Had I been your school's IT policy planner, I would give the same answer I give to employees at the software company where I work: "We support Windows XP, OS X, Ubuntu, Fedora and OpenSolaris". The "Linux" title covers so many idiosyncratic distros that we can't reasonably offer to support them all. Many such distros are poorly documented/tested, to make matters worse for a support team.
This is just off the top of my head. Is there something special about SPARC that would make it remarkably good at some specific application that Oracle uses?
Something that a lot of people don't realize (or forget) about SPARC is that the new chips (T1 and T2 series) excel at concurrency - lots of requests getting serviced at once. This happens to be something that a database needs, too. So I'd say owning SPARC (the 'source' of which was actually open-sourced!) is a pretty good thing for Oracle.
I'm more interested to see how Oracle re-brands (or doesn't) the Sun product line.
FWIW, Sun and Intel engineers have had an excellent working relationship for the past few years, so I don't think keeping SPARC necessarily means trying to fight Intel.
My impression from reading news reports was that Sun was actively seeking a buyer, which is a little different than a takeover.
Sun is really good at engineering. IBM is really good at making money from engineers' work. Sounds like a good reason to get together to me. IBM likes to have a stable of awesome tech to sell, and Sun needs management that can monetize that.
I think the point is that this is something quite like Apple's much-heralded Time Machine, but wastes a lot less space, and is made available in a free OS.
Might want to try the Live CD (when it becomes 2008.11) that you can get at opensolaris.org.
I also think that the underpinnings are part of the Solaris Management Facility, which means you can do all kinds of servery goodness in addition to Apple-y goodness with the described Gnome tool.
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Not all protesters were destructive. In fact, my impression is that a majority were peacful: http://pittsburghpolice.net/
Had I been your school's IT policy planner, I would give the same answer I give to employees at the software company where I work: "We support Windows XP, OS X, Ubuntu, Fedora and OpenSolaris". The "Linux" title covers so many idiosyncratic distros that we can't reasonably offer to support them all. Many such distros are poorly documented/tested, to make matters worse for a support team.
This is just off the top of my head. Is there something special about SPARC that would make it remarkably good at some specific application that Oracle uses?
Something that a lot of people don't realize (or forget) about SPARC is that the new chips (T1 and T2 series) excel at concurrency - lots of requests getting serviced at once. This happens to be something that a database needs, too. So I'd say owning SPARC (the 'source' of which was actually open-sourced!) is a pretty good thing for Oracle.
I'm more interested to see how Oracle re-brands (or doesn't) the Sun product line.
FWIW, Sun and Intel engineers have had an excellent working relationship for the past few years, so I don't think keeping SPARC necessarily means trying to fight Intel.
My impression from reading news reports was that Sun was actively seeking a buyer, which is a little different than a takeover. Sun is really good at engineering. IBM is really good at making money from engineers' work. Sounds like a good reason to get together to me. IBM likes to have a stable of awesome tech to sell, and Sun needs management that can monetize that.
I'm posting this from OpenSolaris with a ZFS boot disk, running on a 32-bit ThinkPad T43 :)
I think the point is that this is something quite like Apple's much-heralded Time Machine, but wastes a lot less space, and is made available in a free OS. Might want to try the Live CD (when it becomes 2008.11) that you can get at opensolaris.org. I also think that the underpinnings are part of the Solaris Management Facility, which means you can do all kinds of servery goodness in addition to Apple-y goodness with the described Gnome tool.