Posts by Nick

Hyundai and Kia's latest pitch to US drivers - Windows

Blue Ford/Hyundai/Kia of death?

Have the marketing people at the named companies considered the ramifications? I was considering getting a Hyundai SantaFe, but I'll chose some other manufacturer.

Paris, since she is driving a Mercedes :-)

Microsoft begins virtualization software delays

Oh - come on, Chris!

"How is Windows going to act"?

I am not a virtual machine expert either, but I believe you are simplifying somehow, leaving out some of the VM advantages.

But anyway - to answer you naive question - haven't you ever seen BSOD ?!?! :-)

Fortify and the Java open review project

Popular of widely used?

I tend to agree with Matt. Popular at a certain point in time is one thing, while widely used is a different thing. We are running tons of code precluding Java's birthdate, so I'd say C/C++ still constitutes the majority of the code in use now-a-days. Also, there is a lot of code written in Perl or other scripting languages (Tcl/Tk, Python, PHP)...

{Fashionable / "en vogue"} != existing

Is Solaris really a bright choice for developers?

Solaris, not that easy...

Read this on how to install KDE on Solaris:

http://solaris.kde.org/instructions.php

and compare to - let's say -

apt-get install kde

A lot of things are possible now-a-days with Solaris that were in the realm of Linux and *BSDs till not so long ago.

If you're a developer and you want to have a GUI set up fast, to enable you to use an IDE as an intermediate step in some development project - then you don't want to get distracted and going on a tangent just to achieve that.

Also, hardware support - while not stellar in Linux / BSDs, is far better than OpenSolaris. With OpenSolaris one would have to pick and chose the hardware components to build a development / desktop machine that would run satisfactory. Same was true for Linux 5 years ago. Now, Linux can be installed on whatever white box happens to lay in a corner of your basement.

We are not talking about server performance here. Even though to achieve that one needs Sparc hardware, which is expensive. For a lot of jobs the price / performance ratio and maintenance is better on Linux or BSD on Intel / AMD.

Several times we had to roll back patches on Solaris, because of hardware incompatibilities. The worse was when we had a patch cluster tested for a while and then failing in Production with apparently identical hardware (same V880). The only difference proved to be the hard-drive manufacturer (Fujitsu vs. Seagate). A firmware update (after long hours spent to find the issue and going back and forth on the phone with the Sun rep.) solved the problem and we could bring the OS back up again... Lucky we had a clustered environment ;-)