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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

#231

Post by fusiongyro »

qubex wrote: post #173
fusiongyro wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 an…

If you think Solaris is user-hostile, you should really try out IBM's AIX ("Unix by drunk aliens"). I haven't had great experiences with Irix either.

Sure. But AIX is something you are forced to use, not something you opt-in for. All the remaining commercial Unixes are kind of in that boat.

People my age and younger just didn't get much access to commercial Unix environments when we were growing up. Once we got into industry, we found it hard to see the justification for high Unixes when we had experienced good results with low Unixes. So the low Unixes have mostly won the war. This story repeats time and time again in our industry: the freest foo conquers the non-free foo, even if the non-free foo is technically superior.

Re: The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris

#232

Post by fusiongyro »

DonHopkins wrote: post #208
fusiongyro wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 an…

I guess you never had the pleasure of using a Pyramid Technology Corporation 90x RISC-based minicomputer running OSx, which supported BSD and System V at the same time in parallel universes, and had patented "conditional symbolic links" to support dynamically switching between the two by changing an environment variable. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbolic_link#Variable_symboli... >Pyramid Technology's OSx Operati…

Terrifying!

Re: The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris

#233

Post by lobster_johnson »

DonHopkins wrote: post #223
lobster_johnson wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fairytal…

I really loved the movie The Congress, directed by Ari Folman, an adaptation of The Futurological Congress. Like Blade Runner's relationship to Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, it was a lot different than the book, but shares some deep ideas, and stands on its own as a great movie. The scene in the USC ICT's motion capture studio was riveting, with Robin Wright playing a partly fictionalized version of herself, a…

Hmm. I watched about 15 minutes of it, and thought it was very amateurish, and the reviews aren't great. From the clips I've seen, the animation is also pretty terrible.

As far as I've read, plot has absolutely zero to do with The Futurological Congress. The only similarity is that there's something in the movie called the "Futurological Congress" and that there's some kind of attack on it.

If you think it's worth seeing, maybe I'll give it another go.

Re: The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris

#234

Post by DonHopkins »

buserror wrote: post #165
InTheArena wrote: post #65

Solaris, hell, I still mourn the death of SunOS (esp verison 4.1.3) at the hands of Solaris,

Ah... I loved SunOS! Fondly remember my Sun Station 3/80, nothing like that fancy SPARC processor in there, a good solid 68040 like real men used back then ;-) Mind you, I still use the 'sun' font when booting my linux kernel on framebuffers, I always loved that font.

"Love your country but never trust its government."

https://nohats.ca/wordpress/blog/2016/01/24/why-the-sun-spar...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10966571

Re: The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris

#235

Post by DonHopkins »

lobster_johnson wrote: post #233
DonHopkins wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really loved the movie The Congress, directed by Ari Folman, an adaptation of The Futurological Congress. Like Blade Runner's relationship to Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, it was a lot different than the book, but shares some deep ideas, and stands on its own as a great movie. The scene in the USC ICT's motion capture studio was riveting, with Robin Wright playing a partly fictionalized version of herself, a…

Hmm. I watched about 15 minutes of it, and thought it was very amateurish, and the reviews aren't great. From the clips I've seen, the animation is also pretty terrible. As far as I've read, plot has absolutely zero to do with The Futurological Congress. The only similarity is that there's something in the movie called the "Futurological Congress" and that there's some kind of attack on it. If you think it's worth se…

Something happens later that I'm not going to say anything about. ;) Give it another try!

Re: The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris

#236

Post by nickbauman »

I know of a least one major company (fortune 30) that requires solaris for several safety critical systems products (think, for example, but not necessarily, commercial aircraft control systems) with thousands of active installations all over the world. Without it, they can't maintain these systems.

Re: The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris

#237

Post by peterwwillis »

titzer wrote: post #155

If there is a one phrase takeaway from this excellent essay it would be Brian's terse and apt characterization of Oracle as a "remorseless corporate sociopath."

Corporations do not have remorse and they can not be sociopathic.

Corporations are like ant colonies. They are bodies of people who are bound together in order that the whole outlasts the individual, in order to serve the needs of the group. They are made up of individuals with feelings, but they can't "feel" things on their own. They can reflect the shared feelings of the group, but this is just a reflection, like seeing the image of trees reflected in a body of water.

The author is obviously very upset about the whole thing, but personifying a corporation is illogical (even if the Supreme Court disagrees with me)

Re: The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris

#238

Post by thanatropism »

emmelaich wrote: post #127
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…

I always sensed a great tension between the engineers and the business people at Sun, to the detriment of both. The business didn't know how to drive and target sales, and the engineers built brilliant things (ZFS, dtrace, mdb, zones, internal high availability, firewall*) that customers weren't asking for. [edited to add firewall, that first gen that no-one used because it was so complex]

This is not a good look on the engineers.

Business is fundamentally uncertain, and decomposing failure into avoidable and unavoidable factors is very very hard. This is even harder in industries dominated by network externalities like computer platforms.

On the other hand: if engineering wasn't serving the stated business purpose (things that customers want, at least as far as business can see) but doing semi-academic research on the company dime... well, it's an indirect misappropriation of funds, however cool the results turned out.

Analogy: Sugarcube Industries is in the business of farm built infrastructure and its flagship product is a barn that can comfortably house N horses cutting down on injuries, promoting weight gain by proper thermal environment. I don't know much about horses, bear with me.

Engineering is asked to design such a horse barn. Maybe it's fundamentally impossible to fix heat flows in such and such weather or idiotic in general to try and improve horse health by those means. Maybe business even understood market research wrong, and what people wanted was barns with hooks where farmstaff can hang horse ponchos that will be manually deployed in times of need.

It's a bad look on engineering if instead of delivering the best horse barn on the market, they come up with a three-storey optimized IVF-incubator-horse feeding operation.

----

Unix (a decades-long project whose capital costs are inestimable when considering all the failed companies and free labor) nearly lost to Windows NT because the latter had hooks where sysadmins could hang those needed ponchos.

Re: The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris

#239

Post by astine »

mrpippy wrote: post #73
oxryly1 wrote: post #64

I hate to be facile, but if Sun and Solaris were so great and Oracle was this known bad place, why did they let the Oracle people in the door in the first place? Maybe sell to someone else?

Oracle paid $5.6 billion for Sun. If someone else wanted to pay that much they could have submitted an offer too. The board cares about maximizing shareholder value, not about the future of any ongoing technologies. Sun had been in discussions with IBM for months about an acquisition, but I believe the offer was lower and there were antitrust concerns (they did compete directly in a lot of markets) [1]. I suspect the…

I was a Solaris admin at the time of the acquisition and some of the Sun folks I was in contact with were glad that it was at least not IBM that had bought them out because IBM had always been their primary 'enemy.'
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