Sun actually competes very well on the throughput-based benchmarks.
Another thing is that Sun, on this front, should be more worried about IBM Power servers than anything, now that Alpha is easing out of the picture and Itanium still hasn't shown up for the party.
It's important to understand, also, that companies like Sun really are competing on multiple fronts. Low-end business: Microsoft and Linux. High-end business: IBM, HPAQ. HPC: Linux clusters, IBM, SGI, Itanium. Software: Microsoft, BEA, IBM. And so forth.
Check out the SPEC web site [spec.org]. The performance of Sun's SPARC processors is pathetic.
SPECint-for-SPECint, UltraSPARC has lagged in single-CPU performance for several years, now. This is not news to anyone. However, Sun clearly out-classes x86 in SMP. Sun actually competes very well on the throughput-based benchmarks. If you look slightly past the SPECint2000, you'll see the SPECrate benchmarks and things like TPC. Sun regulary makes press releases about world records for throughput (leap-frogging with people like IBM, HP, and SGI, etc.). Even in small SMP configs with 2 CPUs, 1GHz UltraSPARCs will easily match Pentium 4 of well over twice the clock for floating-point throughput. Throughput is more important for large simulations and other big tasks.
Don't forget that the Pentium 4, for example, focuses on marketing buzz. Theoretical benchmark this, theoretical bandwidth that, etc. without divulging the inherent limitation in the PC architecture (one AGP slot, non-linear SMP scaling, memory limit hacks, high power consumption, you name it).
...no 3rd party apps can cope with this fudging with their memory and CPUs...
I would expect the kernel makes this transparent to the apps, because the kernel schedules CPUs and allocates memory. Do you really know what you are talking about or are you a troll?
The original post hit upon a good question. How is Sun going to differentiate these from other vendors?
Even low-end Sun equipment still has genuine OpenBoot PROM, remote administration by dedicated Ethernet, generally very high-quality components, uniformity accross a class of machines (V480-V880-V1280, Sun Fire 3800-4800-6800-12K-15K, V210-V240, etc.), optional support of any degree, lots of compelling software (Solaris, Sun ONE), they generally aren't assholes (of course there will be exceptions--no flames),... and some people like purple computers.
Given that so many companies (e.g., Sun, IBM, and Dell) want to increase their 64-bit x86 offerings, Microsoft had better work double time to release 64-bit Windows.
Imagine the horror of loading 64-bit Windows up on a Sun-branded server. Would the server implode in some sort of confused fury? Would the little OpenBoot PROM chip see the coming plauge, crawl out of the enclosure, and run away to a blissful place where that MS monster can't go?
Sun Microsystems Inc. (NasdaqNM:SUNW - News) said it is considering using Advanced Micro Devices Inc.'s new Opteron chip in a server it expects to deliver to the market shortly, a spokesman said.
Either this is Sun-speak for "next year sometime", or they've really been engineering an Opteron-based server for some time and are now boxing it up for sale. Saying they're simply considering it doesn't add up in this case (unless they have super-EEs that can whip up a server with a new CPU from scratch in a couple months).
For some more elaboration on the "day care for teens" position, here's an article [paulgraham.com] that you may find interesting.
The comparision between teachers and prison wardens in the article is a good one. It makes sense why school society is so perverse given the artificial and unbalanced constraints placed on it. But I think it isn't just students; rather, the problems are layered all they way up to the school boards and the parents themselves.
What, like how to flip a burger? Seriously folks, I'm about a year away from getting a PhD in physics and it's all because of what I learned in high school. And if my parents hadn't watched me like a hawk and made sure I did my homework I would never have made it this far.
You are about to get a PhD, because 1) you have an aptitude for learning and abstraction and 2) you are self-motivated. If your experience in high school put you on track, then great, but that is probably more an exception than the rule. From what I've seen, public education is barely preparing students for entry-level (albeit valuable) jobs. You'd be suprised how many "professionals" I've worked with that can't even write a proper English sentence, yet they've lived in the U.S.A. their entire lives.
Well if someone has that much of your SSN, you probably have bigger security/privacy issues than someone simply looking up your grades.
It's as simple as filling out the paperwork at the doctor's office for a sick kid, where the receptionist is also a parent at the same school. Or perhaps a loan application/loan officer scenario. The level of trust on that computer system is now reduced to how much we trust basically everyone we do business with.
It is in the child's best interest to be watched like a hawk watching a mouse.
Sure it is. Now, not only does the child know that the parents don't believe them, but also that the parents don't believe in them.
A parent should be able to step in a teach the child a lesson that could be very dangerous to learn through trial and error.
And, thus, the child's experience might be limited to the parent's own experience.
Without a proper education you can seriously mess up your future.
School, for a long time, has never been the place to get that "proper educations." Face it, schools are day care for teenagers. Everything that is important to learn, people will learn it on their own. This has been true in my life and in the lives of people I talk to.
...if the parents routinely check up on you and your story always is the same as what they get from the school, then the trust will be in your honesty.
Do you really think schools give out straight stories, too? Teachers sometimes have agendas, are too busy, or are too incompetent to give you the information you need. This is the same scenario as "total information awareness" and those lame "I don't have anything to hide" excuses. The school's perception of the truth isn't always correct or even needed.
I'm 27
Do you remember what it was like in school? I've attended public, private, and residential secondary schools. In the public case, the school was hopeless and just a teenager farm. The private school was good, but only because it was fairly small (but not too small) so that there was a healthy level of parent-teacher-child interaction. The residential school had no respect for privacy due to overzealous over-loud parents, and the experience was pretty miserable. With curfews, strict-same-sex dorms, and lights-out times, the students were only allowed to grow "academically" and only on the school's terms, which is a pretty narrow definition of growth.
If your internal time is billed out at $50 per hour, and you want to save your company money, you aren't going to spend 4 hours to create a custom garbage collector just to save another 5k of RAM-- you're going to go out and buy another stick of memory.
This reminds me how broken many (most?) corporate accounting systems are. Where I work, for a stick of RAM (or software, or whatever), it would take at least four hours spread over a couple weeks just to figure out who to submit the request to, wait for our "purchasing agent" to get a couple signatures from bureaucrats, wait for the purchase order to work its way to the top of a pile, and finally get the RAM only to discover they ordered the wrong type. All the while, they'll happily pay for labor hours wasted on slow computers with inadequate RAM (for example).
Why there is such a fundamental disconnection between spending money on labor versus spending it on time-saving equipment and software leaves me questioning reality.
Solaris buys us performance on machines with more than 16 CPUs. But we don't have any!
Therein lies your problem. Forte, now Sun One Studio 7, is less than $1,000, and is a much better compiler for SPARC than GCC. It can target your specific type of CPU, if you want. IMO, using anything other than Sun's compiler on Sun's hardware is irresponsible. You can still use gmake and the other GNU tools (no lock-in required!), but just change those CC and CFLAGS variables to use cc and not gcc.
If you want more convincing, I would bet money that Sun doesn't use gcc for their SPEC submissions. Also, $1,000 is pretty damn cheap relative to the hardware iteself and payroll.
FWIW, Sun has a long-standing behavior of taking extra time to test new hardware, losing the cutting edge in favor of higher stability.
This appears to be true. For example, their UltraSPARC IIIi "just around the corner" press release was dated October, 2001.
It seems that the "less enlightened" folks out there stomp all over Sun for doing this and, then, take for granted that their server room seems to never cry for attention. Their hardware tends to be unusually durable, too, as I still see SPARCstation 5 or Ultra 1 workstations serving e-mail, dns, etc. without a hiccup.
Also, too many people are still on the Gigahertz craze. I find it interesting that Ace's Hardware runs off a single dinky 500MHz UltraSPARC IIe CPU. Even Slashdot appears to need only several obselete Pentium III and Xeons to handle a Slashdotting, literally, every moment of the day.
Sun. Any day of the week, any week of the year, and any year of the millenium.
SPARC, copyright SPARC International, Inc. Licenses $99.
Java, licensed by none other than Sun's biggest competitors: IBM, BEA, Microsoft (historically). Even GCC compiles Java source code and has some of the APIs implemented.
There's also OpenOffice.org (the significance of OpenOffice.org is only beginning to show itself), NFS (interoperability), System V/BSD/POSIX (again, interoperability), and membership on various WWW standards committees. If Sun is so closed, then why do Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD all run on every recent Sun architecture (sun4c, sun4m, and sun4u)? How do they manage to support an impressive number of Sun-branded peripherals?
Does Microsoft allow you to attach a bundled debugger (mdb) to the running system kernel? Did Microsoft allow downloads of the system source code that can be actually be compiled (Sun did this with Solaris 8)?
While Sun is unambiguously a profit-motifivated corporation, I've heard them say more than once they prefer to compete on implementation than lock-in via proprietary interfaces. This is why BEA is currently a bigger J2EE vendor than Sun itself! This is why Fujitsu can sell servers that can sometimes scale better and smell more like mainframes than Sun's servers.
In review, Sun is more open than: most corporations in existence.
...track how much attention you are paying and the "worth" of individual messages. Based on these criterion, it adjusts how intrusive to make the alerts.
There are already many millions of children across the world saying (in their native tounge, of course), "Look at me daddy! (gauging pause) LOOK AT ME DADDY!!!! (tug at daddy's arm)...". Do we really need computers doing this, too?
When asked about his brand-new 24K gold biking helmet, Theo pointed behind the reporters and exclaimed "What's that!". With the reporters distracted, he promptly ran the other direction and hid behind some bushes. The reporters, being only average journalists, published that OpenBSD's leader can turn himself invisible at will and cited that OpenBSD appears to be some sort of Canadian rap group.
If it isn't, we don't want it! At the risk of sounding "with the crowd", OpenProm and other OpenFirmware implementations are so much nicer than all PC-BIOS concepts I've seen to date.
In addition, Open Firmware is proven (in every Sun since at least the early 1990s), extensible (built-in Forth), and an IEEE standard (a genuine standard, for once!). Having such powerful firmware makes the RISC workstations a dream to work with sometimes. On Sun, at least, it's even possible to halt the running operating system, drop into firmware to check something out, and go back right ware the OS left off (sometimes CDE needs a refresh).
The term "legacy system" is now used to describe any piece of technology which actually works as opposed to "modern system" which describes things that might work.
There's a lot of truth in this. I suppose this is why Sun workstations and servers still have two 9600 baud serial ports on the back for diagnostics. They are brain-dead easy to use and are invaluable when the frame buffer isn't installed or is malfunctioning.
I imagine that the next election will break down 50/50 along party lines, just as the 2000 elections did.
This will happen, because the canidates have become so homogenous or, at least, equally dislikable, that the election results are truly left to chance. In other words, each voter flipping a coin would have reach the same outcome.
Recently though, my employer has standardized on C# and.NET, and since I'm new to the technology (isn't everyone?)
I'm suprised your company would take such a high-risk action. "Standardizing" on something so new and untested is, IMO, irresponsible.
Adopting.NET now is like adopting J2EE when it was at version 1.0 or 1.1. The details of the APIs aren't hammered out, yet, so a lot of code your company creates will be "legacy" very quickly--probably within one year. If you don't believe me, ask anyone who jumped onto the JSP and Java Servlet bandwagon when they first came out (before tag libraries, etc.).
Slashdot Mirror
Sun actually competes very well on the throughput-based benchmarks.
Another thing is that Sun, on this front, should be more worried about IBM Power servers than anything, now that Alpha is easing out of the picture and Itanium still hasn't shown up for the party.
It's important to understand, also, that companies like Sun really are competing on multiple fronts. Low-end business: Microsoft and Linux. High-end business: IBM, HPAQ. HPC: Linux clusters, IBM, SGI, Itanium. Software: Microsoft, BEA, IBM. And so forth.
Check out the SPEC web site [spec.org]. The performance of Sun's SPARC processors is pathetic.
SPECint-for-SPECint, UltraSPARC has lagged in single-CPU performance for several years, now. This is not news to anyone. However, Sun clearly out-classes x86 in SMP. Sun actually competes very well on the throughput-based benchmarks. If you look slightly past the SPECint2000, you'll see the SPECrate benchmarks and things like TPC. Sun regulary makes press releases about world records for throughput (leap-frogging with people like IBM, HP, and SGI, etc.). Even in small SMP configs with 2 CPUs, 1GHz UltraSPARCs will easily match Pentium 4 of well over twice the clock for floating-point throughput. Throughput is more important for large simulations and other big tasks.
Don't forget that the Pentium 4, for example, focuses on marketing buzz. Theoretical benchmark this, theoretical bandwidth that, etc. without divulging the inherent limitation in the PC architecture (one AGP slot, non-linear SMP scaling, memory limit hacks, high power consumption, you name it).
...no 3rd party apps can cope with this fudging with their memory and CPUs...
I would expect the kernel makes this transparent to the apps, because the kernel schedules CPUs and allocates memory. Do you really know what you are talking about or are you a troll?
The original post hit upon a good question. How is Sun going to differentiate these from other vendors?
... and some people like purple computers.
Even low-end Sun equipment still has genuine OpenBoot PROM, remote administration by dedicated Ethernet, generally very high-quality components, uniformity accross a class of machines (V480-V880-V1280, Sun Fire 3800-4800-6800-12K-15K, V210-V240, etc.), optional support of any degree, lots of compelling software (Solaris, Sun ONE), they generally aren't assholes (of course there will be exceptions--no flames),
Given that so many companies (e.g., Sun, IBM, and Dell) want to increase their 64-bit x86 offerings, Microsoft had better work double time to release 64-bit Windows.
Imagine the horror of loading 64-bit Windows up on a Sun-branded server. Would the server implode in some sort of confused fury? Would the little OpenBoot PROM chip see the coming plauge, crawl out of the enclosure, and run away to a blissful place where that MS monster can't go?
Sun Microsystems Inc. (NasdaqNM:SUNW - News) said it is considering using Advanced Micro Devices Inc.'s new Opteron chip in a server it expects to deliver to the market shortly, a spokesman said.
Either this is Sun-speak for "next year sometime", or they've really been engineering an Opteron-based server for some time and are now boxing it up for sale. Saying they're simply considering it doesn't add up in this case (unless they have super-EEs that can whip up a server with a new CPU from scratch in a couple months).
For some more elaboration on the "day care for teens" position, here's an article [paulgraham.com] that you may find interesting.
The comparision between teachers and prison wardens in the article is a good one. It makes sense why school society is so perverse given the artificial and unbalanced constraints placed on it. But I think it isn't just students; rather, the problems are layered all they way up to the school boards and the parents themselves.
What, like how to flip a burger? Seriously folks, I'm about a year away from getting a PhD in physics and it's all because of what I learned in high school. And if my parents hadn't watched me like a hawk and made sure I did my homework I would never have made it this far.
You are about to get a PhD, because 1) you have an aptitude for learning and abstraction and 2) you are self-motivated. If your experience in high school put you on track, then great, but that is probably more an exception than the rule. From what I've seen, public education is barely preparing students for entry-level (albeit valuable) jobs. You'd be suprised how many "professionals" I've worked with that can't even write a proper English sentence, yet they've lived in the U.S.A. their entire lives.
Well if someone has that much of your SSN, you probably have bigger security/privacy issues than someone simply looking up your grades.
It's as simple as filling out the paperwork at the doctor's office for a sick kid, where the receptionist is also a parent at the same school. Or perhaps a loan application/loan officer scenario. The level of trust on that computer system is now reduced to how much we trust basically everyone we do business with.
It is in the child's best interest to be watched like a hawk watching a mouse.
...if the parents routinely check up on you and your story always is the same as what they get from the school, then the trust will be in your honesty.
Sure it is. Now, not only does the child know that the parents don't believe them, but also that the parents don't believe in them.
A parent should be able to step in a teach the child a lesson that could be very dangerous to learn through trial and error.
And, thus, the child's experience might be limited to the parent's own experience.
Without a proper education you can seriously mess up your future.
School, for a long time, has never been the place to get that "proper educations." Face it, schools are day care for teenagers. Everything that is important to learn, people will learn it on their own. This has been true in my life and in the lives of people I talk to.
Do you really think schools give out straight stories, too? Teachers sometimes have agendas, are too busy, or are too incompetent to give you the information you need. This is the same scenario as "total information awareness" and those lame "I don't have anything to hide" excuses. The school's perception of the truth isn't always correct or even needed.
I'm 27
Do you remember what it was like in school? I've attended public, private, and residential secondary schools. In the public case, the school was hopeless and just a teenager farm. The private school was good, but only because it was fairly small (but not too small) so that there was a healthy level of parent-teacher-child interaction. The residential school had no respect for privacy due to overzealous over-loud parents, and the experience was pretty miserable. With curfews, strict-same-sex dorms, and lights-out times, the students were only allowed to grow "academically" and only on the school's terms, which is a pretty narrow definition of growth.
If your internal time is billed out at $50 per hour, and you want to save your company money, you aren't going to spend 4 hours to create a custom garbage collector just to save another 5k of RAM-- you're going to go out and buy another stick of memory.
This reminds me how broken many (most?) corporate accounting systems are. Where I work, for a stick of RAM (or software, or whatever), it would take at least four hours spread over a couple weeks just to figure out who to submit the request to, wait for our "purchasing agent" to get a couple signatures from bureaucrats, wait for the purchase order to work its way to the top of a pile, and finally get the RAM only to discover they ordered the wrong type. All the while, they'll happily pay for labor hours wasted on slow computers with inadequate RAM (for example).
Why there is such a fundamental disconnection between spending money on labor versus spending it on time-saving equipment and software leaves me questioning reality.
I've never owned a printer and I never plan on owning one.
You actually achieved the dream of getting a job with a crayon-written resume? Oh great one, teach us the way!
...we use GCC (not Forte)...
Solaris buys us performance on machines with more than 16 CPUs. But we don't have any!
Therein lies your problem. Forte, now Sun One Studio 7, is less than $1,000, and is a much better compiler for SPARC than GCC. It can target your specific type of CPU, if you want. IMO, using anything other than Sun's compiler on Sun's hardware is irresponsible. You can still use gmake and the other GNU tools (no lock-in required!), but just change those CC and CFLAGS variables to use cc and not gcc.
If you want more convincing, I would bet money that Sun doesn't use gcc for their SPEC submissions. Also, $1,000 is pretty damn cheap relative to the hardware iteself and payroll.
FWIW, Sun has a long-standing behavior of taking extra time to test new hardware, losing the cutting edge in favor of higher stability.
This appears to be true. For example, their UltraSPARC IIIi "just around the corner" press release was dated October, 2001.
It seems that the "less enlightened" folks out there stomp all over Sun for doing this and, then, take for granted that their server room seems to never cry for attention. Their hardware tends to be unusually durable, too, as I still see SPARCstation 5 or Ultra 1 workstations serving e-mail, dns, etc. without a hiccup.
Also, too many people are still on the Gigahertz craze. I find it interesting that Ace's Hardware runs off a single dinky 500MHz UltraSPARC IIe CPU. Even Slashdot appears to need only several obselete Pentium III and Xeons to handle a Slashdotting, literally, every moment of the day.
Who is being more open?
Sun. Any day of the week, any week of the year, and any year of the millenium.
SPARC, copyright SPARC International, Inc. Licenses $99.
Java, licensed by none other than Sun's biggest competitors: IBM, BEA, Microsoft (historically). Even GCC compiles Java source code and has some of the APIs implemented.
There's also OpenOffice.org (the significance of OpenOffice.org is only beginning to show itself), NFS (interoperability), System V/BSD/POSIX (again, interoperability), and membership on various WWW standards committees. If Sun is so closed, then why do Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD all run on every recent Sun architecture (sun4c, sun4m, and sun4u)? How do they manage to support an impressive number of Sun-branded peripherals?
Does Microsoft allow you to attach a bundled debugger (mdb) to the running system kernel? Did Microsoft allow downloads of the system source code that can be actually be compiled (Sun did this with Solaris 8)?
While Sun is unambiguously a profit-motifivated corporation, I've heard them say more than once they prefer to compete on implementation than lock-in via proprietary interfaces. This is why BEA is currently a bigger J2EE vendor than Sun itself! This is why Fujitsu can sell servers that can sometimes scale better and smell more like mainframes than Sun's servers.
In review, Sun is more open than: most corporations in existence.
Anyone have an idea on this?
Just count the number of new BMW 7-series sedans stopped on the side of the road.
Embedded Windows is a joke.
...track how much attention you are paying and the "worth" of individual messages. Based on these criterion, it adjusts how intrusive to make the alerts.
...". Do we really need computers doing this, too?
There are already many millions of children across the world saying (in their native tounge, of course), "Look at me daddy! (gauging pause) LOOK AT ME DADDY!!!! (tug at daddy's arm)
When asked about his brand-new 24K gold biking helmet, Theo pointed behind the reporters and exclaimed "What's that!". With the reporters distracted, he promptly ran the other direction and hid behind some bushes. The reporters, being only average journalists, published that OpenBSD's leader can turn himself invisible at will and cited that OpenBSD appears to be some sort of Canadian rap group.
If it isn't, we don't want it! At the risk of sounding "with the crowd", OpenProm and other OpenFirmware implementations are so much nicer than all PC-BIOS concepts I've seen to date.
In addition, Open Firmware is proven (in every Sun since at least the early 1990s), extensible (built-in Forth), and an IEEE standard (a genuine standard, for once!). Having such powerful firmware makes the RISC workstations a dream to work with sometimes. On Sun, at least, it's even possible to halt the running operating system, drop into firmware to check something out, and go back right ware the OS left off (sometimes CDE needs a refresh).
The term "legacy system" is now used to describe any piece of technology which actually works as opposed to "modern system" which describes things that might work.
There's a lot of truth in this. I suppose this is why Sun workstations and servers still have two 9600 baud serial ports on the back for diagnostics. They are brain-dead easy to use and are invaluable when the frame buffer isn't installed or is malfunctioning.
For any Microsoft shop using VB6, COM, or MFC, moving to .Net is a no-brainer.
.NET, and who knows what comes next.
VB6, COM, MFC,
I imagine that the next election will break down 50/50 along party lines, just as the 2000 elections did.
This will happen, because the canidates have become so homogenous or, at least, equally dislikable, that the election results are truly left to chance. In other words, each voter flipping a coin would have reach the same outcome.
I find this very sad.
...and graduated from the University of Texas.
This alone should put him Pres. George's "good guy" list. He'll be just fine.
Recently though, my employer has standardized on C# and .NET, and since I'm new to the technology (isn't everyone?)
.NET now is like adopting J2EE when it was at version 1.0 or 1.1. The details of the APIs aren't hammered out, yet, so a lot of code your company creates will be "legacy" very quickly--probably within one year. If you don't believe me, ask anyone who jumped onto the JSP and Java Servlet bandwagon when they first came out (before tag libraries, etc.).
I'm suprised your company would take such a high-risk action. "Standardizing" on something so new and untested is, IMO, irresponsible.
Adopting
My Experience
Is this the Windows 2003 folder where users can store their soul under DRM?