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Where Is Sun Going With Linux?
jg21 writes "LinuxWorld has an interview with Sun's head software honcho John Loiacono which provides an opportunity to gauge Sun's intentions with regard to Linux in particular, open source in general, and where Solaris fits in. In spite of the assertion "Sun was founded on the principle of open source. We have contributed more lines of open source code than any other entity on the planet except for Cal Berkeley," Sun seems to view Linux somewhat grudgingly, judging from Loiacono's tone: "Linux is something that we'll have to interoperate with because it may exist far beyond whatever Solaris turns out to be." An important read, if only because a Windows-free Loiacono notes that he's been using the Linux-based Java Desktop System for a year. "It is not perfect by any means," he concedes though. Refreshing honesty from Sun's top software exec."
"Linux is something that we'll have to interoperate with because it may exist far beyond whatever Solaris turns out to be"
meaning, SunOS/Solaris has no future, Linux does, so we'll morph the former into the latter.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
More and more Sun seems to becoming the thing they hate, despite the fact that they also seem to be trying harder and harder not to.
I really hope someone can prove me wrong about this.
With all the support sun has put into Solaris I can understand why they would look upon Linux with some aprehension.
... the enemy. They did to OPENSTEP the same that is in store for Linux. Obsolescence!
hell. Seriously.
I know that a lot of folks when thinking of the Open Source wars think that it's about Linux replacing Windows but where I work we are replacing Solaris with Linux.
It's mucho easy to do.
Sun seems to view Linux somewhat grudgingly,
Somehow I'm reminded of the imperious Ken Olsen of DEC dismissing UNIX in the late 1970's despite the popularity of his company's computers being used in all kinds of UNIX niches. A very different alternate reality might have developed if (a) Ken Olsen had jumped onto UNIX and (b) successfully put it onto desktop PCs early on.
I owe a debt to Sun; my Linux experience isn't where it would be if Sun hadn't contributed so much to UNIX standards.
They could do it again, or sit back while Novell does it instead of them.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
"Where is my son going with that linux hippy?", I asked myself.
The police called a few hours later...
LWM's senior contributing analyst, Bill Claybrook, spoke with John Loiacono, executive vice president of Sun Microsystem's Software Group about his new job, and what he has in store for Sun's Linux strategy.
Q: You replaced Jonathan Schwartz several months ago as Sun's software leader.
Jonathan was very visible. Is this the way you are going to do it?
A: In my previous job as VP of Sun's operating platforms group, I was more visible than over the past few months simply because we were making some changes internally regarding implementation strategy. Not the strategy itself, but how we were going to get things done, and how we were going to deploy some of the things that we had been talking about.
Jonathan is a great visionary and paints a good picture, and he hired me to make sure that things happen. Now we are making some course corrections, not changes. Course corrections are how we are going to get things done, and when I've solidified what that is I'll be back to communicate it. I'm doing a bit of navel staring right now because I'm actually focused on the operation itself: the partners, the sales force that we are revamping, and the infrastructure that we are putting in place to roll out the things we've been working on. You'll see a change when I get out on the road; I'll be more visible.
Q: Sun is going through the process of adapting itself to disruptive technology such as Linux. In terms of Linux, how is Sun going about this?
A: There are two different questions that you have asked, maybe three. What is Sun's viewpoint on open source? What is Sun's viewpoint on Linux? What is Sun's viewpoint on Red Hat? Sun was founded on the principle of open source. We have contributed more lines of open source code than any other entity on the planet except for Cal Berkeley. By the way, Bill Joy was one of the founders of Sun and was instrumental in the BSD work that took place at Cal Berkeley. NetBeans, Sun Grid Engine, OpenOffice, and Solaris are all technologies that use the open source process, and we will continue to do so. We'll remain a heavy contributor on the open source front, and it will remain a key component of how we develop software.
People don't realize today that a huge portion of Solaris is open source. For example, today we use GNOME as our desktop environment. We use Mozilla. We have integrated Apache. We have SAMBA. All of these pieces of software are a part of Solaris today. Some people think that open source is new to Sun and that we don't get it. We are a pioneer.
Q: What's your viewpoint on Linux?
A: We firmly believe that Linux (server and desktop) is an x86/AMD phenomenon. We believe that this will continue. Understanding that it does run on other architectures, that 99% of the volume generated in the Linux space is on x86. We think that Linux will continue to be a big player, including on the desktop where people are concerned about cost and want an alternative to Windows. Linux is something that we'll have to interoperate with because it may exist far beyond whatever Solaris turns out to be. We are in favor of Linux. We think that the Linux movement is great and that the open source process is great. We are leveraging open source in our software stack where it makes sense. However, we also believe that there are certain vendors in the Linux camp that are running away with Linux.
When it all started there was a level playing field. The level playing field has tilted and the numbers manifest it. We are a Red Hat licensee. We will continue to offer Red Hat on our price list. But Red Hat has the vast majority of the market share. In fact, if you listen to the quotes that came out recently from ISVs, they're saying that it's just Red Hat. This is certainly true in the U.S. and in markets such as financial services. In markets outside the U.S., Novell/SUSE is a player primarily in Europe. But beyond Red Hat and Novell/SUSE, it's challenging to find another Linux distributor who is a serious player. There is Debian, Mandrake, Red Flag, and Yello
"Sun was founded on the principle of open source."
This seems patently false. I could be wrong about this, but his claims that Solaris contains huge amounts of open source seems like a purposefully misleading comment.
He lists a bunch of programs, but none of them were developed by Sun. Can anyone correct me on this, or is he just Mr. Marketing?
Cuchullain
"If sharing a thing in no way diminishes it, it is not rightly owned if it is not shared." -St. Augustine
He sounds like he has his head screwed on right from what I read of TFA. He concedes the in certain markets Solaris won't reach the status that Linux has. True. And he also states how that Linux disto branches are more disparate than has been the case in the past. Red Hat does seem to hold a tremendous market share. Whether this is a good or a bad thing is up to the reader.
As for the posters who are claiming that Sun is just another Microsoft and whatnot, just because a company is large and competitive doesn't mean that it's always patently evil. To me I believe that Sun is trying to adapt to a changing environment to keep their collective heads above water. Much akin to Novell's migration toward SUSE and all of the Linux inclusions in their new services.
If most **experts** view Linux as the most serious threat to Microsoft these former big players are trying to grab a life preserver. Hopefully they can help elevate and improve what they are latching onto, however. If not then things will get more fragmented and more financially endangered in the end.
Well, it's != GPL, anyway. And everyone seems to think of Open Source as the GPL. So. :P
:P
Vast chunks of early commercial unices integrated large amounts of BSD Unix, which used the BSD License. This license, summed up, is essentially "do whatever the hell you want with this code just so long as we're credited for writing it."
So yeah, Sun - SunOS/Solaris- is built on "Open Source". Open Source they don't have to give back.
All of Sun's executives saw the headline, "Where Is Sun Going With Linux?" and dropped everything to quickly find out themselves.
Then they realize this is just an interview with another Sun executive, and they go, "Ahhh. Crap. I thought I was going to actually learn something!"
Honestly, when someone figures out where Sun is going with Linux, Open Source, Java, Microsoft, etc. please tell Sun!
Like Digital Freedoms? Then donate to EFF before they're gone.
I just bought a Sun Opteron workstation on eBay for a great price. It comes with Solaris installed. Though, I have extensive experience (and liking for) Sparc Solaris, I'm going to wipe it when it arrives and install Linux or FreeBSD. Not for religious reasons, but because the software is there. Who even bothers porting to Sparc Solaris any more much less Solaris x86? For example, none of the commercial Lisps or the best open source ones run on x86.
I hate to ask but why not bundle there java desktop with Solaris x86 instead of Linux? Can Solaris X86 run Linux binaries?
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
They founded a business model on taking BSD Unix, customizing and taking it proprietary, then selling the devil out of it. Without Open Source, Sun wouldn't have an OS to sell!
The WHOLE solar system.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
As for where Sun is going - I get the distinct feeling that they don't know. They say that interoperability with Linux is important, but since Linux cannot be tightly defined, how do you define interoperable? At the IETF protocol spec level? At the POSIX level? These have nothing to do with Linux, and most OS' do all that already.
If we're talking IBCS-style binary compatibility between Linux and Solaris, that could be interesting. Linux developers have largely dropped that path, though, preferring to build a structure for native apps (and pressuring companies to provide them) than translating between system calls and system quirks.
I don't see why Sun would chase that path, unless they see Linux evolving from being "just" a kernel and/or OS and into a Unix-like standard in its own right. POSIX and Unix98 certifications are much rarer than 'compliance', because the certification requirements are so obnoxious. A truly open/free specification that ANY company can "certify" would be vastly superior.
The idea that a "Linux Stanard" could appear, against which Solaris could be compliant or certified, would strengthen Sun's hand. It would also fit with the anti-Linux hostility from Sun's head honcho, as Linux as a kernel doesn't need to exist for a Linux specification to be around. Indeed, a surviving Linux kernel would mean a moving target, which would be harder to meet.
The idea Linux would out-last Solaris is interesting, as this implies Sun are developing a replacement in the same way Solaris replaced SunOS. It also implies Sun expect to ditch Solaris relatively soon, as what is understood by "Linux" today is NOT what will be understood by "Linux" by version 3 and certainly not by version 4.
I don't feel any beter for knowing more of Sun's plans - it feels too much like a hostile take-over bid designed to enable Sun to ship an OS that can "steal" Linux' market share rather than fight fair over it.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Sun has been quite schizophrenic about Linux for years. They have done good things and bad in roughly equal amount. They've said good things and bad in roughly equal amount.
The result of this is that while I don't really consider them an enemy of FOSS, I sure don't feel they can be trusted. I'd rather trust MicroSoft. At least with MicroSoft you KNOW that they are intending to 0wn your soul, your pants, and everything in between. So you can understand what they mean. With Sun you haven't got a clue, and the best evidence is that they don't have a clue either.
I expect another press release from Sun either tomorrow or next week lambasting Linux as the source of all evil. (Or possibly this press release is in response to that blog?)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Sun specifically will not under any circumstance include GPL'd code in the Solaris kernel. Sun was recently somewhat screwed by Intel. Sun had been waiting for Intel to release wireless drivers (mainly for Solaris x86 laptop/wireless users). When Intel finally did release the code, they did it under GPL. Thus, completely screwing Sun's ability to include the drivers in their distribution. Technically, they could add the drivers, but they strictly adhere to the idea that NO GPL code will become part of the Solaris kernel.
I'm not suggesting Sun hasn't contributed anything to the tech-community, but to say they were "founded on open source" reminds me of Animal Farm.
Disclaimer: I'm not a Sun kernel guru, but I know some. Some of the "facts" above may be a little munged in translation.
This one gang kept wanting me to join cause I'm pretty good with a bo staff.
Linux doesn't belong to you!
Sun seems to be very schizophrenic right now. I would guess that there is some kind of power struggle in the company going on between the old hard-line commercial software folks and the people who want to enter the new open source fueled business model.
It's not clear which way it will go. I am steering clear of anything using any Sun IP (e.g. Java) until I am convinced that they are not going to go on some kind of insane "monetizing" spree.
Side note: the SCO FUD has had a powerful effect on me... just not the one they intended. It's made me *very* wary of anything with a restrictive license and of any IP controlled by a single entity. The moral of the SCO story seems to be "don't base your projects or your business on proprietary IP or you might get sued in the future when the company controlling it needs some quick cash."
Today, Solaris is far less expensive than Red Hat or SUSE. The list price on a two-way Red Hat is about $799 per year. My first year price for Solaris with service and support and the right-to-use license is about the same as Red Hat.
Of course, you CAN find expensive versions of Linux - how much do you want to spend? I'm sure we can find a way to accomodate you. Big corporations tend to go for the expensive options when it comes to OSes and software.
But what the man doesn't want to mention, is that you can get suse professional for $59 and set up a desktop, server, or whatever. updates for 2 years via suse/yast, or install apt, and get upgrades & legacy support that way. Many small businesses are quite happy with that arrangement.
Suse Linux runs just fine on my laptop, or on my 4-way opteron server, or on the mainframe, if I want it, and the Suse tradition of reliability and solid engineering continues under Novell's leadership.
If everything you have copyright on that is available under an open source license counts than the FSF might have a good bunch of code going for them.
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
"Linux today has maybe a few tens (or hundreds, depending on how you patch it) lines of code. Linux 0.1 had something like 10,000 lines of code. Linux today is far and away more powerful than version 0.1 was, but it is NOT 1,000 times or 10,000 times as powerful."
read over that again a few times. please.
For the record I was once a Sun fanboy and I maintain several hundred sparc boxes for a largish ISP.
I think they are mixing up FOSS and Linux. I would guess that 95% of Sun's customers don't care about a kernel. Solaris as good as it is would be much more appealing if I didn't have to install a few dozen OSS packages in order to get the system usable. Give me Apache, Tomcat and all the good GNU stuff that comes with any standard Linux distro.
I believe it was Bruce Perens (maybe ESR?) in Revolution OS that said before Linux was around, he would spend days GNUifying Sun machines. It's the same damn thing 20 years later!
Oh and ditch sparc already. Give me a quad Opteron on a board that uses OpenBoot.
I'm glad to hear that the courts in California have finally overturned the OJ precedent that made it legal to brutally murder your wife, even if you look really cute on TV.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
- they have given the community Java, Open Office, NFS, & RPC. While Java is not strictly open source it is widely used.
- Sun's John Bosak created XML.
- they still make most of their money from hardware and services
- just about all the machines they sell can run linux (and bsd)
Since they lost that patent suit to Kodak, w.r.t Java, does that mean any chance of Java being GPL'ed are null and void because it's now officially patent encumbered?
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
When I read this title, I imagined Bill Gates, six-shooters in hand, sneer on his face:
... or...
"Where you think yer goin' with that Linux, Sun?"
"Drop the Linux, Sun, and nobody gets hurt, see?"
from my own experience at work:
:"You guys are sure you dont wanna go back to Solaris??!!"
We have several clusters from work from different vendors, Sun for starters, IBM, SGI, Dell.
The worst and the one with more downtime nodes and most incosistent is the Sun nodes. They were the first we bought, and their problems made us automatically switch to other vendors.
Their first reply was
So personally i was not impressed, and i assume they are only going with linux because if they didnt, they are gonna miss the train.
The lunatic is in my head
We have contributed more lines of open source code than any other entity on the planet
It's quality, not quantity, that counts.
Does everything include nothing?
You'll need that to post-install the recommended patch cluster anyway.
When it comes to Linux versus Solaris I wonder which of those two kernels you feel is always loaded with userland apps. ;-)
Oh, and when it comes to hardware I'll have a sparc anytime.
Sun can contribute millions of LOC to open source projects and still hold on to crucial portions of the code or crucial patents. Take, for example, the Java Desktop System. It may run on top of Linux and be mostly Gnome. Sun might even donate all the Java code that is part of the Java Desktop System under an open source license. But no matter what they do, what makes it work is Sun Java: there is no open source implementation (and, in fact, no implementation that doesn't include some Sun-licensed code) that runs it. Any code that requires Sun Java or a derivative to run on might as well be owned by Sun.
Of course, in the long run, Sun can't prevent Java from being cloned and from losing control over it. No matter how hard Sun fights, uncertified and incompatible open source implementations will become more and more widely used. But Sun sure is fighting hard to stay in control (all in the name of WORA, of course).
(As for Sun's open source record, I think one might call it "mixed"; but that's a separate thread. Just don't automatically take frequent claims from Sun officials that everybody used to agree that they were "the good guys" as truth.)
That should read tens or hundreds of MILLIONS of lines of code. That is, unless Alan Cox and Linus Torvalds have talked Transmeta into reimplementing Linux as a gigantic VLSI processor core...
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Thell me something, judging by the kinds of trolls, speculation and lies getting modded up as "Insightful" here today, I am beginning to think that this place is swarming with IBM and DeadRat astroturfers. I wonder these people get extra mod points compared to everyone else?
Sun took the BSD code developed at Berkeley and built a proprietary system out of it. I think that counts as "being founded on open source", just not in a good way: their source code went from fairly open to quite proprietary.
IBM has kept itself 'sharp' through internal competition, which in the end is all focused on selling IBM in one way or another.
Sun is struggling. At IBM, management directs factionalism toward the greater goal, selling. At Sun, it's more a domestic dispute. IMO this is g'rowing pains' for Sun and will require some savvy management.
Especially difficult is managing internal competition in the smaller company of Sun.
Now I'm the grandest Tiger in the Jungle!
That's like saying that in order for IBM to sell mainframes to large and medium-sized corporate customers, they have to gain the mindshare of home users. There are two different markets here, and the one of interest is business-to-business. While I might agree that getting mindshare of the home user might be important in some cases, I don't think an enterprise information system is one of them.
Sun's Linux roadmap is headed in the same place that all of Sun's plans lead - dwindling sales and bankruptcy. Until Sun's board grows some balls and fires Scott McNealy's arrogant ass, that company is just going to keep pushing one lame idea after another until nobody can remember what it is Sun does well enough to justify using Sun kit.
No. Because selling mainframes alone is not what sun is trying to do. I still think the parent post is wrong since he thinks in order to sell to bussiness's you need to sell to home users. Its the other way around. Once you start effectivly selling your desktops to bussiness's people will want the same thing at home. This is EXACTLY how MS came into power, and why it has stayed there. Schools and shops run MS so people run it at home.
.com boom is over. Most companies buy cheap ass machines that they get sweet deals on because they also buy the back end machines from the same company (ie IBM, Compaq etc etc).
Sun has not had a cost effective end user desktop. Ever. I know because I used to work for them. They have had plenty of high end machines. No company is going to buy a 2k computer for a secretary to play solitare on, the
Their weakness was never competing against MS, it was competing against Intel.
"Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the the universe." --Albert Einstein
Are you suggesting Windows is perfect?
- Just my $0.02, take with a grain of salt, your mileage may vary.
Between their constant focus shifts and their newfound friendship with Microsoft, I don't think Sun can be trusted anymore. I also think that Sun is having its business gutted by free Unix-like operating systems running on cheap x86 chips.
It's a shame when you consider what Sun could have been. Nowadays, it wouldn't me if Apple sold more Unix systems than Sun does.
"First they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win."
Mahatma Gandhi
"My intent is that we need to bring Linux and Solaris together more rather than bash or trash one or the other."
Very true. Especially now.
I am a big fan of Solaris and RedHat. In fact I like RedHat (vs. SuSE, Slackware, Gentoo, Debian) because it is build with the same ideas I came to appreciate in Solaris distribution. Until RedHat Linux renamed into RHEL it was marriage in heaven. I was getting solid, feature-full, tested, distribution for $0. Now with Fedora's fast development cycle wide deployment is very questionable. By the time I am done planning and testing FC1 deployment it gets moved into Fedora-Legacy state i.e. unsupported. I don't feel comfortable with that at all and deployment of RHEL promises to be costly...
In the mean time Sun went far with Solaris 10 incorporating all the nice features down the road providing supported, stable and tested environment. I think it has its place at least in my strategy.
Friendly competition is good for the industry, for both RedHat and Sun. There is always room for two and in the end we, UNIX followers will benefit.
go to https://ttademo.tarantella.com
A tad overpriced, but you could take one of these Netra 1280s I'm managing, tie it to a chain on the back of your truck, and drag it down the freeway for 10 miles without it being the worse for wear.
I'm sick of fooling around with cheap-ass Dell and ex-Compaq DL-series hardware. Of course developers are getting better at writing 100% cluster-capable applications and thus life with cheap hardware is getting better, but it always seems some boxes are mission-critical regardless.
We have a new toy, a rack-full of HP blades. They are running Linux. Seems like the best of both worlds - a high-end box, and Linux with drivers engineered specifically for the HW by the vendor. Sun is a little behind in this respect, but I don't see them gaining.
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
Then they came out with the alpha chip. A screamingly fast 64 bit machine in a tower case that destroyed any PC in terms of performance. They could not sell it.
How a company can create one fantastic product after another and still get it's ass kicked like a 90 pound weakling is beyond me.
"Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes."
- E.W. Dijkstra
But they need McNealy! Because he's a great technologist... no wait, that's not it. Because he's a great CEO... no wait, that's not it....because he makes a drunk 13-year old sound mature... could that be it? They need an official trash-talking nitwit?
we will end no whine before its time
There's a standard industry joke that if DEC were in charge of marketing for Kentucky Fried Chicken, the advertisements would be for "warm dead bird". Their technical staff was brilliant, and even their general management staff had some bright bulbs in their, but the marketing was utterly inept.
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
I once worked at a company where there were several whole floors filled with cubicles with QA people in them, all with Sun Ultrasparc Desktops.
Some of them were proud, even zealous about it. Not many. And they were in the process of replacing them all with cheap Clone PCs.
"What's the frequency Kenneth?"
For the sake of their employees.
It takes time to fit into the Linux community, work out the legal bits, work our internal processes. If I'm not mistaken SGI had a terrible time with all of this but are now in the process.
But its not about making Linux better. Linux is going to walk all over Solaris. It has the momo and brick walls wont be stopping this freight train.
If Sun employees want to be marketable in a Linux world, working on a Linux like OS wont cut it. They need to get into the process. Stake out some respect and a niche of expertise in the community. Otherwise someone else will be there and Sun engineers will be filing bugs with the rest of the end users out there.
It would be sad to see a bunch of kernel developers become evolutionary dead ends and then have the company go belly up.
Taking a bullet for inflated dot com egos is not what Sun engineers should be put up to. Sun should enable their engineers and join the rest of the world. Sun isnt big enough to keep a disneyland in the backyard to live in.
Can Solaris X86 run Linux binaries? YES
especially in Solaris 10, claimed to be without performance hit.
I have never heard the school referred to as Cal Berkeley except by outsiders. It's one or the other...Call it Cal, Berkeley, UCB, or whatever, but Cal Berkeley is like taking two contractions and piling them together.
This includes Netra T1, Sunfire V100/V120, and also systems based on the AXi and Netra CP lines of OEM motherboards.
These days most of those people are purchasing dual processor AMD64 systems instead.
I do not deploy Linux. Ever.
Yes there was a time when companies had Sun workstations. This was before the PC became commonplace. Since then Sun has been far above the average. (in terms of price)
I have never worked anywhere that had Sun workstations (besides Sun obviously). I have seen old old Sun boxes floating around, and occasionally seen a Sun (ws) system in a closet somplace being used as a server, but never a desktop being used as such.
They of course are going a long way towards fixing this by offering AMD solutions.
"Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the the universe." --Albert Einstein
It's a beautiful thing really, the swirling winds of a free market economy. The market forces of competition are what drives creativity and inspiration that is ultimately behind the delivery of better, more efficient, and affordable products to consumers the world over, at least in theory anyway. But it's quite pointless to harbor this type of animosity towards Sun. It's transparent to anyone who cares enough to follow the industry that how precariously close they are to extinction at the moment, and having seen the abyss are in panic mode to try and reinvent themselves hoping the public can at least remember enough of their past glory to remain in public consciousness. After all, they were the standards bearers for the industry for a period of time, and have more significant contributions to the unix world than a number of other fadish neo*nixes that I will thankfully abstain from eulogizing. The anti-open stance of their position today amd their joining with MS has been necessary just for survival so they might HOPE to even have the chance to reinvent themselves. Since if you look at their business model, what do they have if they open up their source? They become a hardware manufacturer? VA Sun? I don't think so. for what they are and represent today, they had no choice.
Whatever they may tell you - IMHO they are free-riders. At LinuxWorld in Frankfurt recently, when talking to a Sun employee about their V40z and blade server offerings, the man quickly switched over to how great Solaris x86 is. For about 10 minutes he talked about Solaris, and I let him talk to see what their real intentions are. But hey, this was a Linux event. Incredible.
You could not insert the GPL'ed source into any LPL, BSD, X11, MIT or SISSL product, without the authors permission, without violating the terms of the GPL license.
Schizophrenia != Multiple Personality Disorder, just FYI. Schizophrenics often hallucinate, hear voices, and are generally psychotic.
I'm not exactly sure how the popular misconception that it was at all similar to Multiple Personality Disorder started, but that's completely wrong. As I'm sure you like being right, try to avoid using schizophrenia in this context. To a psychology geek, it makes you look as stupid as you would saying something like, "I bought a bigger hard drive because I was running out of memory."
The wikipedia entry provides a lot of information on this widely misunderstood condition. In particular, check out the signs and symptoms section, which gives a good overview of how Schizophrenics actually behave.
Conversely, the wikipedia entry on multiple personality disorder (now refered to as Dissociative Identity Disorder, or DID), offers some information on what people with little or no exposure to abnormal psych tend to incorrectly presume is the defining characteristic of Schizophrenia.
Don't get the two confused, it makes you look stupid (or at least, ignorant).
Couldn't tell you off hand what the Tadpole uses (It's at work and I'm not) but it has all the bells and whistles for power management that the standard Windows/Mac laptop has. In most ways it's far better at going to sleep and coming back up then any of the other laptops I've been using.
Laptop support is still hairy, and power management is it. Full ACPI has the os powering off everything that isnt needed; even bits of the mainboard like the sound card or LAN, which complicates things. And the trouble with laptops is you cannot easily juggle parts (except external or mini-PCI WLAN kit) till it all works. Plus the displays adapters are usually tier 2 junk.
But linux does work pretty on recent systems, especially if you are a bit trailing edge in your kit. The big problem I had with RH9 on mine (apart from power) was the WLAN. I had to get Jaques 'WLAN-man' himself to do that bit of setup, for which I was very grateful.
Blah blah
we love Linux
blah blah
IBM has no strategy
blah blah blah
we hate RedHat blah.
When will Sun get it through their thick skull? Linux is taking over in the data center and Solaris is a has been OS that won't be around much longer. What Sun needs to do is copy what IBM is doing... first get Linux running on every platform you make and this includes the 1 ways all the way to the huge StarFires. Second, port all your applications over to work in these new environments. Three, have a clear strategy of which OS they are going to focus on: Linux.
Your mom always said, a PB&J is better than nothing, and God is nothing, is a PB&J better than God?
Our company evaluated the Micro Vax. We all loved it, but our boss felt that DEC was not serious about marketing it, and that we would be stuck with an orphan. Turns out he was right - but I felt like it was a self fulfilling prophecy at the time.
Don't be so fucking stupid. So fucking Micro$haft fucking sells fucking mice and fucking joysticks and who fucking knows what fucking fuckall other fucking shit. You fucking know that the fucking GP was fucking talking about fucking CPUs and real fucking hardware instead of this fucking piddly fucking peripheral fucking shit, you fucking stupid fucking douchebag fucking asshole.
BTFW, there was no fucking need for you to be so fucking sarcastic in your fucking post. It's not fucking nice. You fucking need to fucking learn how to fucking be more fucking civil to other fucking people. Fucking remember: a fucking spoonful of fucking honey will fucking get you fucking further than a whole fucking cup of fucking vinegar.
--
Yours fucking sincerely,
William Fucking Buckley
"learn how to" should fucking be "learn fucking how to".
My favorite Sun box is a SparcStation 10SX. Dual 24-bit framebuffers, and I have the big bright monitors (447L's) to go with it. It's a great box, slowish but with stunning graphics.
"What's the frequency Kenneth?"
Marc Hamilton, Executive Director of Sun's Global Science and Technology Network, will speak at SCALE 3x (2005 Southern California Linux Expo) Might be a good place to hear a bit about Sun's Linux strategy.
I'm posting this AC for obvious reasons. Sun were recently at my company giving their pitch on Solaris 10. They flat out stated that it will run faster than linux for all of our apps or they consider it a bug and will fix it.
They know we are trialing Linux, but they have said that they will guarantee better performance and cost. They went on to say that there is now no reason to run Linux.
Im not anti-Sun, but Im anti-the-attitude that Sun is somehow pro GNU/Linux. They are not... however, the are for it, IF and only if, it can be USED to propel their business (a business without GNU/Linux) model.
Sun likes GNU/Linux ONLY as long as it stays an OS for hobbiests... btw, Microsoft is fine with this as well!