An anonymous reader writes "Sun Microsystems might have had a chance if the Oracle merger had gone through quickly, but between the DoJ taking its time and the European Commission, which seems to get off on abusing American firms, just plain dragging its feet, that won't happen now. As Sun twists in the wind, unable to defend itself, and Oracle is unable to do anything until the deal closes, IBM is pretty much tearing Sun to shreds. By the time this deal closes, there won't be much left for Oracle. This is not how a Silicon Valley legend should end."
Over the past year we've been looking at enterprise level database platforms. PostgreSQL served us well in development and initial stages of production. Initial consideration was given to SUN, IBM, and Teradata. But it was clear a year ago that SUN's days were numbered. After they started talks with IBM we didn't give SUN much thought after that. Also they lacked a true enterprise level database (sorry MySQL fans, but NDBCLUSTER is still horribly buggy and what we need goes beyond Master/salve replication) & hardware platform and we wanted both from the same vender. Sorry, but I've been in the "It's a hardware problem, no it's a software problem" disputes between venders too many times.
I know a lot of other businesses who thought the same way once the talks were underway with IBM. Why buy a platform that you don't the future of 6 months from now?
Which is sort of sad. I worked around Sun machines 12 years ago. We had a few boxes that were from the 1980's running Solaris 2 (or 3 I can't remember now) that were STILL supported. Something went wrong, they sent in the old grey beards to fix it. Same with applications. We had a certified app that broke in Solaris 8 or 9 and Sun sent a team of engineers to help us fix it.
I'm confused. You're looking for an enterprise database, but you're ignoring the company that makes the best platform for running the most successful enterprise database... because it is in the process of being bought by the company that makes the most successful enterprise database? I sincerely hope I never have to work with anyone who makes decisions based on the same logic as you.
It isn't AIX from IBM that's burying Solaris, it's Linux.
At the fortune 100 companies I've worked with, AIX was legacy and stagnant, and being retired as quickly as possible. Solaris was losing servers to Linux starting with the web/application servers and moving into the Database space (replacing Oracle and DB2, in some cases with Mysql for smaller databases). Applications that could be run on virtualization were the next big thing to move to Linux. If they could replace large sun boxes (and expensive sun hardware/software service contracts) with a bunch of 1Us or Blades connected to a SAN, it was done.
At one financial institution it was even mandated that Linux be tested before any other Unix because of the cost savings.
Initial "disclaimer", I work in IBM. I'll try however to be balanced, especially since I'm more interested in clarifying a few points than in engaging in some sort of competitive bashing.
For the record though I'll say that I like Solaris and business imperatives apart Sun is/was a company that interested me.
IBM's offerings with their overpriced hardward,
Really depends on how you do the math. Individual systems can be more expensive, but then again they generally do a lot more in terms of processing power. Of course, "processing power" can be again measured in multiple ways, which is why you'll find a lot of contradicting information. One thing to bear in mind though is that, for example, the IBM Power Blades are quite competitive, being similarly priced as the ix86 ones. The higher you go in terms of vertical capacity of growth, the pricier it is, but that's the same in all vendors.
ancient lineage
I'm not sure what you're intending to say here, most Unix vendors have an ancient lineage (Solaris itself is a BSD/System V mix, a bit like AIX). If you're referring to a supposed lack of innovation, well, POWER6 still has the edge in terms of processing power and POWER7 is just around the corner (IBM won the DARPA bid against Sun btw). AIX 6 introduces a lot of new stuff which you are probably not aware. I'm not sure how is the Sun situation in terms of chip manufacturing. I know about the highly threaded CPUs, etc, I am just commenting on the possible perception that looms in the air with the Oracle acquisition.
how about a free x86 version, IBM? no, then fuck off!
While I understand that it would be interesting in general terms, it doesn't matter in terms of judging the fitness of the OS for the market we are talking about.
After that, I have a hard time figuring out why anyone would favor IBM's LPARs over the much more efficient, and easier to manager Solaris 10 Zone offering.
They are quite different concepts though.... a LPAR is for most purposes a separate server, with a level of isolation that exceeds Solaris zones. They don't even compete in the same area. A critical problem in the Solaris kernel that is supports 10 Containers will mean death to all of them (correct me if I'm wrong). You can do whatever you want to an LPAR that it won't affect any other LPAR. This with the added benefict of dedicated OR shared hardware, dynamic CPU and RAM entitlement via policies, etc, etc. It behaves a bit like z/VM.
The only comparison with Solaris zones are WPARs, Workload Partitions, introduced with AIX 6. They share a global kernel and behave in a similar way to Solaris Containers, give or take. They are lighter in terms of creation, etc, but with less isolation. I'm sure that there are arguments pro and against each of them, but in terms of use they can be compared. Not so with LPARs.
Don't get me started on HP
HP-UX is a solid UNIX OS. Of course, it isn't as "sexy" as Solaris (like AIX also isn't I guess), but again what matters for most is if it's stable and manageable. HP also has different virtualisation offerings (nPars, which work at the physical level a bit like Sun Domains IIRC, vPars which are lighter weight and share the same hardware, IVM which is sort of like VMware in Itaniu, etc). I always was an admirer of the Alpha architecture, and respected PA-RISC. In personal terms I don't especially like Itanium, *but* this is a personal thing.
Ever heard of ZFS or DTrace?
Quite interesting features. I especially like DTrace.
I will disclose that I am a three-time ex-Sun employee/contractor who has also seen inside the belly of IBM. Solaris will bury AIX. And you can take *that* to the SAN and store it!
Well, we're both a product of our surroundings I guess:) I disagree that Solaris will "bury" AIX of course. You might enjoy Solaris more - that's quite reasonable - but in the end this things are more about the business sense they make than anything else (and I'm not saying that Solaris doesn't make business sense).
When a company is taken over, the corporate "feel" usually suffers. I have seen a few companies that were taken over from the inside (I experienced the take-over itself in one occasion), and the employers were never happy with it. And as always, the best people have the best chances, so they leave first...
This is not how a Silicon Valley legend should end.
How should they end?
Spectacular bankruptcy like Enron?
Seems like most in silicon valley do a slow fade into oblivion and are eventually acquired for peanuts and never heard from again. 3DO, Transmeta, Borland, Quarterdeck, SGI, etc...
"sync; sync; halt" works for immediate stoppage at minimal risk to your filesystem compared to many other options.
Or just "stop-A", "sync", and leave it hanging at the OK prompt forever:) This has the benefit of a subsequent tech being able to power up again remotely, which just pulling the power cord wouldn't...
I wish I had mod points today because this is one of the most insightful and simple things I have seen posted on Slashdot. Engineers need interesting work and great colleagues. Without those things, the great engineers will bail and a vicious downward spiral will begin. This is why I am never surprised when government sponsored information system re-writes spend millions of dollars and never finish (California DMV).
by Anonymous Coward
on Thursday September 03, @02:59PM (#29303871)
We weren't in Silicon Valley, but our company ended like this: By 1999 we had grown to two offices and about 70 employees, had an award winning retail product and an online mall. We we're still private. After about 5 unsuccessful tries at getting VC, a Canadian company who processed credit card payments offered to buy us for ~$43M USD. They wanted our mall, so that they could make money in about 6 different ways from it. When the sale was announced but not complete, my stock was worth about $1.8M at their current stock price:) Unfortunately, they missed the point that our retail software was what generated the stores in the mall. As soon as the sale went through in 2000, they stopped development and sales of the retail product, laid off about 30% of us, and then gave the remaining people really stupid things to do for about a year while they slowly figured out what went wrong. At this point I was worth about $800K.:| For 6 months all I did was get paid >$100K/yr to drink coffee, smoke cigarettes, and surf the web. Eventually there was a meeting at which they admitted that their business and our business (now basically dead) were irreconcilably different, and announced they were shutting down all US operations. I was on the street Jan 1, 2001, and my stock was now worth $1200:( Incredibly, when a group of us that had worked on the retail product approached them asking if we could retain the source, trademarks, remaining stock, etc., with the intent of reviving it, we were told that they would never allow us to do this because it "would look bad to the stockholders". As if blowing $43M didn't look bad enough? D'oh!!
The summary places a lot of blame on regulators. But in fact, the article quotes IBM claiming the announcement of the acquisition is what drove people to IBM; that obviously has nothing to do with subsequent delays. As for talent leaving, the article provides one example of 3 employees who left because they were unsure of Oracle's commitment to their work. However, there is no reason to assume the EU or DOJ have anything to do with this. Oracle could have reassured them at any time, if they knew, and cared, which isn't a very realistic expectation for a small team in a big merger. What is motivating the story submitter to put so much unwarranted blame at the feet of the EU and DOJ?
The government comes into play because they're taking an enormously long time to approve the merger. This allows IBM and its ilk more time than they normally would have to poach customers before Oracle can step in and engage in concrete action to stop the bleeding. So, the government delays do play a role. Yes, Oracle could try (and has tried) to reassure everyone that it will be business as usual with the hardware segment, but until they're able to actually take control of that segment and do something concrete to convince people, the uncertainty remains. Where uncertainty exists, other companies can come in and exploit it.
As for the talent leaving, that happens in any merger because, once again, people hate uncertainty. If someone is facing a lot of uncertainty in his job, and has the ability to go elsewhere, he will probably do so. Ironically, the people most likely to move on are often the ones that would have been the most likely to be kept by the new company anyway, since they tend to be the top talent.
Oracle could have reassured them at any time, if they knew, and cared, which isn't a very realistic expectation for a small team in a big merger.
But anyone in that position knows that those assurances aren't worth the air breathed to utter them.
Given today's job market, if you're in an uncertain position, and you get a good offer elsewhere that seems more certain -- you take it.
What happens if the regulators deny the merger application? If you've stuck around, now you're in a lame-duck company and you can see your employer has lost a large portion of your customer base to IBM.
What happens if the merger is accepted? At least now you've got a chance of your employer taking advantage of Oracle's sales & marketing force, etc. That is, if you're not let go as a result of the merger.
In short, employees are leaving Sun because they don't like uncertainty. Never mind the customers leaving Sun for the same reason (amongst other reasons).
The length of time it's taking for the review process is definitely a factor.
That said, I think the review is important, and I hope it's taking so long because of thoroughness, not because of some stupid attempt to hamstring American companies.
The fundamental truth of the European Union is this: It's intended to attack the United States' economic dominance.
lulz. That's true of any union. Go look up "softwood lumber," "corn," and "steel," among many, many (many, many, many) other disputes the US is involved in.
Americans don't seem to realize what a "global economy" truly entails.
Americans don't seem to realize what a "global economy" truly entails.
I think you're making an apples to oranges comparison. The average american doesn't know much about business. The average american also doesn't own a business that competes in a global marketplace. A business owner that does compete in a global marketplace is aware of these issues, because s/he must. his/her place of birth doesn't change this.
The European Union's economic policies are designed to benefit business owners in Europe, just as the United States' economic policies are designed to benefit business owners here. Where these interests coincide favorably, there is cooperation (intellectual property, globalization, etc.). Where they do not (monopolies, taxation, etc.) there is not cooperation. Both sides state they strive for "fair", "open", and/or "unbiased" markets, but privately they strive to provide a benefit for their members, which sometimes results in "fair", "open", and "unbiased" markets, and sometimes does not.
The issue here is that the EU is motivated by a need for cultural integrity -- whereas their competition (the United States) does not bring a need for cultural integrity to the negotiation table. The end result is that US businesses are paying for the EU member nations' need for cultural integrity as a condition of competition within the European marketplace. Evaluating the correctness of each position is left as an excercise for the reader.
There seem to be two points in the article and summary. The one that makes sense is that the slowness of the merger is murdering Sun's business. The other is that the slowness is causing people to leave. I doubt the latter is true. People do not want to work for Oracle, fast merge or slow merge.
My two cents: It doesn't suck to work at Oracle. Pay is fair and above market, benefits are good, employees are treated fairly, and there are a lot of exciting projects going on to choose from as a techie. If you don't like what you're doing for a living, there are numerous opportunities always available in something more suited to your interest, and telecommuting is encouraged in most "talent" positions, so relocation is largely a non-issue. The employees I work with (admittedly, we're a rack-monkey and operating system nerd crowd) are generally optimistic and excited about the merger.
Yes, as part of the M&A process there have been layoffs from time to time. With the exception of hostile takeovers, they are fairly predictable in advance, severance is decent and fair, the door remains open if you decide to rejoin the company later, and as far as a huge Fortune 500 company goes, it's a really decent place to work. If you work in some of the larger locations there are nice benefits on-site for free or at really reduced prices (gyms, cafeterias, massages, to name a few), and there is a lot of employment flexibility.
Of course there are annoyances like paperwork, lengthy project approval processes, ITIL compliance, SOX compliance, and so forth. Welcome to working for any large company. But to say "People do not want to work for Oracle, fast merge or slow merge" is simply false. By and large, it's a good company to work for, and the low turnover rate and lengthy average employment time amongst extremely talented and well-educated people speaks to overall job satisfaction.
Oracle is beginning it's own long slow decline. The large apps on the internet are all moving away from RDBMS and into scalable key value stores. Oracle will only get to remain in the G&A aspects of those business, not in the front line internet customer apps. Read 'The Innovator's Dilemma', it is happening to Oracle. Get out while you can.
Ever try to do GIS in a key-value store? Statistical analysis? Data mining? Billing?
Key value stores are great for high throughput applications that have very simple and predictable access modes. But for anything else, you are much better of with a RDBMS.
The front line customer apps is not where the money is. It never was, and it never will.
Citing two sources familiar with the situation, Reuters said that the EC's antitrust concern centers around Oracle getting its hands on Sun's MySQL database. U.S. antitrust officials, who earlier signed off on the deal, made no such concerns about MySQL.
If the EU is actually delaying anything over this, then they're either doing it for political reasons or out of incredible incompetence. MySQL is open source and has already been forked. So what if Oracle gets ahold of the IP behind MySQL?! They cannot close source MariaDB, Drizzle, etc.
"Silicon Valley legend"? Sun made it's fortune by taking BSD Unix and commercializing it, selling it pre-installed on boxes. Sure, most of the enhancements made to PCs over the years appeared years earlier on Sun workstations (e.g. CD-ROM drives, sound cards, and Ethernet), but ever since the rise of Linux as a viable alternative to Unix, Sun has been floundering about looking for a viable business model. Spark CPUs? Give me a break; no matter how good the initial design was, if you don't have the several billion dollars a year Intel is putting into R&D to improve the chips, you're fighting a losing battle. Java? Great idea, but you give it away for free, and never have figured out how to make money off of it. Now they can't compete in hardware with off-the-shelf X86 boxes, and they can't compete in software with Linux (being supported by their rival IBM). In short, they have no real business model and no real reason to continue existence. Oracle is doing them a favor by offering to buy them out. Oracle has been trying for years to sell a database appliance with Oracle preinstalled, but they keep running up against that "can't compete with off-the-shelf X86 boxes" barrier too. Sure, Sun invokes fond nostalgia for many, many Unix nerds, but face it -- it's dead, Jim.
but ever since the rise of Linux as a viable alternative to Unix, Sun has been floundering about looking for a viable business model.
That wasn't it. Sun's failures have less to do with linux and probably more to do with marketing taking over the company and messing with the expensive, but rock solid, hardware their clients came to trust -- and replacing them with cheaper variants. When they did this they gambled their niche for larger margins, and they lost. The "rise of Linux" wouldn't even make it as a footnote in the story of the fall of Sun. Linux may have been on servers 10 years ago, but these installations were a joke compared to AIX and Solaris installations at the time. Only in the last few years has linux even come within striking distance of AIX and Solaris... and no, Linux has not yet surpassed what serious admins have come to expect from AIX and Solaris afa uptimes, i.e. staying up under heavy crushing loads.
"This is not how a Silicon Valley legend should end"
It's almost fitting considering how some of Sun's best customers were left out in the cold with bad CPUs and RAM, while Sun lawyers (waving signed NDAs in hand) were more prevelent than Sun Support engineers. Remember all the press about that? What, you don't? It's because it was silenced by Sun.
My experience working in Sun Services, taking care of Gold and Platinium level customers...
The ECC fiasco with the Blackbirds and following revisions was the bookcase example of how not to treat your customers. Customers were lied to, then lied to some more, then received defective pulls as replacement after 2 errors on the same CPU, then lied some more. Until the scrubber patch got released, my average customer had 2 CPU swaps per week.
Receiving defective pulls for customers was the norm rather than the exception... sometimes the customer's own defective parts from the previous intervention, RMA box still sealed but with a "tested OK" sticker magically applied on top of the red "DEFECTIVE" sticker. This applied to disks, memory, CPUs, motherboards... all parts really. Making things worse, the standard procedure was to have the parts delivered directly at the customer... so the engineer didn't get a chance to check for DOAs beforehand.
In the end, the only trick was to order a batch of replacement parts in the hope of having a working one delivered at the customer. Said trick would of course end up damaging your score for the next evaluation... but so would an unsatisfied customer lodging a complaint for substandard support. I gave up, moved to Professional Services then to Pre-sales before leaving.
..the European Commission, which seems to get off on abusing American firms...
Oh, horseshit. I've worked in American companies with European offices for years and have seen no such thing. Europeans are just as happy to take American dollars as anyone else. The EC countries do, however, have rather more stringent antitrust laws than the United States (and more consumer protections, more privacy laws, and so on). If you do business in a country, you have to respect their laws, just as European countries doing business in the US have to respect our laws (or our lawlessness in many matters). That Microsoft and Oracle -- two companies that are hardly well-loved here -- have had trouble in Europe hardly constitutes a pattern of "abusing American firms".
It may be that the real issue here is that Oracle, like Microsoft, gets off on anti-competitive practices, and as a result often finds itself up against laws against the same, in Europe as well as the US.
If they didn't care about selling in Europe they could just ignore them and cease operations there. I don't see it being worth it to either oracle or sun for that to happen.
The US just approved this merger about a week ago. An additional week is certainly no proof of malice. Even if it takes longer, it might be due to more intensive oversight, as the EU seems to simply take the job more seriously.
You could argue that in-depth oversight hurts businesses, but it's a common fallacy here to attribute it to Anti-Americanism, even though there's ample evidence that European and Asian country are often hit just as harshly as American ones. See for example the then-highest cartel fine [glassonweb.com] against countries from Belgium, the UK and Japan.
So, are you saying American businesses are too stupid to avoid bad business situations? You make it sound as if you think of Europe as our enemy, rather than our staunchest allies. I mean, how DARE they provide better health care for less money than we do and make our capitalist health care system look bad? How DARE they get 32 hour work weeks with minimum one month of vacation. Here we are, working our asses off, and we aren't any happier than them for it. The bottom 80% of our society aren't any richer for it, either. That's just not fair, and obviously, they are evil for not fellating their owning class like we do. Why, if they aren't stopped, our peasantry might just get uppity ideas on their heads and start thinking they should get a share in our increase in GDP.
I'll take it [photius.com]. At least if it's France (#1), Italy (#2), Belgium (#21), or really anywhere better than the US (#37). Forget the talk show "rah rah rah U-S-A U-S-A" nonsense. If you think the US health care system is legitimately "the best", tell me by which measure.
Compare that to fines levied against European companies and you will see that there is no difference. You were flagged troll for your content-free angry pro-American karma pandering. You thought you'd get a quick karma boost from anti-socialist, libertarian, and pro-American moderators, which you may yet get if you stop whining and present some actual facts. Cherry-picked anecdotes don't count, give us some figures to back up your butt-hurt position.
You are trying to make your case by presenting one side. You've shown absolutely nothing to prove that the EU does not do the same thing to EU companies. You have also not shown that the US companies did not deserve the criminal and civil sanctions they received.
Oh, and Boeing doesn't need Airbus flight software, Boeing's is better. Yet we don't see Boeing getting hit by the EU.
Just out of curiosity, your citations are so one sided, where are you getting your data from? Does Fox News have a Two Minute Hate spot on the nasty socialist EU nowadays?
But $1.5B is in proportion to the fines given to some European companies. (And EU companies are fined by the EU, but it doesn't make the news in the USA.)
(PS Post in ~4 hours when all us Europeans are asleep, and the Americans will mod you up.)
So? The EC fined Telefónica (a spanish telco) with 150 millions. And the fined EON (german) and GDF (french) with 550 millions each one for being a cartel. And the fined 11 european and japanese companies with 750 millions (including 330 millions for siemens, which is german).
And in my opinion, the EC is just doing what EEUU should do but doesn't.
Yes. Shipping WMP with Windows was a crime, as was not providing a browser choice tool. Anti-competitive actions taken by a monopoly are a crime in most jurisdictions. The EU has gone after plenty of European companies for the same things.
In a cathartic orgy of violence in the third act, in which everyone dies except the narrator, who is finally revealed to be an obscure character who was shown briefly in the second episode and everyone forgot about in the meantime.
How can the European Commission block the merger of two US firms?
The short answer is that they can't. The companies are free to go ahead and merge without receiving EU permission. They are also free to not sell anything in the EU or be fined heavily if they attempt to do so. I doubt that Oracle wants to give up this lucrative market.
Why do so many of my fellow Americans have trouble understanding this? Are you dense? Governments do this sort of thing. They actually want to have a say about what gets sold in their countries and by whom. And, frankly, what you think of the practice is irrelevant, unless you can get enough people to agree to convince our government to negotiate a treaty or declare war, since you have no voice in any government but that of the US. Suck it up...
FUD article (Score:5, Insightful)
Stupid article - so three coders (JRuby team) quit, and Sun's losing in sales to IBM (which they were doing anyway before the merger).
Re:FUD article (Score:5, Interesting)
Over the past year we've been looking at enterprise level database platforms. PostgreSQL served us well in development and initial stages of production. Initial consideration was given to SUN, IBM, and Teradata. But it was clear a year ago that SUN's days were numbered. After they started talks with IBM we didn't give SUN much thought after that. Also they lacked a true enterprise level database (sorry MySQL fans, but NDBCLUSTER is still horribly buggy and what we need goes beyond Master/salve replication) & hardware platform and we wanted both from the same vender. Sorry, but I've been in the "It's a hardware problem, no it's a software problem" disputes between venders too many times.
I know a lot of other businesses who thought the same way once the talks were underway with IBM. Why buy a platform that you don't the future of 6 months from now?
Which is sort of sad. I worked around Sun machines 12 years ago. We had a few boxes that were from the 1980's running Solaris 2 (or 3 I can't remember now) that were STILL supported. Something went wrong, they sent in the old grey beards to fix it. Same with applications. We had a certified app that broke in Solaris 8 or 9 and Sun sent a team of engineers to help us fix it.
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Re:FUD article (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:FUD article (Score:5, Interesting)
Perhaps you are unaware that IBM is primarily a services company nowadays?
The hardware and software is a tool to sell services.
You know that's where Oracle is aiming for growth too, right?
For all the advantages you see for Solaris over its competition, IBM's service offering is miles ahead of Oracle right now...
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Re:FUD article (Score:5, Insightful)
At the fortune 100 companies I've worked with, AIX was legacy and stagnant, and being retired as quickly as possible. Solaris was losing servers to Linux starting with the web/application servers and moving into the Database space (replacing Oracle and DB2, in some cases with Mysql for smaller databases). Applications that could be run on virtualization were the next big thing to move to Linux. If they could replace large sun boxes (and expensive sun hardware/software service contracts) with a bunch of 1Us or Blades connected to a SAN, it was done.
At one financial institution it was even mandated that Linux be tested before any other Unix because of the cost savings.
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Re:FUD article (Score:5, Informative)
Hello,
Initial "disclaimer", I work in IBM. I'll try however to be balanced, especially since I'm more interested in clarifying a few points than in engaging in some sort of competitive bashing.
For the record though I'll say that I like Solaris and business imperatives apart Sun is/was a company that interested me.
IBM's offerings with their overpriced hardward,
Really depends on how you do the math. Individual systems can be more expensive, but then again they generally do a lot more in terms of processing power. Of course, "processing power" can be again measured in multiple ways, which is why you'll find a lot of contradicting information. One thing to bear in mind though is that, for example, the IBM Power Blades are quite competitive, being similarly priced as the ix86 ones. The higher you go in terms of vertical capacity of growth, the pricier it is, but that's the same in all vendors.
ancient lineage
I'm not sure what you're intending to say here, most Unix vendors have an ancient lineage (Solaris itself is a BSD/System V mix, a bit like AIX). If you're referring to a supposed lack of innovation, well, POWER6 still has the edge in terms of processing power and POWER7 is just around the corner (IBM won the DARPA bid against Sun btw). AIX 6 introduces a lot of new stuff which you are probably not aware. I'm not sure how is the Sun situation in terms of chip manufacturing. I know about the highly threaded CPUs, etc, I am just commenting on the possible perception that looms in the air with the Oracle acquisition.
how about a free x86 version, IBM? no, then fuck off!
While I understand that it would be interesting in general terms, it doesn't matter in terms of judging the fitness of the OS for the market we are talking about.
After that, I have a hard time figuring out why anyone would favor IBM's LPARs over the much more efficient, and easier to manager Solaris 10 Zone offering.
They are quite different concepts though.... a LPAR is for most purposes a separate server, with a level of isolation that exceeds Solaris zones. They don't even compete in the same area. A critical problem in the Solaris kernel that is supports 10 Containers will mean death to all of them (correct me if I'm wrong). You can do whatever you want to an LPAR that it won't affect any other LPAR. This with the added benefict of dedicated OR shared hardware, dynamic CPU and RAM entitlement via policies, etc, etc. It behaves a bit like z/VM.
The only comparison with Solaris zones are WPARs, Workload Partitions, introduced with AIX 6. They share a global kernel and behave in a similar way to Solaris Containers, give or take. They are lighter in terms of creation, etc, but with less isolation. I'm sure that there are arguments pro and against each of them, but in terms of use they can be compared. Not so with LPARs.
Don't get me started on HP
HP-UX is a solid UNIX OS. Of course, it isn't as "sexy" as Solaris (like AIX also isn't I guess), but again what matters for most is if it's stable and manageable. HP also has different virtualisation offerings (nPars, which work at the physical level a bit like Sun Domains IIRC, vPars which are lighter weight and share the same hardware, IVM which is sort of like VMware in Itaniu, etc). I always was an admirer of the Alpha architecture, and respected PA-RISC. In personal terms I don't especially like Itanium, *but* this is a personal thing.
Ever heard of ZFS or DTrace?
Quite interesting features. I especially like DTrace.
I will disclose that I am a three-time ex-Sun employee/contractor who has also seen inside the belly of IBM. Solaris will bury AIX. And you can take *that* to the SAN and store it!
Well, we're both a product of our surroundings I guess :) I disagree that Solaris will "bury" AIX of course. You might enjoy Solaris more - that's quite reasonable - but in the end this things are more about the business sense they make than anything else (and I'm not saying that Solaris doesn't make business sense).
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Not news, is it? (Score:4, Insightful)
Huh? (Score:5, Insightful)
This is not how a Silicon Valley legend should end.
How should they end?
Spectacular bankruptcy like Enron?
Seems like most in silicon valley do a slow fade into oblivion and are eventually acquired for peanuts and never heard from again. 3DO, Transmeta, Borland, Quarterdeck, SGI, etc...
Re:Huh? (Score:5, Funny)
How should they end?
#shutdown -h now
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Re:Huh? (Score:5, Interesting)
That wouldn't end a sun box
shutdown -i5 -g0 -y
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Re:Huh? (Score:5, Informative)
"sync; sync; halt" works for immediate stoppage at minimal risk to your filesystem compared to many other options.
Or just "stop-A", "sync", and leave it hanging at the OK prompt forever :) This has the benefit of a subsequent tech being able to power up again remotely, which just pulling the power cord wouldn't...
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Re:Huh? (Score:4, Funny)
That wouldn't end a sun box
It will if the Sun box is running Linux :D
But my post would have been funnier with the Solaris syntax. For my oversight I should be spanked by Jen from The IT Crowd.
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Re:Huh? (Score:5, Interesting)
For example, SGI may have died, but nVidia and Mozilla (to name only two) are doing quite well, thanks.
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Re:Huh? (Score:5, Insightful)
Engineers need interesting work and great colleagues. Without those things, the great engineers will bail and a vicious downward spiral will begin. This is why I am never surprised when government sponsored information system re-writes spend millions of dollars and never finish (California DMV).
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Re:Huh? (Score:4, Interesting)
You should try to read How Software Companies Die [zoion.com] by Orson Scott Card. A short essay on the same subject as GP. Really nice.
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Re:Huh? (Score:5, Interesting)
We weren't in Silicon Valley, but our company ended like this: By 1999 we had grown to two offices and about 70 employees, had an award winning retail product and an online mall. We we're still private. After about 5 unsuccessful tries at getting VC, a Canadian company who processed credit card payments offered to buy us for ~$43M USD. They wanted our mall, so that they could make money in about 6 different ways from it. When the sale was announced but not complete, my stock was worth about $1.8M at their current stock price :) Unfortunately, they missed the point that our retail software was what generated the stores in the mall. As soon as the sale went through in 2000, they stopped development and sales of the retail product, laid off about 30% of us, and then gave the remaining people really stupid things to do for about a year while they slowly figured out what went wrong. At this point I was worth about $800K. :| For 6 months all I did was get paid >$100K/yr to drink coffee, smoke cigarettes, and surf the web. Eventually there was a meeting at which they admitted that their business and our business (now basically dead) were irreconcilably different, and announced they were shutting down all US operations. I was on the street Jan 1, 2001, and my stock was now worth $1200 :( Incredibly, when a group of us that had worked on the retail product approached them asking if we could retain the source, trademarks, remaining stock, etc., with the intent of reviving it, we were told that they would never allow us to do this because it "would look bad to the stockholders". As if blowing $43M didn't look bad enough? D'oh!!
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Blaming the Govt. Strawman (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Blaming the Govt. Strawman (Score:5, Insightful)
As for the talent leaving, that happens in any merger because, once again, people hate uncertainty. If someone is facing a lot of uncertainty in his job, and has the ability to go elsewhere, he will probably do so. Ironically, the people most likely to move on are often the ones that would have been the most likely to be kept by the new company anyway, since they tend to be the top talent.
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Re:Blaming the Govt. Strawman (Score:4, Insightful)
But anyone in that position knows that those assurances aren't worth the air breathed to utter them.
Given today's job market, if you're in an uncertain position, and you get a good offer elsewhere that seems more certain -- you take it.
What happens if the regulators deny the merger application? If you've stuck around, now you're in a lame-duck company and you can see your employer has lost a large portion of your customer base to IBM.
What happens if the merger is accepted? At least now you've got a chance of your employer taking advantage of Oracle's sales & marketing force, etc. That is, if you're not let go as a result of the merger.
In short, employees are leaving Sun because they don't like uncertainty. Never mind the customers leaving Sun for the same reason (amongst other reasons).
The length of time it's taking for the review process is definitely a factor.
That said, I think the review is important, and I hope it's taking so long because of thoroughness, not because of some stupid attempt to hamstring American companies.
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Re:Blaming the Govt. Strawman (Score:4, Interesting)
lulz. That's true of any union. Go look up "softwood lumber," "corn," and "steel," among many, many (many, many, many) other disputes the US is involved in.
Americans don't seem to realize what a "global economy" truly entails.
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Re:Blaming the Govt. Strawman (Score:5, Informative)
Americans don't seem to realize what a "global economy" truly entails.
I think you're making an apples to oranges comparison. The average american doesn't know much about business. The average american also doesn't own a business that competes in a global marketplace. A business owner that does compete in a global marketplace is aware of these issues, because s/he must. his/her place of birth doesn't change this.
The European Union's economic policies are designed to benefit business owners in Europe, just as the United States' economic policies are designed to benefit business owners here. Where these interests coincide favorably, there is cooperation (intellectual property, globalization, etc.). Where they do not (monopolies, taxation, etc.) there is not cooperation. Both sides state they strive for "fair", "open", and/or "unbiased" markets, but privately they strive to provide a benefit for their members, which sometimes results in "fair", "open", and "unbiased" markets, and sometimes does not.
The issue here is that the EU is motivated by a need for cultural integrity -- whereas their competition (the United States) does not bring a need for cultural integrity to the negotiation table. The end result is that US businesses are paying for the EU member nations' need for cultural integrity as a condition of competition within the European marketplace. Evaluating the correctness of each position is left as an excercise for the reader.
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Two different things (Score:4, Interesting)
There seem to be two points in the article and summary. The one that makes sense is that the slowness of the merger is murdering Sun's business. The other is that the slowness is causing people to leave. I doubt the latter is true. People do not want to work for Oracle, fast merge or slow merge.
Oracle is OK (Score:5, Informative)
My two cents: It doesn't suck to work at Oracle. Pay is fair and above market, benefits are good, employees are treated fairly, and there are a lot of exciting projects going on to choose from as a techie. If you don't like what you're doing for a living, there are numerous opportunities always available in something more suited to your interest, and telecommuting is encouraged in most "talent" positions, so relocation is largely a non-issue. The employees I work with (admittedly, we're a rack-monkey and operating system nerd crowd) are generally optimistic and excited about the merger.
Yes, as part of the M&A process there have been layoffs from time to time. With the exception of hostile takeovers, they are fairly predictable in advance, severance is decent and fair, the door remains open if you decide to rejoin the company later, and as far as a huge Fortune 500 company goes, it's a really decent place to work. If you work in some of the larger locations there are nice benefits on-site for free or at really reduced prices (gyms, cafeterias, massages, to name a few), and there is a lot of employment flexibility.
Of course there are annoyances like paperwork, lengthy project approval processes, ITIL compliance, SOX compliance, and so forth. Welcome to working for any large company. But to say "People do not want to work for Oracle, fast merge or slow merge" is simply false. By and large, it's a good company to work for, and the low turnover rate and lengthy average employment time amongst extremely talented and well-educated people speaks to overall job satisfaction.
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Re:Oracle is OK (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:Oracle is OK (Score:4, Insightful)
Ever try to do GIS in a key-value store? Statistical analysis? Data mining? Billing?
Key value stores are great for high throughput applications that have very simple and predictable access modes. But for anything else, you are much better of with a RDBMS.
The front line customer apps is not where the money is. It never was, and it never will.
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Re:Oracle is OK (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem isn't being an Oracle employee, it's being an Oracle customer. That seems to be a seriously negative experience for a lot of people.
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This is a bullshit reason for delaying it (Score:4, Informative)
If the EU is actually delaying anything over this, then they're either doing it for political reasons or out of incredible incompetence. MySQL is open source and has already been forked. So what if Oracle gets ahold of the IP behind MySQL?! They cannot close source MariaDB, Drizzle, etc.
So what? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:So what? (Score:5, Interesting)
but ever since the rise of Linux as a viable alternative to Unix, Sun has been floundering about looking for a viable business model.
That wasn't it. Sun's failures have less to do with linux and probably more to do with marketing taking over the company and messing with the expensive, but rock solid, hardware their clients came to trust -- and replacing them with cheaper variants. When they did this they gambled their niche for larger margins, and they lost. The "rise of Linux" wouldn't even make it as a footnote in the story of the fall of Sun. Linux may have been on servers 10 years ago, but these installations were a joke compared to AIX and Solaris installations at the time. Only in the last few years has linux even come within striking distance of AIX and Solaris... and no, Linux has not yet surpassed what serious admins have come to expect from AIX and Solaris afa uptimes, i.e. staying up under heavy crushing loads.
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Say what? (Score:5, Informative)
It's almost fitting considering how some of Sun's best customers were left out in the cold with bad CPUs and RAM, while Sun lawyers (waving signed NDAs in hand) were more prevelent than Sun Support engineers. Remember all the press about that? What, you don't? It's because it was silenced by Sun.
Re:Say what? (Score:4, Interesting)
My experience working in Sun Services, taking care of Gold and Platinium level customers...
The ECC fiasco with the Blackbirds and following revisions was the bookcase example of how not to treat your customers. Customers were lied to, then lied to some more, then received defective pulls as replacement after 2 errors on the same CPU, then lied some more. Until the scrubber patch got released, my average customer had 2 CPU swaps per week.
Receiving defective pulls for customers was the norm rather than the exception... sometimes the customer's own defective parts from the previous intervention, RMA box still sealed but with a "tested OK" sticker magically applied on top of the red "DEFECTIVE" sticker. This applied to disks, memory, CPUs, motherboards... all parts really. Making things worse, the standard procedure was to have the parts delivered directly at the customer... so the engineer didn't get a chance to check for DOAs beforehand.
In the end, the only trick was to order a batch of replacement parts in the hope of having a working one delivered at the customer. Said trick would of course end up damaging your score for the next evaluation... but so would an unsatisfied customer lodging a complaint for substandard support. I gave up, moved to Professional Services then to Pre-sales before leaving.
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Nice bit of jingoism there... (Score:5, Insightful)
..the European Commission, which seems to get off on abusing American firms...
Oh, horseshit. I've worked in American companies with European offices for years and have seen no such thing. Europeans are just as happy to take American dollars as anyone else. The EC countries do, however, have rather more stringent antitrust laws than the United States (and more consumer protections, more privacy laws, and so on). If you do business in a country, you have to respect their laws, just as European countries doing business in the US have to respect our laws (or our lawlessness in many matters). That Microsoft and Oracle -- two companies that are hardly well-loved here -- have had trouble in Europe hardly constitutes a pattern of "abusing American firms".
It may be that the real issue here is that Oracle, like Microsoft, gets off on anti-competitive practices, and as a result often finds itself up against laws against the same, in Europe as well as the US.
Re:European Commission SUCKS (Score:5, Insightful)
Perhaps, it's just that the European Commission is just slightly less beholden to corporations than their counterparts in the US.
As far as I can tell their slowness to sign on to other corporatist things coming from the US has been a pretty good thing.
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Re:European Commission SUCKS (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:European Commission SUCKS (Score:5, Funny)
You lose your geek card, please hand it over.
NEVER misquote Yoda.
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Re:European Commission SUCKS (Score:5, Funny)
Misquoting Yoda cry baby Jesus makes.
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Re:European Commission SUCKS (Score:5, Funny)
Slashdot user 1049312 tells Slashdot user 926 to hand in his geek card. I never thought I'd see the day.
Although really, the correct syntax is "Geek card you lose. Hand it over you must."
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Re:European Commission SUCKS (Score:4, Informative)
If they didn't care about selling in Europe they could just ignore them and cease operations there. I don't see it being worth it to either oracle or sun for that to happen.
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Re:European Commission SUCKS (Score:5, Informative)
You could argue that in-depth oversight hurts businesses, but it's a common fallacy here to attribute it to Anti-Americanism, even though there's ample evidence that European and Asian country are often hit just as harshly as American ones. See for example the then-highest cartel fine [glassonweb.com] against countries from Belgium, the UK and Japan.
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Re:Meh. (Score:5, Insightful)
So, are you saying American businesses are too stupid to avoid bad business situations? You make it sound as if you think of Europe as our enemy, rather than our staunchest allies. I mean, how DARE they provide better health care for less money than we do and make our capitalist health care system look bad? How DARE they get 32 hour work weeks with minimum one month of vacation. Here we are, working our asses off, and we aren't any happier than them for it. The bottom 80% of our society aren't any richer for it, either. That's just not fair, and obviously, they are evil for not fellating their owning class like we do. Why, if they aren't stopped, our peasantry might just get uppity ideas on their heads and start thinking they should get a share in our increase in GDP.
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Re:Meh. (Score:4, Informative)
I'll take it [photius.com]. At least if it's France (#1), Italy (#2), Belgium (#21), or really anywhere better than the US (#37). Forget the talk show "rah rah rah U-S-A U-S-A" nonsense. If you think the US health care system is legitimately "the best", tell me by which measure.
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Re:Really? Got any evidence? (Score:4, Informative)
Compare that to fines levied against European companies and you will see that there is no difference. You were flagged troll for your content-free angry pro-American karma pandering. You thought you'd get a quick karma boost from anti-socialist, libertarian, and pro-American moderators, which you may yet get if you stop whining and present some actual facts. Cherry-picked anecdotes don't count, give us some figures to back up your butt-hurt position.
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Re:Really? Got any evidence? (Score:4, Insightful)
You are trying to make your case by presenting one side. You've shown absolutely nothing to prove that the EU does not do the same thing to EU companies. You have also not shown that the US companies did not deserve the criminal and civil sanctions they received.
Oh, and Boeing doesn't need Airbus flight software, Boeing's is better. Yet we don't see Boeing getting hit by the EU.
Just out of curiosity, your citations are so one sided, where are you getting your data from? Does Fox News have a Two Minute Hate spot on the nasty socialist EU nowadays?
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Re:Really? Got any evidence? (Score:5, Insightful)
But $1.5B is in proportion to the fines given to some European companies. (And EU companies are fined by the EU, but it doesn't make the news in the USA.)
(PS Post in ~4 hours when all us Europeans are asleep, and the Americans will mod you up.)
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Re:Really? Got any evidence? (Score:5, Informative)
So? The EC fined Telefónica (a spanish telco) with 150 millions. And the fined EON (german) and GDF (french) with 550 millions each one for being a cartel. And the fined 11 european and japanese companies with 750 millions (including 330 millions for siemens, which is german).
And in my opinion, the EC is just doing what EEUU should do but doesn't.
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Re:Really? Got any evidence? (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes. Shipping WMP with Windows was a crime, as was not providing a browser choice tool. Anti-competitive actions taken by a monopoly are a crime in most jurisdictions. The EU has gone after plenty of European companies for the same things.
Your post is yet more fact free jingoism.
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relevance (Score:5, Insightful)
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How, exactly, should a Silicon Valley legend end? (Score:4, Funny)
In a cathartic orgy of violence in the third act, in which everyone dies except the narrator, who is finally revealed to be an obscure character who was shown briefly in the second episode and everyone forgot about in the meantime.
Oh, sorry, I was reading TVTropes.
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Re:IBM strategy (Score:4, Informative)
You're blatantly wrong here. The reason the IBM - SUN merger didn't go through is because SUN walked away from the deal.
http://www.internetnews.com/bus-news/article.php/3813841/ [internetnews.com]
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Re:What's EC got to do with it? (Score:5, Insightful)
How can the European Commission block the merger of two US firms?
The short answer is that they can't. The companies are free to go ahead and merge without receiving EU permission. They are also free to not sell anything in the EU or be fined heavily if they attempt to do so. I doubt that Oracle wants to give up this lucrative market.
Why do so many of my fellow Americans have trouble understanding this? Are you dense? Governments do this sort of thing. They actually want to have a say about what gets sold in their countries and by whom. And, frankly, what you think of the practice is irrelevant, unless you can get enough people to agree to convince our government to negotiate a treaty or declare war, since you have no voice in any government but that of the US. Suck it up...
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