I have thought hard about whether Linux was a real threat to Sun and whether Sun is a good thing for Linux.
Well, I've come to the realization that Linux is not a threat to Sun. Instead, companies like Dell, HP, Compaq, and IBM are the real competition. What's the catch? They all compete on hardware implementations. They compete on prices and features. Would I still buy a Sun server with Linux? Yes, for the same reasons I prefer Sun servers with Solaris: the hardware has benefits beyond whatever OS happens to be running.
Is Sun good for Linux? Yes, because Sun can provide an absolutely top-notch hardware platform on which to run Linux. All Linux needs are some hardware RAS support features and device drivers, which Sun is probably capable of providing, and better C-compilers for RISC architectures, which could be improvements to GCC or a port of Forte C to Linux.
It is not Sun vs. Linux. I'm convinced of that. Rather, the Linux community should be asking "What can Sun do for us?" rather than "What does Sun have up its sleeve?" These same questions should be applied to all the first-class hardware vendors. The more hardware that Linux runs well on, the better it gets for Linux. It's win-win.
What about Microsoft? Well, that's another war on another front over different principles. Sun is an ally in this war, unambiguously.
Uhm, yes, they are powerful. They can juggle more things at once and keep plugging. BUT, and this is the important part, on individual processes (apache) that don't multi-thread (a lot of commerical apps) they are SLOW.
Sun servers are not "SLOW" for the reason you give. Apache will still scale with the number of processors in a Sun server, regardless of whether each process is threaded. Also, Sun UltraSPARC processors ship with large caches that can hold most of an Apache server process, and the SPARC architecture is pretty much designed for C-language-programmed UNIX kernels and applications, such as Apache.
So, they are not "SLOW" as you claim but are actually quite FAST. For example, if you have a server with enough processors to delegate one Apache process per processor, the kernel can keep every processor busy with minimal context switching or threading overhead. And recent Solaris kernels are extremely good at keeping all processors busy very efficiently. Under really really high load, Solaris on SPARC is hard to beat.
This is arguable. IBM has failed to gain market share against Sun's Enterprise/Fire servers, and IBM's servers tend to not offer better price/performance. Also, IBM's server lineup is heavily fragmented between UNIX/RISC servers, mainframes, and Windows NT.
2) Sun uses many open standards in its treasured hardware business (SPARC, SBus, PCI, etc.) and its software business (UNIX, POSIX, etc.).
In general, Sun tries to compete on its implementation of standards with value-added things, such as excellent hardware features and reliability, support services, etc.
Every time someone runs apache on Solaris, Sun sees that as another iplanet sale lost.
Then why did Sun package Apache as part of the default install of Solaris 8?
Solaris now ships with Apache, Perl, and Java. Out of the box, it is a pretty potent web-serving OS. And it can be downloaded for free or delivered to your front porch for about $50US (only Free operating systems are more cost-effective; M$ Windows doesn't even come close).
iPlanet is expensive enough that it really doesn't compete with Apache directly. Typically iPlanet is used in "enterprise" environments alongside J2EE and Oracle. When a company can throw a ton of money at a big server and Oracle, iPlanet is just the icing on the cake.
region-coded everything, RIAA/MPAA copy "protection" lockdowns destroying fair use, the death of webcasting, even more media mega-mergers, and spyware in EVERYTHING
Sounds a lot like the Dark Ages will soon be reborn. The actors are different, but the roles are the same.
Creating a repeater device that just regurgitates a "replacement" ID enroute between a peripheral and the XBox sounds like a fairly trivial task.
So trivial, in fact, that making one using a simple circuit diagram and a trip to Radio Shack would be a nice weekend project.
Is this the case? If so, are the reistors and NAND gate ICs at Radio Shack also in violation of the DMCA? They are just components that, when connected in the right way, can sidestep a company's schemes. How is this different from those Dreamcast serial cables or GBA flash cards?
I love the convenience of M$ Office. It is so wonderful that I named my children after the components..."Quit painting the cat, Excel!!!" "Hey, Outlook, you don't look so good."
Actually, the "Author" field can be meaningless. I've edited files that other people started, and I don't get any credit. The meta-data in M$ Word just isn't very consistent over the life of the document.
Perhaps, but what is really sad is the reputation that M$ has earned. M$ has a long history of decision making that has put themselves exactly where they are.
This new OS could be the best thing ever. However, that isn't meaningful to the people who have simply given up on M$ products out of frustration, disappointment, and/or love of freedom of choice.
There is a guarantee in the U.S. Constitution that the current administration lasts only eight years at most, so the People will always have some opportunity to change things, if they choose. The opportunities come only in four-year increments, but I claim that is a lot better than living under a decades-long dictatorship with no opportunity at all.
Terrorism will always be possible (as bank robberies are always possible), but the "War" will stabilize into something more sustainable, such as improved domestic infrastructure. We will adapt but still find ways to live our lives (as we already have against bank robbers, etc.).
During wartime. The U.S. President even has the power to declare a total police state during war if he deems it in the country's best interest. However, war is always temporary, so the police state is, too.
War is so perverse that no one should expect to live a normal life until it is over. This is just how it is.
Our organization is looking at these closely as an possible replacement for Sun machines on the desktop. Running Linux on Intel hardware is very compelling from a price/performance perspective.
Be wary, though. Going from a Sun workstation to an HP PC is sort of like trading in a BMW for a Chevy Cavalier. Don't be suprised when those "up-front savings" dissappear when your support staff doubles and overall productivity drops due to flaky hardware.
Brand-name UNIX workstations may look expensive up front, but my experience is that they wear like iron and take outright (computational) abuse. My experience with choice-component PCs has been bland at best. PC components--even good ones--just seem to fail more frequently.
What nightmare? If your sys admins are worth their salaries, then you shouldn't be losing any sleep.
I think the article is referring to a heterogenous network with lots of history, where mediocre sys admins have come and gone and six different flavors of OS exist. This is not a problem with UNIX, it is a problem with your high staff turnover and patchwork network architecture!
Planned well and managed well, a UNIX network is very nice, and you don't need glitzy GUI tools to get you there.
The GUI is purely an interface layer to the software. If the software is modularized properly, UIs can be swapped in and out, and the core functionality remains unchanged (GUIs for CLI UNIX programs, for example).
If IE were designed properly, the real guts of the browser are in separate modules from the UI. It appears this is the case, since mshtml.dll appears to be the "guts". If such DLLs remain after so-called IE cleansing, then the cleansing really failed. IE still remains on the system just without the UI.
Is this unfair to other vendors that make more robust version of these utilities commercially?
Yes, because Microsoft has a long history of denying other vendors the right to thrive or even exist. If this were done to humans instead of software, Microsoft would be on international trial right now for genocide. Microsoft has killed a whole generation of good software and must pay the price.
"good enough" for 90% of the users
These 90% of users have been brainwashed to expect the worst, so when it comes they aren't disappointed! If that isn't oppression, I don't know what is.
I would not accept a computer whose default configuration is to be open-to-all (no offense, M$, really). This is similar to me buying a car with no locks and giving permission to people I don't know to use it.
Anonymous driver says, "I'll just leave the gas money in the ash tray." Why should I believe him?
Also, it is pretty easy to write
while( true )
{
...add a few bytes...send a few bytes...
}
What is to stop me from doing this on a thousand computers drawing from a false bank account (if I had the knowledge and were so inclined)?
...I HATE grocery store lineups...and the delays they cause.
I don't know the history of grocery stores, but their designs are simply the worst possible.
Whoever thought of the multiple-queues multiple-processors configuration of the grocery store check-out area should be dragged out into the street and insulted. Even worse, now, is that this system has been popularized, so the public perception of efficient check-out has been ruined.
So much better is the single-queue systems I see at recent super bookstore chains, such as Barnes & Noble and Borders.
Is their work in Linux part of a long-range strategy to phase out Solaris?
Unless it is done right, Linux on really big servers won't be quite as good as Solaris. Sun has invested a lot of effort in making Solaris extremely efficient on many processors. Sun can afford to drop Solaris only if Linux is equally good or better on large computers, which isn't the case, right now.
Instead, Sun sees Linux as an opportunity to position themselves better against small-time servers, such as those that run Windows NT/2000.
It would be interesting to see the international community flock away from U.S. software, if Congress further regulates software by requiring back-doors for so-called national security. The effect would probably be complete isolation for a big part of the U.S. software industry.
Slashdot Mirror
I have thought hard about whether Linux was a real threat to Sun and whether Sun is a good thing for Linux.
Well, I've come to the realization that Linux is not a threat to Sun. Instead, companies like Dell, HP, Compaq, and IBM are the real competition. What's the catch? They all compete on hardware implementations. They compete on prices and features. Would I still buy a Sun server with Linux? Yes, for the same reasons I prefer Sun servers with Solaris: the hardware has benefits beyond whatever OS happens to be running.
Is Sun good for Linux? Yes, because Sun can provide an absolutely top-notch hardware platform on which to run Linux. All Linux needs are some hardware RAS support features and device drivers, which Sun is probably capable of providing, and better C-compilers for RISC architectures, which could be improvements to GCC or a port of Forte C to Linux.
It is not Sun vs. Linux. I'm convinced of that. Rather, the Linux community should be asking "What can Sun do for us?" rather than "What does Sun have up its sleeve?" These same questions should be applied to all the first-class hardware vendors. The more hardware that Linux runs well on, the better it gets for Linux. It's win-win.
What about Microsoft? Well, that's another war on another front over different principles. Sun is an ally in this war, unambiguously.
Uhm, yes, they are powerful. They can juggle more things at once and keep plugging. BUT, and this is the important part, on individual processes (apache) that don't multi-thread (a lot of commerical apps) they are SLOW.
Sun servers are not "SLOW" for the reason you give. Apache will still scale with the number of processors in a Sun server, regardless of whether each process is threaded. Also, Sun UltraSPARC processors ship with large caches that can hold most of an Apache server process, and the SPARC architecture is pretty much designed for C-language-programmed UNIX kernels and applications, such as Apache.
So, they are not "SLOW" as you claim but are actually quite FAST. For example, if you have a server with enough processors to delegate one Apache process per processor, the kernel can keep every processor busy with minimal context switching or threading overhead. And recent Solaris kernels are extremely good at keeping all processors busy very efficiently. Under really really high load, Solaris on SPARC is hard to beat.
I challenge you to provide hyperlinks to back up your claims. Right now, what you say is mostly baseless.
IBM is shaking down their top end
This is arguable. IBM has failed to gain market share against Sun's Enterprise/Fire servers, and IBM's servers tend to not offer better price/performance. Also, IBM's server lineup is heavily fragmented between UNIX/RISC servers, mainframes, and Windows NT.
Sun's problem is that they want to be a big monopoly like Microsoft...
I really don't think so.
1) Scott McNealy has said so.
2) Sun uses many open standards in its treasured hardware business (SPARC, SBus, PCI, etc.) and its software business (UNIX, POSIX, etc.).
In general, Sun tries to compete on its implementation of standards with value-added things, such as excellent hardware features and reliability, support services, etc.
Every time someone runs apache on Solaris, Sun sees that as another iplanet sale lost.
Then why did Sun package Apache as part of the default install of Solaris 8?
Solaris now ships with Apache, Perl, and Java. Out of the box, it is a pretty potent web-serving OS. And it can be downloaded for free or delivered to your front porch for about $50US (only Free operating systems are more cost-effective; M$ Windows doesn't even come close).
iPlanet is expensive enough that it really doesn't compete with Apache directly. Typically iPlanet is used in "enterprise" environments alongside J2EE and Oracle. When a company can throw a ton of money at a big server and Oracle, iPlanet is just the icing on the cake.
region-coded everything, RIAA/MPAA copy "protection" lockdowns destroying fair use, the death of webcasting, even more media mega-mergers, and spyware in EVERYTHING
Sounds a lot like the Dark Ages will soon be reborn. The actors are different, but the roles are the same.
Creating a repeater device that just regurgitates a "replacement" ID enroute between a peripheral and the XBox sounds like a fairly trivial task.
So trivial, in fact, that making one using a simple circuit diagram and a trip to Radio Shack would be a nice weekend project.
Is this the case? If so, are the reistors and NAND gate ICs at Radio Shack also in violation of the DMCA? They are just components that, when connected in the right way, can sidestep a company's schemes. How is this different from those Dreamcast serial cables or GBA flash cards?
MSWord's "Author" field
I love the convenience of M$ Office. It is so wonderful that I named my children after the components..."Quit painting the cat, Excel!!!" "Hey, Outlook, you don't look so good."
Actually, the "Author" field can be meaningless. I've edited files that other people started, and I don't get any credit. The meta-data in M$ Word just isn't very consistent over the life of the document.
sad ain't it?
Perhaps, but what is really sad is the reputation that M$ has earned. M$ has a long history of decision making that has put themselves exactly where they are.
This new OS could be the best thing ever. However, that isn't meaningful to the people who have simply given up on M$ products out of frustration, disappointment, and/or love of freedom of choice.
There is a guarantee in the U.S. Constitution that the current administration lasts only eight years at most, so the People will always have some opportunity to change things, if they choose. The opportunities come only in four-year increments, but I claim that is a lot better than living under a decades-long dictatorship with no opportunity at all.
Terrorism will always be possible (as bank robberies are always possible), but the "War" will stabilize into something more sustainable, such as improved domestic infrastructure. We will adapt but still find ways to live our lives (as we already have against bank robbers, etc.).
its illegal to hinder the war effort
During wartime. The U.S. President even has the power to declare a total police state during war if he deems it in the country's best interest. However, war is always temporary, so the police state is, too.
War is so perverse that no one should expect to live a normal life until it is over. This is just how it is.
Our organization is looking at these closely as an possible replacement for Sun machines on the desktop. Running Linux on Intel hardware is very compelling from a price/performance perspective.
Be wary, though. Going from a Sun workstation to an HP PC is sort of like trading in a BMW for a Chevy Cavalier. Don't be suprised when those "up-front savings" dissappear when your support staff doubles and overall productivity drops due to flaky hardware.
Brand-name UNIX workstations may look expensive up front, but my experience is that they wear like iron and take outright (computational) abuse. My experience with choice-component PCs has been bland at best. PC components--even good ones--just seem to fail more frequently.
What nightmare? If your sys admins are worth their salaries, then you shouldn't be losing any sleep.
I think the article is referring to a heterogenous network with lots of history, where mediocre sys admins have come and gone and six different flavors of OS exist. This is not a problem with UNIX, it is a problem with your high staff turnover and patchwork network architecture!
Planned well and managed well, a UNIX network is very nice, and you don't need glitzy GUI tools to get you there.
import java.net.*
Yes, '*' is the lazy programmer's haven.
Java is great, but wildcard imports just invite namespace clashes and poor documenation of dependencies in the software.
Just using one import per class provides instant automatic source-code-level documentation of all the dependencies in a software project.
The GUI is purely an interface layer to the software. If the software is modularized properly, UIs can be swapped in and out, and the core functionality remains unchanged (GUIs for CLI UNIX programs, for example).
If IE were designed properly, the real guts of the browser are in separate modules from the UI. It appears this is the case, since mshtml.dll appears to be the "guts". If such DLLs remain after so-called IE cleansing, then the cleansing really failed. IE still remains on the system just without the UI.
Is this unfair to other vendors that make more robust version of these utilities commercially?
Yes, because Microsoft has a long history of denying other vendors the right to thrive or even exist. If this were done to humans instead of software, Microsoft would be on international trial right now for genocide. Microsoft has killed a whole generation of good software and must pay the price.
"good enough" for 90% of the users
These 90% of users have been brainwashed to expect the worst, so when it comes they aren't disappointed! If that isn't oppression, I don't know what is.
mshtml.dll pretty much is the browser. Everything else is GUI fluff. When will people realize that GUIs are <10% of real software?
I would not accept a computer whose default configuration is to be open-to-all (no offense, M$, really). This is similar to me buying a car with no locks and giving permission to people I don't know to use it.
...add a few bytes...send a few bytes...
Anonymous driver says, "I'll just leave the gas money in the ash tray." Why should I believe him?
Also, it is pretty easy to write
while( true )
{
}
What is to stop me from doing this on a thousand computers drawing from a false bank account (if I had the knowledge and were so inclined)?
intuitive and easy to use IDE
Bourne shell, vi, make, and compiler-of-choice (this is the language-universal IDE, and it really is the easiest IDE--all plain text all the time)
simplified GUI design and event handling
Qt (C++), Swing (Java)
advanced error handling
not too sure about this one; error handling tends to be on a per-application basis.
advanced object oriented design including multiple inheritance, abstract classes, and garbage collection
C++...no, Java...no, C++...
full support for operator and function overloading
C++
portable (at compile-time) across various platforms.
C++ (Yes, C++ really is portable, if you aren't a slouch)
What was they hype ten years ago? Twenty?? Then, why am I still using UNIX??? And why is UNIX still the most powerful OS commonly used????
I think there hasn't been a new idea widely used in computing since the '70s! What gives?
...I HATE grocery store lineups...and the delays they cause.
I don't know the history of grocery stores, but their designs are simply the worst possible.
Whoever thought of the multiple-queues multiple-processors configuration of the grocery store check-out area should be dragged out into the street and insulted. Even worse, now, is that this system has been popularized, so the public perception of efficient check-out has been ruined.
So much better is the single-queue systems I see at recent super bookstore chains, such as Barnes & Noble and Borders.
M$ will probably require a Passport for their coming release of Voter 2003. They won't need lobbyists any longer, when they can just fix the election!
Is their work in Linux part of a long-range strategy to phase out Solaris?
Unless it is done right, Linux on really big servers won't be quite as good as Solaris. Sun has invested a lot of effort in making Solaris extremely efficient on many processors. Sun can afford to drop Solaris only if Linux is equally good or better on large computers, which isn't the case, right now.
Instead, Sun sees Linux as an opportunity to position themselves better against small-time servers, such as those that run Windows NT/2000.
It would be interesting to see the international community flock away from U.S. software, if Congress further regulates software by requiring back-doors for so-called national security. The effect would probably be complete isolation for a big part of the U.S. software industry.