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developers have no choice but to implement it themselves or go searching for someone else's code.

...or use open-source projects, like saxon...

and what exactly is jaxp doing for us, if it isn't handling xml in Java?

i work for a small web development/consulting company... i work under linux. so do three other of our java developers. our 4 other java developers run windows (98x3, 2000x1)... no one has to recompile when it comes time to throw our class files up on our linux-based java app server. we all can run the same IDE, too. everything was great until we decided it would be a good idea to do native interfacing with a 3rd party library, which just so happened to be in a fscking DLL. now i'm writing C++ code in Visual Studio, which decides every once in awhile that the enter key should move the cursor to the next line, rather than inserting a \r\n ... *sigh*

http://www.sun.com/solaris/source/

Nah...you want to see overpriced, look at Sun's high-end stuff, like the Enterprise 10000. (On Sun's page for the E10K, why is there a "buy online" link?)

Check out ONE

This page explains to Java developers how to develop bidirectional support. It even covers how to do English with Hebrew embedded in the middle of the string. I would suggest finding Java applications that use such techniques. The full Internationalization Trail of the Java Tutorial is here.

For example, here is a Java Calendar that does Hebrew from IBM.
Here is an editor using an older form of Java that does Hebrew, also from IBM
You might even ask JEdit if they have or are planning on adding support for multiple languages, importing/exporting Word, etc..

Anyways, just a thought.

This page explains to Java developers how to develop bidirectional support. It even covers how to do English with Hebrew embedded in the middle of the string. I would suggest finding Java applications that use such techniques. The full Internationalization Trail of the Java Tutorial is here.

For example, here is a Java Calendar that does Hebrew from IBM.
Here is an editor using an older form of Java that does Hebrew, also from IBM
You might even ask JEdit if they have or are planning on adding support for multiple languages, importing/exporting Word, etc..

Anyways, just a thought.

this is just like solaris's nca (network cache accelerator) which made its debut in 2.8, or maybe 2.7/isp pack.. it uses solaris doors to communicate with the userland web server, but I don't think any server but sun's web server works with it yet. dunno..

If you read http://www.sun.com/gridware, you will note that it says:

Sun will distribute Sun Grid Engine software under an industry-accepted open source
license in order to accelerate the adoption of the distributed computing model.

Note that they haven't distributed it under an OpenSource License yet.

Batch systems have been around a long time in the HPC world. Gridware was orginally developed by GENIAS Software GmbH. GENIAS produced a batch scheduler called Codine, which was a commercial version of DQS. In fact, Sun's Grid Engine FAQ even states that Sun Grid Engine is a new name for CODINE.

Of course, DQS/Codine/Grid isn't the only batch-scheduling/cycle-scavenging game around. Other players are:

• Condor
• openPBS and it's commercial version PBS Pro
• Load Leveler (which IIRC is IBM's commercial implementation derived from Condor)
• LSF which is the product Sun was previously co-marketing until they purchased Gridware (probably because of the high per CPU cost of LSF).
• and lots of others that I've forgotten, many based on the once-common NQS/NQE batch system.
• There are also systems like Legion that represent a sort of ``next step'' computing enviroment.

Many of these predate newcomers like SETI@home and Mosix by serveral years. Most also provide hooks into parallel computing APIs like MPI, PVM, openMP, or something similar.

Batch scheduling and cycle-scavening are old concepts. Having wasted away my years as a graduate student submitting large quantum chem jobs to Crays, it's nice to see lots of groups continuing to squeeze every useful cycle out of existing hardware. Sun's recent annoucements are just the latest update to an old product---not a new idea, and not a Mosix/SETI rip-off.

Once upon a time, the U.S. government write a set of specifications for multi-level secure computers, called the orange book. This worked pretty well for mainframes: Multics was rated B2, and was on the 'net as dockmaster.mil.

It was a bit clunky, but had been continuously updated over time, so I still have a machine running Trusted Solaris 7 in my basement.

It's arguably the same task to do this sort of thing with a virtual machine monitor as it is with a security monitor: both create trusted computing bases, which enforce the security rules.

It would look almost exactly like an unmodified system, with optional colored bars on the windows indicating the security level and subject matter that was displayed there.

The rules the TCB would enforce are things like "thou shalt not copy from higher security down to lower security", so the TCB gets asked if it should allow a top-secret cut buffer to be pasted into an merely restricted document.

The Trusted Computing Base (the VMM) gets to say no, and so refuses to allow mapping of that page. The X server gets a -1 return code and errno=NOWAYJOSE, so it then pops up a "sorry, that was a security breach" message... which is exactly what my TS system does when I klutz and try to copy stuff from my confidential files into my unclassified email!

Licensing
The product is free and there is no software enforcement that restricts distribution. The product is issued under a standard Sun Binary Code License.

Now who'll come up to explain what that means?

I still maintain html stuff like what they do in MSMoney could be done in any language. In java for instance their are HTML components that work quite nicely, the Ice browser for one, and one of lesser quality the JEditorPane even comes included with the JDK.

All you really need a is good framework behind your application to do this. Maybe JScript, etc. are a good start but that's not to say there aren't other choices. Java isn't as limiting as you make it out to be. I will admit there aren't very many java apps out there right now that do this, publicly available anyway.

Java is slowly getting better performance on the client too, 1.3 is a vast improvement over 1.2, I just wish it didn't take so long between releases. 1.4 is supposed to have substantial performance and memory requiremnt impovements.

I'm tempted to mock something up in Java to show you how easily an add/remove "like" dialog could be done but I'm sure it would be a complete waste of my time.

1. Any Language. [...] I know the Java bytecode isn't tied to Java the language, but realistically, that's the way Sun as limited it.

The other purported advantages you list for C#/.NET/CLR/MSIL are similarly specious. Large-fraction-of-native-speed, cross-platform, secure distribution is already available with the Java-the-platform, and the other advantages you mention are at least as easy with Java (Java-the-language and Java-the-platform) as with .NET. Further, free Java/JVM implementations are mature and widely available (from, for example, IBM, Blackdown, TransVirtual (Kaffe), and Sun, for varying definitions of "free").

.NET is not an example of Microsoft "getting it." .NET is an example of Microsoft continuing not to get it -- reinventing the wheel, rather than building on perfectly good existing systems.

--

Bear in mind that there have been at least four entities called "Cray". All but one would be perfectly at home building clustered micros.

1. The original Cray, pioneer of vector supercomputers. Probably the company you're thinking of.
2. The same company after it branched out into microprocessor-based high-performance computing, system integration, and consulting. This entity not only made MIPS, SPARC, and Alpha-based systems, they resold Sun and SGI workstations.
3. A loosely-defined entity never completely assimilated by SGI. The only parts of Cray SGI really wanted was Craylink (as much to keep it away from Sun as for themselves) and maybe the compiler software. The rest they more or less ran into the ground.
4. Tera Computer, which bought the Cray name from SGI, together with the Alpha-based and vector supercomputer lines. SGI had already sold the SPARC-based line to Sun and kept the MIPS-based line for itself.

__________________

I was simply stating that you don't use them in java. sure, they are behind the scenes, but you are NOT going to use the wrong one.

What do you mean inconsistent? You pass in your variable name in all cases.

Regarding your C++ conventions, take a look at Java Programmers FAQ: For C and C++ Fans.

I just don't get it. Here in Slashdot seems to be a lot peole who really haven't followed server-side application development in past few years. Truth is that Java has a solid and GROWING market on server-side. I'd say Java ROCKS. These new frameworks change the way we see software in few years and I can't undestand people just don't see it. .NET probably is a viable option but by J2EE is way ahead.

Oh.. figures. J2EE Application Servers have 76-90% share, with 25+ vendors. [source java.sun.com]

Java is controlled by the Java Community Process, *NOT* Sun and there are lots of companies on the JCP!

Well, speaking as another Java evangelizer, there is just no way I could possibly sign up to Sun's soi-disant 'Community Process'. There's nothing 'community' about this - you have to, for example, grant Sun (not 'the community') an irrevocable license to use and distribute (under whatever terms they like) everything you do - and Sun (not 'the community') may even assign those rights to anyone they please!

I very much like Java, and I'm betting the future of my company on it - but there's no way you can claim that it is controlled by an open process. It is controlled by Sun, and Sun have not demonstrated they have anything but very narrow selfish commercial interests in their management of it. The 'community process' is a gossamer-thin device to enable Sun to pretend to the market that they are committed to open systems. If it weren't, Sun would set up a not-for-profit trust which would own the IPR licences, and would allow the community to elect the board of that not-for-profit.

Sun sometimes makes a distinction between "the Java programming language" and "the Java platform". AFAICT, C# is like the language. Microsoft's "Common Language Runtime" is like a Java VM. After that, comparisons start to get fuzzy (in part because the descriptions we get from Sun and Microsoft are fuzzy).

.NET, according to Microsoft, is a "strategy". But it also includes a ".NET platform", which might usefully be compared to the Java platform by someone with more free time than I have. Part of the .NET platform is "the .NET framework", which consists of the runtime, a set of Framework classes (comparable to Java's standard class library), and ASP.NET. I don't know what ASP.NET is.

Both are comparable in that they are ill-defined concepts surrounded by millennial marketing hype.

In comparing the two platforms it might be useful to focus on Jini, which is Sun's "vision" of network services, etc., just as .NET is Microsoft's.

Microsoft makes a big deal out of the universality of their runtime, but it isn't significantly more universal than the JVM. They claim they compile C++ into their runtime, but it isn't C++, it's a "safe subset" (full C++ is compiled into native code and linked in--useful, but not a feature of their runtime). In fact, more than 100 languages have been implemented on top of the JVM, including C; there are also semi-automatic translators for C++.

.NET is about not just C# and the runtime, but also about XML. Of course, that's a big thing with Java as well, with several excellent XML projects in Java, perhaps most notably the Apache efforts.

I wouldn't actually care much about whether Java or C# ultimately "wins" in the market, if it weren't for the fact that C# is years behind and has the wrong motivations behind it. Java is, by now, fairly mature and it has an excellent set of APIs and libraries behind it, both from Sun and from other sources. There are numerous compilers to the JVM for languages like Python and Smalltalk. And there are several third party implementations. Java's implementation isn't particularly tied to any one platform, and it actually runs better on Windows than on Sun's own Solaris. And it will take a C#/.NET implementation at least as long to mature as the JVMs--building these kinds of runtimes is hard and requires a lot of benchmarking and user feedback to get the bugs and performance bottlenecks out.

If Slashdot readers care about open source and open standards, rather than complaining about Microsoft, there is a much more effective thing you can do: support open source Java efforts like Kaffe, Intel's Intel's Open Runtime, GNU GCJ (now part of GCC), and GNU Classpath. By "support" I mean: use them, consider them for your next open source project, submit bug reports, and maybe contribute code. GNU GCJ, in particular, should be a good basis for you to write Linux applications: it compiles to executables that start up quickly, it lets you use native code almost as if it were written in Java, and you can even write native Gtk/Gnome applications in it.

But perhaps most importantly, educate yourself about Java rather than complaining about it; Java is really a pretty decent engineering effort. Give it the benefit of the doubt, and wher it needs improvement, help it along. C/C++ will not make it in the long run. It's Java or C# or something else similar to those languages.

here
here
here

Sun's got a bunch of info at JavaSoft.com if you wanna switch from the consumer angle to the developer angle...

But Star and Applix were anachronisms, and it is completely unsurprising that they have disappeared.

Three Cheers for Paul's achievement. As the prepubescent third of the SlashDot readership hasn't realized yet, getting an ATA driver on the Newton is really an amazing feat.

First things first: I'm (Sean Luke) not just a Newton user, I'm a Newton developer. I'm the person little by little working on the MP3 player for the Newton, along with Paul Guyot and a few other diehards. :-) I'm also the author of (in my opinion) the second coolest thing to come out on the Newton recently since Paul's ATA driver, namely Waba (Java) for the Newton. I've also written Hemlock (a Sherlock-compatible internet search system for the Newton) and a bunch of chinese programs and other fun stuff.

Okay, so I'm a diehard, but the only reason I write Newton programs is, ultimately, for me. They're all open source. If other people find them useful, more power to 'em. And it's fun and relaxing -- the Newton's development environment is quite nice, especially compared to the Hideousness that is developing on Palms or WinCE boxes, ugh!

The Newton I use is a MessagePad 2000, the oldest Newton model that really, truly is still superior to pretty much anything out there. Which disturbs me. And the Ebay market has reacted accordingly -- the MP2K was introduced 6 years ago at $1100, and is still worth about $400 used. Newtons hold their value like no other computer I have ever seen. Which is a pain in the butt for me because I'd like to buy a Newton MessagePad 2100 to do some further development on, but they're still in the $700 range. :-(

The MP2K was an astounding machine for its time -- it's still an impressive machine. It has a 480x320 16-bit grayscale screen, a 162 MHZ StrongArm processor (and this was back in '94!), 1 Meg of static RAM, and 4 megs of internal Flash RAM for archival storage. It has a battery life easily as good as a Palm Pilot. It's got two PCMCIA card slots, presently filled with a 16-meg linear Flash RAM card and an AmbiCom 10Base-T Ethernet card. I also have a modem card.

Early Newtons suffered because Apple rushed them out the door before ParaGraph International (the makers of Apple's first handwriting system) had handwriting working very well at all. ParaGraph never really did much better, and eventually migrated to WinCE. This first handwriting system was bad enough that Palm Computing was born through selling Graffiti, an alternative input method for the Newton. In NewtOS 2.0 (circa 1993) Apple supplemented Paragraph's word-by-word recognition system with Rosetta, a letter-by-letter recognition system developed internally at Apple. Perfected in NewtOS 2.1, Rosetta is, bar none, the best handwriting system available for any PDA in existence. If you think Microsoft's recent attempts are any match, you haven't actually tried a Newton (OS 2.1) machine. It really is that good.

Newtons are very sophisticated little beasts, able to fax, print to inkjets or postscript, beam, email, ftp, surf the web, create and display fully-formatted ebooks (the Newton pioneered the notion), write in aribitrary foreign languages (Newtons were the first devices to use Unicode, which is used throughout the device). Equipped with Apple's MacInTalk voice synthesis, they can speak text in different voices. They can record and play long chunks of sound.

For as small a user community as the Newton community was, there was a very large number of developers, partially due to Apple's exceptional NewtonScript development environment (NewtonScript is a proto-based OOP language rather similar to Self. As such, Newtons have an amazing array of stuff available for them for free now. Besides the typical notepad-datebook-namecards-etc., Newtons sport web browsers, web servers (!), terminal emulators, word processors, spreadsheets, drawing programs, mod players, astronomy software, on-the Newton development software (although most Newton development is done on Macs or PCs, the Newton comes with a built-in compiler), and of course games, including a great chess program which beats the snot out of ones on other PDA platforms.

Why did the Newton never really take off? Because it was WAY ahead of its time, and because Apple hadn't figured out the price point. Apple was selling highly sophisticated Newtons for $800-1000, when it should have been stripping them of features and selling them at $300. It took Palm to finally realize that what people wanted was a glorified day planner that you could put in your pocket, for $300, and to heck with powerful features. The result: the Palm Pilot, a terribly primitive device with a grotesque UI, but it cost the right amount, had a great battery life, and fit in your pocket. And more power to 'em! Palm got the market right. It's taken Microsoft years to realize the same thing.

Just before Steve Jobs axed the Newton, the product was finally making a profit and Apple was preparing to spin off the company into a separate firm, Newton Inc. It had taken years, but the Newton was finally making money, and Apple was preparing a tiny one to compete head-on with the Palm Pilot. Why did the whole thing get Steved? Former Apple employees point to the fact that the Newton was the brainchild of John Sculley, the man who ousted Steve in the first place.

Oh, well.

Or, if you've got any PCI-based Sun workstation (Ultra-5 and up) and you want/need a PC as well, you can get one of these puppies: http://www.sun.com/desktop/products/sunpci/ Populated with a Celeron-600 and (iirc) 128MB ram, they run $495

You should take a look at Sun's Java Classes available on their Java website. These classes are designed pretty well, and the standard of the code is very high. Even though this code is pretty high-level, it shows some interesting programming aspects (hashed lists, interfaces, object oriented design, just to name a few).

You should take a look at Sun's Java Classes available on their Java website. These classes are designed pretty well, and the standard of the code is very high. Even though this code is pretty high-level, it shows some interesting programming aspects (hashed lists, interfaces, object oriented design, just to name a few).

Listen, I am both Microsoft (MCSE) and Sun (SSA) certified. I have worked with Solaris, Linux and Windows for years. How can windows users that have little if any Unix knowledge, make any comment on what Taco has to say? I'm sure some of the posts were written by people with experiance on both platforms.. but.. Of the people that LOOVVEE M$ many know little or no Unix .. Most M$ users only know M$. Most Unix users know BOTH Unix and M$. Taco is entitled to his opinion (which it just so happens is accurate this time..you overly defensive Microsoft Borgs!) As far as microsoft.com being usefull, I guess that value is in the browser of the beholder. I don't personally have much use for Microsofts web site except when I need to patch my servers. Unfortunately, Microsoft often releases patches long LONG after a problem has been made known (see L0pht.com for a quote from the Microsoft folks). I admin both Unix and Windows machines, If I need a good technical reference I go to O'Reilly and buy a book on the subject.. not microsoft. Or I go to Docs.Sun.Com , Cisco or Linux.org but I don't go to Microsoft.com which is apparently a good thing because they have had DNS problems most of the day! -Celtic

Perhaps you are posting without knowing the opposition? Have you not heard of JINI? I quote:

• Jini[tm] network technology provides a simple infrastructure for delivering services in a network and for creating spontaneous interaction between programs that use these services regardless of their hardware/software implementation. Any kind of network made up of services (applications, databases, servers, devices, information systems, mobile appliances, storage, printers, etc.) and clients (requesters of services) of those services can be easily assembled, disassembled, and maintained on the network using Jini Technology.Services can be added or removed from the network, and new clients can find existing services - all without administration.

I am not sure what issue you have with installing the Java Plugin (since I have it working on every machine here). Perhaps it is your system?

Does it matter if Microsoft ports .NET to Linux, BSD, BeOS, etc? How many of us would even be willing to use it? Besides the inherent incompatabilities Microsoft will most likely FORCE on it, how can you even trust their product to be stable? I can't even get their page about .NET to LOAD from ANY BROWSER! Tell me that is accessible from anywhere.

But enough about justified Microsoft Bashing. I am not denying that people will get .NET because they don't know better (ie: see MSN/AOL) -- but don't fool yourself into thinking that they are creating something New, Unique, or Better.

I just checked further into WebStart's capabilities for applets. Here it is, available from the developer's guide for WebStart:

The Applet-Desc Element
Java Web Start has support for launching Java Applets. This support provides easy migration of existing code to Java Web Start. An Applet is launched using the applet-desc element instead of the application-desc element. For example:

The JAR files that make up the Applet are described using the resources element as for applications. The documentBase must be provided explicitly since a JNLP file is not embedded in an HTML page. The rest of the attributes correspond to the respective HTML applet tag elements.

The main-class attribute is used instead of the code attribute. The main-class attribute is assigned the name of the Applet class (without the .class extension). This attribute can be omitted if the Applet class can be found from the Main-Class manifest entry in the main JAR file.

Note: Applets must be packaged in JAR files in order to work with Java Web Start.

I hope that helps. My original suspicions (that WebStart does support applets) is now confirmed.

Cheers!

Java's JMF is quite an impressive media API and includes support for RTP/RTSP, the real time streaming protocol largely put together by Real but also supported by others. There is work by the Blackdown people to provide platform native accelleration, like that available for Windows and Solaris. The users would have to install the 5MB JMF files though.

Yet another example of intellectual property rights being used to do the right thing...

Thalia

Sun's take is linked from http://www.sun.com/2001-0123/audiocast/. Sorry, a direct link didn't work (silly session id in the URL).

Here.

I haven't used it, but Sun has the JMF.
Quote: Developed by Sun and IBM, Java Media Framework 2.0 (JMF) technology is the unified architecture for the playback, synchronization, capture, and transmission and transcode of media - including streaming audio and video - across most major operating systems.

5{o be possible to use vic or the Java Media Framework with the H.263 codec instead of Sorenson Broadcaster.

First, I'd like to take issue with your comment about portability. Applets suck from a portability standpoint because Netscape has a stuffed implementation of the JVM. Use Sun's Java Plug-In. It works nice. And Java on almost every platform (even Mac, with MacOS X, but not yet BeOS) is pretty good. However...

Take a look at Sun's Java WebStart. It looks to be Sun's successor to applet technology.

The idea is basically to create a web-enabled application. It allows you to create full blown Java applications. Every time you run a WebStart application, it checks to see if there are updates for the .jar files on the web. If you're not connected, no problem--you just use the older .jar files. If you don't want to upgrade, find--you just click "no" when it asks you if you want the latest .jar files. Since the .jar files are cached locally, there's no horrendous download every time you run the application (as with applets). It's extremely easy to set up your application to be WebStart-enabled. And, I believe (but don't quote me on this one) that you can make your applets WebStart-enabled, too (adding caching to applets).

This is not exciting at all compared to hopscotch for motorola phones.

With games supported like this featured one, I am positive that these phones will turn out to be the ultimate in portable gaming!

-gerbik

I wonder how this compares with Sun's MAJC processor, which also runs Java natively... personally, I would pay Bucks for a PCI card with a secondary CPU to which my Java apps would be offloaded (but not being a computer engineer, I don't even know if that's feasible).

$75 is cheap. There's a catch though...the licence doesn't include upgrades. So, if an exploit or other defect is discovered and fixed, you need to...

Well, it's not conclusive, but the "Identifying Components" diagram on p 87 of the User Guide shows separate cables for HDD0 and HDD1. Might mean they've got separate buses...

According to the this sun site it uses standard PC133 memory. No more high sun memory prices! Why wouldn't you buy one of these?

(from Sun's site):

Pricing and Availability

Sun's Netra X1 thin server will be available starting March 6, 2001 through Sun and Sun's existing worldwide sales channels. The starting list price is $995 for a system configured with an UltraSPARC IIe 400MHz processor, 128MB memory (1GB max), 1-20GB hard drive (2 drives max), and Solaris 8 and LOM management software pre-installed.

http://www.sun.com/smi/Press/sunflash/2001-01/sunf lash.20010117.4.html;$sessionid$EBXDBFYAAANTXAMTA1 FU45Q

Solaris 8 is free (beer) for up to and including 8 CPUs though they charge $75 for the media package (several CDROMs)..

(check here for details)


Your Working Boy,

I am one of SuSE's SPARC/Linux developers. Currently, I don't think Linux will run on one of those machines. If you look at their Product White Paper, you'll see (from the description and pictures) that the machine has both an UltraSPARC-IIe processor and an ALi PCI chipset. The US-IIe, while probably easy to add support for, just isn't known to the kernel currently. The ALi PCI chipset is a new thing for SPARC machines. Also, the machine has USB ports that the SPARC/Linux port won't currently take advantage of. Support will, of course, be worked on... just have patience. :)

Well, mostly the fact that, according to the site, these particular units DON'T have any localhost ports on them.

http://www.sun.com/products-n-solutions/hw/network ing/netrax/X1/details.html#rc See subheading "Interconnect".

With a starting price of $995, the Netra X1 server is extremely competitive when compared with other entry-level servers. It is an especially attractive proposition given the fact that the server comes complete with the Solaris Operating Environment and disk drive preinstalled along with remote management capabilities, making it ready for out-of-the-box use.

Sun is NOT funding FreeBSD to any sun4x architecture. The FreeBSD/SPARC port was started in 97 by Jason Evans, who, at the time worked for Sun MicroElectronics (SME). SME had approached the FreeBSD core offering monetary compensation for FreeBSD on sun4u's. The core team turned down this offer with jkh saying that SME's offer was not of major interest since to be of long term use of FreeBSD, such a proposal would need to include support for a number of years from someone internal to Sun. Eventually Jason Evans left Sun and the port remained largely untouched since October 10, 1998. The core team's response was reasonable at the time. Now if Sun came with an identical offer today, you bet that gorilla vagina thats grafted on your right hand they'd pounce on it now. David O'Brien and some others have been tinkering with it since early 2000 though.

As of late, Jason Evans has been working on the KSE project

To throw in a bit of dramatic irony, while the FreeBSD/SPARC port was in its ragnarok, Sun signed that deal with Red Hat :|

Meandering abit offtopic but oh well...

Sun is NOT funding FreeBSD to any sun4x architecture. The FreeBSD/SPARC port was started in 97 by Jason Evans, who, at the time worked for Sun MicroElectronics (SME). SME had approached the FreeBSD core offering monetary compensation for FreeBSD on sun4u's. The core team turned down this offer with jkh saying that SME's offer was not of major interest since to be of long term use of FreeBSD, such a proposal would need to include support for a number of years from someone internal to Sun. Eventually Jason Evans left Sun and the port remained largely untouched since October 10, 1998. The core team's response was reasonable at the time. Now if Sun came with an identical offer today, you bet that gorilla vagina thats grafted on your right hand they'd pounce on it now. David O'Brien and some others have been tinkering with it since early 2000 though.

As of late, Jason Evans has been working on the KSE project

To throw in a bit of dramatic irony, while the FreeBSD/SPARC port was in its ragnarok, Sun signed that deal with Red Hat :|

Meandering abit offtopic but oh well...