Solaris and OS X (continued)

There were a whole pile of questions about my previous blog entry, here are a few quick answers:
  • Yes, it was a typo. I meant Lightning, the calendar plugin for Thunderbird.
  • The physical laptop I'm using is a middle-of-the road Sony VAIO. (Nice, except for the way that the long-life battery hangs out the butt end).
  • Apple's JDK support is a part of my problem, and yes, I have their JDK6 from the ADC. I've met the folks on the JDK team and they're trying real hard. It's hard to tell what the fundamental issue is, but it keeps feeling like the big problem is that developers aren't the "Target Demographic" :-) iPods are nice, but they're not the defining center of my life (What's playing on my iPod now: Springsteen's Magic. "Last to Die" and "Long Walk Home" are particularly great). I'm not a college student chatting away (although I have a daughter who is a college student, but she doesn't chat (at least, not with family)).
  • Lots of folks ask "why doesn't sun just do the JDK for Mac?". The real answer is "because Apple wanted to do it". They've wanted to do all sorts of customization and integration that only they could do - because they own the OS.
  • But it's not just the JDK. The Solaris folks have really made huge strides. The two big things in my everyday life are ZFS and Zones: I just can't live without them.
  • One of the areas that has really progressed in Solaris is device drivers. It's a much less ragged landscape than it used to be.
October 16, 2007