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Most Sun Employees Own Macs
An anonymous user writes, "Most Sun Microsystems employees use Apple when they're not at work. This leaves Jonathan Schwartz, executive vice-president of Sun's software group, hinting at a Sun/Apple partnership." This comes on the heels of Pat Gelsinger, senior VP and chief technology officer of Intel, claiming Apple makes the wrong decisions about CPUs. So it figures Sun, who Intel likely thinks wouldn't know a good processor if it came up and -- um, processed something, would like Macs.
Where the hell did they get the statement that "most Sun employees use macs at home"?
Other than myself, I only know of three other employees that use a mac. One uses his as his primary work machine (other than his Solaris boxes), one has a powerbook that he uses as his portable and is probably not his primary machine, the other - I don't know about him and myself, I just use my powerbook here and there as a portable solution. I wouldn't use a mac as my main or desktop machine. I just wanted a sturdy, simple, reliable laptop and Mac seemed a good choice. Makes it simple for me to access almost any network environment and most services within seconds as opposed to all the trouble a windows box would give me.
But yeah... I would say that "most employees" is incredibly off base. Not only that, but of those employees that *do* use Macs at home, few probably use them as their main machines.
Maybe what they really meant was "most Sun *EXECUTIVES* run macs at home"?
If you look into it, you'll just find sun blaming apple and apple blaming sun. So while a 'partnership' would probably be very cool, I just don't see it happening without some drastic changes taking place first.
A Multiplayer Strategy Game for Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux
No idea on the legal merits of that argument, but I don't get what your objection is.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Which vendor, Sun or Intel, had a 64-bit processor first?
DEC? SGI?
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
You keep using the name SCO, but I thought your first post (haven't finished reading the article) mentions that Sun licensed from AT&T *before* SCO bought the rights...
So why does SCO even matter in this arrangement, other than the enforcer of the rights that Sun bought from AT&T?
AT&T gives Sun the right to the code
Sun injects said code into Linux *or* has the right to
SCO buys rights to code/IP outright
SCO claims SCO's newfound IP has contaminated Linux and demands reparations
Sun contends that *their* Linux product is free of contamination by definition, because they have the right to 'enhance' (rather than contaminate) Linux with AT&T code, making them immune from SCO's claim
On the other hand, there *is* the possibility that Linux isn't contaminated at all.
GPL Deconstructed
And I quote:
As for the Apple connection, Schwartz said that the practically every Sun employee owns an Apple desktop at home.
Patience is a virtue, but I don't have the time - TH
I agree that the 68k was a better processor and at the time my Mac was a dream to use in lieu of the damned 80286. I did some programming on the PowerPC 601 and the systems that ran the 601 were so slow that I nearly threw them out of the computer lab every day. We ran Codewarrior on some 601 PowerPCs and it took minutes to compile a simple program that just showed a single dialog panel. The reason the PEntium beat the PowerPC had nothing to do with the PowerPC and everything to do with Windows 95 being lightyears ahead of MacOs 6.x/7.x being unusable or mind numbingly slow to work with.
- Kill Yourself, spare us all! -
Would you crave the excitement of configuring a sun box or some obscure linux distribution? ;)
Buying a used Sun workstation and the media kit/RTU license for Solaris 9 is a great way to learn UNIX. The bundled documentation is thorough, and there is a strong on-line Sun community (fan sites, newsgroups, news sites, etc.).
Actually, the software and documentation that comes in the Solaris box set is sufficient for a motivated person to get Sun Certified with no outside help, such as training classes. However, I would recommend buying a book for the Sun Certified Network Admin exam (it's much less clear-cut than the System Admin exams).
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
Occasionally... if you give me a SPARC I will feel the urge to configure it :-) but to answer the question: Nothing can tempt you very far away from OSX, you get spoilt baaadly. Nice *consistent* GUI, BSD shell to configures&&make all&&make install to your hearts content, what more do you need?(My X11 nostaligia is limited)
What did Sun do with it? Dump it in favor of Motif
No, they dumped it in favor of Java (which has very similar goals as OpenStep, after all).
Sun bought Lighthouse Design mostly as a favor after they changed direction on OpenStep and fucked certain people. Unfortunately, changing the strategy back will not unfuck those people, nor will it help Sun in any way. (although, I'd agree about StarOffice).
Your history is a little off unfortunately. Before the NeXT acquisition Apple had been working on the successor to MacOS 7, called Copland. The idea behind Copland was to get rid of all the cruft that no one used or no one was supposed to be using anymore. Copland was intended to run classic Mac applications in an emulation environment akin to Classic on OSX. Copland-aware apps were going to be the equivilent of Carbon apps in OSX now. They would be preemptive and have protected memory spaces. They would also be allowed to create real threads.
After about two years Apple finally killed the Copland project. It was horribly overdue and many of the components were going nowhere. Late in 96 Apple bought NeXT for ?$430m. In January of 97 Steve Jobs was an "advisor" to Apple from the NeXT deal. He was not then actually CEO. Basing Rhapsody (OSX) on NeXTSTEP had been the contingency plan after Copland washed out.
Basing your opinion of the Cocoa/OpenStep API based on the commercial failure of NeXT hardware is a bit ridiculous. The API is not the reason NeXT hardware sold poorly. NeXTStations were expensive, moreso even than the egregiously overpriced Macs of the time. Breaking into a populated market is difficult at best and impossible at worst. NeXT sold expensive computers with remarkable hardware quality and an awesome OS but no killer app.
That has nothing to do with the quality of the OpenStep API however. The OpenStep, now Cocoa, API is well designed and very robust. Play around in GNUStep or Cocoa for a little while sometime. The API is easy to work with and very verbose which requires a lot of typing but in the end makes for very easily understood code. Designed to run inside of a host OS, OpenStep is extraordinarily portable and abstracts as much as possible from the developer. The source code in Building Cocoa Applications: A Step by Step Guide by Simson Garfinkle and Michael Mahoney is nearly identical in every way to the code in NeXTSTEP Programming: Step One written by Simson Garfinkle. A lot of the text of the book regarding the applications themselves is also similar if not identical. The only real changes between the two books are OSX or NeXTSTEP specific topics and explanations. Those same examples will Sun's OpenStep implemantation and GNUStep. How the history of the API somehow invalidates those facts I don't seem to understand. Nor does the history show in any way that developers hate working with it.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.