After Sun goes out (NewsForge)

Posted Oct 2, 2003 20:18 UTC (Thu) by deatrich (guest, #25)
Parent article: After Sun goes out (NewsForge)

Well, I read Eric's article earlier today. It's a bit doom-and-gloom, but I have to say that I really wonder about Sun. I think one of Sun's big problems is that they are still the dot in the dot-com. That is their problem. The dot-com thing sent them on a tangent, and they have never 'returned'.

Sun needs desperately to refocus. They really need to understand what is going on around them. I can only presume that some people at Sun understand, and have tried (are trying) to push the company back into the right direction. For some years now, Sun has MISunderstood the lay of the (l)intel land. This is the most disturbing part of all. If this was an x-month burp I wouldn't be concerned. However it has been years - they don't get it, they never have. What a sad thing to see a company that was innovative and fresh reduced to this catatonic state.

Just the fact that their attitude and support for solaris-intel has yo-yo-ed to the extent it has is very telling.

Here we have a company that is chalk-a-block full of unix expertise. Reving up their participation in the open-source revolution should be a cakewalk for them! But they keep dropping the ball. Would someone please wrestle their stupid spokespersons to the floor and *gag* them? They simply can't open their mouths without offending the open-source movement, and saying things that are totally ridiculous, and I mean TOTALLY.

Do they _ever_ talk to open-source people to understand why many of us would never install a solaris system (or any other commercial unix system for that matter) if we can get away with an open-source OS? I can't believe how utterly painful it is to install and patch-to-date these damn things - let alone set them up (gnu-ify) so that they are vaguely useful.

I think there is still time for them to get back on track - but not much time. It would help (in my opinion) if they would open-source java. I don't know if it is any longer possible, but it would help. If it is possible, then they should do it now. If they wait for another year, I think it will be too late. Microsoft is behind schedule, and not entirely on-track, with the .Net thingy (hey, their vaunted marketing machine hasn't succeeded here, at least not yet). Sun always had an opportunity here, but not by themselves.. never by themselves.

One thing in their favour: they have launched themselves into the (l)intel world with their (albeit strange) 'Java'* platforms (I saw a Sun presentation recently: a rather purply-gnome experience). They are selling, for example, V6xx intel- based servers for competitive prices. From an intel hardware point-of-view: other *nix vendors and intel/linux wannabees pretty much suck. I am more than a bit fed up with Dell these days; HP seems to be self-destructing (okay, I admit it, I spend _way_ too much time reading theinquirer). It would take VERY LITTLE for me to move away from Dell Linux workstations and servers. Dell's spokespersons are just about as bad as Suns. Their web sites are atrocious. Within some fuzzy price and support range I would be perfectly happy to purchase other red hat linux-installed systems.

There are opportunities here. With all that money in the bank, and with all that *nix expertise, Sun should be able to do an about-face that would set the IT industry back on their heals. Sun? Are you there? Wouldn't it be nice to buy intel-based hardware from a vendor who isn't constantly bending over backwards for Microsoft?

After Sun goes out (NewsForge)

Posted Oct 2, 2003 20:31 UTC (Thu) by smoogen (subscriber, #97) [Link] (2 responses)

Sun isnt going to change until the board and upper executives are gone. Since that isnt ever going to happen.. I have to agree with Eric's bleak painting.

On the Dell article... Dell is right, people werent buying Linux installed desktops at the rate they needed them to. Of course this may have to do with the fact that their Desktop division never wanted to sell any and had to be brought kicking and screaming to the table by the big boss. Their server division has a completely different take on Linux and have sold quite a bit.

On the other hand.. unless they were to sell at least 1 Linux desktop for every 100 windows desktops, they would lose money overall... if they only see sales of 1 Linux desktop for every 1000->10000 desktops.. they wont have to have any sort of incentive to keep selling them.

After Sun goes out (NewsForge)

Posted Oct 2, 2003 20:49 UTC (Thu) by deatrich (guest, #25) [Link] (1 responses)

I guess for Dell that desktop = optiplex.

Maybe they should just stop selling their linux workstations too then. They really annoy me. What annoying person at Dell decided that the default mouse type for a linux workstation is a 2-button mouse? And it seems to be a crap-shoot what you will ulitimately get from their online web-ordering process.

Sorry for the rant, but I have to say that purchasing linux desktops is, and has never been, an enjoyable process. There are opportunities here, really. Some of us just want to avoid the white-box experience, and don't mind paying more.

After Sun goes out (NewsForge)

Posted Oct 2, 2003 21:11 UTC (Thu) by smoogen (subscriber, #97) [Link]

I just dont think that this is where the community of do-it-yourselfers shoot themselves in the foot. I know many organizations that purchase tons of Dell Precisions with windows and then strip out and put Linux on it. The price differential isnt enough for them to have two different procurement methods.

Nit: dot in dot com,

Posted Oct 3, 2003 1:39 UTC (Fri) by kmself (guest, #11565) [Link] (5 responses)

Sun was "the dot in dot-com", literally. They used to run the root DNS nameservers. The DNS root is dot. Not that you could figure this out from the ads... Mind that Sun lost this contract to boot, a couple of years back.

Nit: dot in dot com,

Posted Oct 3, 2003 15:42 UTC (Fri) by Baylink (guest, #755) [Link] (4 responses)

Well, no.

The DNS root servers used to be run by *a lot of different people* -- look at an old root.cache file; isi.edu, PSInet, UMD, ISC, the Army, NORDUnet, etc.... none of whom seem to have been Sun.

And, anyway, the root isn't the "dot in '.com'"... it's the (almost always *implied*) dot *after* .com: "baylink.pitas.com." Truly strictly speaking, it's the *empty space after* that trailing dot, but even I'm not usually that pedantic. (UPS commercial pause) Yes I am.

Now, they're *all* run by Verisign, a topic that is an *extremely* sore sport for DNS junkies... see last weeks' piece about the .com/.net wildcard fiasco.

Well, except for the ORSC roots. Using them, of course, doesn't fix the wildcard problem -- that's in the *GTLD* root servers for com and net... but at least you're not at Verisign/ICANN's worthless behest for other issues -- and I've been using them for 2 years, in production, and haven't ever had a problem.

Nit: dot in dot com,

Posted Oct 4, 2003 9:15 UTC (Sat) by rise (guest, #5045) [Link] (2 responses)

Actually VeriSign runs the .com and .net GTLD servers, the roots are still run by a mess of independent cooperating organizations (of which VeriSign is only one). For example f.root-servers.net is run by the ISC as a distributed virtual server, M by the WIDE project in Tokyo and K by RIPE out of London and Amsterdam. See http://www.root-servers.org/ for all the gory/interesting details. Thanks, by the way, for explaining the null label - after it surfaced in conversation last night I was surprised to note that some very clueful people had no idea it existed.

Nit: dot in dot com,

Posted Oct 6, 2003 16:12 UTC (Mon) by Baylink (guest, #755) [Link] (1 responses)

I'd fallen off the domain lists (when Verisign yanked them with no
notice to avoid litigation some years back); things are less ugly than
I'd thought; thanks.

But to reply to wcooley, no, I don't think that it was ever true that all
the root servers ran on Sun hardware either... I'm fairly sure that
ISC's, in particular, does not.

Sun on the roots

Posted Oct 18, 2003 17:18 UTC (Sat) by shane (subscriber, #3335) [Link]

I can't speak about other roots, but the RIPE NCC's root server (K) ran on Sun boxes for a few months only. The fact is they were too slow to keep up with the load immediately after going on-line. Admittedly this is a failure of the organisation to properly benchmark the hardware required, but it is also not a ringing endorsement of Sun either. ;)

The K root now runs Dell PC's.

Nit: dot in dot com,

Posted Oct 6, 2003 5:22 UTC (Mon) by wcooley (guest, #1233) [Link]

He meant that the root servers were all running on Sun servers, not being run by Sun itself.