Ashlee,

If that is a Babelfish Phishworks FISHworks project ... http://www.bbc.co.uk/cult/hitchhikers/guide/babelfish.shtml ...with some out ot this world RNA/DNA Code Injection to turn on the Sun 42 Shine on the Dark Side of the Moon, then boy, are they gonna have to learn how to Party, for what on Earth would there be to stop that Meme Team taking over Global Communications HQ?

I posit Absolutely Nothing ... other than only their own self-doubt/lack of positive good will but that is easily supplied with an Inward Investment/Credit Transfer/click of a mouse, is it not?

Are they man enough for the Turing Trip, do you think, or are they just Daydream Believers rather than Zero dDay Traders....Par Excellence Naturally?

Certainly Wwwe could all do with the Change that a Charge of New World Order Programming would bring. And IT never an Expense to Cost and Balance whenever IT is always an Investment to Reap what you Sow....42 Win Win......and that always has a very Sunny Disposition.

So what is the hold up? Are they missing a Key Driver?

You wouldn't just happen to have Mr and Mrs Sun and Moons e-mail address, would you? I have a little something for their ears only. :-) ... as you already know, surely.

> Why not just slap us in the face?

Just too much fun, Ash.

Well, for certain applicaitons.

I'm currently lookng to build my next fileserver. Frankly, Solaris using ZFS with the RAIDZ virtual pool thingy is my current number one. If Sun would get their fingers out and do capacity expansion for RAIDZ, it would take the low-to-mid storage market by storm. Fully checksummed, atomic storage with no write hole despite software raid?

Solaris is looking pretty good right now, and FUSE support for ZFS just can't match it.

You actually can do a type of RaidZ expansion - you can replace each device in the RaidZ pool with a larger device (one at a time) with the

zpool replace [pool] [original_device] [new_device]

command.

I'm actually doing this exact thing as I post - I just picked up 3 500gb Seagate disks to replace the 3 250gb Seagate disks I'm currently using. Here's the output of 'zpool status':

pool: tarn

state: DEGRADED

status: One or more devices is currently being resilvered. The pool will continue to function, possibly in a degraded state.

action: Wait for the resilver to complete.

scrub: resilver in progress, 3.21% done, 5h34m to go

config:

NAME STATE READ WRITE CKSUM

tarn DEGRADED 0 0 0

raidz1 DEGRADED 0 0 0

replacing DEGRADED 0 0 0

c2d0s0/o UNAVAIL 0 0 0 cannot open

c2d0 ONLINE 0 0 0

c3d0 ONLINE 0 0 0

c4d0 ONLINE 0 0 0

errors: No known data errors

I've used Nexenta, which is basically Ubuntu (which i am not a fan) + Solaris kernel and it was absolutely excellent. A fantastic distro that just as good as Fedora or Debian. It could have a really significant user base too when lots of drivers are brought in. Sun has been smart. It feels like they've said "Hey, people are finding free software better and it builds itself instead of our centrally controlled system" so instead of fighting this, we'll make our contribution to the community and continue to grow our profits the same way Red Hat, Concanical and Novell do. Rather than fighting the community they've embraced it.

I can't help think it does look like it can shake up the existing OSS community. I mean, Linus is a really influential person, who undermined Richard Stallman with his "not free, just open source" talk. Now companies like IBM have already spent millions aligning their brand with Linux and we see the first *viable* rival kernel come into play that can deminish the communities single association. (The Linux Kernel)

I'm sure Richard Stallman will push Solaris strongly to make people acknowledge it's GNU + Kernel, not just the kernel.

And doesn't everything think it would be great to see Microsoft overtaken on the desktop in 2 decades by a system, basically called "GNU/Unix"? That would be awesome.

A current advantage of the Solaris kernel seems to be ZFS. The disadvantage is that it has too few drivers available compared to Linux to support all the hardware in use. Solaris has a useful niche here, which helps those involved in developing kernel/userspace interfaces further to standardise these. Making the system more cleanly modular in this manner can only help everyone, enabling genuine progress through competition between developers targetting common interfaces. BSD Unix variants also provide further choice in supporting essentially the same applications stack. Having viable alternatives in the kernel space can only be good for Linux.

Similar choice exists in other areas, for example OpenOffice or KDE Office productivity suites, Evolution, Thunderbird or Mutt mail clients, Sendmail or Postfix mail servers, KDE or Gnome desktops, all these programs and their users benefit from genuine competition.

from being the company that once touted free hardware with the OS and support contact to now offering an open-source OS in order to drive hardware sales.

I guess, though, they finally figured out where the unit cost of producing hardware + OS really comes in. Way to go, Sun!