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Take a look to Ajax and Aardvark [link 2] [link 3] [link 4].

(I am assuming here that Windows as such would not exist today if it were not for Bill Gates.)
Here goes:
So you want a world without MSDOS, Windows 3.1, Windows 95, Windows 98, XP, with all their admitted faults?
Without those as a benchmark, would KDE be here today?
How about Loadlin?
Go check 'em out if you want to see how they might be related in some way to the products Microsoft has brought out.

We, of the open-source world, would not have the PC's around in such great numbers to install our distros on, if it were not for Windows.

The one thing that Windows does is bring a PC to market that Boots to X, Soundcard Works, everything else works, and is engineered to do just that before the box shows up at the store.

Sure, I get a thrill when a Linux Distro boots to a decent X configuration. I loved Mandrake 8. You could go back and forth till you got it just right.
Windows users don't know what we are talking about there. They just turn the box on, and the GUI appears. With XP, it is fairly fast, too.
Because of the requirements of Windows Longhorn, we have the new dual core processors coming on the scene just this week from Intel and AMD.
Soon, computers with these processors will be available.
Dell already has their Model 9100 with the Dual Core Intel model D, for $100 extra. (they have 3 more, for extra $$)
Would Intel and AMD have spent the money, and brought them to market in a world without Windows?
Didn't Bill Gates say he wanted lots of processing power, memory, and other advanced features for Longhorn? Because of that, we have these new machines available.

We'll all benefit in the long run because Windows is around.

With all this going on, it's no wonder IBMers are staging a company-wide protest on Monday, as this story reports.

http://blog.informationweek.com/002869.html

In related news, according to this story, IBM employees (numbering +- 300,000) are urged to switch over to Firefox. That should help the numbers even more

Wonder how this fits in with their policy that Governments get the patches before businesses

Chinese, Indian, and US wages do not have to become equal before it becomes unprofitable for US companies to stop shipping work to China or India. In fact, shipping work overseas becomes unprofitable long before equality is reached. Even today, 44% of companies say outsourced projects did not save any money. 25% of the companies have brought functions back in-house after realizing they could be addressed more successfully and at lower costs. If costs go up in China or India at all, then it's likely US outsourcing would stop.

I was specifically speaking about IT in my previous arguments, but I will address your manufacturing statement now. Raw materials are not the main cost in manufacturing in any developed country. Labor is. China is not a developed country yet, but it is quickly getting there. I've already read of cases where Chinese factories are having problems getting the cheap country workers that they've historically relied upon. That means wages will start going up, independently of any currency move. When you have salaries increase in China, then the prices of those goods will increase and less Chinese goods will be sold in the US. That will become more evident once the peg is released and currency differences come into effect as well.

There is also the logistical problem of creating goods for a market halfway around the globe. With oil over $50/barrel, shipping prices for large goods, such as cars and refrigerators, can outrun savings on labor. Shipping prices for smaller goods may still be profitable, but certainly less profitable. We've already seen decreased manufacturing sent to China.

I make my family run Firefox because I get tired of cleaning up spyware. As for the rest of the world, I say let them burn. Fuck them. To all those who like to point out the good things about Microsoft products, fine. Keep running Windows/IE, assholes. See if I give a shit. I'm sitting fat and happy on Debian with no worries. You're the ones debating about which spyware remover to use. You're the ones warning each other left and right about viruses. I can happily filter all that out, because it doesn't effect me a bit. I can focus on more interesting things than wondering if it's safe to click on a link or not.

Now, I realize this isn't true for everyone, and it's not true for me when I'm working in our Windows-based office. But when I'm sitting at home, I get a good chuckle out of the demise of Windows/IE users. Mod me insensitive. I just don't care.

As a reporter for a technology publication, I find Graham's points to be rather overwrought. He makes it sounds as if every story in the mainstream press was ghostwritten by a PR agency.

No doubt the PR agencies have a hand in launching many stories, but far more of their pitches fail than get picked up. I get anywhere from 50 to 100 pitches a day via E-mail (not to mention phone calls). I write maybe one or two stories a day. Sometimes the story begins with a pitch, sometimes not.

And when a story does arise from a PR pitch, there's no guarantee the agency will be pleased with the results. Reporters generally do talk to a range of sources and not all say things PR reps like.

No doubt there are a lot of rewritten press releases that get published as news. That's true of mainstream press sites and of blogs. Sometimes the press release says it all. And sometimes time or resource or editorial ambition constraints prevent a more substantive analysis.

Graham cites fashion stories as an example of the mainstream press's lack of initiative. Please. Is he expecting a Pulitzer from the fashion and lifestyle pages? Is that much worse than the gear-porn stories so common in the tech industry? (He should have condemned those who covered Enron...that's a case where the spin really did some damage.)

Sure, there's lots of feel-good or sensationalist fluff out there. But that's what people prefer to read. How else to explain the popularity of titles like People?

Every journalist dreams of getting a hold of a great story, but they're rare. Not everyone is approached by an inside source with nation-shaking revelations. And it's hard to find such people by cold-calling. Nor do most publications have the reources to fund a thorough investigation of a particular practice or industry. Be grateful we still see some from time to time.

Graham writes, "Whatever its flaws, the writing you find online is authentic. It's not mystery meat cooked up out of scraps of pitch letters and press releases, and pressed into molds of zippy journalese. It's people writing what they think."

Well, I think it's a stretch to condemn the entire mainstream press as inauthentic based on a few stories born of PR. I'd also venture to say that much of the writing I find online is suspect. Is someone's review of some book or CD on Amazon somehow more worthy of trust than one penned by a reviewer for the NY Times (who got the book for free from a PR agency)?

Graham talks about people writing what they think. Usually, their thoughts begin with a link to a story in the mainstream press.

The best bloggers are good reporters. If reporters happen to use facts that originated with a PR agency, that shouldn't be a problem as long as efforts are made to consider the reliability of the data.

You suck at teh internet.

Here's the same link again, except that it's pointing to the correct place...

http://www.informationweek.com/shared/printableArt icle.jhtml?articleID=160900911

I wasn't expecting enlightenment myself - not from Langa anyway - and from my cursory examination of some of the facts employed by Langa, it appears that objectivity is too much to expect as well.

IMO Fred Langa of InformationWeek fame wrote a deliberately misleading article suggesting that those concluding IE is less secure than Firefox are being duped by hype, while unsurprisingly he uses selective facts to paint Firefox / Mozilla in a light it doesn't really deserve to be under.

• Information Week Story:
  http://www.informationweek.com/shared/printableArt icle.jhtml?articleID=160900911
• Symantech Report Langa quotes:
  http://ses.symantec.com/pdf/ThreatReportVII.pdf
• Langa's site:
  http://langa.com/newsletters/2005/2005-04-18.htm#1
• Responses on Langa's forum:
  http://www.forums.informationweek.com/jive3/thread .jspa?threadID=300055004&tstart=0

My quick observation:
Langa has IMO published one of the more misleading articles in some time suggesting in its tone and opening narrative that Firefox is no more secure than Microsoft Internet Explorer. Balance would be nice, but his use of deception to make a point calls into question his objectivitity.

While using selective quotation of the Symantec report, Mr. Langa ignores a parabolic increase in Win32 specific threats from viruses and worms over the past five years even though Windows growth itself is not so parabolic.

Port based attacks, according to Symantec, designed to exploit 445 and 135 (Microsoft file sharing and RPC mechanisms) account for 52% of the top attacked ports, with no other port service - Microsoft or otherwise - accounting for more than 8% of the total.

The issue has been discussed before, so perhaps the spin on this is a discussion over Langa's motivations. Factual representation (evening being fair to both sides) clearly wasn't his objective or met if it was.

I wasn't expecting enlightenment myself - not from Langa anyway - and from my cursory examination of some of the facts employed by Langa, it appears that objectivity is too much to expect as well.

IMO Fred Langa of InformationWeek fame wrote a deliberately misleading article suggesting that those concluding IE is less secure than Firefox are being duped by hype, while unsurprisingly he uses selective facts to paint Firefox / Mozilla in a light it doesn't really deserve to be under.

• Information Week Story:
  http://www.informationweek.com/shared/printableArt icle.jhtml?articleID=160900911
• Symantech Report Langa quotes:
  http://ses.symantec.com/pdf/ThreatReportVII.pdf
• Langa's site:
  http://langa.com/newsletters/2005/2005-04-18.htm#1
• Responses on Langa's forum:
  http://www.forums.informationweek.com/jive3/thread .jspa?threadID=300055004&tstart=0

My quick observation:
Langa has IMO published one of the more misleading articles in some time suggesting in its tone and opening narrative that Firefox is no more secure than Microsoft Internet Explorer. Balance would be nice, but his use of deception to make a point calls into question his objectivitity.

While using selective quotation of the Symantec report, Mr. Langa ignores a parabolic increase in Win32 specific threats from viruses and worms over the past five years even though Windows growth itself is not so parabolic.

Port based attacks, according to Symantec, designed to exploit 445 and 135 (Microsoft file sharing and RPC mechanisms) account for 52% of the top attacked ports, with no other port service - Microsoft or otherwise - accounting for more than 8% of the total.

The issue has been discussed before, so perhaps the spin on this is a discussion over Langa's motivations. Factual representation (evening being fair to both sides) clearly wasn't his objective or met if it was.

Print version of the article fitting nicely onto one page.

And this comment: Even if it is, at this point, it's a useles, failed operating system is a pathetically horrible troll, even by slashdot standards. Is JP Morgan stupid? Just to point out one company that seems to find use for Solaris.

You are ignorant.

Using the same stats, one could claim that MS could lose as much as 10% of its mid-sized business customers over the next three years.

It's all in how the editors choose to spin the story.

The second link already seems to show white, so not exactly a replacement but perhaps an addendum.

CC.

She is just mind-bogglingly insightful.

You might want to notify the Boston Stock Exchange that just moved their ticker processing systems to Linux that Linux is not stable.

Does anyone think that leaking news of Apple's latest silly doo-dad is going to cause a competitor to reverse engineer the item and compete with Apple?

Any non-disclosure agreements are civil contracts. In order to "prosecute" the violators of these civil contracts, Apple wants to claim that bloggers aren't journalists and have gone so far as to claim that Constitutional free speech doesn't apply to these bloggers!

Apple maintains that California's Shield Law, which protects journalists from being forced to reveal sources, should not apply to Internet sites. In addition, the firm stated in court filings that free speech protections likewise should not apply to the three Internet sites.
Information Week

This will bite Apple on the ass if they don't back off.

all else equal.. two cores, two times the power, two times the heat..

You haven't been paying attention! Go back and read this article again (about AMD's demo of their dual core processor). While you're at it, read the related /. article.

The dual core processors use nowhere near double the power and produce nowhere near double the heat.

-- Steve

The Linux Increase Can Be Attributed to none other than IBM I would presume.

Hardly "none other."
IBM is second in Linux server revenue with 23.5% of the market, HP is first at 26%.
source

Microsoft doesn't have to build a better browser. It just has to build one that's good enough.

Firefox is still doing well despite the fact that users have to take three non-passive actions: 1 ) actively seek it out and 2) download it and 3) install it. Also, large installations are reluctant to draw attention to themselves for fear of reprisal in the form of increased MS fees and such. There are, however, ways to hide from MS.

and choicepoint http://informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml ?articleID=60403673/ news article on about how congress wants the california law to be aended and spread over all the states, should fix this nicely hmm any complaints?

Linux is easier to maintain than Windows, largely thanks to IBM. Linux is more reliable and is less prone to infection by viruses and malware (e.g. spyware) than Windows. IBM ensures that any OS (whether it is commercial or free) shipped to customers on its computer systems meets stringent requirements for reliability.

IBM has been vindicated. IBM initially tried to dethrone Microsoft by producing OS/2, but it was a failure. Now, IBM has thrown its weight behind a product (i.e. Linux) developed outside of IBM, and that product is succeeding in hurting Windows.

At Information Week, their poll shows that 84% of their voters are of the same opinion: Mike Nash is full of crap.

Do you work for the FBI and is this about the SAIC outsourcing contract to build the virtual case file system?

from information week

"The computer failure that grounded an airline's entire fleet over the Christmas weekend and stranded thousands of travelers was due to creaky software that couldn't count higher than 32,768." ...

According to the Post, the software -- which tracks all details of crew scheduling, including how long they have flown (an FAA regulation restricts airtime), and logs every change -- has a 16-bit counter that limits the number of changes to 32,768 in any given month. ...

to be fair (although it's not an excuse), but 32K crew changes in a month? that's like 1,000 a day? that's crazy!...

Whoever modded my post as Flamebait should observe the FAQ here :

Flamebait refers to comments whose sole purpose is to insult and enrage. If someone is not-so-subtly picking a fight (racial insults are a dead giveaway), it's Flamebait.

My post was not flamebait. It certainly does appear that Microsoft has issued this 'discussion' right at a time where NT users are considering Windows or Linux , and it really doesn't take on any different stance than what Microsoft is promoting in its Get The Facts campaign.

From what I read, it's just purely Microsoft advertising.

This is a case that started in the United States. Microsoft is an American company.

Sorry but then perhaps you should keep your company in America ...

Also, Penn state university urges 80000 students to dump IE.

Developer Quote Of The Week: "What we do is, given a benchmark, we try to do as well as we can on it, and make sure that our system is the fastest benchmark -- I mean, fastest system -- in the world." -- Brian Croll, Sun Microsystems' director of marketing for Solaris

Two weeks ago, Sun Microsystems got caught with its hand in the benchmarking cookie jar. Or did it? Depending on your point of view, Sun either grossly misrepresented the performance of its Solaris Java just-in-time compiler by fooling Pendragon Software's CaffeineMark performance test, o r Sun proved the CaffeineMark is not an acceptable measure of Java compiler performance.

For those who may have missed it, here's the background: In a Nov. 4 press release, Ivan Phillips, president of Pendragon Software, in Libertyville, Ill., a developer of software for personal digital assistants, accused Sun of engineering its new Java compiler to trick the CaffeineMark into reporting higher performance results.

When Sun's compiler detected a block of 600 bytecodes unique to the CaffeineMark (a technique known as pattern matching), the compiler bypassed data processing, and instead returned a value expected by the benchmark. This fooled the test into reporting performance results 300 times faster than the compiler would deliver in real-world use. Third-party developers subsequently validated Phillips' assertion. Interestingly, when Pendragon's engineers altered the test to appear different to Sun's compiler, the compiler's branching was short-circuited, and its performance plummeted. Java compilers under Windows 95, Windows NT, and the Mac OS delivered uniform results under both the original and altered tests.

Sun officials initially admitted no wrongdoing, and were quick to point out that optimizing software to improve benchmark scores is an accepted practice among computer technology vendors. "People are optimizing against the benchmark," says Brian Croll, Sun's director of marketing for Solaris.

Further, Croll maintained that the aberrant results indicate a fundamental flaw in Pendragon's benchmark suite, and do not represent any impropriety by Sun. "I don't know how valid the [CaffeineMark] is," Croll said. Then last week, during a day-long media briefing at Sun's Mountain View, Calif., headquarters, Sun officials updated their explanation of events. SunSoft president Janpieter Scheerder said the company was not trying "to do anything malicious;" rather, Sun engineers simply "optimized too much."

A Sun spokesperson at the event blamed the incident on human error, and said an engineering prototype somehow found its way through Sun's rigorous (you would think) development and quality assurance processes, and onto the Web, with documentation, and overblown press release in tow.

What if Pendragon officials had not discovered Sun's alleged trickery? What if Sun engineers tweaked their compiler to only improve its score 10-fold, instead of the eye-popping 300-fold increase that flagged Pendragon officials?

Sun's PR machine had already posted a press release, in which they touted their "new Web-enhanced Solaris operating environment" as delivering "the world's fastest Java technology performance." The release also claimed Solaris' compiler was 50% faster than the best Windows NT score, and cited the CaffeineMark as proof.

If Pendragon officials had not discovered the ruse, Sun's formidable sales and marketing machine would now be steam-rolling press and IT decision-makers alike, trumpeting Solaris' performance advantage over Microsoft's Window s NT, waving Sun's illicitly obtained CaffeineMark results as evidence in hand.

"Any benchmark, no matter what its original purpose, is subject to use as 'benchmarketing,'" says Larry Gray, board member of the Standard Performance Evaluation Corp. (SPEC), in Manassas, Va., a consortium that administers many well- known benchmarks. "I'd guess may

1. Who WANTS to exercise underwater options? That means that you LOSE money because you suddenly have options that cost WAY more than the market value is and selling those would instantly lose a ton of money.

2. Blocked? Well there is this thing called Vesting....

3. In 2003 Microsoft made an offer to buy back ANY underwater options that were above a certain price

There are news bites coming out about Firefox everywhere you could possibly imagine.

Thanks, but we've already heard about Google News.

Red Hat just announced the purchase of the Netscape Directory Server and Certificate Management System from AOL, which seems to be a slight departure from the usual business plan.

What I don't get is if Red Hat acquired Netscape Directory Service why are they still claiming to be focusing on the "desktop" when Novell's NDS is Linux-friendly. Is it mostly because of the proprietary nature of NDS? I just hope there isn't too much duplication of effort with the directory services biz.

Link ... they might be blocking links from /. ?

Mature companies like Microsoft have switched from options (who really thinks their stock will increase enough to make their stock will increase enough to make the options valueable?)

Starting 2005, however, MS employees can resume selling which means they can bail and look for a job elsewhere without losing their options. C'mon. Do you see anyone doing anything other than bailing?

Yes, Ballmer's making all kind of noise, but security and quality problems are starting to cut into MS' bottom line. OpenOffice.org is cutting into the applications profit. Linux is cutting into their server profit and just starting to edge into the desktop arena. Areas like embedded systems have MS listed as a no-show. If litigation and a patent war don't pull things up next year, MS is out of the way for good.

Microsoft Security Bulletin Advance Notification

Another news story about it:

• Information Week - Microsoft To Issue Early Warnings For Patch Tuesday Nov. 4, 2004 - The software maker will provide a summary of planned security bulletins three days in advance.

The only way to effectively deal with spyware is to block it across the board on the network. Looking for a clientside software solution is ineffective as it requires installation of what is essentially a personal FW on each computer and becomes a major IT headache to manage.
Here is one article (WSJ login required) http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB109805050471847 505,00.html
that describes an alternative solution to block spyware in the network and prevents requests from actually being loaded on the client PCs.

Another related article on where this was done http://www.informationweek.com/showArticle.jhtml?a rticleID=50500086&_loopback=1 but the article doesn't have in details.

Quite the contrary.
http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.j html?articleID=50500043

Is why Linda Dillman was quoted in the Sept. 27 issue of Information Week saying "We'd be nuts to outsource."

but consider professional organizations whose printouts cannot be altered (anyone here ever dealt with architects?). Will they too be subject to government regulation? And who is going to administer the integration of the technology? Surely not the government...don't they have better things to spend tax dollars on? The DMCA and other such legislation are bad enough. Next thing you know we'll all be wearing little radio transmitters with our name and prisoner numbers on them... http://informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml ?articleID=49901698

This is a clear example of getting taxpayers to fund the RIAA's private war, Schultz said. (Wired)

Operation Digital Gridlock has resulted in the seizure of more than 40 terabytes of intellectual property being exchanged illegally over peer-to-peer networks since the effort began in August. (Information Week)

Intellectual property industries account for 6 per cent of the US gross domestic product, employ more than five million people, and contribute US$626 billion to the US economy, Mr Ashcroft said. (SMH)

Such theft costs American companies $250 billion per year, the report estimated. Sales of copyrighted materials alone accounted for 6 percent of the nation's Gross Domestic Product in 2002. Companies that produce films, music, books, software and other copyrighted material employed 4 percent of the nation's work force in 2002, the report said. (The Mercury Times)

Specifically, the report asks Congress to introduce legislation that would permit wiretaps to be used in investigating serious intellectual property offences and that would create a new crime of the importation of pirated products. (SMH)

The report also endorsed the rights of companies to compel Internet service providers to turn over the names of people who have traded copyright-protected items online. That power is included in the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, but has been challenged by companies that want to protect the identity of their subscribers. (Boston.com)

US Attorney Debra Yang said that intellectual property is lifeblood of south California region. This is an issue that has been of utter and utmost importance to our community here in Los Angeles, she said. (China View)

The task force proposed a dozen changes to rules governing criminal enforcement of intellectual property law and also called for the opening of five new anti-piracy offices across the United States. (news.com.au)

Dan Glickman, the new president of the Hollywood studios' influential lobbying body, the Motion Picture Association of America, applauded the aggressive initiatives aimed at protecting his industry. Piracy of intellectual property is a massive, global problem with far-reaching implications on the US economy, he said. In addition to hard goods piracy, which is rampant throughout the world, peer-to-peer networks that facilitate illegal file sharing are some of the most dangerous threats to copyright ownership today, he said. (news.com.au)

Ashcroft declined to comment on the Supreme Court's action, saying that his department might have to be involved in future, similar cases. But he defended the task force's recommendations. We believe people in the private sector have a responsibility to address these threats in the civil dimension as the law allows them and we have a responsibility to address these matters criminally, Ashcroft told The Associated Press in an interview. (The Mercury Times/AP)

The report also suggested expanding educational efforts in schools to prevent illegal file sharing. It also included principles to be adopted when evaluating pen

If you want to know what a true fiasco is like, just Google "CoreFLS" and read the results.

At the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, some of the payroll systems date back to 1964 (that's right - no joke, they were bought when Lyndon Johnson was President), so they decided to replace them with a new system based on Oracle Financials. The new system is called CoreFLS. It has been a fiasco. So far VA has already spent over $270 Million out of an expected $472 Million total budget for the project. The project has been a failure laregly because of mis-management and plain-old stupidity.

First, they decided to do test trials at one of the busiest hospitals (that's right, they first went live at one of the *BUSIEST* hospitals) instead of a smaller test location. The user training for a critical system consisted of a self-paced web-based distance training as detailed here. No hands-on training was provided until a month after deployment and only after problems were apparent because the whole operation ground to a halt. So finally the senior managment decide to commission a $500,000 study from Carnegie Mellon to find out why it failed. The study concluded that CoreFLS was "an exemplary case study in how not to do technology transition." Yeah, they needed to spend a half-million to find the obvious.

Finally Congress got involved and all the senior managers including the Secretary himself were put on the "hot-seat" to testify. Lots of heads rolled (even senior managers like Assistant Secretaries) and lots of people were forced to resign or were fired. Now the place is crawling with federal investigators looking to put people in jail

So now the project gets cancelled. The sad thing is that VA really needed this program to succeed. I suspect that the technology has been made a scapegoat for mismanagement (not that the technology was perfect). Well.. back to 1964.

You forget that HP is so opposed to open source that it appears to have walked away from it's $470 million (what they paid) open-source-based software group out of fear of offending their proprietary software vendors. I think they'd sooner sign over the patents to MSFT than release it as open source.

No more PA-Risc.
No more Alpha.
No more Itanium Workstations
No more open source (except for lip service)
No more Bluestone software (based on open source.
No more HPUX.
No altavista when they bought CPQ.
No more Vision
No more Hewlett Packard name
No more Walter Hewlett or Packard involved.

Seems to me that last one triggered when it all started falling apart.

Hewlett and Packard built one of the greatest companies in the history of Silicon Valley; and Carly managed to tank the thing in a couple years trying to pretend she can be a Michael Dell commodity-vendor.

I wish they'd just change the name to Carly&Co to stop trashing the inintials of two of the greatest heros of silicon valley.

If you want to save the thing, people should really bring back Walter Hewlett to the board and make him Chairman. At least he understood what his father's company stood for.

No more PA-Risc.
No more Alpha.
No more Itanium Workstations
No more open source (except for lip service)
No more Bluestone software (based on open source.
No more HPUX.
No altavista when they bought CPQ.
No more Vision NO more Hewlett Packard name
No more Hewlett or Packard involved.

Seems to me that last one triggered when it all started falling apart.

Hewlett and Packard built one of the greatest companies in the history of Silicon Valley; and Carly managed to tank the thing in a couple years trying to pretend she can be a Michael Dell commodity-vendor.

I wish they'd just change the name to Carly&co to stop trashing the inintials of two of the greatest hheros of silicon valley.

I don't know if this is should be rated funny or scary. Why? 'Cause corporate drones actually listen to whatever Gartner says even though they are owned in 38% by VC's (Michael Dell, Larry Ellison, and Bill Gates to name a few.).

Doh! Try this http://www.nwfusion.com/newsletters/netware/2004/0 823nw2.html?fsrc=rss-novell/ and this http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.j html?articleID=20900628/

It was at least 3 years and at the University of North Carolina according to this page. Search that page for "Server Missing No More".

Unless, of course, there was more than one Novell server walled in at a university for several years... :)

1. The greatest threat to SUNW is IBM. IBM is now pursuing the low end of the server market, which is precisely the market on which SUNW is focused. As you recall, SUNW allied with Fujitsu and devised a plan whereby Fujitsu focuses on the high end and SUNW focuses on the low end.

   The new systems by IBM run Linux atop a Power5. Proprietary Solaris 10 atop a Niagara simply cannot compete because Linux is debugged by a small army of developers and made rock solid by IBM's 6 sigma commitment to reliability. So, in a desparate move, SUNW has decided to put Solaris 10 into open-mode in order to bring the SUNW Niagara-based servers closer to parity with the Power5.

2. Intel is now designing multiple cores into future x86 chips. In short order, Intel will devour SUNW. SUNW simply cannot match the engineering prowess of Intel; the current Pentium IV crushes the UltraSPARC III in performance. Future systems from the Dell, HP, etc. will feature Linux running atop a multi-core Pentium. Proprietary Solaris 10 atop a Niagara simply cannot compete because Linux is debugged by a small army of developers and made rock solid by IBM's 6 sigma commitment to reliability. (IBM is the prime commercial developer for Linux.)

The bell tolls for SUNW.

1. The greatest threat to SUNW is IBM. IBM is now pursuing the low end of the server market, which is precisely the market on which SUNW is focused. As you recall, SUNW allied with Fujitsu and devised a plan whereby Fujitsu focuses on the high end and SUNW focuses on the low end.

   The new systems by IBM run Linux atop a Power5. Proprietary Solaris 10 atop a Niagara simply cannot compete because Linux is debugged by a small army of developers and made rock solid by IBM's 6 sigma commitment to reliability. So, in a desparate move, SUNW has decided to put Solaris 10 into open-mode in order to bring the SUNW Niagara-based servers closer to parity with the Power5.

2. Intel is now designing multiple cores into future x86 chips. In short order, Intel will devour SUNW. SUNW simply cannot match the engineering prowess of Intel; the current Pentium IV crushes the UltraSPARC III in performance. Future systems from the Dell, HP, etc. will feature Linux running atop a multi-core Pentium. Proprietary Solaris 10 atop a Niagara simply cannot compete because Linux is debugged by a small army of developers and made rock solid by IBM's 6 sigma commitment to reliability. (IBM is the prime commercial developer for Linux.)

The bell tolls for SUNW.