Well, if you have a PC that doesn't come with a Windows license (most do) then yes, using Linux saves you a license fee. And even if you do save money up front, that's only a savings if you provide your own support. Because face it, running Linux requires more tech savy than running Windows.
Sure it's misrepresentation. But who really cares? Anybody who's fooled by this has an expressed willingness to break the law and to help destroy humanity's cultural heritage. Ripping of these narcissists is not morally defensible, but it is hard to get worked up about.
Donald Westlake wrote an amusing novel ("High Adventure", and yes it's pun) about a marijuana smuggler who's conned into buying land that supposedly has Mayan ruins on it. Although there are no ancient artifacts to exploit, he discovers that the locals still know how to carve them. Of course, to make a profit, he has to pretend that he's a tomb robber. So you end up with perfectly legal trinkets being smuggled into the U.S., carefully concealed in bales of illegal weed! One of my favorites.
This is just a clarification of "harassment" as it already exists.
There's already a federal law against harassment? Citation please.
It's not an attempt to shut down blogs.
Dude, read the law: "Whoever transmits in interstate or foreign commerce any communication, with the intent to coerce, intimidate, harass, or cause substantial emotional distress to a person, using electronic means to support severe, repeated, and hostile behavior, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than two years, or both.". That would cover most slashdot posts! Never mind all the angry blogs out there.
No, Linux isn't windows, BUT,if it were very easy to run windows apps in Linux (for common Joe user with Joe user level hardware), I think it would be a boon to Linux.
I don't think anybody's disputing that. That's not the issue. The issue is, if an OS is just an alternative way to run Windows apps, why should anybody switch to it?
I don't think cost had that much to do with OS/2's failure. Note that at one point IBM was basically giving away OS/2 to people who bought PCs from them, with machines that dual booted OS/2 and Windows. And towards the end, you could buy OS/2 for a lot less than $500! Anyway, the retail cost of a shrinkwrap copy of an OS doesn't have much to do with its adoption, because most people adopt an OS by buying a machine with it pre-installed.
One day I read that even IBM sales pushed Windows and ignored OS/2. That's when I knew OS/2 had no future.
Nobody's going to adopt your OS just because it implements Windows APIs. That's a positive, but it's not enough by itself. The easiest way to get Windows application support will always be to run Windows. If you want to persuade people to switch, you have to give them a lot of incentives beyond that.
In other words, I agree with Shuttleworth: any Windows alternative needs its own user/developer ecosystem. That's what killed OS/2. Yes, costing a lot more hurt, but if there had been advantages, people might have ponied up.
And I'm still not seeing a real self-sustaining ecosystem for desktop Linux. Server Linux, sure. But Desktop Linux seems to be sustained more by the enthusiasm of its advocates than any real growth in its user base or application developer community. And no, desktop Ubuntu is not an exception: it's being subsidized out of the half-billion dollars Shuttleworth got when he sold Thawte. Presumably the guy thinks he can create this ecosystem before his money runs out. But it's not obvious how.
Hmm, come to think of it, I might know something about this. But yeah, I'd get in big trouble if I leaked any of it. I can point out that we've only owned the remnants of Montalvo for a few months, which is way too soon for the kind of they-wrecked-my-product rant that TheSunbeam describes.
This article is instructive on the dangers of entering the x86 market based only on a cool idea:
Maybe corporations that are actually on the ground in the Netherlands pay these costs. I suspect many corporations only keep their paperwork there.
I find myself terribly amused by this account of the Dutch welfare state. Far from being "socialistic", it appears to be motivated by a Lutheran "everybody for everybody" ethic.
And parts of it seem positively whimsical. You guys get "vakantiegeld" (vacation money) every May? Even if you're unemployed? Maybe a good idea, but it still makes me laugh.
How about lowering taxes and making the tax code simpler, so theres not all these loopholes and thus no reason to have the offshort accounts
We keep hearing this argument, presumably from people who don't understand why the tax code is so unbelievable complicated.
I'll tell you why: because people benefit from that complication. Every complication was inserted after lobbying from the same people who pay a little less tax because of it. If you want to simplify the tax code, you have to start chipping away at all these special cases backed by huge, powerful constituencies.
Which, come to think of it, is exactly what Obama is doing.
What does he think is going to happen? These evil rich businessmen are going to go out and deliver pizzas in their free time to pay the extra taxes?
I like your use of the word "extra". This is about removal of tax breaks — some of which end up subsidizing business for exporting jobs. All anybody wants is for the ERBs more of their fair share. I say "more of" because I have no hope of their ever being made to pay their fair share. When you're rich, it's much easier to duck responsibility, and that's never going to change.
And no, that's not an argument getting rid of rich people. We need greedy people to make the system work. But it is an argument for not letting those greedy people make excessive use of their disproportionate power.
Your comment about pizza delivery is the kind of lame nonsense that always appears whenever people are whining about taxes. Paying more to the government may hurt, but spare us this nonsense about having to take a second job or go on welfare. You might have to downscale your car (or, if you're an ERB, your yacht), but you're not going to be driven to extreme hardship by a few extra percentage points on your tax bill.
I speak from personal experience here. I have been on welfare, and believe me, it's not something people do voluntarily, whatever the talk radio idiots say. Much later, I was living on unemployment, odd jobs, and some small savings, spent 80% of my income on rent — and still had to pay income taxes. Now I make six figures and pay a huge tax bill on it. (Though not as huge as if I were living in "socialist" Europe, where they mysteriously still have beamer-driving yuppies and ERBs with yachts.) But somehow I can't seem to find the resentment you do.
Sun has made a lot of acquisitions over the years. Possibly some design firm got bought out that had originally targetted x86. That's much like what happened with the company that created the HotSpot VM, which was originally meant for Smalltalk runtimes, not Java.
My first thought was that you were confusing Afara with Montalvo, which was an x86 company. But that only happened last year, and Montalvo was already defunct — we just bought their assets, which probably included some juicy patents.
Sun's in-house CPU design is pathetic, which is why UltraSPARC started to lose out to x86 in the late '90s
That might have been part of the reason, but I think the industry-wide shift away from chips that weren't Wintel-compatible might have had a bigger role. How many non-x86 CPUs are widely used? POWER? Not outside of IBM. MIPS? Not even what's left of SGI uses them; outside the embedded market, they are history. Itanium? Not even Intel could get people to buy them!
Whatever the merits of your critique of Sun's management decisions (you'll understand if I keep my opinions on this to myself) I think you're overestimating the impact of the decisions you list. For example, even if MySQL turns out to be a $1 billion mistake, a single gigabuck writeoff is not enough to kill Sun. It's a lot of money, of course, but it's a onetime cost. The things that kill a company are more systemic than that, or any of the other things you mention. These are things like margins, marketing strategy, product focus.
Anonymous posts are pretty pointless. They could be me, or they could be some stupid troll.
SPARC products do indeed have a higher margin. And I suspect there will always be a market for them. But there are good reasons for Sun needing to grow its x64 market share. I'm going to have to assume everybody knows what they are, because certain people will give me a hard time if I start commenting on our marketing strategy.
I don't work in the microelectronics division, so I'm as much an outsider as you when it comes to this stuff. This is the first I've ever heard of the T1 being designed by an acquisition. I was always under the impression it was in-house from start to finish. Could you point me at any sources for this story, beyond the usual blog rumors?
I could speculate as to the truth of this story, but now that I've IDed myself as a Sun employee, I'd get in a lot of trouble for doing so.
I have to strongly disagree with this statement:
If sun had taken the x86 version of T1 given it an hyper transport and sold it to third parties(In the same way that Amd and Intel sell their chips) it might have taken a good part of the server world.
Not a bloody chance. There is simply no room for another player in the x64 component marketplace. AMD is just barely surviving; even with a grossly superior product, Sun would have to spend huge amounts of money just for the hope of becoming another minor player. And in the process, ruin our relationship with two companies that have helped us turn out a lot of profitable hardware.
Sun was shipping far more Intel product than SPARC
I work at Sun on x64 products (both Intel and AMD) and this just isn't true. The x64 products are doing well, but our sales are still predominantly SPARC. The long-term strategy has always been for Sun to place more emphasis on x64 products, but not to the exclusion of SPARC systems. And so far, x64 hasn't even achieved parity with SPARC, or anything like it. Why? Not something I'm going to comment on in a public forum.
A lot of Slashdotters seem to think that Sun has turned into a kind of white box server vendor. Even if we we totally abandoned SPARC, that's not going to happen. Our market niche is high-end computing, and always has been. In the x64 world, it means that in order to compete we have to do stuff that white boxes can't. This includes fancy lights-out remote management, really high computer density (anybody else have an 4U system with 8 processors and a half-terabyte of RAM?) and a greener machine with few plastic parts and a lot of power-conserving measures. These things require a lot of clever engineering, and are the only reason we have any successful x64 systems at all.
I have no idea what Oracle has in mind for Solaris. Contacts with them are, if anything, more circumscribed than they would be under normal circumstances. But in my own inexpert opinion, it's not a coincidence that we've been acquired by one of the few software vendors that's still serious about Solaris/SPARC application.
Never said it was killed by a conspiracy. Said it was strange that in pre-USB, pre-Bluetooth days, it was more or less standard on European cell phones but not available at all on cells targeted at the U.S. market.
And far from being dead, IRDA on cell phones is actually pretty easy to find, though obviously there's little or no application for it. Guess it's one of those legacy ports that's too much of a hassle to do without. Or maybe there's a European standard that requires it.
Anyway, American cell providers do have a history of trying to prevent third-party interoperability. Recall that early Bluetooth cells had all their profiles except handsfree disabled.
If you don't mind recharging 1-2 times a day, carting a small bag around to hold your notebook and setting your notebook down on a convenient surface to read books, then don't bother with an e-book reader.
As a matter of fact, I hate reading on a notebook. You can't curl up with the thing. If I didn't already have a tablet, the Kindle would be a lot more tempting.
Because it has one feature that your netbook doesn't: the eInk display. This display only consumes power when the contents of the display change. The Sony ebook claims 7 thousand/i. page turns before the battery runs down. That would be very handy for long plane rides or road trips. The best netbooks run out of power in 10 hours, regardless of how quickly you read. (Which might be OK if you have access to a power outlet.) Dead tree books don't use any power at all — but that much printed matter is a pain to carry around when you're on the road.
Now, I don't have an ebook reader because $400 is to much to spend on something I'd rarely use. Part of that is because I own a tablet which is great for reading in an armchair or in bed. (And which I paid way too much for.) I'd still be tempted if I did any travelling, especially to place where I wouldn't want to risk my tablet.
Most laptops already have IRDA built in. I'm not sure why exactly...
For syncing PDA data, of course. Recall that all Palm PDAs had IRDA, and I think most other PDA platforms used it too. Without bluetooth or USB, IRDA was the simplest way to sync. Cradles were a pain to set up, and PDA makers hadn't bothered to develop simple RS232 sync cables (though you could find them aftermarket if you looked).
When I got my first cell phone, in 2000, I looked for one that had IRDA. None available for the U.S. market, though most European "mobiles" seeemed to have it. Interesting discrepancy — I've tended to blame the fact that American providers like to lock in their customers, though maybe it's just a result of the Europeans creating so many cell hardware standards. Anyway, I found it very frustrating that there was no way to sync my Palm PDA with my cell.
I've since had cells that had IRDA (I suspect they were originally designed for the European market) but never used it, since by then I also had a laptop with bluetooth.
Besides which, the whole Klingon language thing has gotten too ridiculous. The linguist they hired to invent the language actually tried to make the psychology behind the language truly alien. So he did things like not have words for "hello" or "goodbye". I actually heard an interview with him where he explained that Klingons don't believe in courtesy, and just start and end interactions without ceremony.
This was completely forgotten by the time TNG came out. I guess they decided that aliens acting alien was too subtle for a TV audience. So they decided that Klingons greet each other with "Qapla'!" Officially, that means "Success!" but I suspect it really means "Fuck off, patronizing bald guy!"
But what's really lame is the project to translate Shakespeare into Klingon, based solely on a stupid Cold War reference (one of many) in that Kirk-is-Nixon movie.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, if you have a PC that doesn't come with a Windows license (most do) then yes, using Linux saves you a license fee. And even if you do save money up front, that's only a savings if you provide your own support. Because face it, running Linux requires more tech savy than running Windows.
Sure it's misrepresentation. But who really cares? Anybody who's fooled by this has an expressed willingness to break the law and to help destroy humanity's cultural heritage. Ripping of these narcissists is not morally defensible, but it is hard to get worked up about.
Donald Westlake wrote an amusing novel ("High Adventure", and yes it's pun) about a marijuana smuggler who's conned into buying land that supposedly has Mayan ruins on it. Although there are no ancient artifacts to exploit, he discovers that the locals still know how to carve them. Of course, to make a profit, he has to pretend that he's a tomb robber. So you end up with perfectly legal trinkets being smuggled into the U.S., carefully concealed in bales of illegal weed! One of my favorites.
My experience always had IBM P5 (now P6) for the real high end applications, except for big Oracle servers.
I think that's correct. But note that there are a lot of Oracle servers out there!
This is just a clarification of "harassment" as it already exists.
There's already a federal law against harassment? Citation please.
It's not an attempt to shut down blogs.
Dude, read the law: "Whoever transmits in interstate or foreign commerce any communication, with the intent to coerce, intimidate, harass, or cause substantial emotional distress to a person, using electronic means to support severe, repeated, and hostile behavior, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than two years, or both.". That would cover most slashdot posts! Never mind all the angry blogs out there.
I don't think anybody's disputing that. That's not the issue. The issue is, if an OS is just an alternative way to run Windows apps, why should anybody switch to it?
I don't think cost had that much to do with OS/2's failure. Note that at one point IBM was basically giving away OS/2 to people who bought PCs from them, with machines that dual booted OS/2 and Windows. And towards the end, you could buy OS/2 for a lot less than $500! Anyway, the retail cost of a shrinkwrap copy of an OS doesn't have much to do with its adoption, because most people adopt an OS by buying a machine with it pre-installed.
One day I read that even IBM sales pushed Windows and ignored OS/2. That's when I knew OS/2 had no future.
Nobody's going to adopt your OS just because it implements Windows APIs. That's a positive, but it's not enough by itself. The easiest way to get Windows application support will always be to run Windows. If you want to persuade people to switch, you have to give them a lot of incentives beyond that.
In other words, I agree with Shuttleworth: any Windows alternative needs its own user/developer ecosystem. That's what killed OS/2. Yes, costing a lot more hurt, but if there had been advantages, people might have ponied up.
And I'm still not seeing a real self-sustaining ecosystem for desktop Linux. Server Linux, sure. But Desktop Linux seems to be sustained more by the enthusiasm of its advocates than any real growth in its user base or application developer community. And no, desktop Ubuntu is not an exception: it's being subsidized out of the half-billion dollars Shuttleworth got when he sold Thawte. Presumably the guy thinks he can create this ecosystem before his money runs out. But it's not obvious how.
Hmm, come to think of it, I might know something about this. But yeah, I'd get in big trouble if I leaked any of it. I can point out that we've only owned the remnants of Montalvo for a few months, which is way too soon for the kind of they-wrecked-my-product rant that TheSunbeam describes.
This article is instructive on the dangers of entering the x86 market based only on a cool idea:
http://venturebeat.com/2008/06/23/post-mortem-the-real-story-of-how-chip-startup-montalvo-went-down-in-flames/
No, it contains 32 cores, not processors. As does the Sun system I was talking about.
Though 2U is still much smaller. Still, the IBM system is POWER, while the Sun system has a commodity CPU.
Maybe corporations that are actually on the ground in the Netherlands pay these costs. I suspect many corporations only keep their paperwork there.
I find myself terribly amused by this account of the Dutch welfare state. Far from being "socialistic", it appears to be motivated by a Lutheran "everybody for everybody" ethic.
And parts of it seem positively whimsical. You guys get "vakantiegeld" (vacation money) every May? Even if you're unemployed? Maybe a good idea, but it still makes me laugh.
How about lowering taxes and making the tax code simpler, so theres not all these loopholes and thus no reason to have the offshort accounts
We keep hearing this argument, presumably from people who don't understand why the tax code is so unbelievable complicated.
I'll tell you why: because people benefit from that complication. Every complication was inserted after lobbying from the same people who pay a little less tax because of it. If you want to simplify the tax code, you have to start chipping away at all these special cases backed by huge, powerful constituencies.
Which, come to think of it, is exactly what Obama is doing.
What does he think is going to happen? These evil rich businessmen are going to go out and deliver pizzas in their free time to pay the extra taxes?
I like your use of the word "extra". This is about removal of tax breaks — some of which end up subsidizing business for exporting jobs. All anybody wants is for the ERBs more of their fair share. I say "more of" because I have no hope of their ever being made to pay their fair share. When you're rich, it's much easier to duck responsibility, and that's never going to change.
And no, that's not an argument getting rid of rich people. We need greedy people to make the system work. But it is an argument for not letting those greedy people make excessive use of their disproportionate power.
Your comment about pizza delivery is the kind of lame nonsense that always appears whenever people are whining about taxes. Paying more to the government may hurt, but spare us this nonsense about having to take a second job or go on welfare. You might have to downscale your car (or, if you're an ERB, your yacht), but you're not going to be driven to extreme hardship by a few extra percentage points on your tax bill.
I speak from personal experience here. I have been on welfare, and believe me, it's not something people do voluntarily, whatever the talk radio idiots say. Much later, I was living on unemployment, odd jobs, and some small savings, spent 80% of my income on rent — and still had to pay income taxes. Now I make six figures and pay a huge tax bill on it. (Though not as huge as if I were living in "socialist" Europe, where they mysteriously still have beamer-driving yuppies and ERBs with yachts.) But somehow I can't seem to find the resentment you do.
Sun has made a lot of acquisitions over the years. Possibly some design firm got bought out that had originally targetted x86. That's much like what happened with the company that created the HotSpot VM, which was originally meant for Smalltalk runtimes, not Java.
My first thought was that you were confusing Afara with Montalvo, which was an x86 company. But that only happened last year, and Montalvo was already defunct — we just bought their assets, which probably included some juicy patents.
Sun's in-house CPU design is pathetic, which is why UltraSPARC started to lose out to x86 in the late '90s
That might have been part of the reason, but I think the industry-wide shift away from chips that weren't Wintel-compatible might have had a bigger role. How many non-x86 CPUs are widely used? POWER? Not outside of IBM. MIPS? Not even what's left of SGI uses them; outside the embedded market, they are history. Itanium? Not even Intel could get people to buy them!
Whatever the merits of your critique of Sun's management decisions (you'll understand if I keep my opinions on this to myself) I think you're overestimating the impact of the decisions you list. For example, even if MySQL turns out to be a $1 billion mistake, a single gigabuck writeoff is not enough to kill Sun. It's a lot of money, of course, but it's a onetime cost. The things that kill a company are more systemic than that, or any of the other things you mention. These are things like margins, marketing strategy, product focus.
Anonymous posts are pretty pointless. They could be me, or they could be some stupid troll.
SPARC products do indeed have a higher margin. And I suspect there will always be a market for them. But there are good reasons for Sun needing to grow its x64 market share. I'm going to have to assume everybody knows what they are, because certain people will give me a hard time if I start commenting on our marketing strategy.
I don't work in the microelectronics division, so I'm as much an outsider as you when it comes to this stuff. This is the first I've ever heard of the T1 being designed by an acquisition. I was always under the impression it was in-house from start to finish. Could you point me at any sources for this story, beyond the usual blog rumors?
I could speculate as to the truth of this story, but now that I've IDed myself as a Sun employee, I'd get in a lot of trouble for doing so.
I have to strongly disagree with this statement:
If sun had taken the x86 version of T1 given it an hyper transport and sold it to third parties(In the same way that Amd and Intel sell their chips)
it might have taken a good part of the server world.
Not a bloody chance. There is simply no room for another player in the x64 component marketplace. AMD is just barely surviving; even with a grossly superior product, Sun would have to spend huge amounts of money just for the hope of becoming another minor player. And in the process, ruin our relationship with two companies that have helped us turn out a lot of profitable hardware.
Sun was shipping far more Intel product than SPARC
I work at Sun on x64 products (both Intel and AMD) and this just isn't true. The x64 products are doing well, but our sales are still predominantly SPARC. The long-term strategy has always been for Sun to place more emphasis on x64 products, but not to the exclusion of SPARC systems. And so far, x64 hasn't even achieved parity with SPARC, or anything like it. Why? Not something I'm going to comment on in a public forum.
A lot of Slashdotters seem to think that Sun has turned into a kind of white box server vendor. Even if we we totally abandoned SPARC, that's not going to happen. Our market niche is high-end computing, and always has been. In the x64 world, it means that in order to compete we have to do stuff that white boxes can't. This includes fancy lights-out remote management, really high computer density (anybody else have an 4U system with 8 processors and a half-terabyte of RAM?) and a greener machine with few plastic parts and a lot of power-conserving measures. These things require a lot of clever engineering, and are the only reason we have any successful x64 systems at all.
I have no idea what Oracle has in mind for Solaris. Contacts with them are, if anything, more circumscribed than they would be under normal circumstances. But in my own inexpert opinion, it's not a coincidence that we've been acquired by one of the few software vendors that's still serious about Solaris/SPARC application.
Never said it was killed by a conspiracy. Said it was strange that in pre-USB, pre-Bluetooth days, it was more or less standard on European cell phones but not available at all on cells targeted at the U.S. market.
And far from being dead, IRDA on cell phones is actually pretty easy to find, though obviously there's little or no application for it. Guess it's one of those legacy ports that's too much of a hassle to do without. Or maybe there's a European standard that requires it.
Anyway, American cell providers do have a history of trying to prevent third-party interoperability. Recall that early Bluetooth cells had all their profiles except handsfree disabled.
As a matter of fact, I hate reading on a notebook. You can't curl up with the thing. If I didn't already have a tablet, the Kindle would be a lot more tempting.
(Insert Sarah Palin joke here.)
Because it has one feature that your netbook doesn't: the eInk display. This display only consumes power when the contents of the display change. The Sony ebook claims 7 thousand/i. page turns before the battery runs down. That would be very handy for long plane rides or road trips. The best netbooks run out of power in 10 hours, regardless of how quickly you read. (Which might be OK if you have access to a power outlet.) Dead tree books don't use any power at all — but that much printed matter is a pain to carry around when you're on the road.
Now, I don't have an ebook reader because $400 is to much to spend on something I'd rarely use. Part of that is because I own a tablet which is great for reading in an armchair or in bed. (And which I paid way too much for.) I'd still be tempted if I did any travelling, especially to place where I wouldn't want to risk my tablet.
Most laptops already have IRDA built in. I'm not sure why exactly...
For syncing PDA data, of course. Recall that all Palm PDAs had IRDA, and I think most other PDA platforms used it too. Without bluetooth or USB, IRDA was the simplest way to sync. Cradles were a pain to set up, and PDA makers hadn't bothered to develop simple RS232 sync cables (though you could find them aftermarket if you looked).
When I got my first cell phone, in 2000, I looked for one that had IRDA. None available for the U.S. market, though most European "mobiles" seeemed to have it. Interesting discrepancy — I've tended to blame the fact that American providers like to lock in their customers, though maybe it's just a result of the Europeans creating so many cell hardware standards. Anyway, I found it very frustrating that there was no way to sync my Palm PDA with my cell.
I've since had cells that had IRDA (I suspect they were originally designed for the European market) but never used it, since by then I also had a laptop with bluetooth.
From one attempt to design a reusable vehicle? In a project that everybody agrees was poorly planned?
Sorry to get personal, but that's one of the stupidest argument I've even heard.
Your post makes no sense. Governments waste money, therefore disposable boosters will always be cheaper? I simply don't see the connection.
Besides which, the whole Klingon language thing has gotten too ridiculous. The linguist they hired to invent the language actually tried to make the psychology behind the language truly alien. So he did things like not have words for "hello" or "goodbye". I actually heard an interview with him where he explained that Klingons don't believe in courtesy, and just start and end interactions without ceremony.
This was completely forgotten by the time TNG came out. I guess they decided that aliens acting alien was too subtle for a TV audience. So they decided that Klingons greet each other with "Qapla'!" Officially, that means "Success!" but I suspect it really means "Fuck off, patronizing bald guy!"
But what's really lame is the project to translate Shakespeare into Klingon, based solely on a stupid Cold War reference (one of many) in that Kirk-is-Nixon movie.
tlhap yIn!
Not newsworthy. Apple fanboys play telephone more creatively than anybody this side of John Dvorak.
I know for a fact that those chips are from a different company! Do Apple's lawyers know about this?