The XBox2, which is based on the G5 PPC, uses G5 PowerMacs with a specially modifed WinNT (XP Kernel maybe?) for game development.
I don't know why Microsoft decided to go with PPC, although I suppose it has to do with the Altivec vector unit and the fact that the G5 is a damn fine CPU, better for graphics, but it means that PPC G5's might very well become cheaper in the near future (at least the older one in the XBox2) and it means that MS would not have that much difficulty to port the rest of Windows to the PPC and it also means that game developers would have slightly less hassle and more experience developing for Mac OSX.
But would Microsoft actually port and sell the whole Windows over to PPC? I don't think so. Who would buy it? People who use PPC now use it because that's what Macs come with and what Mac OSX runs on. If they wanted to use Windows, they would buy a PC. I doubt that the entire software market would suddenly jump at this, given that the major thrust is in x86 Windows software.
In any case, I am fantastically happy with OSX on my PowerBook, so Microsoft can do what it wants.
One guy further down asked what Apple would do since its marketshare is so small, even though its total userbase is constantly growing.
Most of us who use Macs and PCs know how good the Mac and Mac OSX is. For us, the people who know both sides (and who really doesn't these days?) there is no question.
But the guy raised my interest because I wondered what kind of strategy Apple keeps up its sleeve in case a crisis hits such as the one in the mid 90's. What products and goals would Apple have if large Mac software developers started deserting the platform for Windows or perhaps even Linux in the future? (For instance a lot of Games studios now produce Linux versions, which they didn't before and even Macromedia is considering developing for Linux). What would Apple do if MS stopped producing Office for Mac OSX and Adobe decided that it isn't worth the money develpoing for Mac?
I think Apple under Jobs considers this scenario very often in designing products.
In order to ease the dependance on pure Mac sales, not that Macs will die anytime in the next decade or so, if ever (Dvorak, you clown, where are you?), I think Apple started the semi-independant iPod and iTMS products that, although loosely coupled with Macs in marketing and software, appeal to a far broader base of customers than Macs do. This division is so successful that it even allows Apple to use it as a marketing device for the new iMac.
I think Apple spends more time than possibly any other company in both product R&D and market segment R&D. I don't know any other company that makes as much effort to cater for its various market segments, with the iMacs and iBooks for consumers and education, PowerMacs and PowerBooks for professionals and XServes and XRaid for enterprise, with especially ahuge amount of effort being put into the i- range to make them more appealing than your run of the mill PC or laptop. Added to this the huge amount of research that they must put into OSX R&D in order to keep it as simple, stable and powerful AND goodlooking as it is.
Then there's Apple's software line, ranging from the extremely well thought out and simple but powerful iLife apps, to the professional video and audio applications in whose markets Apple almost dominates. And even the very nice small business database Filemaker belongs to Apple, to round things off.
But back to the main subject. What does Apple do to stave off Microsoft and Adobe desasters? In the first case, Apple has a not very well kept secret that it keeps OSX compiled and up to date for x86. This mere fact is probably enough to keep Microsoft on its toes and keep the Office version for PPC rolling. The strange CherryOS post of yesterday showed just how much interest there would be for OSX on x86. If I put on my tin-foil hat I would be nice a conspiracy minded and say that the CherryOS debacle would be in Apple's inerests in order to simply show MS how muuch damage Apple could do to MS' marketshare.
Then, anyone who's been watching the development of OSX 10.4 Tiger knows about the CoreImage and CoreVideo technolgies. Those two technologies allow developers to slowly start gnawing away at Adobe's domination in that market, by making it easy for graphics developers to make applications that now only Photoshop and Illustrator can do. Apple is extremely clever in doing this because it will be a slow process, one that Adobe won't notice and suddenly kill InDesign and PS and AI, until the competition slowly makes itself known, when it will be too late for Adobe to blackmail Apple the way Gates did in the 80's with Excell and Word forcing MacBasic out.
In doing this Apple is taking a page from Microsoft who orginally got its strong position by using developer power. (Ballmer didn't dance on stage for fun, you know. He really meant that)
I think Apple has an even rosier future than imagined.
But then again, maybe the new iPod with image capability will be an absolute dud, so you never know.
I don't think it's fair that you got modded down, unless you really meant to troll of course, which, in a Mac section of any forum will get you flamed quite quickly.
Let's look at it from the perspective of a few potential software developers, one small, i.e. shareware, one big, i.e. enterprise ERP and one in a specialised field, i.e graphics.
The case of the small developer: You only need to spend a small amount of time with the generally extremely low quality level and huge mass of sharware software available on download.com to notice that you are both right and wrong here. The huge marketshare of pc's means that the majority of shareware gets developed for Windows PC, BUT also the large majority of junk made by semi-incompetent developers. The market is so large and the competition so high, that as a sshareware devloper for Windows, your chances of making a buck and getting recognition are tiny.
The situation is very different for Mac OSX and Macs. Here, the avergae quality level is quite a bit higher, perhaps because the community being smaller, the word gets around quicker if something is a dud. The Mac shareware developer has a good chance of getting recognition and even money for his work, because the market is smaller.
Let's look at the enterprise market: Apple now makes both servers and raid storage solutions, both of which offer excellent value and performance and very good management tools. These products are obviously selling, both in Apple's traditional media market, where video and sound demand these products as they fit in with Apple's other strengths in this area, and in other enterprises where they fit in perfectly with Linux and Unix servers. The fact that Oracle, Sybase and SAP offer their products for the Mac now shows that the interest is there.
There are indeed corporations using OSX, often because the TCO is very low, the quality high, and because OSX is so extremely flexible to fit in in mixed environments, and because it supports traditional Unix enterprise systems very well (The Java integration is the best available)
Last, let's look at traditional niche markets, such as designers and media industries. This is one area where Apple lost a lot of marketshare in the late 90's and early 2000's because OS9 was unstable and OSX 10.0/10.1 so slow and had so little software available. Many designers moved to Windows and the PC marketshare of Adobe and Macromedia etc, shot up.
That situation has now stopped and people are moving back to the Mac because of its superior colour management and stability and flexibility and simplicity. In video and sound, Apple competes extremely well with its own applications and Adobe, Macromedia, Alias, Quark etc have all now overcome the initial problems and their apps are again second to none on the Mac. I am willing to wager money that media types are simply more productive in a Mac environment, than in a PC environment. I used to be a Windows sysadmin, so I know what I'm talking about.
And then there's the new market of people switching to Macs from PC's. The iMac and iBook are made for these people. A simple, well performing, rugged, stable, virus and problem free, stable computer and OS makes friends on its own.
In fact, about the only market where Apple does have difficulties is in the traditional medium business where there is basically only MSOffice and a few servers, or where there are applications which have never had Mac equivalents, such as AutoCAD and engineering applications.
What would you say, perhaps, if in 5 to 10 years, Linux had captured 50% marketshare in the PC market? Would you also ask where the applications were now today? Or would you look at the growth in Linux in general.
As long as Apple keeps on growing, developers will keep on making apps for the platform, even, with time, specialised ones.
Wall-Mart and Culture Oil and Water Heaven and Hell Good and Bad Right and Wrong Black and White......
On the other hand this is an excellent opprotunity for Apple and other online stores to compete in sectors where Wallmart simply does not stock the music or even have clue.
take a look at the poser in that forum making a big noise about this "wonderful emulator", the guy called DAG33K. Notice his English mistakes. Notice his location, "In da middle of da pacific". The do a whois on cherryos.com, and you get an address in Hawai. The tech contact, who is also the admin contact etc etc, is a guy called Arben Kryeziu, the same guy doing the video "demonstration", which you never get to actually see apart from an installation screen and some supposed OSX desktop, which looks very similar to PearPC. The guy's name is Albanian, and if you listen in that demonstration, he speaks with a thick accent, so my gues is that the poster on hardforum is the very same guy trying to pimp his warez.
I still think the guy is trying to fuck everyone for their money.
For one thing, I just did a couple of whois on cherryos.com, all of whose contacts are listed as arben kryeziu, whose email is given as arben@bumpnetworks.com. Do a whois on bumpnetworks.com (which is a run of the mill web development company according to its website) and you get all the tech contacts as arben@kryeziu.com, which is a simple holding site, obviously the guy's own.
Now, this Arben Kryeziu guy is the one in the, of all things, java video player on the video link site.
So this guy has time to run a web development company, be the tech and admin contacts for all the sites, and run a PPC emulation development outfit on the side? I seriously doubt it.
Not that it might be possible, who knows, but companies such as Connectix (now owned by Microsoft) spent literally years, getting their x86 emulators up to about 1/4 of the speed of the host PPC CPU. And this guy has done it on his own, with a tiny outfit in no time and with no news announcements, and got it to run at 3/4 the host x86 system? I doubt it again.
And then, he sells the whole thing for $50????? And only by electronic download???? With a PDF manual that closely resembles the PearPC effort???? Has anyone actually downloaded this and paid the guy his $50???? Has anyone seen it run???
Even in that weird video (why no wmv, why no real, why no quicktime?) where he supposedly "demonstrates" the application, you don't actually see it running.
My guess is that, if the application really does run, it is simply a PearPC wrapper and runs at around 1/10th or less of the host speed. (Notice the typical marketing "up to 80% of the host" x86 system?)
I have nothing against Albanians (Kryeziu is an albanian name, listen to the guy's accent), but I think the guy is trying to make a quick buck off the hopefuls who want Mac OSX but won't or can't buy a Mac.
We'll see when the first real reports come in of how and if this thing performs, but if it truly is what he claims it to be, which I seriously doubt, then he has one big hurdle and that is Apple's EULA, which states that Mac OSX is only allowed to be run on Apple branded hardware.
Apple cannot do this. For multiple reasons that have nothing to do with technology and everything to do with marketshare and market forces.
If Apple were to switch, it would start at point zero, with no applications, just as it did in 2000 with the Mac OSX public beta. It would not even have the Classic layer to run the old Mac apps, although that is less of a concern these days. These days Mac OSX on x86 would either have to have some very fancy easy to use WINE like environment, so that Windows users could use their current apps until OSX equivalents came along, or run Windows in a VMWare like environment.
Also, you would have to kiss MSOffice for OSX goodbye. You, as an OOo user might think this is insignificant, but it sure as hell isn't to those who use it.
Then, there would be the hardware problem that people like the article author always always forget. Apple makes most of its money from hardware. Do you think Apple would still make as much money and sell as many units if the OS was able to run on x86 commmodity hardware? Obviously not. That would force the price of the OS up. How many newbies would then pay for the OS?
Talking of newbies, how many of the gazillions of windows users who currently have never heard of OSX, or think OSX is still the same crap they used back in 1995, will fork over $100 plus for an OS without Office, without games and without other pro applications? I seriously doubt that Apple's pro apps like FCP and Logic alone are enough to sustain the platform, not to mention the intensely pissed off current users on PPC.
That means that the only people buying OSX on x86 would be geeky types like those here who are so fucking stingy (and I don't mean poor - I'm poor yet I use a Mac because it's so good) that they bitch about a $100 price difference in a computer. The vast majority would not use OSX or even think about switching.
Apple's only recourse in this case would be to make an x86 mainboard, using a special OpenFirmware with no bios, such as current Mac mainboards do, to make it incompatible with other x86 machines so that it would not encroach on Microsoft's Windows territory too much and so that it would keep users from using other x86 hardware.
And the advantage of that over its PPC platform is right around zero, so why even think about it.
Apple could have done this exactly once in the past. Back in 2000 when everyone was started to switch to OSX and there were no OSX applications for the new OS, Apple could have gone with a proprietry x86 motherboard and kept on producing a few last PPC machines until their classic MacOS users had switched and there were enough new OSX apps. That time passed as soon as new apps started coming out for OSX and people started investing money in them.
The only thing Apple could possibly do to make money on x86 these days is possibly port its Cocoa frameworks and devtools over to windows to compete against MS'.Net stuff, but here again, who would actually buy this?.Net is far enough advanced that it is the king of Windows and no big shops would move to Cocoa.
I am so so fucking tired of some one night wonders asking this same stupid question, when it is so obvious that it is just a geek cheapskate wet dream.
I can understand full well why Apple zealots are hated (I use a Mac myself btw,) because I am starting to get so pissed off with Microsoft fans getting on the fucking defensive and ranting and raving at slashdot, once again, everytime a MS security bug crops up here or when MS does yet another crazy business action.
For crying out loud, if you are so blind that you can't see that A) slashdot, in general favours Linux and opensource products, and B) slashdot does actually post interesting article on MS every now and again when MS really does innovate, then...
fuck off back to Winsupersite where Paul "I sold my butthole to Bill" Thurrot will be glad to have you.
Or are you drawn to this site because its actually interesting?
Migros, the largest supermarket chain in Switzerland, uses iMacs and OSX in its Zürich sales area headquaters stores. They apparently use 1500 OSX clients, mainly sunflower iMacs, running OSX 10.2 (in the process of upgrading to Jaguar), some 100 Windows client machines, and a mix of Xserve and Intel servers running, amongst other things, OpenStep.
In this article, (sorry in German), they describe the process and the reasoning. Some highlights:
Since the introduction of Macs back in the 90's, running OS9 back then, they have not had one single total system outage.
They figured the average cost of security problems in the Windows world over time, not just in one year, into the TCO, and came to the conclusion that the Mac is far cheaper in this respect.
They also figured the stability of the systems over time into the TCO and came to the conclusion that the Mac is cheaper
They use a software package called Filewave to centrally install a new Mac's OS and software, which takes on average 30 minutes.
The same software can install updates on a running OSX machine without any downtime and the user can just keep on working. They find that this further reduces the TCO enormously
They did a study and found that it takes on average just 2 hours to introduce a new user to OSX, which was less than the case with Windows
They found the iMacs to be robust, ergonomic machines with very littel in the way of hardware support costs.
They use SAP for ERP/CRM stuff with Java clients on OSX. It apparently works flawlessly.
Finally, they very happy with their decision.
Now, I know one could do a Wintel environment with Citrix MetaFrame, in order to reduce clientside upgrade problems, but Citrix would require a larger backend.
My title above is a disclaimer. I am a Mac user, and only use a PC via VNC to view webpages in IE. That said, I found this article pretty straightforward about the pros and cons of IE and alternative browsers from a Windows point of view. The guy make valid points about centralised management of IE vs. the standalone path of Firefox et al that would be a question in mainly Windows environments.
That said, all of these problems can be overcome by a good admin who thinks creatively, and I seriously doubt that much active development is going into ActiveX using sites these days.
There are a number of things I'd like to say about this article in the NYT, the American Public(TM) and GWB's policies.
Firstly, what amazes me, truly, on a website meant for above average technically interested people is that almost no comments have been made on the actual technical contents of the NYT article itself as regards the Aluminium tubes and their suitability for use as Uranium centrifuges. The NYT went out of its way to explain to the layman (along with a very good graphic) how the tubes fit the use of small tactical rockets and were totally unsuitable, without extra manufacturing, for the use as centrifuges. I mean, come one, 60 000 tubes for centrifuges! Even the USA, the world's largest nuclear power, doesn't have or need that many centrifuges! It would be nice if people noticed this fact and then took note of how almost the whole American establishment basically went along with the analysis of ONE man (The guy called Joe), ignoring the majority's dissenting voices!
Secondly, this NYT article may well have been timed to be a political time bomb, since it appeared now, after the TV debate, but the NYT, to give it some credit (which the right does not do), explains very well in the same article that it itself was as guilty as almost everyone else in ignoring the evidence available during the highly emotional bullshit campaign that Bush and Co. conducted in the run up to the war. The NYT, for all its failings and left leaning political bias, has explained in a number of editorials that it made a mistake. How often does the favourite of the right, Fox news, do that?
Thirdly, I've seen a number of comments here about what the real motivations were for going to war, be they oil, control of the middle east, liberating Iraq, bring democracy to the middle east, furthering an agenda in wake of the 9/11 attacks. etc. My answer would be the Falklands War in 1982, when the right wing military Junta in Argentina used the issue of the Falklands, by invading them, to bring the nation behind them in the rush of patriotism in wartime, when they were politically starting to lose support. I think that the main reason for this war was a domestic political agenda in the USA, used by the very intelligent people behind Bush, such as Karl Rove, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld etc, in order to bring the American people in line with their way of thinking by starting a war. I feel most sorry for Collin Powell, who despite his actual opinion, suffered the consequences for being true to his President. I hope he gets a decent job in the future where he is repsected and not treated as the house nigger.
Fourthly, despite all the nuances of the aluminium tubes, such as the fact that this was not unknown in 2002 and the faked yellow cake uranium from Niger, none of which stopped anyone from believing the most astounding things about Iraq at the time, such as Iraqs supposed ICBMs capable of threatening the USA, I think that this article will be treaed by the American Public as being new and novel. I seriously doubt the ability of the public to distinguish the facts, and I am buoyed in this opinion by the comments here on/. where the same old emotional debate between faithful right and cynical left rages. In short, I think it will have a serious impact on GW's reelection chances, but that's possibly a good thing.
Firstly, I fully agree with those who note that these are so called contingency plans. It would be incompetent for the US military not to have them. Every nation of a suitable size (and above all, budget) has contingency plans. China, Russia, the UK, France, India, Pakistan... They all have plans about what to do when the shit hits the fan.
However, and this is the sticking point, the comment in the article about the consequences of the US building a large anti-satellite and possible space-earth bombarment weaponry is that the mere existence of such weaponry forces potential targeted nations to respond with their own ability to target US satellities, and this is precisely what China is doing.
With the demise of the USSR there was only the USA left in terms of superpowers, and the USA hasn't exactly been humble about using that power of late, and the potential danger that the US would strike at Chinese or European satellites will force those countries to look for ways of defending their property in space.
While I doubt that the EU will ever have enough of a budget or the will to build a defense against the US, I am positively certain that China has both the will and the budget to do so.
China also has one big advantage on its side and that is time. The Chinese are under no pressure to match the USA today, since they will not risk going to war with the USA right now, but they have the time to develop a large arsenal of space weapons and deploy it over time without the huge seesaw problem of US budgets going up and down depending on who is in power.
Most likely I think the Chinese are aiming for a long term matching of US military capability, in the region of 20 to 40 years from now, and the chances are that they will achieve it too, simply because they have, due to an authoritarian system, the ability to focus on long term projects that the US doesn't.
I think that eventually, towards the middle of this century, the Chinese will probably have the role of second superpower that the USSR used to have.
I have no idea how successful it would be, but wouldn't simple mirror shades (all the rage in the 80's) or mirrored windshields offer fairly good protection against visible wavelengths of laser light?
true, I got mixed up a bit (I don't actually speak Zulu, but had it in school about 27 years ago) with the word Nkosi (don't ask me why), but I sort of hazily remember from school that Ubuntu is the plural of person, or was that abantu?
The only reason for this effort in Russia, and the similar one in Thailand, is that Microsoft is trying to stop OEMs from selling Linux. Microsoft knows full well that no one in Thailand or Russia (or China or Indonesia or Vietnam or anywhere else not in the western mode of big bucks) is going to pay for Microsoft's software. This is pretty obvious because a full 97% of the world's population a) can't afford Windows anyway and b)have other things to worry about in life.
No, this is simply a measure to pacify the respective governments that have been using Linux as a bargaining tool (Thailand did this) by threatening to start state sponsored pro-OSS programmes, as well as being a measure to keep OEM's from selling computers without any OS whatsoever or Linux.
While the OEMs probably don't give a flying fuck what OS is on the system so long the customers buy their stuff, and governments will be satisfied until their clueless newbie IT departments finally realise what a bunch of shit this is, I think this might actually backfire hugely in Microsoft's face.
Think of it: Third world countries will tend to get highly offended when they realise that they have been given a useless POS when what they wanted was a cheaper version of the real thing. Microsoft will say, "Yes, but this way you get to stay Legal(TM)" and we won't try to get the US government to threaten you for using our stolen innovations. To this the third world government says, "Well, we really like Ubuntu Linux anyway, sucker".
Where Ubuntu is coming from and going to
on
Ubuntu Linux Review
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· Score: 2, Interesting
The name Ubuntu is zulu, a South African language, for God. The distro is compiled and managed by South African Soyuz tourist millionaire Mark Shuttleworth (Hey boet) and his company Canonical. There has been quite a bit of movement in South Africa over the past couple of years to get Linux into schools and small businesses, although the vast majority are still using pirated versions of Windows or whatever came with their computer.
This distro, from my point of view (I'm South African), makes excellent sense for people wanting to install Linux and basically just get up and working without having to fight through masses of obscure applications. It provides what 90% of average computer users need and use on their computers:Office productivity, mail, browser, messaging, graphics and media player. That's it, no fluff.
This distro is exactly what is needed (once they sort out the various bugs) for a home user or small business to get started. Given that there has only been a move to competition in the telcom business in South Africa this month, and that SA has had the world's highest rates out, wireless networking has not been a major feature in the SA IT landscape up until now, so I think that not working detection of Wireless NICs is not a major priority at the moment.
I'm really proud about this, as it gives SA its first distro aimed at the country.
I respect the decision of the two companies (not several as claimed by the submitting astroturfer) to switch back to windows, but there are some huge flaws in both decisions that make me wonder wehther this is not some piece of MS funded anti-Linus FUD.
Firstly, the first company, in NY, claimed, that they switched to Linux and Orcale nine years ago. I'm not sure about the timing but Orcale had, AFAIK, no Linux offerings that long ago. It's possible that the database backend came about when Orcale offered it's first Linux versions back in 2000, around 4 years ago.
If the guy was worried about the lack of Linux know-how in his company, why on earth did they even go for Linux that far back, in 1995, when Linux was nowhere near as stable and powerful as it is now? Why didn't the guy look for Linux expertise in the mean time. You cannot tell me, that by 2002, when they started their move back to Windows, that profeesional services, both for Linux (Red Hat, SuSE pro services) and Oracle (who by 2002 had moved their entire development over to Linux and for which there would have been mountains of support available). By 2002 there were multiple DB's available, MySQL had started becoming very powerful, PostgreSQL was there, and DB2 had been migrated by IBM which is no slouch when it comes to support and services.
To me it sounds like an extremely incompetent manager who went with the ASP hype in 1999 and 2000 only to get burned when it collapsed, instead of recognising, as he should have and as a competent manager would have, that the ASP model involves big risks. Why on earth didn't he just look for another one with better financials (did he even bother to look how well the ASP was doing?)
Pathetic.
Secondly, in the case of the second company, it sounds similar or even worse. The fact that their system (inhouse aparently) had major design issues. "Not designed to support x transactions per second in the programme" sounds suspiciously like a scalability problem that could have been either fixed by a reasonable programmer, or by a distributed system.
His concerns about security is pure and utter FUD given that 2002 was the year of Nimda and Code Red. The fact that the system went down for a day points to slackers not taking into account failover solutions or backup systems.
None of these desicisions say anything about Linux, but they do say a lot about the incompetence of managers and the willingness of certain so called IT news outlets to act as paid mouthpieces for a company in Redmond.
That way it will be in one of 3 places, a firing range, a foreign country, or an enemy of the US.
You forgot about number four: Inside friendly soldiers, killing them softly with your love.
In the Gulf War in 1991, the war in Bosnia in 1995 and Kosovo in 1999, Depleted Uranium ammo was used....
And ended up making many many friendly Nato soldiers sick and numerous soldiers died of cancer. Thhis has been the cause of huge outrage in Italy, for example where it has been documented that about 12 soldiers died after having been exposed to the remains of DU ammo.
Problem is that DU ammo vaporises on high velocity collision contact, and the resulting fine Uranium powder is a bit worse than a carton of Marlboros a day would be.
And I wish little (grown) boys like you would fucking grow up and get a fucking clue. You might think you're a big strong man talking about nuking everything, but the effects of what you want never entered your fucking little skull, dickwad.
I see people here bitching about the fact that it takes energy to rpoduce hydrogen, and that that energy usually comes from oil, or when the poster is "enlightened", nuclear energy. I'm surprised, really, although I shouldn't be, that yet again, no one bothered to read the article about BMW working with Shell to produce automatic filling stations with solar power.
And solar power is where it's at. In these times of global warming and increasing desertification, there's really one source that provides energy constantly: The sun. I seriously doubt that the investements needed to get a solar powered economy up and running, with the power coming from all the huge deserts in the world, would be that huge.
It would be a boon for most Saharan countries, the Arabs once again, as well as basically anywhere there is a lot of sun.
All it requires is someone to get the ball rolling. And that's what I like about this BMW/Shell project. It's getting that ball rolling.
I think it's bullshit. I've had my hotmail account since 1997 and there's been no change to my account. I think that the MSN shill quoted in the article as saying that the accounts are being upgraded from the oldest to the newest is simply lying. That's not the way MS or MSN works. The way they probably are doing it is giving it to new sign ups in order to get people away from Gmail, and simply ignoring the rest. It's very easy for them to say, "Oh, because there are so many millions of hotmail accounts, we missed that one"
The guy in the ZDNet article makes a good point about how Microsoft is not above betraying partners. Sun is a competitor for Microsoft in the small to medium server arena, and Microsoft will in all likelyhood make sure that Sun doesn't get one little bit of marketshare that Microsoft would want. If Sun offers Windows on its low end x86 machines, then Microsoft would be in the position to use that against Sun's Sparc machines. (The usual paid for FUD "analyst studies"), and Sun wouldn't be able to do anything about because it would lose revenue otherwise.
I can put Sun's problem with it's Red Hat strategy in one word: Novell Ok, two words: Novell->SuSE Ok, ok, three words: Novell->SuSE->IBM
They had better watch their asses or else in some years time you will be able to hear this when discussing Sun: "Wasn't Sun that company that used to make purple servers?"
Slashdot Mirror
The XBox2, which is based on the G5 PPC, uses G5 PowerMacs with a specially modifed WinNT (XP Kernel maybe?) for game development.
I don't know why Microsoft decided to go with PPC, although I suppose it has to do with the Altivec vector unit and the fact that the G5 is a damn fine CPU, better for graphics, but it means that PPC G5's might very well become cheaper in the near future (at least the older one in the XBox2) and it means that MS would not have that much difficulty to port the rest of Windows to the PPC and it also means that game developers would have slightly less hassle and more experience developing for Mac OSX.
But would Microsoft actually port and sell the whole Windows over to PPC? I don't think so. Who would buy it? People who use PPC now use it because that's what Macs come with and what Mac OSX runs on. If they wanted to use Windows, they would buy a PC. I doubt that the entire software market would suddenly jump at this, given that the major thrust is in x86 Windows software.
In any case, I am fantastically happy with OSX on my PowerBook, so Microsoft can do what it wants.
Go and try a Mac with OSX out for a few days. Then come back and look at that word "debatedly". I was a windows syadmin. No thanks.
One guy further down asked what Apple would do since its marketshare is so small, even though its total userbase is constantly growing.
Most of us who use Macs and PCs know how good the Mac and Mac OSX is. For us, the people who know both sides (and who really doesn't these days?) there is no question.
But the guy raised my interest because I wondered what kind of strategy Apple keeps up its sleeve in case a crisis hits such as the one in the mid 90's. What products and goals would Apple have if large Mac software developers started deserting the platform for Windows or perhaps even Linux in the future? (For instance a lot of Games studios now produce Linux versions, which they didn't before and even Macromedia is considering developing for Linux). What would Apple do if MS stopped producing Office for Mac OSX and Adobe decided that it isn't worth the money develpoing for Mac?
I think Apple under Jobs considers this scenario very often in designing products.
In order to ease the dependance on pure Mac sales, not that Macs will die anytime in the next decade or so, if ever (Dvorak, you clown, where are you?), I think Apple started the semi-independant iPod and iTMS products that, although loosely coupled with Macs in marketing and software, appeal to a far broader base of customers than Macs do. This division is so successful that it even allows Apple to use it as a marketing device for the new iMac.
I think Apple spends more time than possibly any other company in both product R&D and market segment R&D. I don't know any other company that makes as much effort to cater for its various market segments, with the iMacs and iBooks for consumers and education, PowerMacs and PowerBooks for professionals and XServes and XRaid for enterprise, with especially ahuge amount of effort being put into the i- range to make them more appealing than your run of the mill PC or laptop. Added to this the huge amount of research that they must put into OSX R&D in order to keep it as simple, stable and powerful AND goodlooking as it is.
Then there's Apple's software line, ranging from the extremely well thought out and simple but powerful iLife apps, to the professional video and audio applications in whose markets Apple almost dominates. And even the very nice small business database Filemaker belongs to Apple, to round things off.
But back to the main subject. What does Apple do to stave off Microsoft and Adobe desasters? In the first case, Apple has a not very well kept secret that it keeps OSX compiled and up to date for x86. This mere fact is probably enough to keep Microsoft on its toes and keep the Office version for PPC rolling. The strange CherryOS post of yesterday showed just how much interest there would be for OSX on x86. If I put on my tin-foil hat I would be nice a conspiracy minded and say that the CherryOS debacle would be in Apple's inerests in order to simply show MS how muuch damage Apple could do to MS' marketshare.
Then, anyone who's been watching the development of OSX 10.4 Tiger knows about the CoreImage and CoreVideo technolgies. Those two technologies allow developers to slowly start gnawing away at Adobe's domination in that market, by making it easy for graphics developers to make applications that now only Photoshop and Illustrator can do. Apple is extremely clever in doing this because it will be a slow process, one that Adobe won't notice and suddenly kill InDesign and PS and AI, until the competition slowly makes itself known, when it will be too late for Adobe to blackmail Apple the way Gates did in the 80's with Excell and Word forcing MacBasic out.
In doing this Apple is taking a page from Microsoft who orginally got its strong position by using developer power. (Ballmer didn't dance on stage for fun, you know. He really meant that)
I think Apple has an even rosier future than imagined.
But then again, maybe the new iPod with image capability will be an absolute dud, so you never know.
I don't think it's fair that you got modded down, unless you really meant to troll of course, which, in a Mac section of any forum will get you flamed quite quickly.
Let's look at it from the perspective of a few potential software developers, one small, i.e. shareware, one big, i.e. enterprise ERP and one in a specialised field, i.e graphics.
The case of the small developer: You only need to spend a small amount of time with the generally extremely low quality level and huge mass of sharware software available on download.com to notice that you are both right and wrong here. The huge marketshare of pc's means that the majority of shareware gets developed for Windows PC, BUT also the large majority of junk made by semi-incompetent developers. The market is so large and the competition so high, that as a sshareware devloper for Windows, your chances of making a buck and getting recognition are tiny.
The situation is very different for Mac OSX and Macs. Here, the avergae quality level is quite a bit higher, perhaps because the community being smaller, the word gets around quicker if something is a dud. The Mac shareware developer has a good chance of getting recognition and even money for his work, because the market is smaller.
Let's look at the enterprise market: Apple now makes both servers and raid storage solutions, both of which offer excellent value and performance and very good management tools. These products are obviously selling, both in Apple's traditional media market, where video and sound demand these products as they fit in with Apple's other strengths in this area, and in other enterprises where they fit in perfectly with Linux and Unix servers. The fact that Oracle, Sybase and SAP offer their products for the Mac now shows that the interest is there.
There are indeed corporations using OSX, often because the TCO is very low, the quality high, and because OSX is so extremely flexible to fit in in mixed environments, and because it supports traditional Unix enterprise systems very well (The Java integration is the best available)
Last, let's look at traditional niche markets, such as designers and media industries. This is one area where Apple lost a lot of marketshare in the late 90's and early 2000's because OS9 was unstable and OSX 10.0/10.1 so slow and had so little software available. Many designers moved to Windows and the PC marketshare of Adobe and Macromedia etc, shot up.
That situation has now stopped and people are moving back to the Mac because of its superior colour management and stability and flexibility and simplicity. In video and sound, Apple competes extremely well with its own applications and Adobe, Macromedia, Alias, Quark etc have all now overcome the initial problems and their apps are again second to none on the Mac. I am willing to wager money that media types are simply more productive in a Mac environment, than in a PC environment. I used to be a Windows sysadmin, so I know what I'm talking about.
And then there's the new market of people switching to Macs from PC's. The iMac and iBook are made for these people. A simple, well performing, rugged, stable, virus and problem free, stable computer and OS makes friends on its own.
In fact, about the only market where Apple does have difficulties is in the traditional medium business where there is basically only MSOffice and a few servers, or where there are applications which have never had Mac equivalents, such as AutoCAD and engineering applications.
What would you say, perhaps, if in 5 to 10 years, Linux had captured 50% marketshare in the PC market? Would you also ask where the applications were now today? Or would you look at the growth in Linux in general.
As long as Apple keeps on growing, developers will keep on making apps for the platform, even, with time, specialised ones.
I'm certainly not worried.
Wall-Mart and Culture ......
Oil and Water
Heaven and Hell
Good and Bad
Right and Wrong
Black and White
On the other hand this is an excellent opprotunity for Apple and other online stores to compete in sectors where Wallmart simply does not stock the music or even have clue.
When can the rest of us adjust the trodes and jack in?
take a look at the poser in that forum making a big noise about this "wonderful emulator", the guy called DAG33K. Notice his English mistakes. Notice his location, "In da middle of da pacific". The do a whois on cherryos.com, and you get an address in Hawai. The tech contact, who is also the admin contact etc etc, is a guy called Arben Kryeziu, the same guy doing the video "demonstration", which you never get to actually see apart from an installation screen and some supposed OSX desktop, which looks very similar to PearPC. The guy's name is Albanian, and if you listen in that demonstration, he speaks with a thick accent, so my gues is that the poster on hardforum is the very same guy trying to pimp his warez.
I still think the guy is trying to fuck everyone for their money.
For one thing, I just did a couple of whois on cherryos.com, all of whose contacts are listed as arben kryeziu, whose email is given as arben@bumpnetworks.com. Do a whois on bumpnetworks.com (which is a run of the mill web development company according to its website) and you get all the tech contacts as arben@kryeziu.com, which is a simple holding site, obviously the guy's own.
Now, this Arben Kryeziu guy is the one in the, of all things, java video player on the video link site.
So this guy has time to run a web development company, be the tech and admin contacts for all the sites, and run a PPC emulation development outfit on the side? I seriously doubt it.
Not that it might be possible, who knows, but companies such as Connectix (now owned by Microsoft) spent literally years, getting their x86 emulators up to about 1/4 of the speed of the host PPC CPU. And this guy has done it on his own, with a tiny outfit in no time and with no news announcements, and got it to run at 3/4 the host x86 system? I doubt it again.
And then, he sells the whole thing for $50????? And only by electronic download???? With a PDF manual that closely resembles the PearPC effort???? Has anyone actually downloaded this and paid the guy his $50???? Has anyone seen it run???
Even in that weird video (why no wmv, why no real, why no quicktime?) where he supposedly "demonstrates" the application, you don't actually see it running.
My guess is that, if the application really does run, it is simply a PearPC wrapper and runs at around 1/10th or less of the host speed. (Notice the typical marketing "up to 80% of the host" x86 system?)
I have nothing against Albanians (Kryeziu is an albanian name, listen to the guy's accent), but I think the guy is trying to make a quick buck off the hopefuls who want Mac OSX but won't or can't buy a Mac.
We'll see when the first real reports come in of how and if this thing performs, but if it truly is what he claims it to be, which I seriously doubt, then he has one big hurdle and that is Apple's EULA, which states that Mac OSX is only allowed to be run on Apple branded hardware.
Apple cannot do this. For multiple reasons that have nothing to do with technology and everything to do with marketshare and market forces.
.Net stuff, but here again, who would actually buy this? .Net is far enough advanced that it is the king of Windows and no big shops would move to Cocoa.
If Apple were to switch, it would start at point zero, with no applications, just as it did in 2000 with the Mac OSX public beta. It would not even have the Classic layer to run the old Mac apps, although that is less of a concern these days. These days Mac OSX on x86 would either have to have some very fancy easy to use WINE like environment, so that Windows users could use their current apps until OSX equivalents came along, or run Windows in a VMWare like environment.
Also, you would have to kiss MSOffice for OSX goodbye. You, as an OOo user might think this is insignificant, but it sure as hell isn't to those who use it.
Then, there would be the hardware problem that people like the article author always always forget. Apple makes most of its money from hardware. Do you think Apple would still make as much money and sell as many units if the OS was able to run on x86 commmodity hardware? Obviously not. That would force the price of the OS up. How many newbies would then pay for the OS?
Talking of newbies, how many of the gazillions of windows users who currently have never heard of OSX, or think OSX is still the same crap they used back in 1995, will fork over $100 plus for an OS without Office, without games and without other pro applications? I seriously doubt that Apple's pro apps like FCP and Logic alone are enough to sustain the platform, not to mention the intensely pissed off current users on PPC.
That means that the only people buying OSX on x86 would be geeky types like those here who are so fucking stingy (and I don't mean poor - I'm poor yet I use a Mac because it's so good) that they bitch about a $100 price difference in a computer. The vast majority would not use OSX or even think about switching.
Apple's only recourse in this case would be to make an x86 mainboard, using a special OpenFirmware with no bios, such as current Mac mainboards do, to make it incompatible with other x86 machines so that it would not encroach on Microsoft's Windows territory too much and so that it would keep users from using other x86 hardware.
And the advantage of that over its PPC platform is right around zero, so why even think about it.
Apple could have done this exactly once in the past. Back in 2000 when everyone was started to switch to OSX and there were no OSX applications for the new OS, Apple could have gone with a proprietry x86 motherboard and kept on producing a few last PPC machines until their classic MacOS users had switched and there were enough new OSX apps. That time passed as soon as new apps started coming out for OSX and people started investing money in them.
The only thing Apple could possibly do to make money on x86 these days is possibly port its Cocoa frameworks and devtools over to windows to compete against MS'
I am so so fucking tired of some one night wonders asking this same stupid question, when it is so obvious that it is just a geek cheapskate wet dream.
I can understand full well why Apple zealots are hated (I use a Mac myself btw,) because I am starting to get so pissed off with Microsoft fans getting on the fucking defensive and ranting and raving at slashdot, once again, everytime a MS security bug crops up here or when MS does yet another crazy business action.
For crying out loud, if you are so blind that you can't see that
A) slashdot, in general favours Linux and opensource products, and
B) slashdot does actually post interesting article on MS every now and again when MS really does innovate, then...
fuck off back to Winsupersite where Paul "I sold my butthole to Bill" Thurrot will be glad to have you.
Or are you drawn to this site because its actually interesting?
In this article, (sorry in German), they describe the process and the reasoning. Some highlights:
Now, I know one could do a Wintel environment with Citrix MetaFrame, in order to reduce clientside upgrade problems, but Citrix would require a larger backend.
My title above is a disclaimer. I am a Mac user, and only use a PC via VNC to view webpages in IE. That said, I found this article pretty straightforward about the pros and cons of IE and alternative browsers from a Windows point of view. The guy make valid points about centralised management of IE vs. the standalone path of Firefox et al that would be a question in mainly Windows environments.
That said, all of these problems can be overcome by a good admin who thinks creatively, and I seriously doubt that much active development is going into ActiveX using sites these days.
There are a number of things I'd like to say about this article in the NYT, the American Public(TM) and GWB's policies.
/. where the same old emotional debate between faithful right and cynical left rages. In short, I think it will have a serious impact on GW's reelection chances, but that's possibly a good thing.
Firstly, what amazes me, truly, on a website meant for above average technically interested people is that almost no comments have been made on the actual technical contents of the NYT article itself as regards the Aluminium tubes and their suitability for use as Uranium centrifuges. The NYT went out of its way to explain to the layman (along with a very good graphic) how the tubes fit the use of small tactical rockets and were totally unsuitable, without extra manufacturing, for the use as centrifuges. I mean, come one, 60 000 tubes for centrifuges! Even the USA, the world's largest nuclear power, doesn't have or need that many centrifuges! It would be nice if people noticed this fact and then took note of how almost the whole American establishment basically went along with the analysis of ONE man (The guy called Joe), ignoring the majority's dissenting voices!
Secondly, this NYT article may well have been timed to be a political time bomb, since it appeared now, after the TV debate, but the NYT, to give it some credit (which the right does not do), explains very well in the same article that it itself was as guilty as almost everyone else in ignoring the evidence available during the highly emotional bullshit campaign that Bush and Co. conducted in the run up to the war. The NYT, for all its failings and left leaning political bias, has explained in a number of editorials that it made a mistake. How often does the favourite of the right, Fox news, do that?
Thirdly, I've seen a number of comments here about what the real motivations were for going to war, be they oil, control of the middle east, liberating Iraq, bring democracy to the middle east, furthering an agenda in wake of the 9/11 attacks. etc. My answer would be the Falklands War in 1982, when the right wing military Junta in Argentina used the issue of the Falklands, by invading them, to bring the nation behind them in the rush of patriotism in wartime, when they were politically starting to lose support. I think that the main reason for this war was a domestic political agenda in the USA, used by the very intelligent people behind Bush, such as Karl Rove, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld etc, in order to bring the American people in line with their way of thinking by starting a war. I feel most sorry for Collin Powell, who despite his actual opinion, suffered the consequences for being true to his President. I hope he gets a decent job in the future where he is repsected and not treated as the house nigger.
Fourthly, despite all the nuances of the aluminium tubes, such as the fact that this was not unknown in 2002 and the faked yellow cake uranium from Niger, none of which stopped anyone from believing the most astounding things about Iraq at the time, such as Iraqs supposed ICBMs capable of threatening the USA, I think that this article will be treaed by the American Public as being new and novel. I seriously doubt the ability of the public to distinguish the facts, and I am buoyed in this opinion by the comments here on
Firstly, I fully agree with those who note that these are so called contingency plans. It would be incompetent for the US military not to have them. Every nation of a suitable size (and above all, budget) has contingency plans. China, Russia, the UK, France, India, Pakistan... They all have plans about what to do when the shit hits the fan.
However, and this is the sticking point, the comment in the article about the consequences of the US building a large anti-satellite and possible space-earth bombarment weaponry is that the mere existence of such weaponry forces potential targeted nations to respond with their own ability to target US satellities, and this is precisely what China is doing.
With the demise of the USSR there was only the USA left in terms of superpowers, and the USA hasn't exactly been humble about using that power of late, and the potential danger that the US would strike at Chinese or European satellites will force those countries to look for ways of defending their property in space.
While I doubt that the EU will ever have enough of a budget or the will to build a defense against the US, I am positively certain that China has both the will and the budget to do so.
China also has one big advantage on its side and that is time. The Chinese are under no pressure to match the USA today, since they will not risk going to war with the USA right now, but they have the time to develop a large arsenal of space weapons and deploy it over time without the huge seesaw problem of US budgets going up and down depending on who is in power.
Most likely I think the Chinese are aiming for a long term matching of US military capability, in the region of 20 to 40 years from now, and the chances are that they will achieve it too, simply because they have, due to an authoritarian system, the ability to focus on long term projects that the US doesn't.
I think that eventually, towards the middle of this century, the Chinese will probably have the role of second superpower that the USSR used to have.
I have no idea how successful it would be, but wouldn't simple mirror shades (all the rage in the 80's) or mirrored windshields offer fairly good protection against visible wavelengths of laser light?
true, I got mixed up a bit (I don't actually speak Zulu, but had it in school about 27 years ago) with the word Nkosi (don't ask me why), but I sort of hazily remember from school that Ubuntu is the plural of person, or was that abantu?
The only reason for this effort in Russia, and the similar one in Thailand, is that Microsoft is trying to stop OEMs from selling Linux. Microsoft knows full well that no one in Thailand or Russia (or China or Indonesia or Vietnam or anywhere else not in the western mode of big bucks) is going to pay for Microsoft's software. This is pretty obvious because a full 97% of the world's population a) can't afford Windows anyway and b)have other things to worry about in life.
No, this is simply a measure to pacify the respective governments that have been using Linux as a bargaining tool (Thailand did this) by threatening to start state sponsored pro-OSS programmes, as well as being a measure to keep OEM's from selling computers without any OS whatsoever or Linux.
While the OEMs probably don't give a flying fuck what OS is on the system so long the customers buy their stuff, and governments will be satisfied until their clueless newbie IT departments finally realise what a bunch of shit this is, I think this might actually backfire hugely in Microsoft's face.
Think of it: Third world countries will tend to get highly offended when they realise that they have been given a useless POS when what they wanted was a cheaper version of the real thing. Microsoft will say, "Yes, but this way you get to stay Legal(TM)" and we won't try to get the US government to threaten you for using our stolen innovations. To this the third world government says, "Well, we really like Ubuntu Linux anyway, sucker".
The name Ubuntu is zulu, a South African language, for God. The distro is compiled and managed by South African Soyuz tourist millionaire Mark Shuttleworth (Hey boet) and his company Canonical. There has been quite a bit of movement in South Africa over the past couple of years to get Linux into schools and small businesses, although the vast majority are still using pirated versions of Windows or whatever came with their computer.
This distro, from my point of view (I'm South African), makes excellent sense for people wanting to install Linux and basically just get up and working without having to fight through masses of obscure applications. It provides what 90% of average computer users need and use on their computers:Office productivity, mail, browser, messaging, graphics and media player. That's it, no fluff.
This distro is exactly what is needed (once they sort out the various bugs) for a home user or small business to get started. Given that there has only been a move to competition in the telcom business in South Africa this month, and that SA has had the world's highest rates out, wireless networking has not been a major feature in the SA IT landscape up until now, so I think that not working detection of Wireless NICs is not a major priority at the moment.
I'm really proud about this, as it gives SA its first distro aimed at the country.
I respect the decision of the two companies (not several as claimed by the submitting astroturfer) to switch back to windows, but there are some huge flaws in both decisions that make me wonder wehther this is not some piece of MS funded anti-Linus FUD.
Firstly, the first company, in NY, claimed, that they switched to Linux and Orcale nine years ago. I'm not sure about the timing but Orcale had, AFAIK, no Linux offerings that long ago. It's possible that the database backend came about when Orcale offered it's first Linux versions back in 2000, around 4 years ago.
If the guy was worried about the lack of Linux know-how in his company, why on earth did they even go for Linux that far back, in 1995, when Linux was nowhere near as stable and powerful as it is now? Why didn't the guy look for Linux expertise in the mean time. You cannot tell me, that by 2002, when they started their move back to Windows, that profeesional services, both for Linux (Red Hat, SuSE pro services) and Oracle (who by 2002 had moved their entire development over to Linux and for which there would have been mountains of support available). By 2002 there were multiple DB's available, MySQL had started becoming very powerful, PostgreSQL was there, and DB2 had been migrated by IBM which is no slouch when it comes to support and services.
To me it sounds like an extremely incompetent manager who went with the ASP hype in 1999 and 2000 only to get burned when it collapsed, instead of recognising, as he should have and as a competent manager would have, that the ASP model involves big risks. Why on earth didn't he just look for another one with better financials (did he even bother to look how well the ASP was doing?)
Pathetic.
Secondly, in the case of the second company, it sounds similar or even worse. The fact that their system (inhouse aparently) had major design issues. "Not designed to support x transactions per second in the programme" sounds suspiciously like a scalability problem that could have been either fixed by a reasonable programmer, or by a distributed system.
His concerns about security is pure and utter FUD given that 2002 was the year of Nimda and Code Red. The fact that the system went down for a day points to slackers not taking into account failover solutions or backup systems.
None of these desicisions say anything about Linux, but they do say a lot about the incompetence of managers and the willingness of certain so called IT news outlets to act as paid mouthpieces for a company in Redmond.
That way it will be in one of 3 places, a firing range, a foreign country, or an enemy of the US.
You forgot about number four: Inside friendly soldiers, killing them softly with your love.
In the Gulf War in 1991, the war in Bosnia in 1995 and Kosovo in 1999, Depleted Uranium ammo was used....
And ended up making many many friendly Nato soldiers sick and numerous soldiers died of cancer. Thhis has been the cause of huge outrage in Italy, for example where it has been documented that about 12 soldiers died after having been exposed to the remains of DU ammo.
Problem is that DU ammo vaporises on high velocity collision contact, and the resulting fine Uranium powder is a bit worse than a carton of Marlboros a day would be.
And I wish little (grown) boys like you would fucking grow up and get a fucking clue. You might think you're a big strong man talking about nuking everything, but the effects of what you want never entered your fucking little skull, dickwad.
I see people here bitching about the fact that it takes energy to rpoduce hydrogen, and that that energy usually comes from oil, or when the poster is "enlightened", nuclear energy. I'm surprised, really, although I shouldn't be, that yet again, no one bothered to read the article about BMW working with Shell to produce automatic filling stations with solar power.
And solar power is where it's at. In these times of global warming and increasing desertification, there's really one source that provides energy constantly: The sun. I seriously doubt that the investements needed to get a solar powered economy up and running, with the power coming from all the huge deserts in the world, would be that huge.
It would be a boon for most Saharan countries, the Arabs once again, as well as basically anywhere there is a lot of sun.
All it requires is someone to get the ball rolling. And that's what I like about this BMW/Shell project. It's getting that ball rolling.
This story was posted by CowboyNeal six hours ago and IS STILL ON THE FRONT PAGE!!!!!
Timothy, the slashdot dupe king.
And slashdot would like people to pay for subscriptions of duplicated atricles....
I think it's bullshit. I've had my hotmail account since 1997 and there's been no change to my account. I think that the MSN shill quoted in the article as saying that the accounts are being upgraded from the oldest to the newest is simply lying. That's not the way MS or MSN works. The way they probably are doing it is giving it to new sign ups in order to get people away from Gmail, and simply ignoring the rest. It's very easy for them to say, "Oh, because there are so many millions of hotmail accounts, we missed that one"
The guy in the ZDNet article makes a good point about how Microsoft is not above betraying partners. Sun is a competitor for Microsoft in the small to medium server arena, and Microsoft will in all likelyhood make sure that Sun doesn't get one little bit of marketshare that Microsoft would want. If Sun offers Windows on its low end x86 machines, then Microsoft would be in the position to use that against Sun's Sparc machines. (The usual paid for FUD "analyst studies"), and Sun wouldn't be able to do anything about because it would lose revenue otherwise.
I can put Sun's problem with it's Red Hat strategy in one word:
Novell
Ok, two words:
Novell->SuSE
Ok, ok, three words:
Novell->SuSE->IBM
They had better watch their asses or else in some years time you will be able to hear this when discussing Sun: "Wasn't Sun that company that used to make purple servers?"