On Fri, 19 Dec 1997, Dave McGuire wrote:

> On December 18, Michael J. Miller Jr. wrote:
> 
>   Just because it's commercial doesn't make it better...it usually
> only makes it more expensive, more difficult to get source, and much
> slower to integrate new technologies.

I'm well aware of this.  I believe it was the first release of 2.5 that
had a broken install when using a tty rather than a graphics head.

SGI integrates new technologies at a very impressive rate, and I wouldn't
touch them with a ten foot pole.  To many people I know have way less
hair and/or ulcers from dealing with the bugs and flakiness.  :-)

> 
> > in the commercial market place if you aren't.  Sun is number one in the
> > Unix world for a reason.
> 
>   Well...I'm by no means an OS expert...and even I have fixed so many
> bugs in SunOS I've lost count.  Some of them were found buried in code
> that looked like it'd been written by a five-year-old pounding
> aimlessly on an unattended keyboard.

Again I'm not surprised.  The admintool in early solaris releases was
PATHETIC.  Whomever wrote it had near zero user interface skills and
even less ability as a programer.

>   Survival in the commercial marketplace has nothing to do with
> product quality.  If it did, Microsoft would have gone bankrupt back
> in the Windows 3.0 days and we'd all be living much happier lives.

Here I disagree.  The product may not be the best or great, but it
has to meet a certain quality point or it just won't make it.  To
be successful you have to balance a lot of different factors.  The 
cold hard reality of the world is that technical superiority doesn't
matter.  I've seen dozens of technically superior products come
and go over the last fifteen years.

> 
> you...I'll just point out that you're on very shaky ground here, and
> hope that you have the good sense to just back off.

In my opinion I'm not of shaky ground at all.   Sun is showing interest
in FreeBSD, and has offered documentation and help to NetBSD and you're
posting to this list saying that their OS is shit.  Correct me if I'm
wrong here, but that just doesn't make sense.  Especially since it 
isn't true.  There's and old saying that goes "If you can't say anything
nice, don't say anything at all."  After this post I'm planning on
following this very wise saying.

Mike Miller             mke@netcom.com  
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