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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.
Apple make personal computers and Sun make mostly server machines. It's not really that suprising.
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Does this mean we're looking forward to a new brand of "Dried Apple" computers!?!!?
>
...ok that was a really really bad joke, fortunatly this is slashdot so it's sure to get modded up. PS Can you find the misspelling?
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?
Even more blast from the past the co-operation between Sun and NeXT for OpenSTEP and such.
Quiz questions -
Which vendor, Sun or Intel, had a 64-bit processor first? By how many years?
Measuring a "good processor" isn't just about speed.
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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"?
Apparently Intel follows an all-to-common business model, which has been scientifically proven to inevitably lead to cannibalism:
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.
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Sun Apple... SunApple... Snapple?
Well it is a different industry.
Are they so convinced that OS X is the future that they are giving up on Solaris and Licensing OS X? :)
These are two different OS's with two different purposes. OS X is more of a desktop OS and a small server. While Solaris is almost entirely a Server OS designed to run on the big machines and it is ok for a workstation usage. Basically most Sun employees don't like the Intel platform and rather have something different. Also when they are home they are also tired of hacking computers and just want it to work and also have their command line interface.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
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Does it come complete with a silly dance?
(Stupid DBZ reference, back to your normal programming.)
Karma: Chameleon (mostly due to the fact that you come and go).
This doesn't suprise me. Really, the only reason UltraSPARC III isn't blasting away everyone else, I believe, is due to manufacturing constraints. Excusing Sun's very low-end equipment, such as the Ultra 5 workstation, their products are generally very solid, very well engineered, very practical, and not totally off-base on cost (when you do an apples-to-apples comparison (was that a pun?)).
It is very understandable why they would prefer Mac OS over Windows, and Macintosh computers over white-box PCs.
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- Install Solaris 9
- Realize that getting the box to halfway resemble the functionality of your Sun box at work would take two onsite admins...
- Take the Sun Blade back
- Buy an Apple (cause its Unix and media capable)
- Profit$$
Remember, there's a reason that your local Sun admin doesn't have a Sun box at his house... (s)he's worked darn hard at getting the applications working off the network at work. Why would they want have to duplicate their efforts at home on the hardware and network they can afford? For what? It's just cheaper and easier to go Apple with the same satisfaction. Of course, if Linux and OSX did not exist and Windows was the only option... Sun employees would have Sun boxes at home. Even if it was just a Sparc2 running SunOS 4.1.1.
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.
So, the senior VP and chief technology officer of Intel, a company that Apple has refused to use the flaship processor from for years, thinks Apple not using the chips they make money on is a bad idea?
And this is supposed to be at all surprising or interesting?
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
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 was in Palo Alto doing a job at Stanford back in mid 2000. Went out to eat at a little Italian place just down from the Cardinal Hotel (who was doing 802.11b in the hotel way back then), and overheard some engineers from Sun talking shop (blah blah Sparc blahblah Solaris blah). I went over and asked them what they thought of Mac OS X. They pooh-poohed it saying Mach was a crappy kernel, the PowerPC was a dead-end, blah blah Objective-C bad blah, and other things. I'm just a lowly Network Admin for whom all things silicon are magic, so I was roundly "put in my place."
With G5s and Panther nigh, it's safe to say those engineers were wrong. Maybe Apple should just buy its way into the Enterprise by snapping up Sun, but then again Solaris is a "dead-end" compared to Linux and the Sparc III is "stuck" back at 1.2GHz blah blah blah....
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from Macintosh...
No merger, but Sun employees are looking towards the future and want to be familiar with Mac OS X when they apply for jobs at Apple. They would prefer to stay in the Unix world than have to do Windows. :-)
I can understand his fondness for Macs, since OS X is more or less a successor to NextStep. But very few programmers, even at Apple, are fans of the NextStep API. And I'm skeptical as to whether there are as many Mac fans at Sun as he says, or whether this translates into any kind of Sun/Apple synnergy.
Besides, this sort of thing has been tried before. That's why JavaSoft and Taligent were headquartered accross the street from Apple. The clash of egos was always fatal.
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