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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'!"
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");
Fontconfig. 'Nuff said. 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.
You can't even install multiple versions of glibc. Even if you could, I daresay you would statically link anything to it.
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.
Which file manager are you talking about? Huh?
4. Make it so these problems can be fixed without changing distributions.
Umm...this is so...1997.
Slashdot: Where people pretend to be twice as smart as they really are by behaving like children.
While doing price comparison, most people treat sun unfairly. At work, I have used PCs and Sun machines side by side for last 8 years. Within this span, I am on my 5th PC while I am on my second sun machine. Total cost of 5 PC is similar to that of Sun for hardware alone. When added software, the Sun is quite cheaper. The support cost for PC is high too. I have had several hardware failure (including hard drive crash with loss of data which needed to be retrieved from tape). With Sun, the only support call had been twice to update newer OS. I did hardware update twice on Sun and 5 times on PC (again driving the cost for PC higher).
As far as work is concerned, PCs have been used for browsing, e-mail and multimedia. Most of the development work is on sun. I spend roughly same number of hours on PC and Sun. My current PC is 2 GHz and Sun is lowly 450 MHz but productivity wise, sun is far more productive that PC.
Linux combines the best of cheap PC hardware with Solaris OS productivity. This is the reason why that would be the best solution (provided we get some decent hardware company to make reliable PCs). The biggest problem with Linux for enterprise development is compatibility. We have lot of problems with binaries compiled with one version of Linux not working with other while this problem is virtually non-existent with PC and Solaris (e.g. we recently got a support call for one of java app. after spending lot of time with several developers, we discovered problem with system libraries. replacing one of the system library with its debug version cured the problem).
RTFA! Schwartz wants Sun to become a software company and thus make money off software, not hardware. Thus he wants to sell his software on commodity hardware running a free OS, but a not-quite free office suite (Star Office.)
Fontconfig. 'Nuff said
Wrong. Stock install of just about any distribution with the 2.4 kernel. Gnome applications can't see all the necessary fonts. Most crash. Only way to fix it: edit the XF86Config file to have the correct font paths, then spend another 2-3 days debugging. With that, you might have 70% working fonts. It's worse if KDE is the default desktop.
You can't even install multiple versions of glibc.
My point exactly.
Which file manager are you talking about?
Nautilus, Konqueror, for starters.
Item 5: Stop making problems the user's fault. Let's just fix them. The reason Windows (and Mac) keeps eating Linux's lunch on the desktop is because these (very simple) problems never seem to get fixed.
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
Sun doesn't sell to Walmart. Sun sells to Microtel, who's a Walmart supplier. God forbid anyone even follow a fucking link.
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
--dave
davecb@spamcop.net
What does the kernel have to do with fonts? I'll ignore that though. Most applications crash when trying to "see" all the "necessary" fonts? What are these necessary fonts? Have you tried typing 'fc-cache'? Are you saying that for almost every distribution out there, you have to spend 2-3 days 'debugging' after making obscure changes to XF86Config just to get the fonts that are already installed by default to view?
I'm sorry--that just isn't the reality. Since the days of RedHat 8.0, fonts have looked just fine out of the box (except for in applications that did not at the time use fontconfig, such as Mozilla built against gtk1).
Can you tell me what changes specifically have to be made, please? This doesn't even remotely sound legitimate. I have no idea what you even mean by "necessary fonts."
You can't even install multiple versions of glibc.
My point exactly.
What, that you need to install multiple versions of glibc to be able to use software in Linux? Do you know what happens when you try and run binaries built against alternate versions of glibc than the version that the system is using? Distributions bundle software all built against the same version of glibc. Third party software ought to just release software in source form, and let the distros package it, but those who don't tend to be pretty good about both releasing up to date packages and letting you know what versions of the distro you can be running to use the software.
This is a complete non-issue.
Nautilus, Konqueror, for starters.
Umm, they're not built against all the libraries on the system, they're built against the libraries of the desktop system which each one is respectively designed for. This is also a non-issue, because all of the modern distributions include the file manager appropriate to the desktop of choice by default. In which distributions do you need to fiddle with library dependencies to install a file manager?
Item 5: Stop making problems the user's fault. Let's just fix them. The reason Windows (and Mac) keeps eating Linux's lunch on the desktop is because these (very simple) problems never seem to get fixed.
Windows and Mac do not keep eating Linux's lunch. Gnome and KDE continue to improve over time, and are quite open to real problems. For example, Gnome before 2.6 had a rather lame and unprofessional file selector--gtk 2.4 features a much better one. Fixed. Fonts used to be really hard to deal with, now you just plop new fonts in your home font directory, type 'fc-cache,' and everything works. Used to be that the user had to figure out which software a given package needed to run, and install those manually. Fixed with yum, apt, portage, etc.
Almost all open source projects have a bug system, where you can actually go and file bug reports for problems you have with their software. Your problems display more than a lack of understanding of Linux--they show that you have not used Linux in a long time.
Slashdot: Where people pretend to be twice as smart as they really are by behaving like children.
> Wait a minute, I didn't know executives could be Slashdot Trolls.
...
Darl McBride, Daniel Lyons*,
Trust me, there's precident for it these days.
I Lyons is not an exectuive, but is the guy who writes many of the articles on SCO for Forbes. Lyons has even quoted trolls in Forbes (the kind who make obscene comments like "DiDio == dildo," not mere astroturfers, moreover these unrelated parties were used to malign PJ of Groklaw fame).
Pity I'm not sure how to find out if anyone is suing Forbes for libel, nor how to file an amicus brief for any such cases, mentioning that Forbes would seem to be developing a pattern of making recklessly untrue comments about their critics... Obviously, IANAL.
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
Whoa boy! It's not a matter of disk space; it's a matter of memory. If you have 10 statically linked apps running, each with some 4M of glibc/etc stuff, that's 40M of memory. With dynamic linking, it's all the same 4M.
Plus, by upgrading the glibc, you fix bugs in all 10 apps that are using the same major version number.
Dynamic linking is a good thing. What's tainted its reputation it is the silly tendency for people to always do "rpm -U", ie "upgrade", which deletes older versions of the library you're wanting to install: please, guys, when it comes to libraries, just install, don't "upgrade".
There's rarely any good reason to delete old libraries. Let them sit there in peace. As you said, disk space is cheap.
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
It's because most slashdot readers are windows users. Some are dual boot but get exasperated when they can't get debian or whatever to work with some 3rd party package.
/etc file, or whatever)... curiously enough in Windows it's usualy the program itself that makes the change to the OS.
People blame this on linux being non-user friendly. For 95% of the machines, it will work fine if you just use the apps that come out of the box.
In linux the user usualy has to alter their OS to fix a problem with a new program (add a new library, change an
That's ultimatly the trade off (as far as application installations go) in Linux it's more difficult for the user if the app isn't taliored with their config in mind. In windows they can usualy install the app easily, but it alters their OS comprimisning stablity.
I like linux better frankly, cause I'm a control freak. (That and I just think it's cool =)
Fontconfig not working for you in KDE sure is strange I have been using it for over a year now in debian sid.
/etc/X11/XF86Config-4 file there are NO fontpath entries and there have not been for over a year. Since its introduction and kde supporting it fontconfig has worked pretty much flawlessly for me. There where a few buggy packages in debian sid where the font cache did not get updated correctly and you had to run fc-cache but it has been months since that has been a problem.
In my
I compile almost nothing on my systems except for the code that I am working on. I use a debian system because it has just worked for me however I have also used knoppix and recent versions of Mandrake and I have NEVER seen the issues you are talking about. Actually I have not seen library issues of any kind on linux sine redhat 5.2 or so many years ago and I have used many versions.
I have not seen libc issues in a long time on redhat, mandrake, suse, debian, knoppix, etc.
Overall it seems to be cool to knock linux and while it does have issues it would be better if you stuck to real issues that existed. If you are compiling all this software yourself then you should probably stop until you learn how to compile software correctly.
Computer modeling for biotech drug manufacturing is HARD!
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.
"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
No, this is where the ludicrous "you're only using Linux because you're a GNU/Zealot, you won't even admit it sucks" argument comes in. Don't you just love ignorance?
.fonts directory and gets X using it immediately.
Well, there are certainly GNU/Zealots out there who behave that way, so it's not so much ignorance as prejudice or overgeneralization. Even many of the zealots out there will admit Linux sucks. I just use it because for what I do the alternatives usually suck more.
I was going to use font installation as an example "Linux sucks" of my own (because while Linux programs have always worked fine with the default fonts for me, installing new fonts even a few years ago was a pain), but that doesn't seem to be true anymore.
I can't imagine how easy this is to do on, say, RedHat, these days. I bet it all comes preinstalled by default.
I couldn't tell you what the default font installation is (except that it just seemed to work), but I just investigated what the current (KDE 3.2 on Fedora Core 1) situation for installing new fonts is:
You browse to the directory in Konqueror, and see an icon which previews a dozen small characters in the font. Clicking on the font once displays a larger character set and an "Install" button, clicking on the button asks if you want to install the font as a Personal font or System font (and explains what each means, including the need for a password for a "System" install), and clicking on "Personal" installs it to your
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.
10. KDE does this with fish. (As long as the destination has ssh) In konquerer do something like: fish://username@computer/dir/name
You do have several good points. Fortunatly things are still advancing.
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
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".
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.
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.
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
Sun is not IBM. IBM is not bleeding money. IBM does not need to change anything to avoid going bankrupt. IBM is different in many ways as well. Sun only builds systems with Sun processors. IBM builds Power4 systems as well as Pentium systems. Sun only builds solaris systems. IBM builds systems that run AIX, they build linux servers, they even build windows workstations. IBM has been smart and followed market trends. When the mainframe market began to wane, IBM didn't sit there and wonder why their mainframes were not selling, they started building PC's. They find out what the customers want and give it to them. Sun builds the same sort of stuff and wonders why the customers aren't buying it.