From the article: "Music creators have the right to protect their property from theft, just like owners of any other property," Sherman said.
Where do I start? a) It's not the music creators who have put "copy protection" on, it's the music publishers b) Whether it's the creator or the publisher, the creation is not "property". If it were there would be no patent or copyright law c) Illegal copying isn't theft, it's illegal copying d) What they're doing isn't like any other property, and asserting the opposite doesn't change the facts
If the context for this sentence related to the theft of a truck full of CD's then it would be correct. But I somehow don't think that's what he means.
It is exciting to see this happening, but the acid test is whether they are still selling these machines in this config in three months' time. If they *are*, then we may have a major breakthrough on our hands.
IMHO, the single most significant difference between different vendors' offerings is the difference in what happens before you get to the OS. If you have a dead machine and want to run firmware diagnostics, or boot a different OS image or whatever, then the different platforms are almost completely proprietary.
There's the Intel stack - with the MBR outside the disc partitions, and the Bios limitations with 1024 cylinders, and the need for a tiny LILO or GRUB to get stuff from the filesystem.
There's the Sparc stack - with the boot blocks inside the disc partitions and Firmware capable of booting from the network.
I had brief encounters with the HP K-series stack once, and had to bluff my way through somehow.
While the differences in installers, and patchers, and package management are all significant, the ability to use the firmware layer effectively when the machine won't boot normally and the PHB is looking over your shoulder is the main difference between platforms.
Two very simple principles of data protection are:
Personal data must not be released to a third party without the consent of the party who has given the data
Personal data must not be used for a purpose other than that for which it was collected
Now let's judge Passport against these:
As soon as somebody signs for a Passport account they start getting spam from third parties
As soon as somebody signs for a Passport account they start getting spam
Now, this isn't some precious view about what a pity junk email is - this is a basic breach of fundamental principles of privacy and data protection being perpetrated by a corporation with a large amount of trade in every EU country (and elsewhere in the world).
If they want to trade in the EU and make money here, they have to obey our laws. And our laws on privacy and data protection aren't that onerous - all that is asked is that if you collect personal data that you don't hand it out willy nilly, and that you use it for the purpose for which it was collected. Is that an unreasonable restraint on trade?
Au contraire, I think Sun would be more than happy for the more technically literate to download and use OpenOffice. The decision over whether to charge for SO6 or give it away for free was based on achieving maximum penetration, not on earning revenue.
Having establised the price point for SO6 I would expect frequent "promotions" (Summer Madness - for the month of July only get SO6 for just $39.95, that's 50% off).
Remember, every time a document is created in MS Office format it reinforces Microsoft's monopoly on office document file formats. Every time a document is created in OpenOffice/SO6 format it undermines not only that monopoly but also the Windows monopoly (as OO/SO docs can be opened on Windows, Solaris, Linux...)
So the simplest way for Joe public to be part of undermining this monopoly is to walk into a shop and buy SO6. For the more technically literate they can achieve the same effect by a download. Is Sun bothered about the lost revenue because people are using OO? Not at all - it's all grist to their mill.
It's harder to justify a marketing campaign to the bean counters if there's not going to be any revenue. And you can't get the PC shops to stock it if they're not going to put it through the tills.
How they decided the price point is what interests me. The five seats licence is the most telling part - basically they're not interested in the revenue, and are only using the pricing model as a means to get the suite into the conventional market channels. Their interest is in denying revenue to Microsoft for Office, and attempting to break the monopoly of the secret office file formats.
Further, by charging money there is a greater likelihood that people will use SO6 *instead* of MS Office rather than as well as MS Office.
Depends entirely on how recoup of the development costs is loaded into the pricing model. The actual physical cost to build is probably under $100 (but I'm prepared to be corrected). So improving volume really does drive down the unit "cost".
Essentially the declared cost to build each unit can be massaged to be whatever you want it to be.
No, in many ways she is right. The jewel in the crown of Sparc/Solaris is the RAS features, which they justifiably use as a stick to beat IBM/HP with.
Solaris/Sparc allows automatic system recovery - if your machine crashes with a hardware fault, it will find the fault at POST time, and boot the kernel around the faulty hardware. Not such a good thing when thieves broke into XXXX organisation, nicked a load of system boards leaving one in each machine, and the machines recovered and restarted the applications running on what hardware was left.
Solaris/Sparc allows you to add and remove CPU/memory boards to and from a *running* domain.
And Solaris/Sparc has a SMP kernel which will scale linearly to over 100 processors - this isn't just a particular design choice about the kernel architecture, it's a lot of choices about the hardware, firmware and kernel details.
So while the Linux kernel has proved itself massively capable for horizontally scalable systems, the Solaris kernel has been designed for vertical scaling. There's actually no need for the Linux kernel to head in this direction - it's a good solution where you can have multiple boxen scaled out, or where you are using a HA/clustering solution, but for large installations with (for example) massive database instances and requiring the RAS features which Solaris/Sparc offers, the Linux kernel doesn't fit.
Dunstanb
Re:interesting approach
on
Enigma
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Bollocks. The computers used *were* invented at Bletchley Park. Alan Turing invented the Bombes, and Tommy Flowers invented Colossus. And this was all years before Eniac BTW. But history missed out on this, because Churchill had everything from Bletchley Park destroyed at the end of the war - presumably to stop it from possible falling into Stalin's hands.
Dunstan
Role of the Poles
on
Enigma
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
We Brits often complain about how war films are slanted to play up the American involvement because that's where the money for the films comes from (cf Memphis Belle). After the British release I heard an interesting radio interview where a Polish veteran was complaining about how the Poles don't get a proper share of the glory in this story.
[minor spoiler alert] The point he was making was that not only did the Poles find the machine in the first place, but if they hadn't kept quiet about it for the duration of the war then Hitler would have abandoned Enigma much sooner, or at least have had an inkling that his communications were being intercepted. But the secrecy surrounding the codebreaking operation was so good from *all* parties that Rommel went to his grave cursing the spy who was giving away information from his signals back to Germany.
There was an excellent series on Channel 4 about the operation about three years ago, and I would assume that it has been aired on PBS (though maybe not because it isn't exactly complimentery towards our American allies). Enigma makes the whole subject into a story, but the subject also bears telling in a documentary style.
NeWS was the first proper windowing system I saw - SunView doesn't count, as it was kernel based. It seemed to make the old 4MB 3/50s run a bit slow though. But NeWS was a *much* sounder idea than X - while multiple object in X have to be drawn by pixels, you could draw an object in NeWS and then tell the display "I'll have another one of those in green, but 20% bigger and rotated 45 degrees".
An interesting side note - Sun moved the windowing system from the kernel (SunView) into user space (X/NeWS). OTOH, Microsoft moved it from user space (Win 3.1/NT 3.5) into kernel space (Win95/WinNT). An interesting sidebar to the "What's part of the operating system" debate.
I had a HP 35 calculator. One afternoon it fell out of my bike carrier into the road - before I could retrieve it a car had driven over it. I was really annoyed with myself. I took it out of its case to inspect the wreckage and found my calculator - with a small crack in the plastic on one corner - working fine.
More to the point, when my nephew was born he had a serious problem with his respiration, and spent the first fortnight of his life in an oxygen tent. Attached to his chest were sensors with "Hewlett Packard" on them, connected to a rack of instruments with "Hewlett Packard" on them. I'm glad that these instruments are still being made by Agilent, but why-oh-why-oh-why did HP get rid of the part of their business which gave people a warm fuzzy feeling - and which represented excellence?
That's exactly what happens in one of the Inspector Morse episodes - Morse and Lewis are after a murderer who is also a system cracker, and has changed all manner of records about him. Ends up with Lewis in the library going through ten year old copies of the Oxford Mail to find out what really happened in the court case.
Reminds me of a campaign which ran in the newspapers here (GB) encouraging advertisers to buy newspaper advertising space. It pictured a couple enjoying married congress on the sofa with the TV on in the background and said "accorting to audience statistics these people are watching your advert - who's really being screwed?".
Of course Turner's real concern isn't whether people skip the adverts, it's whether he gets paid by the advertisers, in which case it's not a lot different to websites saying "please click on the banner ads so we get money from the advertisers".
Dunstan
BTW, is this the same Turner as runs TNT? I happened to be in the US for the 1990 World Cup, and remember that TNT repeatedly interrupted the live soccer to run adverts while play continued, and it was the same adverts over and over and over again. After that I vowed never to by "Tums" again. Worse, they ran trailers for their own World Cup coverage instead of cutting back to the game which was going on. Madness.
Since when does a machine with Windows pre-loaded come with any support? If the machine is shipped with a recovery CD (you boot the machine from it, and it is back in the same state as when it came from the shop) then that's as much support as you get with pre-installed Windows. They could also contract a third party (e.g. RedHat?) to provide support via a premium rate phone service.
This would be a perfect embodiment of what RMS wrote 15 (or more) years ago - that if software is free then businesses can make money out of selling support and handholding.
How does this help Walmart make bigger profits? Because they will ship *far* more machines if they are "working systems" where prople can do real work (and play real games) rather than bare machines which need someone to install an OS before they can do anything. Remember, the whole Windows OEM scam started with the premise that "people shouldn't have to install an OS before they can start using their computer".
How much would it cost W'mart to sell these machines with a pre-loaded Linux image? Surely if they cut a gold image it would only cost a few cents to ghost them onto the hard drives before they went into the machines? Or they could produce a "recovery CD", which restores a Linux image which works on that hardware?
How much better for the customer to go home with a system which they can plug in and start playing nethack straight away without having to obtain and install a Linux distro.
And it would annoy the crap out of M$.
Dunstan
Re:Yourdon on Y2K indeed
on
Byte Wars
·
· Score: 2
The problem was that everybody thought that Y2K was an issue whose effects would only be noticed in Dec 1999 and Jan 2000. The first Y2K failure I heard of occured in about 1996 when a retailer was putting corned beef (the tinned stuff we have in GB, not the stuff in the US) into their stock control system. Tinned corned beef has a very long shelf life, and they couldn't put it into the system until the Y2K (aka century bug) had been fixed.
The acid test for most people was the first quarter of 1999 when budgets and cash flows for the financial year April 1999 - March 2000 were being worked out. Financial systems had to be fixed by then.
By December 1999, 95% of the Y2K faults would have either been fixed or have long since caused failure.
Now, 2038 on 32 bit systems... that one will be interesting.
"If a kid goes into school with some candy, the teacher will encourage him to share it with the other kids. If a kid goes into school with a neat bit of software, the teacher will forbid him from sharing it with the others".
Tarantella is the Swiss Army Knife of remote access. you can connect it to applications which are programmed in X, Windows Terminal Server or HTML. Your display device can be a native client (Unix or windows) or a java enabled browser.
So you can have your desktop available on SunRay in the office, or via your laptop when out of the office. Or you can access the office securely from an Internet cafe. It's well thought out.
Just a little plea for the proper use of the language. Piracy is a violent crime which still carries on in some parts of the world, often resulting in the death of its victims.
The practice being referred to here is "Illegal Copying" which never results in its victim's death.
No, consumers might all go and buy the full version, but big businesses and government might well use the smaller version. Large businesses typically spend a lot of time creating a build to roll out to their desktops, and then deploy thousands of identical machines with an identical image blown onto them. And this is where, for example, Staroffice might make significant inroads - as part of a corporate standard build.
Assuming that the smaller version was cheaper.
And consider this: You're a large company wanting thousands of identical utility desktops, configured in bulk to be desk ready, and you're going to spend several man years developing this build. All of a sudden the seeds of doubt are sown in your mind as to whether you will actually be able to deploy this build, because the people you must get licences from are suggesting they might pull the product from the market at some point. Would this make you more or less likely to consider developing a desktop build which doesn't depend on getting licences from this company?
The reason the Sunrays are quiet is because they consume relatively little power. I have seen investment banks changing form PCs to Sunrays because of the heat and air conditioning issues - each trader can run up to 6 screens, and if he/she has six PC base units under his/her desk that's a lot of heat.
And as far as software is concerned, a Sunray is a vanilla Solaris environment which equals free StarOffice. Work out what Sun's doing with Staroffice licensing...
And if you put the Sunray clients and smartcards together with Tarantella, you have an environment you can use in the office on the Sunray, at home via your laptop/ISP, in the internet cafe via the java client in a browser... a true follow-me desktop.
Sun can't market StarOffice6 unless you can buy it from somewhere. There will be loads and loads and loads of home users and small businesses who will come to StarOffice because it is being marketed. They will see the adverts, and then the next time they're wandering round PC World with a few quid burning a hole in their pocket, they'll cough for a copy.
Having bought it, they'll install it. Then they'll start boring their workmates about it - they're not clever enough to experiment with GNU/Linux, so they'll show off to their colleagues about how clever they are to be using StarOffice. (These are the same people who bore you about the processor speed of their new machine, but don't know what chipset is running on their mobo).
You'll hear them in the office "blah blah blah blah StarOffice blah blah blah really very good, only $50 blah blah blah Microsoft better buck their ideas up blah blah blah".
And you can feel smug about having sent them a document which you wrote on OpenOffice on GNU/Linux, and they think they're clever to be able to read it (because they pressed "Next" a few times).
Never foget how stupid, vain and banal the people are that Sun are aiming at.
Dunstan
PS a quick word on the Solaris version being free - this, of course, isn't aimed at Solaris workstation users, rather at businesses who are considering deploying Sunray solutions, so after buying the servers, network infrastructure and appliances, you don't have to pay software royalties for running an office suite. Add in a Tarantella infrastructure, and you can work on the same desktop on the SunRay in the office, or in a browser at the internet cafe.
Sun's big pitch is RAS (Reliability, Availability and Serviceability), and they have got it absolutely spot on with the new F15K. The dynamic system domains on the 10K and 15K (and the next size down Serengeti machines) allow multiple Solaris instances to run on a single frame, and for processors, memory and I/O to be put into and taken out of a running Solaris instance. But unlike VM, the domains run in partitioned sets of hardware, so that (for instance) any CPU fault will only bring down a single instance, whereas with VM style logical partitioning you could lose a whole lot of domains with a single hardware fault.
No, this article is about the fact that "Linux Mainframe" sounds like the benefits of the Linux API with the RAS of a mainframe, whereas in reality you are getting something which is not as resilient as a E10K or F15K, and the Linux kernel won't linearly scale out to 72 CPUs and 500GB of memory as a Solaris kernel will.
GNU/Linux on mainframe has its place, all Sun are trying to do is point out the IBM might get a bit carried away by what they achieve, and try to pitch it into situations where a different system might be better.
Slashdot Mirror
From the article: "Music creators have the right to protect their property from theft, just like owners of any other property," Sherman said.
Where do I start?
a) It's not the music creators who have put "copy protection" on, it's the music publishers
b) Whether it's the creator or the publisher, the creation is not "property". If it were there would be no patent or copyright law
c) Illegal copying isn't theft, it's illegal copying
d) What they're doing isn't like any other property, and asserting the opposite doesn't change the facts
If the context for this sentence related to the theft of a truck full of CD's then it would be correct. But I somehow don't think that's what he means.
Dunstan
Can't see how muderous thugs in the South China Sea comandeering ships and their cargoes would hurt music sales.
Dunstan - still fighting for the correct usage of words
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=31934&cid=3
It is exciting to see this happening, but the acid test is whether they are still selling these machines in this config in three months' time. If they *are*, then we may have a major breakthrough on our hands.
Dunstan
IMHO, the single most significant difference between different vendors' offerings is the difference in what happens before you get to the OS. If you have a dead machine and want to run firmware diagnostics, or boot a different OS image or whatever, then the different platforms are almost completely proprietary.
There's the Intel stack - with the MBR outside the disc partitions, and the Bios limitations with 1024 cylinders, and the need for a tiny LILO or GRUB to get stuff from the filesystem.
There's the Sparc stack - with the boot blocks inside the disc partitions and Firmware capable of booting from the network.
I had brief encounters with the HP K-series stack once, and had to bluff my way through somehow.
While the differences in installers, and patchers, and package management are all significant, the ability to use the firmware layer effectively when the machine won't boot normally and the PHB is looking over your shoulder is the main difference between platforms.
Dunstan
Personal data must not be released to a third party without the consent of the party who has given the data
Personal data must not be used for a purpose other than that for which it was collected
Now let's judge Passport against these:
As soon as somebody signs for a Passport account they start getting spam from third parties
As soon as somebody signs for a Passport account they start getting spam
Now, this isn't some precious view about what a pity junk email is - this is a basic breach of fundamental principles of privacy and data protection being perpetrated by a corporation with a large amount of trade in every EU country (and elsewhere in the world).
If they want to trade in the EU and make money here, they have to obey our laws. And our laws on privacy and data protection aren't that onerous - all that is asked is that if you collect personal data that you don't hand it out willy nilly, and that you use it for the purpose for which it was collected. Is that an unreasonable restraint on trade?
Dunstan
Au contraire, I think Sun would be more than happy for the more technically literate to download and use OpenOffice. The decision over whether to charge for SO6 or give it away for free was based on achieving maximum penetration, not on earning revenue.
...)
Having establised the price point for SO6 I would expect frequent "promotions" (Summer Madness - for the month of July only get SO6 for just $39.95, that's 50% off).
Remember, every time a document is created in MS Office format it reinforces Microsoft's monopoly on office document file formats. Every time a document is created in OpenOffice/SO6 format it undermines not only that monopoly but also the Windows monopoly (as OO/SO docs can be opened on Windows, Solaris, Linux
So the simplest way for Joe public to be part of undermining this monopoly is to walk into a shop and buy SO6. For the more technically literate they can achieve the same effect by a download. Is Sun bothered about the lost revenue because people are using OO? Not at all - it's all grist to their mill.
Dunstan
It's harder to justify a marketing campaign to the bean counters if there's not going to be any revenue. And you can't get the PC shops to stock it if they're not going to put it through the tills.
How they decided the price point is what interests me. The five seats licence is the most telling part - basically they're not interested in the revenue, and are only using the pricing model as a means to get the suite into the conventional market channels. Their interest is in denying revenue to Microsoft for Office, and attempting to break the monopoly of the secret office file formats.
Further, by charging money there is a greater likelihood that people will use SO6 *instead* of MS Office rather than as well as MS Office.
Dunstan
Depends entirely on how recoup of the development costs is loaded into the pricing model. The actual physical cost to build is probably under $100 (but I'm prepared to be corrected). So improving volume really does drive down the unit "cost".
Essentially the declared cost to build each unit can be massaged to be whatever you want it to be.
Dunstan
No, in many ways she is right. The jewel in the crown of Sparc/Solaris is the RAS features, which they justifiably use as a stick to beat IBM/HP with.
Solaris/Sparc allows automatic system recovery - if your machine crashes with a hardware fault, it will find the fault at POST time, and boot the kernel around the faulty hardware. Not such a good thing when thieves broke into XXXX organisation, nicked a load of system boards leaving one in each machine, and the machines recovered and restarted the applications running on what hardware was left.
Solaris/Sparc allows you to add and remove CPU/memory boards to and from a *running* domain.
And Solaris/Sparc has a SMP kernel which will scale linearly to over 100 processors - this isn't just a particular design choice about the kernel architecture, it's a lot of choices about the hardware, firmware and kernel details.
So while the Linux kernel has proved itself massively capable for horizontally scalable systems, the Solaris kernel has been designed for vertical scaling. There's actually no need for the Linux kernel to head in this direction - it's a good solution where you can have multiple boxen scaled out, or where you are using a HA/clustering solution, but for large installations with (for example) massive database instances and requiring the RAS features which Solaris/Sparc offers, the Linux kernel doesn't fit.
Dunstanb
Bollocks. The computers used *were* invented at Bletchley Park. Alan Turing invented the Bombes, and Tommy Flowers invented Colossus. And this was all years before Eniac BTW. But history missed out on this, because Churchill had everything from Bletchley Park destroyed at the end of the war - presumably to stop it from possible falling into Stalin's hands.
Dunstan
We Brits often complain about how war films are slanted to play up the American involvement because that's where the money for the films comes from (cf Memphis Belle). After the British release I heard an interesting radio interview where a Polish veteran was complaining about how the Poles don't get a proper share of the glory in this story.
[minor spoiler alert] The point he was making was that not only did the Poles find the machine in the first place, but if they hadn't kept quiet about it for the duration of the war then Hitler would have abandoned Enigma much sooner, or at least have had an inkling that his communications were being intercepted. But the secrecy surrounding the codebreaking operation was so good from *all* parties that Rommel went to his grave cursing the spy who was giving away information from his signals back to Germany.
There was an excellent series on Channel 4 about the operation about three years ago, and I would assume that it has been aired on PBS (though maybe not because it isn't exactly complimentery towards our American allies). Enigma makes the whole subject into a story, but the subject also bears telling in a documentary style.
Dunstan
NeWS was the first proper windowing system I saw - SunView doesn't count, as it was kernel based. It seemed to make the old 4MB 3/50s run a bit slow though. But NeWS was a *much* sounder idea than X - while multiple object in X have to be drawn by pixels, you could draw an object in NeWS and then tell the display "I'll have another one of those in green, but 20% bigger and rotated 45 degrees".
An interesting side note - Sun moved the windowing system from the kernel (SunView) into user space (X/NeWS). OTOH, Microsoft moved it from user space (Win 3.1/NT 3.5) into kernel space (Win95/WinNT). An interesting sidebar to the "What's part of the operating system" debate.
Dunstan
I had a HP 35 calculator. One afternoon it fell out of my bike carrier into the road - before I could retrieve it a car had driven over it. I was really annoyed with myself. I took it out of its case to inspect the wreckage and found my calculator - with a small crack in the plastic on one corner - working fine.
More to the point, when my nephew was born he had a serious problem with his respiration, and spent the first fortnight of his life in an oxygen tent. Attached to his chest were sensors with "Hewlett Packard" on them, connected to a rack of instruments with "Hewlett Packard" on them. I'm glad that these instruments are still being made by Agilent, but why-oh-why-oh-why did HP get rid of the part of their business which gave people a warm fuzzy feeling - and which represented excellence?
Dunstan
That's exactly what happens in one of the Inspector Morse episodes - Morse and Lewis are after a murderer who is also a system cracker, and has changed all manner of records about him. Ends up with Lewis in the library going through ten year old copies of the Oxford Mail to find out what really happened in the court case.
Dunstan
Reminds me of a campaign which ran in the newspapers here (GB) encouraging advertisers to buy newspaper advertising space. It pictured a couple enjoying married congress on the sofa with the TV on in the background and said "accorting to audience statistics these people are watching your advert - who's really being screwed?".
Of course Turner's real concern isn't whether people skip the adverts, it's whether he gets paid by the advertisers, in which case it's not a lot different to websites saying "please click on the banner ads so we get money from the advertisers".
Dunstan
BTW, is this the same Turner as runs TNT? I happened to be in the US for the 1990 World Cup, and remember that TNT repeatedly interrupted the live soccer to run adverts while play continued, and it was the same adverts over and over and over again. After that I vowed never to by "Tums" again. Worse, they ran trailers for their own World Cup coverage instead of cutting back to the game which was going on. Madness.
Since when does a machine with Windows pre-loaded come with any support? If the machine is shipped with a recovery CD (you boot the machine from it, and it is back in the same state as when it came from the shop) then that's as much support as you get with pre-installed Windows. They could also contract a third party (e.g. RedHat?) to provide support via a premium rate phone service.
This would be a perfect embodiment of what RMS wrote 15 (or more) years ago - that if software is free then businesses can make money out of selling support and handholding.
How does this help Walmart make bigger profits? Because they will ship *far* more machines if they are "working systems" where prople can do real work (and play real games) rather than bare machines which need someone to install an OS before they can do anything. Remember, the whole Windows OEM scam started with the premise that "people shouldn't have to install an OS before they can start using their computer".
Dunstan
How much would it cost W'mart to sell these machines with a pre-loaded Linux image? Surely if they cut a gold image it would only cost a few cents to ghost them onto the hard drives before they went into the machines? Or they could produce a "recovery CD", which restores a Linux image which works on that hardware?
How much better for the customer to go home with a system which they can plug in and start playing nethack straight away without having to obtain and install a Linux distro.
And it would annoy the crap out of M$.
Dunstan
The problem was that everybody thought that Y2K was an issue whose effects would only be noticed in Dec 1999 and Jan 2000. The first Y2K failure I heard of occured in about 1996 when a retailer was putting corned beef (the tinned stuff we have in GB, not the stuff in the US) into their stock control system. Tinned corned beef has a very long shelf life, and they couldn't put it into the system until the Y2K (aka century bug) had been fixed.
... that one will be interesting.
The acid test for most people was the first quarter of 1999 when budgets and cash flows for the financial year April 1999 - March 2000 were being worked out. Financial systems had to be fixed by then.
By December 1999, 95% of the Y2K faults would have either been fixed or have long since caused failure.
Now, 2038 on 32 bit systems
Dunstan
The other way I heard RMS put it was:
"If a kid goes into school with some candy, the teacher will encourage him to share it with the other kids. If a kid goes into school with a neat bit of software, the teacher will forbid him from sharing it with the others".
That sums up proprietary software licences to me.
Dunstan
Tarantella is the Swiss Army Knife of remote access. you can connect it to applications which are programmed in X, Windows Terminal Server or HTML. Your display device can be a native client (Unix or windows) or a java enabled browser.
So you can have your desktop available on SunRay in the office, or via your laptop when out of the office. Or you can access the office securely from an Internet cafe. It's well thought out.
Dunstan
Just a little plea for the proper use of the language. Piracy is a violent crime which still carries on in some parts of the world, often resulting in the death of its victims.
The practice being referred to here is "Illegal Copying" which never results in its victim's death.
Dunstan
No, consumers might all go and buy the full version, but big businesses and government might well use the smaller version. Large businesses typically spend a lot of time creating a build to roll out to their desktops, and then deploy thousands of identical machines with an identical image blown onto them. And this is where, for example, Staroffice might make significant inroads - as part of a corporate standard build.
Assuming that the smaller version was cheaper.
And consider this: You're a large company wanting thousands of identical utility desktops, configured in bulk to be desk ready, and you're going to spend several man years developing this build. All of a sudden the seeds of doubt are sown in your mind as to whether you will actually be able to deploy this build, because the people you must get licences from are suggesting they might pull the product from the market at some point. Would this make you more or less likely to consider developing a desktop build which doesn't depend on getting licences from this company?
Dunstan
The reason the Sunrays are quiet is because they consume relatively little power. I have seen investment banks changing form PCs to Sunrays because of the heat and air conditioning issues - each trader can run up to 6 screens, and if he/she has six PC base units under his/her desk that's a lot of heat.
...
... a true follow-me desktop.
And as far as software is concerned, a Sunray is a vanilla Solaris environment which equals free StarOffice. Work out what Sun's doing with Staroffice licensing
And if you put the Sunray clients and smartcards together with Tarantella, you have an environment you can use in the office on the Sunray, at home via your laptop/ISP, in the internet cafe via the java client in a browser
Dunstan
Sun can't market StarOffice6 unless you can buy it from somewhere. There will be loads and loads and loads of home users and small businesses who will come to StarOffice because it is being marketed. They will see the adverts, and then the next time they're wandering round PC World with a few quid burning a hole in their pocket, they'll cough for a copy.
Having bought it, they'll install it. Then they'll start boring their workmates about it - they're not clever enough to experiment with GNU/Linux, so they'll show off to their colleagues about how clever they are to be using StarOffice. (These are the same people who bore you about the processor speed of their new machine, but don't know what chipset is running on their mobo).
You'll hear them in the office "blah blah blah blah StarOffice blah blah blah really very good, only $50 blah blah blah Microsoft better buck their ideas up blah blah blah".
And you can feel smug about having sent them a document which you wrote on OpenOffice on GNU/Linux, and they think they're clever to be able to read it (because they pressed "Next" a few times).
Never foget how stupid, vain and banal the people are that Sun are aiming at.
Dunstan
PS a quick word on the Solaris version being free - this, of course, isn't aimed at Solaris workstation users, rather at businesses who are considering deploying Sunray solutions, so after buying the servers, network infrastructure and appliances, you don't have to pay software royalties for running an office suite. Add in a Tarantella infrastructure, and you can work on the same desktop on the SunRay in the office, or in a browser at the internet cafe.
It's all starting to come together.
Sun's big pitch is RAS (Reliability, Availability and Serviceability), and they have got it absolutely spot on with the new F15K. The dynamic system domains on the 10K and 15K (and the next size down Serengeti machines) allow multiple Solaris instances to run on a single frame, and for processors, memory and I/O to be put into and taken out of a running Solaris instance. But unlike VM, the domains run in partitioned sets of hardware, so that (for instance) any CPU fault will only bring down a single instance, whereas with VM style logical partitioning you could lose a whole lot of domains with a single hardware fault.
No, this article is about the fact that "Linux Mainframe" sounds like the benefits of the Linux API with the RAS of a mainframe, whereas in reality you are getting something which is not as resilient as a E10K or F15K, and the Linux kernel won't linearly scale out to 72 CPUs and 500GB of memory as a Solaris kernel will.
GNU/Linux on mainframe has its place, all Sun are trying to do is point out the IBM might get a bit carried away by what they achieve, and try to pitch it into situations where a different system might be better.
Dunstan