Well, of course he's going to say that - he's not just going to say "well, we're planning on axing 20,000 jobs and kissing bye-bye to the SPARC line". He has to at least maintain the *illusion* that they're going to keep producing SPARC chips.
I love the line about "even Apple" is designing its own chips. One could say "even Sun" sells Intel.
Sure, buy a company and kill off their highest revenue generating, and highest margin products which coincidentally are chosen more than any other platform to deploy your own database product. That's real smart.
Anyone that thought it would make sense to kill off sparc doesn't have a clue or is just likely spreading IBM FUD.
There isn't any rule to make it wrong. You can disagree with it, but that doesn't establish that it is wrong, just that you disagree with it.
Uhm.. yeah there is. This isn't kindergarten where every child is a treasure and there is no wrong so we don't hurt people's feelings. Saying you're going to buy something isn't the same as owning something.
You can't go to a car dealership, tell them you want to buy a car then slap on your "I heart <topic>" bumper stickers on it and take it to the beach until you fork over the money.
Caldera bought the division of SCO that had UnixWare and the SVR4 licensing rights and dropped their linux efforts. They were essentially SCO with some new management.
SCO had the lead in Unix on x86 hardware and apparently were used widely in certain sectors.
Unline, IBM, HP and Sun, SCO didn't have their own processor architecture so they weren't resistant to having their OS run on commodity hardware like the other big Unix vendors did.
This whole SCO lawsuit thing confuses me. At least the reaction to it and SCO going after Linux users.
SCO was under the Canopy Group and every time Ray Noorda spun a company out of Novell, it usually resulted in an IP lawsuit. Usually against Microsoft. Strange or ironic that SCO and Novell would go head to head this time.
I can understand why SCO sued IBM. IBM, SCO and Sequent got together to work on Project Monterey. SCO's role in that was providing their leading Unix on x86 work. Then the project fell apart, IBM bought Sequent and SCO got nothing for their efforts.
Then all of a sudden, IBM puts more effort into Linux, an alternate Unix like OS that can run on x86.
If you were SCO, had spent a lot of time with IBM showing them your Unix/x86 secrets, then they ditch your work and all of a sudden put a big push into a competing unix like os on x86 that could benefit from the knowledge you shared with IBM, you'd probably want to sue too. I would.
Maybe they did, maybe they didn't, but you'd have to go to trial to get to the bottom of it.
Somehow it all turned into a giant circus and SCO seemed to start it by going after licensing fees for Linux users, but people on the sidelines, in either camp really made a mess of things. I think it's probably one of the most ridiculous moments in technology history.
As they were a Linux company they might be making $$$'s. Even at 3rd place linux company would be in a much better place than SCO is today...
How do you figure? The top three linux distros these days seem to be Ubuntu, RedHat and SuSE, probably in that order since Ubuntu has grown so fast. In terms of revenue, it's probably RedHat, SuSE, Ubuntu but it's hard to tell since Ubuntu is a private company that doesn't disclose revenues.
Profit wise, it's also not easy to tell. RedHat makes a fairly small margin for a software company, Novell still makes most of their money from non SuSE stuff and Ubuntu seems to be breaking even.
For RedHat, profit to revenue is about 14% compared to Oracle which is 25% and Microsoft at 29% for 2008. The last time Novel turned a profit was in 2006 and their profit margin was about 2%
2 of the 3 top linux distros are either not making or just making a profit.
Its more than the application. Its the millions of users that come with it.
Screw that. Just add a micro blogging component into the RSS and ATOM specs and join micro blogging with regular blogging. You already have a well known social communication platform with millions of bloggers.
I'm surprised that hasn't happened yet and killed twitter.
The ??? used to be selling the attention you generate on your free service to advertisers. Google AdSense being the most profitable one for many. But it seems like the attention economy is coming to an end, or at least the potential has been greatly reduced.
Twitter isn't worth anything right now other than what investors would like to get back if they sell. I can't think of any way that their customer base could financially benefit any other company. The folks at Twitter seem to be in the same boat since they haven't been able to generate any significant revenue from their users.
I thought he was talking about Montalvo too. I've been wondering what might happen from that acquisition.
Apparently Montalvo's chip design was touted as the x86 Cell processor.
I don't know if the plan is to release the chip Montalvo was working on, or to integrate it with other tech and you likely can't comment on it.
I think the best solution would be to offer to license some of the technology to Intel and AMD as well as implementing some of it in the SPARC line. If the goal is to build a competitor to IBM's cell, I think Intel or AMD would have a better chance.
The concept of asymmetric cores seem interesting but I'm not sure that it is that good a design in as many applications. The x86 world is about general purpose performance. What Intel is doing, building the ability to overclock a single core to increase speed when necessary and other cores aren't being used, seems to a better method.
IBM is just being smart and try to capitalise on the uncertainty around Sun's future. It's an easier sell to the manager who bought Sun. Gives them an incentive to switch vendors and not lose face.
IBM isn't trying to capitalize on the uncertainty around Sun's future, they are trying to create the feeling that there is uncertainty in Sun's future and they have been doing so for some time.
IBM's always had the message of Linux/x86 is killing Solaris/SPARC so migrate to AIX/Power. Huh? While some of the Solaris/SPARC migrations have been to Linux/x86 by IBM, the salespeople push you to AIX/Power but the Linux base eats it up and applauds IBM as their hero.
Oracle isn't going to buy Sun and kill off the largest revenue generating and highest margin products that most of their own customers use.
Like someone else posted, this just makes IBM look scared and they're trying to grab up more Sun customers before the dust settles and people realize Solaris/SPARC isn't going anywhere.
Like the fich company that, for some reason, their salmon was white instead of pink, so they advertised it as "guaranteed not to turn pink in the can."
Apparently, it's just an urban legend that nobody can seem to backup.
At the peak of the dot-com era, AAPL was trading about 5 times pre bubble price, Sun was more than 20x, Oracle was about 10x. Yahoo about 30x. Dell around 50x
Throw in all the IPOs that went nowhere and that little bump AAPL had is not significant.
That may not have been its intention, but a lot of people are using it for that purpose since many forms of advertising are served up through JavaScript.
Even the advertising on NoScript's site is primarily JavaScript based.
From reading the blog, he didn't just whitelist his own domain, but also the domains where Google AdSense ads are served.
Personally, I don't see the big deal in blocking advertising. Most good sites aren't too in your face about it and it helps keep them running. I haven't run ABP in years because of it and I've found some of the ads to be useful.
The only issues seem to be in some NSFW advertising but since advertising tends to be based on the content of the site (either through contextual advertising such as AdSense or the webmaster's own good sense to put related ads on the site) NSFW ads tend to show up on NSFW sites which you shouldn't be surfing during work anyway. There are some exceptions but they seem to be infrequent.
I'll repair your car for free, and as an added bonus I'm also going to change all of your saved radio stations, adjust your seats, replace your tires with a cheaper brand, and rape your lass.
I do it for free, so people aren't allowed to complain!
The parts in bold happen frequently in my experience. The part in italics happens frequently if you exchange "hit on" for "rape".
Start a project that blocks ads that is funded by advertising on their website and donations.
Sounds real smart.
They have 3 AdSense ad units (the max) on their home page, a couple of small buttons and a set of sponsored links. The sponsored links also don't use the rel="nofollow" tag but I guess google doesn't penalize everyone for that or nobody has reported them.
Seriously, this is a business model that shoots itself in the foot.
That article you link to is years old and is about a the first generation of Niagara processors, T1, sun has addressed some of the issues with the T1 in the T2 and T2 plus.
Worse yet, when you spend that long fighting it and you flip, people don't trust you or your commitment. They'll go with the people who had already been promoting and supporting it for years.
Throughout Sun's history they have been involved in Open Source projects.
They didn't back Linux as much as they did their own OS, with good reason. But Linux and the GPL are not the only words in Open Source.
One problem is that the very latest SPARC chips ("CoolThreads") are outperformed on a per-core basis by the much cheaper Intel Core i7.
The point of the coolthreads servers aren't to go core to core with other CPUs. The strength of those systems is the number of cores you can get in a single system. A T5440 supports 4 T2 Plus prcoessors which gives you 32 cores. The CoolThreads servers also the number of threads. A 4 socket Core i7 server only has 32 threads while a T5440 has 256.
The Core i7 is also not a server class processor, it is meant for the desktop and gaming market. It doesn't support ECC memory.
The Nehalem based Xeon processors will be coming out this year will support up to 8 cores 16 threads per socket.
That might be closer, but the Niagara line of processors are still quite different. I think the Nehalem Xeon processors will be more like Rock so it will be interesting to see head to head comparisons of those systems when they eventually come out.
But that's besides the point. Niagara based servers have been shipping for years and other than the Mac Pro workstation that came out recently, the Nehalem Xeon systems haven't started shipping yet.
But two years ago we were selling at 10 times revenues when we were at $64. At 10 times revenues, to give you a 10-year payback, I have to pay you 100% of revenues for 10 straight years in dividends. That assumes I can get that by my shareholders. That assumes I have zero cost of goods sold, which is very hard for a computer company. That assumes zero expenses, which is really hard with 39,000 employees. That assumes I pay no taxes, which is very hard. And that assumes you pay no taxes on your dividends, which is kind of illegal. And that assumes with zero R&D for the next 10 years, I can maintain the current revenue run rate. Now, having done that, would any of you like to buy my stock at $64? Do you realize how ridiculous those basic assumptions are? You don't need any transparency. You don't need any footnotes. What were you thinking?
Wall St was unrealistic during the dot-com era, at least in their advice to others.
Why would you think that Btrfs is unstable and slow...
There have been other Btrfs benchmarks. The main page of the Btrfs wiki says:
Btrfs is under heavy development, and is not suitable for any uses other than benchmarking and review. The Btrfs disk format is not yet finalized, but it will only be changed if a critical bug is found and no workarounds are possible.
If anything, one could hope that Oracle pulls some folks from ZFS to btrfs and actually speeds development, why develop two competing open file systems?
If they were going to pick just one, why would they favor the one that is not done over the one that has been in production for years? Especially considering that more people deploy Oracle on Solaris/SPARC than on Linux?
And what happens? Someone takes the features they need from a non-GPL program/filesystem/etc and creates a GPL version. Yea, great going there with using an incompatible license. Feel free to use a license incompatible with the GPL. Also feel free to whine when someone replaces the functionality of whatever you've written with a GPL version, which is then included in Linux distros or the kernel where huge amounts of users get access to it.
How many years has it been since ZFS has been released and we still don't have a workable linux alternative.
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Well, of course he's going to say that - he's not just going to say "well, we're planning on axing 20,000 jobs and kissing bye-bye to the SPARC line". He has to at least maintain the *illusion* that they're going to keep producing SPARC chips.
I love the line about "even Apple" is designing its own chips. One could say "even Sun" sells Intel.
Sure, buy a company and kill off their highest revenue generating, and highest margin products which coincidentally are chosen more than any other platform to deploy your own database product. That's real smart.
Anyone that thought it would make sense to kill off sparc doesn't have a clue or is just likely spreading IBM FUD.
There isn't any rule to make it wrong. You can disagree with it, but that doesn't establish that it is wrong, just that you disagree with it.
Uhm.. yeah there is. This isn't kindergarten where every child is a treasure and there is no wrong so we don't hurt people's feelings. Saying you're going to buy something isn't the same as owning something.
You can't go to a car dealership, tell them you want to buy a car then slap on your "I heart <topic>" bumper stickers on it and take it to the beach until you fork over the money.
If you want something that maintains compatibility, go with java.
Depending on your point of view, that could be a negative or a positive.
This was the first PHP related story on Slashdot that didn't have a few dozen replies that mention Java until you went ahead and ruined it.
I'd choose Java over PHP any day though.
Caldera bought the division of SCO that had UnixWare and the SVR4 licensing rights and dropped their linux efforts. They were essentially SCO with some new management.
When were they ever a respected Unix vendor?
SCO had the lead in Unix on x86 hardware and apparently were used widely in certain sectors.
Unline, IBM, HP and Sun, SCO didn't have their own processor architecture so they weren't resistant to having their OS run on commodity hardware like the other big Unix vendors did.
This whole SCO lawsuit thing confuses me. At least the reaction to it and SCO going after Linux users.
SCO was under the Canopy Group and every time Ray Noorda spun a company out of Novell, it usually resulted in an IP lawsuit. Usually against Microsoft. Strange or ironic that SCO and Novell would go head to head this time.
I can understand why SCO sued IBM. IBM, SCO and Sequent got together to work on Project Monterey. SCO's role in that was providing their leading Unix on x86 work. Then the project fell apart, IBM bought Sequent and SCO got nothing for their efforts.
Then all of a sudden, IBM puts more effort into Linux, an alternate Unix like OS that can run on x86.
If you were SCO, had spent a lot of time with IBM showing them your Unix/x86 secrets, then they ditch your work and all of a sudden put a big push into a competing unix like os on x86 that could benefit from the knowledge you shared with IBM, you'd probably want to sue too. I would.
Maybe they did, maybe they didn't, but you'd have to go to trial to get to the bottom of it.
Somehow it all turned into a giant circus and SCO seemed to start it by going after licensing fees for Linux users, but people on the sidelines, in either camp really made a mess of things. I think it's probably one of the most ridiculous moments in technology history.
As they were a Linux company they might be making $$$'s. Even at 3rd place linux company would be in a much better place than SCO is today...
How do you figure? The top three linux distros these days seem to be Ubuntu, RedHat and SuSE, probably in that order since Ubuntu has grown so fast. In terms of revenue, it's probably RedHat, SuSE, Ubuntu but it's hard to tell since Ubuntu is a private company that doesn't disclose revenues.
Profit wise, it's also not easy to tell. RedHat makes a fairly small margin for a software company, Novell still makes most of their money from non SuSE stuff and Ubuntu seems to be breaking even.
For RedHat, profit to revenue is about 14% compared to Oracle which is 25% and Microsoft at 29% for 2008. The last time Novel turned a profit was in 2006 and their profit margin was about 2%
2 of the 3 top linux distros are either not making or just making a profit.
But which is more important? Or actually: which state really has jurisdiction in this case?
Probably the State in which the contract was executed or otherwise specified in the contract.
Its more than the application. Its the millions of users that come with it.
Screw that. Just add a micro blogging component into the RSS and ATOM specs and join micro blogging with regular blogging. You already have a well known social communication platform with millions of bloggers.
I'm surprised that hasn't happened yet and killed twitter.
The ??? used to be selling the attention you generate on your free service to advertisers. Google AdSense being the most profitable one for many. But it seems like the attention economy is coming to an end, or at least the potential has been greatly reduced.
Twitter doesn't include ads in their tweets or even on their website. According to this Create a Revenue Model for Twitter contest they don't generate any revenue.
Twitter isn't worth anything right now other than what investors would like to get back if they sell. I can't think of any way that their customer base could financially benefit any other company. The folks at Twitter seem to be in the same boat since they haven't been able to generate any significant revenue from their users.
I thought he was talking about Montalvo too. I've been wondering what might happen from that acquisition.
Apparently Montalvo's chip design was touted as the x86 Cell processor.
I don't know if the plan is to release the chip Montalvo was working on, or to integrate it with other tech and you likely can't comment on it.
I think the best solution would be to offer to license some of the technology to Intel and AMD as well as implementing some of it in the SPARC line.
If the goal is to build a competitor to IBM's cell, I think Intel or AMD would have a better chance.
The concept of asymmetric cores seem interesting but I'm not sure that it is that good a design in as many applications. The x86 world is about general purpose performance. What Intel is doing, building the ability to overclock a single core to increase speed when necessary and other cores aren't being used, seems to a better method.
IBM is just being smart and try to capitalise on the uncertainty around Sun's future. It's an easier sell to the manager who bought Sun. Gives them an incentive to switch vendors and not lose face.
IBM isn't trying to capitalize on the uncertainty around Sun's future, they are trying to create the feeling that there is uncertainty in Sun's future and they have been doing so for some time.
IBM's always had the message of Linux/x86 is killing Solaris/SPARC so migrate to AIX/Power. Huh? While some of the Solaris/SPARC migrations have been to Linux/x86 by IBM, the salespeople push you to AIX/Power but the Linux base eats it up and applauds IBM as their hero.
Oracle isn't going to buy Sun and kill off the largest revenue generating and highest margin products that most of their own customers use.
Like someone else posted, this just makes IBM look scared and they're trying to grab up more Sun customers before the dust settles and people realize Solaris/SPARC isn't going anywhere.
Like the fich company that, for some reason, their salmon was white instead of pink, so they advertised it as "guaranteed not to turn pink in the can."
Apparently, it's just an urban legend that nobody can seem to backup.
At the peak of the dot-com era, AAPL was trading about 5 times pre bubble price, Sun was more than 20x, Oracle was about 10x. Yahoo about 30x. Dell around 50x
Throw in all the IPOs that went nowhere and that little bump AAPL had is not significant.
NoScript is not primarily an ad blocker.
That may not have been its intention, but a lot of people are using it for that purpose since many forms of advertising are served up through JavaScript.
Even the advertising on NoScript's site is primarily JavaScript based.
From reading the blog, he didn't just whitelist his own domain, but also the domains where Google AdSense ads are served.
Personally, I don't see the big deal in blocking advertising. Most good sites aren't too in your face about it and it helps keep them running. I haven't run ABP in years because of it and I've found some of the ads to be useful.
The only issues seem to be in some NSFW advertising but since advertising tends to be based on the content of the site (either through contextual advertising such as AdSense or the webmaster's own good sense to put related ads on the site) NSFW ads tend to show up on NSFW sites which you shouldn't be surfing during work anyway. There are some exceptions but they seem to be infrequent.
I'll repair your car for free, and as an added bonus I'm also going to change all of your saved radio stations, adjust your seats, replace your tires with a cheaper brand, and rape your lass.
I do it for free, so people aren't allowed to complain!
The parts in bold happen frequently in my experience. The part in italics happens frequently if you exchange "hit on" for "rape".
Start a project that blocks ads that is funded by advertising on their website and donations.
Sounds real smart.
They have 3 AdSense ad units (the max) on their home page, a couple of small buttons and a set of sponsored links. The sponsored links also don't use the rel="nofollow" tag but I guess google doesn't penalize everyone for that or nobody has reported them.
Seriously, this is a business model that shoots itself in the foot.
I meant the 8 core models. I think only the 6 core X7460, L7455 and E7450 are out.
Sun didn't cancel the SPARC line.
That article you link to is years old and is about a the first generation of Niagara processors, T1, sun has addressed some of the issues with the T1 in the T2 and T2 plus.
Worse yet, when you spend that long fighting it and you flip, people don't trust you or your commitment. They'll go with the people who had already been promoting and supporting it for years.
Throughout Sun's history they have been involved in Open Source projects.
They didn't back Linux as much as they did their own OS, with good reason. But Linux and the GPL are not the only words in Open Source.
One problem is that the very latest SPARC chips ("CoolThreads") are outperformed on a per-core basis by the much cheaper Intel Core i7.
The point of the coolthreads servers aren't to go core to core with other CPUs. The strength of those systems is the number of cores you can get in a single system. A T5440 supports 4 T2 Plus prcoessors which gives you 32 cores. The CoolThreads servers also the number of threads. A 4 socket Core i7 server only has 32 threads while a T5440 has 256.
The Core i7 is also not a server class processor, it is meant for the desktop and gaming market. It doesn't support ECC memory.
The Nehalem based Xeon processors will be coming out this year will support up to 8 cores 16 threads per socket.
That might be closer, but the Niagara line of processors are still quite different. I think the Nehalem Xeon processors will be more like Rock so it will be interesting to see head to head comparisons of those systems when they eventually come out.
But that's besides the point. Niagara based servers have been shipping for years and other than the Mac Pro workstation that came out recently, the Nehalem Xeon systems haven't started shipping yet.
Apple didn't have any significant bump during the dot-com years compared to other tech companies.
Post dot-com failure Scott McNealy said:
But two years ago we were selling at 10 times revenues when we were at $64. At 10 times revenues, to give you a 10-year payback, I have to pay you 100% of revenues for 10 straight years in dividends. That assumes I can get that by my shareholders. That assumes I have zero cost of goods sold, which is very hard for a computer company. That assumes zero expenses, which is really hard with 39,000 employees. That assumes I pay no taxes, which is very hard. And that assumes you pay no taxes on your dividends, which is kind of illegal. And that assumes with zero R&D for the next 10 years, I can maintain the current revenue run rate. Now, having done that, would any of you like to buy my stock at $64? Do you realize how ridiculous those basic assumptions are? You don't need any transparency. You don't need any footnotes. What were you thinking?
Wall St was unrealistic during the dot-com era, at least in their advice to others.
Unfortunately McNealy didn't seem to realize there was a bubble either and didn't react to the crash quick enough. Sun might have borrowed too much during the dot com era too.
Company leadership would like people to think that the company has no failures. Ridiculous, of course, but there you have it.
I wonder if it has more to do with the sale to Oracle that has not been finalized.
If you're selling your car, you don't want your wife coming out and telling the guy why you're getting rid of it before he hands you the cash.
I have my own theories on why Sun had to sell and surprisingly it had to do with Notes.
Why would you think that Btrfs is unstable and slow...
There have been other Btrfs benchmarks. The main page of the Btrfs wiki says:
Btrfs is under heavy development, and is not suitable for any uses other than benchmarking and review. The Btrfs disk format is not yet finalized, but it will only be changed if a critical bug is found and no workarounds are possible.
If anything, one could hope that Oracle pulls some folks from ZFS to btrfs and actually speeds development, why develop two competing open file systems?
If they were going to pick just one, why would they favor the one that is not done over the one that has been in production for years? Especially considering that more people deploy Oracle on Solaris/SPARC than on Linux?
And what happens? Someone takes the features they need from a non-GPL program/filesystem/etc and creates a GPL version. Yea, great going there with using an incompatible license. Feel free to use a license incompatible with the GPL. Also feel free to whine when someone replaces the functionality of whatever you've written with a GPL version, which is then included in Linux distros or the kernel where huge amounts of users get access to it.
How many years has it been since ZFS has been released and we still don't have a workable linux alternative.
I don't think anyone is whining at Sun.