After the Sun (Microsystems) Sets, the Real Stories Come Out 166
Tekla Perry (3034735) writes "Former Sun executives and employees gathered in Mountain View, Calif., in May, and out came the 'real' stories. Andy Bechtolsheim reports that Steve Jobs wasn't the only one who set out to copy the Xerox Parc Alto; John Gage wonders why so many smart engineers couldn't figure out that it would have been better to buy tables instead of kneepads for the folks doing computer assembly; Vinod Khosla recalls the plan to 'rip-off Sun technology,' and more."
Re:DRTFA (Score:4, Funny)
Java: Why explain everything you need to know about what went wrong in a one line error message when a three page stack trace can leave you totally confused instead?
Re:DRTFA (Score:5, Funny)
Just $1? They should have asked $100 per license and they would have earned hundreds of billions in cash anually!
Heck, why not ask $1mln per license; they'd have more money than exists in the world.
Reminds me of something that happened while I was waiting in line at a DIY store. Some guy had two coupons for 20%-off, two for 15%-off and he was demanding 70% off in total. Why didn't he just wait until he had two more 15%-off coupons? I swear to this actually happened; I didn't even spice it up.
Re:Sun 4 Keyboard (Score:5, Funny)
A good keyboard should be sturdy enough to beat a man to death with.
And then use to write his obituary.
Re:DRTFA (Score:4, Funny)
Reminds me of something that happened while I was waiting in line at a DIY store. Some guy had two coupons for 20%-off, two for 15%-off and he was demanding 70% off in total. Why didn't he just wait until he had two more 15%-off coupons? I swear to this actually happened; I didn't even spice it up.
The inability of a large part of the population to understand junior high maths and that ratios (like percentages) are multiplied instead of added is one of the reasons why so many coupons state "may not be combined with any other offer or coupon". It's not that they want to limit your savings, but because quite frankly, too many people should never have graduated from the primary school system, and are likely to throw a fit at the register, just like your guy did.
Another reason for the same common restriction is that even among those who do understand that percentages are multiplied there are a lot of people who didn't even learn the commutative laws in school.
I was in line behind a lady who complained that the clerk took the 10% off coupon off before the 40% off coupon, and demanded that they revert it and ring the purchase up again with the 40% first. The idiot behind the counter complied and then when the amount came to the same blamed the register and store policies.
I so wanted to put both of them out of my misery.
Re:I did a contract there briefly (Score:4, Funny)
Damn I hated working with [SGI] UNIX. You couldn't wipe your ass without them wanting to charge you for it.
Guess you never worked with Banyan Vines... you couldn't do anything without a hardware dongle attached to the parallel port on the back. If you wanted to enable multiple features, you daisy chained multiple dongles off each other. I recall seeing servers with 5-6 dongles hanging off the same parallel port like some sort of unicorn horn.