On May 9, 2004, at 1:32 PM, John Hebert wrote: > > When I was at USL (a long time ago), we had Sun boxen > for user terminals (guess they still do), and those > boxes worked great. You could run apps and store data, > though the data was kept on a central server, not the > local machine. Expensive, but SunOS was a heck of a > lot more secure than Windows 3.1 (at that time). The > Sun optical mouse in 1990 was like science fiction to > me! >
They are still expensive (even with our 50% discount for edu) but are more stable than anything I have ever laid my hands on. They are also still pretty secure. Just like anything else, you have to keep them patched, but they are rock solid and I have had over a year uptime in a pretty dynamic environment. The nice thing about Solaris is that I learn how to do something and then have to relearn it every year because they are just so damn stable and reliable (hardware _and_ software) that I set up a service/machine/etc. and walk away and never have to touch it again. The damn things just run and run... As for the optical mouse, they still have high quality mice (I use them on a lot of PCs) but I will never understand why they went away from optical mice. They have pretty standard three button mice with the roller ball. I must say, that with Sun, you really get what you pay for. Too bad the company just went through another round of layoffs. I bumped into our local Sun service guy in the mall Friday and he told me that Sun laid off another few thousand people last week. I really do not know if they are going to be around much longer. They need focus. Hopefully Schwartz can turn the company around. Shannon
