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What he says about RIA might be controversial but there is some validity to what he says. There is a lot to be said for simplicity of interface and richness of content. That has been the hallmark of most great websites.

That's not to say user interfaces couldn't be improved on the web through technologies such as AJAX, but I feel it should be used more as a condiment rather than the main course.

I remember back in the 90's people kept saying "push" technologies will be the next big thing but that didn't seem to be the case.

By the way, there was a cool presentation of the Sun Cloud at CommunityOne last week. It's pretty neat. I think that cloud computing should still abstract scaling from the user, but that may never happen or will take a lot longer to implement.

Right now it's just like drawing a network diagram in Visio, except the symbols in your drawing represent actual virtual servers in the Sun Cloud. It's pretty neat. It will be interesting to see what the pricing will be like. They say they are planning on being price competitive with other platforms, which should mean it should be similar with Amazon's EC2???

Problem? The development tools aren't available and research is only starting.

Nonsense. Here are a few couple of portable tools and libraries that will solve many developers problems.
http://www.threadingbuildingblocks.org/ (c++)
http://developers.sun.com/sunstudio/downloads/ssx/tha/tha_getting_started.html
Research is mature and ongoing.

Education, however, is only starting to reach the mainstream.

Get a core i7. But if you really need a lot of smp'ing, you should check out sun's niagra t1 processor: http://www.sun.com/processors/niagara/ or the Niagra 2.

SUN already beat you to it...
http://www.sun.com/products/sunmd/s20/specifications.jsp#Anchor6
It was also posted on /. when it first came out...

It was too busy "competing" with MS to focus on it's core market - high performance computers.

Sun did waste a lot of effort on desktop initiatives. (Still does.) But that's never dominated management's attention. It's just what got the most press, because the issues of hardware manufacturing and sales don't make good copy.

(Right now, I'm working on a system that's in the process of being upgraded from Hypertransport 1 to Hypertransport 3. Doesn't that send chills up and down your spine? No?)

The problem is not that management didn't pay attention to the hardware business — they paid plenty. The problem is that they kept selling to the 1998 marketplace long after the game changed. In 1998, there was so much demand for computers, and people were so unpicky about costs, Sun could sell expensive systems just by boasting how powerful they were. Then the dotcom bubble burst, and people either went out of business or survived by looking for ways to do business cheaper. And a big way to cut costs is to switch from proprietary architectures (SPARC, MIPS, PowerPC) to the commodified x86.

Took Sun a long time to come to terms with that. When the bubble burst, the party line at Sun was that it was a temporary downturn and they could just ride it out. Well, the downtown was indeed temporary, but the customers never came back. They wanted commodity systems, and Sun was only working on SPARC systems. Yes, they had acquired Cobalt, but the SPARC-uber-alles mindset at Sun soon drove the Cobalt people away and destroyed a product line Sun had spent $2 billion acquiring. When they finally admitted to themselves that they had to change with the marketplace (and there are lots of Sun people who still haven't drunk that koolaid) they had to build up the business all over again, partly by outsourcing design, partly by buying up yet another x86 company. Ironically, that company was founded by Sun co-founder Andy Bectholsheim, who had left Sun partly because of this very issue.

So, despite the attention it got in the press, the Sun-MS feud was just a sideshow. What really hurt was their inability to adapt.

There are many technologies at Sun that IBM might covet, but no one of them is worth that much money, or even a substantial part of them. They'll certainly want Java, but Java is mainly a server-side technology these days. It's client side tech is floundering, both marketwise and developmentwise. Same goes for Solaris. (Sun's workstation lineup is down to one system!) As for OO/SO, IBM already has a free office suite, and it's not doing any better.

Having a realistic alternative to Windows is every geek's dream, but I don't see anything that Sun owns really changing the game. And big companies like IBM don't really have any incentive to revolutionize the desktop — not that much money in it, and there are too many risks. Which is why IBM has moved away from desktop computing in recent years.

For the avoidance of doubt: the quasi-statutory NGOs I refer to are ACPO and IWF, and so (I believe) are immune to FoI requests. These are ostensibly private organisations which never the less effectively have had statutory/typically-governmental functions delegated to them.

Some functions have been delegated in a very indirect, even underhand way. E.g. the UK government has leaned heavily on ISPs to sign up to the IWFs' blacklist - there is no statutory requirement, just the threat of future statutory requirements. Personally, I believe this undermines democracy.

The CPS directly represent the state (or "the Crown" in UK speak).

I have blogged about IWF filtering, in particular on the general efficacy of the IWF blacklist filtering, and on security issues of IWF-blacklist implementations, particularly the use of Squid, at certain ISPs. May or may not be interesting to some to read, comment on and/or correct.

For the avoidance of doubt: the quasi-statutory NGOs I refer to are ACPO and IWF, and so (I believe) are immune to FoI requests. These are ostensibly private organisations which never the less effectively have had statutory/typically-governmental functions delegated to them.

Some functions have been delegated in a very indirect, even underhand way. E.g. the UK government has leaned heavily on ISPs to sign up to the IWFs' blacklist - there is no statutory requirement, just the threat of future statutory requirements. Personally, I believe this undermines democracy.

The CPS directly represent the state (or "the Crown" in UK speak).

I have blogged about IWF filtering, in particular on the general efficacy of the IWF blacklist filtering, and on security issues of IWF-blacklist implementations, particularly the use of Squid, at certain ISPs. May or may not be interesting to some to read, comment on and/or correct.

The real irony is that Sun get's slagged so often by FOSS advocates even though Sun has probably contributed more than 50% of all FOSS code. And while the article/survey seems to indicate that Linux is continues to take market share from 'Unix', it doesn't explain why the google trendline for Linux and all GNU/Linux distributions is falling and the google trendline for OpenSolaris is rising. Maybe OpenSolaris is stealing market share from Unix (AIX/Solaris 8/HP...). IMHO, that's a good thing and Sun is in much better shape than you think. It still has the cash to buy itself and go private and/or buy GM or a number of other companies, and it hasn't to my knowledge accepted a dime of bailout money or been the benefit of silly government intervention like 'cash for clunkers' to get it's old equipment out of data centers.

The real irony is that Sun get's slagged so often by FOSS advocates even though Sun has probably contributed more than 50% of all FOSS code. And while the article/survey seems to indicate that Linux is continues to take market share from 'Unix', it doesn't explain why the google trendline for Linux and all GNU/Linux distributions is falling and the google trendline for OpenSolaris is rising. Maybe OpenSolaris is stealing market share from Unix (AIX/Solaris 8/HP...). IMHO, that's a good thing and Sun is in much better shape than you think. It still has the cash to buy itself and go private and/or buy GM or a number of other companies, and it hasn't to my knowledge accepted a dime of bailout money or been the benefit of silly government intervention like 'cash for clunkers' to get it's old equipment out of data centers.

> Java Applets should get DOM access... it could be done

And, in fact, has been:

http://blogs.sun.com/octav/entry/javafx_and_ajax

"This lets [JavaFX] call JavaScript functions defined on the web page, modify the Document Object Model (DOM) of the web page on the fly, and generally write JavaFX Script apps that integrate well within the web page."

Let me be certain that I understand this:

This is the primary difference between the CDDL and the GPL? (Please correct me if I'm wrong. It happens a lot.)

3.6. Larger Works.

You may create a Larger Work by combining Covered Software with other code not governed by the terms of this License and distribute the Larger Work as a single product. In such a case, You must make sure the requirements of this License are fulfilled for the Covered Software.

Pretty nifty.
Via: http://www.sun.com/cddl/cddl.html

You're still on the hook for distributing the source code for the Covered Work and any Modifications. And you're free to distribute the binaries of the Covered Work however you please, so long as its source code is distributed under the CDDL. So, in *that* regard, it's identical to the GPL.

...the GPL is fucking cretinous...

Cretinous? As in "Mentally retarded"?
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Cretinism&oldid=276705806

WRT the "arrogance" of GPL users:
I use the GPL for my own work 'cause I want to see a self-perpetuating body of high-quality [0] work that anyone [1] can pick through and take parts from. You're free to not use my code. You're also free to take my code, compile it, and sell the result at any price. :)
How do you feel about the LGPL?

[0] Yeah. I know. Most software is terrible. Free software is no exception.
[1] Anyone who adheres to the terms of the GPL, natch.

That spec really struck me, because I spend a lot of time documenting a multi-CPU systems, and its maximum RAM for a 4-CPU setup is 256GB. But of course, it's a server.

I actually took a screen shot of it. Then went to a window to see if the apocalypse was happening. Sun working with microsoft?!

You're kidding, right? Sun has been in bed with Microsoft since shortly after the Java thing was settled. Interestingly that "in bed" link has some extremely telling content permanently removed links, especially including this link: Sun and Microsoft Announce New Identity Specifications and Additional Measures for Product Interoperability which goes to a "Content Removed" page. Wow, trying to bury the truth already? Hooray for the internet archive! You might also be interested in Sun/Microsoft Q&A with Greg Papadopoulos. It's interesting that Sun is too stupid to put a year in their datestamps. Did they not expect to exist past 2005? I certainly stopped even considering them as a solution to anything in 2004...

I actually took a screen shot of it. Then went to a window to see if the apocalypse was happening. Sun working with microsoft?!

You're kidding, right? Sun has been in bed with Microsoft since shortly after the Java thing was settled. Interestingly that "in bed" link has some extremely telling content permanently removed links, especially including this link: Sun and Microsoft Announce New Identity Specifications and Additional Measures for Product Interoperability which goes to a "Content Removed" page. Wow, trying to bury the truth already? Hooray for the internet archive! You might also be interested in Sun/Microsoft Q&A with Greg Papadopoulos. It's interesting that Sun is too stupid to put a year in their datestamps. Did they not expect to exist past 2005? I certainly stopped even considering them as a solution to anything in 2004...

xVM from Sun any1??? http://www.sun.com/software/index.jsp?tab=1

Re: "backup old file and write a new one" - A transactional copy-on-write filesystem such as Sun's ZFS is doing almost the same job, transparently.

I have little doubt that copy-on-write will eventually supersede overwrite-and-pray filesystems. The wins are numerous, including cheap snapshotting, etc, etc. Install OpenSolaris and give ZFS a try today!

SSDs allow us to stop thinking about attached "storage" devices, and instead think
of them as their originally-intended purpose - Slow memory.

I think adding the SSDs is a little more focused than that. It's aimed directly at improving ZFS.

According to this blog you can use a combination of SSDs (one read biased, one write biased) for ARC caching and ZIL offloading (respectively) for ZFS pools to tremendously speed up overall disk activity.

Integrating the SSD onto the motherboard allows at least entry level ZFS caching to be instantly available to their server line regardless of configuration. With the beauty of ZFS as your storage pools increase you can add more/newer SSDs to L2ARC and ZIL and improve performance for every aspect of your storage.

Given that Sun design their boxes around their own custom hardware (Niagra, Sparc etc) who exactly are you buying the same specification from?

You are correct, but incomplete. Sun also sells servers based on Intel and AMD as well as Intel based Workstations.

Given that Sun design their boxes around their own custom hardware (Niagra, Sparc etc) who exactly are you buying the same specification from?

You are correct, but incomplete. Sun also sells servers based on Intel and AMD as well as Intel based Workstations.

Given that Sun design their boxes around their own custom hardware (Niagra, Sparc etc) who exactly are you buying the same specification from?

You are correct, but incomplete. Sun also sells servers based on Intel and AMD as well as Intel based Workstations.

which is more than I can say for many other operating system vendors

Are you serious about this statement. Microsoft is only focusing on security because of all the bad PR it has gotten in losing the virus war. Meanwhile, I can still install an older RedHat version without it being exploited 5 minutes after install.

While people on here might disagree because of being partial to one OS over another... Solaris is mighty ahead of the curve when it comes to security and have done a lot more than Microsoft on the security front IMHO

I totally hear where a lot of people are coming from on this issue.

What is the fate of Web 1.0 development tools in a Web 2.0 world?

The problem is that a lot of Web 2.0 goodness, such as Ajax, dynamic content, and collaboration require databases and dynamic coding. The static HTML produced by WYSIWYG web authoring tools can never meet the user expectations of today for a better web experience.

So you could argue that WYSIWYG development tools are obsolete, and that portals and content management systems are the future, but I would only partially agree. Sure, the web is changing, but that does not mean Web user interface design, navigation design, usability, accessibility, information architecture, CSS, HTML, Web standards compliance, metadata, and cross-browser compatibility are dead. On the contrary - I would argue that tools like Dreamweaver are indispensible for ensuring that Web 2.0 applications remain "backwards compatible" with Web 1.0 standards and guidelines. :-)

As users take on an increasing level of ownership of their content, we need web designers more than ever to help ensure the aesthetics and the semantics of the web do not suffer as a consequence (anyone remember GeoCities?). Dreamweaver happens to be an excellent tool for standards-based visual Web design and development. It makes it easy to create attractive pages that pass W3C compliance tests, and with the right Dreamweaver extensions you can build full-featured, Ajax-enabled, dynamic, collaborative Web 2.0 applications much more easily.

I spent years evaluating different open-source portals and CMS systems written in different languages (ASP, PHP, Perl, and Java), and I found that they all imposed certain user interface design constraints and even the best web-based WYSIWYG editor required was still a lot less powerful than Dreamweaver. The nice thing about Dreamweaver is you get complete freedom to develop your Web user interface however you choose, without any design constraints imposed on you.

But how do you get Web 2.0 support out of a Web 1.0 development tools? Remember Tim O'Reilly's Web 2.0 meme map?

The answer is components - rich, data-driven, Ajax-enabled, standards-compliant Web user interface components.

The component-based web development paradigm makes it easier to build content-driven, dynamic web applications with the latest Web 2.0 features. This is how desktop apps have been written for years, which is also consistent with the "Web as a platform" concept and the goal of making Web 2.0 applications more like desktop applications (that is, by building web applications the same way we build desktop software, we can make the web experience more like a desktop software experience).

Since I do mostly Java development today, I decided to learn JavaServer Faces, a component-based framework for building web apps. As a long-time Dreamweaver user, I also wanted to create my JSF pages in Dreamweaver. Dreamweaver had no built-in JSF support, so I decided to write JSFToolbox for Dreamweaver, a suite of design and coding Dreamweaver extensions that support JavaServer Faces development.

JSF is quite popular in the Java space today. We had our first conference last September. I spoke about using Dreamweaver for Web 2.0 development in my podcast from the conference - check it out if you like.

One of the great things about JSF is that you get Ajax support for free with a lot of UI components, so you can simply add a rich tree component to your page for example and you don't have to write a single line of JavaScript to get the partial page rendering behavior. Our tools allow you to create Ajax-enabled JSF pages in Dreamweaver both visually and intuitively. Personally I've designed and implemented many JSF We

Sun Microsystems are still creating mainframe type systems - see http://www.sun.com/servers/highend/m9000/

This is a "bug". Under recent POSIX revisions this is now considered incorrect behaviour (something about trying to follow "/." and "/.."):

http://blogs.sun.com/jbeck/entry/rm_rf_protection

I didn't realize that had been changed recently. How sad. Another bit of Unix lore that only us old-timers will get to experience.

By their argument, `cd /; rm -rf .' still ought to work. Sigh. That lacks the drama, the feeling, the intensity of slamming down the return key knowing you're about to delete every file on the system. :-)

Supposedly Debian (from Sid onwards) also does not allow 'rm -rf /'.

Pathetic. But at least you get the source to rm(1) so you can fix that bug - or write your own, it's not that hard.

Now, get off my lawn.

Null checks are cheap and the idea of a compiler removing mine scares me.

Null checks are cheap indeed, but there are still bound to be places where removing them can be a useful optimization. I've thought harder about it, and the one sort of case where I think it might be valuable is when inlining code into inner loops.

I don't think you should be any more scared of the compiler removing such checks than you are of compiler optimizations in general. In theory, the compiler can remove checks or alter the way they are done if it can prove the program won't be affected. In practice, actual compilers certainly do have optimization bugs (check out this bug in Java). My point? You should be as scared of of your compiler removing null checks about the same amount as you are scared of compiler bugs already. (And IIRC, Java already does null-check elimination.)

It's a pretty good product--the only bad thing about it is from the publisher's standpoint, since IIRC it requires you to prepare your books in a new format (which is a not-insignificant undertaking) and Amazon has near-complete control over the pricing structure. (The pricing structure thing hurts authors, too.)

Speaking as an author who's had to deal with format issues, I'm hear to tell you that they have to do it anyway.

Don't want to overstate my experience as a mass-market writer. Most of what I've written is obscure, boring technical documentation only a few specialists ever read. But a couple years ago, I got a writing contract with Sun to help update the Java Tutorial, which had been neglected for a really long time. This document is still authored in a kludgy preprocessed HTML system designed over a decade ago. The preprocessor (which was somebody's very first Perl program!) is this evil thing that was designed to generate both web content and PDFs for the printed version. I'm just good enough with Perl and HTML/CSS to update the web generator so the tutorial pages had a more modern look and feel, but I would have been totally out of my depth making the PDF generator work.

Fortunately, that wasn't my problem. For this revision, Sun had agreed with the publisher that converting the HTML into PDF was the publisher's job. Instead of trying to get our old, kludgy setup working, they hired this consultant to convert our HTML to XML, which could then be fed into an off-the-shelf XSL-FO processor to create the PDF. I was extremely skeptical that he could pull this off, but in fact he did an excellent job.

The really ironic part was that the PDF then got converted back to HTML for the Safari Books Online version. Although I'm reasonable proud of the look and feel I created for the original version, Safari's version is better.

The bottom line here is that publishers already have to think about delivering to multiple formats: PDF, HTML (with automatically generated navigation), WAP, and now eBooks. It's helpful, but not absolutely necessary, that the original content be authored in XML or SGML. The main reason to use these formats actually has more to do with maintaining large document bases and reusing content.

It's a pretty good product--the only bad thing about it is from the publisher's standpoint, since IIRC it requires you to prepare your books in a new format (which is a not-insignificant undertaking) and Amazon has near-complete control over the pricing structure. (The pricing structure thing hurts authors, too.)

Speaking as an author who's had to deal with format issues, I'm hear to tell you that they have to do it anyway.

Don't want to overstate my experience as a mass-market writer. Most of what I've written is obscure, boring technical documentation only a few specialists ever read. But a couple years ago, I got a writing contract with Sun to help update the Java Tutorial, which had been neglected for a really long time. This document is still authored in a kludgy preprocessed HTML system designed over a decade ago. The preprocessor (which was somebody's very first Perl program!) is this evil thing that was designed to generate both web content and PDFs for the printed version. I'm just good enough with Perl and HTML/CSS to update the web generator so the tutorial pages had a more modern look and feel, but I would have been totally out of my depth making the PDF generator work.

Fortunately, that wasn't my problem. For this revision, Sun had agreed with the publisher that converting the HTML into PDF was the publisher's job. Instead of trying to get our old, kludgy setup working, they hired this consultant to convert our HTML to XML, which could then be fed into an off-the-shelf XSL-FO processor to create the PDF. I was extremely skeptical that he could pull this off, but in fact he did an excellent job.

The really ironic part was that the PDF then got converted back to HTML for the Safari Books Online version. Although I'm reasonable proud of the look and feel I created for the original version, Safari's version is better.

The bottom line here is that publishers already have to think about delivering to multiple formats: PDF, HTML (with automatically generated navigation), WAP, and now eBooks. It's helpful, but not absolutely necessary, that the original content be authored in XML or SGML. The main reason to use these formats actually has more to do with maintaining large document bases and reusing content.

A few years ago we were facing the problem of the need to host/maintain a Java webservice. We started to look into common Java containers like Tomcat, JBoss and naturally Glassfish. The only problem we saw was that the application server had to function as a backend and thus we would need the webserver to relay requests.

Eventually we stumbled upon the Java System webserver 7 and that turned out to be much more than merely a webserver with a nice administrative interface. If you're used to administrating Apache servers then it can be a bit tricky to get used to this since the server fully uses XML for its configuration files (that is, if you chose not to use the admin. interface). At first we focussed fully on the Java container, but eventually started to discover that you could do a whole lot more with this critter.

Personally I think it really excells at clustering. If you made changes on one node then one command (or 2 clicks of the mouse) is enough to distribute those changes all over the cluster. Next to that it has excellent (online) documentation and is free for use just like Apache is. Oh, and before I forget.. While it is aimed at Java usage its also perfectly capable of supporting other languages like PHP. Either by using a PHP addon or simply setting up PHP as some sort of "back end" (allow use of FastCGI for example).

Considering the price and the ease of use (setup a cluster in approx. six steps) I think this might be just what you want. And its onboard extensive statistics engine will allow you to clearly see for yourself if the load on your park is getting too high or not.

And yes, I agree with most other reactions that your load really doesn't need clustering. I'll add a little more to that; the service I mentioned above is currently still running on a single Webserver 7 instance and easily deals with more than that amount. We did tune the Java container to suit our needs, but apart from that even an app. server should be capable of handling this load. But having said that I think you might find this webserver very usefull nonetheless. Especially the administrative interface might save you guys a lot of tweaking.

A few years ago we were facing the problem of the need to host/maintain a Java webservice. We started to look into common Java containers like Tomcat, JBoss and naturally Glassfish. The only problem we saw was that the application server had to function as a backend and thus we would need the webserver to relay requests.

Eventually we stumbled upon the Java System webserver 7 and that turned out to be much more than merely a webserver with a nice administrative interface. If you're used to administrating Apache servers then it can be a bit tricky to get used to this since the server fully uses XML for its configuration files (that is, if you chose not to use the admin. interface). At first we focussed fully on the Java container, but eventually started to discover that you could do a whole lot more with this critter.

Personally I think it really excells at clustering. If you made changes on one node then one command (or 2 clicks of the mouse) is enough to distribute those changes all over the cluster. Next to that it has excellent (online) documentation and is free for use just like Apache is. Oh, and before I forget.. While it is aimed at Java usage its also perfectly capable of supporting other languages like PHP. Either by using a PHP addon or simply setting up PHP as some sort of "back end" (allow use of FastCGI for example).

Considering the price and the ease of use (setup a cluster in approx. six steps) I think this might be just what you want. And its onboard extensive statistics engine will allow you to clearly see for yourself if the load on your park is getting too high or not.

And yes, I agree with most other reactions that your load really doesn't need clustering. I'll add a little more to that; the service I mentioned above is currently still running on a single Webserver 7 instance and easily deals with more than that amount. We did tune the Java container to suit our needs, but apart from that even an app. server should be capable of handling this load. But having said that I think you might find this webserver very usefull nonetheless. Especially the administrative interface might save you guys a lot of tweaking.

A few years ago we were facing the problem of the need to host/maintain a Java webservice. We started to look into common Java containers like Tomcat, JBoss and naturally Glassfish. The only problem we saw was that the application server had to function as a backend and thus we would need the webserver to relay requests.

Eventually we stumbled upon the Java System webserver 7 and that turned out to be much more than merely a webserver with a nice administrative interface. If you're used to administrating Apache servers then it can be a bit tricky to get used to this since the server fully uses XML for its configuration files (that is, if you chose not to use the admin. interface). At first we focussed fully on the Java container, but eventually started to discover that you could do a whole lot more with this critter.

Personally I think it really excells at clustering. If you made changes on one node then one command (or 2 clicks of the mouse) is enough to distribute those changes all over the cluster. Next to that it has excellent (online) documentation and is free for use just like Apache is. Oh, and before I forget.. While it is aimed at Java usage its also perfectly capable of supporting other languages like PHP. Either by using a PHP addon or simply setting up PHP as some sort of "back end" (allow use of FastCGI for example).

Considering the price and the ease of use (setup a cluster in approx. six steps) I think this might be just what you want. And its onboard extensive statistics engine will allow you to clearly see for yourself if the load on your park is getting too high or not.

And yes, I agree with most other reactions that your load really doesn't need clustering. I'll add a little more to that; the service I mentioned above is currently still running on a single Webserver 7 instance and easily deals with more than that amount. We did tune the Java container to suit our needs, but apart from that even an app. server should be capable of handling this load. But having said that I think you might find this webserver very usefull nonetheless. Especially the administrative interface might save you guys a lot of tweaking.

A few years ago we were facing the problem of the need to host/maintain a Java webservice. We started to look into common Java containers like Tomcat, JBoss and naturally Glassfish. The only problem we saw was that the application server had to function as a backend and thus we would need the webserver to relay requests.

Eventually we stumbled upon the Java System webserver 7 and that turned out to be much more than merely a webserver with a nice administrative interface. If you're used to administrating Apache servers then it can be a bit tricky to get used to this since the server fully uses XML for its configuration files (that is, if you chose not to use the admin. interface). At first we focussed fully on the Java container, but eventually started to discover that you could do a whole lot more with this critter.

Personally I think it really excells at clustering. If you made changes on one node then one command (or 2 clicks of the mouse) is enough to distribute those changes all over the cluster. Next to that it has excellent (online) documentation and is free for use just like Apache is. Oh, and before I forget.. While it is aimed at Java usage its also perfectly capable of supporting other languages like PHP. Either by using a PHP addon or simply setting up PHP as some sort of "back end" (allow use of FastCGI for example).

Considering the price and the ease of use (setup a cluster in approx. six steps) I think this might be just what you want. And its onboard extensive statistics engine will allow you to clearly see for yourself if the load on your park is getting too high or not.

And yes, I agree with most other reactions that your load really doesn't need clustering. I'll add a little more to that; the service I mentioned above is currently still running on a single Webserver 7 instance and easily deals with more than that amount. We did tune the Java container to suit our needs, but apart from that even an app. server should be capable of handling this load. But having said that I think you might find this webserver very usefull nonetheless. Especially the administrative interface might save you guys a lot of tweaking.

Servers need to be extremely cautious with drivers in order to provide the sort of 99.999% uptime expected for industry.

Dude, I work for a server company. I'm the documentation lead for our current high-end x64 server. For this platform, we support Linux (both RHEL and SLES), Solaris, Windows (both 2003 and 2008) and VMware.

And yes, we do put a lot of effort into making sure various drivers, firmware, and hardware work together. Half the people I work with do nothing else. But we work just as hard to do it for the Open Source operating systems as for the proprietary ones.

The difference is that getting your drivers into a proprietary OS is longer, slower process. More legal issues, more technical issues. Everybody having access to everybody's source code really speeds things up. So does not having to worry about who you can communicate proprietary information to.

you can also script on top of Java:
here

The open source java implementation (OpenJDK) is a separate project. http://www.sun.com/software/opensource/java/

This capability is part of the plugin API and works in every major browser, as documented by Sun. And unlike Silverlight, most people actually have Java installed.

You make an interesting point in that it's free as in beer. However, isn't Java GPL'd nowadays?

Java 6 SE License. In a word, "no." Sun have talked about open sourcing Java, and I heard it was, but I just read the license and it does not look open-source to me. Regardless, I know for a fact they were not going to use the GPL, but another OSI-approved license, perhaps the Sun Public License?

I don't see why people are upset about this.

1) The addon/plugin is tied to your computer - not your profile. It's similar to installing quicktime. It registers plugins with your browser. But for some reason it shows up as an addon rather than as a plugin - perhaps because of the featureset it requires? It looks like they split prefetching functionality from the main plugin, so that it can be disabled if desired.

2) It's easy to turn off. Just go to the java control panel and disable it. If you can't figure it out, here. (first result on google)

3) Prior to Firefox 3, nobody even knew this stuff was running. Now you do, and you actually have the option to disable it, or totally remove it. Isn't this a good thing? Why are you screaming now that you know it's there?

4) This happened something like 6 months ago.

5) This feature was not "slipped in". Sun wrote about it in April 2008. Maybe if you were going to throw a fit, you should've done it when they first announced it.

6) Technically you did choose to install the addon. It's part of Java. A checkbox when installing would be nice, but really, isn't required - especially since this is easy to disable, and the functionality is known, and has been disclosed for almost a full year.

If you want something ludicrously invasive, go look at OpenOffice. It silently steals file associations, has no way to manually register extensions, etc.; half the changes they make are so poorly documented that deploying a new version in a production environment can leave things totally FUBAR.

(not that I'm dissing them - just pointing out that this isn't a big issue to me, because Sun did just about everything right, and people are still screaming about it - typical)

For the paranoid...

http://java.sun.com/developer/technicalArticles/javase/java6u10/

Performance:
* Sun's JRE has been steadily getting faster over the years, and 6u10 is no exception. Key performance improvements are the introduction of Java Quick Starter, which will substantially improve Java cold start time on most systems, and a new graphics pipeline on Windows.

You're downloading the wrong packages. If you download from the main java download page it doesn't include the extra crapware.

It will still show a splashscreen for OpenOffice though. Shocking. Quite shocking.

Sure. There are *lots* of considerations beyond speed to want SSDs

And SSD drives are also shock-resistant.

But... Are they resistant to shouting?

Well, there is this and this. But yeah, OP kinda forgets what Unix is.

Sun's Java Webstart provides this functionality.

And

Pretty much what you asked for. OSS[?not sure here], available for a large number of platforms, and already seeing some real world use.

Why go with something with a brain? Try using a Robot to move the mouse around and click at random (like a drunkard's walk.) If it should happen to click on the Okay button on the EULA, well, the robot did it!

So open source isn't immune to adware.

Proponents of Microsoft often cite their market share as being the reason for bullshitwares' authors' attraction to their OS.

With only 1% desktop share, the last thing that needs to be associated with the word "open" is this kind of crap. Microsoft are the worst [citation not needed], but Apple are also bad. I haven't been this pissed since Sun tried to push Yahoo fucking toolbar into their garden-variety Java install.

Alan Cox does assure us that Linux is now working on 64-bit time, and the UNIX epoch 'roll-over' would happen about the time that the sun burnt out."

No, I think he meant "when Sun burns out."

Either that or he knows something we don't about the nature of time. (Or is that "knew something we won't"?)

hmm it looks good, but why do i need to code all that if with a simple parametrized query i could almost do the same?
this could serve i think...

Alan Cox does assure us that Linux is now working on 64-bit time, and the UNIX epoch 'roll-over' would happen about the time that the sun burnt out."

No, I think he meant "when Sun burns out."

I'm sure that all spaceships will be using Linux, and not Solaris.

And "Windows That Was" will be a distant memory.

Wrong. As pointed out above, you have a hole when you break the raid to remove the drive, and need to resync it to the new drive.

What you want is something that allows you to create a snapshot. Something like this: http://blogs.sun.com/mmusante/entry/rolling_snapshots_made_easy

That's not true. For example, when I go to Sun's URL for the Sun Fire T5240 and click through to the section to purchase a server, you first see the MSRP. However, after I login on the account window to the right, the price of the server now shows my corporate discount. Of course, this assumes you have an account that is linked with a corporate discount in the first place, but that seems like a fairly obvious assumption to me.