

In my book, Sun's officially dead now - lallysingh

They've been dying for quite some time, but now they've EOL'd all their workstations, save 1 single socket Intel box.  Somehow I suspect it's only there b/c it was the only one released in 2008.<p>Note that this is without ever coming through on their promises to let their AMD boxes handle quad-core CPUs (requiring that they just release a firmware upgrade).<p>How's anyone supposed to develop for their stuff?  How can anyone in the scientific/research community even try now?  Why release SPARCs when you don't provide a way to dev for them?  Why even maintain Solaris?<p>It's like they just gave up.  Well, I guess a body will atrophy to death when it doesn't have a brain to keep it going.
======
rcoder
Just out of curiosity...when was the last time _you_ bought a Sun workstation?
If you did, was it SPARC or AMD-based?

Heck, when was the last time you bought any desktop system instead of a laptop
for development or science work? Sun's hardware is very cool, but desktop
machines that neither dirt-cheap nor monster gaming systems are a hard sell
these days.

On the other hand, if you want to develop software that targets the SPARC ISA
-- and there are lots of reasons to do so -- you can easily pick up an entry-
level config of a 1U SPARC server, and rack it up wherever you like.

~~~
lallysingh
AMD, the only sparcs available were obscenely slow IIIis.

Without workstations, how's anyone going to dev for solaris? It's not known
for its hardware support of non-sun hardware.

I've been in an office with a rackmount in it. The rack is huge and it's
_loud_. They used to just shove the guts of their servers into a desktop box
and call them workstations. But I guess that's too much for them now.

------
kqr2
Until they return to profitability, it makes some sense to streamline their
product line. Although they've narrowed it down to a single workstation, it
still comes in different configurations and options.

<http://www.sun.com/desktop/workstation/ultra24/index.xml>

~~~
lallysingh
If they're going to sell x86 workstations, at least sell some more powerful
than the macintosh I can buy down the street.

They've been shoving COTS motherboards into x86 boxes for a few years now, how
about keeping up with the idea of some computational ooomph?

Seriously, what's a reasonable computer scientist supposed to use these days?
I'd rather not spend a day a week fixing/maintaining a linux box for its own
problems, or for tracking down the new compatible binaries, or begging for
help on undocumented software on mailing lists.

~~~
lacker
Just use Ubuntu, things pretty much work. For any reasonably sized project
there is someone else who has already made it work.

------
schtog
What does that mean for Java if you are right?

~~~
jlouis
It dies. Thank god.

Face it: Java played its part in the Theatre. It dragged people onto GC and
provided a simpler C++. It was the logical halfway-path to Lisp. Now, it looks
aged, bloated and bad. Note how few fruitful/succesful Java projects there are
out there compared to other languages...

~~~
jcl
I'm not sure how you're defining "fruitful/successful projects", but the
impression I get is that there are mountains of Java business logic in the
wild... It's practically the new Cobol, and it will be just as hard to kill.

