The Six Sun Sins
Every year, I go to JavaOne. Every year, I’m ashamed, embarrassed, and apologetic about Sun’s message. Don’t get me wrong, I like Sun. I really truly honestly do. They have a whole lot of clever people, who can do awesome clever cool things. Sun however is much like King Midas, with shit instead of gold. They have an uncanny knack of hoisting aloft every little turd they find in the bowl, holding it up to the light and screaming gleefully that they have just discovered the answer to life, the universe, and everything.
When viewing things from a distance, its easy to assume that they just make dozens of mistakes all over the place, but really, when you stop to think about it, it’s not that many. In fact, I think I’ve identified a good selection that when addressed, would surely result in the success and admiration that Sun so richly deserves.
1. The headless chicken business model is not a recipe for success. Whereas most sane companies evaluate a marketplace, considering such mysterious factors as relevance, business problems, use cases, adoption rates, target audiences, and suchlike, Sun decides that all that stuff is a bunch of smoke and mirrors, and that the only way to financial success is to run around like a headless chicken, plop little turd nuggets, and hope some kind passerby sees a Jesus in the shape of said turds and offers to buy it for some amount of money.
2. What the fuck does Tim Bray do? Now, I know he invented XML (gee, thanks Timmy, what a brilliant fucking idea THAT turned out to be) and all, but what on earth does he actually do now? All I see is swathes of inane posts, a silly hat, and ludicrous navel gazing proclamations such as ‘javascript is ubiquitous’ and other such earth shatteringly obvious observations. Maybe he’s supposed to be an evangelist of some sort? What exactly is he trying to convince us Java hordes to do, and to what purpose? Sun, you’re not Google, they have enough money (for now) to hire pointlessly and for bragging rights, you don’t.
3. Nibble on the wrong penis. Sure, all companies have to at some point suck nasty nether bits. Sun though excels in finding the exact wrong crowd and proceed to spend untold amounts of effort towards appeasing this random crowd. Did we REALLY need an open source Java? How many external contributors are there now? All that did is land you in trouble with the Apache turdburglars because now you want to pretend to be all OSSy and yet still make money. Honestly, who in their right mind would try to sell to a bunch of gay python lovers who either have no money or have no intention of spending any?
4. Ponytails look stupid on grown men. Seriously? The CEO has a ponytail and wears tweed jackets? What exactly is the message here, that he’s a refugee from the early 70s? I think that the community will gladly rustle up $2000 as a reward for anyone who managed to lop the damn thing off. Not for any particularly reason, but as a sensible outlet for the anger we feel at all the ways in which Sun pulls a self-Cheney every other day; shooting itself in the face for the comedic effect, apparently.
5. JavaFX is a useless pile of steaming monkeyshit. It’s been over a year now, and the best JavaFX minds assure me it’s nowhere near useful, ready, or relevant yet. Sure, it was a cute project, some random guy (Chris Oliver, now nicknamed olo behind his back, apparently, presumably not for the size of his ass, but for jlo’s other qualities) comes up with a cute trick. This does not a product make. Whats amazing is how the definition of JavaFX varied depending on which Sun monkey you’re talking to. It’s either a new RIA platform, a deployment mechanism, a scripting language, or a neat way for graphics designers to develop apps (and we know how many graphics designers can code, such a huge untapped market that must be). Needless to say, I cant do anything with it like write a basic useful app thats not some graphics demo toy penistugger. Even worse, competent swing people are being relocated to this clusterfuck, so not only is time and effort wasted, but there’s actual damage being done elsewhere too.
6. People with small orifices shouldnt annoy people with big dildos. Sun somehow seems to go out of its way to piss off anyone it ever deals with. This is fine when you’re dealing with a bunch of asshat powerless developers, but less fine when you’re dealing with vindictive incompetent shitbags like Oracle and IBM. Sadly for you Sun those guys are doing well, and sadly for them they’re heavily invested in Java. You need to do a fuck of a lot more sucking up, and an awful lot less of pretending you’re the dude with the big dildo.
May 29th, 2008 at 9:50 am
first :)
May 29th, 2008 at 10:13 am
I have a HP Lasetjet 4L printer, and whenever I try printing anything all I get is a blank page. It’s very annoying as I NEED to be able to print some stuff very very soon. Reply by post or email to h…@ic.ac.uk
May 29th, 2008 at 10:16 am
–
You need to set up your printcap. You likely need to write a filter for that printer.
May I suggest that you RTFM, read the FAQs, read the howtos. They should solve all
of your problems.
May 29th, 2008 at 12:04 pm
Well um.. FOURTH !
May 29th, 2008 at 3:10 pm
i need to puke
May 29th, 2008 at 3:19 pm
Tim Bray invented XML like I invented the fucking atom bomb. XML is a subset of SGML which came from GML which was invented by IBM in the 60’s. It’s like these idiots who think that Tim Berners-Lee/CERN invented the internet. They took a bunch of shit that other people invented and put a piece of glue between it. They should get credit for that but 99% of the work was from DARPA and IBM — not CERN.
May 29th, 2008 at 6:32 pm
Hey, I invented internet!
May 29th, 2008 at 7:35 pm
Jonathan’s appendage turns me on.
May 29th, 2008 at 7:51 pm
Let Oracle and IBM partake the creamy knowledge of Sun…..purrrrrr
May 30th, 2008 at 12:47 am
I am disappointed that there are no adjectives for limited deployment capabilities of 6.10.
.V
June 9th, 2008 at 9:09 am
@Sam, did the caveman invent the car then?
Ed.
June 16th, 2008 at 1:55 am
Agree w/ #1, not really sure what u mean by the other 5 :)…
my answer to the first sin is to compete with Sun head-on and make them earn something for their R&D in the form of a functioning business model, i mean they have no competitive threat to push them in another direction. So, I would take all of their good stuff, and build an appliance with best practices for only use-case scenarios that make money, and lo-and-behold, they have made everything open source, so here it is:
take Linux (not openSolaris), deploy Glassfish v.2 with MySQL on top of openSPARC with the 5120:
http://www.sun.com/servers/coolthreads/t5120/
maybe throw-in openStorage with the 4500:
http://www.sun.com/servers/x64/x4500/
and cut-out Java over-head and all other sorts of non-sense that make them fundamentally unprofitable, and build-your-own Sun Microsystems…
July 10th, 2008 at 9:31 am
What?? Hani is not dead?
July 23rd, 2008 at 5:15 pm
Somewhere within Sun is a vague recollection of the early UNIX, of it’s elegance and beauty. They are still in shock from this and flounder about trying to recreate the freshness, the simplicity, the purity of 7th Edition UNIX.
There is an urge in Sun to renunciate every other technology and API and return to the 7th. They have problems expressing this hence their marketing and ponytails.
They deserve credit for trying, despite the endless turds.
July 28th, 2008 at 6:07 am
I’d like to bile about testng plz.
Suppose you’re invoking testng from eclipse.
Suppose you’re debugging
Suppose you’re break’d at a breakpoint
Suppose you run said test again, either on purpose or whatnot.
Why oh why must testng lag me the fuck out for 5 hours before telling me that, sorry dave, i cannot do that ;
org.testng.TestNGException:
Cannot establish connection: 127.0.0.1:3226
motherfucker. pos too.
August 20th, 2008 at 4:38 pm
All java Gurus!
I get java exception! help me.
August 22nd, 2008 at 12:55 pm
We were afraid that this would happen. I’ve posted previously. Hani died over four months ago in an auto accident when his car rolled-over. Unfortunately, a co-worker, Carl, had Hani’s password to the bileblog and continues to post under Hani’s name. As a manager at Formicary this was brought to my attention and Carl has recently been “let go”. As you can tell, this blog post doesn’t reflect the cleverness that Hani possessed before his death. We are currently working with jroller to terminate access to this blog and any future mention of our company.
Please send your condolences to formicary.net’s european or us offices. Your messages will be forwarded to his family.
Regards,
Larry Marshall
Sr Manager
Formicary
August 31st, 2008 at 10:33 pm
That would be ‘Cold Carl’. Last one out, please turn off the lights
September 7th, 2008 at 4:53 pm
Heheheheh. I invented Java. Hehehhe. Heheheheh.
September 20th, 2008 at 11:29 pm
you know larry if you want to prove YOU are telling the truth, (which I admit seems increasingly likely given the lack of posting), just release a press release on formicary. He was your CTO afterall. Then link to that PR here.
September 22nd, 2008 at 5:52 am
I think you’ve overlooked why Sun wanted to open source their code. It wasn’t just to be cool. Because of the Sun licences it is not possible to put the dependencies in public repositories for instance, for many developers using systems like Ivy or Maven this means lots of manual work installing the jars to a local repo, manually managing transitive dependencies, etc.
October 5th, 2008 at 8:08 am
@Ed
The caveman invented Java.
October 27th, 2008 at 5:41 pm
Hani,
I’m curious what you think of our recent announcements regarding charging big bucks for typing “svn copy” to make a tag. It’s brilliant, better than any RedBoss, I mean JHat, I mean RedHat/JBoss business model! I think you should make an insightful post about it.
Cheers,
–Jod Rohnson