At 08:06 28/04/2002 -0500, you wrote:
I spoke with a good source at Sun the other day about some other topics, but he did confirm that several new units are in the pipe including a RaQ5 due out in about 6 months. Sun has made a VERY significant commitment to Linux in general and Cobalt in particular... it wouldn't surprise me to see a Solaris Cobalt too.
presumably this will mean that everyone with "obsolete" hardware like RAQ3 (and possibly base RAQ4) will be out in the cold along with RAQ2 owners.... the real issue IMHO with Cobalt is lack of post sales support, a box that I originally purchased when Windows 95 was still out is sat behind me happily running XP and having had several hardware upgrades, MS, for all their faults, could teach Cobalt a few lessons.... Cobalt is NOT just a hardware vendor, pay the money and adios.... for example we are now on PHP 4.2.0 and yet I am restricted to 4.0.3 if I have a policy (which I do) of official Cobalt updates only.
I simply do not believe that a company that could give away x86 solaris in successive versions cannot afford to keep up to date with patches for an EXTREMELY limited range of hardware...
I am moving away from Cobalt for one reason and one reason only, I am being FORCED to by customers who demand newer kernel, newer php, etc that I can run on a cobalt with official patches only.
Which is a bloody shame, I have an old raq2 sat here behind me which is a lovely little box, totally silent and runs cold, but cobalt has NEVER released a mysql or php pkg for this box, this says one thing "We expect you to buy a new box"
With attitudes like this it means I must consider the option of a new XTR at £2,000 as an investment that I must depreciate to £0 over 18 months at most, and therefore add this sum to the costs I pass on to customers... this is not economically viable unless I am mebbe 10 times bigger than I am, so cobalt in effect squeezes another smaller business out, and you think I am going to go BACK to them when I expand sufficiently to afford to do so? Afraid not. This is *despite* the fact that I really love my old RAQ2s.
Sun / Cobalt may be able to take such suicidal attitudes to its future customer base, I cannot... I intend to be still trading in 10 years time, god alone knows what we will all be running then, but I doubt cobalt will mean any more as a name than Tandy TRS80
-- ================================ jb@xxxxxxxxxxxx / www.surfbaud.org / 2002 ================================