1. Sun did not "own" an OS (first they have a version of BSD, then a blend of
sysV) until they got the Solaris nightmare that we still can not have a
general useful system so far (unless you want to pay $$$$$ and change your
working environment).
2. The problem of Sun and other Unix vendors is they want to control the
world, instead of concentrate on what they are best for. I mean every
of them is treying to build their own version of HW, software development
tools, and office products, etc. And none of them are compatible to each
other. By doing it, they effectively killing each other and clean the
road for Microsoft. But they got their closed worlds anyway (You have
different exchange rate inside these worlds).
3. Linux never try to control the world. Instead, it adapts to the world in
a massiveive way (I even not sure how many HWs have been tried to get
Linux running). The main impact is that it adapts to a main stream of
HW: Intel based PC. It takes the ride of PC grows (actually, Microsoft,
too).
4. We've been pushed out of proprietary Unix system (SGI, Sun, etc.) by
these vendor not only because their performance/price ratio, but also
(mainly) by their usability (available software) and raw performance.
Now our main computing servers and software development are migrate to
Linux boxes. Hopefully in the nearly future we can make it to be a
desktop workstation choice. To get there, we need a good suite of office
products which is interoperable with MS office stuff. Given the open
source and "does not want to control the world" nature of Linux, I believe
sooner or later we'll see a major desktop product player will take
Linux as its man platform (maybe Microsoft will do it. Who knows). I don't
see any technical problem to do so.
5. I don't like Windows NT system administration (Win95 or Win98 do not belonng
to here since we don't consider them as stabled office/development
environment) due to its complication of installation and maintenance.
To install a full NT software environment, we need about 3-4 hours and
a dozen of reboots. Compare to it, Linux needs about 10-30 minutes. And
there is no major network installed software architecture yet for NT.
Almost everything has to be local (count your DLLs and figure out how to
deal with them manually).
6. I've been doing programming on different Unices (none of them are the same) and
DOS. And now I've benn considered as MS Windows software developer, besides
my other duties. My pick is to get the best development environment which
has easy access to many software gadgets which make me more productive and
have fun. Given that, Microsoft/Visual Studio become top of the choice (thanks
to millions of developers out there writting stuff on it). But the bad part is
that you have to get the code back to Linux to get the heavy computing work done.
Hopefully there is a comparable dev. tools to compete with MS.
7. I develop software on Windows since our customer want it. I use MS tools
since they make me more productive (after you paid for them: HW, software,
and time to get them work). I like Linux since it's the only choice to
make my scientific experiment done on time (if you don't want to pay $$$$$).
I love Linux since it gives me a chance to look what's going on inside.
I adapt to all these!
8. What's next, Java? Neural computer?
-- QZ
"Robert G. Brown" wrote:
>
>
>
> This sort of stuff is why I gave up Sparcs. A simple story may be
> instructive that isn't totally inappropriate for linux-smp as it points
> out some of the reasons that linux has succeeded as strongly as it has.
> It also shows why I am absolutely certain that linux (and freebsd;-)
> will "eat Microsoft alive" over the next few years. Here are my
> shameful confessions:
>
> "My name is Rob Brown and I - uhh -- used to like Suns" he said, his
> unshaved face grizzled with greying hairs, and his watery blue eyes
> somehow forlorn as they swept across the understanding faces of the
> folks sitting in the ring of chairs that surrounded him...
>
> Yes folks, I used to be a rabid Sun-Lover, mostly because some years ago
> SunOS 4.x.x was the BEST (Unix) operating system distribution available
> on any platform -- it was the direct heir of BSD Unix, and Sun's
> scheduler was tuned to provide excellent interactive performance even on
> a heavily loaded system (given, of course, a 3-15 MIP processor). They
> were also not all that expensive compared to the general run of
> workstations with a standard 40% University discount.
>
> Sun then made several REALLY DUMB strategic mistakes. Each of these
> mistakes created market circumstances that would ultimately cost Sun
> what by now has probably grown to close to $100 Billion. They also,
> incidentally, led to the creation and evolution of linux. It is worth
> understanding this.
>
> First, there was a brief shining moment back in the mid to late 80's
> where Sun had a version of SunOS that would run on Intel CPUs -- my
> first Sun box was actually a Sun 386i. True, the 386i was a "custom"
> piece of overpriced hardware with a number of significant flaws (tell me
> about 'em!). Still, they had WRITTEN the core assembler for the CPU,
> they had PORTED a C variant of the SunOS sources, they had a compiler,
> they had built a standard set of applications (and pretty much anything
> written for SunOS would build without tweaking on a 386i) and they had
> device drivers for at least their custom SCSI interface, ethernet, and a
> frame buffer. They were in a great position to build what, a handful of
> device drivers (IDE, VGA, ethernet for at least one card) and sell a
> version of SunOS that would run on a "standard" 386 PC with 4 or more
> megabytes of memory for $50. Sunview and all.
>
> Had they done so, Sun would "own" the software/OS world now, just like
> Microsoft does instead. I mean, who would have bought Windows 3.0 with
> no compiler, no software, a need to run on top of DOS, no real
> multitasking, no real networking, etc. when they could have bought
> SunOS, a real Unix, with ALL of the above and a huge library of public
> domain applications even BEFORE the stampede ensued to write
> applications? Nobody. Not corporations, not consumers. Sun could have
> been the "Turbo Pascal" of mass market operating systems with an
> absolutely insurmountable lead over Microsoft (or anybody else) and
> would have made far more money from selling software than they ever made
> from selling hardware.
>
> Linux, of course, would never have been born, or if Linus had gone ahead
> and written linux even with a cheap, popular, and universal Unix for
> PCs, it would have had a much harder time attracting all the programmers
> and talent that now contribute to it (at the time I'm speaking of, they
> were all writing PD software that was typically built to run under
> SunOS).
>
> Instead, Sun gave Microsoft YEARS to build a real multitasking operating
> system and smoothly transition an immense mass of corporate software and
> systems from one shit operating system to another while gradually
> increasing both cost, profit, and functionality. Talk about dumb.
>
> Second, Sun failed to differentiate between "kernel" and "distribution"
> when they released Solaris. I won't get into an argument about whether
> Solaris is technically superior to SunOS. Frankly, SunOS was quite
> excellent UP, and SunOS SMP was very similar to linux 2.0.x (single
> kernel lock but excellent userspace multiprocesser-ing). I think that
> the tremendous success of linux 2.0.x even today clearly shows that a
> refined kernel spinlock, while clearly important, is far less important
> than people imagine from the point of view of producing a stable and
> usable and satisfactory system for MANY different purposes. And
> besides, I could care less if Sun improved their kernel or even changed
> kernel paradigms, as long as it continued to properly function.
>
> So, Sun decided to convert to SysV-type kernels to get "threads". This
> was just great by me -- if it boots and runs smooth the paradigm doesn't
> matter to users or administrators, only to programmers (and not even to
> all programmers since you don't HAVE to use threads in procedural
> single-threaded code, which is very, very, common). However, they ALSO
> decided to change their entire bloody operating system DISTRIBUTION over
> to SysV. Even to this day, I have a hard time grasping this. They had
> some 30-40% of the workstation market, they "owned" the University and
> were making inroads into the corporation, and all those expert systems
> administrators and systems programmers were overnight told that they had
> to learn different flags for ls, for ps, learn a different layout for
> /etc and a different boot sequence -- basically, they were told that
> they would spend the next six months relearning to do what they were
> already very, very good at doing but differently.
>
> Let's face it. Software is cheap. Hardware is cheap. Human time is
> expensive. Take some tens of thousands of systems personnel, charge
> them a thousand hours (half a year FTE) apiece to convert skills, to
> rebuild software, to struggle with a new kernel (which, as it happened,
> sucked compared to SunOS on SINGLE processor systems up through Solaris
> 2.5 -- I don't know if 2.6+ are finally usable because with linux around
> it's "Frankly, Scarlett, I don't give a damn") and you have saddled a
> market known to be strapped for cash and time and intolerant of bullshit
> with (say) 10^5x25x10^3 = $2.5 BILLION in conversion expenses. Except
> that this still neglects the cost of supporting all the USERS of these
> systems as THEY learn that ps now has different flags, sorry, and that
> oh, that application isn't ported and rebuilt yet, sorry, and... So we
> could easily multiply this figure by a factor of 2-4 and probably still
> be short on the real cost of the SunOS->Solaris forced transition.
>
> To avoid our little piece of this immense cost, we (like many, many
> others) held out as long as we could, running SunOS on our aging ELC's,
> SS2's, and SS 10's (after Sun realized that we were NOT going to run
> Solaris, they were arm-twisted into releasing SunOS for each new
> platform that was originally released for "Solaris only" until the
> Ultra). We all began to look for alternatives, and surprise! There was
> linux, all ready to go and running on commodity PC's that were just
> getting to be as powerful as Sun workstations anyway. Furthermore, some
> DISTRIBUTIONS of linux were refreshingly SunOS/BSD-like in their
> interface. A PC running Slackware could literally not be told from a
> Sparcstation 2 running SunOS at the command level, most /etc files were
> where they belonged (or close to it, it made some concessions to SysV
> but kept the hand-editable flatfile paradigm going) and was sufficiently
> close to a Sun at the compiler/library level that "most" of that vast
> library of PD software (obviously including all of gnu:-) could be
> rebuilt on a linux box with only a few tweaks, far less than what was
> required for Solaris. Indeed, the distributions came with a hell of a
> lot of what one used to build and maintain by hand prebuilt FOR you in
> the distribution. It was BETTER and EASIER than SunOS to install and
> manage!
>
> Well, add up the numbers. Cheap PC's (see below) save money on
> hardware. Cheap (free) OS distributions that preserve the interface one
> has grown to know and love permit one to avoid the huge time investment
> required to change over to something different. The only remaining
> question was, did linux work well enough? Was it stable (SunOS was also
> legendary in its stability, routinely accumulating months of uptime
> before it was wise to therapeutically reboot a system if it hadn't
> crashed, probably from a minor memory leak or something)? Well, as we
> all know it was at least as stable as SunOS back in 1.x, and although
> there have certainly been unstable revisions, it has never been a
> problem to find a stable revision and stick with it. Even with
> 2.0.(x<30) when the SMP kernel had KNOWN deadlocks in it, we could
> usually rack up months of uptime without getting nailed by one.
>
> The third and last mistake Sun made they are still making, as Robert's
> little anecdote (which motivated this whole sad story of my 12 point
> plan to kick the Sun habit) clearly shows. They have utterly failed in
> the hardware market to respond to the advent of Intel systems (or
> perhaps better, COMMODITY systems in general) as serious competitors in
> the workstation/server market. To this day an Ultra workstation costs a
> truly absurd amount compared to what one can get from a local dealer
> with an Intel or AMD or Cyrix or DEC Alpha CPU in it (note well that
> Digital did NOT fail to respond and made a better/faster CPU anyway).
>
> Sun has maintained an immense price/performance barrier that effectively
> excludes (sane) University departments from using their hardware except
> in speciality applications or because they are rich enough to afford it
> and don't give a damn. Of course these same Universities are training
> the next generation of systems programmers, the next generation of
> systems administrators, and so on. Some poor Universities have even
> turned to NT, for gosh sake, just to be able to buy cheap enough
> hardware that they can cover folks' desks. Time was, all those desks
> had Sun boxes on them or plain old PC's. One cannot even afford to
> maintain a Sun box.
>
> Let's see, Robert, you paid $1000 for a 500 MB drive and $1200 for 3 32
> MB DIMMS to keep your three aged Supersparcs alive. This gives you a
> budget of $2200. Hmmm, if I walked into almost any computer store (even
> Best Buy) I could buy over the counter at least 2 Celeron based PC's
> with a MINIMUM of 12 GB between them, a MINIMUM of 128 MB of SDRAM
> between them, NICs, 17" color monitors and accelerated graphics, and
> even have enough leftover to buy nice multimedia kits with big speakers.
>
> If you shopped carefully and were willing to add an extra $500-800, you
> could replace all three with nice clean year warranties. I don't know
> how many CPU's your SuperSparcs have, but it is almost dead certain that
> one Celeron at 300 MHz would eat them alive (possibly all the CPUs in
> all 3 systems alive).
>
> Sun just doesn't get it. They make it IMPOSSIBLE to use their hardware
> if you are a sane and reasonable person, even if you are (like I once
> was) predisposed by years of happy experiences to "like" and "trust"
> Suns or are irritated by the technical flaws in Intel CPUs. I don't
> have to "like" Intel or Intel CPUs if they are cheaper by a factor of
> two or three and drive a perfectly functional system.
>
> Obviously I except things like 10 processor systems and speciality
> systems from this -- I'm referring to the "commodity" workstation
> business. Sun should well know, however, that the commodity workstation
> business has a way of sneaking up on those high end high margin systems
> and eventually eliminating them. Sun did just that to the VAX and the
> IBM mainframe (with help, of course).
>
> So, what are the lessons to be learned from this, and why does it show
> that it is historically inevitable that linux and freebsd and their
> cousins will (as Linux drolly puts it) achieve "world domination"?
>
> a) Linux has filled the OS niche that COULD have been filled by Sun
> back in 1988 or Digital in 1993 or Novell in 1995 (boy did Novell blow
> THAT one!). The $50 (or less!) distribution is finally here and has
> achieved critical mass (the number of systems required for
> entrepreneurial developers and real corps to start to write real
> software for it). It is in the phase of exponential growth, driven by
> price/performance alone, into an "infinite" potential market. At this
> point even if Sun or Novell "saw the light" and dropped prices to match,
> they couldn't catch up. Microsoft, of course, could still win. All MS
> has to do to win is drop prices for NT-server with all compilers and
> programming and networking tools included to $50, retire Windows
> 95/98/2001 (and give people FREE upgrades to NT server from any MS OS
> product) and maybe bundle NT with MS Office 97 for personal use only.
> So Microsoft is doomed to lose.
>
> b) Linux (more than any other OS ever) fully recognizes the difference
> between "kernel", "libraries" and "distribution". The kernel is really
> irrelevant to most users EXCEPT that it be functional and invisible and
> stable. Libraries and posix compliance and the like matter only to
> programmers and technoweenies. Users (and perhaps most systems
> administrators who aren't also systems programmers) care only about
> what's in a distribution. You like BSD? Well, there is freebsd or
> there is slackware. You like SysV? Well, Red Hat is very SysV-ish in
> its /etc/layout and management. Like Windoze-like tools? Some linux
> distributions come with GUI system management tools. Like to do it
> yourself? Some distributions are very flatfile oriented and presume
> that either you know what you are doing or want to learn. Don't like
> any of the distributions? Make your own. Do a good job, and it could
> even become popular and displace the existing ones. Everybody likes
> choices, and linux has more choices than a chinese restaurant, from
> any-num-num-can-do-it Red Hat to build an entire distribution yourself
> from source and lay it out the exact way you like it (Unix Guru's Only,
> of course). Run it on a personal box at home (I do) or run an entire
> network of it at work (I do, or rather I help).
>
> c) Linux runs on true commodity hardware. Intel, AMD, Cyrix, Digital,
> Sparc... heck, linux runs on NON-commodity hardware from other Unix
> workstation vendors and not infrequently runs as well or better than the
> vendor's own pet flavor of Unix. I could be wrong (NT runs on many
> platforms as well) but I >>think<< that linux runs on more hardware
> platforms than any other OS. Again, people love choices. Sun didn't
> understand that porting SunOS to the x86 family of systems ultimately
> would make people MORE likely to convert to Sparc boxes, not less, as at
> the time Sparc systems tremendously outperformed any Intel system and
> running the same OS on both would make it painless to jump from an x86
> to a Sparc when more performance was required. Now users of linux would
> hardly be inconvenienced if Intel main CPU factory were hit by a small
> asteroid. They'd simply buy something else (alphas? Power PC's?) as
> their old Intel boxes aged out, expending a lot of effort in a short
> amount of time to debug the distributions as numbers increased.
>
> ...and then there is Gnome. Microsoft's last refuge is their Windows
> interface (and all the software written for it), warts and all. As the
> above clearly demonstrates, there is a huge real cost in switching user
> or administrative interfaces. Over time, huge dollar differentials in
> cost/benefit still motivate the change, but a Windows user or NT user is
> probably lazy and fearful (just like me) and hesitates to try something
> different if it will require a long time to learn to use it or even set
> it up. The "one place" that many linux distributions could still be
> simpler (including Red Hat) is in the very lowest end of userspace, the
> Mac-loving dummy. Gnome is significant not so much because it is
> supposed to be a super-duper GUI/WM in its own right but because it MAY
> finally move num-num-user account management and userspace GUI
> management down to the level that the average Mac or Windows user can
> handle it.
>
> In the case of Windows, the growing complexity of Windows is a point in
> favor already -- if Windows DIDN'T come pre-installed on most systems,
> few users would be able to handle the installation any more. I say this
> with certain knowledge from the many times I've had to (re)install it on
> various boxes I own. The mac still has the advantage of totally
> protected and homogeneous hardware support so users can usually manage
> an install, but Gnome promises to challenge even that. Give linux one
> more year of (well-funded!) development toward maturity and any num-num
> will be able to pop a floppy in the drive, a CD in the other drive,
> boot, and manage a full install through account creation, add-on
> software installation, and GUI setup and management all without opening
> a manual. Red Hat is not TOO far from this now, although I think that
> one is still way to likely to need to know what one is doing to make
> things work correctly. This is not intended to invite a religious war
> on distributions; the beauty of linux is that there is a CHOICE of
> distributions and the open opportunity to roll your own. In three
> years, when Microsoft finally abandons Windows as a primary moneymaker
> and enters the linux reseller market to avoid bankruptcy, we could see
> intense competition between linux distribution resellers (to the benefit
> of all consumers).
>
> The new world cometh. Linus Torvalds will yet stand on his mountain,
> gentle ruler of all that he surveys...
>
> rgb
>
> Robert G. Brown http://www.phy.duke.edu/~rgb/
> Duke University Dept. of Physics, Box 90305
> Durham, N.C. 27708-0305
> Phone: 1-919-660-2567 Fax: 919-660-2525 email:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
> -
> Linux SMP list: FIRST see FAQ at http://www.irisa.fr/prive/mentre/smp-faq/
> To Unsubscribe: send "unsubscribe linux-smp" to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
=================================================================
Qiru Zhou [EMAIL PROTECTED]
2D428 Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies tel (908) 582-4562
600 Mountain Avenue, Murray Hill, NJ 07974 fax (908) 582-7308
=================================================================
-
Linux SMP list: FIRST see FAQ at http://www.irisa.fr/prive/mentre/smp-faq/
To Unsubscribe: send "unsubscribe linux-smp" to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
