Schwartz said: I expect to take 10 percent of the market in the first year. Ten percent of a $30 billion a year desktop market is huge. So, is it going to be more than 10 percent? I hope so, but in the next year I'd like to get a million users. There's a hundred million computers sold every year, I want to be in front of a million of those and two-million the next year.
Ten percent in the first year? What is he kidding? I think reporters should really ask for some sort of substantiation for claims like this. 10 percent would be a seismic shift in the computing industry. This is not a realistic prediction.
eWEEK: So, does the uncertainty around Linux benefit Sun and Solaris?
Schwartz: We have an interesting migration opportunity now because we can go back with Unix that is familiar, we can deliver the Java Enterprise System pricing at $100 per employee, which allows them to run Solaris at infinite scale.
His playbook is obviously to avoid mentioning "linux" and just substitute "Java Desktop System" at every opportunity. He is disguising the fact that they have in fact adopted a third-party linux distribution for desktops. This is the kind of corporate bs that gets slashdotters on Sun's case.
Basically, Intel came out with MMX (and all the later developments) in order to have a talking point on a slide presentation about their processors, about the time when competitors like AMD were starting to come forward: functionally, an awful mess, and impossibly difficult to program.
AMD has been making Intel-compatible processors under license from Intel since the 8088 processor.
Those pictures look a lot like the cluster in The Thirteenth Floor. Also the simulations described in the article remind me of this story from Slashdot.
Cheaper, more stable. It's still linux so it's better. I'm assuming they're bundling some support for that $100 price, according to the closed source model instead of distributing it under GPL and charging for support. This will go over well with people used to the closed source model. Plus they can include closed source code this way. The rest of the components are available some place or other as open source, if not from Sun, and frankly they will have to be from Sun too to the extent that they are open source.
This is just another company trying to get a slice of what is a growing market, which is the corporate desktop environment. Microsoft has a stranglehold on this, but it's a growing market, and the sales of non-Microsoft desktops are growing too. Redhat just had a good quarter, and they are doing a good job, but Sun can handle support for large companies too, they're a known quantity, and I think this will help spur further sales of desktop linux, which is a good thing (TM).
I think also this is really a way for Sun to again try to introduce the thin client. But the way they're going about it is using x86 boxes with linux, relabeled as low cost computing/java desktop. They're still going to try to sell these companies a sparc, from which in theory configuration of all the desktops can be handled. That may limit their success since they're not using a linux server, but I would wager that this solution will be cheaper than an all-windows solution. Going with dell servers and redhat desktops is also an option, but this will give end-to-end support for the whole system.
Yes I forgot my point. The point is that this is a further demonstration of the truly universal openness of TCP/IP. It's supposed to enable any system to communicate, and this is the proof that it can.
In terms of power, I'm thinking early PDAs. Yes they had much more power than a C64, but they had vastly less power than PCs. Also they were black and white--to respond to the poster who commented on the 16 colors of the C64. So the point is there are uses for any system that can be realized by using a network.
I initially started using the internet with a 2400 baud modem and a 486 notebook. The only way I connected was through a shell, but through that I used e-mail and netnews. There was no web to speak of yet, so I wasn't missing out on anything there. But still this greatly increased the usefulness of my computer, which up till then had been strictly for word processing. A C64 could do this easily, and I don't doubt other things as well.
Again processing power isn't the point. It's networking per se that is the issue here. If you can network it, you can greatly increase its functionality. Granted you could have used a modem with it before, and had these uses of it, but ethernet has other advantages besides bandwidth.
I used a C64 for a long time, and it always seemed to me there was new and better software coming out for it. This software did not require upgrades--it was for that computer. That is the improvements that were going into the software were coding improvements or conceptual improvements, not improvements designed to take advantage of increased hardware capacity. I don't know if it's because of Microsoft, or if Microsoft is the result, but these days the prevailing idea seems to be that if you want some new or better software, you need to buy a new and more powerful computer. For a while Linux went against this grain, but recently I found myself having to go to a newer linux distro just so that I could download the latest versions of Mozilla and OpenOffice. (I chose RH9 and have discovered it's slow and have found many others complaining about the same thing.) Yes I know there are alternatives, but the point is that with the C64 you didn't have to look for alternatives. Software companies were focused on coming up with new software for the existing hardware. And frankly, I think this made for better software because it was designed to just be better, not to be better when used on a more powerful machine.
So basically I'm just glad to see there are people who are still focused on this kind of development, for the C64 specifically and for computers in general. If it can be made to work on a small scale, it should be usable on powerful systems as well. I think this was the genius of Linux--from PDAs to mainframes, the same system works. And frankly I'd really like to try this on my old C64s (I have two because a friend gave me his when he got tired of it, which was a good thing because my power supply gave out). But I wouldn't want to shell out the 100 euros....
At a recent computer expo (COMDEX), Bill Gates reportedly compared the computer industry with the auto industry and stated, "If GM had kept up with the technology like the computer industry has, we would all be driving $25.00 cars that got 1,000 miles to the gallon".
Let's not forget as well that the price of Windows has increased and not decreased.
And thinking that it's the OS that is driving all those fast upgrades to physical machines is also absurd. A huge portion of all business desktop and laptop upgrades is driven by vanity, not need. Good luck thinking that a rational OS decision based on security and TCO will quickly stop "mine's bigger" purchasing. You think execs sending email, looking at excel spreadsheets, and playing solitaire need those multi-thousand dollar laptops? You think that running linux they'll stop buying them?
If the savings or productivity increases from linux cause higher profits, then vanity won't matter. To compete you will have to use linux. It's like any other new technology that gets widely adopted. If vanity made you want to use a secretary with a typewriter for each manager, you were going to get put out of business by a company that used one secretary with a computer for every five managers (or replace 1000 managers and their secretaries with one assistant and a set of five or six.dot templates. This is what happened in the early 90s during corporate downsizing).
Even if it was indistinguishable from Windows from an appearance perspective it would still be better because it wouldn't crash, especially in cases such as this where users would be limited to bounded accounts (although this of course also means that you could quickly tell the difference. I think most people familiar with Linux could tell the difference by the feel if not the look).
If nuclear weapons do indeed destroy life on earth, then earth would have been better off not only without science, but without homo sapiens. Teller is a clear illustration of the dialectic of Enlightenment. See chapter 18 of The Tangled Wing by Melvin Konner.
It was the Republican Party that carried out emancipation with the Emancipation Procalamation in 1863 and the 13th Amendment in 1865, not the Democratic Party.
How can someone not think about the possible uses when it's a weapon? You know, a device for killing people? It's not like he was just working on the possibility of nuclear fusion. He was building a bomb.
Well call me a label whore but I've always wanted to have a Sun. If these sell for the same price as regular PCs it just might induce me to buy one.
On the other hand it's hard to imagine buying [i]any[/i] new pc at this point because used ones are so cheap. I bought my current one for $75, and if I wanted Linux I'd just install it for free.
So I guess I'm offering myself up as one of a potential market, and the answer is I can see some buy not all of those like me plunking down the cash for this.
But then again it's not aimed at consumers really but businesses. But maybe that's been one of M$'s strengths. Most computers are sold to businesses, but they are marketed to individuals. Perhaps they get bought by companies because individuals like working with them. That and the fact that i/o has always seemed to be about a generation slower (from the user perspective) on a Mac than on the same generation PC.
Doing a PhD is hard work, and you will almost certainly go through times when you wish you'd never started and wonder if you should just cut your losses.
Don't get a PhD. It's horrible.
--Someone who just handed in a draft of the first chapter of his diss.
McNutt says that Linux will save 20% to 30% in administration costs, 50% in hardware costs, and 80% in licensing fees.
Of course this is unsurprising to readers of Slashdot, but it can take a couple of years for it to ferment and for people to catch on. The fact is you can get the same productivity as MS products for free. This has been true for some time, but the change isn't going to take place overnight. It's already happening on the server side, and this article is suggesting it will take place in large enterprises, where the costs are most compelling, on the desktop first.
I'm reminded of that quotation, I don't remember by whom, which went, "The future is here, it's just not evenly distributed."
Well in my experience it just takes a lot less keystrokes to do something in Linux than in Windows. That may sound silly but the single-click thing is a part of it. Now of course you can set Windows to do that, but I never would because you can easily hang the proc, especially on older systems, by executing the wrong commands. Linux that's just not a problem, so you can bundle much more into a single click or keystroke.
Welp I've been running OO on Linux on a notebook for doing archival research and it has yet to crash or freeze. That's a big comfort to me--no risk of data loss. Plus I can walk into the next room, plug it into the ethernet port, and upload my stuff to Yahoo Briefcase, and then I can use it on my desktop at home using OO on OSR2. All this and more for... $0! Using a PII desktop and PI notebook. Open standards baby.
I'm sure I'm missing something obvious, but why can't you just download Redhat and install it for free--is it that Oracle only supports the Enterprise version, or is it that the Enterprise version contains something you need?
You are positing a golden age in which up till now law was not on the side of those with money. In fact this has gone back and forth, but money has always been central to American law from the Constitution forward. Cf Morton Horwitz, The Transformation of American Law. The high point of the right to contract and the tilting of the law in favor of corporations came in the 1880s with the Santa Clara decision which said that corporations were individuals under the 14th amendment, so that their property could not be affected by public law without due process. This was then changed during the Progressive period due to theorists such as Oliver Wendell Homes and juduges like Harlan and Brandeis. Things swung back in the 20s, and then of course during the New Deal they went far in the direction of abridging the right to contract. What we are seeing now is a return to new Gilded Age and absolute right to contract.
I've always found this baffling, when people claim not to understand introversion. In fact, I've usually found it to be disingenuous, since it's often the same people who are critical of introverts as "losers," "weird," "nerds," "geeks," etc. etc. There's no shortage of introverted persons around, everone has known some, and they're staples of literature, movies, television, etc. etc. Although I can't say in this case specifically, I think this sentiment is usually not "understanding" in the Warren Buffett sense of the term.
Slashdot Mirror
This is Moore's law.
Murphy's Law says that if something may go wrong, it will.
The corollary to this would be, if processor speed doubles, so will the number of lines of Microsoft code.
Ten percent in the first year? What is he kidding? I think reporters should really ask for some sort of substantiation for claims like this. 10 percent would be a seismic shift in the computing industry. This is not a realistic prediction.
eWEEK: So, does the uncertainty around Linux benefit Sun and Solaris?
Schwartz: We have an interesting migration opportunity now because we can go back with Unix that is familiar, we can deliver the Java Enterprise System pricing at $100 per employee, which allows them to run Solaris at infinite scale.
His playbook is obviously to avoid mentioning "linux" and just substitute "Java Desktop System" at every opportunity. He is disguising the fact that they have in fact adopted a third-party linux distribution for desktops. This is the kind of corporate bs that gets slashdotters on Sun's case.
AMD has been making Intel-compatible processors under license from Intel since the 8088 processor.
Those pictures look a lot like the cluster in The Thirteenth Floor. Also the simulations described in the article remind me of this story from Slashdot.
This is just another company trying to get a slice of what is a growing market, which is the corporate desktop environment. Microsoft has a stranglehold on this, but it's a growing market, and the sales of non-Microsoft desktops are growing too. Redhat just had a good quarter, and they are doing a good job, but Sun can handle support for large companies too, they're a known quantity, and I think this will help spur further sales of desktop linux, which is a good thing (TM).
I think also this is really a way for Sun to again try to introduce the thin client. But the way they're going about it is using x86 boxes with linux, relabeled as low cost computing/java desktop. They're still going to try to sell these companies a sparc, from which in theory configuration of all the desktops can be handled. That may limit their success since they're not using a linux server, but I would wager that this solution will be cheaper than an all-windows solution. Going with dell servers and redhat desktops is also an option, but this will give end-to-end support for the whole system.
Just my $.02.
In terms of power, I'm thinking early PDAs. Yes they had much more power than a C64, but they had vastly less power than PCs. Also they were black and white--to respond to the poster who commented on the 16 colors of the C64. So the point is there are uses for any system that can be realized by using a network.
I initially started using the internet with a 2400 baud modem and a 486 notebook. The only way I connected was through a shell, but through that I used e-mail and netnews. There was no web to speak of yet, so I wasn't missing out on anything there. But still this greatly increased the usefulness of my computer, which up till then had been strictly for word processing. A C64 could do this easily, and I don't doubt other things as well.
Again processing power isn't the point. It's networking per se that is the issue here. If you can network it, you can greatly increase its functionality. Granted you could have used a modem with it before, and had these uses of it, but ethernet has other advantages besides bandwidth.
So basically I'm just glad to see there are people who are still focused on this kind of development, for the C64 specifically and for computers in general. If it can be made to work on a small scale, it should be usable on powerful systems as well. I think this was the genius of Linux--from PDAs to mainframes, the same system works. And frankly I'd really like to try this on my old C64s (I have two because a friend gave me his when he got tired of it, which was a good thing because my power supply gave out). But I wouldn't want to shell out the 100 euros....
Let's not forget as well that the price of Windows has increased and not decreased.
If the savings or productivity increases from linux cause higher profits, then vanity won't matter. To compete you will have to use linux. It's like any other new technology that gets widely adopted. If vanity made you want to use a secretary with a typewriter for each manager, you were going to get put out of business by a company that used one secretary with a computer for every five managers (or replace 1000 managers and their secretaries with one assistant and a set of five or six .dot templates. This is what happened in the early 90s during corporate downsizing).
I think Linux vs. Windows is more like the swordsman shooting Indiana Jones.
Even if it was indistinguishable from Windows from an appearance perspective it would still be better because it wouldn't crash, especially in cases such as this where users would be limited to bounded accounts (although this of course also means that you could quickly tell the difference. I think most people familiar with Linux could tell the difference by the feel if not the look).
If nuclear weapons do indeed destroy life on earth, then earth would have been better off not only without science, but without homo sapiens. Teller is a clear illustration of the dialectic of Enlightenment. See chapter 18 of The Tangled Wing by Melvin Konner.
It was the Republican Party that carried out emancipation with the Emancipation Procalamation in 1863 and the 13th Amendment in 1865, not the Democratic Party.
How can someone not think about the possible uses when it's a weapon? You know, a device for killing people? It's not like he was just working on the possibility of nuclear fusion. He was building a bomb.
No, I don't. But I have a feeling that's true.
I'm told that it's impossible to distinguish between a record and a recording of a record on 16-bit digital media.
On the other hand it's hard to imagine buying [i]any[/i] new pc at this point because used ones are so cheap. I bought my current one for $75, and if I wanted Linux I'd just install it for free.
So I guess I'm offering myself up as one of a potential market, and the answer is I can see some buy not all of those like me plunking down the cash for this.
But then again it's not aimed at consumers really but businesses. But maybe that's been one of M$'s strengths. Most computers are sold to businesses, but they are marketed to individuals. Perhaps they get bought by companies because individuals like working with them. That and the fact that i/o has always seemed to be about a generation slower (from the user perspective) on a Mac than on the same generation PC.
Come on that's like saying there are 9 versions of RedHat Linux.
Don't get a PhD. It's horrible.
--Someone who just handed in a draft of the first chapter of his diss.
I'm reminded of that quotation, I don't remember by whom, which went, "The future is here, it's just not evenly distributed."
Well in my experience it just takes a lot less keystrokes to do something in Linux than in Windows. That may sound silly but the single-click thing is a part of it. Now of course you can set Windows to do that, but I never would because you can easily hang the proc, especially on older systems, by executing the wrong commands. Linux that's just not a problem, so you can bundle much more into a single click or keystroke.
Welp I've been running OO on Linux on a notebook for doing archival research and it has yet to crash or freeze. That's a big comfort to me--no risk of data loss. Plus I can walk into the next room, plug it into the ethernet port, and upload my stuff to Yahoo Briefcase, and then I can use it on my desktop at home using OO on OSR2. All this and more for ... $0! Using a PII desktop and PI notebook. Open standards baby.
I'm sure I'm missing something obvious, but why can't you just download Redhat and install it for free--is it that Oracle only supports the Enterprise version, or is it that the Enterprise version contains something you need?
You are positing a golden age in which up till now law was not on the side of those with money. In fact this has gone back and forth, but money has always been central to American law from the Constitution forward. Cf Morton Horwitz, The Transformation of American Law. The high point of the right to contract and the tilting of the law in favor of corporations came in the 1880s with the Santa Clara decision which said that corporations were individuals under the 14th amendment, so that their property could not be affected by public law without due process. This was then changed during the Progressive period due to theorists such as Oliver Wendell Homes and juduges like Harlan and Brandeis. Things swung back in the 20s, and then of course during the New Deal they went far in the direction of abridging the right to contract. What we are seeing now is a return to new Gilded Age and absolute right to contract.
I've always found this baffling, when people claim not to understand introversion. In fact, I've usually found it to be disingenuous, since it's often the same people who are critical of introverts as "losers," "weird," "nerds," "geeks," etc. etc. There's no shortage of introverted persons around, everone has known some, and they're staples of literature, movies, television, etc. etc. Although I can't say in this case specifically, I think this sentiment is usually not "understanding" in the Warren Buffett sense of the term.