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IBM About To Buy Sun For $7 Billion
plasticsquirrel was one of several readers to send in the sharpening rumors that IBM is on the verge of acquiring Sun Microsystems, as we discussed last week. The pricetag is reportedly $7 billion. According to the NYTimes's sources, "People familiar with the negotiations say a final agreement could be announced Friday, although it is more likely to be made public next week. IBM's board has already approved the deal, they said." After the demise of SGI, one has to wonder about the future of traditional Unix. If the deal goes through, only IBM, HP, and Fujitsu will be left as major competitors in the market for commercial Unix. And reader UnanimousCoward adds, "Sun only came into the consciousness of the unwashed masses with the company not being able to get E10K's out the door fast enough in the first bubble. We here will remember some pizza-box looking thing, establishing 32 MB of RAM as a standard, and when those masses were scratching their heads at slogans like 'The Network is the Computer.' Add your favorite Sun anecdote here."
If the deal goes through, only IBM, HP, and Fujitsu will be left as major competitors in the market for commercial Unix.
Really? I'm posting this comment from a workstation running a commercial UNIX. I'm using a Mac.
another day, another possible layoff.
drink and be merry tonight, for tomorrow we're unemployed.
How much would that be per square foot?
Wow, IBM is buying our Sun for only 7 Billion US dollars? What are they going to use the Sun for though? Something sinister, probably to power their ultimate War Machine and conquer the EARTH!
I remember rockin' coffee machines in the break rooms of their education centers. It's no mystery their most successful product is named "Java".
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
... I.B.M. into the dominant supplier of high-profit Unix servers ...
Oh, how pleasent, what a smart move for IBM.
Woh. Hold on. Wait. Please, I beg of you, save Sun's software from IBM's slow moving process and lack of usability.
I must confess that while I have used Solaris, the only thing I have ever cared about from Sun enough to bitch is Java and Java related thingies. Now, I'm not saying that this is going to fall apart if/when it transfers to IBM's hands and I certainly hope that the people involved in those projects stay there but if I look at the products of the two companies I must say that Sun is far better at Software.
This hasn't always been the case but let's look at web application servers. The free open source Glassfish container has been one of my favorites for development. Websphere, on the extreme other side of the spectrum, was the bane of my existence for a very short time in my life causing me to lose sleep night after night. I would take Weblogic, Tomcat, Resin, anything over Websphere. Please, baby Jesus, if you can hear me do not let this happens and if it does, let Glassfish be the source code they stick with moving forward.
Although I'm sure you'd love to hear me bitch for hours about Rational products, I'm just going to say that I think competition is healthy and also I prefer Sun Software to remain Sun Software. I hope this deal falls apart. I've loved IBM's tutorials but do not care for their software.
My work here is dung.
Really? I'm posting this comment from a workstation running a commercial UNIX. I'm using a Mac.
Try running a mac os x server and a solaris server, side by side, running the same application, and tell me that mac os x is truly unix. Any OS requiring >90% of configuration changes to be made in a GUI does not count as UNIX, in my book.
I'll grant you that OS X is UNIX-certified, but OS X is _not_ SVR4 UNIX.
PS- That burning you smell is my karma going up in flames.
Anybody want my mod points?
Sun somehow managed to butcher so many of its acquisitions, that it would be interesting to see what would be the outcome of IBM buying Sun. OpenOffice vs Symphony, DB2 vs MySQL, WebSphere vs Sun's offerings, Solaris vs AIX, and not to mention the hardware side.
If it goes ahead, of course....
ws
So does Anonymous Coward have good karma?
IBM today announced the outsourcing of 90% of Sun employees. "This will save us a good chunk of the $7B we paid for them," said an IBM representative.
Meanwhile, in Washington, IBM was approved to receive $3B in taxpayer money from the Keep America Working fund.
"First things first, but not necessarily in that order."
- Doctor Who
But, what will IBM do with Open Office?
Seems I remember IBMs fetish for Office Suite battles. Maybe early onset Alzheimers, but didn't they usta battle Office with some product of their own? Now they'll have our previously free Office Suite.
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
I had a friend buy their stock in '01 expecting '00 prices to come back.
I heard about all this a few years ago and was like, get out of it, Sun will never be what it was then.
The make some great stuff, but decent has gotten good enough that the market for great is much smaller than it used to be.
They said "but it was worth so much", and I said "it may never have been worth that much"
It is funny looking at the two next to each-other since 1995, Sun took a ridiculous jump, IBM pretty much tracks with S&P and DOW, but slightly better.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
What market SUN has which is still substantial in certain arenas. Then there is Java, MySQL, and many other products which has been clearly covered. But I think getting their hands on ZFS and dtrace will be big. With ZFS IBM can build cheaper versions of NetApps Filers. Did I use cheap and IBM in the same sentence?
Hopefully IBM will still push out OpenSolaris along with Trusted Solaris. I wonder if this means the sparc processor is done and Solaris will be migrated to the IBM's RISC. What of AIX then? I don't see IBM maintaining two operating systems long term.
"RISC is going to change everything."
There are no loopholes. It's either legal or it's not.
There's a number of decent forks of MySQL out there, time to look at them. People, list all of the forks you can think of here, I'll start with drizzle https://launchpad.net/drizzle
Drizzle's no good for me, I want those advanced features.
Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins, for they are subtle, and quick to anger.
I built a dial-up ISP in a major metro city with five Sparc 4s, and a Sparc Classic. Several Bay Terminal Servers and a crate full of USR Robotics Speedsters to attach to the octopus serial cables.
Upstream was a Cisco 2500 running two T1s, bonded with that new cool PPP protocol.
Over 650 shell accounts, usually 500 going at a time. A Special variant of SunOS 4.1.3 and access to tin, trn, pine and even... lynx!
Those Suns never took a break, never died and were solid, despite being located in a colo facility that alternated between being 100 degrees, and being 40 degrees. (Don't ask). Had a mind blowing $7,000/mo of revenue coming in the door to pay three people and keep the lights on the worlds crappiest office.
Good times.
In college at Southern Utah University in 92 we got some SparcStations. We were a VAX/VMS (or NetWare) shop (and the instructors were all VAX (or NetWare)guys) so Seniors, like me, were sitting there with "Unix for VMS Users" (From O'Reilly?) trying to get the damn things on the network. Once that was accomplished we had fun trying to get X running.
Then we had to try to figure out how to do something actually useful with the damn things. It was a fun quarter. A couple years later I discovered Linux. Now I run a commercial Unix, the MacOS, with Debian running in a VmWare virtual machine.
Best Slashdot Co
TFS says "one has to wonder about the future of traditional Unix" in the immediately preceding sentence. While OSX is indeed commercial and UNIX, it is quite arguably not "traditional Unix". Its distribution in the wild is almost the opposite of most others, quite common on laptops, not very common on desktops, fairly common in specific workstation markets, quite uncommon in smallish servers, and nonexistent in big iron applications. "Traditional Unix" tends to imply lots of big iron, a fair number of smallish servers, and some workstations, with minimal or no desktop/laptop presence.
Further, most "traditional Unix" setups, if they have graphics at all, use X. OSX supports doing so; but the mac users' howls of protest are deafening around any program that actually tries to do so. OSX is UNIX; but there are solid reasons for saying that it is hardly "traditional Unix".
...when I should start going back to calling things "IBM-compatible."
What if I do the same thing, and I do get different results?
If anyone wants to jump on the bandwagon with me, the ticker symbol is "JAVA".
And don't we all owe them something for keeping openoffice alive and well?
RUN!!!!! Ever since Sam Palmisano took over US based IBM employees have been treated worse and worse. Unless something changes the brain drain going on is going to bite IBM in the ass in the next year or so. Keep an eye out for massive published audit failures.
You're right, there is no need to put lipstick on the pig.
I was reading about this earlier in the week, and remembering when IBM and Sun were arch-rivals in the high-end Unix market. I'm guessing IBM's going to kill AIX and maybe even the p-series servers now.
My question is, does IBM want Solaris, the hardware business, Java, or do they just want to get rid of a competitor?
Every IBM product I've seen in the past few years has had its user interface written in Java. Every piece of middleware they write now is Java. So it seems like they just want to consolidate the market.
That said, they got a good deal in this market, but what a lousy time to do this. How many thousands of employees on both the IBM and Sun side are going to get kicked out over this? I guess it all depends on how many products this kills. Worse still, IBM hasn't been known to be keen on keeping jobs in the US and Europe lately...
wow that's one hot piece of real estate.... (sorry)
You can fool some of the people all of the time
Our Sun sales rep has already reported that 75% of the sales force has been let go - which may not be a bad thing... Sun couldn't sell/market themselves out of a wet paper bag.
I have the utmost respect for a large part of their technology portfolio... and they really do (or at least seem to) try hard, but in the last 5 years support, sales, and things in general with them have just degraded.
Any company they buy ends up dieing horribly. It's no coincidence they make the vast majority of their money off user support. They ensure that their products are impossibly frustrating to use.
IBM buying out Sun is a bad thing. A very bad thing. You can also kiss competition goodbye. You can also kiss competition goodbye.
Will IBM drop their support for Linux and switch to Solaris and OpenSolaris for their hardware? They won't if they want to continue to receive the support of the FOSS community, which they have been enjoying for some time now, otherwise they will be seen as exploiters, like so many who use the FOSS community during their beta period but take their product proprietary. Are you reading this Skype? Get that 4.0 Linux version out NOW!
Will IBM release ClassPath under the GPL2, making Java ENTIRELY GPL? They will if they want Java to remain competitive to .NET and expand.
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
Last time I checked, Red Hat was selling a version of Linux, and so was Novell. They make quite a tidy profit from their Linux business.
Much of Linux's success is due to its community of contributors, but that community also includes corporations.
This space left intentionally blank.
First heard this one way back when Sun flirted with OpenStep:
"All the Wood Behind One Arrow"
Back in college in the 1980's I administered a cluster of Sun2's with 160MB rack mounted hard drives. You could define those days as when a "hard drive" would kill you if dropped on your head from a height of 3 feet.
How much would they be willing to pay for some other celestial body. Say for example... Uranus?
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
The article mentions "I.B.M. could also undercut Oracle by more actively promoting the free MySQL software" but bring up IBM's DB2. Isn't this the more interesting question? Won't there be fear of IBM cannibilizing DB2 with "free" MySQL? Will IBM try to bury (or join the ranks of those who disparage) MySQL so that it doesn't endanger DB2?
Run and catch, run and catch, the lamb is caught in the blackberry patch.
Will we get SMIT on Solaris now?
...GM buying Ford. Adding and combining more crap has never been a solution for a failing business.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
Very soon there will be 3 OS's: Windows, Linux, OS X
Of course windows will have 7 to 14 flavors;
Linux will have 700 to 14,000 different distributions.
OS X will run on all of your All-White appliances, but you won't know its there.
Think Deeply.
Firewall guy to Websphere admin. I see this as somewhat good news. IBM has the uncanny ability to get execs to buy there stuff. I never and mean never get to talk to the sales guys. Big Blue puts company execs on their boards, we get a huge huge so called ROI with a product like Tivoli and we have to make it work under any circumstance so the exec won't be wrong.
With IBM essentially owning Java and Websphere platform I think this to be good news for anyone supporting it. Probably bad for the devs though, granted the market usually decides but IMB is good, real good at bypassing those who ask the tough questions.
You can never know what's going to happen with this but Eclipse and Netbeans being arch rivals I fear about the future of Netbeans.
It's the Java IDE I like most and I'd hate it go away.Yes, I know it's open source but Sun pays most of the people who develop it and it'd never been so big without their help.
"IBM About To Buy Sun For $7 Billion...in other related news, IBM representatives are scheduled to speak in front of Congress today regarding their proposed plan to 'throttle' luminous energy from the newly-acquired Sun based on a multi-tiered priority structure with various governments, multinational corporations, and non-governmental organizations..."
Alpha Centauri, followed by Betelgeuse.
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
( http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/04/29/181235)
Was the author right? Would Sun have been worth more than $7B back then?
I'd agree with you, but also point out that one issue people typically have with this is the lack of documentation on said command-line configuration.
I often see "power tips" and the like on how to enable some OS X behavior that's not an option in their GUI. So far, just about every time I've run across one of these, it also follows that if Apple intentionally left the option out of the GUI, they also left the option undocumented. Someone had to comb through settings files and "play around" to discover it initially....
EG. Have you ever wanted Apple's "Front Row" software to default to opening on a second display instead of the primary one? Yep, doable with a console command, but hardly documented!
Against their x86 server competitors, they probably know better than to think they can suddenly drop investment in Linux and not get trounced. They had the opportunity for a long while to prioritize AIX port to x86 and yet never seemed to make an effort to do so. Of course, with a readily available x86 Unix with no required investment, that could be different in the long term, but don't expect much else.
In terms of more releases under GPL, IBM isn't well known for that. IBM tends to use the Eclipse public license, which is more BSD in style.
I started using Sun Workstations back when they had the Motorola based Sun-3's. Later,
when they came out with Sparc based Sun-4's, I learned just how portable software written
in C is. I used to take a buffer of data read in from the network or serial port, cast to a char*,
bump along the buffer, then cast to an int* to get some piece of a network header.
On Sparc architecture, you can't de-reference a pointer to an int if the address is not divisible
by 4. So you have to do a byte copy into memory properly aligned for 4 byte data.
In those days, if you wanted spreadsheet software that ran on Unix, it cost about $1000. Most
software for Unix workstations cost much more than the same sort of thing for Windows. The
rationalization for this was a Unix machine could support way more users so they had to charge more.I used to think that Unix software vendors were responsible for the success of Windows.
"We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them." -- Albert Einstein
IBM and SUN operate too much of the same space... the merger doesn't do anything other than mean the elimination of too man products that all compete. netbeans/eclipse Glassfish/WSAD Solaris/AIX Plus they both compete in the hardware market. In the long run this just means less competition in a market that I actually care about. If some other tech company (like google) that had orthogonal interests bought the company that would be a win.
If
The Computer is the Network
and
The Network is Down
then
It's Time to Take the Rest of the Day Off
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
I remember hacking away in the labs until 3:00 A.M. trying to get my CS projects done on those SUN "pizza boxes". I loved those things.
I recently returned to my Alma-mater and found that many of the SUN labs have been converted to PCs running Linux.
-ted
This comes under the heading of "Market consolidation". IBM will cherry pick anything of value and pick up the lucrative support contracts from Sun service the rest will probably be "donated" to FOSS.
Since IBM is Cozy with Novel or whatever the hell they call themselves now, the last of the AT&T SVR4 source will probably be opened and any useful pieces that are left will be absorbed into Linux and BSD with yet to be determined ramifications for HP-UX. Eventually I see all the variants like AIX, HP-UX and Solaris going away with Linux and BSD left standing. With HP now moving to Itanium based servers for the higher end, it will not be long before Intel x86 and IA64 processors stand alone accross the spectrum.
IBM and HP will rule the high-end datacenters where the revenue is generated from service and support contracts, leaving the rest to squabble over the department server market.
I find this a little disturbing in regards to the commercial unix space. It seems like Sun, IBM, and Intel are the only chipset manufacturers left. If sparc goes, your choices are IBM, Intel (Power, Itanium). If another company were to enter the chip market with something competetive, I would think there are enough Unix variants and forks that another one could arise. The software isn't really the problem, IMHO.
... one has to wonder about the future of traditional Unix
Not really, it has been and will continue to be replaced by open Linux solutions (and is some cases BSD).
Respect the Constitution
Sun developed the first industrial strength version of unix, that is, the first one widely used that was reliable. They also created the first really usable workstation -- like a PC, but with really good networking and (for those days) decent graphics. They created the first network file system. RIP.
Or maybe not. But at least, IBM has a totally different approach to Linux, and they may want to revisit the ZFS licensing.
Calling MacOSX a 'commercial unix' just doesn't taste right coming out of the mouth.
Mac OSX doesn't sound or look like a commercial Unix because of it's nice, which some disagree with, and shiny GUI. Apple doesn't spend much billing it as Unix either.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Even an open source version is made available.
OpenSolaris is a last-ditch effort to remain relevant in the face of Linux.
Solaris is doomed to fail because Sun made it unnecessarily baroque. Speaking as someone who cut their Sun teeth on SunOS 4.1.1 on sun3 (now is your cue, crusty Unix overlords, to come and tell me you started with sun2) I can conclusively say that while SunOS has come a long way it has also become continually more of a PITA. If it's so fucking great, why is Linux eating its lunch? Maybe ZFS and dtrace just aren't enough?
"Eating its lunch"?
Really? Get thee to a real customer that demands five 9s or better uptimes. Yeah, there are probably some - running IBM mostly. We'll see how IBM likes handing support revenue over to RedHat now that it looks like they'll have their own open-sourced OS that's not burdened by GPL restrictions.
Until Linux guarantees backwards binary compatibility, Solaris is going to stay put. Nothing sucks more than applying a patch and having your customer's app fail to run. And as long as backwards compatiblity can be broken by some long-haired wackademic on his vision of free-software jihad deciding unilaterally "THIS IS THE RIGHT WAY TO DO IT!", Linux has a problem.
Ever try to back out an upgrade on Linux? Hint: enterprise customers do NOT upgrade their boxes by running yum or some other app against an internet repository.
Yes, I said burdened by the GPL earlier. Get this: there are a lot of companies that simply will NOT put their product into a mix that includes the GPL. Period.
The GPL allowed Linux to grow into what it is. It's also going to prevent it from "winning".
If the deal goes through, only IBM, HP, and Fujitsu will be left as major competitors in the market for commercial Unix.
Do we really still count HP as 'being in the market' for commercial Unix? Last time I checked HPUX was as dead as a commercial Unix OS can be, and that was 5 years ago. Which wasn't surprising because it's probably the most archaic and outdated OS I've ever used, a real masochist OS.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Sparc or Power? Those new Niagara-series Sparcs are quite nice, but will IBM keep development going in both chip families?
Solaris or AIX? Personally, I'd prefer Solaris. A better option would be to GPL/BSD Solaris and let the best parts be cannibalized off by Linux and the BSDs.
With DB2, what attention will IBM give to MySQL?
The bigger question, is Red Hat next?
IBM already has a tight relationship with Red Hat. RH's support for Power and IBM zSeries mainframes (and lack of support for Sparc) are evidence of that. I've also worked a couple of jobs where there were thousands of IBM blade servers all running Red Hat Linux.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
They make SPARC chips (and boxes), but that doesn't make them a Unix vendor, it makes them a SPARC vendor.
And doesn't Apple qualify as commercial?
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
RUN! Run for lives! If you don't get canned outright your jobs will be sent to India ASAP.
I'm willing to sell them the Moon for $1 Billion or Mars for $1.5 Billion
It's yet another company killed by H1-Bs.
It's not as if IBM is an innocent in that regard. They just took it further and officially became a foreign company. There is nothing American about IBM anymore except its origin.
i wonder how much the moon will go for... i hope apple doesnt buy it, i like their stuff, but i'm sick of their logo and you know they'd laser it on there.
Forbes predicts 10,000 layoffs from the merger, most on the Sun side, in "IBM and Sun: There Will Be Blood".
Sun had a good run: 27 years. But they lost in workstations, they lost in servers, and Java isn't a big moneymaker.
This has serious implications for Java. To Sun, Java was their one remaining strong product. For IBM, it's just another software product line. IBM will do a decent job of maintaining it, as they do with all their corporate products. But they may not push it forward.
IBM also gets MySQL, which might be a problem, since IBM has other competing database offerings.
Sun's Silicon Valley operations have been shrinking for years. They overbuilt hugely during the dot-com boom, and have far too much office space. There's even an abandoned Sun industrial park in Fremont, where they built the parking lots and the building foundations before stopping construction around 2001.
On top of outsourcing Sun employees, I think one of the big money savers for IBM was laying off approximately 5000 of their own employees just a few months ago. I guess they needed the cash to buy Sun, so they could outsource Sun's employees to save more cash... This hardly seems like good corporate policies in our current economic climate. I just don't see how average Americans tolerate companies who fire 5000 of their own (American) employees to raise enough cash to buy another company to increase their stock margins. Isn't this the sort of business policy that got us into this recession?
$7,000,000,000.00
Mid-Eastern Pennsylvania Gaming Convention
MVS is still inside the descendant operating systems, you can run MVS apps on z/OS, for example, it's in there!
Most of you are so young you think MS is the source of evil. In actual fact MS learned at the feet of the master - Big Blue. That is where most of MS' bad behavior comes from. The saying was: you could sell shit if you could paint it blue. BEWARE - Big Blue awakens !
That's a different question.
Though many don't look or see it that way Apple does support Unix.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
... in dot-bomb, er, dot-com
My company has been using IBM AIX for 8 years. I finally convinced them to try a SUN T2000 for comparison. I blew or AIX systems out of the water! for thousands of dollars less than what an AIX costs.
Damn, I guess IBM figured that out to. IBM will buy SUN and eliminate the SPARC T1 and T2 processors.
setting the country back another decade in technology.
My favorite anecdote from Sun is riding up and down the office on top of an e450 (purple & grey monster the size of a dorm room fridge and with 4 convenience caster-enabled wheels on the bottom).
They sure dont make em like they used to...
Damn, I guess IBM figured that out to. IBM will buy SUN and eliminate the SPARC T1 and T2 processors setting the country back another decade in technology.
Not to mention ROCK, the 16-core floating-point monster that is due out later this year. It will make POWER look like a ZX81, so IBM will have to kill it.
With Solaris on POWER, IBM will migrate people off of SPARC and cancel its development, just like the Alphacide committed by intel and HP.
Solaris will play second fiddle to AIX and Linux.
We will soon live in a world where intel, IBM and Microsoft are the only players left and technology is stagnant. This will be great for the suits and shareholders, and bad news for everyone else.
Stick Men
IBM wants to sell you different hardware that works better for your different software needs rather than shoehorning everything into Power, x86, or System z and trying to force those into your racks. They've made lots of press with this lately. Just search for "IBM hybrid server", as there are too many articles to link from here.
There are some workloads that the Niagara, Rock, and such are just phenomenal at running. These tend to be ones that Power, which is fewer faster cores, aren't so great at running.
IBM and Sun both have different strengths in their closed Unixes, too. They both have their own connections to Linux. They both have their own strengths developing software for Linux.
MySQL could complement DB2 as the entry-level DB. IBM has lots of middleware software written in Java. They have Lotus stuff and Sun has OpenOffice.
They both have blade products, and Sun's x86 ones are IMHO better than IBM's. They oth have torage products, and they are each one stronger in different parts of that market. Sun steps all over most other server companies in the telephone and telecoms market with their Fire and related servers.
I think there's a good match to be made here if IBM doesn't kill the engineering culture of Sun. The two are rumored to have very different product development styles, and it'd suck to see IBM chase off all the good employees who are more comfortable with how Sun does things.
Sun likes to put an inordinate amount according to IBM's figures into R&D. Maybe they can become an IBM Research subsidiary or something, sort of like AT&T had Bell Labs. That could be awesome for the IT industry.
I've got one in my shed wrapped up in thick polythene waiting for the day I have a huge house for my evil museum of non-conformist computers which is really a secret plot to take over the world.
It's only got two 333MHz processors and 128MB or RAM but it is dual boot with debian and Solaris 8 IIRC.
I got it from my previous employers. It was going in a skip and I asked nicely.
When I resurrect it, it will have NetBSD or something similar.
Stick Men
How much of the long gone and best forgotten CDE was Sun's fault? The horrible dull blue on dull gray theme seems to tie into their hardware offerings and the standard Java UI look and feel so I've always given them a large share of the blame for it. I hated CDE. Dullest windowing environment ever, and not at all free.
How is modding this comment a troll anything but an abuse of moderation? It's not even flamebait. If anyone wants a long dissertation on exactly what is wrong with HP-UX 11i IPSEC, pay me. But suffice to say I have experience.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
What I think the parent had meant to say was that Apple like most American companies are only forward thing as the next financial quarter because that is all American investors want to see is what is going to give their portfolio the quickest buck. There are other business philosophies out there, ones that are more customer oriented such that customers are retained long term, where you make a quality product and let the product sell itself. These businesses last much longer and tend to be more financially stable. Their prices will often be a little higher, but not always. In the end, it is still only about the money because that is the way we measure everything. The difference in philosophy is that long term stability maximizes returns over the lifetime of the company. Each have their challenges, and so in the end, every company needs to keep some kind of balance (or a good lobbyist... but that is another topic)
Apple has done some really cool things, and some things that really make you wonder how Steve Jobs can sleep at night. Microsoft, Sony, AT&T have all made major contributions in many ways that have improved the quality of life for many people around the world, if not at very least with jobs... but there are other things they have done that mean I can not trust to do business with them because I don't feel I can trust what I am going to get from them.
Companies just want your money, cause shareholders only want to see that maximum return, and I am sure if your boss came to you and said "Well, we really don't have any more money to pay you, but you are welcome to keep working as long as you like". What are the chances you are sticking around? Hmm.. MAYBE if it is some kind of AIDS cure, you already have tons of money to support yourself... and you have no family or someone in your family has AIDS. Wow, you must be so selfish!
The kool-aide I want to drink (ok, honestly, I don't really get what the hell that even means, unless it a racial stereotype / ignorance joke) is that money is only a tool. What we want to do is enable ourselves with the power to make choices for our own life. In a philosophy of liberty is is prudent in the pursuit of such power to enable others with such power such that you may work together to make better accomplishments. It would seem that it is so typical to measure such power in dollars and cents, given its status as legal tender, but in the end it really is the useful labor that is encouraged and a smoother flow of goods and services through the economy that causes us to use money at all. It also doesn't mean that for every dollar moved an equal amount of useful work was done. In this way the value of the dollar is highly volatile.
So while it may be complicated, different philosophies even conflict, and while everyone is only out there for the money, what others do with money one chooses to give away will play an influence, in some way, on who they will end up giving that money too.
Want Big Business out of government? Take away the incentive and start by getting government out of big business!
No. Sad, but no:
Sun doesn't have the volume to do chips anymore. HP and Apple gave up a few years ago, and frankly I'm not so sure about IBM and AMD. Have you actually looked at real benchmarks for the Intel 5500 series (or Power, or Sparc)?
The SMT Sun machines were actually halfway competitive with x86 on throughput/performance, but not better, and single-threaded performance sucks. The Ultrasparc-VI/VII had improved but still weren't really competitive unless you needed a $500k box that was twice as fast as a $50k top-of-the-line x86. Power6 was better, but still not really competitive.
And now Nehalem is out - Intel's first real bottom-up redesign since they realized AMD was kicking their butts because nobody wanted to move onto a new Itanium architecture (which, by the way, was slow) - and it's all over but the screaming. Once the 4-socket 32-core Intel x86 is shipping by Q1 next year I'm not sure anybody else can really hang in in the processor market.
Sun has some real innovation in software, though (Java, Dtrace, ZFS, some of their new storage stuff). It'll be a real loss if IBM kills that.
Now my LCD panel's monitor stand is a Sparc IPC. I carry arround an AUI-10BaseT converter in my jacket pocket for luck.
The times, they are a-changing.
uhhhh, no. Sun entered the consciousness of the unwashed masses in 1995-1996 when, in an entirely unprecedented maneuver, it spent millions of dollars advertising a programming language. My mom actually called me to ask me about this "Java" thing and what she should do about it. No, my mom does not know how to program.
Ultraman, and his big Ultra-Guitar from the UltraSPARC 1 launch?
Maybe ZFS and dtrace just aren't enough?
Maybe they're not, but no other server OS has them, and they're fucking awesome IMHO. If Solaris is discontinued, what am I supposed to use? LVM and strace / truss?
Currently I'd rather take Solaris as a whole over any other server OS right now (and I also run Linux and BSD).
Add in zones and the T-series servers, and it's a pretty good set. (Perhaps a bit too late though.)
Sun is (was?) a nice little free radical that kept the corporate overloads on their toes.
I met Scott McNealy (Sun's Chairman/Co-founder) several weeks ago and had the opportunity to ask him a few questions.
I asked what it is that gives Solaris an advantage over other Unix/Linux distros. He stammered a bit and talked about how enterprise customers don't trust Canonical (which I deemed to be a straw-man), but do trust Sun for support. He talked a bit about downtime and stability. He really seemed to think that Sun was at the forefront of open-source.
McNealy also pushed OO.o, which I found to be out of line with his well-known "the network is the computer" theme. He seemed confident that Open Office would become a dominant player, but was unclear as to whether that was with home or business users.
Anyway, he's a smart guy, but I think his good ideas have run their course, and I'm happy to see IBM stepping in to inject a new perspective on Sun's businesses.
After the demise of SGI, one has to wonder about the future of traditional Unix.
Sun is going the way of SGI because of traditional Unix!
I see no indication Rackable intends to immediately stop selling SGI kit or using the SGI name, assuming it's definitely not an april fool's. SGI is supplying large, likely profitable Altix systems to HPC places around the world - Rackable may have been OEMing for them already anyway.
But of course SGI had already transitioned to linux and irix is basically gone, so in one sense it already wasn't much of a "commercial closed unix vendor" very much - my point is, being bought out by rackable isn't a some new thing that changes that.
You mean IBM is buying the Sun in outer space? What a hot buy.
so it's not a realman's Unix.
Xll comes on the OS X DVD, it does not need to be downloaded, or at least not anymore than it does for Linux. I installed X from the DVD that came with my Mac. When I install Linux, I may install Ubuntu on my Mac, I will also have to install X.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Of all the bits of OS X that are actually interesting and of value to users, "it's a UNIX" is a long, long, long way down the list
Depends on what you mean by "users." Web developers love it: you can be running a near-perfect approximation of your production server right on your laptop and have commercial desktop apps like Adobe's (and even IE via virtualization) all on the same machine. And I've met other hacker types who value the shell and BSD-like subsystem plus other features of the OS.
Tweet, tweet.
Since this entire thread is completely off topic of the article, your choice of signature reminded me of an idea I had, and was curious what you might think.
I have weighed all the difference evidence and such out there regarding the death penalty and such as I found it difficult to decide what to support and its relationship to my own philosophy. In the end, I think it is unjustifiably expensive, and horribly immoral, but not immoral for what I might call "the typical reasons". I think it is immoral that a person that was not a victim is the executioner, and the sterile atmosphere trying to make it appear so "humane" is just disgusting. The state has a compelling interest in justice because we pay them through taxes to be the benevolent and fair moderator, and if a person has possibly committed a crime that morally justifies death, the state should get to make the final decision, but them actually doing the killing is wrong.
I like what (I have been lead to believe is true) goes on in Japan. Honor killings. If you have been dishonored or wronged in such a way that means the criminal deserves death, they can issue you a permit, more or less, to hunt that person down and kill them. THAT is honorable. THAT is humane. THAT is moral. It isn't a "bad dog" that needs to be put down, this is a living human being that deserves to DIE! Let a man (or woman) in such a position face their death with some dignity, and the face of the person they wronged be it with a rope around their neck, or a knife swiftly jabbing into them. Let that face be the last thing they see before meeting their maker up close and personal. Not behind some sterile glass where the "victim" sits right along site the criminals lawyer. What a sick and pathetic situation for both parties.
Making the family responsible for the execution of an individual not only puts responsibility where it should lie and make them accountable for their accusations, but could also brig a type of closure better then some damn shrink is going to give them helping them "talk about their problem".
If you are morally object to killing the person yourself, or none of the members of the family will kill them, or possible closest friend (maybe put that in a will? In the event of my murder, I entrust the undersigned to avenge my death. Hmm...) then the person should get life imprisonment. Further, if the victim is against honor killing / death penalty or the such, then no revenge death can be granted.
Why is is that justifiable homicide can be a defense, but only after the fact? Premeditated justifiable homicide can only be committed by the state? That just doesn't seem right.
Anyway, I think you get the point. Have you thought about this? I know personal responsibility really isn't a virtue in the United states much anymore, but as a matter of principle more than policy, what do you think?
Want Big Business out of government? Take away the incentive and start by getting government out of big business!
I'll remember fondly the days of running a 32-bit Sparc 20 w/ Solaris 2.3 as the main server for a small ISP back in 1994, and the heyday of running 6 E10Ks for a major telco in the late 90's.
IBM gets Sun's customers. IBM has one less competitor to worry about. IBM will be able to close their "sunset" program.
I think IBM will shit-can the hardware, and parcel off the software stuff to their software divisions. "Ever onward pSeries."
This move will probably be a case study in MBA programs in a couple of years. This was an excellent chance to kick your competitor in the balls, when he is down on the ropes during an economic turn down.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
I was programming at a company in the beginning of the 80's that bought Sun workstation serial number 2 for us to develop on. It was an S100 bus machine with a M68000 CPU. Berkeley UNIX with C compilers. The documentation stacked 4 feet tall. We connected to it with WYSE-50 RS-232 terminals.
The antitrust problems are far too large. Especially in light of the massive "too big to fail" problems we've seen in other industries. The computer tech industry cannot be allowed to put this many eggs in so few baskets.
What antitrust problem? The alternative is that Sun goes out of business.
I worked on the E10K team - we were called "Cray Research" then.
Most people only pay attention to the big vector boxes but Cray also had a SPARC shop in San Diego. There was a Cray blessed version of Solaris and a 64 processor beast called the "SuperDragon".
When SGI bought Cray, they couldn't figure out what to do w/us. After a few weeks Sun got the SPARC shop for basically the cost of inventory.
The SuperDragon was renamed the E-10K, got new colorful cabinets and people started to eat them up. I still don't understand why Cray couldn't have done just as well w/those boxes.
Anyway... I still own a nice SS-20 which I boot up a few times/year (and turn off when I can't take the noise). I am sad to see Sun go (just as I was sad to see Cray and Tandem and other employers go). Hard to believe that IBM will do a better job of managing Sun but we will see.
In the end, it is still only about the money because that is the way we measure everything.
Money is part of it but not everyone cares only about it. About 10% of mutual fund investors invest in SRI, Socially Responsible Investment funds. While not everyone is into SRI, it does have a significant impact. For instance it had a big impact in ending apartheid in South Africa.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
IBM Unix Servers: 6.387b
IBM Unix Desktops: Essentially 0
HP Unix Servers: 4.561b
HP Unix Destkops: Essentially 0
Apple Unix Servers: 0.099b
Apple Unix Desktops: 14.27b (FY 2008)
In other words, Apple makes TWICE as much money selling Unix-based systems as IBM.
we're gonna have to think up a new word for what its competitors are doing.
IBM's still on the list, but only because they have generally embraced Linux. Sun has been going "la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la" and it's been getting less and less convincing as time passes.
SunOS was really the Linux of its day at the end, and Solaris was the first clear misstep towards Sun's eventual demise.
"Not an actor, but he plays one on TV."
The problem with the idea that Apple will continue to try to build products that you want to pay for is clear: you are only one person.
There are many others who buy Apple products as well.
Apple is trying to serve the lowest common denominator.
Quite the contrary, Apple is more elitist than pro common man. Steve Jobs has said as much when he said he did not want to serve those who wanted a cheap expandable Mac. I love Macs, I'm typing this on my MacBook Pro, but I hate this elitism. As many other /.ers have pointed out there could be a big market for OS X on cheap PCs.
Apple is about peer pressure. It is not about providing the most technically superior product.
I did not get my Mac because of peer pressure, almost everyone I know or knew uses Windows, I switched to Macs and Linux from Windows PCs because it is a superior product. I have had problems with Macs, last Thursday I picked mine up from an Apple store where I took it because it did not waken up right. But I've had many more problems with Windows, and a Linux PC, than with Macs. I also switched because I don't like being treated like a criminal, which Microsoft does.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Okay, thanks for explaining that.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Noooo! I've always thought Sun had the most ingenious logo (designed by Stanford Prof. Vaughan Pratt, lead designer of the original Stanford University Network (SUN) workstation)
I really don't associate really nice GUI and Unix, so I don't consider it very Unix'y.
But that's one of the reasons I wanted a Mac. Unix plus a nice GUI.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
That's because in Unix, you get what you paid for in function.
In Microsoft Windows land, and I'm boasting on the Apogee and related Shareware breakthroughs, is where home-brew grew its tendrils on speculation and Microsoft did the same; it's all there in theory and still continually forecasting those theories as the advancements of every rendition of the marketing department's pseudo-code charts extending from the very developer's workstations and into the exhibit room.
Unix on the other hand, doesn't put any claim on the box that hasn't already been proven at the console. As you can see back in Windows NT 3.5 days, Microsoft abandoned their OpenVMS approach to Windows NT/2K/XP based on the inability to speculate on a design that has its limitations in applicable and expressed sciences; which is why marketers would rather pay someone door-to-door to throw business cards and advertising stickers on hardware rather than sell an expensive Unix system with a free breakfast+lunch+dinner.
I worked for Microsoft at their TechNET division for two years. Trust me. Shitty software sells when you put more prepaid Stars on the box from *INSERTDOMAINNAMEFEATHERWEIGHTMAGAZINEHERE.COM*
Well, considering they INTENTIONAL tried to follow the design of MS Office, they did a really great job. It isn't turd polishing from scratch, this is like genetically engineered feces grown from stem cells; give them some credit.
:)
If you can be bothered for 3 seconds to bother reading a manual, learn Lyx / LaTeX / TeX. If you are going to do something at all, why not bother doing it write. LYX is to OO.o or word what Inkscape is to MS Paint.
If you are happy with OO.o, cool. I loved it for a long time too, but if you feel like it is just like word in the worst ways, and too often find yourself saying "Why the hell did it think I would want it to look like that?" or "crap, why don't these things line up the way I want?" or the ever popular "gee, yeah, templates great, but why the hell do they have to be so freakin' useless?". Not that everybody or even most people say that, but some + perfectionists and professional publishers likely would, with an exception, professional publishers have known and used TeX and derivatives for longer than MS has been significant.
Want to evolve to better precision, control, and auditing? Learn LaTeX. Lyx makes it easy to learn and use
Want Big Business out of government? Take away the incentive and start by getting government out of big business!
I wonder what it really means for the sparc (hardware) platform? It was a nice platform and continues to be in some ways but always feels like its slowly dieing off due to lack of r&d. Its quite possible the the sparc platform will morph its way into the IBM RISC chipsets I guess? The whole backward binary compatibility thing would probably go out the window (which was quite a plus for solaris in someways). Hopefully though theres some engineer in IBM that has the brains to be able to create some "best of breed" cpu (though they've not managed to yet obviously) cause I love the (relatively new) cool-threads and sparc vi line.
I grew up as an admin on sunos then solaris and i loved them both, more then any other commercial unix offering practically. I dont see IBM getting rid of that really, and I dont see them rationalising the platforms either (they haven't really done so yet - they've pushed people to move from platforms they own to AIX and linux, but not to the n'th degree).
Java is an interesting one and I hope glassfish doesn't bite the bullet and that eclipse gets some of the "nice" bits from netbeans cause they're both fantastic products - of course, in the J2EE realm nothing beats websphere (IMHO, i've worked on J2EE as an integration type for many years, websphere, sun one, weblogic, oracle, tomcat, you name it and I probably know it intimately). Sun ONE j2ee certainly improved, but websphere was just such a brilliant product in many respects. But, while java certainly helped unix at the server, i personally think its done more harm then good at the desktop.
Then theres MySQL, obviously not going anywhere but I wonder what might happen license wise? IBM certainly have no problems doing the GPL thing, so in reality its probably going to be a good thing with some db2/mysql crossover coming down the track (yes, db2 does have some features that make it worth it).
As for storagetek, IBM have shark and they both kinda suck. The old (entrenched) storage vendors are really beginning to suffer at the hands of the newer people coming out (if you've worked in SAN's for the last couple of years, you know what I mean). Alot of new companies have gotten somewhere just because they took a new view to storage. Lets face it, EMC (stotek, hds, etc) have been doing almost the exact same thing with storage - management wise - for decades and its antique tech, sure they've added some minor bits of functionality (eg EMC got alua - woopdy doo), but look at some of the new companies and what they do with storage and you wonder. OF course, IBM have already seen this and bought XIV which is a much more modern way of dealing with "spinning rusty metal" that makes alot more sence these days, even if it only does sata. (Sorry, didn't mean to bash EMC I just know them the best in terms of hardware).
Of course, anything that does happen will take a number of years. IBM will be required to support what Sun currently has in the field and Sun have long service lives in software and hardware. I doubt very much IBM are going to start heading to customer sites going "rip out yon M4000 and replace with a pseries", it just wouldn't work.
Just on the (OT) "apple is unix" thing, yeah apple is unix and alot of unix people do feel at home in it. Personally I dont like apple, I fear them more then I fear microsoft because they want to own everything (hardware and software) while MS are hardware sluts. Im also not much of a fan of the interface, to me it seems clunky like gnome does (I live on a linux desktop just for the record and own an iPod) but the mac interface is much prettier but the one thing i've wanted is a more compact interface (compare nautalus to windows explorer side by side and look at the space-waste in gnome for example - same goes on the apple interface and its space-wastage). Oh, and no I dont mean that gnome and the apple interface have anything in common other then they both allow you to use a mouse and keyboard! The one thing I will thank Apple for (altho, probably just as fair to thank MS
Does this mean that Sun's perpetual license to all of SCO's "intelectual property" will continue under IBM?
Does this mean that Darl McBride will finally burst his brain aneurysm that has been growing like a well watered plant?
So they decide to merge their Unix OS's Would that take the form of either: Suix, or AiSol or what
...if it will be "assimilated" by the Borg-ish IBM, and completely change its company culture (compare the Sun website with the IBM one), I prefer to look somewhere else, for a place where I would like working...
...but now, if they are going to be "assimilated" by the Borg-ish IBM, and the beautiful company culture of Sun vanishes (compare their websites...the IBM's one makes you depressed), I prefer to look somewhere else, for a place where I would like to work...
A lot of people attending MS presentations have Symbian phones and run embedded non-ms in their cars. Nobody in their right mind would run a laptop as you would a server.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Sun continues to exist as a wholly-owned subsidiary of IBM, existing as-s with some marketing help from IBM, while IBM fixes its shit with good Sun software.
We're talking about the possible acquisition of one of the most innovative companies in the history of business computing (Sun): they invented sparc, java, own the Unix name, have been developing an enterprise (among other things, hugely multicore) Unix for decades, pioneered stateful firewalls, own mysql, etc., etc. and 1/3 of the total comments are about comparisons between Solaris and Mac OS X?
How ridiculous.
On-topic, I like both companies but am saddened by this news. I think IBM lacks the progressive research agenda that has made Sun famous, important, and (unfortunately) unprofitable. I'd hate to see great budding projects like opensolaris get brushed aside by IBM. Sun has other valuable projects that might also suffer. Fortunately, I think java is popular and important enough to be neglected.
Time to dust off the resume in case this goes through. Likely case secret shady layoffs. Best case, move to india and work for less than minimum wage for the same company. I wonder if McDonald's is hiring?
Sun was at my campus this year for recruiting.
Liked their caption. "If you're curious, you're qualified."
It's kinda ironical that I approached them for an intern, they said they don't take interns. I'm now interning for IBM.
Ah, now I will never work for Sun. Sad.
That makes me feel a little better about the world
Depending on how you look at it, it can be either fortunate or unfortunate, but different funds focus on different criteria when deciding what corporations they invest in. Some don't invest in alcohol, firearms, and or tobacco businesses. Some invest in businesses that meet certain employment criteria, such as paying and treating employees well. Others look at businesses environmental records. A corporation that meets one fund's criteria may not meet another's. Here's more on screens SRI funds use.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Sooo, IBM is going to buy Sun and then fire thousands of people. And then Microsoft will come and hire the best of them. If you expected ZFS and dtrace on AIX, you're wrong. :-)
I still have equipment running SunOS on a SPARCstation-5. These things just never die.
In GOD we trust, all others we monitor.
Considering StorageTek was founded by a bunch of ex-IBM engineers who broke off on their own (and did a pretty damn good job), it's really too bad that they got bought out by Sun, who's now getting bought out by IBM.
I know of some Redwood silos that'll be getting Yet Another Rebranding Sticker here RSN.
They don't?
I seem to remember UNIX being prominently displayed on Apple's OS X page when OS X was first announced, and it's still there!
He who has no
IBM releases the bulk of Sun offerings back to the FOSS community. They might retain just enough of the patents and such to beat up Microsoft (for whom they have no love).
...is this part of the Year of Astronomy, then?
Power corrupts the few, while weakness corrupts the many.
Let me see if I got this straight:
IBM is laying off employees.
Sending jobs over seas.
Buying Sun for 6 Billion
And have their hands out for government bail out money?
Did I miss anything?
Writing as an ex-IBMer I wonder how the take-over will be handled. Two that I remember, SRA and Rolm, had their own employees who were also IBMers. In fact a couple of IBMers I worked with went to Rolm when IBM bought it. Both returned to IBM after Rolm was sold off. Maybe IBM will run Sun as a division. There are plenty of precedents for having competing products under the IBM banner; CICS and IMS for a start.
We are the dot in the IBM.com
Really, moderators? Informative? Really?
Interesting, sure. Insightful, maybe. But informative? Did you, with your mighty mod points, walk away from this one word sentence reply, these two letters and a punctuation mark, feeling INFORMED? Really? Are you so stupid that this informs you? Really?
P of mac ownership â(Proportional to) P of homosexuality
Damn unicode.
or post a video tute on Youtube?
I mean, there are thousands of you guys who know how to run these monster setups, a few hundred know the entire method, end-to-end, and all you guys do is post 10-sentence comments on slashdot while we basement bums read and drop jaws in awe. This is not an optimal setup for knowledge or information technology distribution or for peer-to-peer SME ISPs - which is what we probably need in many parts of the world.
We are forced to stick to CDs and DVDs for specific content.
I know how things can go really bad if you allow local radio stations like what happened in Rwanda in 1994, but I also know that you have your own ways to circumvent such misuse of information systems in the control of butchers. Besides they only needed radio to butcher millions overnight.
That means that you are NOT ADDING any great destructive capacity to these butchers' arsenal. They can already do that.
Or do you really believe that if you teach rabid Islamic fundamentalists how to run servers, there's a chance that they can bring down the WhiteHouse internal security system, but there are enough BS, MS and PhD crooks already doing that.
You also keep screaming about the security being as bad as the weakest link.
So where are the ISP Howto archives, published in full glory of 8bit or 16bit color?
Youtube, my lords, Youtube.
Actually, we also want to study the tick ecosystems in your divine beards loaded with mutant AI caffeine :-P
Teh Intarwebz must spread and be out of Govt control for "national security".
Ummm, ok, let me introduce temptation into the discussion - some of you have lost jobs, surely?
Which means you have to start small companies, which you can in large numbers if you get a few code monkeys or tech support monkeys (like me).
And for that, my lords, we need youtube tutes!
Distributed internetworking and death to the corp ISP!!
viva la micro ISP revolucion!
All i want is my comp to turn on and good rez for surfing porno MS OSX unix what ix whatever just show me some TA
He went for the normal meaning. I know. Isn't it upsetting? ;)
My theory is there some exec who goes around from successful company to successful company cutting costs in sales to the education market...they move on before this happens:
Undergraduates stop seeing your name, they become Graduates who never desire your equipment, they become Young heads of startups who say (and I have heard this more than once: "Sun who?").
Sun also has some wicked-efficient and brilliant hardware (multicore UltraSPARC, the "thumper" fileserver in the x86 space) and seemed to have influenced AMD designs a bit.
This naming weirdness extended all the way to Sun's stock ticker: JAVA.
Java is a big deal but it isn't Sun Microsystems.
If you can't even consistently name your company, you have a problem.
I really want Sun to continue as a company, they always punched above their weight and their current business strategy had promise. As always: clever.... but clever doesn't always work out.
Being a mathematician by culture and by trade, I happen to have a great deal of experience with LaTeX. And that's precisely the reason why I despise OOo. You can put it any way you want, but it's still crap. Even good ole' WordPerfect was eons better in almost every respect (reveal codes, proper watermark support, smart toolbars, generic SGML and XML editing, anything you want to name, they had it); too bad it's in the wrong hands 8-/
"I'm never quite so stupid as when I'm being smart" (Linus van Pelt)