For the price, I agree Apple's RAID box is pretty darn hard to beat. Sun's lowest-end RAID box is, unfortunately for most people, a near-military-grade hardened one (while awesome in its own right, it is much more expensive than Apple's offering).
For a team of inexperienced programmers, pooling and caching are debugging nightmares. I've seen first hand where a pooling problem surfaces, does not get understood for what it is, and the programmers either go off on some witch hunt among themselves or start implementing terrible band-aid solutions everywhere.
Pooling and caching should probably not be included at the beginning of a project. If the database abstractions are properly implemented, adding pooling should be trivial later on if performance studies warrant it.
Pooling is an optimization and _not_ an architecture.
No, but he is one of the business people who "gets it" from the raping-customers-blind-is-a-bad-business-model department. I know of no significant data lock-in regarding Sun's products, which is much more than anyone can say about Microsoft or IBM. McNealy isn't an antagonist, regardless of people's opinions about Sun's business strategies and price/performance competitiveness.
Sun is the only company I know of where you can buy a 10-baseT NIC new and have it cost $700.00. They will also sell you a new 4GB scsi drive for over $1000. The list goes on.
What list? Those prices are absurd and you know it. If you really want at 10-year-old NIC, anyway, go pay $50 for it from a second-hand dealer.
I see a future of Linux, UNIX, and Mac OS all interoperating with OpenOffice.org. Microsoft doesn't even need to be in the picture, except for legacy reasons.
Exactly. JDS offers an OS-abstracted desktop, where customers can choose Linux or Solaris yet get the same user experience without butting their heads against customizing various Linux distros for their needs. Again, Sun is a bit ahead of the times, but the trolls out there won't admit it.
WTF are you talking about? Sun's _only_ income on Java is licensing for the compliance testing and their Sun ONE software sales. There will be no SCO garbage from them.
The Ultra 10 is not representative of Sun hardware. These are the real Sun workstations: SparcSTATION 20, Ultra 2, Ultra 60, Blade 2000. These things are built like tanks (and weigh and sound like them, too!).
One thing is that the Fujitsu CPU is more expensive than even the US3. They couldn't afford to put them into servers like the V440, which appears to be underselling even Dell.
I'm a Sun enthousiast, but, regardless, I predict Linux/Opteron workstations will explode in popularity. Near PowerMac G5 performance yet runs Linux/x86 and is not from Intel (the best of all worlds for the Linux zealots out there).
1) Ultra 10 workstations are really PeeCees in disguise.
2) A single failure generally should not take an E4500 off line.
Your dataset is too small, anyway. We have similarly sized all-Sun network, and outside of hard drives (as expected), reliability has been very very good. All unplanned downtime I can remember is either due to a UPS failure (non-Sun) or system admin snafu (human error). Uninterupted uptime of months on end is the norm.
This is IMO bullshit, like so many of vi's supposed 'advantages'.
Actually, the "home row" aspect of vi is a huge advantage. I can even use bash in vi mode and have full command-line editing and history using the vi commands. Emacs has a vi-emulation mode, too, that works pretty well. vi is still the ubiquitous and lowest-common-denominator editor for UNIX.
You also have to factor in that the US3 is much more highly engineered for reliability than Intel's CPUs, which adds a non-linear aspect to their cost.
And FibreChannel disks and UPA bus graphics and a packet-switched backbone similar to the SunFire servers. It's up to you if this warrants the cost or not. Also, I doubt many people actually spend the list price for any Sun equipment, anyway.
The Blade 2000 really is a beast of a machine, and its attributes appeal to a niche (hooking it directly to a FibreChannel SAN for massive datasets is one example).
Of course, the best feature of the Blade 2000 are the LEDs that light up the logo on the front:)
Sun's workstations are still cheaper than IBM RS/6000 ones, so why don't people bitch about IBM's prices?!?
You didn't even select REMOTE MANAGEMENT for the Dell. It is another $400. This brings the Dell within $500 of Sun. Also, Dell doesn't specify whether their server offers dual SCSI channels to the external port, which Sun does. You are not comparing Apples to Apples, here. You are a troll.
Absolutely. Why demand Linux, when there is already another free best-of-breed option out there? Setting OpenBSD up as a firewall is a piece of cake (IIRC, three or four intuitive config files all in/etc and their corresponding well-written man pages).
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XRaid
For the price, I agree Apple's RAID box is pretty darn hard to beat. Sun's lowest-end RAID box is, unfortunately for most people, a near-military-grade hardened one (while awesome in its own right, it is much more expensive than Apple's offering).
connection pooling and caching system
For a team of inexperienced programmers, pooling and caching are debugging nightmares. I've seen first hand where a pooling problem surfaces, does not get understood for what it is, and the programmers either go off on some witch hunt among themselves or start implementing terrible band-aid solutions everywhere.
Pooling and caching should probably not be included at the beginning of a project. If the database abstractions are properly implemented, adding pooling should be trivial later on if performance studies warrant it.
Pooling is an optimization and _not_ an architecture.
Kessler Effect negated by the Hoover Company's New Bussard Collector WindTunnel (TM) vacuum now featuring side-scrubbing action!
Gen. Xiong is most famous for his threat to incinerate Los Angeles with nuclear destruction
I suppose China doesn't give a damn about the huge number of Chinese immigrants in the USA.
Are you Scott McNealy...
No, but he is one of the business people who "gets it" from the raping-customers-blind-is-a-bad-business-model department. I know of no significant data lock-in regarding Sun's products, which is much more than anyone can say about Microsoft or IBM. McNealy isn't an antagonist, regardless of people's opinions about Sun's business strategies and price/performance competitiveness.
Sun is the only company I know of where you can buy a 10-baseT NIC new and have it cost $700.00. They will also sell you a new 4GB scsi drive for over $1000. The list goes on.
What list? Those prices are absurd and you know it. If you really want at 10-year-old NIC, anyway, go pay $50 for it from a second-hand dealer.
Actually, I think Brown Dwarf is probably more accurate. At least their new mascot will be obvious.
Mazda RX-8
The Mazda sucks for hauling bricks, no matter how cool it is.
Sun + Apple + a touch of brown sugar = yummy.
they see a future of Microsoft and Linux.
I see a future of Linux, UNIX, and Mac OS all interoperating with OpenOffice.org. Microsoft doesn't even need to be in the picture, except for legacy reasons.
the internet still runs on html (or the IE equivalent) and it is still a pain in the ass to take code from one platform to another.
HTML has no conceptual relationship with Java, unless of course a System.out.print() statement happens to output HTML. Do you see the distinction?
Exactly. JDS offers an OS-abstracted desktop, where customers can choose Linux or Solaris yet get the same user experience without butting their heads against customizing various Linux distros for their needs. Again, Sun is a bit ahead of the times, but the trolls out there won't admit it.
WTF are you talking about? Sun's _only_ income on Java is licensing for the compliance testing and their Sun ONE software sales. There will be no SCO garbage from them.
Ultra 10
The Ultra 10 is not representative of Sun hardware. These are the real Sun workstations: SparcSTATION 20, Ultra 2, Ultra 60, Blade 2000. These things are built like tanks (and weigh and sound like them, too!).
One thing is that the Fujitsu CPU is more expensive than even the US3. They couldn't afford to put them into servers like the V440, which appears to be underselling even Dell.
I'm a Sun enthousiast, but, regardless, I predict Linux/Opteron workstations will explode in popularity. Near PowerMac G5 performance yet runs Linux/x86 and is not from Intel (the best of all worlds for the Linux zealots out there).
1) Ultra 10 workstations are really PeeCees in disguise.
2) A single failure generally should not take an E4500 off line.
Your dataset is too small, anyway. We have similarly sized all-Sun network, and outside of hard drives (as expected), reliability has been very very good. All unplanned downtime I can remember is either due to a UPS failure (non-Sun) or system admin snafu (human error). Uninterupted uptime of months on end is the norm.
This is IMO bullshit, like so many of vi's supposed 'advantages'.
Actually, the "home row" aspect of vi is a huge advantage. I can even use bash in vi mode and have full command-line editing and history using the vi commands. Emacs has a vi-emulation mode, too, that works pretty well. vi is still the ubiquitous and lowest-common-denominator editor for UNIX.
Yep, and twice 1200 MHz (US3) isn't quite 3200 MHz (P4)...
You also have to factor in that the US3 is much more highly engineered for reliability than Intel's CPUs, which adds a non-linear aspect to their cost.
Granted it has an 8MB Cache
:)
And FibreChannel disks and UPA bus graphics and a packet-switched backbone similar to the SunFire servers. It's up to you if this warrants the cost or not. Also, I doubt many people actually spend the list price for any Sun equipment, anyway.
The Blade 2000 really is a beast of a machine, and its attributes appeal to a niche (hooking it directly to a FibreChannel SAN for massive datasets is one example).
Of course, the best feature of the Blade 2000 are the LEDs that light up the logo on the front
Sun's workstations are still cheaper than IBM RS/6000 ones, so why don't people bitch about IBM's prices?!?
You didn't even select REMOTE MANAGEMENT for the Dell. It is another $400. This brings the Dell within $500 of Sun. Also, Dell doesn't specify whether their server offers dual SCSI channels to the external port, which Sun does. You are not comparing Apples to Apples, here. You are a troll.
Absolutely. Why demand Linux, when there is already another free best-of-breed option out there? Setting OpenBSD up as a firewall is a piece of cake (IIRC, three or four intuitive config files all in
how many starving children you could feed for $50 million...
It doesn't matter.
how much cancer research you could fund.
It doesn't matter.
Freedom means freedom, and you can't expect someone else to take care of your agendas.
Throw the docs in, light the thermite, push it over the side.
Even worse, guys in submarines have to eat the documents, then they use the delayed gas reaction to torment their captors.
And you're aware of some elusive Open Source software program that "hardly ever" needs a patch?
All programs that don't provide a network service or local security service need only be upgraded when the user feels it is justified and useful.
Also, if I disable a service entirely or, even better, don't have it installed, then, of course, patching becomes a moot point.
UNIX/Linux/BSD offer a granularity of controlling these things that Microsoft only dreams about.