With 2000+ messages here already, I don't know why I'm bothering but...
Most of your points I agree with or can take your word for. There is a very viable cross-platform alternative to Outlook Express, though. It's called 'hitting yourself in the head with a hammer.'
Ye Gods, OE is bad! It is so far beyond unacceptable that I can't even begin to describe what evil sins it's committed against email. Microsoft should have been thrown in jail just for writing it, let alone publishing it and making it something of a standard.
Remember: Sentient beings don't let sentient beings use MS Outbreak (Express).
Pity there are few decent email clients in Linux, though. At least Windows has Pegasus.
Spaf is a Smart Guy, and of the many things he's said, 'open source == less secure' is certainly not one that I'm aware of!
Open source may or may not be more secure because it allows for independent code review. It is NOT, however, inherently secure which is something that some people seem to think.
What he's saying is that none of these things are a panacea. We can't say that we're secure because we use open source software (like tcpdump, sendmail, BIND), nor can we say that we're safe from bad guys because of biometrics.
He's reminding us of the fundamental point of security: It's a journey, not a destination. The technologies that he mentioned are great cases of either or both (a) easily breakable technology, and (b) technology that too many people are willing to wave their hands at and call 'secure.'
Is is fision or fusion? No. Is it a nuclear process? Yes! It's radioactive decay--the nucleus is breaking down into something else, releasing beta particles in the process.
It's not chemical. It's nuclear. It's just not a nuclear reactor setup.
This is a questionable practice. It's nasty, and more than a bit frightening.
BUT, it's fairly understandable, as are its counterparts.
If an investigation into a robbery suspect led to a gun shop, should the gun shop owner be able to phone up the suspect and say, "Hey--the cops were asking after you."
Due to the nature of crime (criminals don't want to get caught!), the cops have to have a reasonable opportunity to work quietly, and in private. After an investigation has been concluded, THEN this stuff should be made public.
I don't think he really gives a shit about investor confidence.
He's rich. The government gave him something approaching carte blanche to continue his empire building. He'll sell now to make money, and FUCK the poor sod who has faith in his ruthless company.
Heh. His first ones, before he took up a bet on whether he could create a cult, weren't entirely bad. Not great, but not nearly as bad as his stupid Cult of Dianetics stuff.
Mind you, I also never though Heinlein was anything more than decent at his very best. (and utterly wretched beyond belief at his worst)
That the tech sector was overvalued is a given. I mean, RedHat at $114??!!! It doesn't get much more ridiculous than that!
But I'd argue (or rather disagree mildly) with much of the rest of your post. The x86 chips just don't compare to the Sparcs. Itanium I don't know about, but I suspect that it is a better chip than the Sparc, for some things. (After all, it's a newer technology base) Less scalable than SGI? I would say that was true up until the introduction of the UltraSparc II. Even if it were still true, the Sparc scales very well up to 100+ processors, and I'm not convinced that parallel processing beyond about 50 processors is the way to go.
Linux/x86 is eroding the Solaris/Sparc market in _some_ fields. In others, it's not even a speck on the horizon. For instance, what do I want as a firewall: FW-1/Solaris, or IPTables/Linux? It depends on the situation, but IPtables/Linux is a great option where before there may not have been any alternative. In those cases, Sun loses.
BUT, if I'm looking for a high end workstation for geophysical modelling, my answer is a Blade2000 with Solaris, running Landmark software. No alternatives, no other consideration.
As for the appearance of not being a healthy company: Every publicly traded company is laying off people, forcing vacations, cutting costs, and cancelling training. Why? Because they're trying to show profitability in the current quarter, and get their stock price back up! When I say that they're healthy, I mean that they have good products for the market they're in, good technology, a good organisation, and good potential for long-term growth. Unfortunately, like effectively every other stupid company out there, they're chasing the damned stock market on a week-by-week basis, instead of working long term.
Oh, and if you think the market's flooded with Sun gear, try to buy a V880--there's currently a 3 month waiting list!
1) It never was. 2) Because Gnome 2.0 hasn't hit final release yet. That's where Sun is going from CDE, and good riddance!
"Linux a good all-around choice for those who do a little work on Unix"
Oh, absolutely it is! No argument from me on that aspect--three of my machines at home run Linux! What I object to is the assumption (or occasionally flat out claim) that Linux is (a) a better solution always and forever; and (b) therefore the only one that should be talked about. It amounts to the same sort of egotistical empire-building and chest-beating attitude that Microsoft is always accused of.
Heh. Some of of your comments take me back to high school.
We had to read Lord of the Flies. I hated it. I thought it was a bloody awful book, and the symbolism only made it worse.
Well, William Golding was speaking publically on our local campus, and so our english teacher gave us leave to go see him. I blew it off and went for coffee instead, and have been kicking myself ever since. What I heard was that Golding started the talk by saying, "I've heard so many interpretations of LotF that I never thought I was putting in there, that I clearly have no idea what the book is about and therefore won't talk about it." Sounds like a neat guy.
On the other hand, I've read a few classics that have blown me away by being really good! In Watermelon Sugar is one of my favorite stories of all time. On the Road is brilliant! I could list a dozen other classics that I loved, but suffice to say--I often find them to be really good reading, so when something like Dune comes along, I just shake my head in amazement and/or confusion.
I do feel sorry for my sister, though. Her book club decided they had to read one SF/Fantasy book in a year, and they decided on Dune because it was one they'd all heard of. Is it any wonder that they don't like the genre now?
I was sitting here laughing about Sun's "Death Throes," and then thought about their stock price for a minute, and decided that the business world needs to be blown up in its entirety.
Sun is a healthy, prosperous company. They have a BIG market share in server rooms (especially in the geophysics/oil&gas world), they're producing excellent hardware, they've got a top-notch OS, and...
their stock price is floating around $3, making them ripe for a takeover by quite a few companies.
It's stupid. Their stock price, like that of many other companies, has no bearing on their health as a company anymore. There's simply no connection between stock price and performance, either good OR bad.
Bah. No real point. Just disgusted with big business.
No sense in applying Latin pluralisation to a word that doesn't have a latin plural, especially when an existing plural already exists and has been in use for decades.
I honestly worry about the number of brain cells that Hemos and others like him are firing on, at times.
Every single time an article about Sun/Solaris comes out, someone (often the original poster) will say, "but Linux does xxx, so we don't need this!"
Everybody chant the following mantra: Solaris is not Linux. Linux is not Solaris. There is room for both.
Do we need this laptop? Well hell, do we need laptops at all? Is there some reason we NEED a Linux laptop over one running Win2k? Of course not!
That said, some things are easier under Linux that Windows. (and vice versa!) Some things are more mature under Solaris than Linux (or maybe all things?). Some people prefer Solaris, some prefer Linux, some prefer Windows, and some preferred OS/2. WHY WHY WHY WHY WHY do we have to say "but Linux..." EVERY SINGLE FUCKING TIME ANYTHING ABOUT ANY OTHER PLATFORM IS MENTIONED?????
Personal thought is to tell the sons to stuff it. Come up with something original for a change. You're getting far too many royalties already, you should be able to spend some time being creative (if you're actually creatively inclined), or find SOMETHING to do other than ride on your father's coattails.
OK, this is an honest question. I'm not trying to troll here.
But I have been a SF/Fantasy fan for most of my life. I am a huge fan of the classics, modern writing, and all of the (good) stuff in between. It should also be mentioned that I'm also not JUST a SF/Fantasy reader either--my reading stretches over a fair range.
That said, Dune is the ONLY book I have EVER failed to finish reading, once I got more than ten pages into it. In fact on my third (and last) attempt, I read some 400 pages of it, and couldn't be bothered to pick it up again.
I found Dune utterly uninvolving. Heavy, ponderous, dull, stilted, and just bloody painful reading. I had no interest in characters, stories, or outcomes in it.
So what am I missing that sequel #9, written by the son of the original author, is getting created at all, let alone cheered enthusiastically?
If you look closely, they mention that buying a large machine entitles/licenses you to run Solaris on it. The biggest thing that Sun is charging for (besides the media kit, which you get free when you're a bigger customer) is running Solaris on grey-market machines bought on eBay. Buy a dozen sparc 10s? Sun doesn't care. Buy an F4800 from Sun? They don't care. Buy an E4500 on eBay? THEN you'll be paying for a license if Sun ever talks to you.
But here's a secret for you: The licensing is entirely a paper entity, and doesn't impact the software you buy/download/install at all. Download the Solaris9 image from Sun, and it will happily install (and run) on any supported hardware. It doesn't count processors, it doesn't read a license file, and it doesn't email Sun. Technically if you put that on an SMP machine in your basement you're in violation, but Sun isn't going to prosecute you or care that you're doing it.
So go download the images and install on your 4-processor Sparc20. I won't tell!
First of all, consider Solaris in the generic (i.e. Sparc, x86 versions both). Solaris is simply a better OS than Linux. Stability, reliability, scalability, and a track record that Linux can't yet touch. Solaris and Linux are both far more _advanced_ OSes than *BSD. Consider that FreeBSD isn't that much beyond SunOS 4.1. Given a choice, I'd use all three of them in different situations.
Now Solaris on Sparc? You have a hardware-specific OS running on...that hardware! There is nothing that runs on a Sparc as well as Solaris, if you count 'better' as meaning predictable, fast, managable, standardised, solid, reliable, non-tweaky, well established, and supported.
Finally, you don't have to pay for Solaris Sparc! When S8 was the current version, it was a free download and free to use on anything up to (and including) eight processor machines. Solaris 9 is now a free download, and free to use on single processor machines. (And in fact will work fine on any number of processors, but if you're in a production environment, don't count on support if you don't have it licensed).
And while community support is oftentimes invaluable, it's also unpredictable and unreliable. When you have a problem at 3:00am that HAS TO BE FIXED RIGHT NOW!!!, who would you rather turn to for help: The informal community of Aurora Linux hackers, or professional trained engineers, specialising in your particular combination of hardware and software?
First of all, public patches are still available for free and Sun plans on keeping things that way.
Secondly, don't hold your breath on Trusted S9/x86. Trusted S8 is still the current version for Sparc as well as x86, and Sun tends to move quite cautiously on their trusted OS.
Solaris 7 was free across the board, for a while. Solaris 8 was free off and on to acquire, and always free to use on any system with no more than eight processors. Solaris 9/sparc is free to download, and free to use on any single-processor system. Buying a multiprocessor system from Sun implies a license to use it there as well.
Bottom line: Sun has never in recent history charged significant licensing fees for their OS. Companies simply don't pay for Solaris.
I'm on 24x7 call during Christmas this year, but I still have a job. On top of having some great coworkers, an interesting job, and a technically literate manager who ISN'T an ass, that's not a bad bonus at all!
Slashdot Mirror
With 2000+ messages here already, I don't know why I'm bothering but...
Most of your points I agree with or can take your word for. There is a very viable cross-platform alternative to Outlook Express, though. It's called 'hitting yourself in the head with a hammer.'
Ye Gods, OE is bad! It is so far beyond unacceptable that I can't even begin to describe what evil sins it's committed against email. Microsoft should have been thrown in jail just for writing it, let alone publishing it and making it something of a standard.
Remember: Sentient beings don't let sentient beings use MS Outbreak (Express).
Pity there are few decent email clients in Linux, though. At least Windows has Pegasus.
Spaf is a Smart Guy, and of the many things he's said, 'open source == less secure' is certainly not one that I'm aware of!
Open source may or may not be more secure because it allows for independent code review. It is NOT, however, inherently secure which is something that some people seem to think.
What he's saying is that none of these things are a panacea. We can't say that we're secure because we use open source software (like tcpdump, sendmail, BIND), nor can we say that we're safe from bad guys because of biometrics.
He's reminding us of the fundamental point of security: It's a journey, not a destination. The technologies that he mentioned are great cases of either or both (a) easily breakable technology, and (b) technology that too many people are willing to wave their hands at and call 'secure.'
Caution is a fair attitude, I'd say.
Pshaw!
Is is fision or fusion? No. Is it a nuclear process? Yes! It's radioactive decay--the nucleus is breaking down into something else, releasing beta particles in the process.
It's not chemical. It's nuclear. It's just not a nuclear reactor setup.
Slashdotted already? Guess that says something about how popular (and necessary!) this is for slashdot readers!
:-)
Of course, I know it was unavailable because I tried to get there asap.
This is a questionable practice. It's nasty, and more than a bit frightening.
BUT, it's fairly understandable, as are its counterparts.
If an investigation into a robbery suspect led to a gun shop, should the gun shop owner be able to phone up the suspect and say, "Hey--the cops were asking after you."
Due to the nature of crime (criminals don't want to get caught!), the cops have to have a reasonable opportunity to work quietly, and in private. After an investigation has been concluded, THEN this stuff should be made public.
I don't think he really gives a shit about investor confidence.
He's rich. The government gave him something approaching carte blanche to continue his empire building. He'll sell now to make money, and FUCK the poor sod who has faith in his ruthless company.
Huh? Where did McNealy say that?
Heh. His first ones, before he took up a bet on whether he could create a cult, weren't entirely bad. Not great, but not nearly as bad as his stupid Cult of Dianetics stuff.
Mind you, I also never though Heinlein was anything more than decent at his very best. (and utterly wretched beyond belief at his worst)
Hmm. How do you so clearly differentiate between their business model and their business practices? Doesn't the one describe and define the other?
Personally, I hate their business model, their practices, and most of their products.
That the tech sector was overvalued is a given. I mean, RedHat at $114??!!! It doesn't get much more ridiculous than that!
But I'd argue (or rather disagree mildly) with much of the rest of your post. The x86 chips just don't compare to the Sparcs. Itanium I don't know about, but I suspect that it is a better chip than the Sparc, for some things. (After all, it's a newer technology base) Less scalable than SGI? I would say that was true up until the introduction of the UltraSparc II. Even if it were still true, the Sparc scales very well up to 100+ processors, and I'm not convinced that parallel processing beyond about 50 processors is the way to go.
Linux/x86 is eroding the Solaris/Sparc market in _some_ fields. In others, it's not even a speck on the horizon. For instance, what do I want as a firewall: FW-1/Solaris, or IPTables/Linux? It depends on the situation, but IPtables/Linux is a great option where before there may not have been any alternative. In those cases, Sun loses.
BUT, if I'm looking for a high end workstation for geophysical modelling, my answer is a Blade2000 with Solaris, running Landmark software. No alternatives, no other consideration.
As for the appearance of not being a healthy company: Every publicly traded company is laying off people, forcing vacations, cutting costs, and cancelling training. Why? Because they're trying to show profitability in the current quarter, and get their stock price back up! When I say that they're healthy, I mean that they have good products for the market they're in, good technology, a good organisation, and good potential for long-term growth. Unfortunately, like effectively every other stupid company out there, they're chasing the damned stock market on a week-by-week basis, instead of working long term.
Oh, and if you think the market's flooded with Sun gear, try to buy a V880--there's currently a 3 month waiting list!
"Why is CDE still a viable window manager?"
I can think of two reasons:
1) It never was.
2) Because Gnome 2.0 hasn't hit final release yet. That's where Sun is going from CDE, and good riddance!
"Linux a good all-around choice for those who do a little work on Unix"
Oh, absolutely it is! No argument from me on that aspect--three of my machines at home run Linux! What I object to is the assumption (or occasionally flat out claim) that Linux is (a) a better solution always and forever; and (b) therefore the only one that should be talked about. It amounts to the same sort of egotistical empire-building and chest-beating attitude that Microsoft is always accused of.
Heh. Some of of your comments take me back to high school.
We had to read Lord of the Flies. I hated it. I thought it was a bloody awful book, and the symbolism only made it worse.
Well, William Golding was speaking publically on our local campus, and so our english teacher gave us leave to go see him. I blew it off and went for coffee instead, and have been kicking myself ever since. What I heard was that Golding started the talk by saying, "I've heard so many interpretations of LotF that I never thought I was putting in there, that I clearly have no idea what the book is about and therefore won't talk about it." Sounds like a neat guy.
On the other hand, I've read a few classics that have blown me away by being really good! In Watermelon Sugar is one of my favorite stories of all time. On the Road is brilliant! I could list a dozen other classics that I loved, but suffice to say--I often find them to be really good reading, so when something like Dune comes along, I just shake my head in amazement and/or confusion.
I do feel sorry for my sister, though. Her book club decided they had to read one SF/Fantasy book in a year, and they decided on Dune because it was one they'd all heard of. Is it any wonder that they don't like the genre now?
Hmm.
I was sitting here laughing about Sun's "Death Throes," and then thought about their stock price for a minute, and decided that the business world needs to be blown up in its entirety.
Sun is a healthy, prosperous company. They have a BIG market share in server rooms (especially in the geophysics/oil&gas world), they're producing excellent hardware, they've got a top-notch OS, and...
their stock price is floating around $3, making them ripe for a takeover by quite a few companies.
It's stupid. Their stock price, like that of many other companies, has no bearing on their health as a company anymore. There's simply no connection between stock price and performance, either good OR bad.
Bah. No real point. Just disgusted with big business.
Viruses. Not Virii, or even Viri.
No sense in applying Latin pluralisation to a word that doesn't have a latin plural, especially when an existing plural already exists and has been in use for decades.
I honestly worry about the number of brain cells that Hemos and others like him are firing on, at times.
Every single time an article about Sun/Solaris comes out, someone (often the original poster) will say, "but Linux does xxx, so we don't need this!"
Everybody chant the following mantra: Solaris is not Linux. Linux is not Solaris. There is room for both.
Do we need this laptop? Well hell, do we need laptops at all? Is there some reason we NEED a Linux laptop over one running Win2k? Of course not!
That said, some things are easier under Linux that Windows. (and vice versa!) Some things are more mature under Solaris than Linux (or maybe all things?). Some people prefer Solaris, some prefer Linux, some prefer Windows, and some preferred OS/2. WHY WHY WHY WHY WHY do we have to say "but Linux..." EVERY SINGLE FUCKING TIME ANYTHING ABOUT ANY OTHER PLATFORM IS MENTIONED?????
OK, rant off. Just had to get that off my chest.
Personal thought is to tell the sons to stuff it. Come up with something original for a change. You're getting far too many royalties already, you should be able to spend some time being creative (if you're actually creatively inclined), or find SOMETHING to do other than ride on your father's coattails.
But that's just my curmudgeonly way.
OK, this is an honest question. I'm not trying to troll here.
But I have been a SF/Fantasy fan for most of my life. I am a huge fan of the classics, modern writing, and all of the (good) stuff in between. It should also be mentioned that I'm also not JUST a SF/Fantasy reader either--my reading stretches over a fair range.
That said, Dune is the ONLY book I have EVER failed to finish reading, once I got more than ten pages into it. In fact on my third (and last) attempt, I read some 400 pages of it, and couldn't be bothered to pick it up again.
I found Dune utterly uninvolving. Heavy, ponderous, dull, stilted, and just bloody painful reading. I had no interest in characters, stories, or outcomes in it.
So what am I missing that sequel #9, written by the son of the original author, is getting created at all, let alone cheered enthusiastically?
I'd be slightly more interested in those than in the endless Dune saga. At least those originals didn't suck. :-)
If you look closely, they mention that buying a large machine entitles/licenses you to run Solaris on it.
The biggest thing that Sun is charging for (besides the media kit, which you get free when you're a bigger customer) is running Solaris on grey-market machines bought on eBay. Buy a dozen sparc 10s? Sun doesn't care. Buy an F4800 from Sun? They don't care. Buy an E4500 on eBay? THEN you'll be paying for a license if Sun ever talks to you.
But here's a secret for you: The licensing is entirely a paper entity, and doesn't impact the software you buy/download/install at all. Download the Solaris9 image from Sun, and it will happily install (and run) on any supported hardware. It doesn't count processors, it doesn't read a license file, and it doesn't email Sun. Technically if you put that on an SMP machine in your basement you're in violation, but Sun isn't going to prosecute you or care that you're doing it.
So go download the images and install on your 4-processor Sparc20. I won't tell!
OK, I'll rise to the bait...
First of all, consider Solaris in the generic (i.e. Sparc, x86 versions both).
Solaris is simply a better OS than Linux. Stability, reliability, scalability, and a track record that Linux can't yet touch. Solaris and Linux are both far more _advanced_ OSes than *BSD. Consider that FreeBSD isn't that much beyond SunOS 4.1. Given a choice, I'd use all three of them in different situations.
Now Solaris on Sparc? You have a hardware-specific OS running on...that hardware! There is nothing that runs on a Sparc as well as Solaris, if you count 'better' as meaning predictable, fast, managable, standardised, solid, reliable, non-tweaky, well established, and supported.
Finally, you don't have to pay for Solaris Sparc! When S8 was the current version, it was a free download and free to use on anything up to (and including) eight processor machines. Solaris 9 is now a free download, and free to use on single processor machines. (And in fact will work fine on any number of processors, but if you're in a production environment, don't count on support if you don't have it licensed).
And while community support is oftentimes invaluable, it's also unpredictable and unreliable. When you have a problem at 3:00am that HAS TO BE FIXED RIGHT NOW!!!, who would you rather turn to for help: The informal community of Aurora Linux hackers, or professional trained engineers, specialising in your particular combination of hardware and software?
First of all, public patches are still available for free and Sun plans on keeping things that way.
Secondly, don't hold your breath on Trusted S9/x86. Trusted S8 is still the current version for Sparc as well as x86, and Sun tends to move quite cautiously on their trusted OS.
But it'll probably happen, eventually.
OK normally I don't bite on stupidities committed by the editors, but...
originally, rumor had it that Sun was not going to be supporting, in a major way, Solaris 9 on x86 at all -- that decision has now been reversed.
First you say "rumor had it..." and then you say, "that decision has now been reversed."
There was no rumour involved here. Sun had press releases, and a FAQ about the damned thing! Then they changed their mind. That's not a bloody rumour.
OK, rant off.
Solaris 7 was free across the board, for a while.
Solaris 8 was free off and on to acquire, and always free to use on any system with no more than eight processors.
Solaris 9/sparc is free to download, and free to use on any single-processor system. Buying a multiprocessor system from Sun implies a license to use it there as well.
Bottom line: Sun has never in recent history charged significant licensing fees for their OS. Companies simply don't pay for Solaris.
I'm on 24x7 call during Christmas this year, but I still have a job. On top of having some great coworkers, an interesting job, and a technically literate manager who ISN'T an ass, that's not a bad bonus at all!
There are some technical issues, but it's mostly planned obsolescence. Companies would rather you bought a whole new video card every two years.