back to article Moon Macrosystems - How to build a better Sun

You're a Sun Microsystems systems engineer. Or a Sun software developer. Or maybe even one of the few sales people that knows a disk drive from a processor from a TCP/IP stack. You have survived countless layoffs since 2000, when the dot-com gravy train ran under the sink. You've rolled with the seemingly endless strings of …

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  1. Bryce Prewitt
    Heart

    Best advice for a company I've ever seen.

    "One last thing. If by some miracle this actually makes money, save it. Don't ever go public and don't ever let the private equity companies take control. Be happy running a business, employing people, and serving customers. Let that be your reward. All the rest is vapordough anyway."

    Why in the hell don't companies realize this?

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Up

    Great Logo!

    Turn the other cheek, eh, Larry?

  3. Jason DePriest
    Thumb Up

    Your job must be fantastic

    You spent entirely too much time coming up with this cheeky article.

    Reading it and giggling, I am reminded that you were actually paid money to come up with it.

    I think I've come up with a way to create a logo that mimics Sun's by the way.. but it can't really be drawn easily in ASCII art...

  4. Jim Kirby
    Paris Hilton

    Chuckwagon

    Makes it's own gravy!

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9BBqgMQluDM

    Paris she's been covered in "gravy" more than once...

  5. Chronos

    Tee hee!

    I must be in kid mode today. The Moon Macrosystems logo had me giggling like a six-year-old. I'd hate to have to take the Rorschach test. Everyone else thought I was mad.

  6. amanfromMars Silver badge

    Moon Shine Systems for Virtual Safe Cracking/Stressed Bank and Vault Vulnerability BetaTesting.

    White man Tim speak with Alien tongue, Kemo Sabe. Heap Good Medicine. Clouds bring Heavy MetaDataBase Reign and Spooky Renegade Renaissance Plays with Non State Universal Actors .... Clean Red Team Skins into Beta Powers of Shared IP Control ....... for Absolutely Fabulous Rewards and Outrageous Fortunes to Administer.and Dispense.

    Money in the Bank is Dead Money and a Disgrace which Shames Bankers?

  7. Eddie Edwards
    Pirate

    @ Timothy and Bryce

    "don't ever let the private equity companies take control."

    So how are you going to start this without two tiers of investment? Sell your Sun mousemat collection?

  8. Mike Flugennock
    Coat

    Hey, wait a second...where's Collins?

    You've got Armstrong and Buzz, but... where the hell's Collins?

    Any space history geek will tell you that the CDR and LMP would've been totally lost without a really sharp Command Module Pilot to get them there and back, and mind the store in orbit while his buds are on the surface.

    Isn't that always how it goes, though... everybody forgets the Command Module Pilot. (;^>

    (Mine's the one with the copy of "Carrying The Fire" in the side pocket)

  9. Anonymous Coward
    Coat

    Thanks for the isea

    Off to the Patent office for me...

  10. Anonymous Coward
    Flame

    COBWEBS

    Sun started chaning but they were too late while in this changing phase and nobody really took notice.

    The SUN OS interface was really really old

    fashioned and always reminded me of WIndows 3.1 and was not very user friendly.

  11. Mark C
    Thumb Up

    Enjoyed It

    Silly logo made me smile but the rest of the article is food for thought.

  12. Fatman
    Happy

    Product line

    ASS 500: Nice name for a product!

  13. vincent himpe

    i hope

    that the analogy stops at the names... After all the space stuff consists of millions of parts slapped together. Each part made by the lowest bidder .... pray it doesn't blow up

  14. Oninoshiko
    Boffin

    hierarchical storage on solaris...

    ZFS already does support some hierarchical storage through ZFS, atleast insofar as harddrives to flash and NV RAM disks go. Now it doesn't do tapes, but from what I've seen drive are getting big enough and cheap enough that they are replacing true tapes (albit sometimes in the form of a VTL) anyway.

  15. Pierre

    Need other branding...

    http://www.loonaris.org/ is a French dental cabinet's website apparently :D

  16. Anonymous Coward
    Go

    They already do it

    I think that Sun's engendering understood Moon Macrosystems situation a bit earlier, that is why they are inflating the Lunaris by open source apps in the full throttle, as well as they do a exportation the prairies of openstorage

  17. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Google it.

    Just sayin - when you search for "moon macrosystems" google asks you if you meant Sun. Classic.

  18. Camilla Smythe

    Errmmm Yeeeees

    If....

    Then...

    And....

  19. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Up

    WoW

    A positive article -- what could be done to utilize the good parts rather than trashing everything and starting out at "Hello World" all over again!

  20. amanfromMars Silver badge

    Heavy MetaDataBasIQs

    "Clouds bring Heavy MetaDataBase Reign and Spooky Renegade Renaissance Plays with Non State Universal Actors .... Clean Red Team Skins into Beta Powers of Shared IP Control ....... for Absolutely Fabulous Rewards and Outrageous Fortunes to Administer and Dispense."

    Timothy,

    Congratulations. That was one Mother of a Monster article which does the Register and Oracling Proud. And the "Best advice for a company I've ever seen." ... By Bryce Prewitt Posted Monday 4th May 2009 16:49 GMT .... says IT Proud and Loud too.

    And I just revisited the above HyperRadioProActive Astute SubMission because it has a clone here? ..... "Using the analytic techniques contained in this primer will assist analysts in dealing with the perennial problems of intelligence: the complexity of international developments, incomplete and ambiguous information, and the inherent limitations of the human mind. Understanding the intentions and

    capabilities of adversaries and other foreign actors is challenging, especially when either or both are concealed. Moreover, transnational threats today pose even greater complexity, in that they involve multiple actors—including nonstate entities—that can adapt and

    transform themselves faster than those who seek to monitor and contain them. Finally, globalization has increased the diversity of outcomes when complex, interactive systems such as financial flows,regional economies or the international system as a whole are in flux." ..... https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/books-and-monographs/Tradecraft%20Primer-apr09.pdf

    Although I would hotly dispute and always disagree that there are any inherent limitations of the human mind, much preferring to consider that Failures of Intelligence and Feeble Imagination be held Accountable and Responsible for the Perversely Destructive and Subversive Entrenching of Self-Serving Status Quo Stasis in some/many/most minds.

    However, Sprinkle some Kosmic Karma* Moondust around the Virtual Environment and you will be Able and Enabled to be Free as a Big Blue Bird.

    *http://www.integralworld.net/Excerpts.html

    "Ask yourself this: What is Oracle really buying for $5.6bn?" ....... It could also be posited that King Larry is donating funds to Sun for distribution to Intelligent Source Providers? SMART Seed Money ....... for Honey Trippers/Busy Bee Drones/Worker Clones/Virtually Real AIMachinery into Growing Money Plants for Sowing Wealth and Prosperity to All. And the Fed. could certainly do with some Real SMART Virtual Help as their Vapourdough Ponzi is revealed as a Pyramid Scam and Virtualised Sham ........ http://www.john-f-kennedy.net/thefederalreserve.htm

    A World/InterNetional System in Flux in Deed, indeed......... but Easily Fixed to the Mutual Benefit of All with some Common Sense and CyberIntelAIgents, which you can see and hear, is a NEUKlearer Statement of Fact rather than an Obscure and Ambiguous Question for Fiction.

    And Just Perfect for the SMARTer Fed. to Seed and Feed.

  21. WinHatter
    Stop

    Sunmoon - Munsoon

    What if Oracle bought Sun just to get java & Sun's customers?

    Hands on Java specification committee : good

    Financial sector customers : good

    Solaris : not so bad as a massive number of Oracle licenses are Solaris ones.

    MySQL : well who cares other than a bunch of pennyless companies,

    Sun UltraSparc I II IIi III IV T1 T2 : what can't you achieve on a x64 ??? Plus x64 has the added advantage to run any Linux distro or even Windows. Oracle may even terminate the UltraSparc thing all together as this will be one less CPU to maintain code for ... Fujitsu & Siemens can go to hell.

    Basically the whole Sun stack is not that worthy.

    So go ahead and build your stack but if companies are willing to pay less they'll take the stack and maintain it themselves if they are willing to pay for support being charged by Oracle will be fine.

  22. Matt Bryant Silver badge
    Happy

    All very good , but....

    Just like Sun did for waaaaaaaaay too long, the new Moon Macrosystems idea ignores Linux. RedHat and Novell have shown you don't need the full solution if you can partner with the leading vendors (hp and IBM) to provide the base to mount your OS and apps on. Whilst Moon sounds a lot better idea than Sun has become, it doesn't have the market presence or simply the scope of even the dead-on-its-feet Sun of today, and it would have to go up against both Windows and Linux, and I'm not sure there's space for another x64 OS in the long run. There may be in the short-term for those customers wanting to get off old SPARC onto x64, but expect to be battered by the marketing and sales might of Oracle, hp, IBM, Dell, Fujitsu, etc, etc, who will be targeting those same accounts with polished migration plans, services teams, and the ability to discount well beyond what some small start-up can afford. And hp, IBM, Dell and Fujitsu at least can offer Solaris x64 support to boot (even Solaris on SPARC for a price for the diehards or those simply too scared to migrate).

    All in all, this does remind me of some of those bitter AS400 refugees that left IBM when they saw the rise of AIX and WIndows, tried their own thing, and then faded into obscurity. Or ended up working for the Reg! :P

  23. This post has been deleted by its author

  24. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    The Money Shot

    I think you have the money shot wrong.

    The money will be in consulting companies that do support of SUN gear and existing deployments, and help plan for future transitions to new systems.

    The way to look at it: All the existing Sun customers are screwed. But they have to struggle on. They can't struggle on by themselves. So someone is going to get the money the customers are going to dole out to keep things together and plan a future transition strategy. They have to pay something. Paying nothing makes them fail.

    Larry E. could get that money, but that would mean he bought you and your skills with his wallet. Since he can't do it himself.

    So: you could ask, Can you do that role better more profitably under Larry E. or in some new organization?

    The reason it's a reasonable question, is because the normal guarantees of a future, i.e. a cooperative labor-management-corporate-what's-good-for-the-many-is-good-for-the-one, well it's unclear how that works here?

    But, there's also the bet to go with the flow, and assume a strategy will be created that makes sense, that you just have to implement and everyone stays happy.

    Both possibilities are ..possible.

  25. amanfromMars Silver badge

    Micro/Macro Singularity Solutions

    The Money Shot Field is not in Systems and Applications, it is in Core and Central and Graphic Processing Units for Virtual Architecture XXXXoSkeletons and thus is an Ab Fab Competition Environment pitting the Likes of Intel Heads and AMD Minds against each other for a PreDominant and PreEminent Position which will likely Morph into an Alliance and Master Model Template for Virtual Machinery Networks InterNetworking to Provide Power with Steady Constant Supply of Currency.

    And given Dresden's Prodigious Rise from the Ashes, it would be unwise not to expect them to Provide Leads which can be Followed, for Experience is a Master Tutor?

  26. Matthias Pfuetzner

    Moon?

    So, what does Moon stand for then?

    Medley of old Nerds?

    Curious... ;-)

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