Uh, the vast majority of businesses are just fine paying for MS licenses to run software.
Not according to Steve Ballmer.
There are a few all Linux/Unix shops out there but they are by far in the minority.
I don't recall mentioning Linux or Unix. I just mentioned that licensing, and the cost of inevitable spin-off software and pre-requisites (Client Access Licensing, not being able to to run Sharepoint as a shared site etc.) inevitably gets factored into the quotes and costs that development companies have to deal with.
I know most of the software we buy absolutely dwarfs the cost of the hardware + MS licenses (most of the purchases we've made in the last couple years have been mid 6-figures to 7 figures + equal costs for implementation consultants, the cost of our MS licenses barely breaks into the 6 figure range...
You're in a minority. I'm thoroughly pleased that you can blow silly money on things like that where the licensing cost sinks into oblivion and where you don't need to justify what your software actually does, but the wider economy does not depend on organisations that you're a part of. I really chuckled at the whole 'implementation consultants' thing by the way. Classic.
We take advantage of MSDN, it's MUCH cheaper to pay for MSDN subscriptions for our technical staff then it is to pay for ~2/3rd's of our environment (Dev+Test).
Yes it is nice.......... Until you realise that, if you stupidly buy into it, as a development company you are stipulating Microsoft software and licensing as a prerequisite for any deployment or implementation of your work for a customer. You can't use your MSDN licenses there. You will also have to factor that into your quote, budget and costs. Why do you think Microsoft has MSDN? A lot of silly companies who are built around being Microsoft partners and using MSDN have found it tough because Microsoft always takes their cut regardless.
Actually, the reason it won't is Active Directory. You have the same authentication internally for your e-mail as you do for all the other systems you authenticate against AD for, not to mention the Exchange integration for e-mail that many internal systems have. That's tough to break.
The only way it will work is if you could give companies the advantages of not having to manage and run hardware for internal e-mail systems (a catch-all basically) whilst giving them a managed appliance they don't have to worry about internally to allay their fears about data security and providing internal integration.
The only definable OpenSolaris distribution is Nevada, and the last I looked it contained some prorietary software that all distributions had to pull in if they wanted to bootstrap. There's also no reason to believe that will change. AuroraUX is pie-in-the-sky stuff because they're effectively saying they want to be the kernel.org community for the OpenSolaris community, which is something that Sun doesn't want to create.
Unlike Java,.NET makes native bindings dirt simple. If you were using a DLL in C++, you can use the same DLL in C# relatively easily.
The biggest problem with that is error trapping and such like. If your native library throws an internal error or something unexpected then the.Net or Mono application is left out in the cold. It isn't easy at all. That's why Microsoft has put such effort into wrapping COM and Win32 effectively so that errors that get thrown there throw decent exceptions in.Net - most of the time. The notion that you can easily wrap a piece of native code with Mono is totally bogus and potentially insecure, but that's less of a problem versus getting it working reliably.
This isn't a surprise. The most reliable way of doing this is to use Wine. install the proper.Net framework and you'll have something that works better.
You're operating under the impression that UltraSparc is also designed for general purpose computing, and s such should also be selling hundred of millions of units - but it isn't.
The problem is that's what UltraSPARC ended up competing against, despite protestations to the contrary from a lot of people. SPARC machines have been replaced by the boatload with x86 and x86_64, which is why the architecture is in trouble. When you benchmark an UltraSPARC III as I did with pystones against a 1.4GHz Athlon and find the Athlon is between two and three times as fast then you're entitled to ask what you're spending the money on.
Sun doesn't really make mainframes and aren't competing with IBM in that market. The problem is that they made their money getting people to spend a lot on server hardware and support for workloads that can be easily run faster and cheaper on x86. 'We are the dot in dot com'? That market disappeared overnight for them as faster and cheaper x86 servers for web applications took hold snd overlapped with expensive SPARC machines.
And as power and heat become issues in large server farms (mostly running database and web applications), the Niagara line is attractive....
Yes they are concerns, but people aren't going to go for that at the expense of potentially less performance, unless they plan their workloads very, very, very carefully. Few will. I've heard of some organisations who've went for these machines as J2EE or database machines who've had to allocate a lot more hardware than they planned which doesn't match up to Sun's marketing at all.
Databases do not benefit as much by fast single thread execution as they do by very reasonable multi-thread execution. That is because in a database application, or Web application, you want to support many sessions.
Not really true, and it's why most people haven't bought into Niagara despite any benchmarks Sun might come up with. The problem is that Niagara doesn't have the single threaded performance to start with. Rock was what was necessary, but that seems to be stillborne. For Niagara to work for you you have to have a lot of extremely lightweight threads that don't depend on each other and can run completely in parallel. You won't find many workloads like that these days, even with databases, because everyone has ever larger single jobs for specific tasks that they want to run faster and faster as well as potentially large stored procedures to mangle through. No one wants to find out that their hardware platform is OK for a specific workload and then as soon as you throw it something different it nosedives.
All of these satellite navigation companies currently produce proprietary and relatively expensive devices of varying quality and rely on those devices being continually replaced as it gets ever harder and more expensive to maintain the map data and come up with something new. The other day I realised that Google could pretty much put all of these companies out of business by making Google Maps speak and give directions.
Everybody else must be under the age of seven then if you don't find Gimli's "You're gonna have to toss me" daft. Maybe you have to be a little bit older to see Frodo decyphering 'speak friend and enter' and not Gandalf in some attempt to make Frodo the hero of the film as daft. The examples you can pick out of how awful these films are are numerous, but you never get anything back that refers to what you actually referenced. See fanboy comment. I could also read any book part faster than watch the film part.
They are not trillogies at all.
Bit of a mis-speaking or whatever on my part, but not germane to the point really.
They are not even a single trillogy (which requires three complete but linked stories)
If you say so................
The Lord of the Rings is one story broken (almost abitrarily) into three segments.
They are three books linked into a trilogy and have always been published as such, even if they might not have been originally intended that way, but, we're being pdeantic now to avoid discussing the criticism.
Apparently, the Tolkien Trust is supposed to be a charity. Businesses masquerading as charities seems to be de jour these days, not to mention the tax benefits....... I digress.
Anyway, am I the only person who actually read The Hobbit, thought it was a great book, read Lord of the Rings and thought it was good, if long-winded, and then absolutely hated the films? I honestly don't see what others seems to see in those films at all. They're far more long-winded than the book(s), lacking in focus, lacking in atmosphere, poorly acted in parts (mostly because of the lack of focus), has some very poor imitation of 'The Mission' as its soundtrack, very pretentious and not exactly faithful to the book(s) at all. "Lean forward!" - WTF?! They're certainly not trilogies that will live in the memory like Star Wars (the proper trilogy, that is). I just don't want to see a book that's better than the Lord of the Rings getting the same Peter Jackson personal massacre treatment as well as all the fan worship that seems to go around with them.
Elite...... God I loved that game. No matter how much I wanted to be a nice, peaceful space trader I could never resist the urge to bounty hunt other ships.
When I read stuff like this it makes me feel reasonably glad that I live in the UK, pay a TV license and get all the channels I need on Freeview or Freesat. I've tended to find that I don't need any paid cable or Sky TV because it's generally full of adverts, full of repeats and all I watch on there is the sport.
I feel for you guys over the pond. TV seems to be dead.
Not sure how you figure that. Something like the OMAP3530 can decode H.264 in a tiny power envelope compared to something like a Core 2, and yet costs much less.
Hmmmmm. So Sun are turning the Sparc platform into a specific platform for specific purposes with specific processing for specific tasks? Doesn't really sound like a computer to me so I don' know where you're going with that. It's a bit of a daft comparison. I was referring to Sparc's lack of performance when compared with the competitor that has ate its lunch over the years - x86.
But it's slower to replace standards than either, and encryption standards require years of peer review before they are approved.
Standards come, standards go, implementations change and get updated. That's why we have this thing called 'software' and why trying to do things in hardware that can be done in software on more powerful machines have generally fallen by the wayside. There are very few specific cases left.
Yup, no modern CPUs contain on-chip floating point or vector coprocessors. Well, none except for all of them. And no modern computers contain graphics coprocessors.
Bit of a stupid comeback really. On-chip floating point and vector processing isn't anywhere near comparable to putting full blown IPSec or similar encryption and decryption on the chip. The formers are common denominators of everything else. Graphics cards have proved to be the exception largely because graphics is still a growing field with ever expanding requirements that takes up significant resources. That won't always be the case but it will continue to be for some time. That certainly isn't the case with what Sun are doing, so again, you're using nonsensical comparisons.
Not sure what you mean by 'inherent lack of grunt'.
x86 systems have outperformed Sparc systems for over a decade now. That's largely why Sun's workstation market disappeared overnight.
For highly parallel workloads (e.g. web serving, lots of database workloads), there isn't much that beats a T2 in terms of throughput at the moment, and nothing that comes close in terms of performance per Watt.
Oh please. Stop with that parellel workload and performance per watt shit. The vast majority of people don't have completely parellel tasks. They have tasks that double in size that they want completed in half the time. Those who have apparently parallel workloads don't because each thread of execution tends to depend on another completing at some point. That's the bottom line. Those workloads are very, very, very limited and it doesn't justify sustaining a whole hardware architecture. Performance per watt is a meaningless benchmark that can be measured in umpteen ways to cover up for Sparc's lack of performance when it comes to the opposition.
Sorry, but when Oracle gets in there I can only see them ditching what's left of Sun's in-house Sparc architecture systems unless they can make the architecture relevant performance-wise. This just isn't worthy of being news.
Slashdot Mirror
Not according to Steve Ballmer.
I don't recall mentioning Linux or Unix. I just mentioned that licensing, and the cost of inevitable spin-off software and pre-requisites (Client Access Licensing, not being able to to run Sharepoint as a shared site etc.) inevitably gets factored into the quotes and costs that development companies have to deal with.
You're in a minority. I'm thoroughly pleased that you can blow silly money on things like that where the licensing cost sinks into oblivion and where you don't need to justify what your software actually does, but the wider economy does not depend on organisations that you're a part of. I really chuckled at the whole 'implementation consultants' thing by the way. Classic.
Yes it is nice.......... Until you realise that, if you stupidly buy into it, as a development company you are stipulating Microsoft software and licensing as a prerequisite for any deployment or implementation of your work for a customer. You can't use your MSDN licenses there. You will also have to factor that into your quote, budget and costs. Why do you think Microsoft has MSDN? A lot of silly companies who are built around being Microsoft partners and using MSDN have found it tough because Microsoft always takes their cut regardless.
Actually, the reason it won't is Active Directory. You have the same authentication internally for your e-mail as you do for all the other systems you authenticate against AD for, not to mention the Exchange integration for e-mail that many internal systems have. That's tough to break.
The only way it will work is if you could give companies the advantages of not having to manage and run hardware for internal e-mail systems (a catch-all basically) whilst giving them a managed appliance they don't have to worry about internally to allay their fears about data security and providing internal integration.
I wouldn't equate Mac OS X as a 'Unix' for a comparison with Windows if I were you. The amount of stuff running setuid on a Mac is a little scary.
The only definable OpenSolaris distribution is Nevada, and the last I looked it contained some prorietary software that all distributions had to pull in if they wanted to bootstrap. There's also no reason to believe that will change. AuroraUX is pie-in-the-sky stuff because they're effectively saying they want to be the kernel.org community for the OpenSolaris community, which is something that Sun doesn't want to create.
The biggest problem with that is error trapping and such like. If your native library throws an internal error or something unexpected then the .Net or Mono application is left out in the cold. It isn't easy at all. That's why Microsoft has put such effort into wrapping COM and Win32 effectively so that errors that get thrown there throw decent exceptions in .Net - most of the time. The notion that you can easily wrap a piece of native code with Mono is totally bogus and potentially insecure, but that's less of a problem versus getting it working reliably.
This isn't a surprise. The most reliable way of doing this is to use Wine. install the proper .Net framework and you'll have something that works better.
What a load of crap. The US III performance was laughable, as is splitting hair over floating point performance.
The problem is that's what UltraSPARC ended up competing against, despite protestations to the contrary from a lot of people. SPARC machines have been replaced by the boatload with x86 and x86_64, which is why the architecture is in trouble. When you benchmark an UltraSPARC III as I did with pystones against a 1.4GHz Athlon and find the Athlon is between two and three times as fast then you're entitled to ask what you're spending the money on.
Sun doesn't really make mainframes and aren't competing with IBM in that market. The problem is that they made their money getting people to spend a lot on server hardware and support for workloads that can be easily run faster and cheaper on x86. 'We are the dot in dot com'? That market disappeared overnight for them as faster and cheaper x86 servers for web applications took hold snd overlapped with expensive SPARC machines.
Yes they are concerns, but people aren't going to go for that at the expense of potentially less performance, unless they plan their workloads very, very, very carefully. Few will. I've heard of some organisations who've went for these machines as J2EE or database machines who've had to allocate a lot more hardware than they planned which doesn't match up to Sun's marketing at all.
Not really true, and it's why most people haven't bought into Niagara despite any benchmarks Sun might come up with. The problem is that Niagara doesn't have the single threaded performance to start with. Rock was what was necessary, but that seems to be stillborne. For Niagara to work for you you have to have a lot of extremely lightweight threads that don't depend on each other and can run completely in parallel. You won't find many workloads like that these days, even with databases, because everyone has ever larger single jobs for specific tasks that they want to run faster and faster as well as potentially large stored procedures to mangle through. No one wants to find out that their hardware platform is OK for a specific workload and then as soon as you throw it something different it nosedives.
Even Fujitsu are finding it tough and becoming non-committal:
http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2009/03/30/fts_server_strategy/
They want to gravitate to where the growth is, and it just isn't SPARC.
I fail to see why Novell should be doing the work for a competitor, but I suppose that's what they're best at these days.
You're obviously not familiar with Gordon Brown as a literary wordsmith.
All of these satellite navigation companies currently produce proprietary and relatively expensive devices of varying quality and rely on those devices being continually replaced as it gets ever harder and more expensive to maintain the map data and come up with something new. The other day I realised that Google could pretty much put all of these companies out of business by making Google Maps speak and give directions.
Everybody else must be under the age of seven then if you don't find Gimli's "You're gonna have to toss me" daft. Maybe you have to be a little bit older to see Frodo decyphering 'speak friend and enter' and not Gandalf in some attempt to make Frodo the hero of the film as daft. The examples you can pick out of how awful these films are are numerous, but you never get anything back that refers to what you actually referenced. See fanboy comment. I could also read any book part faster than watch the film part.
Bit of a mis-speaking or whatever on my part, but not germane to the point really.
If you say so................
They are three books linked into a trilogy and have always been published as such, even if they might not have been originally intended that way, but, we're being pdeantic now to avoid discussing the criticism.
The defence of these films is pretty nauseous at times.
Apparently, the Tolkien Trust is supposed to be a charity. Businesses masquerading as charities seems to be de jour these days, not to mention the tax benefits....... I digress.
Anyway, am I the only person who actually read The Hobbit, thought it was a great book, read Lord of the Rings and thought it was good, if long-winded, and then absolutely hated the films? I honestly don't see what others seems to see in those films at all. They're far more long-winded than the book(s), lacking in focus, lacking in atmosphere, poorly acted in parts (mostly because of the lack of focus), has some very poor imitation of 'The Mission' as its soundtrack, very pretentious and not exactly faithful to the book(s) at all. "Lean forward!" - WTF?! They're certainly not trilogies that will live in the memory like Star Wars (the proper trilogy, that is). I just don't want to see a book that's better than the Lord of the Rings getting the same Peter Jackson personal massacre treatment as well as all the fan worship that seems to go around with them.
Elite...... God I loved that game. No matter how much I wanted to be a nice, peaceful space trader I could never resist the urge to bounty hunt other ships.
What about 'Blessed are the cheesemakers'?
Not only that, but he's unelected and has been kicked out of government several times before because of his slimy ways.
When I read stuff like this it makes me feel reasonably glad that I live in the UK, pay a TV license and get all the channels I need on Freeview or Freesat. I've tended to find that I don't need any paid cable or Sky TV because it's generally full of adverts, full of repeats and all I watch on there is the sport.
I feel for you guys over the pond. TV seems to be dead.
For most of the world that's not football.
Hmmmmm. So Sun are turning the Sparc platform into a specific platform for specific purposes with specific processing for specific tasks? Doesn't really sound like a computer to me so I don' know where you're going with that. It's a bit of a daft comparison. I was referring to Sparc's lack of performance when compared with the competitor that has ate its lunch over the years - x86.
Standards come, standards go, implementations change and get updated. That's why we have this thing called 'software' and why trying to do things in hardware that can be done in software on more powerful machines have generally fallen by the wayside. There are very few specific cases left.
Bit of a stupid comeback really. On-chip floating point and vector processing isn't anywhere near comparable to putting full blown IPSec or similar encryption and decryption on the chip. The formers are common denominators of everything else. Graphics cards have proved to be the exception largely because graphics is still a growing field with ever expanding requirements that takes up significant resources. That won't always be the case but it will continue to be for some time. That certainly isn't the case with what Sun are doing, so again, you're using nonsensical comparisons.
x86 systems have outperformed Sparc systems for over a decade now. That's largely why Sun's workstation market disappeared overnight.
Oh please. Stop with that parellel workload and performance per watt shit. The vast majority of people don't have completely parellel tasks. They have tasks that double in size that they want completed in half the time. Those who have apparently parallel workloads don't because each thread of execution tends to depend on another completing at some point. That's the bottom line. Those workloads are very, very, very limited and it doesn't justify sustaining a whole hardware architecture. Performance per watt is a meaningless benchmark that can be measured in umpteen ways to cover up for Sparc's lack of performance when it comes to the opposition.
Sorry, but when Oracle gets in there I can only see them ditching what's left of Sun's in-house Sparc architecture systems unless they can make the architecture relevant performance-wise. This just isn't worthy of being news.