Hardware support is plenty good enough for me. It works just great on the two machines I have. So it won't work with some obscure ISA token ring card, and it won't run on ARM processors. What do I care? It works for me.
As for software, yes, a lot of commercial stuff is SPARC only. But then, I can't afford licenses for commercial stuff, and I really don't need any of it anyway, so that doesn't matter to me either.
On my Solaris machine I've got everything I need. Bear in mind that pretty much anything that comes as source will build on Solaris. The exceptions are crappy little programs put together by people who can't see further than Linux, and I don't miss any of those.
I'm struggling to think of an application that runs on Linux but not Sol x86. The only one I've ever missed was the Audiogalaxy satellite, when that was worth anything. It was pretty easy to get the Linux binary running through lxrun though.
I'm not sure Solaris has the multimedia stuff Linux does, but I'm not really into that, so I don't know. If I reinstalled my machine with Linux, I'd just put on all the apps I now have on Solaris.
All the "big name" open source apps run just as well on Solaris as on Linux.
I'm not sure what you mean by widely supported. If you mean a tech support community, there are plenty of Solaris people round and about, and they're generally pretty experienced and smart. Too much of the Linux community is leet haxors who think they know it all and really don't know shit. In terms of support, the documentation for solaris (docs.sun.com) is second to none. The depth and quality is a different class to anything you can find for Linux.
If you mean that people who write open source software don't explicity support Solaris, again, what do I care? I've got the source, and I'm smart enough to make tweaks to port things. I enjoy the challenge, and I get to contribute something.
I've made my living out of Solaris for a good while: it's the Unix I know better than all the others, so it suits me to use it.
I say "I really like it" because, when choosing the operating system I run on my computer, that's all that matters. Arguing about "the best" operating system is like arguing about the best band, or the best film. Ultimately it's pointless. You go with what feels right for you. Unix is incredibly configurable. You can make any flavour do pretty much anything if you have the time and the smarts.
That probably does say more about me than about the OS, but it keeps us away from OS holy wars.
> No sound drivers for anything other than Sound Blasters; probably not a biggie, and you can download drivers for SB64/128
The one thing I don't like about Solaris on x86. I've *never* been able to get the OSS soundcard drivers to work on my system. (Dual CPU - something goes very screwy and system usage goes up to ~95%!)
> Pick your network cards carefully; check the HCL
True, but many non-HCL cards can be persuaded to work without too much trouble. I've got a great system, works beautifully except for the sound card, which I don't miss, and none of it is on the HCL. (Oh, maybe the SCSI cards..?)
> Poor/non-existent X support. You almost have to use XFree86 to get any useful X windows
Not so bad as it used to be, especially with the porting kit. The XiG Accelerated-X server, or Summit as I think they call it now (www.xig.com) is very reasonably priced, works with anything, and generally *rocks*.
> Poor support for IDE; DMA is limited
Solaris IDE support really sucks, even on SPARC. Give it SCSI disks - it loves them.
Wondering the same thing myself. $99 I don't have a problem with. Solaris is my OS of choice and I'm happy to shell out for it. But if they're going to want, say, $400 for dual CPU then I'll stick with 8.
Solaris really is sweet on a dual CPU system. Yes, it sucks on crappy hardware, but for my money it can't be touched on decent kit.
Finally, just to preempt a few of the "why pay for Solaris when Linux is better and it's free as in beer and it's free as in speech and my leet AMD Gentoo boxen do everything an E15k does but faster" posts that invariably come with any Sol x86 story: SOME OF US JUST LIKE IT, and don't mind parting with a bit of cash now and again. m'kay?
Re:It's a long way down...
on
Life on Pluto?
·
· Score: 5, Funny
> "What we need is a mad scientist with a gi-ant 'la-ser' cannon!"
Do you have any idea how hard it is for mad scientists to get funding today?
With uncertainty over the economy many mad R&D labs are slicing budgets and indefinitely delaying all but the most mundane of projects. Just how do these people think they're going to conquer the world with an ebola vaccine?
The situation in government funded labs is little better, as public opinion of all science, and particularly mad science, is at an all-time low. This of course is due primarily to scares over GM foods, cloning and climatic catastrophe: all areas in which mad scientists typically excel.
In addition studies suggest the intake of mad PhD students is in decline as gifted sociopaths are incresingly drawn towards fields with more immediate financial rewards, most notably, law.
So please don't point to the mad scientists for the lack of planet destroying lasers. It's the people holding the purse strings who are holding us all back.
You're slipping, man. That one was *way* too obvious. You're still the best poster on here though.
Re:Is it five years only?
on
Slashdot Turns 5
·
· Score: 4, Funny
re: the recent rediscovering of the first emoticon, is it possible to dig back through the archives and find out just who it was that first "imagined a beowulf cluster of these things"?
Then, mod them down so damn far they can't even get into a damn computer room.
> You should try reading Slashdot a little more than once a month.
I would, but things like this always end up driving me away.
To summarise: the original poster says he'd write something in Perl that would move things to a trash directory rather than removing them.
I point out, admittedly in a childishly sarcastic (but hey, remember where we are) way. that that's using a sledgehammer to crack a walnut.
You point out, in a condescending, superior (but hey, remember where we are) way, exactly the same thing.
I repeat what I just said.
You repeat what you just said.
Someone else chips in having completely misunderstood what we've both said.
The internet is *even more* full of pointless crap than when we started.
So, for what it's worth to move instead of removing, for my ksh user's I'd have an alias to a function calling mv, and in csh and derivatives, just an alias. We agree?
The point I was making, for the benefit of those who couldn't quite grasp it, was that loading into memory a great big executable, with however many shared libraries and other dependent files perl requires, is overkill. A one line shell function in everyone's.profile will do the exact same job.
So many people, especially here on/. want to show off their leet coding skillz and solve every problem with Perl, when it so often isn't the right solution.
Get that? Or are you equally clueless at understanding follow-up posts as you are the originals?
Possibly the author has some obsessive/compulsive mouse fetish combined with a charmingly naive enthusiasm. Possibly it's is a piece of satire just marginally too subtle for my Itchy and Scratchy addled brain to grasp.
Either way, it's a strange thing to find on the/. front page. Still, beats stuff about Lego and/or Lord of the Rings.
So we've got everyone in the office talking over everyone else trying to message each other, while these bloody great surround sound speakers play whale song or dolphin noises or whatever management have heard makes people more productive this week?
In any event, people won't like using voice e-mail, the same way they now don't like talking to answerphones, voice mail, or any crappy voice recognition system. They all suck.
I don't generally pick people up on spelling or typos but I always do my best to make sure there aren't any in anything I write. If nothing else it's a common courtesy to the people who might read it.
I don't want to wade through a heap of awful spelling and bad grammar. Rightly or wrongly, I can't help but assume that someone who writes good English is smarter than someone who doesn't. (For native English speakers of course!)
Of course, the odd mistake is bound to get through, but don't you ever assume that someone who hasn't gone to the trouble of checking their spelling *certainly* hasn't gone to the trouble of checking their facts? Oh, and I'm not talking about clicking a spell check icon either: I mean reading back over what you've just written.
To get back on topic, Futurama as Groening's greatest creation? Puh-lease!
Slashdot Mirror
then may I suggest p00h as a honeypot symbol?
A colony of e-coli bacteria? Like I don't already have enought of that shit floating round my kitchen.
He needs to get a life. Oh, err... sorry...
Dude, you're getting h@X0r3d
Well, since you asked...
Hardware support is plenty good enough for me. It works just great on the two machines I have. So it won't work with some obscure ISA token ring card, and it won't run on ARM processors. What do I care? It works for me.
As for software, yes, a lot of commercial stuff is SPARC only. But then, I can't afford licenses for commercial stuff, and I really don't need any of it anyway, so that doesn't matter to me either.
On my Solaris machine I've got everything I need. Bear in mind that pretty much anything that comes as source will build on Solaris. The exceptions are crappy little programs put together by people who can't see further than Linux, and I don't miss any of those.
I'm struggling to think of an application that runs on Linux but not Sol x86. The only one I've ever missed was the Audiogalaxy satellite, when that was worth anything. It was pretty easy to get the Linux binary running through lxrun though.
I'm not sure Solaris has the multimedia stuff Linux does, but I'm not really into that, so I don't know. If I reinstalled my machine with Linux, I'd just put on all the apps I now have on Solaris.
All the "big name" open source apps run just as well on Solaris as on Linux.
I'm not sure what you mean by widely supported. If you mean a tech support community, there are plenty of Solaris people round and about, and they're generally pretty experienced and smart. Too much of the Linux community is leet haxors who think they know it all and really don't know shit. In terms of support, the documentation for solaris (docs.sun.com) is second to none. The depth and quality is a different class to anything you can find for Linux.
If you mean that people who write open source software don't explicity support Solaris, again, what do I care? I've got the source, and I'm smart enough to make tweaks to port things. I enjoy the challenge, and I get to contribute something.
I've made my living out of Solaris for a good while: it's the Unix I know better than all the others, so it suits me to use it.
I say "I really like it" because, when choosing the operating system I run on my computer, that's all that matters. Arguing about "the best" operating system is like arguing about the best band, or the best film. Ultimately it's pointless. You go with what feels right for you. Unix is incredibly configurable. You can make any flavour do pretty much anything if you have the time and the smarts.
That probably does say more about me than about the OS, but it keeps us away from OS holy wars.
True, but a couple of points:
> No sound drivers for anything other than Sound Blasters; probably not a biggie, and you can download drivers for SB64/128
The one thing I don't like about Solaris on x86. I've *never* been able to get the OSS soundcard drivers to work on my system. (Dual CPU - something goes very screwy and system usage goes up to ~95%!)
> Pick your network cards carefully; check the HCL
True, but many non-HCL cards can be persuaded to work without too much trouble. I've got a great system, works beautifully except for the sound card, which I don't miss, and none of it is on the HCL. (Oh, maybe the SCSI cards..?)
> Poor/non-existent X support. You almost have to use XFree86 to get any useful X windows
Not so bad as it used to be, especially with the porting kit. The XiG Accelerated-X server, or Summit as I think they call it now (www.xig.com) is very reasonably priced, works with anything, and generally *rocks*.
> Poor support for IDE; DMA is limited
Solaris IDE support really sucks, even on SPARC. Give it SCSI disks - it loves them.
Wondering the same thing myself. $99 I don't have a problem with. Solaris is my OS of choice and I'm happy to shell out for it. But if they're going to want, say, $400 for dual CPU then I'll stick with 8.
Solaris really is sweet on a dual CPU system. Yes, it sucks on crappy hardware, but for my money it can't be touched on decent kit.
Finally, just to preempt a few of the "why pay for Solaris when Linux is better and it's free as in beer and it's free as in speech and my leet AMD Gentoo boxen do everything an E15k does but faster" posts that invariably come with any Sol x86 story: SOME OF US JUST LIKE IT, and don't mind parting with a bit of cash now and again. m'kay?
> "What we need is a mad scientist with a gi-ant 'la-ser' cannon!"
Do you have any idea how hard it is for mad scientists to get funding today?
With uncertainty over the economy many mad R&D labs are slicing budgets and indefinitely delaying all but the most mundane of projects. Just how do these people think they're going to conquer the world with an ebola vaccine?
The situation in government funded labs is little better, as public opinion of all science, and particularly mad science, is at an all-time low. This of course is due primarily to scares over GM foods, cloning and climatic catastrophe: all areas in which mad scientists typically excel.
In addition studies suggest the intake of mad PhD students is in decline as gifted sociopaths are incresingly drawn towards fields with more immediate financial rewards, most notably, law.
So please don't point to the mad scientists for the lack of planet destroying lasers. It's the people holding the purse strings who are holding us all back.
You're slipping, man. That one was *way* too obvious. You're still the best poster on here though.
re: the recent rediscovering of the first emoticon, is it possible to dig back through the archives and find out just who it was that first "imagined a beowulf cluster of these things"?
Then, mod them down so damn far they can't even get into a damn computer room.
It broadens the mind by introducing you to subgenres of pr0n that you never knew existed.
> You should try reading Slashdot a little more than once a month.
I would, but things like this always end up driving me away.
To summarise: the original poster says he'd write something in Perl that would move things to a trash directory rather than removing them.
I point out, admittedly in a childishly sarcastic (but hey, remember where we are) way. that that's using a sledgehammer to crack a walnut.
You point out, in a condescending, superior (but hey, remember where we are) way, exactly the same thing.
I repeat what I just said.
You repeat what you just said.
Someone else chips in having completely misunderstood what we've both said.
The internet is *even more* full of pointless crap than when we started.
So, for what it's worth to move instead of removing, for my ksh user's I'd have an alias to a function calling mv, and in csh and derivatives, just an alias. We agree?
The point I was making, for the benefit of those who couldn't quite grasp it, was that loading into memory a great big executable, with however many shared libraries and other dependent files perl requires, is overkill. A one line shell function in everyone's .profile will do the exact same job.
/. want to show off their leet coding skillz and solve every problem with Perl, when it so often isn't the right solution.
So many people, especially here on
Get that? Or are you equally clueless at understanding follow-up posts as you are the originals?
> Yes, it's completely non-standard but could just be a simple perl script that moves those
/opt/perl5 /opt/perl5 | wc -l
> files somewhere
$ du -sk
20801
$ find
1194
Yep, I need 20Mb of Perl installation spread over 1194 files to do that. How elegant.
> If I worked there, I'd organize all of the
> programmers to go work downstairs in the posh
> lobby and tell the management to fuck themselves.
Then you'd get fired. Way to go!
...just how hard is it to mislead potential AOL customers?
best /. post so far this year. w00t!
I don't think that will help him, cos the last I heard you couldn't fit haX0R3d copy of Photoshop 7 and American Bukkake 1 thru 9 on a C90.
My suggestion to the original poster as to what he do now, is, of course, Shut The Fuck Up. (TM)
There's something very odd about this article.
/. front page. Still, beats stuff about Lego and/or Lord of the Rings.
Possibly the author has some obsessive/compulsive mouse fetish combined with a charmingly naive enthusiasm. Possibly it's is a piece of satire just marginally too subtle for my Itchy and Scratchy addled brain to grasp.
Either way, it's a strange thing to find on the
I knew you were going to say that.
Wouldn't matter. He's bound to have already cloned himself.
So we've got everyone in the office talking over everyone else trying to message each other, while these bloody great surround sound speakers play whale song or dolphin noises or whatever management have heard makes people more productive this week?
In any event, people won't like using voice e-mail, the same way they now don't like talking to answerphones, voice mail, or any crappy voice recognition system. They all suck.
> I WANT OSX on the intel platform !!!
Yeah, and I want Episode III to be great. But it's not going to happen is it?
1 c10X0r3d my m0m'5 66MHz 486 f4573r 7h4n 7H!5. My r007 k17 unp4X0r5 50 f457 d00dZ
> well balanced people don't care
I'm reasonably well balanced, and I care.
I don't generally pick people up on spelling or typos but I always do my best to make sure there aren't any in anything I write. If nothing else it's a common courtesy to the people who might read it.
I don't want to wade through a heap of awful spelling and bad grammar. Rightly or wrongly, I can't help but assume that someone who writes good English is smarter than someone who doesn't. (For native English speakers of course!)
Of course, the odd mistake is bound to get through, but don't you ever assume that someone who hasn't gone to the trouble of checking their spelling *certainly* hasn't gone to the trouble of checking their facts? Oh, and I'm not talking about clicking a spell check icon either: I mean reading back over what you've just written.
To get back on topic, Futurama as Groening's greatest creation? Puh-lease!