Similar story: http://patrickthomson.tumblr.com/post/2499755681/the-best-de...
Oh, and back when Sun Microsystems said random server crashes were due to alpha particles. http://web.archive.org/web/20020202013942/http://www.compute...
Oh, and back when Sun Microsystems said random server crashes were due to alpha particles. http://web.archive.org/web/20020202013942/http://www.compute...
Side note: that scream makes a superb notification tone for people you don't like, or PagerDuty.
I also heard a good yarn once where a customer's DSL service inexplicably stopped working at exactly the same time every day, and after weeks of troubleshooting and changing absolutely everything, with pretty much everyone involved ready to give up, a senior network engineer sitting in the guy's living room happened to notice the street light directly outside turning on at the same time. Turns out the lamp was poorly shielded and throwing enough RF into the poor customer's apartment to light up Pittsburgh. Never heard what came of that, though I imagine that call to public works was interesting.
Turned out that the contractor who replaced the coax on our block didn't use the right grade of cable... the weight of the water plus wind would stretch the cable and open a crack in the housing.
That gave me more than a few giggles.
What an interesting analyses of the scene. I always got the impression Linux was looked down on early on (learned about Linux very late), and there you go.
Kind of. Solaris' history is a bit quirky due to it being built on SVR4 (which is the part that "can be traced back to the original Bell Labs UNIX"), SVR4 having in turn been based on a hodge-podge of "good parts" from all sorts of Unix implementations (including BSD - both on its own and by way of SunOS - and Xenix).
It's thanks to Solaris, though, that we have the only (AFAIK) FOSS implementation of "real" Unix in any form: OpenSolaris (which was then violently murdered by Oracle, but it lives on as illumos and the various distributions thereof, so not all is lost).
I reckon the biggest reason for the eventual outcome is that Linux was FOSS from pretty much the start and wasn't dealing with a big legal conflict (unlike BSD, which was still dealing with AT&T lawsuits and such). By the time Sun released OpenSolaris, it was by far too late for them to really curb Linux's momentum.
> Q: Do you ever think about retiring?
> A: Every day. No, not really. I can't leave my kids to Microsoft. The government won't fight the battle. The government won't enforce the laws.
i'm not old enough to know the context, and out of context this is pretty funny.
"People say, 'Why haven't you retired?' I said, 'I can't leave my kids to a world of Control, Alt, Delete,' " he said, referring to the function in Microsoft Windows for rebooting after a system crash. "I can't leave my kids to MSN. I think you [developers should be out there helping your families [by spreading Java use.]"
http://www.crn.com/news/channel-programs/18818889/mcnealy-ev...