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Do not forget that there are only relatively few drivers for (Open)Solaris. This is crucial for a satisfying desktop experience.

You must be joking - tons of opensolaris drivers out there now. Old tapes... and way, way more stable a driver base than the equivalent Linux collection.

Do not forget that there are only relatively few drivers for (Open)Solaris. This is crucial for a satisfying desktop experience.

Solaris (Open Solaris or not) is an excellent server OS. It's not designed for interactive desktop use, though. (Ex: the conservative emphasis on not caching disk writes so as to eliminate any necessity for data recovery that might not suceed, for example.)

I'm not saying Solaris will not be proposed for the desktop, though it is not a great choice for that. One of the BSDs or a Linux distro would be a better choice as all of the same apps will work and these systems are more tuned by default to work as both servers and client systems.

Note: Interactive use = mousing around under X or as a single local user. Solaris is fine as a remote server resource and great under heavy load from multiple client systems for things such as web apps, file services, and mail, as well as other transaction services.

Funny that you don't see the blatently obvious thing that SUN is trying to push; don't you remember the @Home programme where by SUN employees are given a SunRay appliance, connect it up to a cable modem or ADSL connection, and remotely access resources on SUN computers?

Whose to say that SUN and Google won't team up on something similar; Google has already bought up large amounts of backbone infrastructure; it would make perfect sense having a large distributed network and selling desktop access.

End users would get all they need for set fee; they wouldn't have to worry about all the hassles with maintaining their own computer, installing software etc. and SUN would get a great partner with a well known name - heck, it might end up being called a Google Computer.

As for the grid computing/utilitiy computing, there is another avenue that would marry up, again, the large infrascture buy ups and the extra capacity to team with SUN to provide on demand computing for corporate clients.

There are a number of difference avenues out there, it isn't just a 'desktop search plus Solaris for the desktop' - first and foremost SUN want to see their technology put to use to demonstrate to those beyond their core customer base, that SUN is ontrack, and focusing on the bigger picture besides a few niche markets.

I fail to see what's awsome about Google Talk. Gaim has a lot more functionality without loosing its simpllicity.

Do you know what Google Talk even is? take a page from the clue book; it is a service offered by Google that relies on the open Jabber protocol - I don't know about you, but it feels great knowing I can use what ever client I wish, without experience problems because the master of the messenging service has a bee in their bonnet over third party messenger software.

All google need to do is get their Google Mail available for more people, and hopefully with a good marketing push, we'll see people ask, "got a Googletalk contact?!"

On the extreme side, a move to Solaris or even OpenSolaris? A move to Sun's new X Opteron servers? However, it is probably more likely to be something Java related since Schmidt was apparently involved heavily with Java during his time at Sun.

In any case, I sure hope it is something significant and not just some lame marketing BS that never results in anything tangible or otherwise useful.

#1 This could be something to do with the Liberty Alliance, which I believe was started at Sun.

I hadn't thought of that, but it makes sense in light of the recent Google book scanning fiasco ( http://business.bostonherald.com/technologyNews/view.bg?articleid=1... ) Getting into DRM would be a logical step.
Come to think of it, Sun has been hyping up their DRM scheme lately with its open source "Project DReaM" (DRM/everywhere available.)

As a sidenote I hope someone bolted down the chairs in Redmond :-)

Right after I posted, I stumbled on a DReaM article. I think you are probably right about this and Google books.

If this were true and Apple jumped on the wagon...

Why would Google be even remotley interested in this?

They wouldn't be. Google Ubuntu Looking Glass? This makes absolutely no sense...

> As long as we don't see java

There's nothing wrong with Java and infact I trust Java to be a much better solution than the Mono being copied (or reverse engineered) from Microsoft. You really must grow your own opionions rather than become a band waggoner. It's so fashionable to say Java is evil.

"It is proprietary and comes from an evil corporation whose only purpose for existence is to make money."

Since when is "evil" synonymous with "capitalistic"? No corporation exists for any other reason than to make money, period. Your logic baffles me...

Java has the same problems as C#. It is proprietary and comes from an evil corporation whose only purpose for existence is to make money.

I hope you aren't running you boxen on AMD or Intel products... and God forbid Apple. I'm about as far-out in left field as they get, but as far as Sun goes I find them pretty harmless and they come out with a lot of interesting stuff.

In 10 years I'll definitely buy a 1 or 2 U Niagara for dirt cheap to play with.

Business is not evil; corporations do exist to make a profit. Now how a business goes about making a profit and if they gouge their customers is a different story. But having a competitive market is supposed to be an equalizer to said gouging. And yes, there are some loop holes in regards to market forces:
1) price fixing
2) no/not enough competition
3) Patents. Yes, patents do create an impact on competition.
4) And the list goes on......

Who knows, your belief that corporations and capitalism are evil are un-founded.

Side note: I do support BSD and GPL licenses. Yes imagine that; a capitalist supporting FOSS. Just my opinion.

Yeah, I'd bet on Niagara. If Google isn't in Niagara's target market, I don't know what would be! If people are right that Niagara will share the X4100 enclosure, then imagine a CPU with 4 memory controllers, gigs of RAM, 32 threads, hooked up to those 4 GigE ports on the back.

Agreed; Good that you bought it up; Niagara would be right up Google's alley; more throughput than you can shake a stick at, and yet, runs as cool as a cucumber; what more can a heavily dependent on IT company ask for?

Add the fact that Solaris 10 has come along way, and speed wise, is comparable with Linux on similarly configured hardware - this maybe just the kind of promotion that SUN needs to demonstrate that Solaris 10 is ready for large scale deployment, along with their Niagara chips.

Of course, would the TCO be lower because of Niagra, or because Schmidt is buddy-buddy with Sun?

If a 3rd party posts lower TCOs with Windows, the anti-MSers scream rigged, but if anyone else does it, it's perfectly ok? Double standards again.

people already complain that openoffice takes a long time to start. Imagine if it was coded in javascript and had to be downloaded for each use.

Come on, Ajax desktop applications are insane. Nobody wants to go back to the thin client model, especially when you will actually require more resources on the client side.

- Jesse McNelis