RE: ACs - woof, woof!
"..."Sun's stock price"
Was rising about 20% yesterday..." A lot of shares rose initially on the news of the Bush recovery plan, but a lot slid back later in the day, including Sun, and the NASDQA closed down. Meanwhile, Sun's stock is still under threat of being delisted. Nothing like the whole story to ruin a Sunshiner's party!
"....Funny, last time I worked for IBM, we charged the same price for running Linux as for running Solaris (and HP/UX and AIX)...." I suspect you wre one of the overpaid oxygen wasters IBM let go then? In the real corprorate world, where there has alwyas been the split of the lower-paid Wintel team and the higher-paid UNIX team, I have seen management keen to push new products onto Wintel as they know it means they can reduce the number of expensive UNIX admins. The smart UNIX admins have seen this coming for years and have been learning Linux. And as for IBM hosting prices - don't make me laugh! I have seen massive differences quoted for different platforms. And when we did try them we had the disconcerting case of Global Services calling us, the customer, because they didn't have an hp-ux resource available to make some changes but had taken on support for a 24x7 hp-ux solution! I can't think of anyone less qualified than an ex-Global Screwups employee to comment.
"...It seems like they have left the sinking ship called Itanic...." That would be a dig at the Hp Integirty servers, then? The server range that is the only enterprise server range that is growing year on year? And don't bleat on about Niagara, it's not enterprise, it's barely edge server, and not a real replacement for UltraSPANKed or any other RISC server, which is why Sun has to rebadge FSC SPARC64 servers and pray Rock makes it out alive. You may no have noticed (not hard to understand why with that Sunshiner Blinfold (TM)), but Integrity servers can run hp-ux, OpenVMS, Windows, Linux, or even Solaris on Transitive, and can mix all the above in electrically isolated partitions (that's real highly-available virtualisation, which Sun can't match). And I think you'll find the majority of the hp-ux contractors are happilly working in the City where hp-ux is still the number one UNIX choice. It's not surprising you can find plenty of Sun admins out there as there are plenty of them out of work.
"...Hey, have you heard about this "new" Solaris feature called binary compatibility guarantee?..." Yes, I have heard of it. When we asked Sun to provide penalties into a support contract for the "binary compatibility gurantee" they wouldn't. So if Sun don't even have the confidence to back up their claims with their money why w=should I bet the company's money on it?
"....Let's see what the TCO is for porting PA-RISC applications to Itanic... maybe not..." Well that's because hp-ux 11i v3 has full binary compatibility across Itanium and PA-RISC, and I can tell you for a fact that if an 11i app hasn't been hard-coded with specific library links then it will usually port without recompilation. Which measn the TCO costs for migration are usually very low. Most such porting tasks consist of running the code through hp's transition tools, which require very little in cost, and provide a reliable indication of where any problems lie. Compare this to Sun's approach of cross your fingers and hope and you may see why admins in the real world will tell you hp-ux migrations of business critical apps are a piece of cake compared to Slowaris or AIX.
"....Oh, I thought Oracle was good in running things in parallel...." Yes, it is very good at doing full-sized heavt threads in parallel on proper CPUs like Itanium, Power, Xeon, Opteron or even SPARC64, not on wheiner latency engines like Niagara, hence why Oracle performance is awful on any Niagara system, being outperformed by the avergae Wintel whitebox for a fraction of the price.
Which is why, if you want to see dead, just watch Sun for a bit longer, you won't have too long to wait.
RE: Ding, Ding - check the market figures, you will see that Lintel is eating up the Sun marketshare for a reason - they don't believe Sunshiners like you.