My entry about the end of Sun wasposted on Hacker News and garnered a comment thread . In two comments that I'm condensing andexcerpting here, HN user rbanffy wrote ( in context ):

There is a huge difference between a glorified PC and a Unixworkstation.

[...]

Unix workstations were built to run Unix. A Mac pro is essentially aPC. [...]

The difference looks subtle now, when every desktop computer isessentially the same. For those who lived through this

I've previously written about how weuse a different source IP address when forwarding spam-tagged email than when forwarding other email, so that userswho forward all their email can still get some of it. If you do this,it turns out that you really want to use an entire separate machinefor this, not just an IP alias on your main mail machine.

(We used a relatively small virtual machine for the purpose, ratherthan dedicating physical hardware to the job. If you really wanted to,