Streets and Trips, and its big brother MapPoint are easily the best products made by Microsoft. Who did the buy to get these nice programs, because surely it wasn't developed in house...
You're right about Apache. My mistake for not realizing they were using a 1.3.x version of it. I cannot comment on the reasoning for making Apache multithreaded, besides just being better from a software architecture standpoint, but it is a moot point. I think you just provided the reason why Apache performed so much better on Linux than on Solaris x86, a pity the author of the article wasn't as knowledgeable as you on the subject. Of course that all goes back to my original point about the author's intelligence, or lack thereof. Your comments do little to discredit my claim that benchmarks done against RH 9 would not be identical to benchmarks done against RH-AS, though given your insights, I would agree that RH-AS would still outperform Solaris x86 when it comes to load testing against Apache 1.3.x.
The article was more than a collection of benchmarks. The author spent a great deal of time talking about things like installation, drivers, desktop features, and available software. My comment was in response to the author's remarks about the availability of commercial software for Solaris x86 vs. Linux. His remarks showed a lot of ignorance by talking about enterprise software like Oracle being available for Linux while the distro he chose for his comparisons was Red Hat 9. The whole point is that Oracle is NOT available for Red Hat 9 only for Red Hat AS.
And you showed your own ignorance by stating that:
It will benchmark the damn same.
Red Hat AS's kernel is the same as RH 7.2 plus some other bits that Red Hat as added. It is far shy of the 2.4.20+ kernel being used in the benchmarks, which implements full POSIX threading (and contains some of those naughty bits for SMP systems, like the ones in the test, that has SCO suing everybody and their brother) among many other things. Let's think about a place where an improved thread model might make a big difference... hmm, maybe in a web server load test? That might involve a lot of threads, what do you think? I would guess that RH 9 would offer significant performance benefits over RH-AS in such a test, but maybe not. However, it would be truly ignorant to guess that they would benchmark the same.
This guy states that Linux is the clear winner in the enterprise software space, but he states this based on a comparison that uses Red Hat 9? If you want to run enterprise software on Linux, such as Oracle or BEA, you can't run Red Hat 9! You have to run Red Hat AS. Oh you can get Oracle to run on RH9, but you will not get any support from Oracle if you do it. The fact that the author left this little fact out indicates that either he doesn't know this or that he left it out intentionally. So either he is an idiot or biased. I will go with idiot, though the article would support either conclusion (or both!)
You are right on that Apple is not looking for a monopoly. They 1.) Found a ripe market, 2.) mdea great products (iPod, iTunes, music store) 3.) PROFIT!! They have expanded these products to Windows because the market demanded it. They didn't force this on the market, the demand was there. Nobody else has been able to generate similar demand, but maybe they will, who knows...
Another aspect of Apple's foray into digital music, is that it has exposed a lot of Windows users to the Apple experience. People in my office on Thursday were downloading and running iTunes left and right. We had a few people already running Macs with sharing turned on. So many of the new iTunes for Windows users saw the Mac users' libraries upon launching iTunes, and quickly figured out how to turn it on for themselves. Needless to say, this was not great for office productivity. It was funny for me to see people talking almost jealously that all the Mac users had been enjoying this thing for so long and they had not. It's like they suddenly got a one day pass to an exclusive club. They were definitely curious as to what other benefits the club members had been enjoying without them knowing about it. Now I'm not saying that these people are all going to buy Macs next time they buy a home computer, but the chances of a couple of them doing just that has got to be higher now than it was before iTunes for Windows was released.
Please tell me - what experimental innovative software is there available for Linux?... The innovative software that I have I've seen running on Linux was not written with Linux in mind but was originally written for Unix/X11 before Linux existed.
Response, titled "Two Examples":
X Windows:
You aren't stuck with a default Window Manager with Linux (yes with MacOS X you can change WM also nowdays) - you can use any that you like, and installation in most cases is trivial (not quite so easy with Mac OS X).
My response simply states that his second example is not an example of something innovative done by Linux, but just another case of Linux cloning an existing technology.
Also, it is not accurate to say that X-Windows has been overlooked by Microsoft and Apple. I run X-Windows everyday on my WinXP laptop using Exceed. No, that's not Microsoft technology and it's not free, but it is done very nicely and easily installed on any NT based OS. On the other hand, Apple provides their own free
X11 client. So while Linux may rely on X-Windows, it didn't invent it and is just one of many OSes that support it.
Please do not try to claim that X Windows is an innovation of Linux. X Windows is from Unix. I was running it on Sun and SGI workstations more than ten years ago. X Windows is just another of Linux's borrowed ideas.
The VBR settings for MP3 importing says that the Stereo Bit Rate setting you choose is used as a minimum bitrate. There is also a list of VBR "Quality" settings from "Lowest" to "Highest." This seemed to imply that the quality setting determined the average bitrate used by VBR, and that the Stereo Bit Rate was just a minimum, a la Lame. I imported some songs using a VBR Quality of "Highest" and Stereo Bit Rate of 64 kbps. I noticed that a five minute song was only taking up 2mb or so, and I knew something was amiss. I played the song in WinAMP, and its average bit rate was 66 kbps. I went back to iTunes and changed its Stereo Bit Rate to 256 kbps. Now the song was 9 mb in size, and WinAMP claimed its average bit rates was 268 kbps. So I think these controls are just busted. It also doesn't look like there's much V in the VBR setting, as most songs seem to stick the Stereo Bit Rate, very rarely dipping higher or lower. Maybe that's a function of the "Quality" setting?
CERN, whose laboratories straddle the Franco-Swiss border near Geneva, said it had sent 1.1 Terabytes of data at 5.44 gigabits a second (Gbps) to a lab at the California Institute of Technology, or Caltech, on October 1.
Finally somebody spelled Caltech correctly. It's not Cal Tech or Cal-tech, and it damn sure isn't CalPoly or PCC.
How naive. Take it from a mathematician, there is an art to statistics -- you use the numbers to prove your point. So if you have two conflicting points, but numbers to back both, one can anecdotedly say that that the numbers lie. Duh.
This is especially true when you are trying to measure something that is inherently subjective, such as "what sounds good?" Even if you have something that is objective, randomness, reproduceability of experiments, etc. can allow for "creativity with numbers" to support opposite claims.
Re:yes, you are required to update
on
Longhorn in 2006
·
· Score: 1
When you talk about "apps" are you talking about the free ones from Apple, such as the iLife suite and Safari? Those are free, so if you want to bitch about having to upgrade your OS so that you can get upgrades of free apps... If you are talking about software from people other than Apple, well it is up to them to decide what OS to support. This is usually dictated by what features the different versions of the OS have and what the application needs. Most apps only require 10.1 (FileMaker, Office, Dreamweaver, Boris.) Some of the Adobe apps released in the last three months require 10.2 as does Quark, but that's about it.
any one who has had the iPod for more than a few months has already switched easier software such as Xplay
In other words you like Xplay better than iTunes, and so you will make sweeping generalizations. After all, if it is true for you it must be true for everyone, right?
Just so you know, I've had an iPod for two years and amazingly I still use iTunes for managing it.
Apple is worried about software being available on other platforms? Are you insane? Look at how much more software is available on Windows, and that includes stuff like Photoshop and Quark. If those were available on Linux, it would make no difference to Apple because Apple's selling point is its ease of use for non-technical people and elegant interface. Linux is far inferior to even Windows when it comes to these aspects, and Windows is far inferior to Apple.
It's part of this amazing thing called a free market: people find that the product in question has enough value (put it on multiple Macs, unlimited burning, unlimited iPods, high quality mpeg4 format) to justify the price of 99 cents per song. Sorry that is so difficult for you to understand.
You exhibit a frightening lack of knowledge of both chess and algorithms. If chess was "purely mathematical" then there would exhist an optimal solution(s). However, the way that chess computing works is not by solving for this optimal solution, but by constantly examining all possibilities (or some well crafted subset) as far ahead as possible and picking the optimal solution over that set. Why is this? Simple, chess is an increasingly complex game, i.e. the number of possible outcomes does not always decrease after each move. This may seem counter-intuitive, certainly a player making a move should eliminate some possible outcomes that relied on the player making a different move, but it is sort of an infinity minus something less than infinity is still infinity. That is why there is no solution to be solved for and instead computers must solve for partial solutions. These partial solutions get better and better as computers can examine more scenarios, but there are definitely diminishing returns.
You have been socially engineered by Microsoft to think that such things as one-click installs are necesarry and desirable. You have been brainwashed to believe that "if it's not as easy as possible, then it is too hard."
Even if you think that one-click installs are necesarry, take a look at MacOS. It allows for one-click installs, but if you the program is going to change OS code/settings, then you are warned about it and prompted for a password (a la sudo.) Of course the MS-programming-kernel that used to be your brain will probably respond that having to put in a password makes the OS "broken"...
Imagine some software engineer saying "hey you know what would make things really easy for our users, if we could remotely take control of their computers, install patches/extensions, and optimize some of their hardware settings." There you go. That could make installing/setting up/maintaining complex software so much easier, right? Hey there are some really obvious security implications, but eaiser is always better right?
You are absolutely right. I personally do not use P2P networks to share music, because I feel that it is wrong. However, if a new cd came out that I wanted and it had this kind of trojan horse/DRM crap on it, there is no way I would purchase it. I might buy it from Apple, but if it wasn't available there... time to reinstall K-Lite?
You might be theoretically (though I would *love* to read the least squares analysis you claim, purely because I love reading crap like that) correct, but I even if you are, I don't think it is practically true. I am fortunate enough to have a progressive scan DVD player and a TV that handles 480p. There are some DVDs that look very good, but there are a lot more IMO that look like shit. Many people on this thread have already pointed out how older DVDs or those with lots of dark scenes have poor encoding. In other words, the bandwidth maybe there for a great picture, but that does not guarantee that the right bits are there. Imperfections are often magnified when a second, lossy algorithm is applied. And even if the picture does look great, a second compression can screw it up.
My point is that a DivX encoded movie mastered from the digitzed source (or if its from Lucas, the actualy source itself) should be a lot better than a DivX encoded movie ripped from a DVD. I don't think there's anything particularly insightful about that statement. Subjectively, you might think that the latter is still good enough or that the former is still not good enough.
Many of the DivX movies you see (especially on P2P networks) are rips from DVDs. As such they are compressions of an already compressed, lossy format. It would be like making AAC rips from MP3s. It is not a good measure of the codec.
You are absolutely correct that analysts are totally worthless. It is in fact a mathematical fact. Any advice offered by analysts/brokers/advisers/your dad/etc. is complete garbage. The market is smarter than them and anything they know is already priced in and probably has been for months. The only exception to this is if they have insider information that can only be known by very few people by definition. In which case, they should go to jail for offering financial advice based on insider information (sorry dad.) They don't want you to know the truth: picking individual is equivalent to gambling. If that's what you want to do, you would have a lot more fun taking your money to Vegas. If you want to actually invest long term, stick with index funds.
How did this get modded up? If one knew anything about Sun's last five years, then one would know that they have spent a ton of money on R&D. One of Merrill Lynch's criticisms is that if you compare the number of people that Sun employs compared to their pre-bubble (1998) levels, then you have to conclude they need to cut several thousand jobs. The first place they suggest Sun cut jobs is in hardware R&D. From a strictly ROI perspective, one could argue that Sun's big mistake has been spending way too much on R&D, not too little.
As for marketing, I've never seen a Sun ad on television. Driving through Silicon Valley, one sees numerous billboards for Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, HP, Veritas, and Apple, but none for Sun. So I'm not really sure where these marketing expenditures are...
So what have been Sun's mistakes? I don't think there are any easy answers to this. One could argue that they did not react to the recession fast enough, especially given that the recession hit them especially hard because of their premium hardware. Maybe they should have scaled back R&D big time in 2001, but it's hard to argue that for a company with several billion dollars in cash. I don't think there's much they could have done to prevent their loss of market share. The combination of cheap OS (Linux) plus cheap hardware with ever increasing performance in a recession economy is pure poison to a company that makes expensive OS and hardware. They could've "embraced" Linux earlier, but why? That would be like a contest on a reality tv show telling the other contestants that it's ok to kick him off the island. There is very little money for Sun to make from Linux (hell there isn't a whole lot of money for anybody to make there.) They could've shifted resources into making Solars x86 better and cheaper. That might have been effective at perserving market share, though it wouldn't have helped their bottom line much.
Sun's decline of market share and profits was unstoppable. The most relevant quesion now I think is : so what? Just because Wall Street doesn't like the direction of a company is really irrelevant. Wall Street is always extremely short-sighted, especially in the aftermath of the dot com bubble. Sun could cut R&D, kill Sparc, spin off Java, etc. basically just becoming a support company for their current customers and become profitable short term. Would they really have any chance then of rebuilindg lost market share long term? I'm not saying they are going to do this now, but just that at least by keeping a lot of R&D going they have a chance of using innovation to regain market share and profits. Isn't that what a technology company is supposed to do?
So, in order to have these databases do the trick, first you'd need to create amazingly complex diagnosis devices, that could scan a human being, measure every possible symptom, and punch all of the data it collected to determine whether that matrix of symptoms matched a disease.
So your doctor scans you, measuring every possible sympton and then analyzes all that data? The amount of data collected by a doctor is very small, and only increases when analysis fails. This would be true for a computer based system as well.
You may think that such a system is far-fetched, too complex to build, and would its cost would be prohibitive. Most of the "scanning" is already out there already. A doctor doesn't take your temperature, pulse, bood pressure -- a nurse does. They write this information down and give it to a doctor. Why not have the nurse enter the information into a device instead? Nurses also listen to your symptoms, which are from a finite set of common ailments, and pass this on to the doctor. Again this could be passed to a computer. A doctor doesn't take your blood and analyze it. This is done by an outside lab with the results sent to the doctor. So why not have this information sent to the diagnostic computer in some standard way? A doctor doesn't perform an mri or x-ray, these are done by technicians with the results given to the doctor. Again this could be given to a computer instead.
I don't care if it's cheaper. If I was sick, I'd much rather talk to a doctor about it than a machine
Most people pay thousands per year in health insurance. If people don't feel the lesser expense makes up for not seeing a doctor, then hospitals that choose not to use this technology and instead keep the current system will thrive. Consumers will make the choice. If they are willing to pay more to choose an insurance plan that lets them bypass machines and only see human doctors, then that is great! It would be a free market at its finest. I'm not arguing to force people into this, I am just arguing for the choice.
But you know there are people who do not have insurance, people for whom health care is too expensive to even have right now. I think these people would be happy to get health care from a computer vs. no health care at all.
$200 Nike shoes cost about $2 in materials and labor. But Nike charges a lot.
Oh boy, yet another person who knows nothing about economics. People pay for Nike because of brand recognition. They could just as easily go down to Wal-Mart and buy a pair of shoes for a couple of dollars. Your example is not one that disproves the free market, but instead shows its strength. If a product has an extra value that people find utility in, they will pay for it. The fact that you may think that this extra value is silly is irrelevant. If hospitals could do the same thing, i.e. Nike Hospital can charge more and people are willing to pay, then that is good for them. Once again it is a free market in action with people exercising their right to choose.
If hospitals didn't spend money on doctors, they'd find something else to spend the money on.
If a hospital is run by a corporation, then they will not spend anymore money than they have to. Otherwise share holders will be upset, etc. Take a look at corporate America over the last couple of years. The fact is that like most companies, personnel expense are the biggest ones for a hospital, and if you compare what a nurse/technician makes vs. a doctor, then its pretty obvious where to look if you wanted to cut costs.
Healthcare isn't expensive in the US because of the doctors.
Slashdot Mirror
The world needs more Real Genius references.
Streets and Trips, and its big brother MapPoint are easily the best products made by Microsoft. Who did the buy to get these nice programs, because surely it wasn't developed in house...
You're right about Apache. My mistake for not realizing they were using a 1.3.x version of it. I cannot comment on the reasoning for making Apache multithreaded, besides just being better from a software architecture standpoint, but it is a moot point. I think you just provided the reason why Apache performed so much better on Linux than on Solaris x86, a pity the author of the article wasn't as knowledgeable as you on the subject. Of course that all goes back to my original point about the author's intelligence, or lack thereof. Your comments do little to discredit my claim that benchmarks done against RH 9 would not be identical to benchmarks done against RH-AS, though given your insights, I would agree that RH-AS would still outperform Solaris x86 when it comes to load testing against Apache 1.3.x.
And you showed your own ignorance by stating that: Red Hat AS's kernel is the same as RH 7.2 plus some other bits that Red Hat as added. It is far shy of the 2.4.20+ kernel being used in the benchmarks, which implements full POSIX threading (and contains some of those naughty bits for SMP systems, like the ones in the test, that has SCO suing everybody and their brother) among many other things. Let's think about a place where an improved thread model might make a big difference
This guy states that Linux is the clear winner in the enterprise software space, but he states this based on a comparison that uses Red Hat 9? If you want to run enterprise software on Linux, such as Oracle or BEA, you can't run Red Hat 9! You have to run Red Hat AS. Oh you can get Oracle to run on RH9, but you will not get any support from Oracle if you do it. The fact that the author left this little fact out indicates that either he doesn't know this or that he left it out intentionally. So either he is an idiot or biased. I will go with idiot, though the article would support either conclusion (or both!)
You are right on that Apple is not looking for a monopoly. They 1.) Found a ripe market, 2.) mdea great products (iPod, iTunes, music store) 3.) PROFIT!! They have expanded these products to Windows because the market demanded it. They didn't force this on the market, the demand was there. Nobody else has been able to generate similar demand, but maybe they will, who knows...
Another aspect of Apple's foray into digital music, is that it has exposed a lot of Windows users to the Apple experience. People in my office on Thursday were downloading and running iTunes left and right. We had a few people already running Macs with sharing turned on. So many of the new iTunes for Windows users saw the Mac users' libraries upon launching iTunes, and quickly figured out how to turn it on for themselves. Needless to say, this was not great for office productivity. It was funny for me to see people talking almost jealously that all the Mac users had been enjoying this thing for so long and they had not. It's like they suddenly got a one day pass to an exclusive club. They were definitely curious as to what other benefits the club members had been enjoying without them knowing about it. Now I'm not saying that these people are all going to buy Macs next time they buy a home computer, but the chances of a couple of them doing just that has got to be higher now than it was before iTunes for Windows was released.
Also, it is not accurate to say that X-Windows has been overlooked by Microsoft and Apple. I run X-Windows everyday on my WinXP laptop using Exceed. No, that's not Microsoft technology and it's not free, but it is done very nicely and easily installed on any NT based OS. On the other hand, Apple provides their own free X11 client. So while Linux may rely on X-Windows, it didn't invent it and is just one of many OSes that support it.
Please do not try to claim that X Windows is an innovation of Linux. X Windows is from Unix. I was running it on Sun and SGI workstations more than ten years ago. X Windows is just another of Linux's borrowed ideas.
No, it was terrible, it actually reminded me of a scratched up album.
The VBR settings for MP3 importing says that the Stereo Bit Rate setting you choose is used as a minimum bitrate. There is also a list of VBR "Quality" settings from "Lowest" to "Highest." This seemed to imply that the quality setting determined the average bitrate used by VBR, and that the Stereo Bit Rate was just a minimum, a la Lame. I imported some songs using a VBR Quality of "Highest" and Stereo Bit Rate of 64 kbps. I noticed that a five minute song was only taking up 2mb or so, and I knew something was amiss. I played the song in WinAMP, and its average bit rate was 66 kbps. I went back to iTunes and changed its Stereo Bit Rate to 256 kbps. Now the song was 9 mb in size, and WinAMP claimed its average bit rates was 268 kbps. So I think these controls are just busted. It also doesn't look like there's much V in the VBR setting, as most songs seem to stick the Stereo Bit Rate, very rarely dipping higher or lower. Maybe that's a function of the "Quality" setting?
How naive. Take it from a mathematician, there is an art to statistics -- you use the numbers to prove your point. So if you have two conflicting points, but numbers to back both, one can anecdotedly say that that the numbers lie. Duh.
This is especially true when you are trying to measure something that is inherently subjective, such as "what sounds good?" Even if you have something that is objective, randomness, reproduceability of experiments, etc. can allow for "creativity with numbers" to support opposite claims.
When you talk about "apps" are you talking about the free ones from Apple, such as the iLife suite and Safari? Those are free, so if you want to bitch about having to upgrade your OS so that you can get upgrades of free apps... If you are talking about software from people other than Apple, well it is up to them to decide what OS to support. This is usually dictated by what features the different versions of the OS have and what the application needs. Most apps only require 10.1 (FileMaker, Office, Dreamweaver, Boris.) Some of the Adobe apps released in the last three months require 10.2 as does Quark, but that's about it.
Just so you know, I've had an iPod for two years and amazingly I still use iTunes for managing it.
Apple is worried about software being available on other platforms? Are you insane? Look at how much more software is available on Windows, and that includes stuff like Photoshop and Quark. If those were available on Linux, it would make no difference to Apple because Apple's selling point is its ease of use for non-technical people and elegant interface. Linux is far inferior to even Windows when it comes to these aspects, and Windows is far inferior to Apple.
Depnds on what you call "nowhere near CD-quality". The quality of music compression formats has been frequently discussed on Slashdot.
It's part of this amazing thing called a free market: people find that the product in question has enough value (put it on multiple Macs, unlimited burning, unlimited iPods, high quality mpeg4 format) to justify the price of 99 cents per song. Sorry that is so difficult for you to understand.
You exhibit a frightening lack of knowledge of both chess and algorithms. If chess was "purely mathematical" then there would exhist an optimal solution(s). However, the way that chess computing works is not by solving for this optimal solution, but by constantly examining all possibilities (or some well crafted subset) as far ahead as possible and picking the optimal solution over that set. Why is this? Simple, chess is an increasingly complex game, i.e. the number of possible outcomes does not always decrease after each move. This may seem counter-intuitive, certainly a player making a move should eliminate some possible outcomes that relied on the player making a different move, but it is sort of an infinity minus something less than infinity is still infinity. That is why there is no solution to be solved for and instead computers must solve for partial solutions. These partial solutions get better and better as computers can examine more scenarios, but there are definitely diminishing returns.
You have been socially engineered by Microsoft to think that such things as one-click installs are necesarry and desirable. You have been brainwashed to believe that "if it's not as easy as possible, then it is too hard."
...
Even if you think that one-click installs are necesarry, take a look at MacOS. It allows for one-click installs, but if you the program is going to change OS code/settings, then you are warned about it and prompted for a password (a la sudo.) Of course the MS-programming-kernel that used to be your brain will probably respond that having to put in a password makes the OS "broken"
Imagine some software engineer saying "hey you know what would make things really easy for our users, if we could remotely take control of their computers, install patches/extensions, and optimize some of their hardware settings." There you go. That could make installing/setting up/maintaining complex software so much easier, right? Hey there are some really obvious security implications, but eaiser is always better right?
You are absolutely right. I personally do not use P2P networks to share music, because I feel that it is wrong. However, if a new cd came out that I wanted and it had this kind of trojan horse/DRM crap on it, there is no way I would purchase it. I might buy it from Apple, but if it wasn't available there ... time to reinstall K-Lite?
You might be theoretically (though I would *love* to read the least squares analysis you claim, purely because I love reading crap like that) correct, but I even if you are, I don't think it is practically true. I am fortunate enough to have a progressive scan DVD player and a TV that handles 480p. There are some DVDs that look very good, but there are a lot more IMO that look like shit. Many people on this thread have already pointed out how older DVDs or those with lots of dark scenes have poor encoding. In other words, the bandwidth maybe there for a great picture, but that does not guarantee that the right bits are there. Imperfections are often magnified when a second, lossy algorithm is applied. And even if the picture does look great, a second compression can screw it up.
My point is that a DivX encoded movie mastered from the digitzed source (or if its from Lucas, the actualy source itself) should be a lot better than a DivX encoded movie ripped from a DVD. I don't think there's anything particularly insightful about that statement. Subjectively, you might think that the latter is still good enough or that the former is still not good enough.
Many of the DivX movies you see (especially on P2P networks) are rips from DVDs. As such they are compressions of an already compressed, lossy format. It would be like making AAC rips from MP3s. It is not a good measure of the codec.
You are absolutely correct that analysts are totally worthless. It is in fact a mathematical fact. Any advice offered by analysts/brokers/advisers/your dad/etc. is complete garbage. The market is smarter than them and anything they know is already priced in and probably has been for months. The only exception to this is if they have insider information that can only be known by very few people by definition. In which case, they should go to jail for offering financial advice based on insider information (sorry dad.) They don't want you to know the truth: picking individual is equivalent to gambling. If that's what you want to do, you would have a lot more fun taking your money to Vegas. If you want to actually invest long term, stick with index funds.
How did this get modded up? If one knew anything about Sun's last five years, then one would know that they have spent a ton of money on R&D. One of Merrill Lynch's criticisms is that if you compare the number of people that Sun employs compared to their pre-bubble (1998) levels, then you have to conclude they need to cut several thousand jobs. The first place they suggest Sun cut jobs is in hardware R&D. From a strictly ROI perspective, one could argue that Sun's big mistake has been spending way too much on R&D, not too little.
As for marketing, I've never seen a Sun ad on television. Driving through Silicon Valley, one sees numerous billboards for Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, HP, Veritas, and Apple, but none for Sun. So I'm not really sure where these marketing expenditures are...
So what have been Sun's mistakes? I don't think there are any easy answers to this. One could argue that they did not react to the recession fast enough, especially given that the recession hit them especially hard because of their premium hardware. Maybe they should have scaled back R&D big time in 2001, but it's hard to argue that for a company with several billion dollars in cash. I don't think there's much they could have done to prevent their loss of market share. The combination of cheap OS (Linux) plus cheap hardware with ever increasing performance in a recession economy is pure poison to a company that makes expensive OS and hardware. They could've "embraced" Linux earlier, but why? That would be like a contest on a reality tv show telling the other contestants that it's ok to kick him off the island. There is very little money for Sun to make from Linux (hell there isn't a whole lot of money for anybody to make there.) They could've shifted resources into making Solars x86 better and cheaper. That might have been effective at perserving market share, though it wouldn't have helped their bottom line much.
Sun's decline of market share and profits was unstoppable. The most relevant quesion now I think is : so what? Just because Wall Street doesn't like the direction of a company is really irrelevant. Wall Street is always extremely short-sighted, especially in the aftermath of the dot com bubble. Sun could cut R&D, kill Sparc, spin off Java, etc. basically just becoming a support company for their current customers and become profitable short term. Would they really have any chance then of rebuilindg lost market share long term? I'm not saying they are going to do this now, but just that at least by keeping a lot of R&D going they have a chance of using innovation to regain market share and profits. Isn't that what a technology company is supposed to do?
You may think that such a system is far-fetched, too complex to build, and would its cost would be prohibitive. Most of the "scanning" is already out there already. A doctor doesn't take your temperature, pulse, bood pressure -- a nurse does. They write this information down and give it to a doctor. Why not have the nurse enter the information into a device instead? Nurses also listen to your symptoms, which are from a finite set of common ailments, and pass this on to the doctor. Again this could be passed to a computer. A doctor doesn't take your blood and analyze it. This is done by an outside lab with the results sent to the doctor. So why not have this information sent to the diagnostic computer in some standard way? A doctor doesn't perform an mri or x-ray, these are done by technicians with the results given to the doctor. Again this could be given to a computer instead. Most people pay thousands per year in health insurance. If people don't feel the lesser expense makes up for not seeing a doctor, then hospitals that choose not to use this technology and instead keep the current system will thrive. Consumers will make the choice. If they are willing to pay more to choose an insurance plan that lets them bypass machines and only see human doctors, then that is great! It would be a free market at its finest. I'm not arguing to force people into this, I am just arguing for the choice.
But you know there are people who do not have insurance, people for whom health care is too expensive to even have right now. I think these people would be happy to get health care from a computer vs. no health care at all. Oh boy, yet another person who knows nothing about economics. People pay for Nike because of brand recognition. They could just as easily go down to Wal-Mart and buy a pair of shoes for a couple of dollars. Your example is not one that disproves the free market, but instead shows its strength. If a product has an extra value that people find utility in, they will pay for it. The fact that you may think that this extra value is silly is irrelevant. If hospitals could do the same thing, i.e. Nike Hospital can charge more and people are willing to pay, then that is good for them. Once again it is a free market in action with people exercising their right to choose. If a hospital is run by a corporation, then they will not spend anymore money than they have to. Otherwise share holders will be upset, etc. Take a look at corporate America over the last couple of years. The fact is that like most companies, personnel expense are the biggest ones for a hospital, and if you compare what a nurse/technician makes vs. a doctor, then its pretty obvious where to look if you wanted to cut costs. Yes it is. I highly recommend reading Nobel prize winning economist Milton Friedman's analysis of the costs of health care and the AMA.