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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*
i thought Sun was pushing madhatter for the desktop env.
Consensus is good, but informed dictatorship is better
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.
All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. --Edmund Burke
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.
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.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
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.
"Times have not become more violent. They have just become more televised."
-Marilyn Manson
"...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.
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.
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.
Fear is the mind-killer.
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.
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.
Matt Thompson - Actuality - Insert product here.
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.
I did not design this game/I did not name the stakes/I just happen to like apples/And I am not afraid of snakes-AniD
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.
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
Un-news
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
- Old Man of the Mountain ---- "I want to disturb my neighbor"
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.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
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.
... 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.)
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
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.
Karma Clown
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.
Un-news
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.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
sounds like something that may be handled by the ltsp.org linux terminal server project to me ;)
Washington, DC: It's like Hollywood for ugly people.
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.
The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it. - G.B. Shaw