Sun's President Dreams of a Linux Future 436
Sara Chan writes "The Economist has a story analyzing the recent Sun-Microsoft deal. What's especially interesting is the ending. Sun recently promoted Jonathan Schwartz to President and Chief Operating Officer, recognizing the need for radical change if the company is to survive. According to the story, Schwartz's dream is 'to sell deep-discount desktop computers at Wal-Mart, carrying Sun's office applications on top of a Linux operating system'!"
When sleeping with Microsoft, keep one eye open (Score:5, Insightful)
When Mr Ballmer gives Mr McNealy a hug and says that "we do both believe in intellectual property", this is a not-so-veiled jab at the open-source Linux, which both men consider, in essence, communistic. Microsoft and Sun happen to be the only major backers (in the form of licence payments) of Linux's gadfly, a firm called SCO, which is trying to obtain money from Linux users with threats of litigation.
The article also points out that LINUX hurts Sun more than Microsoft:
Linux, however, is hurting Sun far more than Microsoft. Solaris is similar to Linux, which makes it very easy for customers to switch from one to the other. Migrating from Windows to Linux is a much more fiddly process.
I think Microsoft is particularly wiley here. They make nice with Sun knowing that Sun will probably become marginalized as a result of the growth of LINUX and not end up being much of a competitor at all. I am not faulting Microsoft for this, but, you gotta believe that they believe, in their heart-of-hearts (do they have those?) that they will eventually own the whole pie. This sure is fun to watch.....
Happy Trails!
Erick
Re:When sleeping with Microsoft, keep one eye open (Score:4, Interesting)
Just because it runs Linus doesn't mean the whole product's open source/free/whatever.
Re:When sleeping with Microsoft, keep one eye open (Score:5, Insightful)
More likely the hug by Ballmer was like the kiss of death. He probably whispered something into McNealy's ear like, "Sell Windows workstations and we'll let you live."
Re:When sleeping with Microsoft, keep one eye open (Score:3, Insightful)
Next thing you know, Bill Gates is going to ask McNealy if he wants to go for a boat ride...
Re:When sleeping with Microsoft, keep one eye open (Score:4, Informative)
Re:When sleeping with Microsoft, keep one eye open (Score:5, Interesting)
I think Mandrake also GPLs everything, for that matter. SuSE recently GPL'd YaST, too, so actually, they might be totally free, too.
I hope that educates you.
-Erwos
Re:When sleeping with Microsoft, keep one eye open (Score:3, Informative)
Re:When sleeping with Microsoft, keep one eye open (Score:3, Insightful)
Unless you mean free as in: if it's not our Definition of free, we don't include it, then Debian is the only one (though Gentoo could be made to (all ebuilds have what the licence is, and portage should be able to filter out all those you don't want.))
Everyone's base system is pretty much the same though, in terms of it being GPL.
Re:When sleeping with Microsoft, keep one eye open (Score:3, Insightful)
By that definition, "Sun's Linux" qualifies too.
Re:When sleeping with Microsoft, keep one eye open (Score:5, Insightful)
FreeBSD?
Re:When sleeping with Microsoft, keep one eye open (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:When sleeping with Microsoft, keep one eye open (Score:3, Interesting)
They would have to subsist on their dominance on the desktop, and they would be stuck at only making $35 Billion per year and a growing cash horde of $50B.
But, that won't really be the case anyway. MS currently has a pretty small share of the enterprise server space. As Sun declines, that opens up a lot of opportunities in that arena. Yes, Linux will win a lot
Re:When sleeping with Microsoft, keep one eye open (Score:3, Insightful)
MS is not going to win away all of Oracle's business and all of IBM's business because MS software just can't do quite as much for a very large enterprise.
However, a lot of midsize businesses will be faced with the UNIX vs windows question, because midsize businesses have requirements that are available in both UNIX and windows.
If sun is no longer around, people will still be applying the myth
Re:When sleeping with Microsoft, keep one eye open (Score:4, Insightful)
As Windows takes over, Unix is fighting on another front called Linux.
Ever here of divide and conquor? Politicans and the Romans used this strategy quite well.
MS is estatic that Sun is going to go away since Sun is fighting 2 fronts it will not be able to have as much ammo agaisnt Microsoft. They are losing money while ms rakes in more and more.
The problem is since MS owns the desktops they can tie features into Windows2k3 via active directory, SQL server and
After awhile your workplace will have hundreds of MS_SQL-Server databases. They will be running on every copy of Windows(longhorn will use a lite version of it for the new filesystem), and from
MS SQL-Server will be the only one the CIO's would want due to desktop and Windows2k3 server tie-in.
PHB's love Microsoft for that reason. Its not just products but a whole architecture and platform across the enterprise. Java1 or whatever Sun planed with Iplanet and J2EE is too little and too late. They lost.
No wonder Eu is afraid of MS. They are the only ones seeing what they are doing.
The battle agaisnt Linux has only just begun.
Re:When sleeping with Microsoft, keep one eye open (Score:5, Insightful)
Everything else is crap, microsoft probably runs less than half of the sites on the net (apache runs 70% or the web servers, and I would venture most of those run BSD/UNIX/Linux). Microsoft can bundle the fuck out of whatever they want, it will HURT them in the long run because customers are already becoming weary of their crap with licensing and forced upgrades etc
Only one fortune 100 company uses windows 2k3. (source: netcraft). And MS-SQL is a piece of shit, everyone knows that. If they use it in their filesystem they will kill performance and negate any stability increases they have had in the past 5 years.
The EU went after MS for the same reason the American justice department did, they broke laws. The only difference is the bush administration let them off since they are big business friendly.
Then of course their is this POS DRM built in OS they want to release (whats the ETA now 2007 ?). That won't go over well. Linux has been gaining market share in the desktop arena over the past few years without major vendor support, not that companies like HP, Dell and Sun are backing it, gaining more share is a foregone conclusion, especially at its current price point.
The only market overlap that existed between sun and MS was the development arena. java vs
Re:When sleeping with Microsoft, keep one eye open (Score:3, Informative)
I don't know that. I used to know that, until I spend some time working with MS-SQL2k, Oracle 8, 9, and 10, and PostgreSQL 7.3 and 7.4. I've done installation, admin, and same-hardware performance benchmarking on all of those platforms now, from a standing start in each case (I had a lot of networking and Unix experience, but no
Re:When sleeping with Microsoft, keep one eye open (Score:5, Interesting)
Eh? I have just installed Oracle 10g on a Linux box. Took 3 hours from start to finish. Detailed documentation about how to do this was available on-line at Oracle.
9i and 10g were able to complete the tests, but at half the speed of MS or PG. Perhaps if we'd hired a consultant they'd have been able to get better numbers, but no one was willing to pay to find out when we had two perfectly good platforms which cost much less.
Bizarre. After the 3-hour install, Oracle was up and running and giving at least a five-fold performance boost over Postgresql, with no fiddling or tuning.
Re:When sleeping with Microsoft, keep one eye open (Score:3, Informative)
I hired a DBA to do some similar tests and came to similar conclusions.
* MSSQL exceeded expectations, and if it only ran on a server we could easily ssh to, it would have been the best choice
* PostgreSQL good once the (at least well documented on the net) black magic of tuning shared memory, sort memory, 'free space' memory, and vacuum stuff was figured out
* Oracle - pain to set up (installation failed if you followed their docs to the letter - but DBA new the tricks
Re:When sleeping with Microsoft, keep one eye open (Score:5, Interesting)
Secondly although you can install Oracle on intel hardware it was not (and shouldnt be) desiegned for intel hardware
Not to be an ass (I am no DBA) but I have seen very large gains 15-20% in overall speed when PG or My are properly tweaked by a DBA with experience. I have never seen someone get comparable performance from MsSQL
Re:When sleeping with Microsoft, keep one eye open (Score:3, Informative)
Oracle should probably come out with a dumbed down "small project" version to compete with MS-SQL, but I'm sure they have already studied the viability of that.
Re:When sleeping with Microsoft, keep one eye open (Score:3, Insightful)
Linux is growing. Not much else is.
Re:When sleeping with Microsoft, keep one eye open (Score:5, Insightful)
Dream on. I've personally plugged in so many linux boxes in small business, installing them over Small Business Servers charging $2000 per Linux install, and they have all not only been running without incident for years at a time, but all have thanked me and entrusted us for all their desktops. I am talking about law firms with revinues exceeding $11 million, manufacturing companies, and real estate offices. Web file/print, email and backup within domain logins is all it takes. And Gentoo + Samba/CUPS + postfix/courier/spamd + Apache/MySQL/PHP has done it every time. And no reboots or worms either. Software upgrades for free. What a change. I can't tell you how easy a sell it has been. Taking over the server market --- please! The only takeovers I see are the endless variety of worms every month that take over Windows servers.
Re:When sleeping with Microsoft, keep one eye open (Score:3, Insightful)
"..and J2EE is too little and too late"
This could not be further from the truth. J2EE is a truly excellent solution for developing enterprise applications and
Of course sun makes money from Java! (Score:3, Informative)
Sun also makes money by selling and supporting products such as Sun Studio that use Java.
Re:When sleeping with Microsoft, keep one eye open (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:When sleeping with Microsoft, keep one eye open (Score:4, Informative)
There are a lot of things that " huge, expensive Sun servers" can do that commodity Windows boxes couldn't dream about on the best day they ever had.
disk I/O, multi proc sclability, OS hardening (Trusted Solaris)
I could go on
There is a damn good reason why Sun boxes are still deployed, and will continue to be deployed, in critical environments.
They just work. All the time.
And I for one thank the Powers That Be that *my* bank is smart enough to realize this.
Re:When sleeping with Microsoft, keep one eye open (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:When sleeping with Microsoft, keep one eye open (Score:3, Insightful)
Microsoft, on the other hand
Re:When sleeping with Microsoft, keep one eye open (Score:4, Informative)
Where have you been for the last 15 years? SPARC has always been an open, licensable processor architecture, which is why Fujitsu makes a competing SPARC implementation [serverwatch.com]. Just because we don't want to give it away for free doesn't mean it's not licensable.
Stand By For Prestige Adjustment (Score:5, Funny)
Whoa!
There was a time when saying you had a Sun meant you weren't just 1337, but respectable, a power user. It may seem a cool thing to be mass marketing Linux boxen from Wally World, but that's a real comedown. Saying you have a Sun would be like saying you have a microwave oven. Is this what it takes to save Sun? Honestly, Linux boxen could easily become commodity hardware. You're not much of a player anymore when you're trying to keep your head above water by selling commodity PCs.
"Hi, my name is Bob and I still felt 1337 with my Walmart-bought Sun."
"Welcome Bob, to Sun-aholics."
Re:Stand By For Prestige Adjustment (Score:2)
Assuming this happens at all.
Re:Stand By For Prestige Adjustment (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Stand By For Prestige Adjustment (Score:3, Interesting)
I'd say that's already a lost battle. These days, "I've got a Sun" seems to elicit "Huh! That's kind of neat. Don't you spend all of your time trying to get seemingly trivial applications to compile, though?"
You're not much of a player anymore when you're trying to keep your head above water by selling commodity PCs.
Unless you're also the person who develops the most common implementation of the commod
Re:Stand By For Prestige Adjustment (Score:4, Interesting)
Secondly, shifting a company from super high end to low end, has not, to my knowledge, ever worked. You might as well throw away the company and start over, since there is very little value transferrable between these two types of company. Name? Nobody who's not in IT has ever heard of Sun. Marketing? They have no idea how to market to consumers. Manufacturing? They don't know how to make cheap, shitty products. This guy's throwing away what's called their company's "core competencies", looking for a quick buck. It will be a monumental failure. That's been foreshadowed with each of Sun's forays into the consumer market, and any other business that has tried to make a shift this dramatic. Just because they're both computer companies doesn't mean shit. You simply can't decide that your company is going to make a 180 degree change in services, products, marketing, etc. and expect it to survive, unless you have enough cash to, once again, create an entirely new company.
Trolls. (Score:5, Funny)
Wait a minute, I didn't know executives could be Slashdot Trolls.
Re:Trolls. (Score:3, Funny)
Then how do you account for SCO?
best quote (Score:2, Funny)
how things change (Score:5, Interesting)
--Tsiangkun
I'll be windows free for 10 years in June
Re:how things change (Score:2, Interesting)
Like you say owning a Sun box does not seem to as 1337 as it was - how important is that though? I'm sure Sun didn't make too much money off of people buying their kit for home use but lots of geeks get a say in what gets bought at work - how much will it effect them if the next generation of geek
Re:how things change (Score:3, Insightful)
It's been interesting watching my business migrate the enterprise HW from DEC to Compaq to HP because we get to keep our OS and processor arch. I don't care how 1337 sun is, it would be hugely expensive in terms of lost produc
sun sounds like a company (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:sun sounds like a company (Score:4, Insightful)
What Sun needs to do, and has needed to do for some time, is become a software and services company. They tried this with the AOL partnership (iPlanet), and they tried again by making a software "company" under Schwartz. Now that Schwartz has moved up the ladder what does this do to software at Sun? My prediction is nothing good. Sun still sees itself as a hardware box vendor, an attitude that is deeply ingrained in the sales force. Until that self-image changes, don't look for much change from Sun.
Re:sun sounds like a company (Score:2, Insightful)
Deep discounts? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Deep discounts? (Score:3, Insightful)
Sun should stick to what they do best (Score:3, Insightful)
This is part of a trend that we've been seeing from sun: they don't know what they want. They thought Java was going to make them lots of money, and that they were going to be a software company; now they have very few people actually working on it. They don't seem to be sure what they think of linux, because they are both promoting it and trying to hurt it at the same time. And now this high-end AND low-end stuff, it doens't really add up. Sun must should just stick to what they do best, and maybe make some lower-end servers (2,3k machines), but not go anywhere close to cheap cheap cheap.
Re:Sun should stick to what they do best (Score:4, Insightful)
"The high end" means a totally different thing today than it did 10 years ago. We used to buy $20K Sun machines to use around the network as everything from firewalls to mail servers to DNS servers. Now, all of those jobs are done by cheap Linux boxes.
The speed of cheap systems today is such that "high end" is only a small handful of corporate apps. This is simply not enough revenue to sustain a company the size of Sun.
Re:Sun should stick to what they do best (Score:5, Interesting)
The high-end is way more than $20k. I've spend well over $1M on a single, fully-configured Sun machine (one of the original E10Ks, with all 64 processores, lots of RAM, and a massive disk array). I've seen rooms full of those machines.
If you want a single, big UNIX monster, its still basically monster Sun, HP or IBM. Clustering is bringing Linux up there, but I don't see any 64 - 256 processor Linux boxes around (that I know about, anyway).
I don't know if that is due to the Intel platform (I know Linux is portable, but its mostly used on Intel in my experience) or due to locking in ther kernel. I do know the "old kernel" (I started with Linux 0.96c+, when the whole system was on 4 floppy disks, and we didn't even joke about a graphical interface, and Linux was no more popular than 386BSD) was not terribly scalable in a multi-processor setting. I don't know much about the scalability of the newer kernels, honestly.
Re:Sun should stick to what they do best (Score:4, Interesting)
Sun has started as a workstation company, so even if they have been very successfull in big accounts, they know that that is not enough to survive.
I think, the Opteron boxes are an good move to get more share in the low end server market.
The interesting part is the way they want so sell their software: from the cooperation with AOL on Netscapes server products (Iplanet) to the current Jave Enterprise System, they still seem to believe in selling software as a commercial, closed source product. Even if they they to license it on a yearly base (and give customers real value, different from Microsoft, which software assurance program mostly anoys customers), they still keep the development process in house.
Even their try to sell Linux for desktops, JDS, is something you have to pay per employee or per seat, although it's mostly based on open source software like mozilla, evolution and gnome.
I don't think that this is doomed from the beginning. They may be successfull, if they can convince customers, that it's not just the software they pay for, but also support, service and updates. This could work, both for companies used to a "classic" way of buying software once and paying extra for support and for companies disappointed by using "unsupported" open source.
But this is the software strategy, which is mostly independant from their formerly very successfull hardware business. And software was only a small part of their business up to now. The hardware part is much bigger (and responsible for most of the service revenue). Even if they have cheap x86 (both Intel and AMD) boxes now, UltraSPARC is still their choice for the big servers, and UltraSPARC is lagging behind more and more in terms of performance, so that even much better RAS features (Reliability, Availability, Serviceability) make it hard to sell those boxes and reason a hefty price tag.
So, even after almost three years with losses, Sun still heads interesting times. :-)
Re:Sun should stick to what they do best (Score:5, Insightful)
No one is buying high end systems anymore. Of course customers still need them but what I am saying is as pc server hardware advances, it can do all the things only solaris boxes could and IBM mainframes a decade before that.
Also huge servers do not get upgraded as much as they do their job. If customers are not upgrading, Sun is not making money.
Java did make sun some money at first because it was a powerfull langauge at the time that was cross platform and had alot of libraries. Think of java servlets. MSDN was stealing their market share with proprietary win32 server apps. Java at the time was a great alternative even though its stagnated and it might be killed now thanks to the deal with MS.
But even to run java servlets Windows/Linux server provide a better value today to run them. Again this cuts sun right out.
I think Sun is testing the waters right now on Linux. IBM made money off it and will replace AIX with Linux for their blades and aix servers. I am sure it got Sun's attention.
TI also royally screwed them like Motorolla did to apple. The sparcV should be out already and be outcompeteing all the processors out there besides the power5. But they keep delaying and delaying and yet Sun is still waiting for the sparcIV??
Not only are they expensive but slloooww thanks to this.
If sun can kill all solaris development and use fast AMD Opterons then all teh power too them.
But the market is changing and they must adapt to survive.
poor sun (Score:5, Funny)
they're fucked.
Re:poor sun (Score:3, Informative)
--dave
Y2K called... (Score:5, Insightful)
Deep-discount computers S U C K. They *must* know this. A free office suite on top of a free OS isn't going to do anything to sell these things if people can't double click and install software, preferably the software they sell at WAL-MART.
"I bought this here Sun computer, but it won't run these deer huntin' and bass fishin' games I bought with it. I'd like my munny back, please"
Re:Y2K called... (Score:3, Interesting)
They do. Profit margins on deep discount PC's were so small that Sun was not able to provide the level of customer support that they would like to provide. That's why customer support is being handled by a third party. However, it does act as another front of attack. Previously Microsoft only had to keep pushing the price/performance upwards to compete against workstations and servers. Now, they (or the PC makers) are sandwiched between high-end serve
While we're at it (Score:5, Insightful)
1. Find its fonts without having to edit the XF86Config file 189 times and install some half-working font server for the other three fonts.
2. Upgrade Gnome and KDE applications without having to install yet ANOTHER version of glibc. That or statically link everything and quit pursuing dynamically-linked utopia. I think there's enough disk space now.
3. Have a file manager that isn't linked to every single library on the system, so that if one library is upgraded/replaced, it doesn't make the file manager useless.
4. Make it so these problems can be fixed without changing distributions.
Re:While we're being negitive (Score:3, Informative)
1. Find its fonts without having to edit the XF86Config file 189 times and install some half-working font server for the other three fonts.
Funny, I just dropped some
2. Upgrade Gnome and KDE applications without having to install yet ANOTHER version of glibc. That or statically link everything and quit pursuing dynamically-linked utopia. I think there's enough disk space now.
Windows dynamically links, and includes the dependan
Re:While we're at it (Score:2, Informative)
Fontconfig. 'Nuff said. 2. Upgrade Gnome and KDE applications without having to install yet ANOTHER version of glibc. That or statically link everything and quit pursuing dynamically-linked utopia. I think there's enough disk space now.
You can't even install multiple versions of glibc. Even if you could, I daresay you would statically link anything to it.
3. Have a
Re:While we're at it (Score:3, Informative)
Wrong. Stock install of just about any distribution with the 2.4 kernel. Gnome applications can't see all the necessary fonts. Most crash. Only way to fix it: edit the XF86Config file to have the correct font paths, then spend another 2-3 days debugging. With that, you might have 70% working fonts. It's worse if KDE is the default desktop.
You can't even install multiple versions of glibc.
My point exactly.
Which file manager are you talking about?
Nautilus, Konqueror, fo
Re:While we're at it (Score:3, Informative)
What does the kernel have to do with fonts? I'll ignore that though. Most applications crash when trying to "see" all the "necessary" fonts? What are these necessary f
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:While we're at it (Score:3, Insightful)
This statement, IMNSHO, is an excellent example of a Linux user Not Getting It.
Why not be humble about it? :-)
I was countering the claim that it takes 2-3 days of 'debugging' (whatever that means) to get fonts working. As hard as fc-cache in an xterm may be to a new user, I was pointing out the absurdity of the OP.
As far as new users are concerned, Gnome for example has Fontilus, which actually makes this all ui-driven and simple. Besides, fonts are set up fine automatically, and there really is no ne
Re:While we're at it (Score:5, Informative)
In my
I compile almost nothing on my systems except for the code that I am working on. I use a debian system because it has just worked for me however I have also used knoppix and recent versions of Mandrake and I have NEVER seen the issues you are talking about. Actually I have not seen library issues of any kind on linux sine redhat 5.2 or so many years ago and I have used many versions.
I have not seen libc issues in a long time on redhat, mandrake, suse, debian, knoppix, etc.
Overall it seems to be cool to knock linux and while it does have issues it would be better if you stuck to real issues that existed. If you are compiling all this software yourself then you should probably stop until you learn how to compile software correctly.
Re:While we're at it (Score:3, Informative)
Well, there are certainly GNU/Zealots out there who behave that way, so it's not so much ignorance as prejudice or overgeneralization. Even many of the zealots [catb.org] out there will admit Linux sucks [catb.org]. I just use it because for what I do the alternatives usually suck more.
I was going to use font installation as an example "Linux sucks" of my own (
Re:While we're at it (Score:2, Funny)
You must know by now that all you have to do is either apt-get install msttcorefonts or create a .fonts directory in your homedir and dump a bunch of TTF fonts in there. Oh, maybe you didn't know. This doesn't suck anymore.
Re:While we're at it (Score:3, Insightful)
On Windows when you stick in some new hardware, it detects it and grabs a driver from the huge stock of pre-installed drivers. With Linux, well, you getter hope you have those modules compiled. Or you need to find the RPM.
I had the "pleasure" of compiling a new Linux kernel last week when I upgraded from one processor to two. The nice RPM of an SMP kernel worked, b
Don't forget. (Score:5, Insightful)
6. Create at least one distribution in which every single scroll bar in the entire system looks the same.
7. No one ever has to think about the XF86Config file, ever.
8. There's a clear and obvious way to set and change your monitor resolution that works regardless of whether you know strange things about your monitor, or "scanlines", or the XF86Config file, and NO MATTER WHICH WM AND DESKTOP ENVIRONMENT YOU USE.
9. The way to set up a remote X session is clear and straightforward, and doesn't involve lots of poking at cryptic pages on google and headscratching trying to remember where you have to run Xauth or other such and whether you have forwarding enabled in your ssh_config , etc...
9a. No one ever gets the error message "Invalid MIT-MAGIC-COOKIE-1", for any reason, ever. That's just not descriptive as an error, and it doesn't give you any indication what to do to fix it.
10. If I am on a linux machine, and there's another linux or unix machine somewhere or hopefully even something more exotic (like windows), I can connect to that machine and open up a file browser window displaying the files there and edit them and copy them back and forth, without having to read the Midnight Commander web page, without having to set up cryptic emacs/vi plugins, without having to think about "does this remote computer have ftp, samba, afp, nfs, or some combination thereof?".
11. Make a GUI manpage browser with scrollbars, and hyperlinks, and tables of contents for individual manpages, and the ability to quickly expand/collapse individual sections within the individual manpages, and quickly sorted/filtered browsing of the man -k / apropos database; and put this program where people know it exists and know what it is.
Re:Don't forget. (Score:4, Funny)
9. The way to set up a remote X session is clear and straightforward, and doesn't involve lots of poking at cryptic pages on google and headscratching trying to remember where you have to run Xauth or other such and whether you have forwarding enabled in your ssh_config , etc...
9a. No one ever gets the error message "Invalid MIT-MAGIC-COOKIE-1", for any reason, ever. That's just not descriptive as an error, and it doesn't give you any indication what to do to fix it.
Date: Wed, 30 Jan 91 15:35:46 -0800
From: David Chapman
To: UNIX-HATERS
Subject: MIT-MAGIC-COOKIE-1
For the first time today I tried to use X for the purpose for which it was intended, namely cross-network display. So I got a telnet window from boris, where I was logged in and running X, to akbar, where my program runs. Ran the program and it dumped core. Oh. No doubt there's some magic I have to do to turn cross-network X on. That's stupid. OK, ask the unix wizard. You say "setenv DISPLAY boris:0". Presumably this means that X is too stupid to figure out where you are coming from, or unix is too stupid to tell it. Well, that's unix for you. (Better not speculate about what the 0 is for.)
Run the program again. Now it tells me that the server is not authorized to talk to the client. Talk to the unix wizard again. Oh, yes, you have have to run xauth, to tell it that it's OK for boris to talk to akbar. This is done on a per-user basis for some reason. I give this ten seconds of thought: what sort of security violation is this going to help with? Can't come up with any model. Oh, well, just run xauth and don't worry about it. xauth has a command processor and wants to have a long talk with you. It manipulates a
xauth> help add
add dpyname protoname hexkey add entry
Well, that's not very helpful. Presumably dpy is unix for "display" and protoname must be... uh... right, protocol name. What the hell protocol am I supposed to use? Why should I have to know? Well, maybe it will default sensibly. Since we set the DISPLAY variable to "boris:0", maybe that's a dpyname.
xauth> add boris:0
xauth: (stdin):4 bad "add" command line
Great. I suppose I'll need to know what a hexkey is, too. I thought that was the tool I used for locking the strings into the Floyd Rose on my guitar. Oh, well, let's look at the man page.
I won't include the whole man page here; you might want to man xauth yourself, for a good joke. Here's the explanation of the add command:
add displayname protocolname hexkey
An authorization entry for the indicated display using the given protocol and key data is added to the authorization file. The data is specified as an even-lengthed string of hexadecimal digits, each pair representing one octet. The first digit gives the most significant 4 bits of the octet and the second digit gives the least significant 4 bits. A protocol name consisting of just a single period is treated as an abbreviation for MIT-MAGIC-COOKIE-1.
This is obviously totally out of control. In order to run a program across the fucking network I'm supposed to be typing in strings of hexadecimal digits which do god knows what using a program that has a special abbreviation for MIT-MAGIC-COOKIE-1?? And what the hell kind of a name for a network protocol is THAT? Why is it so important that it's the default protocol name?
Fuck this shit.
Obviously it is Allah's will that I throw the unix box out the window. I submit to the will of Allah.
Bad, BAD news for Sun (Score:5, Insightful)
Badly.
Watch Sun continue to wither on the vine. Watch it slowly shrink, more each year. They might have a "we'll sell Linux to lusers at Walmart!" strategy, but that's simply absurd.
Selling $199 computers at Walmart is not the road ahead for Sun Microsystems!
IBM has grabbed the Linux ball and run like hell with it, and they've done very well. Sun has pussy footed, flip-flopping more often than a spatula at a pancake shop on Linux.
They have no clear strategy. They have no real, effective, business case for using Linux in their organization. And, unless they come with something, and damn quick, the train will have passed them by.
As a post note, Sun made theirs by grabbing a commodity operating system, putting good hardware underneath it, and selling it for a fair price. Why can't they do that anymore?
Screwed on two fronts? (Score:2)
Re:Bad, BAD news for Sun (Score:2)
....snip....
Selling $199 computers at Walmart is not the road ahead for Sun Microsystems!
Perhaps like most computer geeks they are also in it for the free sex?
Re:Bad, BAD news for Sun (Score:4, Insightful)
The costs involved in creating "good hardware" are astronomical in this day and age. Fabs to manufacture processors cost upwards of 2 billion dollars. IBM has the resources (economies of scale) to make their own CPUs and systems, but even IBM lost a ton of money in it's microelectronics division. Sun does not. Their cost structure is totally out of whack with the rest of the industry. They need to get out of SPARC and get into something more cost effective like x86 - In fact the move to sell Opteron systems may be a sign of bigger things to come.
It's hard to make money against an IBM or an HP when your costs structure requires you to spend 3x more per system on crap like SPARC development.
My recommendation would be to abandon SPARC, move to x86 and build enterprise systems off of that. Then, fix Solaris on x86 so it actually scales and runs well. In effect - turn yourself into a software company. I keep hearing that Solaris has scalability advantages over Linux. Use that as your competitive advantage. AMD provides a good scalable CPU solution.
Fabs (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Bad, BAD news for Sun (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Bad, BAD news for Sun (Score:3, Insightful)
The customers are nice but the technology and IP that Sun owns would pay for itself. I think IBM is just waiting for a good price to come along. Thats possibly why MS gave sun the money, to prevent IBM from buying them. microsoft can't buy sun, the justice department and competitors wouldnt allow it.
High-end business? (Score:2)
All this time I thought servers were Sun's high-end product. Jerseys...who'd have thunk?
Sell to wal-mart? (Score:3, Interesting)
I think it will start off like this: Sun will give them a price. Compared to current Sun offerings, it will be very very cheap and about as low as Sun can go and actually make money. Fantastic. Everyone is happy. Two months later, however, Walmart does their famous "rollback" and no longer wants to sell a system at $699 but $588. Wal-mart doesn't want to absorb these costs. There are companies lined up around the block that are willing to sell to wal-mart. Therefore, Sun will absorb the cost. Will they make money in the beginning? Probably. But making money in the long term with Wal-mart is a very difficult thing indeed.
Apple now has Suns original core business (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Apple now has Suns original core business (Score:4, Insightful)
The workstation market is a niche market with high margins, well suited to Apple. It is not a very significant market, though. Sun gave up on it a long time ago.
Tired business model (Score:4, Interesting)
JPL, Sun and Linux (Score:4, Interesting)
We use many Sun boxen, along with various flavors of Linux, and it would be tremendous to see more integration. Their work on linux-based Java has already been an enabling factor in our work and I believe that Sun has many good ideas (and good engineers working hard on it).
This annoucement gives me hope that we can continue in our relationship with Sun for future missions, while taking advantage of many of the best features of Linux.
To be fair I should mention we also use Windows and OS X to great effect as well, however good news for Sun is good news for us, especially considering the tremendous quantities of legacy software we have for Solaris!
Cheers,
Justin Wick
Science Activity Planner Developer
Mars Exploration Rovers
They call that picture an embrace? (Score:5, Funny)
Uh, What? (Score:2)
More importantly, Microsoft and Sun have a new common enemy: Linux, an operating system that competes with Windows and with Sun's Solaris but which, unlike the other two, is written by volunteers and shared freely among all who want to download and use it. When Mr Ballmer gives Mr McNealy a hug and says that "we do both believe in intellectual property", this is a not-so-veiled jab at the open-source Linux, which both men consider, in essence, communistic. Microsoft and Sun happen to be t
a problem (Score:2)
The one standing in the way Of a SUN tunr aorund is Scott McNealy..
The beginning of the end for Sun? (Score:2)
Yes, Walmart offers quality merchandise, but Sun offers _quality_, and Sun's kind of quality doesn't retail for $399.99. Sun will have their boxes made in China or Elbonia by slave labor for peanuts, and soon, Walmart and the sweatshop owners will cut Sun out of the deal. Instead of generic PCs with Staroffice and the Su
Down the tubes, just like DEC (Score:5, Interesting)
Remember when Compaq bought DEC? Fired all the really good people, let the really good technology (64-bit Alpha) wither and die (not due to lack of innovation, but complete lack of marketing and executive support), and became just another brand of PC-clone?
Then Fiorina gets involved, HP gets sucked in, and bam, another really good technology company gone, now just a PC-clone seller?
Yeah, I have some grudges. I'm not the world's hugest fan of Sun... but I see all the really innovative stuff they've done (even though I'm not a Java nut!) going away. And the computer world will be worse off without it.
Schwartz (Score:3, Insightful)
Making friends with your enemy's enemy, leading to profit doesn't usually work. Not in Illinois, not in Iraq.
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
marketing mistake? (Score:4, Insightful)
That'll do wonders for the server Linux market, not to mention the general public awareness of Linux.
Oh, and call it "Lindows", so it fits in with the whole industry of substandard equipment with brand names like "Toshipa", "Somy", etc.
Walmart preloading OpenOffice.org on XP (Score:3, Insightful)
Sun's in the game with their Java Desktop.
It'll be interesting to see what the OEMs do about OpenOffice, though, Dell offering OpenOffice would be a real foot in the door.
Linux might well save Sun (Score:5, Interesting)
Yeah, I know, ain't gonna happen... but I guy can dream, right?
The problem is (Score:3, Interesting)
It's almost as if like MS and Sun have decided to share the pie, but make sure they get to keep the biggest pieces by shooting the cook. That way no newcommers get a piece of pie too, and so they won't half to compete (accept against each other) to keep the biggest shares.
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
Sun, Java and Microsoft (Score:3, Interesting)
First and foremost, they should have made MS get rid of their broken JVM completly (if you install the latest service pack on a machine without the JVM, you get the JVM. No service pack currently downloadable should contain any contents of the MS JVM.
In fact, SUN should have (if it was possible) told MS that they had to distribute the SUN Java VM.
Its like when AOL and MS made up for the Netscape debacle.
Not only did MS only have to pay a piddling little fine but AOLTW actually sggreed to use crappy MS technology (like Windows Media Player and Intercrap Exploder). The settlement with MS over the Netscape issue actually BENIFITED MS.
Same with the sub settlment.
All they have to do is pay a little fine and remove their VM from new pressings of windows. They dont have to remove it from service packs or anything else. MS benifits because the cluless idiots (banks for example) who coded JAVA to its broken VM have no reason to change plus the true JAVA (i.e. the sun official standard) doesnt get any further forward.
This can only benifit Microsofts new JAVA killer in the form of
Sun broke again in 6-9 months? (Score:3, Interesting)
At that rate the 1.6 to 2B USD will be gone in just a few quarters. And I'm sorry Mr. Schwartz but selling cheap commodity hardware at razor thin margins will not help much. The only way that strategy will work is if Linux becomes the de facto standard and Sun distinguishes itself with its Sparc hardware. But that will take years and 2B doesn't seem like enough to bankroll it. Can Sun hold out long enough? Unix sales are collapsing fast. What are they going to do for money in the meantime? And will they break rank like SCO and try to preserve short term revenue at the cost of their long term viability?
I just can't help myself. Look at that handshake in the picture. McNealy looks like Steve Irwin, the Crocodile Hunter [crocodilehunter.com], cautious not to get any body parts too close to the mouth. Crikey!
Sun boxes = Ferraris? (Score:5, Insightful)
As someone who works in an ISP that is almost entirely Sun I believe the correct analogy would be a Rolls-Royce. Sun boxes, in my experience, are not really that fast for the money, but the quality of them is undeniable. Once you go through the pain of setting them up (Solaris=least fun Unix IMO), they sit there running for a decade. Very nice, but not exactly Ferraris.
Linux on i386, depending on the admin's skill, I would put more along the lines of a nice VW Jetta or Toyota. Stable, quick, cheap, more than enough for most people.
MS and Patents (Score:3, Interesting)
Now, MS is busy buying up whatever they can. Just a bit ago, they bought a number of patents from SGI. In addition, they are trying to pawn SCO into an IP fight with Linux when in reality the only fight that SCO stands a chance on is contractual.
I am guessing that MS has some deal with Ray Norda/Canopy Group to buy SCO iff SCO appears to be winning any agreement against Linux.
Even though I use and develop on KDE, it will seem odd if MS owns canopy group which owns 5% of the trolls.
But hey, this is all conjecture.
Sun's desktops (Score:5, Interesting)
I came up with:
DPS
NeWS
OpenWindows
CDE
Gnome
JDS
Lookin
But since my friend was an ex-Sun employee who worked on NeWS, he came up with a few more that I never heard of.
SGI (Score:3, Insightful)
Sun hasn't said "We're dropping Solaris" but embracing Linux without becoming a player in the Linux kernel team is a HUGE mistake.
Solaris does some things much better than Linux -- less and less, certainly, but, for example, Solaris does partitioning of machines, the IP stack is great, and Solaris boxes can be configured to run complicated apps with higher uptimes even than Linux -- it's close but Solaris still has a small edge in reliability.
So Sun embraces Linux, further marginalizes Solaris, and soon Solaris will only run on Sun's Big Iron -- E10K's and the like.
IBM will make Linux scream on their Big Iron, and some of us (more and more of us) will pick IBM's Iron over Sun's because it's the same across the board.
Sun really has two options. 1. Embrace Linux and be part of the process, cannibalizing Solaris for Linux's sake and becoming a major Linux player -- with the E10K running just a feature-rich on Linux as Solaris. 2. Push Solaris hard. Give it away for the small boxes, get it on the desktop, run Linux apps on it (they've already got a project to allow this), and keep a culture that's 100% Sun, stressing in their sales pitch the few, but legitimate ways where Linux is a liability on Big Iron.
Option 3, undermine Solaris, and remain apart from the Linux community, seems to be the chosen path, however. It's the same path SGI went down. You remember SGI, don't you? You know, the guys with the pretty colored plastic? Think back...
Re:sun java desktop running linux already at walma (Score:2)
Re:Solaris vs other Unices (Score:3, Insightful)
People like schwartz think that slick marketing and "features" are what will lead sun to microsoft like market dominance, that flies in the face of the past 20 years worth of sun's thought process.
SGI has no market share to speak of these days, HP and IBM (AIX) are