What took them so long? Going in to fight Microsoft in the courts isn't a fun thing to do. Sun has had experiance with this in the past. The legal costs will probably be large. It might also distract people from Sun's own message and product line. This is the sort of decision that has to be made with lots of care. I'd guess they had hope the courts would have smacked MS around a bit more, but decided they needed to step in since the administration has had the DOJ roll over and play dead.
Regarding the "discovery" issue. If I'm of a culture and I learn something nobody in my culture knew, I've discovered it. We may not be the first, but many cultures may discover the same thing. That people where in the New World prior Columbous doesn't mean he didn't do any discovering. Nobody puts forward that C. was the first guy to hit the new world, but his discovery opened the doors to great (big not good) changes in the wrold.
Not only is it cheaper to buy it everyday, they'll also deliver it to your house. You're right on the visible minorities issue, but that's another matter entirely.
Due to the expense of the back-end server, I'm not sure you'll save a whole lot of hardware cost going to Sun Rays. However, you should be able to cut administrative costs / hassle a good bit. That and it's really really cool to be able to put your terminal session in your pocket ( they have smart cards which carry session info).
I think many of us will start trapping ourselves with the should I waste a page view problem. Here's what I would say, you pay $5 per thousand. Over the course of a few days, you might waste 20 if you're sloppy. You're out a dime. Not worth the worry. Also, that might be a goal of theirs. To limit their bandwidth costs.
No, Slashdot charges for the privilage to read Slashdot without nasty banner ads. Since you are posting here, you obviously see that Slashdot provides some value and you read it. If you think it has very little value and ads are too much hassle then you can leave. I suspect though that you'll either view these adds are pay a couple dollars so you don't have to see them.
True, this isn't going in and screwing with DNA. But this is excactly the process described in Gataca and we should be cautious in its use. In the fairly near future, it is likely to be possible that we will screen for heart problems, the "fat" gene, and other common 'problems'. Next shortness, super-agressive or passiveness and anything else that one could be genetically predisposed to and the parents find less than optimal. We could raise generations of super-babies leading to, of course, the social problems of Gataca. Furthermore, if we have lots of super-babies and say, China does not. Would we be at risk of thinking ourselves so superior as to become very arrogant? We're entering territory where caution is warranted, that's why this is news.
This is most often the case in in-vitro fertilization. You can't attack this research on abortion grounds unless you attack the more general process as well.
Before you accuse somebody of taking money or doing other things slimy and illegal, you should have something to back that up with. Basically what Tom has said all along is that Rambus gives you better memory bandwidth at the cost of latency. What he used to say is that the latency is unacceptable and the bandwidth wasn't needed and the price is too high. What he says now is that if you look at P4s with clock rates up above 2500Mhz they appear to need that super high bandwidth to perform at their best. And recent price increases in DDR have brought its price in line with RDRAM. Where do you see something fishy? It's the sign of integrity when somebody admits that a solution they said was bad has become better. I wish more politicians would have the guts to do so.
IBM gets the press because they have the massive funds to advertise. And yes, getting impressively worded information to journalists is advertising. That's mostly a guess, but I suspect it's closer to the truth than we'd like to admit.
I heard a talk with McNealy where he was frustrated that businesses wouldn't take up Star Office. He talked to some hot shots at other companies and heard the same thing a few times - We love it, it does what we need it to for most of our users but we just don't trust something that's free. Well, now we get to see if businesses will take a product more seriously if it costs some. I'm willing to bet that it will be very very cheap compared to MS products. This should be interesting. Oh, has anyone seen any info on how much it might cost?
Sun isn't eager for Linux to be successful on the mainframe, at least partly because it believes it has a superior product. You better believe that Sun does want Linux to kick butt in the x86 PC market though. If you have linux PCs you might go for the Sun server while if you have MS PCs you might go for a MS server. There's a huge difference between Sun and MS from a Linux point of view.
No, I can promise you that this cost them a pile more energy to make then they would ever get out. It might be good for space travel since we could store lots of energy made on Earth in a small area on a spacecraft. If you want 'free' energy, I'd be waiting for fusion, but don't hold your breath.
When you said 'before linux began' I think you meant the more recent widespread adoption of Linux and particularly IBM's involvement? But yeah, I think for being a big company, Sun does decent things for open source. They released OpenOffice which has potential for competing with MS Office. Java is controlled by a community process not changed by the whim of McNeally or Joy. Recently they've pledged to help out in the Linux kernel. While they don't have 1 billion to give out, McNeally did go out on stage dressed up as Tux, which you'll never see Lou do:) So if they percieve that XML and logging are critical and supply that to the their users instead of forcing their users (who might not all know what Apache offers) to go find tools, are they really doing anything wrong? Maybe, but it's a hard call for me. The J2EE certification issue concerns me but I'm interested in what Sun has to say about it. Oh well.
Disclaimer: I have been employed by Sun, although temporarily. I personally like the company, and might be badly biased. I don't think so though.
Just because I have the source, doesn't mean I can use it. Many of us could run away from work today with the source code to some product that we're working on. That wouldn't allow us to open source it or build a competing product based on that code.
Your first point is weak. In Software quality issues, lives are frequently at stake. Think medical software. Software in use in drug desing. Software running nuclear power plants. Software for air traffic controllers. Software calculating structural integretity of a proposed building being effected by an earthquake. He's right in the sense that it's time to wake up and realize that programming real applications can be a very serious task.
I'll agree that he's wrong in a number of departments as well. Personally his suggestion that we put excellent programmers into QA. No way. What you need are people good at finding bugs and understanding how customers are likely to use the software. These people are frequently not programmers. Their career testers or tech support types with very good attention to detail He's right that bad programmers shouldn't join their ranks though. Frequentyl bad programmers write buggy code for the same reason they'd be bad testers - they don't pay close enough attention.
Generally though, I think you were just a bit too aggressive in attacking him. For instance, fallacy 5, I agree with you that GUIs are generally easier but you don't need to be a programmer or sysadmin to user one. Moreover, the author's point is not that GUIs are bad but that just because your program has a GUI doesn't mean it's easy to use. Only careful ui design can get you to that point.
This is excactly his point. At the level of Teach yourself C++ in 14 easy lessons, you can now pound a nail. What we expect of these junior programmers is the ability to write decent software which is more like bridge building or constructing a house. Sure, you know how to hammer, but that doesn't make you qualified to architect and build homes. Programming is a design process.
I'll respond here, but a number of folks have said, the software needed just ain't out there. It's coming though. Check out the Anandtech article on the new Unreal2 engine. It beats up current graphics cards and I think we can expect the same from other game companies.
Actually, I think that most of the "profiling" that is done is based on various people's *perceptions* of the probablilities.
There are two very differant kinds of profiling going on. One is where a cop on the street thinks someone looks suspicious and it turns out most of these people are black or whatever. The other is the kind that credit card companies use when they watch for stolen cards. If patterns of spending change dramatically, there is a statistical likelyhood that there has been a theft and they act accordingly. It would be interesting to know what combination of the two forms we're going to be seeing more of at airports.
My understanding is that civil disobedience is usually a non-violent breaking of the law to attract attention to your cause / protest. You still break the law and go to jail / get probation, you just do it in the kind of way that people don't get hurt.
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What took them so long? Going in to fight Microsoft in the courts isn't a fun thing to do. Sun has had experiance with this in the past. The legal costs will probably be large. It might also distract people from Sun's own message and product line. This is the sort of decision that has to be made with lots of care. I'd guess they had hope the courts would have smacked MS around a bit more, but decided they needed to step in since the administration has had the DOJ roll over and play dead.
Regarding the "discovery" issue. If I'm of a culture and I learn something nobody in my culture knew, I've discovered it. We may not be the first, but many cultures may discover the same thing. That people where in the New World prior Columbous doesn't mean he didn't do any discovering. Nobody puts forward that C. was the first guy to hit the new world, but his discovery opened the doors to great (big not good) changes in the wrold.
This is a great one! Where are you moderators to bounce this up?
Not only is it cheaper to buy it everyday, they'll also deliver it to your house. You're right on the visible minorities issue, but that's another matter entirely.
Due to the expense of the back-end server, I'm not sure you'll save a whole lot of hardware cost going to Sun Rays. However, you should be able to cut administrative costs / hassle a good bit. That and it's really really cool to be able to put your terminal session in your pocket ( they have smart cards which carry session info).
I think many of us will start trapping ourselves with the should I waste a page view problem. Here's what I would say, you pay $5 per thousand. Over the course of a few days, you might waste 20 if you're sloppy. You're out a dime. Not worth the worry. Also, that might be a goal of theirs. To limit their bandwidth costs.
No, Slashdot charges for the privilage to read Slashdot without nasty banner ads. Since you are posting here, you obviously see that Slashdot provides some value and you read it. If you think it has very little value and ads are too much hassle then you can leave. I suspect though that you'll either view these adds are pay a couple dollars so you don't have to see them.
Free country yes, but as an owner of a website I have the right to give away access to it, or ban individuals who cause me trouble. At least I should.
Why nuke power instead of solar / wind or even the highest tech of them all: covection tower power?
True, this isn't going in and screwing with DNA. But this is excactly the process described in Gataca and we should be cautious in its use. In the fairly near future, it is likely to be possible that we will screen for heart problems, the "fat" gene, and other common 'problems'. Next shortness, super-agressive or passiveness and anything else that one could be genetically predisposed to and the parents find less than optimal. We could raise generations of super-babies leading to, of course, the social problems of Gataca. Furthermore, if we have lots of super-babies and say, China does not. Would we be at risk of thinking ourselves so superior as to become very arrogant? We're entering territory where caution is warranted, that's why this is news.
This is most often the case in in-vitro fertilization. You can't attack this research on abortion grounds unless you attack the more general process as well.
Before you accuse somebody of taking money or doing other things slimy and illegal, you should have something to back that up with. Basically what Tom has said all along is that Rambus gives you better memory bandwidth at the cost of latency. What he used to say is that the latency is unacceptable and the bandwidth wasn't needed and the price is too high. What he says now is that if you look at P4s with clock rates up above 2500Mhz they appear to need that super high bandwidth to perform at their best. And recent price increases in DDR have brought its price in line with RDRAM. Where do you see something fishy? It's the sign of integrity when somebody admits that a solution they said was bad has become better. I wish more politicians would have the guts to do so.
IBM gets the press because they have the massive funds to advertise. And yes, getting impressively worded information to journalists is advertising. That's mostly a guess, but I suspect it's closer to the truth than we'd like to admit.
I heard a talk with McNealy where he was frustrated that businesses wouldn't take up Star Office. He talked to some hot shots at other companies and heard the same thing a few times - We love it, it does what we need it to for most of our users but we just don't trust something that's free. Well, now we get to see if businesses will take a product more seriously if it costs some. I'm willing to bet that it will be very very cheap compared to MS products. This should be interesting. Oh, has anyone seen any info on how much it might cost?
I bet the heat is done by running current through the strands. That's how an electric blanket works - more or less.
Sun isn't eager for Linux to be successful on the mainframe, at least partly because it believes it has a superior product. You better believe that Sun does want Linux to kick butt in the x86 PC market though. If you have linux PCs you might go for the Sun server while if you have MS PCs you might go for a MS server. There's a huge difference between Sun and MS from a Linux point of view.
No, I can promise you that this cost them a pile more energy to make then they would ever get out. It might be good for space travel since we could store lots of energy made on Earth in a small area on a spacecraft. If you want 'free' energy, I'd be waiting for fusion, but don't hold your breath.
Disclaimer: I have been employed by Sun, although temporarily. I personally like the company, and might be badly biased. I don't think so though.
Congratulations. We wish you both happiness.
Just because I have the source, doesn't mean I can use it. Many of us could run away from work today with the source code to some product that we're working on. That wouldn't allow us to open source it or build a competing product based on that code.
I'll agree that he's wrong in a number of departments as well. Personally his suggestion that we put excellent programmers into QA. No way. What you need are people good at finding bugs and understanding how customers are likely to use the software. These people are frequently not programmers. Their career testers or tech support types with very good attention to detail He's right that bad programmers shouldn't join their ranks though. Frequentyl bad programmers write buggy code for the same reason they'd be bad testers - they don't pay close enough attention.
Generally though, I think you were just a bit too aggressive in attacking him. For instance, fallacy 5, I agree with you that GUIs are generally easier but you don't need to be a programmer or sysadmin to user one. Moreover, the author's point is not that GUIs are bad but that just because your program has a GUI doesn't mean it's easy to use. Only careful ui design can get you to that point.
Be a little more reserved please.
This is excactly his point. At the level of Teach yourself C++ in 14 easy lessons, you can now pound a nail. What we expect of these junior programmers is the ability to write decent software which is more like bridge building or constructing a house. Sure, you know how to hammer, but that doesn't make you qualified to architect and build homes. Programming is a design process.
I'll respond here, but a number of folks have said, the software needed just ain't out there. It's coming though. Check out the Anandtech article on the new Unreal2 engine. It beats up current graphics cards and I think we can expect the same from other game companies.
There are two very differant kinds of profiling going on. One is where a cop on the street thinks someone looks suspicious and it turns out most of these people are black or whatever. The other is the kind that credit card companies use when they watch for stolen cards. If patterns of spending change dramatically, there is a statistical likelyhood that there has been a theft and they act accordingly. It would be interesting to know what combination of the two forms we're going to be seeing more of at airports.
My understanding is that civil disobedience is usually a non-violent breaking of the law to attract attention to your cause / protest. You still break the law and go to jail / get probation, you just do it in the kind of way that people don't get hurt.