Want a good itanic laugh?

When you want a good itanic laugh? In this case i recommend the “by the way”-announcement regarding Intel® Itanium® Processor 9100 series processors. It looks like Intel is so desperate about the software support that they aren´t afraid of really far fetched arguments:

Unlike products from the remaining RISC vendors, the 9100 series continues to offer end-user freedom through a broad choice of software with more than 12,000 applications in production, and flexibility to support multiple operating systems, including Linux, Windows, HP-UX, HP NonStop, HP OpenVMS, z/OS and Solaris/SPARC.

Okay, z/OS is subject of a legal battle at the moment: IBM sued PSI (the manufacturer of an itanium based Mainframe clone) and PSI sued IBM. I assume this will end nowhere soon, but as mainframe buyers tend to be the most conserative and risk avoidant people, this isn´t a good business card for going into real deployment. And the Solaris/SPARC stuff. They use this Transitive stuff for this. I wrote about the problems of such a solution not long ago. Before trying to run an application for Solaris on SPARC on Transitive on Suse Linux on VMware on x86 you should try to run the application on Solaris 10 on Sparc. When when you have some problems by hardcoded dependencies(shame on the programmers) , you should try the Solaris 8 Containers for Solaris 10. From my view, Transitive is a solution for a non-existant problem, you have the binary compatibility under Solaris and for hard nuts you have Project Etude or it´s downloadable variant. So, dear Intel, is there nothing more convincing for buying Itanium. Oh, yeah, i forgot … next year you will show us the Itanium variant leaving all others processor in the dust … as every year … really …