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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.
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?
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.
A Multiplayer Strategy Game for Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux
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.
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.
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
- 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.
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
Argh. The laws of science be a harsh mistress.
Which vendor, Sun or Intel, had a 64-bit processor first?
DEC? SGI?
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
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
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. :-)
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.