The World's Most Advanced OS?

A while ago Jenny bought herself a new laptop. There was no way we consider wasting money on a laptop running Windoze (you try buying a non-Apple laptop without paying Windoze tax!), so a MacBook Pro it was (I had some say in the machine's specs).

The Mac has some interesting features, and I like the way everything Just Works. MacOS is a bit different from Solaris, but it's really easy to pick up. So what's the point of this post? Apple touts Mac OS as "the world's most advanced OS", and that patently isn't so. Don't get me wrong: I like Mac OS (although I still find the idea of paying for an OS to be a bit grating), but the world's most advanced OS it isn't.

I'll raise just a couple of points to support my view.

1. Until the recent release of Mac OS Snow Leopard (10.6), Mac OS was a 32-bit only OS (Snow Leopard is apprently 64-bit--I can't confirm this cause I haven't got round to installing it yet). Colour me unimpressed: Solaris has been 64-bit clean the launch of Solaris 7, well over a decade ago! Also, Solaris' 64-bit kernel is quite capable of running brand new 64-bit apps and ancient 32-bit apps side by side. I don't know if Mac OS supports that.

2. Mac OS is based on (IIRC) FreeBSD. Not exactly the first OS that comes to mind for multithreaded scalability. How scalable is Mac OS? I guess we won't know because the biggest machine Apple sells is a piddly dual-socket, quad-core desktop. Big deal! Solaris scales from tiny single-core tiny laptops to massive 64-socket, quad-core behemoths that supports up to 4TB of RAM. And that's from the same OS binary.

3. Apple recently announced the dropping of ZFS, arguably the world's most advanced file system. If your OS doesn't support an adavanced file system like ZFS, then it is not a contender for the world's most advanced OS. It's just that simple.

4. Solaris has support for HW hot swapping that Mac OS can only dream of. In the right machine, if a CPU board dies, you can just replace it on the fly. No downtime, no interruptions.

I could go on, but I think I've made my point. Mac OS is a fine OS and is leagues ahead of Windoze, but the world's most advanced OS it isn't. That crown belongs to Solaris.

Wither Solaris x86 (again)?

So, there's a message to Sun's customer's in the Wall Street Journal, highlighting some of Oracle's plans should their acquisition of Sun be approved (at this writing, the deal is pending EU approval). The ad states that Oracle plans to:

1. Spend more money developing SPARC than Sun does now;

2. Spend more money developing Solaris than Sun does now;

3. Have more than twice as many hardware specialists selling and servicing SPARC/Solaris systems than Sun does now;

4. Dramatically improve Sun’s hardware performance by tightly integrating Oracle software with Sun hardware.

Notice that mention of Sun's AMD and Intel x86 systems is suspiciously absent (and has been absent from all public words I've seen from Oracle). Does this mean anything? Sun tried to can Solaris x86 (concentrating on big SPARC systems) a few years ago which resulted in a massive backlash which forced them to reverse their decision, so one would hope that Sun's new owners wouldn't duplicate that mistake...

Rhetorical questions are fine, but let me ask a direct question to those in the know: What are Oracle's plans for Sun's x86 hardware support if/when they take over? Given their silence on this issue (as far as I've seen, anyway), I don't think it's an unfair question.

If Oracle has no plans to drop support for x86 (hardware or software), perhaps they should be a bit more vociferous about it.

Lots of old Sun stuff free or cheap to a good home!

Well, the time has come for a long-overdue clear out and tidy up of my office, and regretably some stuff has to go. :-( It would be much easier to just chuck this stuff away, but given that at least some of it might have some historical curiosity, I wanted to see if anyone was interested in it. I don't want much, if anything, for this stuff (although I ask that interested people pick up the tab for shipping), provided it's to a good home.

Here's a partial list of the stuff I'm disposing of (there are still boxes of stuff I need to sort through). If interested, drop me an email!

* Insignia Solutions SoftPC 1.1 for Sun 3 systems. Complete package as far as I can tell.

* Pretty much complete SunOS 3.5 manual set. No binders, and most of it is still shrink-wrapped. Still in it's original shipping carton!

* SunOS 3.5 Export for the 68020, on 5 QIC 24(?) tapes.

* UK Sun Express catalogues, Issue 2 to Issue 20.

* SunOS 4.0.3 Export Upgrade, on 2 QIC24 tapes.

* Various old SunSolve and Catalyst CD ware CDs.

* Various Solaris media kits (mostly different Solaris 9 releases IIRC).

I'd really like the SunOS 3.5 tapes and manuals to go to a Sun museum if at all possible. I'll be listing more stuff in the coming weeks/months, so stay tuned!

Alas poor Orac (I knew it well)

Wow. I can't believe it's been 18 months (give or take) since I last posted to my blog. What a slacker!

Much has changed in the last 18 months: I found a great programming job here in Kelowna only to be downsized about 18 months later (damned economy), and Sun is in the process of being acquired by Oracle! And to top it off, my beloved shiny red Acer Ferrari 3400 laptop died last Thursday. I tried all sorts of reset incantations, removed the battery, etc., etc., no no avail. I am now the proud owner of a shiny red brick (whose hostname was orac, hence the title of this blog entry).

I started looking at various laptops, with the intent of buying one to run Solaris. Windoze is still not an option for me! Finding an appropriate one was kinda hard, but the problem was solved when The Boss (that'd be Jenny, my wife) mentioned that she was hankering after a Mac so that she could hook her iPhone up to iTunes. She had some birthday money to spend, so (to cut a long story short) last night we ordered a 15.4" MacBook Pro with a 2.66 GHz CPU, 4 GB of RAM, and a 128 GB SSD (the speed increase of my Ferrari was phenominal when I installed an SSD into it, so there was no way I was going to order a new computer without one!). It should be here in the next week or so...

Third PAM article published

My 3rd article about PAM on Solaris was recently published. I'm currently working on the fourth (and final) part.

Enjoy!

Happy Birthday to me!

Well, today I reached the big four-oh. Yep, it's my 40th birthday today. To celebrate, Jenny and I treated me to a shiny new 80GB Playstation 3, plus accessories (i.e., an additional SixAxis controller and the Bluetooth Blu-ray remote control).

I also got a bunch of movies on Blu-ray, a couple of movies on UMD (for my PSP), and the game Ridge Racer 7. I'm addicted to Ridge Racer on my PSP, so the latter should provide endless hours of entertainment! :-)

I have a new job!

A couple of weeks ago, I started a new job at a company called Signalink Technologies. It's a bit of a departure from my more recent Solaris sysadmin gigs--I'm back to my C programmer roots!

The stuff I'm working on is about as far away from Solaris servers and workstations as one can get: I'm developing software for embedded systems, where resources are scarce (the chip I'm working with has a massive 6K of RAM!), and bit twiddling and register shuffling are the order of the day.

So far, it's great. I'm working with a great bunch of guys, doing some interesting work (which will only get more interesting as time passes), in an environment that suits me just fine (think Silicon Valley style start up). The job is well paid, and best of all, it's a mere 10-minute drive away in my own town of Kelowna! No more travelling to God knows where to earn a few shekels; hurrah! :-)

Despite being far removed from the Solaris world in my current professional capacity (though I hasten to add that I'm running build 70 of Nevada on my desktop--no Windoze for me!), I'll still be involved with the OpenSolaris community as much as I can. And I intend to keep writing articles for SDN, so it's good job the days are getting shorter (relaxing in the sun becomes less of a temptation when it's dark out!)...