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To: jim kelley who wrote (73685)	10/21/1998 9:47:00 PM
From: Mohan Marette	Respond to of 176387

The Rubin Communique-World's economic prospect may be brightening. Jim: See if this is worth anything. =========================== Source:Bloomberg Top News Wed, 21 Oct 1998, 9:40pm EDT Treasury Secretary Rubin Says World Economic Outlook May Be Brightening Treasury's Rubin Says World Economic Outlook May Be Brightening New York, Oct. 21 (Bloomberg) -- Recent developments offer cause for optimism about the world economic picture, even though there are no ''magic wands or easy answers'' to solve the global slowdown, U.S. Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin said. Rubin, speaking at a Concord Coalition dinner, cited Congress' final approval today of additional money for the International Monetary Fund and Japanese lawmakers' passage this week of banking legislation. At the same time, further evidence has surfaced that Thailand and South Korea are making economic progress, Rubin said in the text of an address. ''Recovery will take time, the road may be bumpy, and there are great challenges for all to meet, but I believe we are on the right track,'' Rubin said. The fiscal 1999 U.S. budget, passed today, includes $17.9 billion in additional funds for the IMF. The U.S. appropriation clears the way for contributions from the rest of the IMF's 182 members. That should add about $90 billion to the lender's reserves from an estimated $6 billion to $8 billion today, helping restore investor confidence, Rubin said. Japan's new banking legislation will enable that country's financial institutions to deal with 77 trillion yen ($660 billion) in bad and risky loans. Once those loans are wiped off the books, bank lending should pick up, helping the country recover from its deepest recession in 50 years. ''The key is to implement it quickly and strongly and put in place appropriate fiscal measures that will promote demand-led growth,'' Rubin said. Fiscal Discipline In this country, U.S. policymakers must be ''diligent'' in keeping the nation's fiscal house in order, or face the wrath of investors, he said. ''The dynamics of today's global markets greatly heighten the importance of fiscal discipline,'' Rubin said. The Treasury secretary praised President Bill Clinton's 1993 budget, which raised taxes and tightened caps on domestic spending that were approved under the Bush administration. Rubin called the legislation ''the indispensable factor'' in achieving the nation's first budget surplus since 1969. Clinton said on Sept. 30 the administration expects a $70 billion surplus for fiscal 1998. Rubin, who didn't mention the balanced budget agreement passed by the Republican Congress last year, said the Clinton administration's economic strategy going forward would have four parts. The first is addressing the long-term solvency of Social Security. ''Soon after the turn of the year, the president wants to work with Congress to produce a bipartisan plan to put this program on a sound footing for the long term,'' Rubin said. ''We must not flag in our commitment to it.'' At the same time, Rubin said, the country must work to improve education, ''especially the public school system,'' and deal with the ''tremendous social costs and loss of productivity'' among those in the nation's inner cities who still haven't found work. Finally, the U.S. must remain ''deeply engaged'' in providing leadership in international economics, Rubin said. The administration, he said, will push for open markets and trade liberalization, growth and reform in developing nations, and ways to limit the damage in future international economic crises. He called on Congress to join the effort, warning against developing isolationism. ''We are the only major country in arrears to the United Nations, we still lack the authority to negotiate new trade agreements, even though expanding trade is very much in our interest, and protectionist pressure seems to be increasing,'' Rubin said.

To: jim kelley who wrote (73685)	10/21/1998 10:16:00 PM
From: Byron Xiao	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 176387

Jim, what else do you know besides losing Superbowls? Sun will be reduced to the role of a boxmaker and system integrator in a few years? Well, as far as I know, NT has not been scalable enough to cut into mid-range/high range server market. When will NT 5.0 be stable enough to capture that part of the market? Sun is already announcing they will introduce the next generation of Solaris next week in New York, and that version is the 64 bit version of OS that MSFT don't plan on releasing till 2000 as scheduled now. And I think you know that SUNW also license the Java technology. Granted it hasn't produced huge revenue, however, it's gaining momentum and is becoming the de-facto in consumer electronics and other apps. So I am not sure why are you categorizing SUNW as a hardware company solely. The matter is that NT will improve, so will Solaris, and application software will also become more complex. Scalability, open architecture will be what determine who will succeed and who will fail. SUNW has not shown that they are letting MSFT technology get ahead of them, and their market shares in mid-range to high-range server market is actually increasing. They have built a pretty loyal customer bases. It's doubtful that these customers will abandon SUNW in a few years and embrace MSFT. Plus, you can buy a low end SPARC server for about $3500 now. Given a choice of a $2500 NT workstation and a $3500 Solaris machine, I might opt for the scalability and reliability of a Solaris. Put it plainly, NT is good for the chicken shit, children apps. For critical financial data transaction, high performance scientific computation apps, I would put my trust in SUNW. I don't think with a 60M lines of source code, you can expect NT to ever reach the kind of stability, scalability that these mission critical apps require. Software quality degrades as code size increase, not improve. That is the 1st lesson in Computer Engineering. The simpler, leaner the software, the more elegant it will be. NT is not a software jewel, and don't expect NT to dominate every phase of the computer market. And lastly, I did NOT say Solaris is 50,000 lines of elegant code, I said a real time UNIX micro kernel QNX version of UNIX is 50K lines of code. That's a big difference. Solaris might be millions lines of codes, but it's still leaner than NT. <Sun's OS (Solaris) is hardly 50,000 lines of elegant code as you seem to have implied. The UNIX tower of BABEL is on its way out. People are voting with their pocket books.>