Sunshiner?
I have a single open Solaris box, and no SPARC hardware. I'm a Microsoft and Redhat man through and through. White box and run everything on a shoestring budget.
If you think for a second I’m a “sunshiner” just because I find the “Matt Bryant vs. Sun and beating the HP drum” bit more tired than Apple bashing, then I got some sad news for you, friend. Whole other world than the one I live in. I get my chances to play with mainframes, and (sadly) Itanium junk, but it’s nothing I have deployed on any of the networks I maintain 24/7. I even have to support a few when some buddies of mine are on vacation and I cover them.
There’s no question of ignoring you because you “tell me what I don’t want to hear.” Since I don’t use *any* of that crap, I actually couldn’t care less if HP or Sun or IBM won, lost, or burned and died. It’s all completely irrelevant.
What does get under my skin is the “hey, here’s an article about this sector of technology that I only get to dabble in. Cool, let’s see what the comments say, maybe I’ll learn something.” In most threads, I even do learn something, the debates and comments are useful and informative.
It generally works that way until I see “Sun” (or “Oracle” now,) in the article anywhere, and then see “Matt Bryant” in the comments. Any article with those two elements is a gigantic “THREAD DERAILED” stamp of troll, counter-troll, and spiralling arguments and brutal sarcasm.
If I take enough time to filter the troll/counter-troll MB/Sun noise from these threads, there often is good information to be extracted, but it just takes a lot more effort. I’ve no stake in any of the companies or technologies involved here. Personally, I think HP are a bunch of greedy, evil, soulless bastards with nothing approaching corporate ethics and worse hardware. They are superseded only be Ellison and his pet company who I trust even less. (Frankly, I can’t think of a thing Oracle made that price/performance is worth it.) Sure, if you want super-ultra-high-end, then you are talking to HP, Oracle and IBM. Find, the ultra-super-deluxe high end can have ‘em.
In the low end and midrange, all three of those companies can take a flying leap, and everything they ever created. They don’t help me do my job at all, and since I am most like to be an SME admin for the rest of my existence, they won’t be helping me do my job ever.
That doesn’t mean that it isn’t part of my job to learn about them. Learn everything there is to know about every facet of the IT world that I can. Keeping informed and abrest of as much as possible gives me a competitive edge, and it lets me know when things change.
A great example actually is HP. As much as I personally despise much of the business practices of HP, they are still eleventeen squillion times better under Hurd than they were under Fiorina. If I didn’t constantly update my knowledge of these companies, then I would have stuck with my first impression of them, and never considered them for a second for anything.
As it stands now, while I have problems with them, there are certain areas I feel they have reformed enough that you could almost trust buying equipment from them and believing it wasn’t made form the cheapest possible parts with virtually zero hope of making it past the warrantee period.
Who knows, maybe in ten years, they will have put the bad old days of Fiorina and Hurd behind them, and started producing the best gear on the planet: stable, cheap, and ready to live for ten years without blinking.
Until then, I’d just love to be able to read threads about these companies without the entire thing getting derailed by the ten tonne Sun thread troll.
If that seems mean, or makes me seem like I am “a sunshiner,” I’m sorry. I just want to learn, and having read literally years of Matt Bryant Sun threads, I can’t consider any of the cyclic arguing that goes on in these things remotely objective unbiased or reliable information. I don’t say this to be mean. I’m just tired of having to spend my time on Ars’ HPC forums to learn anything about this stuff, when El Reg is part of my daily routine, and the forum threads are right here.
It’s like having to go to the coffee shop down the street to get a packet of sugar for your coffee because there’s always this guy sitting right in front of the sugar packets at the excellent coffee shop that’s in your work.
Again, this isn’t meant as an attack, or to be mean…but things like “Slowaris?” Come on, man…please? I recognise that you have a lot of experience with the big heavies of IT, but how many years of this before we can just discuss these subjects like adults? No name calling, no vitriol, just an honest sharing of knowledge without the crap.
After all this time, I think we get how you feel about the guys who ran Sun, and how you feel about Itanium, and HP and all the rest. It’d done. Done and dead and dusted a long, long time ago.
So no; no “sunshiner.” I’m not one now, nor will I ever be, and isn’t about time to drop the whole ridiculous moniker at all? I mean, for the love $deity, the company doesn’t even exist anymore.
Anyways, this is a huge rambling rant now, but consider it an honest request: enough with the pathetic names and vitriol man.
Please?
Biting the hand that feeds IT
