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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."
Really? I'm posting this comment from a workstation running a commercial UNIX. I'm using a Mac.
Heh. +1 pedant.
It has lost most of the characteristics people identify as Unix though.
+5 Insightful? There are too many Mac fanboys here. I'm sure he/she was referring to enterprise Unix. OSX is still a home desktop / toy server until further notice. It amazes me that people actually have the nerve to install OSX servers in the Enterprise. At the absolute BEST I would install a OSX server to serve Mac files and nothing more. Give me Linux, Solaris or BSD. (yes, I know OSX is based on BSD, but they are NOT the same!)
Go ahead and mod me down fanboy. :P
What else should Apple care about besides my money?
That's an excellent straight man question, and I am gratified that you have played directly into my hands.
Apple sells smugness. This is not really a debatable point but since every Apple fanboy tries, I guess the focus of my point has to be to point out that it is unwarranted.
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. Apple is trying to serve the lowest common denominator. If you are that person, then Apple will serve your needs. I personally am not satisfied with being that person; I elect to be exceptional. It's valid to believe that I am only an exceptional pain in the ass; I still believe that to be superior to being one of the mindless drones that will eat what they are fed. Apple does not actually care about your money; Apple just wants money.
The distinction is utterly important, but is still too fine to be made in casual conversation, which is why the saying goes "x doesn't love you, they just want your money." In reality, it's obvious that they don't give one tenth of one shit about you. They are more than willing to shit all over you provided the next twenty people are satisfied that Apple provided them sufficient value. In fact, they're banking that those next 20 people will make you feel like such a tool for not being part of their candy-coated, brushed-metal little world (how many different UI themes are they using at Apple these days, anyway? Even Microsoft knows how to grab one and run with it) that you'll feel like the problem is within you.
Apple is about peer pressure. It is not about providing the most technically superior product. Apple did not adopt the trappings of Unix because they felt that Unix was inherently superior. They could have taken NeXTStep, denied you access to the commandline entirely, and delivered a GUI-only experience like the classic MacOS. This would have served their existing customer base quite well, perhaps better in fact than what they did deliver. It did however allow them to take a percentage of the user base which was attracted to Open Unixes/Unixlikes and draw them over to their camp. Some of them have stayed, improving the place considerably in most cases. Some of them have given up and gone back to Linux. Some of them are running both. I can see why if you must have some application which runs on OSX and not on Linux or Windows, although there's less and less reason to need something like that every day (Does FCP support mastering Blu-Ray yet?)
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
But terminal.app is a GUI application, it's not unixy unless it scrolls build logs in text mode all the time!
Installed Gentoo = UNIX elite
Doing sys-admin stuff in OS X = Desktop noob