Boring Bill strikes again! I really wonder if Bill lives in a parallel reality or if their is some logic-defeating forcefield surrounding all Sun facilities that stops him realising what twaddle he writes.

"So, apparently Matty is the only "user" doing performance analysis and all of the companies buying Sun are too stupid to do shootouts...." Nope, there are plenty of customers just going straight to Sun. What you forgot to look at was why - because they made poor strategic decisions in the past and backed UltraSPARC, kept those old Slowaris systems as long as they can in the desperately vain hope Sun would get Rock out on time, and now their upgrade options are so limited they really have a choice of pain, lots of pain or just give up and start from scratch. Unless they want to start from scratch and port to another vendor - unlikely in the current downturn - they have to go for Sun, but in the longterm they will be looking for other options as they are business people, and they won't like betting their livelihoods on the poor odds of backing Sun. The proof is in Sun's decline in the high-end, which shows that businesses just don't believe they can trust Sun with their business critical requirements.

"....Sun sells twice the number of Unix servers that HP does and sells more Unix servers than HP and IBM combined....." Yes, we've already been over your Sun figures and had a good laugh. Sun are selling lots of small boxes at small to no margin, whereas hp and IBM make more revenue per system and pull through more services and support revenue. What you are deliberately ignoring is hp and IBM each make more money out of Power and Itanium than Sun do out of all their server lines put together - SPARC, Niagara and Galaxy. And seeing as Sun doesn't make enough money to make a profit, this means Sun will have to stop doing servers pretty soon. It's simple maths, which is why Sun's market cap is brown and smelly.

"....SPEC and TPC don't do the actual benchmarks on the equipment. Users and vendors do...." Yes, the point being they are testing their own kit, not deliberately misconfiguring competitor's kit to make theirs look better. And they have to disclose how they did it, so you can see if it's with a stack that is unrealistic and won't benefit your environment or application. Compare this to Sun's copmpetitive "benchmarking" where they hide all the real info away so you can't see how poor a comparison it really is. If you made a decision of just Sun's "benchmarking" then I wouldn't call you stupid, just incompetent.

"....Apparently you don't understand this stuff as much as you think you do...." No, you just leapt to the wrong conclusion due to poor comprehension of what I wrote. But then I'm not surprised your preconceptions and fear make it hard for you to take things in.

"....Apparently, if you're doing SAP, you don't think that SAP-SD is a valid benchmark?...." I think getting the kit onsite, building it how you want it with your own images, patches, software stack and SAN, and then benching it using copies of live data, is more valid than any vendor's benchmark. That way you know for sure before you have to pay that it is going to do the job.

"....That's very telling..." It's very telling that you get upset at the idea of competitive shootouts and you'd rather sprout Sun's "benchmarks" instead.

"....You're probably the type of person that does a copy command from /tmp to a block device and uses that number as your performance comparison....." Like I said, I do real benchmarking in real environments with real data and then use that to pass recommendations to the board. I suspect you have never done a real bench in your life, wouldn't even know the way to your boardroom, and couldn't formulate a recommendation without getting it written for you by the Sun salesgrunt.

"....Too funny! Microbenchmarks, you gotta love 'em." Sunshiners, so funny, but you just end up pitying them.