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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."
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.
You think $3,400 is bad? You obviously haven't shopped for a Sparc laptop from Tadpole!
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
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.
The grass is only greener, if you don't take care of your own lawn.
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.
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.
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.
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.