I don't think Solaris is expensive, but you're wrong regarding the Solaris licensing. Sun has changed the licensing agreement recently. Solaris licenses are now free for use on single processor systems that have been purchassed from Sun or an authorized Sun reseller only (the last part of agreement does not apply to Solaris on x86). In all other cases you have to pay.
No, this is not a further proof. Read the article. Sun is not saying that they're dropping their Linux products or low-end Solaris/SPARC servers. What they're saying is that they're dropping "Sun Linux" in favor of more standard Linux distributions.
You're not getting the point. Bruce suggested that IBM might want to nuy SCO to get the their UNIX IP rights, not their stinking unix or linux operating systems per se.
I think it's not about compiled vs scripted languages but programmers vs amateurs. Lots of scripting languages have an easy learning curve and many people who are hired to write scripts have not really been trained as programmers. This, also why we often hear "perl code is such a pile of mess". Well, most of it seems to been written by people who learned it from tutorials and have no idea about basic concepts of software engineering, algorithms, programming styles and such. Most companies just can't afford to hire a person with a computer science degree from a respectable CS school for every job that requires coding.
my $0.02
Re:The cost of Solaris
on
The Faded Sun
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Let me explain..
First, I didn't say Solaris is "free for all". I said Solaris is free or cheap. I really meant to say "Solaris is free or relatively cheap"
Second, $999 is relatively not that much for a box that cost upwards of $20,000 when it was new. I bet $999 is even less than the cost of a yearly hardware support contract for such class of machine. A Win2k or other commercial Unix license for this class of server would cost a lot more. (e.g a 25-user Win2k server license is being quoted for around $3000 by Dell while the quad-processes Sun server could easily provide file/print/directory services to hundreds of machines for a flat license fee of $999)
Finally, Solaris -is- free even for businesses for unlimited number of systems as long as they have one CPU and as long as were originally purchased for Sun or Sun's authorized reseller. Everyone else has to purchase a license. However, as I have already pointed out, Solaris licensing is relatively cheap.
The cost of Solaris
on
The Faded Sun
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
They have just renewed a commitment to the Solaris operating system, which is no longer really viable from an economic standpoint. I know, I know, Solaris users love Solaris, but they don't love Solaris prices.
This statement is wrong. The cost of Solaris is not an issue. Solaris licenses are either free or cheap depending on what kind of hardware you own and where you got it. The real problem is in the cost of Sun's hardware as well as relative performance of UltraSPARC processors compared to the 32-bit x86 processors and certain 64-bit processors. Sun executives are still living in an imaginary world thinking that Sun's future is in selling large mega-bucks systems to the data centers completely ignoring the low-profit high-volume low-end side of the market.
Solaris last ship date (LSD) happens sometimes after a second release after the version in question. Solaris releases come more than two years apart. That means, that typically a Solaris release ships for about five years. Add to that another five years promissed support -after- LSD, and you can see that most solaris versions are supported for at least 10 years since the first ship date.
For example, Sun is still shipping Solaris 7 which first was shipped in 1998. At the LSD date of Solaris 7, it will be about five years since the first ship date.
... or maybe it is for an ISP.. but they're not gonna lose millions of $$ because of a one minute or even 10 second glitch in DNS. Ppl who complain that PSQL is not their choice for mission critical applications are talking about running their enterprise apps on it, not DNS.
Most LCDs are targeted at Windows users, most of whom don't care about real estate space on their desktop (ever wonder why most windows users use IE in full screen mode even if their monitor has a rediculously high resolution and the IE would work just fine in a smaller window?) That, why all 15inch LCDs on the market use 1024/820 resolution or so. All larger LCDs (17inch and up) use higher resolutions but they're also a lot more expensive than the 15inch LCDs. However, because of the advantages, they're worth every penny IMHO.
Viewing angle isn't a problem on reasonably modern LCDs. Also, I'd like to disagree about brightness and sharpness. LCDs look much brighter and sharper and CRTs. They are specially good if you're mostly working with text, which is what people do most of the time on computer related jobs. I think LCDs are great for businesses. The consumers might take a while to catch up though.
The text and other figures (but usually not colors) look -much- sharper on LCDs. LCDs -are- a great improvement because my job involves stating at the screen at least 6 hours a day. For the last few years I have been using exclusively 19inch CRTs. Recently, I have switched to a 19inch LCD and man.. that's a real improvement. It is trully a joy to look at that screen and I don't have headaches any more at the end of work day.
It seems to me that most internet retailers are operating on such razor-thin margins that adding a sales tax would probably shove them further over the edge in to non-profitability.
No. The tax will be passed onto the customers. THe customers are the ones who are going to pay the tax, not the online retailers. Yes, this might indeed drive some vendors out of business because of the laws of supply and demand. The consumers will treat the sales tax as the part of the cost of the goods that they buy. Since the price goes up, certainly, they're gonna buy somewhat less goods online.
Why can't Liunx kernel developers come up with an API for binary kernel modules and keep it stable at least between minor kernel releases so that users could use third party kernel modules withfout having to recompile them for each kernel upgrade?
Look at Solaris. It's quite possible to take even certain kernel modules that were built for Solaris 2.6 and use them on Solaris 8 without recompiling. I am not even mentioning that kernel modules don't break at all between minor kernel releases (or patch levels) on Solaris.
But no matter how you look at it, speakeasy is more expensive than the Directv's basic service.
With DirecTV I get 1500/128Mbps ADSL, 1 static IP and a simple DNS hosting service. Last time I checked, for the same price you can only get a twice as slow RADSL service from Speakeasy and no static IP.
Having lots of RAM and standard IDE disks might be a good thing for workstations whose main application is not I/O intensive. However, if you're using an application that constantly reads and writes files, likely litte of that will be cached in memory and it is better to have a decent raid system (preferably SCSI based with a hardware RAID controller)
Apple "unix" has no legal right to be called unix or even to be said to be based on unix. Steve Jobs is bending rules here. Neither OS X nor FreeBSD can use the unix trademark. It's not like I will like either of these two systems less because of that, just trying to be anal retentive..
You can write commercial gnome/gtk applications without paying a penny to anyone. QT license does not allow that (although, it _is_ an open source license)
The rumors that tons of freeware software and even Gnome might be integrated into Solaris started floating around even before Solaris 8 release. After Solaris 8 release, Sun has made several official statements promissing to include the Gnome desktop in Solaris 9. Solaris 9 has been released in May and it still does not include the Gnome desktop. The last rumor I have heard, was that Solaris 9 12/02 (which was supposed to be released this month) will include it. However, I haven't heard a confmation of that rumor in a long time and now this. They're asking us to wait until Solaris 10 release, damn you Sun.
And no, an unsupported add-on beta package is not good enough. I want it to be integrated with Solaris and supported by Sun, just like any other Solaris package (this includes fixing bugs and providing patches as part of Solaris patch clusters).
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Please take a an introductory Reading Comprehension course and then go back and read the article again. Sun is not leaving the Linux market.
They're not leaving the Linux market. Please take an introductory course in "Reading Comprehension" and then read then article again.
I don't think Solaris is expensive, but you're wrong regarding the Solaris licensing. Sun has changed the licensing agreement recently. Solaris licenses are now free for use on single processor systems that have been purchassed from Sun or an authorized Sun reseller only (the last part of agreement does not apply to Solaris on x86). In all other cases you have to pay.
I don't understand why this has been modded up.
No, this is not a further proof. Read the article. Sun is not saying that they're dropping their Linux products or low-end Solaris/SPARC servers. What they're saying is that they're dropping "Sun Linux" in favor of more standard Linux distributions.
You're not getting the point. Bruce suggested that IBM might want to nuy SCO to get the their UNIX IP rights, not their stinking unix or linux operating systems per se.
I think it's not about compiled vs scripted languages but programmers vs amateurs. Lots of scripting languages have an easy learning curve and many people who are hired to write scripts have not really been trained as programmers. This, also why we often hear "perl code is such a pile of mess". Well, most of it seems to been written by people who learned it from tutorials and have no idea about basic concepts of software engineering, algorithms, programming styles and such. Most companies just can't afford to hire a person with a computer science degree from a respectable CS school for every job that requires coding.
my $0.02
Let me explain..
First, I didn't say Solaris is "free for all". I said Solaris is free or cheap. I really meant to say "Solaris is free or relatively cheap"
Second, $999 is relatively not that much for a box that cost upwards of $20,000 when it was new. I bet $999 is even less than the cost of a yearly hardware support contract for such class of machine. A Win2k or other commercial Unix license for this class of server would cost a lot more.
(e.g a 25-user Win2k server license is being quoted for around $3000 by Dell while the quad-processes Sun server could easily provide file/print/directory services to hundreds of machines for a flat license fee of $999)
Finally, Solaris -is- free even for businesses for unlimited number of systems as long as they have one CPU and as long as were originally purchased for Sun or Sun's authorized reseller. Everyone else has to purchase a license. However, as I have already pointed out, Solaris licensing is relatively cheap.
They have just renewed a commitment to the Solaris operating system, which is no longer really viable from an economic standpoint. I know, I know, Solaris users love Solaris, but they don't love Solaris prices.
This statement is wrong. The cost of Solaris is not an issue. Solaris licenses are either free or cheap depending on what kind of hardware you own and where you got it. The real problem is in the cost of Sun's hardware as well as relative performance of UltraSPARC processors compared to the 32-bit x86 processors and certain 64-bit processors. Sun executives are still living in an imaginary world thinking that Sun's future is in selling large mega-bucks systems to the data centers completely ignoring the low-profit high-volume low-end side of the market.
Solaris last ship date (LSD) happens sometimes after a second release after the version in question. Solaris releases come more than two years apart. That means, that typically a Solaris release ships for about five years. Add to that another five years promissed support -after- LSD, and you can see that most solaris versions are supported for at least 10 years since the first ship date.
For example, Sun is still shipping Solaris 7 which first was shipped in 1998. At the LSD date of Solaris 7, it will be about five years since the first ship date.
But it's OpenBSD, so they don't care. Linux people are telling Theo to "suck it up" and sign an NDA.
Acutally, the Linux/SPARC developers did suck it up and sign the NDA to get the docs.
... or maybe it is for an ISP.. but they're not gonna lose millions of $$ because of a one minute or even 10 second glitch in DNS. Ppl who complain that PSQL is not their choice for mission critical applications are talking about running their enterprise apps on it, not DNS.
Most LCDs are targeted at Windows users, most of whom don't care about real estate space on their desktop (ever wonder why most windows users use IE in full screen mode even if their monitor has a rediculously high resolution and the IE would work just fine in a smaller window?) That, why all 15inch LCDs on the market use 1024/820 resolution or so. All larger LCDs (17inch and up) use higher resolutions but they're also a lot more expensive than the 15inch LCDs. However, because of the advantages, they're worth every penny IMHO.
Viewing angle isn't a problem on reasonably modern LCDs. Also, I'd like to disagree about brightness and sharpness. LCDs look much brighter and sharper and CRTs. They are specially good if you're mostly working with text, which is what people do most of the time on computer related jobs. I think LCDs are great for businesses. The consumers might take a while to catch up though.
The text and other figures (but usually not colors)
look -much- sharper on LCDs. LCDs -are- a great improvement because my job involves stating at the screen at least 6 hours a day. For the last few years I have been using exclusively 19inch CRTs. Recently, I have switched to a 19inch LCD and man.. that's a real improvement. It is trully a joy to look at that screen and I don't have headaches any more at the end of work day.
It seems to me that most internet retailers are operating on such razor-thin margins that adding a sales tax would probably shove them further over the edge in to non-profitability.
No. The tax will be passed onto the customers. THe customers are the ones who are going to pay the tax, not the online retailers. Yes, this might indeed drive some vendors out of business because of the laws of supply and demand. The consumers will treat the sales tax as the part of the cost of the goods that they buy. Since the price goes up, certainly, they're gonna buy somewhat less goods online.
Why can't Liunx kernel developers come up with an API for binary kernel modules and keep it stable at least between minor kernel releases so that users could use third party kernel modules withfout having to recompile them for each kernel upgrade?
Look at Solaris. It's quite possible to take even certain kernel modules that were built for Solaris 2.6 and use them on Solaris 8 without recompiling. I am not even mentioning that kernel modules don't break at all between minor kernel releases (or patch levels) on Solaris.
But no matter how you look at it, speakeasy is more expensive than the Directv's basic service.
With DirecTV I get 1500/128Mbps ADSL, 1 static IP and a simple DNS hosting service. Last time I checked, for the same price you can only get a twice as slow RADSL service from Speakeasy and no static IP.
No, in fact we have eliminated the budget deficits during his time.
Which of the popular applications and uses of OpenBSD would benefit from SMP support?
But did you know that when you open your network you can give access to terrorists?
How come peole -know- that they need a driver's license to drive a car?
Having lots of RAM and standard IDE disks might be a good thing for workstations whose main application is not I/O intensive. However, if you're using an application that constantly reads and writes files, likely litte of that will be cached in memory and it is better to have a decent raid system (preferably SCSI based with a hardware RAID controller)
My point is, with Qt, Sun wouldn't be able to provide its application developers with a free GUI toolkit like they do with Motif and CDE right now.
Apple "unix" has no legal right to be called unix or even to be said to be based on unix. Steve Jobs is bending rules here. Neither OS X nor FreeBSD can use the unix trademark. It's not like I will like either of these two systems less because of that, just trying to be anal retentive ..
You can write commercial gnome/gtk applications without paying a penny to anyone. QT license does not allow that (although, it _is_ an open source license)
The rumors that tons of freeware software and even Gnome might be integrated into Solaris started floating around even before Solaris 8 release. After Solaris 8 release, Sun has made several official statements promissing to include the Gnome desktop in Solaris 9. Solaris 9 has been released in May and it still does not include the Gnome desktop. The last rumor I have heard, was that Solaris 9 12/02 (which was supposed to be released this month) will include it. However, I haven't heard a confmation of that rumor in a long time and now this. They're asking us to wait until Solaris 10 release, damn you Sun.
And no, an unsupported add-on beta package is not good enough. I want it to be integrated with Solaris and supported by Sun, just like any other Solaris package (this includes fixing bugs and providing patches as part of Solaris patch clusters).