Sun to Build Alternative Desktop ?

murthydn writes " At "Sun Tech Days 2003" Developer Conference in India ,Sun Microsystems Inc Chairman, President and CEO Scott McNealy exhorted Indian software programmers to build Sun's "desktop computer" as an alternative system to Microsoft software architecture .The complete article is here" 'Cuz if there is one thing that will save Sun, its a new desktop platform. *cough*

Comments

Not a new platform

[matthew.thompson]

The article talks of a new desktop computer.

Looks like sun are trying to get into the low cost desktop platform providing Office-a-like features on a cheap and cheerful device.

It mentions Linux, Evolution, Gnome and Star Office - sounds like it's more of a re-packaging that anything.

Re:Not a new platform

[rugwuk]

The sunray has been around for several years. Its a flat panel, with smart card reader, move your badge to a new terminal your session goes with you. Walk from one conf room to another and your sessions goes with you!

Re:Not a new platform

[Craig Maloney]

I saw one of these in practice at a Sun field office. It's very cool to see people insert their card through and have their desktop appear on their screens without logging in. In todays corporate environment of people being rather mobile throughout the corporation, I'm surprised it hasn't caught on outside of Sun. Of course it preclused having a personalized workspace and a place to call "yours", but perhaps combining the idea of "home base" no matter where you are along with a personalized workspace would be something I'd like to have.

Re:Not a new platform

[matthew.thompson]

However Scott seems to have mentioned this and said that the SunRay is not a computer. Looks like they're getting the stuff the network I want a processor message from clients.

Re:Not a new platform

[lindsayt]

I have a Sun Netra X1 in my basement feeding four sunrays throughout my house. It's really very nice - I can move from room to room and my session goes with me so long as I have my card. I use the sunrays for word processing, music, video, pretty much everything except video games, for which I have a Winblows box in the basement.

It's really nice, but the Sunray really isn't aimed for home users - I'm an abherration. They're really business TCO-reducers. They require an experienced UNIX systems admin to install and maintain, and they provide a standard UNIX CDE/gnome desktop. Since I'm a full-time Solaris Systems admin during the day and I maintain sunrays for work, it's really simple for me to use them at home. Not so for the proverbial joe sixpack and his wife.

Though I love the sunrays, the whole system would have to be prepackaged and simplified drastically before they would make sense for the average home user(maybe with the Cobalt Raq stuff). I imagine that this new vision of McNealy's must be something totally different.

Re:Not a new platform

[hackstraw]

There may be integrated monitor versions, but we use them with standard CRTs. FYI, the card reader is not really a smart card per say, the card only acts as an identifying token to maintain sessions, it does nothing in terms of authentication/authorization or any kind of encryption. The performance of these guys in terms of X over a network is pretty good. I belive that there is some kind of hardware compressor or special codec chip in the box to lower network bandwidth needs.

Re:Not a new platform

[jo42]

Eh, wot's wrong with an Ultra 10 or dual-processor Ultra 60 as a desktop system? And why does he need a foreign nation to tell him what to do when the people in his back yard already know. Is this yet another case of the conslutant knows better (than inhouse staff)?

Me wish list:

- 1+ GHz UltraSPARC III (dual processor capable).
- Cheap industry standard memory (no over-priced proprietary Sun shite).
- Support for EIDE/ATA/whatever-the-fsck its called these days and U320 SCSI.
- Onboard GigE, Firewire and Universal Silly Bus 2.whatever.

Starting price of $995.

Next product suggestion will cost you one million dollars.

Re:Not a new platform

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually this kind of setup is very common at techie conferences where they have the pool of systems. First time I saw the swipe/ID card combo with roaming was at a Microsoft conference about 6 years ago.

Re:Not a new platform

[oldmanmtn]

The Sun Ray idea is very cool even without the whole "hotelling office" setup.

I can prep a presentation in my office, and then walk over to a conference room with my card and pop it up on the screen there instantly.

I can have a debug session running in my office. If something goes flakey with the hardware, I can bring the whole session into the lab without stopping and re-establishing everything.

If I run into a problem with a piece of code, I can grab my card, walk over to the original author's office, and show it to him on his Sun Ray - without him having to do so much as open a new window.

I can move seamlessly back and forth between my office and the "Internet Cafe" in the next building. I can start writing an email over lunch, and finish it when I'm back at my desk.

You get the portability of a laptop (within the campus at least), but it fits in your shirt pocket.

Re:Not a new platform

[Steeltoe]

I saw one of these in practice at a Sun field office. It's very cool to see people insert their card through and have their desktop appear on their screens without logging in. In todays corporate environment of people being rather mobile throughout the corporation, I'm surprised it hasn't caught on outside of Sun. Of course it preclused having a personalized workspace and a place to call "yours", but perhaps combining the idea of "home base" no matter where you are along with a personalized workspace would be something I'd like to have.

Problem is that you MUST have a paperless office if you move to such a mobile solution. And we are using more paper now than ever before, thus destroying the myth of a paperless office along with the viability for this in every office... I wouldn't want to carry all my books and perms along with me.

Maybe, you can get a paperless office if you spend 2 or 3 LCD screens per employee, but I doubt it will be cost-efficient.

For large consulting firms, it makes sense though. But then, a laptop and a LAN/private network makes even more sense..

Then there is the risk: In a paperless office you can lose EVERYTHING.

Re:Not a new platform

[Lumpy]

I have this here. Sans the silly smartcard, but that could be added.

It's called a Terminal Server and X terminals.

Logoff at your location , move to the other cubes and login.. voila you are back to work. espically if you are using gnome and the desktop restores to what you were last doing.

for office drones, a dual P-III supports 15-20 users easily.

Re:Not a new platform

[Tackhead]

> I saw one of these in practice at a Sun field office. It's very cool to see people insert their card through and have their desktop appear on their screens without logging in.

Which is neat. However, if this is the marketing spiel...

> In todays corporate environment of people being rather mobile throughout the corporation, I'm surprised it hasn't caught on outside of Sun. Of course it precludes having a personalized workspace and a place to call "yours", but

See yesterday's thread on "How [not to] improve employee morale"

> perhaps combining the idea of "home base" no matter where you are along with a personalized workspace would be something I'd like to have.

Not trolling here - sincerely curious - why?

Humans are tribal animals, creatures of habit. The notion that a chunk of dirt (or carpet, or a computer) is "yours" is a very old ans powerful one.

On paper, it works - "my" computer is identical to everyone else's, so it doesn't matter which one I sit in front of.

In reality, it doesn't. The computer is "mine", because it's got my stickynotes on it (I don't use the things myself, but many users do), and it's on "my" desk. The desk is "mine" because it's got my papers, stuffed penguin, CD coaster, and double-sized coffee mug on it. It's in "my" cubicle because it's got my Dilbert page-a-day thingy on it, and "my" despair.com calendar on the wall. If I had to move into "someone else's" cubicle (the one with the calendar featuring cute little puppies), I'd freak.

Hoteling was a buzzword for a while, but how many companies can do it effectively without destroying morale?

Like any technical solution that requires a "paradigm shift" in a worker's attitude towards himself and his place in the company (and hoteling is definitely such a thing), unless you can get everyone to guzzle the Kool-Aid simultaneously, you're going to have a morale problem. No matter how good it sounds on paper.

Re:Not a new platform

[AKnightCowboy]

Unfortunately, knowing Sun, the new desktop computer will be $15,000 and require a separate OS license and yearly maintenance contract.

Re:Not a new platform

[Dunkirk]

This is a great idea until you see the requirements for the backend server you need to do this for any reasonably-sized workforce... Then Citrix terminal servers start sounding a whole lot better, even if they don't have the smart-card stuff. (But maybe you could attach that to client PC's?)

Re:Not a new platform

[axxackall]

espically if you are using gnome and the desktop restores to what you were last doing.

Wrong.

Gnome will start same programs as they've been running last time you've logged out. But all data will be lost. Consider that I am on the middle of some game, or I have a terminal window with multi-hour compilation process. If I logout my game session is gone and the compilation process is terminated.

Re:Not a new platform

[KMAPSRULE]

> perhaps combining the idea of "home base" no matter where you are along with a personalized workspace would be something I'd like to have. >>Not trolling here - sincerely curious - why? I agree with you that it is extremely hard to break the notion that a computer is "mine" but as someone who travels for the company quite a bit I would love to see the "Visitors" cubes set up with something like this so that no matter what site,no matter where in the country I have uniform access to all the tools and such I need and not have to have IT install 20 things everytime I arive anywhere. Then again a Laptop would be nice ...really Nice....

Re:Not a new platform

[Doomdark]

Hmmh. Pardon my ignorance here, but are you talking about something above and beyond just normal X-windows server and desktop like Gnome/KDE? I do know how extensively SunRays work (completely transparently for apps, it's complete snapshot as far as user is concerned), but I haven't seen anything close to that for Linux yet. Desktops generally remember approximately which apps you had running, and in some cases try to get back to about where you were (assuming apps play nice and help). But that's not really much of a session, it's more like having configurable starting point; reduces start up time, not having to open number of xterms (et al) you usually do. Nice thing usually (and pain in other times when you forgot to uncheck that 'restore desktop' and get n+1 unnecessary apps).

As to smart card, smart card's whole idea is that you do not even have to logout or login (that is, inserting/removing card constitutes login/logout action). So, it's what connects you to your session. Nothing extraordinary, but added convenience.

Am I missing something here?

Re:Not a new platform

[op00to]

If you pay full price for Sun products, I got a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you ...

Re:Not a new platform

[Surak]

It mentions Linux, Evolution, Gnome and Star Office - sounds like it's more of a re-packaging that anything

Linux? Why not Solaris? All of those things will run great on Solaris.

Re:Not a new platform

[wwwillem]

Then there is the risk: In a paperless office you can lose EVERYTHING.

What about a burned down office building? :-)

Serious: Besides the "move your desktop around on campus", the main other principle behind SunRay's, MadHatter, etc. is that your paperless stuff is important enough to be put on central (probably mirrored or RAID) storage which gets backed up nightly. So you don't lose ANYTHING.

Since a year or three, I'm working 99% paperless. Don't have a cabinet with folders anymore. It also saves my lower back when I'm travelling.

Re:Not a new platform

[Roberto]

Yes, it can be done. Use a VNC session on the server, then start a VNC client fullscreen as your session on the "sunray".

When you logout, all you close is the display, and the session in the server doesn't notice.

Re:Not a new platform

[docl]

Is there a commercial market for this? I assuming broadband becomes more common. Could my 78 yo mother could have a terminal in her home, managed by a professional service for $20-30/mo? It might be worth it since her computing needs are simple (Word processing, e-mail, and web browsing) and she could avoid the headache of updating virus software, etc.

Re:Not a new platform

[Doomdark]

Ok, VNC is good, and probably does similar job to SunRay (servers). Good point. But original poster seemed to indicate normal X-servers could do the same without any additions?

Re:Not a new platform

[arkanes]

I don't think this'd catch on, for the same reasons posted about about morale, and for the same reason subscription software is recieved very poorly. People like stuff to be theirs, or at least appear theirs, and a dumb terminal thats maintained by someone else certainly isn't that. It's ones thing to use one in a library, or as a workstation in your office (although I assume that most places these are used, most users are developers or engineers and are allowed a large degree of control over thier environment), but another entirely if it's YOUR computer in YOUR home.

Re:Not a new platform

[lindsayt]

Unfortunately, the current implementation of sunray software wouldn't be able to handle that - it needs just about every last bit of a 10Mbps lan connection to function well. A sunray on the other side of a 1.5Mbps WAN connection from its server would have woefully poor performance. On the other hand, Sunray software 1.3 was useless without a 100Mbps link, and 2.0 has reduced that drastically to 10Mbps, so perhaps a future version would be more bandwidth-efficient...

Re:Not a new platform

[Anonymous Coward]

>Acts 17:28, "For in Him we live, and move, and have our being."

So He is like a sort of town then? Or a disco? Oooh, i`m so confused. Perhaps that nice - if slightly simple - old man who goes on about god when no-one is listening can help me out. You know, the one with poor dress sense and no decent CDs.

Re:Not a new platform

[SecretAsianMan]

In reply to:

You get the portability of a laptop (within the campus at least), but it fits in your shirt pocket.

Do you have Sun Rays in your bathroom stalls?

Re:Not a new platform

[abhisarda]

My university[mtu.edu] was the first to adopt those sun ray programs MTU in 2000 for students in residence halls. Turned out to be big flop and MTU discontinued that program in 2002. Sun Rays are a real pain in the ass. I worked on them for 2 years but just hated them. Of course I had no alternative because the math dept had only suns. Thank god my Elec Engg dept did not use them.

Re:Not a new platform

[Steeltoe]

Serious: Besides the "move your desktop around on campus", the main other principle behind SunRay's, MadHatter, etc. is that your paperless stuff is important enough to be put on central (probably mirrored or RAID) storage which gets backed up nightly. So you don't lose ANYTHING.

In case of a pole reversal, or magnetic storms, it can be lost very quickly. It has happened before, will happen again, we just don't know when. I'd backup on different types of media to be sure.

Since a year or three, I'm working 99% paperless. Don't have a cabinet with folders anymore. It also saves my lower back when I'm travelling.

Myself, I find it easier to read a book outside of the monitor, and have neat papers that I can quickly take with me on meetings etc. I wouldn't be comfortable with a paperless office even though I like the idea of not cutting down trees. I also like to take notes that are not meant to be a document. With a pen, it's quick and easy, and I can even draw pictures while I wait on the phone.

If it works for you, good, but it just wouldn't work for me.

Re:Not a new platform

[Mirus Nex]

Buy recycled paper (blech), or recycle your paper. At least then you won't feel so bad about "cutting down trees".

I *try* to recycle, but it's so damn hard to a) know what CAN be recycled, and b) remembering to throw paper in the recycle bin. Recycling centers could make it much easier by sorting through the crap like plastic windowed envolopes, etc... You'd think environmentalists would be lined up outside the recycle center doors for the chance to sort through paper...er......maybe not. :)

BOT...I haven't seen, nor previously heard, anything about Sun Ray, sounds rather interesting. I just don't like the idea of employing thousands of people in a foreign country taking jobs away from the U.S. Has anyone heard or seen proof that exporting development to India actually saves money? Or is it one of those "it looks good on paper" deals? I would think the English translation would be...lacking. And wouldn't support be a bitch? Calling India at 4:00am (India time) and getting a half asleep support tech that barely speaks English to begin with... Hopefully, this is just the latest fad that'll go away in time...

Re:Not a new platform

[randyest]

Hoteling was a buzzword for a while, but how many companies can do it effectively without destroying morale?

Easy -- just let them enjoy the benefits (move your workspace easily for presentations, meetings, etc.) without forcing them to deal with annoyances like an ever-changing office location.

Re:Not a new platform

[randyest]

Nothing new here -- SUN (Stanford University Network) has always has the motto: the network is the computer.

I work very closely with Sun (high-end server engineering in Burlington, MA), and while they have gotten a bit big and slow, and their organizational hierarchy is a little flat (which can lead to too much discussion of the best way to do something and too little actually executing any one of the acceptable ways to do it), I do believe Sun is quite clueful and still making some cool stuff.

They're gonna shock us all when InfiniBand-equipped Solaris boxen start rolling out -- then the network really will be the copmputer, in ways we've not seen before . . .

Re:Not a new platform

[gpoul]

Could you please be more verbose about this setup? From what I've heard you need a bigger system to support the Sun Ray's software and the software costs huge amounts of money.

Could you please tell us how much you paid for it (and the software)? thanks!

Re:Not a new platform

[blincoln]

Do you have Sun Rays in your bathroom stalls?

I would instantly convert from agnosticism to the religion of any deity who would strike down with wrath the people who are so dorky they use their laptops while taking a shit.

Re:Not a new platform

[argel]

In todays corporate environment of people being rather mobile throughout the corporation, I'm surprised it hasn't caught on outside of Sun

I'm surprised our users do not take advatange of it. I think a few of our more tech savvy users do, but the majority either take the card home with them or just leave it in the unit forever. Most do not even realize that since we upgraded to the 1.3 software they can ditch the card completely. I cannot explain it, except to say that they do not run into a need to be mobile enough to remember to take advantage of it. Though that makes the 1.3 mobile sessions more attractive since if you forget your card you are screwed but with mobile sessions if you login somewhere else your session automatically moves to the new unit (even if you forgot to disconnect it with shift+pause/utdetach).

Re:Not a new platform

[lindsayt]

I get academic pricing and I'm not sure if it's NDA or not. However, based on list prices, here's a basic sunray setup using a V100:

Sun P/N Part Name Price
N19-UUE1-9S-256EXW Netra V100 995.00
BAE-100-00 Sun Ray 1 525.00 (or less than 50 on ebay)
CECIS-200-992S 1-client RTU 95.00
CECMS-200C99MS Sunray Media 35.00

I had a nice table but the lameness filter killed it. Sorry, it's kind of ugly now.

A couple notes: first, the V100 will only really run about 5 or 6 sunrays before it starts really bogging down under the load. The config above includes 256 MB of RAM; you'll want to up that to at least 1024 but you can get the (standard but not common) memory at crucial.com for much less than Sun charges. The base configuration includes a 40GB 7200 RPM IDE disk, which is drastically more than you need unless you plan to keep all your user data there too. It can safely be swapped with any industry-standard IDE disk (cable select mode).

Second, the regular price for Sunray 1 clients is drastically more than I remembered - buy them on ebay for $40 each instead. They are the headless kind but work with any standard monitor.

Thirdly, Solaris 9 is a free download and free RTU for personal use. The V100 comes preinstalled and is fine out of the box for beginners, but I recommend that you reinstall before a sunray installation.

Finally, sunray software prior to 2.0 required a private network. 2.0 no longer requires this, but I would recommend that sunrays be behind a firewall if they're not on a private network - I don't know how much sunray code gets audited, since the *normal* install involves a private network.

Re:Not a new platform

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds like I need to be even more careful with my porn... imagine, "Oops, don't know how that got in my session." --sweat--

Re:Not a new platform

[kilfarsnar]

Aw c'mon! Minesweeper on the can is better than the paper! ;-P

Re:Not a new platform

[Natalie's Hot Grits]

Although we are about due for another pole reversal, this is not going to lose any data stored on magnetic devices (unless there is a huge influx of magnetic field, significantly larger than the current magnetic field of the earth).

To test your hypothesis of pole reversals ruining your data, take a hard drive that is turned on and in a machine (such as a laptop computer), face the computer magnetic north (use a compass, not the north star) and then spin the laptop computer 180 degrees. If there is significant data loss, then your hypothesis may be correct. If there is no data loss, you are probably just full of hot air.

You can replicate this experiment to more exacting specifications by sending a laptop to australia from the US and see if the data is still intact when it arrives.

As far as magnetic storms, this is another possability that needs to be looked into. It will be nice one day when cheap, large, and standard optical backup storage becomes mainstream. (CD-R is not large, and DVD-R is not standard nor cheap nor fast. IMHO, tape backups are a waste of time if they are magnetic unless you are storing them in seperate physical locations (which most people I have run into don't) when you could be using mirroring. Maybe one day we will have optical tapes that can be as large as we want. I doubt that day will come any time in the near future.

Re:Not a new platform

[Anonymous Coward]

so dorky they use their laptops while taking a sh*t

The catchphrase would be:
so geeki it's so phr34ki

Re:Not a new platform

[bluGill]

First of all, in most cases a fire will not destroy ALL papers. It will in the area that the first first starts, but just outside that area most papers are readable (often only once, so better get an expert to make that one time a copy). World Trade Center type disaster where everything is destroyed for everyone are rare. I used to heat with wood, after heating the house all day and night, I'd find the next morning some of the newspapers I used to light yesterday's fire still readable in the ashes. (you couldn't even breath in their direction without destorying them, but they were readable within those limits)

Of course I see your point: but with papers you should have copies of valuable documents stored offsite. It just happens that it is significantly cheaper and easier to store an electronic version of the document offsite. Easier because it should be automatic, cheaper because a tape that can hold thousands of documents (less if you use wasteful file formats like Word) in the space of one in a warehouse.

In most cases I find my office is full of papers, but almost of them are things I can easially print out again if I need them. I used to have a set of documents I'd print out at least weekly, the paper version was easier to read (and pin to the wall), but it was always out of date.

Re:Not a new platform

[DJ FirBee]

I worked for Unisys and we had a hoteling setup for the consultants who were always supposed to be out working in a practice in the field. It was stifling to sit in one of the empty 'anybody' cubes with a sheet to tell you how to hook up to the network and a vga monitor. This hoteling setup was laptop based.

It was just about as alienating of an environment as I have ever worked in. I spent alot of time just staring around my cublice and occasionally getting softdrinks. I even played games on my palm pilot in the bathroom.

It was the worst.

Later my practice had a project that was done and the company forgot about me and another guy for >4 months. I 'worked from home' with the VPN. It was a lush life. This is the good side of consulting.

Re:Not a new platform

[BamaSlam]

They also have a model that is a lot cheaper but requires a VGA display. We have been using these for about a year. Very cool and we saved a bunch of money vs. Desktops and Exceed licenses.

Re:Not a new platform

[dublin]

Yes, it can be done. Use a VNC session on the server, then start a VNC client fullscreen as your session on the "sunray".

When you logout, all you close is the display, and the session in the server doesn't notice.

Well, sort of. First, let me say that I'm a huge fan of VNc and it makes life much easier. Second, it is in NO WAY equivalent to the Sunray in the real world. VNC is horribly slow, and even the bext implementations (probably Konstantin Chaplinsky's TightVNC) are still at least an order of magnitude slower than Microsoft's RDP protocol, and the Sunrays (at least the newer ones) seem even faster than that to me.

I like VNC, but it's really not in this game - even though VNC is probably the only other reasonable way to get real session transparency...

Re:Not a new platform

[Anonymous Coward]

Minesweeper on the can is better than the paper!

...but you can't wipe your arse on a computer if the bog roll runs out. I think. I'll get back to you on that...

Re:Not a new platform

[Anonymous Coward]

I even played games on my palm pilot in the bathroom

I bet you don't think wanking is a city in China.

Re:Not a new platform

[Anonymous Coward]

Sun dosent understand the desktop. Unix dosent understand GUI. KDE and GNOME sucks, and worse than Win95 when it comes to the GUIs. Its best if Sun stays off the GUIs, least it makes another intolerable GUI.

Re:Not a new platform

[Anonymous Coward]

noone give a rats ass about your game. and if you dont save in your app then your fault for being a really stupid user.

I have used Terminal servers before and it's just as nice a sthis SUN system... login anywhere on the terminals and your desktop follows you, with your data /etc... all the sun setup does is make it easier for the lazy but for lots more money.

I also think that a simple LTSP is just as good and suceeds in creating the same thing.

Re:Not a new platform

[callipygian-showsyst]

It's sad that the parent was modded down. Sad because supporting Java means supporting child-rape

The inventors of Java are convicted, admitted, sex offenders who prey on little girls.

Coninuting to endorse Java means $$$ go to these people who prey on our children.

Re:Not a new platform

[Anonymous Coward]

Good point! Patrick Naughton and Sun still get royalties from his Java Books. His books are still endorsed by Sun and sold on Amazon. It is for that reason that I will never specify or purchase Sun equipment!

Sun desktop...

[st0rmcold]

Well...

I for one am not overly excited for a speedy Java desktop environement. *cough*

Anyone know if Sun gonna code this is anything but Java?

Re:Sun desktop...

[borgdows]

have you ever tried Eclipse?

http://www.eclipse.org

well... speedy is not the word for describing Eclipse, but it's not laggy neither and they are a lot of killer-features for Java developers, that you won't find anywhere else.

Re:Sun desktop...

[rugwuk]

Its a server side application in C actually that manages the session and you get the power of the backend server for your desktop! If you have a 64 way E10K, then the user sees a 64way E10K. The session is delivered as graphics packets over ethernet, so the only computer inside the sunray is a graphics card!

Re:Sun desktop...

[Michael Crutcher]

The more appropriate question would be, have you ever tried SWT? The part that he's excited about is the new GUI Toolkit that IBM developed while building eclipse. SWT uses native widgets to draw the screen. It "feels" better than Swing and looks more like native applications.

Re:Sun desktop...

[Anonymous Coward]

yes, but what about NetBeans, huh? Sun won't go near eclipse the buggers.

Re:Sun desktop...

[Demiah]

The Eclipse GUI is written using SWT, which I'll agree both looks nice and is pretty responsive - under win2k at least, I haven't tried the linux version yet..

Sun's unlikely to use it, as SWT's IBM technology, and a directly competing API with the likes of AWT & Swing..

The reason for it's speed is the Java Native Interface (JNI) calls to the platform-dependent libraries, coded in C IIRC.

IMHO, if you're planning on writing a Java Desktop App then SWT's your only real choice - though respect to the LimeWire project for what they've achieved with Swing.

Good

[mschoolbus]

Woo Hoo!!! No more CDE at work if they actually decide to upgrade...

Re:Good

[paulmcd]

Thats the Gnome port :)

Re:Good

[Anonymous Coward]

You know, the CDE login screen (run by the "dtlogin"
program) lets you choose a traditional X11 session
if you want, when logging in. It even remembers
your preferences for next time you login.

So just set up your .xinitrc or .xsession or
whatever it is people are using these days,
and use twm or whatever your favorite window
manager is.

Of course, if you want gnome or KDE or something,
your sysadmin might not be totally thrilled
with you if you install it in your homedir.
(Trust me, I am a former sysadmin.)

Advangates?

[Ponty]

I'm honestly trying to think of what advantages Sun could bring to a desktop, and I can't think of any.

The "incompatible with the standard, but based on Unix and fun to use" dimension is covered by Apple. The "cheap and runs on your hardware, but is almost enterprise-ready" page has Linux written all over it.

It seems Sun would be better off writing software to kick MS's butt. A high quality office suite, or a set of network tools that make IE look like etch-a-sketch. It's not much, but it's something, and they need anything.

Re:Advangates?

[dlm3]

Um, ever heard of OpenOffice ???

Re:Advangates?

[Randolpho]

MS Office kicks OpenOffice.org's ass two ways to Tuesday.

Don't get me wrong, I love OO.o, especially the price, but MS Office *is* a better product, and there's no denying it. It's more mature, all of the many minor kinks that plague OO.o are ironed out.

Re:Advangates?

[clarkc3]

The "cheap and runs on your hardware, but is almost enterprise-ready" page has Linux written all over it.

Depends on how you look at it, Sun Blades are cheap and fast, and lots of businesses would prefer a Sun solution over a generic linux one because they know the company and know they wont be going away anytime soon so support will be there

Re:Advangates?

[Anonymous Coward]

"...incompatible with the standard" you say? How so? I seem to be able to run any piece of Linux software under OS X that you can imagine... So. Praytell, how is Apple incompatible with the standard? I can visually read the XML files it uses to store application preferences, unlike MS Office's "XML"...I can open inetd.conf and make the same changes I would in Red Hat and have them work...

So, if you're more enlightened, please, tell me... If this is more FUD, maybe you should make that clear by mentioning how uninformed you are.

Re:Advangates?

[Anonymous Coward]

I have to reluctantly agree.

OO.o 1.0 was pretty good, but slow.

I just "upgraded" to 1.0.2. It is a piece of crap.

Re:Advangates?

[Ponty]

For the average user, a Mac is incompatible with the standard. I'm not saying that that's a problem (note that I'm writing this from my PowerBook while writing a web app that is hosted on a Quicksilver G4,) I'm just saying that for the most part, Macs are (accurately or not) perceived as incompatible.

I'm also not saying that that's a problem. I've never really run into any major roadblocks being exclusively a Mac user, or being a NeXT user before that.

Re:Advangates?

[Ponty]

Nope. It's just that OO really isn't all that hot.

I'm not saying that Office is all that great, either. That's why there needs to be a _better_ office suite.

I find it remarkable that people are all bursting forth about how great Office for the Mac is. I would rank it near the very bottom of all Mac OS X programs. Nevertheless, it's so much better than Office for Windows, that it's praiseworthy. Disturbing, really.

Re:Advangates?

[Christianfreak]

Yes nothing more innovative than that 1337 Paperclip. Oh I forgot Office is so easy to use that he's out of a job. Like how easy it is to get it to stop putting in numbered lists after you've started one.. and how easy it is to get it to start a new one at "1" if you have another one in the document (even if its 30 pages up). How innovative and awesome the power of Office which always presumes to know what I'm doing and writting. Yes Office is so cool.

Thanks but I'll use OO even on Windows where Office is availiable. I can't stand Office's autocorrect "features" I like thinking for myself. Finally an office program that stays out of the way.

Re:Advangates?

[Anonymous Coward]

and lots of businesses would prefer a Sun solution over a generic linux one because they know the company and know they wont be going away anytime soon so support will be there

You say this about Sun? Are you sure? Linux will far outlive the companies that support it, though many companies will exist throughout its lifetime that would love to support it if you pay them. This cost of support turns out to be less than the mark-up on Sun's hardware and software. Meanwhile, if Sun's fortunes tumble while their debt rises, support for their closed source products will mostly disappear.

Re:Advangates?

[govtcheez]

You realize those are just options that take all of 5 seconds to turn off, right? Don't rip on a product you're too lazy to learn how to use correctly.

Re:Advangates?

[turgid]

I was only joking.

Re:Advangates?

[lindsayt]

I agree that MS Office is still (at this point) better than Openorffice/staroffice. However, the main point is that openoffice has a lot of potential *and* it's open-source and uses standards for the file saves. I use staroffice for all my word processing, and when I hit a bug (it's getting far less common now) I send in a bug report. Sure, right now it puts me out a little; but not much, and I'm contributing to something that has potential to far outshine MS office very soon.

In terms of the word processor, Star writer (the OO/SO wp) is nearly as feature-rich and almost exactly as good as MS Word. The others lag quite a bit, but the word processor is the most important in terms of getting wide acceptance.

Not two years ago my boss was telling me that all our machines had to be Suns because they were "more mature, all of the many minor kinks that plague [linux] are ironed out." Guess what? Today we use linux for everything that does not specifically require Sun, because those kinks were ironed out. We'll see the same thing with OO/SO I'm sure.

Re:Advangates?

[Anonymous Coward]

You realize those are just options that take all of 5 seconds to turn off, right?

Well no, he clearly didn't. If it didn't know about those options, then that would indicate that Word is probably a little too complex, or the user interface is poor.

Just to add to his list, the way Word chooses the (wrong) style and size for text when you paste it in. How Word screws up your numbered lists if you are editing it and have numbered sub lists. How it removes indendation from the line above the one you are editing, because you just deleted a magic character that aparently keeps the indentation in the line above working. How you have to edit headers and footers seperatly, because if you change the page orientation from portrait to landscape within the document, that breaks the headers and footers into three seperate lots. On and on and on...

Re:Advangates?

[Randolpho]

Won't get much of an argument from me. I love OO.o, but I readily admit that MS Office XP (or even Office 98, really) is a better product.

OO.o has a lot of catching up to do. What really sucks is that MS Office basically kicked every other office suite to the curb and had quite a bit of time to mature without competition.

Like it or not, MS is still king of the hill and it's gonna be hard to knock it off.

Re:Advangates?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Thanks but I'll use OO even on Windows where Office is availiable. I can't stand Office's autocorrect "features""

Maybe you should, now, stay with me here, I know this is a difficult concept...

Turn them off?

Dolt.

Re:Advangates?

[Anonymous Coward]

IE is an etch-a-sketch

its a feature poor, crash prone, non standards complient, ugly piece of code.

why do people insist its somehow powerful?

its NOT

Re:Advangates?

[j3110]

Actually... back in my student days when I had to enter a lot of formulas into a document, OOo > *. :) Play with their formula editor. It's the way formula editors should be. Microsoft Office gets a 1/10 in this aspect.

Actual editing is about the same as well.

OOo is missing:
a very smart way of dealing with paper/printing (no one has a good way of dealing with this ... like, I have Bond in tray 2, Hole punched in tray 3, and an envelope feeder. You have to write wierd macros for MS Office to deal with it, and I don't even know if OOo can at all.)
Access
Mail-merge from arbitrary data sources (It may exist now.)
A slightly cleaner GUI.

Other than that, I love OOo. I reccommend it to just about everyone, and most are happy. I get a few angry people telling me it sucks because something isn't under file menu. I try to tell them it's not supposed to be the same program, it's just similar enough to use. Usually when I tell them to just learn the new way or go pay 200$ at Best Buy, they stop complaining fast.

I'm interested in knowing what you can do, or can do easier, in MS Office but not in OOo?

Just so I can know what use-case I would probably not want to recommend OOo.

Re:Advangates?

[Trolling4Dollars]

I use OO.o myself on both the Linux and Windows platforms. While I am very happy that there is an OSS alternative to MS Office, I have run into quite a few issues with OO.o that make it a little harder to use.

When my wife and I were getting married last Summer, we needed to make an insert to send out with our invitations. We used OO.o (it had just gone 1.0 when we were making our insert) and had a lot of difficulty with setting up text boxes for layout. In MS Office, you just insert a text box and stretch it out to the size you need using a marquee tool. Then you can set properties on that text box. If you don't want it to have a line around it, you select 'no line' from the line style of it's properties. Or you can change the background color of the text box, etc... In OO.o there was no functionality exactly like this. We finally figured out how to do what we wanted to do, but it was cumbersome and took a lot longer than it should have. In addition, it was also a lot less accurate. Fortunately, I have little need for an Office suite about 99% of the time.

I DO expect OO.o to get better and better as the development continues. However, I hope that the developers at OO.o eventually set up some kind of system (kind of like the folks at Transgaming) that allows people to vote on "most desired features". This way they can address the needs and desires of the users in a direct way.

Re:Advangates?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well no, he clearly didn't. If it didn't know about those options, then that would indicate that Word is probably a little too complex, or the user interface is poor.

More likely, it indicates that he's an idiot. There's not exactly a shortage of them here, you know.

Re:Advangates?

[Randolpho]

I'm interested in knowing what you can do, or can do easier, in MS Office but not in OOo?

Well, MS Office is faster, more stable, more responsive, and has better shortcut support (key commands, right-clickety, etc.), but on a more "user-interface" level, you've already mentioned a few of the problems, like printing, and GUI layout/customizability. MS also has much more evolved interactive and static help capabilities -- I personally hate the paper clip, but he's more capable at figuring out what you're trying to do than OO.o's lightbulb.

Again, don't think this is somehow a criticism of OO.o -- it's leaps and bounds better than any of the other competition (if there are any that may be considered competition at all). It just has a long way to go to beat MS Office. There are a few little features it has over Office that are a good start -- autocomplete of words is surprisingly useful (and I haven't found it on Office XP yet), and the open standard for files is, if bulky, at least easer for 3rd party use.

Finally on Access, I assume you mean a visual database program. I shudder at this prospect. Access, by allowing people unfamiliar with database design to easily create databases, has done more harm to the field than help.

Re:Advangates?

[j3110]

So, if I understand you right, it's just a lot of little things that add up to annoyance.

Access is a neat way to give people access to a remote database for administration purposes. It doesn't have to do much more than an easy to use GUI for insert/delete/update. By no means should anyone use Access to create more than a trivial database. :) Most of what I see it being used for in the Office world is linking to some other SQL server through ODBC to get at data in a more custom way than their apps allow. I've seen one program written in VBA embedded into Access, and it was a horrible POS that took the company that made it out with it. :) (That's what they deserve for putting it on a SMB share... the locks database is not a substitute for concurrence.)

Re:Advangates?

[Doomdark]

I'm honestly trying to think of what advantages Sun could bring to a desktop, and I can't think of any.

Perhaps you were only thinking about technical aspects? What Sun can bring to table is the good old "warm fuzzy feeling" for companies, just like what IBM is doing with Linux. That is, sense of trust and safety, that there is a big company that stands behind the product. I'm the first one to agree that that's usually a fallacy, but for many (esp. higher ranking) decision makers, having enterprise-level support with contracts is tempting.

That is, even if Sun can not bring much above and beyond what other Open Source integrators can, they can add their brand, their corporate weight and visibility. And that is another combination of price, standards-compliancy and support. Not everyone is just looking for cheapest thing, nor most fun to use. Many bigger corps have pretty different goals.

As to writing software, I don't see why Sun should try to rewrite Mozilla, or why OpenOffice couldn't become (if it's not already) worthy competitor to MS Office. Those are dead end paths in terms of trying to create something clearly superior. In many ways, browsers and office packages have 'only' evolution left, not revolution (you could come up with new ways of browsing net, or creating documents, but those would belong to new genres of apps most likely).

Re:Advangates?

[clarkc3]

Do I think sun will be doing well financially and do I think they will still be around are 2 different topics. They will definitely still be around in some way/shape/form

Re:Advangates?

[Anonymous Coward]

MS Office kicks OpenOffice.org's ass two ways to Tuesday.

Looks like there's ANOTHER office suite coming out of Germany ... this company is already beta-testing Textmaker, their word processor, and from what I've seen, it's much better designed than the OpenOffice WP. Oh, Textmaker's Word filters are much better as well.

Re:Advangates?

[Ponty]

That's my point. IE is lousy. Mozilla is lousy. Opera is pretty lousy. Netscape is lousy. There needs to be a worthwhile browser on the PC platform.

(I use a Mac, so I don't care a lot, but when I have to use PC browsers, I get pissed off pretty quickly.)

Re:Advangates?

[Z4rd0Z]

IE is an etch-a-sketch

its a feature poor, crash prone, non standards complient, ugly piece of code.

why do people insist its somehow powerful?

its NOT


I used to think IE was a great browser. But then I read your post, and I realized how wrong I was. Thanks for making the truth so clear.

Re:Advangates?

[Anonymous Coward]

MOD PARENT UP!!!

At last someone that realizes Word has many
annoying aspects which tend to surface especialy when you are just trying to get the job done.
But hey! I forgot! For the slashdot crowd, it is infinitely more important that MSoffice uses a more "c00l" widget set than OO. Gimme a break...

Re:Advangates?

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you know we can customize the file menu or any other pull-down menu to however we want. If the users are expecting a certain feature under a certain menu, then OOo can certainly do this.

It is as easy as Tools | Configure | Menu
(intuitive enough!)

Ahhh, the freedoms.

Re:Advangates?

[j3110]

Thanks for the info! Now if only that had been under tools->macros :) Just kidding :)

no more cheap indian programmers

[Anonymous Coward]

If there is one thing the software industry needs to learn, it's that you don't guarantee a good product by simply buying hoards of cheap labor. The jobs crisis is because the industry is full of semi-qualified people and employees unable to tell the difference.

Re:no more cheap indian programmers

[Anonymous Coward]

No, its because of the cost of licensing, not the employees. Now, would you like a spoon to take the head from youre spinkter cavity?

Re:no more cheap indian programmers

[Anonymous Coward]

i agree.. there's nothing wrong with high quality programmers from any country, but by and large, quality of individual employees is the last thing a company looks for when hiring. and a company with no long term view of what's needed to sustain itself, has little chance of survival.

Re:no more cheap indian programmers

[DeadSeaTrolls]

Someone mod the parent as insightful.

Unfortunately a lot of people here in the US pick careers based on how much money they can make, rather than having any aptitude for the given task.

When hiring for technology positions, managers need to hire people that are smarter than they are. Managing talented people is difficult, as is taking credit for there efforts.

Indian programmer are often very smart and well educated. Their education system isn't totally bolloxed up by the focus on sport. Instead they focus on science and math, playing cricket later. That's not to say everyone there is educated, but those that are should not be ignored because they need less money to do the job.

The general blaming H1B visas or offshore labour for the economy or job market is misplaced. It's a failure in the education system (at many levels), and consumers not being willing to pay the frieght on products built at home.

Throwing money at the US education system is not the solution either, it requires a whole change in mindset.

Re:no more cheap indian programmers

[nonos]

From the jargon file :

Mongolian Hordes technique n. [poss. from the Sixties counterculture expression `Mongolian clusterfuck' for a public orgy] Development by gang bang. Implies that large numbers of inexperienced programmers are being put on a job better performed by a few skilled ones (but see bazaar). Also called `Chinese Army technique'; see also Brooks's Law.

gang bang n. The use of large numbers of loosely coupled programmers in an attempt to wedge a great many features into a product in a short time. Though there have been memorable gang bangs (e.g., that over-the-weekend assembler port mentioned in Steven Levy's "Hackers"), most are perpetrated by large companies trying to meet deadlines; the inevitable result is enormous buggy masses of code entirely lacking in orthogonality. When market-driven managers make a list of all the features the competition has and assign one programmer to implement each, the probability of maintaining a coherent (or even functional) design goes infinitesimal. See also firefighting, Mongolian Hordes technique, Conway's Law.

Re:no more cheap indian programmers

[Anonymous Coward]

The H1B program was implemented to supplement what US businesses were calling a shortage of talent. Of course, this was during a rapid growth phase for the industry. Now the H1B is used by those same companies as a resource for less expensive labor. Sun is the worst of the bunch, even going so far as to say that they intentionally give Indians preference. Now, normally, I'd say that's OK with me. It's your company, hire and fire as you like for whatever reason you like. Let consumers/businesses pass judgement with their $$$. However, H1Bs aren't US citizens, and shouldn't get the same protections as US citizens. If a company wants to tap a pool of over-seas talent, move there and tap away. As for US education, I agree. As for your generalized statements about Indians versus Americans, I disagree (and could sight many cases to prove you wrong). I know of several significant businesses who farmed out development work to Indians, and ended up with a failed business because they had to invest in development twice - once to the Indians and a second time in the US to fix the out-of-spec software they received. Talk to anyone who worked on th eoriginal Iridium project and ask what the number one cause of budget overruns and scheule delays was. Your assertion that Indian programmers are very smart and the implication that US educated programmers are not is all wrong. Bad code is written everywhere and in equally large quantities. Blame corporations for accepting junk code and pushing it out the door to customers/consumers as if it were quality stuff, attempting to patch it later just to meet unrealistic deadlines set by incompetent management.

Re:no more cheap indian programmers

[driverEight]

Feeding the troll, but...

Unfortunately a lot of people here in the US pick careers based on how much money they can make, rather than having any aptitude for the given task.

That market economy sure is a bitch. Imagine the gall of these people chosing to do what society most needs them to do, so the rest of us can have a better, easier life.

Re:no more cheap indian programmers

[Anonymous Coward]

Blaming H1 Visas is NOT misplaced. Why should Americans loose out on jobs so that foriegn guest workers can come here and fill those jobs cheaper? I have had to pay taxes all of my life and support the system. Why should others be allowed to come over here and reap the benefits of that system. Why is it wrong to take care of the American people in America first? Every other country does it. I've been in other countries and Americans are treated like crap. Then I come back to my own country and I get the same treatment.

As for Indian programmers being better, sorry that is NOT true. Indians are better at BULLSHIT. Most managers want to hear good things and never bother to even check if what is being said is true. Here is how indians work:

1: Get into a job, find the person in charge, and kiss their ass 6 ways to sunday.

2: Promise the moon for a project. Anything that is wanted say you can do no matter what it is.

3: Hack out a piece of shit and tell everyone that it is gold. If there is a problem then make bogus code to make sure that it looks like it's working.

4: Move on to something else before anyone else figures out what you have done.

This is what I have seen from experience. Yeah, all these companies are going to go over seas. Yeah, they all thing they are getting a better product because the indians are saying this. But in the end you will end up with complex, buggy code that no one understands and no one takes responsibility for. How many MS programmers are indian? How many problems does MS software have? How many bugs and security flaws does it have? You can expect more of this quality work from the Indian bullshit machine. And when things start blowing up and failing in a big way I hope all of these companies that use this crappy software get sued right off the face of the planet.

Re:no more cheap indian programmers

[nelsonal]

I have no problem with people using market forces to make a decision, but I have heard many a kid and young adult who wanted to be a doctor/lawyer only because he would make a lot of money. Only to learn after college that money doesn't buy happiness. Now you have a miserable bitter person who is taking a position from someone that would have enjoyed it and been more successful. Money should be one of the considerations of a career, but certainly not the only one.

Re:no more cheap indian programmers

[Anonymous Coward]

A majority of them graduate from IIT schools. IIT schools are undoubtedly the best in the world with graduates who don't accept at IIT frequently easily making it into the best of the Ivy league schools. If anything Indian programmers are massive in numbers, cheap, and amazingly talented.

Re:no more cheap indian programmers

[DeadSeaTrolls]

Your assertion that Indian programmers are very smart and the implication that US educated programmers are not is all wrong.

Actually I think that's your assertion. Mine point was that some US technology workers were there for the wrong reasons, and the education system has failed if it can't help people find a niche in which they can excel. And that an adept Indian coder might well outwit a misplaced English major. I'm also going to suggest that many career paths don't properly reward those traveling them, Teachers being a very specific example. It's been my observation that the incompetent can't be fired and that the excellent can't be promoted/paid quickly enough.

Let consumers/businesses pass judgement with their $$$.

They will choose the cheapest path (Wal Mart Syndrome), not usually the best long term path. Once we export all our manufacturing base we'll be truely screwed.

However, H1Bs aren't US citizens, and shouldn't get the same protections as US citizens.

And for that they can't vote, but they still have to pay tax and for social security. They have to leave when their visas expire or the job is eliminated. Their presence is a net gain for the US government.

Bad code is written everywhere and in equally large quantities. Blame corporations for accepting junk code and pushing it out the door...

Indeed, and blame them for not hiring the most competent managers and coders to do the job, wherever they may be located. Using cost as the only or primary measurement is doomed to fail.

Re:no more cheap indian programmers

[b1t r0t]

Mongolian Hordes technique n. [poss. from the Sixties counterculture expression `Mongolian clusterfuck' for a public orgy]

Except that this is Slashdot, so it should be renamed as the "Mongolian Beowulf Cluster-fuck technique".

Re:no more cheap indian programmers

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh here we go, this one again. Being accepted into a good school is not much of an indicator of your long-term-future ability to perform in the workplace.

Take the UK: 50% of entrants to Oxbridge are from the most expensive private schools (and I went to one, so I'm not bitter, just commenting :-). Yet these universities claim to admit on potential, which cannot be measured by the ability of your parents to afford a good school, but by your aptitude, interest, etc. What a private school does well is prepare you precisely for the entrance requirements to the top notch places (interview tech, etc.).

Re:no more cheap indian programmers

[Billly Gates]

Are they more educated?

How many percentage wise?

Most Indian universities are equilivant to devry. THe indian institute of technology is an exception but its just one school. WIth %38( yes close to %40) of our jobs being deported there. I highly doubt those millions of Indians all came from the semi-prestigous Indian instute of technology. Hu.

Also the Indian institute is no MIT either.

So why are employers interested in India? Its easy. Money! Money money money and shareholder expectations. Even if American workers are cheaper in the long run it will bring our demand down so they can pay us less. They want to oversupply our market.

They are not getting better coders. I read alot of comments here from people who work with oversea's developers and they can't code for shit, speak poor english, and have false creditials. But ha, if they suck you can hire 4 of them to do the work of 1 american price wise.

This is the argument. Just hire abunch of poor developers to replace every bad american and get a big fat raise from the bean counters at work.

India is a third world country and the majority of the population is uneducated. Yes some Indians have advanced degree's but this is true in alot of other third world countries. Percentage wise its alot lower then the US. The crap about them being better educated is rationale from the lobbiest to export cheaper labor.

Re:no more cheap indian programmers

[desau]

wow.. would you like a burning cross.. or perhaps some white sheets?

I work at a large company with people from all races. You simply cannot place every employee into a bucket based on their ethnicity.

Many Indian workers here are very good, some aren't. The same applies to all races, including Caucasian.

However, you cannot ignore that the American school system lags far behind many other countries (including India).. which would make one tend to think that Indian students are better equipped when starting out.

Re:no more cheap indian programmers

[Anonymous Coward]

Yipee! If all those Indian programmers are too busy writing OS's that nobody will use, that will reduce the number available to take our jobs. Let's pay them to write the Pizza OS, the Toad OS, the Bozoo The Clown OS, the Star Wars OS, etc.

Re:no more cheap indian programmers

[Billly Gates]

What you say might of been true in 1999 but its not an issue anymore.

The problem then was that there was too little supply of educated workers. What I mean was that liberal arts and english majors were learning programming by these teach yourself programming in 1 month courses.

The demand was so reducilously high that of coarse you will not be able to find good candidates with proper education.

Today the situation is opposite. In the want ads all the programming jobs available require CS degree's. 3 years ago they could not do this because no qualified applicants would apply.

The outsourcing situation made sense in 1999 but it certainly does not know. You can easily find overqualified candidates with 10 years experience willing to work for under 40k a year.

But now that is viewed as too much and 5k a year is what the new market wants to pay leaving everyone else in the dust. The situation is horrible and extremely unethical.

Our education system is not that bad. ITs that in Europe %20 of those in highschool go to a university while the rest go to college. Those %20 score well on the International SAT. Now in American %80 of highschool graduates apply at universities so they take the similar tests. Of course the top %20 will score higher then the top %80 average wise.

Its a myth that is false. Highschools could use some improving but its not that horrendously bad. Alot of the myth was brought by the American Teachers Union which is the second most powerfull lobby in Washington. Colleges are the same. The difference is American students who are not ready for college flunk and drop out while in Europe only good students are accepted so the dropout rate is less.

Re:no more cheap indian programmers

[Anonymous Coward]

Congratulations on completely misreading the thread. No-one is arguing against Indian coders on the basis of them being Indian, so no racism is going on here. The position is against hiring Indians (and it does seem to happen more with India than any other nation, but any other place applies) on the sole basis of them being cheap, while ignoring their quality.

People are responding by spouting how wonderful the Indian education system is. Excuse me? Last time I checked, most of India was living in extreme poverty compared to America and most of Europe. A small minority elite in India may get access to education comparable to Western nations, but "hordes" of Westerners get good education: the problem is, they're also expensive.

So "hordes" of Indian companies ride on the name of the few prestigious Indian schools (to which they have no relation) to sell their services to the West. At first this looks like a saving, managers get bonuses, etc, etc. then when it actually comes to timely shipping and maintaining a working product, suddenly the outsourcing overhead is extremely relevant. The local company goes bust, the local jobseekers (having already been downsized) now have even less places to work for, and India's profits are short-lived. Everyone loses.

Sun, a second-rate company with a loud yap and little bite, are an excellent example of why the pile-developers-high-and-cheap methodology fails. Hey, how about using technical merit rather than taxpayers' money to fight MS?

I'm wondering if the problem exists the other way with open source. Generally you have to be quite rich to develop quality open source, as otherwise you're too busy working (possibly on something a lot more mundane) to have time to give away your efforts.

Ho hum, the free market as implemented today really isn't very good at sustainability.

An impression of 'deja-vu'

[borgdows]

Scoot 'ballmer' Mc Nealy said to indians : "developers! developers! developers!"

( http://www.ntk.net/ballmer/mirrors.html )

Re:An impression of 'deja-vu'

[Anonymous Coward]

he has done the indian monkey dance too!

what about madhatter???

[stonebeat.org]

i thought Sun was pushing madhatter for the desktop env.

Re:what about madhatter???

[ravenwing_np]

Read the article. This is Mad Hatter, as was introduced by Sun in a press release in Jan 2003.

Re:what about madhatter???

[miratrix]

Read the Article before commenting -

"He said the desktop with a smart card reader capability would have Mad Hatter, Linux, Gnome, Evolution and Java's star office products."

Re:what about madhatter???

[oldmanmtn]

Read the freakin' article before posting! It's only about 5 paragraphs long for Bob's sake!

Mad Hatter is a part of it.

And _that_ was modded up?

if you actually read the article

[jbellis]

he said,

He said the desktop with a smart card reader capability would have Mad Hatter, Linux, Gnome, Evolution and Java's star office products

Sun's backed gnome for quite some time and that's not changing.

Damn !

[Anonymous Coward]

Why Sun don't just pick up OPENSTEP ! it's incredible ... they HAVE IT, it's one of the best Desktop ever, and they act as they don't even know that they have it. Moreover they could finally beneficiate of MacOS X programs (and old OPENSTEP programs ... they have great programs they bought years ago from LightHouse Design, only to forget them... what a shame ...)

--> there is a petition on petitiononline.com to let Sun free thoses old LightHouse programs !

Re:Damn !

[squiggleslash]

Why Sun don't just pick up OPENSTEP ! it's incredible ... they HAVE IT, it's one of the best Desktop ever, and they act as they don't even know that they have it. Moreover they could finally beneficiate of MacOS X programs.

Because the code they have is 100% Copyrighted by Apple and as a result Sun can't just dust it off, release the source, and allow anyone to use it for no charge.

What Sun could do, which would help everyone, is put some work into the GNUStep project. This project includes a Java API - a very nice one; Sun would encourage the creation of OpenStep Java applications in doing so, and could take the opportunity to create a rather good cross-Unix-platform desktop while they do it. I've used OpenStep Java under OS X, and it actually felt like a smoother development arena than the Objective C system you're "supposed" to use.

Of course, it does mean Sun would be promoting a second API for Java, and that might not be quite what they want to do. OTOH, the worst part of Java, in my experience, is the standard set of APIs, so perhaps that'd be a good thing for the language and concept as a whole.

Re:Damn !

[netless]

That is right, those Lighthose Design apps are second to none. Too bad they are abandoned. Sun should at least sell those apps to Apple. Maybe they could convert and update them on MacOSX.

Re:Damn !

[roard]

About the lighthouse design applications, please sign the petition !

Petition

various screenshots of theses applications could be see here : Screenshots of NeXT apps

in particular, take a look on Quantrix (a multidimensional spreadsheet), Concurrence (a presentation program), TaskMaster (a task manager), etc.

Screenshots :

Quantrix
Concurrence
TaskMaster
Diagram
OpenWrite
ParaSheet
VarioBuilder
WetPaint

Sun DON'T use thoses applications, why not simply release them as open source ? They could be ported on GNUstep (and thus, on linux, freebsd, solaris and even windows ..), and on Mac OS X ...

Re:Damn !

[Anonymous Coward]

A bunch of mid-90s desktop applications left over from a nitch platform aren't as great as it sounds. (Except maybe on Linux, where most of the end-user stuff is shite.)

One of the old OpenStep survivors, TIFFany, recently died because most Mac users thought it had an ass interface, not to mention that the featureset was years and years behind Photoshop.

Re:Damn !

[luisdom]

Yeah, bit offtopic, but...
OTOH, the worst part of Java, in my experience, is the standard set of APIs, so perhaps that'd be a good thing for the language and concept as a whole.
You've not tried W^HVC++ and the MFC, right? You would be missing the Java API every second you work with it... (at least I do)

Re:Damn !

[roard]

You've not tried W^HVC++ and the MFC, right? You would be missing the Java API every second you work with it... (at least I do)

Of course, there is always something worse ... but the OpenStep API (used in Cocoa and GNUstep) is far better than Java API imho ...

They must be getting desperate...

[nyc_paladin]

Sun trying to build a new desktop platform is like hammering the last nail in the coffin. Why don't they try working with Apple to build out the Apple OS on the workstations and use Sun on the servers. It seems Sun is just wasting time and money on reinventing the wheel when supporting Apple would give them a boost.

Re:They must be getting desperate...

[Anonymous Coward]

It seems Sun is just wasting time and money on reinventing the wheel when supporting Apple would give them a boost.

They're not reinventing anything, they're just packaging up commodities including Linux and GNOME in an enterprise-friendly way and providing technical support. No other large company is in the position to do that because they are all party to some sort of Faustian bargain with Microsoft that prevents them from providing any alternative.

Re:They must be getting desperate...

[perljon]

That would be an interesting merger. The reason Sun wants a desktop is because they know the MS is gaining server market share for these reasons:
Executives are familiar with the MS desktop, and they prefer to buy something they know.
Some really cool features of the Microsoft Server are only made available with a Mircrosoft Client (ie, using Explorer to check your Exchange Mail)
Because a ton of people use the MS OS as non-professionals, when they become an IT professional, there is significant less learning curve to work on MS products. (They've already spent years learning the OS on a user level, where they may have never run into a UNIX box.)

Sun doesn't really want to sell desktops. And Apple really doesn't want to sell servers, but thinks they need to in order to compete with MS. That would be a very strategic marriage.

Besides, SUN has always been horrible at creating user friendly interfaces, but builds rock solid hardware and OS. Apple builds great interfaces that are easy to use.

A new company that could use the MS startegies of tieing functionality into have a single propietary OS on the client and server, might actually have a chance at really competing.

Re:They must be getting desperate...

[axxackall]

Apple OS is not THAT network-oriented as X11. Why should Sun abandon X11 in a network-centric project?

Apple OS is for Apple's hardware. Sun has own desktop hardware to push on the market. Why should Sun abandon its own hardware.

Besides, X11 works everywhere (or almost everywhere). Why should Sun limit itself to 5% of US desktop market?

Sun has own (even OSS) office suite. Apple brings MS Office to its users. So, why would Sun be interested in promoting its office competitor?

Personally I think that Mac OS X is no more than a candy. What users need is a functionality. And what developers need is architecture design. Agian, it's my personal opinion, but in X11 (and Gnome) environment Sun has much more potential to create much better skeleton of functionality, which can be "candied" with no efforts later.

Re:They must be getting desperate...

[sql*kitten]

Why don't they try working with Apple to build out the Apple OS on the workstations and use Sun on the servers.

Maybe, but Apple's Xserve is competing directly with Sun's low-end Netras, which are what you'd have as a back end for your Sun Rays, at least in SMEs. I'm sure when Apple work out how, if they think there's a market, they'll want to sell 4- and 8-way boxes (for rendering, bioinformatics, WebObjects servers, whatever) to compete with Sun. Remember, Apple have just superseded Sun as the largest Unix workstation vendor in the world. The two have little reason to cooperate.

Re:They must be getting desperate...

[gwappo]

You're absolutely right, it's a great thing they will do this, and they're one of the few that can.

But, we're talking about Sun here, so it looses all credibility, the chances of this becoming a success are about as high as that "Network Computer" thing from a couple of years back.

So sad, can't they just go in a corner and die quietly Darwinian style while the rest of us get on with it?

(yeahyeahyeah, am on the edge of a troll, but had to be said).

I think Sun will have to realise...

[FyRE666]

That they cannot compete with PC hardware in the desktop market (I assume from the article they're thinking of creating a new desktop machine). They've never been a good choice for anything but high-end hardware in terms of price/performance, so how will a new (almost certainly overpriced) workstation help matters? Who will buy it?!

Re:I think Sun will have to realise...

[rugwuk]

Corporations who want to remove the costly pc from desktops of their users would - in the future - when they become tired of the insecurity of MS products. Granted the apps are mature but they ain't secure.

Re:I think Sun will have to realise...

[davecb]

FyRE666 writes: I assume from the article they're thinking of creating a new desktop machine.

They aren't trying to: like Scott, I wouldn't care to play in the no-economies-of-scale marketplace unless I made hardware (eg, intel) which wouldn't scale (:-))

I read the article the same way the chap with SunRays at home does: put a small server behind something that can use a standardized smartcard and you have a seriously inexpensive and somewhat more secure home network.

If you put a laptop behind the same card you have a more secure laptop, which is something I personally want (on my RH8 Fujitsu).

Put the same smartcard-capable tubes in at work and you get a scalable business system: if you need more space, jam another shelf of RAID drive into the rack. If you need Star Office to run faster, put it on a single larger server, so the code pages are shared between all the copies, instead of competing for space in memory or instead of buying memory cards for every machine in the office. And if you need more CPU, plug in another CPU board or another inexpensive Linux server.

--dave (who is seriously biased, you understand) c-b

Re:I think Sun will have to realise...

[Wesley Felter]

You're right; Sun can't compete with cheap PC hardware. That's why Mad Hatter will be built on cheap PC hardware. The only thing "Sun" about it will be the purple case and the software.

ok

[Joe the Lesser]

That sounds good, since it will lead to competition. So this should help stimulate our lagging economy right?

Sun Microsystems Inc Chairman, President and CEO Scott McNealy today exhorted Indian software programmers to build Sun's "desktop computer" as an alternative system to Microsoft software architecture.

... oh. Well, thanks for remembering your roots...

Not much meat in the article

[epicstruggle]

Basically, they want to build a linux desktop pc. Now here is where it might get interesting. Lets assume that they do the following:
-remove all legacy hardware:floppy,ps/2,...,IDE
-build in available techs: SATA,firewire,usb2,wi-fi,ethernet,sound(5.1+)
-Ma ybe even future proof it by including PCI Express

They may have a very nice little desktop here. Make it a small form factor, and you might have a gold mine.

just my 2cents
later,

Re:Not much meat in the article

[ichimunki]

IDE is legacy hardware?

Re:Not much meat in the article

[Anonymous Coward]

Technically, IDE is four generations out of date. Original IDE -> EIDE -> ATA -> SATA.

Re:Not much meat in the article

[StarKruzr]

No. You would not have a gold mine. You would have an excellent design that would never, ever, ever sell. All of this change you are proposing would require engineering. Engineering is expensive, and so this workstation would be expensive. $500+ is FAR too expensive for what you are proposing here, and that's the expected price point for this device. Why would a corporation pay $500 for something which has specs that can be exceeded by a commodity PC WITH a monitor?

Sad, but true. While the design you're talking about would be superior in technology to what's available now, no one would ever buy it.

If Sun can push the price even further down, then you might have something there... but barring that, I'm afraid this is destined to be another Java OS.

Re:Not much meat in the article

[ichimunki]

Technically, IDE is four generations out of date. Original IDE -> EIDE -> ATA -> SATA.

Thanks, AC. I guess IDE, EIDE, and ATA all look about the same to us casual observers. SATA is definitely different. That looks really cool, in fact. I can just imagine how much easier my life (currently using five different devices on IDE cables) would be with the HDs on those skinny little serial cables.

Re:Not much meat in the article

[DancingSword]

re the sibling-post, parallel-ATA is legacy, S-ATA's more efficient ( non-blocking, without command-redundancy, out-of-order execution in the upcoming Seagates, etc. )

but what the parent is describing, here, is Mini-ITX ( Kermit-style YayYy! )
Ahem.

Doing it with C3's or Transmetas, I could see, but Sparcs?

Cheap enough for India?
... hmmm let's see, canneries workers, wages...
here we are, 6-day work-week, 150 rupees/day ( about $2.70 US per day ).

So with 52 weeks/year, that'd be $842.4/year, with no sick-day or holiday ( or benefits, of any kind ), ever, compared with our .. more-than-order-of-magnitude greater wages?

Excuuuse me?
Vast and profitable market?

I think someone should consider the difference between the margins gettable in the US and the margins gettable in India, and if they want to expand into India ( or China, or anywhere in similar condition ), I'll invest in 'em, just because I enjoy it when others are more cognitively lively, but to mistake this for some Get Rich, Very Profitable, While We Keep Our Leverage scheme...

... of course, some'd call it a conflict-of-interest, too, eh?
IF All Others are kept ignorant/poor/limited, THEN they can't threaten Our Glorious Importance ( economic or political or governing-influence or however one's measuring ), but...
IF we go and make a bit of money bringing 'em up to technological effectiveness, THEN they might go and threaten to be our .. equals!!

#undef sarcasm

Sorry, but that point IS true, and it DOES pertain to nationalism's/protectionism's 'national security interests', etc:
If the "first world" becomes both technologically AND economically insignificant in the world, ... exactly how well would we 'adapt' or 'adjust' to that, or would we throw some wars .. To PROVE, We Were Important...

( glancing back through history, looking greyish )

GNOME?

[Xpilot]

What about Sun's supposed commitment to GNOME? Have they forgotten about that already?

Re:GNOME?

[Anonymous Coward]

What about Sun's supposed commitment to GNOME? Have they forgotten about that already?
im wondering, wouldn't it be faster and easier to just RTFA?
their desktop is supposed to include gnome, so no, they haven't forgoten it already

Re:GNOME?

[Anonymous Coward]

How did the :-
What about Sun's supposed commitment to GNOME? Have they forgotten about that already?

get modded up?

my first ever post and ive ended up trolling about mod points.
tut tut

Here we go again

[Timesprout]

Looks like the "network is the computer" line is getting a revamp here. From the article the focus would appear to be a thin client rather than a full on desktop. Mc Nealy really needs to let go of this idea if Sun is to progress. It failed miserably in the past and I cant see a compelling reason why it will work now.

Re:Here we go again

[Anonymous Coward]

The thin client idea could very well be doomed, however...

What would work well, especially in corporate environments, but also in home use, is some kind of grid computing. All of your computers are networked together, and share resources, including storage, allowing users to seamlessly move from one computer to another. Possibly more peer-to-peer oriented than server/mainframe-client/dumb, though that would present security issues.

Re:Here we go again

[evocate]

Perhaps McNealy just realized what Gates has known for 20 years: in the consumer market, the *desktop* is the computer.

Re:Here we go again

[Anonymous Coward]

It failed only because of ignorant and "power-
users". Thin client *is* the correct way to
go.

Kent

Re:Here we go again

[sheldon]

Yeah, dumb consumers always get in the way of product sales.

Please ignore the sarcasm.

Re:Here we go again

[Doomdark]

Please do not assume that "does not work for me" (as a developer, hobbyist or free thinker) equals "does not work for anyone". Like others have pointed out, SunRay concept is fairly nice example of how it can work out. I don't know extensive list of corporations (outside Sun) that have big number of SunRays, but I do know that Sun itself is using them heavily, and with good results.

The aim of the whole thin client concept is NOT individual end user, it's the business world; especially non-tech businesses. They do not care whether they have full-featured work station or just "dumb" simple terminal that is enough for browsing the web, sending/receiving emails and doing office document work. And thin clients can be competitively priced... but more importantly, very very easily (and economically) administered.

Re:Here we go again

[Anonymous Coward]

They do care when the net goes down, and their thin client/dumb terminal is useless.

(Funny thing is - the net went down today, and the PC users were the ones stuck, while I was doing just fine with the Sun box under my desk)

text of news

[harami]

Sun CEO woos Indian developers to build alternative desktop PTI[ SATURDAY, MARCH 22, 2003 09:46:19 PM ] BANAGALORE: Sun Microsystems Inc Chairman, President and CEO Scott McNealy today exhorted Indian software programmers to build Sun's "desktop computer" as an alternative system to Microsoft software architecture. "We want you to build the next generation software alternative to the Microsoft architecture," McNealy told over 2,000 software programmers and developers on the second day of "Sun Tech Days 2003" Developer Conference here. He said the desktop with a smart card reader capability would have Mad Hatter, Linux, Gnome, Evolution and Java's star office products. "The world will get a choice," he said on the desktop operating on thin client and invited developers to contribute to its development. The thin client model would be ideal for countries like India. McNealy, Chairman of the USD 13.6 billion Sun, said the company had deployed over 25,000 "Sun Rays" virtual terminals in its campus in the US, which did not have any accessories. "It is not a desktop, but works on a big server platform," he said. Terming it as "unleashing mobility with security," McNealy said access to the workstation through a smart card would be easy from any location and secure.

Re:text of news

[Anonymous Coward]

People who post the text of the article are so, so lame...

For The US?

[Syris]

It's not mentioned in the article, but is this new 'Microsoft Alternative' even targeted at the US market? Smartcards aren't exactly popular here.

So sweet

[ciryon]

I've been waiting for one large Software vendor to bring out a Desktop OS that can compete with Windows. The most obvious choice would be to use Linux and Wine for out-of-the-box compatibility with Windows for apps and games. I know this has been done before (Lindows blah blah) but what if someone LARGE with MONEY like Sun or IBM does what Apple allready have; a Unix based Desktop OS for the masses. I know lot's of people would buy this when it runs on cheap hardware, is windows compatible and is backed by a large and respected company.

Ciryon

Re:So sweet

[Hard_Code]

I'm sort of cynical about Sun tranforming into a desktop operating system vendor... do they have any experience doing this? I think the best they could hope to do would be to throw money (and influence) at the existing open source projects with the best chance of acceptance.

Re:So sweet

[Phantasmo]

That would rock! But instead of calling it Windows compatibility, they should call it "Legacy PC Compatibility". As far as most of today's computer users are concerned, this whole Unix/Linux thing is brand new, and Windows has been around forever. Convince the average PC user that Windows is old and unreliable tech and that Linux is the new way of doing things. Attach a stigma to Windows usage.
Of course, you'd have to make your OS "just work", give it a great (and fast) UI... basically do what OS X did.

Re:So sweet

[Tablizer]

I've been waiting for one large Software vendor to bring out a Desktop OS that can compete with Windows.

Great fresh idea! I even got a cool name idea for it: "OS/2"

It'll just clobber Windows totally.

Not a very clear article

[panurge]

The article hasn't been proofread very carefully and may not reflect very accurately what McNealy actually said. But I have just been on a customer site where, really, the users would all be better off with thin clients and a straightforward locked down implementation of Star Office. The management hasn't yet upgraded from workstation NT4/Office 97. In fact, they could save considerable server space and network traffic by saving documents in the SO6 zipped XML format. And as their main MIS system is now browser based, it really does look like they could run the whole thing on Linux.

OK, they won't do it. There's a learning curve (though they'll have to retrain everybody when they eventually move to XP/Office 11, won't they?)But Indian companies might, they might get some real economic benefits from it, and McNealy is surely right in the general thrust of his argument.

Incidentally, and taking a less anglocentric view of the universe, how well do K/gnome/CDE support Indian languages compared to XP?

Re:Not a very clear article

[Anonymous Coward]

Motif, which is the GUI that CDE used, is
leaps and bounds ahead of either Qt or Gtk
in it's support for foreign languages. Actually,
it's just one of the many things that Motif
does better than Qt or Gtk.

Kent

phsycological barrier?

[Sam the Nemesis]

I am sure man, that you are overwhelmed by Apple's Sun setting in near future. But that's no excuse to fuse words - physiological + psychological = phsycological?

Good, Great, Grand, Wonderful

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm glad that sun is using all their newly generated H1-B workers from India to perform their rock-bottom budgeting work for them to build this "new" desktop.

Perhaps if this works, then even more companies will strive to take the American Workforce and bend them over the proverbial office desk.

What would you call it?

[Anonymous Coward]

INDows.

Re:What would you call it?

[borgdows]

I would prefer windIAN, it's more sexy windy!

Why?

[rf0]

I can understand why Sun would want to move into a very competitive market where margins are low and competition is fierce. When I think of office type PCs, which is the market they are going after I think of Dell, HP/Compaq and maybe IBM. I don't think of Sun and I can't see what they can bring.

How will a Sun compete on a price/performance point (even if running x86) with a Dell. Most offices will want M$ wether we like it or not. I really think this might just be a dying breath...

Rus

READ THE ARTICLE

[Anonymous Coward]

He said the desktop with a smart card reader capability would have Mad Hatter, Linux, Gnome, Evolution and Java's star office products.

you fucking idiot

Hmmm....... I guess Sun will get what they pay for

[semaphore69]

Yep, let's just hire all that cheap labor in India. I used to hate Microsuck, now I guess I'll have to include Sun Microsystems to my hit list!

I'd buy one - if it's hackable

[DrSkwid]

because, let's face it, thin clients are all you need most of the time. I use them all the time.

I'd be happy to buy a graphical thin client that wasn't Intel or AMD for a change.

It's an unnoccupied niche - the cheap reference platform computer. Backwards compatibility is great and all but sometimes a clean sheet can work wonders. It's a brave move but one that could reap rewards for many people. The Wintel platform is a mess. It would be wonderful to dump the lot and start with a unified architecture and someone with the muscle to say "You know those apps you've been using to save licensing fees and support costs, well we've got some computers we made especially for them that could reduce your over support costs".

I say "good luck to them" (so long as they don't come up with a sucky name for it)

Re:I'd buy one - if it's hackable

[borgdows]

I say "good luck to them" (so long as they don't come up with a sucky name for it)

I hope they won't call their platform SunTWO

Read a bit more ...

[popeyethesailor]

That wasnt all that Scott had to say.. Check-out this report
to hear more of Scott's views.
The gist: Scott doesn't want you downloading the source, he wants you to write it. And buy the product his company packages for you.

'Cuz if there is one thing that will save...

[Anonymous Coward]

'Cuz if there is one thing that will save Sun, its a new desktop platform.

You probably meant:

'Cuz if there is one thing that will save Sun, it's a new desktop platform.

It's not a desktop guys

[melonman]

The clue is in the article:

"It is not a desktop, but works on a big server platform," he said.

He appears to be talking about some sort of thin client, which is certainly potentially different to what MS is doing. Whether it is actually any thinner than a PC running terminal-type software, and whether Sun can do any better than Oracle in making thin clients take off beyond a few specific niches remains to be seen.

Re:It's not a desktop guys

[banzai51]

Smells familar. Haven't we stepped in this before?

Re:It's not a desktop guys

[melonman]

On paper, thin clients have a lot going for them. My cybercafe has 10 of them, and, in general, they are a big win over peer networking. The problem is that the cheapest way to get a thin client is to build half a PC, rather than any of the more elegant bespoke solutions. If Sun had a cheap terminal that let a roomful of people pretend they had a Sun workstation of their own, I can see a few people being interested...

i wonder...

[m1chael]

will it be written in java? :)

Sun is all about PR these days

[Anonymous Coward]

Sun is maybe trying to push up their stock price. You may recall that over the past 2 months or so there has been a flurry of Sun PR articles. However, those articles were more well supported by upcoming (vaporware) releases. THis particular PR outburst is less well defined. I wonder if it may be meant to be some sort of counter to the negative publicity of the H1b lawsuit article that came out last week.

Re:Hmmm....... I guess Sun will get what they pay

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, I got the impression that McNealey was encouraging Indian programmers to write software, not PAYING for it.

So, yes, Scott will get what he pays for.

If you are a disgruntled unemployed American programmer, feel free to follow Scott's advice, and package a competitive desktop for him. Have at it. No one's stopping you.

Oh yeah, your hours spent reading Slashdot, your bad attitude, and your laziness are stopping you.

Re:500 comments phsycological barrier

[Bluefirebird]

Speaking of Apple... I think Sun has products with such cool designs but with a completely different approach in comparison to Apple. If Sun reaches the market with one of those black coloured thin clients and with a trendy smart card, they will appeal to a lot more people. One other important thing is not to antagonize the Linux/Open Source community. If they want to fight Micro$oft, they must be kind to Linux.

creativity and innovation

[Anonymous Coward]

All of a sudden the Centrino concept looks innovative

Free upgrades here ...

[Anonymous Coward]

redhat isos

Sun is a joke...

[realmolo]

And they have been for years. Great support, overpriced, dull products. And, worst of all, McNealy himself. The whiniest CEO of all-time. I just don't see what Sun has to offer anyone these days.

What about Americans?

[hackstraw]

This is US centric, so consider yourself warned.

I'm starting to get pretty pissed off at US companies farming out work to H1Bs and overseas. I remember when I was a kid, there was pride in the US and American products. Foreign cars (mostly Japanese) were cheaper, more fuel efficient alternatives to US models, and there was some kind of "buy American" belief that most people held.

But today, many of the largest companies in the US are giving money to foreigners, not immigrants, but giving the money away. And the motivation is purely greed (competition I guess in the companies eyes).

Sun does it, I've heard that Intel does it, Nike, and I'm sure that whoever is not on the list now, is looking to do so soon.

This is utter bullshit. I went to college, spent 2 years in grad school, learned Linux/UNIX on my own time and am an administer of a million dollar computer, and coadminister another XX million dollar computer, and purchase 50 to 100k worth of equipment a year. Yet, I drive a 1991 car that my father gave me, live in an apartment because I can't afford a house, and my home computer is a 100MHz AMD. Yes, I am grateful to have a job, especially since I was laid off for 6 months not too long ago, but maybe I would be able to afford to have the "average American" things if I weren't competing with every computer employee in the world.

I don't mind competing based on skills, bring em on! But to lower my standard of living because of this competition, no, I don't think so.

Re:What about Americans?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't mind competing based on skills, bring em on! But to lower my standard of living because of this competition, no, I don't think so.

These two attitudes are mutually exclusive.

Re:What about Americans?

[borgdows]

I totally agree with you! Bush should be working on ECONOMY instead of making a war that is useless, illigetimate and dangerous!

Re:What about Americans?

[AlgUSF]

Hmmmm, I wonder who you voted for? Remember, this economic downturn started during the Clinton administration.

Re:What about Americans?

[jjc2222]

I'm very confused by this post. It sounds as though the author wants companies to give jobs and money to Americans simply because they are Americans, and while that is a perfectly valid belief, he goes on to say that he wants to compete based on skills. On top of that, his car example admits that the Japanese built cheaper, more fuel effecient cars. So which is it?

Economies are globalizing. It sounds to me that the author only wants to compete if he is going to win!

s/he/she if appropriate.

Re:What about Americans?

[hackstraw]

I'm very confused by this post.

Sorry, I didn't get much sleep last night, so I may not be totally coherent.

It sounds as though the author wants companies to give jobs and money to Americans simply because they are Americans, and while that is a perfectly valid belief, he goes on to say that he wants to compete based on skills.

If an American company expects to sell goods/services in America, then the ppl have to be able to afford it. For example, in Japan they still have full service gas stations, but very little welfare systems.

On top of that, his car example admits that the Japanese built cheaper, more fuel effecient cars. So which is it?

I meant the Japanese cars of the '70s. More noncoherentness, bad example I guess. The attitude then was that you were selling out and not supporting American companies and workers if you bought a Japanese car. Today, there is little difference between US and American cars because they are both made in US (sometimes Mexico or Canida).

Economies are globalizing. It sounds to me that the author only wants to compete if he is going to win!

Let me try to be a little more clear. I work at a research facility where top scientists all over the world collaborate to do their research. That is compitition based on skills. I have no problem with that.

I do not want to compete with someone who lives in a dirt floor shack in a 3rd world country who, granted may have equal skills as I, but who's biggest asset to the American company is that they will work for less money. I do not feel as though the economy nor America in general will benefit from this. Sure, maybe some shareholders may get some shortterm gain, but I don't think that its best in the long run.

And I'm a he :)

Re:What about Americans?

[jjc2222]

I do not want to compete with someone who lives in a dirt floor shack in a 3rd world country who, granted may have equal skills as I, but who's biggest asset to the American company is that they will work for less money.

But that is what competition is. Given two equal quality items, of course I choose to buy the cheaper one.[1]

If someone who lives in a dirt floor shack in a 3rd world country was able to acquire the same skills as someone brought up in America, where presumably much more effort is exerted towards education, then the 3rd world counterpart has won the competition! As an American, we have much greater access to some terrific educational institutions. To me, the advantage of being an American is precisely this opportunity.

[1] Granted, there are cases where this is not true for me. The easy example is companies who _exploit_ people, violate basic human rights, etc.; there's a thick line between competition and exploitation. But I digress...

Re:What about Americans?

[Anonymous Coward]

> Today, there is little difference between US and
> American cars because they are both made in US
> (sometimes Mexico or Canida).

And they're still two totally different kinds of car.

Re:What about Americans?

[Billly Gates]

Please mod parent up!

This is a very serious and real problem if you work in IT!

According to a study by the gartner group %38 of all IT jobs are not outsourced oversea's and that market is expected to grow to %70-%80 by 2005!

DO you want to wait tables? The community needs to here this if we are going to make a difference!

Nevair.

[termos]

I can never trust them again after this.

McNealy..

[Anonymous Coward]

..is an ass, pure and simple. I don't know which is the biggest egomanic, him or Larry Ellision.

Re:McNealy..

[Anonymous Coward]

Ellison is a bigger egomaniac, but McNealy is a bigger ass.

It makes sense

[stevenp]

It makes sense. What Sun is trying to produce is a Linux/Java/Gnome/KDE based desktop that is a low-cost alternative to the Microsoft desktop. In other words the same thing that all the Linux entusiasts have been doing for years.
It may catch in India, as they are well oriented towards low-cost computing even if it is not very feature-rich. Remember the simputer
The government also seems to be Linux oriented even after some MS attempts to win the indian developers.

The network is the ...umm... desktop!

[Yacob]

or... " We're the 'top' in 'Desktop'! "

sun seems to jump from gimic to gimic a little too frequently for a healthy company. Does anyone have a link to a history file of Sun's marketing campaigns?

Re:The network is the ...umm... desktop!

[Anonymous Coward]

Try this:

http://members.aol.com/fbftp/java

Why don't they fund it?

[supabeast!]

From what I read it seems that Scott McNealy asked a bunch of indian developers to make Linux running Gnome and Mad Hatter the next generation OS. What he did NOT do was state that Sun will be doing anything to help. What he really did was incite a bunch of *NIX geeks with anti-Microsoft sentiment to get their attention, and then turn around and start promoting the Sun Ray, another neat old technology that has never caught on in a big way.

In other words, Scott McNealy stood up in front of a crowd, shot off at the mouth, and beat a dead horse.

Re:Why don't they fund it?

[nelsonal]

Isn't that what he always does, and what has made him almost as reliably entertaining as Larry Ellison as a speaker?

Re:Why? Because there is pent-up demand for this.

[Anonymous Coward]

There are thousands of organization that have a requirement for secure (i.e., no floppy drive, no CDROM) terminals. That requirement cannot be fulfilled by desktop PCs. Such organizations include

• Fortune 100 companies
• all law-enforcement agencies
• most other federal, state and local agencies
• anyone who wants to keep their important business data in-house.
  

A card-enabled logon sequence is ideal; people know how to protect their credit cards and can easily adopt this pre-biometric security measure.

Given a powerful server, the only problem is the network. And, to paraphrase Bill Gates "If there is sufficient bandwidth, it makes no difference where the computer is located." The further benefits of centralized control and management make this type of system a huge no-brainer win.

SunRay

[jm91509]

The article mentions sunrays. These are great little machines that truely are thin client.

They are small units that have 4 usb ports, a graphics card, sound (in and out), video out and a network card. All they do is relay input back to the server and display the results on the graphics card. They also have a smart card slot where you put in you smart car (obviously...) and it displays your desktop. Then at the end of the day you take out your card and you desktop disappears and reappears when you put the card back in. It doesnt' matter what sunray you put the card in, you desktop will be the same.

Think of a call center. Get VoIP working and this is the business. You can now move people around the office without any problems, and in the middle of a call. Just take out the card and go somewhere else.

Now with a nice desktop environment and sun could be on to something here. They can sell the big iron at the backend.

Sorted.

No no, .Net is a joke... :-P

[Jugalator]

http://news.com.com/2100-1012-993226.html

Nah seriously, I agree that it's hard to take someone saying stuff like "viruses are a feature in .Net, but Java has security built in" seriously. :-P If it's anything McNealy offer his company, it's bad PR for his childish comments.

only four sunrays?

[joshsnow]

I have a Sun Netra X1 in my basement feeding four sunrays throughout my house
You must be rich...or is your name Scott?

Re:only four sunrays?

[lindsayt]

The Netra is about $1500 as equipped, and the sunrays are only about $200 each with academic discount. More expensive than a single PC, but less than four PCs! The Netra X1 (the current V100) is a really lowball sun, and it really shouldn't be used for more than five or six sunrays. The T1 (V120) can handle about ten, but for any more you have to shell out the big bucks and get a 280R (~$5000 starting). As long as you keep the number of sunrays low, it's pretty cheap. The most expensive part is the sunray software (I think about $500 if you have to pay full price).

Re:only four sunrays?

[Anonymous Coward]

Aye, and my last name is Tiger.

Sun taking over

[Alcohol Fueled]

First, not only is the sun causing more global warming, but now it's going to make a new desktop! Oh, the sun is taking over!

When you have software developers come cheap...

[mnmn]

I suppose you could put them to any use, good or otherwise. Sun has too much money and the Indians will accept any paycheck. Great, put several dozen on the desktop backburner, because you NEVER know...

Indian Programmer not Good Enough?

[Anonymous Coward]

The insults aimed at Indian programmers are a bit sickening and totally unjustified.

I think people are confusing bad project management or stupid executive decisions (throw an already ruined or only halfway through project to a different programming team) with programming skill, education and good practice.

I can't believe some of the things I've read here. To me it shows the overall intelligence and knowhow of the slashdot community is at an all time low.

Possible due to AMD and Intel Embrace of Palladium

[FreeUser]

That they cannot compete with PC hardware in the desktop market (I assume from the article they're thinking of creating a new desktop machine).

I have been quite scathing in my opinion of Sun's appraoch to Java (a semi-closed standard, jerking free software implimentations around, etc.) and their woeful lack of vision with regards to GNU/Linux, which has resulted in their very late arrival to the Linux scene in anything other than a half-hearted propoganda attempt, their costly hardware, their cumbersome operating system, and so on. As an employee of an ex-sun shop, I have lots of gripes, and can point to many reasons why we dumped Sun (and Microsoft) in favor of GNU/Linux.

All that having been said, Sun appears to (slowly, grudgingly) finally "get it." If so, I think they could put together quite a competative box. How?

By leveraging Microsoft's Palladium trojan for all it is worth. If AMD and Intel are offering Microsoft-Palladium enabled hardware, crippling the rest of the world (GNU/Linux, *BSD, etc.) in the process by either requiring it a la the 'secret reenabling' they allow with the CPU ID, or by simply removing the option to turn Palladium off a la the DVD Forum's phased implimentation of region coding, then Sun and Apple will be the only two desktop vendors offering uncrippled hardware.

Home users may (I stress, may ... I am always surprised at how many individuals and home user's are sick of Microsoft yanking their chains, so there is no guarantee Palladium and their so-called "trusted" computing is going to fly there, either) be willing to put up with crippled products in order to cling to the familiar (Microsoft Windows), but businesses aren't going to be at all inclined to do so. Sun (and Apple) could, if they play their cards right, absolutely wipe the floor with the encumbered hardware the Wintel platform is poised to begin foisting upon us.

Which is one scenerio where Sun could excel on the desktop (and where Apple could gain significant market share).

Venting about Sun

[Trolling4Dollars]

I KNOW I'll get modded down for this, but here goes.

I currently work with Sun products pretty intimately at work. I have to say that while the Solaris OS and it's related contract support from Sun is better than Microsoft's Windows OS and it's related support, I will warn EVERYONE away from SunONE products.

I've been working with iPlanet Messaging Server for about two years and have had some of the most outrageously poor technical support I've ever gotten from a vendor. After the Sun/Netscape alliance ended, Sun got the iPlanet products for themselves. So, the new iPlanet Messaging Server 5.2 suite should now be known as SunONE Messaging Server... any day now.

The problems that I've had with this system are so incredibly stupid as to be unbelievable:

-multiple administration interfaces that are half broken. (They actually told me to use one interface to do user deletions and another interface to modify users, and yet another one to add users!)
-dense and very pooly laid out documentation
(Read thousands of pages that barely help you get anywhere.)
-user forums that up until last year almost never worked or archived messages (WHY did they take away the NNTP groups they used to have!!!??)
-inconsistencies throughout the entire system with regard to how one would make changes to mail users or implement new mail domains when hosting multiple mail domains.
-No decent admin interface to the LDAP db. (Their "Java Console" is the slowest piece of shit I've ever worked with. Screen updates take about 5-10 minutes just to get a menu to pop up!!)
-No decent GUI based tools to deal with high volume data in LDAP (I'm sorry, but walking through a text file that describes your users, groups, domains and configuration that is megabytes in size, is NOT realistic! They need a hierarchical representation of data in a GUI based app. And NO... the Java Console is NOT it!)
-Major naming inconsistencies. (Some parts of SunONE iMS are called "Netscape", other parts are "iPlanet" and others are "Sun". None are currently "SunONE" yet. The only excuse I hear is that they are slowly "getting there". !!!??? It's been TWO FUCKING YEARS!!!! You'd think they would have, at least, gotten the mnaming straight and provided on Admin tool rather than the four or five that they currently have, half of which shouldn't be used for certain operations!!)

When I bitch about these things to support, I get the same old tired answer "...iMS is a product that is in development, so it should be expected that some things will be a little inconsistent. Just wait a little longer" I've been waiting two years.

After a recent migration from iMS 5.1 to iMS 5.2, I found that their recommendation was to install the new mail system on a "test box" and run with it for a few months before going live with the real thing. They didn't recommend that I do an "upgrade in place" on our original box if we didn't want to have any downtime. WTF???!! Of course we don't want ANY downtime on a mail system. The techs I talked to said to expect anywhere from a 24-36 hour total working time (read a few work days) of downtime while migrating to the new version of iMS. !!!??? We wound up buying a new box to start clean with iMS 5.2 and then migrated users, groups, domains and mail over. The other box will become our redundant backup system. However, I told my boss that we should NEVER buy anything from Sun again. And you know what? They listened. We are doing a multimillion dollar transistion to a new data base system. The database vendor was pushing Sun, but said that the product would also run on HP-UX. We already have a very close relationship with HP (and history with Compaq and DEC). So... we told them no thanks and went with HP-UX instead of Sun.

Once we've gotten some years of use out of our Sun boxes, they will be retired and replaced with HP-UX boxes.

I hope Sun straightens out the SunONE products. The amount of time I've spent trying to learn that crap could probably h

Re:Venting about Sun

[Anonymous Coward]

HP-UX?????

Sweet Jesus... I'm no pundit but give me a Sun Box with Solaris over an HP box with HP-UX anyday.

Re:Venting about Sun

[ilikehardhouse]

What about other Netscape ^H^H^H iPlanet ^H^H^H^ SunONE products? We use iPlanet 4 and, granted, it's a bit crufty and rough round the egdges, they happily squirt out gigabytes of static content every day (app servers handle all the dynamic stuff)- and our web servers are never under any load.

Also, granted, the naming schemes are inconsistent in iPlanet software. I've worked with only one product that was worse. But the iPlanet directory server is also reputed (sorry, no real experience of it) to be pretty solid - any geeks care to comment on that or any other bits of the iPlanet line? And again, granted, iPlanet is at the bottom of the Netcraft charts, but the product itself can still take a pounding ...

Re:Venting about Sun

[m11533]

I have used just about all of the various Unix flavors and platforms at one time or another as well as RedHat Linux.

OS:

Solaris - Tends to be clean, fast, and buggy. The most patches I've ever applied on a non-Microsoft platform was Solaris.

HP-UX - a Solaris clone intended to make porting from Solaris very easy. Generally, I found it to be a very good Solaris with many fewer bugs.

AIX - Very clean and very fast. A terribly literal SysV Unix, thus frequently rather spartan and basic. But, it cranks things out quickly and reliably.

Tru64 - Well, almost not worth mentioning since Digital was gobbled up by Compaq which was gobbled up by HP. If not for the fact that it was definitely at the top of my list for high quality Unix platforms. Stay away from DECnet (there for VMS sites) and DECWindows (ditto) and its a pretty nifty platform. The one downside... Hate that digital uses a software licensing system for pretty much all of its products. Now that HP owns what once was Digital, it can be pretty painful to buy a license.

Linux - Requires a lot more hands-on time to get things up and running properly, a bit unpredictable what quality of component one will encounter. For example, its VM system just does not compare to that in AIX or Tru64. If you don't have enough RAM to fit everything in real memory, paging performance just doesn't approach the competition.

Hardware:

SPARC: Always bringing up the rear in price/performance, but marketed extremely well.

HP-PA/PA-RISC: Far ahead of SPARC in price/performance, but much later to see ports of your favorite software. Not going to be around much more as HP is hot to drop it for IA64.

Alpha: Also far ahead of SPARC, usually playing leapfrog with HP-PA/PA-RISC & PowerPC. Not going to be around much more, as HP is hot to drop it and their own HP-PA/PA-RISC in favor of IA64.

PowerPC: Another very strong RISC platform, also with a questionable future due to IA64 plans.

The bottom line: Sun, while not necessarily the best Hardware or Software vendor, has provided a very important competitive presence in the industry. As they head down the path to low cost Intel platform solutions with Linux software, from where is the competition and inovation in Hardware and software going to come? It sure doesn't look like Sun will continue to be a significant player.

A nicer desktop would help... but wrong problem

[fortinbras47]

People using Sun machines are NOT using them because they went a pretty way to check their e-mail. They're using them because they need powerful, scalable, reliable machines.

And it seems to me that Sun's biggest problem is that their hardware is really expensive and not that much faster or more robust than linux running on Intel machines. From my own very unscientific and emprical tests, it seems that a gigahertz Sun Blade 2000 handles high loads better than my PIV machine running linux, but that the runtimes of most single-threaded programs I write finish as fast if not faster on the PIV. And you can get a well equipped PIV with linux for $2000 and a Sun Blade 2000 will cost you 10 times as much.

With 64 bit architecture from AMD and Intel etc... the reasons you need Sun are just getting fewer and fewer.

Re:A nicer desktop would help... but wrong problem

[pmz]

And you can get a well equipped PIV with linux for $2000 and a Sun Blade 2000 will cost you 10 times as much.

This is incorrect. Sun Blade 2000 workstations start out at much less than $10,000. The ones that actually do cost ten times as much as the PC come with 2 CPUs, XVR-1000 graphics, and Gigabytes of RAM. Dropping the XVR-1000 is an instant 3 or 4 thousand dollar savings, for example.

Yes... Build me an army of clones!

[Dr. Spork]

This is kinda spooky. McNealy is trying to fight the Empire by recruiting some far-away mercenaries to build him clones of something the Empire already has. It sounds like he's been watching too much Star Wars, and not the good stuff, either.

If sun were smart... they would look to Apple

[digitalgimpus]

If sun were smart, they would look to Apple as a partner... Sun could get exclusive rights to build "clones"... and provide software like Open Office for OS X... not to mention good Java support....

Sun's hardware would make good xServe alternatives. Not to mention some good desktop workstations.

Apple would gain the experience Sun has, which would allow for better hardware and software.

Re:If sun were smart... they would look to Apple

[burns210]

Apple has superb Java support.org as a selling point to conivnce apple? They will get OO.o without a partnership, I am sure Sun has better software to convince apple to partner with them.

My answer? Simple; most people are convinced apple is going to have to jump platforms(ibm ppc970), but instead of jumping to one platform, apple should jump to several, at once. I am speaking of the fat binaries Jobs used at NeXTSTEP. He supported 4 platforms at once, and so can apple. :)

Re:If sun were smart... they would look to Apple

[digitalgimpus]

True. But remember, Apple is a hardware company. Their profits are mostly hardware.

It's a change in business strategys.

Sun stuff....

[WetCat]

What a large pig Sun gives to me! :(
I mean Model-Controller-View "standard".
Ok, ok. you created an application, based on that
standard.
But what else? What if you want that application to be compatible with others? What if you need it to
generate XML instead of HTML?
You are out of luck, you have to parse the html pages, produced by JSPs, nothing else.
My last hope is Cocoon. Any other ideas?
How to change and make modular the MCV-made application?

Mad hatter

[arvindn]

I was probably not the only one to wonder what this mad hatter thing is. Seems to be their own desktop-oriented linux distro that comes bundled with the (PC) hardware. Still in vaporware, promised sometime later this year. I vaguely remember hearing that the pricing model would be a monthly subscription. More info here

McNealy needs to wake up....

[jpmorgan]

And realise Sun's primary goal should be making money, not spiting Bill Gates. If he doesn't, this vendetta of his will kill his company eventually.

Only on Slashdot

[turgid]

Only on Slashdot can you say something obviously completely and utterly ridiculous in jest and be moderated as a Troll. :-)

Heh.

[Anonymous Coward]

"exhorted Indian software programmers to build Sun's "desktop computer" ..So, what sort of Indians are we talking about here?

Are we talking Indians who have become US citizens? Are we talking Indians who live in India? The former is fine with me. The latter.. Well, it'd be nice if Sun gave work to its own country. The economy could certainly use it.

Or are we talking H1Bs, which Sun is infamous for?

If so, they can choke on their new desktop.

Re:Heh.

[Roberto]

RTFA. The very first word is "Bangalore". And trust me, this ain't Bangalore, Kansas.

So, what you're say..

[multipartmixed]

..is that the sunray is just an X Terminal?

Re:So, what you're say..

[op00to]

Not exactly. The Sunray is more like a "VNC" Terminal. It uses a remote framebuffer to show the session on your Sunray. An X terminal runs an X server in the terminal itself, the Sunray has the X server run on the host computer. A little bit different. Sun's knowledge base thing has plenty of information on this should you want to learn more.

Re:So, what you're say..

[Doomdark]

Right. The extra features over and beyond 'standard' diskless x terminals mostly reside on server side (seamless session migration). Combination of SunRays and SunRay servers thus are somewhat extended/enhanced version of stock X-server / X-term combo.

Anyhow, SunRays are about the only existing somewhat succesful implementations of... what was it called by Larry Ellison et al... network computers? Anyway, thin client, fat server idea that was supposed to revolutionaze computing landscape 5 years ago or so.

Re:So, what you're say..

[1010011010]

X needs a disconnect/reconnect feature.

Re:So, what you're say..

[Cheetahfeathers]

Not really. The Sunray is your IO.. your graphics card, sound, keyboard, mouse, monitor.. that kind of stuff. Those things connect to the computer over a bus (PCI, AGP, etc). The Sunray uses ethernet equipment for the bus, and connects many different systems to one computer.

The network is the bus, the bus in the network. Understand that and you have the basic idea of
Sunrays.

Why is everyone so upset....

[JohnnyCannuk]

It's a short article. SM says

"We want you to build the next generation software alternative to the Microsoft architecture"

It then goes on to say

He said the desktop with a smart card reader capability would have Mad Hatter, Linux, Gnome, Evolution and Java's star office products (emphasis mine)

It seems to be saying to me that the alternative to Windows is Linux, Gnome etc, not something new. Sounds like all those developers will be contributing to Linux and Gnome etc, adding software and capabilities that will make it compete with Windows.

Sounds good to me...

Now maybe I'm wrong. If so, could someone point out where in the 7 paragraphs (6 really sine one "paragraph" is a single line) it says that Sun will be making its "own" desktop environment and not use what they already support (Gnome)?

Or did some of the whiners not bother to read the article and just spout off because of a headline?

Like hiring drug addicts...

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, since nowadays hiring an American "Windows" programmer who only knows how to do things the "Windows way" is just like hiring a drug addict, whaddya expect?

Re:Like hiring drug addicts...

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, since nowadays hiring an American "Windows" programmer who only knows how to do things the "Windows way" is just like hiring a drug addict, whaddya expect?

But there must be a lot of ex-Sun people out there. After all, Sun has laid off several of thousand of them in the past few years, with over 4,000 in October. Granted those ex-employees might not have been programmers, but it's still an enormous exodus.

I often wonder why Sun, with its remaining 30,000 employees, can't do a desktop, when a small handful of geeks are able to slap together KDE and Gnome.

Please mod parent up...

[Anonymous Coward]

... as insightful.

Cost of entry too high?

[pmz]

I wholeheartedly wish for Sun the best of luck in this endeavor. However, I wonder if the barriers of entry to the desktop are so high that even Sun might not be able to devote enough resources to it.

As a counter-example to desktop software, consider cars. The barriers to entry in the automotive market are extremely high, but these barriers are generally very well defined. A new car company needs the resources to make their new car: 1) work on roads, 2) meet DOT & EPA regulations, 3) handle and appear as well as the competition, and 4) be durable under typical usage. It is completely plausible that, given enough resources, the new car company can pull it off and have a tangible product that can be immediately sold. In support of this argument, look at Kia and Hyundai over the past several years in U.S. markets.

None of these well-defined barriers work for desktop software. 1) There are no roads, at least for office software, high-level design software, financial software, etc. 2) There are no regulations for quality. 3) The competition is garbage, but people still buy it! 4) Durable software (meaning completely stable and reliable) is almost prohibitively expensive to build. Oh, and consumers have been conditioned for years to enjoy the worst, anyway. Given the cynicism and the ignorance of the public, there are no guarantees that this product can be sold at all.

(Sigh) I think the software industry has a long way to go.

READ THE ARTICLE

[Anonymous Coward]

"He said the desktop with a smart card reader capability would have Mad Hatter, Linux, Gnome, Evolution and Java's star office products."

I am the only one getting a feeling of deja vu?

[WegianWarrior]

There was - in the early, mid eighties - a british company decided to make a computer that wasn't built 'to standards'. They went forward to sell heaps of them, and made quite a bit of money too...

The machine? The Amstrad PCW. More info here, here and off course here for some circut diagrams.

Linux based xterms

[Moderation abuser]

You can build Intel based Linux Xterms for around $150 and the minimum spec you can buy these days is hugely overconfigured for what's required. The servers can be $500 desktop PCs.

I don't see a need for a new platform. Just make use of the PXE bios features and the PXES linux distribution[1].

It gives you a massively scalable architecture, for peanuts. This is what'll kill windows on the corporate desktop.

[1] http://pxes.sourceforge.net/

The standard?

[Xenex]

"For the average user, a Mac is incompatible with the standard."

The standard what, exactly?

Re:The standard?

[Ponty]

"Microsoft."

I'm not saying that they're right or that that's what I believe, but for Joe Blow, if it doesn't "work with Microsoft," then he won't buy it.

Uh Ohh

[Anonymous Coward]

...President and CEO Scott McNealy exhorted Indian software programmers to build Sun's "desktop computer" as an alternative system to Microsoft software architecture...

And all along you thought Microsofts APIs were bad.

HP no better

[Anonymous Coward]

Jumping from Sun to HP is like jumping from one sewer to another. You'd be better off support-wise with a free OS and commodity hardware.

Re:HP no better

[Trolling4Dollars]

Personally, I agree with that statement... unfortunately my employer doesn't. They want the accountability of a big vendor. Now that HP is seeling RedHat, I may be in better shape though.

But, hey... I was able to convince them that Sun was a bad idea, and now that a budget crunch is upon us, they might be more open to OSS. For us, getting our staff up to snuff on OSS products isn't much of a stretch and wouldn't require hiring anyone new on, so... it may very well be a distinct possibility in the near future.

Re:Possible due to AMD and Intel Embrace of Pallad

[Ari Rahikkala]

Home users may (I stress, may ... I am always surprised at how many individuals and home user's are sick of Microsoft yanking their chains, so there is no guarantee Palladium and their so-called "trusted" computing is going to fly there, either) be willing to put up with crippled products in order to cling to the familiar (Microsoft Windows), but businesses aren't going to be at all inclined to do so. Sun (and Apple) could, if they play their cards right, absolutely wipe the floor with the encumbered hardware the Wintel platform is poised to begin foisting upon us.

Sorry, not quite. Remember how Palladium's designed. There will be two sorts of platforms, crippled and non-crippled ones; The crippled ones will be the ones that do not have Palladium. After all, if a thing isn't secured, Palladium won't say a thing, and if a thing is secured, those with Palladium might or might not be able to access it, but those without will definitely not be able to access it. Thus, in the short run, it will seem that Palladium grants people more freedom. It's a very devious plan.

Endian?

[lostchicken]

Would those be Big Indian or Little Indian programmers?

Re:Endian?

[Anonymous Coward]

Mwahahaha!

Re:Endian?

[mccoma]

off-topic I know, but

When Be was still the next great thing, one of their developer conferences had its transcription done by computer. One of the lectures had several Big Endian / Little Endian comparisons. The software that was doing the translation kept putting Big Indian / Little Indian.

I saw this and sent in an e-mail telling them of their problems. At the time I worked for a Native American community college and signed my e-mails as such. I got a response back real fast (actually a couple, they were great people, I still wish Be has made it). I thought it was pretty funny, but years later (sometimes I am not too swift), I realized that they might have thought I was offended or something.

Thin client is the only sane solution

[Moderation abuser]

For corporate IT systems. It's just taken said corporations rather a long time to realise that half a billion dollars a year on IT is a little over the top and might just be contributing to the slashing their profit margins. Well, nobody called management the sharpest tacks in the box.

Having half a dozen support people at every site along with file, mail, sms and application servers is hugely expensive. With thin clients, say Xterms. 1 guy can support a thousand desktops.

The problem has always been though, that it's an expensive solution to implement in capital terms. The Xterms themselves were hugely expensive, the big iron Sun and HP and IBM servers on the backend were cripplingly expensive and upgrading and replacing them simply didn't happen, the client access licenses for Windows terminal server are massively expensive, and, you have to do it all twice, for redundancy...

Not with Linux though. With Linux that all goes out of the window. The hardware's cheap, the software's cheap and it's a doddle to implement a doddle to make it scale.

Cost is a very compelling reason indeed. Of course, a lot of people are going to lose their support jobs when it happens.

Re:Advangates? OOo is BETTER than Office

[anagama]

For one reason: autosave. OOo autosaves at an interval you pick. I will never lose more than 3 minutes of work.

Office has some goofy recovery system that is supposed to bring back your work if Office crashes. I have lost many hours of work when this has failed, or I have accidently properly closed a file without saving (e.g., a billion dialogs suddenly come up and I madly close them all, including the document I'm working on). Yeah - that example is my fault, but the software should allow for user error. If I do the same thing in OOo, I have to retype a paragraph: "Shucks" In Office, it's a 15 minute swearing session.

Sun and Linux

[ajs]

This box is a planned follow-on to a lot of work Sun has been doing. We all know that they work on Gnome and ship it with newer versions of Solaris. We all know they had a terminal product that used Java.

What I think is interesting about this is the use of Linux as the OS base.

Why would Sun choose Linux? Well, for starters, they don't have an OS whose performance profile is best on lower-end hardware. For another, Linux supports not only lots of hardware (which does help Sun, but not as much as if they were deploying on random hardware) but also has dizzying arrays of extra goodies available if they decide they need it.

Solaris has always been a conservative OS, and they're not a desktop system, so to add in all of the things that they would want for a desktop, Sun could spend years modifying Solaris. On the other hand, modifying Linux to suit their needs is trivial.

I've heard a few voices saying over the past few years that Sun is going to dump Solaris for Linux. IMHO, this is a far more credible data-point in that direction than the absorbtion of Cobalt. A new product is an ideal place to test the theory....

On the server side, Solaris could be dumped in favor of Linux with about 1-2 years work. Sun's engineers certainly are capable of making the required changes (mostly hardware support for Sun's high-end hardware and bringing Solaris' high-performance threading, multi-processor support and NFS to the Linux kernel, along with some userland stuff like porting tools and the pkg system, though they might prefer to dump that for apt or rpm or apt+rpm).

The real question is: how badly does Sun need to cut OS development costs to stay afloat? They're hurting. Everyone buys into the idea that on the high-end, Sun's hardware is sweet. It's just that the costs of maintaining an entire OS just for a high-end hardware niche don't match up. Linux could give Sun the chance to cut costs, improve Linux (and thus score PR points) and ship their hardware without having to employ anyone to maintain "ls".

Thing is, I can and have, done it for a lot less.

[Moderation abuser]

Using open protocols and software.

Server:

Desktop PC with maxed RAM: $600.

Client:

Desktop PC with minimum RAM (128Mb these days), minimum spec mboard and CPU (1GHz AMD is about the minimum you can still buy), no floppy, no HD, no CD, keyboard and mouse, built in 10/100 ethernet, video and audio and PXE support in the BIOS: $160.

(Note, this includes a 17" monitor as well)

RH Linux dist: $0
PXES linux dist: $0

No discounts either, these are highstreet prices. So, there you go, a nice 5 user system for $1400. Course, you charge $2500 for it. If you're trade, you should be able to get it for a bit less.

New?

[t0ny]

Is it just me, or is anyone else getting deja vous thinking of Sun's vision of the 'network computer' in our future?

On a side note, how the hell does Sun stay in business? With all these future FC ideas, and the fact that suing MS isnt as lucrative as they imagined, Im just wondering when the Sun bubble is gonna pop.

Re:New?

[blincoln]

Is it just me, or is anyone else getting deja vous thinking of Sun's vision of the 'network computer' in our future?

Totally. We had one of those at work back when I was in high school. It was like, the worst of all possible worlds. "Sun presents: The Network Computer. Now instead of a speedy workstation running NT4, you can have an incredibly slow session on a remote server, a UI that looks like it's still in the prototype phase, and run an outdated version of Netscape Navigator in 8-bit colour! But the tower is 33% smaller than that of a regular desktop! How can you resist?!"

2000?

[MoobY]

So these guys are gonna need 2000 indians to slap together some open sourced software in a sun environment. That'll be tough.

sounds like ltsp.org

[urbieta]

sounds like something that may be handled by the ltsp.org linux terminal server project to me ;)

desktop low cost computer?

[linuxislandsucks]

tell me what about the statement desktop low cost computer does not match when it comes to SUN?

Considering that you hav eplaces like Motorola going down the tubes by allowing non engineeers to use high priced SUN laptops adn desktop computers..can we say the shipis sinking..start bailing now!

But seriously, low cost desktops start with a low cost cpu design something that SUN does nto excell in..

Not just the cost to vendors but also the cost of running that cpu in a laptop or desktop computer..

No thanks I will stick with ADM and Linux..

Re:desktop low cost computer?

[randyest]

Archer Daniels Midland (ADM) is in tech now? Or is that American Direct Mail? I'm confused.

Re:Possible due to AMD and Intel Embrace of Pallad

[Tony-A]

Sun quality that is affordable. Hmmm. Could fly.
And I don't mean low-end "consumer" junk by Compaq, etc.

Re:Advangates? OOo is BETTER than Office

[Anonymous Coward]

Try C:\Recovered Files. If you aren't smart enough to use Office, and can't read the manual it comes with go ahead and bitch on Slashdot about how much M$ sux0r$ teh biggun.

Wolf!! Wolf!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Sun has repeated this for how many years now??

Those of you who fall for this again will probably also fall for this everytime too, "Wolf!! Wolf!!!!"

Evilman

Re:Hmmm....... I guess Sun will get what they pay

[Tolleman]

Becuse the IIS (Indian institute of technology or something) educates the worlds best nerds. And one of the co founders of sun is from india I belive.

Yet another reason why their stock is in toilet

[nomadicGeek]

I guess this proves the Dilbert adage that intelligence has very little practical application.

I guess that Sun is going to compete against the entire low margin commodity PC business?

The reason that people stick with MS on the desktop is that they have VB apps, Excel Spreadsheets, Access databases, etc. that they have built over the years that they depend on everyday. There is also that 10% of applications that are special niche apps that are available for the Windows platform only.

Sure you can use Open Office or other Office alternative but everybody knows that the files that everyone uses are too complicated to convert easily. It takes a lot of time and usually manual effort to convert each of these files and there always seems to be a function or two that you must have that does not exist in the alternative.

About 10% of software that users us are special purpose programs that are used in every company by a few people here and a few people there that would have to be converted to run on a new system. This is no small task either.

Remember all of the trouble that you had to go through for Y2K? You would have to do it all over again. The big difference is that every vendor offered a Y2K upgrade path. Few are going to provide a Linux path in addition to the Windows version that they already support.

Remember the days of DOS, Windows, OS/2? It sucked developing software because you had to pick a platform or choose to develop on multiple platforms. Either way you made less money and increased your costs. Most software vendors are happy that they only have to support 1 platform, Windows. Yes there are problems but it still reduces their costs dramatically having to support only one platform.

Even though you can provide a replacement for 90% of the functionality, providing a replacement for the remaining 10% is probably 90% of the work.

I just don't see Sun being able to sell enough of these units at low margin to make a lot of money off of them. As such, why bother? Can't they think of anything to spend their time on that will actually produce profits? That is after all what a company is supposed to do.

it's it's it's

[Anonymous Coward]

it's = it is
its = something belongs to "it"

the car lost its engine

if anything will save sun, it's a new desktop

it's it's it's

Because Solaris is going away

[DerFeuervogel]

At least that's my take on it. SUN cannot afford to keep ignoring Linux. They sell hardware - yes they sell software too but they can make more money by repackaging a stable well known OS that is fairly close to the product they offer (at least from the users perspective). So since Solaris is going away, it makes no sense to target it for new projects. Although I expect enough Solaris diehards will pay for a version of this and that will justify some support. This is a mistake IMHO. They should move to Linux now and be done with it. For the high end Solaris might hang around but this project doesn't seem to be targeted at the high end.

Re:Thing is, I can and have, done it for a lot les

[SecretAsianMan]

In reply to:

Using open protocols and software

Are there any open protocols or software for moving your X session between thin clients without having to log out?

Re:Thing is, I can and have, done it for a lot les

[jandrese]

Damn, those are cheap components. The desktop PC with Maxed RAM (the server I assume) for only $600? Did you remember to add the HDDs, case, power supply and processor? What is "maxed ram" anyway? I'd say you'd want to invest a bit more hardware into your server.

That's not as bad as your clients though.

$160 for a PC and 17" monitor. Well, the cheapest 17" monitor I could find on Pricewatch is a Daewoo for $97 + $10 shipping. That leaves you with $53 for case, power supply, keyboard, processor, memory, NIC, motherboard, mouse, graphics card, and cables. The cheapest processor I could find was a Duron 950 for $25. That leaves you with $28 for everything else. 128MB of memory comes to $20, leaving you with $8. I don't think you're going to be able to afford much of a case, keyboard, mouse, power supply, motherboard, graphics card, NIC, or even cables, and you've already used all of the bottom of the barrel parts. Those Suns are actually surprisingly hard to match, although if you really wanted to you could do it. Just be preprared to replace lots of broken hardware since you'll be using a low end equipment.

Re:Thing is, I can and have, done it for a lot les

[Mirus Nex]

You could us the Cardboard box the monitor came in as the case. And the power supply can be made up by resoldering an old PC/AT power supply to an ATX cable...Old PC/AT power supplies can be had for $1 a dozen, or I've got 2 I'd pay to have someone take from me. :)

But you are right, $160 for a home build w/ monitor is a stretch...even in the used market. Unless, of course, they are PC/ATs which won't run Linux very well anyway...

Re:Thing is, I can and have, done it for a lot les

[Xerithane]

Desktop PC with minimum RAM (128Mb these days), minimum spec mboard and CPU (1GHz AMD is about the minimum you can still buy), no floppy, no HD, no CD, keyboard and mouse, built in 10/100 ethernet, video and audio and PXE support in the BIOS: $160.

(Note, this includes a 17" monitor as well)


Can you go ahead and send me some of the crack you are smoking? As for your $600 server, I wouldn't trust anything running 5 clients on a $600 server. I wouldn't trust anything I do on a multi-user $600 server.

Welcome to the difference between enterprise systems and your parents basement.

desktop a better hedge

[Tablizer]

It failed only because of ignorant and "power-
users". Thin client *is* the correct way to
go.

Maybe, but who ever said IT decision makers are rational.

Besides, a PC desktop is a better hedge. It can be more things than a dedicated thin client. For example, if X-Windows falls out of favor for another remote-GUI protocol (perhaps one that is more HTTP-friendly), then with a fat client you can more easily install the new emulator/browser.

Or, what if a business partner uses a different protocol than your internal stuff? For example, to access special features of their product catalog, you need Mozilla for example. You can put a zillion protocols/emulators/browsers on a PC, but not a dedicated thin client. (If you could put all that on, then it would not be a "thin client".)

Sun seems to think businesses work on an island where one vendor controls every protocol and access approach. Not!

Hardware.

[enomar]

...incompatible with the standard" you say? How so?

I have no idea what the original poster meant, but for me, hardware comes to mind. Granted, Sun is in the same boat as Apple, but I simply can't see myself ever buying a Mac. They only work with one set of operating systems and they are expensive. If Sun, or Apple for that matter, can provide a good desktop OS that runs on cheap hardware, I'm in!

Re:Hardware.

[superdan2k]

Again, more FUD. A Mac will run multiple OS's -- MacOS 9 and earlier, Mac OS X, Yellow Dog Linux, and Linux/PPC (though I don't know if that one is still being distributed)...

As for cheap hardware, you get what you pay for...

Re:Hardware.

[enomar]

Again, more FUD

God. FUD is such a buzzword. Can we all stop using it? What possible motive would I have to project fear, uncertainty and doubt? I only speak what I know, and I've never heard of Yellow Dog Linux, or Linux/PPC. Thank you for correcting me. Do these distributions use the same Linux kernel? I don't see how they could.

As for cheap hardware, you get what you pay for...

Assuming price is proportional to quality, how exactly is the PPC platform better than PCs? I see no increase in speed. Please site some benchmarks.

Re:Hardware.

[superdan2k]

If you aren't informed enough to know the ins-and-outs of a subject, perhaps it's bad to make broad generalizations? Yeah, FUD may have been out of line in this case, but generally speaking, shooting holes in it is an event in the Slashdot Olympics...

It seems to me that your only measure of hardware is in raw speed. My argument is more that you get more in overall "experience"...it's similar to a BMW... why do they cost so damn much compared to cars with similar styling (sedans), horsepower, and engines? Because of the thoughtfulness that goes into their engineering... I don't buy Macs just for horsepower, but for the attention to detail, which I think applies to most of the people who do purchase them...

Good Point

[pyrrho]

I especially like the idea that the network is the computer.

But to me that harkens back to when Sun machinery was the cheap stuff. Sun machines were smaller than the other big iron... Sun was a force in the distribution of processing power.

That is, the network is the computer meant having beefy workstations, "clients" capable of contributing to the net.

To me... having fat clients... general purpose computers that can run client software, host their own servers, etc, that is what the Network Being The Computer is really about! You don't log onto a big ass computer owned by someone else. You don't log on, so much as attach. Your computer, when attached, adds to the network. When you log on the network gets incrementally bigger and more powerful.

In the thin client wet dream when you log on you draw resources, the net becomes weaker.

All to have a better reason to charge you for that priveledge.

I'd worry, but as far as I'm concerned I've already watches this vision die a hundred times... so I'm more worried for Sun than of Sun.

Re:Thing is, I can and have, done it for a lot les

[Z4rd0Z]

Yeah, or maybe he wants a professional quality system that Just Works.

Re:Thing is, I can and have, done it for a lot les

[lakeland]

Yep, sure are. apt-get install xmove; man xmove

Sun's vision - Nasdaq ad

[bildstorm]

I don't know if you've seen the Nasdaq ad with Scott McNealy in it talking about washing cars growing up as a great way to learn about business, but check it out if you can.

Aside from the fact that his idea of entrepreneurship seems to be based on something completely out of touch with reality and not a booming business, I also get the feeling that maybe he was breathing a few too many fumes in those days.

A new desktop platform for Sun will not result in a great an wonderful way for them to survive. Maybe if they were push for software developers to build great apps with wonderful support for something like Linux, and Sun was going to do something more than just try to ride on a Linux label once in a while, well then they might get to go.

Sun makes good solid servers. I'm happy with them. But this trying to find an identity out in public is a clear sign of a dying company.

Re:Sun's vision - Nasdaq ad

[christophersaul]

This new desktop will be Linux based. The Sun Rays are Solaris based, but any OS stuff that runs on Solaris runs happily on them. Sun are actively developing the Sun ONE stack for Linux and support numerous open source projects - Gnome for example. What more are you expecting?

This is so 90s...

[Strudelkugel]

The more I read /. , the more I realize *nix is just as fragmented as ever. In a few years, people will be saying "RH is fine, but I really liked <fill in fave distro name>, and after all that excitement about OSS here were are with IBM, HP, M$ and RH."

TightVNC

[Malachi]

I do this with everything.. but I use Tightvnc.. I pop up production servers, workstations, desktops..with little to no latency, on or off campus.

Suns got a good idea, but it can be done elsewhere through different mechanisms.

-M-

Re:TightVNC

[Jason Earl]

Actually, TightVNC is the exact same idea with slightly different software. Instead of putting a PC on every desk. You put a thin client (perhaps running the TightVNC client) on everyone's desk. You then purchase servers to run everyone's applications on.

Re:Thing is, I can and have, done it for a lot les

[Anonymous Coward]

VNC can do this, but it doesn't transmit using the X protocol (it processes X commands and transmits them using its own protocol).

it smells like

[eliza_turing]

*sniff*

it smells like a bunch of terminals for a mainframe.

before i read the article, i thought sun was actually trying to come out with a new desktop. i was thinking, "didn't apple already do that?"

the big problem i see with this system, as cool as it may be, is that desktop computers are really cheap now. the appropriate software will allow centralized administration. it may not work quite as well as on big piece of iron with lots of terminals. but i expect it will generate far less network traffic.

Re:Thing is, I can and have, done it for a lot les

[dohcvtec]

No discounts either, these are highstreet prices.
Is that the next street over from crack alley?

I Hope the H-1B Suit Gets Thrown Out

[Baldrson]

See this sort of garbage with executives like McNealy is why I hope the suit against Sun for its illegal H-1B vias gets thrown out of court.

Let them just try this sort of horseshit with cheap programmers (ie: the belief that software gets more valuable with lines of code) and see how far it gets them. Valuable lessons are to be learned. Don't confuse the idiot MBA's with law suits and thereby give their equally idiotic investors a way to rationalize their stupidity as "interference from the courts".

Ebay

[Anonymous Coward]

I have a Netra/Sun Ray setup in my home, purchased off eBay of course.

Netra T1 105 - $400
Sun Ray - $50/each
Solaris 9 - Free download from Sun
Sun Ray Server - Free download from Sun
Geek Factor - Priceless

Re:Ebay

[DaedalusHKX]

cute -Daedalus

No matter how desperate...

[Anonymous Coward]

Sun won't merge with Apple because Sun doesn't know how to play well with others.

Also, if you put McNealy and Jobs' egos in the same room, they'd reach critical mass and explode

wow

[Anonymous Coward]

At least Sun is doing something right for a change. Hope it's not too late.

xmove

[Herkules]

Xmove can do it!

And i have read that sowe new version of GTK will be able to move also.

http://www.mit.edu/afs/sipb/user/golem/tmp/xmove /

Re:Thing is, I can and have, done it for a lot les

[bluGill]

Woah! I rememver running 10 users on a single 200 mhz sun years ago when that was a fast sparc. Depends a lot on your aps. Look at the specs of a cheap PC, and you will find that anyone is plenty fast. Most of your applications could run local on whatever machine you loged into, and you export X sessions only when you need to.

Second, remember this is supposably targeted at a home users. How many households do you know of that really can get 5 people at once doing something on the computer? Now make that 5 big things, because most things that people do on a computer don't need a lot of CPU.

I agree the prices are too low, but that doesn't change that it is workable to get close to those prices.

Re:Thing is, I can and have, done it for a lot les

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, there's Xvfb. And there's VNC.
Neither is perfect, but they'll do the job.
Try googling for them.

Re:Thing is, I can and have, done it for a lot les

[Xerithane]

Second, remember this is supposably targeted at a home users. How many households do you know of that really can get 5 people at once doing something on the computer? Now make that 5 big things, because most things that people do on a computer don't need a lot of CPU.


Well, considering I'm the only programmer and my girlfriend uses an 800Mhz PIII, that ceased to suit my needs, for her email, you do have a point. But this technology originally was implemented for workplace environments...

I have an idea using LCD detachable systems like tablet PCs in my house, linked over 802.11 that has the same type of system. I'm hoping that Sun really does do well with this because I would love to be able to use this. A lot of times I just want to listen to music, or do a quick websearch and that keeps me trapped in my home office. Yes, I do realize I'm spoiled :)

Re:Thing is, I can and have, done it for a lot les

[Alien Being]

Vnc

Re:Thing is, I can and have, done it for a lot les

[Anonymous Coward]

Wrong

How about a Java sales program for their website

[tjstork]

It's really stupid, but Sun should provide a hosting system for small third party Java developers to ply their wares on line.

Sun will "buy" a desktop like Ximian

[Anonymous Coward]

They are 100% committed to Gnome. It kicks CDE's ass IMO. But they won't dedicate time to redo what's already been/being done. With Mad Hatter's "deadline" looming, watch for them to snap up someone like Ximian and be done with it.

Cuz?

[Anonymous Coward]

How do I ignore any further stories posted by this moron?

What is wrong with CDE?

[arthas]

CDE is very nice environment if you know how to use and configure it. I use it on my Alpha and I haven't even installed gnome and kde that came with Tru64 Unix.

Re:Advangates? OOo is BETTER than Office

[anagama]

Maybe I am too stupid to use Office but I never received a manual and the Computer support people were half a state away (large state office). I don't know, and I'm not going to research either, but I don't think recovered files director will help me when I accidentally close something I shouldn't. All I'm saying is that autosave protects people from making mistakes. Everyone makes them, the notion that they will ought to be built into a program.

Last Post!

[alpg]

How many seconds are there in a year? If I tell you there are
3.155 x 10^7, you won't even try to remember it. On the other hand,
who could forget that, to within half a percent, pi seconds is a
nanocentury.
-- Tom Duff, Bell Labs

- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...