by DonHopkins | 2025-05-15 15:37:56+00:00
McNealy's other terrible ill-formed neologism was "You're going to have to stop hugging your tree!"

Yet now he's hugging the Trump Tree!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39501069

DonHopkins on Feb 25, 2024 | parent | context | favorite | on: Institutions try to preserve the problem to which ...

>exhortation I assumed you were talking about Sun, and I read that as "extortion".

It reminds me of the vicious intimidation tactics that Sun executives made their poor sysadmin enforcers perform on their behalf, to ruthlessly coerce other reluctant executives and employees to run Solaris instead of SunOS!

http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/slowlaris/worst-...

I remember an all-hands meeting where Scott McNealy told everybody, "You're going to have to stop hugging your tree!"

After the meeting I went to my manager and demanded a tree: I never knew about any trees! Why did everybody get a tree but me? I want my tree! I promise I will not hug it.

So he gave me an old set of SunOS manuals.

ChuckMcM on Feb 25, 2024 [–]

One of my mentors was Steve K. at Sun who I consulted with about how badly Sun did changes. It really pissed me off that Sun wouldn't put NIS+ into SunOS because they were allegedly worried it would "reduce the incentive to migrate to Solaris."

I would say I was not particularly successful at being a 'change agent' there.

DonHopkins on Feb 26, 2024 | parent [–]

It's not just changing badly, but changing to the wrong thing. They'd beaten AT&T in the Unix marketplace, then celebrated by getting in bed with them.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34125284

DonHopkins on Dec 25, 2022 | parent | context | favorite | on: The Dawn and Dusk of Sun Microsystems [video]

You're right, it was Slowlaris that killed Sun, and Java was meant to be a "Microsoft Killer", not a programming language.

Sun was a dead man walking long before Java. And Scott McNealy's me-too obsession with Microsoft was extremely unhealthy, leading to him actually naming the division "SunSoft". Never define and even NAME yourself in terms of your enemy. Scott McNealy knew neither himself nor his enemy.

“If you know the enemy and you know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle” - Sun Tzu’s “The Art Of War”

Sun could never measure up to Microsoft, and McNealy was totally obsessed with fighting them, to the point that Java was not actually a programming language for solving developer's problems per se, but primarily a weapon in his personal vendetta against Microsoft, and Java developers were considered expendable mercenaries in that war, above all else. Everything they did with Java was measured by how much it would harm Microsoft, not help developers.

Scott McNealy was pathetically and pathologically obsessed with being and beating Bill Gates and Windows, yet so unfit for the task, just as he has been more recently obsessed with licking Trump's boots, raising money for him and his failed coup attempt, and towing his anti-mask anti-vax anti-science line of bullshit.

https://www.theregister.com/2019/09/17/mcnealy_trump_fundrai...

Michael Tiemann on "The Worst Job in the World":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Tiemann

>Michael Tiemann is vice president of open source affairs at Red Hat, Inc., and former President of the Open Source Initiative. [...] He co-founded Cygnus Solutions in 1989. [...] Opensource.com profiled him in 2014, calling him one of "open source's great explainers."

http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/slowlaris/worst-...

>Subject: The Worst Job in the World

>From: Michael Tiemann <tiemann@cygnus.com>

>I have a friend who has to have the worst job in the world: he is a Unix system administrator. But it's worse than that, as I will soon tell. [...]