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Sun's Last Stand
non writes "Wired has an article by Gary Revlin in the July edition about the current state of affairs at Sun. He attributes half of Sun's problems to failure to recognize the emergence of Linux, and the other half to their failure to make up with Microsoft, and finishes up with a server price comparison. An interesting read."
Apple should offer them 25% of their current stock price in a buy-out offer.
Burn baby burn. Wait what does this mean for the UltraSPARC I just bought! Doh.
This just shows that two wrongs don't make a right, or a hole, or...
People are always predicting doom for Sun and Apple, and yet both companies manage to hold on. Sun's doing much better than a year ago and is selling LOTS of hardware. They aren't dead yet...
That summary is only half correct. The article attributes the preoccupation with microsoft as one of their problems... not with making up with them (which they still haven't)
They won't be doomed until they start an insane court battle with someone. I don't think the Java wars really qualified for that.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Stiff-legged and hunched over, Scott McNealy limps slowly to a wheat-colored couch in the corner of his office. His eyes are bleary, and a wrinkly wattle is forming about his neck. In his semi-exhausted state, McNealy looks almost frail. There was a time not that long ago when the smash-mouthed, overamped CEO of Sun Microsystems would have been shuffling along like this because of a nasty collision during a no-holds-barred intramural hockey game. Instead, the culprit is a long international flight home two days ago following a week-and-a-half swing through Asia. "I'm getting old," groans the 48-year-old McNealy.
Goddamn, when I started reading that, I thought it was one of those tasty Slashdot porn stories, got sort of dissapointed by what followed.
I think you can partially blame sun's (demise?) on their inability to attract younger developers. As a (younger) sysadmin, I didn't touch a sun box until I got into my first job. Even then I am concentrating on migrating everything over to Linux because it is what I know. I think the same applies in a lot of cases, especially with the younger-folk. How many teenagers do you see trying out Solaris? How many do you see trying out Linux? I would imagine that Linux would far exceed Sun.
When my boss asks me to recommend a server, I would most definetely recommend a Linux server over a Solaris box simply because I have far more experience with Linux than with Unix.
- tom -
Sun's current "low-end" tactic of trying to replace Linux with Sun on x86 is going to win a lot of converts. There are a lot of applications out there and companies that are used to Solaris and that installed base isn't going to just go away peacefully.
The biggest argument for converting servers to smaller x86 boxes has been scalability and cost. Linux is a popular way to do that, but many companies have been using various BSD variants as well because they are more comfortable with server vs. desktop oriented software. Sun will do very well in those areas with their new emphasis.
For a company that wants to keep their big hardware on Solaris for some stuff, it makes a lot of sense to standardize on Solaris for their cheap x86 servers as well.
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
as the leading Unix server seller in the last few months?
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
Sun has tried to sell me some servers before (this is education, remember)...but in an age of white boxes that do the same thing for a fraction of the cost, I can't really justify it for a small district. They did send me an evaluation of StarOffice (read the article yesterday)...and I might switch some machines over from MS Office...but servers, no way.
And just like predictions of Apple's demise over the years, it's a load of crap.
This looked really weird before I realized they were talking about the company......
What I've never understood about Sun is why they didn't make it easier to install Java on a client machine. If you tried to do it (on either Windows or Linux) you would find that the process was increadably badly designed. Most members of the normal public wouldn't stand a chance installing it.
Did they do this on purpose, or are they just incompetent? I've just noticed that they've made it much easier, but for years it was very difficult, at least for normal people.
Sun was riding on top of the world during the boom periods. The problem was all its new customers were startups. When the recession happened Sun pretty much lost the bulk of its customers.
Only real lesson I see is if you court customers whose entire business model is based on riding an irrational economic wave, be prepared to lose all their revenue input when the tide comes crashing down.
IBM on the other hand kept playing to its usual customers, other big name and stable companies, so it rode out the recession almost completely un-scathed.
I for one am lucky I only have one Sun machine to administer. What gets me is that here in academia, researchers are buying high end Blade servers to do 2 things, email and database. I can do the same thing with better performance on a white box linux machine.
This is a test. This is a test of the emergency sig system. This has been only a test.
Sun Is Setting.
Tierce
Who sponsors your feelings?
It does come as any surprise. The Sun will surely fail once it exhausts all of its fuel. Yes, it will take billions perhaps trillions of years, but no energy source is infinite no matter what the marketing hype says. All that remains is for Netcraft to confirm it.
Join Tor today!
...except the setting of the Sun definitely won't envelope the industry in darkness.
Mmmm...no more slowlaris.
// Agent Green (Ian / IU7 / KB1JQO)
// IEEE 802.3: All 10base Are Belong To Us
Heres to hoping that the Hypertransport consortium becomes to Apple what the CHRP spec always promised to do. Common specs + multiple vendors (apple, amd and who else?) = cheaper prices for everyone. From what I gathered the first area we will see the hypertransport spec will be in connecting the PCI bridge and various components like that - not processor to memory connections. But that said, it seems to me Apple is really jumping on the right bandwagon here, anything that moves the platform away from this starved processor pc133 ram shit is in my opinion A Very Good Thing.
And yes i will be selling both my macs to get a ppc970 the day they come out.
---- The real Slashdot is still here. You just have to browse at -1 to read the comments.
There does seem to be a sense of angst in the presentations: just about everyone seems to gripe about the economy. As a long time holoder of Sun stock (ouch!), I can feel their pain. On the other hand, recently a top Micorosft exec was complaining to me about the value of his stock options - everyone is feeling the heat in this industry.
While I have always liked Sun hardware, they are having their lunch eaten on the low end. For example: I just had to replace a server - I went to Frye's and bought a Chineese built Linux PC for $199; after reinstalling my prefered SuSE distro, I have what appears to be a reliable (and very low power use) server - close to free.
It is difficult to compete with Linux and cheap hardware.
Sun does make the point that soon there will be more sales of Java enabled cell phones and PDAs than PCs - still, I don't see how they can make much money in that product space.
-Mark
- Free Java/AI web book at my web site
Sun Fire V480
Four 900-MHz UltraSparc III Cu processors,16 Gbytes RAM, Solaris 8: $46,995
IBM eServer pSeries 630 Model 6C4
2 x 2-way 1.2-GHz Power4+ processor, 8 Gbytes RAM, SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 8: $35,944
Dell PowerEdge 6650
Four 1.5-GHz Intel Xeon processors, 16 Gbytes RAM, Red Hat Linux 8 Professional: $24,421
Seeing the expression on people who claimed Linux was not ready for the enterprise: Priceless.
Some things money can buy. Piece of mind and a wad in your wallet can only be achieved by cheap hardware and an even cheaper operating system.
This message brought to you by Open Source. Live free!
---
You should never wear your best trousers when you go out to fight for freedom and liberty.
-- Henrik Ibsen
What a shame! I can remember when a Sun 3/50 was the coolest machine around! Mine was an 8MB model! :-)
I remember thinking in the late '80's that Sun was making a huge mistake by not pushing a good SunOS distribution for commodity PC's. I guess they eventually did, but I think it was too late!
-Bill
Apple wasn't committing the equivilent to suicide by attempting to step on the very people who make it work.
In fact, if anything, Apple has continued to survive and/or grow partly by catering strongly to its target audience, and receiving mass-loyaltyin turn.
Linux may be improving but Solaris is too. Sun stock price is rising. Sales are good. New processors are in the pipeline (no pun intended). New people have been hired. The big competition from itanic has failed to materialise. Linux is being sold on cheap PeeCee hardware at competitive prices. Solaris is portable: it runs on many architectures and is available 32- and 64-bit. Most FOSS runs on it (and is provided with the OS). Things are not as bad as you people think.
It seems everyhting but the most recent story can only be browsed at 2. WTF Taco, I want my trolls.
many medium size corporations are seriously in love with Sun, even if they wouldn't see the difference bewteen solaris and linux when someone would crunch their skull with it.
:-)
Sun still has this magical "it's a sun, so it must be expandable, performant and reliable" thing floating around it. A bit like the Microsoft "it's MS, so it must be cheap, userfriendly and er... cheap" myth.
My guess is that those myths will stand longer than Moore's law. I call it Selderrr's law
When will I end this grieving ? When will my future begin ?
wrong story, ill go sit in the corner..........
Sun made a series of blunders the effects of which are still felt today. Illuminata's Eunice ticks off what he dubs "significant" tech glitches that were revealed once the bubble had burst, including memory problems with Sun's top-selling server that were aggravated by the company's insistence that customers sign a nondisclosure agreement if they wanted a patch.
Wait a minute, I thought we were talking about Sun, not SCO.
"If I could live to be several hundred
I could take a walk and really wander, really wonder."
In fact, the V480 has a 3 year warranty, if you add AIX license, 3 year warranty, 8+ GB RAM, the p630 id far more expensive than the V480... it's always easy to cheat... No one runs Linux under Power4, since you loose functionality (dynamic LPARs) compared to AIX.
The Dell machine is far less powerfull (SPECrate comparison) and doesn't include 3 year warranty.
Those prices are plain wrong!
I always wander why Slashdot ops. hate Sun so much and loves IBM... will never get it.
In fact, Sun's is the single company that has donated more lines code in the world (OpenOffice, JXTA, GridEngine, NetBeans, etc.).
News story
Apparently they are going to switch their software to run on Java, giving new meaning to "tape delay"...
Focusing on beating Microsoft in any way possible might actually *not* be as effective as innovating and creating products people want to use.
Sun's anti-MS strategy was quite interesting (e.g. it was quite a bit more innovative than just reimplementing the GUI part of windows on top of a big teetering stack of different projects
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
Think of something (a product, a company, an idea, whatever). Now presume that something is dying. Now search the web for that idea until you find an article stating that particular something is not doing well. Rephrase that article into a few sentences. Now tack on a suffix from one of these standard Slashdot patterns:
1. "It's an interesting read."
2. Write a short anecdote in first person. E.g. "I never did like that something."
3. Add a rhetorical question. E.g. "Can you believe it?"
I believe the root cause of most software companies is in the way they pay their development staff. It's old, it's tired, it's time for a change. Here is an article I wrote to address this issue. "Why arenâ(TM)t developers paid royalties?â Currently many software development projects fail, are over budget or the end product is of low quality. One reason for this could be the current business practice, which is to pay the developer a flat rate for their time with the idea that the company doesnâ(TM)t have to pay royalties later. This same concept has been used ever since the early days of programming. Many failed entrepreneurs had what I term the âoeBilly Gatesâ mindset, with the idea of paying little to the developers and then cashing-in big later. Today, most developers arenâ(TM)t naÃve as some may think. It isnâ(TM)t very difficult for them to see through the scam. They can quickly become disgruntled, which means less production, lower quality and higher cost for the company. The only leverage companies have right now is the bad economy but that wonâ(TM)t last long. Most people who have been in software development have come to understand that the role of the developers is more along the lines of being an artist rather than an engineer. Structural engineers use many different physics principles in the design of structures they are planing. The design is proven to work before any construction ever begins. Given that the budgeting planners know the amount of materials and time it will take to complete the project, they can set a reasonably accurate completion date. Artist usually donâ(TM)t set deadlines, instead they take a âoeItâ(TM)s done when itâ(TM)s doneâ approach. If software developers are more like artist then why arenâ(TM)t they treated more like artist? Artists are paid royalties from the copyright holder for their work. Sometimes an advance is paid to allow them to pay their bills while the art is being created. I believe that the royalty based business model would work much more effectively than the current flat-rate model. The developers would have more incentive to care about their finished work because their income would depend on the quality of the finished product. Instead of milling about most of the way during the process then working extreme overtime hours during âoecrunchâ time, they would have more incentive to contribute everyday they came to work. This would encourage more of the developers to take an active role in all phases of the development process. Any unproductive members of the team can and should be voted out of the team by a group of their peers with involvement of management. Instead of having 80% of the work done by 20% of the people you would have more like 99% of the work done by over 80% of the development team. Imagine a world where software is relatively bug-free when it is first released and the cost to maintain it is negligible. I believe with a royalty based business model that is not only possible, it is more likely. How many developers constantly complain that they only get a small amount of the end profits through bonuses? What incentive is there for anyone getting a flat-rate salary to contribute on daily bases? With a royalty based model they would share the profits equitably with other productive members of the team and have a lot of incentive to contribute. It is time entrepreneurs started treating software developers more like the artist they are instead of like engineers. Why not pay royalties instead of a flat rate, itâ(TM)s a win-win situation for everyone.
They are probably the worlds most innovative software company....
And they don't know it. Or if they do they don't know how to capitalise on it. Cracking products, cracking ideas that are at the very edge, but very little go-to-market.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
Disclaimer: Please, this really isn't an attempt to start an OS flame war, so don't reply to this with your opinion about which OS is better!
The article leaves out the "other" main competitor for stability as seen on Netcraft's top uptime sites BSD.
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
It's servers are too expensive for most tasks. They might be better, but the value for your $$$ is on x86. On the OS side Windows and Linux are kicking Sun's ass. On the hardware side Intel and Dell have created an efficient business model that is increasingly moving up higher and higher in the enterprise.
Sun needs to figure out a business model that will work in the new economic reality. They will either need to be a software company or a hardware one. But like a lot of companies they will probably die off because they couldn't adapt. They were successful once because they filled a market need, but when the market changed they couldn't adapt fast enough.
Dual 1.33 Ghz RISC G4's 2 GB RAM 720 GB with 2.52TB RAID and UNLIMITED client licenses: $20,000
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
Just a little background on events leading up to this point. HTML form or PDF form
My sausage tree didn't grow, does that make me a bad mommy?
Ironically, at the same time my knewsticker told me about this article on /., I caught this article about how Sun just scored a big deal with HBO.
This should be modded off the front page.
Sun makes nice gear, there's no doubt about that. If you got a rediculous amount of money to drop on some big iron, stuff like the Sunfire 15K is enough to make any true geek drool. For that market, I think Sun actually stands a decent chance of survival...when you're talking about F50 companies and governments, price isn't really an issue. Besides, Sun has a pretty strong track record in this arena.
Where they're going to get killed (actually, where they already are getting killed) is in the small-to-medium server market. Honestly, why would a company/institution with limited resources spend almost exponentially more money on small servers when they could strap together some x86 boxen and run a free OS on them? Support might be a reason to stick with Sun (I can't speak from experience), but I would imagine that companies like Dell would price their Intel-based servers (with full support) at a lower price than say, Sun's LX50?
This is not a head-to-head comparison, so don't throw prices out saying how Sun makes a few cheaper machines than other companies. That's not the point. My point is hindsight's 20-20. It would have been hard to predict that Linux on cheap off-the-shelf x86 gear would have been a serious threat to Sun back in, say, 1998. Now Sun's major decision is if they should adapt their business model to be more flexible, or to fight it out in the trenches and hope for the best.
Either way, they make some pretty sweet gear and even if it is expensive beyond reason, I'd kill for some of their toys.
"Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned for SEGA. ..."
My gift to you:
<p>, <p>, <p>, <p>, <p>, <p>, <p>, <p>, <p>
Use them liberally, if you need more, just ask.
...here's the crux of Sun's problem!...I've never been able to really get Java working with Mozilla on my box. I don't want to rebuild half of my system to do it either!...Why can't I just simply get an RPM that WORKS!....
Since I built my first Linux box (3 years ago), Java has been a TOTAL hassle in every release. I read little snippets about "licensing" type problems here, lib compatability problems there, etc, all while they are still whining about MS.
The article is right. They seem preoccupied with MS and this wrongheaded idea that somehow they will right the wrongs in court or through the media...get your products working, make them easy to install and put them EVERYWHERE and the problem will solve itself.
Yeah, MS thwarted them illegally, keep whining about that and you will be bankrupt like all the others that MS wronged. Now just get over it, pick yourself up and make it as easy for EVERYONE to install JRE and JDK on ANY platform...be damned with the "licensing" bullsh*t. Like any war, you must win "on the ground" in order to be effective. Give MS a little taste of thir own medicine, give your new Java development studio away for cheap. Who cares if you were wronged if nobody can even install your stuff?
Just my two cents.....
p.s. I'm still without any Java on my Mozilla 1.0.1 install.....
I still remember when Sun pushed mainframes (VM/SP HPO) out of the company I worked at ... "to cut costs". Instead costs went straight thru the roof of course. DIE SUN DIE!
Did they do this on purpose, or are they just incompetent?
Have you EVER encountered Sun software that didn't blow? Java? Slow & bloated, even on the server side. Star/Open Office? Slow, bloated and unreliable. Hell, it makes MICROSOFT LOOK GOOD, for Christ's sake. Solaris? It ain't called "Slowlaris" for nothing. CDE? Sun's C compiler? WOW, what pieces of crap!
SunOS doesn't count. It is just a copy of the original BSD.
We have got Suns and Linux machines in the datacenter.
Where is really matters (big database engines, 4+ CPUs, a lot of external storage) Linux/Intel is just not capable of the task. Sun plainly does not have much competition there. At least not from Linux. HP-UX, AIX -- may be (though not here).
What are these whacky analysts talking about? What Linux? 8-CPU, 64bit, fibre storage attached and Linux? Have you ever tried it? I have, I know what a pain it is. It DOES NOT FLY. Period.
What REALLY hurts Sun is Windows on the low end. Not the hardware, not the price, but all these litty-bitty apps, that do not work anywhere but on Windows. Espetially Web apps. All these moronic developers with only Windows experience and mantra "does not work -- reboot it!", "open MS-DOS command prompt window and type c:".
There is Sun's biggest problem. They are lacking in the software, not the hardware.
The main thing sun has going for themselves over anyone supplying linux and white box hardware, is stability, scallability, support and availability.
With a Sun package (hardware and software) you have the ability to upgrade both system software components, and hardware (including memory and cpu's) without downing the machine, and in many cases without even rebooting the machine. Whatever it is serving, is always available, even after upgrades (granted, we are talking their high end machines, but for... say financial institutions, downtime is a no no, even a few min can cost ungodly amounts of money). Kernel updates, and software updates can also be made (not in all cases) without even rebooting the system.
There are no linux, or even bsd boxes that can do that to my knowledge, and certainly no windows systems.
The reason Apple and Sun hardware/software combinations are superiour in stability, is due to the fact that they are made to support each other, unlike in a windows enviroment, where you have a mix and match of hardware, and software drivers that bring in many inknowns sometimes.
I came, I conquered, I coredumped
Their problem maybe slashdot.org
They are innovative (Java), competitive (low cost Linux), open minded (open source, Linux). They have a large share of developers. They created Java. They support Linux. They make profit during the down turn of the economy.
So wait a gosh darn minute here. Could it be that Sun really only runs well on extremely expensive hardware? Could it be that sun has horrible support for open standards (HTTP, LDAP, Mail, DNS ... iPlanet sucks, flat out).
Maybe it's because Linux actually has an active user-base, unlike Sun which is basically 30 - 40 something sys admins who got with Sun when they were the best Unix in town. There is no new sun blood because Sun is a PITA to work with if you're used to a linux system.
Then there's the packaging system, what the hell? What sun could learn from Apt and Rpm ...
Linux is dominant because it runs on almost everything and because it has a huge user base, not because people want solaris for (x86) pentium computers.
Sun goes away I won't be teary eyed
Ignore the "p2p is theft" trolls, they're just uninformed
Cheers...
$HOME is where the
-- silver_p
Sun reminds me of DEC. DEC had great hardware, impeccable service and Ultrix rocked. However, they couldn't market. Look where it got them.
I see the same thing with Sun. They are too busy trying to be Microsoft, stabbing their partners in the back, and I've seen service that is not of the usual high caliber.
I predict they will be gone in 5 years (bought by someone else, or just plain out of business).
Netcraft's site discusses how they gather the uptime, and states that Solaris, Linux, and HP-UX (maybe more) all will max out in those charts at 497 days, due to limitations in whatever they're using to measure uptime remotely.
The *BSD boxes don't have that limitation, it seems.
I wonder how many boxes are out there where this 497-day counter has "rolled over", and if this figure is accurate given that limitation?
Apple would also gain Java as an Apple supported program and language. It would help better, faster Java come to Linux and OSX. Java could be more tightly integrated into Quicktime and thus into mobile phones where Apple is implementing it's latest builds of Quicktime.
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
My apologies, cut & paste without built-in html formating often end up this way. Gift noted.
I enjoyed your insight on IBM and Sun. I just want to point out that SUN is not an acronym, nor is it Sun Microsystems' ticker symbol, so you may want to alter your spelling of it to simply Sun.
Allow me to add some non-pedantic information to this post. Here is a five-year chart of Sun's (NasdaqNM:SUNW) stock activity.
The boss over at Sun has a really bad attitude, from a couple of articles I've read. In Business Week, a year or two ago, he was quoted as saying he often feels like retiring, but can't bare the thought of leaving the next generation in a world controlled by Microsoft.
In a symposium, about a year ago, on Web services, both Microsoft and Sun representatives were invited to speak. Microsoft (and I am no great fan of theirs) gave an informative presentation, admittedly biased to their products. Sun basically bitched to the audience, asking them if they could trust Microsoft!
I ask you, just what the hell is going on over there at Sun? Some of their comments make them sound like disgruntled adolescents. Is that any way to market themselves? Does their attitude provide any reason for their employees to get up in the morning to do a day's work?
Granted, I don't know more about their corporate culture, so my insight is necessarily incomplete.
quiquid id est, timeo puellas et oscula dantes.
Oops! Of course I meant "bear the thought."
McNealy "bares" his thoughts on Microsoft every opportunity he gets.
quiquid id est, timeo puellas et oscula dantes.
And that is moving I/Os. I'm a programmer for a company that makes large scale storage arrays, and Solaris can beat most any other operating system (no matter what hardward) at moving just a bulk ammount of I/Os. We support Linux, AIX, Windows, Solaris, and many others, and Solaris is always a top performer on our tests.
Beyond that, I'm not sure what Sun machine's are good for.
Its not what it is, its something else.
when you're the dot in "dot com". Dot coms crash, you crash.
-no broken link
The Baby Bells used their last mile monopoly to kill the "dot com" folks. The bandwith demands have grown, but not like they could have and they are concentrated in far fewer hands. This has made a glut of Sun equipment. A friend of mine bought and ultra spark, which once sold for $10,000, for less than the price of a high end home computer. There's no way he would have gotten his hands on a deal like that if a healthy and free internet market was working. Bad laws, such as those preventing me from buying California wine, and preventing me from running servers on my cable modem, have also played a part. Established interests are shining triumphant and we all suffer for it.
Microsoft has also harmed Sun's traditional scientific computing business. Microsoft has done much to blow up X compatibility and make communications with Unix difficult. One of the responses has been to move some of the calculations to M$/Intel platforms. This obviously does not work for all calcs, but consider the losses from 3D CAD and a perpetuation of the M$ as a client model. Linux can be a great aid there, so long as scientists and engineers revolt against the M$ Office lockin. They have only to realize that the pain is comming from one location and move on. Most have, but many are loath to move on yet. The support infrasturcture for free software is still growing.
In the end, Sun has much to offer. Their hardeare is first rate and they can embrace free software at any time.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
Wow, that's the first time I've ever heard torque used when talking about computers.
:-)
Cool. I'm gonna use that now.
-- it's keeping them. I went to work for Sun my first job out of school. Our lab had largely Sun workstations and I really cut my unix teeth with Solaris, so the opportunity to go work for them was huge for me. When I went to work there, only 3 people in my group were over 30.
I went to interview at their brand new (at the time) Burlington, MA facility and I was simply amazed at the place; the facilities, the people and the atmosphere was so key in my going to work there (as was the salary they offered). I still think it's a great place to work, especially for people in my age group (I'm 25) who grew up getting used to flex time. That I could take a long lunch, play a few rounds of foosball and go to the gym at 4 in the afternoon made me a happy camper.
The problems began when I started sensing I ought to be moving up (or at least, around) in the company. I started in a position I liked but didn't want to stay in for more than a year or so, and as I started to make pushes to move around I was met with stiff resistance. Management claimed it was because of the economy, but I knew people who moved around and they weren't exactly examples of people who were going to save the company.
The key to this issue was that while Sun was publicly making overtures towards attracting the younger developers, the first and second level managers were only advertising positions for senior engineers and were being very inflexible in "stretching" the job prereq's for younger engineers. I often think the only reason I got a job in the first place was because I came in during one of the last "conscription"-type expansions the company did before the IT sector did its nosedive.
To this day they still have that problem; I often consider going back to Sun because the corporate culture is fast moving, fun and flexible, and I doubt I'll find that in any other company of that size. But the jobs and the people they're hiring now are all mid- or senior-level engineers.
So actually, now that I think about it, maybe it's more apt to say their problem isn't attracting young engineers -- the culture is almost geared towards them (why else would you put foosball tables and a Starbucks in your engineering centers?). The problem is that once they've attracted the young people, they have to get their managers to hire them.
B
"I'm payin' taxes, but what am I buyin'?" -- James Brown
As other people have said, that 8Gb of memory where Sun are concerned will make all the difference. I think it's just about got down to $1500 per gig or thereabouts.
I love Linux, but where I work, in the financial services industry, they're still trying to come to terms with the fact that mainframes might not be the bargain they were made out to be. They understand Sun and Solaris because like mainframes, it's reassuringly expensive. We're at the low end of the market Sun (and IBM) are fighting for now.
Just remember Mark...you get what you pay for. That Fry's "Great Quality" special will probably last for about 6 months, when something will undoubtedly fail. Maybe it will be the crappy Samsung HD. Maybe it will be something on the crappy PC Chips/Not-so-EliteGroup motherboard. Maybe it will be the bottom of the bargain barrel RAM. But something will happen. Let's hope, for the sake of your job, that there is nothing mission-critical on that "close to free" server.
It really doesn't take much more to make a sane x86 machine. Build the box yourself. Put in a nice, solid ASUS motherboard. Get a retail boxed chip, complete with chip fan. I don't know where to steer you as far as hard drives go, but maybe run Linux software RAID 5 with drives that still have 3-year warranties. That way if one of the drives fail you can reconstruct their contents using the parity info. Make sure the case you buy has a decent power supply...Antec, Sparkle and Powerman are good brands to look for. Get Crucial or Kingston or Mushnik or Corsair RAM. It's really not too much more expensive than the Fry's no-name crap special.
Really, for a few hundred dollars more, you could have something other than a disposable server. It will certainly cost you less than a Sun, that's for sure. Or an IBM, for that matter. Spending a little more money to save in the long term is a Very Good Thing (tm).
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
http://www.sun.com/smi/Press/sunflash/2003-06/sunf lash.20030605.1.html
:rolleyes:
I called Sun not too long ago inquiring about hardware so my rack. I asked them a technical question about certain software running on it. The Sales guy said he would have a tech call me back. 2 months later after I purchased intel hardware and running Linux. A survey guy called from Sun and asked how things were going. I informed him Sun lost a $10,000 sale.
Microsoft is basically using the same strategy with Sun that worked so well against Netscape. Basically they let Sun do a lot of the groundwork and innovating with Java/J2EE, etc. Then MS basically reimplemented it as C#/.NET with a few improvements (ostensibly after learning from Sun's mistakes), and now MS can throw more resources at their version than Sun can ever hope to. As a Java/J2EE and C#/.NET developer I find them very similar, but I just see Microsoft's solution improving at a faster pace than Sun's. From an idealistic standpoint I don't like it, but it's also hard to turn away from better technology. I know Sun isn't all Java, but alot of their solutions incorporate it, and in the late 90s it gave them a real progressive presence that made them a major player in the whole Internet Boom. These days I'm back to thinking of Sun as those guys who make Solaris and those workstations and servers that are kinda slow but still pretty cool.
RealVideo is awesome :-)
Anyone know how to do the JRE on Debian? Their GUI installer would copy a bunch of files but it refused to see them. I ended up just pushing the "no java installed" button.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
Slightly off topic, and I know that Linux on Sparc is more or less dead, but this came up in conversation the other week: what's the biggest Sun machine or equivalent (in terms of number of CPUs, memory, disk) that anyone has got Linux/Sparc to run on?
Sun had a brief respite from the workstation battle due to the enormous server market during the boom. Then the boom faded and Lintel hit hard. Sun is forced to go where Linux cannot, up into the ultra high end with 5 9's and 128 CPU's per box. Perhaps they can survive there, perhaps not. There is at least one other company with large cash reserves but none of its original market left out there: SGI. They are trying to take Linux into just the space where Sun thought it would be safe.
Perhaps Sun can find a place for itself. Perhaps SGI can as well. The question is whether they stay around in anything but name and logo - and in SGI's case not even that.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
and I have 20 or so sun boxes left that I haven't cleared Solaris from. You can get a free copy from sun.com for testing or eductational purposes.
In all fairness, I've been running Linux for quite a while longer. Here in Tennessee, Sun hardware has no street value of any kind. Case in point: I got a lot of 20 big Sun monitors for only $20 at auction.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
"However, they couldn't market. Look where it got them."
Yea. It got them bought - by Compaq. For billions.
...that the 1.5GHz Xeon only executes real-world apps (like Oracle 9i) about as fast as a 450-500MHz IBM POWER or Sun UltraSparc cpu chip. You might find benchmark tests that inflate the Xeon's "laboratory measured" specs, but real world apps tell all the truth you need to know. I run Oracle 9i on three machines, a dual XEON 1.0GHz Proliant ML530 (SuSE Linux 8.1) an IBM p610 with a single 500MHz POWER3 chip and an earlier IBM 6C4 with a single 1.0GHz POWER4 chip. The dual Xeon Proliant is no faster than the little p610 with its lone 500MHz risc processor. The single-cpu 6C4 is literally twice as fast as either in Oracle 9i performance. All three machines have 2GB ram each, and use 10K RPM 36.4GB Ultra160 SCSI discs attached directly to the motherboards' embedded scsi interfaces because my boss is too cheap to spring for any hardware-caching disc controllers.
Not true. Assuming you have only one system at home and you don't have a couple gigs to spare- it's actually easier to try solaris, given that one can find Sun pizzaboxes for well under $100- more like $50. They don't need much ram or disk space, especially with older Solaris versions- and it's a good way to get to know Solaris.
Please help metamoderate.
No, it's a Sun and has much better hardware. The Intel world is catching up, but Sun's piece parts were designed better to begin with. There is an economy of scale that still fits well for medium sized companies.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
Unfortunately, Sun's technical innovations have too often been overshadowed by McNealy. He is responsible for creating a corporate culture known equally for its bunker mentality as for its technical excellence. To have lost such a dominating market position so quickly can only point to top management being asleep at the switch. Sadly ego may have put Sun on the endangered list. Once it was clear that low end alternative servers were closing the performance and stability gap McNealy should have stopped the Anti-Microsoft road show and dealt with the real threat.
This article announces Suns' intention to create a DRM product that spans cell phones, smart cards & desktop Java.
Is sun receiving pressure from RIAA/MPAA, or are they just jumping on the IP protection bandwagon here? I suppose they must have received requests from *someone* for the technology, because they seem to think that it will increase their Java device sales, and therefore would also increase the sales of the servers to which these devices connect. I don't believe it will work, though. I can't see DRM driving consumer-end sales.
std::disclaimer<std::legalese> sig=new std::disclaimer; sig->dump(); delete sig;
It only gets modded up if there's references to Cmdr Taco and gay activities.
:)
You must be new here
You think that I'm crazy, you should see this guy!
And, in other news...
Microsoft has agreed to play fair...
Apple is dying!!!
SCO now owns the Linux kernel...
and Sun is dying!!!
In all seriousness, any company with 5.5 billion in the bank that is not bleeding money will not be dying any time soon.
Now back to your regularly scheduled program.
"When the president does it, that means it's not illegal." - Richard M. Nixon
SUN has two problems they must sort out.
1. Java - there are too many releases and java applications seem to be too tightly tied to specific point releases. This causes huge support problems.
2. SUN supplied h/w to many of the dot.com companies. When they went bust a LOT of 2nd hand hardware appeared on the market. It's difficult to compete with your own h/w at 2nd hand prices.
(Does anybody else find that typing in the form for SlashDot submissions causes Mozilla/Redhat8 to bounce the form around the window for no apparent reason?)
Juggling tasks simultaneously rather than serially is known as multithreading, and Sun execs contend it's possible on systems running its machines but not on Wintel or Lintel boxes.
Hmm. Maybe they should add multithreading to Windows and Linux so they can become more competitive...
> He talks up a next-generation chip potentially 30 > times faster than the microprocessors currently > > running Sun's most powerful machines. Wow, isn't that last year's Xeon? r4lv3k
Gaaah, can you imagine how slow OS X would be if you ran Aqua on Solaris???
*ducks and runs for cover*
Constitutionally Correct
1. SUN would find it easier to compete with Intel on chip development with Opteron under its belt and AMD's proven development teams.
2. SUN could switch over to Solaris/Opteron and Linux/Opteron and mature both product lines while slowly unifying driver development.
3. Insert advantage here.
Is this nuts? Why?
Anand Rangarajan anand@cise.ufl.edu
Didn't they at one point offer free binary download of solaris 7 and 8 for both sparc and x86?
My memory is a touch vague, but I seem to remember that I got a downloaded version 8 before I was given a offical CD distrobution.
I'd have to check my CD-R box, but i'm sure that I had solaris 1.1.1, solaris 2. and solaris 8 downloaded, and the source was sun it self.
Solaris 7 I believe I didn't bother downloading as it seemed worth it to pay the nominal fee to get both x86 and sparc editions of the disks.
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
this is why capitalism i sso good. it allows for disruptive technologies. in the end, some companies fail, some change, some succeed. the beneficiaries are the consumers. linux is that that disruptive technology. it's like gasoline. gasoline can power lawnmowers to airplanes. linux can power watches to mainframes. ultimtely, even microsoft will have to do more than bash linux.
My problem? I was perfectly gruntled, until some numbnuts came by and dissed me.
haw haw haw
I can't get java working with mozilla on linux !
it must be because java sux0rrz !
what ? java has uses other than applets ??
noooo ! j00 suxxx0r !
You moderators are fucking idiots.
Take a look at this article
Their hardware may be reliable and OS stable, but the CPUs -- Sparcs -- are just way too slow, even with their gobs of on-chip cache.
Now, that Intel and AMD have decent operating systems to run on them, there is no reason to pay premium for the Sun's systems. Actually, the operating systems have been available for a long time, but it finally began to sink into the minds of the decision makers (or, some of the FreeBSD/Linux fans finally grew up to become decision makers :-)...
Sun-branded x86 systems may be their salvation -- competing with Dell... Which is, probably, rather sad, because, from what I know, x86 is an inferior architecture on the technical merits alone.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Are you living in a cave? One of *the* great things about sun hardware and solaris is jumpstart, the ability to go to the 'ok>' prompt on a sun box (find that on your home PC for me, wouldja boy?), type "boot net - install" and wack, 30 minutes later you've got a box installed that looks exactly like the 200 other boxes ... you just installed.
PuLEASE, if all you want is glitz, don't talk about Linux, solaris, or the *BSDs; what you're really looking for is Fischer-Price.
Where is the "Eat your own dogfood" principle. Sun has put far too much energy into Java, and not nearly enough into staying competitive with Windows and Linux at a server level. Compare Microsoft who is porting all of their userland into managed mode with Sun who has not released any core component of Solaris in Java.
When Sun ships rm6 in Java and it works well, then maybe I will look at their technology with something other then a short critical glance.
There are quite a few reports that SUN is hoping to make some headway with AIX customers due to the ongoing litigation between SCO and IBM.
Solaris , Linux, AIX, whatever they are pretty much all the same. At that level it's just a matter of having your favorite piece of software ported over. But it's really ALL about the hardware. Imagine loosing a week of work just because your memory chip dropped a bit and segfaulted your simulation. Sure it would be nice to just run down to your local Fry/ Best Buy for new parts, but how many times have I had to return memory or hard drives because they were pieces of junk to begin with. There comes a piece of mind knowing that when you buy from Sun, they have exhuastivly stressed tested thier machines for the types of failures you repeated see with cheap white box hardware.
Wasn't me who posted the anony message. It's nice to have a vote of confidence though.
Better yet, submit a story.
I've submitted 2, have you?
Wing Seals Blamed in Columbia's Demise
Stopping NetBIOS Spam?
I am a meat popsicle.
Because then you have people who can't tell the difference between 3rd party applications and apple applications and blame apple for screwing their computer up. Apple is not a software distributor, they do not get a commission from every copy of every program sold. Their platform is open in the sence that anyone can write a program that will run on it without paying Apple any money.
A merger is most beneficial between companies whose products have synergy. To merge with a company whose products compete with yours is to essentially buy their customer base.
Because IBM and Sun compete more than they cooperate, a merger between the two would be effectively IBM buying Sun to acquire its Java unit, and end-of-life its hardware and OS.
The biggest problem with Sun is that Scott McNealy is about as lovable as Bill Gates, and they closed Java. And being nice to Microsoft doesn't make one bit of difference.
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
The problem is, you're making the assumption that "Open Source" is a large, monolithic entity, like a corporation. It is not.
Slashdot and the "insta-pundit" sites are rife with people who talk a lot about the evils on MS and how "we" need to do X or replace Y, but 9 times out of 10 they're not the ones that are actually contributing to the movement. (Heck, you could probably lump me in that 9...)
There are a lot of people out there who could care less about MS that are just writing free/open software.
(Here's an ironic thought: isn't Microsoft guilty of exactly what you suggest? "We'll (help SCO) sue IBM! We'll undermine Java! We'll challenge Linux!" Wonder what that means...)
Jay (=
Sun is still selling compelling products, but they have always lagged in marketing skills, it seems. Isn't this the reputation they have always had?
For example, the V210/240 is comparable to a dual-CPU 2GHZ Xeon server--but it also comes with FOUR gigabit Ethernet interfaces and U320 SCSI. It would be a clustering monster (think Oracle RAC). Also, only the newer Opteron servers can compare feature-for-feature (me thinks Sun would do well selling Opterons).
The Sun ONE marketing is a bit confusing, at first, but is basically amounts to all the non-operating system software Sun sells. They are also looking to pull an interesting stunt by delivering all software to a customer and unlocking what the customer buys. This is very similar to how high-end CAD/CAM software sells, and it generally works well.
I think Sun is doing a lot of good stuff. I just hope they weather the economy and keep putting the pressure on Microsoft, IBM, and HP. Sun, whether you like them or not, is an important part of keeping the IT industry in check.
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
Sorry, but that's not quite what multithreading is. That's multitasking, actually, unless you are devoting one processor to the job, and then you just might be doing multiprocessing - actually, you are probably doing the first two at all times; add in the last one if you have a machine with multiple processors which are not used strictly for running individual tasks.
So what it sounds like here is that Sun is trying to make a processor which can maintain multiple contexts at once. I'm not at all familiar with the SPARC or UltraSPARC architectures but on intel that means maintaining the instruction pointer and offset, the address pointers and offsets, and the state of the flags register. I would assume that one has similar registers on any processor, though those with a flat memory model rather than segmented (hello, 64 bit!) will have less registers to mess with, meaning that context switches will be less expensive. Say, I wonder if x86-64 sticks the segment and offset in different portions of a 64 bit address register (high and low, ala x86 registers) to reduce the cost of swapping them out in a 64 bit aware OS? That would be slick.
Sun also plans to insert multiple CPUs on a single chip; Duh. Thanks, Sun. When you find out how to make it reasonably priced, let us know. It would be a huge advantage if you combined it with the "throughput" (let us call it multiple-context since others are doing it already) technology somehow, though that seems like a harder problem than you might think. It would be most beneficial to be able to tie any CPU to any context, and to have more contexts than CPUs, for obvious reasons. This would remove most of the overhead of context switching (it might effectively remove all of it on systems whose fine-granularity tasks number less than the number of contexts in the CPU) and as such be a huge win.
So Sun is planning to give up the last advantage they have (given that the UltraSparc III is looking painfully dated now) and start bringing in other people's software? This is something that Microsoft can't do, but that doesn't mean it's the right thing. Obviously it's what we the FOSS community want until Linux is able to run on Sun's big iron at least as well as S
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I think one of suns largest problems is that they sell to a niche market. They openly state that they dont want to compete for desktop users or even for small buisness customers. I'm a desktop user, and a netadmin for a small ISP, and I have to say that my sun UltraSPARC is by far the most reliable computer Ive ever used. Ive only got an Ultra1 and its STILL more stable than anything else we have, outperforms most of our up to date FreeBSD systems (in terms of network performance and load handling), and isnt even very loud...
.. They really had a good chance to gain huge market share with affordable 64-bit desktop workstations, and if they learned from the mistakes made with the Alpha, they might even have made it work....
I really think Sun blew thier big chance when they decided not to market the UltraSparc to lower-end customers
For shame Sun, now your going to go under or merge with the antichrist over at apple, and all your cool 64-bit toys will start to suck, and the (existant) ones that dont will skyrocket in price on the used market. Doh.
-Tim Smith
tim@jlc.net
Sun is dying!
And they reeaaly need Sun to survive...
**ducks**
I wish I could filter out the annoying Pickens articles...
so damn right!
as one of the many actual non-linux fiends at this site, has anyone seen benchmarks on a sun chip running linux? i'm certain someone's hashed together code to optimized for that hardware.
i know, i know: the entire idea w/ linux is that you don't need the latest & greatest chip to do the work, but i think the kinds of numbers might be very helpful, esp for anybody trying to convince PHBs to move from proprietary to open source, and having legacy hardware running around.
[insert obligatory beowulf cluster comment here]
ed
At the end of the article McNealy says the following about linux:
"Yet when talk turns to Linux, it's as if McNealy can't help himself: He knows he should be courting the world's Linux devotees, but instead he pokes fun at them. He points out that Red Hat, the leading purveyor of Linux systems, announced revenue of $24 million for its last quarter of 2002. I don't know where this multibillion-dollar Linux business is."
however, earlier in the article, when discussing SUNs past we get to read this:
"Back in the mid-1980s, when Sun was still a startup, it had neither reputation nor intellectual property, and it faced a murderer's row of competitors. One quarter it even needed to borrow $50 million to make payroll."
yeah well, i suppose a lot of people were laughing at sun at that time too figuring out where 'the money' was. I can't believe how ignorent SUN is towards Linux.
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
Perhaps Slashdot should learn from Sun's mistakes.
There's a Mercedes gap too. I want one and can't afford one, but it's not government's job to do anything about it.
He's getting old and rich
The CEO who delivered least for shareholders, for the second consecutive year, was Oracle's Ellison, whose massive 2001 haul, combined with a plunging stock price, virtually assured a poor pay-for-performance comparison. An Oracle spokesman said Ellison declined to comment.
Joining Ellison on the list were other execs who managed to reel in big bucks despite poor performance. Among them: Sun Microsystem's (SUNW ) Scott McNealy. In three years, he hauled in $53.1 million, mostly through option exercises, while investors saw the value of their Sun shares decline by 92%. And McNealy's riches are likely to continue. In 2002, he was awarded 3.5 million options. They're under water now, but the company estimates they have a future value of $24 million. A Sun spokesman said that most of the options McNealy exercised in 2002 had lost the bulk of their value and were about to expire. McNealy, who takes only a $100,000 salary, kept most of the shares.
# cd
# ln -s
Sun may require that you distribute an application in order to distribute a JRE, but I have yet to install a utility on Solaris, SuSE, RedHat, Mandrake, WinXP, Win2K, or WinNT that did not allow me to specify the location of my JRE.
The "recommended" JRE shipped by the application provider is simply the one that they've done their testing with.
The only exception I've found is for Java in RDBMS stored procs, which obviously have to run with the JRE that is bound in to the RDBMS.
The fact that most so-called sysadmins are afraid to select a configuration other than "default" says far more about the sysadmin's skill than the product or it's installer.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
I would automatically question any comparison between Sun and any Intel based platform. However even Sun recognizes the future looks to be Linux on Intel.
We recently performed an internal cost/benefit analysis of Sun vs. Linux on Intel. Our study showed that while Intel platforms are very competetive, they fall behind on supportability. Intel machines require VGA port, BIOS, and keyboard/mouse ports. To provide remote OOB management you end up spending a fortune in cards and/or console managers, that Sun has built-in to their low end equipmnt. By low end I'm talking about a 1U $995 machine.
In fact we recently had a conference call with Sun about their Linux boxes... I told them that if they wanted us to buy Sun Intel Linux machines they would need to dispense with the VGA port and provide the same Light Out Management console port that their Sparc machines have. Which effectively means they need to build an OpenFirmware/OpenBoot machine with a RJ45 console port. Sun's rep stated that they are working on incorporating those technologies into the Intel platform.
So I think if Sun can deliver such a machine, in the sub $1000 category they will end up as the trendsetter for Intel based Linux boxes.
Sun was forever touting themselves as "the dot in dot-com", and we know what happend to all those dot-com companies. Perhaps they should have been more careful to what they hitched their wagon.
Java is the blue pill
Choose the red pill
It's worth keeping in mind that stock option incentives are designed to mimic a royalty-based scheme...
The real problem here is the business model (IMHO). Whenever a company is successful (eg: Ford) a large field of imitators popup. Well, Microsoft was enormously successful with their software licensing model -- so now we have a large field of imitators out there attempting to execute the same business model.
Unfortunately, there is only one Microsoft. For that matter, take a look at the consolidated automobile industry -- even Ford is a bunch of companies now (Janguar, Aston Martin, Land Rover, etc.); that industry has consolidated.
The days of prospecting software are over. If you work for a sofware company that doesn't already dominate a significant product segment, then you should get out now. Only a few leaders will be tolerated in this kind of market, especially given the compatibility issues posed by multiple software programs on many platforms.
Sun needs to learn this and then decide how they want to expand their business. They dominate(d) the big-iron in your backoffice server room, now they are getting pinched by others looking to expand into that area (Microsoft, Apple). Make an alliance with one of these companies if you want to grow your business; otherwise, bunker down and focus on delivering the best turnkey server solutions out there.
Eric Sarjeant
eric[@]sarjeant.com
Does this mean Sun is going to change their name to Twilight?
Outdoor digital photography, mostly in New Engl
News.com.com.com.com just posted this story:
Sun systems key to HBO transformation
Of the 20 Wall Street analysts who cover Sun, only one rates the company a buy.
I wonder if it's b/c of the whole market is down (means "do not buy anything!") or they really advise to re-invest from Sun to something else.
Less is more !
Forget the stock price and flagging sales, [McNealy] argues, and focus on Sun's record of innovation.
Ask DEC how far that got them.
If this is the tack Sun's management is going to take in responding to criticism, then it may be "Goodbye Sun. Glad we knew ya....."
"Rocky Rococo, at your cervix!"
These folks are already using it.
Try, uhm, torsion! Yea, that's not taken!
Even the best Oracle results are obtained on SMP systems, not on RAC. Plus it's not totally transparent and requires you to mod the apps to support failover clusters (contrary to Oracle claims). Plus it costs $20K per processor per node for RAC alone. Over two years after it's been released, it's only installed at about 100 customer sites (according to Oracle). How's that for market penetration? The product must either suck balls really bad or be overpriced or both (which I believe is the case) to fare this bad.
The only thing that those "giants of low cost computing" (Ellison and McNealy) really know how to do is how to rape customer's wallet.
Apparently not many people here work directly in the Oil and Gas exploration/development sector.
This business is Sun. The servers are Sun, the desktops are Sun, the network infrastructure boxes are Sun. Big (BIG!) O&G companies have decided to standardise on Sun because:
1) The applications were developed on Sun
2) The data resides effortlessly on Sun (via Oracle)
3) The hardware is the same across the board with Sun
This is an enormous industry, and while they're considering Linux on the desktop (sporadically), the back end is still pure Sun hardware, and will be for the forseable future. Furthermore, when you have that much Sun hardware and require Unix workstations on the desktop, how much do you have to save in hardware costs to justify moving to a different platform?
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
You must have gotten the REALLY good stuff.
Software royalties? ROFL. And THIS is how you expect to compete with cheaper overseas programmers?
Programming isn't an ART. Its labor. You're no different from some guy who never went to college who works in a Ford factory putting together Taurus cars. You put together a product. If they don't get royalties, then why the HELL should you?
You are amazing you know that. You're like the LAST person in the friggin WORLD to learn that software developers ARE NOT SPECIAL. You are not a special class of worker/person/higher being....etc. Software royalties? Jesus H. Christ. Over-inflated sense of self-worth much?
If a company hires workers to build say a new building for them, do you think they still want to be paying for the building in the form of royalties 25 years from now? So what makes software any different?
The main problem with your plan is 1 we're in a recession, 2 there's too many damn programmers all over the world, 3 even after the recession ends you're on angel dust (PCP) if you believe salaries will go back to what they were during the dot.com era, 4 the very dot.com era ITSELF misled programmers into believing they were actually worth the money they were getting paid, 5 Abu Sharif in New Delhi India is very happy to outperform and outwork you for 1/4th of the cost it would take to hire your expensive American ass.
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
Bwahaha!! Curse you for beating me to the punch on this. If I could moderate you up, I would.
IBM Dorp sAIX in two years fro Linux and since SUn doesnt want to do Linux guess what ? no sale!
Don't Tread on OpenSource
Look at us. We're arguing over an article in Wired Magazine?
Journalism has never sunk so low!
(Well maybe Business 2.0. And Newsweek. Gah! I think I just depressed myself)
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
of converting ObjC to Java based syntax was poor performance. Not Java.
Re-read.
What part of 'fear retaliation' didn't you get? MS could pull support for Office X at any moment which would devastate Apple's acceptance in mixed-shop companies.
Stock price is only a reflection of how the market perceives the value of the company. Even that is often so skewed as to not have any real bearing on the true worth of companies. The dotcom bubble is a great example. While Sun's stock was flying through the roof, it was greatly overvalued during the boom. It was not, however, as overpriced as most of the other "what's a business plan?" stocks of the time.
To make a judgement on how well Sun is doing now based on a 96% decline in stock value makes no sense. Sun stock is actually up 100% from just several months ago. What shall we assume from that? Has sun doubled its real value in that time? Its sales? Of course not! Sun is doing appreciably better over the last year on margins and costs while sales have steadied in a tough market.
How will Sun do in the future? I honestly don't know. I hope it does well. [My paychecks are important to me.] It's real easy to make snide remarks from the cheap seats buddy. I hope your 401k portfolio is not a reflection of how well you are doing!
_damnit_
It's my job to freeze you. -- Logan's Run
Back in the day, when super-minis roamed the earth, DEC substantially discounted their systems to colleges and universities knowing that all those starving students would one day be key decision makers. They were right. And they sold a ton of Vax and PDP systems. Sun displaced them by giving away "workstations" and stressing "the network is the system." They too were successful. The Sun boxes ran well and replaced microvaxes in droves.
Now it's the penguin's turn and those labs are in dorm rooms, high schools, eighth grade basements and garages all over the world.
Anyone like to venture a guess what solutions will be proposed by generation Linux when it faces the same IT problems?
I agree with most of what you said. I disagree with the easiest way to apply patches part. I've recently started using Live Upgrade as my method of patching. I "upgrade" to the same or higher update/release and apply patches onto that boot environment. Then all that's required is to reboot into the new environment. If something gets hosed or a patch doesn't agree with an app I depend on, I have the previous environment that I can fall back on. It's quite handy and makes everyone sleep better at night.
_damnit_
It's my job to freeze you. -- Logan's Run
Great argument there buddy.
Guess what, it's called progress. How much did a 40mb hard drive go for 10 years ago? A 200GB drive can be had for a measly $200 today. Are all hard drive companies out of business? Obviously not. Same goes for any other kind of tech.
Sun is already "in bed" with Linux, has been for close to 2 years now.
Solaris 9 is bundled with Red Hat's gnome distribution (the CD is stamped with RedHat copyright), and many other things.
It also has linuxes network threading model for tcp/ip. and some other things hidden away.
let's not forget Sun (sparc) servers have dropped to almost worthless prices. You scoff? Check ebay! I just bought an E450 loaded for $350 US !
and also got an E4500 (very nicely loaded) for under $1500. These are with warranty, certified, etc.
and to add insult to injury you need look no further than Sun's news to DUMP the sparc completely. This was months ago. So what are they doing? AMD Opteron of course!
now for some news many dont know, Sun has revealed to certain people that Solaris v10 will *BE* Linux. Well, not exactly Linux, but a conglomeration of Linux, BSD and Solaris.
yes, Sun plans to level the unix playing field and unify Unix whether people like it or not (personally I think a unified Unix is a good thing!)
Want more proof? How about the fact that Apple's OSX is actually the BSD kernel riding on top of Debian Linux ? hrmmm
I predict with all this that within 2 years (maybe less) we will see a consolidated "Linux" roll out of Sun as Solaris10 riding on AMD Opteron (64bit) platform.
This makes a lot of sense, and cuts some major costs all across the board for Sun.
In 2002, everyone lost sales, except for Dell's dekstops. Sun lost fewer sales than IBM and HP and everyone else in the industry, so it picked up marketshare, a critical yardstick of competitive performance in down markets. So, while Sun is fuxxored, it is less fuxxored than IBM, HP, SGI, Unisys, etc.
The piece was a hatchetjob that displayed very little deep understanding of the IT market.
SoupIsGood Food
I find this discussion and article interesting as Sun has never been the high performance leader, even in their own machine class. When it comes to RISC, Sun's SPARC line and decendents has always been slower than the competition. DEC's alpha, IBM's PowerPC, HP's PA-RISC all were always ahead.
What Sun provided was a platform on which more software was available sooner than any other platform. Then, it became more software than any other platform except Microsoft. I am sure this is the origin of the pre-occupation with Microsoft. Yet, while Sun was regularly able to pummel its better performing competitors with its wider and earlier software availability, it just can not rival Microsoft in the breadth and timing of software available. Note that I am not refering just to the software produced by the system manufacturers. In fact, if that were the sole measure, then HP and IBM would have given Sun a much greater challenge. Sun's key to success was getting ISVs to use their platform as their native development platform, ensuring it was the first platform everyone released on. All the others were ports, and thus were released months later. This was a huge edge for Sun that was terribly difficult for competitors to remedy. Simply building faster, "better" hardware would not lure ISVs to shift their development platform to another hardware vendor's product.
But, Micrsoft is far ahead of Sun in exactly those things that allowed Sun to beat its competition. I don't see Sun ever being able to succeed using that strategy, and they sure don't seem to be interested in any other. Though, with the other RISC platforms dropping like flies, being replaced by Itanium with all of its performance and acceptance problems, and sudden Sun's hardware looks like it may become king of that hill. Of course, no one is paying for that class of hardware any longer... if they do, they now go buy IBM's tREX and run piles of virtual Linux machines on it.
Sun makes damn good hardware, damn reliable .
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Some of their newer cheaper stuff does not hold up to this
For the Telecom space they are the System of choice , but
ppl have started running other OS's on the Sun hardware
namely Linux
Sun needs to work to minimize its costs, work WITH Linux,
and become a powerhouse WITH opensource
If it joins forces with Open Source FULLY, it will win the
war that was started years ago against M$
Sun's bread and butter has been server space, forking
from Solaris is going to be a near impossible choice
for them to embrace
The amount of time and money they have put into they cannot
see letting go of it, but if they cling to it and do not
have a parallel thread for the lower ROI of Linux they
are going to lose simply by attrition
Telecom and a few others will be their only long term
die hard hold outs, and they will reduce over time
Adapt or die, that is what this business is about
IBM adapted, even M$ adapted and used some Unix/Linux code
Opensource can no longer be ignored, Sun must see that
and they must join with opensource or just like M$ they
too in time will fall or just be a high end hardware vendor
Peace,
Ex-MislTech
google "32 trillion offshore needs IRS attention"
I never said any specific percentage of the profits as royalties. As an example suppose a software company wanted to higher a good software developers and was offering 60k per + standard benefits as compensation for each one. In that case the majority of people 80% or so only need show up for work to get paid. Only about 20% of the people do about 80% of the work in such situations. Now lets say the company offerer 30K + standard benefits + (25% royalties/number of developers on each project you work on). The 30k is enough to live on when your just starting out along with the standard healthcare benefits. Your employee ID/SSN is associated with every project you work on alone with everyone else on it, including project management. When the project is finally ready for release, each person that contributed to the project gets a equal share in 25% of the profits.
Advantages to this system include: -Each developer has a interest in the quality of the finished project. -Unproductive people are quickly indentified and elminated. -Since the developers who contribute actually share in the profits, they don't feel like they're being scamed. -Lets disgruntlment, increased productivy, everyone who contributes wins.
Now exactly what would be the problem with that?
I my humble opinion, it is the executives who do that are overvaluing themselves and underating their software developers. They may have had the intial startup capital, the base idea for the business but it's the developers who make it happen and come up with most of the innovations.
Another thing you might want to take note of is that there are a lot of people who know a little about programming but don't fully understand what takes to go from concept to finished product. Many only copy what other's have done before.
I've worked with people from India and other countries. They are a nice bunch of people. Any of them that wishes is welcome to join in is more than welcome. Those who contribute are just as worthy as anyone else who contributes.
All of these arguments I've seen from people comparing Sun vs random 3rd party intel servers obviously have never used a Sun. The best explanation comes from an immediate case experience. We have 70+ sun servers. We buy a sun server, open the box, turn it on, it works. Recently we picked up two AMD based servers from a linux/bsd 'open' source rack-server provider (name left out for their own sake). The RAID flakes out (thanks Adaptec for the crappy zero-channel raid card!), the thing is unreliable. We've replaced one motherboard, and had problems with both systems weekly. The amount of time we've spent trouble shooting these POS servers far outweighs any cost benefit. If sun had the new intel boxes on the market at the time, we would have bought them without a second thought. There is something to be said for the level of quality sun ships in their servers, even their low cost ones. This alone makes them uncomparable IMHO.
tora
I never said any specific percentage of the profits as royalties. As an example suppose a software company wanted to higher a good software developers and was offering 60k per + standard benefits as compensation for each one. In that case the majority of people 80% or so only need show up for work to get paid. Only about 20% of the people do about 80% of the work in such situations. Now lets say the company offered 30K + standard benefits + (25% royalties/number of developers on each project you work on). The 30k is enough to live on when your just starting out along with the standard healthcare benefits. Your employee ID/SSN is associated with every project you work on, along with everyone else on it, including project management. When the project is finally ready for release, each person that contributed to the project gets a equal share in 25% of the profits.
Advantages to this system include:
-Each developer has a interest in the quality of the finished project.
-Unproductive people are quickly indentified and elminated.
-Since the developers who contribute actually share in the profits, they don't feel like they're being scamed.
-Less disgruntlment, increased productivy, everyone who contributes wins.
Now exactly what would be the problem with that?
I my humble opinion, it is the executives who do that are overvaluing themselves and underating their software developers. They may have had the intial startup capital, the base idea for the business but it's the developers who make it happen and come up with most of the innovations.
Another thing you might want to take note of is that there are a lot of people who know a little about programming but don't fully understand what takes to go from concept to finished product. Many only copy what other's have done before.
I've worked with people from India and other countries. They are a nice bunch of people. Any of them that wishes is welcome to join in is more than welcome. Those who contribute are just as worthy as anyone else who contributes.
You should also be aware that software has a limited self-life. It is unlikely you would collect royalties on software you did today, 25+ years from now. It would've become obsolete in 5-10 years.
I'm a bit surprised by the blanket sun v*80 machines w/ sun chips run faster than the intel/xeon chips. The code I run is numerically intensive and memory intensive. I have a v880 based on the 933cu chip (4 proc/8 gigs of ram) as well as a "graphic workstation" w/ 2 gigs of ram and 2 of the same chip. I also have bought some cheapy dell "xterminals" that cost $650. Two of these machines are sdram based PIV motherboards w/ 512mb of ram and a 2.4 ghz chip. Using intel's compilers for *our code* the intel chips are wallclocking at twice as fast as our sun chips. (Non MPI single processor runs that are probably using currently about 200 mb of memory) I also have an old rdram based PIV machine also running at 2.4ghz and get another 50% speedup over the sdram based mb (slightly more expensive glorified xterminal). Some of the things we noticed that was a bit surprising is that intel's compilers did really incredible things w/ our code in contrast to gnu while the sun compiler gave us hardly any speedup. Quite honestly, the only case when the sun machine will be worth using is if we need to use (stablely) > 4 gigs of ram.
I've seen a few comments of the hotswapping redundancy issue. I think this is important but I think that sun oversells this. If you have a critical datastore or somesuch yes it is worth that sort of money, but there are a lot of things that are "computationally" intensive that doesn't need the immediate restore losslessness. i.e. the who cares if the machine dies, resubmit the job on a different node, google philosophy. The is afterall the underlying truth behind all the distributed projects and the "beowulf" cluster issue. Needless to say I see a lot of people saying the sun boxes at 1ghz are equivalent to 2.4 ghz xeons. This is how sun is trying to sell their blade servers. I can currently build xeon machines at ~1500 a dual and amd duals at ~1100 a dual while the sun blades are going at (I believe) $999 a processor/blade and those chips are way slower than my v880. I have say $80k to get the most cpu/$ I can afford. Given the fact I can reasonably distribute my code (i.e. don't need "large memory machines > 16gb") and I don't need redundancy and/or terabyte level fiber storage etc (i.e. job dies I resubmit it, blade philosophy) I honestly find it hard to believe that my money is better spent on buying single processor blades than buying dual processor xeons at not much more.
-bloo
Slashdot users, torque, has it and I thought of naming my son that. Twisted, eh?
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
why not gnome? you fear change, choice, freedom? If so work for microsoft& let the user be the one to decide.
As for the rest of your post, I agree. Sun is in the lead if they were to do this. However I feel it would compete with their own OS.. even if it is on its way down. Some company (re: execs) don't like the idea of throwing out their baby.
Tell them the air is much fresher when they take their heads out of their .... mmm, windows.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Sun needs to roll out Itanium and Opteron servers, scaled as high as possible both under Linux and Solaris. They need to do this right now. The market should decide between Sparc, Opteron, and Itanium; Scott should get out of the way.
Sun needs to price Solaris below any other UNIX vendor, and they need to do everything possible to insure that Solaris runs on their competetor's (equivalent architecture) machines. Any Sun technology running on non-Sun equipment is a win for Sun marketing.
Sun has enough experience with low-end systems that they should become the Clawhammer workstation vendor. They should sell these systems with Win32 if the customers ask.
Sun should make a grand show of giving the customer what they want, not what Scott wants.
Maybe I'm just dumb or not reading the right stuff, but what gives with Sun and Java?
Does Sun actually make money with Java? If so, how? How much?
If Sun goes into the toilet, what happens to all of us who build our applications in Java?
The only good weather is bad weather.
Do you even know what you're talking about? MOST phones are java based - most all games for phones are written in java. Quicktime has java implemented. The parent said phones are picking up Quicktime ... parent posted a logical arguement.
Apple has been rather behind in java speed, that's a known. OS X depends on Java in some aspects. Also programs that I use often (LimeWire) are full java apps.
Throwing in fancy but useless info is just that - useless!
Oh yeah, despite the doom and gloom of declining revenue everyone is seeing, Sun still makes money. That's more than can be said for many companies, especially ones that don't have monopoly rents to fall back on.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
A day ago, we had an "article" about "Bill Gates, the Entertainment God" or other nonsense. This was also in Wired. So is it that the editors are so removed from the real IT world/culture that this counts as "new" news, or are the submitters that way? I thought that this was NEWS for Nerds, not "the AP rehash of other nerdy news".
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Umm, by my calculation, 30 seconds of downtime in a year corresponds to an availability of ...
... which is, of course 6 nines. That's a whole order of magnitude harder than what we're talking about.
...
...
... or even 99.9999999% (which is only 9 nines).
1 - 30s / (60s/min * 60min/hr * 24hr/day * 365.25 days/year) > 0.999999
Properly computed, 5 nines corresponds to a yearly downtime of
(1 - 0.99999) * (60s/min * 60min/hr * 24hr/day * 365.25 days/year) > 315 seconds ~ 5.26 minutes
The 4 nines you mention is yet another order of magnitude more downtime
(1-0.9999) * (60s/min * 60min/hr * 24hr/day * 365.25 days/year) > 3155 seconds ~ 52.6 minutes
Now I'll grant you that 30s/year downtime (6 nines) is an absurdly high standard - at least given the current state of technology. However, 5 nines is currently achievable for mission critical systems if you're willing to pay the price. If I was the CIO for, say, VISA and I was only getting 4 nines, I'd be investigating different lines of work.
I've never seen a user ask for 12 nines
Anyone else notice how this has "The Innovator's Dilemma" written all over it? Sun was drawn up market (more and more processors, more high end features), while Linux became "good enough" for most things. The high margin draw was irresistable, until it was too late.
Peace be with you,
-jimbo
XML Tools for Mac OS X
"So the same hardheaded pride that got Sun into trouble with Linux is alive and well. Nowhere is this clearer than in the office of Scott McNealy, where he keeps what he calls a "decapitated penguin" on a shelf (it's the head from last year's costume). He admits to tactical errors "too numerous to discuss," and then singles out just one: Sun was late jumping into the market for a cheaper set of offerings on the lower rungs of the server world."
If this is innovation and fulfilling customer need, then I have a Ebola-laced dildo to sell SUN.
These folks should change their name to Moon. The galaxy no longer revolves around them. They are either going to adapt or die. I hope that they adapt. No use in wasting more customers money on a dying product line. The market is driven by cheapness and efficiency, not hubris. I wish them well.
web server, ftp, database backend... so what else?
Signals processing, yeah, we got that. Works just fine. I mean seriously, what else is there that anyone cares about involving "uptime" besides web or app servers? Educate me.
Fuck Beta. Fuck Dice
This is higly off-topic, and will probably hurt my karma, but ... I'm a kinda Slashdot newbie and couldn't find a way to post a privat message to you. I absolutely love your sig, and wonder : where does this quote originate from ?
"And you are dying so slowly, you believe to be living" - Bertrand Besigye
Linux has more innovative solutions to common computing problems. Sun is old school - living in the past.
dual channel DDR in their workstations and small servers, they are NOT going to a good platform for CAD/CAM. Their hardware, while nice, is geared towards running Oracle and that's about it. (okay exaggeration, but you get the idea)
Fuck Beta. Fuck Dice
Because while KDE improves in leaps and bounds (becoming faster, more integrated) Gnome just took a step backwards by removing configuration options.
Of course offering Gnome doesn't hurt anybody, but if they want to have a chance on the desktop it would be better to load KDE by default.
Actually my opinion is pretty much confirmed by the big inroads KDE/Linux, especially SuSE is making in Europe (already 5%-20% in German non-technical newsgroup posts, Munich, a city of 1.5 million will also switch) while desktop Linux is in a comatose state (less than 5% share in most non-technical newsgroups, no big cities switching) everywhere where RedHat (= Gnome/Linux) is dominating, especially the USA.
The Gnomies can talk all day long how confusing KDE is to the mythical, non-existant "average" user invented by self-proclaimed usability experts, however the *real* users in the *real* world have chosen KDE. Call me crazy, but I consider the needs of real users more important than those of hypothetical ones.
However I feel it would compete with their own OS.. even if it is on its way down. Some company (re: execs) don't like the idea of throwing out their baby.
Actually KDE/Solaris wouldn't be any more expensive than KDE/Linux for Sun, however Solaris doesn't offer anything over Linux on the desktop AFAIK and Linux is better supported (think about consumer hardware), better known and runs on more architectures (Think about Opteron, think about PPC970) so Linux would certainly be the better choice.
That Solaris is doomed in the long term is a fact.
We are in the process of tearing out over one hundred Sun workstations from some of the public labs here at the University at Buffalo and replacing them with Dell systems running Linux. As someone who's been a Sun system administrator for 14 years, this is tearing my heart out, yet I concede that this action is necessary for one reason: lack of application support. Many of the software packages our users need have either already abandoned Solaris or have declared end-of-life for it. Many of these same vendors have jumped on the Linux bandwagon, plus these systems can run Microsoft Windows either in dual-boot mode or with VMware for the applications that require this environment. The simple fact is that no matter how good the OS and the hardware, a computer isn't useful unless it can run the apps that the users need.
Our purchasing of Sun equipment (I work for a group that supports the Engineering School and the Faculty of Natural Sciences and Mathematics) has gone way down for this reason alone. Ironic that a company that started with great workstations has almost totally abandoned this market. They've failed to nurture third-party application support, failed to take advantage of opportunities (when SGI was having problems, HP successfully lured some very powerful software packages onto their workstation platforms), and fallen way behind the curve in performance, especially in graphics.
I feel terrible about this, having been a Sun and Solaris pundit for many years (I still think Solaris is the most reliable version of Unix out there), but it's necessary, because in our world the needs of the users outweigh the desires of the sysadmins.
-- Dave
Solaris x86 sucks donkey cock.
I am 100% serious. Sun would have to pay ME $20 to even make a partition for it.
Solaris is only worth running on SPARCs (mostly because no other OS supports all the hardware). For the student to procure one, he has to be motivated to find on one ebay (where they command fair prices), but to be motivated to search out a decent box, they have to already had experience with one.
Where? At work, or in graduate studies if they're lucky.
But not the other way around. Until you can buy SPARCbooks or the low-end workstations for competative prices at CompUSA or NewEgg, it's NOT going to happen.
Fuck Beta. Fuck Dice
more torque == more cache. SPARCs always have a gig and a half of cache because the memory buses are very conservative.
If you run linux on a Xeon (even an old one), it "feels" a lot different than a run of the mill whitebox.
That being said, Solaris (not the SPARC, because SPARC/linux does this) does perform more consistently under load. It is heavily tuned for such situations.
And I've found that OSX has compatibility issues with Unix. Specifically, NIS and autofs. It doesn't like Solaris-style NIS/NFS and requires translation for amd and netinfo. Not pretty, not for the weak-stomached. But it's bread and butter for Solaris/Linux shops. So throwing OSX into the mix can get messy. It's fine if all you have is Windows and BSD (and other Macs).
Solaris doesn't need spit and polish. It needs to come with a CD of "experimental" hardware support and a big warning sticker for all those PCI cards that work with Linux on SPARC/ix86, but they haven't had time to obsessively debug. Throw in an OSS, netlink, SDL, fb, and dri compatibility APIs, maybe a command-line-syntax compatible iptables/ipfw system for firewalls/packetshaping, etc., and more people might think twice before ditching Sun for Linux or *BSD. People wouldn't object to switching from Linux to Solaris because it's unfamiliar (it's very close to the same), but because there's things YOU JUST CAN'T DO. Or if you want them, it's a pain to set up.
Sun should examine all those popular linux-isms and start sucking those in to be a bit more hacker/admin-friendly. They made a good start with pre-packaging GTK/Perl/Bash, and they could go further.
Fuck Beta. Fuck Dice
NOTHING U SAY CAN CHANGE IT!!
What I've never understood about Sun is why they didn't make it easier to install Java on a client machine. If you tried to do it (on either Windows or Linux) you would find that the process was increadably badly designed. Most members of the normal public wouldn't stand a chance installing it.
I could never understand this either. Now everyone's using Flash for what Sun wanted them to use Java for. Why? One reason is that installing or updating Flash clients is completely automatic and seamless. There's no excuse for not having Java work this way.
The UNIX world knew this for years that it would come.
They did not belive that it would come from witin link Linux but rathere from M****softw.
"Exactly what does IBM get by buying out Sun?"
Java.
...for Microsoft Office.
Even with Internet Explorer gone, the need for Office remains.
The Linux kernel uses a 32-bit integer for counting ticks, and ticks go by at the rate set by the kernel constant HZ, which is currently 100 on x86 systems. 2.5.x has increased this to a 64-bit integer and increased HZ to 1000 (to offer better timing accuracy: right now Linux timers have a resolution of only 10ms, which is far inferior to Win2k/XP and unsuitable for audio-type work; though as an aside even 1ms timers are far worse than XP's 100us timers).
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
The problem with Sun is they didn't hire enough guys from India on H-1B visas.
Seastead this.
This is what Microsoft offers that nobody else provides. Not OS/2, not Macintosh (though the iApplications feature a similar sort of integration - Steve Jobs "gets it").
Microsoft didn't do this all at once, but Bill Gates did know Microsoft had to get there (and first, he felt). The company was able to afford to because they started with a monopoly in one area (MS-DOS), and used the profits to fund the development of failed products until they weren't failures any more. They grew one monopoly into a handful (Windows, Office), and are using those to fund more monopolies (SQL server, Xbox, whatever else).
Sun is doing the same thing. It's starting with Unix, which is a handicap because, as a commercial entity, it was being pulled by commercial interests who still had the "proprietary mindset" in which they wanted Unix to be a lowest common denominator, but wanted to keep the best improvements to themselves to compete with the other Unix providers. Much of Unix's advances were from non-commercial University or research lab development (TCP/IP, X windows), and the occasional corporate gift (NFS being the main). Common development tended to focus on extremely limited results (Motif, CDE) which really only gave the impression that Unix was incapable of being used for anything very good, desktop-wise.
Much of Sun's development has been aimed at filling in the vast gaps in things Unix can be used for. It funds this with hardware sales, much like Microsoft funded its development effort from previous monopolies (to be fair, some were legitimately acquired).
This is why Sun has invested and promoted such a wide range of software. They attempted to fill the GUI gap with NeWS, the networking gap with NFS, the portability gap with Java, the development and office gap by buying Forte and StarOffice, web servers with Netscape, and so on. Some have been successful, some haven't, but one thing has always been clear to Scott McNealy - a computer is useless unless you can do what you want with it. The stated goal of Sun is to provide a complete infrastructure for anything you want to do with computers - from cell phones to mainframes, you'll find Sun software.
That's Sun's strategy - be the next Microsoft, the same way that Microsoft did it (well, maybe more legally).
Of course, Sun doesn't have the resources to do it on its own, and Linux has been an indirect blessing - since Linux is so similar to Unix, and Sun has the most popular Unix, the vast growth of software created for Linux (as programmers create their own infrastructure independently of the choking control of Microsoft's non-technical influence) can be easily used by Sun to fill in more of its own gaps.
But Sun's strategy is clear, and the only other companies in a position to do the same thing are Microsoft (done already), and IBM (selling manpower to hook together existing products from itself and others). Everyone else seems to see hardware as just hardware - that's like selling an audio/video player that can't play existing CDs or DVDs because it has a vastly superior, but incompatible medium - shades of the Digital Alpha.
This is why Sun's outlook is so much better than people who only look at numbers and charts would ever dream of. Sun is investing in a very large, very significant future, while almost nobody else is. That investment has the potential to pay of massively, if they choose correctly, or recover from their incorrect choices quickly enough (Solaris vs. Linux - maybe, maybe not).
In case you thought I was serious: Not.
Seastead this.
I'm definitely not a Ricer when it comes to my computers. I build solid, sane boxes. I don't overclock, I don't cut portholes in the side of my case to show off the guts, I don't do anything vaguely resembling the kind of atrocities Ricers inflict on perfectly good Hondas and Toyotas and Acuras.
I'm the kind of person who would buy a Toyota for basic transportation, never race it, buy it in a nondescript color, and just keep it tuned and maintained and drive it for literally decades. My husband and I have an '86 Chevy Nova, (basically a Toyota Corolla in all but badge) it's a nondescript beige, and it still gets the kind of gas mileage described on its showroom sticker.
Basically what I was objecting to was the fact that basically the "Great Quality" Chinese-made Fry's PCs are more like the Trabants and Yugos of the PC world. They are made with the cheapest possible parts and are doomed to fail spectacularly. All I am saying is that if you build something with a little better grade of parts, you have the possibility of something that will serve you longer and work better for you.
I mean, Mark got it...he responded to my post and understood exactly what I meant.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
The thumbnails on space.com seem to be hosted by them, and I see a lot of URLs that seem to go through an Akamai server (for exit tracking?). Who are these people and what is their business?
Sun's contributed a lot to UNIX over the years (RPC, NFS, NIS, OpenOffice) . . .
As clumsy at it sounds, the correct name is OpenOffice.org.
It's not an idealistic or political thing; it's a trademark thing.
Sun Microsystems was a creator of premium datacenter servers, with the scalability and stability that the top dollar bought. Enter Java.
Java was a new technology that bridged the gap between many of Sun's diverse platform of computers. It was a great thing for Sun's customers because it meant that applications could be written across all of their diverse product line.
Enter Microsoft. Java made it possible to write software on the Windows client, too. It was almost as easy as VB. Developers in a middle market between professional and VB flocked to Java, as did colleges. I myself made the jump from VB to Java my Junior year in HS. Microsoft, however, understands its customer base and knows what they are looking to do. Microsoft very quickly integrated Java into Windows in the way that they saw fit to do so, and made their J++ tools perfect for taking advantage of the rich APIs that already existed.
The problem with Sun's Java is that it was free, just like with Netscape. Sun's technology was given away, and the company failed to innovate in the places which make money: Premium servers and support. IBM and Dell and Intel and Microsoft had no problems picking up the slack when Sun attempted to diversify outside of its strengths.
IBM is a very interesting opponent, and I'm going to put the blame on IBM and not Microsoft for Sun's downfall. IBM will readily adopt "cheap" technology, integrate their sales and consultant "services" around it, and sell it to their customers for a markup. IBM has success with this in Open Source software like Linux as well as with open platforms like Java. IBM can SELL Java, whereas Sun can't.
From their online stores, a decent 2U x86 Rack server (Dual Xeon, 1GB RAM, 1x36GB disk, dual Gigabit Ethernet) costs $5458 from Dell (PE2650) versus $4595 from Sun (v65x), and the Sun box has 3.06GHz Xeons, 6 PCI-X slots, and U320 SCSI compared with 2.8GHz Xeons, 3 PCI-X slots, and U160 SCSI on the Dell.
You can bet that usability, or even eye candy, is not the reason they chose Gnome over KDE - otherwise they would hardly still stay with CDE. My guess is that they simply find the idea that writers of commercial solaris software would have to pay license fees to another company distasteful.
Programming can be fun again. Film at 11.
Solaris is better than linux in many ways. Yet I've got 185 linux machines and only 3 Solaris machines left at my shop. It's unlikely that the remaining three will last thru the year. Most of the problem I have seem to be with their lack of sales skills. We probably gave Sun more chances than we should have. Maybe it was due to my long history with them, my first Sun was a 3/50.
Funny that we now have more MacOS X machines than Solaris machines. Often we'll run OpenBSD on an old Ultra 5 or Ultra 10 machine which makes for a great little server.
Is it Red Hat's or Sun's fault that there isn't a Java runtime environment RPM on my Red Hat CDs? Or have I just overlooked it?