Posts by Matt McLeod 3 publicly visible posts • joined 15 Jun 2007
The desktop-y bits in OpenSolaris are a bit of a diversion. The interesting things from the perspective of a Solaris admin are IPS and bootable ZFS. All that desktop crud is typically first against the wall when looking for clusters to explicitly rip out in the Jumpstart config.
Solaris is still a first-class server OS and that really is where the money is. Drivers for J. Random Laptop NIC ought to be a pretty low priority.
Trying to dodge paying for a new license going SPARC->x86 isn't really the issue -- I doubt this software is exactly cheap -- rather it's that many sites are running software that is no longer supported, either the vendor has kicked the bucket or they've simply decided it's too much like hard work to keep supporting it.
And in any event if you're buying smaller machines Sun is about to screw you over by dropping all the low-end UltraSPARC gear. All you'll have left is Niagra, and while I'm sure that's very nice for web servers it's not so hot for big chunky batch processing jobs. Being able to take your existing binaries and have them "just work" on something like an X4100 is a nice option to have.
Not that I'll believe this really works until I've seen it for myself, which may never happen as we're freeing ourselves from dependence on SPARC and moving as much as we can to Solaris on x64.
Safari's feature-set looks basic compared to Opera or Firefox+extensions, but not compared to IE. And we all know which browser still dominates. That's the feature-set you need to beat in the first instance.
Safari's advantage over Opera/Firefox right now is that the interface is very straightforward. If they'd come to their senses and quit trying to emulate OS X on Windows they could have a very nice browser.
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