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Technology Stocks : All About Sun Microsystems -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: William T. Katz who wrote (7444)	1/29/1998 6:01:00 PM
From: Dan Good	Respond to of 64865

Bill, Yesterday, I had responded to the reasoning to short SUNW with a lengthy reply on the T/A of the stock and risks of shorting at this time, but being on a Windows platform the system crashed during submitting and the response was lost.(true story). However, the news today, while not totally new has brought some selling in the stock. And could cause further selling tommorow. Long term though, I see good returns with the buy and hold philosophy. The licensing of Java will bring high margin profits and MOTs adoption can only bring further implementation of the language in other applications. Dan

To: William T. Katz who wrote (7444)	1/29/1998 10:09:00 PM
From: batskinner	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 64865

NT vs UNIX workstations for engineering: ... However, I think the crash argument is overargued since occasional crashes, although undesirable, are (1) a function of the applications you are using [how well-written are they], (2) your NT workstation configuration, and (3) not as productive as they seem.. That depends on your application. I don't want my system crashing while I'm running a simulation, even if I can do a restart from the last simulation state written to disk. My experience has been that if a system crashes enough times, eventually, you're going to start to have disk and OS problems. I had this happen with one NT installation. I had to reinstall NT even though I had Emergency Repair disks. No fun. My perspective is from dealing with very large medical images which require lots of image processing, graphical manipulation, and various types of optimization. I assume this is the simulated annealing you referred to. These really run in less than a minute on a PC? My only (minor) exposure to the use of simulated annealing has been in artificial neural net (ANN) training. Those tend to be ghastly "pain in the rear" problems that take substantial computational effort. I don't fiddle with ANNs much now; I saw too much hype and misapplication. In fact ANNs remind me of stocks in a way. I would see people defending the use of ANNs for situations in which they were clearly not the best or even an appropriate solution method. People would rationalize and hype them alot -- much like stocks. They'd stick by their guns no matter what the facts seemed to suggest. (Don't get me wrong; there are of course many excellent applications for ANNs. I'm getting off topic though.) I've found that NT crashes can be very tied to the type of workstation you are using. I agree with this statement. But this can be interpretted two ways. On one hand, it can be used to explain why NT is flakey on some systems but better on others. On the other hand, I think you can argue that this is one of the advantages of going with Sun. You know what hardware you're going to be running on (assuming you go with Sparc and not x86) and you know it'll be reliable. think NT 4.0 is better than NT 3.51. Hopefully, NT 5.0 will be even more bulletproof. Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought that NT4.0 was actually less bulletproof than 3.51. As I understand it, certain stability features (for lack of a better term) had to be relaxed in order to accomodate the Win95 style shell (GUI). As for NT5.0, I assume it will be an improvement, but won't Solaris have also improved during the same time period? More importantly though, I think you also have to consider the richness of the environment. And there is a definite trend in porting all kinds of applications to NT. NT has probably the best software development environment available with multiple vendors all provide excellent products. I think this is the best argument to be made for WinNT. The fact of the matter is that there is more software available for NT than for Solaris. This is why I have an NT box on my desk along with a Sun box. For word processing, spreadsheets, presentation preparation, and such, there just isn't as much software available for Solaris. I'd say this is the biggest road block to Solaris gaining wider acceptance in the lower end market. Then again, the low end market isn't where Sun makes their money right now. One thing is for sure -- this battle will be raging for some time to come (IMHO). --Batskinner

To: William T. Katz who wrote (7444)	1/29/1998 10:55:00 PM
From: paul	Respond to of 64865

" Hopefully, NT 5.0 will be even more bulletproof" William do you know that NT 5.0 will have 25 million lines of code - NT 4.0 has 10 million. In other words it is much larger than MVS or for that matter Solaris and all of it unproven and years before it gets stable. While Hope springs eternal in the breast of Microsoft apologists - 10 out of 12 ISP's who depend on their servers use Solaris as their Backbone. The 2 of them that dont are IBM and MSN. Guess which one is known for unreliable service and frequent outages?

To: William T. Katz who wrote (7444)	2/3/1998 5:51:00 AM
From: Chung Yang	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 64865

Let me play the devils advocate. NT is actually not a bad solution for running every day task and some engineering application (such as simple mechanical design and image manipulation ... etc) .. because it is low cost. (Some may argue that point with the introduction of the ULTRA5/10 line which are unix stations with PC price tags). However, let me pose a question. What if an image takes a week to render? What do you do then? Is NT reliable enough so that you may leave it running in the background while you use your PC workstation to browse the web and to do word processing. Would you trust that your machine would not crash while you are doing these everyday tasks? What about if your collegues need to access some other images that you've already done in the disk of your system? (Remeber, your disk is already swapping chunks of data like crazy.) Would you let your collegues access your disk via the network? What if your job depends on this? Let me give you an additional observation. Most people who use NT based machine for traditional client applications and it works great. But not many people use it under an intensively networked environment (like sharing computing cycles and sharing storage). By the way, that is when the machine crashes the most often. If you want to see the critical differences between UNIX and NT machines are, all you need to do is to set it up as a e-mail, web, or database server so other people can access it while you work. Then let the fun begin! Another reason why you would want to pick UNIX workstation for engieering related to the idea of scalability ... chaining many workstations together to share computing cycle. So in effect with proper utilization of the network, you build a mini super computer. This is where UNIX excels. In engineering this is called "job farming". You will hear this term more and more in the near future. - Chung >>> NT vs UNIX workstations for engineering: I'm not going to argue that UNIX workstations are not more stable at this time. Because I agree that is one of only 2 good reasons I can think of to go with UNIX over NT. However, I think the crash argument is overargued since occasional crashes, although undesirable, are (1) a function of the applications you are using [how well-written are they], (2) your NT workstation configuration, and (3) not as anti-productive as they seem. My perspective is from dealing with very large medical images which require lots of image processing, graphical manipulation, and various types of optimization. I've found that NT crashes can be very tied to the type of workstation you are using. With one vendor (Tagram) we had a relatively large # of blue screens while with my current DEC dual P-166, I haven't had one single crash in over a year. DELLs also do quite well. One problem is that there is no single NT vendor and shoddy workmanship can cloud the whole NT vs UNIX debate. Also, I think NT 4.0 is better than NT 3.51. Hopefully, NT 5.0 will be even more bulletproof. More importantly though, I think you also have to consider the richness of the environment. And there is a definite trend in porting all kinds of applications to NT. NT has probably the best software development environment available with multiple vendors all provide excellent products. The same is true of graphics applications and whole slew of other domain-focused applications. As someone pointed out, having Sun as maybe the sole UNIX vendor won't be bad in that it removes all those variants of UNIX from the mix :) -Bill <<<