Sorry, I expressed that backwards, and too simplistically.
Why did you give up at $92? Unless you're a compulsive bidder, it's because that's the most you're willing to pay. So that's the maximum you're going to bid for the thing, regardless of what the other guy does.
Now suppose you bid $92 a week before. The other guy doesn't know this, he just knows that his top bid is less than yours. So he still bids it up to $97. Maybe he does it more quickly, but aside from that, the outcome is the same.
I bid $92, but that's not enough, and he still has high bid at $97. And I give up. He still wins, but he's paying $97 instead of $85. Bidding early cost him $12.
Why? If you had bid $92 in the first place, he still would have given up at $85.
It's possible that when you get outbid on something, you could rationally decide that the item is worth a little more to you than you originally thought. But that's obviously not what's happening when people up their bids several times — especially when they do it at the last moment.
My point was mainly that... having a defensive system that had a component that relied on detonating nuclear weapons wasn't all that out of line with what we'd had prior to the time work started on SDI
Perhaps. But pre-SDI, there was no suggestion that defensive weapons could do more than mitigate the effect of a Soviet attack. By contrast SDI was supposed to be a "shield" that we could hide safely behind.
A defensive weapon with lots of "collateral damage" might have a place in the cold-blooded calculations in place when Nike was first proposed near the end of WW II. (Recall that AA guns from that war also did a lot of damage on the ground.) It also would have fitted in with the bloody-minded attitude during the early years of the Cold War, when it was widely assumed that the two superpowers had to come to blows eventually. But once Mutually Assured Destruction became the accepted doctrine on both sides, the idea that you could tolerate some civilian casualties went away.
Whatever its actual motives or effects, SDI didn't revive the doctrine of "acceptable collateral damage". It was supposedly about making civilians completely safe. "Defensive" explosions of nuclear weapons are kind of inconsistent with that.
what reference for east/west did they have -other- than the position of the sun?
Pastoral cultures tend to be pretty good at basic observational astronomy. When you spend most of your life outdoors, the sky is an important source of entertainment. Southwestern native American cultures (including the Hopi) have left a lot of stuff lying around that indicates a lot of time and energy on this stuff.
Anyway, all cultures have the stars as a background reference. You have heard of Polaris?
Also, remember that "east and west" is our terminology. If there actually is such a Hopi myth (probably not, see below) it might well say, "The big fire in the sky used to ascend over Mount Thatway, instead of on the other side of the plain."
On the other hand, the notion that the Hopis have a myth that the sun used to rise in the west seems to be itself a myth. I can't find any reliable reference to it. (There's a famous collection of Hopi traditions in Google Books that makes no mention.) What references I can find to the Hopi and the sun rising in the west are supposed prophecies, which seem to be various "experts" claiming that Hopi prophets predicted an atomic war!
I'm skeptical that this "prophecy" exists outside the fervid imagination of the people reporting it. We "advanced" cultures seem to do a lot better than "primitive" cultures at mythologizing!
Please. The "SE" in Java SE is just branding to differentiate it from Java EE, Java ME, etc. Java SE certainly did exist back in the WORA days. It was called "Java".
You certainly wouldn't want to run a heavy duty enterprise app on a netbook. But there are light-weight ones that are deployed over the web that could be very useful.
Suppose you're in charge of a bunch of Sun servers and one of them has a problem that you can only figure out by access the console — while you're off on a trip, and can't get back anytime soon. No problem. You just need a system with a recent JRE, and the server's service processor will give you a Java terminal application that gives you full access. You can even reinstall the OS and re-flash the firmware if there's a file server somewhere with the right image files.
You could carry a Windows laptop or netbook against that contingency. But then your system has to be Intel-compatible, which means you have a big power-hungry CISC processor. An ARM-based system is perfectly capable of meeting your needs, despite its limited processing power — if it has the JRE to run that terminal software on.
I seem to recall that they fired up an X-Ray laser as part of the tests for the Strategic Defense Initiative. The whole thing was powered by an atomic blast, so it was kind of a one-shot deal.
If they had actually deployed lasers like that one, I think I would have been more afraid of our missile defense than of any missiles.
Ronnie promised us that SDI would make nuclear weapons "impotent and obsolete". I think he didn't quite understand how hard that is.
If all Time Warner customers decided one day not to check their e-mail or download a single movie, the company's costs would be no different than on a day when every customer was glued to the screen watching one YouTube video after another.
And if no tweenies show up to tonight's Miley Cyrus concert, the cost of putting it on will be pretty much the same. Does that mean that Miley should go to a flat rate, come-as-often-as-like model?
All retail businesses are based on assumptions about normal behavior. Hypotheticals that posit unlikely behavior aren't arguments. If they were, then we could suppose that every TW customer might decide to visit YouTube at precisely the same moment, and that TW should build out its network to support that and charge accordingly. Are you ready for $1,000 a month for DSL?
Let me anticipate the same lame point that gets made every time we have this discussion: Even if TW ripped off the government by pocketing the money they were supposed to use for expanding their infrastructure, we still have a "no free lunch" scenario. Even thieves need a sustainable business model.
Please. Java SE may not be the Windows killer Sun used to claim it was, but there are still a lot of people running Java GUI apps, especially in enterprise applications. And not "legacy" apps either. It's a simple way to create simple client programs that you can deploy over the web. It will never replace native apps for most purposes, but it still has a big role.
The absence of a JRE would all seem to relate to the confusion over what kind of device Android is really meant for. Google seems to have targeted at cell phones and PDA-style devices. In that context, not supporting Java SE makes sense. But once you start deploying Android on netbooks....
So they're a software company. Where is it written they can't branch out? In effect, their salespeople are already selling hardware, because IT application deployments are almost always hardware/software stacks. The difference is that before Oracle salespeople had to hand off the hardware purchase to a hardware partner — along with its commissions.
Oracle is claiming that Sun will add $1.5 billion a year to their profits — starting in the first year. That number may or may not be realistic, but it lacks all credibility if it's based solely on monetizing Sun's (mostly open-source) software. They could make those kinds of profits if they cut costs drastically and do a much better job of selling Sun's servers than Sun has.
Both are eminently doable. There are a lot of Sun people (sales and marketing mostly) that Oracle won't need. And Oracle's own sales force (which is bigger than all of Sun!) isn't hampered by Sun's religious belief that you can sell a SPARC system to any customer if you try hard enough. Oracle will concentrate on selling SPARC to people who actually need it (and it just so happens that most of these people run Oracle software) and stop trying to push it to customers who are committed to commodity technology. Sun has put a lot of work into developing x64 servers that many of their sales people don't seem to care about, except as an x86/Linux-to-SPARC/Solaris migration path. Once these servers are in the hands of people who don't have a stubborn attachment to 1998 market models, they might finally get some traction.
Oh please. Yeah, there were people who predicted this. There were also people who predicted that Sun would go to Apple, Lenovo, or Acer. It wouldn't surprise me if somebody predicted that SourceForge would buy it for the sole purpose of upgrading Slashdot's hardware!
There are so many BS predictions out there, it's darned easy to miss the ones that actually make sense. Everybody I know was caught flatfooted by this. There are lots of good reasons to think that Oracle couldn't or wouldn't buy Sun: their partnership with HP, the difficulty of borrowing money right now (IBM was going to use its cash reserves, which isn't an option for Oracle), and the difficulty Oracle will have maintaining good relationships with the hardware companies it depends on — which are now its competitors.
On a serious note, I hate last-minute eBay bidders. Since all auctions on eBay are proxy auctions, you're not really bidding when you enter a number, you're setting a maximum that your proxy can bid on your behalf. The people you're bidding against don't know what your maximum bid is, so it doesn't matter if you enter your maximum as soon as you decide on it or at the last minute.
Except in the rare case where somebody else enters the same maximum as you do. In which case the person who entered the maximum first wins! So why wait for the last minute? Unless you're more concerned about winning than about getting a good deal, which I guess describes a lot of eBay bidders.
Of course, this behavior is profitable for eBay, since overbidding inflates their commissions, so they make no attempt to educate folks, and even send you "Don't let it get away!" emails if you're outbid. But it gets really old. You seem to be winning, and then somebody willing to pay way too much jumps in at the last minute. Too frustrating and time consuming. I try to stick to Buy It Now purchases these days.
You're thinking of Immanuel Velikovsky. He started out as a Jungian Psychotherapist. Jungians are fond of spinning theories about myths and their historical origins. The history IV needed to make his theories work included a lot of near collisions between Earth and other planets. When told that this totally contradicted current physical theory, IV just went and invented his own "science" of planetary cosmology.
This "science" has always had a huge following, despite it's sheer aburdity. Perhaps it's the vivid imagery in his writings. Jungians have a talent for pushing people emotional buttons and triggering a "shock of recognition" effect.
One thing that didn't help was the attempt by various physicists who got upset over the bad science in IV's work and threatened to boycott the textbook arm of his publisher. Gave him the usual validation through martyrdom.
In any case, I wouldn't worry about there being anything to it. Aside from the bad science, Velikovsky's claim that certain myths are universal doesn't stand up. For example, he claims that all cultures have a Noah myth. Some do, some don't. The ones that do always turn out to have a history of city building in river flood plains. That allows us to explain the Noah myth as a simple flood disaster that grew in the telling. A much simpler explanation than Velikovsky's claim that the planet Saturn exploded one day...
You don't make it clear exactly why you hate this outcome, but it sounds like your interest begins and ends with the future of Java.
First off, Sun no longer controls Java the way they used to. Companies who do a lot of heavy-duty Java stuff, like IBM and Google, have a big role to play these days. If they don't like the way Oracle is handling Java, they'll just fork it the way Microsoft did — and which they can do a lot more easily, since they don't have to develop the fork from scratch. They'd probably have to abandon the Java trademark, but does anybody really care about that?
Second, why on earth do you think Oracle can't manage Java well? That's mostly about listening to the Java community, and it's not like Sun has been outstanding in that department. Too much sense of "we invented it, you don't really understand it as well as we do."
They need Solaris for their Sparc servers and since the x86 and Sparc versions come from the same codebase, and the x86 server sales are increasing, it doesn't make sense to ditch Solaris.
Two little details: First, there's a SPARC version of Linux, though Sun doesn't support it. (Cannonical does.) Second, most of Sun's x86 servers end up running Linux or Windows. A lot of Sun people are in denial about that, and still pretend that the x86 systems are still just a migration path to SPARC; Oracle will have no reason to continue that pretense.
That said, I do agree that Oracle is likely to keep Solaris going. Oracle database does run on Linux, but Oracle people tend to prefer Solaris. It's probably not a coincidence that Sun got acquired by the one company that actually has a serious use for the OS.
Its highly unlikely Oracle will maintain Sun's hardware aspect of the business.
Dude, most of Sun's revenue comes from hardware, either by selling it, or by selling services bundled with it. Software people see sun in terms of Java, MySQL, and so on, but these actually generate very little revenue on their own; to Sun, they're valuable mainly as a way of driving its hardware and service businesses.
If Oracle writes off Sun's hardware business, they will have paid $5 billion ($7 billion plus the cost of assuming Sun's debts, but minus Sun's $3 billion in cash reserves) for a few software products. MySQL cost Sun $1 billion; I doubt it's worth that much now. So unless the rest is worth more than $4 billion (is Java worth even $1 billion? don't be absurd) the idea that this is all about the software just won't fly.
Safra Katz (Oracle President under Ellison) is saying that he can make Sun's hardware business profitable. That's a credible claim. There are some solid products there, hampered by a corporate mindset that thinks it's still 1998.
Sun already has put SPARC into legacy mode.
Nonsense. SPARC systems still account for 90% of Sun's hardware sales. Sun has some solid x86_64 products, but these have been slow to gain traction. One reason for this: Sun's sales org still has a nasty habit of pushing SPARC products at potential customers, even those who've made it clear they want commodity hardware. Needless to say, this has not been good for Sun's sales.
The bigger question is what Oracle plans for Sun's software products, like Solaris, MYSQL, and Java.
Bigger if you're in one of those user communities. The answers are pretty simple:
Solaris is dead as a significant workstation or office OS, and has been for some time. Sun is in denial about this, but it's true. It's main future seems to be in servers, and it's probably not a coincidence that Oracle is one of the few server application vendors that still relies on it. Yeah, Oracle runs on Linux too, but if you need to scale things up, you use a Unix.
Sun lost control of MySQL almost immediately after buying it. It's an open source product, so "owning it" means employing the people who are key to its developer community. As often happens with this kind of acquisition, too many MySQL people have decided that working for Sun is not what they signed up for.
Sun's control of Java is also kaput, and for similar reasons. Even though they developed Java inhouse, they've open-sourced it, and as with MySQL they've failed to maintain the loyalty of many key employees. I had thought that "ownership" of Java would end up with Google, which is where most of these former Sun people now work. But Google seems satisfied with being a dominant player in Java development, and sees no need to own the trademark.
An accepted tactic to grow a customer base is to buyout another company's customer base.
Which is probably what IBM had in mind. But Oracle's not really a competitor for Sun, except in a few software and service markets that hardly matter. At least not $5 billion worth.
I don't think the Dr. Strangelove aspects of this building are at all typical for modern telco buildings. Recall that when AT&T built it, they were still a legal monopoly, and one way they justified their monopoly status was by touting how disaster resistant their network was.
In this case, it's all a dog and pony show. All that fallout proofing would be useless against a direct hit, even with conventional weapons. And even in conventional warfare, communications centers are prime targets.
Sigh. Are Slashdotters getting terminally lazy or what? Supporting arguments of gone from lame to simplistic to a single-word statements of opinion.
Your opinion contradicts all the evidence. Why should your opinion matter when you can't be bothered to back it up with actual arguments or facts.
Mind you, I'd love for you to be right. High Speed Rail has been a boon in every country where it's established itself. Aside from all it's obvious benefit, the French system has ended up costing its taxpayers zilch (it was built with government bond money, but these have long since been paid back out of fares), unless you count all the negative costs of not having to deal with so many cars, buses and airplanes.
But France is not the U.S. (Cue the usual lame French-hating jokes. Go away, the grownups are talking.) Their cities are closer together, the French are used to paying huge amounts for gas, and they don't have America's cult-like worship of the automobile. They've always depended more on trains the we have — they went to faster trains mainly because it was the only practical way to expand the carrying capacity of their existing network. Americans, by contrast, won't even car pool without a gun put to their head.
In 1964, they built a bridge across the Hudson Narrows that was specifically designed so it could never be adapted to support trains. (The assumption was that only downscale people you didn't want around would ride such trains.) That's the kind of psychology American rail advocates have to deal with.
These are huge barriers. If you know of ways to overcome them, let's hear them. If you don't, your opinion is irrelevant.
The problem is that some security experts tangle up STO with their philosophy on F/OSS and their dislike for anything MS.
Like who? Yes, there are a lot of idiots are there who think that proprietary software is evil, and that MS is Satan. But I don't know any credible security experts who talk that way, just the usual religious nuts.
Funny how the creators of software can't automatically search for all possible vulnerabilities but malware authors magically can even if they don't have the source code.
Here's the difference: people probing for security holes aren't on deadline. And there are a lot of them. Think thousands. I mean jeez, nowadays every Mumbai slumdweller with an old laptop is a potential script kiddie. I've worked for software organization of all different sizes, and not even the big guys can compete with that kind of resource.
Also, it's a given that the people suck at finding mistakes in their own code. Code review helps, but a code review by one person is nothing like the kind of poking and prodding you get when you open the source tree.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry, I expressed that backwards, and too simplistically.
Why did you give up at $92? Unless you're a compulsive bidder, it's because that's the most you're willing to pay. So that's the maximum you're going to bid for the thing, regardless of what the other guy does.
Now suppose you bid $92 a week before. The other guy doesn't know this, he just knows that his top bid is less than yours. So he still bids it up to $97. Maybe he does it more quickly, but aside from that, the outcome is the same.
I bid $92, but that's not enough, and he still has high bid at $97. And I give up. He still wins, but he's paying $97 instead of $85. Bidding early cost him $12.
Why? If you had bid $92 in the first place, he still would have given up at $85.
I hope that was an attempt at a joke. Though given your inability to express yourself clearly, I guess it probably wasn't.
You can be rational without being a "robot".
It's possible that when you get outbid on something, you could rationally decide that the item is worth a little more to you than you originally thought. But that's obviously not what's happening when people up their bids several times — especially when they do it at the last moment.
You seem to be implying that the only way to win against an irrational counter bid is with a larger, also irrational bid.
It is. It just isn't a valid strategy for getting a good price.
Perhaps. But pre-SDI, there was no suggestion that defensive weapons could do more than mitigate the effect of a Soviet attack. By contrast SDI was supposed to be a "shield" that we could hide safely behind.
A defensive weapon with lots of "collateral damage" might have a place in the cold-blooded calculations in place when Nike was first proposed near the end of WW II. (Recall that AA guns from that war also did a lot of damage on the ground.) It also would have fitted in with the bloody-minded attitude during the early years of the Cold War, when it was widely assumed that the two superpowers had to come to blows eventually. But once Mutually Assured Destruction became the accepted doctrine on both sides, the idea that you could tolerate some civilian casualties went away.
Whatever its actual motives or effects, SDI didn't revive the doctrine of "acceptable collateral damage". It was supposedly about making civilians completely safe. "Defensive" explosions of nuclear weapons are kind of inconsistent with that.
what reference for east/west did they have -other- than the position of the sun?
Pastoral cultures tend to be pretty good at basic observational astronomy. When you spend most of your life outdoors, the sky is an important source of entertainment. Southwestern native American cultures (including the Hopi) have left a lot of stuff lying around that indicates a lot of time and energy on this stuff.
Anyway, all cultures have the stars as a background reference. You have heard of Polaris?
Also, remember that "east and west" is our terminology. If there actually is such a Hopi myth (probably not, see below) it might well say, "The big fire in the sky used to ascend over Mount Thatway, instead of on the other side of the plain."
On the other hand, the notion that the Hopis have a myth that the sun used to rise in the west seems to be itself a myth. I can't find any reliable reference to it. (There's a famous collection of Hopi traditions in Google Books that makes no mention.) What references I can find to the Hopi and the sun rising in the west are supposed prophecies, which seem to be various "experts" claiming that Hopi prophets predicted an atomic war!
I'm skeptical that this "prophecy" exists outside the fervid imagination of the people reporting it. We "advanced" cultures seem to do a lot better than "primitive" cultures at mythologizing!
Please. The "SE" in Java SE is just branding to differentiate it from Java EE, Java ME, etc. Java SE certainly did exist back in the WORA days. It was called "Java".
You certainly wouldn't want to run a heavy duty enterprise app on a netbook. But there are light-weight ones that are deployed over the web that could be very useful.
Suppose you're in charge of a bunch of Sun servers and one of them has a problem that you can only figure out by access the console — while you're off on a trip, and can't get back anytime soon. No problem. You just need a system with a recent JRE, and the server's service processor will give you a Java terminal application that gives you full access. You can even reinstall the OS and re-flash the firmware if there's a file server somewhere with the right image files.
You could carry a Windows laptop or netbook against that contingency. But then your system has to be Intel-compatible, which means you have a big power-hungry CISC processor. An ARM-based system is perfectly capable of meeting your needs, despite its limited processing power — if it has the JRE to run that terminal software on.
I seem to recall that they fired up an X-Ray laser as part of the tests for the Strategic Defense Initiative. The whole thing was powered by an atomic blast, so it was kind of a one-shot deal.
If they had actually deployed lasers like that one, I think I would have been more afraid of our missile defense than of any missiles.
Ronnie promised us that SDI would make nuclear weapons "impotent and obsolete". I think he didn't quite understand how hard that is.
If all Time Warner customers decided one day not to check their e-mail or download a single movie, the company's costs would be no different than on a day when every customer was glued to the screen watching one YouTube video after another.
And if no tweenies show up to tonight's Miley Cyrus concert, the cost of putting it on will be pretty much the same. Does that mean that Miley should go to a flat rate, come-as-often-as-like model?
All retail businesses are based on assumptions about normal behavior. Hypotheticals that posit unlikely behavior aren't arguments. If they were, then we could suppose that every TW customer might decide to visit YouTube at precisely the same moment, and that TW should build out its network to support that and charge accordingly. Are you ready for $1,000 a month for DSL?
Let me anticipate the same lame point that gets made every time we have this discussion: Even if TW ripped off the government by pocketing the money they were supposed to use for expanding their infrastructure, we still have a "no free lunch" scenario. Even thieves need a sustainable business model.
Please. Java SE may not be the Windows killer Sun used to claim it was, but there are still a lot of people running Java GUI apps, especially in enterprise applications. And not "legacy" apps either. It's a simple way to create simple client programs that you can deploy over the web. It will never replace native apps for most purposes, but it still has a big role.
The absence of a JRE would all seem to relate to the confusion over what kind of device Android is really meant for. Google seems to have targeted at cell phones and PDA-style devices. In that context, not supporting Java SE makes sense. But once you start deploying Android on netbooks....
The "reviewer" was the usual ignorant and opinionated "technology columnist". Saying stupid things is practically part of his job description.
So they're a software company. Where is it written they can't branch out? In effect, their salespeople are already selling hardware, because IT application deployments are almost always hardware/software stacks. The difference is that before Oracle salespeople had to hand off the hardware purchase to a hardware partner — along with its commissions.
Oracle is claiming that Sun will add $1.5 billion a year to their profits — starting in the first year. That number may or may not be realistic, but it lacks all credibility if it's based solely on monetizing Sun's (mostly open-source) software. They could make those kinds of profits if they cut costs drastically and do a much better job of selling Sun's servers than Sun has.
Both are eminently doable. There are a lot of Sun people (sales and marketing mostly) that Oracle won't need. And Oracle's own sales force (which is bigger than all of Sun!) isn't hampered by Sun's religious belief that you can sell a SPARC system to any customer if you try hard enough. Oracle will concentrate on selling SPARC to people who actually need it (and it just so happens that most of these people run Oracle software) and stop trying to push it to customers who are committed to commodity technology. Sun has put a lot of work into developing x64 servers that many of their sales people don't seem to care about, except as an x86/Linux-to-SPARC/Solaris migration path. Once these servers are in the hands of people who don't have a stubborn attachment to 1998 market models, they might finally get some traction.
Old and slow Ballmer.... old and slow...
Oh please. Yeah, there were people who predicted this. There were also people who predicted that Sun would go to Apple, Lenovo, or Acer. It wouldn't surprise me if somebody predicted that SourceForge would buy it for the sole purpose of upgrading Slashdot's hardware!
There are so many BS predictions out there, it's darned easy to miss the ones that actually make sense. Everybody I know was caught flatfooted by this. There are lots of good reasons to think that Oracle couldn't or wouldn't buy Sun: their partnership with HP, the difficulty of borrowing money right now (IBM was going to use its cash reserves, which isn't an option for Oracle), and the difficulty Oracle will have maintaining good relationships with the hardware companies it depends on — which are now its competitors.
Hindsight is always 100% accurate. So what?
On a serious note, I hate last-minute eBay bidders. Since all auctions on eBay are proxy auctions, you're not really bidding when you enter a number, you're setting a maximum that your proxy can bid on your behalf. The people you're bidding against don't know what your maximum bid is, so it doesn't matter if you enter your maximum as soon as you decide on it or at the last minute.
Except in the rare case where somebody else enters the same maximum as you do. In which case the person who entered the maximum first wins! So why wait for the last minute? Unless you're more concerned about winning than about getting a good deal, which I guess describes a lot of eBay bidders.
Of course, this behavior is profitable for eBay, since overbidding inflates their commissions, so they make no attempt to educate folks, and even send you "Don't let it get away!" emails if you're outbid. But it gets really old. You seem to be winning, and then somebody willing to pay way too much jumps in at the last minute. Too frustrating and time consuming. I try to stick to Buy It Now purchases these days.
Right. Oracle has no interest in the OS that most Oracle installs run on top of.
More than your ill-informed crap. If you'd bothered to head any of the reporting on this story, you'd know you were spouting BS.
Megawatts don't have holes, Robin.
You're thinking of Immanuel Velikovsky. He started out as a Jungian Psychotherapist. Jungians are fond of spinning theories about myths and their historical origins. The history IV needed to make his theories work included a lot of near collisions between Earth and other planets. When told that this totally contradicted current physical theory, IV just went and invented his own "science" of planetary cosmology.
This "science" has always had a huge following, despite it's sheer aburdity. Perhaps it's the vivid imagery in his writings. Jungians have a talent for pushing people emotional buttons and triggering a "shock of recognition" effect.
One thing that didn't help was the attempt by various physicists who got upset over the bad science in IV's work and threatened to boycott the textbook arm of his publisher. Gave him the usual validation through martyrdom.
In any case, I wouldn't worry about there being anything to it. Aside from the bad science, Velikovsky's claim that certain myths are universal doesn't stand up. For example, he claims that all cultures have a Noah myth. Some do, some don't. The ones that do always turn out to have a history of city building in river flood plains. That allows us to explain the Noah myth as a simple flood disaster that grew in the telling. A much simpler explanation than Velikovsky's claim that the planet Saturn exploded one day...
You don't make it clear exactly why you hate this outcome, but it sounds like your interest begins and ends with the future of Java.
First off, Sun no longer controls Java the way they used to. Companies who do a lot of heavy-duty Java stuff, like IBM and Google, have a big role to play these days. If they don't like the way Oracle is handling Java, they'll just fork it the way Microsoft did — and which they can do a lot more easily, since they don't have to develop the fork from scratch. They'd probably have to abandon the Java trademark, but does anybody really care about that?
Second, why on earth do you think Oracle can't manage Java well? That's mostly about listening to the Java community, and it's not like Sun has been outstanding in that department. Too much sense of "we invented it, you don't really understand it as well as we do."
They need Solaris for their Sparc servers and since the x86 and Sparc versions come from the same codebase, and the x86 server sales are increasing, it doesn't make sense to ditch Solaris.
Two little details: First, there's a SPARC version of Linux, though Sun doesn't support it. (Cannonical does.) Second, most of Sun's x86 servers end up running Linux or Windows. A lot of Sun people are in denial about that, and still pretend that the x86 systems are still just a migration path to SPARC; Oracle will have no reason to continue that pretense.
That said, I do agree that Oracle is likely to keep Solaris going. Oracle database does run on Linux, but Oracle people tend to prefer Solaris. It's probably not a coincidence that Sun got acquired by the one company that actually has a serious use for the OS.
Hoo boy. Where do you get your facts?
Its highly unlikely Oracle will maintain Sun's hardware aspect of the business.
Dude, most of Sun's revenue comes from hardware, either by selling it, or by selling services bundled with it. Software people see sun in terms of Java, MySQL, and so on, but these actually generate very little revenue on their own; to Sun, they're valuable mainly as a way of driving its hardware and service businesses.
If Oracle writes off Sun's hardware business, they will have paid $5 billion ($7 billion plus the cost of assuming Sun's debts, but minus Sun's $3 billion in cash reserves) for a few software products. MySQL cost Sun $1 billion; I doubt it's worth that much now. So unless the rest is worth more than $4 billion (is Java worth even $1 billion? don't be absurd) the idea that this is all about the software just won't fly.
Safra Katz (Oracle President under Ellison) is saying that he can make Sun's hardware business profitable. That's a credible claim. There are some solid products there, hampered by a corporate mindset that thinks it's still 1998.
Sun already has put SPARC into legacy mode.
Nonsense. SPARC systems still account for 90% of Sun's hardware sales. Sun has some solid x86_64 products, but these have been slow to gain traction. One reason for this: Sun's sales org still has a nasty habit of pushing SPARC products at potential customers, even those who've made it clear they want commodity hardware. Needless to say, this has not been good for Sun's sales.
The bigger question is what Oracle plans for Sun's software products, like Solaris, MYSQL, and Java.
Bigger if you're in one of those user communities. The answers are pretty simple:
An accepted tactic to grow a customer base is to buyout another company's customer base.
Which is probably what IBM had in mind. But Oracle's not really a competitor for Sun, except in a few software and service markets that hardly matter. At least not $5 billion worth.
I don't think the Dr. Strangelove aspects of this building are at all typical for modern telco buildings. Recall that when AT&T built it, they were still a legal monopoly, and one way they justified their monopoly status was by touting how disaster resistant their network was.
In this case, it's all a dog and pony show. All that fallout proofing would be useless against a direct hit, even with conventional weapons. And even in conventional warfare, communications centers are prime targets.
Sigh. Are Slashdotters getting terminally lazy or what? Supporting arguments of gone from lame to simplistic to a single-word statements of opinion.
Your opinion contradicts all the evidence. Why should your opinion matter when you can't be bothered to back it up with actual arguments or facts.
Mind you, I'd love for you to be right. High Speed Rail has been a boon in every country where it's established itself. Aside from all it's obvious benefit, the French system has ended up costing its taxpayers zilch (it was built with government bond money, but these have long since been paid back out of fares), unless you count all the negative costs of not having to deal with so many cars, buses and airplanes.
But France is not the U.S. (Cue the usual lame French-hating jokes. Go away, the grownups are talking.) Their cities are closer together, the French are used to paying huge amounts for gas, and they don't have America's cult-like worship of the automobile. They've always depended more on trains the we have — they went to faster trains mainly because it was the only practical way to expand the carrying capacity of their existing network. Americans, by contrast, won't even car pool without a gun put to their head.
In 1964, they built a bridge across the Hudson Narrows that was specifically designed so it could never be adapted to support trains. (The assumption was that only downscale people you didn't want around would ride such trains.) That's the kind of psychology American rail advocates have to deal with.
These are huge barriers. If you know of ways to overcome them, let's hear them. If you don't, your opinion is irrelevant.
The problem is that some security experts tangle up STO with their philosophy on F/OSS and their dislike for anything MS.
Like who? Yes, there are a lot of idiots are there who think that proprietary software is evil, and that MS is Satan. But I don't know any credible security experts who talk that way, just the usual religious nuts.
Funny how the creators of software can't automatically search for all possible vulnerabilities but malware authors magically can even if they don't have the source code.
Here's the difference: people probing for security holes aren't on deadline. And there are a lot of them. Think thousands. I mean jeez, nowadays every Mumbai slumdweller with an old laptop is a potential script kiddie. I've worked for software organization of all different sizes, and not even the big guys can compete with that kind of resource.
Also, it's a given that the people suck at finding mistakes in their own code. Code review helps, but a code review by one person is nothing like the kind of poking and prodding you get when you open the source tree.