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On the Record: Scott McNealy
Sequoia writes "There's a worthwhile interview with Sun CEO Scott McNealy at sfgate. I've always had a hard time seeing how Sun has any long-term staying power. I'm still skeptical, but I was able read why Scott thinks he can be successful, 'execution.' He sounds like a hitman! Like any good hitman, Scott seems uncomfortable with his feelings, or at least he doesn't want to talk about them. 'First of all, I don't get paid to feel.' Sure you do, dude. The best decisions come from the integration of feeling and thought. If feelings don't matter, you can by replaced by a computer. He does a beautiful job putting Dell in his place. 'Michael Dell is the greatest spare parts distributor out there. He'll get you a piston ring or a carburetor or a crank shaft at a really low cost.' But, uhhh, isn't that execution? Scott's international perspective is a breath of fresh air. 'Yes. So global companies grow globally. Shouldn't India be a little upset that we have most of their software programmers here?' Heh."
What's the deal with this article summary? Some random person comments on his comments? Only slightly better than an editor doing it.
do we like or hate sun this week?
While I personally have my doubts, I still run into plenty of people out there that NEED to hear that you run on Sun, Solaris, Oracle, EMC, etc. in order to take you seriously.
:)
With that in mind, I've been eyeing their newest dual Xeons. Best of both worlds.
What a strange guy... Every time he is interviewed he immediately goes into some super-defensive mode. They weren't attacking him, but he is quick to interrupt and apparently likes the "high school debate team" type situation:
"
A: To what kind?
Q: Industry standards.
A: What does industry standard mean? Define industry standard.
"
No wonder the other three founders are all gone.
Who's with me that that level of commentary is really unnecessary in posting a story like this? Couldn't the "editors" have cut that down a bit?
'm still skeptical, but I was able read why Scott thinks he can be successful, 'execution.' He sounds like a hitman! Like any good hitman, Scott seems uncomfortable with his feelings,
...
Executing on a business plan is called execution. It's a standard business expression, although a tad dot-commish. No need for retarded hitmen analogies
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
[100% ISO 646 Compliant]
SVM, ERGO MONSTRO.
Seriously, this is a horrible trainwreck of a "story".
It wouldn't have been so bad if it was at least coherant.
"When I grow up, I want to be a weirdo"
and got done and there were still no +1 comments.
He sounds a little defensive, but that's understandable. He's been beat up over the last couple of years. Everyone's saying no-one needs Sun and it's a dinosaur. "All the talented people are leaving the company".
But they have over $5 billion in the bank and their line-up is really second to none. Dell can't match their highly tailored line-up. They've got a killer community in java and tons of other stuff coming out.
Sun's still useful for some things, and they got cash to burn. They have a marketplace and they have a line-up. What more do you want?
Why can he do something about those stock prices? Lashing out at Dell and offering "amnesty" to IBM users to switch is all well and good, but none of this fixes what's broken at Sun. Where's the plan of action, man?
More Information
A programmer is a machine for converting coffee into code.
If Dell is smart they do not have to own a web services stack. Dell just has to load Redhat and Jboss, no development cost, no r&d cost and a better solution. Sun forgets that packaged software is quickly being extincted by open source tools. Packaged software is a quickly dying business. The only hope for their survival is embrace and consult.
Got Code?
Steve Jobs made a similar crack when someone asked him to compare Apple to other computer makers like Dell and Compaq. He said something to the effect of, "Dell and Compaq are part of the distribution chain for Intel and Microsoft, like CompUSA is. They're not computer manufacturers like Apple or Sun."
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Now if Bill Joy was running, that'd be a different matter.
aw, poor baby. maybe you should sign up for the army and invade india. that's the current us policy for solving problems, yes?
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The Indian government has been concerned about the "brain drain" since 1990 or so. Atleast that's around the time they started acknowledging the fact that it was a serious problem.
The government puts in a lot of money into the Indian Institutes of Technology and the Regional Engineering Colleges. Tuition fees and on-campus living expenses are greatly subsidized for students who are admitted to these colleges based on national-level exams (like the IIT-JEE believed to be the toughest exam at it's level in the world).
A large percentage of graduates from these colleges look for higher salaries and better jobs outside of India: in the US and Europe or Asia, and given the huge amount of resources that the government (and tax payers) pumped into their education, it naturally gets the jitters when students choose to work abroad.
The Indian government has lately taken to giving pep talks in colleges, in addition to distributing booklets explaning the effect of brain drain on the local economy.
I think brain-drain is essentially an outcome of globalization. Technology, irrespective of where it is developed benefits the world as a whole.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
I thought it was a great article. You can read inbetween the lines a bit and see the humor in many of his comments.
He's a CEO, not a governor in-the-running. I think his answers were suprisingly candid...and made for a good over read.
Colossians 2:8
Has he looked at his own product range recently? Dell and Sun use the same manufacturer for the v65x etc. Dell with a different bezel, same "spare parts".
WTF is this?
Q: Are you happy?
A: What does happy have to do with anything?
Q: Well, you said your wife was happy.
A: Am I happy with what?
Q: Your stock price?
A: I don't worry about it. I'm a long-term shareholder. I'm letting it all ride. A long time ago I stopped doing this to make myself super rich. I am in this to provide a great return for the long-term shareholders, to provide a great alternative to what I think is an incredibly important problem to solve.
It's like they sent in some intern(s) with a bunch of canned questions to do the interview and didn't tell the poor bastard that McNeally is a dick.
I don't believe Sun will die. Claiming they will would be like claiming "IBM is going to die" in 1990. It might have seemed like an intelligent thing to say, but too many background issues ensured it didn't happen.
In fact, Sun and IBM might become a whole lot more similar in the years to come.
Currently they're both companies that have a lot of proprietary mid/high-end server and mainframe equipment out in the field with specialized engineers ready to maintain them. They both have a very large internal focus on research and information management (Sun has its own 'SunLibrary', Google for more information), and both are renowned for developing new technologies which are then "stolen" or "borrowed" by other companies.
Sun and IBM also do a lot of research and provide a lot to disciplines that run alongside their product line. For example, Sun did a lot of work with usability (that's where Jakob Nielsen came from), whereas IBM has done a lot of work on information retrieval and search engines (Google for 'ibm web fountain').
Even if Sun's main market dries up, replaced by Apple XServes and Linux clusters, this will be no more devastating to them as IBM losing out in the x86 market in the late 80's and early 90's.
Sun has a lot of brainpower, a lot of money, and partnerships (Oracle is the latest) to ensure that they'll continue for many years as a research and technology company, if not as a "consumer facing" company.
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Linus said some time ago that: "Quite frankly, Sun is doomed. And it has nothing to do with their engineering practices or their coding style." (URL: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/transhumantech/messa ge/9453)
I did take that with grain of salt till I read this interview. I wouldn't want this guy to wash my car, let alone be CEO of Sun.
Where I work, we just sold several Sun servers at a fraction of what we bought them for, and we used some of that money to buy a dual Xeon box for running Linux. We run Electonic Design Automation (EDA) applications, and we find that they run faster on Linux, and transitioning our design environments to Linux has been fairly painless. The system uptimes are comparable, and the total cost of ownership is lower with Linux. The faster runtime on Linux also lets us get more out of the EDA software licenses that we purchase. About 4 years ago, Microsoft tried to push its way into the EDA market, but that flopped because most of the existing applications ran on UNIX-type OSes, so the transition was too difficult. Now EDA vendors are flocking to Linux at the expense of Sun.
If feelings don't matter, you can by replaced by a computer.
How is this in any real way true?
More articles, less whimsical opinionated fluff.
Why are you letting these clowns ruin our country?
Seems like Sun is quite similar to Apple. I believe they almost merged at one time. Having used Solaris it sure would be sweet if Sun slapped OSX on their machines ... ah I guess that's just a fantasy. Seems like the ego of Mr. McNealy wouldn't allow it ...
I so needed some 19-year-old, unemployed slashdotter telling me that good business decisions come from the heart.
Oh wait, no, I didn't.
News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters? Like hell.
Executing on a business plan is called execution. It's a standard business expression, although a tad dot-commish.
'Execution' is a word executives use to divert blame from themselves. If a company or team is unsuccessful, "poor execution" is the reason, even though a bad or unrealistic business plan may have been at fault.
When an executive says from the beginning that execution is the key, it means the business plan is shaky. If he actually had a good business plan, he would have said something that sounds like "we can't lose."
You must be new here.
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
Hello? He has a masters in economics from Oxford. Who else do you need to fix the economy - an oil man from Texas?
I could have done without the editorial.
I'm surprised you didn't mention other thoughts in your head, like whether or not you like twinkies.
>80 column hard wrapped e-mail is not a sign of intelligent
>life
If you're interested in what "Execution" means in a business sense, a couple of interesting books to read are Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't and Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done.
The former is an interesting outside-looking-in study of what happened to turn an ok company into a really successful company with sustained growth.
The latter is inside-looking-back on what it takes to lead a company that can get things done.
--The more you know, the less you know.
This is an age old marketing issue in the computer industry. Here's my take on it.
A "solution" is, well, something that actually satisifies all the customer's needs. Also known as a "system".
A "product" is something that a customer buys with a defined feature set and just does what the seller says that it does. Also known as a "box".
In McNealy's view of Sun's market, there are two ways to set up a data center or a big web site or whatever he's calling his market these days:
(1) Buy a "solution" from Sun which comes with hardware, software, service agreements, and a damn big price tag. Single-vendor integration all the way.
(2) Buy a bunch of "products" like x86 hardware + a Linux distro + a database and then hire some people to put it all together with in-house support. For example, Google.
What McNealy does not get about open source is that it lets us work on the "products" (kernel, gcc, apache, et cetera) and still let companies sell the integrated "solutions" (like IBM and Red Hat enterprise support). Sun's competition is not Dell; it is other complete "solution providers".
This whole argument is obscured by the fact that most people's experience with computers (including mine) is with personal computers; and for personal computers, Dell, Compaq, et al, do sell complete solutions.
For more on McNealy's anti-privacy advocacy, see http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/05/29/14 32247&mode=thread&tid=158 and http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/10/12/003242 &mode=thread&tid=102. I also like the Doctor Fun cartoon.
You're new to /., aren't you?
"I believe they almost merged at one time."
Wrong.
-- $SIGNATURE
...it doesn't matter what you submit, the goal is having the longest and most provocative comment on the Slashdot main page. Extra credit is given for extended rants on continuations the story page, but at a lesser rate than for comments on the main page.
Slashdot Warlording would be an amusing thesis paper subject for someone trying to kill some sociology credits.
Please, no suggestions, I'm already not looking forward to paying for the perpetual occupation of iraq for the rest of my life.
(and Japan, Europe, and 100+ other countries we have troops in for no goddamn reason)
911 was just a "problem"?
Cheap labor flows into the US because the rich and powerful want cheap labor. There is little to prevent capital outflows from the United States to address an disequilibrium. Regardless, American companies, since Reagan and Nixon, have subverted the American immigration laws in order to crush unions and discipline labor. Capital is essentially squeezing workers. Real purchasing power for the Average American family is down since 1973, growth rate is down, savings rate is down. The winners are the millionaires. If American companies want to outsource, that's one thing. We should tax that. But to deliberatly target American workers for special competition from guest workers is wrong.
Here's the problem. Programmer makes 80K a year. Boss thinks, "gee, I can hire a guest worker for 50K a year instead". So. Boss gets 30K more a year, guest workter gets $50K a year. And American
looses his job. Yes. World is technicly better off. But American workers are NOT better off. What's worse, the American worker paid for the road that that the foreign worker now drives to work and pays for the school that the foreign workers kids now go to. By the way, we're cutting back on Advanced Placement classes for more spending on English as a second language.
Few would say we need to cut out immigration all together; but the growth of immigration is out of control. Some people should be allowed in. But to massively expand the H1-B program just because the richest people in American want to pay less in wages in crazy. The few who do come in should have full rights as workers, including the right to change jobs easily, be on a citizship track and not be forced to pay lawyers lots of money to fill out complex paperwork.
You mention the Indian government's relationship to it's students. Yup, most are subsidized by the
government. Most Americans have student debt up to their eyeballs. It costs a lot of money to live in Silicon Valley. American workers deserve fair compenstation and not be targeted by special laws like the H1-B program.
We can stop taking their best engineers if they stop taking our development jobs.
And just what are those "best engineers" supposed to do with all that free time on their hands? Work on non-development jobs?
We really didn't need Sequoia's "editorial" cluttering up the news here. People should not be able to have their biased opinions posted as part of the story and thus circumvent the whole comment system and get prominent placement of their views without moderation.
"Who's with me that that level of commentary is really unnecessary in posting a story like this? Couldn't the "editors" have cut that down a bit?"
The initial poster's comments are rather childish--while this is a good article to discuss, did we really need to hear Sequoia's inane opinions glommed on to the topic?
Do you have any idea how long Sun has already been around? Your comments come off like the final script for a great film that was hacked apart, glued together and then jammed into theatres.
> Technology, irrespective of where it is >developed benefits the world as a whole.
How nice and fuzzy that sounds.
Sure its decimates critical industries in poorer countries especially smaller ones but Hey! its for the good of humanity.
You should write copy for McDonalds, Nike or the WTO.
Im sick of this whats good for the richer country is good for the whole planet bullshit.
spend a day with Nike PR flacks and youd think their mother theresa.
zeke
look muppet, iraq didn't have anything to do with 911. get a fucking clue. when bush wins the next election - and he will - then maybe blair will catch up with the rest of europe and realise that gwb is not the only dangerous american.
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Your comment only makes sense ift the US only has invaded countries recently because of 9/11.
Since the US has invaded Iraq, that would mean that you believe Iraq was somehow behind or supported 9/11.
If you believe that, you should be able to show why you believe such a strange thing.
Also, you would be calling the US administration liars, since that was not the stated reason for the invasion. Or if it was, it was one of many.
GO. VOTE. IN. 2004.
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The result of this growing disparity between the haves and have nots. I mean everyone acknowledges that brain drain happens because the conditions in some other country are much better than conditions in one's home country, which used to be the case in India up until 90s, but now I think the process has slowed. I know that there are a lot of slashdotters who oppose Indians taking their jobs, but the point is that this is the only area where Indians were able to compete with US, in the face of such a huge disparity. Did you know that US pays a 3 Billion dollars subsidy to its cotton farmers every year. And do you know the number of cotton farmers in US? 25000. Which means a subsidy of 120,000 USD per farmer per year, enough to hire two software engineers. These farmers then compete with farmers of countries like India in the international market whose per capita income is 500 USD per year . That is the irony of the situation that these poaching practices killed almost all the industries of the developing countries, and now the only capital they are left with is their people. (India used to be the biggest producer of cotton once upon a time btw). So now we are seeing them fighting back with the only resource they have. How come slashdotters can make societies to ban H1Bs but can't make societies to ask their sentors to cut down the subsidies being given to already rich farmers and maybe invest this money to make education cheaper or start some other development activity? That is the tragedy of US, that every economist says these policies are bad, every senator knows that as well, but majority of the people are not aware because it doesn't affect them directly. All I am saying is don't fight what you see in front. Spare some thought for the causes behind the problem as well.
What's under yellowstone?
It really depends how you define "anything." Much of Osama Bin Laden's anger with the United States was, in fact, a result of the first Gulf War. They didn't like the fact we ended up with bases in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait.
and Japan, Europe, and 100+ other countries we have troops in for no goddamn reason
What's it like to live in ignorance?
Here's some truth for you: the fact that you are unaware of it does not mean it doesn't exist.
Well reasoned arguments, but the premises, like the terminology used, are vague and nebulous. Put another way, I don't buy your arguments.
People don't buy solutions. They're marketed solutions. Which is nicer and very modern way of saying "they're sold a sales pitch."
I've never bought anything from Dell or Compaq, but if I did, I would know that, unlike the vast majority of their customers, I would be buying a Wintel machine assembled by that company. And to the extent that Wintel machine included any proprietary components, I would know they're as authentic as my local supermarket brand of razor blades.
It's sort of like produce. You see and hear "Vons is value" and the salad on your dinner table may have been marketed to you as a "solution," but it's really just lettuce grown nearby and picked by migrant workers.
iraq didn't have anything to do with 911
Right. They would have, however, been the source of the next one. Now they're not.
gwb is not the only dangerous american
That's right. Americans are very fucking dangerous. Don't fuck with us.
A dollar spent by an American worker on diapers or baby food or schoolbooks is more important to our well being than two dollars spent by Bill Gates for licences to SCO technology. Redirecting wealth the the middle class may be more important than GNP. Higher median household income is more important than lower Capital gains rates for Larry Ellison. American have always competed, we just don't need the deck stacked against working families.
Perhaps, McNealy is referring to #1 in the sense of #1 performance. Again, the #1 in performance is the triad: Power architecture (with implementations being Power4, Power4+, Power5), the Itanium architecture (with implementations being Itanium 2, 3, etc.), and the x86 architecture (with implementations being the Pentium 4, etc.). A quick review of the performance stats at SPEC should clarify any confusion. The SPARC is among the worst processors in terms of performance.
Below is the second key quote.
Compared to IBM, Sun is #1 -- in the sense that Sun has more H-1B employees. IBM, as a matter of corporate policy, refuses to hire any H-1B workers unless they are applying for a job that requires a Ph.D. The Power4, which handily beats the UltraSPARC III in performance, was built almost exclusively by American citizens or permanent residents. No H-1Bs.
Perhaps, McNealy was referring to the number of H-1Bs when he was talking about the SPARC being the supposed #1 computing architecture.
I care more about execution than I did in the old days. In the old days, vision was really important. Today, you've got to have execution with vision.
And Sun has neither, moving into Intel based servers and distributing Linux, kind of like selling parts and charging for assembly and certification? Where did Scott learn to rationalize, the Larry Ellison School of Public Speaking???
good point. i wonder how the next osama bin laden will express his feelings about america having bases in saudi arabia, kuwait and iraq (which is also occupied by america).
considering that obl's lesser rationalisation resulted in four downed airliners, several demolished buildings (including wtc 1 & 2), severe damage to several more (including the pentagon) and the deaths of nearly 3,000 people.
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This quote sounds like it came from an employee of SCO--not Sun! Is this not a restatement of Darl McBride's rip on IBM and all other GNU/Linux resellers/distributors? I thought Sun still contributing to GNOME and shipping some system running Linux--thus themselves being a GNU/Linux distributor. And if they aren't paying royalties then why has SCO praised Sun for doing so?
I thought the majority of the "new desktop" is based around GNOME? Why is it that McNealy seems to be putting down the GNU/Linux community and then praising results from the community all in the same breath?
"I did meet (Gov. Gray) Davis once...in the rest room. We shook hands..."
;)
Was that before or after you washed your hands?
We've got the No. 1 64-bit computing architecture out there. Is SPARC the #1 computing architecture? Let us review the matter
Yes let's review the matter and remember that x86 arch is not 64 bit except for Itanium and I'm sure SPARC has way more market share than the Itanic.
----
In Soviet Russia, the overlords welcome you!
What Compaq ever did that was so great, I have no idea.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Personally, I don't see Sun sticking it out for the long haul, it seems to me that there master plan is to usurp Microsoft by moving the PC into the server, then serving up desktops as needed. I really think that the industry will move in another direction--servers will slowly become obsolete as more and more of a servers work is spread over employees PCs.
As PCs become more powerful and as storage becomes cheaper grid computing among offices will probably be way more efficient in the future. If you need CRM in your office maybe PC 22 and 23 will use half of there unused hard-drive space for that information and serve it up to the rest of the company- or perhaps the information could be spread throughout the entire companies computing grid.
Most office computers today do not use 100% of their CPU 100% of the time, how much more efficient could companies become if they started to use those extra cpu cylces. I think in the end (say 10-15 years) SUN will become a relic.
muppet.
i like the mature foreign policy. glad i left.
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Quote- "Nine years ago, I got married and the stock was a buck and my wife was very happy. It's at 4 bucks. She's happy. (So it) depends on when you get in." -What kind of logic is this? How good is that as an investment- 9 years and it's only up a buck? What about inflation?
His company's stock is way down in the toilet, his cash reserves are rapidly depleting, PC manufacturers are as close to eating into his 64bit marketshare as they've ever been, IBM is making him its bitch in the high-end market, yet his only concern is the market dominance of Microsoft.
Simply amazing. Get REAL, Scott, come up with a valid VIABLE business plan and execute on it. With cheap mainstream 64 bit computing around the corner you gotta do better than you do these days and sell your crap at competitive prices.
Compaq did the original cleanroom recreation of an IBM compatible BIOS, allowing clone sales. What they have done since does not stand out so much.
-- the computer doesn't want any beer, no matter how much you think it does. NEVER, EVER feed your computer beer.
Neither Sun nor Dell gives a hoot about American employees. The OEM for Dell is Taiwanese companies, and Sun hires mainly H-1Bs from India or Taiwan.
That is untrue and you are a troll for the Republicans. Clinton would not have allowed it period.
I think the point both Jobs and McNealy were making (probably tongue in cheek in both cases) is that nobody at Dell is concerned about what a "computer" ought to be. They have been phenomenally succesful at transforming parts from a variety of suppliers into computers on people's desks, but their innovation is almost entirely in different fronts of operations management. (Not that there's anything wrong with that.) Apple and Sun, and Alienware, for that matter, define the nature of what they sell in a way that Dell doesn't.
And this leads to an obvious question. Dell is able to sell products that meet millions of customers needs. They certainly sell more computers than Apple and they certainly beat Sun on desktops. So what is the innovation that Apple and Sun are bringing to the table? After all, with almost no R&D, Dell is able to sell a highly competitive product at a lower cost. I don't think there are too many Dell customers who thought they were settling for less.
I think the answer's more obvious for Sun in the monsterous machine catagory. But even that is looking rough as x86 scales up and out.
totally off topic but this really is beginning to bug me now.
/. editors don't even look at.
/. posts it. less and less am I even hitting /.s front page.
this article was the most confusing read I've ever seen. the entire thing is in italics but only a third of it is relevant. the other 2 thirds is opinion of the submitter.
CmdrTaco, what the hell is going on? in the last year things on slashdot have really gone to hell. Normally I would shout down someone making a post like this but its gone too far.
We've seen numerous re-posts and even re-re-posts. the stories at times have been utterly out of touch with their hype. headlines don't reflect the reality of linked articles that obviously the
Taco, I love slashdot. I really do. But, man, seriously you need to do something. Crack the whip on your boys. Care again. If not you will lose eyeballs. This isn't an idle possibility.
With the prevalence of RSS feeds more and more slashdotters are getting the info first hand days before
the quality of slashdot is dropping. We've seen a swift decline in the last year. Games.slashdot and a new navigation sidebar is not going to change things. Content, we all know, is king.
-
People that spend their entire lives looking at everything with a GWB factor need to seek help. Maybe you'll be able to see a doctor next week? Oh, socialized medicine. Maybe you'll get in sometime in 2006.
I was running up the stairs and stubbed my toe. "Damn you GWB!" I screamed. We do all agree it was somehow his fault don't we? It had to be. He is responsible for everything else. Do you visualize GWB when you have sex too?
Get a grip dude.
> These farmers then compete with farmers of countries like India in
> the international market whose per capita income is 500 USD per year
Well, it's an unfortunate outcome of the continual agricultural battle between the US and Europe. They're constantly one-upping each other with protectionism or subsidies, meanwhile wreaking havoc with the "lesser" players.
uh... Itanium isn't x86.
AMD64 is the 64bit version of x86.
As for the parent, I suspect they mean #1 in terms of units sold. There's prolly more UltraSPARC than any other 64bit CPU out there...
That means, among other things, taking advantage of the SCO situation by telling people to buy Linux or Solaris from Sun so that they can't get sued by SCO.
And you can see his current thinking in this quote: Note the "we have", as in "Sun has". The guy obviously views Sun's ownership of Java as analogous to Microsoft's ownership of
Linux or POSIX don't even enter into his thinking as platforms. He already thinks of the Linux and POSIX APIs as being irrelevant, supplanted by Java APIs, APIs that, by his own statement, Sun effectively owns.
At least with Gates, people know exactly where he stands. McNealy is dangerous because some people actually believe his talk of openness and support of free software. But make no mistake: if it would help his business, the guy would clearly not hesitate a second to kill Linux or grab control of it. And that's just what he is trying to do, both with Java and with his SCO-related efforts.
That's what happened to my family. My grandparents (and their ancestors too) were farmers in India, but globalization of their crops caused cheaper substitutes from Southeast Asia and America to undercut their way of life. They had no choice but to make sure their children became educated, since it was the only way out of their shitholes. And those educated children came to high paying jobs in America.
So the moral of the story is, keep on learning or become jobless.
"We own our entire software suite. We can do software indemnification. We don't pay any royalties."
This quote sounds like it came from an employee of SCO--not Sun!
No... SCO would say "We own *your* entire software suite.
-a
So, what's with the commentary ? Clearly, it was by some twenty-something, who was has never held a job at any level of responsibility. Execution my friend is the realization of vision; and, by the way it is not about how you feel. The article was quite good. I am a fan of Sun (which is not the same as Scott) - great inovation over twenty some years. Sure, as scott says they have done many things wrong. And, yes, Dell is a great spare-parts distributor - not that there is anyting wrong with that either.
So which is the #1 64 bit architecture out there? Well, PA-RISC and Alpha are systems which HP is trying to replace with Itaniums. Shame really, they were both very good systems. The Opteron is outselling the Itanium, which is fantastic, except it looks like the Itanium is selling at a rate of about 13000 a year, so neither of the 64-bit ones coming from teh x86 shops are really in the running at the moment. And where's MIPS these days? That leaves SPARC, Power4+ and the PPC970 (too early to tell for that one). Well, the Power4+ seems to perform better than the UltraSPARC, but it only goes up to 32 processors per box, as opposed to 106 for the UltraSPARC III. For quite a lot of applications, large numbers of processors in a box is better than clusters, so these really do offer a lot in terms of performance. I'd expect that those 106 way Sun boxes to have very high scores in the Spec throughput tests.
There's also other measures of quality, such as reliability. IBM has a pretty good reputation for it with the high end products (there was that one story about some ols S/390 which was up for 8 years and only the case was part of the original install), but then again, Sun doesn't have a bad reputation there either. They're both good, and x86 is nowhere near either of them.
So is the SPARC the #1 64 bit architecture out there? Depends on what you mean by #1, but it's certainly a contender for many definitions.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
And that's not just true in sports, but also in business - I get emails all the time at work that basically encourage us to work harder executing the plans handed down from On High, but never for a moment consider that it's a suboptimal plan, right up to the email that announces a new plan to execute, from the same people who announced the last one....
[100% ISO 646 Compliant]
SVM, ERGO MONSTRO.
Here is another example. Remember the SPARC64 by Fujitsu? It too beats the pants off the UltraSPARC III. Yet, in Japan, Fujitsu generally does not hire the equivalent of H-1Bs. The SPARC64 was built largely by native labor.
That destroys 1 bogus claim.
Here is another bogus claim. The supporters of H-1Bs are mostly foreigners who want desparately to come into the USA. They claim that you need H-1Bs in order to keep wages and, hence, prices in check. In short, in their view of the world, the world can function properly if and only if there are impoverished people who are desparate to get out of their homelands. Yet, isn't the goal of the United Nations to bring everyone to prosperity?
Let's face the matter directly. Shut off the H-1B faucet. The economy always heals itself of any shortage. Read any economics book. When there is a shortage, the economy self-heals. In the case of engineers, if there were a shortage, then wages would rise. Higher wages attract more engineers. Will the price of new products rise? Probably. However, after they become commoditized, then their prices will fall. The economy is really a cycle.
Anyhow, the H-1B program is unnecessary. In fact, it is detrimental to American society. Please. Do somethng about the problem. Most of us in the Slashdot community oppose the H-1B program. Let us work together to petition the government to terminate both the L-1 program and the H-1B program. Do not wait of the guy sitting at the next computer to do your civic responsibility . Move your ass. Do your job.
The best decisions come from the integration of feeling and thought
When emotions enter the equation of making critical decisions, 9 times out of 10, you will make a poor decision (that other time you were just damn lucky).
Its a good thing good (successful) military commanders don't follow this highly flawed philosophy of using "feelings" to make decisions.
You use experience, wisdom, logic and analysis to make good decisions. Feelings and emotions are best left at the door.
sad robot making broken music
McNealy is ignorant of his own company's practices.
Interesting. Let's take a side trip to the grocery store.
... okay, so you don't buy off-the-shelf computers from Dell or Compaq. Do you weave your own clothes? Do you generate your own electricity, or does it just come out of the wall? Do you make your own toothpaste? Do you grow your own food? How self-reliant are you about avoiding things that you and your neighbors don't make?
A head of lettuce: definitely a product. Not very useful to the customer until they combine and customize it with other products.
A ready-made salad in a clamshell dish with a plastic fork, plastic knife, napkin, and a pack of dressing: a lunch solution.
Some people go for the solution (especially when it comes from a restaurant rather than a grocery store); some people compose their own solutions from grocery store products.
Flour and yeast: products. Sliced bread: a solution. In this case, most people go for the turnkey "solution" most of the time.
Actually, "product" and "solution" are just crude categories here; there's actually a continuous scale from "grow the grain yourself" to "hot pizza $2 per slice".
But damn
Me, I'm happy to buy turnkey desktop and laptop computers, and then slap a turnkey Linux distro on them and start doing things.
There's nothing inherently good or bad about products versus solutions; it depends on the specifics of the products and the desires of the customers.
In other fields:
CD's and MP3's: very turnkey solution.
Sheet music and guitar tabs: nice raw product.
ftp.gnu.org: many fine products that do fine things
Debian CD: a solution for your personal computing needs
One interesting thing about open source is that there are legions of volunteer programmers working on products, and a complementary spectrum of for-profit companies (plus a few not-for-profit groups like Debian) offering solutions based on those products, and they are working out novel arrangements for mutual co-operation.
So its Java vs .Net? Everything is so black-and-white to him. Hasnt he forgotten about another community, the one that MS considers its enemy no.1? The one (with the help of IBM) eating Suns launch?
US-UK-Israel: The real Axis of Evil
Thats because they have not had the chance, any company would become a monopoly given the chance. Just because you do not own microsoft, shut your hole, asshat.
It is official; Yahoo confirms: Java is dying
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered Java community when IDC confirmed that Java market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all programming language use. Coming on the heels of a recent Yahoo report which plainly states that Java has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. Java is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict Java's future. The hand writing is on the wall: Java faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for Java because Java is dying. Things are looking very bad for Java. As many of us are already aware, Java continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
Sun leader Scott McNealy states that there are 7000 users of J2EE. How many users of J2ME are there? Let's see. The number of J2EE versus J2ME posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 J2ME users. GCJ posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of J2ME posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of GCJ. A recent article put J2SE at about 80 percent of the Java market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 J2SE users. This is consistent with the number of J2SE usenet posts.
Due to the troubles of Java, abysmal sales and so on, Sun went out of business and will probably be taken over by IBM who sell another troubled programming language. Now IBM is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that Java has steadily declined in market share. Java is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If Java is to survive at all it will be among programming dilettante dabblers. Java continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, Java is dead.
Fact: Java is dying
I'm surprised by the vehemence of the posts regarding my commentary. I've been reading /. for years. I really did think the first post was supposed to be provocative. It must be my autism. Point taken. In the unlikely event I have something to post in the future, I'll put any commentary where it can be moderated.
Obviously Sun has accomplished a lot. It's an extremely successful business. DEC was another extremely successful business. 'Staying power' may not be important, or even desireable in today's economy.
Still, it's sad to see how people as capable as Scott McNealy can be so preoccupied with hubris. In the interview he says, 'We need to be more aligned in terms of skill sets and we've got that with the new team. We've got exactly who I wanted in there to run the joint.' That's nice, but the shareholders may not want 'yes men' and 'yes women'.
Cheers!
Of course I've been modded down. Why not respond to my post? How can this be considered a front page-worthy story when it only consists of the submitter's opinions?
"The meek shall inherit the earth, the rest of us shall go to the stars." Isaac Asimov
Please stop being logical as a defense against the Bush-bashers, otherwise they do not have a point.
This is a wonderfully naive point of view that seems to be very common on Slashdot. While it might be true in some industries, it makes me think you don't have much experience with H1-B's at the higher levels of the tech industry. So I'm going on a rant....
<rant>
I was a manager at IBM for a couple of years, and in that time I think I hired two or three people on H1-B visas and helped one or two more apply for green cards. (With some overlap between the sets.) This was out of a group of abut a dozen people, so maybe a third of my team was on some sort of visa. The reasons had nothing to do with saving money or time. Instead, the reason was simple: a talent shortage.
My group and the others at our site were feeding off the top of the programmer food chain, to borrow an analogy. We needed engineers who knew the ins and outs of Java and/or C++, had a good grasp of OOD, and were able to figure out the details of standards documents and implement them, or even to help write them in the first place. Just as important, we needed people who were smart and could learn new technologies and languages quickly.
People like this were very hard to find at the height of the tech boom here in the Valley. When I was at IBM I and my group did a lot of interviewing, both on the phone and in person. It took up a lot of time. We got resumes from outside recruiters and we got a lot of transfer requests from other parts of the company. Even with all of those resumes, I still couldn't hire people as fast as I wanted to. Sure, there were lots of engineers available, but most of them just weren't that good. Truly talented "star" engineers are rare.
When I found a star, I did what it took to hire them, even if they weren't a US citizen. H1-B paperwork is a royal PITA, as is getting approval from umpteen levels of management. (If you're a really bad person, you come back in the next life as an immigration lawyer.) It also costs a lot of money to sponsor someone for an H1. I think it was around $5,000 when you added up the application fees, lawyer's fees and so on, but I can't remember. Then you have to do the green card a year or so later, and it costs even more and has more paperwork.
We definitely weren't saving money by hiring people on H1-B's. In addition to the legal fees and management time we spent on the visas, we were paying the H1 folks the same salaries we'd pay anyone else. Every few months we'd informally rank all the employees at the site and make sure the salaries lined up with the rankings, with absolutely no concern over visa status. The better, more productive engineers got paid more, period. There were definitely senior engineers who happened to be on H1's who got paid more than more junior (but still bright) engineers without much experience. I didn't see any correlation with visa status, except maybe that I never made any college hires of people on H1's. (It wouldn't have been worth the expense of flying them over here for an interview; the same thing applies to out-of-town junior-level US people.)
Many people think that market conditions have changed in the last few years and that H1s are now mostly obsolete. I think that may be true at some levels of the industry. But even with all the layoffs in the last couple of years, extremely bright "star" engineers are still hard to find. For an example, look at all the engineering openings at Google. You'd think that in a down economy with lots of engineers out of work, they'd be able to hire people as quickly as they wanted to. If they wanted just anybody, that might be true. But they're also feeding off the top of the food chain; they only want
Yes they both have a lot of proprietary mid/high-end server and mainframe equipment out in the field with specialized engineers ready to maintain them etc etc
However, IBM covers every single facet of IT - from database, to servers (midrange and mainframe), services, components, R&D, software etc. Sun really only has it's servers and Java - yes it may dabble in many areas, but it doesn't really have a strong business in any but it's server division.
When one section of IBM falters due to market conditions or bad 'execution', the other sections can support it. Sun doesn't have that luxury.
In simplistic terms, I see Sun like your local fruit and veg store, while IBM is your supermarket chain. The fruit and veg store may be good at what it does, but the supermarket chain is more like to survive changes in consumer demand.
Amen, brother. I'm a white-anglo-saxon-US-citizen, and I think those subsidies are disgusting (btw, I heard they were $4bn!). They make my skin crawl every time I see those "Fabric of our lives" commercials on TV (I don't know if you live in the US, but we regularly see high-production-value ads from the cotton industry on prime time TV -- as if those actually make people buy more cotton shirts!).
At any rate, it's the worst form of protectionism, and it comes even more directly on the back of the US taxpayer than the H1-B thing that people are complaining about here.
Sun's solution includes - is based around - the UltraSPARC series of processors. Okay, they'll flog you an x86 box if you insist on one, but that's a side-issue. Sun sell tin; the software exists to make the tin useful. You can't make yourself a F15k out of open source and industry standards.
Author, Shell Scripting : Expert Re
Just to clarify, the Power4 is a dual-core processor, so the 32-chip IBM server has 64 processor cores and 23 L2 caches.
Who do you get to be an expert to tell you something's not obvious? The least insightful person you can find? -J Roberts
I so want to support the man. But I can't stop this nagging feeling that he's ever so slightly deluded and actually, Sun is fucked, capitalism is getting more and more broken, losing tech jobs is a problem, golf does suck, etc. Pessimism, I guess. I hope.
Maybe 'industry standards' was not the right term. Maybe we need another name for technolgy supplied by multiple venders.
Still it was obvious these questions were about how Sun will do in a world where people go for solutions with multiple suppliers.
Scott showed a lot of candor on some issues but just danced around this one.
Religion is the main cause of atheism.
so are we.
so what ahppens in the latest sun employee layoffs is their CEo doens't have feelings?
Okay okay actually its the opposite this CEO strongest feelings is saved for calling OpenGroup out to get Sun adn that Linux will bury sun at least in his more private talks and interviews for the history of unix..:)
Remember folks this is the saem CEo who had a had in splitting and fragmenting Unix to give Solaris OS its push in the market place..don't be fooled
Don't Tread on OpenSource
From the article: That's the big change that's going on here. The (computer) world is moving from building your own components like a Linux blade or Sparc server or NetApps storage device, to finding the system complete, which is where we're focused and where we're spending R&D dollars.
While a few other posters have argued that building a system ad hoc can be advantageus, nobody can really deny the fact that many functions performed by computers today will be performed by commodity hardware tommorow. For example, you can play a dvd using your pc, but I find it much easier to just plug the disk into the dvd player and watch it on tv. Another example is PDA's, watches, cel phones etc. As these machines grow smarter, they will eventualy need a more serious operating system of some sort. But on the other hand I wouldn't like to spend all of my time trying to administer these machines. I like my cell phone to do what it does whithout me having to worry much about it staying functional. And I don't care if your phone has more megahertz's and memory than mine, as long as I can make my phonecalls and store my numbers easily. It is not a question of technical superiority any more.
The same (IMHO always) will happen someday to servers, networking equipement, storage devices. At least a smaller amount of care will be required to maintain the machine in a stable state. This is why I believe Sun has a point. If they can produce trustworthy equipement which does its job while causing as little trouble as possible installing and maintaining it, I think they may gain an edge.
Compared to IBM, Sun is #1 -- in the sense that Sun has more H-1B employees. IBM, as a matter of corporate policy, refuses to hire any H-1B workers unless they are applying for a job that requires a Ph.D. The Power4, which handily beats the UltraSPARC III in performance, was built almost exclusively by American citizens or permanent residents. No H-1Bs.
..just like everyone else. I know this for a fact. Also, I know it'll piss you off ..but IBM is VERY diverse.
.. a google says it's Ravi Arimilli .. that sounds indian to me. LOL .. that must piss you off!!
Where did you come up with such a stupid ass IGNORANT blanket statement like that.
I used to work for IBM. They hire(d) H1-B's like crazy
Go look up who the chief architect for the power5 is
Quit spreading dirty lies and propaganda you piece of shit.
Why should I pay someone $50 to mow my lawn, when the kid next door will do it for $10?
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
Some USians here forget something very important: the US education system sucks.
/.ers would become reality and a dumb goverment (this one for example) would close the doors. But better not, if the US economy takes a real hit (not the mild recession we are experiencing) populist protectionism would run amock...
Yes, the US has some impressive institutions, leaders in the world. But all the others are pure mediocrity (and the syteme of majors and minors in University is a waste).
Educated foreign workers are required in the US because you don't have enough talented people and luckily for your economy and your society, your companies are willing to stand the quasi racist, protectionist barking in order to bring those workers to the US.
I have worked all around the world, consistently the brightest people from India, Vietnam, Venezuela or Nigeria perform better than most US educated people in a mediocre system, many jobs in the US would go unfilled if this people was not allowed to enter the US.
I whish the wish of so many USian
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
A piece of software runs faster in a new Intel machine than in an old Sprc one.
I am tempted to write "news at 11" but I am not that ironic.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
One of the great things about Scott is that he always has something interesting to say. Maybe he's right. Maybe he isn't. Maybe you agree with him; maybe you don't. I'm pretty sure he couldn't care less either way. But you must admit that he has something to say. He pulls no punches and he names names. Compare and contrast with other CEOs of other major companies who speak only corporate doubletalk and even then only with prior approval of the PR department.
And as for Sun's staying power, who knows? I don't. You don't. They've been around for 20 years and have seen an absolute ton of competitors come and go. Many of you probably thought that SGI was going to bury Sun with superior graphics and the MIPS processor. Didn't happen. Or that HP was going to clean their clock with the PA-RISC processor. Ditto. I know that many of you were convinced that either/both of things were going to happen. They didn't.
Can Sun survive in an X86-64 world? Why not? Sun is, primarily, a manufacturing and distribution company. They're as good at it as anyone and better than most.
And this leads to an obvious question. Dell is able to sell products that meet millions of customers needs. They certainly sell more computers than Apple and they certainly beat Sun on desktops. So what is the innovation that Apple and Sun are bringing to the table? After all, with almost no R&D, Dell is able to sell a highly competitive product at a lower cost. I don't think there are too many Dell customers who thought they were settling for less.
They're shifting a commodity product. Classic economics: high-volume, low margin vs. low-volume high-margin, sure Sun don't sell many F15K's but they do sell a significant number of smaller boxes in the 8 to 24 CPU bracket. List price they make over 90% margin on every box they sell - as do HP and IBM. Simple, there's room for both. Dell are piggy-backing off of intel's R&D, Sun invest billions in R&D and recoup the investment over the longer term, on boxes which are as scalable as they are upgradable (with faster CPU's etc.) Sun Enterprise boxes, the 3000-6500 are still holding a amazing amount of their value 6 years after they came out, on a chassis which will accept 167MHz-400MHz CPUs. Just have a look on ebay.
Many problems can be solved by clustering cheap boxes together to achieve parallelism, some problems can't. Some customers need ultra reliable, 64bit big iron boxes with masses of storage. Many don't. Most slashdotters have never experienced high-end enterprise computing, a few have.
I've said it before, I'll say it again - the day Sun stop investing in SPARC/Solaris is the day I sell my stock - I'm not at all happy with the Xeon box precedent, but Sun have had short lived product lines like this before, I wouldn't touch them with a barge pole.
# init 5
Connection closed.
Oh...
Oh god, that was the worst slashdot story I've read. The submitter should post his uninformed comments in the comment section where they belong, and michael shouldn't be publishing it. Hello? Editing standards?
Sun has got the be the most mistundestood company in the business. No one has any idea what they're doing and how are they still making money? Dell and Linux and everything are the hot thing in the industry, right? For some areas, yes, but the fact is that no one does big iron like Sun. Xeons and clusters are fine for some uses, but there are applications where only true SMP (although even Sun's latest solutions aren't completely true SMP, thats why they don't make such a big deal about it anymore) servers that cost in the millions do the job.
So, what's the point of buying a Sun box these days? Other than having an obsolete operating system running on top of aging hardware, the advantages of Sun's model seem legion!
This is my sig.
You missed an impartant part of that quote... You know, the bit about 64 bit, which imediately means you must discount x86 as it's only 32.
Tp.
Depends on the application profiles according to Jim Gray (the Bill Joy of Microsoft). The article makes a lot of sense.
Not exactly. Back in 1995, Sun was looking into buying Apple, encouraged by then-Apple-CEO Michael Spindler. Reportedly, talks broke down after Apple announced a large quarterly loss.
No, what he is actually saying is that Sun does not need to spend time worrying about whether or not they will need to defend themselves from a potential suit from SCO here. They have the appropriate rights to all of the software that they distribute. They can use their time far more productively than worrying about SCO going after them too.
Tp.
Here's the main problem with Slashdot. Remember when he posted a personal compaint w/ Speakeasy on every story for day? Take a look here if you don't.
This guy is way out there
We'd know they were just going to pull an SCO.
Scott McNealy is just a drunken Irish toothless
... "F**K OFF!"
fool impersonating a Central Executive Officer
of a company called SUN.
He probably tried, unsuccessfully, to market his
current blather to the Wall Street Journal,
New York Times, Washington Post, Miami Hearold,
London Times, LA Times, and then in a vodka
blur he, finally, gets an opening with "SFGate".
Duha.
Bill Joy, the real Intellectual Property at SUN
just said to SUN and McNealy
Scott, poor fool, was all but too glad to ablidge.
I'm really interested; are there any high profile tech industry leaders who are not largely Libertarian? I mean, is a progressive liberal tech industry leader completely unheard of? It's seem that so very often I see this same trend in the tech workforce, especially the younger people.
...er, "in defense".
"The market economy is all about winners and losers. You can't have winners without losers. Without losers, you don't have winners.
I'm just a raging libertarian. I'm not a believer in anarchy or no regulation. I believe there is a role for government in state, in defense."
There's nothing like the discovery of another "raging libertarian" directing billions of dollars and thousands of workers to bring just a little more gloom to my day.
Ah, wonderful. You see folks, even though he's "raging", he doesn't believe in "anarchy or no regulation", it's just that what comes to mind for him as the only significant role of government is
"Defense" from dirty, no-good progressive social programs, no doubt!
And so, more or less folks, if you lose your job, Scott just isn't interested in doing anything about it, because you are just a loser. It's just the way things are; unfortunate as it may be, we just can't change it. I'm really sorry.
But, do not dispair! For if it weren't for you being as big a loser as you are, people like Scott wouldn't be able to be as big of winners as they are. I'm sure he's quite grateful for your contribution.
Now, if you'll please just work for a little bit less, drop this unionizing crap, and stop demanding minimal levels of health care, that would be just dandy.
Aren't you glad, you hard working Libertarian party members, that your bosses are upstanding Libertarians themselves? They truly are splendid examples of the truth of the Libertarian party line and the undeniable truth of "Objectivist" ethics.
Yes? I couldn't agree more. You are in good company.
.sig Realistic fines for copyright in
Sounds like the misguided "sequoia" person thinks that he knows a whole lot more about running sun, or any hi tech company, than Mr McNealy. If "sequoia" is so superior, why isn't he running a multi-billion dollar company?
Shit, anyone can be a monday morning quarterback, or a back seat driver.. but if you've never been the game day QB or the guy at the helm, you really don't have any right to go spouting off like this fat-tree guy did.
Let's PLEASE get back to factual summerizations for the stories, and leave the message boards for the ranting and misguided opinions.
Now for my opinion: with the name like sequoia and his incredible bias against Sun, this guy most likely works for microsoft.
You pro-immigrant forces always do. It's not a racism/xenophobia question. It is a question of good, sensible policy. It's time to rationalize
the immigration system.
BTW, we had a higher growth rate when we had
protectionism. Higher savings. Less crime.
More civic mindedness. More kids. Greater
optimism. More social progress.
It's a question of balance and moderation.
It's time to return to our senses and take
control of our borders.
When an executive says from the beginning that execution is the key, it means the business plan is shaky.
Woah, what the fuck kinda crack are you on?
You can have the best business plan in the world, but without 'on the mark' EXECUTION, you won't be a winner. Period.
If Speakeasy serviced my area (I can't get DSL at all), I would go through them. Even moreso after the bitch's whining. Any company that doesn't want the bitch for a customer is OK in my book.
I'm sure I'm not the only one. The bitch's whining probrably HELPED Speakeasy's sales.
Disclaimer: for those offended by me referring to Mikey as "the bitch" allow me to apologize to the adult female dogs.
It sounds like whoever wrote that header has a clue. Cheers to the slashdot.org crew for publishing his take. I read McNealy talking about how he is a Libertarian (Why don't they call themselves Orwellians?), and is so happy market forces "are taking over" -- so the next time I take the train into Manhattan I can see bag ladies everywhere smelling like raw sewage, just the way it was when I was a kid in the '80s after the Reagan's policies destroyed so many lives... I want to puke.
this
"When someone says the sun sucks, say, "Yeah, the sun sucks. Long live the fsckin beast..." (off-topic, but who cares...)
$1.00 for the first person to guess who Sun and Microsoft are in this allegory.
This space for rent.
dont know, but maybe we should be !
So which Native American tribe do you belong to?
I've already posted so I can't mod this one up. If someone has some points to spare, please consider moderating this one up. There are some very good points made by this poster. I have a different perspective on things, but these are the right questions to be asking.
:-)
Disclaimer: these are my opinions, not necessarily those of my employer.
EDA vendors are not in the business of maintaining and supporting every flavour of Linux distribution out there. That's part of the motivation behind only officially supporting tools on the professionally supported (a.k.a costs real money) distros. There's nothing to stop the power users from building and using their own ultra-optimized version/flavour/distro of Linux, but if you run into problems, make sure you have verified that they exist on the supported platform.
In other words, invest in at least one machine with the supported and conventionally maintained, professional distro. No custom kernels, compilers or anything modified from the stock, "up2date maintained" install. Verify that the problem exists and can be replicated on that platform if you expect a problem to be addressed. It sounds like common sense, but you'd be surprised...
My IBM T30 Thinkpad out-performs my Tadpole UltraSPARC laptop for all my mobile EDA computing needs, so it's a moot point for me.
--The more you know, the less you know.
More than mere navel gazing.
What gets me is you liberals think you have a monopily on wanting social justice. When you can explain why I should be forced to fund your social welfare programs that have failed time after time and your job killing labor laws perhaps more would give you some kind of attention.
I can think of no better social justice program then giving everyone a living wage job that wants one. You liberals would rather allow illegal aliens to come into the country and force me to support them and their kids than let the limmited job market be forced to pay US citizens what they are worth and offer compteive benfits. Just one example of your liberal left wing stupidity.
Oh did I mention Scott is a moron just like you.
I'm not at all happy with the Xeon box precedent, but Sun have had short lived product lines like this before, I wouldn't touch them with a barge pole.
Being a collector of old hardware, I would love to have a Sun 386i.
I think the new Sun Xeon boxes probably have as much potential for Sun.
A Good Intro to NetBS
'Michael Dell is the greatest spare parts distributor out there. He'll get you a piston ring or a carburetor or a crank shaft at a really low cost.'
Have any of yall ever purchased "spare" parts from Dell...
How about their special memory only they seem to have, or a spare matching CPU ???
I haven't seen these "low cost" anywhere?? Have you?
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
He is a businessman. His company exists to make money.
Where's the news in that?
More importantly, why would that be a reason not to trust him?
I don't think anyone believes in his talk of "openness" and "support of free software" because they think he's a raving GNU hippie.
Rather, it would be because he believes, and asks his shareholders to believe, that it's good for Sun's business plan.
Usually, the people who believe him are convinced of that too.
Usually, people believe they will not kill/control Linux because it would be risky, unprofitable, doomed to fail, or all three.
This is no different from IBM, or any other pro-OSS company. We all know they're in the game to make a profit. We all know they'll leave if they do not. That's THEIR JOB. To do otherwise would be unethical, since their obligation is with their shareholders, not with Free Software.
You can trust someone only when you understand his motivations.
It took some time for "business" to trust the concepts of Free Software and Open Source, because it took them some time to understand the motivations of the community. A businessman's motivations are remarkably simpler to understand.
You just can't expect all of your allies to share your own motivations, or that list will be very short.
Freedom is the freedom to say 2+2=4, everything else follows...
As for Ravi Arimilli, he was born in India but came to the USA when he was a kid. He graduated from high school in Louisiana. He also obtained a degree from Lousiana State University. No. He was not an H-1B.
Yes. There are numerous foreigners working at IBM, but they have American permanent residence.
As for Ravi Arimilli (who is the architect of the Power4), he was born in India but came to the USA when he was a kid. He graduated from high school in Louisiana. He also obtained a degree from Lousiana State University. No. He was not an H-1B.
Here's the problem. Programmer makes 80K a year. Boss thinks, "gee, I can hire a guest worker for 50K a year instead". So. Boss gets 30K more a year, guest workter gets $50K a year.
No, sorry, that's not the way it works. I'm sure there are some H-1b workers that are underpaid, but that's not the usual situation in my experience. H-1b workers are a lot of work to hire in the first place and any manager recruiting overseas in an attempt to save money would be a fool. Furthermore H-1b visas have become fairly portable so if he underpays them, they can just leave.
The reason why companies hire H-1b workers is because there really is a shortage of good software professionals in the US, at any price. If the boss really wanted to save money, he'd outsource the job to India. The fact that he offers people H-1b visas to come to the US is a perk he uses to compete for an already small and competitive pool.
And American looses his job. Yes. World is technicly better off. But American workers are NOT better off.
"American" loses his job anyway--it wasn't an "American" job in the first place. I mean, Sun and companies like that are global companies--they sell everywhere, they should hire everywhere. But they still have disproportionate numbers of jobs in the US. In any case, if it's outsourced to India rather than handled by an Indian immigrant, "American" doesn't even get the tax benefits.
What's worse, the American worker paid for the road that that the foreign worker now drives to work and pays for the school that the foreign workers kids now go to.
And the foreign worker's education and health care was paid for by the tax payers where he grew up. To get the equivalent of one high-powered programmer through the H-1b program, the US would have to give dozens of kids a high quality education domestically so that one of them would turn out to take that job. Given that the US really only hires the best and brightest, this is one sweet, money-saving deal for the US and one lousy deal for everybody else.
Furthermore, the notion that people come to the US for tax-payer funded education or other government services is laughable. To get a good education, they either have to move into very high-priced neighborhoods, or they just have to pay for a good schools outright.
Yup, most are subsidized by the government. Most Americans have student debt up to their eyeballs.
Bingo: the US is just not paying for the education of its own workers, and imports workers educated at the expense of other nations. That's because of incessant anti-government rhetoric by certain political groups in the US that has fallen on fertile ground with greedy voters (e.g. "Proposition 13"). The result has been a dismantling of public education in the US. Now, that you have a perfect right to complain about.
The reason to stop the H-1b program is not some bogus argument of it being unfair to US workers--it isn't unfair to US workers at all; the reason to stop it is that it's unfair to India, China, and Europe, who spend enormous resources educating people while Americans drive around in SUVs and build a megalomaniacal military with the money they save on social services and education.
Of course, if the H-1b workers aren't allowed in the US anymore, IT jobs won't magically appear in the US--the US just doesn't have the people to fill them with native-born workers. Instead, the IT industries in India, China, and Europe will become much more important relative to the US. US workers will only benefit once the US makes the additional effort of investing heavily in public education and social services. That means hundreds of billions of dollars a year in real tax dollars, like for example the hundreds of billions of dollars we are spending on wars and the military.
+ First brand to have equal reputation with IBM in the PC market.
+ Formed the royalty-free EISA standard, thus dooming the proprietary IBM Microchannel standard
+ First rackmounted Intel servers
+ First commodity 4-way Intel servers
Compaq did an enormous amount to advance "industry standard" computing, when those with divided loyalties (IBM, HP, DEC) wouldn't.
Look, you poor oppressed prick; at least you didn't have to wear a bustier and French kiss Madonna.
"We have one of two developer communities left on the planet, (Microsoft) . Net being the other. "
Sun and Microsoft are really peas in a pod, they are stuck in their thinking in a couple old models... but, we don't know if they will keep the world at their point, or if the world will move on as it seems it must.
-pyrrho
While the grandparent of this post seem to have a clear view of the difference between a product and a solution, the parent doesn't.
Just because something requires less effort on your part to make it do what you want it to (sliced bread vs flower and yeast) doesn't make it a solution.
With a product, the vendor determines the specifications and you decide if you want it or not. In the case of a solution, you tell the vendor what you want to be done, and they present an array of products which as a system will solve your particular problem.
The solutions are where Sun has ruled, and where IBM is riding Linux into their territory. Dell rules at moving the most units at the least overhead, without a care in the world how they're used. Apple is making a push into the enterprise, it'll be interesting to see what route they attempt.
~Lake
The article, "Experience with H-1Bs?", actually describes a violation of the H-1B laws. Please join with me to contact the Department of Labor. It has a web site with contact information. Please forward the article to the Department of Labor.
What violation is described in the article? Well, the intent of the H-1B laws is to allow companies to hire foreign workers when they cannot find American workers with the right skills. For example, suppose that a job requires a person who can wrote C-language code. If the American company cannot find an American who can write C-language code, then the American company may hire a foreign worker via an H-1B visa.
However, the H-1B laws do not allow the following situation. Suppose that the American company actually finds an American who can write C-language code. Yet, the company knows of a foreign worker who can write even better C-language code. So, the company then hires the foreign worker.
Unethical American companies exploit the H-1B laws in order to give them access to the entire world's labor market -- from the very beginning of the hiring cycle. Then, these unethical American companies proceed to hire the best talent in the world's labor market. Do the H-1B laws allow this kind of exploitation. No. Absolutely not.
The H-1B laws require American companies to access only the American labor market. If, at the end of the hiring cycle, they cannot find someone with the needed skills, then they can access the world's labor market.
Please join with me to report possible labor violations at Google and IBM to the Department of Labor. If the author of the article is telling the truth, then we must also report this story to IBM's department of human resources. IBM will likely fire the person who was author's manager when the author was employed at IBM. IBM discourages the use of H-1B workers unless the position requires a Ph.D.
A: Does anybody see a disparity in that question? We are the one company that has a major market position in every one of the key components in horizontal and vertical (small and large-scale computing) and Web services.
-pyrrho
I am in this to provide a great return for the long-term shareholders, to provide a great alternative to what I think is an incredibly important problem to solve.
to provide a great alternative important problem? as in, the problem is "How do I get out of this lock in I have with Microsoft?" and the alternative, equally important problem is, "How do I get out of this lock in I have with Sun?"
And to say the important thing is "execution", is Execuspeak for, "My ideas are flawless, it's all your fault if it doesn't actually work." Scott really thinks that Microsoft has proven ideas don't matter, that Microsoft's ideas are bad and it's succeeded.
But no, Microsoft has sound ideas, oddly enough.
-pyrrho
But guess what? The chief architect of Power4, the most powerful UNIX processor in the world, is Ravi Arimilli. He never got a Ph.D. He graduated from Louisiana State University (LSU), which is barely average in the rankings. The IIT or NTU graduate would say that LSU sucks big time. Yet, the Power4 is #1. Processors like the UltraSPARC III, which were partly designed by NTU or IIT graduates, rank dead last in performance.
Guess what else? Mr. Arimilli prefers to live in Texas with his fellow Americans. Even though he was born in India, he does not want to live in California, which is infested with Indians.
Don't you see? Yankee ingenuity is what made this country great. Not a bunch of Ph.D.s from IIT or NTU. Also, a university like LSU, which is just "average", is pretty damn good.
The parent article was referring to the SPARC64-V, which was introduced at the HPCA-9 conference held this year, 2003. The SPARC64-V is mentioned in a paper. The design and implementation of the SPARC64-V was an entirely Japanese effort. Fujitsu does not hire the equivalent of H-1Bs.
The SPARC64-V was not built at HAL.
The SPARC64-V crushes the UltraSPARC III in performance. The UltraSPARC III was built by H-1B labor.
"Yes. So global companies grow globally. Shouldn't India be a little upset that we have most of their software programmers here?" India isnt afraid becaus they can pump out as many cheap code monkeys out as the world can take. Then they can pump out some more, just as a reserve. India has a limitless supply of code monkeys. They can be trained in three months to use the latest buzzword: .NET, JAVA, C#, XML, Capuccino, Earl Grey....
He is right in saying that the jobs that require brains will always move towards Western countries...even brilliant and highly trained IIT graduates. Now India should be worried about losing those. They are the ones who can really push the country forward technologically...
The original poster explained why he used H1-B visas thusly:
"The reasons had nothing to do with saving money or time. Instead, the reason was simple: a talent shortage."
This is precisely why the H1-B visa exists.
You suggest that in order to apply for an H1-B, there can be no Americans available with the same skill set, even if they are incompetent. As any immigration lawyer can tell you, this is flat out wrong.
Under the statute, companies are permitted to set the qualifications for the position any way they see fit. If they want to set a subjective cutoff based on skill level, that is their option. In the case of programers, this is a business necessity.
Remember, a single bad programer can easily do as much harm as ten other programmers do good.
If the law required us to hire any American who put C on their resume, it would have taken billions of dollars out of our economy over the course of the bubble. And believe you me, billions of extra dollars in the hands of American companies and shareholders results in a great many additional jobs for Americans.
So what is the innovation that Apple and Sun are bringing to the table?
... Dell took Apple's risk and made money off it. I don't see Dell experimenting and taking the risks for creating the products that we'll be using in five years time ...
Do Dells use USB? USB existed, but most people ignored it till the original iMac
I believe that is not the case. The whitepaper says that 4 chips are combined in to an 8 way SMP module, and 4 of these can be connected together to form a 32 way SMP. It only has 16 chips, though since they're dual-core.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Along with that India is producing replacements from its billion populace faster than the US would ever be happy to have them over to work!
I've don't have a problem with sunw products.
But I do have a problem with sunw/scox trying to hijack linux. If these companies have their way, linux as we now know it will be gone.
Unlike msft, sunw is very sneaky about it. Penguin-suit McSquealy pretends to advocate linux, while - in secret - sunw is supporting scox, and trying desperately to kill OSS.
Suck up to McSquealy is you like, but don't let this scummy company fool you. Sunw is much dirtier than msft.
While this might sound reasonable from an economic point of view, you have to consider the problems if you were ever at war. It's no use having a huge military force if you can't feed them because the country that supplies most of your food is one of the enemy.
Similarly, in the UK at least, there are subsidies paid to crofters (small scale farming type thing) for areas where they grow crops without using artificial fertilisers (they use seaweed as a natural alternative) or pesticides. In the event of a major nuclear attack, these knowledge and skill might be very necessary and so they're preserved.
I'm surprised more people don't know the reasons behind these things, but I suppose it would be a bit imprudent for a politician to openly state that your country was paying farmers subsidies just in case civilisation was destroyed!
Igor Presnyakov stole my hat
and for personal computers, Dell, Compaq, et al, do sell complete solutions.
Really? Personally, I've found the only thing that Dell sells is bigger problems.....
The Department of Labor would disagree. If the issue of "qualified" were entirely up to the subjective judgment of the employer, then any high-school graduate can see that the H-1B laws allow any unethical American company at any time to access the world's labor market. The article "Experience with H-1B's?" describes a violation of the H-1B laws, or the H-1B laws are broken. The Department of Labor will say that "Experience with H-1B's?" describes a violation of the H-1B laws.
Come on, folks. Forward a copy of "Experience with H-1B's?" to the Department of Labor. Check its contact information.
While you are on-line, please visit the web site called "H-1B Myths". Professor Norman Matloff is a professor at a top-notch university in computer science and has testified in Congress. He has claimed repeatedly that there is no labor shortage in computer science and that companies like Google hire only a tiny percentage of qualified applicants. The article "Experience with H-1B's?" confirms what Professor Matloff says and provides enough information to investigate a violation of the H-1B laws. The article claims that companies like Google and IBM want "star" programmers instead of merely "good" programmers.
"A: No, this is all very civil. I play ice hockey. I believe the beauty of the Darwinian capitalist market battles is that nobody gets -- I shouldn't say nobody -- very few people actually get physically injured." Curious what he had in mind, when correcting himself from "nobody" to "very few" ... For sure the set isn't empty, I bet it's a singleton -- oh Irony! Darwin would further call that failure to evolve...
Which is perfectly legal, as long as the requirement for the job isn't simply "can write C code". If the job requires expert knowledge of C++ or Java, OO API-design skills, the ability to implement W3C & ISO standards while working independently, and so on (all of these are things the folks in my group actually did), then your red herring doesn't apply.
Part of the whole visa process is (or was 3 years ago) a "Labor Condition Certification" application where you have to prove to the DOL that a person with the desired skills isn't available in the US. We did have one or two of these turned down; the one I remember involved someone who was extremely good but didn't have a college degree yet. These days with the market the way it is, I've heard that most companies won't look at people with H1's because they know that the Labor Condition application is very unlikely to be approved. As I said earlier, I have no idea what Google does. (I'm a US citizen so I had no reason to ask.)
Another poster claimed that IBM only hired H1-B workers if they had Ph.D.'s. This wasn't the case when I was there, though it may have changed since then. However, it was much easier to get a visa for someone with a Ph.D., because it was a lot easier to prove to the DOL that the same skills weren't available in the US. I think there might even have been a special "outstanding researcher" visa for Ph.D.'s. I don't remember the details because I never actually did this.
Many geeks believe it's the idea that matters, but it matters less than actually executing it.
Big Daddy, Johnny, Burp, Aunt Zelda, Scott, Slurp, Big Momma
There are 25,000 + Dell employees in the Austin area who would disagree with you about the above statements, if they wanted to waste their time.
All Dell equipment is seen by Dell employees throughout the design phase, and much of it is seen by Dell employees in the manufacturing phase.
Accuracy is not one of your high points.
I am a Dell engineer, and I feel that our quality is at the top of the list, not the bottom.
This is born out by our low return rate and complaint rates compared to the industry.
So Dell is an equipment designer and manufacturer.
Yes, a lot of Dell product may be manufactured by someone else, but that statement is true of all computer manufacturers.
Who did you think manufactured most or all of their own products? You are dreaming on that one, buddy.
Dell adds a great deal of value.
Too bad you did not want to bother adding value to your comments.
wake up and hold your nose
I am a Hardware engineer at Dell. Everyone I meet here is very concerned about what a computer ought to be. We are also very concerned about what the customer thinks a computer ought to be.
We have more customers than most other computer companies, so we must be more correct than most other computer companies in figuring out what a computer ought to be. Our customers mostly always come back to us for repeat business, so we know they are not all first time, newbie buyers, but instead satisfied customers.
Our innovation is in many areas.
Quality, reliability, and customer satisfaction are some of them.
There is nothing wrong with that.
If Apple and Sun were so great at what they do, then why do so many customers not buy them?
(I love Apple, so don't think I am bashing them. If I could afford it, I would own one)
You have to do great things that people can afford, or what you are doing is not great, it is a luxury reserved for the rich or obsessed.
wake up and hold your nose
I guess Michael Dell cries all the way to the bank.
Cheers,
Well, the US has been invading countries with no valid reason for long before 9/11.
Ask Latin America.
Cheers,
Linux or POSIX don't even enter into his thinking as platforms. He already thinks of the Linux and POSIX APIs as being irrelevant, supplanted by Java APIs, APIs that, by his own statement, Sun effectively owns.
.NET articles here.. No, it's all Java vs. .NET because the "communities" really are "tribes", complete with their own belief systems and mythologies, fed by their large creators.
I think you're misreading this.
Scott was referring to development communities within the corporate world, and was correct, there really are only two "communities" left in that world, led by rabid fans.
There are pockets of C++ , COBOL, Perl, Python, etc. but they're more "tools" than "communities".
Sure, they have their rabid fans, but you really don't see too many Python vs.
-Stu
'Execution' is a word executives use to divert blame from themselves. If a company or team is unsuccessful, "poor execution" is the reason, even though a bad or unrealistic business plan may have been at fault.
It's odd that you note that executives blame poor execution for a failure... by definition, an 'executive' is someone who is responsible for 'execution' of affairs (see Websters). So if the execution is poor, the executives must be responsible!