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> ..employees who had given their careers to the company were told of their termination via a pre-recorded call — “robo-RIF’d” This sounds awful, and very long from what would be the legal requirements demanded in the country I live in. What would such a robot call say?
I'd imagine something like "shutdown -h now" or the solaris equivalent
As someone who's never used Solaris or looked into its merits I'm curious: can someone comment on why all the nostalgia for Solaris?
For others, like me, who learned Solaris fairly late (2006), Solaris was a testbed for one of the best operating system technologies out there. Modern filesystem (ZFS), dynamic tracing (dtrace), containerization (zones), dependency management during boot (svc) and virtual network stack (crossbow), have been in solaris way before Linux. Most of modern Linux tools, such as eBPF, systap, btrfs, etc are a direct answer to the research done by Sun.
So some are nostalgic as it's their first experience, others, because it felt like a really good operating system a few years ago (despite it's quirks).
> ..employees who had given their careers to the company were told of their termination via a pre-recorded call — “robo-RIF’d” This sounds awful, and very long from what would be the legal requirements demanded in the country I live in. What would such a robot call say?
I'd imagine something like "shutdown -h now" or the solaris equivalent
Every single first person or second hand account I've heard about Oracle makes like a terrible place to work... is this just people being hyperbolic, or is is truly that terrible?
As someone who's never used Solaris or looked into its merits I'm curious: can someone comment on why all the nostalgia for Solaris?
Now, really that product (SunOS) is not the "Solaris" that exists today. Solaris was a somewhat kludgey merger of the early BSD code with the System V tree from AT&T, done as much to settle legal issues as for market reasons. But nonetheless when we all look back to the golden days of unix, we see Sun's logo.
> ..employees who had given their careers to the company were told of their termination via a pre-recorded call — “robo-RIF’d” Every single first person or second hand account I've heard about Oracle makes like a terrible place to work... is this just people being hyperbolic, or is is truly that terrible?
Support.com is another big offender.
Does the death of Solaris have any implications for the future of SPARC? Seemed like most of the SPARC hardware that Oracle sells/sold exclusively ran Solaris. I could be wrong about that, though.
Edit: grammar.
> ..employees who had given their careers to the company were told of their termination via a pre-recorded call — “robo-RIF’d” Every single first person or second hand account I've heard about Oracle makes like a terrible place to work... is this just people being hyperbolic, or is is truly that terrible?
You answered yourself
I always thought Solaris was a beautiful and memorable name for an operating system. Any connection with the Stanislaw Lem novel (or Tarkovsky movie) was always a bit unclear to me... But I guess a book about futile interactions with a planet-sized alien brain that doesn't care about you other than mysteriously experimenting with your memories is a reasonable metaphor for the Unix user experience.
Soderberghs version is much more reflective of what happened with the emergence of OpenSolaris and Illumos (not to give away any spoilers but apparently forking is a real thing and it lives on). Tarkovskys movie was such a philosophical drivel that I feel asleep. How is the book - is it worth reading? As I understood it neither of films follow the novel very closely.
Also people, please don't downvote parent. It's very fair to say this movie is boring and confusing, and I think it was the very point. Tarkovsky has this style of filming around supernatural / sf things but never actually showing them. Instead, he prefers to explore the anxiety they cause on humans, anxiety which he often represents through long waiting with deceptive conclusions, so I would say that feeling annoyed is quite what is expected from people watching them. It's art, not entertainment.