Yes Sun boxes will last forever, but who keeps them that long? I would rather have a box that will work reliably for the expected lifespan before it is reasonable to upgrade.
You'd be surprised, a lot of universities and colleges have a lot of old hardware, especially Suns.
I work as a Unix admin at a major school of medicine in the midwestern US. We have a pretty large amount of Sun equipment on campus, and also a lot of Linux on Dells.
Sun's hardware, especially the old SparcStations, are nearly indestructible. We literally have old Sparc 5s plugging away still. Dells are, as others have pointed out, inexpensive to buy and run pretty well.
Basically, the way it works around here is, if you can afford it, you buy a Sun. If you don't, you buy a Dell and throw Linux on it. With NIH funding slowing down in general, buying cheaper hardware for use now makes sense to me. But basically anything serious (that I have seen) is done on either Solaris or Linux. We'd also be interested in Xserves, but we do a lot of statistics, and that means SAS, which isn't available on OS X.
I actually bought a 15" PowerBook last night. I had poked around and older postings on places like Slashdot gave a reasonable assurance that Apple wouldn't do something really dumb like give you 17 days. Huh!?!
Anyhow, I called the Apple care line today. Apparently many Slashdotters had gotten there first: I got a recording stating how I had to have purchased it TODAY, not at 9:00pm last night.
Luckily, I dropped by the Apple Store on the way home from work (nicely missing a hailstorm!). The guy I spoke to put up a token resistance until I pointed out that I had just dropped $2200 on my very first Apple product the night before. He then rang up the system as a return, credited it to a gift card, and then used the gift card to pay for the system, giving me an April 12th purchase date. Very cool and I hope someone from Apple is reading this - THIS IS HOW YOU GET NEW CUSTOMERS AND KEEP YOUR OLD ONES. I'd like to send a note in to praise the guy that helped me, but hesitant since I don't wish to get him in trouble for doing the right thing and taking care of the customer.
Anyway, as a Solaris and Linux admin (I also run OpenBSD here at home), I'm impressed with my PowerBook and am pretty happy with the local Apple Store (St. Louis, MO).
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Yes Sun boxes will last forever, but who keeps them that long? I would rather have a box that will work reliably for the expected lifespan before it is reasonable to upgrade.
You'd be surprised, a lot of universities and colleges have a lot of old hardware, especially Suns.
I work as a Unix admin at a major school of medicine in the midwestern US. We have a pretty large amount of Sun equipment on campus, and also a lot of Linux on Dells.
Sun's hardware, especially the old SparcStations, are nearly indestructible. We literally have old Sparc 5s plugging away still. Dells are, as others have pointed out, inexpensive to buy and run pretty well.
Basically, the way it works around here is, if you can afford it, you buy a Sun. If you don't, you buy a Dell and throw Linux on it. With NIH funding slowing down in general, buying cheaper hardware for use now makes sense to me. But basically anything serious (that I have seen) is done on either Solaris or Linux. We'd also be interested in Xserves, but we do a lot of statistics, and that means SAS, which isn't available on OS X.
I actually bought a 15" PowerBook last night. I had poked around and older postings on places like Slashdot gave a reasonable assurance that Apple wouldn't do something really dumb like give you 17 days. Huh!?! Anyhow, I called the Apple care line today. Apparently many Slashdotters had gotten there first: I got a recording stating how I had to have purchased it TODAY, not at 9:00pm last night. Luckily, I dropped by the Apple Store on the way home from work (nicely missing a hailstorm!). The guy I spoke to put up a token resistance until I pointed out that I had just dropped $2200 on my very first Apple product the night before. He then rang up the system as a return, credited it to a gift card, and then used the gift card to pay for the system, giving me an April 12th purchase date. Very cool and I hope someone from Apple is reading this - THIS IS HOW YOU GET NEW CUSTOMERS AND KEEP YOUR OLD ONES. I'd like to send a note in to praise the guy that helped me, but hesitant since I don't wish to get him in trouble for doing the right thing and taking care of the customer. Anyway, as a Solaris and Linux admin (I also run OpenBSD here at home), I'm impressed with my PowerBook and am pretty happy with the local Apple Store (St. Louis, MO).