"Pork barrel" projects does not mean "projects arbitrarily attached to other bills". Pork barrel projects might be arbitrarily to the previous purpose of the bill or not. They are the projects included in a bill as required by congressmembers who will not vote for the bill without them included, whether they're arbitrary or not, designating money for that congressmember's interest whether or not the expense supports the previous purpose of it. Sometimes it's "a piece of the action" of the main purpose, sometimes it's just a "favor" demanded by the congressmember who has the power to block passage of the bill.
"Earmarks" is the other buzzword that is more accurately associated with "pork barrel". Nobody is "entitled" to earmarks or pork barrel projects; they are not entitlements.
The $850B isn't "new deficit spending", it's revenue reduction. Of course it contributes to the deficit by depriving us of revenue that could fund spending, but it's not spending.
What do you mean by "entitlement spending"? Be specific.
It's the "NOT open sourced many products they did at the end" that is not supported by either his argument, or your lack of one, or the independent facts.
The point is that McNealy's way of running Sun was wrong, not simply his open source strategies that were too little, too late. Plenty of other companies have shown that running open source right is quite the income generator, both directly and indirectly.
What relevance has to do with is marketing. Without relevance, computer tech companies can't attract either developers or customers - or keep them. Without growing customers, shareholders don't get profits - which is what shareholders care about. Indeed, tech corp shareholders care about ever increasing stock prices more than they care about income (on which stock prices are only loosely based). Stock prices are more directly based on relevance than on income, as stock analysts are their real market.
Of course I know what Solaris and Java are. If you don't know how to open the source of an OS, then port it to a new language, that can be compiled to a portable binary running on an embedded VM, then you evidently don't know any more about computers than you do about business.
I dunno, it's obvious that "ZOMG Chineze Hz Our National Budgetz!", but our politicians and pundits are just digging deeper holes instead of cutting the vast and counterproductive military budgets that just create debt China uses to own our national budgets. And it was the Qaeda "working with Iraq" that created over a $TRILLION in debt, much greater than even the entire US debt to China ($860B).
The correct response to exploits that take control of the Internet is to change the Internet so that kind of exploit doesn't work.
The Internet's global community is responding to threats like China's power over it much better than countries are responding to Chinese threats. Maybe because the Internet's developers don't directly depend on China buying their debt.
So because the goal of Linux (you say) was to offer something like Solaris, therefore Solaris was Linux?
Linux was open source, a kernel added to the GNU userland, owned by no one, sold by many, developed, distributed, marketed and supported by many more. Solaris was none of those: it was a proprietary product developed and available from only Sun, and until it was too late to matter running only on Sun HW.
I'd point out that McNealy could have transformed Sun into a real competitor to MS (plus with a Sparc/HW biz up its sleeve), but you just tried to argue that Solaris was Linux. Absurd anyway, but backed up by "read/. from the 1990s or even the early 2000s" (which of course I did; I've been on Slashdot since about 1998). If you're going to say stuff like that, I'm not interested in convincing you of what I'm saying.
Because then people would have kept buying Solaris, not just the Sun boxes (and asking for Linux on them). Sun could have been the leader of Unix virtualization on an open source Solaris, and would have blown Linux away. Open Linux, open Java, OpenOffice.org , every developer captured in "the Sun way" - and Sun simply ensuring the quality of those products, selling Sparcs (and PCs) in virtualizing racks, selling site licenses with support, training, all branded "Sun". But it tried to cling to proprietary software as open source was devaluing that (unless you had a Microsoft type monopoly, which Sun never did), then threw up open source too late, and not enough, and in ways that alienated the developer community instead of integrating with it. The opposite of the right strategy, except in lip service. And not just in retrospect: IBM has done exactly all that, with Java.
The point is that Solaris could have been Linux: the hugely popular open-source OS that ran on CPUs and machines from high to low, because it captured the exploding population of developers. Instead years passed while Linux eclipsed (pun intended:) Solaris. Then Sun, which made a big deal out of porting it to x86 but missed that market entirely, finally open sourced it as a halfway step to dumping it. And effectively dumped it.
I think you exaggerate both the difficulty of that task, and the degree to which Sun tried. The hardest part was probably dealing with hardware UI differences, like Apple's 1-button mouse (and Unix/Linux's 3-buttons), but that kind of thing hasn't proven prohibitive in the years that so many outsiders have worked on improving it. Thus, by the way, demonstrating the lost value of open source to Sun.
I use the Caps Lock key only to deactivate my screensaver without disturbing any app state. But I really like it for that.
Also, I like idiots to be able to Caps Lock and scream their messages at me, so I can quickly tell they're idiots to be ignored. What would really be useful would be a browser plugin that replaced those with an "ALL CAPS" flag that could be toggled to examine just what kind of idiot is screaming at me.
So when he said "We probably got a little too aggressive near the end and probably open sourced too much and tried too hard to appease the community and tried too hard to share" he was just lying like a weasel, as his contradictory hindsight also says he should have done more of what he did "too much".
Open source wasn't the problem, as he freely admits. Doing it too late was the problem. By the time it was "near the end" it was too late to "take care of the shareholders" by doing anything different. Open source was the only thing keeping Sun relevant near the end, and therefore the only thing taking care of the shareholders.
McNealy screwed up, as everyone watching Solaris sink could tell. He should have opened the Solaris source, ported it to Java running on every CPU but optimized for highest speed on Sparc - and then maybe Xeon. Should have made Java applets actually work on every CPU/OS/browser, the way Adobe did Flash, and bought Macromedia instead of Adobe getting it - or just competing with it. So many things he could have done if he'd managed for the 2000s instead of the early 1990s. Now he's just a whiner whose day is long gone.
Red Hat does quite well giving away its open source OS and apps as fast as it can. That's not what devalued Sun.
What devalued Sun was that its CEO, McNealy, was unable to run such a company. He kept proprietary products like Solaris propped up for years longer than they had a market among competitors like Windows and Linux, even as primary competitor IBM deprecated its proprietary OSes to embrace them both. Then McNealy punted on Solaris, opening its source only when there was no demand for it. Sun's Solaris business didn't get taken by competitors copying Solaris' source or anything like that. In fact, opening the source kept it going for years, even if it was too little, too late to save it. Especially with the CEO failing to actually embrace open source, but rather seeing it as a dumping ground for nonproductive assets instead of a hothouse to grow those assets into productive centers to be monetized.
McNealy is like any failed CEO whose failure was trying to control something better developed by letting it go more: blame the "liberals" ("liberal" means "free from control"). If McNealy can blame open source for his own failures, he might find new income from the many other incompetent businesses that need a scapegoat like open source to hide their own failures. And in today's corporate world, especially America's, there is no higher demand for anything than for a scapegoat.
Reducing the core count lets Oracle make each core bigger, to add features making each faster. But can't Oracle keep the same core count, and instead of increasing the core count in the next generation the way most other CPU makers will, just add circuits to each existing core? Is it really necessary to reduce the count? Process size will probably also be shrinking in that generation, and new tricks developed, as usual. Can't Oracle just make a bigger chip, and also keep the benefits of the high core count Sun already achieved?
No. Nobody's moving away from Oracle - that rhetorical question doesn't make you sound like a smartass, but rather its less intelligent opposite.
What matters to Oracle's customers who buy Sun hardware is that their databases run as fast as possible, as that's the limiting factor on those customers' businesses. That's why Oracle bought Sun: to compete with IBM, which runs DB2 on IBM CPUs at the high end, the HW and SW tweaked to work best together for that operation.
Reducing the number of cores isn't designed to help. It's designed to leave that amount of transistors on the CPU available for making Oracle DBs run as fast as possible in the few simultaneous threads that Oracle needs for DB performance.
Oracle is not selling CPUs to the mass market that can't tell the difference among products, mostly because they don't have a benchmark that describes their use profile specifically. Oracle is selling to customers who pitch $:TPM to their bosses. And the $:TPM buzzword is not only not going out of style, it's what continues to drive $ to Oracle.
It looks like you need a lot more than $37K in a Swiss bank account to stay a threat to the US Military/Industrial/Banking complex. Probably helps if your threats mean $TRILLIONS in war/intel budgets.
I'm sure that each of Apple, HTC, Nokia and Motorola each independently invented the same things, that they wouldn't have invested effort in inventing if they couldn't protect forever with an exclusive monopoly, so now tech progress is protected by these patents instead of being completely logjammed. I'm sure the money spent on lawyers instead of development is promoting tech progress, not scaring away other innovators.
And if you believe that, I'm sure that you're either a lawyer or, worse yet, a congressmember.
Plenty of people don't have any longterm commitment to a sexual partner, especially when they're young. Some of them have one night stands. Some are celibate between longer (than one night) term exclusive relationships. But probably most of them have one night stands. That's not infidelity.
Nor is it genetic. One night stands are mostly determined by what the other partners want or are willing to accept from the person, not the person's own genetics.
An interest in fidelity or infidelity might be genetic, but of course the other people have a lot do do with it.
Once again, a very narrow set of new and interesting data about genes is exaggerated to say something wrong about broad human behavior.
1: What I posted replies to the comment asserting that "the US government deemed Wikileaks' content illegal". Amazon's given reasons are totally irrelevant to the fact that the government has not "deemed" that, as I detailed.
2: Amazon's claims are also not believable. Specifically Amazon says Wikileaks has released 250,000 classified documents, though Wikileaks has released only about 270. There is little evidence that human rights orgs are the ones whose complaints Amazon is acting on. Those excuses are a smokescreen for a giant telecom/retailer cooperating with some people in the US government despite no due process proving support for these various claims. Meanwhile Amazon's servers sell books that are "damaging" to people every day, which is what Americans believe is protected by free speech so long as it's true.
OK, your post does indeed clearly look like a flamebait, what with your arguing that "Linux is not an OS but a kernel" when I am clearly talking about replacing the entire GNU/Linux userland/OS with Android. But especially because you both don't actually know (just "strongly believe") what you're talking about, while calling the question "moronic". So congratulations, your flamebait got you flamed!
Can't I just take any Android GSM phone and put in a SIM for any GSM network, so long as the SIM's accounts are active (and both the phone and the network use the same frequency, as they all do in the US)?
What about a separate Bluetooth keyboard? If it were really thin, and fitted into a bracket in a shockproofing case for the phone, it would seem to be better to be able to choose which keyboard model you prefer, and to choose to leave it behind for a smaller phone.
It hasn't been "deemed illegal by the US government". That requires a court decision, and the government attorneys haven't even filed charges yet. People are innocent until proven guilty, facts are not established until proven in court. There most certainly are plenty of disputes about whether the publications were legal, on several different bases. But even if it were an "open and shut case", that still requires that the case be opened and then shut, which it hasn't.
Without that due process, Amazon can decide for any reason, like some Senator whining about some bad press, that content or services must be shut down. Due process is important, as is protection from arbitrary denials of services that are paid for and expected to critically support a business operation.
By this time in Twitter's huge rise, previous services like IM had already spawned several competing networks inspired by the original pioneer. Twitter is even easier to duplicate. How come Twitter still has a monopoly on the service? After a few years of millions of people using it, the "Twitter" protocol should be either standard or have big gateways for other networks of users to all intercommunicate with it.
I'm surprised Google doesn't offer a competitor, or Yahoo, or Microsoft, or Disney.
Slashdot Mirror
"Pork barrel" projects does not mean "projects arbitrarily attached to other bills". Pork barrel projects might be arbitrarily to the previous purpose of the bill or not. They are the projects included in a bill as required by congressmembers who will not vote for the bill without them included, whether they're arbitrary or not, designating money for that congressmember's interest whether or not the expense supports the previous purpose of it. Sometimes it's "a piece of the action" of the main purpose, sometimes it's just a "favor" demanded by the congressmember who has the power to block passage of the bill.
"Earmarks" is the other buzzword that is more accurately associated with "pork barrel". Nobody is "entitled" to earmarks or pork barrel projects; they are not entitlements.
The $850B isn't "new deficit spending", it's revenue reduction. Of course it contributes to the deficit by depriving us of revenue that could fund spending, but it's not spending.
What do you mean by "entitlement spending"? Be specific.
The Right Shift key what kind of idiot is posting ;)? I've got to move my Right Pinky off the Backspace key sometime :).
It's the "NOT open sourced many products they did at the end" that is not supported by either his argument, or your lack of one, or the independent facts.
The point is that McNealy's way of running Sun was wrong, not simply his open source strategies that were too little, too late. Plenty of other companies have shown that running open source right is quite the income generator, both directly and indirectly.
What relevance has to do with is marketing. Without relevance, computer tech companies can't attract either developers or customers - or keep them. Without growing customers, shareholders don't get profits - which is what shareholders care about. Indeed, tech corp shareholders care about ever increasing stock prices more than they care about income (on which stock prices are only loosely based). Stock prices are more directly based on relevance than on income, as stock analysts are their real market.
Of course I know what Solaris and Java are. If you don't know how to open the source of an OS, then port it to a new language, that can be compiled to a portable binary running on an embedded VM, then you evidently don't know any more about computers than you do about business.
I dunno, it's obvious that "ZOMG Chineze Hz Our National Budgetz!", but our politicians and pundits are just digging deeper holes instead of cutting the vast and counterproductive military budgets that just create debt China uses to own our national budgets. And it was the Qaeda "working with Iraq" that created over a $TRILLION in debt, much greater than even the entire US debt to China ($860B).
The correct response to exploits that take control of the Internet is to change the Internet so that kind of exploit doesn't work.
The Internet's global community is responding to threats like China's power over it much better than countries are responding to Chinese threats. Maybe because the Internet's developers don't directly depend on China buying their debt.
So because the goal of Linux (you say) was to offer something like Solaris, therefore Solaris was Linux?
Linux was open source, a kernel added to the GNU userland, owned by no one, sold by many, developed, distributed, marketed and supported by many more. Solaris was none of those: it was a proprietary product developed and available from only Sun, and until it was too late to matter running only on Sun HW.
I'd point out that McNealy could have transformed Sun into a real competitor to MS (plus with a Sparc/HW biz up its sleeve), but you just tried to argue that Solaris was Linux. Absurd anyway, but backed up by "read /. from the 1990s or even the early 2000s" (which of course I did; I've been on Slashdot since about 1998). If you're going to say stuff like that, I'm not interested in convincing you of what I'm saying.
Because then people would have kept buying Solaris, not just the Sun boxes (and asking for Linux on them). Sun could have been the leader of Unix virtualization on an open source Solaris, and would have blown Linux away. Open Linux, open Java, OpenOffice.org , every developer captured in "the Sun way" - and Sun simply ensuring the quality of those products, selling Sparcs (and PCs) in virtualizing racks, selling site licenses with support, training, all branded "Sun". But it tried to cling to proprietary software as open source was devaluing that (unless you had a Microsoft type monopoly, which Sun never did), then threw up open source too late, and not enough, and in ways that alienated the developer community instead of integrating with it. The opposite of the right strategy, except in lip service. And not just in retrospect: IBM has done exactly all that, with Java.
The point is that Solaris could have been Linux: the hugely popular open-source OS that ran on CPUs and machines from high to low, because it captured the exploding population of developers. Instead years passed while Linux eclipsed (pun intended :) Solaris. Then Sun, which made a big deal out of porting it to x86 but missed that market entirely, finally open sourced it as a halfway step to dumping it. And effectively dumped it.
Yet Adobe succeeded.
I think you exaggerate both the difficulty of that task, and the degree to which Sun tried. The hardest part was probably dealing with hardware UI differences, like Apple's 1-button mouse (and Unix/Linux's 3-buttons), but that kind of thing hasn't proven prohibitive in the years that so many outsiders have worked on improving it. Thus, by the way, demonstrating the lost value of open source to Sun.
I use the Caps Lock key only to deactivate my screensaver without disturbing any app state. But I really like it for that.
Also, I like idiots to be able to Caps Lock and scream their messages at me, so I can quickly tell they're idiots to be ignored. What would really be useful would be a browser plugin that replaced those with an "ALL CAPS" flag that could be toggled to examine just what kind of idiot is screaming at me.
So when he said "We probably got a little too aggressive near the end and probably open sourced too much and tried too hard to appease the community and tried too hard to share" he was just lying like a weasel, as his contradictory hindsight also says he should have done more of what he did "too much".
Open source wasn't the problem, as he freely admits. Doing it too late was the problem. By the time it was "near the end" it was too late to "take care of the shareholders" by doing anything different. Open source was the only thing keeping Sun relevant near the end, and therefore the only thing taking care of the shareholders.
McNealy screwed up, as everyone watching Solaris sink could tell. He should have opened the Solaris source, ported it to Java running on every CPU but optimized for highest speed on Sparc - and then maybe Xeon. Should have made Java applets actually work on every CPU/OS/browser, the way Adobe did Flash, and bought Macromedia instead of Adobe getting it - or just competing with it. So many things he could have done if he'd managed for the 2000s instead of the early 1990s. Now he's just a whiner whose day is long gone.
Red Hat does quite well giving away its open source OS and apps as fast as it can. That's not what devalued Sun.
What devalued Sun was that its CEO, McNealy, was unable to run such a company. He kept proprietary products like Solaris propped up for years longer than they had a market among competitors like Windows and Linux, even as primary competitor IBM deprecated its proprietary OSes to embrace them both. Then McNealy punted on Solaris, opening its source only when there was no demand for it. Sun's Solaris business didn't get taken by competitors copying Solaris' source or anything like that. In fact, opening the source kept it going for years, even if it was too little, too late to save it. Especially with the CEO failing to actually embrace open source, but rather seeing it as a dumping ground for nonproductive assets instead of a hothouse to grow those assets into productive centers to be monetized.
McNealy is like any failed CEO whose failure was trying to control something better developed by letting it go more: blame the "liberals" ("liberal" means "free from control"). If McNealy can blame open source for his own failures, he might find new income from the many other incompetent businesses that need a scapegoat like open source to hide their own failures. And in today's corporate world, especially America's, there is no higher demand for anything than for a scapegoat.
And that's why IBM is raking in ever more $BILLIONS in mainframe sales.
You and the post you're defending are like a press release from 1989.
Reducing the core count lets Oracle make each core bigger, to add features making each faster. But can't Oracle keep the same core count, and instead of increasing the core count in the next generation the way most other CPU makers will, just add circuits to each existing core? Is it really necessary to reduce the count? Process size will probably also be shrinking in that generation, and new tricks developed, as usual. Can't Oracle just make a bigger chip, and also keep the benefits of the high core count Sun already achieved?
No. Nobody's moving away from Oracle - that rhetorical question doesn't make you sound like a smartass, but rather its less intelligent opposite.
What matters to Oracle's customers who buy Sun hardware is that their databases run as fast as possible, as that's the limiting factor on those customers' businesses. That's why Oracle bought Sun: to compete with IBM, which runs DB2 on IBM CPUs at the high end, the HW and SW tweaked to work best together for that operation.
Reducing the number of cores isn't designed to help. It's designed to leave that amount of transistors on the CPU available for making Oracle DBs run as fast as possible in the few simultaneous threads that Oracle needs for DB performance.
Oracle is not selling CPUs to the mass market that can't tell the difference among products, mostly because they don't have a benchmark that describes their use profile specifically. Oracle is selling to customers who pitch $:TPM to their bosses. And the $:TPM buzzword is not only not going out of style, it's what continues to drive $ to Oracle.
It looks like you need a lot more than $37K in a Swiss bank account to stay a threat to the US Military/Industrial/Banking complex. Probably helps if your threats mean $TRILLIONS in war/intel budgets.
I'm sure that each of Apple, HTC, Nokia and Motorola each independently invented the same things, that they wouldn't have invested effort in inventing if they couldn't protect forever with an exclusive monopoly, so now tech progress is protected by these patents instead of being completely logjammed. I'm sure the money spent on lawyers instead of development is promoting tech progress, not scaring away other innovators.
And if you believe that, I'm sure that you're either a lawyer or, worse yet, a congressmember.
Plenty of people don't have any longterm commitment to a sexual partner, especially when they're young. Some of them have one night stands. Some are celibate between longer (than one night) term exclusive relationships. But probably most of them have one night stands. That's not infidelity.
Nor is it genetic. One night stands are mostly determined by what the other partners want or are willing to accept from the person, not the person's own genetics.
An interest in fidelity or infidelity might be genetic, but of course the other people have a lot do do with it.
Once again, a very narrow set of new and interesting data about genes is exaggerated to say something wrong about broad human behavior.
1: What I posted replies to the comment asserting that "the US government deemed Wikileaks' content illegal". Amazon's given reasons are totally irrelevant to the fact that the government has not "deemed" that, as I detailed.
2: Amazon's claims are also not believable. Specifically Amazon says Wikileaks has released 250,000 classified documents, though Wikileaks has released only about 270. There is little evidence that human rights orgs are the ones whose complaints Amazon is acting on. Those excuses are a smokescreen for a giant telecom/retailer cooperating with some people in the US government despite no due process proving support for these various claims. Meanwhile Amazon's servers sell books that are "damaging" to people every day, which is what Americans believe is protected by free speech so long as it's true.
OK, your post does indeed clearly look like a flamebait, what with your arguing that "Linux is not an OS but a kernel" when I am clearly talking about replacing the entire GNU/Linux userland/OS with Android. But especially because you both don't actually know (just "strongly believe") what you're talking about, while calling the question "moronic". So congratulations, your flamebait got you flamed!
Get back to me when you're not an asshole.
Can't I just take any Android GSM phone and put in a SIM for any GSM network, so long as the SIM's accounts are active (and both the phone and the network use the same frequency, as they all do in the US)?
What about a separate Bluetooth keyboard? If it were really thin, and fitted into a bracket in a shockproofing case for the phone, it would seem to be better to be able to choose which keyboard model you prefer, and to choose to leave it behind for a smaller phone.
It hasn't been "deemed illegal by the US government". That requires a court decision, and the government attorneys haven't even filed charges yet. People are innocent until proven guilty, facts are not established until proven in court. There most certainly are plenty of disputes about whether the publications were legal, on several different bases. But even if it were an "open and shut case", that still requires that the case be opened and then shut, which it hasn't.
Without that due process, Amazon can decide for any reason, like some Senator whining about some bad press, that content or services must be shut down. Due process is important, as is protection from arbitrary denials of services that are paid for and expected to critically support a business operation.
I wonder how true it is that the company also
Which is the kind of marketing I expect from the crappy companies that market anti-virus software.
By this time in Twitter's huge rise, previous services like IM had already spawned several competing networks inspired by the original pioneer. Twitter is even easier to duplicate. How come Twitter still has a monopoly on the service? After a few years of millions of people using it, the "Twitter" protocol should be either standard or have big gateways for other networks of users to all intercommunicate with it.
I'm surprised Google doesn't offer a competitor, or Yahoo, or Microsoft, or Disney.