Time for a new workstation

I remember speaking to Sun HW rep. at a seminar this spring and telling him that Sun should stop f*cking around and give Dell a run for the money and release a kick ass midrange workstation. They guy didn't say much back but said they where considering expanding the Opteron line of workstation. My expectations where quite low since Sun already had two decent workstations in the Opteron line (the W1100z and W2110z). I was expecting some semi-decent box starting at the $995 mark.
Ok, now what we got is quite far from that. It's a great machine starting at the $895 mark (although you really need to opt for a better graphics card).

So it is a with a great welcome Sun introduced the Sun Ultra 20
It simply owns anything else in the segment.

Why?

Fast Opteron proc

Cheapest "real" workstation ever sold

True 64-bit

Solaris 10

Comes with a shit load of (previously) expensive software

Real UNIX-style Sun keyboard as default

It uses disk SPUDs just as its old SPARC siblings (u2/u30/u60 etc)

Doesn't require expensive ECC-memory (but can use it of course)

It just feels right!


Check out the webcast (Warning! RealMedia rubbish required).

On the other front,
I've been starting to investigate the use of undo tablespace in Oracle to create "diffs" in time between an existing table an a older version of that table. Will probably publish some examples later on.

Wanna learn Swedish? ;-)
mastering_swedish_-_lesson_3.mp3 (slayradio.org)