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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."
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.
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.
Executive... Execute...
Hmmm... they sound kind of similar don't they. Maybe there is a reason for that. May be an executive executes things.
Execute -- To put into effect
Executive -- Of, relating to, capable of, or suited for carrying out or executing
The best is the enemy of the good
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.
4 bucks - 1 buck = 3 bucks, not 'a buck.'
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.
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.
Basically, Sun is a pretty cool company, including their OS strategy. If only they would tell their marketing department! (And that Scott McNealy is a stupid jerk doesn't help either.) The most important difference to IBM seems to be that Sun doesn't brag a lot in public about how much they contribute and how much they use and support OS software.
Programming can be fun again. Film at 11.
What part of: ...
Sequoia writes "There's a worthwhile
you don't understand??
Learn to read.
\\k
In what universe is this true? I know top, top, talented people who are still unemployed (and we're talking about people whose names at least 25% of Slashdot would instantly recognize). Referral bonuses have gone the same way as all my underwater stock options. And for myself, I was unemployed for months in Silicon Valley, and the only way I could find a job was to relocate to the East Coast and take a 25% pay cut. And no, I'm not a spring chicken, dot-commer, or college graduate either; I have almost 10 years of industry experience, at least half of which has been with Fortune 500 companies. Back when I was unemployed, a recruiter told me: "you know, the shift of power has gone from the recruiters, to the candidates, and now it is in the hands of the hiring companies." It is true: a company can pretty much hire anyone they want, or hold out as long as they want until an ideal candidate comes by instead of merely a talented one. The publicly displayed job listings of a larger corporation is rarely indicative of what is really occurring at the company--how many of those listings are hopelessly out of date? And how many resumes does HR sift through, file, or toss in the "in case of emergency, break glass" cabinet?