Wooden ships and iron men
We offer the following from a tale related by the chief curator of the National Park Service, and printed in no less an authoritative source than Oceanographic Ships, Fore and Aft, published by the Oceanographer of the Navy. We quote:
"On August 23, 1779, the USS Constitution set sail from Boston loaded with 475 officers and men, 48,600 gallons of water, 74,000 cannon shot, 11,500 pounds of black powder and 79,400 gallons of rum. Her mission: to destroy and harass English shipping.
On October 6, she made Jamaica, took on 826 pounds of flour and 68,300 gallons of rum. Three weeks later the Constitution reached the Azores, where she provisioned with 550 pounds of beef and 6,300 gallons of Portugese wine.
On November 18, the ship set sail for England where her crew captured and scuttled 12 English merchant vessels and took aboard their rum.
But the Constitution had run out of shot. Nevertheless, she made her way unarmed up the Firth of Clyde for a night raid. Here her landing party captured a whiskey distillery, transferred 40,000 gallons aboard and headed for home.
On February 20, 1780, the Constitution arrived in Boston with no cannon shot, no food, no powder, no rum, no whiskey. Just 38,600 gallons of water."
We refrain from comment, other than this breif analysis:
Length of cruise -- 181 days
Booze consumption -- 2.25 gallons per man per day (plus whatever they liberated from the 12 English merchant ships).
Jim on 09.24.04 @ 06:07 AM PST [link]
SUNW .vs the world
Says here (and here, and here, and, of course, here) that Sun is now aiming its guns at linux, via FUDing RedHat.
I'm almost embarassed to admit it now, but I used to work there. However, even when I was there (1989-1992), I predicted that Sun would be the DEC of the 90s. Data General was the wrong comparison to make. DG failed because they fell behind. DEC failed because they arrogantly assumed that the world wouldn't change, so the continued to build everything themselves, (they made their own disk-drives, for God's sake!), while simultaneously ignoring Unix on microprocessors. Then they partnered with Microsoft in an attempt to get back on top of the game. Microsoft famously ripped off Digital's VMS, and turned it into Windows NT. The result was that Compaq eventually purchased the ghost of the once mighty DEC, and then Compaq and HP merged. Today DEC is buried in an unmarked grave.
McNealy once publicly described Windows NT as "a giant hairball", and only two years ago, Sun declared its love for linux, with McNealy wearing a penguin suit.
Sun has recently partnered with MS, and garnered $1.5 Billion (US) for whoring itself to the Pimpmaster Gates. By itself this could kill Sun if it is not very careful. Gates will eventually get pissed off, and try to smack his bitch (McNealy) down. Nobody yet has outplayed Microsoft at the "partner with Microsoft" game. Apple has perhaps come closest, but as many others have said, Microsoft needs Apple to stay in business. Other than Apple, the MSFT endgame always has the partner on its knees, begging for its life.
Sun has recently thrown OpenOffice to the wolves. Jonathan Schwartz answered with
Please do not listen to the bizarro numbskull anti-Sun conspiracy theorists. They were lunatics then, they are lunatics now, they will always be lunatics. We love the open source community, we spawned from it. We'll protect that community, that innovation, and our place in it, with all our heart and energy.
And now Sun wants to equate Linux with Redhat. That might have worked a few years ago, but SuSE is now part of Novell, and IBM has invested heavily in it. Does Sun not realize that SuSE moved into the neighborhood, and that any assult on Linux will be answered by the combination of IBM and Novell?
Redhat, for its part, is attempting to suck-up to MSFT, and earning MS-like badwill, and the result is that FedoraCore is all-the-rage, and RedHat Enterprise Linux will soon be as obscure as Slackware.
IBM and Sun are still focused on big iron. Meanwhile, Google has demonstrated that many applications work well with a large server farm of generic PCs. As Eugene Brooks once famously commented, "You cannot stop the attack of the killer micros." Mr. Brooks was talking about RISC CPUs, and Intel/AMD seem to have pushed RISC back into a corner, for now. Sun's problem is that it can't figure out how to survive on the margins inherent in commodity boxes. Just like Microsoft, they need the extra margin that a licensed OS brings. However, generic boxes are here to stay, despite the best efforts of the gang of dinasaurs who ruled high-tech during the 90s. In the meantime, companies such as IBM have thrived on linux.
Sun is undertaking a PR war against a target that doesn't need to take part in the combat. Linux is highly distributed by its very nature, and it posesses the ultimate guerilla marketing tactics. It's impossible to win a guerrilla war against a highly distributed enemy. Something can nuke you from behind and when you turn around, its gone.
Sun has made a huge mistake, if they're lucky, this "trial balloon" will show the error, and they'll try something else. Otherwise, they will be the Next DEC.
Microsoft Corporation will be best remembered for its blue screen of death, a randomly occuring, incomprehensible, bright blue message would appear, glibly informing you that your machine has, yet again, crashed and that you've lost all your work and you're going to have to reboot.
Hopefully the planes don't crash while this happens.
Jim on 09.24.04 @ 05:21 AM PST [link]
