I don't think losing some grumpy OpenOffice and OpenSolaris users qualifies as "everyone has already decided to move away from Oracle".
The original statement was "Sun/Oracle" not "Oracle" and was referencing h/w sales.
Four years ago, we (network/connectivity company) spent over $50 million annually on Sun servers (h/w only, support was on top of that). That is now almost zero. We still buy lots of servers but they are almost all x86 blades. Sun h/w just can't compete in any of the import aspects that affect h/w purchase decisions (performance, power consumption, stability, reliability, capital cost, support cost, TCO, lifetime cost, transition costs). Java is a non-issue and has nothing to do with server purchasing decisions. I know we are not alone in dropping Sun as a vendor.
Note that we were a dyed-in-the-wool Sun/Solaris shop with a terrific core of dedicated Sun/Solaris admins. Nice thing about all that expertise is that, technically speaking, they had little trouble transferring their skill sets to other h/w and o/s platforms. Hardware and o/s vendors were happy to provide transition training. The cost of transition was a blip in our annual spend. Almost no one wants to go back even though Solaris is a superior o/s in many ways (io performance, network stack, scheduler, SMP).
It will be interesting to see what Oracle reports on Sun h/w sales.
Not trying to be a smartass, but does it really even matter? Hasn't almost everyone already decided to move away from Sun/Oracle, excepting those with a tremendous investment in that area?
I agree. That boat sailed about two years ago for us and we were a major Sun shop ( > 10,000 servers four years ago ). We are now almost exclusively VMware on Intel blades, mostly from IBM, or IBM P systems with IBM o/s. Vendors that were Solaris have moved to Linux. We briefly considered x86 Solaris but there was too much uncertainty with the on-again/off-again support for that platform.
Oracle DB is still at the core of our internal corporate computing because of an excellent licensing deal but we use alternatives for consumer facing services.
IMHO, the Sparc64 is hellishly expensive for the performance provided and the iron in the rack is heavy and power hungry. Nobody likes the M series servers. We don't like buying it, we don't like racking it, and we don't like what it does to our data center power distribution configuration.
The T series are not badly priced and are excellent low power consumption web servers but suck at anything that is single threaded. Almost all application software is effectively single threaded: either there is an explicit single execution path or the app has attempted threading but the threads depend on a core path that is single threaded. Usually I can get a brand name Intel multicore box that provides 4x the execution performance at a lower cost,... and with 3 yr onsite h/w service thrown in.
Everything about Sun h/w is out of sync with what customers want.
Oracle is almost clueless when it comes to hardware sales and development. Try "www.sun.com"... you get a redirect to the Oracle home page and then you have to search for a link to the server product lineup. It's almost as if they are hiding the fact that they have a hardware product to sell. I don't think the Oracle brain trust knows what to do with Sun h/w and the Solaris o/s.
Oracle is a single core product software shop. That's their whole corporate culture and they don't really do other things well. What were they thinking when they bought Sun's h/w division? Possibly they could have just bought the rights to Solaris and developed it for the x86 h/w and made something of it. An argument could be made for the similarity between db and os development. But h/w? It's a black hole for Oracle. SPARC is dead. Write it off.
Now if IBM had bought Sun and turned their R&D folk loose... there would have been hope for Solaris. Too bad so sad.
The firewall just drops the SYN when the ip is recognized and does not make an entry in any table; it just ignores any traffic from that ip.
This at least keeps your servers up and healthy but the problem is that firewalls themselves are typically more easily overrun than the servers behind them.
Usually you want to get your network provider involved so that the filtering can be done as close to the peering gateways as possible. The ISP will want to keep the DDoS traffic off of their network as it will have side effects on other traffic not related to the target. Passing 10Gb/s of traffic through routers and switches only to have it dropped at the destination is not happy making for the ISP.
We were told to get on the floor with our head at our knees and hands behind the head.
This was grade 3 for me. Even at that age, kids are smart enough to question things. One wiseacre who piped up with KYAG was sent to the office for the dreaded strap as punishment for impertinance and use of the word "ass". Another brick in the wall....;->
Nielson wasn't a "straight man". The "straight man" sets up the joke or is someone that the joke reflects off of and the "straight man" doesn't make the jokes. Nielson was the comedian with the funny lines so I don't really buy your assessment. His delivery was deadpan and serious but that again did not make him the "straight man".
It also is condescending to say he was funny only because it was unusual to see him in a comedy role. I think he had great comedic timing and delivery.
I would agree that his extensive dramatic acting experience helped him to play his comedy roles with skill and discipline, which in turn helped make him very funny. Absolutely, LN had a natural talent for comedy.
Great comment. I think the amazing thing about LN was that he could take really lame jokes and make them funny. The "Shirley" joke was old when I was a kid (LONG ago) and typically is worth a muted groan at best, but LN made it genuinely funny.
It's nice to see almost nothing but positive remarks about the man and his work.
Yeah, I agree about the right/left politics and the way that observation/analysis gets coloured and distorted by political positioning.
The interview I heard was from the local CBC station and I haven't found it in the CBC podcast archive. Too bad because it was a good interview. The fellow was not taking a political position. He was just saying that he did not have any great fears for either his people surviving or for the future of the polar bear based on what is being seen by people who live in the high Arctic.
He also expressed some frustration with the way that his people's observations are ignored and gave some examples. For years, scientists have dismissed Inuit observations that there has been change in the position of sky objects with respect to the landscape. Attention is now being paid to the atmospheric effects of the warming air mass above the arctic, including how changing refraction causes objects to shift.
But hey, no big deal, they're, like, attuned with the earth or some other primitivist bullshit.
I don't think he was spouting "primitivist bullshit" as you so eloquently put it. He was attesting to the adaptiveness of his people and their capabilities to survive in a changing environment. He expressed concern about the industrial societies that are not paying attention to the side effects of pollution. Doesn't sound primitivist to me.
"Fuzzy dolphins", good one that! What can one say in reply?
"Driven South". Great observation. Well thought out. Considering that the Inuit population and polar bear distribution areas almost completely overlap, the bears must be moving south from a hitherto unknown location near Alert. Also, if melting ice is the problem then you would think the bears would be going North, not South. You might want to look at a couple of maps and then redraw your conclusions:
Also, understand that although the Inuit population is widely distributed and has low density, they communicate and stay in touch quite effectively.
Your opinions are excellent examples of what he said he has experienced: condescension and dismisiveness from people who do not have the benefit of his life experience or knowledge of his people's history.
The local CBC Radio 1 had an interesting interview with an Inuit hunter who expressed opinions which contradict some current conventional wisdom. He said his opinions were based on what he said was common knowledge among Inuit hunters. He was being interviewed along with an author who was giving a lecture at the U of A. :
1. Across the Canadian Arctic territories (NWT, Nunavet), polar bear numbers are increasing not decreasing. He questioned the methodologies of scientists and government agents.
2. Polar bears will survive quite nicely in an ocean environment as they are highly adaptable and they are more at home in the water than on ice. He said it is not unusual to see a bear swimming in open water 100 km from land. (Oh great... another ocean swimming phobia to go along with my fears of jellyfish and sharks).
3. The Inuit will adapt to the climate changes and circumstances will improve for them.
His expressed fear was not of climate change, but of the societies and processes which are contributing to it because they are not close to/part of the earth.
Caveat: I tuned in part way through so I didn't catch the names and I may be mis-remembering some of the items. Accuracy not guaranteed.;->
Yeah, and I hope it continues but I don't know any of our critical vendors who develop for it. Forgive me for marginalizing the open community on this particular item but a lot of the steam behind Solaris (by reflection OpenSolaris) was the industrial use of the o/s. Not just web servers but all kinds of specialized applications tied to command and control of the internet. Companies like Siemens, Alcatel-Lucent, Cisco etc all have or had Solaris based platforms. Our company has not installed a Solaris application system in two years. Everything is Linux, Windows, AIX and any vendor who comes to us with Solaris might as well save their breath. As well, we have not bought any Sun h/w in two years. Our h/w criteria is basically: how cheaply and reliably can we run VMWare?
I fear that Solaris/OpenSolaris is becoming at best a niche operating system. Sun h/w and Solaris are the walking dead and I don't see Oracle being able to do anything about it.
Too bad IBM didn't buy Sun. Solaris really would have had a chance to grow if IBM wanted to push it.
Solaris is still a terrific operating system. Every version has made advances in stability and performance, particularly with disk and network i/o. SMP, threading are very mature as well.
I doubt that Oracle will be able to do anything with it except bury it. Too bad.
Yup. The OCs among us make life more interesting. If somebody wants to extend their embrace of a game to their real-world ride, who am I to judge? We had a great "classic" car meet in town back in August and there was everything A-Z. The only thing missing was a Trabant. The word "classic" extends to cover just about anything, not just '57 chevys. Really impressive how much work people put into their machines. Several Jeeps covering a variety of models and variations with a lot of customization.
Slashdot Mirror
Yup and Yup. You got it exactly. That's what we did and that's what our competition has done.
Spot on.
Solaris is a great o/s. Sun went from one weird CEO to another with no hope for redemption.
When Adrian Cockroft jumped to eBay, you knew there was trouble in the henhouse. Hi tech company that undermined their core technology brain trust.
Sad sad sad.
I don't think losing some grumpy OpenOffice and OpenSolaris users qualifies as "everyone has already decided to move away from Oracle".
The original statement was "Sun/Oracle" not "Oracle" and was referencing h/w sales.
Four years ago, we (network/connectivity company) spent over $50 million annually on Sun servers (h/w only, support was on top of that). That is now almost zero. We still buy lots of servers but they are almost all x86 blades. Sun h/w just can't compete in any of the import aspects that affect h/w purchase decisions (performance, power consumption, stability, reliability, capital cost, support cost, TCO, lifetime cost, transition costs). Java is a non-issue and has nothing to do with server purchasing decisions. I know we are not alone in dropping Sun as a vendor.
Note that we were a dyed-in-the-wool Sun/Solaris shop with a terrific core of dedicated Sun/Solaris admins. Nice thing about all that expertise is that, technically speaking, they had little trouble transferring their skill sets to other h/w and o/s platforms. Hardware and o/s vendors were happy to provide transition training. The cost of transition was a blip in our annual spend. Almost no one wants to go back even though Solaris is a superior o/s in many ways (io performance, network stack, scheduler, SMP).
It will be interesting to see what Oracle reports on Sun h/w sales.
Not trying to be a smartass, but does it really even matter? Hasn't almost everyone already decided to move away from Sun/Oracle, excepting those with a tremendous investment in that area?
I agree. That boat sailed about two years ago for us and we were a major Sun shop ( > 10,000 servers four years ago ). We are now almost exclusively VMware on Intel blades, mostly from IBM, or IBM P systems with IBM o/s. Vendors that were Solaris have moved to Linux. We briefly considered x86 Solaris but there was too much uncertainty with the on-again/off-again support for that platform.
Oracle DB is still at the core of our internal corporate computing because of an excellent licensing deal but we use alternatives for consumer facing services.
IMHO, the Sparc64 is hellishly expensive for the performance provided and the iron in the rack is heavy and power hungry. Nobody likes the M series servers. We don't like buying it, we don't like racking it, and we don't like what it does to our data center power distribution configuration.
The T series are not badly priced and are excellent low power consumption web servers but suck at anything that is single threaded. Almost all application software is effectively single threaded: either there is an explicit single execution path or the app has attempted threading but the threads depend on a core path that is single threaded. Usually I can get a brand name Intel multicore box that provides 4x the execution performance at a lower cost, ... and with 3 yr onsite h/w service thrown in.
Everything about Sun h/w is out of sync with what customers want.
Oracle is almost clueless when it comes to hardware sales and development. Try "www.sun.com"... you get a redirect to the Oracle home page and then you have to search for a link to the server product lineup. It's almost as if they are hiding the fact that they have a hardware product to sell. I don't think the Oracle brain trust knows what to do with Sun h/w and the Solaris o/s.
Oracle is a single core product software shop. That's their whole corporate culture and they don't really do other things well. What were they thinking when they bought Sun's h/w division? Possibly they could have just bought the rights to Solaris and developed it for the x86 h/w and made something of it. An argument could be made for the similarity between db and os development. But h/w? It's a black hole for Oracle. SPARC is dead. Write it off.
Now if IBM had bought Sun and turned their R&D folk loose... there would have been hope for Solaris. Too bad so sad.
The firewall just drops the SYN when the ip is recognized and does not make an entry in any table; it just ignores any traffic from that ip.
This at least keeps your servers up and healthy but the problem is that firewalls themselves are typically more easily overrun than the servers behind them.
Usually you want to get your network provider involved so that the filtering can be done as close to the peering gateways as possible. The ISP will want to keep the DDoS traffic off of their network as it will have side effects on other traffic not related to the target. Passing 10Gb/s of traffic through routers and switches only to have it dropped at the destination is not happy making for the ISP.
We were told to get on the floor with our head at our knees and hands behind the head.
This was grade 3 for me. Even at that age, kids are smart enough to question things. One wiseacre who piped up with KYAG was sent to the office for the dreaded strap as punishment for impertinance and use of the word "ass". Another brick in the wall.... ;->
Snakes? You insensitive clod!
Why did it have to be snakes?
Nielson wasn't a "straight man". The "straight man" sets up the joke or is someone that the joke reflects off of and the "straight man" doesn't make the jokes. Nielson was the comedian with the funny lines so I don't really buy your assessment. His delivery was deadpan and serious but that again did not make him the "straight man".
It also is condescending to say he was funny only because it was unusual to see him in a comedy role. I think he had great comedic timing and delivery.
I would agree that his extensive dramatic acting experience helped him to play his comedy roles with skill and discipline, which in turn helped make him very funny. Absolutely, LN had a natural talent for comedy.
Great comment. I think the amazing thing about LN was that he could take really lame jokes and make them funny. The "Shirley" joke was old when I was a kid (LONG ago) and typically is worth a muted groan at best, but LN made it genuinely funny.
It's nice to see almost nothing but positive remarks about the man and his work.
Yup... it's always dangerous to try to be funny. The correcting comments, however, are often informative. Thanks!
BTW: I will bracket my silly and inaccurate comments with [JOKE][END JOKE] to provide more clarity.
Cheers
... when you listen to the tumblers on a safe!
or you could look at Alert, Nunavet, Canada: 82:28 N Lat
Of course this again depends on your definition of "town", as Alert is a military radio listening post. However, it is a "permanent" settlement. :->
4 months of darkness: pbfffttttt! You get yer 6/6 in Alert.
“When you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”
It is the Napoleon of time crime: Moriarty!
Arctic rim job?
hahahahahahahaha ROTFLMHO
Yeah, I agree about the right/left politics and the way that observation/analysis gets coloured and distorted by political positioning.
The interview I heard was from the local CBC station and I haven't found it in the CBC podcast archive. Too bad because it was a good interview. The fellow was not taking a political position. He was just saying that he did not have any great fears for either his people surviving or for the future of the polar bear based on what is being seen by people who live in the high Arctic.
He also expressed some frustration with the way that his people's observations are ignored and gave some examples. For years, scientists have dismissed Inuit observations that there has been change in the position of sky objects with respect to the landscape. Attention is now being paid to the atmospheric effects of the warming air mass above the arctic, including how changing refraction causes objects to shift.
The Inuit are careful observers.
But hey, no big deal, they're, like, attuned with the earth or some other primitivist bullshit.
I don't think he was spouting "primitivist bullshit" as you so eloquently put it. He was attesting to the adaptiveness of his people and their capabilities to survive in a changing environment. He expressed concern about the industrial societies that are not paying attention to the side effects of pollution. Doesn't sound primitivist to me.
"Fuzzy dolphins", good one that! What can one say in reply?
"Driven South". Great observation. Well thought out. Considering that the Inuit population and polar bear distribution areas almost completely overlap, the bears must be moving south from a hitherto unknown location near Alert. Also, if melting ice is the problem then you would think the bears would be going North, not South. You might want to look at a couple of maps and then redraw your conclusions:
http://www.ainc-inac.gc.ca/ai/rs/pubs/images/fg2-eng.gif (Inuit settlements in Canada)
http://www.polarbearsinternational.org/polar-bears/maps-and-trackers/population-and-distribution (Polar bear distribution)
Also, understand that although the Inuit population is widely distributed and has low density, they communicate and stay in touch quite effectively.
Your opinions are excellent examples of what he said he has experienced: condescension and dismisiveness from people who do not have the benefit of his life experience or knowledge of his people's history.
Well.... your polarization is argumentative.
Neener neener.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
OTOH any magic, sufficiently explained, will appear to be a technology.
The local CBC Radio 1 had an interesting interview with an Inuit hunter who expressed opinions which contradict some current conventional wisdom. He said his opinions were based on what he said was common knowledge among Inuit hunters. He was being interviewed along with an author who was giving a lecture at the U of A. :
1. Across the Canadian Arctic territories (NWT, Nunavet), polar bear numbers are increasing not decreasing. He questioned the methodologies of scientists and government agents.
2. Polar bears will survive quite nicely in an ocean environment as they are highly adaptable and they are more at home in the water than on ice. He said it is not unusual to see a bear swimming in open water 100 km from land. (Oh great... another ocean swimming phobia to go along with my fears of jellyfish and sharks).
3. The Inuit will adapt to the climate changes and circumstances will improve for them.
His expressed fear was not of climate change, but of the societies and processes which are contributing to it because they are not close to/part of the earth.
Caveat: I tuned in part way through so I didn't catch the names and I may be mis-remembering some of the items. Accuracy not guaranteed. ;->
Yeah, and I hope it continues but I don't know any of our critical vendors who develop for it. Forgive me for marginalizing the open community on this particular item but a lot of the steam behind Solaris (by reflection OpenSolaris) was the industrial use of the o/s. Not just web servers but all kinds of specialized applications tied to command and control of the internet. Companies like Siemens, Alcatel-Lucent, Cisco etc all have or had Solaris based platforms. Our company has not installed a Solaris application system in two years. Everything is Linux, Windows, AIX and any vendor who comes to us with Solaris might as well save their breath. As well, we have not bought any Sun h/w in two years. Our h/w criteria is basically: how cheaply and reliably can we run VMWare?
I fear that Solaris/OpenSolaris is becoming at best a niche operating system. Sun h/w and Solaris are the walking dead and I don't see Oracle being able to do anything about it.
Too bad IBM didn't buy Sun. Solaris really would have had a chance to grow if IBM wanted to push it.
Solaris is still a terrific operating system. Every version has made advances in stability and performance, particularly with disk and network i/o. SMP, threading are very mature as well.
I doubt that Oracle will be able to do anything with it except bury it. Too bad.
er... it was a joke. Not meant to start a vehicle flamewar. Else I'll drive my Land Rover 109 into the picture.
Cheers
I can hardly wait for the "Where's Elmo" Edition of the Pacer..
I doubt that Elmo could top the "mirthmobile", Garth's fabulous Pacer that became forever linked with Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody".
Yup. The OCs among us make life more interesting. If somebody wants to extend their embrace of a game to their real-world ride, who am I to judge? We had a great "classic" car meet in town back in August and there was everything A-Z. The only thing missing was a Trabant. The word "classic" extends to cover just about anything, not just '57 chevys. Really impressive how much work people put into their machines. Several Jeeps covering a variety of models and variations with a lot of customization.
Truck nerds (better known as rednecks -- me included) meet Game nerds.
Puny COD Jeep. COD Jeep make F250 angry.