I figure that by the year 4011, Slashdot (or its analogue) will be posting stories about some dude claiming to have found the remains of the 3-kilometer-long "RMS Gigantic", as described in the popular tale by the ancient author called Spielberg.
(...and there will *still* be jokes about hot grits, jokes about Soviets, and the occasional goatse link. And people will still bitch about the new layout).
I remember back when I had a (work supplied) 386 running SCO Unix* - when they replaced it with a 486, I was allowed to keep the old beastie... so at my missus' insistence, I installed a dual-boot - Yggdrasil Linux (I know), with the other option being DOS and Windows 3.1. Had a crap modem on it (seriously, 2400 baud), but discovered that getting online wasn't so easy in 'doze... The Linux side gave me an easy SLIP connection and let me do what I wanted. To get the;doze side going online, a buddy coughed up an old copy of Trumpet Winsock for me. Worked online just fine after that (but hella slow until I replaced the modem w/ a 14.4k... took anywhere from 30 minutes for a typical website to load on 2400 baud:) ).
Anyrate, I figured I should cough up for it (yeah, 17 years later, but...) No idea what he was originally asking, else I'd just chip in that. Anyone know offhand?
* (the old, good SCO, not the Darl-flavored litigious bastards)
No matter how much criticism you'll hear about him, I wonder how many white American men, ages 21 to 45, wouldn't trade places with him right now.
...let's see......a guy actively destroying his job, hanging out with a pair of wannabe actress chicks that he calls "goddesses", and burning through what little reputation he has left in his industry. Oh, and about to face a legal evisceration, courtesy of his ex wife.
Umm, no thanks - you can have it. Even with the chicks? Your pecker will eventually go limp and sore from overuse and boredom, and the girls likely don't come cheap*. Besides, odds are perfect that they will likely desert him once the camera points somewhere else - and will definitely bail on him about a nanosecond after one of his checks bounce.
Sorry 'mano, but it doesn't take Miss Cleo to figure out where that boy is going to end up - broke, constantly in court, and toxic to any potential employer in the industry he lives in. Maybe they can warm up a guest MC slot for him in World's Dumbest, but I suspect that's about it for his future prospects.
You know? I think it would be fun if all of/. hunted down said YouTube videos and left comments on them... each one describing exactly (and in clear layman terminology) why Sony is wrong, should go out of business, etc.
I figure after the 10,000th one or so being read into public record, they might just get the hint.
"Many civilizations manage/d to live just fine and in a sustainable manner"
Err, by and large, no they didn't: Easter Island, Great Britain (a specific topic to seek is "oak trees"), the Anasazi, The Mayans, Ancient North Americans (see also the Mammoth and its fate), Ancient Egypt (numerous times), Babylonia/Assyria, Zimbabwe, The Incas, Timbuktu, Petra, Angkor Wat, etc etc etc... most of these groups/tribes/peoples happily tore whatever they could lay hands on (especially if a resource was limited), with the only real consumption governor being a lack of technology and/or skill to grab even more resources.
Many, many ancient cultures have suffered massive population crashes, resource over-use, stripping anything they could lay hands on, and in general dying off due to mis-managing their local ecosystems. Many of the civilizations I listed up there were discovered with a very small and ignorant population, yet had fantastically engineered structures rotting in their territories.
In fact, I daresay that old/ancient civilizations who lived in some form of harmony with their environment is the exception, not the norm. Those exceptions were folks like the Pre-colonial Australians, *some* North and South American tribes (after suffering population crashes), the Zulu, and a few others.
Some civilizations got lucky - The Romans and Greeks made out okay in this regard for two reasons: they simply kept expanding (taking in more resources), and they had engineering on their side to make maximum use of local resources (or bring them in) where they were limited. The Mongols made out in their time through sheer aggressive expansion. Others made out due to populations being kept low by war, famine, disease, or some other factor. Even Medieval Europe got an ecological breather by seeing 1/3 of its population die off thanks to Bubonic Plague.
Let's face it - humans are not the type who automatically showed up with a sense of ecological balance. I daresay that the past 100 years mark the bare beginning of our learning how to do it - if only because we've realized as a species that there is no more unexplored bounty of resources that we can always pack up and move to.
Seriously, dude - this whole romantic myth of primitive humans happily living in some Disney-esque harmony with nature *never existed*. Primitive man was too damned busy keeping themselves and their families fed, warm, and safe from predators to stop and think about the larger environmental picture.
For Mr. Cro Magnon, if things tapped out locally, he'd just pack up and move his family/clan wholesale to some other place where the resources were. Easter Island is a perfect example of what happened to a primitive but technologically-savant civilization when there was no means to do that moving (by the time they realized there was a problem, they'd blown the island's wood supply to the point where they couldn't even make a reliable seaworthy boat). The result? The whole cvilization simply began a long, slow downward spiral towards starvation and intra-tribal warfare. By the time European explorers arrived, they found a couple dozen half-wild, half-starved, and wholly ignorant natives left, who couldn't even explain how those big-assed stone carvings all over the island actually got there.
It has taken a combination of technology and knowledge all this time to figure this whole ecological balance thing out to a usable level, over thousands of years, in fits and starts. I tell you that it'll take even more knowledge and technology just to figure out how to do it *right*. I posit that it will require humans to live in space (or undersea, or in some other relatively self-contained and self-sufficient colony) before we perfect it to any sort of reliable science.
Ditto what mallyn said - aI remember resurrecting a 2004-era Sony Vaio, and the one place where I could find a hard drive bracket... was Free Geek.
I intend to hit it up when time permits again so that I can have a go at replacing the trackpad (the stupid paper cable broke). Otherwise, it sits around as a low-power home server, and with an external mouse and USB external HDD, it works rather well.:)
...all from one guy (Charlie Miller), who does nothing much beyond his level best to hunt down any vuln in OSX, and only manages to do it with semi-local machine access.
Doesn't quite jibe with the real world, where you only find the odd and rather blatant trojan for OSX (and trust me - if you get infected by one of those, you're also likely the type to give your bank account number to guys in Nigeria...)
She's been here two months... I was probably grousing more than anything else.
OTOH, if she's still just as lost at the six month mark, I'll probably have to replace her, sucks though it may be (which is why I'm still pissed at HR about it:/ ).
Yep, and finding those able to "hit the ground" running is tough. Matching lists of skills, or worse, certifications, is only going to get you sort-of-close, at best.
Indeed. I had to literally badger the CIO once to get a requirements list down to a couple of vital must-haves, and (as compromise) to shove the rest into optional nice-to-haves. Took way too long to pound it into him that few living humans would have the skillsets he wanted, and those who did would command a salary 2x higher than his.
A carefully crafted examination, designed to evaluate just how deep is a candidates skill in each of the required categories is a must.
Agreed. I kept a Linux VM (with a pile of bogus services on it) sitting around for the sole purpose of testing candidates until we got new admins (until they were hired, I was basically it... and it sucked being an Oracle DBA's bitch on top of the usual workload.:) )
Not long ago, we hired another IT generalist (we're a small company wherein the IT stafff must wear many hats). He was not at all deep in the technologies we relied on the most, but he was very good with others. More importantly, he had not just a willingness, but a genuine desire to learn the other stuff. That has made all the difference.
I keep nodding my head a lot, damn you.:)
We were a small but agile staff who built up the system from greenfield (I was their third IT employee hire overall, and for the longest time there was only three of us as admins - one for networking, one for storage/backup/some services, and I got everything else and tied it all together - servers/architecture/infrastructure). Now we're shifting to a staff sufficient to actually maintain the system in a sane fashion. We're up to 9 ops people now, with two additional slots yet to be filled, and now have an actual help desk of 12 individuals to boot.
It's kind of nice to have only five different things to keep a brain working on at any given day now, and to look at long-term architecture (with actual project planning now!), not just the initial get-them-ready-by-deadline-or-else-things-get-expensive.:)
Again, the point is that the laundry list was useless. It took a much more involved evaluation to find the gem in the pile. Worth every penny of the time and effort involved
Yep... it's common thing with smaller departments to get multi-function people, especially in a start-up phase. When FTE slots are tight, consultants are expensive, and time is often short, it's a *very* common mistake to try and pile it on per person... understandable, but a mistake nonetheless.
Nowadays, I can almost reliably point out a small ulcer-generating IT job just by the laundry list of skills required for the position.:)
if you need "I need folks who are able to hit the ground running" you don't hire new graduates you hire old hands who have a few years of experience. This is just the old whining of companies not wanting to pay for training.
That's the funny part; each employee is *required* to take ongoing training that the company pays for (including travel, per diem, etc) - this includes me (who got saddled with fscking PMP cert training of all things). Also, with Intel fabs and R&D facilities in the (literal) neighborhood, plus multiple semiconductor companies nearby who have no scruples about sniping for talent, we do indeed pay for the experience - we have no choice.
The sad part is, often all that we have to pick from are graduates... who more often than not don't know jack. We still need the help, and waiting six months to a year to get it is tough to do (most of our new hires come from outside the area... as I did).
Replace "IT" in your sentences with "HR", and you'd have a bit more accuracy.;)
Having done a lot of hiring recently, with sane requirements, I have found it tough going sometimes to find the right candidate. Sure, there were folks with tons of experience. There were folks with amazing degrees. The problem is, there was too much missing in the ability and initiative department. I need folks who are able to hit the ground running (we're kind of lean, and babysitting only makes things tougher - and I know I'm not in the only IT department built this way).
One of our hires I had zero input on, and the result was someone who, while very kind and very eager, requires a shitload of hand-holding, even for a junior admin. She has a degree, but little experience in the actual portions of her job duties - yes, she knows Windows, but barely beyond the desktop stage ("...thanks, HR - you fucktards").:/
Point is, it's a balancing act. You have to set sane requirements, but you do have to have people who are confident, and able to get on with the job after a short period of finding out where everything is.
If Apple announced this, world+dog would deride them for the app restriction, claiming long and loud how 'Lord Jobs' is keeping tight rein over the 'peasants' in his 'domain'.
If RIM Announced this, world+dog would collectively yawn, save for some folks who would stand back in astonishment that the Blackberry actually had apps*
If Google announced this, world+dog would think it was normal, and point to that 20% thing they have.
--
Personally, I see it as Microsoft casting about to bolster its struggling product in any way that it can. They're having a pretty rough go of it, judging by the numbers so far. To give you an idea, I'm willing to wager that WP7 still has more phones in the channel than in customer hands... and there's very little prospect so far that WP 7 will do much more than eke out a presence this year, if they're lucky.
From a business standpoint, a revenue stream of $30-100 dollars per update per machine every 6-months seems better strategic plan to me than $100-150 per new OS per machine every 2-3 years. Perhaps Microsoft should take more than just UI design ideas from Apple and the linux distros.
Every six months?
You could've been less obvious with your trolling, especially when one considers that OSX 10.6 came out in 2009, 10.5 came out in 2007, 10.4 came out in *2005*, and 10.3 came out in 2003. Come to think of it, it's the same timetable that Windows used to keep (until that long hiatus between XP and Vista).
That's some screwball "every 6-months" schedule you got there, sport.;)
It would have been there, but it would have been a whole lot slower. Way slower, IMHO.
Imagine something like the iPod coming out just this year, instead of 10 years ago. Imagine the RIAA going even more apeshit (yeah, I know) and keeping the music biz locked down to where digital music was either illegal, or locked down under so much DRM that it would have been nearly impossible to use. Imagine smartphones still being over-priced and slow piles of crap, with the useful models being hella expensive, and apps being distributed (if at all) under carrier lockdown. Imagine still having to use tablets with a stylus, crap specs, crappier battery life, and all of them still running Windows.
I know full well that others would have filled the void, certainly. Problem is, they would have been very slow about it, and innovation would come in fits and starts, with Microsoft running the show (that, or doing its best to ruin the show if it couldn't get a piece of the action - see also netbooks when those all first came out running Linux - notice how all the sudden Microsoft got all wonky with the licensing all the sudden, sometimes threatening vendors outright?).
Apple expertise combined with Sun's might have resulted in a new, easier-to-use class of workstations.
...which would have done bupkis for the consumer side, and would have cost a mint.
I think that was the whole genius of how Apple did it - they have an almost slavish devotion to how the consumer uses their products, and pretty much gave up on the business/enterprise side of things, outside of a few feints and probes here and there (e.g. XServe). They found a whole side of computing and electronics that most OEMs only half-assed paid attention to, and leveraged it to rather enormous success.
Slashdot Mirror
I figure that by the year 4011, Slashdot (or its analogue) will be posting stories about some dude claiming to have found the remains of the 3-kilometer-long "RMS Gigantic", as described in the popular tale by the ancient author called Spielberg.
(...and there will *still* be jokes about hot grits, jokes about Soviets, and the occasional goatse link. And people will still bitch about the new layout).
It originally comes from these guys, back when they still did print
I remember back when I had a (work supplied) 386 running SCO Unix* - when they replaced it with a 486, I was allowed to keep the old beastie... so at my missus' insistence, I installed a dual-boot - Yggdrasil Linux (I know), with the other option being DOS and Windows 3.1. Had a crap modem on it (seriously, 2400 baud), but discovered that getting online wasn't so easy in 'doze... The Linux side gave me an easy SLIP connection and let me do what I wanted. To get the ;doze side going online, a buddy coughed up an old copy of Trumpet Winsock for me. Worked online just fine after that (but hella slow until I replaced the modem w/ a 14.4k... took anywhere from 30 minutes for a typical website to load on 2400 baud :) ).
Anyrate, I figured I should cough up for it (yeah, 17 years later, but...) No idea what he was originally asking, else I'd just chip in that. Anyone know offhand?
* (the old, good SCO, not the Darl-flavored litigious bastards)
Even funnier... you could use the exact same trick on Windows NT 4.0's trial CD and do just as fine.
*sigh*... I know, I know.
There was once a time when trolling was once an art form.
Sadly, those days have passed, and most of us grew up. :(
No matter how much criticism you'll hear about him, I wonder how many white American men, ages 21 to 45, wouldn't trade places with him right now.
...let's see... ...a guy actively destroying his job, hanging out with a pair of wannabe actress chicks that he calls "goddesses", and burning through what little reputation he has left in his industry. Oh, and about to face a legal evisceration, courtesy of his ex wife.
Umm, no thanks - you can have it. Even with the chicks? Your pecker will eventually go limp and sore from overuse and boredom, and the girls likely don't come cheap*. Besides, odds are perfect that they will likely desert him once the camera points somewhere else - and will definitely bail on him about a nanosecond after one of his checks bounce.
Sorry 'mano, but it doesn't take Miss Cleo to figure out where that boy is going to end up - broke, constantly in court, and toxic to any potential employer in the industry he lives in. Maybe they can warm up a guest MC slot for him in World's Dumbest, but I suspect that's about it for his future prospects.
* take the pun as you will. :)
"...stupid git."
They're more than welcome to ban my IP addy... I'm sure my Wii would have a pretty hard time getting into PSN even without a ban. :/
You know? I think it would be fun if all of /. hunted down said YouTube videos and left comments on them... each one describing exactly (and in clear layman terminology) why Sony is wrong, should go out of business, etc.
I figure after the 10,000th one or so being read into public record, they might just get the hint.
No need for modification there.
As a bonus, you can use it to spackle any cracked re-entry shield tiles.
There's no problem with running Firefox or an alternative browser alongside IE6 installed..
Technically, no problem. Business-wise (read: clueless PHB policy-wise), sadly the answer is still often that there is still a problem.
Well, poop... seems that one's out of date. OTOH, there seems to be a lot of others out there as well
There are already a few third-party (for a fee) options out there, or if you have firefox, perhaps this add on for it may do the job for you.
"Many civilizations manage/d to live just fine and in a sustainable manner"
Err, by and large, no they didn't: Easter Island, Great Britain (a specific topic to seek is "oak trees"), the Anasazi, The Mayans, Ancient North Americans (see also the Mammoth and its fate), Ancient Egypt (numerous times), Babylonia/Assyria, Zimbabwe, The Incas, Timbuktu, Petra, Angkor Wat, etc etc etc... most of these groups/tribes/peoples happily tore whatever they could lay hands on (especially if a resource was limited), with the only real consumption governor being a lack of technology and/or skill to grab even more resources.
Many, many ancient cultures have suffered massive population crashes, resource over-use, stripping anything they could lay hands on, and in general dying off due to mis-managing their local ecosystems. Many of the civilizations I listed up there were discovered with a very small and ignorant population, yet had fantastically engineered structures rotting in their territories.
In fact, I daresay that old/ancient civilizations who lived in some form of harmony with their environment is the exception, not the norm. Those exceptions were folks like the Pre-colonial Australians, *some* North and South American tribes (after suffering population crashes), the Zulu, and a few others.
Some civilizations got lucky - The Romans and Greeks made out okay in this regard for two reasons: they simply kept expanding (taking in more resources), and they had engineering on their side to make maximum use of local resources (or bring them in) where they were limited. The Mongols made out in their time through sheer aggressive expansion. Others made out due to populations being kept low by war, famine, disease, or some other factor. Even Medieval Europe got an ecological breather by seeing 1/3 of its population die off thanks to Bubonic Plague.
Let's face it - humans are not the type who automatically showed up with a sense of ecological balance. I daresay that the past 100 years mark the bare beginning of our learning how to do it - if only because we've realized as a species that there is no more unexplored bounty of resources that we can always pack up and move to.
Seriously, dude - this whole romantic myth of primitive humans happily living in some Disney-esque harmony with nature *never existed*. Primitive man was too damned busy keeping themselves and their families fed, warm, and safe from predators to stop and think about the larger environmental picture.
For Mr. Cro Magnon, if things tapped out locally, he'd just pack up and move his family/clan wholesale to some other place where the resources were. Easter Island is a perfect example of what happened to a primitive but technologically-savant civilization when there was no means to do that moving (by the time they realized there was a problem, they'd blown the island's wood supply to the point where they couldn't even make a reliable seaworthy boat). The result? The whole cvilization simply began a long, slow downward spiral towards starvation and intra-tribal warfare. By the time European explorers arrived, they found a couple dozen half-wild, half-starved, and wholly ignorant natives left, who couldn't even explain how those big-assed stone carvings all over the island actually got there.
It has taken a combination of technology and knowledge all this time to figure this whole ecological balance thing out to a usable level, over thousands of years, in fits and starts. I tell you that it'll take even more knowledge and technology just to figure out how to do it *right*. I posit that it will require humans to live in space (or undersea, or in some other relatively self-contained and self-sufficient colony) before we perfect it to any sort of reliable science.
Ditto what mallyn said - aI remember resurrecting a 2004-era Sony Vaio, and the one place where I could find a hard drive bracket... was Free Geek.
I intend to hit it up when time permits again so that I can have a go at replacing the trackpad (the stupid paper cable broke). Otherwise, it sits around as a low-power home server, and with an external mouse and USB external HDD, it works rather well. :)
...err, "hacker", singular. Charlie Miller.
See also, Pwn2Own results.
...all from one guy (Charlie Miller), who does nothing much beyond his level best to hunt down any vuln in OSX, and only manages to do it with semi-local machine access.
Doesn't quite jibe with the real world, where you only find the odd and rather blatant trojan for OSX (and trust me - if you get infected by one of those, you're also likely the type to give your bank account number to guys in Nigeria...)
She's been here two months... I was probably grousing more than anything else.
OTOH, if she's still just as lost at the six month mark, I'll probably have to replace her, sucks though it may be (which is why I'm still pissed at HR about it :/ ).
Yep, and finding those able to "hit the ground" running is tough. Matching lists of skills, or worse, certifications, is only going to get you sort-of-close, at best.
Indeed. I had to literally badger the CIO once to get a requirements list down to a couple of vital must-haves, and (as compromise) to shove the rest into optional nice-to-haves. Took way too long to pound it into him that few living humans would have the skillsets he wanted, and those who did would command a salary 2x higher than his.
A carefully crafted examination, designed to evaluate just how deep is a candidates skill in each of the required categories is a must.
Agreed. I kept a Linux VM (with a pile of bogus services on it) sitting around for the sole purpose of testing candidates until we got new admins (until they were hired, I was basically it... and it sucked being an Oracle DBA's bitch on top of the usual workload. :) )
Not long ago, we hired another IT generalist (we're a small company wherein the IT stafff must wear many hats). He was not at all deep in the technologies we relied on the most, but he was very good with others. More importantly, he had not just a willingness, but a genuine desire to learn the other stuff. That has made all the difference.
I keep nodding my head a lot, damn you. :)
We were a small but agile staff who built up the system from greenfield (I was their third IT employee hire overall, and for the longest time there was only three of us as admins - one for networking, one for storage/backup/some services, and I got everything else and tied it all together - servers/architecture/infrastructure). Now we're shifting to a staff sufficient to actually maintain the system in a sane fashion. We're up to 9 ops people now, with two additional slots yet to be filled, and now have an actual help desk of 12 individuals to boot.
It's kind of nice to have only five different things to keep a brain working on at any given day now, and to look at long-term architecture (with actual project planning now!), not just the initial get-them-ready-by-deadline-or-else-things-get-expensive. :)
Again, the point is that the laundry list was useless. It took a much more involved evaluation to find the gem in the pile. Worth every penny of the time and effort involved
Yep... it's common thing with smaller departments to get multi-function people, especially in a start-up phase. When FTE slots are tight, consultants are expensive, and time is often short, it's a *very* common mistake to try and pile it on per person... understandable, but a mistake nonetheless.
Nowadays, I can almost reliably point out a small ulcer-generating IT job just by the laundry list of skills required for the position. :)
if you need "I need folks who are able to hit the ground running" you don't hire new graduates you hire old hands who have a few years of experience. This is just the old whining of companies not wanting to pay for training.
That's the funny part; each employee is *required* to take ongoing training that the company pays for (including travel, per diem, etc) - this includes me (who got saddled with fscking PMP cert training of all things). Also, with Intel fabs and R&D facilities in the (literal) neighborhood, plus multiple semiconductor companies nearby who have no scruples about sniping for talent, we do indeed pay for the experience - we have no choice.
The sad part is, often all that we have to pick from are graduates... who more often than not don't know jack. We still need the help, and waiting six months to a year to get it is tough to do (most of our new hires come from outside the area... as I did).
Replace "IT" in your sentences with "HR", and you'd have a bit more accuracy. ;)
Having done a lot of hiring recently, with sane requirements, I have found it tough going sometimes to find the right candidate. Sure, there were folks with tons of experience. There were folks with amazing degrees. The problem is, there was too much missing in the ability and initiative department. I need folks who are able to hit the ground running (we're kind of lean, and babysitting only makes things tougher - and I know I'm not in the only IT department built this way).
One of our hires I had zero input on, and the result was someone who, while very kind and very eager, requires a shitload of hand-holding, even for a junior admin. She has a degree, but little experience in the actual portions of her job duties - yes, she knows Windows, but barely beyond the desktop stage ("...thanks, HR - you fucktards"). :/
Point is, it's a balancing act. You have to set sane requirements, but you do have to have people who are confident, and able to get on with the job after a short period of finding out where everything is.
If Apple announced this, world+dog would deride them for the app restriction, claiming long and loud how 'Lord Jobs' is keeping tight rein over the 'peasants' in his 'domain'.
If RIM Announced this, world+dog would collectively yawn, save for some folks who would stand back in astonishment that the Blackberry actually had apps*
If Google announced this, world+dog would think it was normal, and point to that 20% thing they have.
--
Personally, I see it as Microsoft casting about to bolster its struggling product in any way that it can. They're having a pretty rough go of it, judging by the numbers so far. To give you an idea, I'm willing to wager that WP7 still has more phones in the channel than in customer hands... and there's very little prospect so far that WP 7 will do much more than eke out a presence this year, if they're lucky.
* (they do have apps BTW - I have/use a BB Bold).
One small problem with your post:
From a business standpoint, a revenue stream of $30-100 dollars per update per machine every 6-months seems better strategic plan to me than $100-150 per new OS per machine every 2-3 years. Perhaps Microsoft should take more than just UI design ideas from Apple and the linux distros.
Every six months?
You could've been less obvious with your trolling, especially when one considers that OSX 10.6 came out in 2009, 10.5 came out in 2007, 10.4 came out in *2005*, and 10.3 came out in 2003. Come to think of it, it's the same timetable that Windows used to keep (until that long hiatus between XP and Vista).
That's some screwball "every 6-months" schedule you got there, sport. ;)
It would have been there, but it would have been a whole lot slower. Way slower, IMHO.
Imagine something like the iPod coming out just this year, instead of 10 years ago. Imagine the RIAA going even more apeshit (yeah, I know) and keeping the music biz locked down to where digital music was either illegal, or locked down under so much DRM that it would have been nearly impossible to use. Imagine smartphones still being over-priced and slow piles of crap, with the useful models being hella expensive, and apps being distributed (if at all) under carrier lockdown. Imagine still having to use tablets with a stylus, crap specs, crappier battery life, and all of them still running Windows.
I know full well that others would have filled the void, certainly. Problem is, they would have been very slow about it, and innovation would come in fits and starts, with Microsoft running the show (that, or doing its best to ruin the show if it couldn't get a piece of the action - see also netbooks when those all first came out running Linux - notice how all the sudden Microsoft got all wonky with the licensing all the sudden, sometimes threatening vendors outright?).
Apple expertise combined with Sun's might have resulted in a new, easier-to-use class of workstations.
...which would have done bupkis for the consumer side, and would have cost a mint.
I think that was the whole genius of how Apple did it - they have an almost slavish devotion to how the consumer uses their products, and pretty much gave up on the business/enterprise side of things, outside of a few feints and probes here and there (e.g. XServe). They found a whole side of computing and electronics that most OEMs only half-assed paid attention to, and leveraged it to rather enormous success.