Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris

dtrace.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 279 posts

Re: The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris

#171

Post by tarsinge »

arnarbi wrote: post #95
closeparen wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uh, doesn't everything you do with a database reduce to CRUD? I understand that sometimes you do the composition of many CRUD operations, but this is still CRUD.

Not at all. RDBMS features were critical in getting performance and scale once upon a time. Sharding, access control, authentication, indexed views, fk relationships and other constraint enforcement, cascading updates and deletes, efficient data management with stored procs, caching, etc etc. My first job was even writing dynamic web apps entirely in Informix.

> once upon a time. RDBMS features were critical in getting performance and scale once upon a time. Sharding, access control, authentication, indexed views, fk relationships and other constraint enforcement, cascading updates and deletes...

Do you think of better ways to handle this nowadays? Is it more effective/maintainable to do this in the app layer?

Re: The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris

#172

Post by kpil »

fusiongyro wrote: post #145
digitalzombie wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 an…

Using Linux and GNU (and to some extent FreeBSD) was such a relief after a few years as an ordinary (non-root) Solaris user.

Re: The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris

#173

Post by qubex »

fusiongyro wrote: post #145
digitalzombie wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 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.

Re: The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris

#174

Post by frou_dh »

ptero wrote: post #75
topkeker wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately the world doesn't run off technical ability though. Oracle is a mammoth because it's proficient at extracting value and profit from its businesses. Don't get me wrong, I agree with you in principle, but it's the equivalent of someone destroying artwork and making a gain from it and wondering how they get away with it when the world doesn't care about art, they care about money.

IIRC, Oracle got a huge boost from US government as it was the semi-official database engine developed (for the Navy?) with taxpayer funds, then deployed (again with taxpayer funds). I'm not complaining, the US probably needed a better DB engine, but it was partly luck, partly backroom agreements that launched and supported Oracle for years. That said, maybe I got my facts badly mixed up.

I think it's SQLite that had Navy origins.

Re: The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris

#176

Post by snw »

tannhaeuser wrote: post #175

Is there no chance of saving Solaris? If Oracle doesn't have a commercial interest in it, why don't they transfer it to Apache or other foundation? It's not an unusual thing to do, and Solaris devs could make a living by support and maintenance.

Oracle has been slowly killing Solaris for some time. At the same time the community has already saved it - this is what illumos is about. It exists and is open source.

Re: The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris

#177

Post by artursapek »

cyphar wrote: post #151
artursapek wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

some goodwill. Microsoft earned a lot of with all of the open sourcing they've been doing in the last few years.

To paraphrase Bryan Cantrill, don't fall into the trap of anthropomorphising Larry Ellison. Your lawnmower doesn't care about community goodwill either.

What? I'm saying it matters in the community of developers - and it does.

Re: The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris

#178

Post by trashtoss »

lobster_johnson wrote: post #146
boondaburrah wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fairytal…

Fiasco is also first contact gone wrong and is quite something...like almost an anti-star-trek episode.

It may be an easier entrypoint than Solaris, at cost of arguably not being as "deep" in its reflections.

Re: The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris

#179

Post by privong »

asveikau wrote: post #129
privong wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would be fun. Now you have me wondering if I still have those Solaris 7 disks in a drawer somewhere...

If you do and you happen to be in the bay area, I may need to borrow them. :-) I thought about that machine and I wondered which would be more interesting... Trying to get a recent OS on there or maintaining a more typical 90s setup? Somehow I think the latter is more fun.

I'd agree that the 90s setup would be more fun. Unfortunately I don't think my disks would help though – if I remember correctly, they only had the x86 version of Solaris 7.

Re: The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris

#180

Post by mark_l_watson »

oelmekki wrote: post #30
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.

I didn't read the book, but being boring is Tarkovsky's touch, so it sounds pretty safe to say it comes from him. 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, anxi…

We all like different things, which is good. Personally, I have watched the US version of Solaris about 6 or 7 times, and the Russian version twice, and read the book. A planet size consciousness, messing with people - great premise for a story.
Post reply on HN