1) Oh, really? Sez who?
2) Coders are in IT too. You may not carry a pager, but it's the same damned field.

You're missing a major point here: Rotating on-call.

I'm on call right now, 24/7. I'm required to be available and functional (i.e. in town, sober), and must answer the pager within ten minutes.

For one week out of six.

That means that for about nine weeks a year, I'm a slave to the company. That also means that in a telecom company with >>2million customers, I can completely shut off my mind to work at 17:00 for the rest of the year.

And yes, I get paid well during those nine weeks.

Let's be clear here. Google has introduced features higgledy-piggledy into Canada, and presumably the rest of the world. Can I hide search results in Canada? No. But I _do_ have to suffer through "auto-complete" and site preview on their search engine. Giving us half of the features is worse than none at all, because it makes things slower without making them better.

But hey - Google doesn't give a shit, because they're working towards two goals: Market domination and stock price.

...and I'll say it here. Richard Stallman is an asshole who never learned proper manners.

I'm not a Mac person, wasn't ever an Apple person back in the day of the ][+, but I'm willing to let Jobs die with a bit of dignity and recognition of his good.

None of us are perfect people, and I imagine most of us would rather people didn't stand up at our funeral to say "he was a cheap jerk who stiffed me for twenty bucks."

RMS and ESR are embarrassing themselves and those who associate with them.

Let's be clear here. The Sun division of Oracle is being run by Mark Hurd, who was last seen gutting HP and screwing his staff member. Oracle will kill off all things Sun, either now or later. Solaris and Java are the only things they seem to care about, and both of those are still rather endangered.

Solaris still has some great advantages over Linux--enough to actually keep a handful of people on it despite Oracle. I assume that they're going to get those necessary features into Linux, and then dump Solaris entirely.

We're spending about $12 million to dump all of our Sun applications, as well as most of our Sun gear and Solaris installs in favour of x86 gear (mostly IBM) and Linux. The scary thing is that $12 million is less than the increase in licensing and maintenance costs from Oracle, vs. what we were paying from Sun.

Bottom line: Oracle doesn't want people running Solaris. The more features we get into Linux before Larry gives up and says "screw all y'all" the better.

He's apparently not an expert either. He's not a physicist, but rather an entrepreneur. (But to be fair, his partner is a physicist.)

Actually, the invite from /. may be a great litmus test - if he eagerly agrees, it suggests that he's a charlatan who will take any publicity he can get--which he almost certainly is.

Oracle can't play well with others, and their own customers are "others."

In the last few years, Oracle has gone from treating their customers with arrogance and contempt (their old model) to outright abuse. Every major Sun shop I know of has some Oracle DB stuff floating around, and most of them are not just dumping their Oracle/Sun gear and software, but even getting rid of their OracleDB instances as well.

Customers cannot trust Oracle, and are upset over it. There are also more reasonable alternatives now than ever before. I'll be happy to see Oracle slowly die.

Now hold on here, don't mix up Solaris and SPARC.
SPARC has been dwindling for years - I know, I still manage several hundred SPARC servers. Solaris, if it's dying at all, has only started that path in the last year. Solaris on x86 is damned robust, and in a politics-free world, would be my preferred platform for most computing.

The advantage of dealing with a big name comes of being a big player with a big support contract.
Our division within the company runs about 1800 unix servers right now. That doesn't include the switches, the storage, workstations, etc. etc.. That kind of clout gives us traction when we call for support on a system.

If I'm prepared to spend six or seven figures on annual support, then the big companies actually make sense. If I'm looking at a few to a few dozen servers, then no--go with something small, and do your own in-house support.

Fair enough. It's just that up until about three years ago, the Proliants were solid and beautiful tanks, which were almost on par with the new Sun gear at the time.

Actually, you can pretty much blame that on Java - it's a disaster on highly parallel gear. (We got Sun to eventually admit that, after a disastrous aborted rollout of Directory Server on T series machines.)

Still - The T machines are very much a niche market, and that niche is disappearing quickly. I suspect there will never be a T5 processor with any significant changes.

Good luck with the ProLiants. They ain't what they used to be, according to a friend recently ex- of HP.

Short answer, no. Not really. There is no UltraSPARC V. The 'traditional' SPARC architecture lives on in the M-series, which has SPARC64 CPUs by Fujitsu.

We are jumping from Solaris to RHEL as well. It's possible that we work for the same Canadian ISP, but it's more likely that our companies have made the same decision as dozens of others.

There's a lot of belief out there that Apothekar was the short-term CEO while they looked for a permanent replacement. In other words, this is probably it.

Besides which, HP is blowing up RIGHT NOW! The autopilot is broken, and the plane is headed towards the ground.

HP is doomed.

Let's be clear here. The headline could have been shortened to "Looks like it might be the beginning of the end (...) at HP."

They got nuthin'. Since they spun off Agilent, they've been sliding towards the cliff, and hiring Carly was the precise moment at which they went over.

I don't think there's a single thing that HP can do to recover at this point. Maybe they'll keep going as a printer division of another company when they're eventually bought out, but I'm not even sure that's going to be worthwhile for anyone to grab.

HP may be one of the last old-world tech companies to die, but they _will_ die, and I'd guess in about 3.5 years. (give or take - I'm not a market predictor)

Nah. In most data centres, dismembering a server with a roofing hammer would barely be heard. In some data centres, it would probably be routine procedure.