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Sun's President Dreams of a Linux Future
Sara Chan writes "The Economist has a story analyzing the recent Sun-Microsoft deal. What's especially interesting is the ending. Sun recently promoted Jonathan Schwartz to President and Chief Operating Officer, recognizing the need for radical change if the company is to survive. According to the story, Schwartz's dream is 'to sell deep-discount desktop computers at Wal-Mart, carrying Sun's office applications on top of a Linux operating system'!"
When Mr Ballmer gives Mr McNealy a hug and says that "we do both believe in intellectual property", this is a not-so-veiled jab at the open-source Linux, which both men consider, in essence, communistic. Microsoft and Sun happen to be the only major backers (in the form of licence payments) of Linux's gadfly, a firm called SCO, which is trying to obtain money from Linux users with threats of litigation.
The article also points out that LINUX hurts Sun more than Microsoft:
Linux, however, is hurting Sun far more than Microsoft. Solaris is similar to Linux, which makes it very easy for customers to switch from one to the other. Migrating from Windows to Linux is a much more fiddly process.
I think Microsoft is particularly wiley here. They make nice with Sun knowing that Sun will probably become marginalized as a result of the growth of LINUX and not end up being much of a competitor at all. I am not faulting Microsoft for this, but, you gotta believe that they believe, in their heart-of-hearts (do they have those?) that they will eventually own the whole pie. This sure is fun to watch.....
Happy Trails!
Erick
http://www.busyweather.com/
Whoa!
There was a time when saying you had a Sun meant you weren't just 1337, but respectable, a power user. It may seem a cool thing to be mass marketing Linux boxen from Wally World, but that's a real comedown. Saying you have a Sun would be like saying you have a microwave oven. Is this what it takes to save Sun? Honestly, Linux boxen could easily become commodity hardware. You're not much of a player anymore when you're trying to keep your head above water by selling commodity PCs.
"Hi, my name is Bob and I still felt 1337 with my Walmart-bought Sun."
"Welcome Bob, to Sun-aholics."
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Wait a minute, I didn't know executives could be Slashdot Trolls.
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
Just because it runs Linus doesn't mean the whole product's open source/free/whatever.
Steve Ballmer (right), the boss of Microsoft, the Redmond-based software giant that, in the Valley's popularity polls, runs neck-and-neck with the antichrist.
It seems like just yesterday (1996) I would have killed for a Sun workstation, but made due with linux. Now I have Linux boxen being used to replace Sun and SGI hardware for image analysis, and my Servers are running MacOS X.
--Tsiangkun
I'll be windows free for 10 years in June
with no direction. One moment they are advocating how big linux and OSS movement is, the next moment a backhand deal with MSFT. I wouldn't trust SUN too much.
Activists United
Thats funny because that linux machine is already selling at walmart...
u ct _id=2592736&cat=132690&type=19&dept=3944&path=0%3A 3944%3A3951%3A41937%3A86796%3A132690
http://www.walmart.com/catalog/product.gsp?prod
That's not a dream. Showing the Open Source Desktop as a 'deep discount' alternative is de-grading to the community, as if we are a lower-quality brand. Gnome and KDE both strive to be the best, and should be marketted in this light too. I don't mean expensive, just quality (like Tescos has managed)
puts ("Python r0cks\n");
Sun makes some very nice, albeit expensive, high-end servers. If you're looking for very high-end stuff, sun hardware is way up there. Solaris is an excellent operating system as well. Sun should stick to what they do best (high-end stuff) and not try to venture into low-end hardware.
This is part of a trend that we've been seeing from sun: they don't know what they want. They thought Java was going to make them lots of money, and that they were going to be a software company; now they have very few people actually working on it. They don't seem to be sure what they think of linux, because they are both promoting it and trying to hurt it at the same time. And now this high-end AND low-end stuff, it doens't really add up. Sun must should just stick to what they do best, and maybe make some lower-end servers (2,3k machines), but not go anywhere close to cheap cheap cheap.
they're fucked.
It wants its computer business strategy back.
Deep-discount computers S U C K. They *must* know this. A free office suite on top of a free OS isn't going to do anything to sell these things if people can't double click and install software, preferably the software they sell at WAL-MART.
"I bought this here Sun computer, but it won't run these deer huntin' and bass fishin' games I bought with it. I'd like my munny back, please"
Let's set up Linux so it can:
1. Find its fonts without having to edit the XF86Config file 189 times and install some half-working font server for the other three fonts.
2. Upgrade Gnome and KDE applications without having to install yet ANOTHER version of glibc. That or statically link everything and quit pursuing dynamically-linked utopia. I think there's enough disk space now.
3. Have a file manager that isn't linked to every single library on the system, so that if one library is upgraded/replaced, it doesn't make the file manager useless.
4. Make it so these problems can be fixed without changing distributions.
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
...here
Anybody announcing a "partnership" with Microsoft gets screwed, hard, in the end. This is really an admission by Sun that they're losing.
Badly.
Watch Sun continue to wither on the vine. Watch it slowly shrink, more each year. They might have a "we'll sell Linux to lusers at Walmart!" strategy, but that's simply absurd.
Selling $199 computers at Walmart is not the road ahead for Sun Microsystems!
IBM has grabbed the Linux ball and run like hell with it, and they've done very well. Sun has pussy footed, flip-flopping more often than a spatula at a pancake shop on Linux.
They have no clear strategy. They have no real, effective, business case for using Linux in their organization. And, unless they come with something, and damn quick, the train will have passed them by.
As a post note, Sun made theirs by grabbing a commodity operating system, putting good hardware underneath it, and selling it for a fair price. Why can't they do that anymore?
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
All this time I thought servers were Sun's high-end product. Jerseys...who'd have thunk?
I think it will start off like this: Sun will give them a price. Compared to current Sun offerings, it will be very very cheap and about as low as Sun can go and actually make money. Fantastic. Everyone is happy. Two months later, however, Walmart does their famous "rollback" and no longer wants to sell a system at $699 but $588. Wal-mart doesn't want to absorb these costs. There are companies lined up around the block that are willing to sell to wal-mart. Therefore, Sun will absorb the cost. Will they make money in the beginning? Probably. But making money in the long term with Wal-mart is a very difficult thing indeed.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
i showed sun my moon and sold my stock today
Strange how things change, it seems like Apple currently is gaining market share in Suns former core business, Unix workstations and earning lots of money. The idea of Sun is not bad at the first thought, but they always were better (until 2001) as the commodity hardware. What they need is to get their act together and make fast machines which run unix, everything else is lost effort. The problem is it is hard to beate the Wintel combination, Apple did it and their G5 is selling like hotcakes to Unix pros, Sun.... Sun bake a hot processor, put it in a cool box dump Solaris or Linux on it with a good desktop and sell it.... You have all components, except the processor! I dont think selling cheapos in Wallymart is really the key for Suns survival.
bad url...
try searching for Microtel SYSWM8001 on walmart.com
Things don't neccesarily look so rosy for MS either. Think about this, if Linux does totally marginalize Sun (like SCO is now) that means Linux has moved onto the big iron. How does MS move into a market where their OS is hardly supported on the machines required to do the job, especially when the OS is free? MS thinks their getting rid of one foe, only to find in it's place is something much more flexible, modern, and can't be outpriced.
Sun's business model needs to change. By building their own processors, systems, and operating software all at the same time, they are not going to do any of them very well and they will bleed out alot of cash. The only computer company to succeed at this sort of vertical integration - Commodore (they owned the company that made their processor) - succeeded because their product was aimed at one particular market and was extremely affordable. But that was the 80's. Today, there is just too much R&D that needs to go on... Sun is essentially making a profit on a single product when they sell a system while expending the cost of 3 products - a processor, a system, and an OS.
As an interning developer working at the NASA Jet Propulsion Lab, I believe that Sun developing a linux-based strategy will be a great thing.
We use many Sun boxen, along with various flavors of Linux, and it would be tremendous to see more integration. Their work on linux-based Java has already been an enabling factor in our work and I believe that Sun has many good ideas (and good engineers working hard on it).
This annoucement gives me hope that we can continue in our relationship with Sun for future missions, while taking advantage of many of the best features of Linux.
To be fair I should mention we also use Windows and OS X to great effect as well, however good news for Sun is good news for us, especially considering the tremendous quantities of legacy software we have for Solaris!
Cheers,
Justin Wick
Science Activity Planner Developer
Mars Exploration Rovers
Buying No.
It looks more like a ju-jitsu demostration.
Things must be bad. Looks like the sun will not be setting on the horizan.
It's going to sound strange, "I brought my sun system from wal-mart". Some how I don't quite see it.
Once DRM is established left and rigt, DRM free boxen will be selling like hotcakes. Sun is in the weird position to have control over all technologies, so that they can lock out DRM once and forall of their machines.
More likely the hug by Ballmer was like the kiss of death. He probably whispered something into McNealy's ear like, "Sell Windows workstations and we'll let you live."
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
In the UK Wal-Mart own ASDA and having been in one recently I have to say that I fully understand your comments. I'd also like to say that if we were to meet in person I'd probably force you to swallow the contents of my testicles. Good day to you sir.
From the article:
More importantly, Microsoft and Sun have a new common enemy: Linux, an operating system that competes with Windows and with Sun's Solaris but which, unlike the other two, is written by volunteers and shared freely among all who want to download and use it. When Mr Ballmer gives Mr McNealy a hug and says that "we do both believe in intellectual property", this is a not-so-veiled jab at the open-source Linux, which both men consider, in essence, communistic. Microsoft and Sun happen to be the only major backers (in the form of licence payments) of Linux's gadfly, a firm called SCO, which is trying to obtain money from Linux users with threats of litigation.
Yay, more FUD. I've already posted about today how dumb journalists are regarding the GPL.
Why the GPL can't be explained and left alone is beyond me. If IBM, HP, or Sun wants to use GPL code is free to ignore everyone else, make their changes, and publish the changes if they plan on distributing the binaries. They don't have to listen to the "communist" linux promoters (Side Note: is McCarthyism alive and well today, or what? Next stop: fascism) or cooperate with them.
Companies can create their own "corporate" branches of any GPL code they want. Lots and lots of freedom. Just don't use it take other other people's freedom away. Now, was that hard for anyone to understand?
For the love of God, let some journalist read this comment and berate the entire lot of them. No more stupid human-interest angles, please.
selling their blade and fire servers at wal-mart. Imagine teen sales assiant trying to see you a fire sever to average joe.
It's called 'keeping up to date':
.ttf's into ~/fonts/ and they were there.
:)
1. Find its fonts without having to edit the XF86Config file 189 times and install some half-working font server for the other three fonts.
Funny, I just dropped some
2. Upgrade Gnome and KDE applications without having to install yet ANOTHER version of glibc. That or statically link everything and quit pursuing dynamically-linked utopia. I think there's enough disk space now.
Windows dynamically links, and includes the dependancies in the download package. Systems like apt-get will get the deps, or if you get the packages from a physical media (I usually get stuff of a mags dvd), then the deps are usually there too.
3. Have a file manager that isn't linked to every single library on the system, so that if one library is upgraded/replaced, it doesn't make the file manager useless.
Opps, KDE and Gnome have very good file-managers with extra plugins for file previews. No problems there either
4. Make it so these problems can be fixed without changing distributions.
Done
Lets so if people can:
1. Stop whining and be more helpful.
puts ("Python r0cks\n");
The economical reality of Jonathan's dream is a smalller SUN in the R and D sector..to shore up that decrease especially in java r and d one has to open source java..
The one standing in the way Of a SUN tunr aorund is Scott McNealy..
Don't Tread on OpenSource
You just can't get the staff these days. Those photo editors haven't even bothered changing their expressions. It's obvious that Steve's head was originally two feet lower.
Intellectual Property
Intellectual: of the mind
Property: that over which one has control
Who knows, but I'm curious whether their deal with MS prevents them from even considering to open-source Java as had been bandied about over the past couple of months.
When I was a kid, we only had one Darth.
Now is it that hard to turn that into a nice link?
If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land,
it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. -James Madison
Oh, and when an Apple story comes up -- it's "Mac", not "MAC".
Yes, Walmart offers quality merchandise, but Sun offers _quality_, and Sun's kind of quality doesn't retail for $399.99. Sun will have their boxes made in China or Elbonia by slave labor for peanuts, and soon, Walmart and the sweatshop owners will cut Sun out of the deal. Instead of generic PCs with Staroffice and the Sun logo for $399.99, we'll see generic PCs with Openoffice and some more stylish logo for $389.99.
I've seen a shop which was making a go of it selling a few high-margin systems try to go into low-margin retail. It didn't work, and it spelled the end of the business. I think that's coming here.
See what I've been reading.
Microsoft can only buy that which can be bought.
Intellectual Property
Intellectual: of the mind
Property: that over which one has control
Yes, wouldn't that be awful for Microsoft.. They wouldn't be able to extend their monopoly onto the server to take over the complete enterprise.
They would have to subsist on their dominance on the desktop, and they would be stuck at only making $35 Billion per year and a growing cash horde of $50B.
But, that won't really be the case anyway. MS currently has a pretty small share of the enterprise server space. As Sun declines, that opens up a lot of opportunities in that arena. Yes, Linux will win a lot of that business, but MS will get a fair chunk - much more than they have now.
Remember when Compaq bought DEC? Fired all the really good people, let the really good technology (64-bit Alpha) wither and die (not due to lack of innovation, but complete lack of marketing and executive support), and became just another brand of PC-clone?
Then Fiorina gets involved, HP gets sucked in, and bam, another really good technology company gone, now just a PC-clone seller?
Yeah, I have some grudges. I'm not the world's hugest fan of Sun... but I see all the really innovative stuff they've done (even though I'm not a Java nut!) going away. And the computer world will be worse off without it.
For a 38 year old CEO, you'd think he was quite smart. OTOH I think he's been quite daft.
Making friends with your enemy's enemy, leading to profit doesn't usually work. Not in Illinois, not in Iraq.
"It's not your information. It's information about you" - John Ford, Vice President, Equifax
Comment removed based on user account deletion
fool me twice, shame on me. So now the SUN's president is dreaming. Wake up and smell the roses. How many more times is SUN going to flip/flop on Operating Systems before getting their tails out of the software industry.
Why is it almost always Sun and Solaris that makes this kind of news, as opposed to other Unices? Is Sun really the only UNIX vendor who takes Linux this seriously? Is this indicative of Sun's overwhelming dominance of what remains of the commercial UNIX market, or is it simply that Sun's Linux initiative and Microsoft ties make it good fodder for regular news blurbs?
/.ers follow Sun news.
I don't follow commercial UNIX much anymore, so maybe I'm overestimating SGI's (Irix) and HP's (HP-UX) market share. Maybe it's simply that more
Sun still gives me a warm feeling (pun), and I imagine I'm not alone. I mostly cut my teeth on SunOS 4.x as a teenager, and I'll always have a soft spot (sunspot?) for Sun.
Your post is a perfect example of why Linux has gone nowhere on the desktop. You should learn to STFU.
Thank god commercial companies are taking over control of Linux.
Sure, market Linux as a cheaper, "generic" alternative to the mainstream OS.
That'll do wonders for the server Linux market, not to mention the general public awareness of Linux.
Oh, and call it "Lindows", so it fits in with the whole industry of substandard equipment with brand names like "Toshipa", "Somy", etc.
Walmart are already selling linux PCs and PCs with Windows XP and OpenOffice.org.
Sun's in the game with their Java Desktop.
It'll be interesting to see what the OEMs do about OpenOffice, though, Dell offering OpenOffice would be a real foot in the door.
Actually, it's "GNU/Linux", not "LINUX" or "Linux".
-RMS
Stop whining and be more helpful.
Yeah, that's a good way to make people enthusiastic about Linux: call them whiners if they complain about something that's broken out of the box.
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
Just where is the quote from Jonathan that states his dream is to sell machines at Walmart? ... I see a lot of journalists pulling crap out of their asses lately, "Green quits in disgust" for example, with no attibutable quotes from any of the principles involved.
Sun isn't going to make money putting JDS on cheap PCs at Walmart. They know that. It's a "show an alternative" sort of move. Nothing more.
Frankly I expect more from the Economist.
Hey I think it great. Im not really anti-capitolist, so I have nothing against walmart. If walmart wants to sell cheap PC's fine. Sun solaris is so hard to install and use, its really not marketible to the masses. I installed Solarisx86. It took a whole morning to install 3 CD's. I couldnt get the network going although I chose dhcp. Linux and freeBSD dont need 96 megs of ram to install, and are confiugred instantly, if you use dhcp on a home comp with broadband. Another point. First time computer users cannot tell the difference! Seriously, sell grandma, a linux system for $300, and as long she can do email, and solitaire... windows XP?!?!? whats that??? Why do I need it for 100$? My computer works fine now....
Maybe this is an obvious rant, please someone answer my question about the rumour below...
The days of Sun as a leading Unix server vendor are over and have been for a while now. They appear to be shifting to a software company and a reseller of cloned servers (Opteron & x86). They will still sell SPARC based servers for years to come, but it will be continual decline with a complete stop within 4-5 years. IBM and their Power5 based pSeries boxen will eat them for breakfast, Sun's answer is same old 1.2 GHz UltraSPARC from over a year ago, now you get double the density, lower overall throughput. Don't get me wrong, the technology works, it's just not as fast and robust as the IBM pSeries.
I think they're close to calling it quits with the SPARC. They've cut their R&D by 1/2 billion dollars and a lot of speculation is that the UltraSPARC 5 team got their walking orders as part the just announced 3300 person layoff.
Anyone care to confirm or deny this rumour? If this is true I expect that the US-5 will probably be the last gen SPARC CPU in about 18-24 months.
Sun has been a great company to deal with, and I will miss them for that. Their server technology just hasn't kept up with the low end commodity stuff where price/performance rules. And on the high end they get their asses kicked by IBM.
And now their doing a sideways tango with MS, I'm fearful for their chances.
I know, it's a stretch, but what about this this scenario: Sun merges all Solaris code into the linux code and the GNU/etc tools that are used with it. Then they roll out a new breed of UltraSPARC processors, and contribute code to GNU/etc/Linux so that it interfaces very efficiently with the new processors. Suddenly, the best way to get Linux is to get it on Sun's expensive-ass hardware. Many people stick with their x86 machines at first, but soon when it comes time to upgrade hardware, Linux on Sun looks more tempting than ever.
Yeah, I know, ain't gonna happen... but I guy can dream, right?
Funny, isn't Sun essentially doing with JDS what everyone's condemned in Microsoft for so long? Instead of offering JDS as an application suite, which is basically what it is, they've packaged it as an entire OS distribution, from the kernel up. What happened to the Java message of "write once, run anywhere"? Sounds to me like Sun's Java Desktop System will only run on Sun's flavor of the OS. There's already no doubt that's the only way they're going to support it.
Furthermore, they seem to want to "embrace and extend" (remember that one?) the Gnome desktop by re-writing large parts of it in Java (not yet in the current release, but stay tuned). I wonder how long it'll be before file format incompatibilities start to creep in.
Every vendor wants their lock-in, and to a large extent I think *that* is the reason behind corporate interest in GNU/Linux on the desktop. If I'm considering migrating off of Microsoft's desktop after having been in their stranglehold for so long, I'll be damned if I want to expose myself to the same situation with a different vendor.
Best of luck Sun, but I think a better play would have been to certify your applications to work with several of the major distros that are already out there. Customers are wising up to the dangers of the single-vendor OS and applications stack.
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The problem is that freedom is an end in itself, not freedom from MS, but just plain ole freedom. By the way Sun acts with their OS, and Java, it doesn't seem like they want freedom or want to be accountable to it. Rather they want a forced market share.
It's almost as if like MS and Sun have decided to share the pie, but make sure they get to keep the biggest pieces by shooting the cook. That way no newcommers get a piece of pie too, and so they won't half to compete (accept against each other) to keep the biggest shares.
trset
Sam's Club is Wal-Mart...
MY SECRET DIARIES
I'd always envisaged Sun as a company with a rock solid quality OS, and faultless hardware for mission critical apps with top-notch support.
And then they have to go the Walmart route with a cheap box.
That's almost like Ferrari deciding that it's sick of making luxury cars, and opting to make bicycles instead.
There's a place for cheap linux boxes for those who want their internet/mail/office... but for Sun to do it???
This is going to take some getting used to....
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
THe OS may be free but MS is taking over the server market. They own half of it!
.NET.
.NET client/server apps to probably your active directory configuration, and perhaps be indexing all your incoming email on exchange server. Now if a new database was needed for an IT project which os would come to mind first 5 years from now? Oracle, mysql, or SQL-Server that is fully integrated with everything and supported by VB.NET?
As Windows takes over, Unix is fighting on another front called Linux.
Ever here of divide and conquor? Politicans and the Romans used this strategy quite well.
MS is estatic that Sun is going to go away since Sun is fighting 2 fronts it will not be able to have as much ammo agaisnt Microsoft. They are losing money while ms rakes in more and more.
The problem is since MS owns the desktops they can tie features into Windows2k3 via active directory, SQL server and
After awhile your workplace will have hundreds of MS_SQL-Server databases. They will be running on every copy of Windows(longhorn will use a lite version of it for the new filesystem), and from
MS SQL-Server will be the only one the CIO's would want due to desktop and Windows2k3 server tie-in.
PHB's love Microsoft for that reason. Its not just products but a whole architecture and platform across the enterprise. Java1 or whatever Sun planed with Iplanet and J2EE is too little and too late. They lost.
No wonder Eu is afraid of MS. They are the only ones seeing what they are doing.
The battle agaisnt Linux has only just begun.
http://saveie6.com/
5. Create at least one distribution in which in every single program, "copy" and "paste" are done in exactly the same way with exactly the same results 100% of the time.
6. Create at least one distribution in which every single scroll bar in the entire system looks the same.
7. No one ever has to think about the XF86Config file, ever.
8. There's a clear and obvious way to set and change your monitor resolution that works regardless of whether you know strange things about your monitor, or "scanlines", or the XF86Config file, and NO MATTER WHICH WM AND DESKTOP ENVIRONMENT YOU USE.
9. The way to set up a remote X session is clear and straightforward, and doesn't involve lots of poking at cryptic pages on google and headscratching trying to remember where you have to run Xauth or other such and whether you have forwarding enabled in your ssh_config , etc...
9a. No one ever gets the error message "Invalid MIT-MAGIC-COOKIE-1", for any reason, ever. That's just not descriptive as an error, and it doesn't give you any indication what to do to fix it.
10. If I am on a linux machine, and there's another linux or unix machine somewhere or hopefully even something more exotic (like windows), I can connect to that machine and open up a file browser window displaying the files there and edit them and copy them back and forth, without having to read the Midnight Commander web page, without having to set up cryptic emacs/vi plugins, without having to think about "does this remote computer have ftp, samba, afp, nfs, or some combination thereof?".
11. Make a GUI manpage browser with scrollbars, and hyperlinks, and tables of contents for individual manpages, and the ability to quickly expand/collapse individual sections within the individual manpages, and quickly sorted/filtered browsing of the man -k / apropos database; and put this program where people know it exists and know what it is.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
Microsoft, on the other hand, really doesn't have the option to drop Windows until they rewrite the entire thing to run on top of the CLR, and rewrite the M$CLR to run on the HAL or another microkernel directly. (Maybe one with more functionality? But that might actually make it less portable.) Even then they probably won't do it, because it would remove their advantage over everyone else, which is to say hardware support. Unless of course they kick everything but video drivers and basic generic functionality common to all devices out into user space and have 'em all target the CLR. THAT will never happen because then anyone could easily use their drivers, very reliably, with minimal hacking.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Since time immortal - er or since
troll and (hopefully) be modded into obscurity.
Slashdot Score:
Moderation: 1 Intelligence: 0
Ripping an new rectum in the fabric of spacetime.
SUN should have pushed harder on MS regarding JAVA.
.NET
First and foremost, they should have made MS get rid of their broken JVM completly (if you install the latest service pack on a machine without the JVM, you get the JVM. No service pack currently downloadable should contain any contents of the MS JVM.
In fact, SUN should have (if it was possible) told MS that they had to distribute the SUN Java VM.
Its like when AOL and MS made up for the Netscape debacle.
Not only did MS only have to pay a piddling little fine but AOLTW actually sggreed to use crappy MS technology (like Windows Media Player and Intercrap Exploder). The settlement with MS over the Netscape issue actually BENIFITED MS.
Same with the sub settlment.
All they have to do is pay a little fine and remove their VM from new pressings of windows. They dont have to remove it from service packs or anything else. MS benifits because the cluless idiots (banks for example) who coded JAVA to its broken VM have no reason to change plus the true JAVA (i.e. the sun official standard) doesnt get any further forward.
This can only benifit Microsofts new JAVA killer in the form of
--dave
davecb@spamcop.net
...why Sun is failing as a company. With quotes like this, "According to the story, Schwartz's dream is 'to sell deep-discount desktop computers at Wal-Mart, carrying Sun's office applications on top of a Linux operating system'!", is there any reason to wonder anymore?
Think about this, if Linux does totally marginalize Sun (like SCO is now) that means Linux has moved onto the big iron.
Even if Linux is successfull on big irons, this doesn't make Sun redundant. The interesting part for big irons is not the operating system, but also the hardware, the service and the know-how how to run those boxes. And Sun has excactly this kind of know-how.
Microsofts biggest fear is the Linux on small servers and the desktops. Microsoft was very successfull with Windows NT on small servers, because in combination with cheap x86 hardware it was cheaper than the more expensive Unix/Risc boxes.
But Linux can be cheaper than windows, this is the biggest problem for Microsoft. They can try to argue that it's easier or cheaper to develop for Windows or to administrate it, but I doubt that this works.
A second strategy for Microsoft would be to rely on patents and "interlectual property". And a partner in the Unix/Linux camp like Sun, whose software does integrate nicely with theirs, could help them very much.
Breakfast served all day!
in about a year, SUN will be doing exactly what sco has been doing?
not a Sun PC.
While traditionally Sun are the good guys, we have to accept that the open source movement will make casualties of our friends.
It's a shame. Sun makes nice processors, but these are uncompetitive (on price) with x86. x86 is badly flawed (and HPIA (Itanium) is not designed for low level coding). Sun should licence their processor design (at low or no cost) to create competion to create a SPARC-comaptible marketplace. If they really have been converted to open source they will soon realise that they cannot make money from selling software.
This is mostly about consolidating control of not only the data center but the desktop within corporations. LINUX is making a lot of headway - probably faster than Sun & Microsoft ever imagined.
Companies are not yet ready to migrate all of their desktops to Linux. But they are thinking about it, and the most promising place are desktops with a narrow set of applications, like call centers, POS, etc.
And this is exactly the target market, Sun tries to catch with their JDS (java desktop system) products, mostly based on open source.
The biggest problem for a migration to Linux away from Windows is integration with the existing Micrsoft ecosystem: Office, Exchange, etc...
Sun already has answers to some of these, but a cooperation with Microsoft could provide them the rest of the stack.
So they can provide customers with an alternative to Windows on the desktop, which may be nothing for true Linux advocates, but interesting to companies with less religious ambitions.
Given that "Sun's Linux" is currently SuSE, and Sun gave up a previous attempt to create their own distro, I think you're a bit more worried than is really warranted. And who, besides Debian, distributes a completely free as in speech OS anyway? Not SuSE. I don't think RedHat. Who then?
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
JPL? Coool, I saw that on NGC :)
Sun can embrace Linux, since they make more money selling support and they include Solaris "free" with their systems anyway. The money's in support.
Sorry man, but *nobody* has made money in Linux support. I can't think of a single company that has made $$ in Linux support. There's not a single Linux company on a solid financial footing. Sun makes it's money from selling complete HW/SW/support packages, not support alone.
I Sun is just dreaming of having a future. Who wants proprietary anyway hardware and OS anyway? So if they sell Linux - I can download it. So they sell hardware - if its not price/performance completive I'm not buying.
I wouldn't be buying SUNW stock today - I would look at RHAT over them. RHAT has a working model; SUNs day has sat.
Where have you been for the last 15 years? SPARC has always been an open, licensable processor architecture, which is why Fujitsu makes a competing SPARC implementation. Just because we don't want to give it away for free doesn't mean it's not licensable.
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
Don't bother if your goal is to sell crap at Wal-Mart. You'll just become more irrelevant if you do, Sun.
"If you are a dreamer, a wisher, a liar, A hope-er, a pray-er, a magic bean buyer
One moment they are advocating how big linux and OSS movement is, the next moment backhand deal with MSFT.
Sun has a long history of vacilating on openness.
They did it with SPARC. They did it with their OS. And so on.
I jumped to Linux from Sun primarily because I wanted to do some HW/SW hacking. Linux (and the BSDs) are open, as is the hardware they run on. The sofware is certain to stay that way, and the hardware likely either will or will be hacked. But it's just too much of a pain trying to get HW and SW info on Sun/Solaris platforms.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
About ten years ago, Sun had a plan. That plan was for computers to be as ubiqitous as TVs and for them to be thin clients. They still develop hardware and software for this purpose. If they sell low cost hardware and software to the "masses" then they come a little closer to realising this dream. Imagine.. pay per use microsoft apps running on a mainframe. You dont have to shell for a whole office suite, just pay a dollar to use MS word for a day. I really think Sun is planning on doing doing this. If it works for consumers then business might take notice. Sun sells thin clients now but I dont think anyone really notices. If they can get their name back in the minds eye they stand a chance at selling and supporting apps that will run on a pay per use model, which was their idea ten years ago or so and possibly viable now.
Yay me! ^^
AMD does a pretty decent uniprocessor CPU, but you need a backplane by someone like Seymour Cray to run a serious 64-processor system. Sun, not being stupid, have a backplane first designed by... some guy named Cray.
Exactly - Get out of the highly expensive CPU development game and focus on software and systems. Clearly Dell can't build a 64-way system. Sun should do that.
My comment about AMD was that they have a processor solution that can more easily scale because they now have point-to-point links and aren't as constrained as other processors that have shared bus architectures.
Umm, you might want to proof your analogies: Colnago/Ferrari bicycles :)
Adam
"And the death of dreams will be a beautiful end..." - DIJ
At that rate the 1.6 to 2B USD will be gone in just a few quarters. And I'm sorry Mr. Schwartz but selling cheap commodity hardware at razor thin margins will not help much. The only way that strategy will work is if Linux becomes the de facto standard and Sun distinguishes itself with its Sparc hardware. But that will take years and 2B doesn't seem like enough to bankroll it. Can Sun hold out long enough? Unix sales are collapsing fast. What are they going to do for money in the meantime? And will they break rank like SCO and try to preserve short term revenue at the cost of their long term viability?
I just can't help myself. Look at that handshake in the picture. McNealy looks like Steve Irwin, the Crocodile Hunter, cautious not to get any body parts too close to the mouth. Crikey!
'It is a pity that our friends lie in between,' said Gimli. 'If no land divided Microsoft and Sun, then they could fight while we watched and waited.'
'The victor would emerge stronger than either, and free from doubt,' said Gandalf.
In a recent poll, Jonathan Schwartz voted for ring turner
the open-source Linux, which both men consider, in essence, communistic.
McCarthy Lives!
Sharing != Communism. Communism != Fascism. Communism == Democracy == Freedom.
Anyone who disagrees doesnt A) Understand Marx/Lennin/Trotsky and B) confuses propaganda with reality. The USSR stopped being Communist when it turned into a Dictatorship.
Red Hat does, actually. Everything they write is GPL'd, and they do not include non-free software with their distribution (IIRC, last thing they did that was problematic was Netscape, and that's been gone for years). In fact, one could argue that the inclusion of non-free software in the apt repositories for Debian means that Red Hat / Fedora is actually MORE free than Debian. I don't think that's true, but it's something to consider.
I think Mandrake also GPLs everything, for that matter. SuSE recently GPL'd YaST, too, so actually, they might be totally free, too.
I hope that educates you.
-Erwos
Plausible conjecture should not be misrepresented as proof positive.
You got one thing about that post right: "The battle against Linux has only just begun."
...
.NET is still struggling to gain market share on java, thats part of the reason microsoft did this deal, so they can hedge their bets. If .NET fails then they can fall back onto java and vice-versa.
.NET. MS doesn't hold ANY weight in the enterprise and sun's forays into the low end have been minor disasters
Everything else is crap, microsoft probably runs less than half of the sites on the net (apache runs 70% or the web servers, and I would venture most of those run BSD/UNIX/Linux). Microsoft can bundle the fuck out of whatever they want, it will HURT them in the long run because customers are already becoming weary of their crap with licensing and forced upgrades etc
Only one fortune 100 company uses windows 2k3. (source: netcraft). And MS-SQL is a piece of shit, everyone knows that. If they use it in their filesystem they will kill performance and negate any stability increases they have had in the past 5 years.
The EU went after MS for the same reason the American justice department did, they broke laws. The only difference is the bush administration let them off since they are big business friendly.
Then of course their is this POS DRM built in OS they want to release (whats the ETA now 2007 ?). That won't go over well. Linux has been gaining market share in the desktop arena over the past few years without major vendor support, not that companies like HP, Dell and Sun are backing it, gaining more share is a foregone conclusion, especially at its current price point.
The only market overlap that existed between sun and MS was the development arena. java vs
"Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the the universe." --Albert Einstein
I think Mandrake coming out of bankruptcy is one of many examples that dispel that myth.
ymmv
Perhaps I should have given more emphasis to the "(at low or no cost)" part.
Personally I'm an old fan of the Motorola 68k chips, but presumably if commodity priced SPARC-compatible chips can be made it's possible that we could have a genuine SPARC based commodity PC industry out there (running Linux).
In my view Intel is Sun's main competitor, not Microsoft. Software is Free remember.
Don't worry. Sun's shareholders will vote out Mr. Jonathan Schwartz on his patootie if he tries to realign the company for competing in the low-end consumer market. Don't get me wrong, it is possible to compete in such a market but not with a company like Sun. He would have to spin-off a new company to assemble, test and ship without the expense of any R+D people to do this.
Unless you mean free as in: if it's not our Definition of free, we don't include it, then Debian is the only one (though Gentoo could be made to (all ebuilds have what the licence is, and portage should be able to filter out all those you don't want.))
Everyone's base system is pretty much the same though, in terms of it being GPL.
It seems like everyday, Sun has some new scheme or business plan. I'm sorry but they strike me as being very inconsistant.
Sun: make up your friggin mind already.
Cobalt was a kick-ass company making an innovative product marketed (in part) to newbie sysadmins and small organizations. I got my start in linux hacking around on an original Cobalt (thanks!). Anyway, a buyout by Sun should have led to an even more powerful, stable, secure, and well-marketed product, right? Wrong. I still can't figure out if Sun bought them out just to try and kill the future competition...
(hint: it didn't work; we all just use Debian, Gentoo, and Suse these days)
On the other hand, Lindo-s and Walmart is a considerable threat to MS on the desktop (at least in the XP-Home segment). Perhaps they need some assistance from Sun on killing off competitive linux products?
This is mostly about consolidating control of not only the data center but the desktop within corporations.
IMHO this, like the investment in Apple, is about Microsoft trying to head off future legal trouble.
Sun and Apple were essentially the only direct commercial competitors to Microsoft. Right now Sun is dying - and Microsoft has a track record of screwing them. If Sun goes under Microsoft gets bit big-time in the NEXT anti-trust suit.
So just as they did when Apple was about to fold, MS gives 'em enough money to keep 'em afloat.
People have been saying their payments to Sun are peanuts. But they're a LOT of peanuts: MS just gave Sun one out of every 25 peanuts they have. There are only two reasons for them to do that:
- To make even more money later as a result.
- To avoid losing even more money later as a result.
There's no WAY this is going to make them more a couple of billion any time soon. So it's got to be avoiding the loss of more.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
"ditching Sun's computer systems, the equivalent of Ferraris, for cheaper boxes from Dell, Hewlett-Packard or IBM that run Linux, the equivalent of Fiats."
As someone who works in an ISP that is almost entirely Sun I believe the correct analogy would be a Rolls-Royce. Sun boxes, in my experience, are not really that fast for the money, but the quality of them is undeniable. Once you go through the pain of setting them up (Solaris=least fun Unix IMO), they sit there running for a decade. Very nice, but not exactly Ferraris.
Linux on i386, depending on the admin's skill, I would put more along the lines of a nice VW Jetta or Toyota. Stable, quick, cheap, more than enough for most people.
All "coming out of bankruptcy" means is that they've contacted their creditors and agreed on payment terms. That in no way, shape, or form means that they're profitable. All it means is that they've bought some more time.
It's not a myth. There's not a single, financially solid OSS company.
Someoneelse mentioned that the strategy you outline is precisely what IBM is doing. It somewhat agree with that and IBM have the Power architecture and more importantly the volume and money to keep Power ahead of Intel / AMD.
Help fight continental drift.
Just because it hasn't happened yet doesn't mean it isn't going to happen. I do seem to remember hearing that MandrakeSoft was turning a profit and that's why they were able to come out of bankruptcy, but I don't know where I heard it, so I don't know if it's true.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Dream on. I've personally plugged in so many linux boxes in small business, installing them over Small Business Servers charging $2000 per Linux install, and they have all not only been running without incident for years at a time, but all have thanked me and entrusted us for all their desktops. I am talking about law firms with revinues exceeding $11 million, manufacturing companies, and real estate offices. Web file/print, email and backup within domain logins is all it takes. And Gentoo + Samba/CUPS + postfix/courier/spamd + Apache/MySQL/PHP has done it every time. And no reboots or worms either. Software upgrades for free. What a change. I can't tell you how easy a sell it has been. Taking over the server market --- please! The only takeovers I see are the endless variety of worms every month that take over Windows servers.
I looked, but unfortunately, since Mandrakesoft isn't a US company, they don't seem to have any SEC filings, so I'm not sure where to find their financials. Still, there's a reason that businesses and people are generally cut off from getting any kind of credit for years after going through bankruptcy. It ain't a good thing.
Java1 or whatever Sun planed with Iplanet and J2EE is too little and too late. They lost.
Nonsense. Most new IT jobs are Java. Most Java jobs are J2EE. Most server systems are not Microsoft. Virtually no high-end (enterprise level) servers are Microsoft. This is where J2EE is king.
The biggest new market for software is mobile devices. The most important software development platform for these devices is mobile Java (increasingly on embedded Linux).
Sun may have financial problems in the server sales market, but they have wisely expanded their range from Solaris/Sparc to include J2EE and mobile Java licencing. Their long-term prospects are very good indeed.
Sun is running into the same problem Apple did with Microsoft in the mid eighties. Namely, just as was the case with Mac OS in relation to Windows, it is pretty clear that Solaris is a *better product* than Linux (ie more mature, scales better, etc...), but Linux is at the point of being seen as "good enough" and the price is perceived as being right, thus is gaining mindshare at the expense of Solaris - and commercial UNIX in general. This mindshare, while perhaps not warranted based on product quality or maturity, buys Linux vendors time to bring Linux up to speed, at which point it may be as good or better than the commercial vendors.
... that I read in the various posts about sun making a bad move and sliding downhill,there might be an opportunity or three out there for getting nice surplus at throw away prices, so which of their old (?) boxes would be the *best deal* to look for if one wanted a real cheap but still good enough multi processor sun box, say 4 CPUs? Would it require solaris only? Figure they should be at least roughly pen II class equivalent in speed, etc, which is still "good enough" for my purposes, which are basically "fooling around with neat stuff". And what other pitfalls should you be aware of in such a purchase? I have zee-ro experience with anything other than commodity low end PCs and entry level macs. I've looked on ebay, but not familiar enough with the models and the quirks of same, etc. Or should it be a Sun, how about an IBM mid level machine? Or what? Ideally, it should be able to run either the OS that come on it, or linux/bsd whatever. Thanks in advance to anyone who has any tips!
Sun is already on the margins and it has nothing to do with Linux.
Selling cheap boxes at Wal Mart will be a nightmare, not a dream. They are going from selling high value, high margin, professional workstations and servers to selling cheap, low value, low margin home computers. To do this effectively they have to construct an efficient supply chain and they have to have to build a cost saving culture--fractions of a cent matter in that market. In other words, they have to change everything about their company. Why go compete with Dell, HP, e-machines, Gateway, etc., etc. on the low end?
Looking at this from the other angle--that is, they are only selling software so they can sell their software. Their software is already free! (Linux and OO.o, not Solaris.) To put this strategy in dot.com language:
1. lose money on hardware
2. give away software
3. ?
4. profit!
They would be better off to send each stockholder her share of the $2B and lock the doors.
Apparently, MS's strategy is to start collecting patents and in a quick fashion. MS has only recently started building a decent R&D group which is finally obtaining some good patents (most of the ones prior to about 3 years ago were garbage, straight rip offs of others work, or from the companies that they bought ).
Now, MS is busy buying up whatever they can. Just a bit ago, they bought a number of patents from SGI. In addition, they are trying to pawn SCO into an IP fight with Linux when in reality the only fight that SCO stands a chance on is contractual.
I am guessing that MS has some deal with Ray Norda/Canopy Group to buy SCO iff SCO appears to be winning any agreement against Linux.
Even though I use and develop on KDE, it will seem odd if MS owns canopy group which owns 5% of the trolls.
But hey, this is all conjecture.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
You, my friend, have given evidence by that statement that you do not have Clue 1
There are a lot of things that " huge, expensive Sun servers" can do that commodity Windows boxes couldn't dream about on the best day they ever had.
disk I/O, multi proc sclability, OS hardening (Trusted Solaris)
I could go on
There is a damn good reason why Sun boxes are still deployed, and will continue to be deployed, in critical environments.
They just work. All the time.
And I for one thank the Powers That Be that *my* bank is smart enough to realize this.
Time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana.
So was he masturbating to photos of Bill Gates and Sam Walton getting it on when he had this dream?
By that definition, "Sun's Linux" qualifies too.
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
..when you deal with M$. They pimp yo ass like a cheap ho. Sun and, did I hear this correctly, Wal-Mart mentioned in the same sentence? This is no longer the Sun I know, and I will treat it as such. What's next, Sun - McDonald's "Win a free Sparc" french fries peel-off game?
Must-not-watch TV!
True but Mandrake's bankrupcy had nothing to do with the merits of selling support - There were some unfortunate business decisions made by people no longer with them that caused the mess. (Trying to get the company into "e-learning" etc.
Uh... Have you heard of IBM?
Or maybe RedHat?
RedHat's been in the black for quite a while now, and they keep turning a profit quarter after quarter.
But everything is NOT broken out of the box like your stating. Not all distros make setting up fonts hard and not all Linux file managers are garbage.
You are Just as bad as the over the top Linux zealots who think Linux should be hard to use and think Gentoo is good for newbies "if they just follow the instructions". Except your on the side that refuses to admit that Linux can ever do anything right. Many distros clearly are doing things to address your concerns and improve ease of use.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
Remember when Compaq bought DEC? Fired all the really good people, let the really good technology (64-bit Alpha) wither and die (not due to lack of innovation, but complete lack of marketing and executive support), and became just another brand of PC-clone?
DEC and their technology was long dead by the time Compaq bought them. Their really good marketable technology, mostly dealing with the StorageWorks line of RAID storage was integrated into the Compaq lineup.
I thought you were going to give us a semi-insightful analogy, about how DEC lost their dominance in the marketplace in the 1980's because they refused to acknowledge the evolution of Unix, still holding onto their VAX mindset. Then by the time they did realize that VAX was dying, they were too late. Their entries into the PC clone market weren't so great, their entry into Unix wasn't so great... the market left them at the alter.
Your post is an example of how people don't learn from history... they confuse the facts to interpret their own reasoning.
My guess would be that IBM does VERY well with Linux support.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
SS10, 128 Megs RAM, dual SM51 procs, 9 gig and a 4gig drive... CDROM, DAT... box to convert PS/2 mouse and keyboard and regular PC video... :-)
Oh yeah...
-- Steve
Linux free for 7 years
FreeBSD?
"When Mr Ballmer gives Mr McNealy a hug and says that "we do both believe in intellectual property", this is a not-so-veiled jab at the open-source Linux, which both men consider, in essence, communistic."
GPL may be communistic, but it relies on capitalist intellectual property for existence, since GPL is more restrictive than public domain. Kind of ironic.
thanks, I'm printing this out so I can reference it later. Got my lil bro works over there, I should have zip probs getting software should I snag a deal.
zogger
"MS-SQL is a piece of shit, everyone knows that. If they use it in their filesystem they will kill performance and negate any stability increases they have had in the past 5 years."
I don't know that. I used to know that, until I spend some time working with MS-SQL2k, Oracle 8, 9, and 10, and PostgreSQL 7.3 and 7.4. I've done installation, admin, and same-hardware performance benchmarking on all of those platforms now, from a standing start in each case (I had a lot of networking and Unix experience, but no real DBA experience).
MS-SQL took a couple of days to install, patch and test, returning the best numbers of the entire set. PostgreSQL installed quickly, but it took a couple of weeks to learn how to tune it. After that two weeks of hard work, it was just as fast as MS-SQL in controlled conditions. However, it still has weird problems: sometimes it will refuse to use indexes on tables that have grown rapidly, and some nested condition queries can be created which completely choke its optimizer. One in particular took two and half minutes on MS, but was still looping after 14 hours on PG 7.4 when I gave up and killed the query.
All versions of Oracle took days to install, and I found tuning information to be very difficult to find and comprehend via free or paid-for resources (Google, O'Reilly and OTN in that order). 8i was unable to even complete my performance tests without dying due to fragmentation problems. 9i and 10g were able to complete the tests, but at half the speed of MS or PG. Perhaps if we'd hired a consultant they'd have been able to get better numbers, but no one was willing to pay to find out when we had two perfectly good platforms which cost much less.
Take a wild flier at which one of those three "supported platforms" gets recommended to customers who ask what to run the product on...
"Nothing was broken, and it's been fixed." -- Jon Carroll
Just yesterday a coworker and myself were trying to figure out how many desktops Sun has had, or is proposing. I use the term "desktop" loosely.
g Glass
I came up with:
DPS
NeWS
OpenWindows
CDE
Gnome
JDS
Lookin
But since my friend was an ex-Sun employee who worked on NeWS, he came up with a few more that I never heard of.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
Sun should licence their processor design (at low or no cost) to create competion to create a SPARC-comaptible marketplace. If they really have been converted to open source they will soon realise that they cannot make money from selling software.
Here you go:
The LEON2 processor is a synthesisable VHDL model of a 32-bit processor compliant with the SPARC V8 acrhitecture. The model is highly configurable, and particularly suitable for system-on-a-chip (SOC) designs. The full source code is available under the GNU LGPL license, allowing free and unlimited use in both research and commercial applications.
What would Lemmy do?
I'm afraid that you seem to be the clueless one. Sun makes money out of J2EE. Implementors of J2EE who want to provide app servers which are compliant have to pay for testing and certification and licences. That includes IBM and BEA for example.
Sun also makes money by selling and supporting products such as Sun Studio that use Java.
So, how is j. random computer buyer supposed to know
1) that the fc-cache command exists?
2) how to invoke it? (Xterm? But I just want to install a font!)
3) why it's necessary in the first place?
exactly.
I know we hate having to do "psychic friends" style coding, but auto-configure does not mean mostly auto-configure.
Imagine a desktop that works like a toaster... we should really be taking the M out of RTFM... If cars were this hard to use the Ford family would be in the po' house.
All versions of Oracle took days to install, and I found tuning information to be very difficult to find and comprehend via free or paid-for resources
Eh? I have just installed Oracle 10g on a Linux box. Took 3 hours from start to finish. Detailed documentation about how to do this was available on-line at Oracle.
9i and 10g were able to complete the tests, but at half the speed of MS or PG. Perhaps if we'd hired a consultant they'd have been able to get better numbers, but no one was willing to pay to find out when we had two perfectly good platforms which cost much less.
Bizarre. After the 3-hour install, Oracle was up and running and giving at least a five-fold performance boost over Postgresql, with no fiddling or tuning.
Fair nuff :-)
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
Bart: Don't be a sap, Dad. These are just crappy knock-offs.
Homer: Pfft. I know a genuine Panaphonics when I see it. And look, there's Magnetbox and Sorny.
It *is* problematic when you can't access your NTFS drive. The other OSes appear to distribute only GPLed software on disk, but then allow upgrades to non-GPL stuff via their installation manager. (e.g. NVidia driver is as simple as installing an update package in YaST)
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Umm, if selling support was a profitable buisness, they never would have tried "e-learning". It was an attempt to use VC to build a real business.
I assume that Mandrake still makes about $0 off "support", all their revenue comes from retail CDs and "The Club".
.NET is still struggling to gain market share on java, thats part of the reason microsoft did this deal, so they can hedge their bets. If .NET fails then they can fall back onto java and vice-versa.
.Net is being mostly used as an upgrade for client-side development, with C# replacing VB and C++. It has made little impact on the server side. Java is being mostly used for portable server applications, and for rewriting legacy mainframe/enterprise code. It has made little impact on the client side.
The so-called Java/.NET war is much misunderstood. In most cases they aren't in competition at all.
I said nothing about them using only linux. or even primarily linux. but a customer running BSD or Unix or a mainframe is much much more likely to switch to linux than to windows. unix/bsd/linux are all of the same ilk, being based on open standards and not proprietary vendor based ones.
Linux is growing. Not much else is.
"Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the the universe." --Albert Einstein
I hired a DBA to do some similar tests and came to similar conclusions.
* MSSQL exceeded expectations, and if it only ran on a server we could easily ssh to, it would have been the best choice
* PostgreSQL good once the (at least well documented on the net) black magic of tuning shared memory, sort memory, 'free space' memory, and vacuum stuff was figured out
* Oracle - pain to set up (installation failed if you followed their docs to the letter - but DBA new the tricks) - Was dog-slow until tuned - but evntually after tuning slightly outperformed the others.
* MySQL's SQL syntax was a bit too nonstandard for us to port the test to.
Once tuned, they all performed similarly (not surprising, since they all can do merge joins, nested loops, etc; and they all can use as much memory as you tell them to).
But the surprise to me was the MSSQL was friendliest "out of the box".
Does anyone but me remember Wang? I didn't think so. Good-bye, Sun.
"He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. " -- John Calvin, commenting on Genesis 1
MySQL is the Open source DB of choice for most for a reason. try it.
... and this is where the difference between a real database and some crufty piece of shit like ms-sql or ms-access comes in. A real DB will run much more effectivly on larger hardware that a crufty piece of shit. in other words: the performance increase once you get onto higher end machines is not equal, mySQL, postgreSQL and especially DB2 and Oracle experience massive gains in performance when compared to any MS database.
.... a large part of that is the platform it runs on IMHO.
Secondly although you can install Oracle on intel hardware it was not (and shouldnt be) desiegned for intel hardware
Not to be an ass (I am no DBA) but I have seen very large gains 15-20% in overall speed when PG or My are properly tweaked by a DBA with experience. I have never seen someone get comparable performance from MsSQL
"Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the the universe." --Albert Einstein
If you really want to manage your MSSQL server from a vt, you can -- just find a Windows SSHD and use the isql command. The GUI is 100% optional.
I've got it! Port and pre-install Redneck Rampage, bundle Yahoo instant messenger, offer live updates of NASCAR standings, and have it automatically print beer and cigarette coupons. Dat machine's a no brainer.
All versions of Oracle took days to install, and I found tuning information to be very difficult to find and comprehend via free or paid-for resources (Google, O'Reilly and OTN in that order). 8i was unable to even complete my performance tests without dying due to fragmentation problems. 9i and 10g were able to complete the tests, but at half the speed of MS or PG. Perhaps if we'd hired a consultant they'd have been able to get better numbers, but no one was willing to pay to find out when we had two perfectly good platforms which cost much less.
Jeez, what a pathetic troll. Instllation of Oracle (any version fron 8i on) takes less than three hours from CD in drive to database up and running. And the silly statement about fragmentation: how jejune...
Call me old fashioned, but I like a dump to be as memorable as it is devastating - Bender
MySQL was ruled out by the lead developers because of its lack of triggers and stored procedures. I'm sure it's very good for applications that are designed for it.
Um, you do realize that your second comment translates to "throw hardware at the problem?" While that's a fine answer if Unix is being chosen for other reasons, it's not a good answer from a performance standpoint. I'm not a DBA or an accountant, but I can figure out bang for the buck.
The server in question had dual 2GHz Xeons with 2GB RAM and two 36GB SCSI drives on an Adaptec 2940UW (no RAID).
MS-SQL doesn't have a lot of tuning that can be done, aside from the hardware/OS and SQL-schema level stuff that can be done with any database. While I'm willing to believe that a trained admin could turn the numbers I saw on their heads in a relatively short time, not all companies have a trained PostgreSQL or Oracle admin handy. Without that resource, MS-SQL does very well in my experience. I would rather not work with it for other reasons, but I'm not going to knock its ease-of-use or performance.
"Nothing was broken, and it's been fixed." -- Jon Carroll
Like the article suggests, what if Microsoft were to buy Sun?
Oracle is hard to make work, but thats why it owns MS-SQL after you make it work. Also, I would not want to put anything resembling a real database (1tb or more) in MS-SQL... I wouldn't even attempt it (except some benchmarks if I were bored) to be honest.
Oracle should probably come out with a dumbed down "small project" version to compete with MS-SQL, but I'm sure they have already studied the viability of that.
I live in a giant bucket.
The problem is that Windows is not a very viable platform for clustering. Even (or especially) the new G5s on Mac OS X beat the shit out of it (see Virginia Tech Cluster)
There are two rules for success:
1. Never tell everything you know.
I'm glad you're so good at it. I hope your rates are cheap enough to justify the price differential, maybe you can get some work with this client.
I will admit that installing got easier after I found http://www.puschitz.com/, and that the installs I did on RHEL3 went smoother than the installs on RH8.0.
However, fragmentation did happen and it did cause SQL errors that ground the system to a halt, and following the online documentation and advice that I was able to locate did not solve the problem (backing up the data, creating a new tablespace, and restoring the data). Since that backup/restore procedure took seven hours, I didn't try this two step very many times.
"Nothing was broken, and it's been fixed." -- Jon Carroll
There's no reason for Sun to make their own fab, UMC and TSMC and IBM all provide state-of-the-art foundries. But your basic point is valid. In my opinion continuing to utilize the SPARC architecture is foolish.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
I do believe you've got it. One thing I would add is that the development model and licensing of Linux ensures that ideas are shared between vendors, avoiding the necessity for multiple implementations that plagued UNIX vendors in the past. That's what I think will slingshot Linux into the "as good as or better" quality range more quickly than any other model has been able to in the past. Whatever one might think of the GPL, the guarantees it makes are powerful. The GPL is ideal for a commodity system, and the US economy at least loves commodities.
I actually think that Sun hardware for Linux is a great idea. As long as they ensure that their hardware works flawlessly with Linux, have reasonably competitive prices, and don't play the firmware/chipset version game that Dell does on systems of the same model, they might be able to yank the Linux server market out from under Dell. That assumes a good deal of commitment on Sun's part, which I'll believe when I see. Nevertheless, the possibilities are intriguing.
GPL: Free as in will
Sun hasn't said "We're dropping Solaris" but embracing Linux without becoming a player in the Linux kernel team is a HUGE mistake.
Solaris does some things much better than Linux -- less and less, certainly, but, for example, Solaris does partitioning of machines, the IP stack is great, and Solaris boxes can be configured to run complicated apps with higher uptimes even than Linux -- it's close but Solaris still has a small edge in reliability.
So Sun embraces Linux, further marginalizes Solaris, and soon Solaris will only run on Sun's Big Iron -- E10K's and the like.
IBM will make Linux scream on their Big Iron, and some of us (more and more of us) will pick IBM's Iron over Sun's because it's the same across the board.
Sun really has two options. 1. Embrace Linux and be part of the process, cannibalizing Solaris for Linux's sake and becoming a major Linux player -- with the E10K running just a feature-rich on Linux as Solaris. 2. Push Solaris hard. Give it away for the small boxes, get it on the desktop, run Linux apps on it (they've already got a project to allow this), and keep a culture that's 100% Sun, stressing in their sales pitch the few, but legitimate ways where Linux is a liability on Big Iron.
Option 3, undermine Solaris, and remain apart from the Linux community, seems to be the chosen path, however. It's the same path SGI went down. You remember SGI, don't you? You know, the guys with the pretty colored plastic? Think back...
on any mission critical DB they will have a trained DB admin. MS-SQL is nice and cuddly for low end user tasks (like all MS products) but when you get to the meat of what DB's are used for in a bussiness you start talking about better DB's such as DB2, Oracle, and postgreSQL (and yes mySQL if it can handle said task)
Also I might point out that Oracle should install fine on that system. I have a Sun V60 with almost the exact same config sitting next to me with oracle installed.
If a company is running an important piece of software (any not just DB's) without a properly qualified admin they are asking for trouble period. They are the type's that claim everything should "just work". Software isnt utopia, nothing is. Problems happen, be prepared.
"Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the the universe." --Albert Einstein
In general your points lack merit and an understanding of where the enterprise server market is today, but one point I will pick at specifically:
.NET is currently unable to really compete with it, from what I've seen. J2EE is massively popular and dominates its respective market the way Apache dominates web servers. In my opinion, J2EE needs to be fully embraced by the Open Source community for the purpose of developing free alternatives to high-end business software that hundreds of thousands of companies need (or would like to be able to afford!) Enterprise software is the final key to locking in the future of Open Source permanently. It's one thing to get a free OS and relational database. It's another when your whole business (or non-profit) can run on free, collaboratively developed, and easily customizable solutions. (Think of an "Apache" style project for all major business applications: accounting, ERP/CRM, communications, document management, etc.) For business purposes, the desktop is increasingly meaningless today -- it has largely become commoditized. (OS + office suite + web browser) Powerful, modular n-tier enterprise applications are the future.
"..and J2EE is too little and too late"
This could not be further from the truth. J2EE is a truly excellent solution for developing enterprise applications and
that is spouting off about how "middleware is dead". Who got this puppet into power and what home for the mentally infirm did they dredge him up from?
Basing an argument about enterprise IT on netcraft domain counts shows you to be a pud-pulling slashbot who likely works at CompUSA or something. Post stuff like that, you'll get moderated up, but a lot of people are going to think you are trolling dummy.
Microsoft's argument has always been that "big iron" is an outdated concept,
Seen the TPC results lately? -- Full of "Big Iron" 64 CPU systems running Windows Server 2003.
Well I have tried Sun's Java Desktop and it ain't bad. It's got tons of SuSE goodies plus a pretty nice install front end from Sun. I have it sitting nicely in a windows 4.0 domain using exchange and evolution, mapped drives, printing to NT queues, the web via Mozilla 1.4. now if I can get Wine to work we're set.
Have you seen this product? No worms, no viruses (bye bye McAfee protection), no popups loading software automatically via Internet Explorer, no Spyware, key loggers, etc., etc.
Joe Consumer won't adapt to this but Joe's kids will. This should be Sun's strategy aim for the little folks.
Microsoft and Sun both are going to do more in the open source community and also start having more Linux support.
Microsoft is already starting to open the door with open source projects within their organization, that will extend to the population. (The R&D deparment has been doing this for years, but the open source world hasn't noticed this for some reason.)
Don't be surprised that one of the best friends of Open Source and *nix progression will be coming from Redmond as well as Sun.
Now my question, what if Microsoft does open its arms to Open Source and the Linux world? Will everyone then start to hate Open Source and Linux and just go buy a Mac?
PS This is a serious prediction...
That's great, if you're using a server with "dual 2GHz Xeons with 2GB RAM and two 36GB SCSI drives on an Adaptec 2940UW (no RAID)." But most Fortune 100 companies are dealing with massive amounts of data (far in excess of 72GB) in even their smaller databases. When Chase bank, or General Motors, or any number of other major corporations, are talking about databases, their talking about needing massive hardware. The point made in the earlier post was that on the hardware these people require, Oracle or DB2 or MySQL or PostgreSQL will work a hell of a lot better than MsSQL.
So, if you're a small business that needs to keep track of several thousand clients, MsSQL may be the way to go. But if you think that Amex/Visa/Mastercard run those nifty spending analysis/theft detection applications with MS software, you aren't just not a DBA, you aren't thinking very hard.
They already have the software that they already sell to corporations for a fee, so why not sell it everywhere they could. Mitac will be doing everything necessary, so it probably won't cost sun anything.
These days, it seems like Sun is just dreaming of a future, period.
He's stupid or insane. It's a massive waste of time, effort, resources because we already know that non-MS computers do not sell to average consumers. (average as in nearly all Wal-Mart shoppers).
Sun needs to get back to the basics if they are going to survive.
Just my two cents.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Agreed, and not only that but I think that people always underestimate the amount of money in midsize businesses.
MS is not going to win away all of Oracle's business and all of IBM's business because MS software just can't do quite as much for a very large enterprise.
However, a lot of midsize businesses will be faced with the UNIX vs windows question, because midsize businesses have requirements that are available in both UNIX and windows.
If sun is no longer around, people will still be applying the myth that linux is unsupported, and just choose windows.
So, microsoft DOES have a lot to gain.
In fact, does linux really have as much as microsoft to gain by Sun's demise? If Sun loses a customer, let's say for the sake of argument that customer is considering two choices:
(1) Move to linux
(2) Move to another big vendor (e.g. Microsoft)
Why would they choose #1 now if they haven't already? Probably they stuck with Sun because of support. That means they're looking for another vendor with a big name, e.g. microsoft.
Social scientists are inspired by theories; scientists are humbled by facts.
And MS-SQL is a piece of shit, everyone knows that.
/. ...
I would love to know where this idea comes from that MS SQL or any other one of the major professional db products is significantly ahead of or behind the others (using "major professional" to indicate that I am consciously excluding certain products such as MySQL). Clearly people who say this are still living in 1997.
In the modern landscape of DB software, the actual relational DB component is close to commoditized - in the sense that you can easily pick any one of the major vendors for about 99.5% of all of the DB applications out there, with the appropriate tuning for that system. This was not the case 5 or 6 years ago, but for the last few years, the only edge we have seen of any major DB over any other has been marginal, and always a result of biased vendor-commissioned benchmarks.
This is exactly what the grandparent or great-grandparent or whatever was getting at - DBs are already commoditized, and the only way a DB product distinguishes itself today is by providing some distinguishing factor outside of the core DB functionality. For MySQL (lets pretend for a moment that it was actually up to par with true professional db products) the distinguishing factors are "free" and "open source". For Oracle, the distinguishing factors are integration with Oracle analysis tools, and also Oracle enterprise applications (ERP, CRM, etc.). For Microsoft, the factors (today) are similar to Oracle's - integration with Microsoft analysis tools and enterprise servers - plus integration with MS development tools; but in the not-too-distant future, Microsoft is aiming to completely change the landscape, and to take a product that is already commoditized, and turn it into a true bundled commodity, just as the browser and media player have already been.
Am I the only one here who realizes how ridiculous it is that we are having a discussion where one post starts with "everyone knows that MS-SQL sucks" and the next response is "yeah, and MySQL is where it's at" - or perhaps I just forgot that we are on
my ld, old job set up a new Oracle 7.3.something (yes, a while ago). They had a guy from Oracle coming over spending 3 days setting it up, cost a fortune, but boy did he make it run. ;-)
Anyway, got a feeling that Oracle is keeping the tuning stuff so hard because if they made it simple, they would pull the rug away from thousaqnds of poor contractors who specialise in tuning oracle dbs.
if (!signature) { throw std::runtime_error("No sig!"); }
Mandrake's download versions are entirely GPL. There is "non-free" software included with the $70 DVD disc of MDK 10.
-- "You must be the change you desire to see in the world." Mahatma Gandhi --
The top execs at Sun are either cashing out or leaving. Bill Joy, the most senior engineer, author of 'vi' and all the rest left last year. Their senior Java promotor took off after the MS agreement.
My guess is that the senior execs that are left will now be cashing out using the 2Billion payment from MS.
Sun will be maintained as an off-the-shelf MS corporate hull. The next phase of the MS attack will probably be in the form of a pollution of Linux code base via Sun. Remember that Sun is the only company which is now dependent on both SCO and Microsoft.
Be very, very careful.
Sun boxes at Wally World? Step away from the crack pipe now, Mr McNearly, and put the gun down!
your on crack. or you hit your head on something.
... again.)
.com boom the same people who think java should be used for everything.
.com web server. More like massive financial institution back end.
NO microsoft product is enterprise anything. Enterpprise level products have to go years without downtime microsoft doesnt do that, with any MS product your talking weeks, not months or years.
Name me a fortune 100 company that is using MS-SQL for mission critial highly intesive massivly used apps. I doubt even MS themselves would use it on internal apps. (they would of course use it on anything front-facing to avoid the whole MS uses blah debacle
MS-SQL (and all other microsoft products for that matter) have no place in the enterprise except on the desktop. Period. The only people who think different are the people who think monthly reboots are required, and uptime is calculated in the 2 digit range. These are mostly the twits who came into the industry during (or right before) the
The average person doesnt use a DB like they use a media player or browser, if they choose to bundle it fine, but its not a goddamn end user app. Its like saying that kernels are commoditized user apps. No. back end "not point and click" shit is not a "user land app" even MS isnt that fucking dense.
When it comes to enterprise level DB's your choice's are Oracle and DB2. Period.
If you really want me to get into specifics about this (oracle vs MS-SQL. don't know didly about db2) I can, last time I was involved in this discussion a year ago MS-SQL couldnt even do parallel execution of insert or delete; only queries. among other "need to have" features for an *Enterprise* level DB.
Just so we are clear an enterprise DB is mission critical minimum of 5 9's of uptime (99.999%) with thousands of users. Usually running on a system with over 16 processors, usually fully redundant. Not some home brew 2 proc system, not some
Microsoft is great at "ohhh and ahhh" shit, like desktops. There is a saying that I like "Do you know your system administrators name or extension ? No ? then he is doing his job". Do you know what DB your running ? no ? then its performing correctly.
Anyone other than the admin shouldnt have to know what is running on the server. Period. If emails have to be sent out about "emergency updates" or "unexpected failures" or any other such shit that is "mission critical" something isnt working right. or someone doesnt know wtf they are doing (pebkac?). MS doesnt usually alow for this kind of stability. they have come a long long way in the past few years, but they have a ways to go before their shit is called enterprise by anyone who works on enterprise level shit.
The only people I have heard call anything MS enterprise is MS employee's and management types.
"Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the the universe." --Albert Einstein
Mandrake's public version (community build I think they call it) is completely free. I believe it would meet even Debian'ss Free guidelines. Things like Contribs, PLF, or Commercial Disks are like Debian Nonfree. Nice addons, but not required.
Just a Tuna in the Sea of Life
The PC market is owned by companies like Dell, Compaq/HP, Acer, etc., companies who know how to make PCs on razor thin margins, have the distribution channels and the credibility. And then there is Apple, which has created an upscale image for itself and sells for a little more.
OSS companies are nimble companies with comparatively few employees that are eminently sensitive to the needs, wants, and whinings of the OSS community.
Sun is a big hardware company with lots of costs, production facilities, hardware engineers, hardware support staff. During the Internet bubble, they jettissoned pretty much all remnants of their university beginnings and turned into a vendor of expensive server machines. And their attitude towards software is that they can do it better and they are going to own it: that's what they have said about desktops and what they have said about Java, and a significant chunk of the OSS community dislikes and/or distrusts them.
And now they are going to succeed as a PC vendor and OSS company? I don't think so.
SUSE also ships with Java, Realplayer and Mpeg codecs, to name a few, so they're not completely free. Shipping with some commercial components does make it a bit easier for new users though.
.NET is still struggling to gain market share on java, thats part of the reason microsoft did this deal, so they can hedge their bets. If .NET fails then they can fall back onto java and vice-versa.
.NET nor Java are acceptable because both are proprietary. However, OSS's adoption of C# as part of a non-proprietary platform like Mono might boost Microsoft's .NET initiative and hurt Java.
Maybe, but from the OSS perspective, neither
Sun shot themselves in the foot there: if Sun hadn't been so greedy and controlling about Java, Java could be the mainstream OSS programming language. Instead, Java will probably just end up being more and more marginalized.
It would have been more appropriate if he kissed him full on the mouth like Michael Corleone did to Fredo... "You broke my heart Fredo!"...
:)
Next thing you know, Bill Gates is going to ask McNealy if he wants to go for a boat ride...
---- It puts the lotion on its skin or else it gets the hose again. It does this whenever it's told.
disk I/O, multi proc sclability, OS hardening (Trusted Solaris)
100 PCs have a lot more aggregate disk I/O and "multi-proc sclability" than a similarly priced Sun Enterprise server. They are also a lot more robust because they don't all go down at once.
During the Internet bubble, companies were buying Sun's big boxes because a single big box is a little easier to install initially--companies were flush with cash and short on staff. Now, they are still buying some of them on inertia and because moving to some other platform costs them.
But companies are waking up. In another couple of years, most databases are going to be distributed databases running on networks of PCs, just like web servers and middle ware already are. Sun's server business is going to implode.
They just work. All the time.
Everybody claims that about their favorite platform. Fact is: none of them "just work". They all develop hardware problems, they all have bugs, etc.
Note that there is also a big difference whether you ship your own proprietary components or someone else's.
SuSE probably would rather have Java, RealPlayer and MPEG be open source and free.
However, when Sun ships Java on top of Linux, then Sun has an interest in the proprietary software they ship with Linux. That's an entirely different situation.
(SuSE used to be in the same position with YaST, and I think people are happy that they changed.)
Why bother? Sun hasn't demonstrated that SPARC is a better architecture in practice than modern x86 implementations.
PostgreSQL installed quickly, but it took a couple of weeks to learn how to tune it.
/>
It's tough to compare things accurately when you don't know how to use one at the start of the test. Sounds to me like your methodology was flawed.
<shrug
jason
Have a good day?! Impossible! I'm at work!
this is sad - we are watching a death of a company right before our eyes and microsoft is lending a helping hand.
why doesn't sun do something creative. walmart pc's are not the answer.
they need to let java go and get the corporate desktop - java is something beautiful that they actually created but they are strangling it to death.
I hope when they go under they let the open source community have it. but if they sign deals like this other companies are going to get it when they go bankrupt.
here is the problem that open sourcing java would solve Scott - so let it go so it can live on and not be killed or held hostage by the companies you sign deals with.
How do you think HONDA and HYUNDAI became so big in the US?
It's an age old formula... come out with a really cheap product whose quality is not really great, but is a serious bargain. Improve its quality over time and slowly increase its cost. The people who couldn't afford the good stuff in the past and bought your product will continue to buy your product as it improves through brand loyalty and personal income increase.
It's an old trick that works well.
---- It puts the lotion on its skin or else it gets the hose again. It does this whenever it's told.
Here's another one:
The GPL is founded on a philosophy and is designed to propagate that philosophy (mainly that RMS wants all his software for free and in source form). I would think that pro-GPL would relish the communist label since the so desire that others join in on it.
Methinks someone's slumber under the bridge was interrupted. Sorry, it wasn't my intention to troll for trolls. I guess trolls are attracted to controversy like fish to shiny objects.
Look closely at the parent's post, kids. Parent's statements are subtle yet inflammatory and lack grounding in logic or truth. Parent is not interested in constructive discussion.
10 years ago, people argued in favor of mainframes over Unix servers with the exact same arguments.
> Probably they stuck with Sun because of support.
I can only speak from one experience, but at my previous job, the only reason we stuck with Sun? We had Sun hardware that still worked. When the support costs on two machines became too much, we reduced the support to just our primary server & installed Linux on the other. It wasn't because the support was available that we stuck to it, but we got the support because it was available.
Granted, this was basically a consultant shop, so we had enough expertise to do without the support contracts.
One thing, though, was that the Sun contracts were more important in covering the hardware. Microsoft cannot support your hardware, so they can blame any problem on that. Once the hardware support is gone, I think people will start looking into compatibility. They don't want to have to rewrite everything and purchase Win versions of all the UNIX software they have, so they'll probably look to another *NIX first. That's not to say they will CHOOSE another *NIX, but it would be the logical first step for any competent business forced to switch.
Parent obviously didn't bother to RTFA because Schwarz is talking about selling software, not hardware, at Walmart.
"When the president does it, that means it's not illegal." - Richard M. Nixon
I guess the lead developers didn't do their research.
Steve Magruder, Metro Foodist
MySQL was ruled out by the lead developers because of its lack of triggers and stored procedures. I'm sure it's very good for applications that are designed for it.
Did you see the planned development of version 5.0?
Let's not forget the security risks of running SQL Server, such as SQL Slammer.
If you read the website, you will see that the product advertised is not the MySQL database. Its a SAP product distributed by the MySQL organisation.
Note that 'planned' != 'available'.
When MySQL has full referential integrity, really good safe transactions and the ability to do 'select thing from table1 where otherthing in (select yetanotherthing from table2)', I'll take a look.
Anyway, got a feeling that Oracle is keeping the tuning stuff so hard because if they made it simple, they would pull the rug away from thousaqnds of poor contractors who specialise in tuning oracle dbs. ;-)
Things changed for the better with Oracle 9i and later. You get a huge speed improvement over previous versions without any tuning. Its both fast and simple.
Sun is certainly not dropping Solaris at all. Go here to find out about all the new stuff going into Solaris 10.
What Sun is doing is making Linux and Solaris interchageable at the low end by supplying both in the box.
As for becoming a major player in the Linux kernel team, why bother? They're only shipping Linux on comodity boxes i.e. standard kit. Why does Sun need to spend any time and money on that when volunteers, RedHat, SuSE/Novell, IBM and SGI are doing that already and under the GPL?
Don't be so hasty to write off Solaris. Sun has done some incredible things with Solaris in the past. I dare say they haven't forgotten how to throw googlies, and they haven't got so desperate as to being yet another Windows reseller like SGI.
Stick Men
But companies are waking up. In another couple of years, most databases are going to be distributed databases running on networks of PCs, just like web servers and middle ware already are. Sun's server business is going to implode.
There is no evidence for this. True distributed database are very hard to implement and very expensive to buy. Most web servers are the exact opposite of distributed - they run on virtual hosts on a single machine.
Where clustering is implemented, its usually between a few machines, not a huge network of small servers.
The big new thing in the enterprise industry is partitioning - providing very vast and dynamic virtual machines on massively multiprocessing Unix mainframes.
"What have the Romans ever done for us?"
"Aqueducts?"
The Spoon
Updated 6/28/2011
In fact, does linux really have as much as microsoft to gain by Sun's demise? If Sun loses a customer, let's say for the sake of argument that customer is considering two choices:
(1) Move to linux
(2) Move to another big vendor (e.g. Microsoft)
Since when is IBM not a big linux vendor? Or Novell? Sun is already supporting hundreds of thousands of linux customers (or will be like China). I'm sure RedHat can and will grow to meet the needs of their enterprise customers as the amount of those enterprise customers increases.
Where there is a demand there is a supply.
Most web servers are the exact opposite of distributed - they run on virtual hosts on a single machine.
That's because most web servers don't even come close to needing the resources of even a single low-end machine. But that isn't Sun's business.
There is no evidence for this. True distributed database are very hard to implement and very expensive to buy.
I don't know what you mean by "true" distributed databases; if you mean fully transparent, efficient support of all SQL statements as if it ran on a local machine, that will probably never happen. But that isn't necessary in the real world. Distributed database architectures are already appearing on open source platforms, they have restrictions, but they get the job done.
Where clustering is implemented, its usually between a few machines, not a huge network of small servers.
You don't need clustering technology to build large, distributed web farms--people usually do that sort of thing at the application level. Clustering technologies are a convenience solution.
The big new thing in the enterprise industry is partitioning - providing very vast and dynamic virtual machines on massively multiprocessing Unix mainframes.
Yes, a last-gasp effort by big iron vendors to stem the tide.
Ummm... No. Slammer only affected people who didn't bother to patch in the six months or so prior. And all apps have bugs, so don't come throwing back that it is due to MS insecure software. They found the bug, they fixed it. Big deal. If it was an Open Source company, everyone would praise them, and ridicule admins who were running without the patch.
Actually they have a dumbed down version called Oracle Standard Edition One, which runs $5,000, which is much more cost-similar to MS SQL than their Database Enterprise Edition which runs $40,000. http://oraclestore.oracle.com/OA_HTML/ibeCCtpSctDs pRte.jsp?a=b
) .
It says that it is simple to install and configure. I highly doubt it runs much better than MS SQL (Standard Edition $5,000 Enterprise Edition $20,000 from http://www.microsoft.com/sql/howtobuy/default.asp
MySQL gets eaten alive by either of them. ($0).
You get what you pay for. Maybe not true in alot of things, but with databases, it's pretty much the way it is in my experience.
P.S. I've never used PostgreSQL, and cannot comment on it.
I didn't think he implied that he knew anything about any of them when he started, just that Postgre took alot longer to learn to tune compared to MS (which doesn't really have or need much tuning, as it sort of auto-tunes based on schema, utilisation, and usage).
Dig into the Walmart site. This isn't a dream. Sun is already doing it.
Yeah, you're right. I missed this part:
:)
(I had a lot of networking and Unix experience, but no real DBA experience)
My bad. Ignore me.
jason
Have a good day?! Impossible! I'm at work!
You're on crack or incompetent if you think an MS server only goes weeks between downtime. I've seen Win2K go for more than two years without unscheduled downtime and about 6-8 months average between scheduled downtimes which lasted at most 1 hour. I would assume Win2K3 is better, but I've only had experience with the beta, which had some AD issues in my case.
Unlike you, I do not purport to know the technological background of the entire Fortune 100. But, if it is the case that few if any use MS, it could be due to the fact that before Win2K and SQL Server 2K, MS's products were definitely sub-par. Fortunately for their customers and themselves MS has done alot of work in these areas. Fortune 100 companies are very unlikely, in my opinion to be trying out new things, so it might take a couple of years for MS to penetrate certain markets. (Note, I am not saying MS SQL is comparable to Oracle, but it is not some trivial, useless DB system in the enterprise as some indicate).
You stated that misson critical enterprise apps are run on redundant 16+ processer servers. This is absolutely the area that MS's products really shine. If there is some issue with downtime, redundency takes it out of the picture. MS Windows Datacenter Server and MS SQL 2000 also both scale really well on SMP systems. So I would say to anyone testing between DB backends on a standard 2-processor high end system would only find that MS performs even better as you move into the enterprise.
As I stated before. MS SQL is not a replacement for Oracle (I have no experience with DB2, either). But it is getting there. And in the mean time it will work just as well for 90% of the Fortune 10,000.
Let's not split hairs. A MySQL product provides for stored procedures and triggers.
Steve Magruder, Metro Foodist
Wow, I can't believe you just typed all that...it is really nice to take that trip back to memory lane, like in 1997, right? Oh, I see - you're still there...
;)
Seriously, wake up and smell the benchmark reviews. If you really think no F500 co's are using MS-SQL, you are beyond on crack. Maybe heroin or something...
Regarding uptime, I'm not F500 CTO, but I do happen to have my own Win2k and Win2k3 servers running websites and mail servers (yes, pretty much all on MS servers - IIS, ASP.NET, MSSQL, and Exchange), and I have never, EVER had to reboot any of them for any other reason than service pack installs. My main webserver, which is running Win2k3, has not required a single reboot since the day I put it online, which was very shortly after the final Win2K3 release - I believe that was back in the summer of last year sometime, if I remember correctly. Every once in a while I have to restart IIS on this machine, when I want to upgrade a server component library for one of the web applications I have running (but I would assume pretty much any webserver requires a restart for this type of upgrade)... Note that this is simply a right click to restart IIS, not a reboot or anything like that.
My main DB server (running MSSQL) is still on win2k for one simple reason - I have been too damn lazy to upgrade it because it simply never needs a reboot! I moved locations once, and so I had to bring the server down briefly. I also may have had one power outage before I installed my UPS system. Other than that, I believe this machine has not been rebooted in over 2 years - because it is not exposed externally on the network, I do not typically keep it updated with all the service patches, so it does not get rebooted for those.
ok, well I admit, I do have one machine running emule which requires rebooting every once in a while, or at least killing some emule processes and restarting them, but other than that...
umm, did i just say that... ?
My statement was that Microsoft says this. I didn't say I necessarily agreed.
Breakfast served all day!
downtime is downtime, period.
No enterprise level customer "trys out new things" thats a fucking retarded thing to do when you lose millions per hour of downtime.
MS products blow ass in comparison to Unix on large systems, and they always have. I don't know where the hell you get your information but MS didnt even run on systems with more than 16 cpu's til fairly recently.
Getting there and being there are two different things. MySQL and Linux are growing and improving faster than anything in this market. But niether is a reasonable replacement for oracle, proprietary unix, or a mainframe.
MS and its software has come a long way, but in this market they have a long long way to go, people in the enterprise dont expect to get a virus or worm, have to reboot once a month for some major update that shouldnt be affecting them. (like the newest "help subsystem" bug).
My entire point was that this is not, never has been, MS's market. It is mostly a mainframe/Unix market and MS (and linux for that matter) are pushing into this market. Linux is gaining more headway because it is more unix-like making the transition and training easier, however it also suffers from some of the same flaws as windows. If MS wants this market its going to have to fight both the "old" and the "new" and I dont think they can win.
"Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the the universe." --Albert Einstein
You might have servers that have been running that long, and thats dandy. But they are not Enterprise level systems with a similar load and amount of data. Microsoft just recenetly made it into the enterprise, you think people are going to switch to a higher TCO (read some of those whitepapers) with less of a "proven track record"? on what fucking planet ? in an enterprise setting you run what works as long as it does, and as long as you have a contract for it. a high level contract with Sun or IBM is a 1 hour on-site four hour gauranteed replacement type contract, costing millions and millions of dollars that span years. They aren't going to just nullify the contract and the current install and most of the admins so they can run a "new" product. Granted some small and medium business's might be using MS-SQL but they would have never used anything else because there really isn't anything else in that price/performance/ease of use area that is promoted to them.
I have seen systems at large companies (thousands and thousands of users, tera-byte level of data) that haven't been down in years. High level fault tolerant systems with hot-swappable PSU's, CPU's, drives, mobo's etc because its not "economically" feasable to have downtime.
If you wanna start dragging IIS and exchange into this I will pull apache and sendmail into it, roughly 70% of the internet runs apache for a reason.
PS the webserver and DB server that we are using where I work (2 webservers hooked into 1 DB server) have 0 downtime in over a year, they run apache on linux and mySQL on solaris respectivly.
"Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the the universe." --Albert Einstein
gentoo.org?
gentoo.org ?
Just one point, actually with ms-sql 7.0 that changed a bit... They could actually perform. Bought informix out I think. Haven't used it myself. Most of the sites I have work fine with MySQL or PostgreSQL and I have Oracle DBA training if I ever need it. Just wanted to make the comment on 7.0.
/* TODO: Spawn child process, interest child in technology, have child write a new sig */
thanks for the info.
Not much of a DB guy, I just know there are/were several major things that oracle does that MS-SQL doesnt.
Haven't personally come across something that MySQL or PostgreSQL doesnt do that I need, I doubt I ever will IMHO, but they are not ready for the enterprise.
"Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the the universe." --Albert Einstein
What I meant was that most distributions contribute all their code to the community under GPL (it may be distro-specific and use distro-specific things, such as anaconda, but it's GPL.) This means that things like XFree (non-gpl) don't count, nor do other things that they distribute, but didn't create. In the case of Sun, I doubt it (but hope I am wrong).
I don't know what code was created for the first distribution; it looked to me to be a mandrake-style (a la early Mandrake when it was mostly a recompile) redistro of Red Hat, but I wasn't in the responsible group so I don't know that for a fact.
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
> No enterprise level customer "trys out new things" thats a fucking retarded thing to do when you lose millions per hour of downtime.
;) Try learning how to admin a MS Windows system and come back when you are ready.
That's pretty much what I said. Maybe you weren't paying attention.
> I don't know where the hell you get your information but MS didnt even run on systems with more than 16 cpu's til fairly recently.
MS has supported 32-processor systems for a couple months shy of 4 years now. In tech market for most enterprise customers, this isn't a very long time, but your statement sounded as if you thought it had been around for alot less time. Just wanted to make sure you knew what you were talking about. I thank you again for reaffirming my initial statement that enterprise customers haven't had the opportunity to use MS.
MySQL is not gaining in quality on MS SQL; to think so is to be a bit deluded by the Open Source mentality. I cannot speak for PostreSQL, which may or may not be a better example to your claim.
Obviously you receive your MS security bulletins from Slashdot.
I wouldnt have a need to administer a windows system. I work with real computers not the "point and click" variety.
Actually I get my security bullitens from bugtrack and packetstorm. But thanks for playing.
32 CPU's eh ? how about supporting how swapable components other than hard-drives ? how about being more stable than a beta project ? it might have been available for 4 years, but it wasn't ready until about 2 maybe 1.5 years ago.
most enterprise customers have no intrest in using MS systems to work on heavy metal, the few that have tried usually implement some half-n-half setup and eventually ween back to unix. trust me, I have seen it.
why go to a higher TCO ? why go to something thats unproven ? and why switch from a working model ? until real reasons are given its all a fantasy for MS and its fans. stick to the desktop, its what you know best.
"Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the the universe." --Albert Einstein
Ummm... No. Slammer only affected people who didn't bother to patch in the six months or so prior.
Then why were there so many instances of unpatched SQL Server to let SQL Slammer happen in the first palce? In my opinion, the people who say, oh, I need a database, let's use Microsoft's server are the ones who don't patch software in six months.
Open source people, OTOH, just type apt-get update, apt-get upgrade. Done.