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Posted by chmaynard 11 hours ago

What Sun got wrong(bcantrill.dtrace.org)
488 points | 271 commentspage 5
alexnewman 8 hours ago|
Yea he’s wrong. Plenty of people switched to dell cause of Linux and open source . In our case the switch was from alpha and vms
whalesalad 9 hours ago||
Where can one buy the Oxide t-shirt
shevy-java 4 hours ago||
I liked Sun Microsystems. And they were not that wrong because in 2009, Oracle acquire Sun for 7.4 billion$. Granted, Sun was perhaps more worth at that time; and most definitely before that but it is also not a total disaster either. Except, of course, that Sun died. And I do not like Oracle at all. It is a very different company. Like a slow behemoth - it keeps on bulldozering over but nobody is excited about it while it does so.

I think the big US mega-mega-corporations, while powerful and dominating, also became super-boring. Nobody mentions how epic Google allegedly should be, or is; in 2012 that was much more common. People fatigued from corporate propaganda. And now the AI slop propaganda - that one accelerates disinterest and decay.

I think Sun should probably have pushed more on its key technologies. Simplify java, simplify Solaris while pushing on it hard - who knows what could have happened. It is idle to want to talk about it now though.

DonHopkins 10 hours ago||
Speaking of another Steven, the Dell Dude:

Things were going great at Dell until its wildly popular advertising campaign suddenly came tumbling down over an unfortunate indiscretion on the Lower East Side that surprised absolutely nobody...

https://edition.cnn.com/2003/LAW/02/10/deli.dude.arrest/

>'Dell Dude' arrested for marijuana possession

>Monday, February 10, 2003 Posted: 3:55 PM EST (2055 GMT)

>NEW YORK (CNN) -- Benjamin Curtis, better known as the "Dell Dude" from the computer company's television commercials, was arrested Sunday while he allegedly attempted to buy marijuana on Manhattan's Lower East Side.

Steve The Dell Dude Commercial Compilation (DUDE WE'RE GETTING A DELL!)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJxTHMygpDY

ChrisArchitect 10 hours ago||
Love that t-shirt. Does it have the Meta logo on the back of it? /s
chalmovsky 8 hours ago||
lol. at first i thought this is going to be about what Sun Tzu got wrong and i was ready to refute.
traveltalk 9 hours ago||
that right
flanked-evergl 10 hours ago||
Solaris was worse than Linux, and SPARC was worse than Intel. A lot worse.

Even ZFS was way better integrated with the Linux kernel even while Solaris was supposedly maintained.

pjmlp 10 hours ago||
Not in 2000, at my employer back then, our Linux server was only good as MP3 storage exposed via Samba/NFS.

All development and production deployments was being done across Solaris, Aix and HP-UX in regards to UNIX flavours.

icedchai 10 hours ago|||
I had a similar experience. I forget the exact timing, but it was probably around 2002 - 2003 that Linux felt "good enough." I was at a startup that finally considered putting its "enterprise" stack on Linux.
pjmlp 9 hours ago||
Later in 2003, when I joined CERN, there were still Sun workstations being used, and I was an earlier user of Scientific Linux in 2004.

Afterwards Nokia Networks were still deploying into HP-UX, and the first big Linux project started around late 2005, to Red-Hat.

icedchai 3 hours ago||
I worked at smaller companies that were more risk tolerant. At an earlier startup (late 90's), all the developers ran RedHat on Dells, but the actual production environment was Solaris. I remember going out to a customer site and deploying some massive Sun Enterprise setup. It probably cost a half million USD for the whole configuration. Multiple servers (Enterprise 450 and 250 I think, two of each), multiple storage boxes (StorEdge), Veritas filesystem software, some other Veritas HA system, several Cisco switches, some firewall brand that I forget. All this was connected to a fractional T1 (512kbit.) It never went live due to some contractual issue. All that money wasted.
jeffbee 9 hours ago|||
At my employer in 1999 we were maintaining home-grown binary modification to the Solaris kernel so that TCP segment send and receive were not O(N^2) where N was the number of addresses on the interface :-/ It was, as far as I could tell, an operating system that nobody had ever tried to use before. For anything where we could avoid Sun we used FreeBSD. One of the nice things about the free Unixes of that time was that process and thread creation or destruction were orders of magnitude faster than on Sun. To me, Sun was obviously in a lower category than Linux/FreeBSD/NetBSD.
compiler-guy 9 hours ago|||
The linux kernel didn't even gain SMP until 1996. Solaris was running circles around it both before and after that point. Solaris was vastly more mature and stable.

Of course, after that, Solaris just kept running in very expensive circles while linux went on to make steady progress.

toolslive 8 hours ago|||
it was called "Slow arse". This was because it was rather reluctant in handing out resources (memory fe). Having fought it, I remember the system APIs being really well defined and picky (which was good). At one point, the C compiler had some identity issues "am I 32 bit, or 64 bit?"
whobre 10 hours ago||
Eh, depends when. In 2005, sure. Not so much in the 1990s
icedchai 10 hours ago|||
Yep. Solaris was the Unix for the 90's. I worked at a couple of early ISPs and users demanded Sun Solaris shell servers. At a couple of startups, we built everything on Solaris because Linux wasn't accepted in the enterprise yet.

By the early 2000's, 1) Linux was solid, why bother with Solaris? 2) ebay and other channels were flooded with used Sun hardware from failed dot-com companies anyway. No need to buy new.

rwmj 10 hours ago|||
I was asked to benchmark some Solaris/SPARC vs Linux/Intel hardware in around 1997, and the price-performance of the Linux gear was easily 3+ times better. There wasn't really any comparison, especially when you consider how you could buy white box PCs from a local shop, grab a Red Hat ISO for nothing, and have an installed Linux server in 24 hours, compared to weeks to get something more expensive and worse for the Sun option. Even if Sun had been more reliable, it wouldn't have mattered because you could buy 3x the PCs and keep two in a cupboard, or more likely just replace everything with more numerous and better performing Linux PCs which was what we did.
pjmlp 8 hours ago||
Assuming that the PC was actually supported.

I had to survive with 800x600 on a 1024x768 monitor for quite some time.

fragmede 2 hours ago||
The paucity of screen real estate in those days. Now, a 4k ultra wide monitor is less than $2,000 and has so many pixels!
rajtilakjee 8 hours ago|
Sun? Sun Microsystem?