Thanks for sharing. What do you think was the reason that the hardware part of Sun failed to keep up with competitors? Specifically why UltraSparc failed to match Pentium?
CPU design is expensive. Intel was ahead of the competition and wasn't fabbing, so Sun was a generation behind. That sort of thing.
Note that today things are quite different, and Apple can do what Sun wanted to do, but do it well. Market conditions are very different, and Apple, of course is the 800lb gorilla that Sun couldn't quite get to be. It's kinda funny: Apple and Sun weren't all that different, and Sun then and Apple now even more so. Apple just wasn't into servers, and Sun just wasn't into consumer hardware, but both wanted to vertically integrate hardware and software. Apple has a walled garden, Sun didn't. I do think these differences are relevant to why Sun failed, but the leadership differences count for a lot too: no one would compare Steve Jobs to Jonathan Schwartz, nor even to Scott McNealy -- it's just night and day. Now the differences in what Sun and Apple sought to do also evince differences in leadership.
Thanks for sharing. I just read an article comparing UltraSparc III and Pentium 4. The frequency is the biggest difference, and while the article also highlights a few pros for the Sun processor, like being 64-bit and super scalar, the benchmark shows that P4 has a clear win. I don’t know the price tag then, but I guess Sparc was actually more expensive?
I think this needs a strategic change. Unless you have a clear cut life objective and you are really into it, everything else you try to improve are at most tactical wins that will be lost to time. And those small wins actually make the end frustration worse because you thought you won strategically this time.
I’ll also going to declare that doom scrolling-ish working on non-impactful personal projects is as BAD as doom scrolling twitter.
Alternatively we can have a committee distribute attention over things that are useful to the country/humanity/the economy etc.(can't think of the right word) Say, if someone next door is looking for an employee with exactly your expertise and experience and they are willing to pay for it the job offer is worthy of being at the top of your feed.
That the person might not like seeing the perfect offer is less important than filling the hole in the economy.
> so the thing to do is actually to drop a level. not to try to be a higher-level engineer, but to almost drop a level and simply become the greatest teammate for a while.
Thanks, this is going to be my answer to “what’s you first 30 days plan” question.
It is very difficult to tell at the moment. We don’t know what is the upper limit of AI’s capabilities.
If it happens that AI is able to replace say 25% of the office workforce (including programmers of course). The result could be catastrophic, if governments do not step in and do something. It could definitely lead to a depression and another world war, given that we already have some regional wars in the Middle East and Eastern Europe.
I found myself fascinated by two topics -- Synchronization and Virtual File System in kernel land. Do they have similar websites? I know SunOS was the first one who implemented VFS and they wrote a white paper about it back in the 90s.
Who did it is irrelevant. The more important thing is who the propaganda is blaming. Then we know what the elites (behind this piece of propaganda) want.
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