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.

Comments

More Interesting ...

[kalidasa]

Is their take on SCO:

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?

Re:Gelsinger's Slip is showing

[RatPh!nk]

This goes without saying but......"You can't ignore backward compatibility."

This coming from the VP of a company that makes a 64 bit processor that has zero 32-bit backward compatibility?


-pH1nk

80286 vs. 68000 and Intel

[Llywelyn]

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.

Seriously, I would love to see his /technical/ reasons for his statement. Comparing the two, head to head:

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 /Intel Representative/ getting this idea?

Re:This is no suprise.

[elmegil]

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?

Re:Schwartzland

[wchin]

fm6 wrote:

But very few programmers, even at Apple, are fans of the NextStep API.

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.