[SamQ]

Hmmmm,
If I'm doing a job that requires a Sun box, it's usually one that requires a large pot of good coffee, a very large LCD screen and a very comfy chair...

...Oh and a beast of a Sun box stationed somewhere in the vicinity. I can't see myself doing the same task on a busy Virgin cross-country train (doh!)

Re:Already do demanding tasks away from the desk

[Fulcrum of Evil]

When I need my computer to do a really demanding task when I'm not at the desk, I usually start the task, go do something else, and then come back and hope it's finished!

Me too. This is what remote computing is for - you can kick off a big, data intensive task from your cellphone, fer chrissakes.

we have been using sun laptops

[hsmith]

at work for a project, they have been out for a long time AFAIK

plus they run about $17,000 they aren't cheap. i don't know where this article is coming from at all.

Re:we have been using sun laptops

[coldcup]

Sun branded, or Solaris running? There have been other companies making laptops which sparcs in them.

Re:we have been using sun laptops

[KerberosKing]

A SPARC laptop runing Solaris is not new, neither would running Solaris on an x86 laptop be new. Both http://www.tadpolecomputer.com/ and http://www.naturetech.com.tw/_page/index.html have been offering SPARC based laptops for quite a while and any x86 laptop on Sun's hardware compatibility list http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/hcl/ can run Solaris x86. What's news is this is the first time I have seen Sun offer a first party solution for laptops that get the same service and support offerings Sun provides for their servers and workstations.

Re:we have been using sun laptops

[hsmith]

i doubt it is the former, could be just branded

but i am not sure, i have never used them, i just see them and see how muhc they cost :o

Re:we have been using sun laptops

[Guy Harris]

i don't know where this article is coming from at all.

It's coming from Sun announcing the Sun Ultra 3 Mobile Workstation, although the picture on that page suggests that perhaps Sun are just re-branding Tadpole and Naturetech SPARC laptops. (The announcement mainly talks about a new x86 workstation, but it also mentions the SPARC laptops.)

The article didn't say "first SPARC laptop", it said "Sun announces its first laptop", i.e. the first one that Sun is selling as a Sun, rather than somebody else selling it as a SPARC-compatible.

The Sun announcement clearly says "Entry-level pricing for the Sun Ultra 3 Mobile Workstation begins at $3,400 (USD)." Perhaps, as they've "been out for a long time", your workplace bought SPARC workstations when they were a lot more expensive.

Re:we have been using sun laptops

[Anonymous Coward]

No, I think the real news is Sun announcing their new AMD Opteron workstation for under $900, the Ultra 20.

http://www.sun.com/ultra20

Re:we have been using sun laptops

[Guy Harris]

No, I think the real news is Sun announcing their new AMD Opteron workstation for under $900, the Ultra 20.

I.e., the workstation I mentioned when I said ("The announcement mainly talks about a new x86 workstation, but it also mentions the SPARC laptops.)"? Yes, Sun selling a PC-style workstation is arguably a more significant change than Sun OEMing SPARC laptops, but 1) I wasn't saying otherwise and 2) the original article, and this thread, were about the SPARC laptop.

Re:we have been using sun laptops

[Anonymous Coward]

you were running SPARCstation Voyager, a discontinued product line, with very limited sales, here's the handbook

Specifications

[CyanDisaster]

The site seemed to lack many specifications of the laptop, such as screen size/resolution, optical drive, battery life, etc. I'm interested in the laptop, but I'd want more information before I make the decision about purchasing that particular one, or something else...

Hope be with ye,
Cyan

Re:Specifications

[_PimpDaddy7_]

UltraSPARC IIi (550 MHz or 650 MHz)

Isn't that a bit slow by today's standards????

Re:Specifications

[i.r.id10t]

You'd think, but sparc is different. Just like PPC is different, and a 1.8ghz mac kicks butt, a 600mhz sparc can really fly.

Re:Specifications

[Anonymous Coward]

No, it can't. The Ultra 5, when it came out in 1998, was an UltraSPARC IIi at 270 MHz. In 1998. In 2005, they're still selling UltraSPARC IIi processors that are only slightly faster. SPEC2000 results for UltraSPARC IIi at 650 MHz: INT: 246 FP: 276 SPEC2000 results for Pentium III at 733 MHz: INT: 374 FP: 290 SPEC2000 results for Pentinum 4 at 2.4 GHz: INT: 951 FP: 878

Re:Specifications

[bofkentucky]

I don't see how they plan on colling that 1.28, we've got a v440 with 4 of those monsters and its exhaust is hot as hell.

Re:Specifications

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't that a bit slow by today's standards????

Do you judge your engines by their RPM, too?

Re:Specifications

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess you need to look more carefully, and they have a link named specifications on the right side of the webpage, where everything you asked about is, except resolution, which is a misstake I guess, but maybe they expect people to call them to get more information, especially for a $3,4k invest.

old?

[Anonymous Coward]

is it strange ive seen sun based laptops before? (ooold)

Hello, welcome to yesterday

[BrK]

I had a Sun laptop in something like '97. And it wasn't brand new even then.

Re:Hello, welcome to yesterday

[gpw213]

I had a Sun laptop in something like '97. And it wasn't brand new even then.

There have been Sparc laptops for a long time. They were never build by Sun, though. And they were also hideously expensive, i.e. in the $20,000 range. This is Sun's first foray into this highly dubious market segment.

Re:Hello, welcome to yesterday

[BrK]

Ah, yeah, I see what you mean. My bad for skimming the article.

Oh well, it's too little, too late in either case.

Re:Hello, welcome to yesterday

[afidel]

into this highly dubious market segment.

By dubious I assume you mean SPARC laptops, because laptops as a whole are a huge business, accounting for 51% of pc sales by revenue last year and rising.

Re:Hello, welcome to yesterday

[Anonymous Coward]

you likely either had a tadpole or a rdi laptop, not a sun laptop. The sparcbooks were tadpole, and rdi had powerlite laptops. Both were sparc based and ran sunos4 or sunos5.

I believe the closest thing sun came to a laptop before now was the voyager luggable.

Re:Hello, welcome to yesterday

[gpw213]

By dubious I assume you mean SPARC laptops, because laptops as a whole are a huge business, accounting for 51% of pc sales by revenue last year and rising.

Yes, that is exactly what I meant. For the earlier generations of Sparc laptops, the main use I saw of those was for chip-design tool vendors to use them for demos. I knew of engineers that wanted one, but no companies that were buying them for that reason.

These days, all of the chip-design tools also run on Linux (and in fact, Linux is used more than Sparc/Solaris these days), and it would be far more economical to do demos on a Linux laptop.

Re:Hello, welcome to yesterday

[Sleuth]

Yeah... I work for an engineering company, and I know we had one or two floating around. And we don't do chip design tool sales... It's the software development group and our admin staff that had them.

Re:Hello, welcome to yesterday

[TilJ]

Yes, that's exactly right. The only Sun-branded portable has been, until now, the Voyager. I've got one -- it's a surprisingly nice little machine. There's a few details at http://www.seekingfire.com/projects/e3hardware/arv ak/. I haven't put much more on it up on the web because I use the machine so rarely. If anyone with a spare 2.5" SCSI hard drive gets ahold of me so I stop using the massive external enclosure I'd definitely resurrect the machine :-)

Re:Hello, welcome to yesterday

[HardCase]

These days, all of the chip-design tools also run on Linux (and in fact, Linux is used more than Sparc/Solaris these days), and it would be far more economical to do demos on a Linux laptop.

I've got a Dell PowerEdge 360 that runs rings around the Sun Blade 1000 next to it, except for one problem - the PCB simulation software that is written for both Solaris and Linux has a glaring bug in the Linux version that causes it to crash after displaying just a few waveforms of transmission line simulations, making it pretty much useless. And the bug has been there since the Linux version was introduced (in the last major release). The vendor's response? Yeah, they know about it, but they don't have the assets to fix it. Windows is their bread and butter, followed by Solaris, followed by Linux, which gets a passing glance.

And, unfortunately, they are the de facto standard in my business, so I end up doing most of my work on the Sun machine.

I do have to say, though, that after three years, the Blade has been rebooted twice (both times because my big feet got tangled up in the power cord) and the Dell has been rebooted a bunch of times after replacing a couple of defective hard drives and a bad memory module. I expect that the Blade will be going strong long after that Dell has hit the scrapheap. But, doggone it, Linux sure runs some stuff a hell of a lot faster than Solaris on that Sun.

-h-

Re:Hello, welcome to yesterday

[Bert64]

More usefull than a 2.5" scsi drive (which dont come bigger than 1.2gig) would be a little ide to scsi adapter, which are definately available (i have a friend who uses one with an old sparcbook laptop)
I have a 384mb scsi 2.5" hd, but it's useless... but i could put you in touch with the guy who has the converter incase you can't locate one yourself..

Re:Hello, welcome to yesterday

[ignorant_coward]

I'd love to get a used Blade 1000 one day, but my finances are still a bit tight. I'll probably end up going the Ultra 20 or similar route after a year or two.

The allure of the Blade 1000/2000 are that these are the last of the Sun "tanks", where the damn things are built with what feels like bullet proof steel, thick plastic, and CPU wind tunnels. All the new Sun's still have decent cases, but they just don't compare to the era of SPARCstation 20s and Ultra 60s, when weak backs cowered in fear just in the presence of these machines.

The first? what about the Tadpole??

[pinkfalcon]

Any one remember the Tadpole laptop?
While not actually made by Sun, it did run Solaris and I think it had a SPARC chip inside...

Re:The first? what about the Tadpole??

[questionlp]

I believe the laptops mentioned in the summary are made by Tadpole and one other company, but will probably be branded as Sun laptops.

Re:The first? what about the Tadpole??

[PygmySurfer]

I believe the laptops mentioned in the summary are made by Tadpole and one other company, but will probably be branded as Sun laptops.

Looks that way. The picture on Sun's webpage has 2 laptops, one with a Tadpole logo, and another with a Naturetech logo on the displays.

sun? bet it will be...

[Anonymous Coward]

too hot for my lap.

Re:sun? bet it will be...

[djdavetrouble]

shame the best joke of the thread gets modded troll.....

Re:sun? bet it will be...

[drgonzo59]

Whatever, mod the parent up, that was great joke!

oh man ..

[torpor]

.. i have, literally, as a computer geek, been praying (not religious) that Sun was going to be doing this.

well, not actually, just this. that Sun would do it. and then SGI would do it.

i tell you, it'd make up for the bizaare experience that can only be described as the last 5 years of 'Apple make the only Unix laptop worth a damn' reality bubble distortion field ..

please, SGI, make us a laptop, put your Linux on it, and make it rock like it should.

*sniff..

Re:oh man ..

[minkie]

i tell you, it'd make up for the bizaare experience that can only be described as the last 5 years of 'Apple make the only Unix laptop worth a damn' reality bubble distortion field ..

I happen to agree with you that OSX on a PowerBook is a heck of a combination (I'm typing on one right now), but you've been able to run Linux or various BSD flavors on Intel laptops for years (the Sony VAIO line, for example, is some very cool hardware). Of course, you need to roll-your-own install, but this is slashdot after all.

Re:oh man ..

[torpor]

I happen to agree with you that OSX on a PowerBook is a heck of a combination (I'm typing on one right now), but you've been able to run Linux or various BSD flavors on Intel laptops for years (the Sony VAIO line, for example, is some very cool hardware). Of course, you need to roll-your-own install, but this is slashdot after all.



hey, i'm quite happy running nothing but linux on my powerbook.

but the point is: only Apple are making 'blow-me away' luxury-style hardware. where are the similar ultra-slim metal tiBook PC designs?

for me, the apple laptop experience is about the form factor as much as anything else. its about as much of a computer as i need to carry around with me, the 17" powerbook .. since its my only computer. its good that it is slim, 'large', and sturdy.

i have a dell available to me too, but its a flimsy piece of junk in comparison, and grimy too. somehow, i like my laptop like my surfboard: long, smooth, and planky.

the 'mythos of SGI hardware' for me has always been the 'alternative computing intentions' thing, wrapped up in a shiny/pretty box. say what you want, but O2 defines 90's bad-ass computing.

hell, you could make a case that PS2 is 'more like the SGI computer of the future', i suppose .. but then, it would only really be a matter of case aesthetics, and not much else.

come to think of it, i suppose a new PS2 with LCD screen and luggable battery would make a 'nice laptop', assuming i could still put a disk in it .. and 'roll my own', as you say.

Re:oh man ..

[cashman73]

There actually was an SGI laptop featured in the 1996 movie Twister. Thought it was custom built by the production company specifically for the movie, and not by SGI itself. It never hit the market, either. Nonetheless, with all the other computers featured in the movie, SGI must've paid 'em a helluva lost of money for product placement,... ;-)

Re:oh man ..

[quarkscat]

Well, you and I can agree about SGI "laptops".

The only really "transportable" SGI that I ever
worked with was the Indy Presenter c1994. It was
an Indy RC4600 with 256 MB main memory and 10 GB
SCSI hard disk. The video card specifically
drove an LCD panel that you would set on top of
a projector. It even came with a comfortable
padded backpack to haul it around in -- all 28
pounds worth.

SGI is out of the MIPS business, but there are
low power 32-bit cores from SGS-Thompson and
others. A 64-bit MIPS laptop^H^H^H^H^H^Htransportable
running whatever is the latest flavor of IRIX
would be sweet. (Of course, it will never happen,
alas.) SGI's wholesale adoption of Intel uP was
a big tragedy for SGI, from the Visual Workstation
on up to the biggest Intel IA64 cluster they now
sell. (Although there is still a niche market
for them today.) IMHO, the energy and money SGI
wasted on the switch to the Intel juggernaut
would have better spent making faster & cheaper
MIPS computers. (As HP has done with their PA-RISC,
and Apple is getting ready to do with their switch.)

An Intel laptop driven by a 32-bit processor
with 64-bit memory addressing extensions is
a total waste -- how can you put enough memory
in the laptop to justify the difference? The
Tadpole "laptop" and now the SUN UltraSPARC "laptop"
throws the challenge down to the other legacy
OEMs for (at least) "transportable" 64-bit
operations. One can only wish...

Re:oh man ..

[psergiu]

> The only really "transportable" SGI ...
There is ONE SGI Laptop

Way too much unfair bad publicity

[johansalk]

Sun suffers more than anything from a disproportionate and hugely unjust share of bad publicity that is thrown at it. It just had become too fashionable to bash Sun. Whatever Sun does or come up with, you can be certain there'll be a crowd of idiots who'll badmouth it and can't wait to sing its obituary. I don't want to hear nonsense in replies as to why this is so - I don't want to hear anyone tell me any such nonsense; I know this company and I have followed it for years, and fuck you and your thoughtless kneejerk impending-doom reponses to anything Sun does. I know that it innovates and contributes a lot to the industry and to open source, yet all eyes are scornfully on and all tongues are poisonously about it, all the while other giants while in their mediocrity under the radars of the crowds of fucktard wannabe pundits.

Re:Way too much unfair bad publicity

[johansalk]

Don't like their stuff? then don't use it, and stay the hell away with your unalterable opinions and vitriol or STFU.

Re:Way too much unfair bad publicity

[Anonymous Coward]

actually i think you are wrong. sun is dead

Re:Way too much unfair bad publicity

[dynamo]

Dude. You are so ironic.

Re:Way too much unfair bad publicity

[Anonymous Coward]

You're complaining about Sun getting a bum rap here when Microsoft gets about a 100x more than deserved bad rap here in at least 5 FUDite articles aout them every single day?

You do no know where you are. If it ain't Linux it's old festering shit!

Re:Way too much unfair bad publicity

[NickFortune]

Gosh, with silver tounged ambassadors like yourself ready to launch a charm offensive on their behalf, how can they possibly lose?

Re:Way too much unfair bad publicity

[Killer Instinct]

Some of us have to use it! My biggest complaint is that they could have done a lot better. I rememeber trying to get x86 support from them (with a corp contract in place) and there was like 1 guy at sun who even worked the x86 support, and he seemed clueless. Then they brought back x86 support after I had figured everything out myself...not complaining, just noting they could have done a lot better. Solaris 9 was just a blink, on to 10..,their 4 hour contact agreement only works when you dont really need them. Let something major take a crap, and they'll be out tomorrow, if your lucky...They had so much promise...just wish they could have done a better job. Once I get things stable, it usually stays that way, but their support is worse then dell when you really need it, it seems.

Re:Way too much unfair bad publicity

[elbarono]

You are one of a group of ever-dwindling sun loyalists. The fact is that they have been putting out crap for the past 7 years and counting on people like you to lap it up.

This business model is running out of time. McNealy has to go or Sun will die a slow and painful death.

Re:Way too much unfair bad publicity

[grumbledoak]

Great post, you have me convinced - Sun are dead.

Re:Way too much unfair bad publicity

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll second that!

I have been using Sun equipment and software for over 10 years. Its reliable, well designed and Solaris 10 is, well, the Bomb! Solaris Containers are going to change the world, and Solaris 10 makes Linux look like a 12 year old pimply face geek who just realized that he doesn't know everything.

Re:Way too much unfair bad publicity

[ryanov]

Except for the fact that, oops, the idea for this technology came from 1) BSD jails and 2) User mode Linux. I guess that makes Sun the guy sitting next to the pimply-faced geek and copying down his answers?

Didn't Tadpole Make One Years Ago?

[DaGoodBoy]

I thought there was a Sparc laptop from Tadpole back in the mid-1990's that Sun promoted for a while. Does anyone else remember that?

Re:Didn't Tadpole Make One Years Ago?

[Concern]

I remember something like that, from around that time.

Was it called the Sparcbook?

Re:Didn't Tadpole Make One Years Ago?

[Junta]

I even have a SPARCbook 2 deep in my closet somewhere. Ahh, good old laptop, 32-bit sparc, 540 MB hard drive... AUI ethernet (woo), 640x480 LCD, and you could beat the *crap* out of someone if you wanted, or deflect bullets to medium-sized ICBMs if you wanted.

Re:Didn't Tadpole Make One Years Ago?

[Anonymous Coward]

I remember something like that, from around that time.

That has to be the most uninstightful post I have seen in a long time.

Your post, sir, was a waste of space. Please do not do that again or I will have to get nasty on you.

Sincerly,
Anonymous Coward

Sun's Lsat Chance

[MeatBlast]

From the article: "Sun is also loading its newest workstations with free software that it values at thousands of dollars, such as Java Studio Enterprise 7 and Sun Java Studio Creator. The goal is to coax developers to create applications that run on Sun machines, the company said." Sun has dug themselves a pretty deep hole here and only now are they trying to get out of it. There giving away thousand dollar software free on their computers which might convince scientists and business men to buy one but for the normal consumer there is no reason to go and buy a Sun computer. Their designs are ugly and clunky on a desktop computer, I can't begin to imagine how ugly and clunky their laptop computers will be. I wouldn't be suprised to see a slashdot story announcing Sun going out of business within a few months.

Re:Sun's Lsat Chance

[DogDude]

Their designs are ugly and clunky on a desktop computer

It's called retro or "old school". Personally, I like the way they look: the exact opposite of the ultra-slick yuppie Apples. Sun boxes *look* like they mean business, even if some of them are purple.

Re:Sun's Lsat Chance

[Decaff]

I wouldn't be suprised to see a slashdot story announcing Sun going out of business within a few months.

Me neither. They have been turning up regularly for years.

Re:Sun's Lsat Chance

[anagama]

Actually, I find this machine quite tempting. Sadly, the price and buy link isn't working so it's hard to say what you get for $895. If that's an aluminum case, I'd be really tempted depending on what's inside. Nice looking cases (not the gundam freak from hell style) are pretty pricey. If the specs on the $900 box are reasonable, it compares favorably to, off the top of my head here,

• case: 150
• ps: 70
• mobo/cpu: 300
• HD: 80
• Mem: 80
• DVD: 60
• Vid: 60
• Total:$800

Honestly, $95 extra isn't much to pay for passing on the self-assembly hassle (I've done that enough already, thank you veyr much). Plus, there's no doubt it runs linux -- as a bonus, it's a very fetching machine.

Re:Sun's Lsat Chance

[Anonymous Coward]

the big question is whether they will start calling Sun what they used to call Apple - beleaguered

Re:Sun's Lsat Chance

[Anonymous Coward]

Personally, I think Sun will not only be around for years to come, but they will do fine on their Lsat. Getting into law school is the easy part.

Oh yeah, and Boston.. the town, the people, the sports.. they all suck... really.

Re:Sun's Lsat Chance

[Kiryat Malachi]

Opteron 144
ATI 2D graphics card
512 MB (2x256) memory, non-ECC
80GB 7200 RPM SATA
GigE
DVD-ROM drive

For 1395 you can move up to an Opteron 148, 1GB ECC (2x512), and a Quadro NVS 280.

Huh? Sparc laptops been around 4 awhile

[Anonymous Coward]

I even had a veritas cluster class a while back taught on them.

Not even going to bother reading TFA...

better idea

[iggymanz]

why doesn't sun just add support for common x86 laptop chipsets to OpenSolaris.....oh wait, they want us to do it for them. for free.

Re:better idea

[Anonymous Coward]

Firstly, remember that OO.org is actually mainly maintained by Sun developers before you make a statement like that. Secondly remember that open-sourcing Solaris, which represents thousands of man-hours of work in exchange for a few drivers is quite a fair deal.

Re:better idea

[pedantic bore]

Why didn't Linus just add support for common x86 laptop chipsets to Linux...oh, wait, he let us do it for him. for free.

Why didn't *BSD just add support for common x86 laptop chipsets to Linux...oh, wait, they let us do it for them. for free.

etc.

Oh, grow up! Sun opens solaris, and all you can do is gripe that they expect someone else to flesh out the hardware support. If everyone had your attitude, Linus would probably be just another anonymous code monkey and Linux wouldn't even be a historical footnote.

Re:better idea

[iggymanz]

I've not requisitioned $100K's of equipment from Linus, on the other hand from Sun I have. So I'll bitch about them all I please

Re:better idea

[SA Stevens]

Woo-hoo. Another six figure account for Sun.

I bet they really notice you when you call into Sun headquarters.

Re:better idea

[iggymanz]

hahaha, nope, but spouting off in a Public Forum has gotten under the skin of some Sun employees at times here on slashdot. that's priceless.

SUN needs life support - STAT!

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously, it's pretty obvious to the most casual obvserver that SUN is dying (netcraft confirms it!). Let's take a look at the list of their recent thrashings:

1)Lowering the price on their machines by 40%. Clearly this is the death rattle. A company operating at a loss is a company which won't be operating for very long.

2)Sleeping with microsoft. When the lamb lies down with the lion, it's very rare for both to rise back up again. I know that when i watched mcnealy smile and joke with ballmer that I was convinced the end was at hand for sun: and given number one, I'd say I've been proven right.

3)Giving away their crown jewels. Sun recently has taken the very rash and very poorly exected jump onto the open source software bandwagon. Yet, if you look at the fsf web page, you can easily see that 'cuddle' (the sun license; god knows why the came up with yet another one) is as far from free software as you can get!

These mis-steps and sudden -dare I say desperate- changes in direction point to one, and only one thing: SUN's days are numbered. Time to cash in your stock and cut your losses.

text of the article

[Anonymous Coward]

i managed to find the content on that site as many people wont be able to read it due to the number of adverts on that page (the whole site is just an advertising application, content seems to be very inconvienent)

----

Enterprise computer maker Sun Microsystems (Nasdaq: SUNW) Latest News about Sun Microsystems announced its first-ever laptop yesterday, saying the machine was designed to let engineers and scientists perform demanding computer tasks away from their desks.

Sun, which has seen sales fall for the last four years, said that it was also lowering prices for some of its computers by up to 40 percent.
Cheaper Prices

The Ultra 20 Workstation, a desktop computer equipped with an AMD (NYSE: AMD) Latest News about AMD Opteron processor, now will cost US$895, a cut from the previous price of $1,495.

The Ultra 3 Mobile Workstation will list at $3,400 and is equipped with Sun's Ultrasparc processor, the Solaris 10 operating system, 512 megabytes of memory, a 40 gigabyte hard drive and WiFi connectivity.

Also unveiled were several initiatives to drive customer adoption, including a "try and buy" program that lets customers take an Ultra 20 for a 90-day test drive at no charge.
Free Software

Sun is also loading its newest workstations with free software that it values at thousands of dollars, such as Java Latest News about Java Studio Enterprise 7 and Sun Java Studio Creator. The goal is to coax developers to create applications that run on Sun machines, the company said.

Sun is also giving away the source code for its application server Latest News about application server software, which helps corporate databases work together, to spur development of new programs, the company said.

---

The problem is ...

[93 Escort Wagon]

"Enterprise computer maker Sun Microsystems announced its first-ever laptop yesterday..."

I heard it was just a Sun Blade 2500, but it now comes with this really big backpack.

Specifications

[Noksagt]

One of:
UltraSPARC IIi (550 MHz or 650 MHz)
UltraSPARC IIIi (1.28 GHz)

Up to:
2 GB SDRAM

Either
80-GB IDE HD
73-GB UltraSCSI HD

802.11
Solaris 10
JDE

A little (very little) more info...

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.sun.com/desktop/workstation/ultra3/inde x.xml

First? What? No...

[Anonymous Coward]

Unless I dreamt the whole thing there have been Sparc notebooks for years. I think they used to be standard equipment in Military issue Humvees
(this was before they realized that money was better spent on stuff like armor).

Now replace all references to Sun in the parent

[melted]

Now replace all references to Sun in the parent with references to Microsoft and remove open source and you'll get a good description of Slashdot.

Processor?

[nurb432]

Didnt mention the processor used. Perhaps a ultraSPARC?

That would give some of us soon to be ex apple fans somewhere to go, other then just a ix86.

So it was overpriced by 66% yesterday?

[Anonymous Coward]

They are cutting prices on some items by 40%.

If today's prices are fair market value, I guess yesterday you paid 2/3rds too much.

We're Cutting Prices On All Items...

[MightyMartian]

That's right! Sun's cutting prices up to 40%! Mad Dog McNealy is running throughout the store, lifting his leg to great deals! Look at this great workstation! Was 5 trillion dollars, now only 443 billion dollars! With prices like these, this sale won't last long! Get down here while there are stil LOW LOW prices!

Mad Dog McNealy says "Linux is Red Hat, Red Hat is evil, but Microsoft is A-okay!"

This sale is brought to you by Sun Computers, maker of Java, slower than Espresso, and guaranteed to run badly on any platform!

Re:We're Cutting Prices On All Items...

[memfrob]

This sale is brought to you by Sun Computers

Pardon the interruption, but the marketers making the previous offer have been sacked.

"More LOW LOW prices, now from SunSOFT...

We apologize, but the people responsible for sacking the previous marketers, have been sacked.

"..and you can ONLY get this deal from the brand-new Sun... er... Microsystems!

Once again we apologize for the interruption. The people responsible for sacking the people who were sacking the marketing droids, have been sacked.

We now continue with some less offensive Slashdot commentary...

Re:We're Cutting Prices On All Items...

[sharkey]

Come on down to Crazy Scotty's!!! If noone comes down here in the next 20 minutes to buy a laptop, I'm gonna club this baby seal!! That's right! I'll club a seal to make a deal!!

Re:We're Cutting Prices On All Items...

[TheGratefulNet]

come on down to crazy mcneally. his prices are - INSANE!

(new yorkers will get this joke)

I'm salivating over their Ultra 20 workstation

[melted]

Looks better than Apple G5, and uses a _real_ processor (Opteron).

Re:I'm salivating over their Ultra 20 workstation

[anagama]

I totally agree. Looks nice and has a 3yr warranty - what comes with a warranty that long (without paying extra)? And this looks like an interesting 90 day trial offer:

If you do not wish to keep the system, you must notify Sun in writing (by email to ultra20_try_buy@sun.com) with your order confirmation number within 90 days of the product shipment date. If Sun does not receive your email cancellation within such 90-day period, you will be charged the price listed for the product at the time of your order. In the event of cancellation, Sun will be responsible for picking up the equipment from you.

SPARC LC

[hallkbrdz]

First laptop by Sun? I thought they re-sold something like the SPARC LC in the early 90's: http://www.ipsj.or.jp/katsudou/museum/computer/513 0_e.html

You mean, something like this?

[DAldredge]

By Ashlee Vance in Chicago
Published Monday 27th June 2005 14:42 GMT

Sun Microsystems has polished off its cheapest and likely most attractive Opteron-based workstation to date.

The hardware maker today introduced the world to the Ultra 20 a one-way (one socket) box that starts at $895. That price has to please a lot of Sun customers who complained when the much higher-end W2100z amd W1100z workstations arrived, costing thousands of dollars. With the Ultra 20, Sun is really delivering some of the price/performance benefits associated with x86 chips to the developer crowd.

Sun has long been a major player in the workstation market, pumping out Solaris on SPARC boxes for engineers, developers and designers. The rise, however, of Intel Xeon's processor ate into a huge chunk of Sun's workstation share. Sun's line of Opteron-based systems is its response to this loss, and the Ultra 20 is the first box in this line aimed square at developers.

Sun unveiled the system at its Java One conference which starts today in San Francisco.

"This system is meant to reach a much broader audience," said John Fowler, Sun's vice president in charge of the x86 systems. "Java One is the world's biggest developer conference, so it made sense to show it off there."

While you can buy the Ultra 20 flat out just like any another bit of hardware, Sun also has a much weirder pricing option. Customers can pay $30 per month over three years ($1,080) and get the system, Solaris 10, Java Studio Enterprise 7, Java Studio Creator and support. This package full of Java tools is meant for the developer crowd.

Initially, the Ultra 20 will ship with a single-core version - 1.8GHz to 2.6GHz - of AMD's Opteron. As El Reg reported last week, AMD will make a dual-core version of this 100 Series chip available in the third quarter. (AMD confirmed the move to customers in a note issued Friday.)

The Ultra 20 also ships with up to 4GB of memory, up to 2 SATA drives (80GB or 250GB), six USB 2.0 ports and two IEEE 1394a ports. The box will run Solaris x86, Red Hat and SuSE Linux 32-bit and 64-bit and Windows XP Pro 32-bit and 64-bit.

Sun continues to see a sharp rise in it Opteron system sales. The company is currently battling with HP for the top spot among all Opteron server sellers.

Sun has enjoyed particular success in Germany where it holds 41 per cent of the Opteron server market versus 23 per cent for HP, according to the first quarter figures from Gartner.

You can see the Ultra 20 in all its glory available here.

Along with the Ultra 20, Sun also pointed to the new Ultra 3 Mobile Workstation, which runs on its UltraSPARC chip and starts at $3,400. This system looks like a rebranded version of a Tadpole laptop. ®

http://www.sun.com/desktop/workstation/ultra20/rev iews.jsp
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/06/27/sun_ultra2 0_opteron/

Re:You mean, something like this?

[ignorant_coward]

Sun has enjoyed particular success in Germany where it holds 41 per cent of the Opteron server market...

Sun Naysayer Power Rings unite! *fizzle* WTF? I say unite!!! *crackle* *floop* AAARRRGGH! My powers! My powers are gone! Waaaahhh, mommy hold me!

Sun Still sells computers?

[dynamo]

I'm amazed that sun would bother to create a non-server machine (even if they call it a 'server-laptop' or some other such nonsense).

Why buy sun hardware these days when better unix-based OSs and better price-performance are available everywhere else?

Re:Sun Still sells computers?

[rpozz]

Why buy sun hardware these days when better unix-based OSs and better price-performance are available everywhere else?

Sun x86 stuff has a pretty good price/performance ratio, and Solaris is a decent OS, especially compared to Linux with the flaky 2.6.x kernel (why the fuck isn't there a 2.7.x for unstable stuff?), poor backwards-compatibility and compatiblity between distros. What are you comparing it to exactly?

Re:Sun Still sells computers?

[dynamo]

My experience with linux has been that it is rock solid, at least when matched to my decidedly non-determinist ic self. Maybe I just got lucky. I should mention that I haven't used linux in any depth or run it on personal machines since Mac OS X came out. But I remember 2.4 as being the most stable thing out there.

If there is really no 2.7.x branch, is there a 2.5.x branch still being developed? Not having a dev branch is a pretty huge departure from the methodology linux was supposed to be developed on. That sucks if it's really true. It sucks enough that I'd have to confirm it independently before I let it get me down. Is that really true, slashdot?

Does all current linux development take place on a stable branch, and are new features being added improperly there? There should be stories posted on it if that kind of misconduct going on. It's possible I just missed them all, but..

more likely, I am __guessing__ that there are no new features being developed in 2.6 and that there are a lot of bugs getting fixed. That 2.6 was branched from 2.5 a bit earlier than it maybe should have been, if it's really as unstable as you say. Check out 2.4 if you're having problems. It worked well for me.

---

But for the record, I was comparing it to Mac OS.
It's the Gold Standard, at least from this user's perspective.

What about Voyager? not a laptop exactly, but...

[toby]

Sun's SPARCstation Voyager (1994) may not have been a laptop exactly, but "transportable" and at 12lb dubbed a "nomadic" solution... Maybe something like the 15.8lb Mac Portable (1989), a.k.a. the "Luggable".

sun laptops

[telemonster]

Sun had a machine called a Voyager which was an official Sun portable IIRC.

RDI and Tadpole both made Sparc notebooks, as well as a few others. Milspec mostly.

IBM had a PPC RS/6000 notebook... It limited in version of AIX it will run though.

The SGI luggables in Twister were made by banned from the ranch or another group. They are fake, just Indy presenter displays. Given the sizes of the boxes, it would have been trivial to pack an Indy in a case that size. RDI or someone I believe offered portable SGI conversions but they would crush nuts, not sit on a lap (60 pounds?).

Re:sun laptops

[cianduffy]

RSI-CRI still do offer SGI "Laptops". And yes, they'd not only burn your bollox off, but crush them into little tiny peices - I'm not even sure they take the boards out the SGI's case, just shove the machine into the chassis.

I'd like to see you get one on as hand luggage...

Don't forget the New Ultra 20

[DAldredge]

By Ashlee Vance in Chicago
Published Monday 27th June 2005 14:42 GMT

Sun Microsystems has polished off its cheapest and likely most attractive Opteron-based workstation to date.

The hardware maker today introduced the world to the Ultra 20 a one-way (one socket) box that starts at $895. That price has to please a lot of Sun customers who complained when the much higher-end W2100z amd W1100z workstations arrived, costing thousands of dollars. With the Ultra 20, Sun is really delivering some of the price/performance benefits associated with x86 chips to the developer crowd.

Sun has long been a major player in the workstation market, pumping out Solaris on SPARC boxes for engineers, developers and designers. The rise, however, of Intel Xeon's processor ate into a huge chunk of Sun's workstation share. Sun's line of Opteron-based systems is its response to this loss, and the Ultra 20 is the first box in this line aimed square at developers.

Sun unveiled the system at its Java One conference which starts today in San Francisco.

"This system is meant to reach a much broader audience," said John Fowler, Sun's vice president in charge of the x86 systems. "Java One is the world's biggest developer conference, so it made sense to show it off there."

While you can buy the Ultra 20 flat out just like any another bit of hardware, Sun also has a much weirder pricing option. Customers can pay $30 per month over three years ($1,080) and get the system, Solaris 10, Java Studio Enterprise 7, Java Studio Creator and support. This package full of Java tools is meant for the developer crowd.

Initially, the Ultra 20 will ship with a single-core version - 1.8GHz to 2.6GHz - of AMD's Opteron. As El Reg reported last week, AMD will make a dual-core version of this 100 Series chip available in the third quarter. (AMD confirmed the move to customers in a note issued Friday.)

The Ultra 20 also ships with up to 4GB of memory, up to 2 SATA drives (80GB or 250GB), six USB 2.0 ports and two IEEE 1394a ports. The box will run Solaris x86, Red Hat and SuSE Linux 32-bit and 64-bit and Windows XP Pro 32-bit and 64-bit.

Sun continues to see a sharp rise in it Opteron system sales. The company is currently battling with HP for the top spot among all Opteron server sellers.

Sun has enjoyed particular success in Germany where it holds 41 per cent of the Opteron server market versus 23 per cent for HP, according to the first quarter figures from Gartner.

You can see the Ultra 20 in all its glory available here.

Along with the Ultra 20, Sun also pointed to the new Ultra 3 Mobile Workstation, which runs on its UltraSPARC chip and starts at $3,400. This system looks like a rebranded version of a Tadpole laptop. ®

http://www.sun.com/desktop/workstation/ultra20/rev iews.jsp
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/06/27/sun_ultra2 0_opteron/

Re:Don't forget the New Ultra 20

[Anonymous Coward]

Posting the same article twice! Eh, Sun Whore?

Re:Don't forget the New Ultra 20

[kl76]

Sun's product nomenclature just gets more bizarre. They've dusted off the old "Ultra" name (previously only used on UltraSPARC workstations, as the name suggests) and given it to an Opteron-based workstation! WTF?! And at the same time they announce an "Ultra 3" laptop, which is UltraSPARC-based (strangely, given that their workstation line seems to be inexorably drawn towards Opteron), but appears to be nothing more than an existing Tadpole or Naturetech laptop....

Re:Don't forget the New Ultra 20

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, it is amazing that Dshitredge, the anti-semite, managed to get 6 positive karma for posting the same article twice.

Link to the actual product site

[neosake]

here's a link to the actual product page http://www.sun.com/desktop/workstation/ultra3/inde x.xml

Re:Link to the actual product site

[imac.usr]

Am I the only one amused by the fact that the product page URL includes the word "desktop"?

These are just rebranded Tadpole and Naturetech!

[mrbill]

Sun is just reselling the Tadpole and Naturetech portables. I've got one of the Naturetech systems right now (for review on sunhelp.org) and <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/mrbill/sets/48<nobr>9<wbr></wbr></nobr> 821/">some pictures up</a>. It's *very* nice, but *very* pricey.

Re:These are just rebranded Tadpole and Naturetech

[mrbill]

Er, make that: http://www.flickr.com/photos/mrbill/sets/489821/

Poor track record

[DogDude]

Just keep in mind that Sun has a very consistent track record of trying out the low end market, only to decide that they'd be better off sticking with the high end, after all. You may end up stuck with no support in just a few months. Really, Sun should just keep doing what they're good at, instead of continually trying to break into the hyper-competitive (read: profitless) consumer market. The just got finished discontinuing their brand new Java Desktop (today), and they've tried PC's numerous times. Of course, they could've used their Java Desktop on their new laptop, but that would require more than one weeks' foresight, which is obviously more than the management can handle.

Re:Poor track record

[oldenuf2knowbetter]

I call BS.

Sun has always (well, for at least the last 15 years) offered a range of products from desktop to large servers. They've never abandoned any part of that range. They have, like all vendors, introduced products which weren't big hits and which were ultimately discontinued, but they've never simply abandoned any part of their product range.

Also, "they've tried PCs numerous times"? Care to name a couple of those times?

Re:Poor track record

[mikael]

Sun have tried fairly often to abandon the x86 market, but they have always been forced to resume support due to protests from hardcore users.

Competing against Dell, HP is fairly straightforward for Sun. All they have to do, is build a reliable system using the same components bought at bulk discount prices (motherboard, CPU, graphics card, RAM, hard disk drive) and install a popular OS (Windows, Linux, Solaris), and keep the price the same.

Re:Poor track record

[illumin8]

Just keep in mind that Sun has a very consistent track record of trying out the low end market, only to decide that they'd be better off sticking with the high end, after all. You may end up stuck with no support in just a few months.

I call bullshit. Name me one Sun hardware product that they have dropped support for before the support lifecycle was over? There isn't one. Sun's hardware support is second to none. They guarantee that a box you buy now will continue to be supported up until 5 years after the product is EOLd (end of life). This means that in 2007, when they stop selling whatever Opteron server you're buying from them today (like the V40z or whatever), you'll still get full hardware support until 2012 !!! Name me one beige box vendor that guarantees that. In fact, name me one x86 hardware vendor that does that. I don't think there are any.

Re:Poor track record

[himself]

illumin8 wrote:
>
> Sun's hardware support is second to none. They guarantee that a box you buy now will continue to be supported up until 5 years after the product is EOL...
>
*ahem* I bought an L25 (2-drive, 20-tape SDLT library) with only one drive in it. When I got budget for a second drive, Sun had switched the unit from LVD to HVD. I was told that buying a new drive that would be covered under my existing support contract (vs. just buying one off EBay or a gray market reseller) would require actually junking the unit and buying a whole new library and two drives.
Uh, what?
"HP on line two, sir. Somethign about a new tape library?"
And I'm a Sun fanboy.

Re:Poor track record

[illumin8]

*ahem* I bought an L25 (2-drive, 20-tape SDLT library) with only one drive in it. When I got budget for a second drive, Sun had switched the unit from LVD to HVD. I was told that buying a new drive that would be covered under my existing support contract (vs. just buying one off EBay or a gray market reseller) would require actually junking the unit and buying a whole new library and two drives.

Hmm... That's a tough one. You can always buy a drive off eBay, and your L25 will remain supported, they just won't fix the 3rd party drive. If anything else in the box fails, you'll be just fine. In truth, they will probably even replace the 3rd party drive for you if it fails. Sun is usually really cool about that. I've replaced 3rd party memory that went bad in a server before, even when I knew the customer had bought it on their own.

But the fact that they switched from LVD to HVD on the tape library doesn't negate your support contract. Your tape library will continue to be supported throughout the product lifecycle.

I own one of the L25s too. We're using LTO media, and I wish we'd gotten a second drive since it makes life a lot easier for scheduling backups. It's a good unit though (really a rebranded ATL library). Anyway, good luck.

wow, you guys are living up to the slashdot crowd

[Anonymous Coward]

This was annouced several days ago, it is on the sun website if you bother to look, and the picture there actually shows a tadpole as well as another vendor. Basically it looks like a decent laptop, harkening back a little to the old ultra5 or ultra1 design (the little edge at the bottom).

I think some of you should feel a little more free to use multiple OSes and like them all. I have an e450 with sol 10 on it and I like it, along with a linux box and some other really crappy thing from somebody named Bill ;)

They all have their place, although I have to say solaris 10 is a far more refined experience than any linux distribution I have used (and linux is my OS of choice).

I would be so bored without all of this wonderful variety of things to break...

Except these aren't built by Sun, either

[daveschroeder]

They're just reselling the Sparc laptops that have been around for *ages*:

http://www.sun.com/desktop/workstation/ultra3/

Pictures and specs...

[Anonymous Coward]

Pictures and specs...

http://www.sun.com/desktop/workstation/ultra3/inde x.xml

Voyager Was the First

[allenw]

The first Sun laptop that I know of was the Voyager. It was a sun4m-class machine.

Hiring Steve Ballmer for TV-ad

[bubbaD]

http://media.energyradio.fm/energy/ballmer.wmv
For Sale Except in Nebraska!

Funny

[Anonymous Coward]

saying the machine was designed to let engineers and scientists perform demanding computer tasks away from their desks

Funny, this is the exact reason why so many of the UNIX-centric engineer/research people I know have in the last few years switched to Powerbooks.

Including a pretty decent number of people I know who work for Sun...

tadpole?!

[0xdeaddead]

jeez does our editor overloads know anything about Sun, unix or hardware!?

Re:tadpole?!

[mlk]

Tadpole are not part of Sun thou.

But to answer your question, if by "Sun, unix or hardware" you mean "basic sh commands, Super-Easy Linux[1] and x86" yeah!

1] Configured incorrectly

Opteron lappie would be news.

[MsGeek]

Sparc lappie...meh.

Make your time

[Digital Pizza]

I hope this new trend toward AMD processors, Linux/OpenSolaris and cheaper prices works out for them. I've liked Sun hardware for years until the Sparc line fell so far behind the curve. I'd hate to see them go away, just for nostolgia's sake. This may be their last "chance to survive".

Remember when Apple's stock was at rock bottom, pre-Steve, and Sun made a lowball offer to buy them out (which they thankfully refused)?

It'd be really funny and ironic if Apple bought out Sun now. Yeah, sure it probably won't happen, but it'd be funny.

Yow! News Flash! Stop the Presses!

[Un pobre guey]

Mountain View, CA - June 29, 2005 - Sun Microsystems announced today a radically new information storage and communications system using nanotechnology. Using tiny carbon-based fibers carefully prepared, purified and pressed into paper thin sheets, along with sleek, ergonomic pigment deposition units, Sun has introduced a tablet-based handwriting-centric system they believe will inundate the world.

Availlable in units of 75 sheets each, the beautiful yellow nanotech material is easy to hold in the user's hand or attached to a conventional clipboard. It requires no external power, relying exclusively on passive power derived from the user's physical manipulation of the material. The stylus is available in models that apply black, red, blue, or green pigment to the nanotech sheets. They also rely entirely on the user's physical manipulation for power, and only require periodic changing of toner cartridges that are small tubular components only a few millimeters in diameter. Sun has thus eliminated the cost and logistics required to distribute electrical power, UPS facilities, and expensive rechargeable batteries to users. Data storage is for all intents and purposes permanent, and is impervious to even multi-Tesla magnetic fields and large amounts of electromagnetic radiation across a wide spectrum. Styli that contain precisely machined lengths of purified graphite-based toner will soon be available and will add erasable read/write capability.

The nanosheets will be available in units of 10 pads of 75 sheets each for $2500 list price, and non-erasable styli are available in packages of 25 for $1295. The advanced machined graphite styli were not available at press time.

Well technically...

[bluGill]

Back before the sparc, and after the 68020 sun3, Sun had some i386 machines that you could call wintel. (though nobody used Windows then, and I'm not sure if Dos would run). They also made the sun3x in those days, both of which didn't sell many. (In part because the sparc soon came out, and in those days the sparc killed the 80386.

Re:Well technically...

[GreatDrok]

I had one of those Sun boxes. It was called the SUN 386i and it had a 386DX at 20Mhz with 8MB of RAM. It ran SUNOS 4.0.x and was actually pretty quick and able to run X11R4 nicely albeit with only an 8bit framebuffer. There were prototypes of a 486i but that was killed before many were made. The architecture was very different from a PC; the only real similarity was that it used an Intel processor but there was no way to boot DOS. Upgrade options were limited so I replaced it with a SPARC1 although I kept the 19" Trinitron monitor and Type 4 keyboard and optical mouse I had with the 386.

Think of these things as the precursor to the Macintosh with Intel processor due next year. The CPU may have been Intel but the box was SUN all the way through.

Re:Well technically...

[Bert64]

They were called the sun386, and didn't sell very well..
The sun3x was just a 68030 based sun3..
They also ported solaris to PowerPC, but that also didn't take off..

Re:Well technically...

[Anonymous Coward]

They also had a special (SBUS) daughter card that could be plugged into a sun4 machine (probably others too) featuring a genuine i486, making it possible to run intel-based software on the native processor, interated in the SunOS desktop. I haveone of those but unfortunately never got it working...

Re:Well technically...

[Wdomburg]

Sun had some i386 machines that you could call wintel. (though nobody used Windows then, and I'm not sure if Dos would run).

If noone ran windows, how would it be called wintel? :)

The machine couldn't natively run DOS or Windows. They did, however, support DOS applications under SunView by using virtual 8086 machines, and you could install Windows on top of that apparently.

Laptops will go under $200.

[zymano]

Sun is in trouble.

and Steve Ballmer will be their new spokesman

[screwthemoderators]

http://media.ebaumsworld.com/index.php?e=ballmerwi ndows.wmv Except in Nebraska!

Am I the only one wondering ?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is breaking news since Sun never made laptops before. So why can't you find anything about it on their website?

Not important? Or not existant ?

Damn that thing is sexy

[Ahkorishaan]

I'm not sure about the rest of you, but I think that Ultra 20 Workstation is one sleek and sexy looking machine. Even the 24inch Sun branded LCD they show it with looks nice. If I could get a general purpose GPU, and a dual core processor in the thing I'd consider it. It'd sure beat the pants off a Dell, HP, or Gateway workstation...

UltraLinux: Linux for SPARC processors

[screwthemoderators]

http://www.ultralinux.org/ UltraLinux is the name given to the port of Linux to the SPARCTM family of processors most commonly found in SunTM workstations and clones. The port has been developed over the past few years and is currently very stable. It supports most workstations including the older 32bit SPARC processors and the newer 64bit UltraSPARC based workstations. and of course, It Runs BSD!

Gosh, those specs are pretty similar to...

[Shag]

... the PowerBooks all my UNIX-using, mobility-desiring scientific and technical colleagues seem to have already bought. But I guess there's a niche if Sun comes out with a better screen than Apple has, or if those chips are all 64-bit.

Keyboards

[zsau]

Do Sun keyboards still have odd layouts, with the Cut/Copy/Paste and so forth keys? Do these laptops have them?

Re:Keyboards

[dysk]

My RDI Powerlite sparc 110Mhz laptop has the full sun-specific keyboard. I love having the extra keys.

From looking at the product photos on Sun's website, it appears that the 15" model has a standard laptop keyboard and the 17" model has a customized keyboard.

Re:Keyboards

[mlk]

Can you get them for PCs? I also really like the L keys.

Re:Keyboards

[dysk]

A Sun USB keyboard will work fine on a PC, however it is up to you to set up your keymapping so the extra keys do something useful.

I guess you'll have to work for a living

[Anonymous Coward]

...instead of leeching off of the big boys. It must suck not being able to just pawn off another vendor's merchandise for a living, and having to actually Add Value or Integrate. My suggestion? Find a cheap product channel from Taiwan and start branding whiteboxes. Doh! Is that work?

On 64-bit Laptops

[Noksagt]

This is a niche product for a niche line of computers.

or if those chips are all 64-bit.

All of the UltraSPARC (v9) line is 64-bit. I don't see the point of a 64-bit laptop, unless you need binary compatibility with specific 64-bit apps (like ones you develop for use on 64-bit desktops). The Suns only support up to 2 GB of RAM (as are the AMD Turions). Limited battery life, more heat, and larger form factor make either chip lose the geek-appeal fast.

The pricetag and the userland apps will keep the Sun machines out of consumers hands (and, perhaps the Intel monopoly will keep many Turions out of there hands too).

But that's OK, as the two lines are bad anyway. Linux on a Pentium-M or OS X on a (ewww) G4 are enough to make most "UNIX-using, mobility-desiring scientific and technical colleagues" happy. OS X on a Pentium-M will probably make them happier still.

Re:On 64-bit Laptops

[njcoder]

i saw a video interview... at least that's where I remember i saw the info. the way the product came about is that some developers at sun wanted a sparc laptop to be able to do their work remotely. Maybe not so much that a sparc notebook is awesome for everyone but if you're specifically developing for sparc, it might be a nice mobile workstation.

What Sun is probably trying to do is say, hey we have laptops too. Not a bad thing in my opinion. The Ultra 20 at $895 is probably the most interesting bit. They have other Opteron workstations but this is by far the cheapest.

Re:On 64-bit Laptops

[Shag]

some developers at sun wanted a sparc laptop to be able to do their work remotely.

"It's not fair! Everyone else gets to use laptops!" :)

Rule of Thumb

[Anonymous Coward]

PR releases that don't have pictures of the product are:

1) vapor

or

2) so deficiently designed as to be DoL (dead on launch).

Sun, leave the laptop design to the big 3 Tiawanese design firms... while you're at it, leave the processor design to Intel/AMD and go quitely into that good night.

A photo that makes me think it *is* a Tadpole...

[GPS Pilot]

Check out the photo on Sun's product page for the "Ultra 3 Mobile Workstation."

http://www.sun.com/desktop/workstation/ultra3/inde x.xml

Todayear.

[itomato]

I can't find any evidence of this being a Sun branded computer.

The info page shows a Tadpole and a Naturetech notebook.

So these still seem to be SPARC notebooks.

Tadpole makes a Dual CPU SPARC notebook, BTW

Re:Todayear.

[TheRaven64]

Tadpole makes a Dual CPU SPARC notebook, BTW

I find it hard to class anything four inches thick as a notebook...

How much of a rip-off did it have to be...

[Anonymous Coward]

...to lower your prices by 40%!?

Re:Sun laptop? Isn't that an oxymoron?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sadly, I agree with you. We're in the process of ditching Sun E450s for $3000 HP Opteron based DLs. I can basically throw out the unit and replace it 4 times before I hit the price point of what was a cheap E450. I liked Sun hardware because it was well built and reliable. Unfortunately for them, with the power boost in X86 CPUs and the solidification of Linux, it would be incredibly hard to justify springing for Sun hardware anymore. Sun needs new management, they simply aren't seeing how the market has changed.

Um, wait they are Tadpoles.

[libra-dragon]

http://www.sun.com/desktop/workstation/ultra3/inde x.xml

and Naturetechs... Sun is just reselling the two laptops. Not even a rebadging --weak.

Re:Um, wait they are Tadpoles.

[kylemonger]

Well, I guess that would explain why they buried this new product so deeply in their website. Not a peep about it on the Sun homepage. NBFD, I guess.

Someone ought to mention to Sun that monitors is spelled with only one 't'.

Re:Um, wait they are Tadpoles.

[Anonymous Coward]

Why? We use montitors at work. I've even got a couple at home.

About That IBM

[Anonymous Coward]

IBM gets more server revenue than any other vendor in the world and has been gaining marketshare. (So say IDC and Gartner.) Their product line has greater span than anyone, small to large. For example, where else can you buy a zSeries that supports thousands of Linux guests on a single server? And it's the only server vendor that actually does R&D any more -- including server R&D. (See: Cell processor, POWER, millipede storage, UNIX/Linux LPARs, etc., etc.) You don't build multi-billion dollar fab plants (for example) unless you're a serious player. There's absolutely no other server vendor doing that.

Spinning off the Wintel appliance business -- for a handsome payment -- was brilliant. IBM got rid of that Microsoft Windows OEM preload nonsense that undermined their ability to offer their customers choice. IBM is Linux's biggest corporate benefactor -- and an astonishingly, refreshingly benevolent one. That deserves at least a careful consideration of their products in my book.

First? WRONG

[olympus_coder]

Sun sold laptops in the late 90s at least. I know. I had one. Couldn't tell you the model or name, but it was a sun and ran Solaris.

Not sure what crack the people who wrote this were smoking, but good for them.

Re:First? WRONG

[demon]

Perhaps you're thinking of Tadpole's SPARCBooks? They've made several iterations of their SPARC-based laptop line. (They even made an Alpha-based laptop at one point.)

Price

[NitsujTPU]

The Ultra 3 Mobile Workstation will list at $3,400 and is equipped with Sun's Ultrasparc processor, the Solaris 10 operating system, 512 megabytes of memory, a 40 gigabyte hard drive and WiFi connectivity.

Wow, and so inexpensive (I write from my P4 desknote with a Gig, 60 Gigs HDD, DVD+RW, bluetook, widescreen, that cost ~$1000, 8 months ago).

Re:Price

[Anonymous Coward]

You compared your P4 to an Ultrasparc.

That's like digging up a bar wench that died 600 years ago and comparing "her" to Britney Spears in her heyday.

Sparcs consume about half the power of an Intel or Intel compatible CPU too. That is why the row of Wintel machines in your data center is always about 30deg F hotter than everything else.

Re:Price

[Anonymous Coward]

That's the best you could come up with?

Psh. Come back when Sun actually means something to people.

Re:Price

[Hork_Monkey]

But that bar wench from 600 years ago would do things to you that Britney Spears has never heard of.

Re:Price

[NitsujTPU]

Hrmm.

I don't know. I worked on Sun hardware for 3 years professionally, and 3 as a college undergraduate (early graduation, I didn't fail out) before that.

I'm not saying that there's no truth in what you're saying, but I will say that for $3,400, I can get a really decked out Intel machine.

Incidentally, this particular one has seen some pretty heavy use.

First laptop?

[rbarreira]

It's been years that I've had my first laptop. Sun seems to be years late in joining this revolution :)

saying the machine was designed to let engineers and scientists perform demanding computer tasks away from their desks.

Yeah, that's what laptops are for...

Sun had laptops a long time ago

[walterbyrd]

I think they were called "minnows" or something.

Small, black, monocrome screen, no floppies, or cdrom. But, an external scsi port that could read from an external cdrom - even boot from the cdrom.

It's been a while, but I deffinately remember the things.

Re:Sun had laptops a long time ago

[Gleef]

Yes, Tadpole, and they weren't technically made by Sun, but by a "Sun Partner".

Actually, these laptops are probably also made by Tadpole, and just rebranded by Sun.

Tadpole Computer

Not the first time

[Thaidog]

I sold SUN laptops at Tiger Direct Corp back in 99. Maybe the first SUN laptop w/ a sparc (I don't know the specs)

NOT the first - remember the TADPOLE??

[Anonymous Coward]

its not suns first laptop.
tadpole was the first.
I guess Sun just wants people to forget.

already been done!

[loonicks]

See this company. They are a bit bulky and loud, but a nice package all around. They even have a hardware lock-out with key combination which is pretty neat. Expensive suckers, though.

As Strong Bad would say...

[floorpirate]

It's extremely portable!

Probably an Acer Ferrari

[theendlessnow]

Nearly every Sun engineer I know owns one. I figure it's because they found a laptop that works with Solaris, so they tend to just follow suit rather than doing additional trial and error research.

Tons of laptops might work with Solaris (though, I'll admit, Solaris is quite limited)... but no one will ever know... they've found the Acer Ferrari... no need for them to look futher.

Let's see...

Re:Probably an Acer Ferrari

[LarryWake]

Tons of laptops might work with Solaris (though, I'll admit, Solaris is quite limited)... but no one will ever know...

...unless you cheat and look at the Solaris Hardware Compatibility List, which currently lists 175 different laptop models.

Re:Probably an Acer Ferrari

[theendlessnow]

And in tried and true form... many if not most of the entries are chopped full of "does not work", "does not work". Have you ever used the Sun HCL before? I have... I don't recommend it as a good indicator of "compatibility".

Re:Sun laptop? Isn't that an oxymoron?

[ross.w]

not really, you just have to wear the special trousers

(with apologies to the Monty Python team)

I'm going to get one ...

[Sonic McTails]

I use Mac's mostly for there superior hardware performance (I use Mac OS X too but I also use Linux from time to time). Assuming that this uses the SPARC platform instead of the x86, you can sign me up.

Re:I'm going to get one ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Please, please, please learn what the fuck you are talking about before posting.

Your status of a fanboi may get you dick in the ass at a gay bar, but honestly, they hate you for it.

You are a no talent ass clown and you deserve to choke on a large donkey dick.

Re:Sun laptop? Isn't that an oxymoron?

[AusG4]

Why not just run Solaris 10 on those Opterons and get the best of both worlds?

X86 != Linux - Solaris on Opteron exactly the same as Solaris on SPARC and preserves your existing investment in training.

That, and of course, for data center applications, Solaris is Linux's daddy.

There, I said it.
Flame on, fanboys.

These lapttops must be tiny...

[vortex2.71]

bacause Sun must've had their heads up their asses while they were designing them. Apple has a hard enough time selling their 64 bit laptops for $1200-$1500, and they have integrated ease of use, stability, open source functionality and even offer microsoft applications. Why would anyone buy one of these things?

Re:These lapttops must be tiny...

[aventius]

Apple doesn't have any 64 bit laptops... they have 64 bit desktops... but not laptops.

No press release?!?!

[Anonymous Coward]

I call shenanigans AGAIN! There is no Sun press release to corroborate this story. There are also no quotes from any Sun employee in this story. It's BS, not true, or a leak of trade secrets.

VAR = dead business

[Anonymous Coward]

Who wants to pay your premium???? Thats the questions VARs have had to answer for a decade or so, unsuccesfully. In the meantime, Dell has become the world's most envied hardware operation. Duh, see a pattern? And don't tell me how people who buy Sun blahblah servers don't want to buy direct and deal directly with the vendor for support. Its not 1993 anymore.

playing catch-up with SGI

[SethJohnson]

If you look closely at the garbage movie, Twister, there are a couple scenes where the meteorologists are out in the field with their stupid school bus looking at satellite data on a laptop. I'm guessing because they got a deal on CGI work, Silicon Graphics wanted every computer in the movie to be one of theirs. So on this laptop, they had a piece of masking tape on the bottom of the screen with the letters handwritten- 'SGI'.

More ridiculous than that, though, was when the hailstorm came. This ragtag group of meteorologists, working on a shoestring budget, grabbed their stuff and ran for cover. Philip Seymour Hoffman's character uses the 'SGI laptop' as a shield from the hail holding it over his head as he ran towards the school bus.

RDI is another company that (used to?) make them

[Chuck Chunder]

I have a Powerlite sitting on the floor at home doing nothing. It's a heavy bugger!

I have 3 sitting collecting dust...

[Fallen Kell]

Seriously, when I read the topic, I immediatly said to myself, "Sun's first laptop? No way." They are collecting dust in one of our server rooms on top of an equipment rack/storage shelf. We had them back in the early-mid 90's when laptops were not really big (well big as in popular, cause these are certainly big pigs compaired to what is out there now).

Re:I have 3 sitting collecting dust...

[plasticpixel]

You have 3 of them? Some had serial numbers on a label on the front. If you can manage to power one up, the banner should say SparcStation Hawaii with a logo of the Hawaiian islands next to it. Can you get me a picture or send me the serial numbers? As their daddy, I'd like to at least keep a registry of them. I have two of them in the basement collecting dust as well.

Oh, and they did run Linux too!

hmm

[speel3k]

hey can i get a free one =D

What killed sun.

[Viltvodlian Deoderan]

I did most of my MS thesis and part of my PhD dissertation on sun workstations. They were righteous big iron at the time. But the thing that killed sun was that around 2001 you could buy a PC with linux and more processing power than a sun for much much less than a sun!

So that was it for me and sun. I thought they had gone the way of the atari or commador but apparently someone at sun discovered that people like laptops! Hopefully they will do other moderny things like say put a wireless card in a laptop!

This reminds me...

[birge]

This reminds of an old joke about the definition of a social scientist (and despite their claims otherwise, people studying human cognition should be considered social scientists as long as they study human intelligence while there are people still working to really understand worm intelligence):

A social scientist is somebody who is constantly amazed by the obvious.

The idea that our chemical/electronic brain operates continuously and without binary information seems to me to be the overriding assumption anybody would, and has always, taken. Did they think anybody was under the impression that we all had timing clocks in us? And anybody who's tried to order a dessert at a restaurant knows damn well the human brain is analog.

The question I'd like to see answered is why there has been such a recent surge in funding for this kind of bullshit science. Let's figure out how a friggin rat works first, ok? There's a ton of "results" coming out of this field, but nothing of any use. Didn't we try this already with AI in the 70s?

Re:This reminds me...

[megrims]

Hmm. You seem to be posting in the wrong place.

Re:This reminds me...

[birge]

I'll say. That was wierd. Not sure how I managed to do that.

Why only 40 gigs?

[windowpain]

This uberlaptop comes with a puny 40 gig drive. I know if you're not filling your machine with movies, pr0n and tunes a gig goes a long way. But still, it seems ridiculous to saddle it with such a small HD. At newegg a Samsung OEM 40GB 2.5" drive sells for $69 while a 60GB costs $13 more. I guess every buck counts.

Get yours now!

[mrdisco99]

Get em while they're hot, folks. With the price/performance ratio so far out of whack they'll sell fuck all, so they're sure to become rare collectors items... especially after Sun goes out of business Any Day Now(tm).

I actually think it's kinda cool just from a geek perspective. Every other laptop out there is x86 or Apple. Nobody else has made a laptop with a "weird" architecture like Sparc. There aren't any Alpha or IBM Power laptops out there, are there?

Not $3400 cool, though...

Re:Get yours now!

[mlk]

Every other laptop out there is x86 or Apple.

Tadpole SparcLE has been out an age.

Re:Get yours now!

[mrdisco99]

Aha... well then the stuff Sun is selling is nothing new, as this is the same system displayed on their website.

http://www.sun.com/desktop/workstation/ultra3/inde x.xml

This could be pretty cool

[Anonymous Coward]

I used to despise Sun because the raw environments were completely old school to the point that they still didn't have recursive grep and ksh in vi mode was the default shell. But know I know all the tricks, I love Sun because I feel old school. I thiink this points to a personality disorder. Here's hoping they keep pumping em out just like mum used to make.

Hopefully they'll give it rock-solid wireless though. If they do, it'll probably attract quite a bit of attention from java developers who don't want to jump through hoops to get unix on a laptop, and who aren't particularly enamoured with aqua.

Re:Sun laptop? Isn't that an oxymoron?

[tarp]

A behemoth, eh?
Lol. I run into caryw in the darnest places.

Re:RDI is another company that (used to?) make the

[Anonymous Coward]

I remember seeing tadpoles with RDI/Tadpole markings on them, so it would probably be safe to say one bought the other out.

XServer

[falconwolf]

G5 Xserve: 2x G5 2.3Ghz, 1GB Ram, 1x 80GB disk, $4000:

First the link timed out, they don't last longer than an hour, at least that's been my experience. I just configured a system per your specs and the price is $3200. Doubling the disk to 160GB is only $160 more while doubling RAM is $320 more. Exchange the optical compo drive (DVD-ROM/CD-RW) to a super drive (CD-RW/DVD-R) is another $80.

So an XServe G5 spected as :
Dual 2.3GHz PowerPC G5

2GB DDR400 ECC SDRAM - 4x512
160GB ADM (2x80GB 7,200rpm ADM)
SuperDrive (CD-RW/DVD-R)
Mac OS X Server, Unlimited License
No video card
costs $3,759.00

Falcon

Re:XServer

[Anonymous Coward]

why would anyone buy OSX Server over Solaris 10 for a server unit?

Re:XServer

[asbjxrn]

Sorry about the link.
How did you get that price? I just went to http:www.apple.com/store and clicked the G5 Xserve link. Cheapest dual Xserve was quoted as $3.999 for me. I guess you started with the Cluster node at $2.999?

Re:XServer

[Anonymous Coward]

Especially after all the benchmarks that show OS X has terrible fork/threading performance for things like webservers and databases.

OS X is a great workstation OS, but it is just a so-so server OS.

Cool!

[Anonymous Coward]

How cool isnt that? Hope it wont be to expencive and it comes to Sweden :-) /Simon Johansson

Not a tabloid but Sun Announces Its First Laptop

[Anonymous Coward]

Story submitter obviously lacks dramatic talent. The main title should be:

FIRST LAPTOP UNDER THE SUN!

These whacky kids today...

[merlyn]

... who are too young to remember the Sparcbook.

First ever!!!?? Sheesh.

Re:These whacky kids today...

[rimmon]

Well, it's not the first laptop with a sparc processor or the first to be running Solaris. But it sure is the first FROM SUN. And that's waht the article said.
The Sparcbook was made by Tadpole. BTW, these guys are still alive and kicking, check out the Bullfrog, old man! :)

Negativland Re:we have been using sun laptops

[fuzzymutant]

Has anyone seen any actual announcements from Sun ? This is all re-reports of a minor site, nothing on sun.com, just a lot of reporting upwards. And the pictures are obviously not sun kit ? A media experiment, perhaps, in the style of negativland - no real news, just the news reporting itself ...

Re:Negativland Re:we have been using sun laptops

[Guy Harris]

Has anyone seen any actual announcements from Sun ?

Try following the links in the posting to which you responded. (Hint: the link with the word "announcing" might point to an, err, umm, announcement. Scroll down and you'll find the Ultra 3 Mobile Workstation mentioned.)

And the pictures are obviously not sun kit ?

Umm, yeah, one could conclude, from the picture on the page linked to by the other link in the posting to which you responded, that the two models are rebadged Tadpole and Naturetech laptops. (In fact, the posting to which you responded said as much: "...although the picture on that page suggests that perhaps Sun are just re-branding Tadpole and Naturetech SPARC laptops.")

A media experiment, perhaps, in the style of negativland

"I got fired by my boss
Pepsi^WSun.
I nailed Jesus to the cross
Pepsi^WSun."

Re:Negativland Re:we have been using sun laptops

[Anonymous Coward]

Negativland are geniusii

Sun aren't making laptops ...

[DrHyde]

... they're just reselling the Sparc laptops that Tadpole and Naturetech have already been making for ages. As you can see by the image in the top left of this page.

RoadRunner

[Per Abrahamsen]

Basically, Sun simultainiously released three new architectures as replacement for their 68020 sun3.

One based on 80386, nicknamed RoadRunner. This was the most expensive of the three, but could run some DOS programs.

One based on SPARC. This was the fastest and cheapest, but not compatible with antyhing.

One based on 68030, which was somewhere between the two others in speed and price, but could run existing applications.

The 68030 (sun3x) sold a few for a transition phase, but everybody switched to SPARC very fast. The RoadRunner was basiclaly pointless.

Sun laptop... Opteron

[Erik_]

Sun should have released the first Opteron laptop rather than a UltraSparc laptop. I think that would have won over a lot more people...

Re:Sun laptop... Opteron

[absinthminded64]

The cost of R&D required to get a fullblown opteron working in the confined spaces of a laptop is pretty high/maybe impossible see lack of G5 powerbook. I only see the name 'UltraSparc' so I dont know if the processor in this machine is the liter version with it's integrated memory controller and other toys but it would have been fairly easy to get that processor into a laptop. I purchased a blade 100 3+ years ago and after cracking it open it was fairly obvious that it wouldn't take too much work to get the components into a prefab laptop enclosure. I think tadpole has been using the 'lite' ultrasparc in their laptops for some time. not sure about that! I think it's an UltraSparc IIe or something to that effect. Fairly small cache and fairly slow all around. What WOULD have peaked my interest though would be a sun laptop that used the AMD64 processor like the one that's in my HP laptop : )

Woot!

[talornin]

OMG! I want a sparc laptop! Then I can be the geekiest guy on my block! :D

For more info...

[Dolda2000]

Just, for reference, here's a link to Sun's product page on this.

Re:Sun laptop? Isn't that an oxymoron?

[canavan]

Well, sun didn't design the laptops they offer. They are just reselling existing products from naturetech and Tadpole, both of which have offered SPARC based notebooks for years (more than a decade in case of Tadpole). While their CPUs may not be fast compared to currtent x86 Laptops, the hardware is pretty solid and size an weight are comparable to common x86 notebooks.

Additionally, SUN has actually built a portable system back in the days of the microSPARC II CPUs, which probably wasn't too bad, and nowhere near the size and weight of a E450 - probably more like a SparcStation 5 with a LCD strapped on the top.

Re:Sun laptop? Isn't that an oxymoron?

[htd2]

If you compare any 5-6 year old system with the latest system you can buy now you will always find that the newer system is much faster and cheaper.

How about comparing the Opteron powered HP DL with a Sun V20z or V40z.

Sun continues to see a sharp rise in it Opteron...

[Senor_Programmer]

"Sun continues to see a sharp rise in it Opteron system sales."

I'm not surprised given the superior technology of the Opteron and Intel's monololistic exploitation of 'tie-in'. Now that AMD has the gun and bullets (not just a smoking gun) to prove this in court, we'ss learn just how powerful Intel really is.

I expect to see Intel exploiting the DRM aspect of it's products and national security vs AMD arguments along with PROOF of unlawful trade practices.

This is gonna be better than the OJ trial!

AMD has been gathering vidence and buildoing strategy for this suit for some time. Why now you migh ask? Well AMD is building fab capabilities. They expect the lawsuit to close favorably at the same time they are able to meet the pent up demand.

If you're a gambler, AMD stock beats the hell out of SCO for a 'bet on the courst' investment. Personally I'm surprised as hellthat AMD stock hasn't doubled since their strategy has surfaced...

Wave your battle flag

[Anonymous Coward]

Astroturfers unite!

"Failure is normal" I love you man.

[crovira]

Its so refreshing to find somebody who puts it that way...

I work on the software side and I wish that the people who design software worked with the same thought.

Anything complicated rarely works. (Rovira's law of systemantics: The availablity of a resouce [A] is inversely proportional to [=1/] its complexity [C] to the power of [^] the urgency with which it is required [U] therefore [A=1/C^U])

Sometimes things are so complicated that total non-function is undetectable.

check out Sun's misdeeds

[Anonymous Coward]

http://malfeasance.50megs.com/

The article is light on pictures & equipment l

[crovira]

I remember a salesman who had a Sun 'luggable' (it was built like the original Apple luggable.)

The product he sold was interesting (and was primarily a data mining product) but not as interesting as that luggable laptop.

I wonder what the beast LOOKS like. Saying its a laptop conjures up everything from a PowerBook to an Osborne 1 (after lugging that thing around BWI, my are STILL hurts!)

Niagara

[bblfish]

These laptops look interesting. But perhaps they are just the first moves in what may be a Niagara laptop? Now that would certainly have my interest!

US Field Artillery uses SPARC laptops

[Anonymous Coward]

The FA uses TADPOLES for fire direction, and the latest in the AFATDS software (Advanced Field Artillery Tactical Data System). They're pretty cool, have staroffice 6, and have at least some bits of FVWM. The TADPOLES replaced some old 486 and pentium SCO boxes, and added a lot more capability.

Not Sun's first laptop ...

[wprowe]

It isn't their first laptop, especially if it is just a repackaged Tadpole. The did that back in the mid 1990's. It was a SPARC-based laptop that ran SunOS 4 I believe.

Re:Not Sun's first laptop ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep, the SPARCstation Voyager, released in 1994.

*BSD Runs on Sparc Too!

[Anonymous Coward]

You can get either Solaris or Linux installed.

Please don't forget that NetBSD and OpenBSD both run on Sparc, AMD and AMD64.

Sun proves once again that they're CLUELESS!!

[WidescreenFreak]

"Hello! We're Sun Microsystems! You see that logo? It instills awe in you, doesn't it? You are getting sleepy! Keep staring at the Sun logo. You are getting sleepy. Focus on the logo. Now repeat after me - 'I will pay far more than someone with common sense would pay because of the Sun logo.' Say it. Good. Now, keep repeating it. That's right. Just keep repeating it. Excellent!"

STARTING at $3,400 for a Sun-branded laptop running at 1.28 GHz.

Compare that to less than $2,000 for a brand name laptop (pick one) w/ Pentium M 1.8-2.0 GHz, DVD writer, 1 GB RAM, and so forth - and it's very likely that Linux will run just fine on it, perhaps with some drivers.

Oh, look! I can get a screaming fast 3 GHz Pentium IV system w/ 1 GB RAM, 500 GB drive space, 19" LCD panel, dual-layer DVD writer, Gb Ethernet, etc. starting at ~$1,900 from brand name A. Again, it's very likely that Linux + some drivers will work with this system.

Compare that to a Sun Blade 150 at 650 MHz, 512 MB of RAM, 80 GB drive, 100 Mb Ethernet, etc that STARTS at a measly $3,400!

I really wish that Sun would realize that the Sun brand name is no longer sufficient to jack up the prices on their hardware. I honestly don't see this laptop selling any more than it normally would if Sun didn't bring it to the forefront, since us Sun geeks knew about Tadpole for years now.

Before you think I'm trolling, I'm actually a Sun bigot. I have three Sun workstations at home (yes, home) and I've already contacted my Sun sales rep regarding purchasing the new Ultra 20, (which is actually VERY reasonably priced, particularly for Sun) as a personal workstation for me at home (yes, home). But the simple fact of the matter is that for years I have watched major, international, engineering corporations trade in their Sun workstations for Dell workstations simply because of the price per performance. Sun's continually high prices due to the Sun name has been a pet peeve of mine for over six years.

When a Sun workstation offers 1/2 to 2/3 the speed at twice the price, the purchasing decision is a no-brainer. This laptop sadly continues that trend. The dot-com bubble is dead. Most companies take a much harder look at the bottom line than before. I don't see how this laptop will sell any more than before, particularly since us Sun geeks have known about Tadpole laptops for many years.

CRAP , sun = 500% profits....

[cheekyboy]

Yeah like the Sun Sparc 10 Workstations in 1998, that in australia cost $8000, preconfiged to run at 110 volts and would blow up even though they were made in mexico, sun was too lazy to switch the dip switch to 240v even when courier delivered.

Not only that, their monitors for their sun machines were crap, well below the el-cheepo $150 models , ie they couldnt do the same refresh/khz rates.

#2, their HDs were 5400rpm and 9gig back then, when even 20gigs were cheap.

So basically in 1998, the Sun10s were $1200 PCs, with a $7000 CPU.

The tadpole was Sun's forst laptop! Long ago

[MrJerryNormandinSir]

Hmmm..... sun had a laptop called the tadpole.
It was available in the 90s.

Re:The tadpole was Sun's forst laptop! Long ago

[hawkeye]

I'm pretty sure that laptop was not manufactured by Sun, but rather a 3rd. party...named Tadpole.

- hawkeye

I feel your cringing shame!

[Anonymous Coward]

>>To bad, eh?

Bwaaaaaahhhhhhhh haaaaaaaaaahhhhh haaaaaaah!!!!

I can dig it, but why?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not picking on you, but how would sgi come out a notebook? With 'their' linux, no less?

They make neat-o UNIX machines, but they're marketed to engineers who want to locate underground petroleum reserves, compute drag coefficients for jumbo jets, or render models of sarcogphagussed mummies from PET/CAT/MRI scans.

None of these jobs are all that portable. Plus, they require more muscle than a single 800 MHz R16000 can deliver, or a 2GHz Opteron, for that matter.

Linux? Sgi doesn't seem to have "their own", though they offer a "Choice of industry-standard Linux operating systems, fully supported by SGI"

PDF

I agree that it would be frickin fantastic to have a portable 'Visualization Workstation' from a company like Silicon Graphics.

It's easy to imagine an incredible screen, eye-catching industrial design, and a hearty, workstation-y robustness packaged up in a lap-sized container. Especially when you compare Apple to SGI as UNIX vendor = UNIX vendor.

You'd probably wind up with a snazzy little box with beauty all over the outside running IRIX or RHE at 800MHz and for $3,500.

We could do better pulling together around Athlon64 mobiles and Ubuntu or something.

My experiences with SUN systems

[smsiebe]

My personal experience with SUN systems is as a US government employee working as both an end user and an Information System Security Officer (glorified title for tier 1 tech support). I also was a system admin for an public/private email encryption system. Although I can't specifically say what agency I was working for ALL of our workstations were SUN systems and the vast majority of the servers we as well. Long up times, data redundancy, and easy (relativly) system and network administration always seemed to be an advantage of the SUN systemes over my experience with Windows or Linux setups. Not to mention the inherent benefits of working on a *NIX OS rather than Windows. Although hardware redundancy is seen more and more in other commerically available servers, my opinion is that SUN has more experience and desire to keep that positive brand recognition than many of the other multi-focused companies like HP. Although I had my share of processors deaths, hard drives go down, and unknown problems that were magically fixed by reseating the CPU or RAM...I would only purchase SUNs if I was elected president of the unlimited-money department. Like you said, if they are going to work on the pricing I may be convinced to upgrade my homebrewed P4 for a sun system (laptop).

The Sun iPod

[ic0wb0y]

If Sun had the iPod, it would hold 2 full CD's, weigh 6 lbs, the 60 Java applets would have to be patched every day, have a full size keyboard and cost $3000.

How did you get that price?

[falconwolf]

I just went to http:www.apple.com/store and clicked the G5 Xserve link. Cheapest dual Xserve was quoted as $3.999 for me. I guess you started with the Cluster node at $2.999?

Apple has a developer program, Apple Developer Connection , that has it's own store with discounted prices. I admit to buy through the store you have to be a paying member of ADC, but they offer different membership plans. Here's the FAQ about the different plans. The cheapest one that you can buy from the store is for students and costs $99, but it only allows you to make one purchase and to join you have to prove you are a student. The ADC Premier Membership costs $3500 but allows discounts on up to 10 systems per year. The Select Membership allows one purchase per year and costs $500, at least the last tyme I saw the cost. Even paying the $500 though the price is still below retail and for those who develop or work with Macs membership offers a lot more than just discounts on hardware/software purchases, it also offers many resources.

Falcon

Sparcbook is way old

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, it's an old product.

Where is the fucking context Batman?

[jotaeleemeese]

You know, if you say "I batjumped from the floor risking my life" my first question would be, dear caped, from which floor?

So you lost 2 CPUs, my question here is, how many do you have?

If you have only 2 thus, although unfortunate, I would rather blame it on Catwoman than in Sun's lack of quality, since as you surely will agree, your sampling would not be statistically significant.

The bad news about your ranting is that the more CPUs you have the least significant your failures become.

I administer a couple of hundred Sun machines and haven't had a CPU failure for 5 years.

So as they say, YMMV.