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Apple Businesses

Most Sun Employees Own Macs 164

An anonymous user writes, "Most Sun Microsystems employees use Apple when they're not at work. This leaves Jonathan Schwartz, executive vice-president of Sun's software group, hinting at a Sun/Apple partnership." This comes on the heels of Pat Gelsinger, senior VP and chief technology officer of Intel, claiming Apple makes the wrong decisions about CPUs. So it figures Sun, who Intel likely thinks wouldn't know a good processor if it came up and -- um, processed something, would like Macs.
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Most Sun Employees Own Macs

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  • I just wannted to be the first to say it on this thread. ;-)
  • Quel Suprise! (Score:3, Insightful)

    by darkov ( 261309 ) on Wednesday August 06, 2003 @11:24AM (#6626408)
    Apple make personal computers and Sun make mostly server machines. It's not really that suprising.
    • Apple also makes the rack mounted X-Serve, and has OS-X Server.
      • Yes, but where are you going to find an Apple server that scalable to 64 processors? I think Apple has a lot of headroom in their capability, but a deal with Sun would sure bootstrap them.

        OTOH, if they come out with a quad-processor G5 machine (rumor started just this minute), they would be well on the way to showing capability in the enterprise server market. Considering the small relative marketshare for large Sun servers, Apple probably wouldn't need them.
      • Which you can be quite sure is not what the Sun employees we're talking about own.
    • Apple make personal computers and Sun make mostly server machines. It's not really that suprising

      Sun makes mostly server machines because Linux PCs have taken away their workstation market. Between Linux's cost and Apple's ease of use Sun has little chance of retaking this market.
  • by ProfessionalCookie ( 673314 ) on Wednesday August 06, 2003 @11:24AM (#6626411) Journal
    Does this mean we're looking forward to a new brand of "Dried Apple" computers!?!!?
    >
    ...ok that was a really really bad joke, fortunatly this is slashdot so it's sure to get modded up. PS Can you find the misspelling?
    • by Anonymous Coward
      I can't find her. In fact, I haven't seen her in weeks. If you do find her, tell her I said "Hi."
  • 4-5 years ago, there were rumors of Sun buying Apple. But then again, there were also rumors of IBM buying Apple.
  • More Interesting ... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by kalidasa ( 577403 ) * on Wednesday August 06, 2003 @11:25AM (#6626417) Journal
    Is their take on SCO:

    Jonathan Schwartz, executive vice-president of Sun's software group, also said that a broad software-license deal struck with AT&T in the late 1990s allowed the company to inject whatever code it wanted into the Linux kernel. Schwartz pledged to indemnify its customers against any lawsuits by the SCO Group or another supplier.

    I'm hoping that the author of the piece confused Linux and UNIX, and not Jonathan Schwartz, as I don't see how a deal struck with AT&T could be relevant to Linux, which isn't AT&T's IP.

    I'm also wondering what form the "indemnifying" would take. Maybe just a guarantee that if Mad Hatter licenses are invalidated by the SCO lawsuit, Sun will provide an alternative UNIX operating system?

    • by pmz ( 462998 )
      I'm hoping that the author of the piece confused Linux and UNIX...

      I think the confusion may have been "late 1990s" versus early 1990s. From what I've read, Sun did outlay a buttload of money for an above-average UNIX license, where they can stand behind their claim to imdemnify Sun customers. However, my take on the whole thing was that Solaris customers and not necessarily Linux customers would be protected. But the mention of injecting code into the Linux kernel has confused me, again, on the whole m
    • by Otter ( 3800 ) on Wednesday August 06, 2003 @12:11PM (#6626817) Journal
      Seemed straightforward enough -- Sun licensed the right to use Unix code from AT&T, before SCO bought it. They're asserting that their new Linux-based products are therefore OK for any Unix code that might be in there.

      No idea on the legal merits of that argument, but I don't get what your objection is.

      • but I don't get what your objection is.

        The IP on Linux the kernel isn't owned by SCO, it's owned by Linus Torvalds and the contributing developers to the Linux kernel as licensed under the GPL. SCO's license doesn't cover what Sun can do with the GPL. So unless they are saying that SCO's license to Sun permits Sun to add SCO code to Linux and release that code under the GPL, Sun would have to release the product with SCO code in it under a different license, which Linux won't allow. Now if it is true tha

        • You keep using the name SCO, but I thought your first post (haven't finished reading the article) mentions that Sun licensed from AT&T *before* SCO bought the rights...

          So why does SCO even matter in this arrangement, other than the enforcer of the rights that Sun bought from AT&T?

          AT&T gives Sun the right to the code
          Sun injects said code into Linux *or* has the right to
          SCO buys rights to code/IP outright
          SCO claims SCO's newfound IP has contaminated Linux and demands reparations
          Sun contends that
          • The point he was making is that if Sun was allowed to "enhance" the code with the AT&T code, and they were allowed to distribute the result, then they must have distributed the result under the GPL if they did not violate the IP rights of all the other contributors to the Linux kernel. This would mean this valuable code is now available under the GPL and can be used in any other copies of Linux, including ones from IBM and even from SCO.

            I was going to say this is unlikely, but in fact it is quite poss

  • Yeah, right (Score:4, Insightful)

    by DogIsMyCoprocessor ( 642655 ) <dogismycoprocessor@NOSPam.yahoo.com> on Wednesday August 06, 2003 @11:25AM (#6626424) Homepage
    So it figures Sun, who Intel likely thinks wouldn't know a good processor if it came up and -- um, processed something, would like Macs.

    Quiz questions -

    Which vendor, Sun or Intel, had a 64-bit processor first? By how many years?

    Measuring a "good processor" isn't just about speed.

  • by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 06, 2003 @11:25AM (#6626425)
    Where the hell did they get the statement that "most Sun employees use macs at home"?

    Other than myself, I only know of three other employees that use a mac. One uses his as his primary work machine (other than his Solaris boxes), one has a powerbook that he uses as his portable and is probably not his primary machine, the other - I don't know about him and myself, I just use my powerbook here and there as a portable solution. I wouldn't use a mac as my main or desktop machine. I just wanted a sturdy, simple, reliable laptop and Mac seemed a good choice. Makes it simple for me to access almost any network environment and most services within seconds as opposed to all the trouble a windows box would give me.

    But yeah... I would say that "most employees" is incredibly off base. Not only that, but of those employees that *do* use Macs at home, few probably use them as their main machines.

    Maybe what they really meant was "most Sun *EXECUTIVES* run macs at home"?
  • "We would love to partner with Apple,' he said. "They're everyone's favorite company, and iTunes is really cool."

    That sounds less like a hint of a possible Apple/Sun alliance and more like fanboy-ish daydreaming.

  • ... its so they can run quicktime and not have to screw with windows.

    Truth is it would give them the ability to do all the java and most of the UNIX stuff they do on their Sun boxes at work, only with BSD, yet still allow them to do things like watch quicktime and use IE or Safari. Besides Mac has a way better gui than Sun.

    • by .@. ( 21735 )
      No, truth is that there's a policy that disallows connecting Windows machines to the Sun network from home.

      • policy that disallows connecting Windows machines to the Sun network from home.

        Not at all surprising.

        Most internal corporate networks are, compared to folks that endure the raw net, relatively relaxed (years old vulnerabilities available) behind their firewalls.

        They sure as hell don't want Joe Manager logging in from his home Windows box onto the internal network right after his teenage daughter has been viewing email attachments from all her new "friends".

  • Q. Does the word "profit" play in what technologies you push in Intel?

    A. If technology can do it we will embrace it, even if it means eating our own children.


    Apparently Intel follows an all-to-common business model, which has been scientifically proven to inevitably lead to cannibalism:

    1. Eat children
    2. ? (something about processors)
    3. Profit!
  • by BortQ ( 468164 ) on Wednesday August 06, 2003 @11:29AM (#6626456) Homepage Journal
    There have been rumors of this ilk popping around forever. They don't seem to mirror reality though. If you look at the actual relations between sun and apple they are a tortured affair. Witness apple's non-licensing of sun technologies like Java3D or JAI.

    If you look into it, you'll just find sun blaming apple and apple blaming sun. So while a 'partnership' would probably be very cool, I just don't see it happening without some drastic changes taking place first.

  • by pmz ( 462998 ) on Wednesday August 06, 2003 @11:53AM (#6626679) Homepage
    This doesn't suprise me. Really, the only reason UltraSPARC III isn't blasting away everyone else, I believe, is due to manufacturing constraints. Excusing Sun's very low-end equipment, such as the Ultra 5 workstation, their products are generally very solid, very well engineered, very practical, and not totally off-base on cost (when you do an apples-to-apples comparison (was that a pun?)).

    It is very understandable why they would prefer Mac OS over Windows, and Macintosh computers over white-box PCs.

    • the only reason UltraSPARC III isn't blasting away everyone else, I believe, is due to manufacturing constraints.

      UltraSPARC III would have been a great chip if it were released when Sun originally planned, instead of two years later.

      Makers of superior CPU technology are probably hitting themselves in the stomach because Intel, with huge money for fabs, was able to get enough performance per dollar to dominate the industry, merely to fritter it all away on the Itanic.

      Ah, if only the designers of Alpha,

  • From the EWeek article: "Whatever Microsoft's last quote is, we'll be half that," Schwartz said.

    This is awesome. Sun is using Open Source to its fullest, here, where packaging, branding, and support are used to take a figurative 2x4 to the back of Microsoft's figurative head. Even if there is only luke-warm adoption of MadHatter, the impact on pricing industry-wide will be a win for everyone.
  • by nortcele ( 186941 ) on Wednesday August 06, 2003 @12:06PM (#6626786) Homepage
    - Take home Sun Blade
    - Install Solaris 9
    - Realize that getting the box to halfway resemble the functionality of your Sun box at work would take two onsite admins...
    - Take the Sun Blade back
    - Buy an Apple (cause its Unix and media capable)
    - Profit$$

    Remember, there's a reason that your local Sun admin doesn't have a Sun box at his house... (s)he's worked darn hard at getting the applications working off the network at work. Why would they want have to duplicate their efforts at home on the hardware and network they can afford? For what? It's just cheaper and easier to go Apple with the same satisfaction. Of course, if Linux and OSX did not exist and Windows was the only option... Sun employees would have Sun boxes at home. Even if it was just a Sparc2 running SunOS 4.1.1.

    • I'm an admin and I have a 2 Sun boxes at home (well, okay, one is a Cobalt Qube, but the other is a Sun pancake box). Depends what you want to use it for... do I use the suns for a desktop? No. Do I use them to serve webpages and do email and such. Yup. Solaris has never been targeted at the consumer desktop. I administer 100+ suns at work and I don't even use one as my desktop there (use Linux)... the engineers of course, are stuck. :)
    • by v_1matst ( 166486 ) on Wednesday August 06, 2003 @01:13PM (#6627255) Homepage
      I totally agree with this. Being a Solaris admin I have to say that last thing I want to do when I get home is sit in front of another Sun box and do my job all over again. I do own a Powerbook (running OSX) as my primary home computer and love it. Everything 'just works' which is exactly what I want to have happen after screwing with some LDAP problem or something all day.
      • by Polo ( 30659 ) * on Wednesday August 06, 2003 @01:41PM (#6627457) Homepage
        What if you sat at a Mac all day...

        Would you crave the excitement of configuring a sun box or some obscure linux distribution? ;)
        • by pmz ( 462998 ) on Wednesday August 06, 2003 @03:48PM (#6628441) Homepage
          Would you crave the excitement of configuring a sun box or some obscure linux distribution? ;)

          Buying a used Sun workstation and the media kit/RTU license for Solaris 9 is a great way to learn UNIX. The bundled documentation is thorough, and there is a strong on-line Sun community (fan sites, newsgroups, news sites, etc.).

          Actually, the software and documentation that comes in the Solaris box set is sufficient for a motivated person to get Sun Certified with no outside help, such as training classes. However, I would recommend buying a book for the Sun Certified Network Admin exam (it's much less clear-cut than the System Admin exams).
        • Occasionally... if you give me a SPARC I will feel the urge to configure it :-) but to answer the question: Nothing can tempt you very far away from OSX, you get spoilt baaadly. Nice *consistent* GUI, BSD shell to configures&&make all&&make install to your hearts content, what more do you need?(My X11 nostaligia is limited)
        • I used to sit behind a mac all day as a sys admin. Chatted a lot, drank way too much coffee and played games most of the time. I'd go home and do something else on and odd occasion tinker with my mac for a bit.

          Then I made the mistake of taking a job with PCs which paid more money. One of my home macs now lives on my work desk and is the only thing there keeping me sane. There's been talk about disallowing me use of my own machine at work. If this actually happens I'll think i'll start looking for another j
        • Actually, I've been in the situation and the answer is "Yes". Now that the Mac is at home and the big, complex network is at work, when I come home I want nothing to do with dicking with anything after a day's work.
    • by elmegil ( 12001 ) on Wednesday August 06, 2003 @01:51PM (#6627537) Homepage Journal
      Actually it is a huge surprise. I work for Sun in the field. Maybe the folks back in corporate are all mac heads, but I'm one of only two or three of the several dozen field folks in my major metro that I know owns a mac. And I know many others who have PC's like so many other people, both here and around the country.

      Sounds to me like this is just spin to try and push towards that nebulous partnership with Apple by giving them some good press. Oh, and did I mention I own more PCs than macs still?

      With regard to running SPARCs at home, that's just silliness. You don't run much quicken, unreal tournament, etc. on Solaris. It has nothing to do with "how hard" it is to get applications working on Solaris, it's that I have no need to run Oracle or Pro/E or a major webservice at home.

      As for Sun not knowing CPUs, if that's really what Intel thinks, they're stupider than their history makes them out to be. Sun "inherited" a bunch of talented CPU people from other companies that have joined the dustbin of history, and have had a few of our own along the way as well. How much longer than Intel have we had a working 64 bit architecture?

      • by pmz ( 462998 )
        With regard to running SPARCs at home, that's just silliness.

        Eh? Solaris 9 + StarOffice + Netscape 7 makes a very viable home computer for people who don't mind tinkering a bit. It's really no worse than Linux, other than GNUCash won't link on Solaris 9 for some very obscure reason (stupid libtool).

        Add a used SunPCi card (AMD K6 PC on a PCI card), and you can also run Windows or, with a little work, Linux x86 simultaneously with Solaris.

        Add a PlayStation for gaming.

        It works for me :)
        • by elmegil ( 12001 ) on Wednesday August 06, 2003 @04:53PM (#6629031) Homepage Journal
          For those that wants it, more power to ya. But the criticism was about the claim that the average Sun admin/employee wouldn't want to come home and do "even more work" on a Sun box at home. Most of us who don't run Solaris at home (well I do, but only for work at home purposes) are not avoiding it because it's "too much work" but because it's not optimal. If you *want* to tinker all the time, hey that's great, but I wouldn't expect the majority of Sun employees to want to do that tinkering. In fact, reality is, the majority of Sun employees aren't techies--Sun employs a bunch of sales people, managers, administrative workers of all sorts, none of whom are expected to be techies, most of whom aren't in reality techies, so why would they do techie things at home?
  • Here are two exerpts from the article. I guess MSFT'ites must suffer with CPU upgrades to get the bennies from their ongoing hardware improvements. Another prime example of an "Apple Peeler".

    Q. Did Steve Jobs make the right chip decision, choosing IBM for his upcoming G5 processor, or will Apple be missing out on some pretty hot Intel technology.

    A. I think Steve Jobs has made the wrong CPU choice for 20 years, he just added a few more years to the life of his bad decisions. Steve's not an illogical gu
  • Duh... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by analog_line ( 465182 ) on Wednesday August 06, 2003 @12:41PM (#6627013)
    So, the senior VP and chief technology officer of Intel, a company that Apple has refused to use the flaship processor from for years, thinks Apple not using the chips they make money on is a bad idea?

    And this is supposed to be at all surprising or interesting?
  • by Llywelyn ( 531070 ) on Wednesday August 06, 2003 @12:53PM (#6627104) Homepage
    Let's see... the senior VP and CTO of /Intel/ announced that they made the wrong processor choice for the Mac 20 years ago... ...and in other news, Microsoft has announced that no-one in their right mind uses Linux and that Windows is far superior at everything.

    Seriously, I would love to see his /technical/ reasons for his statement. Comparing the two, head to head:

    68000:
    32-bit instruction set (minimum 16-bit instructions).
    32-bit registers.
    16-bit ALU.
    8 MHz in 1984.
    8 general purpose registers, 8 address registers.

    80286:
    16-bit ALU.
    4 16-bit general purpose registers, could be used as 8 8-bit registers.
    6-8 MHz in 1984.

    I'm not seeing the appeal.

    When the 601 came out it also had more than an edge on the Pentium and I sincerely doubt that the Pentium could have emmulated (with its speed, instruction set, and number of registers) the 68k instruction set anywhere close to the speed of the first PowerPCs...

    Where exactly is the /Intel Representative/ getting this idea?
    • I agree that the 68k was a better processor and at the time my Mac was a dream to use in lieu of the damned 80286. I did some programming on the PowerPC 601 and the systems that ran the 601 were so slow that I nearly threw them out of the computer lab every day. We ran Codewarrior on some 601 PowerPCs and it took minutes to compile a simple program that just showed a single dialog panel. The reason the PEntium beat the PowerPC had nothing to do with the PowerPC and everything to do with Windows 95 being
    • If you look back then everyone that had a choice did not use the Intel x86 chips. Only people that had to have PC compatability used them. The 68k was found in everything from Laser printers to Sun workstations. Intel lives because of WinTel PCs. One wonders what kind of systems we would have if as much money could be thrown at the PowerPC, ARM, Alpha, or even the Sparc.
  • I was in Palo Alto doing a job at Stanford back in mid 2000. Went out to eat at a little Italian place just down from the Cardinal Hotel (who was doing 802.11b in the hotel way back then), and overheard some engineers from Sun talking shop (blah blah Sparc blahblah Solaris blah). I went over and asked them what they thought of Mac OS X. They pooh-poohed it saying Mach was a crappy kernel, the PowerPC was a dead-end, blah blah Objective-C bad blah, and other things. I'm just a lowly Network Admin for who
  • Schwartzland (Score:3, Insightful)

    by fm6 ( 162816 ) on Wednesday August 06, 2003 @05:25PM (#6629269) Homepage Journal
    Some history on Jonathan Schwartz is semi-relevent. He was the CEO of Lighthouse Design a company that made NextStep apps. When that platform went away, LD got swallowed by Sun, which wanted LD to rewrite its apps in Java so they'd run on Network Devices. When that platform went away, LD got dispersed throughout Sun, and Schwartz somehow managed to survive the death match that is Sun upper management.

    I can understand his fondness for Macs, since OS X is more or less a successor to NextStep. But very few programmers, even at Apple, are fans of the NextStep API. And I'm skeptical as to whether there are as many Mac fans at Sun as he says, or whether this translates into any kind of Sun/Apple synnergy.

    Besides, this sort of thing has been tried before. That's why JavaSoft and Taligent were headquartered accross the street from Apple. The clash of egos was always fatal.

    • Re:Schwartzland (Score:3, Interesting)

      by wchin ( 6284 )

      fm6 wrote:

      But very few programmers, even at Apple, are fans of the NextStep API.

      That's simply not true. At this year's WWDC, Cocoa was everywhere and developers, both inside and 3rd party were definitely digging in. Most code examples were given in both Cocoa and Carbon (where relevant). Now, Carbon isn't going away, and there are many other choices, but Cocoa has definitely caught on. iPhoto, iMovie, iCal, AddressBook, iSync (and large portions of the Bluetooth stack), iChat, Safari, Quicktime Broadca

      • Aside from Apple people I've talked to (and except for the old Rhapsody team, they're pretty negative), I go by the history of the API. First it was the native API for the NextStep cube. When that product failed, it became the native API for the NextStep OS. When that product failed, it became an API layer on Solaris. And when that product failed, the NextStep CEO and the Apple CEO (who happened to be the same person) agreed that Apple should buy NextStep and use the OS to restart its moribund OS effort. No
        • Re:Schwartzland (Score:5, Informative)

          by Graymalkin ( 13732 ) * on Thursday August 07, 2003 @05:16AM (#6633308)
          Your history is a little off unfortunately. Before the NeXT acquisition Apple had been working on the successor to MacOS 7, called Copland. The idea behind Copland was to get rid of all the cruft that no one used or no one was supposed to be using anymore. Copland was intended to run classic Mac applications in an emulation environment akin to Classic on OSX. Copland-aware apps were going to be the equivilent of Carbon apps in OSX now. They would be preemptive and have protected memory spaces. They would also be allowed to create real threads.

          After about two years Apple finally killed the Copland project. It was horribly overdue and many of the components were going nowhere. Late in 96 Apple bought NeXT for ?$430m. In January of 97 Steve Jobs was an "advisor" to Apple from the NeXT deal. He was not then actually CEO. Basing Rhapsody (OSX) on NeXTSTEP had been the contingency plan after Copland washed out.

          Basing your opinion of the Cocoa/OpenStep API based on the commercial failure of NeXT hardware is a bit ridiculous. The API is not the reason NeXT hardware sold poorly. NeXTStations were expensive, moreso even than the egregiously overpriced Macs of the time. Breaking into a populated market is difficult at best and impossible at worst. NeXT sold expensive computers with remarkable hardware quality and an awesome OS but no killer app.

          That has nothing to do with the quality of the OpenStep API however. The OpenStep, now Cocoa, API is well designed and very robust. Play around in GNUStep or Cocoa for a little while sometime. The API is easy to work with and very verbose which requires a lot of typing but in the end makes for very easily understood code. Designed to run inside of a host OS, OpenStep is extraordinarily portable and abstracts as much as possible from the developer. The source code in Building Cocoa Applications: A Step by Step Guide by Simson Garfinkle and Michael Mahoney is nearly identical in every way to the code in NeXTSTEP Programming: Step One written by Simson Garfinkle. A lot of the text of the book regarding the applications themselves is also similar if not identical. The only real changes between the two books are OSX or NeXTSTEP specific topics and explanations. Those same examples will Sun's OpenStep implemantation and GNUStep. How the history of the API somehow invalidates those facts I don't seem to understand. Nor does the history show in any way that developers hate working with it.
        • In refutation of this, you offer me enthusiasm at the D&P show.
          I'm not sure what a D&P show means (Desktop & Publishing?), but WWDC stands for WorldWide Developer Conference. I.e. it's a gathering geared at everyone that programs for the Mac OS. That's quite relevant imho.
          • Dog and Pony.

            It's funny -- I got two different responses saying the same thing: "I was at wWDC and everybody there says Cocoa is going to conquer the world!" So you both got blasted by big glossy sales presentations that did exactly what they were supposed to do. That has precisely nothing to do with the quality or acceptance level of an API.

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • by Anonymous Coward
    A Sun-Apple partnership could've been so cool if:

    1. Apple had chosen SPARC back when they switch from 68K

    2. NeXT had chosen SunOS as it's base instead of BSD/Mach

    3. Sun had continued their partnership with NeXT and supported OPENStep on Solaris.

    Solaris and OS X could have been ONE! That would've been way cool! Server to desktop ... everything covered.

    Sigh ...

    -j
  • for everyone running around yelling "Apple + Sun would be so cool!" i want to suggest that maybe you're looking at the wrong company. sure Solaris is my personal favorite of the "Big Iron" unix systems who're still even remotely relevant (Solaris, Irix, AIX, HP-UX). but can anyone see one of the others in that list being a better fit?

    Apple just anounced their G5 chip, based very strongly on IBM's Power 4 architecture. like Sun, IBM makes some damn serious hardware for the high-end market.

    imagine: no issue
  • Come off it. Motorola uses Wintel boxes, but me thinks a Moto/Intel parternership isn't exactly around the corner (not that Moto is exactly thriving at the moment).
  • I laughed so hard when I read that statement. Coming from the Atari world, I laughed probably more than most. I remember quite clearly our platform *spanking* the Intel-based world when we only had 16/33mhz Motorola 68030s vs. Intel 486s running at 66mhz. Intel's philosophy has always been to crank up the CPU and damn any other co-processors or custom chips (outside their failed graphics chips foray), which was the antithesis of the Atari/Amiga and Mac worlds... Of course, my laughter transforms into te

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