Your arguments are wrong and/or irrelevant. Try again.
Sorry, but I don't agree with you, just because you seem to think you're living in such a great country you seem to have lost all sense for reality.
Or to quote a guy in the SCO threat today: What are you smoking?
The fact that the US produces more cars for its own consumption than it exports doesn't make the number of cars it exports any smaller. Levels of domestic consumption are irrelevant.
Where does the US export cars to? Mexico? Some of their territories?
Looking to europe the number of american cars sold there is a joke, Japan? Try again. Australia? No chance. Asia? Maybe they produce locally. Canada? It goes the other way.
American companies might be working abroad but the chances are they produce the cars in the local market, not in the US.
Yep, same thing. If you think the US doesn't export a crapton of food, you're totally off your rocker. In fact, the US exported more than $3.5 billion worth of food to the EU in 2000. The US exports more food (in real numbers, not irrelevant "as % of food produced" numbers) than any other country on earth.
Got some links? I would like to see where the food really went and what it was (I take a guess here: Beef).
Having a trade deficit doesn't mean the US doesn't export! All it means is that more is imported than exported. The fact that the US can still afford to buy so much offshore is, if nothing else, an indication of the strength of the dollar.
You've just proofen my own point: You are stating that the only reason the US could prosper was because of a strong USD, now think again what will happen if the world market decides to deal more with Euros?
Granted the love story part I could have done without, but the fact that he went down and tried to resurrect the Titanic a ship everybody has heard off and that has catpured a lot of peoples imaginations was great.
I did enjoy the movie at times it felt like being there.
Besides, he made the money back, more than once and that should tell you that a lot of people enjoyed it (okay okay no measure of artistry but still).
Overall you can see the logo on the dinnerplates, when they all come out of the shelves during the sinking;)
What is actually still produced in the US and exported to other countries?
Cars? Mainly for the domestic market. Food? Same thing. Clothing? Well look at the labels, even american companies like Nike, Gap, Eddie Bauer etc. produce offshore.
So what are you guys exporting? The US actually has a huge trade defecit and that for quite some time.
More to the point, what EU products? The US may not export like (say) China does, but by the same token the EU does so even less.
Off the top of my head:
- Nissan cars (Renault holds a stake). - Mercedes - BMW - Volkswagen - French Cheese - French Wine - Italien Wine - Scottish mineral Water (saw that in a supermarket once) - All Nestle products (Nestle is a swiss company, okay not EU but european) - Infinion chips in your cell phone. - Certain AMD chips are made in Germany - SuSE (who for example fund ReiserFS)
And that's just what I can get off the top of my head there are ton's of products more that go.
melodrama] Oh dear, three of the most important trading partners of the US have gone to Euros! [/melodrama]
Let me know when Canada, Mexico, Japan, and China want Euros. Right now they still seem to like dollars.
No they are not powerhouses, but their moves are political motivated and you can bet that other countries are watching, the US lost a lot of goodwill in the world in the past year and the only reason people in the past held onto the USD was because the american government was working for a STRONG dollar, now they seem to have abandoned it and if it starts to drop further it means less profit for the countries and companies, they go where it is secure and if that is Euro they will.
Canada, Mexico, Japan and China all have their own currency in case you haven't noticed. Do they trade AGAINST the USD? Yes they do like a lot of currencies on this planet, mainly because in the past that was a good thing to do, the USD was stable, now that this is changing it could very well be the Euro. The Euro zone is population wise as big if not bigger than the US and as such a very attractive market for companies in countries like China.
Your scenario involving a plummeting dollar and surging Euro presupposes that not only will countries stop accepting dollars as payment, but that they will no longer buy anything that requires dollars for payment. So unless the EU suddenly becomes an economic giant and the US economy withers away to nothing, your scenario is just hot gas.
Is it? The reason they would go for the Euro is not because they want to sell into the Euro Zone (which is easily as big as the US market) but because the Euro is a more stable and more profitable currency.
Contracts are made for YEARS in advance (up to 2 years) and they do assume that the Dollar is at least as much worth in two years than it was when the contract was signed. Right now it looks like the US Government doesn't really care what way the dollar is going and that is the problem.
If the foreign companies and countries loose their faith in the stability of the Dollar (and that doesn't even have to be a REAL instability an imagined one can do just fine) they will look for alternatives.
The Euro is the perfect candidate, a huge zone, access to dozen of different markets and (presumably) stable. If that happens than the US DOES have a problem.
Also as I wrote in above, never forget that the goodwill the US had over the past couple of year is rapidly disappearing. Saudia Arabia for one is not very happy with the US and there is an ice time.
It only needs one big country to decide to go to Euros and if that works out for them the rest will follow.
Economy is not a science, especially not things like stock markets and currency trade, those rely a lot more on faith than anything else and if the faith is gone you are in trouble.
Yes, but lately there have been reports (I think there even was a post on slashdot about this) that the lowlevel jobs start to migrate from India to China etc.
Nope, I agree with you, but the problem is that the masses seem to think that only by giving up their own right, and by being skimmed do they have a chance of becoming rich one day themselves.
In the past they sold products, nowadays they sell illusions.
And you completely skip the balancing part of that economic concept: where our exported good cost less therefore become more competitive in the world market, lowering our trade deficit, creating more jobs, and recovering our white collar IT jobs back from India, because it is now cheaper to hire our own workers, and possibly even for other countries to hire our workers/contract out to us.
Will it really? The US is the biggest market, the manufacturing capabilities have been moved overseas and it would cost a lot of money to get the machines back.
The tooling of a plastic piece can easily cost several hundred thousand dollars the difference would have to be extreme before this happens.
Also the question would be: Would the demand be there to make it useful? Most of the goods these days flow INTO the US, not out of it.
Well now, but that was the idea right? Profit, profit above all?
Imagine how much your sneakes would costs if they would be "Made in USA" and the same profit margin would exist, how many people could afford them? Nike could never ever pay people like Lance Armstrong ton's of money to promote their products and in fact they probably woulnd't be that big.
(3) Work for an out-sourcing/off-shoring business or start one of your own! Heck, if the companies will export 3 million jobs in the next few years to save money, I'd say there is money to be made in helping companies save money. Like they say, if you can't beat 'em , join 'em.
I would like to see how you are actually going to start an outsourcing business for example in India.
For once do you speak the language(s)? Do you understand the mentality? Do you have the contacts? No? I guess your SOL then.
How about China then? Well, all of the above etc. etc.
Or let me put it different: I doubt very much that you could start your own business offshore without having lived in the country you want to outsource to, and if it is just because of the language barrier.
Then again, welcome to capitalism... now that people have an alternative to the dollar, the US economy may have to actually get real!
One little thing you forgot: Things like Gas prices and products where cheap for the US because they printed the money they PAID in. The money always came back.
Imagine what would happen if all the delivery contracts all of the sudden would be charged in Euros instead of USD? Or if the OPEC would decide that they rather get paid in Euros? (And that is something they think about loud already).
Another not so well known fact is that:
1. Iraq had stopped asking for USD in their Oil for Food program sometime last year and rather wanted to be paid in Euros. 2. North Korea stopped trading in USD and has switched it's international trading to Euros. 3. Iran is on the way to do the same.
Can you imagine how much the US would hurt if people decided to abandon the Dollar (to which they only held on because the US Gov in the past was working for a strong Dollar) and move into the Euro?
All off the sudden the US would need to buy Euros in order to do foreign trade, which in turn would bring the Euro up higher and the USD down even more which in turn would mean higher prices at home, for EVERYTHING. Have a look next time you're shopping where your stuff is coming from and you will realize just how fucked up for the US that would be.
Software should be easy to install and maintain. For end users, or admins.
I work with Solaris and Unix for over 10 years, I have worked with Linux since back in 1995 and I can tell you right now that Linux is not much more userfriendly than Solaris.
Or to quote a quote:
"Unix is user friendly, it's just very particular who it makes friends with."
In my experience, bill crunching happens once a month in as short a time as is possible. If you have lots of customers, that means big crunching - but only for as short a burst as possible on the last day of the month when all the numbers are in.
Companies I worked for had more than one bill cycle, you just don't send 2 or 3 million invoices out in one huge "swoop". Data tends to reside on different systems, it has to be collected, compiled, merged, cleaned up, formatted and then send to the printer.
Any big company I worked for usually was working with 2 or 3 bill cycles, then there was the monthly "cleanup" where the old data was purged, reindexed etc. etc.
Most companies don't need the 9's. A few do - and Sun hardware is fine for those. So is IBM, and I'm sure that Dell, SGI, and some others would try to sell you something, but I wouldn't buy that, either.
Any company that has a call center needs the uptime, it is bad if a customer calls with a problem and you cannot help them with it because the system is down.
Yeah I know you can get hotpluggable Harddrives and Powersupplies these days from Dell and such, but have you ever added CPUs and memory in a running system and had Oracle grab it as soon as it was availbe? I want to see that happening in Linux right now.
Uptime is more than just lost revenue though, you have to pay the people on call etc. etc. (okay, that's peanuts).
I was doing DR analysis for some companies in the past and the amount of money a company can loose is just frightening.
Then there are other systems, like PPV or VOD, how happy do you think the client is when he can't get the movie he wents because your cheap Dell just blew a power supply?
People always complain about the crap that is out there today, but then they flame at the same time when you get a system that is actually beautifully engineered and stable.
You take potshots at apache and MySQL, but Oracle runs just fine on linux. Hell, the billboard up the freeway says "Oracle makes Linux unbreakable" (which I always got a laugh out of). The point is, the difference between big iron and little iron is disappearing fast, and Sun ain't keeping it's eye on the ball.
And how does Oracle scale on Linux? Let's say I have a DB with several TB of data? Can you build me a Server based on Linux and HW "off the shelve" that can support this?
The idea to run Oracle on a Linux Server is a waste of money, look alone at the amount of money you pay for a license. The other day I talked with one of the architects, you know what he told me? The cost for an Oracle license for a 2 CPU server is $66K. If you look at this all of the sudden the Sun stuff isn't that expensive anymore. In fact if you actually "play" with the big boys and start building HA and DR solutions you come to realize that the costs for HW are really the smallest of your worries.
I know companies who spent more money every year on support contracts and consultants than they spend on HW
Sun does not, nor will it ever, understand users. The entire company is geared toward sysadmins who are expected to be able to jump through install hoops and tweak systems to get top performance.
It will kill them.
And what should they gear the system to? The end user? For what reason?
Sun is proud of their "9's" - 99.999...% uptime. The truth is that 99.99% of businesses don't need that percentage.
What companies have you been working for? Every single company that is not just a start up or wet dream of some developers (or a development shop) want and most of the time NEED the uptime.
Guess why mainframes are still around, not only because of legacy apps, but also because of the fact that they are ultra reliable. Most companies need it, during the day people put the data in, in the night the machines start to crunch the data, produce reports, bills etc. etc. Uptime means MONEY, if you can't send out the bill because your computer at home doesn't work it'll piss you off. If the company cannot send bills out to thousands of customers alone the lost interrest can cost a couple of millions.
Sun is proud of their scaling, but I've got news - 99.99% of businesses don't need that much power.
Again, see above. Time is money, if I can just drop in some more CPUs and all of the sudden my number crunching becomes fast the company wins and makes ton's of money with this.
It's also clear that we'll hit 10Ghz machines with multiple gigs of RAM in just a few years, and they'll cost around $1K;
"The Sky is falling, the Sky is falling!"
How is Sun going to compete with that?
If you for a moment forget about your home linux installation or your development job and rather look at the corporate market you'll realize that there is a demand for the things that Sun is selling.
Sure, you get your 100GB ATAPI disk for $50 at the local computer store, but the costs for Diskarrays theses days (regardless from whom you buy) is still a LOT more expensive and that is for good reason. And it will be that way for the times to come as well.
When any Luser can buy a machine that competes rather well with a Sun box, and can install any amount of easy software instead of Sun's pain in the ass stuff...
You're dreaming, get a job in a data center of a big company and try to understand what those machines do. Not everyone is running MySQL and Apache and calls that their business.
What's easiest for you also might be blinding you to choosing the best box for the task at hand. I think Solaris tends to have more "torque" under load than Linux, OS X is better at interoperability with other systems, and IRIX...well, no comment.
Back in '98 I was working at an ISP and we had some SPARC clones. One night one of the processes ran away, besides a lot of things one of the things the box was doing was serving as a Samba Server for the company.
When I came in in the morning people complained about the unusability of the File share, it took me 25 minutes to log into the box, another 5 to get a w back. What I saw then was a Load of 18K+(!) I am not making this up, I found the process that had run away (Chat Server), killed it and restarted it and: Et voila, the system ran again.
I tell you that since then Solaris (and SPARC) get two thumbs up from me, how many OSs do you know that can do THAT and still survive? Windows would have locked and I am sure Linux would have locked up as well.
M.
Re:Sun Doesn't appeal to me
on
Sun's Last Stand
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
As a (younger) sysadmin, I didn't touch a sun box until I got into my first job. Even then I am concentrating on migrating everything over to Linux because it is what I know.
Well I am sorry to say this, but that is the wrong attitude, the right tool for the job. I know ton's of younger SysAdmins who argue exactly like you (and heck, I am only in this business for the past 10 years).
Linux is NOT the end all and be all as much as most Linux advocats would like to see it, there are very good reasons why people buy and use Sun (and HP-UX and AIX and TRU-64).
What really kills me though anytime I talk to one of the "young folks" is that they don't like Solaris because "it's too complicated". Pardon me?
It's still easier in Europe, besides the thing that bugged me when I lived in the US was that it was not just a "sales" tax, deping on where you were they added all kinds of taxes: City Tax, State Tax, Sales tax, Alcohol tax etc. etc.
It sometimes felt like playing the lottery.
I like the way it is handled in europe better, I see the price and I know how much I pay, that's it.
Canada is somewhere between the US and EU (once again) as they have a Provincial and Federal Sales tax and the items where you pay less tax on are few (books and food for example) and both (in Ontario) taxes come to 15% which is almost european level (Germany has 16% if I am not mistaken).
[...] since they stand for what we are NOT wanting to happen to US media.
Why? As you can see the "free market" thing isn't working that well.
In fact chances are you get a more balanced view of the world by a government funded news agency (that is as long as same is in a "democratic" state) than you will get from commercial news media.
Why? Because the people who work for example at the BBC are very much aware that people think of them as the voice of the government and they will try very hard not to act as a propaganda instrument.
Now private companies like Fox don't have that trouble because everybody seems to think they are independent, when in fact they rely way more on politics than say the BBC, Deutsche Welle or the CBC.
Europe (espeically Germany) seems to be active on that one.
The city of Munich decided to go with Linux (IBM & SuSE) and thus Microsoft is out of the door.
Nothing big one might think if you forget two things:
1. Munich is pretty "rich" in comparision to other municipalities. 2. Munich is one of the "high tech" cities in the country.
If IBM and SuSE can pull this off more parts of Germany will most likely make the switch and then it won't be that long until the federal government will go the same route. It already was a close call last year and I bet that Microsoft is already starting to sweat, they tried EVERYTHING to prevent Munich from "deserting" the Microsoft path.
Take a step back even further: Why did the humans black out the Sun?
Setting off EMP blasts would have most likely disabled the machines (most likely human machines as well, but those could be replaced in time).
I didn't quite get it why they just tried to block out the Sun, it must have been clear t them that this would destroy their own eco system and as such their very own existance. No?
ISPs tend to rack up high bandwidth costs when a customer trades files with a customer at an outside ISP. The costs escalate further when a person in one country trades a file with someone in another country.
I remember before everything became commercial and Peering went like this: I peer you, you peer me.
And everybody was happy (if they had enough traffic to get a peering agreement).
These days? It seems only a handful of companies run the net and they want hard cash.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry, but I don't agree with you, just because you seem to think you're living in such a great country you seem to have lost all sense for reality.
Or to quote a guy in the SCO threat today: What are you smoking?
Where does the US export cars to? Mexico? Some of their territories?
Looking to europe the number of american cars sold there is a joke, Japan? Try again. Australia? No chance. Asia? Maybe they produce locally. Canada? It goes the other way.
American companies might be working abroad but the chances are they produce the cars in the local market, not in the US.
Got some links? I would like to see where the food really went and what it was (I take a guess here: Beef).
You've just proofen my own point: You are stating that the only reason the US could prosper was because of a strong USD, now think again what will happen if the world market decides to deal more with Euros?
M.
Granted the love story part I could have done without, but the fact that he went down and tried to resurrect the Titanic a ship everybody has heard off and that has catpured a lot of peoples imaginations was great.
;)
I did enjoy the movie at times it felt like being there.
Besides, he made the money back, more than once and that should tell you that a lot of people enjoyed it (okay okay no measure of artistry but still).
Overall you can see the logo on the dinnerplates, when they all come out of the shelves during the sinking
M.
What is actually still produced in the US and exported to other countries?
Cars? Mainly for the domestic market.
Food? Same thing.
Clothing? Well look at the labels, even american companies like Nike, Gap, Eddie Bauer etc. produce offshore.
So what are you guys exporting? The US actually has a huge trade defecit and that for quite some time.
M.
Off the top of my head:
- Nissan cars (Renault holds a stake).
- Mercedes
- BMW
- Volkswagen
- French Cheese
- French Wine
- Italien Wine
- Scottish mineral Water (saw that in a supermarket once)
- All Nestle products (Nestle is a swiss company, okay not EU but european)
- Infinion chips in your cell phone.
- Certain AMD chips are made in Germany
- SuSE (who for example fund ReiserFS)
And that's just what I can get off the top of my head there are ton's of products more that go.
etc. etc.
No they are not powerhouses, but their moves are political motivated and you can bet that other countries are watching, the US lost a lot of goodwill in the world in the past year and the only reason people in the past held onto the USD was because the american government was working for a STRONG dollar, now they seem to have abandoned it and if it starts to drop further it means less profit for the countries and companies, they go where it is secure and if that is Euro they will.
Canada, Mexico, Japan and China all have their own currency in case you haven't noticed. Do they trade AGAINST the USD? Yes they do like a lot of currencies on this planet, mainly because in the past that was a good thing to do, the USD was stable, now that this is changing it could very well be the Euro. The Euro zone is population wise as big if not bigger than the US and as such a very attractive market for companies in countries like China.
Is it? The reason they would go for the Euro is not because they want to sell into the Euro Zone (which is easily as big as the US market) but because the Euro is a more stable and more profitable currency.
Contracts are made for YEARS in advance (up to 2 years) and they do assume that the Dollar is at least as much worth in two years than it was when the contract was signed. Right now it looks like the US Government doesn't really care what way the dollar is going and that is the problem.
If the foreign companies and countries loose their faith in the stability of the Dollar (and that doesn't even have to be a REAL instability an imagined one can do just fine) they will look for alternatives.
The Euro is the perfect candidate, a huge zone, access to dozen of different markets and (presumably) stable. If that happens than the US DOES have a problem.
Also as I wrote in above, never forget that the goodwill the US had over the past couple of year is rapidly disappearing. Saudia Arabia for one is not very happy with the US and there is an ice time.
It only needs one big country to decide to go to Euros and if that works out for them the rest will follow.
Economy is not a science, especially not things like stock markets and currency trade, those rely a lot more on faith than anything else and if the faith is gone you are in trouble.
M.
Yes, but lately there have been reports (I think there even was a post on slashdot about this) that the lowlevel jobs start to migrate from India to China etc.
Nope, I agree with you, but the problem is that the masses seem to think that only by giving up their own right, and by being skimmed do they have a chance of becoming rich one day themselves.
In the past they sold products, nowadays they sell illusions.
The emperor new clothes in full swing.
Will it really? The US is the biggest market, the manufacturing capabilities have been moved overseas and it would cost a lot of money to get the machines back.
The tooling of a plastic piece can easily cost several hundred thousand dollars the difference would have to be extreme before this happens.
Also the question would be: Would the demand be there to make it useful? Most of the goods these days flow INTO the US, not out of it.
M.
Well now, but that was the idea right? Profit, profit above all?
Imagine how much your sneakes would costs if they would be "Made in USA" and the same profit margin would exist, how many people could afford them? Nike could never ever pay people like Lance Armstrong ton's of money to promote their products and in fact they probably woulnd't be that big.
I would like to see how you are actually going to start an outsourcing business for example in India.
For once do you speak the language(s)? Do you understand the mentality? Do you have the contacts? No? I guess your SOL then.
How about China then? Well, all of the above etc. etc.
Or let me put it different: I doubt very much that you could start your own business offshore without having lived in the country you want to outsource to, and if it is just because of the language barrier.
One little thing you forgot: Things like Gas prices and products where cheap for the US because they printed the money they PAID in. The money always came back.
Imagine what would happen if all the delivery contracts all of the sudden would be charged in Euros instead of USD? Or if the OPEC would decide that they rather get paid in Euros? (And that is something they think about loud already).
Another not so well known fact is that:
1. Iraq had stopped asking for USD in their Oil for Food program sometime last year and rather wanted to be paid in Euros.
2. North Korea stopped trading in USD and has switched it's international trading to Euros.
3. Iran is on the way to do the same.
Can you imagine how much the US would hurt if people decided to abandon the Dollar (to which they only held on because the US Gov in the past was working for a strong Dollar) and move into the Euro?
All off the sudden the US would need to buy Euros in order to do foreign trade, which in turn would bring the Euro up higher and the USD down even more which in turn would mean higher prices at home, for EVERYTHING. Have a look next time you're shopping where your stuff is coming from and you will realize just how fucked up for the US that would be.
Maybe some more wars anyone? Europe maybe?
M.
I work with Solaris and Unix for over 10 years, I have worked with Linux since back in 1995 and I can tell you right now that Linux is not much more userfriendly than Solaris.
Or to quote a quote:
"Unix is user friendly, it's just very particular who it makes friends with."
Companies I worked for had more than one bill cycle, you just don't send 2 or 3 million invoices out in one huge "swoop". Data tends to reside on different systems, it has to be collected, compiled, merged, cleaned up, formatted and then send to the printer.
Any big company I worked for usually was working with 2 or 3 bill cycles, then there was the monthly "cleanup" where the old data was purged, reindexed etc. etc.
Any company that has a call center needs the uptime, it is bad if a customer calls with a problem and you cannot help them with it because the system is down.
Yeah I know you can get hotpluggable Harddrives and Powersupplies these days from Dell and such, but have you ever added CPUs and memory in a running system and had Oracle grab it as soon as it was availbe? I want to see that happening in Linux right now.
Uptime is more than just lost revenue though, you have to pay the people on call etc. etc. (okay, that's peanuts).
I was doing DR analysis for some companies in the past and the amount of money a company can loose is just frightening.
Then there are other systems, like PPV or VOD, how happy do you think the client is when he can't get the movie he wents because your cheap Dell just blew a power supply?
People always complain about the crap that is out there today, but then they flame at the same time when you get a system that is actually beautifully engineered and stable.
And how does Oracle scale on Linux? Let's say I have a DB with several TB of data? Can you build me a Server based on Linux and HW "off the shelve" that can support this?
The idea to run Oracle on a Linux Server is a waste of money, look alone at the amount of money you pay for a license. The other day I talked with one of the architects, you know what he told me? The cost for an Oracle license for a 2 CPU server is $66K. If you look at this all of the sudden the Sun stuff isn't that expensive anymore. In fact if you actually "play" with the big boys and start building HA and DR solutions you come to realize that the costs for HW are really the smallest of your worries.
I know companies who spent more money every year on support contracts and consultants than they spend on HW
And what should they gear the system to? The end user? For what reason?
What companies have you been working for? Every single company that is not just a start up or wet dream of some developers (or a development shop) want and most of the time NEED the uptime.
Guess why mainframes are still around, not only because of legacy apps, but also because of the fact that they are ultra reliable. Most companies need it, during the day people put the data in, in the night the machines start to crunch the data, produce reports, bills etc. etc. Uptime means MONEY, if you can't send out the bill because your computer at home doesn't work it'll piss you off. If the company cannot send bills out to thousands of customers alone the lost interrest can cost a couple of millions.
Again, see above. Time is money, if I can just drop in some more CPUs and all of the sudden my number crunching becomes fast the company wins and makes ton's of money with this.
"The Sky is falling, the Sky is falling!"
If you for a moment forget about your home linux installation or your development job and rather look at the corporate market you'll realize that there is a demand for the things that Sun is selling.
Sure, you get your 100GB ATAPI disk for $50 at the local computer store, but the costs for Diskarrays theses days (regardless from whom you buy) is still a LOT more expensive and that is for good reason. And it will be that way for the times to come as well.
You're dreaming, get a job in a data center of a big company and try to understand what those machines do. Not everyone is running MySQL and Apache and calls that their business.
What's easiest for you also might be blinding you to choosing the best box for
the task at hand. I think Solaris tends to have more "torque" under load than
Linux, OS X is better at interoperability with other systems, and IRIX...well, no comment.
Back in '98 I was working at an ISP and we had some SPARC clones. One night one of the processes ran away, besides a lot of things one of the things the box was doing was serving as a Samba Server for the company.
When I came in in the morning people complained about the unusability of the File share, it took me 25 minutes to log into the box, another 5 to get a w back. What I saw then was a Load of 18K+(!) I am not making this up, I found the process that had run away (Chat Server), killed it and restarted it and: Et voila, the system ran again.
I tell you that since then Solaris (and SPARC) get two thumbs up from me, how many OSs do you know that can do THAT and still survive? Windows would have locked and I am sure Linux would have locked up as well.
M.
As a (younger) sysadmin, I didn't touch a sun box until I got into my first job. Even then I am concentrating on migrating everything over to Linux because it is what I know.
Well I am sorry to say this, but that is the wrong attitude, the right tool for the job. I know ton's of younger SysAdmins who argue exactly like you (and heck, I am only in this business for the past 10 years).
Linux is NOT the end all and be all as much as most Linux advocats would like to see it, there are very good reasons why people buy and use Sun (and HP-UX and AIX and TRU-64).
What really kills me though anytime I talk to one of the "young folks" is that they don't like Solaris because "it's too complicated". Pardon me?
It's still easier in Europe, besides the thing that bugged me when I lived in the US was that it was not just a "sales" tax, deping on where you were they added all kinds of taxes: City Tax, State Tax, Sales tax, Alcohol tax etc. etc.
It sometimes felt like playing the lottery.
I like the way it is handled in europe better, I see the price and I know how much I pay, that's it.
Canada is somewhere between the US and EU (once again) as they have a Provincial and Federal Sales tax and the items where you pay less tax on are few (books and food for example) and both (in Ontario) taxes come to 15% which is almost european level (Germany has 16% if I am not mistaken).
This sports thing is WAAAAY overrated I tell you.
At least if you try this Triathlon thing (hint: Don't).
It seems all the women there are taken and there are still 2/3 guy's 1/3 women.
Of course it is nice to "watch" but what good is it if in the end you can't touch?
The crew were disgusted by the Beeb's blatantly pro-Iraq war coverage, so they shut it off.
So you're telling me that just because you don't like the news you should ignore them or turn on Patriot(TM) TV?
M.
You might ask the crew of the HMS Ark Royal what they think of the "balanced" reporting they were getting from that "government funded news agency."
What did the BBC report about the HMS Ark Royal? I must have missed that one.
M.
Then the question right now would be: How about cable news and internet?
Do they deliver? Or are they just all chanting to the same song?
[...] since they stand for what we are NOT wanting to happen to US media.
Why? As you can see the "free market" thing isn't working that well.
In fact chances are you get a more balanced view of the world by a government funded news agency (that is as long as same is in a "democratic" state) than you will get from commercial news media.
Why? Because the people who work for example at the BBC are very much aware that people think of them as the voice of the government and they will try very hard not to act as a propaganda instrument.
Now private companies like Fox don't have that trouble because everybody seems to think they are independent, when in fact they rely way more on politics than say the BBC, Deutsche Welle or the CBC.
Europe (espeically Germany) seems to be active on that one.
The city of Munich decided to go with Linux (IBM & SuSE) and thus Microsoft is out of the door.
Nothing big one might think if you forget two things:
1. Munich is pretty "rich" in comparision to other municipalities.
2. Munich is one of the "high tech" cities in the country.
If IBM and SuSE can pull this off more parts of Germany will most likely make the switch and then it won't be that long until the federal government will go the same route. It already was a close call last year and I bet that Microsoft is already starting to sweat, they tried EVERYTHING to prevent Munich from "deserting" the Microsoft path.
M.
Take a step back even further: Why did the humans black out the Sun?
Setting off EMP blasts would have most likely disabled the machines (most likely human machines as well, but those could be replaced in time).
I didn't quite get it why they just tried to block out the Sun, it must have been clear t them that this would destroy their own eco system and as such their very own existance. No?
Oh well, it's just a movie.
ISPs tend to rack up high bandwidth costs when a customer trades files with a customer at an outside ISP. The costs escalate further when a person in one country trades a file with someone in another country.
I remember before everything became commercial and Peering went like this: I peer you, you peer me.
And everybody was happy (if they had enough traffic to get a peering agreement).
These days? It seems only a handful of companies run the net and they want hard cash.