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Jini is a java based service delivery system that is a great alternative to UPnP. I'm currently working on a network based music player so I can play mp3's on my home stereo and control it from anywhere with a web browser.

http://developer.apple.com/macosx/rendezvous/
http://developer.java.sun.com/developer/products/j ini/

What I suggest, now when we have lots of transistors to play with, are asyncronous designs!

Sun Microsystems is already planning this for their UltraSPARC IIIi CPU.

One theory I have is that Sun recognizes that super-high frequencies result in less reliability than Sun will tolerate, driving them to new CPU architectures. Remember, Intel cares more about marketing and big business than they do about truly high-availability and zero-error CPUs, which leads to their high frequency yet terribly inefficient Pentium 4. Sun's chip designers are just as talented as Intel's, and if Sun wanted to release a 5GHz CPU they would. It's interesting that Sun chose the asynchronous architecture instead of taking Intel's route of over-the-horizon pipelines and other tricks.they chose

Yeah, no one important installs GNOME as the default. And there are not really any desktop agnostic distros. Red Hat is basically the only thing keeping GNOME alive.

Erik

Speaking of this sort of thing, can anyone point me to a FireWire external disk box that holds more than one drive? I'm thinking something along the lines of this only using 1394 instead of fibre or SCSI.

Perhaps Bill and Monkey-boy have realized that they can't take on Java after all.

What kind of community effort would they really provide? Look at the JCP and what is happening there. Developers, when they find bugs and provide code fixes to the JDK, are actually seeing their changes in future JDK releases ! How many developers using Microsoft products can make *that* claim?

So, take on Linux where the *same claims* can be made with respect to fixes to the OS, but perhaps are a bit more obscure to find since the Linux Community Process (sm) is really in fact Linus himself... (Hint: Linus.. let GO of the kernel.. put stewards on it with you in charge of *them*).

Again, more FUD from the Dud....

Perhaps Bill and Monkey-boy have realized that they can't take on Java after all.

What kind of community effort would they really provide? Look at the JCP and what is happening there. Developers, when they find bugs and provide code fixes to the JDK, are actually seeing their changes in future JDK releases ! How many developers using Microsoft products can make *that* claim?

So, take on Linux where the *same claims* can be made with respect to fixes to the OS, but perhaps are a bit more obscure to find since the Linux Community Process (sm) is really in fact Linus himself... (Hint: Linus.. let GO of the kernel.. put stewards on it with you in charge of *them*).

Again, more FUD from the Dud....

By the way, Microsoft also has offices in Charlotte and Raleigh.

Although I really would like to see more technical information, I bet this will see the same fate as other "simple" "solutions": It's the managers' (and users') darling system as long as they only request simple features, but they will cry for the admin if they need advanced stuff which goes beyond the first three pages of the fancy product overview paper...

N1 will not replace any good Unix admins. There are reasons for this. The way *I* set up a Solaris box, it is near zero maintenance anyway. What (in addition) could N1 offer? Say I have "n" Sparc boxen in a bunch of cabinets, and an interface that makes them all behave like one machine. Do you really think offering all the services on one virtual box will be any simpler than offering a few here and one there on individual servers?

Here's another reason: Unix provides the service of enforcing principles on processes. Even if you take away the enforcement of access to individual hardware devices, and you have this magical VM (like good-ol IBM VM on 390...) for every service to occupy, those services--the software that unix runs-- must still be configured. Here's another idea to chew on: application programmers are not the brightest bulbs. The best thing about unix is how hard you can press sloppily written applications to do work. You can wrap any application in a script that cleans up after a crash and stick it in inittab to minimize the impact of a true bad-and-right piece of software. It rarely inerrupts a good-and-right (or wrong) service. The computer scientists who design operating systems' software are the bright ones: it's all about solving specific problems with general solutions. Most of my work is troubleshooting and pointing the finger of blame on one vendor, or another, or the LAN, or the WAN performance, or some other person... If I never had to install another box, if Sun dropped it on "the grid" and magically the capacity of the system was increased, it wouldn't buy me any slack time. I take trends of problems and create a generalized strategy to elimanate a whole class of problems at their causes. I represent the business needs to the uncaring robot machines. I force them to submit.

Will it be any less work for me to wrangle one big fat pseudomachine? I doubt it seriously. The suits can't articulate what they want in english. How is N1 going to give them what they want? If the CFO is looking at the salaries and grinding his teeth over mine... I'll gladly take twice my salary in consulting fees to do break-fix work on his N1 architecture while he pays his (damned... grinding teeth again) staff to break it for me. I am an artist. CFO: You don't know how to make the machines do your boring repetitive work for you, but I do (stupid luser...). To the BOARD: When your CFO is taking his golden parachute, no thing gives greater joy than to say "I told you so!"

Seriously though.. say you take SunONE, and run your JavaVM on Grid Engine, and wrap it all in SunManagementCentre with a back-door of Jumpstart for new nodes. Solaris Admin: Do you think it will put you out of a job? There are probably a hundred programmers who can write business applications that distribute well. CFO: you can't afford them, so HA! There's a reason unix has only made small incremental architectural progress: the bar is already set so high...

72 Meg of frame buffer memory, and 256 Meg of texture memory with 30-bit color. Of course, it doesn't run in a PC but, we can dream can't we.

--xPhase

Scott McNeally long ago openly stated that it's his aim to put lots of IT workers out of a job. He thinks IT takes up too many resources in terms of staff and manpower

No, he just thinks they take up too much money which could otherwise be used to buy his overpriced oversold boxes. £25k for a dual 1 Ghz UltraSparc III workstation just so I can compile my C++ at a speed vaguely comparable to my £2k dual Athlon ? And run a bastardised Unix that daren't even acknowledge it's parentage ??

Mod me down, but everything from Sun apart from the colour schemes and the name sucks... god I wish Apollo had been the one to survive those early workstation wars rather than the self-congratulatory Sun. And yes I know they supposedly contributed more source to GNU/Linux than anyone else, but I reckon that's just their badly structured .h files. Don't even get me started on Java ("oh, you cut yourself on the nasty sharp edged tool, here, have a blunt edged one instead").

Ooops, sorry, thought I was on Slashdot for a moment there

--
T

Threading performance may be poor on Linux, though personally I haven't noticed it, other aspects are fine though. I'd say that big Java applications start up about 20% faster on my Linux partition than on my Windows one using Sun JVM 1.3.1_04.

In fact, Solaris LWP threading has caused me more headaches - it seems that the old N:M thread model can deadlock with native libraries such as the Oracle OCI drivers, theoretically using the alternate 1:1 model fixes this but I haven't yet proved the case to my own satisfaction. Read up on this new model here, or try it by putting /usr/lib/lwp in your LD_LIBRARY_PATH.

Sun has developed Forte for Java which is based on netbeans. It now goes by Sun One Studio. Anyway, it is a nice IDE and users at my company are generally split 50/50 between that and JBuilder. They have a free Community version as well as some commercial versions.

I want Java Card support everywhere coupled with a single PIN.

A Liberty security review performed at Sun is linked to from the IPL web page and is here.

I carry all my logins etc. in my PalmOS device, encrypted in a Blowfish-protected database, and synched to my personal computer when I'm back in the office. I have to enter one decent password to get at my data, and if I lose the PDA I suppose someone could crack it if they *_really_* wanted to, but at least I know the data are NOT on a Microsoft/Sun/Liberty Alliance box where some disaffected BOFH can get to it.

YMMV.

1. http://research.sun.com/projects/crypto/

The Eliptic curve stuff was donated to OpenSSH team

No, the Elliptic Curve code was donated to OpenSSL. OpenSSL is used in, among other things, OpenSSH. The OpenSSL license is BSD-like, but not strictly a BSD license.

Additionally, it is very possible to accelerate SSL in hardware. In fact, the Sun project page itself talks about integrating ECC and SSL support into a hardware accellerator.

Yes. I think it's clear that you can't beat MS at their homecourt.

You need to take the battle somewhere else

Cheap Linux PCs. What an origional idea! Maybe they can use little cubes for cases and paint them Cobalt blue. rightHand, I would like to introduce you to leftHand.

Sun needs a transition plan to make migration from the low end Linux/x86 based desktops and servers to their Solaris/Sparc based high end workstations and enterprise servers. Otherwise they will not be able to bring as much sales up to the higher tier. There are two ways to do this. One is to run Solaris on x86 hardware as the middle tier. The other is to run Linux on Sparc hardware as the middle tier. One of these approaches leaves Sun subject to the whims of another CPU maker, which has it's own plans for 64-bit domination. The other leaves Sun subject to the whims of a huge open source software community and a few choices in Linux distributions (such as Debian, Mandrake, and SuSE) as well as FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD. Which way do you think would be better for Sun?

Sun needs a transition plan to make migration from the low end Linux/x86 based desktops and servers to their Solaris/Sparc based high end workstations and enterprise servers. Otherwise they will not be able to bring as much sales up to the higher tier. There are two ways to do this. One is to run Solaris on x86 hardware as the middle tier. The other is to run Linux on Sparc hardware as the middle tier. One of these approaches leaves Sun subject to the whims of another CPU maker, which has it's own plans for 64-bit domination. The other leaves Sun subject to the whims of a huge open source software community and a few choices in Linux distributions (such as Debian, Mandrake, and SuSE) as well as FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD. Which way do you think would be better for Sun?

Sun needs a transition plan to make migration from the low end Linux/x86 based desktops and servers to their Solaris/Sparc based high end workstations and enterprise servers. Otherwise they will not be able to bring as much sales up to the higher tier. There are two ways to do this. One is to run Solaris on x86 hardware as the middle tier. The other is to run Linux on Sparc hardware as the middle tier. One of these approaches leaves Sun subject to the whims of another CPU maker, which has it's own plans for 64-bit domination. The other leaves Sun subject to the whims of a huge open source software community and a few choices in Linux distributions (such as Debian, Mandrake, and SuSE) as well as FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD. Which way do you think would be better for Sun?

Sun needs a transition plan to make migration from the low end Linux/x86 based desktops and servers to their Solaris/Sparc based high end workstations and enterprise servers. Otherwise they will not be able to bring as much sales up to the higher tier. There are two ways to do this. One is to run Solaris on x86 hardware as the middle tier. The other is to run Linux on Sparc hardware as the middle tier. One of these approaches leaves Sun subject to the whims of another CPU maker, which has it's own plans for 64-bit domination. The other leaves Sun subject to the whims of a huge open source software community and a few choices in Linux distributions (such as Debian, Mandrake, and SuSE) as well as FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD. Which way do you think would be better for Sun?

Sun needs a transition plan to make migration from the low end Linux/x86 based desktops and servers to their Solaris/Sparc based high end workstations and enterprise servers. Otherwise they will not be able to bring as much sales up to the higher tier. There are two ways to do this. One is to run Solaris on x86 hardware as the middle tier. The other is to run Linux on Sparc hardware as the middle tier. One of these approaches leaves Sun subject to the whims of another CPU maker, which has it's own plans for 64-bit domination. The other leaves Sun subject to the whims of a huge open source software community and a few choices in Linux distributions (such as Debian, Mandrake, and SuSE) as well as FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD. Which way do you think would be better for Sun?

(Some more than others.)

Gook in the black dress's CHIN on suns web site!

Sun.com

Could it be that Simonyi left because in .NET Microsoft deprecated Hungarian notation? Maybe he was too attached to all 138 different prefixes.

The new .NET naming standard is the Camel notation. It's the same naming/casing standard that is used in Java.

You are losing one of the primary advantages of using a "prototyping" language in the first place.

Just for the record, a "prototype-based language" has an actual meaning in the programming world (see: Self and Javascript), so it's sorta confusing to call Perl a "prototyping language" to me.

But whatever! Just thought you might want to know!

Shrug, keep sending your .doc format. You're missing out on the input of hundreds of very, very talented SUN and other UNIX software engineers.

If only those very talented Sun engineers had access to some product that could enable them to read MS Word. The other Unix engineers would still be out of luck, unless they too had access to some kind of product that could do the same.

Alas, I fear this will never come to pass... ;-)

When I went to school we had whole labs of machines donated by Sun and Intel which no one protested about being out of the ordinary. Similarly there is at least one mandatory classes for CS majors which uses Sun Microsystem's proprietary progamming language and many optional classes as well require Java or strongly suggest it.

Until Slashdot started trying to cause a controversy with the C#/University of Waterloo thing I had assumed this widespread practice in the American university system was taken for granted. Academia is all about politics especially when it comes to the curriculum, technical arguments for or against programming languages are just one slice of the cake. If it wasn't about politics we'd all be learning Lisp and Smalltalk in school instead of C++ and Java. OK, we actually did learn Scheme and Smalltalk at GA Tech so maybe that's a bad example. :)

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this post are mine and do not reflect the opinions, thoughts, strategies or plans of my employer.

• Java Media Framework for the playback API
• IBM AlphaWorks MPEG-4 decoder for JMF

JMF has an all-Java version, and the MPEG-4 player is all-java, so yes, you can create an applet that doesn't require WMP/QT/Real installed on the client. An app called jmfcustomizer trims the jar so that you only send the classes needed for your app.

That said, it seems like there is a risk of having to download the same .jar over and over again, unless your browser caches jars, or if they use something cool like Java Web Start (which isn't widely deployed).

Maybe they'll have seperate links for "self-contained applet" vs. "I already have an MPEG-4 player, thanks"

BTW, if Bob gets too many hits, won't he have to pay the content provider fee?

My only complaint about the IBM MPEG-4 support is that it only seems to support MPEG-4 video codec in .avi files (like DiVX), not the .mp4 files created by QuickTime.

--realinvalidname

Java3D actually uses OpenGL (or DirectX) as the underlying rendering layer on many platforms. See here...

Java3D actually uses OpenGL (or DirectX) as the underlying rendering layer on many platforms. See here...

You need to download a recent Linux JRE (Java Runtime Environment) from Sun and link to the included Java plug-in from your mozilla plugins directory. I believe there are more detailed instructions in one of the readme files that come with the JRE.

BTW: If you'd like to donate a new Sun workstation to me, be my guest. I sure can't spring $10K. I've heard time and time again that SPARC processors simply rock

The Sun Blade 100 starts at $1100 (they say $1000 but they then force you to buy the keyboard seperately. *cough*). There's also the Sun Blade 150, starting at $1,395.00 + keyboard.

Neither are as "cheap" as a Mac (har har), but they're not anywhere near to being in five digits either.

BTW: If you'd like to donate a new Sun workstation to me, be my guest. I sure can't spring $10K. I've heard time and time again that SPARC processors simply rock

The Sun Blade 100 starts at $1100 (they say $1000 but they then force you to buy the keyboard seperately. *cough*). There's also the Sun Blade 150, starting at $1,395.00 + keyboard.

Neither are as "cheap" as a Mac (har har), but they're not anywhere near to being in five digits either.

Steve said that "Apple is the number one supplier of Unix worldwide. Bigger than Sun, bigger than Linux..." If Steve said it, it must be true. Other than the fact that Linux is NOT Unix, but merely a clone. And since when was Linux a ,uhm, company supplying UNIX??

I own a Mac too, (G4, 640 Megs memory 2x 18G SCSI, Radeon 8500) but let's face it, Mac OS X is nothing more than FreeBSD 4.4 (pretty outdated by my standards) running Aqua as a window manager. Oh and by the way, it has a crap-load of Open Source goodies rebranded to sound like they came straight from Cupertino.

I'll give Apple one thing: If you think Apple hardware is fscking expensive, try buying a new Sun workstation! I could put a good down payment on a car for that much!

So, the question I have for Apple is: If you want the "average" Windows user to switch platforms, how are you going to convince them to pony up 3x more than a PC with less than a third of the available software? Keep in mind that the average computer user likes to swap out hardware quite a bit instead of buying a new machine every 9 months.

Steve said himself that there are "over 1500 Mac OS X apps". Most of these are haxies or simply Linux software such as GCC or Samba that have been ported over. Or maybe the iApps that are so amazing. Obviously Photoshop wasn't the "killer app" that makes everbody want OS X... So, how about something useful that doesn't cost a kidney to own (Office X, cough, cough)

With all this in mind, I'm not the least bit surprised that Linux is outdoing the Mac. I am surprised that the margin between the two is so close. For one, I can build a box that outperforms even the newest dual 1.2 Gig G4s (Uh, people use more than just Photoshop, Apple. You also haven't benchmarked the Athlons, which beat the shit out of all but the fastest P4s...) and has the latest and greatest hardware for well under $1K. Also keep in mind that the average PC user doesn't throw his entire box away after seeing new product announcements just to have the latest and greatest. If it's that hard to get Motorola to build faster G4s, then you should look elsewhere. Add to that the fact that your typical Linux distro (I also ripped into Macslash.org for calling Mac OS X a "distro")has many thousands of apps and goodies and no DRM, spyware, or product activation bullshit like Windows, and I just plain fail to see why anybody would want to bother with Mac or Windows.

Steve, it's time to break out of the Reality Distortion Field(TM) and offer cheaper hardware to get better penetration in the Windows camp.

Bill, you can take your "Trusted Computing", DRM, WMP9, .NET, buying the U.S. government, BSA, incompatibilities, daily security "patches", Big Brother EULAs and shove them up your fat, money grubbing ass.

In the words of Chandler Bing: "Could I BE more sick of corporate bullshit?"

Why settle for 64?

Although the E15k *only* has a 55GB/sec memory bus, you can...oh here:

Key Specifications:

* Up to 106 UltraSPARC® III Cu 900-MHz processors.
* Big memory - more than 1/2 TB.
* Up to 18 fifth-generation Dynamic System Domains, which are fully configurable while applications are running.
* Hot-swappable Uniboard design CPU/memory boards that are common across Sun Fire server family.
* Redundant, high-performance Sun[tm] Fireplane Interconnect with up to 172.8 GBps peak bandwidth.
* Full redundancy of power and cooling systems.

See that? 106 processors. 42 more than the SGI. I've got 7 sitting around me at the moment...anyone want to try and port Debian for me?

solaris can also do this with Sun Trunking

Grid Engine is an open source product sponsored by Sun (they sell support and/or CPUs) with all of the features of LSF without the huge licensing fees.

From Sun's JMF site: "If and when licensing issues can be resolved, we plan to return MP3 functionality back to JMF."

If Thomson really does not intend to charge for free software decoders, as its PR department is loudly proclaiming, then the MP3 decoder should be very soon added to the JMF again.

Adding support for Ogg Vorbis and Tarkin is bug 4499904 in the Bug Parade. This seems like a good time to vote for the bug and add your comments.

Sun One + Java gives us JavaOne

JavaOne gives us JavaOne.

Apple-Evil-Proprietory-Boot = IEEE 1275. An open standard used by Sun, IBM, and Apple.

Research?

Are they talking about universal remote controls? The Philips Pronto TSU2000 and VAR derivatives, like the Yamaha RAV-2000 and Marantz RC5000i are not "in research" products - they are current universal remotes with a user defined interface. If you had a Microwave that accepted IR controls, these would work with it, and quite nicely so. If they are interested in bringing a universal remote to the market, they have a tough act to follow.

Or are they researching controlling everything in the normal house? Like using Bluetooth wireless technology, or using JNDI as a naming and control mechanism? (Well, they used X-10, but that's besides the point) If that is their focus, I wish them luck in bringing the industry into a situation where they both care and cooperate with standards.

They seem to be doing everything with RF (not IR) wireless technology, but that is both uncommon and unsupported on current and legacy systems. I don't know how they plan on supporting, in a cost effective way, IR and wireless in a single remote, as well as all the wireless devices you would have to deploy around the house to justify the cost of the remote. Perhaps in a market of sufficient scale this would be viable.

Sun started the ISO process over 5 years ago in 1997,Sun's ISO Process
Then in 1999 the began to standardize in ECMA
The then withdrew their application later that year. Details

Sun started the ISO process over 5 years ago in 1997,Sun's ISO Process
Then in 1999 the began to standardize in ECMA
The then withdrew their application later that year. Details