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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."
Any OS requiring >90% of configuration changes to be made in a GUI does not count as UNIX
100% of configuration changes in OS X can be made from the console. There is not a single setting that *requires* a GUI.
The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources. - Albert Einstein
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.
I think there are a lot of developers that would argue as of Netbeans 6 and on that Sun actually has the better offering in the IDE department.
Are you kidding, right? Information from IDC WW Quarterly Server Tracker - CY2008 total Unix Servers factory revenue:
IBM: $6 387 mln.
HP: $4 561 mln.
Apple: $99 mln.
Sorry, but Apple can't be classified as "major unix competitor".
OS X 10.5 on intel is certified Unix 03 by the Open Group. Other certified Unix include Solaris, HPUX, and AIX.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
MacOSX is just FreeBSD
No.
If only this wasn't true.
I know folks in IBM (used to work there long ago myself), and who have just been pushed out. Those who left think they're the lucky ones. The remaining American workforce is stressed out over heavy workloads and fear of the impending (inevitable?) axe. Morale is slightly better there today than it was inside Dachau in 1943.
And yes, CEO Sam Palmisano has been lobbying Barack Obama personally to get some of the stimulus package. So your U.S. tax dollars will go to accelerate offshore outsourcing.
I pity Sun employees. I really do. They are about to become part of a company that is, undeniably, bad for America. (And they won't be staying long either.)
--- The American Way of Life is not a birthright. Hell, it's not even sustainable.
IBM still sells AIX, and I would guess they plan to continue selling Solaris after purchasing Sun. HP still sells HPUX, but I think that they're trying not to. I get the impression that they'd rather use something off the shelf like Linux, but can't quite get all of their customers on board.
I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
First of all, many things that live in a plist can be edited with the 'defaults' command - no file editing required.
For those things that can't be editted with the defaults command - and can't be edited with your favorite text editor, 'plutil' is your friend - you can convert plists between binary and xml very easily. Spotlight indexing for a specific volume can be turned on or off using the mdutil command, and indexing of specific subdirectories of a given volume is (i believe) controlled by metadata on the directory in question.
You can list all the plist domains controllable by defaults by doing 'defaults domains' that'll give you a (huge) list of plists controllable by the defaults command. In there, com.apple.desktop has all the desktop background picture settings.
Disabling automatic login is an ldap property, i believe, and you can disable it by using dscl (at least in leopard, in tiger and earlier that property lived in the now dead netinfo database).
Admittedly, there's one item on your list that I can't, off the top of my head, figure out - FileVault. If I didn't have work to do - I'd spend some time figuring it out - but, alas, I do.
The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources. - Albert Einstein
I'm going to break one of my own rules and explain to you why what you have said is stupid, on the assumption that you actually meant what you said. The ready availability of clustering solution has changed the game. People who need five nines can't use a single Solaris machine either; they need some kind of real mainframe from someone like IBM or Tandem who actually knows how to build hardware that can stand the test of time, hardware that can do shit like fall through a floor and keep running, or they need a cluster. OpenSolaris is a terribly immature platform which will never have the hardware support of Linux unless it goes GPL, at which point everything good about it will immediately be sucked into Linux and the last reasons for OpenSolaris to exist will vanish as well. Solaris itself has a per-node licensing cost which makes it less attractive in a clustering environment. You may have noticed that Linux runs on the lower-end Sun equipment worth building clusters out of, and that IBM sells more Linux clusters than AIX clusters. Solaris is going away just like AIX is going away and like we all wish HP-UX would go the fuck away.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
you're spouting red herrings. I migrate enterprises from Unix(tm) to Linux, we use compatibility matrices, for everything from hardware to kernel and OS patch versions to application software versions. If we upgrade the software the process is planned the same way. Backwards compatibility is never an issue. And GNU/Linux on the proper hardware and correct systems architecture can do more than five 9's same as any Unix(tm). And sorry to break your bubble, but backwards compatibility has been broken by the major Unix vendors many with their patch sets, I've over two decades of experience with all the major commercial Unix(tm) if you want to argue. And I've seen the major Unix ass-plode and dump core because of bugs on mission critical apps, which if you ever took time to read the descriptions of patch sets you'd quickly realize some poor S.O.B. had their "rock-solid" big iron Unix box take a shit on their face....
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.
Not only is it Posix compliant, it is certified by the Open group as meeting it's Single Unix Specification:
http://www.apple.com/macosx/technology/unix.html
Since the Open group is the current owner of the UNIX trademark, that's about as official as it gets. Whether that makes it "UNIX" all depends on how you define it I guess.
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