All elections, unless statistcally impossible, should have a hand recount after the fact, to be finished before the election day. Computer count(secure terminals, obviously, what a REQUIRED paper trail) and what not are fine, they give media the fast count. But those numbers arn't stuck until 1. the thought-to-be losing candidate drops out, or 2. the hand recount confirms the count
if there is any reasonable doubt about the process, the losing candidate(s) can petition a judge that says "X happened, that could have changed how votes were counted, please recount them after fixing this" the judge rules on wether it is reasonable for a recount(not in terms of winning/losing, but in terms of fraud or miscalculation) and then is so ordered.
HOWEVER, true common sense would say:hey, this system (two party, PDC, Diebold-esque voting flaws) we have is bullshit, we need to fix it. Personally IRV looks like the best fix, with electionic machines certified as safe with peer/government reviewed code and testing with a federally mandatory paper trail... and/or hand ballots.
It is a public network. You should ASSUME one or more entities(people, groups, governments) are spying on you. IRC is as public as you can get, everyone on the channel has your ip address, there is no real authentication(without the extra services, non-required features) and no encryption.
If you want to be free from this stuff, look at IIP or ssl(or similar) encryption, private networks and authentication.
I am as pissed-off an American liberal(generalized BS label, but it will make my position 'easy' for those who don't know better) as any of them out there. I know my rights, I know they are eroding. I educate myself well above average and am thuroughly convinced we are about to take it in the ass with our pants on dut to congress's conservative pro-special interest group crap.
You know what keeps me south of the canadian border? What makes me get up in the morning and what makes me believe that my future career in IT will be secure and storng?
I rest assured that my government can be civily overthrown every 2 years. Simple. They will screw us, and screw us, and smile while they screw us some more. But when the masses wake up, with a little prodding from those already keen to the goings on, there will be a mass exodus of assholes from the district.
The houses entire point of existance is to be a short-term, accurate representation of the people. You get a couple years to represent the people who voted you in, if you fail, goodbye. You are protected for a long 6-year term like senators. You arn't suppose to be.
With a little help, we will get rid of the corruption, the SIG money, the lobbying, the pro-corporate/anti-citizen legislation. It is our constitutional right, and some day, we will reclaim it.
" Others who do similar jobs just re-image the machines. Soves the problem faster but I don't think the users are quite as happy. They have to reconfigure the machine to how they like it and there is always the risk of lost data."
Newer versions of ghostcast can backup the profile account from a machine and restory before and after ghosting. Backing up the profile(and checking IT for spyware crap) and then restoring it after ghosting a machine is pretty transparent to the user. It is standard procedure at our (enterprise level) shop.
I would, instead, read the book 'Just For Fun' by Linux Thorvalds. It is a great book. The names escape me, but several distros, in the earliest of days(mid-90s), gave Linus stock options as a 'thank you' for their opportunity... I wanna say redhat, and then later(the more financially interesting of the two) was like Suse or similar... it topped several hundred dollars a share on its IPO, and slowly dropped afterwards... Linus was at the time, in the span of 1 day, a multi-millionaire on paper(he couldn't sell any of the stock though, for X number of days)...
Good and fair point. I hope issues like this get resolved though common sense and/or open source.
interesting side note: for a cheap donation(20 bucks or so, in the states) they will send you a burned dvd of all their packages to date, for easy installing.
"Dijjer will work with almost any direct URL, the content publisher doesn't need to lift a finger - they may not even realise that people are using Dijjer to save their bandwidth costs!"
That is a good thing, but potentially a bad as well, for how some sites make money... I think a needed features is a robot.txt entry that blocks dijjer from caching the site.
With news that xserves are up 110+%, I wouldn't doubt that Apple would like more of the same in terms of server growth. Specialized server lines from IBM would not be a bad idea... I just don't know if darwin has the server-level core to really compete with some of the dedicated servers out there(SELinux, aix, hp-ux, solaris, etc).
On the other hand, licensing to IBM is dangerously close to making 'clones'.. It isn't the same, but it would be the first time since the clones that Apple licensed the use of its OS on non apple hardware.
This wasn't suppose to be a 'i will be updating google news to wait for the announcement' post. Just a neat hypothetical, so on the realistic aspect, cut me a bit of slack...
When I said 'core os', what I meant was Solaris as the system. They use xorg+gnome(in the latest 10beta release) which while functional, is not 'powerful' on the same caliber as Mac's Aqua. The core is, yes, the kernel, filesystem, design, non-gui stuff. For a linux core system for example, this would be essentially a full distrobution without X and a window manager installed... The core command set, the default software, the integration, documentation, etc. Mach, while a perfectly fine system, isn't a selling point other than, as i said, it exists. Linux has many great features, SELinux for example, Mach doesn't have a 'oh wow' factor when I buy 10.4, it will be 64-bit, and updated, sure, but nothing that is headline grabbing, it is just adequite.
This appose to say, NT, where the core kernel (prior to the gui integration thing) WAS the selling point of NT. For all practical puproses they just put the win98 gui ontop of a fairly badass kernel. No one was saying 'wow, 2000 has such nice redrawing fuctions and eye candy' they were talking about ntfs, about security policies, about reliability and stability compared to nt4 and 9x series.
So for terms of core OS, I would say the solaris's scalability, reliability, security(trusted solaris, etc), dtrace and the like, it takes a big leap ahead of NT and Linux(And darwin).
Yes, it would take a TON of work. It would be porting aqua to solaris(rather than trying to morph solaris into the way darwin works under aqua)... To be honest, 5 billion, though an arbitrary number it isn't necesarily too out there... it took 1/2 billion for solaris 10, so I would almost say the number is a bit high, even with the size of the project. 3 years? Fine by me. Solaris 11 and Mac 11 shouldn't be out till then anyway, so that fits realisticly.
I know I am not the first, nor last. I don't think it would happen, I don't think it would work. I do think that it would be neat *if* it did.
My IBM point was a bit out of place, but was trying to catch the 'but apple is a hardware company' arguments for my suggestion to give out the os and port to amd64. I am just saying, as Sun and Apple both do, that they make powerful systems to run on their moneymaker: highend hardware.
Different markets? Ofcourse, but you can be multi-tooled. High reliability filesystem and dtrace don't slow down video rendering or editting any more than the next feature.
"The hardware support is pretty dire"...which is the entire POINT. Open Source would allow for porting Linux's drivers to Solaris much more rapidly and easily.
"Sure, it's supposedly a superior kernel"
I love Linux and what it stands for, but lets be honest here. 'Supposedly'? No. Solaris IS a superior kernel, maybe more so on sparc, but the system itself is superior in the enterprise, as a server, workhorse and datacenter machine. It just plain is.
"I threw up my hands in disappointment and went back to the penguin"
The imrpovements you wished you had(speed, i assume) are going to be worked on, obviously... But open source would make the sun admins using amd64 and x86 servers more likely to improve the performance for their own benefit. THAT is why they want to do it.
Solaris DOES need more drivers, but not file systems. ZFS is more likely to be the first incorporated into linux, not ext3 being put into solaris. Sun does have some stunning code, their filesystem, according to the specs(128-bit, 64-bit checksum on all read to ensure uncorrupt data, auto fixing corrupt data transparent on raid systems, etc) are going to be a killer feature...
Things like dtrace, though, are simply ported. Linux needs to have support for the calls and do so in such a way that performance and behavior does not change. Solaris reports on all levels and aspects with dtrace, with no performance loss, Linux's offerings are not to the level of professionalism (ktrace, among others, i believe) and adding dtrace is not simply a recompile, it is a kernel-wide architecture.
Sun has and supports modern gnu-based command utils... Though not always by default. This is one of the main compatability issues with Solaris, it is binary and source compatabile with version 2.6(i believe)... Linux, Mac, Windows, they can't touch that. Sun cannot lose thise feature, and thus, cannot move to commands(that are used by default install) that break this... For example, more and tar are used, where the moder tar command -xzvf(is that it? i always have to check.) doesn't work. because it just is an older version fork.
disolving one's advantages to the other and vice versa just makes 2 systems that are bastard brothers. Each needs to have an identity its own, and cannot focus on emulating the other. things like a Linux compatability layer(present) are needed, and package management tool improvements from Linux are needed, but not reiserfs, etc. and blanding the two OS's with the other's highlights just disolves what is special about them. To some extent yes, but they need to be distinct, yet friendly, competitors.
You say that Linux wins because it is disposable(free)... Well, an 'open source' solaris is the same thing. A free solaris. You will get the same level(nul / community-based) support with disposable linux.
Sparc/Solaris underperform? On sparc hardware, maybe, sure. But there are some badass features on sparc that just can't be touched by x86. They are two different markets, as always. Sparc is for the enterprise class where 1(or 1+1) server is there and it is the shiznit and it will not(can not) go down. X86 can be the highend, but more in cluster form, where the redundancy of multiple boxes gives you the advantages of the sparc's pricetag and features.
The jab at apple prices, coming from a supposed ISP on the scale you hinted at makes me want to call bullshit. Paying a couple hundred, or thousand(or tens of thousands, depending on the situation), more for a more reliable, more robust, better supported box just makes sense. period. This is PRECISELY the difference in initial cost verse total cost.
Yes, apple hardware is more expensive in many cases. However, that price is (arguably) justified with the pre-bundled software, quality of the components, integration of the system and overall usability of the device. How is that so hard to understand? Is it the best deal for everyone? No. Neither is a lowend Dell box. Is it a legitment competitor that DOES have price points that at times are equal or lower than a comparable Dell machine? YES.
The same is true of Sun. Which, by the way, does sell lowend amd64 boxes with Redhat Linux, if you so choose.
I would specify the OP. Will open source Solaris kill Linux in the datacenter/workstation market, where it has up to this point gained the most ground?
In the sense of killing linux, ofcourse not. Linux cannot 'die'.
In the sense that putting linux in such an unfavorable(sub par, in comparison) competition with Solaris in highend workstation, low/med-end servers(high end servers are still true unix, aix/solaris/hp-ux/etc) then yes, I think, conceivably, Solaris has that chance. Atleast to the point of setting Linux back so far as to virtually kill it for professional use...
Now will it? No. I don't think so. Solaris needs to get some new life breathed into it, while Sun cannot, at the same time, break binary compatability with Solaris 2.6! It is a juggling act that I don't think Sun can manage. In theory, yes, it could happen. In reality? No. No it won't.
Here is hoping for the two of them to move towards a revival in unix-like/based systems, though. More competition is a GOOD THING. Microsoft needs, NEEEDS, to get a black eye, so that they too feel threatened.
Sun has talked about porting to ibm's powerpc. That would be the top 3 archs. What more is needed? What bleeding edge architecture does Linux support that will trumpet in the second coming? Seriously, if I want portability, I will go to an OS that is made to be portable.(netbsd, obviously).
Solaris, simply put, is the best production server os out there. It is not there(drivers, mostly) for a linux-like destktop. It is there for workstations(workstations arn't custom built, so drivers support is less an issue).
For servers, for production machines, for heavy load and serious work. For all my love for Linux, Solaris isn't even comparable to Linux, it is in a league all its own.
Proof? Easy. What market do you want? OS, Browser, Email. lets keep it simple...
*Netscape lost to IE. Regardless of the marketing/antitrust issues, by IE4 vs. nn 4 time, IE won. Why? Because It is harder to keep a lead(Netscape) then it is to take over a lead(IE).
*Google over Yahoo. Yahoo was top dog, with altavista and a couple others, granted. But Google came on the scene, them being late to the game meant they could design around other's(yahoo's portal) faults.
Having a system in the lead means you need to keep improving on that system to stayin the lead. This gets harder and harder.
The persuer(those who join later, or are just a lesser-product) have the ability to see the field and design around the problems others have had.
*Gmail vs. Yahoo Mail and Hotmail. Size regardless, their design(how they can have 1 gig a user is genious in how they handle it) and their UI is unmatched.
*BeOS vs. Mac and Windows. BeOS was the shiznit, because it was created after seeing what absolutely sucked about Windows and Mac(and Unix).
*Firefox vs. IE. IE was stagnant and asleep at the wheel. Firefox came in(and replaced mozilla) as the light, fast, leave browser that worked great and was safe.
What is so hard to understand? The persuer has an advantage because, among other things, they have a fresh start.
Microsoft woke up, and will move towards an IE7 release. Competition is a good thing. Remember?
Sun has, in Solaris 10, arguably the most powerful core OS of any on the market for general/server/production use(not counting embedded, rt, or mainframe systems and I know not enough about them). They have some killer stats, powerful new features, and amazing development coming out. This all sits under xorg+gnome for a gui...
ok, transition time... please don't kill me, just hear me out...
Apple(*ducks*) has arguably, the most powerful gui on the market. Feature wise, simplicity, elegance and consistant... Very powerful, though not perfect, ofcourse. Darwin is a nice enough system but doesn't have much more the 'average' features. Nothing makes it have a selling point other than it exists and it is freebsd-like.
What both companies have is an amazing half OS that by all accounts is/atleast/ on par if not far ahead feature-for-feature with their competition. Yet, they arn't adopted more than their niche(but rabid) markets.
I propose a merger. Sun is marginally(25-50%, i think) larger than Apple income wise and whanot. Merging the two systems, the Aqua and solid gui on top of Solaris 10 core system. This would take time and would coincide with the System 11 release(ironically) for both companies.
To make this really work though, they need to migrate. Procide highend workstations and servers(as Sun and Apple always have) but offer a lowend as well... Sun offers x86 systems for lowend servers, and has talked about a ppc port of solaris. Personally, I think ppc is superior, with IBM's work they have made it very powerful. But an AMD64 system would be fine as well.
The companies need to flood the markets with their OS, even if it is on amd64, only, at a less-supported(community support for the free version)... I mean, send free boxed copies of their software to every university with a cs department, free of charge. They need to literally hand this software out to everyone they can. Free download for personal or non-profit use (minimum) and have a good resource/community site for support.
The more open the system the better, but both companies use open source where it makes sense in their systems, not because they are sucking up, but because it is the best choice for the product.
PS. yes, I know Apple is a hardware company. I wrote this on my 12" pbook. Sun is a hardware company too, which makes demand for an operating system that(for full use/support like sparc or ppc's cooler features) require a more highend(expensive) machine.
IBM does this with Linux, they are a hardware company using a generic operating system on highend machines.
The story is nice, whatever. It doesn't matter. The COOL part about this game is that it is a cel-shaded Batman throwback... Shoot into a bad guy and a series of world bubbles with jagged edges pop up and say 'tat' 'tat' 'tat'... Very old school batman tv show feel. The graphics are badass due to this(and the whole cel-shaded hand drawn feel to the whole game)
You're damn right. NOONE, and I mean NOONE can waste money as well as Oregonians can all the while leading most states in unemployment. Congress can't come close to the level of crap spending our legislature can./me = public employee, oregon resident, disugested with state spendin.
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Common sense would say:
All elections, unless statistcally impossible, should have a hand recount after the fact, to be finished before the election day. Computer count(secure terminals, obviously, what a REQUIRED paper trail) and what not are fine, they give media the fast count. But those numbers arn't stuck until
1. the thought-to-be losing candidate drops out, or
2. the hand recount confirms the count
if there is any reasonable doubt about the process, the losing candidate(s) can petition a judge that says "X happened, that could have changed how votes were counted, please recount them after fixing this" the judge rules on wether it is reasonable for a recount(not in terms of winning/losing, but in terms of fraud or miscalculation) and then is so ordered.
HOWEVER, true common sense would say:hey, this system (two party, PDC, Diebold-esque voting flaws) we have is bullshit, we need to fix it. Personally IRV looks like the best fix, with electionic machines certified as safe with peer/government reviewed code and testing with a federally mandatory paper trail... and/or hand ballots.
But I am open to ideas
It is a public network. You should ASSUME one or more entities(people, groups, governments) are spying on you. IRC is as public as you can get, everyone on the channel has your ip address, there is no real authentication(without the extra services, non-required features) and no encryption.
If you want to be free from this stuff, look at IIP or ssl(or similar) encryption, private networks and authentication.
heh, that was a good one.
/tongue-mostly-in-cheek
No, you are mistaken, this could be used to catch 'terrorists' and is thus above both the law and common sense (and judicial oversight).
Good try though, better luck next time.
I am as pissed-off an American liberal(generalized BS label, but it will make my position 'easy' for those who don't know better) as any of them out there. I know my rights, I know they are eroding. I educate myself well above average and am thuroughly convinced we are about to take it in the ass with our pants on dut to congress's conservative pro-special interest group crap.
You know what keeps me south of the canadian border? What makes me get up in the morning and what makes me believe that my future career in IT will be secure and storng?
I rest assured that my government can be civily overthrown every 2 years. Simple. They will screw us, and screw us, and smile while they screw us some more. But when the masses wake up, with a little prodding from those already keen to the goings on, there will be a mass exodus of assholes from the district.
The houses entire point of existance is to be a short-term, accurate representation of the people. You get a couple years to represent the people who voted you in, if you fail, goodbye. You are protected for a long 6-year term like senators. You arn't suppose to be.
With a little help, we will get rid of the corruption, the SIG money, the lobbying, the pro-corporate/anti-citizen legislation. It is our constitutional right, and some day, we will reclaim it.
" Others who do similar jobs just re-image the machines. Soves the problem faster but I don't think the users are quite as happy. They have to reconfigure the machine to how they like it and there is always the risk of lost data."
Newer versions of ghostcast can backup the profile account from a machine and restory before and after ghosting. Backing up the profile(and checking IT for spyware crap) and then restoring it after ghosting a machine is pretty transparent to the user. It is standard procedure at our (enterprise level) shop.
I would, instead, read the book 'Just For Fun' by Linux Thorvalds. It is a great book. The names escape me, but several distros, in the earliest of days(mid-90s), gave Linus stock options as a 'thank you' for their opportunity... I wanna say redhat, and then later(the more financially interesting of the two) was like Suse or similar... it topped several hundred dollars a share on its IPO, and slowly dropped afterwards... Linus was at the time, in the span of 1 day, a multi-millionaire on paper(he couldn't sell any of the stock though, for X number of days)...
Good book, go read it.
My wish: I think Linux 3.0 should have the goal of creating, in the spirit SELinux, a Trusted Linux system.
Good and fair point. I hope issues like this get resolved though common sense and/or open source.
interesting side note: for a cheap donation(20 bucks or so, in the states) they will send you a burned dvd of all their packages to date, for easy installing.
bandwidth limit the file and promote digger on the site.
"Dijjer will work with almost any direct URL, the content publisher doesn't need to lift a finger - they may not even realise that people are using Dijjer to save their bandwidth costs!"
That is a good thing, but potentially a bad as well, for how some sites make money... I think a needed features is a robot.txt entry that blocks dijjer from caching the site.
You are absolutely, erm, right?
With news that xserves are up 110+%, I wouldn't doubt that Apple would like more of the same in terms of server growth. Specialized server lines from IBM would not be a bad idea... I just don't know if darwin has the server-level core to really compete with some of the dedicated servers out there(SELinux, aix, hp-ux, solaris, etc).
On the other hand, licensing to IBM is dangerously close to making 'clones'.. It isn't the same, but it would be the first time since the clones that Apple licensed the use of its OS on non apple hardware.
I would like to see it happen though.
I have played with IE7... One of the cooler open source projects around, in my opinion. very neat idea.
The article says 'with anaconda'... Anaconda is the redhat-used installed for their distro. Also used by gentoo and fedora.
This wasn't suppose to be a 'i will be updating google news to wait for the announcement' post. Just a neat hypothetical, so on the realistic aspect, cut me a bit of slack...
When I said 'core os', what I meant was Solaris as the system. They use xorg+gnome(in the latest 10beta release) which while functional, is not 'powerful' on the same caliber as Mac's Aqua. The core is, yes, the kernel, filesystem, design, non-gui stuff. For a linux core system for example, this would be essentially a full distrobution without X and a window manager installed... The core command set, the default software, the integration, documentation, etc. Mach, while a perfectly fine system, isn't a selling point other than, as i said, it exists. Linux has many great features, SELinux for example, Mach doesn't have a 'oh wow' factor when I buy 10.4, it will be 64-bit, and updated, sure, but nothing that is headline grabbing, it is just adequite.
This appose to say, NT, where the core kernel (prior to the gui integration thing) WAS the selling point of NT. For all practical puproses they just put the win98 gui ontop of a fairly badass kernel. No one was saying 'wow, 2000 has such nice redrawing fuctions and eye candy' they were talking about ntfs, about security policies, about reliability and stability compared to nt4 and 9x series.
So for terms of core OS, I would say the solaris's scalability, reliability, security(trusted solaris, etc), dtrace and the like, it takes a big leap ahead of NT and Linux(And darwin).
Yes, it would take a TON of work. It would be porting aqua to solaris(rather than trying to morph solaris into the way darwin works under aqua)... To be honest, 5 billion, though an arbitrary number it isn't necesarily too out there... it took 1/2 billion for solaris 10, so I would almost say the number is a bit high, even with the size of the project. 3 years? Fine by me. Solaris 11 and Mac 11 shouldn't be out till then anyway, so that fits realisticly.
I know I am not the first, nor last. I don't think it would happen, I don't think it would work. I do think that it would be neat *if* it did.
My IBM point was a bit out of place, but was trying to catch the 'but apple is a hardware company' arguments for my suggestion to give out the os and port to amd64. I am just saying, as Sun and Apple both do, that they make powerful systems to run on their moneymaker: highend hardware.
Different markets? Ofcourse, but you can be multi-tooled. High reliability filesystem and dtrace don't slow down video rendering or editting any more than the next feature.
"The hardware support is pretty dire" ...which is the entire POINT. Open Source would allow for porting Linux's drivers to Solaris much more rapidly and easily.
"Sure, it's supposedly a superior kernel"
I love Linux and what it stands for, but lets be honest here. 'Supposedly'? No. Solaris IS a superior kernel, maybe more so on sparc, but the system itself is superior in the enterprise, as a server, workhorse and datacenter machine. It just plain is.
"I threw up my hands in disappointment and went back to the penguin"
The imrpovements you wished you had(speed, i assume) are going to be worked on, obviously... But open source would make the sun admins using amd64 and x86 servers more likely to improve the performance for their own benefit. THAT is why they want to do it.
"Solaris adsorbs Linux's strengths (drivers, file systems, etc.)"
Solaris DOES need more drivers, but not file systems. ZFS is more likely to be the first incorporated into linux, not ext3 being put into solaris. Sun does have some stunning code, their filesystem, according to the specs(128-bit, 64-bit checksum on all read to ensure uncorrupt data, auto fixing corrupt data transparent on raid systems, etc) are going to be a killer feature...
Things like dtrace, though, are simply ported. Linux needs to have support for the calls and do so in such a way that performance and behavior does not change. Solaris reports on all levels and aspects with dtrace, with no performance loss, Linux's offerings are not to the level of professionalism (ktrace, among others, i believe) and adding dtrace is not simply a recompile, it is a kernel-wide architecture.
Sun has and supports modern gnu-based command utils... Though not always by default. This is one of the main compatability issues with Solaris, it is binary and source compatabile with version 2.6(i believe)... Linux, Mac, Windows, they can't touch that. Sun cannot lose thise feature, and thus, cannot move to commands(that are used by default install) that break this... For example, more and tar are used, where the moder tar command -xzvf(is that it? i always have to check.) doesn't work. because it just is an older version fork.
disolving one's advantages to the other and vice versa just makes 2 systems that are bastard brothers. Each needs to have an identity its own, and cannot focus on emulating the other. things like a Linux compatability layer(present) are needed, and package management tool improvements from Linux are needed, but not reiserfs, etc. and blanding the two OS's with the other's highlights just disolves what is special about them. To some extent yes, but they need to be distinct, yet friendly, competitors.
Solaris runs on amd64, and there was talk about porting to ppc. It does not run on Itanium, afaik.
You say that Linux wins because it is disposable(free)... Well, an 'open source' solaris is the same thing. A free solaris. You will get the same level(nul / community-based) support with disposable linux.
Sparc/Solaris underperform? On sparc hardware, maybe, sure. But there are some badass features on sparc that just can't be touched by x86. They are two different markets, as always. Sparc is for the enterprise class where 1(or 1+1) server is there and it is the shiznit and it will not(can not) go down. X86 can be the highend, but more in cluster form, where the redundancy of multiple boxes gives you the advantages of the sparc's pricetag and features.
The jab at apple prices, coming from a supposed ISP on the scale you hinted at makes me want to call bullshit. Paying a couple hundred, or thousand(or tens of thousands, depending on the situation), more for a more reliable, more robust, better supported box just makes sense. period. This is PRECISELY the difference in initial cost verse total cost.
Yes, apple hardware is more expensive in many cases. However, that price is (arguably) justified with the pre-bundled software, quality of the components, integration of the system and overall usability of the device. How is that so hard to understand? Is it the best deal for everyone? No. Neither is a lowend Dell box. Is it a legitment competitor that DOES have price points that at times are equal or lower than a comparable Dell machine? YES.
The same is true of Sun. Which, by the way, does sell lowend amd64 boxes with Redhat Linux, if you so choose.
I would specify the OP. Will open source Solaris kill Linux in the datacenter/workstation market, where it has up to this point gained the most ground?
In the sense of killing linux, ofcourse not. Linux cannot 'die'.
In the sense that putting linux in such an unfavorable(sub par, in comparison) competition with Solaris in highend workstation, low/med-end servers(high end servers are still true unix, aix/solaris/hp-ux/etc) then yes, I think, conceivably, Solaris has that chance. Atleast to the point of setting Linux back so far as to virtually kill it for professional use...
Now will it? No. I don't think so. Solaris needs to get some new life breathed into it, while Sun cannot, at the same time, break binary compatability with Solaris 2.6! It is a juggling act that I don't think Sun can manage. In theory, yes, it could happen. In reality? No. No it won't.
Here is hoping for the two of them to move towards a revival in unix-like/based systems, though. More competition is a GOOD THING. Microsoft needs, NEEEDS, to get a black eye, so that they too feel threatened.
Does... It... Matter?
Sun has talked about porting to ibm's powerpc. That would be the top 3 archs. What more is needed? What bleeding edge architecture does Linux support that will trumpet in the second coming? Seriously, if I want portability, I will go to an OS that is made to be portable.(netbsd, obviously).
Solaris, simply put, is the best production server os out there. It is not there(drivers, mostly) for a linux-like destktop. It is there for workstations(workstations arn't custom built, so drivers support is less an issue).
For servers, for production machines, for heavy load and serious work. For all my love for Linux, Solaris isn't even comparable to Linux, it is in a league all its own.
*tag* i'm in.
Proof? Easy. What market do you want? OS, Browser, Email. lets keep it simple...
*Netscape lost to IE. Regardless of the marketing/antitrust issues, by IE4 vs. nn 4 time, IE won. Why? Because It is harder to keep a lead(Netscape) then it is to take over a lead(IE).
*Google over Yahoo. Yahoo was top dog, with altavista and a couple others, granted. But Google came on the scene, them being late to the game meant they could design around other's(yahoo's portal) faults.
Having a system in the lead means you need to keep improving on that system to stayin the lead. This gets harder and harder.
The persuer(those who join later, or are just a lesser-product) have the ability to see the field and design around the problems others have had.
*Gmail vs. Yahoo Mail and Hotmail. Size regardless, their design(how they can have 1 gig a user is genious in how they handle it) and their UI is unmatched.
*BeOS vs. Mac and Windows. BeOS was the shiznit, because it was created after seeing what absolutely sucked about Windows and Mac(and Unix).
*Firefox vs. IE. IE was stagnant and asleep at the wheel. Firefox came in(and replaced mozilla) as the light, fast, leave browser that worked great and was safe.
What is so hard to understand? The persuer has an advantage because, among other things, they have a fresh start.
Microsoft woke up, and will move towards an IE7 release. Competition is a good thing. Remember?
OK, imagine with me...
/atleast/ on par if not far ahead feature-for-feature with their competition. Yet, they arn't adopted more than their niche(but rabid) markets.
Sun has, in Solaris 10, arguably the most powerful core OS of any on the market for general/server/production use(not counting embedded, rt, or mainframe systems and I know not enough about them). They have some killer stats, powerful new features, and amazing development coming out. This all sits under xorg+gnome for a gui...
ok, transition time... please don't kill me, just hear me out...
Apple(*ducks*) has arguably, the most powerful gui on the market. Feature wise, simplicity, elegance and consistant... Very powerful, though not perfect, ofcourse. Darwin is a nice enough system but doesn't have much more the 'average' features. Nothing makes it have a selling point other than it exists and it is freebsd-like.
What both companies have is an amazing half OS that by all accounts is
I propose a merger. Sun is marginally(25-50%, i think) larger than Apple income wise and whanot. Merging the two systems, the Aqua and solid gui on top of Solaris 10 core system. This would take time and would coincide with the System 11 release(ironically) for both companies.
To make this really work though, they need to migrate. Procide highend workstations and servers(as Sun and Apple always have) but offer a lowend as well... Sun offers x86 systems for lowend servers, and has talked about a ppc port of solaris. Personally, I think ppc is superior, with IBM's work they have made it very powerful. But an AMD64 system would be fine as well.
The companies need to flood the markets with their OS, even if it is on amd64, only, at a less-supported(community support for the free version)... I mean, send free boxed copies of their software to every university with a cs department, free of charge. They need to literally hand this software out to everyone they can. Free download for personal or non-profit use (minimum) and have a good resource/community site for support.
The more open the system the better, but both companies use open source where it makes sense in their systems, not because they are sucking up, but because it is the best choice for the product.
PS. yes, I know Apple is a hardware company. I wrote this on my 12" pbook. Sun is a hardware company too, which makes demand for an operating system that(for full use/support like sparc or ppc's cooler features) require a more highend(expensive) machine.
IBM does this with Linux, they are a hardware company using a generic operating system on highend machines.
The story is nice, whatever. It doesn't matter. The COOL part about this game is that it is a cel-shaded Batman throwback... Shoot into a bad guy and a series of world bubbles with jagged edges pop up and say 'tat' 'tat' 'tat'... Very old school batman tv show feel. The graphics are badass due to this(and the whole cel-shaded hand drawn feel to the whole game)
You're damn right. NOONE, and I mean NOONE can waste money as well as Oregonians can all the while leading most states in unemployment. Congress can't come close to the level of crap spending our legislature can. /me = public employee, oregon resident, disugested with state spendin.