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The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris

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Re: The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris

#141

Post by watersb »

lobster_johnson wrote: post #106
type0 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The book is superb. But to appreciate the book have to understand that Lem, in his serious mode (he also wrote comedies and light-hearted adventures, which are quite different), is not very concerned about plot, nor about most things American sci-fi has always been about: There are no heroics, no politics, no space wars, no McGuffins, and there's only minimal world-building. Lem is an engaging writer, but also a some…

Yes, yes yes. Thank you for this defense of one of my favorite meditation-as-novels.

In a similar tone, I actually love the Tartovsky film. A very weird piece of work, and a hell of a thing to experience a few weeks before a summer spent in Russia...

Re: The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris

#142

Post by pjmlp »

tatersolid wrote: post #78
harry8 wrote: post #50

Bryan Cantrill give a great lecture. I saw him give an overview of DTrace a decade or more ago and remain impressed. Check him out. https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=bryan+cantrill It's sad that we live in a world where a company doing good , innovative and useful tech is gobbled up by a company like Oracle who should not exist and do largely on their ability to con ignorant senior management and even more…

The product that built Oracle the company, their RDBMS, is frankly one of the worst pieces of "enterprise" software I've ever encountered. Oracle's only redeeming quality seems to be free golf at nice country clubs paid for by Oracle salespeople.

Open source databases still don't have a developer environment that matches what Oracle or SQL Server offer.

Same applies to their stored procedures languages and deployment options.

Re: The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris

#143

Post by valarauca1 »

bad_user wrote: post #130
magnawave wrote: post #112

At the end of the day, Sun/Oracle has to be able to make revenue from Solaris for them to keep paying those peoples' salaries. Is your startup / company deploying on Solaris? Nope of course you aren't - who is?! Pretty much nobody nowadays - w3techs.com shows Solaris at 0.0005% for webservers for example. Everyone talks about how great it is(to be sure there are some small bits that are pretty dang amazing) - yet for…

If you let the product die with a not giving a fuck attitude, of course nobody is going to use it. For example when was the last marketing campaign that you can remember for Solaris? Besides, they've started killing Solaris since 2010: http://garrett.damore.org/2010/08/hand-may-be-forced.html > And Linux and the BSDs are definitely better for those selective code gifts! AFAIK DTrace and ZFS can't be used with Linux d…

ZFS can't be added to the kernel. You need to install the kernel module yourself.

Ubuntu packages it in the default distro, your base install can have ZFS as root with no configuration.

For Debian/Fedora I think you need "non-free" packages added.

Re: The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris

#144

Post by hindsightbias »

rodgerd wrote: post #58

Twenty years ago, if you'd said that the surviving commercial *ixen would be AIX and HP/UX, you'd have been drummed out of the Unix Beard club.

Research and fabs. Once HP had gone Itanium, we knew it would come down to Intel vs IBM. Sun never had pockets deep enough.

Winning Enterprise may be a pyrrhic victory, but we'll see how many server architectures are left in a few years.

Re: The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris

#145

Post by fusiongyro »

digitalzombie wrote: post #134
magnawave wrote: post #112

At the end of the day, Sun/Oracle has to be able to make revenue from Solaris for them to keep paying those peoples' salaries. Is your startup / company deploying on Solaris? Nope of course you aren't - who is?! Pretty much nobody nowadays - w3techs.com shows Solaris at 0.0005% for webservers for example. Everyone talks about how great it is(to be sure there are some small bits that are pretty dang amazing) - yet for…

> At the end of the day, Sun/Oracle has to be able to make revenue from Solaris for them to keep paying those peoples' salaries. This is a crop out that you're giving on behalf of Oracle. Oracle does this all the time. It's their modus operandi. They buy companies/technologies out, milk them for license fees and let it trudge along until it stops making money anymore and either close shop or abandon it to Apache Foun…

I dunno. I used it a little in college in the early 2000s, along with anything else I could get my hands on, and it seemed to me to be user hostile even by Unix standards. When I worked with Linux, *BSD etc. or Irix, things tended to make more sense.

It was difficult to get much experience with Solaris or the other commercial Unixes because you usually had to have particular hardware. Even when Solaris became free and ran on x86, it was picky about hardware. By then it seemed to me that even running BSD was kind of an uphill battle, if you wanted a VPS or something.

I'm not a completely neutral party. Sun totally botched a job interview process with me when I graduated, and I came away feeling that there must be a lot of internal confusion. Their public side certainly gave that impression too. I knew they had cool technology in Solaris, like dtrace and zones, but apart from the names you almost never saw someone who attributed their success to these technologies. And then of course Oracle and the slow death.

Re: The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris

#146

Post by lobster_johnson »

boondaburrah wrote: post #87
abetusk wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And "His Master's Voice" is one of my favorite books. I totally agree, Lem deserves a place right along Gibson.

If Lem deserves a place among Gibson, I guess I gotta pick some up

I recommend starting with Solaris.

The Futurological Congress is also a lot of fun; it's one of his comedies, a satiric look at futurism.

His Master's Voice is advanced level Lem. It's less a novel than a fictional autobiography of a scientist, and while the subject matter is fascinating, it's a bit dry.

The Cyberiad is a classic, but very different and not really sci-fi. It's a collection of absurd, surreal fairytales about a pair of robots. It contains math puzzles and rhymes and lots of weird stuff.

Fiasco, Memoirs Found in a Bathtub, Tales of Pirx the Pilot and Star Diaries are supposed to be good.

I found Eden (one of his early works) to be a little juvenile and poorly written. It, too, is about first contact gone wrong.

Re: The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris

#147

Post by easytiger »

magnawave wrote: post #112

At the end of the day, Sun/Oracle has to be able to make revenue from Solaris for them to keep paying those peoples' salaries. Is your startup / company deploying on Solaris? Nope of course you aren't - who is?! Pretty much nobody nowadays - w3techs.com shows Solaris at 0.0005% for webservers for example. Everyone talks about how great it is(to be sure there are some small bits that are pretty dang amazing) - yet for…

> Is your startup / company deploying on Solaris?

For precisely the reason of Oracle's direction from day1

Re: The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris

#148

Post by jabl »

tankenmate wrote: post #27
spilk wrote: post #11

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.

Fujitsu as been the largest manufacturer of SPARC chips for a number of years now. They make super computers (and mainframes) with SPARC chips although for how much longer... Their latest major announcement along side Oracle was in May this year.

At least on the supercomputing side, they're switching to ARM: http://www.fujitsu.com/global/Images/post-k-supercomputer-ov...

(no idea about whether mainframes will continue using SPARC)

Re: The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris

#149

Post by edem »

type0 wrote: post #4
pavlov wrote: post #2

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.

I read the book several times. I think it is a good read. I did not fell asleep on the Tarkovsky movie I just hit quit after looking at the road scene at the start for 20 minutes. You can try the George Clooney variant it is a bit better. The interesting part is that both movies have their own interpretation of the book, so it is like having 3 different stories.

Re: The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris

#150

Post by cyphar »

crudbug wrote: post #83

Oracle should open source it back, probably donate it to Apache.

Why? illumos already exists and has been developed by a community and several commercial backers for almost a decade. Oracle Solaris has just been causing confusion for the free software fork (based on the original sources that were published before the Oracle acquisition of Sun).
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