Yes. India has a lot of problems. But they are pulling themselves up from third world levels of poverty. Due to "cost of living" factors the Sun
badged employees live well beyond the levels of slaves. The employess of Sun in India are an extremely small percentage of the Sun engineering population. Sun also has engineering groups in
dozens of other nations (Russia, Scotland, Ireland, Singapore, Japan, etc). It's just a consequence of
a global economy. Creating jobs globally (especially
in countries where a companyy does business) just makes sense.
As I stated before, your view of Sun is widely held but I think it's OK for me to try to balance the discussion with additional information. Most sys admins that hate Sun typically love the price/performance of Linux systems and it's VERY hard to fight that value chain. Open Source is a tremendous value system and I leverage the software and systems for my own computing needs.
I'm a recently "switched" Mac user at home because
I like the Unix under the hood and the robustness of the software for nomadic laptop uses.
mcd
As a Sun emplyee I can affirm that a lot of people feel the way you do. Here's my personal view on some of the issues you raise.
CPU Technology: The current SPARC chips are ideal for one key design point... Large SMP systems. The chips have embedded memory controllers and manage a single view of memory across many banks of RAM and across multiple system boards. Intel doesn't really work in this space and IBM is targeting the same target market w/ PowerPC. Sun is feeling the pressure on the low end from Linux and MS OS based servers and you probably work dominantly in that space, so, it's tough for you too see the chip as a leader when it is in another systems market (SMP > 8 CPU's).
Future chip investments focus on applying VLSI concepts to this systems target with multi-core chips and multi-threading support for each. Sun wants the very-large scale databases and high work load systems that run in F1000 Data Centers.
The UltraSPARC support for BSD has always been a problem for any chip vendor. The chip requires an understanding of the memory (cache coherency) protocols and supporting OpenBSD requires top engineering talent and it just eats away at the area where Sun has a prime focus.
This Sun press release does have a marketing spin but there is a significant effort around Linux strategy going on within Sun and the implications of this marketing message self-servering as most marketing efforts are. Fair enough, you caught a marketing guy spinning a situation for advantage.
Farming out jobs to India... we'll India has more PhD's in computer science and they can be employed for a fraction of a US based programmer. Everyone in the market is leveraging that trend. This was spotted as a key strategy for manufacturing and knowledge workers in the 80's. Ignore the trend and you won't compete. Start a labor union for Programmer's and see if you can negotiate a reversal of the trend without killing the company. Remember US Steel and the impacts on the MoTown of using polictical pressures to fight global market trends. Business is ruthless in adhering to the fundamentals of economics.
I would be interested to see who else is on your shit list... 'cisco, BEA, Veritas, Oracle? All just trying to drive a higher stock valuation and none compete on price.
Let me start by saying that I work for Sun but
I'm not any sort of spokesperson for the company.
I do however have opinions and what follows is
my opinion on this post and some of the comments
from the/. community.
Sun has a basic business strategy that has worked well for over 20 years:
* give a customer a technology choice that doesn't create a proprietary "lock-in"
* and you'll likely grow as a leader in a standards-based market
* where there is no standard, create one
* and push for it's widescale adoption
Conventional business wisdom has predicted Sun would fail to grow and they have been proven wrong
repeatedly w.r.t Sun. Sun typically gets criticised on two fronts:
* Sun can't keep customers without a lock-in
* OR Sun is over-priced vs OS systems
Both arguments put Sun in the middle of two
compelling forces. If the market for open systems
continues to grow and Sun maintains a strong marketshare then the contradictions apparent are
mitigated effectively. Choice and flexibility as features win deals, repeatedly in a large percentage of cases. Sun is just focusing on
added value around quality, support and services
to maintain a leading position with this approach.
For Sun it's always a "call to execute" on the basic strategy because any competitor can adopt the same approach. This is good however because
it increases the choices the customer can evaluate
and grows the market. Grow the pie and maintain a significant slice... Grow at 20% per year and Wall Street will get it too. We're NOT seeing huge pie growths currently but we have some sins of excess as a market to pay for before we get back to fundamentals on purchasing patterns and excess system inventories being recycled in the market.
Those trends seem to have bottomed out. The newer systems offer better value over recycled systems from the Dot Com era. Especially, if support contracts are needed.
This approach has worked with Unix (as Solaris),
NFS, X Windows (begrudgingly due to the NeWS
system, distrust of Motif, etc) Java, lots
of TCP/IP standards (DHCP, SNMP, etc).
Sun's strategy gives customers choice and
increases the likelihood that as a market grows
Sun will get 15-30% of the product sales based
upon that market. It's a solid growth model vs
the MS model which leverages customer lock-ins
on their technology.
Specifically on Linux... Sun would like to win
some percentage of the Linux-based systems sold
but that market is driven by price/performance
and very tight profit margins. As we've seen
a lot of companies have found the competitive
pressures of the Linux systems market to make for
high volume and limited profits.
Linux OS as a business has also been challenging
for Red Hat, SuSe, Mandrake, etc.
Programmer's will tell you that Solaris and Linux
present very similar software targets for code.
It's close to trivial to move a source object
between them... As a result, growth of Corporate
Linux use could help Sun sell more Solaris systems
where the system requirements exceed those offered
by the Linux-based systems (grow the Unix-based
market and Sun grows too).
Sun has announced the intention to ship Linux
based systems based upon feedback from customers
that buy these systems. Those customers want
Linux to be stable and supportable. What is the
shortest path to Linux stability and supportability given that it's hard to offer
Linux software, support and systems that are
profitable? I think you just let the "bazaar
model" work... Lunix gets enhanced, distributed
and tested on new hardware with the Open Source
model and the efforts of thousands of engineers
and scientists. As Sun learned with the System V
situation (when they cut a deal w/ AT&T) you
can't control Open Standards and see them prosper.
It makes customers nervous and makes ALL your competitors gang together in opposition (see
OSF as an example).
So Sun would like to selll something that aligns
well with the growth of Linux... systems, software, support services, professional services.
Sun is not aggressively fighting Linux adoption
but Sun is competiting at various points in an
IT architecture with compatible offerings based
upon Solaris (SPARC and x86). It would be counter
to Sun's Business model to do otherwise because
Sun wants a reasonable percentage of the IT budget
and to give customers the perception that there's
no lock-in stragtegy behind Solaris, Java, SPARC,
or key network Standards used (LDAP, Project Liberty, etc).
Expect Sun to keep working with a Linux strategy
that offers customers choices and some large percentage of those choices lead to the sale of
sun products or services. Otherwise, Sun has truly
lost it's vision. There is profit to be made in
selling Open Systems and even Microsoft can see
the logic of NOT getting blocked by a standards
committee.
Users, industries, governments and vendors need
to follow the lessons of the Internet to build
markets. Widely adopted standards increase the
value of networks exponentially to all involved.
Linux just needs some aggressive standardization
around key areas and it will grow exponentially.
Sun is NOT preventing that from happening with
some proprietary Linux strategy and we should all
approve of that and let the best solutions succeed
without leveraging patents of other "barriers to
entry".
I. A large commericial Unix vendor will sue
all Open Source companies for
patent infringement
(they cleverly patented "reselling
academic code as IP" in the early 80's)
II. The suits will so confuse the legal
system that the supreme court will
overrule existing patent law setting
the stage for true software anarchy:
10 get an idea or borrow one
20 create code
30 goto 10
III. The RIAA will request congress impose
infringement fees on anyone who uses
their ears. Royalties sent to the heirs
of:
John Cage (silence and noise)
The RIAA collects their cut on collecting
the fees. Congress passes the "Analog
Rights Grievance Heuristic" (ARGH!)
IV. Israel will be overrun by American Christian
Military "Terror" groups seeking
to stimulate armageddon.
V. HDTV will be termed a technical failure and
home drive-in movies will be the
Next Big Thing!
It's the intersection of Commerce, Art and Entertainment... Pick one:
Commerce success is measured in $'s
Artistic success is measured in historic legacy
Entertainment success is measured by the
connection between performer and audience
All artists need to sustain themselves so they have to find a suitable balance between the need for $'s, legacy and connection.
Through the ages all artists have confronted these issues of patronage, freedon to create and acceptance.
It's also worth noting that Janis' became an outspoken Lesbian (she values honesty) and she was then rejected by the commercial musical establishment despite her obvious artistic credentials. Too expense to "sell" against mass-market bias...
They prefer to leverage sex is another manner. "Jailbait" is hot this year...
Left with few options she developed her own commericial business base with her own recording production and distribution projects... she lives off these and her performing revenue streams and does so for the priviledge of being able to share art with an audience. A small (by commericial standards) but loyal following. It's worth noting that most arts have an audience... The trick is getting their commercial support to sustain the making of the art... (buy the products or tickets).
FYI... Her article about attending a Science Fiction Convention (where she was the awestruck fan is a great read too). She writes and thinks well. http://www.janisian.com
MS has defined the borders of "Redmondia" on 100 square miles of what was formerly contained in the State of Washington and ceceded from the United States.
The State of Washington has accepted an undisclosed amount to enable Redmondia to establish a Monarchy within their borders.
Citizenship to the new country will be granted to all inhibitants of Redmondia and land rights will be transferred to MS Corp.
"Change to Rules... whenever you appear to be
about to loose... winning is just delaying
any possibility of loosing."
M$ owns the desktop until there a robust Office clone... My perfect anti-trust settlement would force M$ and all other companies to use standardized file formats and submit their extensions to a standards body.
With MS file formats can be imported but never exported. OpenOffice comes close with most file formats but there are still companies that would never leave MS office because the have locked themselves into Excel macros and actually want to send *.exe files in Outlook, etc.
Until very large companies see he benefits and just say no to proprietary formats owning THEIR data ten M$ will continue to reate new formats for media, e-commerce, distributed computing... We the people should at least own the right to 2 or more vendors for a given application type. That's the intent of anti-trust law... Competition actually works to increase innovation and lower costs.
Of course, free software produces dramatic costs decreases but it does limit the exchange of value that creates a robust market. I see Eric Ramond's Bazaar as a swap meet type of model... Great for bargains that only the buyer truly values but most cannot or will ot speculate in... To risky.
Of course, big projects that support consulting models show some promise to establish some kind of professional market but it wold ot be the technolog marketplace we have today... and it's hard to tell the impacts of these models on the economy in the large. As Mel Brook's loved to say as the world's oldest man... "It's a nice living."
I good corporate lawyer sizes up a situation by evaluating risks... IN this case the laywer probably feels:
He can defend the tactic (after study of
the GPL)
or
The "party" that might be offended
has limited resources to attack and the feds
won't see the behavior as a violation of
any business codes
Of course, it's really bad PR and hence puts your company in a major bad light and marketing should reject the idea ASAP. You can't buy such negative press in the technical space:
"Company finds way to close "open" for a profit"
A day without slashdot is like a day without stimulants... good for you but hard to take "cold turkey"
A Mac-smoking friend slid his Powerbook across the table to me at the local coffee shop and said: "It's got Unix underneath... OS X."
Intrigued... I asked for a terminal window and poked about... interesting. I might be at home here and finally loose MS'es deathgrip on my brain.
The coffee shop has an 802.11 wireless connection and his Powerbook's Airport gets past the URL re-directing gateway to download at DSL speeds. I've tried 3 times to get my DLINK'ed 802.11 config to work as the ISP advertises it should... hmmm... DSL into my office net with my morning coffee. [Yes, I've spent a few hours considering Linux for my wireless laptop... I'd expect many more would be required to get it all correctly config'ed... should work but like my MS experiences NOT without great pain and combinatoric exercise]
So, I ask if I might see if Zope would work on the Mac w/ OS X. He allows the "test" and helps my find a package for mac's, download and install Zope. Someone has made Zope fit the Mac install paradigm... It's the easiest Zope install I've seen (vs Windows, Solaris, Linux). I start Zope... and ask if I might add the Squishdot package (Slash-clone written in Python and Zope's D(H)TML). He allows... I download/install it, restart Zope... Works painlessly.
Now I have this $3,000 decision... To Titanium or NOT to Titanium... hmmm, clock's ticking and I can't get myself to re-up w/ the MS eXPerience. How much might painless computing be worth and would it remain painless long enough to get some of my music recorded, video edited, and real work done from the coffeeshop?
Decisions, decisions... I did enjoy that NeXT system back in 1991 I borrowed. I miss my Amiga days... Computers should be fun to use and that Mac was fun.
I recently stumbled across a GUI book on-line:
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/uibook/chapters/fog0 000000057.html
I found Raskin's interview to be elitist... So much so that he appears to have no company on his lofty plane... No current OS has anything admirable... Because you MUST start with the UI first... Before the chips are selected, before the nasty hardware access layer is defined and the "Operating System" fleshed out
we are not operating...
we are interfacing...
don't you see...
don't cut... splice!
don't sever... graft! Before Dr. Fronkenstein's creation bolts up-right and "It's alive!"
No! stop this madness... storm the Dr's Castle... Where's the UI? Where's your UI spec!?
So, First the UI... (Is it in Jeff's book?) then... a massive round of VC funding to build a system to enable the UI... How much money will it take? How much have you got? Spend, spend, spend because this UI is:
p-e-r-f-e-c-t-i-o-n
This would be a system you could dance with... The Ginger to your Fred... moving effortlessly... backwards in high-heels... tap-4-tap...
[Oh yes, don't forget to test it and change anything that delivers less than the highest potential human productivity.]
Simple really,... it's amazing to see so many GUI's just slapped willy-nilly over some hugh wad of software that crawled out of the swamp of technical feasibility... without an intended User Interface... madness...
Slashdot Mirror
Yes. India has a lot of problems. But they are pulling themselves up from third world levels of poverty. Due to "cost of living" factors the Sun badged employees live well beyond the levels of slaves. The employess of Sun in India are an extremely small percentage of the Sun engineering population. Sun also has engineering groups in dozens of other nations (Russia, Scotland, Ireland, Singapore, Japan, etc). It's just a consequence of a global economy. Creating jobs globally (especially in countries where a companyy does business) just makes sense. As I stated before, your view of Sun is widely held but I think it's OK for me to try to balance the discussion with additional information. Most sys admins that hate Sun typically love the price/performance of Linux systems and it's VERY hard to fight that value chain. Open Source is a tremendous value system and I leverage the software and systems for my own computing needs. I'm a recently "switched" Mac user at home because I like the Unix under the hood and the robustness of the software for nomadic laptop uses. mcd
As a Sun emplyee I can affirm that a lot of people feel the way you do. Here's my personal view on some of the issues you raise.
CPU Technology: The current SPARC chips are ideal for one key design point... Large SMP systems. The chips have embedded memory controllers and manage a single view of memory across many banks of RAM and across multiple system boards. Intel doesn't really work in this space and IBM is targeting the same target market w/ PowerPC. Sun is feeling the pressure on the low end from Linux and MS OS based servers and you probably work dominantly in that space, so, it's tough for you too see the chip as a leader when it is in another systems market (SMP > 8 CPU's).
Future chip investments focus on applying VLSI concepts to this systems target with multi-core chips and multi-threading support for each. Sun wants the very-large scale databases and high work load systems that run in F1000 Data Centers.
The UltraSPARC support for BSD has always been a problem for any chip vendor. The chip requires an understanding of the memory (cache coherency) protocols and supporting OpenBSD requires top engineering talent and it just eats away at the area where Sun has a prime focus.
This Sun press release does have a marketing spin but there is a significant effort around Linux strategy going on within Sun and the implications of this marketing message self-servering as most marketing efforts are. Fair enough, you caught a marketing guy spinning a situation for advantage.
Farming out jobs to India... we'll India has more PhD's in computer science and they can be employed for a fraction of a US based programmer. Everyone in the market is leveraging that trend. This was spotted as a key strategy for manufacturing and knowledge workers in the 80's. Ignore the trend and you won't compete. Start a labor union for Programmer's and see if you can negotiate a reversal of the trend without killing the company. Remember US Steel and the impacts on the MoTown of using polictical pressures to fight global market trends. Business is ruthless in adhering to the fundamentals of economics.
I would be interested to see who else is on your shit list... 'cisco, BEA, Veritas, Oracle? All just trying to drive a higher stock valuation and none compete on price.
Let me start by saying that I work for Sun but I'm not any sort of spokesperson for the company. I do however have opinions and what follows is my opinion on this post and some of the comments from the /. community.
Sun has a basic business strategy that has worked well for over 20 years:
* give a customer a technology choice that doesn't create a proprietary "lock-in"
* and you'll likely grow as a leader in a standards-based market
* where there is no standard, create one
* and push for it's widescale adoption
Conventional business wisdom has predicted Sun would fail to grow and they have been proven wrong repeatedly w.r.t Sun. Sun typically gets criticised on two fronts:
* Sun can't keep customers without a lock-in
* OR Sun is over-priced vs OS systems
Both arguments put Sun in the middle of two compelling forces. If the market for open systems continues to grow and Sun maintains a strong marketshare then the contradictions apparent are mitigated effectively. Choice and flexibility as features win deals, repeatedly in a large percentage of cases. Sun is just focusing on added value around quality, support and services to maintain a leading position with this approach. For Sun it's always a "call to execute" on the basic strategy because any competitor can adopt the same approach. This is good however because it increases the choices the customer can evaluate and grows the market. Grow the pie and maintain a significant slice... Grow at 20% per year and Wall Street will get it too. We're NOT seeing huge pie growths currently but we have some sins of excess as a market to pay for before we get back to fundamentals on purchasing patterns and excess system inventories being recycled in the market. Those trends seem to have bottomed out. The newer systems offer better value over recycled systems from the Dot Com era. Especially, if support contracts are needed.
This approach has worked with Unix (as Solaris), NFS, X Windows (begrudgingly due to the NeWS system, distrust of Motif, etc) Java, lots of TCP/IP standards (DHCP, SNMP, etc).
Sun's strategy gives customers choice and increases the likelihood that as a market grows Sun will get 15-30% of the product sales based upon that market. It's a solid growth model vs the MS model which leverages customer lock-ins on their technology.
Specifically on Linux... Sun would like to win some percentage of the Linux-based systems sold but that market is driven by price/performance and very tight profit margins. As we've seen a lot of companies have found the competitive pressures of the Linux systems market to make for high volume and limited profits.
Linux OS as a business has also been challenging for Red Hat, SuSe, Mandrake, etc.
Programmer's will tell you that Solaris and Linux present very similar software targets for code. It's close to trivial to move a source object between them... As a result, growth of Corporate Linux use could help Sun sell more Solaris systems where the system requirements exceed those offered by the Linux-based systems (grow the Unix-based market and Sun grows too).
Sun has announced the intention to ship Linux based systems based upon feedback from customers that buy these systems. Those customers want Linux to be stable and supportable. What is the shortest path to Linux stability and supportability given that it's hard to offer Linux software, support and systems that are profitable? I think you just let the "bazaar model" work... Lunix gets enhanced, distributed and tested on new hardware with the Open Source model and the efforts of thousands of engineers and scientists. As Sun learned with the System V situation (when they cut a deal w/ AT&T) you can't control Open Standards and see them prosper. It makes customers nervous and makes ALL your competitors gang together in opposition (see OSF as an example).
So Sun would like to selll something that aligns well with the growth of Linux... systems, software, support services, professional services. Sun is not aggressively fighting Linux adoption but Sun is competiting at various points in an IT architecture with compatible offerings based upon Solaris (SPARC and x86). It would be counter to Sun's Business model to do otherwise because Sun wants a reasonable percentage of the IT budget and to give customers the perception that there's no lock-in stragtegy behind Solaris, Java, SPARC, or key network Standards used (LDAP, Project Liberty, etc).
Expect Sun to keep working with a Linux strategy that offers customers choices and some large percentage of those choices lead to the sale of sun products or services. Otherwise, Sun has truly lost it's vision. There is profit to be made in selling Open Systems and even Microsoft can see the logic of NOT getting blocked by a standards committee.
Users, industries, governments and vendors need to follow the lessons of the Internet to build markets. Widely adopted standards increase the value of networks exponentially to all involved. Linux just needs some aggressive standardization around key areas and it will grow exponentially. Sun is NOT preventing that from happening with some proprietary Linux strategy and we should all approve of that and let the best solutions succeed without leveraging patents of other "barriers to entry".
I predict:
I. A large commericial Unix vendor will sue
all Open Source companies for
patent infringement
(they cleverly patented "reselling
academic code as IP" in the early 80's)
II. The suits will so confuse the legal
system that the supreme court will
overrule existing patent law setting
the stage for true software anarchy:
10 get an idea or borrow one
20 create code
30 goto 10
III. The RIAA will request congress impose
infringement fees on anyone who uses
their ears. Royalties sent to the heirs
of:
John Cage (silence and noise)
The RIAA collects their cut on collecting
the fees. Congress passes the "Analog
Rights Grievance Heuristic" (ARGH!)
IV. Israel will be overrun by American Christian
Military "Terror" groups seeking
to stimulate armageddon.
V. HDTV will be termed a technical failure and
home drive-in movies will be the
Next Big Thing!
stix
If it's not for fun... it would take two years:
... (commonwealth?)
to secure the rights
get the financing
pull together a company
to turn the discovery
into a profitable business model
If you don't... someone will.
Earth shattering discoveries are like that...
they create wealth
Bell Telepone,
Edison Electric,
Ford Motors
Linux
Sig: gotta light?
It's the intersection of Commerce, Art and Entertainment... Pick one:
Commerce success is measured in $'s
Artistic success is measured in historic legacy
Entertainment success is measured by the
connection between performer and audience
All artists need to sustain themselves
so they have to find a suitable
balance between the need for $'s,
legacy and connection.
Through the ages all artists have confronted
these issues of patronage, freedon to create and
acceptance.
It's also worth noting that Janis' became an
outspoken Lesbian (she values honesty)
and she was then rejected by the
commercial musical establishment
despite her obvious artistic
credentials. Too expense to "sell"
against mass-market bias...
They prefer to leverage
sex is another manner. "Jailbait" is hot this
year...
Left with few options she developed her own
commericial business base with her own
recording production and distribution
projects... she lives off these and her
performing revenue streams and does so
for the priviledge of being able to share
art with an audience. A small
(by commericial standards) but loyal following. It's worth
noting that most arts have an audience...
The trick is getting their commercial support
to sustain the making of the art... (buy the
products or tickets).
FYI... Her article about attending a Science
Fiction Convention (where she was the awestruck
fan is a great read too). She writes and thinks
well. http://www.janisian.com
Stix n pics
Commercial Use.... a High-End Apple Laptop Case "It just works... but some people like fixing code."
If just one more person tells me to get a Mac...
I swear I'm gonna do it.
Of course, that "one person" is my wife.
News Flash: "Hail Redmondia"
MS has defined the borders of "Redmondia"
on 100 square miles of what was formerly
contained in the State of Washington and ceceded from the United States.
The State of Washington has accepted an
undisclosed amount to enable Redmondia
to establish a Monarchy within their borders.
Citizenship to the new country will be granted
to all inhibitants of Redmondia and land rights
will be transferred to MS Corp.
"Change to Rules... whenever you appear to be
about to loose... winning is just delaying
any possibility of loosing."
McD
M$ owns the desktop until there a robust
Office clone... My perfect anti-trust settlement
would force M$ and all other companies to
use standardized file formats and submit their
extensions to a standards body.
With MS file formats can be imported but never exported. OpenOffice comes close with most file
formats but there are still companies that would
never leave MS office because the have locked
themselves into Excel macros and actually want
to send *.exe files in Outlook, etc.
Until very large companies see he benefits and
just say no to proprietary formats owning THEIR
data ten M$ will continue to reate new formats
for media, e-commerce, distributed computing...
We the people should at least own the right to
2 or more vendors for a given application type.
That's the intent of anti-trust law... Competition
actually works to increase innovation and lower costs.
Of course, free software produces dramatic costs
decreases but it does limit the exchange of value
that creates a robust market. I see Eric Ramond's
Bazaar as a swap meet type of model... Great for
bargains that only the buyer truly values but most
cannot or will ot speculate in... To risky.
Of course, big projects that support consulting
models show some promise to establish some kind of
professional market but it wold ot be the technolog marketplace we have today... and it's hard to tell
the impacts of these models on the economy in the large. As Mel Brook's loved to say as the world's oldest man... "It's a nice living."
Give Microsoft 400 Hours of Community Service:
Checking government PC's for illegal software
Replacing "out dated" Apple systems with
Xboxes in University Computer Labs
Setting up MSN accounts for the elderly in
high-rent retirement communities...
I good corporate lawyer sizes up a situation
by evaluating risks... IN this case the laywer
probably feels:
He can defend the tactic (after study of
the GPL)
or
The "party" that might be offended
has limited resources to attack and the feds
won't see the behavior as a violation of
any business codes
Of course, it's really bad PR and hence puts your
company in a major bad light and marketing should
reject the idea ASAP. You can't buy such negative press in the technical space:
"Company finds way to close "open" for a profit"
A day without slashdot is like a day without stimulants... good for you but hard to take "cold turkey"
To BE or Not to BE?
... Not to BE.
NeXT failed but Apple seems to be energized
with the same ideas.
Santa Cruz operation dwindled but Linux is
finding commercial support.
Novell... well... To Be or Not to Be?
What was the question?
A Mac-smoking friend slid his Powerbook
across the table to me at the local coffee shop
and said: "It's got Unix underneath... OS X."
Intrigued... I asked for a terminal window
and poked about... interesting. I might
be at home here and finally loose MS'es
deathgrip on my brain.
The coffee shop has an 802.11 wireless connection
and his Powerbook's Airport gets past the
URL re-directing gateway to download at DSL speeds. I've tried 3 times to get my DLINK'ed
802.11 config to work as the ISP advertises
it should... hmmm... DSL into my office net
with my morning coffee. [Yes, I've spent a
few hours considering Linux for my wireless
laptop... I'd expect many more would be required
to get it all correctly config'ed... should work
but like my MS experiences NOT without great pain
and combinatoric exercise]
So, I ask if I might see if Zope would work
on the Mac w/ OS X. He allows the "test" and
helps my find a package for mac's, download
and install Zope. Someone has made Zope fit
the Mac install paradigm... It's the easiest
Zope install I've seen (vs Windows, Solaris, Linux). I start Zope... and ask if I might add
the Squishdot package (Slash-clone written in
Python and Zope's D(H)TML). He allows...
I download/install it, restart Zope...
Works painlessly.
Now I have this $3,000 decision... To Titanium
or NOT to Titanium... hmmm, clock's ticking and
I can't get myself to re-up w/ the MS eXPerience.
How much might painless computing be worth and
would it remain painless long enough to get
some of my music recorded, video edited, and
real work done from the coffeeshop?
Decisions, decisions... I did enjoy that NeXT
system back in 1991 I borrowed. I miss my Amiga
days... Computers should be fun to use and that Mac was fun.
I recently stumbled across a GUI book on-line:0 000000057.html
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/uibook/chapters/fog
I found Raskin's interview to be elitist... So much so that he appears to have no company on his
lofty plane... No current OS has anything admirable... Because you MUST start with the
UI first...
Before the chips are selected,
before the nasty hardware access layer is defined
and the "Operating System" fleshed out
we are not operating...
we are interfacing...
don't you see...
don't cut... splice!
don't sever... graft!
Before Dr. Fronkenstein's
creation bolts up-right and "It's alive!"
No! stop this madness... storm the Dr's Castle...
Where's the UI? Where's your UI spec!?
So, First the UI... (Is it in Jeff's book?)
then... a massive round of VC
funding to build a system to enable the UI...
How much money will it take? How much have you
got? Spend, spend, spend because this UI is:
p-e-r-f-e-c-t-i-o-n
This would be a system you could dance with...
The Ginger to your Fred... moving effortlessly...
backwards in high-heels... tap-4-tap...
[Oh yes, don't forget to test it and change anything that delivers less than the highest potential human productivity.]
Simple really,...
it's amazing to see so many GUI's just slapped
willy-nilly over some hugh wad of software
that crawled out of the swamp of technical
feasibility... without an intended User
Interface... madness...