Is Oracle's behavior legal? Yes. Are the support companies in the wrong? Yes. Oracle owns Solaris and gets to set the rules. Is this a smart strategy for Solaris or Oracle? I doubt it. My company was a long term Sun/Solaris customer but when Oracle took over they locked down support and pretty much everything in the Solaris community and started attempting to extract as much cash as they could from us. We weren't the biggest customer but we were a pretty good customer and we weren't a tiny little startup either. Oracle did an excellent job of convincing my management to move to Windows and open source solutions. We stay as far away from Oracle as we can these days. Oracle knows the cost of everything but not the value of a community to support them.
I work in what used to be a heavy Sun/Solaris enterprise. We still use a lot of legacy hardware (up through the T2 processors) but pretty much stopped buying when Oracle took Sun over. We also use a lot of Oracle database software. Oracle's has given up on the lower end and are exclusively pitched at the top end of the market. Sun had a lot of problems with their identity over time but they always understood that they needed to create an on-ramp for their brand by supporting the low end. Oracle's systematically destroyed Sun's market ecology, in my opinion, quite deliberately. As usual Sun's hardware stands head and shoulders above anything else in raw performance and elegance. (As do Oracle database products.) But it doesn't matter unless you need the absolutely highest level of performance. And that's a vanishingly small percentage of the market. My management is interested in elasticity and low capital costs now. The cloud and Amazon Web Services seem to be where Sun used to be in mindshare. Oracle might pull it off, but I've seen absolutely no inkling that Larry Ellison cares about anything other than extracting as much margin as he can from the absolute highest paying customers who share his margins. So, probably the T5 and M5 are too late to matter anymore except for a tiny market that needs 8 cores and 32 threads per CPU and has money to burn on very large systems and support contracts. They'd be pretty much the last vendor I'd consider these days for general computing.
Good luck to them! Getting the power back is only the beginning. All sorts of problems are likely to crop up with 9000 servers. They'll be at it for a week, mostly likely.
I've been in DC when the power's dropped. It's surprising how physical it is when it gets quiet. I imagine the initial bang and then the silence broken by the alarms was quite an experience.
Working for a textbook publisher I can say that no one is currently worried about eBook options for textbooks (although I've been trying to tell them it's coming). OLPC seemed to me to be a potential game changer for education but I think it's lost its way. Falling into the MS reality distortion field was the first mistake. I think the proposed form factor is interesting but I think the hardware target is lame and uninspired.
The big problem is that they leave out the content. Creating textbook content is key and requires a serious investment to match the curriculums. Yes, textbooks are expensive (and profitable), but much of the cost is in creating the content and customizing the content for each school. The problems with eBooks isn't the hardware it's having enough content. Amazon is semi-close with Kindle. Reading for pleasure will likely never happen with eBooks but it could work for education with enough of a commitment.
Negroponte's close but, as usual, the Media Lab orientation is light on content and high on concept.
I think they're a good choice for Cape Cod generally but the cell coverage on the National Seashore can be a bit spotty, especially around Eastham where the Seashore's Visitor Center is. (There's some sort of roaming service there.) Further up towards Truro and P'town you're likely to be in better shape. Check out the coverage maps before you select a provider. The town libraries also provide Wifi although they have transfer limits.
After trying various hotspots and using dialup with mixed results I've invested in mobile broadband solution for my visits down there. I'm generally in the Harwich/Chatham area so I'm not too worried about the coverage gaps.
I've found my Cisco VPN client is a bit flaky with Sprint but I'm hoping it's just a version problem.
I'll bet there's a VAX on a factory floor somewhere running something that hasn't changed since the late '70's. It doesn't break and keeps something going.
Optionally, I suspect there's some IBM 360 (or earlier) code that's still being used.
That would be correct. My bad. It was actually an application originally developed on Sol 10 x86. They had to stage it on the Sparc E280R in our house for initial testing and then it got moved to the X4100 for Production since it included a 3rd party product that had only been compiled for x86 (go figure). If you guys figure out a way to run x86 instruction sets semi-natively on a SPARC and it performs I'd be thrilled.:-)
We just had an app that got developed on an E280R running Sol 10 x86 switched to an X4100 running Sol 10 and the developers were complaining the X4100 was noticeably slower. So, I don't think Sun's worried about Solaris x86 eating their hardware sales. x86 just gives them some reach outside of the expensive Sparc systems. But when you want performance on Solaris you get the the Sparc systems. I think HP supports Solaris, too, on their systems. It's pure PR.
The name of the game that Sun is playing is the datacenter. A really significant cost of running a serious enterprise with dozens or hundreds of servers is in the supporting infrastructure, things like electric capacity and cooling. The important metric is computing power per watt. And computing power isn't just CPU power but also things like I/O bandwidth. Sun has always excelled at the I/O portion of the program. The Niagara processors improve the performance of multi-threaded applications but shortening the calls to memory and cache.
Where I work our datacenter is a bit constrained on space, power, and cooling. Adding these bad boys allows us to support many more applications, websites, and whatever else the business wants with less power and cooling and capital cost than what we used last year. And, yes, you can get a three year warranty on brand name Intel servers but the reliability and serviceability of Sun gear lasts way beyond three years.
I think their desktops suck. And I wasn't too much of a fan of Solaris until Sol 10. It was boring. Run Solaris x86 if you want to try it cheap. Linux has made it much better by forcing new features liek Dtrace and ZFS. The cost of entry is a bit steep (and over powered) for SME but if you want serious computing power you can do much worse than Sun. They've been written off more times than I care to count (kind of like Apple) but they're still standing.
I go sit in the cafeteria before I head to my cube for the 15-20 minutes it takes me to drink a cup of coffee. I review the projects list I keep to make a short list of tasks that I need to get or have done that day. Gets my head oriented so I can stay proactive when I do get to my cube and everyone starts hitting me up for stuff.
When I used to just show up without that little ritual I'd lose focus real quick and just get into a reactive mode all day.
This may start to look a little like the fall of Saigon.
I was thinking that it was going to take a little while for the proprietary software silos to collapse under their own contradictions and costs but it looks like the patent decision by the Supreme Court is making it less tenable to sustain software as a business without actually making it useful or serviceable.
Sun has changed its approach and is innovating and opening up and becoming service oriented.
Microsoft, not so much.
The end for proprietary software may come faster than we imagined.
I actually live in a building from the mid-80's that was built to use off-peak electricity. We got (and still have) a Time-of-Day electric rate where the we pay much less for the off-peak electricity. The ceilings in our units were designed as air plenums and were stocked with eutectic salt bags that change phase at about 68F. The idea is that that, in the summer we "freeze" the salt solution during the evening but cooling the air plenum. During the day we avoided running the A/C and saved significant electric costs. It works in reverse during the winter. They kept the apartments quite comfortable.
Eutectic salt solutions have been used in a lot of commercial applications to store "cold" generated during cheaper energy periods. The main disadvantage is that the eutectic salts break down over time and lose their phase change characteristics. There are also kind of expensive to replace.
Strategies like this that use thermal storage to modulate electric demand are pretty efficient ways to lower the required peak capacity of electrical systems. Other schemes like pumping water back up hill tend to run afoul of thermodynamic laws and can't be nearly as efficient.
My wife is a quilter (she graduated from knitting). From my experience with crafts ladies I'd have to say it's a real challenge to get them to learn enough computer technology to use it comfortably. It's a continuous support challenge.
And don't laugh, he's got the inside track on their daughters. And I'll bet some of them are babes who would be happy to handle his tool.
I love it! Getting bit in the ass over-valuing Intellectual Property. And then trying to have your tax cake and eat it too by selling it to foreign subsidiaries. Made my day!
Seriously, though, maybe that will help companies take a more measured approach to valuing "intellectual" "property".
I work for a textbook publisher and I think you're right. The cost of the textbook is more in the development of the material than the actual physical artifact. Because of various state standards there have to be editions to meet particular state requirements, e.g., Florida math books may be slightly different from California math books. We have lots of people who spend a lot of time checking to make sure the editions we offer to different states match what they require.
Developing a series of books may take 5 years and several million dollars of investment before a book is sold. Of course, when you score, you tend to score big.
We also have to develop a lot of supplementary materials like teacher and lesson planning tools, supplementary web sites, test plans, and other stuff, like rich media websites for the students.
So we don't really worry too much about whether they use books or an electronic version. We'll get to charge them in any event. If I had a dime for every prediction of the demise of books I'd be a wealthy man....
Or not. There's an amazing amount of inertia masquarading as serious technical analysis out there. Our company hasn't made the switch to Active Directory because the CIO hasn't decided that there's a "business case" for it. Meanwhile our network and operations were eaten alive this week with viruses and worms from at least a couple of sources.
Being the semi-lone Linux advocate in a rather large Solaris and Windows environment of about 3000 users I think the poor reputation of Linux is the result of older implementations that were done under the "official" radar with poorly supported hardware. When they break it's really painful and those incidents tend to get pointed to as why Linux is a "bad" idea. Usually, "support" is the critical area. "Support" more often means blame shifting than actually getting things to work (although that sometimes happens.)
Fear not. Companies that intelligently use Linux will have a huge cost advantage in the long run. That will eventually turn more heads than all the PR campaigns Microsoft and Sun can fund.
IIRC this happened to the original version of SSH. It was originally an Open Source project, then later versions were progressively closed down until SSH Communications took it proprietary. The BSD folks picked up the last version that was truly open and made OpenSSH. Of course, one of the things that allowed it to work was that it became a standard that could be written to.
CA's just jealous. I defy you to name a CA product that wasn't mediocre, obtuse, or simply useless. CA is where software goes to die. Even Veritas, a money grubbing software company if ever there was one, at least improves their releases and fixes things. CA just pretends to fix things. I wouldn't even begin to take CA's views on Linux kernel bloat seriously.
There's lots of business out there for those who want to do it, but it's rather boring as a regular thing. And arguing with folks who don't want to pay reasonably is a pain.
I tried starting a computer support/repair business during my last stretch of unemployment. It can be done but the upside profit potential is pretty low unless you figure out how to exploit kids to do the work cheap or charge more than most people want to pay. And fixing problems yourself day after day gets pretty tedious, especially when you've been hired because the clients were too cheap to get real support.
I'm sure one can make a living at it but once I got a "real" job I dropped trying to do it as a business without a second thought.
You've obviously never worked in a library. Job title inflation, especially when attached to IT stuff, is rampant. Librarians are still pissed they couldn't control the Web. Since they can't make much money, they settle for fancy titles to make themselves feel more proficient.
Funny, where's Polaroid now? They won that case and are now mostly toast. Maybe that's a good argument against taking this "Intellectual Property" thing too far.
I think the fact that she's a life sciences person is more significant that the fact she's a women. When Vest was chosen they tried to get a life sciences person but he ended up at Rockefeller University IIRC.
That said, she could be a really good role model for women in science. MIT has been making strides and a serious effort to improve in that area. It'll be interesting to see how she does.
I personally think Vest was an overall negative for MIT. Although he did some things that needed to be done, I think he trashed the culture of the place. If she can improve it more power to her.
Microsoft is constitutionally incapable of understanding, both socially and legally, the nature of FOSS. Bill Gates genius was to commoditize software at a time when it was either totally free and commercially exploitable (via software exchanges based in universities) or pretty much custom or vertically oriented.
The GPL and other Open Source licenses cuts off his ability to commercially exploit FOSS and that ruins the MS business model. It IS the long term threat and they'll battle against it until they're a mere shell of their current selves.
If the GPL had an inherent weakness it would probably be exposed by now. RMS' genius was understanding how to cut off the commercial exploitation of free software. SCO's attacks have been useful in helping create an understanding of how to defend ourselves more effectively by documenting the history more carefully. In my opinion, "intellectual property" is kind of oxymoronic in the end. There might be temporary commercial advantages in it but, as a previous poster suggested, it doesn't work well in the long run against non-commercial entities without a product.
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Is Oracle's behavior legal? Yes. Are the support companies in the wrong? Yes. Oracle owns Solaris and gets to set the rules. Is this a smart strategy for Solaris or Oracle? I doubt it. My company was a long term Sun/Solaris customer but when Oracle took over they locked down support and pretty much everything in the Solaris community and started attempting to extract as much cash as they could from us. We weren't the biggest customer but we were a pretty good customer and we weren't a tiny little startup either. Oracle did an excellent job of convincing my management to move to Windows and open source solutions. We stay as far away from Oracle as we can these days. Oracle knows the cost of everything but not the value of a community to support them.
I work in what used to be a heavy Sun/Solaris enterprise. We still use a lot of legacy hardware (up through the T2 processors) but pretty much stopped buying when Oracle took Sun over. We also use a lot of Oracle database software. Oracle's has given up on the lower end and are exclusively pitched at the top end of the market. Sun had a lot of problems with their identity over time but they always understood that they needed to create an on-ramp for their brand by supporting the low end. Oracle's systematically destroyed Sun's market ecology, in my opinion, quite deliberately. As usual Sun's hardware stands head and shoulders above anything else in raw performance and elegance. (As do Oracle database products.) But it doesn't matter unless you need the absolutely highest level of performance. And that's a vanishingly small percentage of the market. My management is interested in elasticity and low capital costs now. The cloud and Amazon Web Services seem to be where Sun used to be in mindshare. Oracle might pull it off, but I've seen absolutely no inkling that Larry Ellison cares about anything other than extracting as much margin as he can from the absolute highest paying customers who share his margins. So, probably the T5 and M5 are too late to matter anymore except for a tiny market that needs 8 cores and 32 threads per CPU and has money to burn on very large systems and support contracts. They'd be pretty much the last vendor I'd consider these days for general computing.
Danger! Will Robinson! Danger!
I've been in DC when the power's dropped. It's surprising how physical it is when it gets quiet. I imagine the initial bang and then the silence broken by the alarms was quite an experience.
The big problem is that they leave out the content. Creating textbook content is key and requires a serious investment to match the curriculums. Yes, textbooks are expensive (and profitable), but much of the cost is in creating the content and customizing the content for each school. The problems with eBooks isn't the hardware it's having enough content. Amazon is semi-close with Kindle. Reading for pleasure will likely never happen with eBooks but it could work for education with enough of a commitment.
Negroponte's close but, as usual, the Media Lab orientation is light on content and high on concept.
After trying various hotspots and using dialup with mixed results I've invested in mobile broadband solution for my visits down there. I'm generally in the Harwich/Chatham area so I'm not too worried about the coverage gaps.
I've found my Cisco VPN client is a bit flaky with Sprint but I'm hoping it's just a version problem.
I'll bet there's a VAX on a factory floor somewhere running something that hasn't changed since the late '70's. It doesn't break and keeps something going. Optionally, I suspect there's some IBM 360 (or earlier) code that's still being used.
That would be correct. My bad. It was actually an application originally developed on Sol 10 x86. They had to stage it on the Sparc E280R in our house for initial testing and then it got moved to the X4100 for Production since it included a 3rd party product that had only been compiled for x86 (go figure). If you guys figure out a way to run x86 instruction sets semi-natively on a SPARC and it performs I'd be thrilled. :-)
We just had an app that got developed on an E280R running Sol 10 x86 switched to an X4100 running Sol 10 and the developers were complaining the X4100 was noticeably slower. So, I don't think Sun's worried about Solaris x86 eating their hardware sales. x86 just gives them some reach outside of the expensive Sparc systems. But when you want performance on Solaris you get the the Sparc systems. I think HP supports Solaris, too, on their systems. It's pure PR.
Where I work our datacenter is a bit constrained on space, power, and cooling. Adding these bad boys allows us to support many more applications, websites, and whatever else the business wants with less power and cooling and capital cost than what we used last year. And, yes, you can get a three year warranty on brand name Intel servers but the reliability and serviceability of Sun gear lasts way beyond three years.
I think their desktops suck. And I wasn't too much of a fan of Solaris until Sol 10. It was boring. Run Solaris x86 if you want to try it cheap. Linux has made it much better by forcing new features liek Dtrace and ZFS. The cost of entry is a bit steep (and over powered) for SME but if you want serious computing power you can do much worse than Sun. They've been written off more times than I care to count (kind of like Apple) but they're still standing.
When I used to just show up without that little ritual I'd lose focus real quick and just get into a reactive mode all day.
I was thinking that it was going to take a little while for the proprietary software silos to collapse under their own contradictions and costs but it looks like the patent decision by the Supreme Court is making it less tenable to sustain software as a business without actually making it useful or serviceable.
Sun has changed its approach and is innovating and opening up and becoming service oriented.
Microsoft, not so much.
The end for proprietary software may come faster than we imagined.
Eutectic salt solutions have been used in a lot of commercial applications to store "cold" generated during cheaper energy periods. The main disadvantage is that the eutectic salts break down over time and lose their phase change characteristics. There are also kind of expensive to replace.
Strategies like this that use thermal storage to modulate electric demand are pretty efficient ways to lower the required peak capacity of electrical systems. Other schemes like pumping water back up hill tend to run afoul of thermodynamic laws and can't be nearly as efficient.
And don't laugh, he's got the inside track on their daughters. And I'll bet some of them are babes who would be happy to handle his tool.
Seriously, though, maybe that will help companies take a more measured approach to valuing "intellectual" "property".
Developing a series of books may take 5 years and several million dollars of investment before a book is sold. Of course, when you score, you tend to score big.
We also have to develop a lot of supplementary materials like teacher and lesson planning tools, supplementary web sites, test plans, and other stuff, like rich media websites for the students.
So we don't really worry too much about whether they use books or an electronic version. We'll get to charge them in any event. If I had a dime for every prediction of the demise of books I'd be a wealthy man....
Being the semi-lone Linux advocate in a rather large Solaris and Windows environment of about 3000 users I think the poor reputation of Linux is the result of older implementations that were done under the "official" radar with poorly supported hardware. When they break it's really painful and those incidents tend to get pointed to as why Linux is a "bad" idea. Usually, "support" is the critical area. "Support" more often means blame shifting than actually getting things to work (although that sometimes happens.)
Fear not. Companies that intelligently use Linux will have a huge cost advantage in the long run. That will eventually turn more heads than all the PR campaigns Microsoft and Sun can fund.
IIRC this happened to the original version of SSH. It was originally an Open Source project, then later versions were progressively closed down until SSH Communications took it proprietary. The BSD folks picked up the last version that was truly open and made OpenSSH. Of course, one of the things that allowed it to work was that it became a standard that could be written to.
CA's just jealous. I defy you to name a CA product that wasn't mediocre, obtuse, or simply useless. CA is where software goes to die. Even Veritas, a money grubbing software company if ever there was one, at least improves their releases and fixes things. CA just pretends to fix things. I wouldn't even begin to take CA's views on Linux kernel bloat seriously.
I tried starting a computer support/repair business during my last stretch of unemployment. It can be done but the upside profit potential is pretty low unless you figure out how to exploit kids to do the work cheap or charge more than most people want to pay. And fixing problems yourself day after day gets pretty tedious, especially when you've been hired because the clients were too cheap to get real support.
I'm sure one can make a living at it but once I got a "real" job I dropped trying to do it as a business without a second thought.
You've obviously never worked in a library. Job title inflation, especially when attached to IT stuff, is rampant. Librarians are still pissed they couldn't control the Web. Since they can't make much money, they settle for fancy titles to make themselves feel more proficient.
Imagine a Beowulf cluster...
Funny, where's Polaroid now? They won that case and are now mostly toast. Maybe that's a good argument against taking this "Intellectual Property" thing too far.
That said, she could be a really good role model for women in science. MIT has been making strides and a serious effort to improve in that area. It'll be interesting to see how she does.
I personally think Vest was an overall negative for MIT. Although he did some things that needed to be done, I think he trashed the culture of the place. If she can improve it more power to her.
The GPL and other Open Source licenses cuts off his ability to commercially exploit FOSS and that ruins the MS business model. It IS the long term threat and they'll battle against it until they're a mere shell of their current selves.
If the GPL had an inherent weakness it would probably be exposed by now. RMS' genius was understanding how to cut off the commercial exploitation of free software. SCO's attacks have been useful in helping create an understanding of how to defend ourselves more effectively by documenting the history more carefully. In my opinion, "intellectual property" is kind of oxymoronic in the end. There might be temporary commercial advantages in it but, as a previous poster suggested, it doesn't work well in the long run against non-commercial entities without a product.