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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.
Jonathan Schwartz, executive vice-president of Sun's software group, also said that a broad software-license deal struck with AT&T in the late 1990s allowed the company to inject whatever code it wanted into the Linux kernel. Schwartz pledged to indemnify its customers against any lawsuits by the SCO Group or another supplier.
I'm hoping that the author of the piece confused Linux and UNIX, and not Jonathan Schwartz, as I don't see how a deal struck with AT&T could be relevant to Linux, which isn't AT&T's IP.
I'm also wondering what form the "indemnifying" would take. Maybe just a guarantee that if Mad Hatter licenses are invalidated by the SCO lawsuit, Sun will provide an alternative UNIX operating system?
Here are two exerpts from the article. I guess MSFT'ites must suffer with CPU upgrades to get the bennies from their ongoing hardware improvements. Another prime example of an "Apple Peeler".
Q. Did Steve Jobs make the right chip decision, choosing IBM for his upcoming G5 processor, or will Apple be missing out on some pretty hot Intel technology.
A. I think Steve Jobs has made the wrong CPU choice for 20 years, he just added a few more years to the life of his bad decisions. Steve's not an illogical guy, he's passionate and opinionated about the directions he wants is a poor path for the company as well as a poor path for the users.
Q. Let's talk a little bit about Transmetta. They are a small competing company, that designed a small and battery efficient CPU that is getting into more small computing devices, especially in the far East. Their premise is to throw away hardware legacy from the CPU, running it if needed in software mode.
A. You can't ignore backward compatibility. People still run applications in corporate environments that were developed 15-20 years ago, in fact many of those applications, the people who wrote those applications are now dead and their children have no idea what they did. You're just not going to change those compatibility requirements, and that's just a flawed, it sounds good, it feels compelling, but it's wrong. Secondly, when they've looked at the implementation the benefits that it brings, yes initially there were some benefits, their chips had lower power at a certain performance level than Intel did. That was because we were asleep at the wheel.
Technically, MIPS. The 64-bit R4000 core was first demonstrated in 1991.
Let's see... the senior VP and CTO of /Intel/ announced that they made the wrong processor choice for the Mac 20 years ago... ...and in other news, Microsoft has announced that no-one in their right mind uses Linux and that Windows is far superior at everything.
/technical/ reasons for his statement. Comparing the two, head to head:
/Intel Representative/ getting this idea?
Seriously, I would love to see his
68000:
32-bit instruction set (minimum 16-bit instructions).
32-bit registers.
16-bit ALU.
8 MHz in 1984.
8 general purpose registers, 8 address registers.
80286:
16-bit ALU.
4 16-bit general purpose registers, could be used as 8 8-bit registers.
6-8 MHz in 1984.
I'm not seeing the appeal.
When the 601 came out it also had more than an edge on the Pentium and I sincerely doubt that the Pentium could have emmulated (with its speed, instruction set, and number of registers) the 68k instruction set anywhere close to the speed of the first PowerPCs...
Where exactly is the
Integrate Keynote and LaTeX
the only reason UltraSPARC III isn't blasting away everyone else, I believe, is due to manufacturing constraints.
UltraSPARC III would have been a great chip if it were released when Sun originally planned, instead of two years later.
Makers of superior CPU technology are probably hitting themselves in the stomach because Intel, with huge money for fabs, was able to get enough performance per dollar to dominate the industry, merely to fritter it all away on the Itanic.
Ah, if only the designers of Alpha, UltraSPARC, MIPS, PA-RISC and Power had had that kind of development budget and Fab facility!
If DEC had had Intel's money, or if Alpha had been absorbed early into Intel and they invested in it as if it were Invented Here, we'd have much a much better leading edge chip than we do now.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
Apple make personal computers and Sun make mostly server machines. It's not really that suprising
Sun makes mostly server machines because Linux PCs have taken away their workstation market. Between Linux's cost and Apple's ease of use Sun has little chance of retaking this market.
With regard to running SPARCs at home, that's just silliness.
:)
Eh? Solaris 9 + StarOffice + Netscape 7 makes a very viable home computer for people who don't mind tinkering a bit. It's really no worse than Linux, other than GNUCash won't link on Solaris 9 for some very obscure reason (stupid libtool).
Add a used SunPCi card (AMD K6 PC on a PCI card), and you can also run Windows or, with a little work, Linux x86 simultaneously with Solaris.
Add a PlayStation for gaming.
It works for me
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
For those that wants it, more power to ya. But the criticism was about the claim that the average Sun admin/employee wouldn't want to come home and do "even more work" on a Sun box at home. Most of us who don't run Solaris at home (well I do, but only for work at home purposes) are not avoiding it because it's "too much work" but because it's not optimal. If you *want* to tinker all the time, hey that's great, but I wouldn't expect the majority of Sun employees to want to do that tinkering. In fact, reality is, the majority of Sun employees aren't techies--Sun employs a bunch of sales people, managers, administrative workers of all sorts, none of whom are expected to be techies, most of whom aren't in reality techies, so why would they do techie things at home?
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
A Sun-Apple partnership could've been so cool if:
... everything covered.
...
1. Apple had chosen SPARC back when they switch from 68K
2. NeXT had chosen SunOS as it's base instead of BSD/Mach
3. Sun had continued their partnership with NeXT and supported OPENStep on Solaris.
Solaris and OS X could have been ONE! That would've been way cool! Server to desktop
Sigh
-j
We have had at least a couple of Sun representatives come and present to us with PowerBook's, so I wouldn't doubt that plenty of Sun employees have Apple systems. Makes sense when you think about it: they're not running Windows and have Unix underneath. I would think they'd integrate pretty nicely with the Sun internal systems and allow them to do cool things like run Keynote, and Photoshop (for the marketing group) etc etc
:)
If only OpenOffice/Staroffice would run in Aqua mode under OSX, everything would be just perfect
That's simply not true. At this year's WWDC, Cocoa was everywhere and developers, both inside and 3rd party were definitely digging in. Most code examples were given in both Cocoa and Carbon (where relevant). Now, Carbon isn't going away, and there are many other choices, but Cocoa has definitely caught on. iPhoto, iMovie, iCal, AddressBook, iSync (and large portions of the Bluetooth stack), iChat, Safari, Quicktime Broadcaster, Keynote, Mail, System Preferences, and so on were done originally in Cocoa or have been ported to Cocoa recently.
There have been many instances of anecdotal evidence that traditional Carbon Mac developers are looking at Cocoa, especially now that Mac OS 9 compatibility is not as important as it used to be last year and even less so for new projects that won't be delivered this year.