Solaris has the best threading model and threading support that I've seen in what I'll call a mainstream operating system. The entire system was designed really well, why? Because these guys built it to make a profit. Not to take a shot at Linux, but dinner is a much better incentive to make something that runs well (and thus sells well) than [kernel] hacker pride. At the end of the day Linux is built on surplus time and energy. Solaris was built by people whose job and living depended on making good software. Not to mention that Sun employed (and employs) some really smart and creative people that have helped make Solaris an impressively scalable OS.
If it has the applications I need, I'll pick Solaris over Linux in a hummingbird heartbeat. I was actually rather upset when I heard my old university moving the CS labs from Solaris to Linux.
This appears to be the big 'gotcha'. They mention they're going after the mainframe and high-end server market, so this makes sense that they can translate to/from mainframe and Unix/Linux.
The problem I see here is that its not that hard to rewrite the app in this situation anyway, particularly between Unix and Linux. Now, if you told me I could run a Windows app on Solaris, now you're talking. So they've compartmentalized the key problem (system call emulation/translation), but haven't really solved it.
But the private networks are disrupting the University's system. The/. story is a bit misleading in that it doesn't tell you why UTD is shutting down the private access points. Specifically the other AP's are causing too much interference. The 802.11b standard has 11 channels (specific frequency ranges) for transmission. It is recommended that APs with overlapping ranges be set at least two channels apart. So, it might be possible to have some such system in place, but it would be cumbersome to setup and regulate between UTD and private access points. What puzzles me is that if these students can get wireless access from UTD, why are they connecting their own to cable/dsl?
One of two conditions exists in this case.
1) The e-mail is vitally important and your business will be seriously damaged by its failed delivery.
2) The e-mail was somewhat important, but not something large enough to materially change your revenue/profits.
If the first is the case, you probably shouldn't be using e-mail in the first place and/or whoever sent it is probably going to follow up with a FedEx or phone call.
In the case of number 2 (ha ha, number two), you've saved so much time not having to wade through spam that the losses are negated.
First of all, Google has 271 million shares outstanding. Only 19 million are being offered today on the open market. What percentage of Class A shares the founders have, I don't know. However, with the dual voting structure (Class B shares have 10 votes per share) the founders still retain voting control of the company.
Well, this is the exact reason that the dual share structure exists. Each Class A share has one vote, each Class B share, however, has 10 votes. The founders have most of (if not all) the Class B shares. In the end, I believe this gives the founders about 60% voting control of the company. However, their equity ownership (right to profits) is less than this.
One of the reasons that they've done this (as state in their S-1 registration statement) is to prevent the pursuit of short-term profits at the expense of long-term success.
There is no way that this won't change the ecosystem of the lake. If you extract cool water from the bottom, you're in effect bringing warmer water further down. This will change plant and animal life at different levels of the lake. Whether it will be destructive or not, who knows. Using ground water (or lake water) for cooling is becoming more popular, as it is cheap and appears green. I just wonder if we'll say the same thing in 50 years when we've thrown water system all out of whack. Maybe we won't, I hope not, but I don't think enough studying has been done of the effects.
I am sure the decision on what platform to use was based far more on the fact that they could get 512 processors per node. The SGI Altix platform exclusively uses Itanium 2 processors. I an not aware of a 512-processor Operton system that is available. While this system has 20 nodes its is far less "clustery" than most "supercomputers" like the VT cluster that uses over a thousand nodes. Expect this cluster to get far higher performance, particularly since each node could be considered a supercomputer in its own right. Plus, yummy NUMA.
-Engage brain, then type.
Firstly, I disagree that players will become profitless. The only way they become profitless is if they're all the same. If they're all the same then no one can charge more than someone else, and its a race to the bottom of prices. This is happening in the Wintel computer box world now, largely they're all the same. Yet, somehow, Apple manages to have pretty nice margins.
Secondly, there is NO MONEY to be made in content distribution now. Apple barely makes money on iTMS. They'll have to sell orders of magnitude greater songs to have any impact on their bottom line. Even if they due that, the contribution is nothing compared to the iPod's.
Finally, 2GB, way too small, even for me, and my collection is fairly small.
Guess, what? Apple OWNS FairPlay. This means you can't encode it or decode it without their permission. Whether you agree with this or not (my personal jury is out), those are the rules.
It is Steve Jobs duty to try to improve this situation. Better market share might be a good first step.
There are two possibilities here:
1) You didn't actually read what the first post said.
2) You don't understand what the original poster was trying to express.
The answer to being profitable is not always to own the market. Let's understand something, Dell is not a computer maker, Dell is a computer assembler and re-brander. Dell puts the legos together and sells you the finished product, but Dell does nothing involved with creating the individual blocks, for the most part. Dell makes their money NOT, NOT, NOT on technological innovation, but rather what management calls "process improvement". Nothing wrong with this, just a different way to make money, I admire Dell's process efficiency. Apple has decided not to compete on the cheapness playing field for two reasons
1) They are pretty sure they'd lose
2) Apple's culture has never been to make something cheap at the expense of making it good. I think this shows greatly in their products.
So, Apple could pour billions of dollars into trying to beat Dell at process efficiency AND come up with innovative ideas, but this would probably land them in bankruptcy. Instead Apple is being economically logical in doing what it has a comparative advantage at, making innovative and cool products.
So, given that you have small market share, but that you make really great stuff that your users love to use and would rather stick a needle in their eye than use something else, maximum profit lies is getting as high of a margin you can and pouring a lot of money back into R&D.
Finally you note market cap and profits, based on your figures, which I have not verified, Apple is trading at 47X earnings and dell is trading at 30X earnings. Higher multiples imply expectations of higher growth. I'd rather own a higher growth company, how about you?
As a former resident and student of Iowa I can tell you the ICN was really awesome. I attended a debate and competition host over the ICN once in Iowa. It was also cool to take a bike ride in the country and see the little signs that read "WARNING: Underground Fiber Optic Cable ICN" It was a great idea and its sad that more states haven't followed. If a low population density state which is fairly poor by national standards can build a state of the art communications network, what are the excuses of the rest of the country?
Slashdot Mirror
Won't be long before we're all solving impossible encryption problems.
Of course by then we'll all be using quantum encryption techniques.
Solaris has the best threading model and threading support that I've seen in what I'll call a mainstream operating system. The entire system was designed really well, why? Because these guys built it to make a profit. Not to take a shot at Linux, but dinner is a much better incentive to make something that runs well (and thus sells well) than [kernel] hacker pride. At the end of the day Linux is built on surplus time and energy. Solaris was built by people whose job and living depended on making good software. Not to mention that Sun employed (and employs) some really smart and creative people that have helped make Solaris an impressively scalable OS.
If it has the applications I need, I'll pick Solaris over Linux in a hummingbird heartbeat. I was actually rather upset when I heard my old university moving the CS labs from Solaris to Linux.
Something tells me that booting up OS X Server on an XServe is going to be cheaper than these babies.
This appears to be the big 'gotcha'. They mention they're going after the mainframe and high-end server market, so this makes sense that they can translate to/from mainframe and Unix/Linux.
The problem I see here is that its not that hard to rewrite the app in this situation anyway, particularly between Unix and Linux. Now, if you told me I could run a Windows app on Solaris, now you're talking. So they've compartmentalized the key problem (system call emulation/translation), but haven't really solved it.
But the private networks are disrupting the University's system. The /. story is a bit misleading in that it doesn't tell you why UTD is shutting down the private access points. Specifically the other AP's are causing too much interference. The 802.11b standard has 11 channels (specific frequency ranges) for transmission. It is recommended that APs with overlapping ranges be set at least two channels apart. So, it might be possible to have some such system in place, but it would be cumbersome to setup and regulate between UTD and private access points. What puzzles me is that if these students can get wireless access from UTD, why are they connecting their own to cable/dsl?
One of two conditions exists in this case.
1) The e-mail is vitally important and your business will be seriously damaged by its failed delivery.
2) The e-mail was somewhat important, but not something large enough to materially change your revenue/profits.
If the first is the case, you probably shouldn't be using e-mail in the first place and/or whoever sent it is probably going to follow up with a FedEx or phone call.
In the case of number 2 (ha ha, number two), you've saved so much time not having to wade through spam that the losses are negated.
First of all, Google has 271 million shares outstanding. Only 19 million are being offered today on the open market. What percentage of Class A shares the founders have, I don't know. However, with the dual voting structure (Class B shares have 10 votes per share) the founders still retain voting control of the company.
Well, this is the exact reason that the dual share structure exists. Each Class A share has one vote, each Class B share, however, has 10 votes. The founders have most of (if not all) the Class B shares. In the end, I believe this gives the founders about 60% voting control of the company. However, their equity ownership (right to profits) is less than this.
One of the reasons that they've done this (as state in their S-1 registration statement) is to prevent the pursuit of short-term profits at the expense of long-term success.
There is no way that this won't change the ecosystem of the lake. If you extract cool water from the bottom, you're in effect bringing warmer water further down. This will change plant and animal life at different levels of the lake. Whether it will be destructive or not, who knows. Using ground water (or lake water) for cooling is becoming more popular, as it is cheap and appears green. I just wonder if we'll say the same thing in 50 years when we've thrown water system all out of whack. Maybe we won't, I hope not, but I don't think enough studying has been done of the effects.
I am sure the decision on what platform to use was based far more on the fact that they could get 512 processors per node. The SGI Altix platform exclusively uses Itanium 2 processors. I an not aware of a 512-processor Operton system that is available. While this system has 20 nodes its is far less "clustery" than most "supercomputers" like the VT cluster that uses over a thousand nodes. Expect this cluster to get far higher performance, particularly since each node could be considered a supercomputer in its own right. Plus, yummy NUMA. -Engage brain, then type.
Firstly, I disagree that players will become profitless. The only way they become profitless is if they're all the same. If they're all the same then no one can charge more than someone else, and its a race to the bottom of prices. This is happening in the Wintel computer box world now, largely they're all the same. Yet, somehow, Apple manages to have pretty nice margins. Secondly, there is NO MONEY to be made in content distribution now. Apple barely makes money on iTMS. They'll have to sell orders of magnitude greater songs to have any impact on their bottom line. Even if they due that, the contribution is nothing compared to the iPod's. Finally, 2GB, way too small, even for me, and my collection is fairly small.
Guess, what? Apple OWNS FairPlay. This means you can't encode it or decode it without their permission. Whether you agree with this or not (my personal jury is out), those are the rules.
It is Steve Jobs duty to try to improve this situation. Better market share might be a good first step.
There are two possibilities here:
1) You didn't actually read what the first post said.
2) You don't understand what the original poster was trying to express.
The answer to being profitable is not always to own the market. Let's understand something, Dell is not a computer maker, Dell is a computer assembler and re-brander. Dell puts the legos together and sells you the finished product, but Dell does nothing involved with creating the individual blocks, for the most part. Dell makes their money NOT, NOT, NOT on technological innovation, but rather what management calls "process improvement". Nothing wrong with this, just a different way to make money, I admire Dell's process efficiency. Apple has decided not to compete on the cheapness playing field for two reasons
1) They are pretty sure they'd lose
2) Apple's culture has never been to make something cheap at the expense of making it good. I think this shows greatly in their products.
So, Apple could pour billions of dollars into trying to beat Dell at process efficiency AND come up with innovative ideas, but this would probably land them in bankruptcy. Instead Apple is being economically logical in doing what it has a comparative advantage at, making innovative and cool products.
So, given that you have small market share, but that you make really great stuff that your users love to use and would rather stick a needle in their eye than use something else, maximum profit lies is getting as high of a margin you can and pouring a lot of money back into R&D.
Finally you note market cap and profits, based on your figures, which I have not verified, Apple is trading at 47X earnings and dell is trading at 30X earnings. Higher multiples imply expectations of higher growth. I'd rather own a higher growth company, how about you?
As a former resident and student of Iowa I can tell you the ICN was really awesome. I attended a debate and competition host over the ICN once in Iowa. It was also cool to take a bike ride in the country and see the little signs that read
"WARNING: Underground Fiber Optic Cable
ICN"
It was a great idea and its sad that more states haven't followed. If a low population density state which is fairly poor by national standards can build a state of the art communications network, what are the excuses of the rest of the country?