I'm running the Toshiba DT01ACA300 drives mentioned in the report, not had a single one fail over several years of usage. Compare that to the Seagate ST3000DM001, also in that report, I had 10 of them at one point, and over 4 years 90% of them failed (not counting those replaced in the first year under warranty!). They report a nearly 30% failure rate, which is comparable to my experience. Only one Seagate left, and I expect that will be gone within the year (it's got a hot spare waiting to take over when it does).
My Toshiba drives (and a couple of HGST HDS5C3030ALA630, which became the DT01ACA300 Toshibas after the plant transfer to Toshiba) were installed as the Seagates died, have up to 27,700 power on hours (3+ years), and so far flawless reliability. They don't look so reliable in their report, but the failure rate they report is low enough that its not unexpected that I wouldn't have seen one die yet.
I had sworn off Seagates, but it looks like it may have just been one bad model. Useful to see these sort of numbers released as it's helped to remind me not to so easily write off the entire companies drives. Having said that, that specific drive is still available in the retail channel but I wouldn't touch it with a bargepole.
Might be the only way to stop the Met Police thinking they have jurisdiction over the entire country. Then again, they seem to think national borders don't apply to them either for "intellectual property" enforcement, so maybe not.
Exactly right. I'm a Scot who voted no at the last referendum, my decision was never in doubt, and I'm fed up with all the calls to repeat the referendum again. This said the UK exiting the EU would make me strongly reconsider my No vote, and I'd probably support having a new referendum whatever my eventual decision on my vote.
Actually I like the parity declustering idea that was linked to in that article, seems to me if implemented correctly it could mitigate a large part of the issue. I have personally encountered the hard error on RAID5 rebuild issue, twice, so there definitely is a problem to be addressed...and yes, I do now only implement RAID6 as a result.
For those who haven't RTFATFALT (RTFA the f*** article links to), parity declustering, as I understand it, is where you have, say, an 8 drive array, but where each block is written to only a subset of those drives, say 4. Now, obviously you loose 25% of your storage capacity (1/4), but consider a rebuild for a failed disk. In this instance only 50% of your blocks are likely to be on your failed drive, so immediately you cut your rebuild time in half, halving your data reads, and therefore your chance of encountering a hard error. Larger numbers of disks in the array, or spanning your data over fewer drives, cuts this further.
Now, consider the flexibility you could build into an implmentation of this scheme. Simply by allowing the number of drives a block spans to be configurable on a per block basis, you could then allow any filesystem that is on that array to say, on a per file basis, how many disks to span over. You could then allow apps and sysadmins to say that a given file needs to have the maximum write performance, so diskSpan=2, which gives you effectively RAID10 for that file (each block is written to 2 drives, but with multiple blocks in the file is likely to be written to a different pair of drives, not quite RAID10, but close). Where you didn't want a file to consume 2x its size on the storage system, you could allow a higher diskSpan number. You could also allow configurable parity on a per block basis, so particularly important files can survive multiple disk failures, temp files could have no parity. There would need to be a rule however that parity+diskSpan is less than or equal to the number of devices in the array.
Obviously there is an issue here where the total capacity of the array is not knowable, files with diskSpan numbers lower than the default for the array will reduce the capacity, numbers higher will increase it. This alone might require new filesystems, but you could implement todays filesystems on this array as long as you disallowed the per-block diskSpan feature.
This even helps for expanding the array, as there is now no need to re-read all of the data in the array (with the resulting chance of encountering a hard error, adding huge load to the system causing a drive to fail, etc). The extra capacity is simply available. Over time you probably want a redistribution routine to move data from the existing array members to the new members to spread the load and capacity.
How about you implement a performance optimiser too, that looks for the most frequently accessed blocks and ensures they are evenly spread over the disks. If you take into account the performance of the individual disks themselves, you could allow for effectively a hierarchical filesystem, so that one array contains, say, SSD, SAS and SATA drives, and the optimiser ensures that data is allocated to individual drives based on the frequency of access of that data and the performance of the drive. Obviously the applications or sysadmin could indicate to the array which files were more performance sensitive, so influencing the eventual location of the data as it is written.
Tax reasons are probably right. I used to work for Sun in their Scottish manufacturing plant. When we'd order one of our own systems to use in the plants server rooms they would be assembled and tested in the plant, then, rather than roll them 100ft to the server room they were packaged up, put on a truck, driven to the south of England, put on a ferry, driven up to the Netherlands to the distribution center, then driven all the way back again. It took 2 weeks for us to see our systems again! If it was a rush order they would airfreight them to the Netherlands and back.
It wasn't just internal orders either, everything had to go via the distribution center regardless of where it was eventually destined. The reason I was given was "some complex tax thing", don't think anyone there understood it.
There is absolutely no way that Sun are doing this to try and recycle 'scrap' machines. I happen to know what the machines they are using are, and they are fairly newly released ones that are a range that is manufactured by OEMs, not Sun themselves. These machines are being manufactured to Sun order, not coming out of over-production. They are also putting a massive investment into the infrastructure (datacenters, racks, etc). I wish I could tell you more, including the machine model involved, but I can't (morally, promised I wouldn't, no legal restriction). I can tell you that they are putting in just one model. If they were trying to recycle scrap material there would be a huge mix of machine types going in, not just the one.
The one thing I do wonder is why they aren't joining all of their internal systems into the grid and selling that unused capacity. I know they are making that sort of a grid, but it's internal research use only AFAIK, and only a relatively small number of systems.
It does still matter, Sun recommends 1GHz of CPU (UltraSPARC IV, not P4 which is less effective clock for clock) per 1Gb/s of network IO. Given multiple gigabit interfaces (they do a nice quad GE card now), or even 10Gb/s interfaces, that's a lot of CPUs just to feed the bandwidth...and this assumes all you are doing is chucking out the data, any encryption or data manipulation CPU power required is on top of this. That is why Sun is reworking (has reworked?) their already pretty good stack, and putting in hardware offload engines for the (tcp|udp)/ip packet generation and handling.
If you're talking about low bandwidth then I agree you will hardly notice it on a modern CPU, but I see a significant CPU hit on my dual athlon Linux workstation just copying a few gigs of files from my local (SCSI) disk to the server nfs share, and that 'only' hits 160Mb/s on the net.
I used to work at Sun, and yes most of the tech guys there do get really annoyed at some of the BS that comes out from the top guys. That was certainly the #2 reason I left the company, I'd lost respect for them. Reason #1 was money. The whole Microsoft sellout was the straw that did it for me.
Actually Sun hasn't committed to open sourcing Solaris (or Java for that matter). What they have said is that they are "evaluating whether or not to open-source". I got that from McNeally himself just this week when he was giving a speach at the Sun Scotland manufacturing plant with a Q&A session afterwards. During that session he was point-blank asked which of the stories in the press were correct, and that was his answer.
Sun has had its B1600 blade shelf fitted with a pair of Cisco derived switches since day 1. Seems like IBM is playing a bit of catchup here. We've got one of these shelves sitting in one of our departments racks, and I can confirm that it the switches are definitely cisco running IOS.
As I said in the other post, it's called civil disobedience. It's just one method of protesting and trying to get the policy chanced. Unfortunately of course there are those who believe the simplistic mantra of 'speed kills'. The politicians like it because it's so simple they can spread it, they really don't like it when the populace tries to think for itself (just look at the Iraq issue). The fact that the policy is based on very little real evidence, with mounting evidence that it actually causes more harm than good, and just as a side effect functions to line the governments pockets is of course of no real import.
Personally I believe very little that comes out of the government (any government in any country) or the media without seeing the facts themselves and making my own opinion. If you've genuinely done that in this topic then you are of course entitled to your opinion, just as I and the other posters are entitled to ours. If on the other hand you only know what the government mantra has told you then I suggest you take the time to make an informed judgement before criticising that of others.
I think speed limits, when they are put in place and enforced by the brain dead, inane methods used today in the UK, then yes. Call it civil disobedience if you will, a tried and tested form of protest.
So, I guess you always drive to the speed limit right? How much thought do you put into what is the appropriate speed? I bet I put in more. How much time do you spend looking at the speedo? I spend that time looking at the road. Take a step back, who do you really think is the safer driver?
I drive safely, within the limits of driver, road, vehicle and other traffic. Sometimes this means I do, say, 30 in a 50 limit, othertimes that means 90 in a 70 limit. There are some points on our roads where the speed limits are far too high for the road conditions, and others where the speed limits seem to have very little bearing on the real risks present. The problem with the current system is that the majority of drivers now drive at the speed limit irrespective of the actual road conditions, if they have an accident they will state that they were within the speed limit, as if that fact alone should have protected them. It is indicative of the whole nanny state that we are rapidly descending towards, that people delegate their own personal responsibilities to the state.
I fundamentally object and disagree with the extremely limited viewpoint that speed causes accidents. That, to be blunt, is bollocks. Statistically it is shown that speed in and of itself does not play a big part in accidents. Drivers not paying attention, faulty vehicles, poor road repair, ice and snow, fog, rain, poor driving style (does anyone really keep a safe distance from the vehicle in front any more?), all of these play a far bigger role than speed. Inappropriate speed is of course a big issue, but when was the last time any police officer pulled over and charged a motorist for going, say, 70, in a 70 limit, in busy traffic with ice and snow? I think you'd have to go back a very long time to find an incident like that. Incidents like that are viewed as more acceptable than doing 90 in a 70 limit, on an empty, dry road with excellent visibility. Now where, I challenge you, is the sense in that?
There are times where speeding actually reduces risk. Take for example a slow moving vehicle (tractor, lorry, etc) on an A or B road. Obviously you want to get past that vehicle as quickly as possible, there is after all a very good reason why they call the time you spend on the wrong side of the road overtaking 'time exposed to danger'. Personally under that sort of circumstance I overtake as quickly as is safe and possible, slowing down if necessary after I have completed the manouver. This reduces the risk of accident to myself, the vehicle I am overtaking and other road traffic, yet often this means I have, technically, committed an offence. Add to this the fact that already today most drivers spend more time looking out for speed cameras and looking at their speedometer than they do planning where they are going, what lane to be in, what is the appropriate speed, what other road users are doing, etc. This tells me that there is something extremely wrong with our system.
I have taken some advanced driving courses, I accept the personal responsibility to drive appropriately and with thought and consideration. What the government should be trying to do is get every driver to do the same, but of course that wouldn't make them money, even if it would save lives.
'Those that would trade freedom for security deserve neither'
but obviously this device isn't going to be used to stop you from speeding in the first place, I predict it will just record the fact that you were speeding and fine you for it. In fact I predict that they will sample the data, look whether each motorist was within the speed limit at a number of random times during the past week/month/year and fine them for each that they weren't. This will encourage people to continue to speed as they hope that they will not get sampled at that point, and provide a nice big flow of cash into the treasury.
What's worse is that they will require car makers to fit these devices, who will pass the cost onto the car buyer, so we are in effect paying for our own personal speed camera/big brother device. This truly is the nanny state gone insane if this gets past. I just hope that they don't make it a crime to disable these units, or at least 'fail to keep them functional' (cough), as I know one in any car of mine would quickly develop a fault.
Bob Maderious will never forget the lease he brokered for property advertised as "plug and play" - only to find that it wasn't.
His client had been thrilled that state-of-the-art wires and cables left behind by the former tenant would allow the new company to move in, plug in and go to work. Thrilled, that is, until moving day when the company discovered the previous tenant had cut the cables.
"Cut it and left it," said Maderious, a broker with Grubb & Ellis. "I said, 'Hey, what's the deal with this?' (A broker) told me that the tech companies do that. They believe it's their investment in the space; why should a potential competitor get it for free?
"The lease documentation had not caught up with practice."
It still hasn't, but more brokers, landlords and property managers are catching on. Part of the reason is a change in the 2002 National Electric Code that requires the removal of abandoned cabling. The new code is not due to become effective in California until 2005 - unless this week's edict by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to suspend state regulations renders the code unenforceable. Literally, millions of miles of unused cable lurk in the nation's buildings.
The situation has been exacerbated during the past decade by technological advances that render functional cable obsolete. Not only are there cables for telephones, computers and faxes, but every few years cables are manufactured that transmit data at higher speeds and business wants data as fast as it can get it so new cables are laid over the old wires.
It is estimated that 60 billion feet of cable have been abandoned in the plenum spaces that allow air circulation through a building, creating a fire hazard. Older cable could be particularly toxic in a fire.
"Year after year, people come in with new technology and don't bother to remove the old cable. It's out of sight out of mind." said Brian Turpen, president of All Systems, a San Ramon company founded in 1990 that installs and removes cable infrastructure. "I've seen ceiling tiles bending under the weight of old cable. There's so much congestion. It's become a problem with cabling falling out of the ceiling onto people's heads."
Jay Miller, construction manager for Equity Office Properties, the largest publicly traded building owner in the country with more than 700 buildings and 124 million square feet of space, said he has witnessed what happens when high-tech companies move out of their space - it's not a pretty sight. Two major tenants, Automatic Data Processing Inc., which left ADP Plaza in San Ramon for Bishop Ranch, and PeopleSoft Inc., which moved into its own buildings in Pleasanton, are prime examples.
"Here you had two companies instrumental in development of the properties and at one point were part owners of their buildings. The leases we had were not as strict as they ordinarily would be," Miller said. "In each of those cases, the companies had server rooms and phone closets scattered throughout the building, with miles of telephone and data cable that was left in place."
Miller noted that PeopleSoft spent 10 years in their buildings. As the company grew, so did their cable infrastructure. "Now we're faced with the prospect of having to remove it," he said.
As in most leases, Equity's contracts contain clauses requiring tenants to return the property to its original state once they leave, but that can be a tough clause to enforce, Miller noted. Buildings change hands, tenants move in, expand, go bankrupt and move out; meanwhile the cables continue to multiply.
The problem of removing cable is twofold: It is not an easy job, especially if it requires finding and removing cables that run from, say, the 38th floor to the basement; Also, there is the question of who pays for the removal - the tenant who installed it and left five years ago, the new tenant just moving in or the building's owner?
"When a tenant moves into second-generation space, they get a tenant improvement allowance. They
Hold on, wasn't that the very point I was making, that the law takes no account of the capabilities of the individual vehicles? I also should have said the individual abilities of drivers, I kind of said that in my bit about the IAM. Every day I see bad driving on UK roads, no indicators, pulling out at the last minute, lane hoggers, people just now paying attention, yet in the eyes of the law makers you are only a danger if you are speeding! One of the other posts makes reference to a site laying out the reasons why speed is far from the entire story. The fact is motorists are an easy revenue stream for this government, and it's time we all stood up for ourselves. If I was being especially cynical I'd say the government doesn't want to genuinely improve the quality of driving as then they wouldn't have the accident statistics to justify their jihad on speed and its nice little revenue stream.
Once again the simple minded retoric strikes. The problem is NOT speed. The problem is INAPPROPRIATE speed. If you are driving a 30 year old car on worn tires, it's raining and the roads are busy you are probably driving far too fast if you are anywhere near the speed limit. On the other hand someone driving a modern, reasonable performance vehicle on dry, empty good condition roads is pretty safe well in excess of the speed limit. Despite this the law insists that the first case is perfectly legal (or at least they won't prosecute you for it), but the second case is, if the zealots get there way, a sentence for public hanging. Which car would you feel safer in, ignoring for the moment airbags, crumple zones and the rest?
Every advanced driving course you can go on will teach you about appropriate use of speed. If I'm overtaking a slower moving vehicle on a single carriageway road the safest thing for me to do is overtake as quickly as possible, speedlimit be damned. They call it "time exposed to danger" for a reason. In your ideal little world I would have to stick to the letter of the speed limit, which would increase the danger to me, the vehicle I'm overtaking and other road users.
Do you honestly believe that people fixating on the precise speed they are doing, staring at their speedometers, at least when they aren't looking out for the next speed camera, are driving safely? I've given up, now I drive to a speed reasonable for the road conditions, my vehicles condition and capabilities, and my level of alertness. Sometimes that means I'm over the limit, sometimes I'm under. I spend my time looking out of the window where I'm going, or in my mirrors, where my eyes should be, not fixed to the speedo. The only times I actually look at the speedo is when there is a speed camera. Now, ask yourself again, would you rather be on a road where everyone is spending more time looking at their speedos than the road ahead, or one where everyone was paying attention to their driving? We seem to be heading rapidly towards a society where the latter is in prevelance.
What the government should be going on about is increasing driver training. If you really want to reduce accidents on the roads every driver should have to take a practical test every 5 years (say). By this I do not mean a little 20 minute drive, I mean a really good, in depth examination of your driving skills. If you fail then you have to go on a course of some kind to sort things out, you have say 6 months to complete this and take the test again (perhaps an abbreviated one).
You can pick up bad driving habits even without realising it. Take me, I considered myself a good driver, I've been on a number of driving courses (off road, rallying, track sessions, skid pans), yet I went out on a "Performance Road Car" course and got picked up for a number of bad habits. None serious, but enough to make me stop and re-evaluate my driving style again. Look at what real "Advanced Drivers" (see http://www.iam.org.uk/) go through, and you will realise that these guys are an order of magnitude better drivers than most people on the roads. I'd rather be in a car with one of these guys at 120MPH than most people at 60MPH.
None of this is rocket science, none of it is surely beyond the whit of anyone of average intelligence, yet the Government hasn't ever made even a single move in this direction. The reasons for this are plain, to do the above, whilst very clearly achieving their stated objective of improving road safety, does nothing to line their own pockets. So instead they focus on the mantra of speed, because this means they can tax^H^H^H fine motorists easily and cheaply. That this has been shown to have very little effect on accident rates, and indeed some speed cameras INCREASE the local accident rate, is brushed off. Actually genuinely improving road safety in any reasonable manner would actually cost them money, so they aren't interested.
Exactly, and of course there is their membership and adoption of Gnome, involvement with Apache, etc. Not to mention that they were the most open of the Unix companies, they effectively open sourced SPARC right at the beginning. Fujitsu make and sell their own line of SPARC chips and servers, because of this, and www.sparc.org is still a real entity because Sun continues to support it. NFS, NIS, Java, and a whole host of core unix things we take for granted today all came about because Sun invented them and open sourced the specifications if not the code. Sun goes on about Open Systems, and are one of the few that really mean it, even if they don't go as far as a lot of people, including some insiders, would like.
I really wish I could say more about this, but contracts kind of restrict me. What I can say is that Sun really are putting their money where their mouth is when they say quality is their number one priority. You saw it with the Broadcom chip incident, where they did the right thing and stopped shipments, even though it hurt the bottom line. That is just one incident that got widespread attention. Right now, more so than ever before, they are taking no risks that a customer will get a product that doesn't work just right when it gets installed in their server room. You've got to admire that sort of attitude, especially in this financial climate.
Bombproof computing, they are really making it their goal -although having just come back from watching Terminator 3 I'm no longer sure thats a good thing!:-) . You have to wonder how many other vendors, when faced with something like the Broadcom thing, either 1) don't notice it, 2) notice it but pretended they didn't, or 3) did the right thing even though it hurt them.
As for the holding onto Solaris thing, you can understand that. Solaris is and was a really great product. Having used AIX in a production environment I can understand why IBM aren't so bothered about loosing it to Linux. Given a choice I'd certainly pick Linux. When it comes to Solaris though, it's still not so clear cut, I'd go for Linux on the desktop because that's what everyone is targetting, but I would be sorely tempted for Solaris on the server, and it's a shoe in on the SPARC platform. If you truly believe in your product, like Sun does, it's much more difficult to accept that there may be a real alternative. Part of the problem is that Linux isn't (yet) a real alternative across Suns product range. SGI's Altix scales Linux to 64 processors, but that's the high end limit for now, until Linux gets to being capable of running on the top of the line Sun kit they can't fully commit to it, and by this I mean 128 CPU's, and be capable of handling 256 cores (coming soon(tm)). You've got to look at Suns selling point ever since it was started, Solaris from the lowliest workstation to the highest end servers. Your developers build and compile and test on the low end and deploy straight onto the highest end. Binary compatibility, surprisingly compelling, and Solaris still does this better than Linux, especially across OS/kernel versions.
That said if it was me who made those decisions I'd be sponsoring a major push to get Linux running on the SPARC platform, after all Solaris doesn't really make much money for Sun by itself but its SPARC hardware certainly does, and who cares if the customer runs Linux on Sparc or Solaris on Sparc, as long as they chose Sparc.
Disclaimer: I work for Sun, so obviously I'm biased, and none of the above statements are sanctioned by Sun in any way.
The issue is the granularity of the locks in the kernel, as well as some other scalability issues like how well it can actually manage 106 CPUs in a single OS instance, handling thousands of devices (disks, etc) and stability in doing so.
Perception is a major part of it, IT managers don't have case studies of major orgs using Linux on high-end hardware so don't trust it there, whereas Solaris is commonplace in that space.
Linux is definitely getting there, finer grained spinlocks help, the number of devices it can handle concurrently is increasing, I think in about 3 years it will be ready for the F15K's of this world.
Background - I work for Sun, but am a Linux advocate. I'd truly love to have Linux everywhere, I keep getting bitten on the arse by differences between Solaris and Linux (as well as HP-UX, AIX, etc) (anyone tried to use killall under AIX?!!). This said I also think that UltraSparc is a massively better CPU base than the x86, especially at the high end. No one has yet been able to put together a 6800 class or above system that gets taken seriously,which is why Intel is playing with Itanium to try and break into that space.
Ok, Sun is not 100% behind Linux (yet), but that's because Linux isn't ready for the high end (yet). By high end I'm talking about F15 and F12K servers. It is pretty close to having the capabilities to run on the Sun midframe stuff, for example I'm sure it would run fine on a 3800, maybe even the 4800, but you start to reach its current limit with a fully stuffed 6800 system.
Now, step back for a minute and think why Suns UltraSparc and Solaris solution is so strong. Simple, at the risk of repeating the marketing guys the lure is that you can give your development and deployment guys a bunch of cheap Sunblade 150s or some cheap UltraSparc blades and whatever they come up with can be moved straight onto anything up to and including an F15K without recompiling. Put yourself in the place of a big corporation. Your putting together a new system, you have no idea just how big a load it will eventually have to take (say in 5 years). Today, sure you could run it on high end Linux box, but what happens if 6 months in the system needs a bigger box? If you chose Sun in the first place you simply buy the bigger box and move over. No porting, no redevelopment, and you know there is always a bigger, faster system you could move to. It buys you severe scalability that Linux isn't placed today to provide.
Now, about not supporting Linux, what about the LX50, the Sun Open Desktop that is coming soon, the Lintel blades (Coming Soon(TM)) the fact that the entire Sun One stack (web, directory, identity, etc, etc, etc) is either available now for Linux or coming soon, not to mention Star/OpenOffice.
So what is the perceived issue? I think people don't see Sun offering Linux on the UltraSparc range and thing they don't get it. Sun does get it, but look at their selling point for the last 10 years, total scalability. Linux doesn't provide this yet so they can't buy into it. What they are doing is making Solaris as compatible with Linux as possible, whilst at the same time helping Linux by providing software (openoffice, SunOne and much more) and I believe some kernel code too.
Believe me, when Linux is ready for the F15K class systems Sun will be ready for Linux to be there.
Disclaimer - I work for Sun, but nothing I have said here is not already public information.
Re:INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY PORTFOLIO
on
The Faded Sun
·
· Score: 1
True, but then we here at Slashdot don't like to believe such things really matter.
This said I know of no case where Sun has actually used its intellectual property against someone. A quick google I just did seems to bare this belief out. This is definitely a good thing. To my mind going after another company for intellectual property infringement means 1 of 3 things
1) The other company has done some industrial-espionage type activity and ripped off a large chunk of a new product.
2) You are trying to prevent competitors to you from having a chance to succeed. (Read protecting your monopoly)
3) Your products aren't good enough in and of themselves to stand in the marketplace so you are resorting to intimidation.
Traditional tech firms, still led by their founders, tend not to use such tactics, they seem dirty, underhanded and bad practice - it's your products and name you trade in, let the rip off merchants do their worst, cos they never get it quite right and their products are still inferior.
Hewlett-Packard of old, before the founders stood down, believed in this. Even blatant exact copies of their products didn't raise lawsuits. Can't say the same now. I believe Sun will stick to its current ways until McNeally et-al step down, then it too will go over to the dark side of the "Professional Management Team".
Re:$2B is the paper loss, $10M operational profit!
on
The Faded Sun
·
· Score: 1
Not to put too fine a point on it, yes this is exactly what it means. If they hadn't paid so much their paper value would be higher, but they wouldn't have gained what they did from those companies. swings & roundabouts. Should they have bought those companies, probably yes. Would they have been better off waiting till the downturn to do so? Definitely. Unfortunately they didn't know if/when/how bad the downturn would be. With all these things it's easy to criticise with hindsight, but it probably, with all the good advice and wisdom in the word, looked a good idea at the time.
$2B is the paper loss, $10M operational profit!
on
The Faded Sun
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Sun lost $2 billion last year and will probably lose another $2 billion this year
What a load of nonescense! On paper yes Sun did come out $2 billion down last year. Want to know why? Four(?) companies it had previously bought which it had to write down its valuations of. Take a look at its accounts, it took a charge of $2.125 billion for "Impairment of goodwill and other intangable assets". Read this to mean "some accountancy stuff that doesn't mean diddly to the companies operations". Thats it, period. It was a brave, forthright financial disclosure it could have put off for a couple of years, or dripped out, but it wanted to do a clear-out, get all the bad news out in a one-er and be able to post figures uncontaminated by that stuff from now on. The actual operations made money, I think it was around $10 million. Granted for a company of its size this isn't much, but this is the figure to look at. They increased cash reserves, its only the companies paper valuation that dropped $2 billion, they didn't actually loose any money. According to the basis of Cringely prediction, Sun continuing on exactly the same path, the market doesn't get any better, etc, etc, in 5 years time it will only have $50 million more in the bank than today. Does someone want to explain to me how this means its going to fold? IANAFA (I am not a financial analyst) but that sounds like bullshit.
Sun has a huge cash reserve, $1.5 billion, another $1 billion in stocks and short term securities, and other bits and pieces. Add all the assets together, excluding plant, 'intangables' and the like and its got $8.3 billion it could pull together if necessary. Oh, and it has no debt at all, period.
Cringley strikes me as a very poor journalist, he didn't even take the time to look into the basic details of the recent accounts, or if he did he was incapable of understanding them. Why does anyone bother reading this cretins opinions, he does seem to have a track record of being unnecessarily sensationalist and outstandingly wrong.
Disclaimer - I work for Sun as an engineer. Whilst I can't say too much on this topic I would say this year is looking pretty good thank you very much. The views expressed here are my personal opinions.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm running the Toshiba DT01ACA300 drives mentioned in the report, not had a single one fail over several years of usage. Compare that to the Seagate ST3000DM001, also in that report, I had 10 of them at one point, and over 4 years 90% of them failed (not counting those replaced in the first year under warranty!). They report a nearly 30% failure rate, which is comparable to my experience. Only one Seagate left, and I expect that will be gone within the year (it's got a hot spare waiting to take over when it does).
My Toshiba drives (and a couple of HGST HDS5C3030ALA630, which became the DT01ACA300 Toshibas after the plant transfer to Toshiba) were installed as the Seagates died, have up to 27,700 power on hours (3+ years), and so far flawless reliability. They don't look so reliable in their report, but the failure rate they report is low enough that its not unexpected that I wouldn't have seen one die yet.
I had sworn off Seagates, but it looks like it may have just been one bad model. Useful to see these sort of numbers released as it's helped to remind me not to so easily write off the entire companies drives. Having said that, that specific drive is still available in the retail channel but I wouldn't touch it with a bargepole.
Might be the only way to stop the Met Police thinking they have jurisdiction over the entire country. Then again, they seem to think national borders don't apply to them either for "intellectual property" enforcement, so maybe not.
Exactly right. I'm a Scot who voted no at the last referendum, my decision was never in doubt, and I'm fed up with all the calls to repeat the referendum again. This said the UK exiting the EU would make me strongly reconsider my No vote, and I'd probably support having a new referendum whatever my eventual decision on my vote.
Actually I like the parity declustering idea that was linked to in that article, seems to me if implemented correctly it could mitigate a large part of the issue. I have personally encountered the hard error on RAID5 rebuild issue, twice, so there definitely is a problem to be addressed...and yes, I do now only implement RAID6 as a result.
For those who haven't RTFATFALT (RTFA the f*** article links to), parity declustering, as I understand it, is where you have, say, an 8 drive array, but where each block is written to only a subset of those drives, say 4. Now, obviously you loose 25% of your storage capacity (1/4), but consider a rebuild for a failed disk. In this instance only 50% of your blocks are likely to be on your failed drive, so immediately you cut your rebuild time in half, halving your data reads, and therefore your chance of encountering a hard error. Larger numbers of disks in the array, or spanning your data over fewer drives, cuts this further.
Now, consider the flexibility you could build into an implmentation of this scheme. Simply by allowing the number of drives a block spans to be configurable on a per block basis, you could then allow any filesystem that is on that array to say, on a per file basis, how many disks to span over. You could then allow apps and sysadmins to say that a given file needs to have the maximum write performance, so diskSpan=2, which gives you effectively RAID10 for that file (each block is written to 2 drives, but with multiple blocks in the file is likely to be written to a different pair of drives, not quite RAID10, but close). Where you didn't want a file to consume 2x its size on the storage system, you could allow a higher diskSpan number. You could also allow configurable parity on a per block basis, so particularly important files can survive multiple disk failures, temp files could have no parity. There would need to be a rule however that parity+diskSpan is less than or equal to the number of devices in the array.
Obviously there is an issue here where the total capacity of the array is not knowable, files with diskSpan numbers lower than the default for the array will reduce the capacity, numbers higher will increase it. This alone might require new filesystems, but you could implement todays filesystems on this array as long as you disallowed the per-block diskSpan feature.
This even helps for expanding the array, as there is now no need to re-read all of the data in the array (with the resulting chance of encountering a hard error, adding huge load to the system causing a drive to fail, etc). The extra capacity is simply available. Over time you probably want a redistribution routine to move data from the existing array members to the new members to spread the load and capacity.
How about you implement a performance optimiser too, that looks for the most frequently accessed blocks and ensures they are evenly spread over the disks. If you take into account the performance of the individual disks themselves, you could allow for effectively a hierarchical filesystem, so that one array contains, say, SSD, SAS and SATA drives, and the optimiser ensures that data is allocated to individual drives based on the frequency of access of that data and the performance of the drive. Obviously the applications or sysadmin could indicate to the array which files were more performance sensitive, so influencing the eventual location of the data as it is written.
Tax reasons are probably right. I used to work for Sun in their Scottish manufacturing plant. When we'd order one of our own systems to use in the plants server rooms they would be assembled and tested in the plant, then, rather than roll them 100ft to the server room they were packaged up, put on a truck, driven to the south of England, put on a ferry, driven up to the Netherlands to the distribution center, then driven all the way back again. It took 2 weeks for us to see our systems again! If it was a rush order they would airfreight them to the Netherlands and back.
It wasn't just internal orders either, everything had to go via the distribution center regardless of where it was eventually destined. The reason I was given was "some complex tax thing", don't think anyone there understood it.
There is absolutely no way that Sun are doing this to try and recycle 'scrap' machines. I happen to know what the machines they are using are, and they are fairly newly released ones that are a range that is manufactured by OEMs, not Sun themselves. These machines are being manufactured to Sun order, not coming out of over-production. They are also putting a massive investment into the infrastructure (datacenters, racks, etc). I wish I could tell you more, including the machine model involved, but I can't (morally, promised I wouldn't, no legal restriction). I can tell you that they are putting in just one model. If they were trying to recycle scrap material there would be a huge mix of machine types going in, not just the one.
The one thing I do wonder is why they aren't joining all of their internal systems into the grid and selling that unused capacity. I know they are making that sort of a grid, but it's internal research use only AFAIK, and only a relatively small number of systems.
It does still matter, Sun recommends 1GHz of CPU (UltraSPARC IV, not P4 which is less effective clock for clock) per 1Gb/s of network IO. Given multiple gigabit interfaces (they do a nice quad GE card now), or even 10Gb/s interfaces, that's a lot of CPUs just to feed the bandwidth...and this assumes all you are doing is chucking out the data, any encryption or data manipulation CPU power required is on top of this. That is why Sun is reworking (has reworked?) their already pretty good stack, and putting in hardware offload engines for the (tcp|udp)/ip packet generation and handling.
If you're talking about low bandwidth then I agree you will hardly notice it on a modern CPU, but I see a significant CPU hit on my dual athlon Linux workstation just copying a few gigs of files from my local (SCSI) disk to the server nfs share, and that 'only' hits 160Mb/s on the net.
I used to work at Sun, and yes most of the tech guys there do get really annoyed at some of the BS that comes out from the top guys. That was certainly the #2 reason I left the company, I'd lost respect for them. Reason #1 was money. The whole Microsoft sellout was the straw that did it for me.
Actually Sun hasn't committed to open sourcing Solaris (or Java for that matter). What they have said is that they are "evaluating whether or not to open-source". I got that from McNeally himself just this week when he was giving a speach at the Sun Scotland manufacturing plant with a Q&A session afterwards. During that session he was point-blank asked which of the stories in the press were correct, and that was his answer.
Sun has had its B1600 blade shelf fitted with a pair of Cisco derived switches since day 1. Seems like IBM is playing a bit of catchup here. We've got one of these shelves sitting in one of our departments racks, and I can confirm that it the switches are definitely cisco running IOS.
As I said in the other post, it's called civil disobedience. It's just one method of protesting and trying to get the policy chanced. Unfortunately of course there are those who believe the simplistic mantra of 'speed kills'. The politicians like it because it's so simple they can spread it, they really don't like it when the populace tries to think for itself (just look at the Iraq issue). The fact that the policy is based on very little real evidence, with mounting evidence that it actually causes more harm than good, and just as a side effect functions to line the governments pockets is of course of no real import.
Personally I believe very little that comes out of the government (any government in any country) or the media without seeing the facts themselves and making my own opinion. If you've genuinely done that in this topic then you are of course entitled to your opinion, just as I and the other posters are entitled to ours. If on the other hand you only know what the government mantra has told you then I suggest you take the time to make an informed judgement before criticising that of others.
I think speed limits, when they are put in place and enforced by the brain dead, inane methods used today in the UK, then yes. Call it civil disobedience if you will, a tried and tested form of protest.
So, I guess you always drive to the speed limit right? How much thought do you put into what is the appropriate speed? I bet I put in more. How much time do you spend looking at the speedo? I spend that time looking at the road. Take a step back, who do you really think is the safer driver?
I drive safely, within the limits of driver, road, vehicle and other traffic. Sometimes this means I do, say, 30 in a 50 limit, othertimes that means 90 in a 70 limit. There are some points on our roads where the speed limits are far too high for the road conditions, and others where the speed limits seem to have very little bearing on the real risks present. The problem with the current system is that the majority of drivers now drive at the speed limit irrespective of the actual road conditions, if they have an accident they will state that they were within the speed limit, as if that fact alone should have protected them. It is indicative of the whole nanny state that we are rapidly descending towards, that people delegate their own personal responsibilities to the state.
I fundamentally object and disagree with the extremely limited viewpoint that speed causes accidents. That, to be blunt, is bollocks. Statistically it is shown that speed in and of itself does not play a big part in accidents. Drivers not paying attention, faulty vehicles, poor road repair, ice and snow, fog, rain, poor driving style (does anyone really keep a safe distance from the vehicle in front any more?), all of these play a far bigger role than speed. Inappropriate speed is of course a big issue, but when was the last time any police officer pulled over and charged a motorist for going, say, 70, in a 70 limit, in busy traffic with ice and snow? I think you'd have to go back a very long time to find an incident like that. Incidents like that are viewed as more acceptable than doing 90 in a 70 limit, on an empty, dry road with excellent visibility. Now where, I challenge you, is the sense in that?
There are times where speeding actually reduces risk. Take for example a slow moving vehicle (tractor, lorry, etc) on an A or B road. Obviously you want to get past that vehicle as quickly as possible, there is after all a very good reason why they call the time you spend on the wrong side of the road overtaking 'time exposed to danger'. Personally under that sort of circumstance I overtake as quickly as is safe and possible, slowing down if necessary after I have completed the manouver. This reduces the risk of accident to myself, the vehicle I am overtaking and other road traffic, yet often this means I have, technically, committed an offence. Add to this the fact that already today most drivers spend more time looking out for speed cameras and looking at their speedometer than they do planning where they are going, what lane to be in, what is the appropriate speed, what other road users are doing, etc. This tells me that there is something extremely wrong with our system.
I have taken some advanced driving courses, I accept the personal responsibility to drive appropriately and with thought and consideration. What the government should be trying to do is get every driver to do the same, but of course that wouldn't make them money, even if it would save lives.
'Those that would trade freedom for security deserve neither'
but obviously this device isn't going to be used to stop you from speeding in the first place, I predict it will just record the fact that you were speeding and fine you for it. In fact I predict that they will sample the data, look whether each motorist was within the speed limit at a number of random times during the past week/month/year and fine them for each that they weren't. This will encourage people to continue to speed as they hope that they will not get sampled at that point, and provide a nice big flow of cash into the treasury.
What's worse is that they will require car makers to fit these devices, who will pass the cost onto the car buyer, so we are in effect paying for our own personal speed camera/big brother device. This truly is the nanny state gone insane if this gets past. I just hope that they don't make it a crime to disable these units, or at least 'fail to keep them functional' (cough), as I know one in any car of mine would quickly develop a fault.
Bob Maderious will never forget the lease he brokered for property advertised as "plug and play" - only to find that it wasn't.
His client had been thrilled that state-of-the-art wires and cables left behind by the former tenant would allow the new company to move in, plug in and go to work. Thrilled, that is, until moving day when the company discovered the previous tenant had cut the cables.
"Cut it and left it," said Maderious, a broker with Grubb & Ellis. "I said, 'Hey, what's the deal with this?' (A broker) told me that the tech companies do that. They believe it's their investment in the space; why should a potential competitor get it for free?
"The lease documentation had not caught up with practice."
It still hasn't, but more brokers, landlords and property managers are catching on. Part of the reason is a change in the 2002 National Electric Code that requires the removal of abandoned cabling. The new code is not due to become effective in California until 2005 - unless this week's edict by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to suspend state regulations renders the code unenforceable. Literally, millions of miles of unused cable lurk in the nation's buildings.
The situation has been exacerbated during the past decade by technological advances that render functional cable obsolete. Not only are there cables for telephones, computers and faxes, but every few years cables are manufactured that transmit data at higher speeds and business wants data as fast as it can get it so new cables are laid over the old wires.
It is estimated that 60 billion feet of cable have been abandoned in the plenum spaces that allow air circulation through a building, creating a fire hazard. Older cable could be particularly toxic in a fire.
"Year after year, people come in with new technology and don't bother to remove the old cable. It's out of sight out of mind." said Brian Turpen, president of All Systems, a San Ramon company founded in 1990 that installs and removes cable infrastructure. "I've seen ceiling tiles bending under the weight of old cable. There's so much congestion. It's become a problem with cabling falling out of the ceiling onto people's heads."
Jay Miller, construction manager for Equity Office Properties, the largest publicly traded building owner in the country with more than 700 buildings and 124 million square feet of space, said he has witnessed what happens when high-tech companies move out of their space - it's not a pretty sight. Two major tenants, Automatic Data Processing Inc., which left ADP Plaza in San Ramon for Bishop Ranch, and PeopleSoft Inc., which moved into its own buildings in Pleasanton, are prime examples.
"Here you had two companies instrumental in development of the properties and at one point were part owners of their buildings. The leases we had were not as strict as they ordinarily would be," Miller said. "In each of those cases, the companies had server rooms and phone closets scattered throughout the building, with miles of telephone and data cable that was left in place."
Miller noted that PeopleSoft spent 10 years in their buildings. As the company grew, so did their cable infrastructure. "Now we're faced with the prospect of having to remove it," he said.
As in most leases, Equity's contracts contain clauses requiring tenants to return the property to its original state once they leave, but that can be a tough clause to enforce, Miller noted. Buildings change hands, tenants move in, expand, go bankrupt and move out; meanwhile the cables continue to multiply.
The problem of removing cable is twofold: It is not an easy job, especially if it requires finding and removing cables that run from, say, the 38th floor to the basement; Also, there is the question of who pays for the removal - the tenant who installed it and left five years ago, the new tenant just moving in or the building's owner?
"When a tenant moves into second-generation space, they get a tenant improvement allowance. They
UltraSPARC not 64 bit? Since when? We have Ultra1 machines running Solaris in 64 bit mode. SPARC was 32 bit, UltraSPARC is 64!
Hold on, wasn't that the very point I was making, that the law takes no account of the capabilities of the individual vehicles? I also should have said the individual abilities of drivers, I kind of said that in my bit about the IAM. Every day I see bad driving on UK roads, no indicators, pulling out at the last minute, lane hoggers, people just now paying attention, yet in the eyes of the law makers you are only a danger if you are speeding! One of the other posts makes reference to a site laying out the reasons why speed is far from the entire story. The fact is motorists are an easy revenue stream for this government, and it's time we all stood up for ourselves. If I was being especially cynical I'd say the government doesn't want to genuinely improve the quality of driving as then they wouldn't have the accident statistics to justify their jihad on speed and its nice little revenue stream.
Every advanced driving course you can go on will teach you about appropriate use of speed. If I'm overtaking a slower moving vehicle on a single carriageway road the safest thing for me to do is overtake as quickly as possible, speedlimit be damned. They call it "time exposed to danger" for a reason. In your ideal little world I would have to stick to the letter of the speed limit, which would increase the danger to me, the vehicle I'm overtaking and other road users.
Do you honestly believe that people fixating on the precise speed they are doing, staring at their speedometers, at least when they aren't looking out for the next speed camera, are driving safely? I've given up, now I drive to a speed reasonable for the road conditions, my vehicles condition and capabilities, and my level of alertness. Sometimes that means I'm over the limit, sometimes I'm under. I spend my time looking out of the window where I'm going, or in my mirrors, where my eyes should be, not fixed to the speedo. The only times I actually look at the speedo is when there is a speed camera. Now, ask yourself again, would you rather be on a road where everyone is spending more time looking at their speedos than the road ahead, or one where everyone was paying attention to their driving? We seem to be heading rapidly towards a society where the latter is in prevelance.
What the government should be going on about is increasing driver training. If you really want to reduce accidents on the roads every driver should have to take a practical test every 5 years (say). By this I do not mean a little 20 minute drive, I mean a really good, in depth examination of your driving skills. If you fail then you have to go on a course of some kind to sort things out, you have say 6 months to complete this and take the test again (perhaps an abbreviated one).
You can pick up bad driving habits even without realising it. Take me, I considered myself a good driver, I've been on a number of driving courses (off road, rallying, track sessions, skid pans), yet I went out on a "Performance Road Car" course and got picked up for a number of bad habits. None serious, but enough to make me stop and re-evaluate my driving style again. Look at what real "Advanced Drivers" (see http://www.iam.org.uk/) go through, and you will realise that these guys are an order of magnitude better drivers than most people on the roads. I'd rather be in a car with one of these guys at 120MPH than most people at 60MPH.
None of this is rocket science, none of it is surely beyond the whit of anyone of average intelligence, yet the Government hasn't ever made even a single move in this direction. The reasons for this are plain, to do the above, whilst very clearly achieving their stated objective of improving road safety, does nothing to line their own pockets. So instead they focus on the mantra of speed, because this means they can tax^H^H^H fine motorists easily and cheaply. That this has been shown to have very little effect on accident rates, and indeed some speed cameras INCREASE the local accident rate, is brushed off. Actually genuinely improving road safety in any reasonable manner would actually cost them money, so they aren't interested.
The same is true when it comes to
Exactly, and of course there is their membership and adoption of Gnome, involvement with Apache, etc. Not to mention that they were the most open of the Unix companies, they effectively open sourced SPARC right at the beginning. Fujitsu make and sell their own line of SPARC chips and servers, because of this, and www.sparc.org is still a real entity because Sun continues to support it. NFS, NIS, Java, and a whole host of core unix things we take for granted today all came about because Sun invented them and open sourced the specifications if not the code. Sun goes on about Open Systems, and are one of the few that really mean it, even if they don't go as far as a lot of people, including some insiders, would like.
I really wish I could say more about this, but contracts kind of restrict me. What I can say is that Sun really are putting their money where their mouth is when they say quality is their number one priority. You saw it with the Broadcom chip incident, where they did the right thing and stopped shipments, even though it hurt the bottom line. That is just one incident that got widespread attention. Right now, more so than ever before, they are taking no risks that a customer will get a product that doesn't work just right when it gets installed in their server room. You've got to admire that sort of attitude, especially in this financial climate.
:-) . You have to wonder how many other vendors, when faced with something like the Broadcom thing, either 1) don't notice it, 2) notice it but pretended they didn't, or 3) did the right thing even though it hurt them.
Bombproof computing, they are really making it their goal -although having just come back from watching Terminator 3 I'm no longer sure thats a good thing!
As for the holding onto Solaris thing, you can understand that. Solaris is and was a really great product. Having used AIX in a production environment I can understand why IBM aren't so bothered about loosing it to Linux. Given a choice I'd certainly pick Linux. When it comes to Solaris though, it's still not so clear cut, I'd go for Linux on the desktop because that's what everyone is targetting, but I would be sorely tempted for Solaris on the server, and it's a shoe in on the SPARC platform. If you truly believe in your product, like Sun does, it's much more difficult to accept that there may be a real alternative. Part of the problem is that Linux isn't (yet) a real alternative across Suns product range. SGI's Altix scales Linux to 64 processors, but that's the high end limit for now, until Linux gets to being capable of running on the top of the line Sun kit they can't fully commit to it, and by this I mean 128 CPU's, and be capable of handling 256 cores (coming soon(tm)). You've got to look at Suns selling point ever since it was started, Solaris from the lowliest workstation to the highest end servers. Your developers build and compile and test on the low end and deploy straight onto the highest end. Binary compatibility, surprisingly compelling, and Solaris still does this better than Linux, especially across OS/kernel versions.
That said if it was me who made those decisions I'd be sponsoring a major push to get Linux running on the SPARC platform, after all Solaris doesn't really make much money for Sun by itself but its SPARC hardware certainly does, and who cares if the customer runs Linux on Sparc or Solaris on Sparc, as long as they chose Sparc.
Disclaimer: I work for Sun, so obviously I'm biased, and none of the above statements are sanctioned by Sun in any way.
The issue is the granularity of the locks in the kernel, as well as some other scalability issues like how well it can actually manage 106 CPUs in a single OS instance, handling thousands of devices (disks, etc) and stability in doing so.
Perception is a major part of it, IT managers don't have case studies of major orgs using Linux on high-end hardware so don't trust it there, whereas Solaris is commonplace in that space.
Linux is definitely getting there, finer grained spinlocks help, the number of devices it can handle concurrently is increasing, I think in about 3 years it will be ready for the F15K's of this world.
Background - I work for Sun, but am a Linux advocate. I'd truly love to have Linux everywhere, I keep getting bitten on the arse by differences between Solaris and Linux (as well as HP-UX, AIX, etc) (anyone tried to use killall under AIX?!!). This said I also think that UltraSparc is a massively better CPU base than the x86, especially at the high end. No one has yet been able to put together a 6800 class or above system that gets taken seriously,which is why Intel is playing with Itanium to try and break into that space.
and F12K
servers. It is pretty close to having the capabilities to run on the Sun midframe stuff, for example I'm sure it would run fine on a 3800,
maybe even the 4800, but you start to reach its current limit with a fully stuffed 6800 system.
Now, step back for a minute and think why Suns UltraSparc and Solaris solution is so strong. Simple, at the risk of repeating the marketing guys the lure is that you can give your development and deployment guys a bunch of cheap Sunblade 150s or some cheap UltraSparc blades and whatever they come up with can be moved straight onto anything up to and including an F15K without recompiling. Put yourself in the place of a big corporation. Your putting together a new system, you have no idea just how big a load it will eventually have to take (say in 5 years). Today, sure you could run it on high end Linux box, but what happens if 6 months in the system needs a bigger box? If you chose Sun in the first place you simply buy the bigger box and move over. No porting, no redevelopment, and you know there is always a bigger, faster system you could move to. It buys you severe scalability that Linux isn't placed today to provide.
Now, about not supporting Linux, what about the LX50, the Sun Open Desktop that is coming soon, the Lintel blades (Coming Soon(TM)) the fact that the entire Sun One stack (web, directory, identity, etc, etc, etc) is either available now for Linux or coming soon, not to mention Star/OpenOffice.
So what is the perceived issue? I think people don't see Sun offering Linux on the UltraSparc range and thing they don't get it. Sun does get it, but look at their selling point for the last 10 years, total scalability. Linux doesn't provide this yet so they can't buy into it. What they are doing is making Solaris as compatible with Linux as possible, whilst at the same time helping Linux by providing software (openoffice, SunOne and much more) and I believe some kernel code too.
Believe me, when Linux is ready for the F15K class systems Sun will be ready for Linux to be there.
Disclaimer - I work for Sun, but nothing I have said here is not already public information.
True, but then we here at Slashdot don't like to believe such things really matter.
This said I know of no case where Sun has actually used its intellectual property against someone. A quick google I just did seems to bare this belief out. This is definitely a good thing. To my mind going after another company for intellectual property infringement means 1 of 3 things
1) The other company has done some industrial-espionage type activity and ripped off a large chunk of a new product.
2) You are trying to prevent competitors to you from having a chance to succeed. (Read protecting your monopoly)
3) Your products aren't good enough in and of themselves to stand in the marketplace so you are resorting to intimidation.
Traditional tech firms, still led by their founders, tend not to use such tactics, they seem dirty, underhanded and bad practice - it's your products and name you trade in, let the rip off merchants do their worst, cos they never get it quite right and their products are still inferior.
Hewlett-Packard of old, before the founders stood down, believed in this. Even blatant exact copies of their products didn't raise lawsuits. Can't say the same now. I believe Sun will stick to its current ways until McNeally et-al step down, then it too will go over to the dark side of the "Professional Management Team".
Not to put too fine a point on it, yes this is exactly what it means. If they hadn't paid so much their paper value would be higher, but they wouldn't have gained what they did from those companies. swings & roundabouts. Should they have bought those companies, probably yes. Would they have been better off waiting till the downturn to do so? Definitely. Unfortunately they didn't know if/when/how bad the downturn would be. With all these things it's easy to criticise with hindsight, but it probably, with all the good advice and wisdom in the word, looked a good idea at the time.
What a load of nonescense! On paper yes Sun did come out $2 billion down last year. Want to know why? Four(?) companies it had previously bought which it had to write down its valuations of. Take a look at its accounts, it took a charge of $2.125 billion for "Impairment of goodwill and other intangable assets". Read this to mean "some accountancy stuff that doesn't mean diddly to the companies operations". Thats it, period. It was a brave, forthright financial disclosure it could have put off for a couple of years, or dripped out, but it wanted to do a clear-out, get all the bad news out in a one-er and be able to post figures uncontaminated by that stuff from now on. The actual operations made money, I think it was around $10 million. Granted for a company of its size this isn't much, but this is the figure to look at. They increased cash reserves, its only the companies paper valuation that dropped $2 billion, they didn't actually loose any money. According to the basis of Cringely prediction, Sun continuing on exactly the same path, the market doesn't get any better, etc, etc, in 5 years time it will only have $50 million more in the bank than today. Does someone want to explain to me how this means its going to fold? IANAFA (I am not a financial analyst) but that sounds like bullshit.
Sun has a huge cash reserve, $1.5 billion, another $1 billion in stocks and short term securities, and other bits and pieces. Add all the assets together, excluding plant, 'intangables' and the like and its got $8.3 billion it could pull together if necessary. Oh, and it has no debt at all, period.
Cringley strikes me as a very poor journalist, he didn't even take the time to look into the basic details of the recent accounts, or if he did he was incapable of understanding them. Why does anyone bother reading this cretins opinions, he does seem to have a track record of being unnecessarily sensationalist and outstandingly wrong.
Disclaimer - I work for Sun as an engineer. Whilst I can't say too much on this topic I would say this year is looking pretty good thank you very much. The views expressed here are my personal opinions.