Co-founder Joy to leave Sun

TheLinuxWarrior writes "An article at CNET says Bill Joy, Sun Micro co-founder and chief scientist, is leaving the company." You'd think after two decades of working at Sun, they could've found a better picture!

Comments

So I guess...

[MarvinMouse]

It really is a Joy to leave Sun. ...
Thank you, I'll be here all evening. :-)

Re:So I guess...

[bluethundr]

It really is a Joy to leave Sun. ... Thank you, I'll be here all evening. :-)

:::sound of slashdot crickets:::

Re:So I guess...

[Anonymous Coward]

Lame attempts at humor notwithstanding, I found it a great joy to leave Sun. Though working with Joy up in Aspen would be a fine scenario.

When I started working with SunOS in 1992, I thought that working at the pioneering company would be a great career path. After several years, I finally got there, and was immensely distressed at the culture of "not invented here" and "zero career growth" as unspoken rules. They build lovely campuses to work in, but boy did it suck to be a minion there.

Re:So I guess...

[Anonymous Coward]

I for one would welcome your silence.

Re:So I guess...

[TopShelf]

So when will the poets start chiming in?

There is no Joy in Sunville,
Mighty McNealy has struck out...

Re:So I guess...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah... It only took me 3 years and a half to finally do the job I was hired to do (although on a different project).

Working at Sun sucks right now.

Re:So I guess...

[Anonymous Coward]

You'd think after two decades of working at Sun, they could've found a better picture!

Believe me when I say that's a pretty good picture of Bill Joy.

Re:So I guess...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, Nice Mullet.

Half of Adelaide wants that haircut.

Re:So I guess...

[Anonymous Coward]

Joy! To the rest of the world!

Re:So I guess...

[Anonymous Coward]

After several years, I finally got there, and was immensely distressed at the culture of "not invented here" and "zero career growth" as unspoken rules.

Same with nearly all companies. There are two philosophies of running companies.

Method #1: "Core Technology Group" - Form your core technology group with experienced staff. Then recruit project managers to manage software engineers. Any strangers will only get offered the dead-end jobs while nieces/nephews and trusted staff get the good software engineering jobs. This is great if you're an senior engineer/architect. The advantage of this method is you keep your senior staff. The disadvantage is that you keep losing your junior staff.

Method #2: "Everyone gets pushed up into management". In this method, the philosophy is to get the new graduates to bring in new ideas. Whenever somebody comes along and has experience (from another company or an university project) an existing member of staff is promoted to team leader. After several pushes they get pushed into a project manager (and promptly leave to set up their own company). In some states/countries management will slap on a Non-Compete-Agreement if they can get off with it. This usually ends up with the brightest entry-level graduates not applying to the company. The disadvantage is that even if you are loyal to the company you'll more often than not get bogged down in some tedious but critical part of a project, only to see new graduates get to work on the latest technology.

This is great when you're an entry level graduate. The disadvantage to the company is that they keep losing their senior staff. Smaller companies seem to be run this way.

Be lucky you haven't applied to a company which uses grad-fighting as an interview technique: Invite 10-12 graduates to an interview session and sit them around a table for a debate. Tell them that there are several positions available and that these will go to the individuals who make the most contribution to the debate. Then sit back and watch the fight take place.

Re:So I guess...

[tetra103]

Same with nearly all companies...

Yes, sad but true. I'm sure everyone has their own dead end career stories, but here's mine: A few years ago I was hired as a UNIX systems administrator. I came into the company as a senior UNIX systems administrator. With the typical corporate downsizing, most of the middle management was cut and we're more a flat manangement style with only a few higher ups and alot of peers. Anyway, during my raise review this year I was informed that I was being overpaid and hence wouldn't get a raise. I would have been satisfied with the "no raise" comment. In this sad economy, I'm just glad to have a job, but the rationale or excuse for not getting a raise bothered me. My manager then felt it was necessary to describe how based on their company point scale I was like a 2 out of 5 (my interpretation of being one better than a janitor). Based on that information, the company felt that a level 2 admin only should make so much. I realized at this point it was an apples to oranges comparison going on here. My skill set puts me way beyond the "junior level" admin status. And by the way, junior level was the term he used.

I don't know if anyone else can relate to such a situation. Having a stagnant career is one thing, but being downgraded in career status? In my former job, I was a senior UNIX administrator for Cantor Fitzgerald installing trading systems around the world. I come to work for Eastman Kodak and after a few years I'm a junior admin?

Based on my rants, it sounds like my crappy company falls under Method #1 and the obvious thing to do is quit and get a new job. But therein the company has me by the nutz (and they know it). The unemployment in my city is one of the worst in the US. Leaving the city isn't much of an option either.

When I first came to Eastman Kodak, I was told that most of the good people have left. This I feel is true. I suppose the very fact that I stayed directly implies I must be some kind of idiot. In that light, I can only agree with my management.

Re:So I guess...

[Anonymous Coward]

Not to be too harsh, but your mistake was joining Eastman Kodak. From what I've seen, that company has been on life-support for several years.

Re:So I guess...

[BuffPustule]

You owe it to yourself and your self-esteem to start looking hard for an alternative to this job. Once your boss belittles your worth and contribution, your best answer is to find another job (not that I'm recommending you jump out of the pan and into the fire, though) because:

a) you will learn something new at a new job

b) you will feel better for having found work where you are appreciated

c) you will allow your former boss the opportunity to determine for himself just how important your contribution really was

By the very fact you read this web site, you are more informed than many and your desire to stay abreast of current developments in tech means you most likely have retained (or even added to) your senior admin skills during your time at Kodak.

Consider non-standard jobs, or start contributing to existing free/open source projects in your spare time now, and that may help you connect with people in a position to hire.

Good luck, and don't let bozos make you feel bad!

Re:So I guess...

[s.fontinalis]

Same with nearly all companies. There are two philosophies of running companies.

You can extend this to most tech businesses (i.e semicon equip, telco & defense - plus many others) After 3 companies in as many years I can firmly say that the only way to advance your career is to leave for greener pastures. Internal promotion is a joke (after all - if you met the criteria for the job above you, we'd have hired you for that position!) Even bigger than the loss of tech skill overseas is the squandering of tech talent through lack of development.

Re:So I guess...

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks for all the Joy, Godspeed and good luck

Re:So I guess...

[Anonymous Coward]

the problem being no one will respect you ever, anywhere, and if you do get respect, then they will expect, and they will control, and they will put you in their pocket as THEIR prize and you still don't get actual respect as in freedom.

but I'm not cynical, no.

Re:So I guess...

[Anonymous Coward]

You might be a fool for still being at Kodak. The fact is, however, you're at a company with a recognizable name and you do still have job. Leverage this into a new job ASAP. It isnt necessarily that jobs aren't out there, but to find something good it takes time. Plan on it taking 9 months. It sounds like it is time to move on anyway--as an admin you need new ground, new challenges, and a new set of people to impress occasionally.

Re:So I guess...

[KyleW]

Just remember this simple fact : People have long memories and these management twits will pay for their nazi policies once the economy improves. Companies that have treated their employees well during the downturn will keep the good ones and get new good ones if needed. The ones that took advantage will pay by losing their best and brightest to the good companies.

Re:So I guess...

[MrWa]

By the very fact you read this web site, you are more informed than many and your desire to stay abreast of current developments in tech means you most likely have retained (or even added to) your senior admin skills during your time at Kodak.

Sweet! I always thought I read /. to pass the hours away when I was supposed to be working on something important for my boss. Now I know refreshing /. is actually a very large indicator of my desire to "stay abreast of current technology" and the level to which I am informed; no longer will I keep a Word document available for quick ALT-Tab action, I will just let my boss know I am not slacking around but in reality I am increasing shareholder value with each refresh!

Thank you Slashdot!

Re:So I guess...

[Anonymous Coward]

It might sound like your boss is being harsh, but really he's doing a big favor to you by telling you to jump ship.

It'd be a lot worse if they were giving you "5"s on your reviews and then one day they Downsized you out of the blue because you make too much money.

PS: Dollars to Donuts you make more money than your boss or some other management type. That's probably the core problem.

Re:So I guess...

[LarryWest42]

Definitely find something else. With due caution.
FWIW, your manager bozo probably has one or all of these forces operating on him:

1. They have to "grade" on a curve, no matter what. Moron HR departments do this kind of thing.
2. He really just wants to cut his budget so he can get a bonus.
3. Or similarly, wants to encourage you to quit so the severance isn't charged to his budget.
4. He has absolutely no idea what it means to be a manager, and takes out his inadequacy on his superiors (by which I mean his direct reports).

Really no healthy answer except to transfer or leave.

Re:So I guess...

[duffbeer703]

Look at the bright side -- you are alive. You could have been installing trading systems in the WTC on 9/11.

If you work at Kodak I'm going to assume that you are living in Rochester. Again, look at the bright side. While it's not NYC, it's a pretty nice area with cheap living. Maybe you should focus on bettering yourself outside of work and then make a decision on your next career move.

Re:So I guess...

[Anonymous Coward]

kill yourself or move, really now is the time to start living or dying. didn't you understand shawshank redemption?

Re:So I guess...

[kcbrown]

Just remember this simple fact : People have long memories and these management twits will pay for their nazi policies once the economy improves.

I hate to break the bad news, but the economy isn't going to improve that way. Perhaps you haven't been keeping up with the news, but the economy itself appears to be growing, but only as a result of significant debt increases but people are still losing jobs.

So: this is a jobless "recovery", and because the U.S. is still the largest customer base (I hate the word "consumer"), it means that the "recovery" won't last very long, once people in the U.S. start to run out of credit:

1. People who run out of credit can't pay for goods and services.
2. Businesses that sell to individuals will see a sharp decline in demand.
3. Those businesses will cut jobs, increasing the feedback in step 1, and thus the economic decline.
4. Those businesses will also cut demand for goods and services, thus causing upstream businesses to cut jobs and demand for goods and services, thus accelerating the economic decline.
5. Those businesses above that need to fill some of the jobs they previously eliminated will do so primarily by hiring overseas workers.
6. Those who lose work will have a much harder time getting credit because of all the people who came before that defaulted as a result of running out of credit while still being jobless, so being unemployed will really mean you probably won't have any money to spend (hint: credit is the only thing keeping the U.S. economy afloat right now).

And I'm not the only one concerned about this.

End result? IMO, there's a reasonable chance that the U.S. economy will collapse in a crash at least as bad as the Great Depression, because the very people who are needed to support the economy will be unable to do so because they're unemployed. And because their jobs are being shipped overseas, they won't ever be employed until the cost of living in the U.S. drops to roughly the same or less than it is in the poorest of countries -- businesses won't have any real incentive to hire locally otherwise.

And that means that you can permanently say goodbye to the first-world standard of living we currently enjoy, unless you're in the richest few percent of the population.

And lest you think that all this activity will cause other countries to see increases in their standard of living (and thus their cost of living), remember that we're seeing proof before our eyes that employers are willing and able to shift jobs elsewhere much more quickly than economies can adjust to it. That means that whichever country has the lowest standard of living (while still being able to provide sufficiently skilled workers) will be the one to supply the workforce. Which country that happens to be may change over time but the speed that employers can shift their hiring patterns will ultimately determine the amount of time that the country's economy can grow before it loses its jobs to some other (cheaper) source.

Just remember: the cheapest possible worker is the one who uses the fewest resources. That means someone living in a dirt-floored hut with no running water, using the money he's paid to barely buy enough food to survive.

Re:So I guess...

[ravi_krishnappa]

This reminds of a true incident about Bill Joy. In the hot days of Java in 1999-2000, Bill Joy tried to get out of Sun and started looking for jobs as a Java developer in Bay area in California. An American project manager interviewed Bill Joy and asked him many questions on Java and Bill reasonably answered all most all questions. Then the project manager interviewed one H1B Visa holder from India. This guy also answered allmost all questions. The project manager couldn't decide which candidate to choose. Then he compared both the resumes. Bill Joy had stated , he has been working on Java since 1994. The Indian guy had been working on Java Since 1988. Guess who got the job. Bill Joy stayed back in Sun and always used to wonder how come he didn't get that job.

Re:So I guess...

[Zeinfeld]

End result? IMO, there's a reasonable chance that the U.S. economy will collapse in a crash at least as bad as the Great Depression, because the very people who are needed to support the economy will be unable to do so because they're unemployed.

Err, the guy works at Kodak so you don't need to bother with the full on ecconomy goes into depression story. 35mm film is dead, it won't be long before there is no mass market for film cameras. There will still be some professionals who use film, but that market will look like the medium format camera market. Kodak may sell some paper for glossy prints but this market will be much smaller than the present print market. Whichever way you look at it Kodak revenues will be declining steeply for years.

As for the wider problems with the economy, even Japan isn't in that bad a state. Nor is it impossible to fix as Clinton proved. As soon as the market is convinced that the debt is going to be addressed seriously long term interest rates, the rates the US pays for its debt will reduce. In 1993/94 that created a positive feedback cycle that quickly brought the budget back into balance under Clinton.

At this point there is only one way to close the budget deficit, tax increases. Well, what do you expect when there is a war on?

Most folk realize that when there is a war their taxes will increase. That is why wars that last more than a few months tend to be unpopular. Tough, get over it. Either there will be a modest tax increase this year imposed by the senate as the cost of passing the supplemental budget or interest rates will jump two to three points (don't just take my word for this, Sorros predicts the same thing). I doubt that will help Bush's already slim chances of being elected. Dean has already made it clear that he will raise taxes to reduce the Bush deficit.

It is not too late to avoid a depression if there is action this year or next. Wait until 2008 and the US will be in the same position as Japan. It is not easy for a politician to oppose a popular war or to propose tax increases, particularly as an election platform. But there are times when those are the right remedy for the country. It takes character and leadership to propose hard choices. Bush has no character and has shown no leadership. Let us hope he will soon be replaced by someone who does.

BTW: Bill Joy would make a pretty good cyber-security Czar in a Dean administration, don't you think?

Re:So I guess...

[tetra103]

Look at the bright side -- you are alive. You could have been installing trading systems in the WTC on 9/11.

If you work at Kodak I'm going to assume that you are living in Rochester. Again, look at the bright side. While it's not NYC, it's a pretty nice area with cheap living. Maybe you should focus on bettering yourself outside of work and then make a decision on your next career move.

Ahh, I had to respond to this. Yes, every day I feel greatful that I choose to come back to Rochester. Working in the WTC was the life. Probably the high point in my life. I had a 103rd floor window seat. At the time, Cantor was the place to be. They took REALLY good care of you. When eSpeed was launched and they went IPO, things became different (in a bad way), but that's another story. NYC life was great, but my wife and I wanted a family. We couldn't see doing that in the big city, so we shipped back to lovely Rochester, NY. Maybe it's just me, but I love this city. That was about a year before 9/11, but it was close enough. Too close. All my friends are fresh in memory.

Although Rochester is a great city, it's pretty depressed. I pretty much had the choice of two evils. Work for Xerox (via EDS) or work for Kodak. Xerox by far is a nicer place to work. Kodak is a dump, plain and simple. I've done a tour of duty at both and I compair my life at Xerox close to Cantor in regards to work environment. Yes, Kodak has been going down hill for a long time. It's a big time mismanagement nightmare. Xerox is worst in those regards.

My mistake was passing on a job offer from Paetec. A smaller company, but growing. It was the lowest paying offer, but it was the company I liked the most. My wife was totally against that company because she feared the oncall rotation. It was something like every third week. I also had a really nice offer from EDS, but again, at the time of the offer, EDS stock took a major dive from 40 down to like 20 or so. It's recovered since then and the lesson learned there is never judge job stability based on stock price. Maybe it's me, but I see no corelation. In the end, I choose Kodak because at the time it was a stable choice. Why I'm still here? Plain and simple. I made a promise to myself I'd stick with a job for 3 years before moving on. Didn't want to be a job hopper. Commendible as that may sound, it was the wrong choice. Paetec again showed interest in hiring me and IBM even contacted me. Although I didn't like Kodak from day 1, I stayed by my principals to stick it out for what I'd dumb my "tour of duty". It was a timing issue and the whole economy went South....no....more accurate to say the whole economy went off-shore right? Every place was hit and there are no jobs out there. Rocester in particular ranked something like 180 out of 200 of the cities with job growth. Heck, Buffalo, Syracuse and Utica ranked higher than Rochester! Anyone from NY state would know that's pretty sad.

In a week or so, we find out if we still have jobs at all. Kodak is heading for major layoffs. In all, I'm not worried. I have what I wanted. A beutiful baby girl. My wife and I live very cheap now, but we're happy. Unlike most Americans, we've saved most of our money during the booming 90's. If I loose my job, we plan to travel. Possibly car camp all the major parks across the US and Canada. Turn off the TV and play cards around the kitchen table. Get back to when times were fun. This economy thing is just a phase. The job that matters is sitting back at home.

Re:So I guess...

[duffbeer703]

I'm from upstate NY myself and have a few friends from Western NY, so I can really identify. It's tough to know what to do when you live in a place like Rochester or Albany (GE, NYS) where there basically two or three places to work.

Keep your eyes open and take the first job that you think you'd enjoy, whether you get laid off or not. You have the good fortune to have a great family to go home to rather than an empty apartment or happy hour :)

Best of luck.

Re:So I guess...

[jacksonyee]

You know, a few thousand crickets discussing profit schemes, first posts, and Soviet Russia jokes would make quite a lot of noise!

I knew it..

[grub]

It's a conspiracy, hear me out before you think I'm off my rocker.

"Sun" has 3 letters, so does "SCO" and "Joy". "Bill" is also the name of some guy at Microsoft.

SCO claims it is making no money (0), there are eight letters in "MICROS~1" (8) and SCO thinks they are the sole owner of UNIX and Linux (1). Apply those numbers to SUN:

rot0 S == S
rot8 U == C
rot1 N == O

That's not all; note how SCO and Sun both start with "S" which looks a lot like a dollar sign? What is the 3rd letter from the right in "MICROS~1"? An "S". 3 companies with "S" in their names, third letter from the right is an "S". S looks like a dollar sign.. you know the inevitable conclusion..

The above facts speak for themselves: Bill Joy is in the pockets of SCO and Microsoft. He's leaving Sun to enjoy his millions of ill-gotten gain.

Don't even think of getting me going on SGI in the equation.


now where is my tin foil hat..

Re:I knew it..

[bsDaemon]

I is the third letter from the left. ~ is a non-alphanumeric character.

Re:I knew it..

[Perl-Pusher]

IBM, I knew that billion dollars had strings attached.

Re:I knew it..

[Anonymous Coward]

Excellent hilarity sir, a well-earned 5, Funny.

Re:I knew it..

[Anonymous Coward]

Next time try using more than three letters. More effective, you know...

Re:I knew it..

[ethanrider]

Personally I found the parent to be a little comical, but in the way you find clips in America's funniest home videos comical: In a sad, sorry for the person to get clipped in the groin, and ashamed at yourself for finding it funny sort of way.

As for your remarks, while I respect your freedom to speak, I remind you that the closed mouth gathers no feet.

Re:I knew it..

[gnuage.cowboy]

Thats why you should use Apple... no S's ;-)

Re:I knew it..

[Koyaanisqatsi]

There should be a way to get a post to "+6 Insanely funny". You sir, woul get my mod points, if I had any;

Re:I knew it..

[stev3]

I tried using my mod points to bump him up even more.

One of the funniest posts I've seen on /. in a long time.

Re:I knew it..

[Damn_Canuck]

Really? Although the company doesn't have an S, its main product of revenue does... macintoSh. Although it is not the third letter from the right, it still has an S. So does that make it not AS evil? But only quasi-evil?

Re:I knew it..

[Anonymous Coward]

macintoSh

macintosh -- Now move the 's' to the beginning and what do you get? That's right, SCO.

also maintosh -- That leaves you with the letters cfr missing from Microsoft. In the style of IBM->HAL and VMS->WNT we get CFR->BGS which is sort for Bill Gates' Software, or as we know it, Micrsoft.

Re:I knew it..

[Jaysyn]

So B*S*D's evil then?

Jaysyn

Re:I knew it..

[I8TheWorm]

$teve Job$

Draw Your Own Conclusion regarding the definition of Teve.

Re:I knew it..

[Damn_Canuck]

In the style of IBM->HAL and VMS->WNT we get CFR->BGS

Shouldn't this, following this logic, be different?
I -> H
B -> A
M -> L
(All letters go back one step...)
V -> W
M -> N
S -> T
(All letter go forward one step...)
C -> B
F -> G
R -> S
So take one step back and then two steps forward? Wait a second.. on second thought, that does sound like MS after all. Now if only they could remove that pesky step back, as it keeps reocurring..

Re:I knew it..

[KyleW]

The CIA did everything. Period.

file not found.

[ChrisTower]

You'd think after two decades of working at Sun, they could've found a better picture!

Geez, The man is a scientist, give him a break. Asking for a good picture of a scientist is like asking for a serious shot of Alf.

Re:file not found.

[tankdilla]

at least it wasn't a picture of this guy.

Re:file not found.

[chazzf]

Perhaps a picture of Alf, wearing sunglasses and hefting a rifle...? Okay, that would still be damn funny, but one could argue that Alf so equipped would be "serious."

Re:file not found.

[Anonymous Coward]

I dunno...
I'd do him.

Re:file not found.

[the MaD HuNGaRIaN]

Have you met the guy?

This is a good picture of him!

Re:file not found.

[Anonymous Coward]

Asking for a good picture of a scientist is like asking for a serious shot of Alf.

I'd like to take a serious shot at Alf. I'm fscking sick of those stupid long distance commercials.

Re:file not found.

[El]

Uh, I've seen him speak in person, and that's what he really looks like!

That's what happens

[Anonymous Coward]

.. tztztz all because of GNOME :)

Re:That's what happens

[Anonymous Coward]

IAGIAPOS! Ive been trying the gnome 2.4 betas and its sickening how bad it is. They crippled file roller so that you have to go through about 20 items to extract a file (rather than the intutive extract here). They have disabled multi level bookmarks in Epiphany/Galeon! The file dialog still sucks. They still force you to use gconf-editor to do even the simplest of tasks. I reccomend EVERYONE!!! To stay away from gnome 2.4, its terrible. And when the Gnome 2.4 desktop is mentioned on slashdot, I'm going to publicly shame it under my 10 accounts!

Re:That's what happens

[Anonymous Coward]

And when the Gnome 2.4 desktop is mentioned on slashdot, I'm going to publicly shame it under my 10 accounts!

Excuse me, but "Anonymous Coward" is MY account!

Position filled

[Simsypoo]

Joe Angry will now step in and fill the vacated spot .

Re:Position filled

[The trees]

I think you're looking for Ed Anger, but he's already working for the Weekly World News.

Adios, Mr. Joy...

[kurosawdust]

Here's hoping that he founds a new start-up with a guy named "Pride"...

Re:Adios, Mr. Joy...

[Anonymous Coward]

I bet he's never heard that one before!

Re:Adios, Mr. Joy...

[Anonymous Coward]

I prefer he work with Mr. Alm. At least they would have nuts because we know that Mr. Mounds doesn't.

Re:Adios, Mr. Joy...

[Gzip Christ]

Here's hoping that he founds a new start-up with a guy named "Pride"...

Or he could get the same effect by starting a second career as a lion tamer.

Re:Adios, Mr. Joy...

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't get it.

Re:Adios, Mr. Joy...

[Dog and Pony]

Joy-Pride... Joyp-ride! Get it? :)

Wanna bet..

[moehoward]

He'll end up at Microsoft.

I mean, we all learned today that .NET is better than J2EE. Right?

If it's on Slashdot, then it must be true!

So, what's he doing next?

[djh101010]

Whatever it is, I'm going to buy stock in it. This guy is a genius, and has truly initiated world-changing technologies. I'm going to be closely watching to see where he goes, because it's going to be impressive.

I wonder, though, what this means for the future of Sun...

Re:So, what's he doing next?

[Frymaster]

like, for instance:

1. csh
2. vi

that's a killer resume... with only five characters!

Re:So, what's he doing next?

[blyon3]

I hear he's going to be working on the next truly world-changing technology: a followup to his initial success -- Just when you thought it was safe.... VI-2 !!!

Re:So, what's he doing next?

[Johnny Mnemonic]

I wonder if he might be going to Apple. They are using BSD, after all, in a desktop environment--and also have some favor among Java developers. Would a Joy be interested in drinking the cool-aid?

Re:So, what's he doing next?

[Anonymous Coward]

Whatever it is, I'm going to buy stock in it. This guy is a genius, and has truly initiated world-changing technologies. I'm going to be closely watching to see where he goes, because it's going to be impressive.

By your logic Marc Andreson's (spelling?) company formerly known as LoudMOUTH^H^H^H^HCloud would be a big hit.

Just do us both a favour - give all your money to me and I'll give you half of it back in two years. This way we'll both be better off - we'll both have enough money to eat at Arby's.

Re:So, what's he doing next?

[pmz]

with only five characters

And perfectly appropriate for someone with a strong UNIX background.

Re:So, what's he doing next?

[Anonymous Coward]

Bill Gates' highlights...

1. DOS
2. VB

Re:So, what's he doing next?

[e40]

I don't think anyone claims Bill Gates wrote DOS or VB. He hired poeple to write them.

OTOH, Bill Joy actually wrote csh, vi, and parts of the BSD kernel (along with many other people).

So, there's no comparison at all between Gates and Joy.

Re:So, what's he doing next?

[Uzziel]

Bill Gates did help write a BASIC compiler in the early days. But IIRC, he bought DOS from Digital Research.

And by the time VB was written, I doubt Gates did any coding himself except for fun.

Re:So, what's he doing next?

[eyegone]

I'm pretty sure that it was an interpretter, not a compiler.

Re:So, what's he doing next?

[m.o]

They are in entirely different leagues. Bill Joy is a rare genius, creating incredible things one after another. Marc Andreesen, while definitely a smart guy, just happened to be lucky and stumbled upon a good idea.

Re:So, what's he doing next?

[turgid]

I wonder if he might be going to Apple.

Man, at his age, with his money and with his achievements, I wouldn't be going to work for anyone. I'd write a few books and build space rockets and take part in the X Prize or something. You guys have no imagination.

Re:So, what's he doing next?

[Mooncaller]

I seem to recall that little willy did'nt realy contribute anything. He just sort a looked over Steves shoulder and dreamt of fortune.

Re:So, what's he doing next?

[Anonymous Coward]

> IIRC, he bought DOS from Digital Research.

You don't recall correctly.

Re:So, what's he doing next?

[vsprintf]

I seem to recall that little willy did'nt realy contribute anything. He just sort a looked over Steves shoulder and dreamt of fortune.

Not true. Bill not only did some coding, but he did some dumpster diving IIRC to get a copy of some existing code. So, we can all learn a lesson from that sorry episode about the evils of using another's IP . . . hmm, well, maybe not.

Re:So, what's he doing next?

[thogard]

From the people that I know who delt with him at the time who do not work for MS will not back up that statment. Its sort fo like when the boss decides he wants to "help out" and someone with a clue says "oh heres a function we need fixed" and hands him a bit of code that will get pulled out just as soon as the new bit your working on is finished. Of course the bosses code gets left in the product for a long time but never called.

I've heard in once case were a an assembler wasn't accepting an instruction so the guy called up and Gates answered the phone. The result was Billy fixed the code. The new assembler would now take the op code if it was in all caps and didn't have opcodes. It turns out he didn't put it in the opcode table, he hard coded a check for it.

Re:So, what's he doing next?

[Anonymous Coward]

I am amazed! ITS TRUE!!!
sh.h:
Copyright (c) 1984, 1986, 1987, 1988, 1989 AT&T */
All Rights Reserved THIS IS UNPUBLISHED PROPRIETARY SOURCE CODE OF AT&T The copyright notice above does not evidence anyactual or intended publication of such source code./* SVr4.0 1.6*/PROPRIETARY NOTICE (Combined)
This source code is unpublished proprietary informationconstituting, or derived under license from AT&T's UNIX(r) System V.In addition, portions of such source code were derived from Berkeley4.3 BSD under license from the Regents of the University ofCalifornia.
Copyright Notice Notice of copyright on this source code product does not indicate publication.
(c) 1986,1987,1988,1989,1997 Sun Microsystems, Inc(c) 1983,1984,1985,1986,1987,1988,1989 AT&T.
#include /* MB_xxx, mbxxx(), wcxxx() etc. */#include
#include #include
((char)wc)), 1)#endif/*!MBCHAR*/ /*
* C shell
*
* Bill Joy, UC Berkeley
* October, 1978; May 1980
*
* Jim Kulp, IIASA, Laxenburg Austria
* April, 1980
*/

also src/cmd/vi/port/ex_news:
The code to handle the -x (encryption) option has been made conditionally compiled, so that ex can run on an an 11/34 (!) with overlays. Since this code calls getpass, stdio was being pulled in even without VMUNIX being defined. The savings from not defining CRYPT are about 4K of text and 4.5K of bss.
Bill Joy put in a buffering scheme under the VMUNIX flag so that up to 64K of file is edited in-core until you make enough changes to force a temp file sync. This makes entry into the
editor much faster, but also makes vi much bigger.

The source to ex is now sccs'ed.

Re:So, what's he doing next?

[Anonymous Coward]

actually someone else wrote dos http://www.google.com/url?sa=U&start=3&q=http://ww w.patersontech.com/Dos/&e=747

Re:So, what's he doing next?

[toriver]

But IIRC, he bought DOS from Digital Research.

No, he bought QDOS from Seattle Computer or somethig. This was a cheap knock-off of Digital Research's CP/M.

Re:So, what's he doing next?

[deanj]

Very luck indeed.

A better picture?

[Anonymous Coward]

You'd think after two decades of working at Sun, they could've found a better picture!

That is the better picture.

Shame shame

[superpulpsicle]

Whatever the excuse maybe, this is a blow to the company. That's like Ballmer leaving M$.

Re:Shame shame

[Jameth]

Not quite the same. Ballmer's more of a comedian, so they'll just lose a bit on the relaxation end of things. Some Seinfeld tapes should cover it.

Re:Shame shame

[kahei]

Ballmer leaving would be *bad* for Microsoft?

Re:Shame shame

[Anonymous Coward]

Whatever the excuse maybe, this is a blow to the company. That's like Ballmer leaving M$.

you are mixing things up.... MS would be better off without that idiot ballmer at the wheel.

Re:Shame shame

[Anonymous Coward]

mod parent +1 funny

Re:Shame shame

[AKnightCowboy]

you are mixing things up.... MS would be better off without that idiot ballmer at the wheel.

Well, Microsoft did prove that even a monkey can run the company and it'd still be profitable. I'd hate to imagine what they're capable of if they actually had a real businessman running the show instead of a bunch of college dropout dorks.

Those in glass houses....

[stratjakt]

You'd think after two decades of working at Sun, they could've found a better picture!

Let's see a good picture of you, Taco.

This guy looks like a GQ model compared to any given slashdot editor.

Re:Those in glass houses....

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey you dingbat, dont mod that down. You personally insult the guy by calling him ugly, you open yourself up for it!

And you are, indeed, one ugly child molestor. It's like you got skin care advice from Freddy Krueger and weight loss tips from Delta Burke. Actually the illegitimate son of Krueger and Burke seems to fit the bill.

Re:Those in glass houses....

[micsaund]

If anyone is curious, you can see Taco's picture in his column in CPU magazine.

Re:Those in glass houses....

[inertia187]

You'd think after two decades of working at Sun, they could've found a better picture!

Yeah, he looks like Alfred E. Newman ... ( <seinfeldian-disgust> Newman! </seinfeldian-disgust> )

Re:Those in glass houses....

[Anonymous Coward]

Taco is hawt, except for the slight hayseed look.

Re:Those in glass houses....

[br0ck]

Oh c'mon, it's not like he looks like a mental patient every day.

Re:Those in glass houses....

[Anonymous Coward]

WTF is your problem? Seriously

he's smart

[Anonymous Coward]

he's getting out, and most likely will soon sell his stock either because of the SCO thing or because Linux kick butt and Sun and Solaris have been deemed "Unnecessary"

What a great name

[Doesn't_Comment_Code]

Replaced by Greg Papadopoulos. I bet that guy got beat up a lot as a kid.

Reminds me of the delivery guy in Big Daddy, trying to say Hippopotamus.

Re:What a great name

[stratjakt]

That was Websters adoptive parents last name.

Remember the one where Webster got sued by the RIAA? What a tearjerker.

Re:What a great name

[Anonymous Coward]

and your post reminds me of the usefulness of tags.

Re:What a great name

[Doesn't_Comment_Code]

yeah, I know... I didn't preview.

Re:What a great name

[Anonymous Coward]

And I don't think Alex Carras got beat up much in school, either.

Re:What a great name

[Anonymous Coward]

#include "stdio.h"
int main () {
printf("Hello, World!");
}

Be careful where you place your jokes!

[FortKnox]

from the insert-slashdot-joke-here dept.
TheLinuxWarrior writes "An article at CNET says Rob Malda, Slashdot co-founder and editor, is leaving the company." You'd think after two decades of working at Slashdot, they coulda changed the graphics and page layout a bit!

But, if you can take that joke, taco, I guess you are free to joke at Sun all you'd like ;-)

geek picture

[ramzak2k]

You'd think after two decades of working at Sun, they could've found a better picture!

Cmon, we bad looking geeks take pride in our bad pictures. Its something like having a lot of cables under the table, messy desktop etc. That picture must make Joy proud.

Re:geek picture

[selderrr]

Its something like having a lot of cables under the table
It's all about the weight of your PC, dude, the weight ! The amount of cable is sooooo yesterday !

Re:geek picture

[KernelHappy]

Ummmm this is one of the better pictures. Eh, I'm always happy to see another co-worker escape. Although I'm sure his parachute is a lot more golden than mine was :(.

Re:geek picture

[DaneelGiskard]

Personally, I find this one much more fitting:
http://www.english.uga.edu/hc/unixrichiejoy.JPG

Re:geek picture

[Steepe]

I've met Bill Joy several times, and talked to him a lot. He is NOT a good looking guy.. that IS probably the best picture in existance of him.. and probably been to glamour shots too!

He is so smart though, I don't think he cares.

Re:geek picture

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know, I think the picture on Sun's site is also...pretty carefully selected, if what you say is true.

pic

[Washizu]

"You'd think after two decades of working at Sun, they could've found a better picture!"

How about this one?

Re:pic

[elmegil]

Is that after the nanobots got him?

Re:pic

[FuzzyBad-Mofo]

Ahhgh, I'm melting, melting..

Rats leaving a sinking ship?

[rf0]

I dunno I always get worried when a company is generally in trouble and people leave. However it might in turn be a good thing as it depends on his motives if he feels that he is burnt out and wants a fresh challenge.

Of course I can think of at least 1 company where there is large reductions but the people in the top still live in the ivory tower.

Rus

Re:Rats leaving a sinking ship?

[Anonymous Coward]

If I had the money that he probably has I would ditch, too. I can think of a million different ways to spend time. Like buying an independant league baseball team and replacing all of the guys with bikini clad 18 year girls.

The other Sun folks probably checked...

[falzer]

The other Sun folks probably checked his past history and discovered that he wrote VI. No wonder he's "leaving." ;)

Re:The other Sun folks probably checked...

[Anonymous Coward]

He isn't leaving.... he's ":q!".

BSD, SUN, etc...

[djcdplaya]

For those who don't know, this is sort of the original founder of BSD.

He wrote the BSD IP stack while at Berkeley (BSD, duh).

Let's hope he works on his terms somewhere and stays away from the business/corporate world.

Re:BSD, SUN, etc...

[gvc]

Here here.

Although Joy was a pioneer in the technical development of BSD, SUN, under his leadership, was a pioneer of closed-source BSD and Unix derivatves.

Re:BSD, SUN, etc...

[AKnightCowboy]

He wrote the BSD IP stack while at Berkeley (BSD, duh). Let's hope he works on his terms somewhere and stays away from the business/corporate world.

Those were the conditions of the agreement he signed with SCO to avoid being sued for violating their intellectual property.

Now I know ...

[ciupman]

they could've found a better picture!

... why the use of stock pictures on IT sites...

he is headed for Apple?

[linuxislandsucks]

is it possible he is headed fro Apple?

Re:he is headed for Apple?

[nucal]

is it possible he is headed fro Apple?

By George, that is a 'fro in the photo ...

Re:he is headed for Apple?

[Billly Gates]

BIll does not care about Operating systems anymore. His interest is in research and development. Sun is cutting this to meet wall street expectations. Also has Sun really innovated anything in the last decade? Java and in the 80's large mainframe like capabilities with server level hardware. That is it.

Its time to go. He may actually be a professor at a college and work on grants. They are more liberal and he does not have to worry about researching topics that profitable.

Re:he is headed for Apple?

[AKnightCowboy]

Also has Sun really innovated anything in the last decade? Java and in the 80's large mainframe like capabilities with server level hardware. That is it.

You're right. No, they haven't done anything interesting lately. Their CPUs are horribly slow compared to even the lowest end AMD x86 line. They made awesome workstations and servers, but the days of corporate IT being able to spend $30k on a mid-range server died with the tech stock bubble. Sure, they're not going to die anytime soon, but they're also not going to introduce anything new and exciting that blows the doors off of the PC world.

Re:he is headed for Apple?

[Anonymous Coward]

Also has Sun really innovated anything in the last decade? Java and in the 80's large mainframe like capabilities with server level hardware. That is it.

What has OSS innovated in the last 10 years besides Apache and Mosaic (if you even count those)?

Seriously. Everything I see is an idea they jacked from some other company that put time and money into creating the original idea.

Re:he is headed for Apple?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok what did sun invent?

Java??

Linux/FreeBSd have usermode-linux/jail for isp's, virtual desktops, remote managability, apache, lpad, kerbos, etc.

Certainly there is some crediblity in OSS, but Sun sure as hell has been asleep. Microsoft and IBM are the ones innovating today.

Re:he is headed for Apple?

[Anonymous Coward]

usermode = VMs = been around for years

virtual desktops? lol! CDE had this for christ sakes

remote managability? telnet? duh

i said besides apache fool. it's a graphical gopher anyway

ldad is yet another naming service, just an expansion of an old idea

kerberos? who uses that again?

OWNEDb

Re:he is headed for Apple?

[Anonymous Coward]

By Microsoft I assume you mean Apple.

anybody else?

[Lxy]

Am I the only one who read "Co-founder of Joy to leave Sun" and thought this was about dishwashing soap?

Re:anybody else?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes. Time for literacy classes.

Since the dotcom collapse...

[TWX]

...there's been no joy at Sun anyway, I guess that it's just time to accept it and make it official

Thanks Bill

[ShieldW0lf]

We all owe you a lot. Good luck.

$100,000,000 has a way of changing people

[Anonymous Coward]

that's how much stock he sold when Sun was at the top. At that point he had no shares or any real stake in the company. He then bought around $3 million worth when SUNW was between $2 and $3.

Re:$100,000,000 has a way of changing people

[djh101010]

Good. I'm glad he did well with the stock. He caused much of the rise, after all.

Re:$100,000,000 has a way of changing people

[KernelHappy]

When I worked for Sun I actually calculated his procedes from stock sales and came up with a number around $65mil for 1999 or 2000 (this was a couple years ago).

Re:$100,000,000 has a way of changing people

[Anonymous Coward]

I also did the math and as I recall the number was much closer to the $100M figure. Use the online database - EDGAR or whatever it's called: http://www.sec.gov/edgar.shtml - it should be all there.

Re:$100,000,000 has a way of changing people

[Anonymous Coward]

I was under the impression Bill Joy got screwed out of his equity in Sun. He sold really early on or some such thing and really never made the killing that McNealy did. Am I wrong?

Re:$100,000,000 has a way of changing people

[Anonymous Coward]

You are wrong.
We're only disputing whether he got $65 mill or $100 mill on the sale of his stock.

Re:$100,000,000 has a way of changing people

[pmz]

We're only disputing whether he got $65 mill or $100 mill on the sale of his stock.

At least he'll still be able to afford a house in Silicon Valley.

Sad, that 100 million is 0.2% of Bill Gate's fortune (approximately...not that it matters).

Re:$100,000,000 has a way of changing people

[Anonymous Coward]

Bill Joy has lived and worked out of Aspen Colorado for some time now.

Re:$100,000,000 has a way of changing people

[nelsonal]

I always knew he was a smart guy, glad to see he's practical like so few very smart individuals. Considering he made the company what it was, they credited him with parts of SPARC, solars, and Java, I think he probably deserved not to have his wealth disappear with the market's fortunes.

and vi

[tigersha]

And he was responsible for vi. For this I cannot decide whether he should be praised as a computer great or be disgraced as the author of the greatest horrible-excuse-for-an-editor known to man.

http://www.cs.pdx.edu/~kirkenda/joy84.html

Re:and vi

[Anonymous Coward]

> as the author of the greatest horrible-excuse-for-an-editor known to man.

one word: edlin

Re:and vi

[Anonymous Coward]

I know how to use vi. I feel superior due to my knowledge of arcane editor commands. Anyone who uses a so-called "user friendly" editor is not a true geek.

P.S. The User Friendly comic strip is funny.

Re:and vi

[neurojab]

>one word: edlin

Just when I was beginning to forget. It's all coming back!

Re:and vi

[Seth Finklestein]

I think ed, as hilariously parodied in a fake manual page, is inferior to vi.

Re:and vi

[RevMike]

And he was responsible for vi. For this I cannot decide whether he should be praised as a computer great or be disgraced as the author of the greatest horrible-excuse-for-an-editor known to man.

I'm a pro-vi (vim, actually) bigot, but I don't want to start a religious war. At least not today.

Remember to place vi exactly in its context. Vi placed a useful set of extensions on ed/ex, and so enhanced an established tool. Enhancing an established tool has advantages and brings baggage.

Pro-vi points...

• Leverages well known line editor commands (ed/ex/sed)
• CPU/memory efficient - I've heard it said that a machine that comfortably handles 20 vi users can only handle 4 emacs users
• Only requires a very simple qwerty keyboard - doesn't need special function keys or meta keys
• A touch typist will find most frequently used commands right under their fingers
• Command structure is fairly logical

Anti-vi points... I know there are some but, like I said, I use vim and vim solved alot of the glaring deficiencies of vi. I think multiple buffer support is a biggie.

Plus vi represents the "Unix-way" of small efficient single purpose tools. A text editor should try to be a text editor, not an email reader, a web browser, a shell...

Re:and vi

[kfg]

vi is like democracy. It's the greatest horrible-excuse-for-an-editor known to man; except for every other editor.

KFG

Re:and vi

[pmz]

For this I cannot decide whether he should be praised as a computer great or be disgraced as the author of the greatest horrible-excuse-for-an-editor known to man.

Praise for both. vi is an excellent editor allowing full control from the QUERTY keyboard home position. After 26 years or so, it is still the standard UNIX editor (no ed jokes, please). It is fast and small yet has few annoying limitations (line length is annoying but rarely a real issue). It doesn't second-guess the programmer yet is smart enough to default to 8-space tabs. If you read the man page, you also discover that many ed/sed commands are accessible in vi, enabling powerful reg-exp global search and replace and block deletions. I swear that vi has paid so much in time savings that its rather small learning curve makes those gigabyte IDEs look just plain foolish.

Re:and vi

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

vi is an excellent editor allowing full control from the QUERTY keyboard home position.

You must have a really mutant left hand.

Re:and vi

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually vi was pretty good for 1976 standards.

Re:and vi

[pmz]

You must have a really mutant left hand.

No, I just have a proper UNIX keyboard with the Control key between the Shift and Tab keys. PC keyboards suck.

Re:and vi

[iainl]

"one word: edlin"

You utter git. I'd managed to forget that.

Re:and vi

[kawika]

I felt the same way about vi when I first used it in the late-1970s, but after using it I realized that its user interface was masterful in the way it took advantage of touch typing in the editing process. Yes, the "modal" interface can be a bit confusing but once you know it your fingers never forget, and they never have to leave the home keys.

The internals of Bill Joy's vi code, however, were butt-ugly at the time. The input loop was a giant switch statement with all kinds of flags and special cases. More than half the commands were implemented by pushing keystrokes back into the buffer, the D command pushed back d$ for example. This turned any command enhancements into a nightmare and there was always some nasty dependency you hadn't anticipated.

Re:and vi

[4of12]

After 26 years or so, it is still the standard UNIX editor (no ed jokes, please)

Well, ex was the reliable fallback.

My first few years on UNIX I used vi until emacs(Gosling, then Stallman's flavo[u]rs), but one of the big hassles back then was all the different terminal types documented in /etc/termcap, with the vt100 only a fuzzy standard.

I remember dropping into ex instead of either vi or emacs because I couldn't stand the wait for a full 24x80 character screen refresh over a 1200 baud modem.

Re:and vi

[Seth Finklestein]

"Proper UNIX keyboards" are QWERTY, not QUERTY.

I've been using computers since the 1980s (that's right, I said *80s*) so I think I know my stuff. I've never taken a computer course, either -- all my knowledge is self-taught!

Re:and vi

[weileong]

I started out thinking Emacs was great, but eventually, like (all?) other people who do any sysadmin work at all, when you really need an editor on a machine that's pretty much completely f@#$ed up ("what?! ls doesn't work?!?"), about the only thing you can count on being there/working is vi, not emacs.

The more I had to use it, the more familiar with it I was, and the more I got comfortable with it, until... now I can barely remember how to use Emacs. This is the true "advantage" vi has and will always continue to have over Emacs - it'll live in places Emacs can't.

I'm almost tempted to analogize with how, well, DOS machines swept the computing universe and basically shunted MacOS machines into the small niche they have existed in ever since... .

Re:and vi

[pmz]

"Proper UNIX keyboards" are QWERTY, not QUERTY.

Oh, I see the typo, now. The earlier joke about a mutant hand just flew over my head.

My argument about the Control key still stands, though!

Re:and vi

[Jeffrey Baker]

You have to be completely ignorant of the meaning of QWERTY to be able to mistype it. The keys are all right there in a row!

Re:and vi

[Seth Finklestein]

Good for you. I know it must be tough for you, considering nobody cares where your Control key is, but you'll pull through.

Have I told you about Michael Sims? He stole control of my web site using his Control key.

Re:and vi

[Fulcrum of Evil]

one word: edlin

I'll see your edlin and raise one ed and a TECO

Re:and vi

[drivers]

Yes but he was also responsible for a technology that vi relied on: termcap. This is what lets you use so many different kinds of terminals and the applications don't have to care.

Re:and vi

[Daniel Phillips]

vi represents the "Unix-way" of small efficient single purpose tools.

daniel@moonunit:~$ sudo apt-get remove vim
Reading Package Lists... Done
Building Dependency Tree... Done
The following packages will be REMOVED:
vim
0 packages upgraded, 0 newly installed, 1 to remove and 151 not upgraded.
Need to get 0B of archives.
After unpacking 15.3MB disk space will be freed.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n] y

Re:and vi

[cpeterso]

maybe Bill Joy will now work full-time on releasing the new vi-2004 editor.

Re:and vi

[lildogie]

> the greatest horrible-excuse-for-an-editor known to man.

I remember when we were happy to have vi! Overjoyed ;p). We used to debug 1st-year programmers' programs for them just to get an hour in the terminal room where we could use the Fox terminals to run vi.

In the meantime, we had to use Hollerith cards on the 029 keypunch, which couldn't delete or insert characters (unless you hold down the card so that the rubber wheel couldn't advance it through the reader). And we had to butter up and beg to the grad students to let us run the final draft of our roff-encoded term papers through their daisywheel printer that they kept under guard in the far corner of their inner sanctum.

vi? We were lucky to have it.

EDLIN, that's an editor from hell. Only thing worse than ed (except for the 029).

Re:and vi

[hackrobat]

I'll pick out my favourite parts of the interview:

The fundamental problem with vi is that it doesn't have a mouse and therefore you've got all these commands. In some sense, its backwards from the kind of thing you'd get from a mouse-oriented thing.

Hi Bill. It's 2003, and we're still using Vi (or Vim) precisely for the reason that it doesn't require a mouse. Look up carpal tunnel syndrome. I love not having to move my hands off the "home row".

I actually use vi for editing programs. James Gosling did a really nice editor as part of a project at Carnegie Mellon University which is AWYSIWYG: Almost What You See Is What You Get. It's also a program editor built into the window system he's working on. I think that will ultimately replace vi.

Sorry, no kind of WYSIWYG has replaced Vi.

One of the good things about EMACS, though, is its programmability and the modelessness.

[...]

I tried to use EMACS and I liked it.

[...]

That lack of programmability is probably what ultimately will doom vi. It can't extend its domain.

What are you doing, Bill?! You're killing the VI vs. Emacs debate. Zealots, take that web page off! DoS it, now!!!

On a serious note, perhaps he's talking about the Vi program of 1984, and not of Vi in general (Vi, like UNIX, is a common term for any Vi-like editors).

I think the Macintosh proves that everyone can have a bitmapped display. The fundamental tension in UNIX that I think AT&T doesn't understand is that everyone is going to have a bitmap.

Bill!!! You're killing the CLUE vs. GUI debate! Command line interfaces rock! Go away, Bill!!!

Systems are going to get a lot more sophisticated. Things will tend to get lost unless the interfaces are done in the Macintosh style. People who use these machines may run applications but won't necessarily be skilled at putting applications together. A lot of these people won't even have access to the underlying UNIX system.

(Emphasis is mine.) It's interesting that he predicted OS X ;-)

Re:and vi

[EJB]

Yeah DUHHH

ViM != Vi

ViM = Vi-IMproved, and opinions on the exact value of the "improvements" can differ.

Of the 15.3 Mb, we have
- 7.4 Mb of documentation
- A lot of language-specific stuff depending on how many languages you've set up. (2Mb locally)
- 2.8 Mb of syntax-definitions that you don't need for a basic editor setup.

Try this:
# du -sH /usr/share/emacs
39M /usr/share/emacs

Re:and vi

[axxackall]

Try this:
# du -sH /usr/share/emacs
39M /usr/share/emacs

... Then compare an amount of features per 1MB vi vs emacs and see which code is effectively more compact by the end.

Re:and vi

[whereiswaldo]

To add to your list...

Pro:

- doesn't require an X connection

Con:

- What's the deal wtih [esc]-:-q! to back out of the editor? That seems to be everyone's first command to learn, and a bad first experience.

Re:and vi

[jotaeleemeese]

me@machine
which vi /usr/bin/vi
me@machine
ls -la /usr/bin/vi
-r-xr-xr-x 5 bin bin 227868 Feb 4 1998 /usr/bin/vi

But wait a minute:

ldd /usr/bin/vi | awk '{print $NF}' | xargs ls -la
-rwxr-xr-x 1 bin bin 1015768 May 22 2001 /usr/lib/libc.so.1
-rwxr-xr-x 1 bin bin 4304 May 22 2001 /usr/lib/libdl.so.1
-rwxr-xr-x 1 bin bin 10168 Jul 16 1997 /usr/lib/libmapmalloc.so.1
-rwxr-xr-x 1 bin bin 16936 May 22 2001 /usr/platform/SUNW,Ultra-2/lib/libc_psr.so.1

Even then we barely reach 2MB (half of it is libc, which is shared anyway).

There you have it.

Burro.

vi != vim

And then they ask why Solaris is more efficient than Linux (another time we can talk about bash vs ksh).

Re:and vi

[tigersha]

God Help Us....

Picture....

[simetra]

Wasn't he in the 80's Super Group Foreigner? Or Journey?

Re:Picture....

[Anonymous Coward]

You're thinking of the megaband "Europe".
Bill Joy played fourth lead guitar and some backing vocals.

Re:Picture....

[stratjakt]

I thought he played cow bell.

At least, he should have, those songs needed more cow bell.

Picture?

[devphaeton]

How can he be an innovative, impressively accomplished UNIX(r) guy?

HE HAS NO BEARD!!!

Re:Picture?

[nerdherder]

Yea, but check out that mullet. One of the Other major qualifiers!

Re:Picture?

[dukerobillard]

It's only the East Coast guys that have UNIX-beards.

Bill's fountain of youth

[Chris Worth]

Dear me! That photo's worse than the one of the Microsoft founders as spotty twentysomethings.

Chris

Like fiction? Try espresso stories

Re:Bill's fountain of youth

[Chris Worth]

Damn, cackhanded typing missed the links

THAT Microsoft photo (from 1979 I believe) is at this link.

================
Like fiction? Try espresso stories

Re:Another Sun Co-founder was Indian (India born)

[ep385]

At the time Bill didn't have a Ph.D (and still may not.. I don't know if they gave him an honorary one years later). How could he have a post-doctorate position?

When will it end?

[GeneralTao]

First Love, now Joy! What's NEXT!?!?

Re:When will it end?

[Anonymous Coward]

First Love, now Joy! What's NEXT!?!?

Hate... like all relationships... ;)

Re:When will it end?

[SheldonYoung]

We could have no Love, no Joy and no Jobs.

Re:When will it end?

[Tellarin]

NEXT is no more, remember it?

Re:When will it end?

[Anonymous Coward]

What's NEXT!?!?
NEXT is predcesor of OSX.
Any other questions?

Re:When will it end?

[a1englishman]

> First Love, now Joy! What's NEXT!?!?
Happiness, if you must ask.

Re:When will it end?

[El]

Hope is dead, too...

Re:When will it end?

[Anonymous Coward]

> First Love, now Joy! What's NEXT!?!?

I think you've got a Case. But the world is at an end, we're at the Gates of Hell. No more Jobs either. Let's hide in the Bush.

Re:When will it end?

[Anonymous Coward]

But the world is at an end

O'Reilly!?

Hats Off

[wFruitbat]

My Sparc is in mourning... But reading the article Joy had written ... I will rummage the attic for my windows books.

The article is slightly incorrect

[watzinaneihm]

The article says sun was co-founded by Scott mcneally an Bill Joy. Actually there were 4 of them out of which 2 have already quit. So with the third guy on the way out it leaves only Scott behind.
Bill Joy can easily take a lot of credit for Java though

Re:The article is slightly incorrect

[Anonymous Coward]

Originally Java was called "Oak" and was designed primarily for operating mechanized pornographic love dolls. Bill saw more potential in this new language and envisioned Java running inside urinal cakes and beeping when it needed to be replaced.

A 20 year old interview with Bill Joy

[tigersha]

Here is a cool 20 year old interview with him, written as far as I can see just after the first Mac came out. It makes for interesting reading:

http://www.cs.pdx.edu/~kirkenda/joy84.html

Re:A 20 year old interview with Bill Joy

[Ever Dubious]

Yeah, I remember reading that same article way back when. Memory for $300/megabyte! Those were the days.

Re:A 20 year old interview with Bill Joy

[tigersha]

Whats really cool is Joy's comments about the coming rise of bitmpped displays. It is quaint to think that a bitmapped display was certainly not a given at that time, it was quite revolutionary.

Re:A 20 year old interview with Bill Joy

[kwoff]

Thanks, that was very interesting.
I like the part near the end where he's talking
about paging memory out over satellite calls. :)

Re:A 20 year old interview with Bill Joy

[Glass of Water]

Great!

A favorite quote: "EMACS is a nice editor too, but because it costs hundreds of dollars, there will always be people who won't buy it."

Another one: "Real programmers use cat as their editor."

Re:A 20 year old interview with Bill Joy

[Anonymous Coward]

Best quote:
The program worked, but it was almost 200 lines long - almost too big for the Pascal system.

BTW... Hyperlink to the interview

Re:A 20 year old interview with Bill Joy

[mamer-retrogamer]

Interesting quote: "One has to wonder what software is going to be worth, too. It's going to be produced in such enormous volume."

Re:A 20 year old interview with Bill Joy

[porttikivi]

"...One of the good things about EMACS, though, is its programmability and the modelessness. Those are two ideas which never occurred to me..."

LOL! The vi today is touted for the BENEFIT of its modes, and for its own wicked latecomer programmability!!!

But I prefer wily/acme mouse editing anyway, from the Plan 9 camp.

Re:A 20 year old interview with Bill Joy

[Jonner]

EMACS only cost hundreds of dollars to obtain because it didn't come with the system and few people had Internet access. It sounds like vi became popular for the same reason that IE is popular: it was bundled with the system.

This is my favorite quote:

I think one of the interesting things is that vi is really a mode-based editor. I think as mode-based editors go, it pretty good. One of the good things about EMACS, though, is its programmability and the modelessness. Those are two ideas which never occurred to me.

Bill Jpy's resignation letter

[sys49152]

:q!

Re:Bill Jpy's resignation letter

[Anonymous Coward]

;q :q :q!

Re:Bill Jpy's resignation letter

[Anonymous Coward]

:x

Re:Bill Jpy's resignation letter

[Eamon C]

:%s/Jpy/Joy

I think he left at the right time...

[WIAKywbfatw]

...because the first thing I thought of when I saw his picture was, boy, that guy looks as if he's been in the sun too long.

bad news for Sun

[esarjeant]

This does not bode well for Sun. Bill Joy was truly a visionary and they are going to have to make significant changes in R&D strategy to compensate for this loss. Note that SUNW stock is reacting accordingly, I expect we'll see $2.80 before the end of '03.

Joy is such a luddite that there really is no threat of him starting another technology company. It's likely he will pursue more writing and pontificating, while Sun will flounder aimlessly as they seek a niche in this new technology market.

Re:bad news for Sun

[Anonymous Coward]

What?

He was a "visionary" and going to make "significant changes in R&D", and yet still a luddite?

You need a dictionary, my friend.

Re:bad news for Sun

[oldmanmtn]

"Score: 4, Interesting" my ass.

The author claims that Joy is such a visionary that Sun's entire R&D strategy will have to change. Then in the next line he says that Joy is such a luddite that he'll never get involved with another tech company. Which is it? Visionary or luddite?

This is so plainly just somebody looking for a way to bitch about Sun that I can't believe anybody bothered to mod it up.

Re:bad news for Sun

[buckinm]

The author claims that Joy is such a visionary that Sun's entire R&D strategy will have to change. Then in the next line he says that Joy is such a luddite that he'll never get involved with another tech company. Which is it? Visionary or luddite?

He's a visionary luddite.

Re:bad news for Sun

[Anonymous Coward]

I recall Joy being quite convinced that nanotechnology would be the downfall of man. He was a visionary he is also a bit of a odd luddite.

Re:bad news for Sun

[TheWizardOfCheese]

Bill Joy was truly a visionary [...]
Joy is such a luddite [...]

Why, exactly, is this comment moderated "Score:5,Interesting", instead of "Score:-7,Bus Error Core Dumped"?

Re:bad news for Sun

[cpeterso]

what has Bill Joy done for me lately? Sure, he worked on BSD, vi, and NFS, but he's spent the 1990s in his secret lab in Boulder, CO working on JINI and JXTA vaporware.

Re:bad news for Sun

[Anonymous Coward]

Note that SUNW stock is reacting accordingly, I expect we'll see $2.80 before the end of '03.

Damn dude, it LOST ALL OF 8 CENTS TODAY.

Get a brain moran.

Re:bad news for Sun

[plasticpixel]

I'm not trying to troll but here goes....

I had to distinct honor of Bill crapping on one of my projects in public simply because he didn't invent it first. He had a habit of looking down his nose at other people's work.

SunLabs is full of bright and innovative people, Bill's contributions are for the history books.

Sun's new innovations aren't just coming from the Labs either, they are coming from other parts of the company too. I think this is an opportunity to buy stock, not sell.

Don't let the door hit your ass on the way out Bill.

The preceeding statements are my opinion only and should not be construed as anything else.

Mad Hatter rocks!!!!!!

> This does not bode well for Sun. Bill Joy was truly a visionary and they are going to have to make significant changes in R&D strategy to compensate for this loss. Note that SUNW stock is reacting accordingly, I expect we'll see $2.80 before the end of '03.

Re:bad news for Sun

[alanwall]

key word is "was' a visionary
and is now a luddite now.See
Wired April 2000.Why the future doesn't
need us by Bill Joy

No Joy for Sun

[digitaltraveller]

It's unusual for founders to leave like this.
This is probably over a major senior management disagreement. A dispute about the best way for Sun to haul it's ass out of the fire. What other subject would they have time to talk about at Sun HQ? McNealy is schitzophrenic, one day he's wearing a penguin suit the next day he's funding SCO's fud campaign against Linux to slow down SUN's haemorraging bottom line.
I guess Bill was on the losing side. The last few things I have read in the trade press (mostly from some ponytailed hippie VP named Johnathan Schwartz) sounded like Sun still hasn't got that they need to take bold risks to stay relevent in today's computing world.
So by virtue of having stayed silent I think Bill Joy has more of a clue about company direction then these other clowns.
Sun (like the town of Gotham) needs an enema. If I was in McNealy's shoes I would hire somebody like Tim O'Reilly to come in and give the company a wake up call on corporate strategy.

Re:No Joy for Sun

[oldmanmtn]

It's unusual for founders to leave like this.

Oh, BS. It's enormously unusual for a tech company to last 21 years, let alone have half of the founders still involved.

This is probably over a major senior management disagreement...What other subject would they have time to talk about at Sun HQ?

And more BS. Joy was a founder, but he's not involved in the day-to-day "management" of the company. Regardless of what Sun management talks about at "HQ", Joy has been in his Aspen lab churning out cool stuff like Java for, what, 10 years now? I don't have a clue why he's leaving, but I can't imagine it's because he's pissed that McNealy hasn't drunk the Linux koolaid.

Seperated at Birth?

[trix_e]

Bill and Gene

Re:Seperated at Birth?

[saddino]

Bill and Jerry

Re:Seperated at Birth?

[Anonymous Coward]

NoNO! It's
Bill and Jerry

he is going to build SkyNet :-)

[peter303]

Bill wrote a pessimistic piece abut computing taking control of our lives. Sounds a little like Ellison's "I have no mouth and must scream" story that became the Terminator movies.

I prefer this one

[FatalTourist]

This is how a true geek thinks of himself.

Joy's Future Plans

[Anonymous Coward]

Bill Joy knows something you don't. He realizes that the coming techo-apocolypse is upon us. I'm certain that he's going off to live in a hermetically sealed mountain hide-away to wait out the end of the human race, after which he can shake the clawed grip of our mechanical successors and explore the universe in their instantaneous transport craft. Enjoy Bill! Zooomm!

Holy Moly!!!

[CaptScarlet22]

Holy Moly....With hair like that, I would quit my job too!!!!!

Two Bills dow; another to go?

[peter303]

The decade of the "Bill's" is fading.

Bill C.
Bill J.
Bill G.

Re:Why did someome mod this Offtopic

[frodo from middle ea]

Considering the chauvinisistic tone of the post, it was correctly moderated as off-topic.
Lots of Indians have done great things in IT, and so have lots of americans, russians, french, chinese, irish so on so forth. So what was the point the grand-parent trying to make ?
I am an indian too, but this kind of stupid superiority complex, that we indians rule the IT is very reprehensible.

VI Rules!

[ccZaphod]

Didn't Bill write VI back at Berkley? I love VI, it's still my editor of choice. I started using it for it's designed purpose -- remote editing over a 300 baud modem. It's really an elegant editor when you get used to it. GVIM is the current version that I'm using and I love it! Did I mention that I'm a VI fan?

Re:VI Rules!

[Anonymous Coward]

*PURR* vi rocks.

Re:VI Rules!

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, and so do Microsoft, torture, and other forms of human misadventure. I wouldn't wish VI on my worst enemy. One need only think of the VI command to quit without saving to understand that VI was never intended to help, but to hinder. It's longevity can be explained only by the peculiar human fascination with scarifiation and Kafkaesque digression from any task at hand. The ratio of usefulness to effort here approaches zero, but we must concede (sadly) that this very fact is often a point of pride for some Unix users whose right hemisphere has atrophied beyond repair.

No, no, no!

[min0r_threat]

You'd think after two decades of working at Sun, they could've found a better picture!

Actually, you'd think that after 20 years Joy could have developed a better hairstyle.

Why would anyone choose sun?

[T-Ranger]

This is a serious question.. I mean why?

Sun's traditional products have been Unix workstations, and because there necessary for unix workstations, unix servers. And of course software to run on them.

In the grand scheme of things, only recently has Sun started producing realy big boxes. And simotaniously, the need for big boxes has decreased: its clusterd micros as far as the eye can see.

For a general purpose unix workstation, a PC with Linux is cheeper, and more powerfull.. I daresay that the likes of Redhat is easier to manage then Solaris. For high end deskops for visualization, get a (Intel based) SGI with its fancy software. For entry level server, linux rocks. For mid range stuff, a cluster of linux boxen on Intel based SMP boxes is better then a single, or a smaller cluster of Suns. And for realy high end stuff, IBM is the only game in town: whatever else you can say about them they have made rock solid mainframes for 50 years, that work all the time, period. If you need such a machine, why would you risk getting one from a company that has been in that market for what? 2 years.

I priced a Sun PCI SCSI card last week. $500. No RAID, no cache, just a vanila SCSI card with a Sun sticker (and solaris support). Thats just insane.

So why? Why would anyone ever go to Sun for anything?

Re:Why would anyone choose sun?

[BigGerman]

IMHO, for high-end Oracle databases I would still use Solaris boxes. I was not able to reach the same level of confidence on not-so-advanced RedHat Server yet. But that is like 5% of the market.
I am with you - when a disk controller costs more than entire Dell server, the game is over.

Re:Why would anyone choose sun?

[pmz]

I priced a Sun PCI SCSI card last week. $500. No RAID, no cache, just a vanila SCSI card with a Sun sticker (and solaris support). Thats just insane.

One thing you do get is peace of mind in an environment where time == money. It is very likely that Sun-branded card was integration tested with their machines and Solaris, so the odds are very very good that it will serve you well. Contrast this with the PC world, where the odds are simply good. The difference is not trivial, IMO.

If I had a business, where revenue was good enough that I didn't have to survive on peanut butter and scrapped-together computers, I would seriously consider Sun equipment. It can be refreshing to simply plug in a card, do a boot -r, and have it ready to go. Along with SunSolve and docs.sun.com, Sun doesn't often leave people wanting for documentation, either. It seems they generally treat their customers pretty well. With PC companies, things are less predictable, and a big brand name doesn't really imply any amount of quality (often they are worse than the white-box suppliers).

Re:Why would anyone choose sun?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sun has been chased upmarket by disruptive technologies (x86, Windows, Linux). This is a classic pattern. It'll ultimately end in Sun's demise.

Re:Why would anyone choose sun?

[zenyu]

I priced a Sun PCI SCSI card last week. $500. No RAID, no cache, just a vanila SCSI card with a Sun sticker (and solaris support). Thats just insane.

So why? Why would anyone ever go to Sun for anything?

Because the only alternative in many cases is an IBM AIX Server, just try to keep one running without very expensive IBM tech on site every week or so. Sun is like the Macintosh of servers, it just works. Of course, you try to use Linux/BSD whenever possible so you don't ever have to see a $995 pricetag for a replacement keyboard. I bet that PCI card is hot swappable and well tested. It's the well tested that you are really paying for. IBM might get some of those Sun shops back, but most shops have someone there in power who remembers experience of working with the old IBM. Only when Sun gets worse will they really consider that option.

Re:Why would anyone choose sun?

[timeOday]

One thing you do get is peace of mind in an environment where time == money. It is very likely that Sun-branded card was integration tested with their machines and Solaris, so the odds are very very good that it will serve you well. Contrast this with the PC world, where the odds are simply good. The difference is not trivial, IMO.

Dell does that too. Of course the expense is amortized across a lot more customers.

Re:Why would anyone choose sun?

[nuclearmoose]

You must have been looking in the wrong place, if you want a vanila SCSI card from sun you can pick one up for about $100 Sun P/N 375-0097 Single-Ended Ultra/Wide SCSI:

http://store.sun.com/catalog/doc/BrowsePage.jhtm l? catid=42708

Sure it lists for $190, but you *would* be crazy to pay list price for anything, sun or not. That's about what you'd pay for an Adaptec card for your PC, but as others mentioned you're not just buying a card, you're buying a whole package. This card has been extensively tested and certified in a number of configurations - so you know it'll work.

Perhaps you were looking at a dual card for a list of $500? Again, $500 list would be around $250 for most Sun customers. Sure the dual card shouldn't cost twice as much, but you should consider that you can pop 6 or 8 or these into a Sun workgroup server giving you 16 external scsi channels!

Also, nearly all of Sun's cards are 64 bit, and many of them run at 66Mhz. Compare that to your 33Mhz 32bit PCI slots on your typical PC server.

Sure PC servers and cards are cheaper, but look at the I/O on 64bit/66Mhz compared to 32bit/33Mhz - it's worth the money in many cases, and the drivers work!

--NM

Re:Why would anyone choose sun?

[pmz]

Dell does that too.

However, most Dell systems lack features that Sun has (OpenBOOT PROM, for example, which is awesome), also Dell is still a Microsoft OEM (and tied by the nuts to Windows).

Re:Why would anyone choose sun?

[JAK]

Amazing...my recent experience has been the opposite of the two parent comments.

Sun's may have good support, but you'll need it because it's always breaking. Defintitely not hardware I'd choose to run HA stuff. Memory error? Machine goes down. CPU failure (one of 20)? Machine goes down. From what I understand (I'm in s/w, not h/w), this isn't supposed to happen, but generally does with Sun's hardware.

I think if Sun's lunch continues to get eaten by Linux on Intel, the quality of their hardware vs. Intel will be just as big a factor as price.

Dell, while it may be solid hardware, has terrible support when (if) you do need it. I suppose, though, sometimes you really do get what you pay for.

Re:Why would anyone choose sun?

[Anonymous Coward]

A Single-Ended SCSI card. For $190! Nice flashback from 1998! You can't even buy that crap for the PC any more, except on eBay.

Also, even lowend Dell servers come with PCI-X nowdays. Time to check your assumptions, Sunboy.

Re:Why would anyone choose sun?

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe it's so expensive because it's only used for replacements in old servers and they can charge a premium?

OWNED

Re:Why would anyone choose sun?

[dublin]

Dell does that too. Of course the expense is amortized across a lot more customers.

Having worked for Dell and had the opportunity to go down to the call center and listen in on calls (long before they shipped the call center to a clueless corner of India), I can tell you that some fairly shockingly wrong and bad things are told to customers. I'm sure this happens elsewhere, too, but Dell is interested more in the customer's perception of the support process and the friendliness of the staff than they are in actually fixing the customer's problem.

Unfortunately, I've far too often seen tech support reps miserably fail to help the customer, but push all the right buttons to create a positive impression of th company in the customer's mind.

(Of course, I was stunned recently when I had a fairly obscure problem caused by a mix of BIOs and video card firmware incompatibilities, and Microsoft Tech Support helped me nail it in fairly short order - all in all, it was one of the best resolutions I've ever had to a really tough problem. Unfortunately, the info was in an unpublished knowledge base article, of which there are apparently quite a few - fat lotta good that does...)

Re:Why would anyone choose sun?

[dublin]

Of course, you try to use Linux/BSD whenever possible so you don't ever have to see a $995 pricetag for a replacement keyboard. I bet that PCI card is hot swappable and well tested. It's the well tested that you are really paying for.

First of all, Sun's hardware is really pretty price competitive with serious gear from any vendor, even IBM or Dell. It's not the cheapest gear around, but it's affordable (unless you are too small to be serious about funding critical functions), but it just flat works, and will generally continue to work for so long that you start to wish it would die.

I've seen environments where I'm certain most of the Sun gear that was getting upgraded was subject to mass homicide - a prominent university here in Texas traded in a whole bunch of really old Suns they were using as X terminals - every one of them appeared to have had 120 VAC applied across the Ethernet circuitry. Heck, even Suns can't stand much of that...

Re:Why would anyone choose sun?

[dublin]

And simotaniously(sic), the need for big boxes has decreased: its clusterd micros as far as the eye can see.

If you've ever really worked with big computing problems and clustered computing in the real world (I have, on the scale of 10,000+ deployed compute nodes in a single cluster) you know very well that clustered computing is powerful but certanly NOT a panacea, and that there are very significant types of big problems for which a cluster is pretty much useless, but a big SMP machine is ideal.

In general, Sun will have a tough time for another year or so, but will come out of this OK. That's at least partly because it's the easier problems that are suitable for clustered computing, and soon, people will want to move beyond those to the more challenging sorts of things that can't be easily ripped into neat little strips for the cluster.

For a general purpose unix workstation, a PC with Linux is cheeper, and more powerfull.. I daresay that the likes of Redhat is easier to manage then Solaris.

Suns are not the cheapest desktops, but can actually be pretty cost effective if you're serious about getting real work done rather than futzing with your work environment. There is no way Red Hat is easier to manage than Solaris - I've worked with both for years, and RH is still a major PITA - it's just that most of us have gotten so used to it that we forget how bad it aspirates. Each has it's strengths, but there are way too many people here on /. that apparently don't bother to learn the power of Solaris before they engage in politically (or karmally?) correct simultaneous Sun-bashing & Linux-fawning...

For entry level server, linux rocks.

Hmm, Sun thinks so too, which is why they have a line of low-cost Linux-based entry level servers (Cobalt)...

For mid range stuff, a cluster of linux boxen (sic) on Intel based SMP boxes is better then a single, or a smaller cluster of Suns.

Maybe, maybe not, for reasons mentioned above. Lots of us are eagerly awaiting to see if Sun is going to build an Opteron box that combines the power and flexibilty of that CPU with the awesome I/O and backplane interconnect of a classic Sun SMP server. 10 Gig (XG) Ethernet changes everything, and the problem with driving it isn't the interface, it's what you hook the interface to inside the box...

And for realy(sic) high end stuff, IBM is the only game in town: whatever else you can say about them they have made rock solid mainframes for 50 years, that work all the time, period. If you need such a machine, why would you risk getting one from a company that has been in that market for what? 2 years.

But mainframes are NOT Unix-like, open machines - they require very specialized proprietary knowledge to set up, run, and program. What you're missing here is that Sun is in the mainframe business, and has been for not two years, but at least 7, since the introduction of the E10000 Starfire, Sun's first mainframe-class machine. (Which actually started life as a Cray - Sun convinced SGI to sell this product off to them after SGI bought Cray. The E10K/E15K are serious machines in anyone's book, and it took IBM several years to figure out how to build a version of the SP2 that had equivalent backplane technology, in spite of the fact that the E10K's backplane technology was actually developed by another IBM division for Cray in the first place. Truth is sometimes stranger than fiction. At least it proves that IBM really can be an honest supplier of technology even to competitors without leaking info all over the company...)

Bill Joy

[Anonymous Coward]

Period.

The should of used this picture..

[cowmix]

Bill in the Ultimate taxi..

who cares

[f00zbll]

So Bill Joy wants to do something new and challenging. Does that mean Sun is dead? Boy /.-ers sure are jumping to conclusions. A company should have change at the top level to give younger guys a chance to bring in a new perspective. Sure he's contributed a lot to Sun, but what's to say there isn't some one else could be equally effective in the same position? A healthy company should bring in new people and executives who are bored should do something new. It's good for the industry and good for Sun. I'd rather a bored Bill move to a new job and let some one else more interestd take the position, so that he can do something that excites him.

Does anybody remember the article where

[eclectro]

he talks about music industry officials doing what they are doing in order to support their crack habits?? He spoke of it when he gave a lecture somewhere, and it was very interesting. A URL would be much appreciated. I have been looking for this article for a long time.

How can you love Linux/Unix and hate vi

[KenSeymour]

They have the same standards of user friendliness.

It reminds me of the observation:

Unix is user friendly. It is just very choosy about who it is friends with.

Re:How can you love Linux/Unix and hate vi

[cant_get_a_good_nick]

UNIX is an expert friendly operating system.

Re:Why did someome mod this Offtopic

[Anonymous Coward]

The post was "as a matter of fact", though the emphasis on "Indian", while leaving the remaining founder's name could have been avoided.

Still it is not offtopic. I modded this as underrated, so posting anon.

The tread continues

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess they really are getting rid of all the Americans at Sun.

Yeah, yeah, mod it down... it's still true.

Poor Teletubbies...

[Demodian]

Having to stare at a crying baby face for a Sun while they drink their Java before starting their day all because Joy has left their lives...

Java is the best example of how Sun blew it.

[oldwarrior]

The greatest invention - best idea - of the corporation and they could not figure out a way to make any money with it. Lots of brainpower expended and fans and users but NO MONEY. YOU LOSE. GAME OVER.

Re:Java is the best example of how Sun blew it.

[sig97]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think you can blame them for not trying. Anyway, how do you make money by creating yet another programming language? The OAK language was initially designed as a home appliance platform. It was mainly written by a few (less than ten) programmers in about one and a half year. However, they didn't quite succeeded in selling their product. The appliance manufacturers weren't all that excited about putting Motorola processors and megs of RAM in toasters and VCR's, while the interactive TV companies chose a different solution.

After a few failures a new radical decision was taken. The OAK language was redesigned (Bill Joy was the man behind the transformation) to run on desktop computers, with the Web development in mind, and so Java was born - in just a few months! The source code was set free in order to gain market share (not so in later Java versions, I beleive) - and hey, for a failed project, it's quite impressive (even if it isn't such a great source of income).

Just what Steve needs...

[macguiguru]

...someone with a brain to question his god-like inspirations. Nope. Ain't gonna happen.

Thank you Mr. Joy

[stox]

For all of the real innovations you have contributed to the community.

JINI, JavaSpaces and JXTA?

[BigGerman]

I wonder what is going to happen to these technologies since Joy was (partially?) behind them.
I did a JavaSpaces project a while ago and it kicked butt.
Too bad Sun was holding JavaSpaces back and instead decided to milk the stupid EJB cow to death.

Mod parent down

[Anonymous Coward]

This guy is a genius, and has truly initiated world-changing technologies.

"world-changing" like what? Nonsense statement, but I guess the moderators likes that nowadays.

You jest, but.....

[DesScorp]

...at one time, Joy owned huge amounts of Microsoft stock. In all truth, I wouldn't be terribly shocked if he ended up affiliated with Microsoft in SOME way.

Trouble...

[Zebra_X]

Bill Joy is quoted as saying... "For 21 years, I've enjoyed the opportunities for innovation provided to me at Sun, but I have decided the time is now right for me to move on to different challenges,"

Another interpretation could be "there are no more opporunities for me at sun".

Lost source code...

[emil]

If that scrunch had not happened, vi would have multiple windows, and I might have put in some programmability - but I don't know.

Since I sort of invented the editor that was most complicated, I thought I would compensate by also designing the editor that was most simple. But I got distracted. If I had just spent another day on it... I could actually edit a file on it. I actually used it to edit itself and scrunched the source code - sort of old home day, because we used to do that all the time.

I wonder what sort of UNIX we might have if Bill Joy hadn't lost so much source code.

Sun has a future?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's going to be harder and harder for Sun to make it's money the way it has in the past. Maybe in a few years they can try to sue some Linux users??

Re:Sun has a future?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why bother suing Linux users - they're already making a lot of money raping Solaris users!

[OT] Re:Those in glass houses....

[Cpyder]

Sorry! I moderated you to "flamebait" instead of "funny" (just pressed the f key after tabbing to the drop-down box). I hope this post will remove the moderation. :)

this sounds like really bad news...

[weileong]

... if he's left and has no immediate plans - "taking time to consider his next move" - it sounds to me very much like there were (are?) some very major disagreements between him and McNealy and that he was driven to leave (not necessarily in the sense of "get out!", but "there's no point if I stay if you won't listen"), which (at least to me) does NOT bode well for Sun's future.

Finally!

[Beaker1]

Maybe we can finally kill off csh now! I couldn't believe that the system controllers for the SF-15K's made heavy use of csh! Then I found out Mr. Joy wrote csh.

Re:Finally!

[hachete]

if Joy goes, and SUN looks dodgier by the day - in fact, what if SUN does go into the twilight home for the terminaly ill, what happens to Java?

The sun shines brightly for MS today.

h.

joy as a luddite

[Anonymous Coward]

If Joy is a luddite, it's probably for a logical reason.

The argument against his thesis on AI relies on human intelligence being of supernatural proportions.

it's for the best...

[capsteve]

seems that bill is interested in other things besides making money, which is what i got out of the wired article. perhaps all the hubbub with M$ and SCO has finally caused one of the chief architects of BSD to think about the "ecology" of software, commercial and open source.

this seems pretty topical/relevant:

[weileong]

Article from SFGate:

Michael Dell, who built an empire selling computers based on other companies' innovations, argued Monday that the future in the technology market belongs to players who embrace industry standards, not proprietary systems.

The 38-year-old chief executive of Dell Inc. also strongly suggested that one of his company's top Silicon Valley rivals, Sun Microsystems, may never get back on its feet because it's stuck in a business model that no longer works.
"I think there are parts of the industry that will never recover, and the reason is that their business is fundamentally based on things that people aren't going to buy very much of anymore," Dell told The Chronicle after his keynote speech at OracleWorld, Oracle's annual user conference in San Francisco.

"They're waiting for (demand for proprietary systems) to come back," he added. "Sorry, it ain't going to happen."

Larry Singer, Sun's senior vice president for global market strategies, disputed Dell's view of the Santa Clara company and the trends in the technology industry.

"When Michael Dell gets up there and says those who don't follow industry standards won't make it, it's a bit disingenuous," he said in a phone interview.

"Innovation still matters. Market standards come from new innovations and new technologies."

Like other major companies such as Hewlett-Packard and IBM, the Texas firm sells computers, servers and other hardware based on widely used technologies developed by such companies as Intel and Microsoft.

On the other hand, Sun, which was once recognized as the top provider of corporate computing, has been a major industry player by offering products based mainly on its proprietary systems.

Asked if he believed that the struggling Sun would never recover, Dell, who typically shies away from comments on competitors, answered: "I sort of said that, but I didn't say that.

"But if you look at their peak revenues and where they are now, it's a pretty big difference, right?" he added. "And if you look at what people are buying now and what they were buying then, it's a big difference."

Singer defended Sun's strategy and performance.

"For Michael Dell, his definition of a market standard is the company that's selling the most today, and that's a pretty easy standard to pick," Singer said. Citing the rapid expansion of Sun's Java technology, particularly in mobile computing, he added, "The definition of what a standard is is beginning to change."

Dell's remarks underscored the debate over the role of innovation and research and development in the tech industry as top players, such as Dell, Sun and HP, maneuver for advantage in the anticipated rise in corporate spending on technology.

Dell Inc. became a tech behemoth by selling directly to consumers and keeping its spending on research and development down.

But rivals like HP and Sun have portrayed the Texas firm as a technological lightweight that grew on the backs of other companies' hard work in research and development.

Dell Inc. has made inroads in the low-end server market, defined as systems under $100,000 each.

But its critics scoff at the company's bid to move up the corporate technology market, arguing that only companies that invest in innovation can afford to compete in the mid-range and higher-end corporate markets.

Sun lost $2.38 billion in its fiscal year that ended in June, compared with a loss of $587 million the previous year. But the company has remained a respected technology innovator, particularly in the high-end market.

"The companies that will survive will be those that innovate technologies," and that means spending on research and development, Singer said.

But Dell has been unfazed by such criticism. In the interview, he reaffirmed his belief that hefty R&D budgets can be overrated and don't necessarily lead to hi

No Joy at Sun

[randall_burns]

Sun has lost over 95% of its shareholders' non-cash equity the last 3 years. More importantly, McNealy has lost serious credibility. I worked at Sun as a contractor for 2 years 10 years ago. Sun had a collection of really bright people, but the decision making process was flawed even then. McNealy had aspect of a class act. Unlike many Silicon Valley execs, he actually worked to be visible. The basic problem here though: the old guard that made these guys has largely been booted or is horribly demoralized(at least the Sun employees/alumni I've kept in touch with). Furthermore, Sun has no process for spotting the folks that are right even when it means being unpopular-which in a highly competitive business is just plain deadly. McNealy just hasn't been able to resist surrounding himself with a bunch of yes-men.

he quit for human reasons

[shakuni]

I dont know Bill Joy at all but from his accomplishments and his contributions like this one http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.04/joy_pr.htm l he seems like a great mind. He admits that he is not a scientist as someone in the previous postings have indicated. He is more a computer architect. His view is that scientists have a bigger role to play in advancement of computing than computer engineers. But most importantly he has pointed to the much needed change to human ideal of a utopian world. He urges us to change ultimate human goal to compassion from blind pursuit of scientific knowledge. In fact, I think he quit his pursuit of technology and he is going to be in the realm of fighting battles against unbridled pursuit of scientific excellence which has the potential of a larger destruction than the current dystopia of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons. all the best in the pursuit Bill. Its great to see people believe in and pursue goals that are aligned with the bigger objective than most can see or comprehend but reap the benefits of. Carl Sagan in his book Cosmos had a chapter called "Who thinks of Mother Earth?" which showed human parochialism. Bill has echoed this sentiment quite strongly and persuasively in his articles and work which talks about maximising narrow gains at the expense of larger humanity wide goals.

Why? Because I'm tired of re-inventing the wheel..

[Desmoden]

When I first got into *nix it was on Irix and SunOS. As the years went on more and more functionality came out of Sun. True DR for example, clustering. But I always heard grumbling from the mainframe guys "oh we had that, oh we had a much better version of that, oh we had that 10yrs ago". "you opensystems guys just don't get it"

And for the most part they were right.

Solaris today is a very nice full feature operating system. I run all of manufacturing for a large plant on a small number of Sun boxes. And in many cases for 4+cpu with apps that must scale vertically (unless you want to run RAC for example) Sun makes some nice stuff. (Yes I help pay for Uncle Larry's jet)

I started using Linux a little late, around 96. It's a nice OS, making great progress. But once again everyone spinning their wheels trying to get the functionality of Solaris and other mature OS's running in linux. With some new very cool stuff I'll agree. But once again, we are rebuilding what we have.

See the cycle?

I run solaris, openbsd and linux. All have nice stuff. But when it comes to high volume manufacturing, I love my sunfire 6800.

If I have to dump Sun for anything, it will be a 32proc G5 running OSX =)

Image not Found

[blogeasy]

You'd think after two decades of working at Sun, they could've found a better picture!

Actually, there are very few pictures taken of Bill Joy. He doesn't like to have very many pictures taken of him. They often reuse the few they do have of him in almost all of his profiles.

Your forgetting to save it!

[qwertyatwork]

:wq!

Re:Your forgetting to save it!

[Anonymous Coward]

ZZ

bill's 48 years old == mid life crisis

[Anonymous Coward]

I think this is a great move and may clear the way for Sun to be acquired by IBM or HP.

It would solve a large problem for us to have an end of life path for all of our Sun boxes running Oracle.

The best thing out of the late 1990s was that we could compare and buy Unix hardware from IBM, HP or Sun and not worry about the differences.

Re:bill's 48 years old == mid life crisis

[rifter]

I think this is a great move and may clear the way for Sun to be acquired by IBM or HP.

Oh hell, why don't SUN, HP, and IBM all merge and get it over with. Then they can move everything to Intel chips. After that, they can move everything to Microsoft Operating systems. You will be assimilated! :P

Sorry, who is this guy?

[Anonymous Coward]

I would guess he was with some 80s rock band after looking at his picture.

Re:Why did someome mod this Offtopic

[Anonymous Coward]

No, it wasn't because he mentioned Indians that it was modded off-topic, it was modded off-topic because Khosla has nothing to do with the story about Joy leaving Sun. For Christ's sake, imagine if the Brits posted something about Turing in every article, or the Irish about Boole, etc. etc. How would it be pertinent? Lose the persecution complex, it's tiring.

goodbye 1970s unix lamer

[Anonymous Coward]

another fine way to send off one of the last few remaining 1970s unix lamers.

Goodbye, good ridance and let us move onto better modern computer systems....

Re:goodbye 1970s unix lamer

[Anonymous Coward]

I still really want to know what innovations Unix has had since 1990.

Re:Why did someome mod this Offtopic

[Anonymous Coward]

I wish there were more people like you around in the citizenry of all nation states, and fewer chauvinists. This is one of the most common-sense posts I've seen on /. in a long time.

Ctrl key

[Tyler Durden]

The thing that really ticks me off is that at my school there are certain Sun keyboards that have the Ctrl key where you describe and others where that put it in the more expected place.

It can be a real bitch to get used to the configuration of the machine you happen to log into.

Re:Ctrl key

[dublin]

The thing that really ticks me off is that at my school there are certain Sun keyboards that have the Ctrl key where you describe and others where that put it in the more expected place.

It can be a real bitch to get used to the configuration of the machine you happen to log into.

Actually, the control key next to the "a" is the expected place for any of us that predate PCs. This was the universally accepted location for the control key on nearly all terminals and workstations until the PC screwed it up. (Just like changing slashes to backslashes for no reason at all... ticks me off at least once or twice a week...)

Re:Ctrl key

[Ctrl-Z]

Actually, the really bad keyboards put the F1 key where one would expect Esc to be. That'll kill a vi user any day, if F1 is mapped to something like "help". In vim, I believe F1 opens help automagically.

The correct position for Ctrl is to the left of the A key.

MOD DOWN PARENT - Troll

[Anonymous Coward]

That's not SETH FINKELSTEIN. Mod down the troll.

Supercuts: $12

[Anonymous Coward]

It costs about $12 for a haircut at Supercuts.

I think Bill Joy can afford that.

Sun was Vinod Khosla's idea.

[obnoximoron]

It is amazing how most of the American tech press is either ignorant of this or does not want to acknowledge it. Maybe it has something to with Khosla being an Indian immigrant and therefore not worthy of serious consideration. I mean, placing Khosla alongside superhuman prophetic 'native' American geniuses like Bill Joy and Scott McNeally? C'mon, the audacity! It is almost subconscious, the way immigrant contributions to Silicon Valley are automatically forgotten. And weeded out of its historical accounts so thoroughly that anyone like your truly who complains about this is considered insane and will probably be modded down to Flamebait -1. Heck, I don't care. Let the truth be known.

The idea of Sun was hatched in 1982 in Khosla's mind when he was a Stanford Business School grad student. The idea was to team up with Andy Bechtolscheim who at the time was licensing his workstation design idea to companies in Silicon Valley.
Khosla wanted Bechtolsheim to join in a partnership with him to build the workstations for sale. Khosla already had experience starting a company called Daisy Systems which went on to become one of the most successful IPOs of 1984. Anyways, he recruited Scott McNeally to help in the business side of things. Now they had two business people and a hardware expert. All they needed was a software expert to cover all facets of the product. And thats when they roped in Bill Joy, who was just 27 like the other 3, but unlike them was already nationally famous in the CS community.

Now after reading this story, tell me if the idea of Sun was not born in Khosla's mind instead of Bechtolscheim's or McNeally's or Joy's.

Re:Sun was Vinod Khosla's idea.

[Alrocket]

Parent is correct - mod up. Khosla was the first CEO too. I'm not sure if "The idea of Sun was hatched in 1982" is correct, I think it was certainly before 82.

Re:Sun was Vinod Khosla's idea.

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh yeah, he was a big contributor. All the best minds go into VC too. Ask any VC.

I don't need to hear anymore about another genius pencil squeezer at Kleiner Perkins and his financial shenanigans. Sun stood out on the basis of technology, not funding.

Wonder when McNealy is going to leave

[Anonymous Coward]

McNealy is beyond a doubt one of the most schizoid people in the industry.
On one hand he is doing mad hatter using Linux, but Sun is backing SCO on their attack on Linux.
He stopped all development of Solaris on x86, but then brings it back to sell sun x86 boxes.
Scott comes out to Colorado to deliver a keynote speech to Colorado's government, but it does not hit him that the governor is solidly behind replacing all Sun, HP, and IBM boxes with MS (this at a time when Ownes has helped kill our economy).
If you ask McNealy where Sun is headed, he will rant and rave about MS and occaisionly throw in Linux as well.
I suspect that Joy is tired of all the shit going on in the company and is tired of a rudderless company.

I'll Try My Hand Too

[Farley Mullet]

Q: What do you call one senior executive leaving Sun?

A: A start, at least.

Re:I'll Try My Hand Too

[vsprintf]

Q: What do you call one senior executive leaving Sun?

A: Not nearly enough. The rank and file don't have any choice about it when their jobs are outsourced. At least one executive may have a clue.

Obituary

[Frobozz0]

Is it me, or did that article sound more like an obituary than anything else?

Perhaps the wording was more than conincidental concerning Sun's future. It's never good when the founder decides to leave. That usually means that game is over.

Did you read Joy's Wired Article? Weird!

[Anonymous Coward]

Did you read Bill Joy's article? Man.. he must
smoke pot or something! I am a Systems Engineer and I also design robots. I do not believe you can
transfer a human's consciousness into a machine.
This dude must of been smoking a huge dubee when watching the original startrek.

Nurologists are no where near understanding how thoughts are recorded in our minds.

Re:Did you read Joy's Wired Article? Weird!

[boudie]

Did you mean neurologist or urologist - because a urologist
could probably understand your mind better than a neurologist.
(I am a brain surgeon, he, he, he)

If I purchased Linux?

[dindi]

If I am running a "tinker with it Linux distro", it was a download most likely, I compiled my kernel so it was me decision to use the questionnable code. But what if I am the average joe user who got his Redhat/Mandrake/You name it - installation? In that case I bought a software from a company, and if they sold stolen code, Sun should kick their butts, not mine... err right?
Not that I am worried that much of Sun getting a cent out of anyone but made me think for a second looking at my Debian server, typing on my Redhat workstation :)
- I might have forgotten to read some EULAs though :) -

So Gates swung shut on Joy...

[Bat_Masterson]

I remember Bill Joy giving a presentation at a place I won't name some 20 years ago wherein he talked about about innovations to come in the computer industry (like "mega-cubed" [1M x 1Mhz x 1Mpixel]) and how Sun would conquer all. He was also talking about how his budget for R&D was bigger than the net worth of Microsoft (at that time), so he really didn't feel that Bill Gates and Microsoft would be much of a problem in the computer market of the future. I guess Bill Gates gets the last laugh... :-(

One Notable Failure Among Joy's Achievements

[reporter]

Bill Joy contributed magnificently to the development of UNIX.

However, Dr. Joy has 1 notable failure. When Sun Microsystems was developing the first SPARC processor and had planned to migrate all its software and tools to the new chip, the engineers designing SPARC came to a critical juncture in their work. That juncture can be summarized in one question: "Should we build register windows into SPARC?".

At the time, Professor Patterson at Berkeley was championing the incorporation of register windows into microprocessors. According to his flawed studies, register windows supposedly give a significant performance boost to C-language code. Patterson was an inspiration for young Dr. Joy.

The SPARC engineers did their own studies but went far beyond what Patterson did. They actually looked at how to build register windows into high-performance circuits, and they concluded that building register windows would be too difficult. They also questioned the supposed performance benefits of register windows. Unfortunately, Dr. Joy overruled them and forced them to incorporate register windows into the first SPARC chip.

The rest is history. It proved that register windows give SPARC no significant performance advantage over other microprocessors. Indeed, register windows appears to reduce performance. Look at the results at the SPEC web site. Power4, Power5, Pentium 4, Athlon, etc. all crush the SPARC chip in performance. When the 80486 became the first 80x86 chip to exceed the performance of the SPARC chip on SPECint, Sun Microsystems should have gotten a clue and dropped register windows. On the contrary, Sun Microsystem stubbornly stuck with register windows. You might say that register windows killed the performance of the SPARC processors.

To this very day, SPARC processors are about 2 generations behind their peers in performance.

... from the desk of the reporter

Re:One Notable Failure Among Joy's Achievements

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm so glad people have realized you're a complete and total anti-Asian and anti-Sun troll and didn't mod you for shit. If anyone out there questions this please look at the poster's previous comments.

Have fun with your commodity hardware, your baseless accusations and pointless rants.

PS: P4 2.4 gets the same SPEC score as a SPARC 1.2. But you wouldn't link to that directly because it would ruin your entire argument, right?

Bill Joy - Interesting Duck

[Goyuix]

I feel somehow obligated to post something to this article as I was lucky enough to be in school when he dropped by for a lecture. There were two distinct feelings I had at the time:

1) This man seemed out of touch with reality. Very forward thinking, and even willing to give up some rights/privacy in the name of invasive (though arguably useful) technology

2) This man certainly has a vision for the future. Sun is a decent company, but has lost a lot of competitive edge over the years, and with Joy leaving the company there is bound to be a change in direction. Whether he was actively steering the company in a positive or negative direction will be the drama played out over the next few years.

Still, as one of the parents of Java, he certainly has made a big impact - and as a visionary individual will probably crank out some interesting theories/designs/apps. He will still be an individual worth keeping tabs on.

Hear, hear!

[DrMorpheus]

Mod the parent post up! He's exactly right because I was in a similar situation at Cisco Systems so I left to start my own consulting business.
It's been hard but I'm happier now than I was under the insufferable arrogance and stupidity that was Cisco management.

Sun make money from Java

[Decaff]

Sun make a considerable amount of money from Java. They sell support, they sell IDEs, they sell J2EE licences. They give the low-end stuff (J2SE and Forte community edition) away free to encourage widespread use of the language.

See the clue car just zoooom by...

[Anonymous Coward]

Was a long time since I last saw someone, even as clueless as you, miss the joke by so much. This is almost legendary.

the real reason..

[Anonymous Coward]

The real reason he left: Vi really has improved

Piggy Back

[Anonymous Coward]

Bill is thinking....

"I realize that Sun's days are numbered and that
Linux is the future. No one is going to pay the
outrageous hardware prices when one can simply
buy a cheaper Dell box with Red Hat."

Bill is thinking....

[Anonymous Coward]

"I realize that Sun's days are numbered and that
Linux is the future. No one is going to pay the
outrageous hardware prices when one can simply
buy a cheaper Dell box with Red Hat."

Co-Founders?

[fm6]

I find it curious that Joy and McNeely are usually listed as "co-founders" of Sun. It's my understanding that neither of them was there from the very beginning. The idea for the company came from a couple of Stanford people (I foget their names, I'm sure someone will fill in the blanks), one a systems hardware person, the other an export on the previously mentioned Stanford University Network. As was usual in those days, the OS was an afterthought -- when they realized they needed one, they brought in Bill Joy.

Scott McNeely was hired away from Onyx, a company that made an early (and not terribly successful) microprocessor-based Unix box. He was not hired as CEO -- he got that job only after a serious of corner-office disasters.

I have a book somewhere the describes one of these disasters. There was an HP exec named Paul Ely who seemed determined to be the prototype for the modern Overpaid CEO. Couldn't do it at HP, so he shopped around. Sun negotiated with him, but balked when he told them he "couldn't keep the lights on" for less than $400,000. Not a lot of money now, but a shocking demand in 1984, and more than twice what anybody else at Sun made. A directors' revolt finally put Ely in charge of Convergent Technologies, where I was working at the time. (I remember seeing the outgoing President looking at him with undisguised loathing.) I forget his salary, but he got a hiring bonus of $1 million. Didn't work out, of course. When Ely looks at Scott McNeely's current compensation package, I'll bet he wishes he hadn't demanded so much up front....

I think it's significant that Joy is leaving Sun just now. He hasn't been at the center of any development effort for a long time. Instead, Sun has been happy to let him sit in Colorado and come up with Big Ideas. When I worked at Sun, there were a lot of people like that -- people whose job description seemed to center around being Creative and Innovative, rather than producing actual product. A lot of people (including me) thought that was a pretty cool thing. But now I suspect that Sun is finding that it no longer afford quite so much coolness.

Re:Why did someome mod this Offtopic

[Anonymous Coward]

He left in 1986 HELLO? What does that have to do with Bill Joy leaving in 2003?

Logical

[njdj]

He's leaving Sun because he can see no future for Sun. People talk about Linux hurting Microsoft, and in the long run they may be right, but in the short to medium term, the company that is most likely to lose customers to Linux is Sun.

Linux is more or less comparable to Solaris - but it runs on cheaper hardware. Sun still has a niche at the high end (machines with many CPUs) but that niche is shrinking all the time. I can't see a good strategy for Sun to deal with this, and presumably he couldn't, either.

Same ol thing in M$

[Anonymous Coward]

I work at M$ and all I do is cut and paste code from win95 to longhorn no innovation here too. We just copied some great stuff from gnome sheel too to longhorn that day that was very interesting.

One down, one to go.

[IGnatius T Foobar]

This is not a troll, so give me a chance here before pressing those mod buttons.

Lately, Sun has has two really big problems holding it back. Those problems are named Scott McNealy and Bill Joy. Stuck in unixland. They were the only "minicomputer" company that didn't jump to Windows NT back in the early 1990's, and they won big time on that bet. Unisys, Data General, etc. where are they now?

Sun stuck with Unix and it turned out to be a good play for them. Now the big man on campus is Linux, and the Sun top brass think they can make the same play again. But this time it's different:

• Moving from Unix to Linux is easy
• Customers don't have oodles of cash anymore
• Linux, unlike Windows, does not suck.
• It's time for Sun to stop being schizophrenic, and embrace Linux as much as SGI, HP, and IBM have. Linux is the name of the game, and I really believe that it's been McNealy and Joy holding them back. Joy is now gone. If McNealy bails out too, then Sun can find its place in the Linux world. As a true open source pioneer (NFS anyone?) they know how to make the engineering happen. Let's hope they manage to pull it off.
• 
  
  I would also hate to see OpenOffice orphaned. We need this package.

Vim Bloat and EMACS stoat

[fm6]

That's Vi/Vim after 25 years of feature creep. The original Vi could run on PDP-11 that didn't have 15MB of disk total. Contrast that with EMACS, which has always had a ton of of scripts and stuff. My copy is about 50MB.

When I was at Sun, anybody who had a root password to their own machine (IS was getting unfriendly about that) would install a local copy of EMACS. Which went against IS policy: you were supposed to run all apps from a file server. Which worked for most applications. But when the network or server got flaky, EMACS would freeze every time it had to fetch another macro. During one such outage, I had to do all the editing for a release, because I was the only writer who knew Vi.

Still, I don't agree that Vi represents the "Unix way". Any program that you can't connect a pipe to violates that concept. I know old Unix hands who still use Ed. (Some of them can edit as fast as I can!) Vi has more to do with terminals. At Berkeley, they standardized on cheap LSI ADM3 terminals, the product for which the term "dumb terminal" was invented. (These didn't even have cursor keys -- there were little arrows on H, J, K, and L, indicating that they were the cursor keys when CTRL was held down. Which is why Vi/Vim uses these keys for cursor motion.) Through simple brute-force techniques, Vi supported fancy screen editing. If you had a fast-enough connection (meaning you were about 10 feet from the computer) you could even use the really cheap terminals that didn't have cursor addressing!

By contrast, MIT and Stanford had full-featured terminals they designed themselves, with powerful machines to drive them and fancy keyboards to invent complicated command sets around. So of course they used editors that had serious feature bloat from day one.

TECO

[Anonymous Coward]

learn TECO first, then go complain about edlin and vi. and do some TACL #DELTAs in your sleep.

horrible horrible.

I still haven't really learned to program csh.

see the guy in action

[Anonymous Coward]

Bill Joy argues that rapid advances in technology, coupled with humanity's dismal record at preventing war and destruction, make humanity's prospect of surviving its own evolving technology a bleak one.

http://technetcast.ddj.com/tnc_play_stream.html? st ream_id=258

Blind hatred of Microsoft does't work

[Anonymous Coward]

You know, blind hatred of Microsoft just isn't rational. One example: I used to buy a video game for $50 for Linux which was available for Windows for $10. No more...

Windows does many things better than Linux: Scanning documents on cheap scanners which do not work well with Linux; buring CD-Rs on cheap USB CDRs which do not work well with Linux; having a stable easy-to-use desktop (RedHat 9's desktop is a lot more buggy than Windows 98); video game support; etc.

Yes, I use Linux for many things, but I am finding myself dual booting these days.

Java developers like Apple?

[TheLastUser]

Really? I would have thought that they would prefer to use Solaris so that they can use the latest 64bit VM, and have a choice of thread models. Or possibly the Linux version so that they can save a few bucks whilst still using the latest VM.

I develop with Linux and deploy to Linux, but for a big app I would use Solaris on a server with many cpu's, that way I would get my choice of VM's, a choice of thread models and full advantage out of parallel GC for >1GB heap sizes.

Re:Java developers like Apple?

[Johnny Mnemonic]

I don't develop in Java, so I don't know. But I have read that some people apparently think the Mac is a pretty good platform. Interesting that Gosling would still be interested in the Mac, even after the features that you mentioned, neh? And he presumably has access to a pretty wide range of machines.

Before you say it--I didn't read this to say that Gosling has thrown out every piece of gear that doesn't have an Apple on it. But if he uses a powerbook as a regular machine in the mix, that's interesting enough for me. Think he might see something about Java on OS X that you don't?

Re:Java developers like Apple?

[TheLastUser]

I would be interested to find out what he is using today, the article is about a year and a half old.

I work with a guy that, if he had a choice, would probably use a Mac for his development. The company just sends us wintel machines and we wipe em and install Linux.

I admit that Mac is a credible Java development platform, especially if you want to use the Mac for other reasons. If your sole interest is Java development though, then I think Solaris or Linux would be better, due to the faster release cycles.

The cool thing about Java is that it really doesn't matter too much what you code on. You can develop on Windows, Solaris, Linux and even Mac and then deploy on a completely different OS. We did this for years, we coded on windows staged on solaris and then went live on linux. Any other language/runtime this would be crazy. We never had a single platform inconsistancy.

I must have clicked the wrong link

[TheLastUser]

This was posted Sept 9, 1996 right?

I think I have heard this all before...

Could be that there is something worthy about their offering. Could be that the same tool is not always the best for every job.

And as for being "chased upmarket by disruptive technologies" seems to me that, if anything, they're offerings have expanded further into the low end markets in the past couple years.

They sell <$1000 1u's now, they sell these thin client thingies for $350, that seems pretty low end to me, and some how they are still selling those "over-priced" workstations that you believe nobody buys anymore.

So if $/MHz is the only worthy measuring stick for a computer purchase then why do people use windows?

Thanks Bill

[rc.loco]

You did this stuff before many of us could type, before some of us could even walk. You believed in the power of hacking (not the media machine's definition...) and took time to share your passion and knowledge. You helped make a (once-great) company, a la the American Dream. Too bad for all of us that Sun's current management doesn't "get it" like their predecessors did. Good luck in your future ventures!

Re:Why did someome mod this Offtopic

[The Cydonian]

Two quick comments:-

I don't quite think the post was chauvinistic. It was a mere repost from the Wiki, of course, with the Indian bit in bold, but had no comments to add per se (and hence added no opinion, no Times of India-style chest thumping). The intention, presumably, is to highlight the fact that he was one of the founders is something; I'm okay with that, 'coz I don't if you've noticed this, but trade rags do tend to ignore Khosla's contributions to Sun's founding. Just like, for instance, how NY Times, Yahoo! Movies and other American websites conviniently forget to mention that Naseeruddin Shah also acted in League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.

Racism in mainstream American media? I don't know, and frankly, never cared, but you begin to notice this after a while.

Now, whether Vinod-ji is Indian or not is a different matter; he has, of course, established the TiE and is considered one of those Great Indian Success Stories, but AFAIK, he holds an American passport. Not to hold it against him of course, many of my relatives are, among other nationalities, American, but all the same, important to remember that.

Second, I agree it's time to give this "IT superpower" concept a decent burial; yes, we've got some great press off-late, yes, every laid-off American techie thinks his job will be shipped to India (even by Gartner expectations, only 10% of jobs can be outsourced; gut feeling tells me that real application development will stay where it is), and for sure, it's led to some wealth creation in NOIDA, Bangalore and Hyderabad, but no, it's not an answer to massive wealth-creation. It is not going to give us those post-8% growth levels that everyone in Raisana Hill dreams about. It's not a big contributor to India's GDP. It alone won't lift us from our so-called Third World morass.

But what's really disappointing, as someone studying CS, is the state of complete technological solutions for India; net security, for one, seems to be a low priority even in the best of our tech institutions, and yes, the state of computing solutions in Indic languages, is shockingly incomplete.

I mean, I don't know if any other techie Indian here feels ashamed when (s)he sees, say, a Korean computer, but I do:- Koreans, like French, Germans, Thais, Chinese, Japanese and so on, can easily create content in their own languages right off the box. I find it stupid that, after 10 years of standards, after all this hype about India being an IT superpower, people still have to struggle so much to get a simple, Unicode-enabled, Google-searchable, Indic language website up and running. Shameful, truly shameful.

Sorry, it was a long winded rant, but had to get that off my chest.

Yeah, sure, that's it

[GCP]

Bill Joy is an alpha geek who created technologies that other geeks respect and still use, who ALSO made it to the highest levels of the business world -- while remaining a hardcore techie. Joy talks about controversial technical visions.

Vinod Khosla is a business guy who has made a career of getting companies started for the cash he could milk out of the deal. He talks about maximizing his financial return.

So when American techies and the publications they read talk more about Bill Joy than Vinod Khosla, you conclude that it could only be prejudice against Indians.

Yeah, what else could it be? Those *@#$% ethnocentric Americans.... When will they grow up and start paying more attention to me?

Now I know why me and Java never went anywhere...

[stylinsty]

I think Bill Joy leaving is total proof Sun is hurting. They would be doing better if Microsoft didn't squash them.
Some who worked there say it sucked and now we know the lead man Bill Joy is finding a lack of personal growth- which translates to-
"this sucks, we write lame software, I'm not known as a master of something great in the industry, this company is holding me back, this dumb Sun thing isn't working- I knew we had no marketing skill and the people here are in a bubble with no desire to work synergistically."
.
I worked at Sony during Everquest development as the Java programmer. The C++ guys made fun of it but I said you watch- Java will have real compilers that make fast exe's and it blows away C++ for simplicity. C++ is just text and so is Java therefore compilers can be written on any system to make us of 3D cards and make high quality software.

I wish I never heard of Sun or wasted my time with Java since 1996 when it came out.
If I'd stayed with C++ I'd have some nice windemos out and could be getting overworked then laid off at Chapter 7 game company :)

I've taken action-
Now I program php, mysql and Linux.
Its as if I had all the control I once had on my Apple ][+ computer back!
It is marketed and written by programmers- it wins.

Re:Now I know why me and Java never went anywhere.

[Anonymous Coward]

You sound bitter.

Re:Now I know why me and Java never went anywhere.

[stylinsty]

Yes I'm bitter- getting into computers to be a good programmer didn't pay off. Not in money and it ruined my health.
Unfortunately it matches my mind type so studying real estate for example is a drag- I like the technical side but not when its unsturdy ground.
Anyone can say 'you sound bitter' have anything else to say about my post?

Acme 0\/\/|\|5 gn00

[DrSkwid]

They talk of usability and which is best and yet their horizons are so narrow it's a joke.

Which is best CLI or WIMP? - Aggggghhhhhhhhhh!!!

fools

False CNET News.com interview with Bill Joy?

[stock]

Hi,

I think something very fishy is going on here. CNet did a small interview with Bill Joy :

http://news.com.com/2100-1012_3-5073205.html?tag=f d_top

however the guy in the picture certainly ain't Bill Joy. Here's some URL's which show defintely other pictures identifying Bill Joy :

http://www.counterbalance.net/bio/joy-frame.html
http://java.sun.com/features/1999/07/bill.joy.html
http://www.sun.com/executives/perspectives/joy.htm l

The False CNet Bill Joy has a chin butt, piercing eyes and no glasses, while the 3 above URL's show the real Bill Joy with _no_ chin butt , no piercing eyes and all 3 of them with glasses. Did some fake dude show up at CNet's, faking as Bill Joy (commiting identity theft) and possibly tell some false rumours?

Robert