DonHopkins on April 15, 2022 | parent | context | favorite | on: Solaris 11.4 free for non-production personal use
You've hit the nail on the head, that's a perfect analysis, and it wasn't an isolated incident!
But they'd been like that for a long time, since before I started there in 1990, long before Java. They DEFINED themselves in terms of Microsoft, to the extreme extent that when Sun Microsystems fell apart into separate divisions, they actually named one of them "SunSoft" to directly position it against Microsoft. As if.
The management at Sun didn't consider Java to be a programming language or software platform, they considered it to be first and foremost their primary weapon of mass destruction in their apocalyptic war against Microsoft, and they didn't consider Java developers to be loyal cherished customers, they considered them to be disposable brainwashed mercenaries in their World Wide War against Microsoft.
It was funny when Sun proudly and unilaterally proclaimed that Sun put the "dot" into "dot com", leaving it wide open for Microsoft to slyly counter that oh yeah, well Microsoft put the "COM" into "dot com" -- i.e. ActiveX, IE, MSJVM, IIS, OLE, Visual Basic, Excel, Word, etc!
And then IBM mocked "When they put the dot into dot-com, they forgot how they were going to connect the dots," after sassily rolling out Eclipse just to cast a dark shadow on Java. Badoom psssh!
Sun totally dropped the ball fighting their true original enemy AT&T, and they should have put all that effort and energy into improving SunOS and railing against AT&T after SunOS finally beat System V in the Unix market, instead of capitulating to AT&T AFTER SunOS won the Unix war against System V, and then rolling over, giving up, selling out to their mortal enemy, and becoming Solaris.
To port my favorite cross platform Apple/IBM joke:
I would add things are rarely only one thing. Did Sun cherish Solaris and Oak/Java developers? Absolutely. Did they cherish all of them equally? Absolutely not. Did they also see them as disposable pawns in a war against MSFT? Not as much at the beginning, but pretty much exclusively towards the end.
You still can't pay me enough to use Eclipse. Well, that's not completely true. I got paid to use Eclipse a couple jobs ago. I wasn't happy about it, but I was too lazy to write something better.
And there's probably another discussion in here about how the market changes and if you don't change with the market you turn into IBM or CA. (Tempora mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis.) IBM came late to the PC party and had to sell it's soul (use an open architecture) in order to not be steam-rollered by Apple (and Commodore and Atari of all people.) MSFT famously came late to the intarwebz and it took Bill Gates to personally beat up some vice presidents to get them to focus on it. I think we just violently agreed that Sun was too focused on defending their web dominance from MSFT that they sort of ignored Leenucks for too long (and as best I can tell just ignored mobile.) Imagine what the landscape would look like if Sun added third-party intel servers as first class supported systems for OpenSolaris (and maybe started OpenSolaris a little earlier.) That was probably too much for Sun management to put their brainstems around at the time.
In US schools during K-12, we generally learn functions in two ways:
1. 2-d line chart with an x-axis and y-axis, like temperature over time, history of stock price, etc. Classic independent variable is on the horizontal axis, dependent variable is on the vertical axis. And even people who forgotten almost all math can instantly understand the graphics displayed when they're watching CNBC or a TV weather report.
2. We also think of functions like little machines that do things for us. E.g., y = f(x) means that f() is like a black box. We give the black box input 'x'; then the black box f() returns output 'y'. (Obviously very relevant to the life of programmers.)
But one of 3blue-1brown's excellent videos finally showed me at least a few more ways of thinking of functions. This is where a function acts as a map from what "thing" to another thing (technically from Domain X to Co-Domain Y).
So if we think of NVIDIA stock price over time (Interpretation 1) as a graph, it's not just a picture that goes up and to the right. It's mapping each point in time on the x-axis to a price on the y-axis, sure! Let's use the example, x=November 21, 2025 maps to y=$178/share. Of course, interpretation 2 might say that the black box of the function takes in "November 21, 2025" as input and returns "$178" as output.
But what what I call Interpretation 3 does is that it maps from the domain of Time to the output Co-domain of NVDA Stock Price.
3. This is a 1D to 1D mapping. aka, both x and y are scalar values. In the language that jamespropp used, we send the value "November 21, 2025" to the value "$178".
But we need not restrict ourselves to a 1-dimensional input domain (time) and a 1-dimensional output domain (price).
We could map from a 2-d Domain X to another 2-d Co-Domain Y. For example X could be 2-d geographical coordinates. And Y could be 2-d wind vector.
So we would feed input of say location (5,4) as input. and our 2Dto2D function would output wind vector (North by 2mph, East by 7mph).
So we are "sending" input (5,4) in the first 2d plane to output (+2,+7) in the second 2d plane.
Just to be clear, when you Khan "killed our remaining low cost airline carrier", are you referring to when the DOJ blocked the JetBlue-Spirit Airlines merger? Not arguing, I just want to understand.
> Also, passengers are probably going to start waking up to the realities of just how bad the air-travel experience in the US has become compared to so many foreign counterparts. If you want passengers to want your plane, design it without sardines in mind; People don't like being sardines.
I hope this is true. However, my sense is that the value chain is so elongated from aircraft designer/engineer/marketing/sales to the end customer (retail airline passengers) that those important signals are lost. Not to mention the financial incentives on the part of US domestic airlines to keep making the flight experience worse for end customers.
> With rare exception, people just buy the cheapest ticket
With rare exception people just buy what they can afford. If people had so much money that they could afford to fly first class and it wouldn't impact their budget very few would get the lowest price they can find knowing that their experience in the air will be miserable.
They need both. They want the high-margin business and first-class passengers, but with those alone the volume would be too low and overall prices too high to make operating feasible.
The high-volume low-margin economy customers keep seats filled to prevent wasted potential space. On most commercial planes, flight is only profitable if nearly every seat is filled.
No. If they could fill the entire plane with business/first class seats and sell out >70% (maybe even less) of it, you bet they would.
The only reason why economy class exists is because they can’t. But the demand for more premium travel is steadily increasing, which will lead to shrinking economy cabins.
So yes, they do need to fill the space. But I wouldn’t say that they need the economy passengers.
How would you explain discount airlines that don't have business class at all?
You also contradict yourself saying they only profit from business class but at the same time they can't profit from business class because there is no enough demand for it.
Your statement doesn't make sense and what the poster above you said is right - they need both and that's the reason there are both.
The thing is, a lot of questions user have aren’t unique, maybe just with a slightly different context and LLMs are good at adapting answers to other contexts.
But it only works for stuff that is already consolidated. For example, something like a new version of a language will certainly spark new questions that can only be discussed with other programmers.
> something like a new version of a language will certainly spark new questions that can only be discussed with other programmers.
I'm not sure this is true? Most languages have fairly open development processes, so discussions about the changes are likely indexed in the web search tools LLMs use, if not in the training data itself. And LLMs are very good at extrapolating.
Ballmer was hard-working, smart, and incredibly lucky in many ways. (Fairly or unfairly, I always have a soft spot for someone who survives Math 55 freshman year at Harvard—which Steve did!)
But he was also enthusiastic about weird non-tech marketing initiatives like trying to partner with big paper companies to launch “MS Office” branded paper for higher margin paper sales. I think this was a few years before the US version of The Office. But it sounds pretty Dunder-Mifflin to me! Whatever his flaws, I don’t see Satya going in this direction.
Source: I spoke directly with someone who worked with Ballmer on this.
I thought there was grumbling about Ballmer adopting GE’s stack ranking employee evaluation system where every team has to grade at least some people as below par. So that led to weird incentives like not collaborating across teams, sabotage, etc.
I don't know, anecdotally I never heard MSFT employees grumbling about stack ranking. The lack of internal collaboration seemed to be more top-down, stemming from powerful execs expanding and protecting their fiefdoms.
Compare that to, say, Amazon, where stack-ranking seems to be an unofficial yet actively enforced policy. I've worked and talked with a huge number of ex-Amazon people and each and every one of them had myriad horror stories about the dysfunctional corporate culture. On the other hand, MSFT employees seemed to have much more balanced experiences.
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