> My first Sun was a Sun 3/60, I loved it, it was a great workstation and I've > used it for years, it even (back then) seemed fast. Since then, things have > quite changed, computers got somewhat faster and it's time for me to find > the "Perfect" OpenSolaris workstation.
[ WARNING - B L A T A N T O P I N I O N S ] Get any decent AMD64 box. Do not buy new as the value of a new computer is zero at some point in the near future. The value of a used AMD64 box is also zero at some point in the future. In either case you lose all money invested so simply buy what you need today because all computers are throw-away land fill junk within five years or less. Same for cars unless its a Ferrari or something special. Never buy new. Leave that for fools. If you want to buy a new system then I suggest the following : don't. Figure out what you think you need in terms of horsepower and go looking for it. Get a cost for a dual proc tier one brand name machine with 2GB of RAM. Dual disks, I prefer SCSI, are nice. Dual gigabit Broadcom ethernet is nice. Ensure that you can drop in a decent NVidia PCI graphics option later on if you desire. Otherwise most graphics works fine. For sound just pop in a SoundBlaster Live! card I guess. Most onboard sound chips work fairly well for general usage. All in all, maybe $1500 max. With surface scratches and some mileage. Then go price up the cost of a new all singing and dancing system. Subtract the two and consider the money you just saved. Now consider that money as being spent already and go buy all the Sun stock you can get with those dollars. The symbol is SUNW and just call up your bank and tell them that you need to buy as much as you can with your money saved. Don't get shy and do ask questions. Figure out how to buy that stock and buy it. You will thank me later. The good news is that by the time your machine is worth zero you can go get a new top of the line machine with your Sun stock that tripled in that time. Most likely a whole lot more. The bad news is that you missed out on the real meat of the money to be made because you didn't buy a boatload of Sun stock 2 years ago. As for build times and speed. Who cares? It will take 2 to 3 hours on a blistering fast machine for a non-debug build these days and that will shrink as faster processors come out. It is a factor that means nothing. Every machine and processor today is faster than anything you had five years ago. The same will be true in five years. But you will have a pile of investment equity. If you need to buy a ton of workstations or desktops for an office then I suggest you look here : http://www.sun.com/sunray/sunray2/index.xml Save power, save the planet and save money too. Get the Sun Ray happening in your office and once people see it and get the concept you will be a hero. The next time a PC is stolen from your office then imagine the surprise of the idiot when they get home and its a SunRay! Ooops. No data lost. No security risk. No problem. The boss loves you, your client data and reputation is solid. You look like a freaking genius. questions ? Dennis _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
