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That's not exactly what Enhanced 911 is all about. Dialing 911 from your cell phone has always patched you to the correct 911 center (unless the cell tower happens to be close to a border). The major goal of E911 is the tell the emergency operaror where you are located. You can read more about E911 on the FCC website.

There are many cell phones currently on the market which have what is called Assisted GPS. As another posted mentioned, Assisted GPS cell phones merely take measurments of the signal strength coming from various GPS satellites. These measurements are forwarded to the cell tower which calculates the mobile phones location. This is mainly implemented to support E911 in the cheapest way possible. However, I have seen numerous postings on the SprintPCS developer website forums that there are plans to put together a Java library which will permit application developers to write J2ME apps which can query the lat/long of the phone. Those postings are from Sprint employees, but they currently seem to be suggesting that we will see this as part of the Location API included with the Java MIDP 2.0 to be released 4th Quarter 2003.

If I did not state it clearly above, once the cell tower calculates your position, it currently has no reason to pass that info back to your phone. The Location API will work by asking the cell tower for your location, not by reading some registers in your phone. Without the Location API (and the supporting software on the towers), there would be no way for you to write a mapping application that ran on your phone, regardless of how much memory you have. For obvious reasons, such a library would have to query the phone user before permitting the application to obtain location information. I also imagine that Sprint would have to come up with a scheme to prevent folks from reverse engineering the Sprint library and then implementing their own libraries which would not bother asking for permission. That is probably at least part of the reason why it is taking so long to get support for polling your phones location.

That's not exactly what Enhanced 911 is all about. Dialing 911 from your cell phone has always patched you to the correct 911 center (unless the cell tower happens to be close to a border). The major goal of E911 is the tell the emergency operaror where you are located. You can read more about E911 on the FCC website.

There are many cell phones currently on the market which have what is called Assisted GPS. As another posted mentioned, Assisted GPS cell phones merely take measurments of the signal strength coming from various GPS satellites. These measurements are forwarded to the cell tower which calculates the mobile phones location. This is mainly implemented to support E911 in the cheapest way possible. However, I have seen numerous postings on the SprintPCS developer website forums that there are plans to put together a Java library which will permit application developers to write J2ME apps which can query the lat/long of the phone. Those postings are from Sprint employees, but they currently seem to be suggesting that we will see this as part of the Location API included with the Java MIDP 2.0 to be released 4th Quarter 2003.

If I did not state it clearly above, once the cell tower calculates your position, it currently has no reason to pass that info back to your phone. The Location API will work by asking the cell tower for your location, not by reading some registers in your phone. Without the Location API (and the supporting software on the towers), there would be no way for you to write a mapping application that ran on your phone, regardless of how much memory you have. For obvious reasons, such a library would have to query the phone user before permitting the application to obtain location information. I also imagine that Sprint would have to come up with a scheme to prevent folks from reverse engineering the Sprint library and then implementing their own libraries which would not bother asking for permission. That is probably at least part of the reason why it is taking so long to get support for polling your phones location.

I work mostly with Java but that isn't to say the Forums on Sun's site can't be helpful for a C programmer. They are categorized so if you wanted to, you could limit your search to the Algorithms forum for example. The search engine is actually pretty good. If all else fails, post a question and you should get a reply pretty quick.

I work mostly with Java but that isn't to say the Forums on Sun's site can't be helpful for a C programmer. They are categorized so if you wanted to, you could limit your search to the Algorithms forum for example. The search engine is actually pretty good. If all else fails, post a question and you should get a reply pretty quick.

I work mostly with Java but that isn't to say the Forums on Sun's site can't be helpful for a C programmer. They are categorized so if you wanted to, you could limit your search to the Algorithms forum for example. The search engine is actually pretty good. If all else fails, post a question and you should get a reply pretty quick.

When personal computers started to gain momentum, Sun proclaimed that they were simple toys that didn't measure up to their standard of computing.

Sun Microsystems was founded in 1982.

I don't think, in all seriousness, PCs reached the same level of operability and power as what Sun was producing until the early- to mid-nineties. Any "trashing of personal computing" that occured after, say, 1993, may be difficult to justify. Arguably, from that point on, Sun was a producer of personal computers and servers, not workstations and servers.

Sun sells x86 blade servers.

They need an os for it and solarisx86 blows on that platform not to mention they canceled it due to lack of demand originally.

Sun is getting eatin up by Linux. Part of the problem is the delay of the sparcIV, V, and III processors. For $/per mip intel servers rule and are eating up Sun's core market.

Sun has 2 options.
1.) wait for the IV, and V sparc processors which will bring sun competitive again and hope intel/AMD slow down
2.) Come out with their own entry level intel servers.

Sun chose a combination of 1 & 2. Solarisx86 was canceled when sun only sold sparc processors and it was eating up their core market. They cancelled and all the software vendors left the platform and ported to Linux or stayed on solaris/sparc.

Linux is the obvious solution since it has the core apps already there. Sun should stick with Linux and port Sun One and N1 to Sun's Linux distro. I think and hope what sun will do is bundle redhat or suse linux and offer SunOne and N1 with it. They prefer to use a standard distro rather then there own to cut costs. Solarisx86 is dead and not real optimized for intel. Why sun wants to bring this back? I have no idea.

Ps. For anyone who runs a sun shop, what exactly is sunone and n1? Is it a big deal or just hype from sun?

First they claim solarisx86 is the answer, then they come out with AMD powered blades and claim solarisx86 is dead and cancels it, then they bundle sun linux for their amd blades, then they decide to resurect solarisx86 after all the vendors left and use it in conjection with linux, now they are deciding to cancel linux again?

Redhat has stated publically they do not like Sun marketing Solarisx86 and they consider it a competitor. My guess is redhat is willing to do a port if Sun cancels solarisx86 and eventually moved to redhat linux for their sparc machines.

First they claim solarisx86 is the answer, then they come out with AMD powered blades and claim solarisx86 is dead and cancels it, then they bundle sun linux for their amd blades, then they decide to resurect solarisx86 after all the vendors left and use it in conjection with linux, now they are deciding to cancel linux again?

Redhat has stated publically they do not like Sun marketing Solarisx86 and they consider it a competitor. My guess is redhat is willing to do a port if Sun cancels solarisx86 and eventually moved to redhat linux for their sparc machines.

• Ah, but with ASP you're locked into using a Microsoft server. With PHP you can use Microsoft, Apache, Zeus, and a handful of others. In theory you can use it on any platform and with any server. Granted, there are programs like ChiliSoft, but you do have to pay for that ($495 per server).
• Which functions, procedures, methods and objects is it missing? I've had no problems finding what I need.
• Response.Redirect() = Header("Location: http://somesite")
• Server.MapPath() = $_SERVER["PATH_TRANSLATED"] or (__PATH__)
• You can easily access all checkboxes using an array. Simply specify the name of each checkbox like this: NAME="value[]" and then you'll have an array of variables.
• If PHP were so horrible, why is it the most popular module for Apache?

from sun themselves

Q: What were the hottest issues to resolve?

Deutsch: They were much the same issues that other standards committees are facing with the same difficulty: intellectual property and patent rights.

You've probably seen lots of accounts in the press over the last year, about standards organizations struggling to come to agreement on intellectual property -- and patents in particular. We were no different. Those were the topics that became very intense for all of us. In fact, they became so intense, that at some point the business representatives started having their lawyers join in on the conference calls.

At various times the lawyers fielded their own calls, as well as joining us in our regular ad hoc teleconferences. This was necessary because we were trying to answer some very complex legal questions about intellectual property and patents that frankly hadn't been addressed by many other collegial forums -- hot issues that evoke some very strongly held and generally conflicting opinions.

This seems to me to be them talking about using community developed standards and calling them theirs.

You are correct that Java was built in-house with prior art being to numerous to bother listing. I am usually not a M$ mouthpiece but at least the released the VM specification and C# language specification over to SOME standards body. Java is not free, it's definition is not free and neither is code posted on their own developer forum by individuals who do not work for Sun.

More details here

Wouldn't this also be very similar to Sun's JINI technology?

It's not so much that Flash competes with Java as it does compliment Java (and .NET). The solutions currently being explored is to have Flash and HTML on the front end with Java on the server back end. I think this combo could be really powerful and takes advantage of the strengths of each platform.

In fact, Macromedia did a Flash + Java "Petstore" application to show off this exact solution. See:

J2EETM: Behind the Pet Market From Macromedia
Macromedia Pet Market Blueprint Application
Macromedia JavaTM Application Development Center

Also it's interesting to note that Macromedia produces it's own J2EE application server, JRun. The latest version is actually rather nice and very well priced. So I think Macromedia has no problems supporting both Flash and Java.

Lies, damn lies, and "mainframes are peerless"

http://www.sun.com/datacenter/mainframe/

These guys are mainly going at SOHO and SMB markets through local resellers, they claim DSL speed with their proprietary system(derived from MidPoint?) and they have a free trial These are the same folks that brough out the Gekko flat-panel speakers that were hot for a while, and who do noise reduction on some jets and headsets... Oh, and don't forget to check Google

Sooo. I guess the overwhelmingly popular question will be "who has tried it"... I'll ignore the "faster pron" jokes that should show up every other post... ;)

the only "feature" I can see that remotely benefits anyone is the ability to have more than four desktops (Gnome 6, CDE 4).

I'll be picky and point out that you can definately have more than four workspaces with CDE. I'm not sure about an upper limit, but you can have at least nine, since that's what I've got set up on a Solaris workstation. Sun's got documentation to show you how to add more workspaces.

If your only reason for using Gnome on Solaris is to get more workspaces/desktops, then you really have no reason to be using Gnome.

I was probably not the only one to wonder what this mad hatter thing is. Seems to be their own desktop-oriented linux distro that comes bundled with the (PC) hardware. Still in vaporware, promised sometime later this year. I vaguely remember hearing that the pricing model would be a monthly subscription. More info here

GJ is the old implementation of Java Generics. It has since evolved into JSR-014. Sun has a prototype implementation of a compiler that supports generics, and there's even an entire forum for discussing Java generics.

Actually, there is a Java Specification Request to add generics to Java, which is essentially adding template capability. The proposal is JSR014.

With a Java Developer Connection account, you can try a prototype compiler with this capability. It claims to generate code that can run on a standard 1.3 JVM.

One of the major strengths of templates is to avoid exactly the situation that Java everything-from-Object inheritance causes in collections.

In other words, this code:

MyObject m = (MyObject)iterator.next();

In fact, it's so useful, it's appearing in Java in JDK1.5, courtesy of JSR 14.

But far beyond convenience when typing, the important point is that using templates or generics in collections turns the typesafety of collections into a compile-time check rather than a runtime exception. Which is a Good Thing.

Heh...Sun sure does seem to be lashing out at Microsoft quite a bit recently...first, they poked fun at them after dropping the .NET stuff (which I thought was pretty hokey anyway), and now they're taking shots on the CLR and C#. Could this be death throes? Or mindless banter? Hmm....

This doesn't make much sense. Why would Sun lay off people here and try to import H1-Bs when they could just expand staffing at their India Engineering Center and ship development over there, as they have already done for their HPC ClusterTools software? Oh wait, they're already doing that. And also why did my submission of this very same story get rejected three days ago?

Java Programmers: Take a look at the Java Architecture for XML Binding (JAXB), available in the Java Web Services Developer Pack V 1.1 (see article here). From my basic understanding of it, it "binds" XML to a set of Java content classes, saving you the time and effort of traversing a DOM tree or dealing with SAX. I have yet to use it, but it looks perfect for my application, which uses an XML-based configuration file.

Actually, I'd be interested if anybody here has used this yet? Is it ready for prime time?

Java Programmers: Take a look at the Java Architecture for XML Binding (JAXB), available in the Java Web Services Developer Pack V 1.1 (see article here). From my basic understanding of it, it "binds" XML to a set of Java content classes, saving you the time and effort of traversing a DOM tree or dealing with SAX. I have yet to use it, but it looks perfect for my application, which uses an XML-based configuration file.

Actually, I'd be interested if anybody here has used this yet? Is it ready for prime time?

Since Fibre Channel is always found in external drive arrays

I always thought the idea of using a iButton ring was rather elegant, since people wear jewelry anyway. I guest the cost factor is too high for each unit though, so it's never caught on. Too bad since some of them Java, and can act as a self contained wallet.

Registration Bla bla

Does this count?

Sun Microsystems, Inc. (SUN) hereby grants to you a fully paid, nonexclusive, nontransferable, perpetual, worldwide limited license (without the right to sublicense) under SUN's intellectual property rights that are essential to practice this specification. This license allows and is limited to the creation and distribution of clean room implementations of this specification that: (i) include a complete implementation of the current version of this specification without subsetting or supersetting; (ii) implement all the interfaces and functionality of the required packages of the Java 2 Platform, Standard Edition, as defined by SUN, without subsetting or supersetting; (iii) do not add any additional packages, classes, or interfaces to the java.* or javax.* packages or their subpackages; (iv) pass all test suites relating to the most recent published version of the specification of the Java 2 Platform, Standard Edition, that are available from SUN six (6) months prior to any beta release of the clean room implementation or upgrade thereto; (v) do not derive from SUN source code or binary materials; and (vi) do not include any SUN source code or binary materials without an appropriate and separate license from SUN.

It's from the copyright statement for The Java Language Specification, Second Edition by Sun. You can download your own copy, complete with this license, here.

Cause there are no Presentation programs for other os's

All this time I thought I used Star Office with Star Impress

What was I thinking!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!

Cause there are no Presentation programs for other os's

All this time I thought I used Star Office with Star Impress

What was I thinking!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!

Tell your grandfather to tell the alum, Scott McNeeley that in order for the doantion to ge accepted he has to donate and least five times as much in Sun Hardware and StarOffice licenses.

The greatest invention of Smalltalk is hype: co-opting and taking credit for other people's inventions.

Simula 67 was the first object-oriented language, and all practical/successful OO languages follow from it: C++, Java, C#, Eiffel, etc. But even Smalltalk experts mistakenly believe that Smalltalk invented OO. Smalltalk isn't even OO as we know it.

Similarly, the mouse was invented by Doug Englebart (movie evidence - ) along with the idea of the word processor and many other things we take for granted now. And the GUI was invented by Ivan Sutherland in Sketchpad: pop-up menus, drag and drop, etc (used a light pen).

has an excellent intern program.

But I work at a datacentre for a major bank and they are extremely touchy about software and (network stability and all that) so we don't get IMs at all. This morning I solved that problem by 'coding' and instant messenger that included history tracking using nothing but batch files, built-in-windows executables, using the windows "NET SEND" command. It works quite nicely and already saved me a bunch of time today getting information.

So if you want the efficiency of IMs but none of the software, I suggest you use NET SEND. It caught on like today with a bunch of other people in my area.

(Please, spare the jokes about using windows on a network when stability is critical. They're only dumb terminals used to launch xterms to access the mighty solaris server.)

Full release notes from Sun Microsystems on release 1.4.1, includes overview of changes and detailed description on many updated packages, etc.

Sun has a Linux strategy?
Wow, that's news to me.

Sun bought Cobalt for their linux based appliances 2 1/2 years ago. You missed that? The purchase of one of the largest, more successful Linux-based product companies by one of the largest, most successful Unix product companies?

+3 Insightful?

It seems like Sun is playing with Linux

Sun isn't playing with Linux, they're shipping product with Linux. Sun store servers

And plan to ship more: Sun Linux PC cheaper

Sun and Microsoft will also learn that you must move or get out of the way when a disruptive market mover is coming.

Sun has been there, done that. What do you think happened to the minicomputer market? You've heard of them, right?

Sun has been part of more than one wave.

Threads are executed as one of four classes:

Actually Sun added a class in Solaris 9. It is called the "Fixed-Priority (FX) Scheduling Class". Check it out here if you interested.

Err, these are competing philosophies. You can't have both types of scheduling going on. Think about it: you have an interactive process which wants to use all the CPU all day long, and you have 6 server processes that want to have balanced scheduling for the clients they are handling. No matter what the scheduler chooses, it is being unfaithful to your bit for each process.

Check out the Solaris 9 Resource Manager, which can do both types. It allows you specify at a high level how much of the system's resources each group of processes gets under which conditions. You could say for example, group A (interactive) gets up to 100% unless group B (batch) needs some, in which case allow B up to 30% during the day and up to 70% at night. You could do this sort of thing in VMS over a decade ago. Also, even if the underlying OS doesn't give you the capability, an Oracle server running batch and interactive tasks can do it too.

Right now everyone uses Sun machines to design, but you can get a cheaper Linux x86 machine that is four times faster. So it is my job to prove that Linux works. The problem is that I'm an analog circuit designer stuck in the role of sysadmin.

Most engineering work, whether it's CFD and FEA or ICE is bound by memory bandwidth, not CPU speed. It requires the construction of very large in-memory data structures, which see a combination of random access and sequential traversal. Before you assert that an x86 machine is 4x faster, benchmark it with the actual applications you use, don't rely on SPECmarks and the like, which can run entirely in cache, because benchmarks aren't representative of real applications. And if you've got UPA in your workstation (like say the old Ultra 1) then no bus-based x86 can match you for I/O. If you want workstation-class hardware, it costs more than a PC.

This is my experience: for benchmarks, my 1Ghz P3 beats my 225Mhz Octane easily, but for work, the Octane runs rings around the PC - one I/O bound task and the PC is almost unusable 'til it completes, but the Octane can max out its disks, run at 100% CPU and still remain responsive. I see similar comparing PC with Sun.

Secondly, when you buy Sun, you aren't just buying a piece of hardware, you're buying a service. Support and maintenance you can get are far, far beyond what you can expect from an x86 vendor. If a part goes bad, you can get it replaced in a few hours. All the components in your machine have been certified as working together and working with the OS. And can your Linux vendor do this? (No, they can't even stabilise on one libc!) Running a network of workstations for your company's core business is a completely different game than running a network of PCs for ordinary office workers.

Um, that's one of the points that Joel makes in his article. I'm not sure about the version posted to the web (he says it's a toned-down version so who knows) but I read the emailed version and he does say that no one has time to click to each next post.

Personally, I have found the best web-based forums to be those used by Sun at forums.java.sun.com. Unlike the ZDNet forums you mention, you just read down through the posts linearly (though threads are kept separate). it's a pretty good system.

Too true. I use a Dell UltraSharp 1900FP on the desk (sits beside a Sun 21" CRT) and it annoys the hell out of me that its stuck at 1280x1024. But if you want to part with an arm, the Apple 23" HD display is simply beautiful and Sun will sell you a 24.1" TFT for an arm, leg, kidney and some other assorted organs. Do the laptop screens really have that many pixels?

• Now you can use the Solaris[tm] 9 Operating System at home or at work -- without paying a license fee. For only the cost of media plus shipping or download related costs,
• you can use the software for non-commercial usage on single processor systems supplied to you by Sun or its authorized distributors or based on the x86 architecture.

I remember seeing a new SPARCstation that had a PCI celeron card that would let you run any x86 OS "inside" of Solaris without affecting Solaris' perfomance at all.. it's primarily being marketed towards x86 (windows) developers. Here's the link.

Why would you buy HPUX when you can download Solaris isos for free? Heck, HP wanted $3000 for its Linux distro. :P

True, however (for fairly big $$$, granted) I could pick up something like a Sun Fire 6800 server, with up to 24 processors and 192 GB of RAM. I would at least be saving on a REAL expensive Oracle license. ;-)

Granted, its not terabytes - however access should be blazingly fast, and you have all the advantages of a fully OO approach, with general purpose languages. I could see LOTS of uses for this, particularly on highly reliable hardware. (You know, in fact, with RMI you aren't limited to a single machine either.)

Great stuff once again coming from the Open Source camp - and nice and tight as well at only 350 lines of code!

That's what I call programming!

(One last thought - 4 processor Opteron servers will be relatively inexpensive, and should support 64 GB RAM.)

A component architecture for the development and deployment of object-oriented, distributed, enterprise-level applications. Applications written using the Enterprise JavaBeans architecture are scalable, transactional, and multi-user and secure.

An enterprise bean that represents persistent data maintained in a database. An entity bean can manage its own persistence or it can delegate this function to its container. An entity bean is identified by a primary key. If the container in which an entity bean is hosted crashes, the entity bean, its primary key, and any remote references survive the crash.

No internally they are using Sun Rays and saving even more money.

IMO you need a clue bat application.

Here, use mine.

1. As far as I know, Sun tried to license NFS. Failed. For various reasons.

Sun made the NFS protocols available in several RFCs. ( RFC 3010 NFS version 4 Protocol, RFC 1094 NFS: Network File System Protocol Specification, RFC 1813 NFS Version 3 Protocol Specification. )

Anyone was free to do a clean implementation based on the RFC, or license Sun's code. Apparently this was such a failure that NFS is used by: Sun, IBM, HP, SCO, SGI, Apple, Microsoft, Hummingbird, *Linux, *BSD, ...

Do not try to pull that "give to the community crap" at least as far as NFS is concerned.

You are either uninformed or trolling. Sun is paying the U of Michigan to port NFSv4 to Linux and OpenBSD. NFSv4 porting project

2. Solaris (not SunOS) NFS support until 2.6 was crap.

Hmmm. I was part of a team running a large engineering site using Solaris 2.5.1 and HP/UX 10.20. Solaris 2.5.1 without patches did suck. But with a reasonable patch set (you did patch, right? Even once at installation?) 2.5.1 was very solid (in my opinin, much more so than HP/UX, especially under version 3 - shudder).

Many patchlevels even as late as 2.5.1 had quite a few data corruptions bugs. As a result most old non-academic installations actually used NetAppliance when they needed NFS.

Network Appliance was founded in 1992, shipped their first product in 1993 (a 7Gb appliance), and in 1995 their total revenue was $45million. Even given their rapid growth, there is no way that "most old non-academic installations" were using Network Appliance for their NFS needs in the Solaris 2.5.1 timeframe. Network appliance history

Good grief, Sun shipped 1.6 petabytes of fibre-channel storage alone in 1998. Sun ships 1.6PB

3. I had to be a design authotity on something like 100+ Netra T1s with Solaris running the most elementary services like DNS, news, mail, etc. None of them running more then one service so they were not even loaded.

Its not the number of services that run, its how heavily they are used. DNS isn't likely to be big load, but it could be as you move up the ISP food chain; news could definitely be a heavy load depending on your feed; mail - depends. I'm also curious, if your servers "were not even loaded," why did you use so many as the "design authority?"

And frankly I have not seen so many hardware failures and memory leaks in the core OS anytime before and anytime after.

Hardware - Maybe you had a bad batch, a lemon model, just plain bad luck. I've generally had good experience with Sun kit.
Core OS - You were following that best practice known as patching your systems, right?

most linux kernels in the 2.3.x and 2.5.x series were more reliable.

Linux NFS protocol support has generally been both limited and inferior to Solaris. (Little surprise - Sun invented it.) Linux also had many problems with stability and corruption prior to 2.2.17. It has greatly improved since then, but is still limited in terms of full protocol support. Since Sun is paying for the port of NFSv4 to Linux, it will no doubt continue to improve. As to the kernel in general, the Linux kernel today isn't fully the equal of Solaris. If you want to assert that it was 4 years ago, I don't think that you are making judgements based upon facts.

4. If you have created a website that needs one 100+ CPUs box instead of having the load spread across several redundant systems you should be fired on the spot.

Strawman/flamebait. Read the post. It didn't say one box with 100+ CPUs, it said "When you want to run a giant website with 100's of CPU's." In other words, a site like you claim to have designed.

IMO you need a clue bat application.

Are you done with the clue bat yet?

Blades? Lots of them out now:

Sun
RLX
Silicon Mechanics
HP
Dell
IBM