Not to rain on your parade, as Sun has been a daily source of irritation for me for the last 18 years, but a lot of your facts are a bit skewed. There's plenty of good reasons to hate Sun/Solaris and you missed every one. Each of your listed beefs aren't anywhere near what matters.
Datacenters (Sun shops) have been using veritas's vxfs in place of UFS because until recently ufs lacked journaling. UFS is a perfectly fine and fast filesystem, though of course not as advanced as AdvFS which HP incompetantly killed after buying Compaq for it (by trying to integrate it into HP-UX *after* firing all of their experts).
Sun Solaris is a true SVr4, you can tell because of how it handles the runlevel scripts. The BSDish behaviour is only found if you are compiling executables originally developed on a bsd/bsd-like box that need to link against the compatibility libraries (which became usable in Solaris 2.4) Since Solaris 2.5.1 the compatibility libraries have been stable and even somewhat elegant. I'm not so happy with Solaris 9 as sun's growing dependance on the OS software is leading to non-consistant behavior, though Solaris 10 is addressing some of those issues.
Sun also has an edge in scalability, in our current DC we have a few E20k & E25k's running relatively peacefully in active production. It's hard to argue with a box with over 200GB of memory. (though I do have a serious beef with Sun about how it handles that specific feature) There are no Opterons or intel/intel-like systems existing anywhere in the world that can approach the raw throughput of a box with 72 processors. Network based clustering is not an acceptable solution to very many real-world problems. But bringing up SMP in this thread isn't even close to fair as openbsd's SMP is in its infancy.
In terms of security, Sun does in fact have a "trusted" package which renders the box very secure (at the cost of being very non-unixlike) Though I would definitely agree that OpenBSD is far more secure out of the box.
But I'd have no second thoughts on putting a blueprint secured Solaris box naked on the internet.
In any event, I'm sure nobody cares about my rant so cheers.
And how is this different from the powers which they have to tap any other form of communication? Just because the net is the new "frontier" people think that it must somehow be magically different from the offline world. This is blatently not true - the net is a different medium sure, but it's the same old shit nonetheless.
I actually disagree that the net is the same old status quo, mainly due to the fact that its global and for the moment allows anonymity (remember we actually got daily updates on the Russian coup via uucp). My main gripe is the attempt to make it so.
The difference is that off the net they are restricted by the 4th amendment... There is a large difference between knowing a person is a criminal and tapping his line (which can be done with precision) and casting a large net and dredging up all interesting information and promising to throw out the ones which don't directly relate to the case.
This technology bugs me for the same reason that somebody standing over my shoulder and watching me reply to e-mails bugs me (This means you John)...
Basically the reason they give for the system not being abused (People monitor it) is the very reason it is subject to abuse... You will probably say "but it [abuse] also happens in phone taps and in real life" and I would have to say, it doesn't mean it also has to happen where I spend most of my time.
This is a 'free speech' quashing technology, I know that even though I harbor no criminal intent, I'll be carefully checking everything I send out for possible misinterpretation by our Friends in Blue.
This new sniffer allows unprecedented access to all unencrypted traffic as this is a sniffer at the backbone... What we have here is merely the FBI promising to use this technology only with a proper search warrant.
You must realize that their comments are much more worrisome than sniffer technology:
"He [Marcus Thomas, chief of the FBI's Cyber Technology Section at Quantico] also noted that criminal and civil penalties prohibit the bureau from placing unauthorized wiretaps, and any information gleaned in those types of criminal cases would be thrown out of court."
Which if you read between the lines says "Don't worry, if we tapped you illegally you can challenge us in court and we will throw it out."
See all these are steps toward a penultimate police state. Ponder this, in a few years technology will have advanced to the point where we can all have our own "police buddy robot" which follows us around making sure we're not commiting any crimes, and bill^H^H^H^Hfining us for the ones we do commit. Safety for all!
This would in fact be fine even if the laws stay static, however new laws are being added by the minute and 20 years from now, it'll be near impossible from accidentally commiting a crime. (When was the last time you jaywalked?)
Today, with California's 3 strikes rule, if you get caught Jaywalking (Misdemeanor) 3 times, its raised to a Felony and you, my dear non-criminal citizen, are now a convicted felon who gets to go straight to jail. Of course, judges, being human, will try to throw the case out of court, but the fact remains that even if common sense prevails, its growing ever more difficult to "stay on the right side of the law" and what happens when intelligent systems are advanced to the point where a computer does sentencing (Don't say it isn't possible, Brazil is already beta testing a computerized real-time traffic judge)
This technology is even worrisome for companies and governments! Witness the France suing the US over Echelon, They caught the US passing intercepted messages to a US company, allowing it to snake a contract from a competing French company.
Bah humbug... DEC had better hardware, but their operating systems blew hard chunks... As a VMS/Ultrix admin I had nothing but grievances... SunOS was godsend... Software actually compiled without serious voodoo!
And those evil round DEC mice! Like hockey pucks they were! I felt dirty just holding one... The rollers were directly on the bottom w/o a ball. Sucked hardcore... it skipped and halted all the time... and compare that to Sun's optical mice... you just had to make sure you knew how to orient the steel micepads and you were good to go...
Digital was also one of the first to start with this PCI crap... I've never had machines as slow backplane throughput as these crappy PC164 and Ultra 5/10/etc systems... God I hate technological regression. By giving IT managers an excuse to buy 3rd rate cheap hardware, thats all we're getting nowadays... I have an *OLD* (built 1991) SGI 220/VGXT system that beats the crap out of my *BRAND NEW* Sun Ultra 10/elite3d system!!! Especially in 3D!!! What gives?!?!?!
We just ordered 30 Ultra 5's for $1,680 each from Sun on their Educational discount. These systems are 360Mhz UltraSparc IIi systems with 128MB RAM, 6 GB HDD, with a Creator gfx card. The creator is based off the Mach64 with a few Sun relevant differences The main difference between the "dirt cheap" Suns and the higher priced onces at the same Mhz is the amount of L2 cache it contains onboard. The system is able to use Creator 3D (which is a PCI based card) and might possibly also be able to support the Elite 3D (pgx) depending on driver support. I'm willing to bet that even if Sun doesn't officially support the Elite3D m3/m6, you can probably get them to work on the machine.
Looking back at the history of products Microsoft has released, I cannot think of a single item which it has not "embraced and extended"... Witness J++, Visual C++, Visual Basic, etc... It really isn't "a bit of a big step" to assume that Microsoft will do the same to Perl.
The perl's license has gives companies the right to do extend... However, extending a language to prevent server/code migration is not a good thing. From reading the FAQ, it sounds as though the main intent is to prevent people from switching from windows to another operating system. There were only 3 real useful features which were added.
All corporations and people have the right to make money... But limiting choice for the consumers (A Microsoft specialty) is not necessarily a good thing.
Your statement that the new logo will not make a difference for people purchasing is completely incorrect.
I handle a large budget for unix servers and workstations... We're primarily a Sun/HP shop, but I always made sure we have a good smattering of SGI's. Basically, they keep people's morale up in the bland world of corporate unix.
I have been a staunch SGI supporter for uncountable years... I have 3 workstations and 1 server in my house no less... I lusted after SGIs back in the days when their cases were ordinary beige and they just used numerical model numbers...
SGI has made a lot of changes recently, many which seems to be trying to alienate their fanatic followers... Their NT workstations for example... I mean nobody ever purchased an SGI for logical reasons... it was always purely emotional... We just always made up reasons why SGI was a viable solution... (for example, SGI's multi-processor math libraries are completely whack. You'll get a different answer depending on how many processors are used to calculate things... (much worse than any FDIV bug))...
With this new logo, they have finally managed to somehow completely sever my emotional ties to them. And its not just me... With the full agreement of most of the administrators and managers I know, over a broad number of companies, I will not be purchasing a machine from SGI again until they replace that ugly and stupid logo.
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Not to rain on your parade, as Sun has been a daily source of irritation
for me for the last 18 years, but a lot of your facts are a bit skewed.
There's plenty of good reasons to hate Sun/Solaris and you missed every one.
Each of your listed beefs aren't anywhere near what matters.
Datacenters (Sun shops) have been using veritas's vxfs in place of UFS
because until recently ufs lacked journaling. UFS is a perfectly fine and
fast filesystem, though of course not as advanced as AdvFS which HP
incompetantly killed after buying Compaq for it (by trying to integrate it
into HP-UX *after* firing all of their experts).
Sun Solaris is a true SVr4, you can tell because of how it handles the
runlevel scripts. The BSDish behaviour is only found if you are compiling
executables originally developed on a bsd/bsd-like box that need to link
against the compatibility libraries (which became usable in Solaris 2.4)
Since Solaris 2.5.1 the compatibility libraries have been stable and even
somewhat elegant. I'm not so happy with Solaris 9 as sun's growing
dependance on the OS software is leading to non-consistant behavior, though
Solaris 10 is addressing some of those issues.
Sun also has an edge in scalability, in our current DC we have a few
E20k & E25k's running relatively peacefully in active production. It's
hard to argue with a box with over 200GB of memory. (though I do have
a serious beef with Sun about how it handles that specific feature)
There are no Opterons or intel/intel-like systems existing anywhere
in the world that can approach the raw throughput of a box with
72 processors. Network based clustering is not an acceptable solution to
very many real-world problems. But bringing up SMP in this thread isn't
even close to fair as openbsd's SMP is in its infancy.
In terms of security, Sun does in fact have a "trusted" package which
renders the box very secure (at the cost of being very non-unixlike)
Though I would definitely agree that OpenBSD is far more secure out of
the box.
But I'd have no second thoughts on putting a blueprint secured Solaris
box naked on the internet.
In any event, I'm sure nobody cares about my rant so cheers.
-Grumpy Old Admin
Actually that would be "fohd" as a common usage would be "FOAD CHOAD"
And how is this different from the powers which they have to tap any other form of communication? Just because the net is the new "frontier" people think that it must somehow be magically different from the offline world. This is blatently not true - the net is a different medium sure, but it's the same old shit nonetheless.
I actually disagree that the net is the same old status quo, mainly due to the fact that its global and for the moment allows anonymity (remember we actually got daily updates on the Russian coup via uucp). My main gripe is the attempt to make it so.
The difference is that off the net they are restricted by the 4th amendment... There is a large difference between knowing a person is a criminal and tapping his line (which can be done with precision) and casting a large net and dredging up all interesting information and promising to throw out the ones which don't directly relate to the case.
This technology bugs me for the same reason that somebody standing over my shoulder and watching me reply to e-mails bugs me (This means you John)...
Basically the reason they give for the system not being abused (People monitor it) is the very reason it is subject to abuse... You will probably say "but it [abuse] also happens in phone taps and in real life" and I would have to say, it doesn't mean it also has to happen where I spend most of my time.
Actually I worked as an admin for a Mathematics Dept where most of the faculty was under contract with the NSA, They were working on exactly that.
Plus you are betting that their computers are too slow.
You really don't see whats going on do you?
This is a 'free speech' quashing technology, I know that even though I harbor no criminal intent, I'll be carefully checking everything I send out for possible misinterpretation by our Friends in Blue.
This new sniffer allows unprecedented access to all unencrypted traffic as this is a sniffer at
the backbone... What we have here is merely the FBI promising to use this technology only with a proper search warrant.
You must realize that their comments are much more worrisome than sniffer technology:
"He [Marcus Thomas, chief of the FBI's Cyber Technology Section at Quantico] also noted that criminal and civil penalties prohibit the bureau from placing unauthorized wiretaps, and any information gleaned in those types of criminal cases would be thrown out of court."
Which if you read between the lines says "Don't worry, if we tapped you illegally you can challenge us in court and we will throw it out."
See all these are steps toward a penultimate police state. Ponder this, in a few years technology will have advanced to the point where we can all have our own "police buddy robot" which follows us around making sure we're not commiting any crimes, and bill^H^H^H^Hfining us for the ones we do commit. Safety for all!
This would in fact be fine even if the laws stay static, however new laws are being added by the minute and 20 years from now, it'll be near impossible from accidentally commiting a crime.
(When was the last time you jaywalked?)
Today, with California's 3 strikes rule, if you get caught Jaywalking (Misdemeanor) 3 times, its raised to a Felony and you, my dear non-criminal citizen, are now a convicted felon who gets to go straight to jail. Of course, judges, being human, will try to throw the case out of court, but the fact remains that even if common sense prevails, its growing ever more difficult to "stay on the right side of the law" and what happens when intelligent systems are advanced to the point where a computer does sentencing (Don't say it isn't possible, Brazil is already beta testing a computerized real-time traffic judge)
This technology is even worrisome for companies and governments! Witness the France suing the US over Echelon, They caught the US passing intercepted messages to a US company, allowing it to snake a contract from a competing French company.
And those evil round DEC mice! Like hockey pucks they were! I felt dirty just holding one... The rollers were directly on the bottom w/o a ball. Sucked hardcore... it skipped and halted all the time... and compare that to Sun's optical mice... you just had to make sure you knew how to orient the steel micepads and you were good to go...
Digital was also one of the first to start with this PCI crap... I've never had machines as slow backplane throughput as these crappy PC164 and Ultra 5/10/etc systems... God I hate technological regression. By giving IT managers an excuse to buy 3rd rate cheap hardware, thats all we're getting nowadays... I have an *OLD* (built 1991) SGI 220/VGXT system that beats the crap out of my *BRAND NEW* Sun Ultra 10/elite3d system!!! Especially in 3D!!! What gives?!?!?!
Your nostalgia is biasing common sense...
"Nothing sucks like a VAX."
We just ordered 30 Ultra 5's for $1,680 each from Sun on their Educational discount. These systems are 360Mhz UltraSparc IIi systems with 128MB RAM, 6 GB HDD, with a Creator gfx card. The creator is based off the Mach64 with a few Sun relevant differences The main difference between the "dirt cheap" Suns and the higher priced onces at the same Mhz is the amount of L2 cache it contains onboard. The system is able to use Creator 3D (which is a PCI based card) and might possibly also be able to support the Elite 3D (pgx) depending on driver support. I'm willing to bet that even if Sun doesn't officially support the Elite3D m3/m6, you can probably get them to work on the machine.
Looking back at the history of products Microsoft has released, I cannot think of a single item which it has not "embraced and extended"... Witness J++, Visual C++, Visual Basic, etc...
It really isn't "a bit of a big step" to assume that Microsoft will do the same to Perl.
The perl's license has gives companies the right to do extend... However, extending a language to prevent server/code migration is not a good thing. From reading the FAQ, it sounds as though the main intent is to prevent people from switching from windows to another operating system. There were only 3 real useful features which were added.
All corporations and people have the right to make money... But limiting choice for the consumers (A Microsoft specialty) is not necessarily a good thing.
The link was down for me but, CVS is just yet another version control system which has rcs at its core.
Hmm... not completely correct...
Sun actually owns complete rights to the NT 4.0 source code through one of companies they got in their buying binge...
Hence "Project Cascade"
Your statement that the new logo will not make
a difference for people purchasing is completely incorrect.
I handle a large budget for unix servers and
workstations... We're primarily a Sun/HP shop, but
I always made sure we have a good smattering
of SGI's. Basically, they keep people's morale up in the bland world of corporate unix.
I have been a staunch SGI supporter for uncountable years... I have 3 workstations and 1 server in my house no less... I lusted after SGIs back in the days when their cases were ordinary beige and they just used numerical model numbers...
SGI has made a lot of changes recently, many which seems to be trying to alienate their fanatic followers... Their NT workstations for example...
I mean nobody ever purchased an SGI for logical reasons... it was always purely emotional... We just always made up reasons why SGI was a viable solution... (for example, SGI's multi-processor
math libraries are completely whack. You'll get a different answer depending on how many processors are used to calculate things... (much worse than any FDIV bug))...
With this new logo, they have finally managed to somehow completely sever my emotional ties to them. And its not just me... With the full agreement of most of the administrators and managers I know, over a broad number of companies, I will not be purchasing a machine from SGI again until they replace that ugly and stupid logo.