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It doesn't give ANY credibility to Apple.

J2ME security model, Symbian Security model which nears a billion installed base wouldn't do a mistake like that and yet there is no "Nokia Store" prison or "Sun Store" lock in.

Here is Symbian security model (295K pdf) http://www.symbian.com/files/rx/file3202.pdf

J2ME security (Symbian also carries J2ME) http://developers.sun.com/mobility/midp/articles/permissions/

It can't be used as excuse for Apple draconian policies. Apple's security policy on iPhone is: Nobody should never, ever compete with their iTunes on device.

Sun might have something you'd be interested in, Hybrid Storage Pools.

RAM will always be faster than any permanent storage (maybe someday AS fast), so I wouldn't expect critical parts of VM to go anywhere. With HSPs, the disk cache is pushed out to SSD, AFAIK. Back a few years ago, when disk swapping was a perfectly normal every day event, I always thought it would make sense to have something faster than a hard drive, but cheaper than main memory to act as a swap space. I was picturing cheaper DRAM I guess, but SSDs make a lot of sense today. This is a similar idea, a middle tier of fast/bulk storage anyway.

ZFS & SSD
Johnathan Schwartz's blog

Of course you could just hold your breath for btrfs with some form of SSD optimization. I think that's ridiculous though, given that ZFS is here today, and Sun is already moving past SSD optimization and onto what are you going to use them for..
Sure, the article implied "desktop OS", but that's a fairly simple subset of what SSD will do in the enterprise.

Sun might have something you'd be interested in, Hybrid Storage Pools.

RAM will always be faster than any permanent storage (maybe someday AS fast), so I wouldn't expect critical parts of VM to go anywhere. With HSPs, the disk cache is pushed out to SSD, AFAIK. Back a few years ago, when disk swapping was a perfectly normal every day event, I always thought it would make sense to have something faster than a hard drive, but cheaper than main memory to act as a swap space. I was picturing cheaper DRAM I guess, but SSDs make a lot of sense today. This is a similar idea, a middle tier of fast/bulk storage anyway.

ZFS & SSD
Johnathan Schwartz's blog

Of course you could just hold your breath for btrfs with some form of SSD optimization. I think that's ridiculous though, given that ZFS is here today, and Sun is already moving past SSD optimization and onto what are you going to use them for..
Sure, the article implied "desktop OS", but that's a fairly simple subset of what SSD will do in the enterprise.

just to get a perspective, the GPUs provide about 10 out of 77 TFLOPs benchmarked in LINPACK HPC article

Sun also refers to Alice. See it at the bottom of this page:
http://java.sun.com/new2java/learning/young_developers.jsp

• Linux free
• IBM Linux
• Sun Linux
• HP Linux

They can't produce quality products as cheaply, as reliably, and as quickly as they would like.

Well, according to this link - http://www.sun.com/customers/software/elp.xml - switching from C++ to Java helps here. Maybe Prof. Stroustrup might find the source of many of the problems in his own mirror... ;-)

How is this any different than a webpage that links to an external JS file (as most websites do)?

Did you or did you not just read that huge sequence I spelled out for you two posts ago? You know, the one that showed the exact string of actions that have to happen in order to load a JAR file vs. a set of Javascript files?

In both cases, you need to download the initial JS or JAR file before loading the rest on demand.

You don't need to do any such thing in Javascript. A JAR is a collection of ALL the files in the applet while Javascript loads and executes each file independently. This works because Javascript is a classless language. There is no object called "MyObject" that I need to download a class file for before I can use it. If I want an object in Javascript, I simply create it:

var STATES = {ALIVE: 0, DEAD: 1};
var myobject = {x: 10, y: 10, state: STATES.ALIVE};

I can fit hundreds of such definitions in a very small amount of space. Meanwhile, Java requires one of these for each object type:

public class MyObject
{
    public static final int STATE_ALIVE = 0;
    public static final int STATE_DEAD = 1;
 
    private int x = 0;
    private int y = 0;
    private int state = STATE_ALIVE;
 
    public int getX() { return x; }
    public int setX(int x) { this.x = x; }
    public int getY() { return y; }
    public int setY(int y) { this.y = y; }
    public int getState() { return state; }
    public int setState(int state) { this.state = state; }
}

As you probably know, you tend to need at least a couple of class files before you can get your program working. Even simple programs often reach a dozen class files or more. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing. Except that with Java, I need to download all of that before my program can start running. Javascript has no need for such gobs of metadata. Which makes it less powerful from a structural perspective, but makes it ideal as a compact web language that can load and execute as the browser loads the page.

Even more interesting is that I can do this:

<body>
Stuff goes here...
<script>
document.write("<div>Hello world!</div>");
</script>
More stuff goes here...
</body>

You cannot perform those sorts of inlined tasks with Applets. They're not designed for it.

FWIW though, it is possible to use Java as a replacement scripting language for Java. Look up the DOM bridge for Applets and the LiveConnect APIs sometime. If you're clever enough, you should understand how to hand-off control from Javascript to Java. Shortly thereafter, you should come to an understanding of why it is not a practical solution using the current Java runtime.

With all due respect friend, you need to actually read your own links.

http://java.sun.com/javase/6/docs/technotes/guides/jar/jar.html#JAR%20Index

The JarIndex mechanism collects the contents of all the jar files defined in an applet and stores the information in an index file in the first jar file on the applet's class path. After the first jar file is downloaded, the applet class loader will use the collected content information for efficient downloading of jar files.

Nothing happens until the first JAR is downloaded. Period. End of Story. It does not compare to Javascript in any way, shape, or form.

I should know. I've written more classloaders and designed more AJAX code-loaders than I doubt you and all your coworkers will write in your entire lives. So listen to an old bear when he tells you: Java Applets are disadvantaged for web use.

Yeash. Kids these days. Get off my lawn, will 'ya! :P

Either way, the entire applet must be downloaded before execution can begin.

Wrong. Here are some enhancements that have been added recently:

Java6: http://bugs.sun.com/bugdatabase/view_bug.do?bug_id=4690736

Java6 update 10: "Lazy Downloading" at the bottom of http://java.sun.com/javase/6/docs/technotes/guides/jweb/deployment_advice.html

I'm not certain whether the latter feature also works for applets (I suspect so) but it proves my point that this is technically possible and already implemented.

Either way, the entire applet must be downloaded before execution can begin.

Wrong. Here are some enhancements that have been added recently:

Java6: http://bugs.sun.com/bugdatabase/view_bug.do?bug_id=4690736

Java6 update 10: "Lazy Downloading" at the bottom of http://java.sun.com/javase/6/docs/technotes/guides/jweb/deployment_advice.html

I'm not certain whether the latter feature also works for applets (I suspect so) but it proves my point that this is technically possible and already implemented.

Seems to confirm the original complaint.

Please read carefully the next statement in the article.
After that phase, there were a lot of bug fixing before Community and Support agreed to a release. (or read the original article)

G.M.

The biggest flaw I see in autoscaling isn't that it isn't fast enough or might cost too much (in both cases it beats the current "scramble out a new server" or "continuous overcapacity" solutions. The biggest flaw is that it doesn't go far enough. I see it as only the first baby step torwards Transcontinental Demand Load Balancing

How do you draw a pixel in Java? Oh yeah, that's right, there is no way to do it.

You can't have looked very hard.

What will you make out of them? Webpages, client apps, games, or boring work applications?

THen consider the apis for what you want to do. Python is nice but it lacks severely in many gui apis compared to Java's swing or .NET windows forms.

If you want to get hired you need to focus on .NET or java as its what most employers want. A few will want experience with php for smaller websites if you want to start using that as many new graduates will not know it as they do not teach it that much yet at universities.

In regards to your comments on Java I have to say that Java is a rich language if you consider the depth of the javadocs where the apis are very rich. There is an api for everything and there are a ton of third party ones on the net unlike C# which everyone uses the MSDN to get their information.

And the Wikipedia page on JavaFX Mobile indicates "JavaFX Mobile" is actually a third party developed product that Sun already had. It has little or nothing to do with JavaFX, just a rebranding of a SavaJe Technologies operating system.

This article is about JavaFX, not JavaFX Mobile. You're being (deliberately?) misleading by suggesting today's announcement is about competitors to Android, which AGAIN is a product Sun has endorsed enthusiastically.

Who to believe. You, or Jonathan Schwartz?

Let's not even begin to compare Microsoft's vs Sun's power to push stuff to the desktops of the masses, it's not even funny.

For a reality check, see in Jonathan Schwartz's blog how Microsoft bought, for an undisclosed but certainly huge pile of cash, the privilege of bundling some of their stuff (e.g. Windows Live toolbar) with Sun's Java updates.

The download for Java *is* as small as possible. If you go to Sun's download page and select the "Windows Kernel Installation", the installer is 0.20 MB

It then dynamically downloads components from the network as required.

More information about this here.

Don't ask me why (I guess it's an experimental feature they're prepping for the Java 7 release) but for the time being you have to access it via Sun's developer site rather than the consumer java.com one. Hmmm.

The download for Java *is* as small as possible. If you go to Sun's download page and select the "Windows Kernel Installation", the installer is 0.20 MB

It then dynamically downloads components from the network as required.

More information about this here.

Don't ask me why (I guess it's an experimental feature they're prepping for the Java 7 release) but for the time being you have to access it via Sun's developer site rather than the consumer java.com one. Hmmm.

The big difference between Java FX, Flash, and Silverlight is that Sun suggests that the stack will be open source, and Sun's track record of open-sourcing things is excellent. That would be a really significant improvement for the open internet .. vs. the ridiculous situation now with the de-facto dominance of totally proprietary Flash. Java FX may have an uphill fight, but it's clearly the one to root for if you don't want the internet locked up by Adobe or Microsoft. See here: http://java.sun.com/javafx/faqs.jsp#2

Client side part is in JRE6u11. JavaFX developers must download SDK/IDE plugins.

*sigh* I wonder if this means Sun is going to pull out of Orbit [slashdot.org] and come up with some J2ME version of JavaFX?

I don't know about Orbit, but a JavaME version of JavaFX is definitely in the works. And to clarify, JavaFX Mobile will be provided to handset manufacturers as a binary distribution, for which Sun will charge a per-unit royalty.

... another RIA platform. Only this one doesn't have a userbase yet and I don't think it'll have one to speak of in the near future; it is Windows and Mac OS only (though Sun promises that Linux and Solaris support is underway http://blogs.sun.com/javafx/entry/a_word_on_linux_and). Microsoft has been pushing Silverlight hard and still has only about 30% market penetration in the US (they claim 50% mp in 'some countries' - I'm very curious which countries are these: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2008/oct08/10-13Silverlight2PR.mspx). With Flash+Flex having a comfortable user base of some 90+%, let's not even begin to compare Microsoft's vs Sun's power to push stuff to the desktops of the masses, it's not even funny.

http://java.sun.com/

http://www.sun.com/software/solaris/security.jsp

The complication comes in when you have to code "connected versus unconnected" states into your app all the way up to the user-interface level, and you realize that you're doing a lot of redundant work to try to keep track of what TCP/IP thinks the connection state is. Admittedly, it's hard to explain unless you've been there.

Oh, I've been there. I'm not saying there aren't applications where using stateless/connectionless abstractions aren't a good idea. There are lots of them where this is a great idea. Web browsers, for example.

But, are you really trying to infer that, say, SSH would be better if it were connectionless? Or telnet?

Or take, for example, POP3. POP3 is a connection oriented protocol. In what way does POP3 enforce bad design? I've never seen a POP3 mailer which has connected/disconnected states propagated all the way to the GUI (beyond, of course, the "I can't connect" icon, but that would be true in a connectionless application as well).

TCP is doing this behind your back. Maybe you can do it better.

I'm not sure what you mean here. TCP has nothing to do with authentication. Unless you mean; if you have a connection oriented protocol, then you authenticate once and TCP takes care of knowing which packets are part of the connection and which ones aren't? If you're trying to run a connectionless protocol over TCP, then you need to reauthenticate on every message. If we take SOAP, for example, you'll see a WSSE header in every message, unless you're using something like WS-Secure Conversation, which effectively tries to emulate an encrypted TCP connection over SOAP (probably over TCP).

That's one of the worst examples you could pick. When, and whether, TCP will drop a connection is up to factors far beyond the application's control.

Umm... close()?

There is a counter-example to your claim in this Sun bug report where the reporter was using Java 6 on Windows XP. I suppose you could try to analyze the report and try to come up with an even more complex set of circumstances under which you might be able to instantiate Swing components outside the EDT, but trying to do that is just a Bad Idea.

Sun does not say anywhere that you can instantiate Swing components outside the EDT for any operating system or for any system configuration. They specifically say to instantiate Swing components on the EDT. If instantiating Swing components outside the EDT has been working on any specific versions of your Java or your OS, then this is only accidentally the case, and you have no guarantee that it will work outside your setup for different (especially future) versions of your Java or your OS.

JSF, RichFaces, Hibernate, MySQL, developed on NetBeans and served by Apache TomCat on CentOS for a state government contract.

We have to train ourselves, but that's half the fun.

The other half will be when we pull the plug on one legacy Oracle database with a per CPU cycle license the state is paying an obscene amount of money for.

No, this is a common misconception. Sun themselves have had to fix many of their Swing examples on their site so that component creation is now on the EDT.

Sun Swing Tutorial states:

Why does not the initial thread simply create the GUI itself? Because almost all code that creates or interacts with Swing components must run on the event dispatch thread.

Here is a blog that discusses this issue further. Point is, Swing component creation must occur on the EDT. Methods must explicitly say they are exempt from the single threading rule before you can exempt them.

Yes, seriously. In your initial post you stated that Stallman blasts companies for opening up, you are wrong and I asked for citations and the information you in turn provide doesn't support your previous statement (more anecdotes and still no citations). You, and many others, are trying to paint Stallman as a raving lunatic even though in actuality the statements he makes are rather balanced. Note how in your little anecdote you didn't even mention Microsoft, though in your original post you stated that Stallman blasted Microsoft for opening up documentation, standards and protocols.

In reality Stallman does tend to commend companies that open up, but he will not turn a blind eye when that company engages in hypocricy or activities that blatantly go against the Free Software ideology (which is not only entirely logical, but essential for preserving the ideals he cherishes). For an example of where he commended a company for opening up see his statements regarding Sun Microsystems decision to open up Java in 2006, he stated:

I think Sun has, well with this contribution, have contributed more than any other company to the free software community, in the form of software. And it shows leadership - it's an example I hope others will follow.

So, I've taken the liberty (read: did the actual hard work you refused to do) to Google around and see what Stallman has really said regarding the matter you've brought up:

Regarding Google Chrome. Stallman in an interview taken on 17 September 2008 stated that:

The license for those binaries is unacceptable for several reasons. For instance, it says you give Google the right to change your software and requires you to accept whatever changes they decide to impose. It purports to forbid reverse engineering. It also uses the confusing and biased propaganda term "intellectual property". [...] You should not agree to those terms.

Note that I believe he is referring to the EULA that one has to accept when downloading or using the Google Chrome binaries from Google, which at this time still states:

10.2 You may not (and you may not permit anyone else to) copy, modify, create a derivative work of, reverse engineer, decompile or otherwise attempt to extract the source code of the Software or any part thereof, unless this is expressly permitted or required by law, or unless you have been specifically told that you may do so by Google, in writing.

Regarding cloud computing. Hold on, even though Google embraces open standards you do understand that by using their proprietary services (Google Search, GMail, Google Apps) you certainly run the risk of becoming dependent (locked in) on functionality offered?

In what I believe to be a short conversation with a reporter from the Guardian (here's the Slashdot discussion) that's the point Stallman was trying to make regarding the concept of SaaS/cloud computing/whatchamacallit (taking into account that Stallman personally just isn't very interested, to put it lightly, in web applications):

If you use a proprietary program or somebody else's web server, you're defenceless. You're putty in the hands of whoever developed that software.

I'm looking forward to your response.

Hmm, at 4K DB IOPS for $719 that compares very favorably with my SAN 250K DB IOPS for ~$250K. Now for the same 7.5TB of RAID10 storage it would cost $337,050 without controllers so the SAN still wins out, but things are getting very interesting. I would expect to see drives like this make it into a high performance storage tier from SAN vendors very soon if they don't already have such an option in their lineup.

You mean something like this?

Slashdot recently covered it even.

Throw 300GB 10K disks for bulk storage fronted by a couple GB of write cache and these drives for things like transaction logs and you are looking at a real winning combination.

Like this ?

One of our biggest surprises is that our Lotus Notes servers are almost as rough on the SAN as the DB servers, huge numbers of IOPS and almost as much storage.

Sounds like your Lotus servers might need some more RAM ?

I should have been more specific/clear. If you read do a full read of a terabyte disk a dozen times, you are likely to see an unrecoverable read error:

"Typically, [Unrecoverable Error Rate (UER) for read operations] will be 1 per 10^14 bits read for consumer class drives and 1 per 10^15 for enterprise class drives. This can be alarming, because you could also say that consumer class drives should see 1 UER per 12.5 TBytes of data read."

That quote is from a Sun blog that has lots of information about Mean Time To Data Loss. His other posts are interesting as well.

Damn it, replying to myself... Whatever. Um, did you say Java bytecode? You do realize that the concept of a easy to handle image of an application and its state are specific to the smalltalk VM environment?

For different definitions of "easy", sure. You can serialize out Java apps with their state, but you have to write the serialization wrapper yourself instead of being built into the environment.

http://java.sun.com/developer/technicalArticles/Programming/serialization/

It's not possible to compile Opensolaris without downloading and using a whole bunch of binary components which are distributed under a proprietary license. (see here for details.

This is in stark contrast to OpenBSD (and to a lesser degree NetBSD and/or FreeBSD -both of which include proprietary binary-only blobs). Their license is OSI approved, but you can't compile a working system using only the parts that are open source.

And this is after three and a half years, guys.

That sounds about right. The adaptive compiler CPU idea was very intriguing (sort of like Hot Spot for x86 code) but nothing really useful seems to have come out of it.

I used to own a Crusoe-based laptop. It ran hot, and battery life was unimpressive. So where's the alleged benefit for this technology?

something something similar-ish with java FX.. basically an interpreted language that gets compiled on the fly and run in a jvm.

http://java.sun.com/javafx/

sposed to be pretty friendly to devs and all with the sdk and open source ide plugins.

Uuuuhh......Why didn't you just point her to Staroffice instead of being a jerk? You do know with the economy in the toilet and folks everywhere afraid of losing their jobs telling her to go out and buy $2000+ worth of gear just to do some office work was kinda being a jerk,don't you? If a customer comes in and says "How can I make it so I don't ever get a virus again" THEN I would tell them about Linux and Apple. But to tell someone in this economy to "buy a Mac" when all they need is a piece of office software is kinda being an asshole when asked a legitimate question.

Why are you spouting off about things you have no understanding of? Computer chips have followed Moore's law since the inception of the Integrated Circuit, causing computational power to double every year and a half or so per cost. Because of this, next year a japanese company is planning to make a computer with the same computational power as the human brain (10 petaflops), http://blogs.sun.com/HPC/entry/japan_to_build_10_petaflop, and it is NOT 100 billion nodes with ~7000 network cards per node, not even close, you are off by so many orders of magnitude it's not even funny. How can you be so clueless and still feel compelled to spout off about something? sheesh. Anyway, every year after that computers will get 2x as fast for the money, until machines hit nanoscale with atomic precision at which point you will have suger cube shaped computers with 100 million times the power of a human brain. This has nothing to do with how many 'nodes' of computers you have on undefined process tech, etc. So please stop making up bullshit to push agendas for no logical reason.

http://www.sun.com/desktop/ Note, no high end Sparc workstations. No fanfare or trumpets. Just gone. One day you could order them, the next you couldn't. It made me sad as my manager was thinking about kitting us developers out with some monster workstations for development.

You're falling into a common trap with Vista sales. "Not selling" in terms of Microsoft sales figures doesn't actually mean that it's literally not selling, it means it's not selling as it could have been with Microsoft's installbase.

Microsoft actually shifted 100million copies of Vista in it's first year of release (not sure how many more in the 10months since then). To put that into context, Apple has shifted only around 10million macs in the last year and only slightly less in the year previous, the story is similar for the previous few years before that.

Vista isn't doing so bad that it's causing a massive migration to the Mac in the slightest, in fact, judging by the fact there's been only a minor increase in Mac sales over the last few years despite platforms like the iPhone going from none to over 10million units in the last year providing a whole new market for mobile developers suggests that there isn't even really much of a switch to Mac development at all.

Regarding your comments on developers, that's a complete redefinition of the term as it's commonly used. Developers and programmers are nearly always cited as one and the same in computing. Artists and web designers aren't developers, they're, well, artists and web designers. If you go for a developer job as an artist people are going to look at you rather funny. It's like an IT manager saying they're a developer because they develop reports, an HR person calling themselves a developer because they help develop the underlying staff base by performing recruitment and payroll tasks. Architects are about the only profession you list that falls in the realm of developer.

http://developers.sun.com/

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-gb/default.aspx

http://developer.intel.com/design/index.htm

oh, and even:

http://developer.apple.com/

All are focussed towards programming and software architecture.

I dont think java6 update 10 makes sense on a mac. The main issue about java6 upate 10 simply is that the core vm is reduced down to 1 meg or so and the rest is loaded on demand from the web as needed. Now this makes sense on windows machines, which do not have a java installed so that you can finally add java plugins to enable the latest applet version. It simply does not make sense on a mac at all which usually has java installed by default!

Java6 update 10 provides *way* more new features than that. You just mentioned the Java Kernel feature, but there are many other features which Mac could really use some of the other features as well: http://java.sun.com/developer/technicalArticles/javase/java6u10/

Besides, the point of Java Kernel is that when a new Java version comes out you can install/upgrade to it with as minimal fuss as the Flash plugin. That might be less relevant on the Mac but it is still relevant. For example, Windows ships with Flash but people still upgrade their versions on a regular basis.

Considering the fact that Flash is essentially mandatory for many websites...

That's the crux of the issue -- web support on 64-bit systems. Adobe Flash has it, Sun Java does not.

By ignoring Bug 4502695 for over 5 years (and over 800 votes), Sun has just given the 64-bit webspace to Adobe. Why should anyone wait another year to see if a 64-bit java plugin is actually released when Flash has a 64-bit plugin now?

Way to go, Sun. You've killed JavaFX before it even got started, and strangled the attempts to resurrect the applet and web-start apps.

That's just bitchin'.

We now have Java and Flash on 64-bit.

No 64-bit Java browser plugin until early 2009.

From Jonathan Schwartz's Blog:

"An auction's afoot (no pun intended) to see who we'll be partnering with us to integrate their businesses and brands into our binary product distribution - the possibilities are limitless: people tend to print those documents, fax them, copy them, project them (and I know this annoys my friends in the free software community, but branding allows us to invest more in OO.o community and features, from which everyone benefits)."

Does this mean Sun intends to place ads on the documents I "fax ... copy ... [and] project"? Ads in my documents?

If so, it's goodbye OpenOffice.org!

I disagree. Whether you think Java is any good or not, Sun have made a profit of 0c over all time on it, and will never make any money on it.

Really? Their CEO seems to think they make alot of money off of it :)

http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/date/200810 (See subheading titled "Wait, you make money off Java?").

I've been very impressed with Sun's strategy of late, and I hope they don't let short term interests stand in the way of their long term vision. Look at their latest storage appliance, for example. Because of their open source strategy, the entire software stack has commoditized, so they can provide a storage appliance without the overhead many other vendors must add on. Plus they have done some very innovative work with their OS and ZFS, so they can offer a solution that does really cool things that no-one else can offer.

As a customer, I'm absolutely drawn to consider Sun for my hardware needs before other vendors. It's clear that from the top down, they understand the way business operates these days. While other vendors play lip service to any and every trend in the business, Sun really "gets it", so I feel like I can trust them to help me get where I want to go without scheming to hook me on a bunch of shit that has nothing to do with their schmoozy marketing schtick (I'm looking at you IBM).

I would love to work at Sun. I would love to have enough extra cash to buy lots of Sun stock. Sun today is where Apple was a few years ago before Jobs came back and reinvigorated the company. Sun's bottom line is connected to the economy like everyone else's, but they are also bottoming out because they are in the middle of reinventing themselves. I like what I see, and I'm confident that if shareholders can keep their panties unbunched long enough to let Schwartz's strategy unfold, they will be very happy indeed.

Why is it that stupid people always put the blame on the vendor. There must be a pattern in there...
We have over 50 xfires (4100s, 4200s, 4600s) in production, so I feel an obligation to comment on this drivel.

1. If you really have mouthbreathers on your team that manage to break a server with the pen switch (of all things!) then you have much bigger problems to worry about. I see no difference between the pen-switch design that Sun uses and the stuff that you find on Supermicro or Dell Chassis everywhere. So better keep your "people" far away from those, too...
2. I don't buy your "front panels falling off" story either. I have no idea what the hell you guys are doing to your servers (curling them through the datacenter?) but anyone who has worked with xfire hardware can attest that design and build are generally stellar, no less. Just by looking at the picture I can only wonder what part of the panel is coming off on your xfires, and how?
3. I cannot comment on the video hardware problems that you were having, other than that we never had a problem with that. Our xfires are generally dead-on-arrival (yes, that happens with sun, too) or work flawlessly. So far we had only two 4200s make it through the burn-in but fail later on (flakey PSU, flimsy backplane respectively) which is a pretty good ratio when compared to our expiriences with supermicro hardware.
4. Yes, PXE booting can be disabled for each individual NIC. Read the manual sometime?
5. You're saying you have "over 50" xfires, yet you keep buying a raid controller that sucks? Honestly, if I were your boss...

Sorry, either you're just making up shit here or you're the wrong guy for the job.

Java-the-language is specified in the Java Language Specification. Part of that specification covers runtime behavior - and that part explicitly uses terms such as "Java virtual machine", "verification", "class loader" etc. So, yes, the Java language specification mandates certain library and runtime facilities - such as class loaders - that must be able to e.g. dynamically load a Java class from a stream with bytecode in proper (specified) format.

I believe that is the idea - SCJP is about memorising the facts, and the SCJD is about testing the application of that knowledge. I know that when I sat the SCJP I did pickup some things that I never new even with my industry experience, so IMHO it is worth while.