Jupiter's magnetic field is stronger than can currently be explained, even for a planet of its size. But this is not conclusive evidence of a solid core--the sun almost certainly hasn't got one. The current thinking is that as you get closer to the center of Jupiter, the pressure increases to the point where the atmosphere gives way to a superdense liquid metallic hydrogen layer, with no defining interface netween the two, and that this layer is what causes Jupiter's incredible magnetic field.
There is still debate over whether the intense heat and pressure preclude the formation of a solid core beneath this metallic hydrogen layer. If Jupiter were to have a "ground", that's where it would be. Good luck trying to reach it, though.
What really needs to happen is for Sony and Handspring and Palm to dump their proprietary module formats and get Palm OS to support Game Boy cartridges. Oh, yeah.
Sparc may be 400 MHz, but it's also got four or eight times as much L2 cache as the X86. So while the X86 is twiddling its thumbs waiting for something from RAM, Sparc is still working. It's very hare-and-tortoise.
And software support and development problems are also bad.
Software support is fine, unless you're an L337 G^|\/|3r. What professional software is out there that doesn't at least have a Solaris-compatible alternative?
As for development problems, I submit that Sun releases software more slowly than Microsoft because Sun actually bothers to debug their software.
Solaris is so stripped down and has an inferior program for each part of it. Commercial X, csh, plain old vi, etc. are standard and it does not have standard Linux tools like Gimp.
Solaris is stripped down because most of Sun's customers don't want a lot of cruft bundled with their server OS. If you need Gimp, go get it from http://www.sunfreeware.com.
I would rather have a server which is similar to the workstation.
Really? Why?
My whole school is Sun, it's Northern Arizona University, and they have the slowest network! They do have Windows Workstations, but the Sun computers in the CSE lab are ridiculous! They don't have anything that have become standard in Linux distributions. How will we ever be taught about the high level programs the end user deals with or the websites, when we don't even have a graphics tool comparable to Microsoft Paint. Let us have Linux and Oracle/mySQL, GIMP, bash, word processing/office programs, multimedia, etc.
This sounds like a NASU problem, not a Sun problem. If no one can be bothered to download or compile the Gnu stuff, do it yourself. Bash is standard as of Solaris 7. StarOffice is available for free from the Sun site. Last I checked, Oracle/mySQL were fricking expensive; can't help you there.
Sun computers are expensive,
True.
unreliable,
You're kidding, right? We measure uptime in years. We have to keep careful records because customers call us for help with their Sparc 20 mailserver that's been running without fail for four years, and no one can remember the root password.
slow
No, but see "expensive" above.
of a bad design, and are falling more behind each day. 500 MHz? A whole bunch of CPU's in one box? Scale out, not up.
So what you're saying is, rather than put several CPUs in a box, just have one faster CPU? What's faster, 4 1GHz procs, or 64 400MHz procs?
Or maybe you mean we should just buy more boxes. Hm, maybe Sun isn't that much more expensive after all.
Each person who ties their company into Sun is tying themselves in to ridiculously expensive proprietary technology.
It may be proprietary, but Sun doesn't abuse its customers the way Microsoft does, and there's something to be said for an OS that wasn't written by zillions of anonymous programmers.
Amazon is now on Linux. For selling, hosting static pages, sharing information, databases, etc, Linux or Windows 2000 rules!
Well, not Win2k, unless uptime isn't important to you.
Probably the one flaw of the 450 is that there's no hardware RAID controller for it. Admittedly you can run those 20 drives on Veritas File Manager or (gag) DiskSuite, but hardware RAID would give the 450 a performance boost, making it a truly outstanding I/O box.
Incorrect. Because each system board has a direct interconnect to the other 15 system boards, all that matters is the number of procs per board (4). Dividing the 12.8GB/s total data bus bandwidth by four gives...3.2GB/s/proc.
The E10K is, of course, the first product from the Cray division that Sun bought from SGI. So, in that sense, it's a Cray.
420R is the machine to have in space-constrained environments (i.e., in co-los where you pay monthly for rack space). But the 450 is the better box if you've got the space: ten slots, twenty drives, environmental sensors, and no damn memory riser. We work on memory risers all the time, and they're the single most error-prone bit in the 420R.
So, this "mouse" is obviously quite tough, but that sure looks like a conventional serial cable coming out of it. What's the point of having an indestructible mouse if the cable is still subject to kinking or yanking?
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There is still debate over whether the intense heat and pressure preclude the formation of a solid core beneath this metallic hydrogen layer. If Jupiter were to have a "ground", that's where it would be. Good luck trying to reach it, though.
What really needs to happen is for Sony and Handspring and Palm to dump their proprietary module formats and get Palm OS to support Game Boy cartridges. Oh, yeah.
Sparc may be 400 MHz, but it's also got four or eight times as much L2 cache as the X86. So while the X86 is twiddling its thumbs waiting for something from RAM, Sparc is still working. It's very hare-and-tortoise.
And software support and development problems are also bad.
Software support is fine, unless you're an L337 G^|\/|3r. What professional software is out there that doesn't at least have a Solaris-compatible alternative?
As for development problems, I submit that Sun releases software more slowly than Microsoft because Sun actually bothers to debug their software.
Solaris is so stripped down and has an inferior program for each part of it. Commercial X, csh, plain old vi, etc. are standard and it does not have standard Linux tools like Gimp.
Solaris is stripped down because most of Sun's customers don't want a lot of cruft bundled with their server OS. If you need Gimp, go get it from http://www.sunfreeware.com.
I would rather have a server which is similar to the workstation.
Really? Why?
My whole school is Sun, it's Northern Arizona University, and they have the slowest network! They do have Windows Workstations, but the Sun computers in the CSE lab are ridiculous! They don't have anything that have become standard in Linux distributions. How will we ever be taught about the high level programs the end user deals with or the websites, when we don't even have a graphics tool comparable to Microsoft Paint. Let us have Linux and Oracle/mySQL, GIMP, bash, word processing/office programs, multimedia, etc.
This sounds like a NASU problem, not a Sun problem. If no one can be bothered to download or compile the Gnu stuff, do it yourself. Bash is standard as of Solaris 7. StarOffice is available for free from the Sun site. Last I checked, Oracle/mySQL were fricking expensive; can't help you there.
Sun computers are expensive,
True.
unreliable,
You're kidding, right? We measure uptime in years. We have to keep careful records because customers call us for help with their Sparc 20 mailserver that's been running without fail for four years, and no one can remember the root password.
slow
No, but see "expensive" above.
of a bad design, and are falling more behind each day. 500 MHz? A whole bunch of CPU's in one box? Scale out, not up.
So what you're saying is, rather than put several CPUs in a box, just have one faster CPU? What's faster, 4 1GHz procs, or 64 400MHz procs?
Or maybe you mean we should just buy more boxes. Hm, maybe Sun isn't that much more expensive after all.
Each person who ties their company into Sun is tying themselves in to ridiculously expensive proprietary technology.
It may be proprietary, but Sun doesn't abuse its customers the way Microsoft does, and there's something to be said for an OS that wasn't written by zillions of anonymous programmers.
Amazon is now on Linux. For selling, hosting static pages, sharing information, databases, etc, Linux or Windows 2000 rules!
Well, not Win2k, unless uptime isn't important to you.
Probably the one flaw of the 450 is that there's no hardware RAID controller for it. Admittedly you can run those 20 drives on Veritas File Manager or (gag) DiskSuite, but hardware RAID would give the 450 a performance boost, making it a truly outstanding I/O box.
Incorrect. Because each system board has a direct interconnect to the other 15 system boards, all that matters is the number of procs per board (4). Dividing the 12.8GB/s total data bus bandwidth by four gives...3.2GB/s/proc. The E10K is, of course, the first product from the Cray division that Sun bought from SGI. So, in that sense, it's a Cray.
420R is the machine to have in space-constrained environments (i.e., in co-los where you pay monthly for rack space). But the 450 is the better box if you've got the space: ten slots, twenty drives, environmental sensors, and no damn memory riser. We work on memory risers all the time, and they're the single most error-prone bit in the 420R.
So, this "mouse" is obviously quite tough, but that sure looks like a conventional serial cable coming out of it. What's the point of having an indestructible mouse if the cable is still subject to kinking or yanking?