Re:The market frowns on Sun's 'monopoly potential'
on
Sun vs. OpenBSD?
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· Score: 3
How are you defining "rapidly loosing market share"? Most of the market analyses over the past 2 years have shown Sun gaining market sharein Unix server and workstation shipments against IBM, HP/Compaq, SGI, et al.
In the high-end market place, where Sun makes most of its money, Linux and OpenBSD have hardly any market share and UltraSPARC pretty much rules the roost in market share terms. In the mid-range there is some pressure from Linux, but mid-range Unix servers equate to highest-end Lintel boxes, and at those price points the cost of the OS is marginal to the overall cost. At the low end, yeah there is market pressure, but mostly because Linux is increasing the size of the low-end Unix marketplace and this is a "Good Thing"(tm).
So what happened in this case? OpenBSD got caught in the beaurocracy most likely. If the upper management had heard about it then something might have been done, but remember that like most Tech companies Sun is struggling in a tight marketplace and trying to make a little bit of money. They've just lost, what, 25% of their workforce in the last couple of years and we wonder why there is no slack to look after what was probly seen as a low-priority request from a project that contributes only a small amount to Sun's bottom line.
BTW - Sun generally don't make money on the OS - you have to have over 4(?) CPU's in the box before there is any charge at all, and even then it is free with all Sun hardware even with 72 processor boxes.
Sun makes money on the hardware, not the OS it runs on, so just why should they want to actively try and stop OpenBSD? The article itself even pointed out a case where Sun was LOOSING sales because OpenBSD didn't run on the better (more expensive) boxes the customer wanted to buy.
Have you ever seen the effects of a high pressure cylinder failing? I have, and the holes (plural!) through the walls that got in its way were not amusing.
I saw that in a document storage facility - the paperwork was ok but scattered everywhere, would hate to see the same scene but placed in a server room!
Oh come on. Yeah Sun messed up, but it hardly compares to M$'s constant business practices. The e-cache issue they did drop the ball on handling, but the entire issue was that Sun's supplier of the part gave dodgy components. Sun innocently shipped them not realising there was an issue.
Where they really dropped the ball was handling the replacements, but this was a MISTAKE rather than a deliberate, underhanded business decision. The scale of the problem took time to come to light, they had to understand the issues, and the volumes involved. Even if they had wanted to swap out every possibly faulty module immediately it would have taken time to
1) find and fix the roote cause, don't want replacement units with the same fault,
2) test all those extra modules - after all they are now LESS likely to trust the parts coming in from the supplier
3) source all of those unplanned for parts, in the volumes we are talking about that is probably going to require the supplier to increase their production volumes to accomodate and that will take time also.
If you've got more examples of abuse then give them, I keep hearing of Sun's abuse of the market, but all anyone has ever come back with is e-cache. One issue does not a villain make.
DISCLAIMER - I'm a Sun employee but these views are not those of my employer or sanctioned by them in any way.
You're thinking too linearly. This can't work on audio CD's, but I imagine they are just aiming at data CD's (and DVD's coming soon if you believe them).
There will be a piece of authentication code in the installer (or whatever). This will be responsible for interacting with the smartcard to send it that initial information pulse. It will then ask the drive to re-read the "smartcard area" of the disk until it gets a response (decryption key), and will use that to decrypt the rest of the disk. Since DVD drives can run code also they will be able to use this same scheme there.
'course all the Warez'ers will have to do is replace the initial installer code once they've accessed the drypt key, so I give new titles a week after they are released before there are cracked versions going about.
One worrying question - are they getting all the power for the smartcard from that laser pulse? Really? Probably means a battery, so your CD or DVD now has an even more limited lifetime. Tinker with the battery size and Hollywood now has a way to program in obsolescence into that new DVD, forcing you to buy a new copy!
My expensive DVD player (out of warranty of course) let out the magic smoke
LWN announced it was shutting down
Seriously though, they will definitely be badly missed. They were part of my daily net routine. Interestingly a number of users on the LWN comments page have made substantial donations just after the news broke (several US$200 donations were mentioned). Perhaps its time we stopped griping and just put our money where our collective mouthes are. I'm going to donate tonight after I get home, and I challenge every other reader who can afford it to do likewise.
Can't agree more with the above post, a system you can play on without any fear that breaking it will cost you your job - remember, these people will be new in the door, and aware that you could replace them without losing any of the company-specific knowledge they have. Ideally - have a system as close to your production systems as possible that they can play on, but also have a vanilla backup that they can use to rapidly completely restore said system to its correct state. Fixing problems themselves is great, but they could easily trash the system completely.
Second - have all your documentation in one (or a few) very easily locatable locations and provide them with details of how to get to those locations on day 1. Write it down, put it on a big poster, whatever, remember they will get a lot of info the first few days and will guaranteed forget 60+% of it in that same timeframe.
Third - do the same with all of your various procedures, who to contact to get stationery, business cards, new hardware, third-party support lines, escalation procedures, the works.
Fourth - and I can't stress this one highly enough, give them first point of contacts in all of the major departments of your organisation they are likely to need to talk to. There is nothing worse than asking someone (who is always busy) about an issue, to be told "to talk to someone in MES", when they haven't a clue what 'MES' is or how to track them down. The newby will feel stupid having to ask. Which brings me nicely onto
Five - you use company-specific acronyms, of course you do, everyone does, but they newby won't have a clue what they mean. Provide a list (and keep it up to date, it's not just useful for the new guys) of all the acronyms in use. Include generic acronyms from the industry your in, he may have come in from outside your specific industry.
Six - On day 1 give him a buddy, someone he will work beside (physically if possible) for the first few weeks. Don't pick the least sociable guy in your department, the busiest or the least knowledgeable.
Seven - and this may seem to run counter to your rapid familiarity thing but bare with me, have newbys work a day or two in each of the major areas of the company. Seriously. If its a manufacturing plant have him/her out there on the line making stuff, using (and seeing other people use) the system, let them hear the gripes that people have about the system. Remember, they are new in the door, don't have any personal feelings one way or the other about the way you work so are more likely now than at any other point to truly listen to the views of the users. It will give them a greater understanding of what the company does and so better able to provide solutions that are a best-fit for the company. Make sure they work in every major function (receiving, manufacture, test, shipping, marketing, finance, whatever) to get a true picture of things. This can get difficult in a large company but at least cover everything in the local area and have a company orientation video or something that covers the global company and where your department/office/division fits into things. This may be the best spent two or more weeks letting them get up to speed on the company before they get up to speed with the behind the scenes IT stuff.
There is more I'm sure, but give them those as a minimum. One final thing, ask them to write down all the problems they had every week, emphasise that you really do want to see them and that by being honest they are helping you out not highlighting any failures in themselves. Do this for the first month or two, then at 6 months ask them to look back and comment on how things went. Use their feedback to improve your new-start information pack or process.
Try and work with other departments on some of the above, there will be a lot of common ground, but never forget that its YOUR department he will need specific info about.
Add AIX to that. Once managed to take out a production critical system with that mistake - hadn't used it on AIX before but had on Linux, got a surprise at the different way they operated. Oops !
In my defence I'd like to point out that is the one and only time I've accidentally taken out a production Unix system. The NT boxen fell over as soon as you looked at them so they don't count!
Oh, and on the multiple Unixes thing (in a desperate attempt to get back on topic) - we manage 300 Solaris boxes by virtue of trying to keep them all precisely alike (OS version, patches, system software). Saves ages on testing - works on one clone box works on them all and you can then blitz the lot with a good degree of confidence. If you guys are anal about testing updates (and this IS a production environment right?) then you should have development boxes (usually older decommissioned boxes or just smaller variants) that run the same software as your production systems to test things out on (moral, never believe the developers, even if you are the developer;-> ). Since this would be the first system of type X ensure they budget to get that smaller system X as well.
The difference is that all of the Linux/BSD exploits are out in the open, and a large percentage come from people looking at the source code and going "oops!".
Whilst I know the "many-eyes" theory isn't as good as many people think, I'm sure that the average line of code in an open source app gets more eye time that the average line of code in a proprietary, closed source one, so we find a higher percentage of our security problems. Now, just what percentage of security issues do you think that Microsoft et al actually openly admit to? I don't think there have been more than a couple of occasions where microsoft has said, without someone sticking the proverbial gun in their back, hey - security issue, we fess up, come and get the fix. Do you believe they don't find many more? Sure they do, they either just ignore them or quietly fix them and slip it in a servicepack.
Quite clearly you can't compare the numbers just by taking them at face value. Filter out all those with "theoretical exploits" for a start. Next, take out all the duplicates - a patch released by RedHat may be for an identical issue to one released by SuSE and Mandrake - how many times did you count it? One? Three? Or do you just look at one distro? Which one? The one with the most patches - maybe they're really good at looking for problems and putting out fixes, on the other hand maybe they really screwed up the original release. The one with the least patches? Probably not paying attention.
Now a more interesting exercise would be to have a couple of groups of security experts sit down for a few months with the complete source of a recent Linux system and that of WinXP and tot up the number of security issues they can come up with. How about an independent study, draw up a set of rules, have MS put up 50% of the money and one (or more ) linux companies put up the other 50.
Linux fan that I am, it's nowhere near ready for the Starcat (E15K). That beast will take 72 processors (106 if you _really_ want them). Solaris has been doing large numbers of processors for a while (E10K, the 24 processor SunFire range, etc). It's pretty good at using them effectively. The linux kernel isn't there yet, in fact I think 8 processors is pretty much its limit right now......
..
The main factor limiting getting past this limit is that few people have access to this sort of hardware to do the development work. Think of how Linux got on the mainframe, a few bored IBM engineers had an old mainframe and got hacking. It got into the wild mostly because that implementation runs on top of the normal mainframe OS, and can co-exist with other mainframe apps. It got into production mainframes for precisely that reason. If it had required the mainframe to be dedicated to Linux we'd still be waiting.
Can the same happen with the E15K's? I don't think it will. Why? Because you'd have to run the Linux kernel on top of Solaris! This simply doesn't make sense when you'd be far better off running the apps natively under Solaris. The only way I see Linux getting onto that sort of hardware is if Sun (or IBM ) give access to one of these multi-processor machines to some developers. That's the short-term view. The linux kernel will continue to scale better and better, and I have no doubt it will get there, but for Sun to have mentioned it in that press release it would have to be there now, and it obviously isn't.
Besides which, you try convincing a conservative IT manager to spend US$1M+ on an E15K to run Linux on it, when you don't have successful case-studies to show him.
These views are not endorsed by my employer, and are given solely on the basis of public-domain knowledge, so don't try reading too much into them.
Nope, SunRays are completely solid-state (my office is covered in the things). Don't know whether anyone has got them working with a Linux server though. The video output is great, decent enough sound for the average office user too. Older ones did have a problem with dodgy resistors (? or something) in the power supply when a supplier mucked-up, but the recent ones are pretty bulletproof.
I remember about 10 years back taking a tour of a major financial institutions data centre based in Edinburgh, (Scotland). The place had been built for mainframes, but they were in the middle of replacing them with a "more modern" client server paradigm (I'm spending _far_ too much time listening to my boss!). This meant that they had collosally huge rooms, chilled to about 10 degrees C, virtually empty.
There were essentially two data centres in one building, each with its own exceptionally large UPS system with rooms full of wet-cell batteries, and each with two backup generators. Naturally there were separate power feeds into the building (three separate sub-stations if memory serves). The most memorable part tho' was walking through the separating wall - 10 feet thick re-inforced concrete which, we were told, had been designed to withstand an impact from a 747. They were under the local airports flightpath - an airport whose runways will never take a 747, but anyway. The wall runs diagonally to the flightpath, but if it lands right on top they've still lost the facility.
The thing that always strikes me about all these types of centres is that they seem to ignore (or just don't talk about) the human factor. Most disaster recovery plans are just as bad. Picture the scenario - half of your facility has just been taken out by some disaster, you probably just lost half of your collegues. I won't describe the scene, but you can imagine what horrors might be going on on the other side of the 10 foot concrete wall from you - how well will the average person be able to cope emotionally, never mind how well they'll be able to do their job? I imagine a lot of people simply wouldn't be able to face coming into work in those situations.
All that said of course, from what I hear those who survived the WTC proved me wrong, but then they were making a stand against the terrorists, and I really admire that. What if though, for the sake of this scenario, the disaster had been caused by human error, natural disaster or whatever. How would people have coped and done their jobs under those circumstances. I think a lot more people would have refused to come into work, even in the disaster recovery site, and those that did would probably have been a lot more distracted and lack motivation, at least once the immediate response to the disaster was over.
Actually, the financial model on consoles is usually to sell the console itself under cost, and make the profit on the games and accessories. I assume M$ is doing the same as Sony, Sega, etc. This means that you can buy an XBOX with no intention of ever buying any games for it and cost M$ money!
An XBOX is fairly standard PC hardware last I heard, so getting Linux on there shouldn't be too difficult. Hack in a bootable ethernet adapter, keyboard and mouse and you've got a pretty good Xterm.
Rumours are that Gnome will ship with Solaris 9, but I don't know if it will be the default desktop. As for the release date, don't know, would have to look on the sun.com site for info. Sun is a BIG company, so I don't have any idea what the OS guys are doing.
DISCLAIMER : I work for Sun, so am biased, but the below comments are in no way endorsed by Sun or necessarily reflect any of Sun's official positions.
I suppose the same applies to TCL? I believe one of the lead developers of TCL/Expect is in the full-time employ of Sun and has been for some time. Besides, GNOME spent a lot of time shouting at KDE for their proprietary library, so there is no way they will let anything proprietary into the GNOME source. So exactly HOW will Sun kill GNOME? If people don't like something Sun gets into GNOME, someone will put in a way to disable it, or more likely it won't get into the official version.
I see all sorts of negative comments against Sun, yet no-one seems to have any real facts. Yes, Sun still has proprietary code, these things take time to change (has IBM open-sourced AIX? HP HP-UX? Oracle? ). Yes, they still don't really support Linux, but the Cobalt range still runs it, and Sun owns them, again, it will take time to change. I think they'll get there, probably only on the low-end high-volume stuff for quite some time, but they'll get there when the really mission-critical (which is mostly where they sell) guys start to demand it. Don't forget in Sun's marketplace it's maximum uptime and speed that counts, not a pretty desktop. That and CONFIDENCE, try selling a Linux solution for a banks core systems.. won't work (yet).. but Solaris is a serious contender.
So, where does that leave us? Sun doesn't fit with "pure RMS tenants", well ok, show me an old-style computer firm that does! Those companies started with a pure open-source philosophy have a much easier time maintaining that philisophy than firms that grew up with the "what's mine is mine, what's yours is mine" marketplace that M$ et al forged. Sun has open-sourced a lot of its stuff, StarOffice, lest you forget, Java, etc. StarOffice alone may do more good for Linux's success than anything else, and don't forget Sun actually laid out hard cash to buy that just to give away, who else can claim that? Personally I think Sun is helping Linux incredibly, and whilst it may not be pushing it or supporting it on its own hardware, yet, Linux is certainly not being hurt by Sun's contributions. Can you say the same about Microsoft, to which you compared them?
Anyone buying 500+ machines to use internally is going to blow away the OEM windows install as soon as it comes in the door (or pay their reseller to do it). They have their company standard OS, config and apps to install. That immediately blows the argument about the benefit of OEM installs out of the water.
Does anyone know what happened about that clause in MS's license agreement that stated if you blew away the OEM install, you had to buy another license? If that still stands, then MS is trying to get large companies to buy their OS twice, once to get their own install on, and once to avoid the MS Police pounding on the door, disrupting their entire IT operation for days/weeks/months and charging the company with whatever systems are illegal due to; negligence, user "upgrades", administrative error, or whatever.
That said, it's not just MS that does this, every member of FAST, BSA, whatever is responsible for just these sort of actions. Last company I worked for had a visit from these cowboys. The representative, who came round with a promise to help us check we were compliant, and a veiled threat of a raid if we didn't, turned out to be a salesman. He was essentially selling a "we won't break your door down" pack, and made it clear that failure to comply would be detrimental. Luckily we were bought out before they could do anything, so we just pointed them at head office. The really annoying part is we walked into the meeting with the results of our latest audit (2 weeks old) that showed we were compliant, but they didn't care.
Am I the only one who remembers one of Linus's original reasons for joining Transmeta? Namely that they did not do a Linux distro, and he could therefore not be accused of favouritism towards one distro in his kernel work. I wonder what his stance now is on this.
Yesterday, we were discussing how we can hack new DirecTV tuners to allow HDTV resolution on analog ports.
Does anyone else appreciate the irony of both events happening in the same week?
Not really. This case is about people stealing content (illegal). The other story was about people being denied the right to do what they want with the content they have paid for. I am against allowing people to steal DVD's, but I am all for allowing people to play region 1 DVD's on their region 2 players. Strikes me as exactly the same issue here, the corporate defending themselves from an illegal attack (pirates), as versus the corporate using legally unenforcable (without a pocket politician or two to change the law for you..COUGHDMCACOUGH) technological and social pressure (look at the deCSS code? We'll sue you) to force the world to be the way that they want.
All that said, I agree with another poster, who said it would be different if the corporation was in a monopoly position, on a local or a national or even international basis, or a member of a cartel (which AFAIK is illegal in most countries, but very prevalent from what I can see).
At the moment the only way to get dual-head on a linux box is to use two cards. The matrox driver is closed source and still beta, and simply won't come up with my G400DH. I haven't heard anything about an open source driver.
Sun's only real problem just now is that it can't recruit fast enough, and can't expand fast enough to keep up with demand, but it is trying incredibly hard to do both, whilst continuing to introduce new technologies. I've only just started working for Sun (not sales/pr/marketing, I'm a systems engineer), and I have to say I'm very impressed.
Whilst all these.com companies are coming and going, when they were coming a good number of them
bought Sun kit, so are large numbers of brick-and-mortar concerns who are going online, as well as the usual in-house stuff. Big companies are still "internet-enabling" their enterprise systems. It is of little importance whether the.com boom is over, big companies are still moving to the internet as an enabling technology for all sorts of things. Just look at the profits and growth of Sun, and to a lesser extent Cisco, to see what I mean. The stock market is jittery? So what? Look beyond the stock prices and you will see that Sun is still doing excedingly well (60% revenue growth in the last published figures).
The other thing to bear in mind is that Sun is all about big, backend servers these days, the workstations are a relatively small part of its business, although still impressive and important, it has most of the workstation market!
PS If anyone wants a job with Sun in Scotland, I get a bonus if I introduce you, so send those CV's in to me!:->
steven at azimov dot demon dot co dot uk
I do not speak for Sun Microsystems, these comments are mine and not endorsed by my employer.
Hate to be picky, but Agilent is not HP Research. Agilent is a separate company that develops, markets etc all the former HP telecoms, medical and "anything that isn't directly a computer" products. They decided to split the company up because the bean-counters thought it would look better on their spreadsheets! (Not a joke, unfortunately). Anyway, HP continues to do all the computer related R&D itself as always, although it does outsource some of that to small, specialist outfits .
SAMBA is pretty platform independent. We run it here for file and print sharing on a pair of IBM RS/6000's running AIX. We don't print anything that doesn't go through one of those.
I know I've replied to this already, but re-reading it the line below stuck out
If they have even half a clue they'll monitor ftp too.
I've seen enough of how UK government organisations work to know that assuming they have even half a clue on such matters is generous in the extreme. They are committee'd up to and over their eyebrows, and everything moves incredibly slowly. They don't stand a chance of keeping up with the moving target that is the internet, and will end up putting in place ineffectual 'solutions' that are massively inconvenient for the ISP's and/or users, give the UK a bad name, and do absolutely nothing to combat the people they claim to be after. Most of the people who make such decisions simply do not 'get' the Internet, and so make bad decisions based on out of date information, and that's before anything is implemented. Remember that they then need to develop these systems, and government IT projects are almost always delivered over time and over budget.
Anyway, I though Eschelon did most of this stuff anyway, if the rumours are true, but I believe that is a US led project.
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How are you defining "rapidly loosing market share"? Most of the market analyses over the past 2 years have shown Sun gaining market sharein Unix server and workstation shipments against IBM, HP/Compaq, SGI, et al.
In the high-end market place, where Sun makes most of its money, Linux and OpenBSD have hardly any market share and UltraSPARC pretty much rules the roost in market share terms. In the mid-range there is some pressure from Linux, but mid-range Unix servers equate to highest-end Lintel boxes, and at those price points the cost of the OS is marginal to the overall cost. At the low end, yeah there is market pressure, but mostly because Linux is increasing the size of the low-end Unix marketplace and this is a "Good Thing"(tm).
So what happened in this case? OpenBSD got caught in the beaurocracy most likely. If the upper management had heard about it then something might have been done, but remember that like most Tech companies Sun is struggling in a tight marketplace and trying to make a little bit of money. They've just lost, what, 25% of their workforce in the last couple of years and we wonder why there is no slack to look after what was probly seen as a low-priority request from a project that contributes only a small amount to Sun's bottom line.
BTW - Sun generally don't make money on the OS - you have to have over 4(?) CPU's in the box before there is any charge at all, and even then it is free with all Sun hardware even with 72 processor boxes.
Sun makes money on the hardware, not the OS it runs on, so just why should they want to actively try and stop OpenBSD? The article itself even pointed out a case where Sun was LOOSING sales because OpenBSD didn't run on the better (more expensive) boxes the customer wanted to buy.
Have you ever seen the effects of a high pressure cylinder failing? I have, and the holes (plural!) through the walls that got in its way were not amusing.
I saw that in a document storage facility - the paperwork was ok but scattered everywhere, would hate to see the same scene but placed in a server room!
and IBM RS/6000, UltraSparc's, SGI's, DEC^H^H^H Compaq ^H^H^H^H^H^H^ HP Alpha.
64bit 66MHz variant PCI is quite common on even the highest end Unix servers - even on the big Starcat (F15K) Sun's
BTW - just how old was this Atari? I had an ST and stuck on a common SCSI hard disk (50Mb, those were the days!).
Oh come on. Yeah Sun messed up, but it hardly compares to M$'s constant business practices. The e-cache issue they did drop the ball on handling, but the entire issue was that Sun's supplier of the part gave dodgy components. Sun innocently shipped them not realising there was an issue.
Where they really dropped the ball was handling the replacements, but this was a MISTAKE rather than a deliberate, underhanded business decision. The scale of the problem took time to come to light, they had to understand the issues, and the volumes involved. Even if they had wanted to swap out every possibly faulty module immediately it would have taken time to
1) find and fix the roote cause, don't want replacement units with the same fault,
2) test all those extra modules - after all they are now LESS likely to trust the parts coming in from the supplier
3) source all of those unplanned for parts, in the volumes we are talking about that is probably going to require the supplier to increase their production volumes to accomodate and that will take time also.
If you've got more examples of abuse then give them, I keep hearing of Sun's abuse of the market, but all anyone has ever come back with is e-cache. One issue does not a villain make.
DISCLAIMER - I'm a Sun employee but these views are not those of my employer or sanctioned by them in any way.
You're thinking too linearly. This can't work on audio CD's, but I imagine they are just aiming at
data CD's (and DVD's coming soon if you believe them).
There will be a piece of authentication code in the installer (or whatever). This will be responsible for interacting with the smartcard to send it that initial information pulse. It will then ask the drive to re-read the "smartcard area" of the disk until it gets a response (decryption key), and will use that to decrypt the rest of the disk. Since DVD drives can run code also they will be able to use this same scheme there.
'course all the Warez'ers will have to do is replace the initial installer code once they've accessed the drypt key, so I give new titles a week after they are released before there are cracked versions going about.
One worrying question - are they getting all the power for the smartcard from that laser pulse? Really? Probably means a battery, so your CD or DVD now has an even more limited lifetime. Tinker with the battery size and Hollywood now has a way to program in obsolescence into that new DVD, forcing you to buy a new copy!
It's my fault, yesterday wasn't going well.
Broke my working code, couldn't fix it again
Had a crash in my car on the way home
My expensive DVD player (out of warranty of course) let out the magic smoke
LWN announced it was shutting down
Seriously though, they will definitely be badly missed. They were part of my daily net routine. Interestingly a number of users on the LWN comments page have made substantial donations just after the news broke (several US$200 donations were mentioned). Perhaps its time we stopped griping and just put our money where our collective mouthes are. I'm going to donate tonight after I get home, and I challenge every other reader who can afford it to do likewise.
Can't agree more with the above post, a system you can play on without any fear that breaking it will cost you your job - remember, these people will be new in the door, and aware that you could replace them without losing any of the company-specific knowledge they have. Ideally - have a system as close to your production systems as possible that they can play on, but also have a vanilla backup that they can use to rapidly completely restore said system to its correct state. Fixing problems themselves is great, but they could easily trash the system completely.
Second - have all your documentation in one (or a few) very easily locatable locations and provide them with details of how to get to those locations on day 1. Write it down, put it on a big poster, whatever, remember they will get a lot of info the first few days and will guaranteed forget 60+% of it in that same timeframe.
Third - do the same with all of your various procedures, who to contact to get stationery, business cards, new hardware, third-party support lines, escalation procedures, the works.
Fourth - and I can't stress this one highly enough, give them first point of contacts in all of the major departments of your organisation they are likely to need to talk to. There is nothing worse than asking someone (who is always busy) about an issue, to be told "to talk to someone in MES", when they haven't a clue what 'MES' is or how to track them down. The newby will feel stupid having to ask. Which brings me nicely onto
Five - you use company-specific acronyms, of course you do, everyone does, but they newby won't have a clue what they mean. Provide a list (and keep it up to date, it's not just useful for the new guys) of all the acronyms in use. Include generic acronyms from the industry your in, he may have come in from outside your specific industry.
Six - On day 1 give him a buddy, someone he will work beside (physically if possible) for the first few weeks. Don't pick the least sociable guy in your department, the busiest or the least knowledgeable.
Seven - and this may seem to run counter to your rapid familiarity thing but bare with me, have newbys work a day or two in each of the major areas of the company. Seriously. If its a manufacturing plant have him/her out there on the line making stuff, using (and seeing other people use) the system, let them hear the gripes that people have about the system. Remember, they are new in the door, don't have any personal feelings one way or the other about the way you work so are more likely now than at any other point to truly listen to the views of the users. It will give them a greater understanding of what the company does and so better able to provide solutions that are a best-fit for the company. Make sure they work in every major function (receiving, manufacture, test, shipping, marketing, finance, whatever) to get a true picture of things. This can get difficult in a large company but at least cover everything in the local area and have a company orientation video or something that covers the global company and where your department/office/division fits into things. This may be the best spent two or more weeks letting them get up to speed on the company before they get up to speed with the behind the scenes IT stuff.
There is more I'm sure, but give them those as a minimum. One final thing, ask them to write down all the problems they had every week, emphasise that you really do want to see them and that by being honest they are helping you out not highlighting any failures in themselves. Do this for the first month or two, then at 6 months ask them to look back and comment on how things went. Use their feedback to improve your new-start information pack or process.
Try and work with other departments on some of the above, there will be a lot of common ground, but never forget that its YOUR department he will need specific info about.
Of course, don't run killall on HP
;-> ). Since this would be the first system of type X ensure they budget to get that smaller system X as well.
Add AIX to that. Once managed to take out a production critical system with that mistake - hadn't used it on AIX before but had on Linux, got a surprise at the different way they operated. Oops !
In my defence I'd like to point out that is the one and only time I've accidentally taken out a production Unix system. The NT boxen fell over as soon as you looked at them so they don't count!
Oh, and on the multiple Unixes thing (in a desperate attempt to get back on topic) - we manage 300 Solaris boxes by virtue of trying to keep them all precisely alike (OS version, patches, system software). Saves ages on testing - works on one clone box works on them all and you can then blitz the lot with a good degree of confidence. If you guys are anal about testing updates (and this IS a production environment right?) then you should have development boxes (usually older decommissioned boxes or just smaller variants) that run the same software as your production systems to test things out on (moral, never believe the developers, even if you are the developer
What? Try being British, and a student, at a technical university, volunteering in a students union. Now that's sarcasm! Fun times though.
:-)
The difference is that all of the Linux/BSD exploits are out in the open, and a large percentage come from people looking at the source code and going "oops!".
Whilst I know the "many-eyes" theory isn't as good as many people think, I'm sure that the average line of code in an open source app gets more eye time that the average line of code in a proprietary, closed source one, so we find a higher percentage of our security problems. Now, just what percentage of security issues do you think that Microsoft et al actually openly admit to? I don't think there have been more than a couple of occasions where microsoft has said, without someone sticking the proverbial gun in their back, hey - security issue, we fess up, come and get the fix. Do you believe they don't find many more? Sure they do, they either just ignore them or quietly fix them and slip it in a servicepack.
Quite clearly you can't compare the numbers just by taking them at face value. Filter out all those with "theoretical exploits" for a start. Next, take out all the duplicates - a patch released by RedHat may be for an identical issue to one released by SuSE and Mandrake - how many times did you count it? One? Three? Or do you just look at one distro? Which one? The one with the most patches - maybe they're really good at looking for problems and putting out fixes, on the other hand maybe they really screwed up the original release. The one with the least patches? Probably not paying attention.
Now a more interesting exercise would be to have a couple of groups of security experts sit down for a few months with the complete source of a recent Linux system and that of WinXP and tot up the number of security issues they can come up with. How about an independent study, draw up a set of rules, have MS put up 50% of the money and one (or more ) linux companies put up the other 50.
Linux fan that I am, it's nowhere near ready for the Starcat (E15K). That beast will take 72 processors (106 if you _really_ want them). Solaris has been doing large numbers of processors for a while (E10K, the 24 processor SunFire range, etc). It's pretty good at using them effectively. The linux kernel isn't there yet, in fact I think 8 processors is pretty much its limit right now......
..
The main factor limiting getting past this limit is that few people have access to this sort of hardware to do the development work. Think of how Linux got on the mainframe, a few bored IBM engineers had an old mainframe and got hacking. It got into the wild mostly because that implementation runs on top of the normal mainframe OS, and can co-exist with other mainframe apps. It got into production mainframes for precisely that reason. If it had required the mainframe to be dedicated to Linux we'd still be waiting.
Can the same happen with the E15K's? I don't think it will. Why? Because you'd have to run the Linux kernel on top of Solaris! This simply doesn't make sense when you'd be far better off running the apps natively under Solaris. The only way I see Linux getting onto that sort of hardware is if Sun (or IBM ) give access to one of these multi-processor machines to some developers. That's the short-term view. The linux kernel will continue to scale better and better, and I have no doubt it will get there, but for Sun to have mentioned it in that press release it would have to be there now, and it obviously isn't.
Besides which, you try convincing a conservative IT manager to spend US$1M+ on an E15K to run Linux on it, when you don't have successful case-studies to show him.
These views are not endorsed by my employer, and are given solely on the basis of public-domain knowledge, so don't try reading too much into them.
Nope, SunRays are completely solid-state (my office is covered in the things). Don't know whether anyone has got them working with a Linux server though. The video output is great, decent enough sound for the average office user too. Older ones did have a problem with dodgy resistors (? or something) in the power supply when a supplier mucked-up, but the recent ones are pretty bulletproof.
I remember about 10 years back taking a tour of a major financial institutions data centre based in Edinburgh, (Scotland). The place had been built for mainframes, but they were in the middle of replacing them with a "more modern" client server paradigm (I'm spending _far_ too much time listening to my boss!). This meant that they had collosally huge rooms, chilled to about 10 degrees C, virtually empty.
There were essentially two data centres in one building, each with its own exceptionally large UPS system with rooms full of wet-cell batteries, and each with two backup generators. Naturally there were separate power feeds into the building (three separate sub-stations if memory serves). The most memorable part tho' was walking through the separating wall - 10 feet thick re-inforced concrete which, we were told, had been designed to withstand an impact from a 747. They were under the local airports flightpath - an airport whose runways will never take a 747, but anyway. The wall runs diagonally to the flightpath, but if it lands right on top they've still lost the facility.
The thing that always strikes me about all these types of centres is that they seem to ignore (or just don't talk about) the human factor. Most disaster recovery plans are just as bad. Picture the scenario - half of your facility has just been taken out by some disaster, you probably just lost half of your collegues. I won't describe the scene, but you can imagine what horrors might be going on on the other side of the 10 foot concrete wall from you - how well will the average person be able to cope emotionally, never mind how well they'll be able to do their job? I imagine a lot of people simply wouldn't be able to face coming into work in those situations.
All that said of course, from what I hear those who survived the WTC proved me wrong, but then they were making a stand against the terrorists, and I really admire that. What if though, for the sake of this scenario, the disaster had been caused by human error, natural disaster or whatever. How would people have coped and done their jobs under those circumstances. I think a lot more people would have refused to come into work, even in the disaster recovery site, and those that did would probably have been a lot more distracted and lack motivation, at least once the immediate response to the disaster was over.
Actually, the financial model on consoles is usually to sell the console itself under cost, and make the profit on the games and accessories. I assume M$ is doing the same as Sony, Sega, etc. This means that you can buy an XBOX with no intention of ever buying any games for it and cost M$ money!
An XBOX is fairly standard PC hardware last I heard, so getting Linux on there shouldn't be too difficult. Hack in a bootable ethernet adapter, keyboard and mouse and you've got a pretty good Xterm.
Rumours are that Gnome will ship with Solaris 9, but I don't know if it will be the default desktop. As for the release date, don't know, would have to look on the sun.com site for info. Sun is a BIG company, so I don't have any idea what the OS guys are doing.
DISCLAIMER : I work for Sun, so am biased, but the below comments are in no way endorsed by Sun or necessarily reflect any of Sun's official positions.
I suppose the same applies to TCL? I believe one of the lead developers of TCL/Expect is in the full-time employ of Sun and has been for some time. Besides, GNOME spent a lot of time shouting at KDE for their proprietary library, so there is no way they will let anything proprietary into the GNOME source. So exactly HOW will Sun kill GNOME? If people don't like something Sun gets into GNOME, someone will put in a way to disable it, or more likely it won't get into the official version.
I see all sorts of negative comments against Sun, yet no-one seems to have any real facts. Yes, Sun still has proprietary code, these things take time to change (has IBM open-sourced AIX? HP HP-UX? Oracle? ). Yes, they still don't really support Linux, but the Cobalt range still runs it, and Sun owns them, again, it will take time to change. I think they'll get there, probably only on the low-end high-volume stuff for quite some time, but they'll get there when the really mission-critical (which is mostly where they sell) guys start to demand it. Don't forget in Sun's marketplace it's maximum uptime and speed that counts, not a pretty desktop. That and CONFIDENCE, try selling a Linux solution for a banks core systems.. won't work (yet).. but Solaris is a serious contender.
So, where does that leave us? Sun doesn't fit with "pure RMS tenants", well ok, show me an old-style computer firm that does! Those companies started with a pure open-source philosophy have a much easier time maintaining that philisophy than firms that grew up with the "what's mine is mine, what's yours is mine" marketplace that M$ et al forged. Sun has open-sourced a lot of its stuff, StarOffice, lest you forget, Java, etc. StarOffice alone may do more good for Linux's success than anything else, and don't forget Sun actually laid out hard cash to buy that just to give away, who else can claim that? Personally I think Sun is helping Linux incredibly, and whilst it may not be pushing it or supporting it on its own hardware, yet, Linux is certainly not being hurt by Sun's contributions. Can you say the same about Microsoft, to which you compared them?
Just my two pence.
Does anyone know what happened about that clause in MS's license agreement that stated if you blew away the OEM install, you had to buy another license? If that still stands, then MS is trying to get large companies to buy their OS twice, once to get their own install on, and once to avoid the MS Police pounding on the door, disrupting their entire IT operation for days/weeks/months and charging the company with whatever systems are illegal due to; negligence, user "upgrades", administrative error, or whatever.
That said, it's not just MS that does this, every member of FAST, BSA, whatever is responsible for just these sort of actions. Last company I worked for had a visit from these cowboys. The representative, who came round with a promise to help us check we were compliant, and a veiled threat of a raid if we didn't, turned out to be a salesman. He was essentially selling a "we won't break your door down" pack, and made it clear that failure to comply would be detrimental. Luckily we were bought out before they could do anything, so we just pointed them at head office. The really annoying part is we walked into the meeting with the results of our latest audit (2 weeks old) that showed we were compliant, but they didn't care.
Am I the only one who remembers one of Linus's original reasons for joining Transmeta? Namely that they did not do a Linux distro, and he could therefore not be accused of favouritism towards one distro in his kernel work. I wonder what his stance now is on this.
Not really. This case is about people stealing content (illegal). The other story was about people being denied the right to do what they want with the content they have paid for. I am against allowing people to steal DVD's, but I am all for allowing people to play region 1 DVD's on their region 2 players. Strikes me as exactly the same issue here, the corporate defending themselves from an illegal attack (pirates), as versus the corporate using legally unenforcable (without a pocket politician or two to change the law for you..COUGHDMCACOUGH) technological and social pressure (look at the deCSS code? We'll sue you) to force the world to be the way that they want.
All that said, I agree with another poster, who said it would be different if the corporation was in a monopoly position, on a local or a national or even international basis, or a member of a cartel (which AFAIK is illegal in most countries, but very prevalent from what I can see).
At the moment the only way to get dual-head on a linux box is to use two cards. The matrox driver is closed source and still beta, and simply won't come up with my G400DH. I haven't heard anything about an open source driver.
Then you obviously didn't buy them from sun.com, where, and I just checked this, they do change $75US plus shipping.
Comments not endorsed by my employer.
Sun's only real problem just now is that it can't recruit fast enough, and can't expand fast enough to keep up with demand, but it is trying incredibly hard to do both, whilst continuing to introduce new technologies. I've only just started working for Sun (not sales/pr/marketing, I'm a systems engineer), and I have to say I'm very impressed.
.com companies are coming and going, when they were coming a good number of them
.com boom is over, big companies are still moving to the internet as an enabling technology for all sorts of things. Just look at the profits and growth of Sun, and to a lesser extent Cisco, to see what I mean. The stock market is jittery? So what? Look beyond the stock prices and you will see that Sun is still doing excedingly well (60% revenue growth in the last published figures).
:->
Whilst all these
bought Sun kit, so are large numbers of brick-and-mortar concerns who are going online, as well as the usual in-house stuff. Big companies are still "internet-enabling" their enterprise systems. It is of little importance whether the
The other thing to bear in mind is that Sun is all about big, backend servers these days, the workstations are a relatively small part of its business, although still impressive and important, it has most of the workstation market!
PS If anyone wants a job with Sun in Scotland, I get a bonus if I introduce you, so send those CV's in to me!
steven at azimov dot demon dot co dot uk
I do not speak for Sun Microsystems, these comments are mine and not endorsed by my employer.
Hate to be picky, but Agilent is not HP Research. Agilent is a separate company that develops, markets etc all the former HP telecoms, medical and "anything that isn't directly a computer" products. They decided to split the company up because the bean-counters thought it would look better on their spreadsheets! (Not a joke, unfortunately). Anyway, HP continues to do all the computer related R&D itself as always, although it does outsource some of that to small, specialist outfits .
SAMBA is pretty platform independent. We run it here for file and print sharing on a pair of IBM RS/6000's running AIX. We don't print anything that doesn't go through one of those.
If they have even half a clue they'll monitor ftp too.
I've seen enough of how UK government organisations work to know that assuming they have even half a clue on such matters is generous in the extreme. They are committee'd up to and over their eyebrows, and everything moves incredibly slowly. They don't stand a chance of keeping up with the moving target that is the internet, and will end up putting in place ineffectual 'solutions' that are massively inconvenient for the ISP's and/or users, give the UK a bad name, and do absolutely nothing to combat the people they claim to be after. Most of the people who make such decisions simply do not 'get' the Internet, and so make bad decisions based on out of date information, and that's before anything is implemented. Remember that they then need to develop these systems, and government IT projects are almost always delivered over time and over budget.
Anyway, I though Eschelon did most of this stuff anyway, if the rumours are true, but I believe that is a US led project.