In my earlier fit of crankiness I forgot to mention why I was looking at the Network Computing page at all: today we officially rolled out our new line of Opteron Servers. I first saw one of these systems hidden away in a lab near the Solaris engineers' offices last year, and I've been dying to get them into customers' hands since then. I'm a software guy, so bits of metal don't generally grab me, but these boxes blew me away. It's amazing how much power they squeezed into such a tiny space.

The reviews are starting to come in, and it looks like we have a hit on our hands. Even the Slashdot crowd generally seems to like what they see.

One complaint really stood out though:

The biggest problem I foresee for Sun in competing with Dell is simple, Suns don't run Windows and they don't run Linux. [...]
But back to that Windows thing, it's nice to be able to take a Dell and repurpose it from being a Linux system to a Windows system or vice versa. [...] If I buy a bunch of shiny new Suns not only am I locked into Solaris (which is painful to use after working on Linux for so many years) but I'm also locked into that hardware.

Others have already started to show this poster the error of his ways, but I hope this isn't a common misconception. These new machines are capable of running Solaris, Linux, or Windows 2003 Server. Obviously I think you should be running Solaris but neither I, nor the people who designed this system, are going to tell you you have to be running Solaris.

[Updated: I originally said the new servers support Windows XP. They actually support Windows 2003 Server. Thanks to Manish Kapur for the correction.]

This week is our big quarterly marketing event: "Network Computing 05Q3".

If you want somebody^h^h^h^hthing to remind you to check out the webcast, you can sign up to get an email message when the big day arrives. You can also download and run a widget on your desktop, which will presumably give you a series of whizzy, annoying announcements with increasing frequency as the time draws near.

I say 'presumably' because I can't actually run the widget. The instructions say:

Don't miss the NEXT Network Computing Event. Download the NC Events widget for a reminder.
Here is what you need to do:

1. Download and install Konfabulator
2. Then download and install the NC Events widget
Runs on Windows XP or 2000 and Mac OS X 10.2 or greater

That's right. The widget announcing Sun's big quarterly product rollout does not work on Sun's operating system. It doesn't even work on Linux. You have to be running Windows or MacOS X to get marketing's full attention.

If anybody can think of an occasion where Apple required a potential customer to use Windows-only technology, or where Microsoft required a Mac-only technology, please drop off a pointer in the comments section.