[Ti] Apple's True Market Share!

[Chris Olson]

Mark C. Langston wrote:

> You're right; it was inappropriate of me to cite a portion of my
> qualifications and background as justification for my arguments; it's
> a kneejerk response to other people trying to assert their position
> from authority, as the other person had.  It's a childish approach,
> and should rightfully be ignored.  When one has facts to support one's

OK, so which post should I reply to?  And where did this come from? 
C'mon, folks!  This was a discussion about whether or not Apple should 
port to x86, and all I did was bring up an example of a an operating 
system that is designed from the ground up to run on 64-bit higher-end 
hardware, then subsequently be ported to x86, and suffer rather 
dramatically in functionality and performance as a result.  I believe 
the same thing would happen with OS X.  I'm just citing my personal 
experience with the x86 port of Solaris because I'm familiar with it.  I 
am not posting any resume's or being childish about it - just relaying 
personal experience.

> argument, one doesn't need such juvenile rhetoric.  My argument
> should and does stand on its own merits:  That Solaris 9 on x86 is
> not yet out, that Early Access is a normal part of Sun's release 
> process, and that Solaris on x86 is fully-functional and perfectly
> fine in a production environment.

I would disagree on being fully funtional.  It suffers a significant 
performace penalty on x86, only supports limited hardware, and Solaris 
is first and foremost a server OS.  As a server, the x86 port is broken 
in several areas, most notably LDAP support, and the fact that it 
crashes more often than Windows 2000 Server.  We've tried it on HP file 
servers and get an average uptime of ~12 days between crashes.  Running 
the c compiler is also an excellent method of getting it to crash. 
Running it alonside linux on identical hardware, reveals how poorly x86 
Solaris really does perform as a server.  If I were allowed to do so, I 
could post several pages of results from extensive bench tests we've 
done on it, on a variety of x86 hardware, but that's comparing it to 
linux, not to OS X on x86, so it probably wouldn't make any difference. 
  But compare to linux on SPARC vs Solaris on it's native hardware, and 
then things are different.  That's *not* what I would call fully 
funtional or production environment quality.

<snipped the rest of this post>

Your recitation of how stable releases of Solaris are developed, tested, 
and released, is correct.
-- 
Chris Olson
Network Administrator
AST Communications,  Inc.
Linux Support                    http://linux.astcomm.net
Barron,  WI   USA