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It is a pitty that your web site is written for analysts and wankers because I would really like to use it to learn more about the Java platform particulary in relation to e-commerce/web-applications.

It's not a pity for analysts (and wankers) who want exactly the sort of information you're complaining about, presented in the style that you're complaining about. Developers, I'm assuming, are expected to have enough intelligence to track down the Java Developer Connection, where they would find a clear and concise introduction to EJBs. Or, if they wanted something a lot more in depth, they'd take a look at the EJB specification, which thanks to the good design of Sun's site is merely three clicks away from the front page of the Java site.

The page that you complain about (http://java.sun.com/j2ee/overview.html) is a relatively good non-technical overview of J2EE, and doesn't pretend to be anything else. However, having found it, a quick click on 'documentation', followed by 'tutorials' takes you to yet another developer-level introduction to J2EE which seems to fit your requirements a lot better.

The only problem I see with the information provided is that it's not great for impatient developers who can't be bothered to look round the site. Perhaps if you'd spent more time reading the navigation options than 'mindless marketing drivel' then you'd have found what you wanted more quickly.

Incidentally, I always find that you get better results when complaining about issues like this if you at least run your mail through a spell-checker first. ('pitty', 'particulary', 'nosence' etc.) It's always helpful to make a good impression when what you have to say is inherently negative.

It is a pitty that your web site is written for analysts and wankers because I would really like to use it to learn more about the Java platform particulary in relation to e-commerce/web-applications.

It's not a pity for analysts (and wankers) who want exactly the sort of information you're complaining about, presented in the style that you're complaining about. Developers, I'm assuming, are expected to have enough intelligence to track down the Java Developer Connection, where they would find a clear and concise introduction to EJBs. Or, if they wanted something a lot more in depth, they'd take a look at the EJB specification, which thanks to the good design of Sun's site is merely three clicks away from the front page of the Java site.

The page that you complain about (http://java.sun.com/j2ee/overview.html) is a relatively good non-technical overview of J2EE, and doesn't pretend to be anything else. However, having found it, a quick click on 'documentation', followed by 'tutorials' takes you to yet another developer-level introduction to J2EE which seems to fit your requirements a lot better.

The only problem I see with the information provided is that it's not great for impatient developers who can't be bothered to look round the site. Perhaps if you'd spent more time reading the navigation options than 'mindless marketing drivel' then you'd have found what you wanted more quickly.

Incidentally, I always find that you get better results when complaining about issues like this if you at least run your mail through a spell-checker first. ('pitty', 'particulary', 'nosence' etc.) It's always helpful to make a good impression when what you have to say is inherently negative.

It is a pitty that your web site is written for analysts and wankers because I would really like to use it to learn more about the Java platform particulary in relation to e-commerce/web-applications.

It's not a pity for analysts (and wankers) who want exactly the sort of information you're complaining about, presented in the style that you're complaining about. Developers, I'm assuming, are expected to have enough intelligence to track down the Java Developer Connection, where they would find a clear and concise introduction to EJBs. Or, if they wanted something a lot more in depth, they'd take a look at the EJB specification, which thanks to the good design of Sun's site is merely three clicks away from the front page of the Java site.

The page that you complain about (http://java.sun.com/j2ee/overview.html) is a relatively good non-technical overview of J2EE, and doesn't pretend to be anything else. However, having found it, a quick click on 'documentation', followed by 'tutorials' takes you to yet another developer-level introduction to J2EE which seems to fit your requirements a lot better.

The only problem I see with the information provided is that it's not great for impatient developers who can't be bothered to look round the site. Perhaps if you'd spent more time reading the navigation options than 'mindless marketing drivel' then you'd have found what you wanted more quickly.

Incidentally, I always find that you get better results when complaining about issues like this if you at least run your mail through a spell-checker first. ('pitty', 'particulary', 'nosence' etc.) It's always helpful to make a good impression when what you have to say is inherently negative.

It is a pitty that your web site is written for analysts and wankers because I would really like to use it to learn more about the Java platform particulary in relation to e-commerce/web-applications.

It's not a pity for analysts (and wankers) who want exactly the sort of information you're complaining about, presented in the style that you're complaining about. Developers, I'm assuming, are expected to have enough intelligence to track down the Java Developer Connection, where they would find a clear and concise introduction to EJBs. Or, if they wanted something a lot more in depth, they'd take a look at the EJB specification, which thanks to the good design of Sun's site is merely three clicks away from the front page of the Java site.

The page that you complain about (http://java.sun.com/j2ee/overview.html) is a relatively good non-technical overview of J2EE, and doesn't pretend to be anything else. However, having found it, a quick click on 'documentation', followed by 'tutorials' takes you to yet another developer-level introduction to J2EE which seems to fit your requirements a lot better.

The only problem I see with the information provided is that it's not great for impatient developers who can't be bothered to look round the site. Perhaps if you'd spent more time reading the navigation options than 'mindless marketing drivel' then you'd have found what you wanted more quickly.

Incidentally, I always find that you get better results when complaining about issues like this if you at least run your mail through a spell-checker first. ('pitty', 'particulary', 'nosence' etc.) It's always helpful to make a good impression when what you have to say is inherently negative.

It is a pitty that your web site is written for analysts and wankers because I would really like to use it to learn more about the Java platform particulary in relation to e-commerce/web-applications.

It's not a pity for analysts (and wankers) who want exactly the sort of information you're complaining about, presented in the style that you're complaining about. Developers, I'm assuming, are expected to have enough intelligence to track down the Java Developer Connection, where they would find a clear and concise introduction to EJBs. Or, if they wanted something a lot more in depth, they'd take a look at the EJB specification, which thanks to the good design of Sun's site is merely three clicks away from the front page of the Java site.

The page that you complain about (http://java.sun.com/j2ee/overview.html) is a relatively good non-technical overview of J2EE, and doesn't pretend to be anything else. However, having found it, a quick click on 'documentation', followed by 'tutorials' takes you to yet another developer-level introduction to J2EE which seems to fit your requirements a lot better.

The only problem I see with the information provided is that it's not great for impatient developers who can't be bothered to look round the site. Perhaps if you'd spent more time reading the navigation options than 'mindless marketing drivel' then you'd have found what you wanted more quickly.

Incidentally, I always find that you get better results when complaining about issues like this if you at least run your mail through a spell-checker first. ('pitty', 'particulary', 'nosence' etc.) It's always helpful to make a good impression when what you have to say is inherently negative.

It is a pitty that your web site is written for analysts and wankers because I would really like to use it to learn more about the Java platform particulary in relation to e-commerce/web-applications.

It's not a pity for analysts (and wankers) who want exactly the sort of information you're complaining about, presented in the style that you're complaining about. Developers, I'm assuming, are expected to have enough intelligence to track down the Java Developer Connection, where they would find a clear and concise introduction to EJBs. Or, if they wanted something a lot more in depth, they'd take a look at the EJB specification, which thanks to the good design of Sun's site is merely three clicks away from the front page of the Java site.

The page that you complain about (http://java.sun.com/j2ee/overview.html) is a relatively good non-technical overview of J2EE, and doesn't pretend to be anything else. However, having found it, a quick click on 'documentation', followed by 'tutorials' takes you to yet another developer-level introduction to J2EE which seems to fit your requirements a lot better.

The only problem I see with the information provided is that it's not great for impatient developers who can't be bothered to look round the site. Perhaps if you'd spent more time reading the navigation options than 'mindless marketing drivel' then you'd have found what you wanted more quickly.

Incidentally, I always find that you get better results when complaining about issues like this if you at least run your mail through a spell-checker first. ('pitty', 'particulary', 'nosence' etc.) It's always helpful to make a good impression when what you have to say is inherently negative.

Well, since the Xeon processors don't suffer from the cache problems that the Sun processors do, I would imagine that the uptime is pretty good.

How's the scalability on the E450 past 4 processors? Non-existent you say? You mean I'd have to spend $223,000.00 on a Sun to even begin to think about something beyond quad-processors? I could spend a 1/5 of that for an 8-processor Compaq/Dell/HP and get better tpc-c performance than the E4500.

The million dollar bet was bullshit and anybody with some sense knew it. Sun's best posted tpc-c score for a non-clustered server is ~150,000 for a 64-way E10k running Sybase for a cost of about $7,000,000. Compaq's best submitted performance for a 4-way server is ~35,000 with Win2k and SQL2k for around $500,000. So basically I get 1/4 the performance for 1/14 the price. Suns cluster really well, you say? The tpc-c number one position right now belongs to a clustered Compaq running Win2k and SQL2k.

Despite these numbers, I agree with you, but not on the basis of performance. When I let my own personal preferences and emotions come into play I like unix a whole lot better than I like Windows anything. As a matter of fact I despise Microsoft Server products, but that doesn't mean that they aren't faster and that they don't get good uptime. Most people's concepts of uptime are based on client systems and sub-optimal configurations that tend to go down. Microsoft server products can be optimized to be stable.

The fact remains that Sun is dropping the ball. Their most impressive hardware just isn't that impressive anymore. The USIII is way way late and not really very impressive. It is an incremental improvement over the USII. Fortunately, it does actually get more done per clock cycle than an Intel P3, but only slightly more. Hopefully they can get the clock speed up.

In the end, if I cared about cost, performance, and reliability I'd be more apt to run FreeBSD. If I were forced to run Oracle, I'd definitely consider Linux on Intel. If I needed to scale really well I'd probably use an HP9000 or an RS6000.

I still haven't seen anybody support an argument for why one would use a Sun Box for a particular application over Win2k on Intel. I can certainly think of a few, but that's me.

Wonder what all that code is on the wallpapers? It's real! It's a multi-threaded HTTP server written in Java from developer.java.sun.com. On the right side (on some image where the head is on the left) you can quite easily make out the comment "go back in wait queue if there's fewer than numHandler connections." - it's on lines 173-174 and the surroundings match too. In the large images one can also see many HTTP-texts on the right side.

Are they into Sun or what? I bet it's GNOME on Solaris...

This doesn't have anything much to do with GNOME, but I found all the Sun logos intruiging...

Sun has something to do with Gnome. Eventually you will be able to use it on Slowaris. Don't think it's supported yet though.

If you are even mildly currious you can find out more Here

The A1000 is rated at 7A, IIRC, and the E4500 is rated at 12A. If you managed to get a second E4500 and a 21" monitor on 15A (7 + 12 + 12 + monitor > 31A), it's certainly not a wise solution.

The Ultra 5 is a PC-style hardware machine, with a 400MHz UltraSPARC IIi processor (256KB external cache), max of 512MB memory, 33MHz 32-bit PCI bus, and an IDE hard drive.

The E3500 (the low-end "midrange" server) takes up to 8 UltraSPARC processors with 4MB or 8MB external caches sitting on a Gigaplane interconnect, 64-bit SBus as well as 64-bit 66MHz PCI busses, a memory capacity up to 16GB, and laughs at IDE hard drives. It also supports numerous more production-environment accessories, such as redundant hot-swappable power and cooling, etc.

The E3500 is a far cry beyond the Ultra5. You are definitely overlooking a lot.

Michael J.

The Ultra 5 is a PC-style hardware machine, with a 400MHz UltraSPARC IIi processor (256KB external cache), max of 512MB memory, 33MHz 32-bit PCI bus, and an IDE hard drive.

The E3500 (the low-end "midrange" server) takes up to 8 UltraSPARC processors with 4MB or 8MB external caches sitting on a Gigaplane interconnect, 64-bit SBus as well as 64-bit 66MHz PCI busses, a memory capacity up to 16GB, and laughs at IDE hard drives. It also supports numerous more production-environment accessories, such as redundant hot-swappable power and cooling, etc.

The E3500 is a far cry beyond the Ultra5. You are definitely overlooking a lot.

Michael J.

he E10k frame is capable of holding up to 16 system boards, with a minimum of 4 boards. Each system board can hold four CPUs (480mhz), 4GB RAM (4 banks of 1GB), and either 4 SBUS devices, or 2 PCI devices. (Note: in the future, this *may* support faster CPUs, 2x higher memory density, and 3 PCI devices per system board, specs are as of 03/29/2000)

For starters, 480mhz processors aren't even available NOW for the E10k, and only the E450. See this Sun Specifications for the E10kpage for verification.

Now, go read my view at Epinions about the Sun Enterprise 10000.

At this point, it should be pretty clear which is the original article and which is the changed one. BTW, if the people at Slashdot save a copy of the web pages before they post it, then check their original copy. You'll find that the date was really "12/29/00" at the review site, and not the "3/29/00" that it is now.

It doesn't make sense that a site would say that 480mhz processors are available in March when they aren't even available now. Not to mention the 2x density RAM that wasn't even announced for the lower-end servers at that point.

This story is a plagairism of my original work, and I am COMPLETELY DISGUSTED at the theft of my work.

BTW, the 480mhz processors for the E10k aren't even available now. See the Sun specification site for details.. Also funny how he knew about Sun's 2x higher memory densitry (which also is not yet supported on the E10k) in March, long before it was available for the lower-end servers.

The base price for their low-end "midrange server" is over $40,000. It has a single SPARC processor, and 1 GB of RAM. It appears to be exactly like a $5,000 Ultra5 Workstation, but in a much bigger box. (Personal refrigerator vs. pizza box) Am I overlooking something, or is this outrageously expensive? I'd just as soon get the Ultra5 and then buy myself one of Cogent Communications' 100 Mbps Fiber lines for $1,000 a month.

Check this page

• Have you or anyone else at LinuxPPC thought about how to make Linux on the Mac as competitive (with the proprietary software bundled with Macs) and useful in the accessibility arena as in all others?
• Do you agree with the idea that in order to ensure widespread use of Linux for the Mac (e.g., in schools) you should consider accessibility?
• What could you reasonably do to increase the accessibility of your distro?
• Do you agree with the idea that in order to fully live up to the notion of "free as in speech software for everyone" we must include non-sighted and otherwise disabled users?

If you just want to build stuff with existing tools, CIS is probably the way to go. If you want to build the tools and/or full-blown from-scratch software, do CS.

Amazon.com does. So does eTrade and Priceline

Of course, some of these sites might be using more servlets than JSP's, but since JSPs are compiled to servlets there is no performance difference, anyway.

Read Sun's dot-com-builder website on how priceline was built sometime. It's pretty interesting (although full of marketing rubbish).

"We see that SOAP [the Simple Object Access Protocol] provides part of the answer to meet the requirements of certain categories of service, such as those for subscription-based models. This explains our commitment and participation in the Working Group at the W3C [World Wide Web Consortium] to develop the recommendation for XP, which builds on the initial SOAP work," said Simon Nicholson, Sun's XML standards strategist.

There was a lot of talk about SOAP at JavaOne last year. This was before Microsoft put the SOAP stake in the ground of .NET. There have been quite a few indications from Sun that they feel XML-RPC is going to be a large part of the furture of distrubuted computing and have given more credibility to SOAP than the OMG standard (even the OMG is making CORBA XML-connectable).

As an aside, the XML-Apache group has some SOAP stuff, too. People aren't thinking of it as a Microsoft thing. Just a distributed thing.

The only problem with the Java and MS solutions is that a majority of the components were closed source, so how could you be sure that a simply text box did not report back to some site on the net?

Java is NOT closed source. At least not Sun's implementation. If you go to Sun's website (www.sun.com) you can download the source code. There are some restrictions on use as it is mostly for research/prototyping, but it is all there.

I submitted two stories over the last little bit that got turned down.. The first one is Sun Microsystems is now offering the Solaris 8 Kernel SOURCE CODE for free!!

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

And the other was that Sun finally fixed TAR for Solaris 2.6 to tar up more than just 18 directories deep. This is pretty interesting stuff that people might want to know about.. this beer in space thing.. I dunno...

When is Sun going to get off their asses and allow Solaris to be downloaded, as they've been promising for months now?

Is now soon enough for you?

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

Thats odd. I live in Europe, also ordered Solaris 8 and it took them only 3 days to deliver. Considering the fact that I had to pay more for shipping & handling I think you're exagurating big time here.

That's a lot of money for a free OS on 2 CDs plus 6 CDs worth of junk that I don't want.

Read the site and that license again. Its not free software (yet?); "There are no fees for the right to use the software on computers with a capacity of eight or fewer processors", so it isn't free.

You "only need to register for your Solaris 8 Free 1-8 way license for Intel here and Sparc here ". I would not be surprised if you didn't even read the site properly and are now "illigally" using the software. I think you're coming close to trolling; you had all the options to see what you were buying, you could have read the FAQ to see that you are not getting a free OS so basicly I see no reason to start whining afterwards.

Besides; 2 CD's & 6 worth of junk? It somehow figures; I'd expect a reaction such as yours from someone who would call CD's filled with buttloads of documentation (docserver2), Staroffice, Oracle 8i SQL server (trial), JAVA tools and much utilities (GNU extras) junk.

IMHO you got no one to kick but yourself if you are unsatisfied.

Thats odd. I live in Europe, also ordered Solaris 8 and it took them only 3 days to deliver. Considering the fact that I had to pay more for shipping & handling I think you're exagurating big time here.

That's a lot of money for a free OS on 2 CDs plus 6 CDs worth of junk that I don't want.

Read the site and that license again. Its not free software (yet?); "There are no fees for the right to use the software on computers with a capacity of eight or fewer processors", so it isn't free.

You "only need to register for your Solaris 8 Free 1-8 way license for Intel here and Sparc here ". I would not be surprised if you didn't even read the site properly and are now "illigally" using the software. I think you're coming close to trolling; you had all the options to see what you were buying, you could have read the FAQ to see that you are not getting a free OS so basicly I see no reason to start whining afterwards.

Besides; 2 CD's & 6 worth of junk? It somehow figures; I'd expect a reaction such as yours from someone who would call CD's filled with buttloads of documentation (docserver2), Staroffice, Oracle 8i SQL server (trial), JAVA tools and much utilities (GNU extras) junk.

IMHO you got no one to kick but yourself if you are unsatisfied.

Thats odd. I live in Europe, also ordered Solaris 8 and it took them only 3 days to deliver. Considering the fact that I had to pay more for shipping & handling I think you're exagurating big time here.

That's a lot of money for a free OS on 2 CDs plus 6 CDs worth of junk that I don't want.

Read the site and that license again. Its not free software (yet?); "There are no fees for the right to use the software on computers with a capacity of eight or fewer processors", so it isn't free.

You "only need to register for your Solaris 8 Free 1-8 way license for Intel here and Sparc here ". I would not be surprised if you didn't even read the site properly and are now "illigally" using the software. I think you're coming close to trolling; you had all the options to see what you were buying, you could have read the FAQ to see that you are not getting a free OS so basicly I see no reason to start whining afterwards.

Besides; 2 CD's & 6 worth of junk? It somehow figures; I'd expect a reaction such as yours from someone who would call CD's filled with buttloads of documentation (docserver2), Staroffice, Oracle 8i SQL server (trial), JAVA tools and much utilities (GNU extras) junk.

IMHO you got no one to kick but yourself if you are unsatisfied.

Thats odd. I live in Europe, also ordered Solaris 8 and it took them only 3 days to deliver. Considering the fact that I had to pay more for shipping & handling I think you're exagurating big time here.

That's a lot of money for a free OS on 2 CDs plus 6 CDs worth of junk that I don't want.

Read the site and that license again. Its not free software (yet?); "There are no fees for the right to use the software on computers with a capacity of eight or fewer processors", so it isn't free.

You "only need to register for your Solaris 8 Free 1-8 way license for Intel here and Sparc here ". I would not be surprised if you didn't even read the site properly and are now "illigally" using the software. I think you're coming close to trolling; you had all the options to see what you were buying, you could have read the FAQ to see that you are not getting a free OS so basicly I see no reason to start whining afterwards.

Besides; 2 CD's & 6 worth of junk? It somehow figures; I'd expect a reaction such as yours from someone who would call CD's filled with buttloads of documentation (docserver2), Staroffice, Oracle 8i SQL server (trial), JAVA tools and much utilities (GNU extras) junk.

IMHO you got no one to kick but yourself if you are unsatisfied.

There is no such thing as a closed source language. A language specification can be open or proprietary. Sun's language specification is open (i.e anyone can read it). There do exist at least on closed source java implementation, but there does exist lots of closed source implementation of C too. Do you consider C a closed source language?

If they aren't going to be language agnostic and just accept pseudo-code (or straight C), I'd rather see a standard free language. For an AP exam, one of the functional languages would probably be a much better choice, because programming in those requires that you know how to think.

Most functional languages aren't standardized that much either. And although java doesn't have a formal standard approved by a standardisation body, that doesn't mean that it doesn't have a formal standard (although it is subject to change, and probably not that formal for anyone who knows how to formally specify programming languages). You can read the formal standard yourself here.

As for the comment about programming in functional languages requires that you know how to think. Of course it does. But do you think that programming in other languages does not require that you know how to think?

well, if you'd like to know more about the VM spec, read it here. The VM doesn't care about class libraries, only that code is converted to bytecode correctly. The class libraries you will have available depend on the platform that you are developing for, so I doubt that javax.swing.anything will be available for an embedded machine. This is a VM implementation, and not a JDK.

I agreee that those whitepapers are worthless. I thought whitepapers were supposed to be the geeky stuff for us.

BigInteger has nothing to do with the Java language. It's just a regular old class written in Java that stores its magnitude as a big-endian array of those 32 bit ints. If it didn't already exist in the API you could write it yourself. If you download the API source and used BitInteger as a reference, you could probably write the same thing in C/C++ in under an hour. Or you could use one of the many existing aribitrary precision C math libraries in the world.

Just invoking the word "bytecode" or compiling a language to bytecode doesn't suddenly make the virtual machine language independent.

Java bytecode, for instance, is significantly tied to the Java language specification. Go browse The Java VM Specification if you like -- classes fields, members, construction, interfaces, and garbage collection are built into the VM.

Admittedly, I am ignorant of Dis code, but when I see "Inferno applications are written in Limbo" in the Inferno FAQ, my confidence in a language independent Inferno VM is shaken.

In point of fact, it means you can run java on your pen now (don't ask me why you would want to... manual spell check perhaps?) This is a fascinating fact you could have learned by reading the article.

Really, I agree with many of your points in the abstract. As a language for top-tier, ass-kicking developers who are wise, subtle, and wily, Java has a lot of annoying constraints.

They did this for a reason though. For a lot of real-world software development, you have to do the work with painfully small amounts of time, money, and talent. So they banned a number of things that it takes an expert to use wisely. E.g., pointers, multiple inheritance, allowing unreachable code, preprocessor macros, raw memory allocation, random memory access, self-modifying code, and so on. As cool as those features are in the hands of a genius, they are plain dangerous in the hands of a mediocre developer. And 99% of the time, the genius will be doing what Java would be doing anyhow; it's only the 1% of the time that it sucks.

That's why I'd much rather inherit a bunch of J. Random Programmer's code in Java than almost any other language. There will be little impressive wizardry in it, but there are also unlikely to be many sections that will make me bleed through my eye sockets.

And you're also right about some of the other feature lacks; the whole primitive type thing is just ugly, and it's clear that they haven't heard about the whole mutable/immutable thing yet. Really, it saddens me that they are just now catching up with a lot of the things that NeXT was doing right with Objective C 5-10 years ago.

But as far as getting things done in the real world for server side stuff goes, it seems perfectly adequate for all the OO work I do. And to be fair to them, they're making a fair bit of progress; the java.lang.ref package, for example, answered a lot of my gripes about pointers and garbage collection.

One thing I didn't understand in your post was the section "lack of parametrised types"; could you talk more about that?

Really, I agree with many of your points in the abstract. As a language for top-tier, ass-kicking developers who are wise, subtle, and wily, Java has a lot of annoying constraints.

They did this for a reason though. For a lot of real-world software development, you have to do the work with painfully small amounts of time, money, and talent. So they banned a number of things that it takes an expert to use wisely. E.g., pointers, multiple inheritance, allowing unreachable code, preprocessor macros, raw memory allocation, random memory access, self-modifying code, and so on. As cool as those features are in the hands of a genius, they are plain dangerous in the hands of a mediocre developer. And 99% of the time, the genius will be doing what Java would be doing anyhow; it's only the 1% of the time that it sucks.

That's why I'd much rather inherit a bunch of J. Random Programmer's code in Java than almost any other language. There will be little impressive wizardry in it, but there are also unlikely to be many sections that will make me bleed through my eye sockets.

And you're also right about some of the other feature lacks; the whole primitive type thing is just ugly, and it's clear that they haven't heard about the whole mutable/immutable thing yet. Really, it saddens me that they are just now catching up with a lot of the things that NeXT was doing right with Objective C 5-10 years ago.

But as far as getting things done in the real world for server side stuff goes, it seems perfectly adequate for all the OO work I do. And to be fair to them, they're making a fair bit of progress; the java.lang.ref package, for example, answered a lot of my gripes about pointers and garbage collection.

One thing I didn't understand in your post was the section "lack of parametrised types"; could you talk more about that?

1. Java has NO! parametrised types This means that generic programming is impossible. One specific consequence of that is, that collections cannot be type-safe, and you loose a lot of the help that type-errors can buy you.
2. Java doesn't have "const" (and friends) which means that when you give someone an object reference you have no control over what they do with that. When returning read-only object, the only solution is to clone() them. Very expensive!

Could you be a little more specific when you say that collections can't be type-safe? Are you referring to putting several different instances of different objects into a collection and then being able to weed out the different instances by object type? I've done that in Java. It's really easy if they all implement the same interface. Once can iterate through the collection and call the same method for totally different objects. Also according to this page, one can create constants in Java. Or are you referring to defining parameters to methods as const so that the compiler won't let you modify them? I will admit that having to have wrapper classes for the primitive types is a pain.

Uhhm, sure. A *single* CPU Ultra 10 (440MHz) with 512 MB RAM and 20Gb IDE HD costs $4225 (see here), and that's not including the monitor. For that much money you can get dual P3 (or better yet, Athlon) with GeForce 2 and 21" monitor included.
___

The US-II's in the Ultra Enterprise Servers come with up to 8-MB of cache. Check out this for more info. Admittedly you're not going to be using a US$15,000 processor for your workstation, but still....

This is a cool attempt.. for one thing it shows how flexible the linux kernel is.

Um... Not really. It's almost trivial to put something inside of something else, as long as you write good interfaces. And the more 3rd party code you accomodate, the more risk there is of unstable code crashing the system, or of security breaches.

If necessary, kernel interfaces to userland programs are probably the best way to go, but even then you're not necessarily safe. Remember: try to run code as an unpriveleged user at first, then as root if necessary, but only in kernel space as a last resort.

but it would be funky having device drivers loaded from anywhere using this technology!

Like Jini? I hope you're not suggesting we embed the JRE into the kernel! That would be grotesque, despite the niftiness... No! No niftiness! Don't tempt me! Back!

--

1. Caldera Systems, Inc.
2. Red Hat
3. Rebel.com

1. Caldera Systems, Inc.
2. Red Hat
3. Rebel.com

Florida's Sunbiz site is a good example of how not to do it. I have a heck of a time searching for information.

Some things that I like in a site... organize data so that you can find information no more than 2 or 3 categories deep. (2 preferred) Also, make a navigation bar that lets you get back to the different parts of the site, without having to back track. Sun Microsystems isn't a government site, but has lots of information that is fairly well organized in the manner I mentioned above.

Sun is helping them with the porting for it:
http://www.sun.com/software/solaris/netscape/

I know that VA Linux sells some systems that have 16 memory slots (yes, Intel machines!).

here is a link to a HP server that supports up to 128GB of memory in one box. I know it's a high end unix server, but wasn't itanium intel's pathetic attempt to compete with these kind of machines?

then there is the coveted Sun Enterprise 1000 which seems to support up to 68GB of RAM, plus a bunch of others from SUN

Then there is this bad-boy from IBM, which supports up to 96GB

Of course there are the Alpha servers, of which the GS series is an example. Up to 256MB.

There are boards that support way more than 8 RAM slots and have been for some time. Hell, you can get a system that supports more than 16GB from ebay.

PS, anyone who wants to donate one of the linked systems, please reply to this and we will arrange something :-).

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# cd /

I know that VA Linux sells some systems that have 16 memory slots (yes, Intel machines!).

here is a link to a HP server that supports up to 128GB of memory in one box. I know it's a high end unix server, but wasn't itanium intel's pathetic attempt to compete with these kind of machines?

then there is the coveted Sun Enterprise 1000 which seems to support up to 68GB of RAM, plus a bunch of others from SUN

Then there is this bad-boy from IBM, which supports up to 96GB

Of course there are the Alpha servers, of which the GS series is an example. Up to 256MB.

There are boards that support way more than 8 RAM slots and have been for some time. Hell, you can get a system that supports more than 16GB from ebay.

PS, anyone who wants to donate one of the linked systems, please reply to this and we will arrange something :-).

-----
# cd /

You do realise that we pay through the nose for telephone calls over here already?

Thinking about the cost per megabyte and past proposals for an "Information Tax"... I wouldn't say that it's all that far fetched...

300Gigs is a small disk array in business terms.

Here's product sheet on a 6-Terabyte Filer well within the capacity of being bought by the Government and being installed in every local telephone exchange.

Data communications can be compressed up and stored on these, analogue (voice) calls could be parsed through voice recognition systems and also compressed. Hell, when they run out of space they'll start dumping the old stuff to tape. (Ahem... Sun's 11-Terabyte solution). If these types of solutions are available commercially just think what the governments of the developed world will have available to them. The two products I just speced out would fit in a rather small datacentre.

Put this configuration in each telephone exchange and keeping records of all calls is just a matter of buying the tapes!!!

On another note, we're not, in general, as concerned with privacy here in the UK as much as you guys are in the US. We've had thousands of Closed Circuit cameras installed throughout our streets since the '80s (What with IRA bombing campaigns etc...) and for many people, especially women, it has instilled security for the general public as opposed to fear. Are we mis-guided? I'm not saying that I agree that my telephone conversations can be recorded, but if they're just going to be archived to tape then it doesn't bother me extremely. Hell, I would think that they are just as likely to protect me as they might incriminate me.

GC

You hit the nail on the head. Just look at all the syntax errors in the stuff people are complaining about. I mean, stdin.readline()??? Nope. I was getting revved up to reply to everyone who made a derogatory comment with code as backup, but almost all of them are blatently wrong that it is obvious they do not understand the intricacies of Java.

Hey taco: import to.long.to.get.to.* and be quiet. Fair use? From the license: "You acknowledge and agree as between you and Sun that Sun owns the Java trademark and all Java-related trademarks, service marks, logos and other brand designations including the Coffee Cup logo and Duke logo ("Java Marks"), and you agree to comply with the Sun Trademark and Logo Usage Requirements currently located at www.sun.com/policies/trademarks."

Wow, I'm usually in a good mood on Fridays.

The Java implementation in *every* modern browser, be it Netscape, IE, or anything else, is either so horribly broken or outdated (or both) that it's not worth seriously programming for. Use the Java plugin instead; it's fast and works with every browser out there (Win32, Solaris, and Linux included), except on Macs. It's a small download for users, and in this age of Flash animations everywhere, a little plugin download doesn't really turn people away.

http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.3.0_01/jre/index.html

jdk1.3 for linux has been out for a while. Get it here, although I doubt anyone would actually download it.

1. Java the language. The syntax, types, etc. Basically anything in The Java Language Specification
   
2. Java the Virtual Machine. The bytecodes, class file format, frames, stacks, etc, as described in The Java Virtual Machine Specification It's worth noting that there are 130+ languages that can be compiled to java bytecode!
   
3. Java the platform. The libraries, windowing toolkits, native interface support. Whatever you might call an API. These are of the use what you need, ignore what you don't class. Interestingly, doing a "import " will not increase the size of your code beyond those classes you actually use. Unlike, say MFC, where referencing just one function means you have to pull the entire DLL into your program.
   

1. Java the language. The syntax, types, etc. Basically anything in The Java Language Specification
   
2. Java the Virtual Machine. The bytecodes, class file format, frames, stacks, etc, as described in The Java Virtual Machine Specification It's worth noting that there are 130+ languages that can be compiled to java bytecode!
   
3. Java the platform. The libraries, windowing toolkits, native interface support. Whatever you might call an API. These are of the use what you need, ignore what you don't class. Interestingly, doing a "import " will not increase the size of your code beyond those classes you actually use. Unlike, say MFC, where referencing just one function means you have to pull the entire DLL into your program.