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...because I'm thinking, who the hell else uses OSes like Trusted Solaris and Argus Pitbull? I mean, it seems like these systems were designed with government use in mind, and I just assumed that they would be smart enough to use systems like these.

Oh well, I guess when you assume, you make an ass out of you and me...

It is really hard to get companies to not file broad patents (I know, the Biotech company I used to work for was always trying to get out broad genetics patents), but maybe the best thing you can do is lobby for an open licensing of the product (which can mean a million things)..

Maybe a good example is how developers at Sun (like Patrick Naughton) lobbied Sun to distribute Java fairly openly... It might be the best thing you can do for the time being, until the EFF gets legislative bodies to pass relevant and fair laws!!! (we hope!)

It is really hard to get companies to not file broad patents (I know, the Biotech company I used to work for was always trying to get out broad genetics patents), but maybe the best thing you can do is lobby for an open licensing of the product (which can mean a million things)..

Maybe a good example is how developers at Sun (like Patrick Naughton) lobbied Sun to distribute Java fairly openly... It might be the best thing you can do for the time being, until the EFF gets legislative bodies to pass relevant and fair laws!!! (we hope!)

I am completely convinced that by version 8 or so, Perl will

• make "$", "%", and "@" optional

• Status: Withdrawn

• will have a decent object-oriented system

• It already has a decent object-oriented system i.e. an optional one (and what it lacks in syntactic sugar can easily be procured from CPAN). Personally, I hardly ever write non OO Perl (and, yes, I'd like to see it graduate from 'decent' to best-of-breed), but there's a bunch of areas - quick'n'dirty CGI, sysadmin scripts, optimizations and general gluing and mucking about - where OO is overkill. Don't forget Perl is a great Unix tool amongst many other things. You can munge the hell out of text with little more than a commandline salvo.

• will have useful threading

• Try version 6.

• will have a secure sandbox ala Java

• Er, you mean like Safe, which is as old as Java, offers vastly more control than the Java sandbox (it operates at the opcode level), and which, to my knowledge, has never met a script kiddie yet it couldn't politely but firmly kick to the kerb.

Perl has many fine and dandy features because it promiscuously and 'diagonally' soaks up good ideas (Larry has even been spotted flirting with C# of late). You don't have to be a hypocritical hobgoblin to want to make it finer and dandier: just another perl hacker.

Nifty bike, but not really fresh news. Dallas Semiconductor was riding it around at this year's Java1 show.

s1.intern() == s2.intern()

or:

s1.equals(s2).

Admittedly, I don't program Java because of issues like this. Currently, I fancy C++ with STL (for creating new systems/languages). So, here's a shameless plug from the 1.2-specification to explain things further:

package testPackage;

class Test {

public static void main(String[] args) {

String hello = "Hello", lo = "lo";

System.out.print((hello == "Hello") + " ");

System.out.print((Other.hello == hello) + " ");

System.out.print((other.Other.hello == hello) + " ");

System.out.print((hello == ("Hel"+"lo")) + " ");

System.out.print((hello == ("Hel"+lo)) + " ");

System.out.println(hello == ("Hel"+lo).intern());

}

}

class Other { static String hello = "Hello"; }

and the compilation unit:

package other;

public class Other { static String hello = "Hello"; }

produces the output:

true true true true false true

This example illustrates six points:

* Literal strings within the same class (8) in the same package (7) represent references to the same String object (4.3.1).

* Literal strings within different classes in the same package represent references to the same String object.

* Literal strings within different classes in different packages likewise represent references to the same String object.

* Strings computed by constant expressions (15.27) are computed at compile time and then treated as if they were literals.

* Strings computed at run time are newly created and therefore distinct.

* The result of explicitly interning a computed string is the same string as any pre-existing literal string with the same contents.

The fifth point is what breaks Java-platform/VM independence IMHO. What if an optimizer optimizes something like that out of run-time? You'll get different results Note though, I'm not sure what restrictions lies in the specifications of a Java-VM. This MAY not be an issue, but it sure is UGLY. It inhibits features you cannot express in the language itself.

So you can't escape pointer issues with Java either it seems. They've implemented a castrated pointertype retaining many of the old problems, for the sake of optimization. This is of course no surprise, it's an easy language to make something quick in, but it's far off from being a good language for what it's supposed to fix.

You can find more on: http://java.sun.com/docs/ books/jls/html/3.doc.html

Regards,

- Steeltoe

Does it have to be PostScript first, or can you just print to the printer? If it doesn't have to be PostScript, Java 1.2 makes it pretty easy to print. Sun's tutorial diplays some graphics to the screen, then prints it.

Anyways, as I was saying, there have been a bunch of people complaining about getting software to run on different machines. Now, I know this is a bit of a utopian view of Java, as I'm well aware of the problems of "Write Once, Run Anywhere", but surely the use of something like Cryptix 3.1.2 alongside a standard such as JavaMail would be a good basis for dealing with all these problems. The Cryptix code has interoperability with PGP 2.x (which may not be enough for everyone, but it shows it's been moving in the right direction), and it links in with the cryptography hooks that Sun has defined. As for JavaMail, well, that speaks for itself.

These are some of the questions that come up to my mind:

Be able to migrate IIS to Apache first, and still be able to access the MSSQL databases (FreeTDS?)

Use a scripting syntax similar to ASP so that the programmers don't have much of a headache learning new stuff (PHP looks like a solution).

Java Server Pages will solve both problems. Sun has worked very closely with the Apache project on making JSP run well under Apache including giving away code and contributing to projects a la Tomcat. Here's a site to give you a quick overview of JSP.

Migrate MSSQL 7 to MySQL, PostgreSQL or other (Which one is better for web development?)

Depends on what kind of Web development you are doing. For the kind of work I have done which is both mission critical (eliminating MySQL) and requires speed (eliminating PostgreSQL) commercial databases have always been the correct solution to solve my problem. Both IBM's DB2 and Oracle 8i are available for Linux and are also very friendly with Apache and Java.

If your site does not traffic in mission critical data (e.g. a bank, major e-commerce company) then MySQL may be the solution that you seek. It is quick, fairly easy to use and heck, slashdot uses it.

Web log reports (I need to generate reports on the web site usage. What weblog report generators are available for Linux? Which ones do you use? Are there any that generate graphs, charts, etc..?)

Look on Freshmeat.


(-1 Troll)

These are some of the questions that come up to my mind:

Be able to migrate IIS to Apache first, and still be able to access the MSSQL databases (FreeTDS?)

Use a scripting syntax similar to ASP so that the programmers don't have much of a headache learning new stuff (PHP looks like a solution).

Java Server Pages will solve both problems. Sun has worked very closely with the Apache project on making JSP run well under Apache including giving away code and contributing to projects a la Tomcat. Here's a site to give you a quick overview of JSP.

Migrate MSSQL 7 to MySQL, PostgreSQL or other (Which one is better for web development?)

Depends on what kind of Web development you are doing. For the kind of work I have done which is both mission critical (eliminating MySQL) and requires speed (eliminating PostgreSQL) commercial databases have always been the correct solution to solve my problem. Both IBM's DB2 and Oracle 8i are available for Linux and are also very friendly with Apache and Java.

If your site does not traffic in mission critical data (e.g. a bank, major e-commerce company) then MySQL may be the solution that you seek. It is quick, fairly easy to use and heck, slashdot uses it.

Web log reports (I need to generate reports on the web site usage. What weblog report generators are available for Linux? Which ones do you use? Are there any that generate graphs, charts, etc..?)

Look on Freshmeat.


(-1 Troll)

Since when is solaris an operating system written by college kids ? Perhaps someone got Solaris confused with the first Sun OS, BSD Unix, which was created at Berkeley. Bill Joy was in college when he helped create Sun in 1982...after he helped create BSD Unix.

Since when is solaris an operating system written by college kids ? Perhaps someone got Solaris confused with the first Sun OS, BSD Unix, which was created at Berkeley. Bill Joy was in college when he helped create Sun in 1982...after he helped create BSD Unix.

As a sr solaris sysadmin, who has worked on Sun boxes for years, I have /nothing/ but praises for Sun service and support. Sun QA is top-notch, in comparison to the rest of the tech industry. I got my start in Linux, and still use it a great deal. At home, all but three of my boxes run Linux, including several PCs and a Sun 670MP. I also use various BSDs. Pretty much, so long as it's Unix, it's ok by me.
Bearing this in mind, realize that I am capable of obejctive, honest review.
Sun has done more for the free software community than anyone therein seems to want to acknowledge, even though they are threatened by Linux. They are a large company, and do have their share of corporatism, but they also get an unfairly bad rap in the Linux community, for reasons I do not comprehend. Sun hardware has always been the industry standard for rock-solid reliability, and IO bandwidth. They never have been the blazing speed machines.
Going back to Ebay, where people were asking whether this was a problem with the cache (It is not a RAM issue, but an issue with the cache on the 400Mhz UltraSparc II processors, and I have /never/ seen it outside of 2x400 configuration in an Ultra II).. It wasn't. Ebay was a victim of bad sysadmins. Perhaps they were very good sysadmins, who had no idea of what to do with an E10k. Perhaps management made the decision for them. (This happens with eerie regularity)
The fact of the matter is, the E10k is not a 'super-processing-power' box. It's a 'IO pumping, high-availibility' box. The sysadmins at Ebay had the E10k running flat out, not partitioned (As they're meant to be run) in quadrants. They grew so fast that they put the other E10k into production in the same fashion, instead of using it as a hot standby. Each E10k was a single point of failure, with the ability to be multiply redundant internally removed. A single problem with an OS that wasn't even officially supported on the E10k running at an invalid patchlevel caused a very highly publicised downtime. Instead of blaming bad setup (Which would be disasterous for investor relations), Ebay blamed Sun.

As to the latter part of this article, I know nothing about Sun covering up that problem, (Which I have seen before), but don't deny that Sun, being a big corporation, might do such things, as all corporations are wont to do, even the ones very popular in the Linux community. Usually that problem manifests itself in the system log long before any problem is ever seen. This problem is also listed on Sunsolve.
Sunsolve is one of the most open policies I've ever seen to system-related issues. The only group of people that even come close to that level of support is Debian.

While I know this was rather long-winded and might generate lots of flames, I do mean it. Don't bash Sun summarily, and don't bash Sun on QA. It's like talking about raising "Serious questions about Honda QA" if Honda issued a recall for defective OEM tires (A year after the vehicles with those tires were issued). Almost nobody would think to bash Honda QA over a single issue. Sun may have had a few quality issues from time to time, but so does everyone. And at least Sun is actually saying something, unlike companies that deny forever.

Why bash Sun, and not Intel - Another /. headline for today.

-Kysh

OpenBSD does an amazing job of presenting an extremely secure distribution, I will stipulate that right at the get go. I think it's a bit premeture to say that it's the Most Secure OS though. There are a number of implimentation of the DoD B1 security standard (as applies to operating systems, specifically) in the world - these include Trusted Solaris from Sun and PitBull from Argus Systems Group.

Granted, these operating systems take a quite different approach to security (rather than requiring strict application audits as in OpenBSD they instead try to eliminate the need for such audits through strict kernel control manifested in a number of sneaky ways). These systems have been, and are currently widely used by military, intelligence, financial, and, increasingly, high end e-commerce systems. In an attempt to increase public awareness and popularity of PitBull Argus Systems Group has begun giving it away for non-commercial use. Anyone interested in high security servers is highly recommended to check it out. It's no holy grail, and by no means the right solution for every problem, but it is a very interesting take on the problem, and quite a different way of looking at system architecture and administration than most of us get exposed to on a regular basis.

None of this is intended to steal OpenBSD's thunder - it's a great accomplishment, and far closer to existing operating environments than it's B1 counterparts (which makes it more accessable, and more flexable). Often, a B1 system will be severe overkill (or just too much of a pain to configure and manage), where OpenBSD will just work. So I'm not saying that OpenBSD is no good, I'm just saying that choosing the "Most Secure OS" isn't quite so clear cut...

Oh, BTW, there is a Trusted BSD project, but it's fairly young and as I understand it building a trusted OS is quite time consuming. When it's ready I think it will likely kick ass, but it may yet be a long way off.
--

It should also be noted that Gnome appears to be more of repacement for OpenWindows, that it does for CDE, at least where Sun is concerned. I think the guys at KDE are simpley jealous because they weren't chosen. Also according the FAQ, KDE will be available on one of the bundled CDs, though they it looks like it will simply be a side note.

The all important FAQ is at: http://www.sun.com/software/gnome/faq/

One of the problems with the JFC demos shipped with the JDK is that, by their very nature, they're using most of the functionality of Swing, which places a fairly high overhead on the system, particularly when the app is first loaded. IIRC this is improved somewhat in the latest releases of the JDK.

A real-world application isn't going to use as many of the different UI components: probably just a fairly minimal subset of them (buttons, menus, labels, textfields and so on) so you won't hit the same kind of problems when you're writing a real application.

Of course, there's always the question of where the slowdown's occurring. I've seen Java UIs written by big-name companies with much Java experience that are painfully slow. I've also seen more complex Java UIs that are comfortably fast. It all comes down to how well you write your code, and there are still a lot of people out there who don't have a clue.

My one real complaint about Swing is that stupid bug that's still there which prevents applications shutting down neatly (this one). Evil hackery should not be the recommended way to make your application stop.

In this interview some Sun engineer says the next Java release will definitely support wheel mice with Swing. No word on how this release (1.4, 'Merlin') will be out, though.

Strange... I've had nothing but problems with Java on Linux, no matter what version I try to run it always has a tendancy to hang up. The only success I've had is running Java in Linux apps on top of Solaris. Check out lxrun for more details. :-)

Btw I run RedHat 6.2. Does anyone have any idea why it has such a hard time with Java apps in general? (Besides Netscape)

Not that I support SCSL ... but this is quite misleading. Sun charges a "Logo Fee", which is a choice of ten cents $0.10 per unit sold or an annual $250,000 fee. You'd only be paying a 5 digit (not 5+) licensing fee if you expected to sell more than 2.5M units annually.

See: Appendix B of the SCSL agreement for Jini. License fees may be waived at Sun's discretion (B2.3) if the product is distributed for cost. This is only for commercial use. All other use is gratis.

No. I didn't read the whole thing and IANAT.

If this is supposed to be the Java community-based Process program, where are the real members of the community, the developers!


You mean developers like the Apache Group?

The Java Community Process Program -- Executive Committee Information

Get a clue.

1. The new American Express credit cards use Java Card(TM) technology. That's right, American Express credit cards now run Java. Here's an
2. interview with the CIO of Amex.

1. Both
2. Oracle 8i and IBM's DB2 use Java extensively both for their DB administration GUIs as well as for middleware code. If you didn't know, these are the number 1 and number 2 Enterprise database systems in the world

1. Java servlets and JSP are used extensively on the web from sites like
2. mail.com to Firstunion.com. Hundreds of sites use Java(TM) to deliver dynamic content these two are simply the most prominent that come to mind.

1. Personal Java(TM) runs on
2. millions of settop cable boxes in the United States.

1. The new American Express credit cards use Java Card(TM) technology. That's right, American Express credit cards now run Java. Here's an
2. interview with the CIO of Amex.

1. Both
2. Oracle 8i and IBM's DB2 use Java extensively both for their DB administration GUIs as well as for middleware code. If you didn't know, these are the number 1 and number 2 Enterprise database systems in the world

1. Java servlets and JSP are used extensively on the web from sites like
2. mail.com to Firstunion.com. Hundreds of sites use Java(TM) to deliver dynamic content these two are simply the most prominent that come to mind.

1. Personal Java(TM) runs on
2. millions of settop cable boxes in the United States.

hmmm - i'm assuming you've never used a telephone if you're making comments like that. Telephone service is one of the most reliable things in the US (excuse my ethnocentricity - i've never been outside the US). Ethernet, and networks in general goes down quite a bit more

In fact, several companies (running a google search right now...) have said they were working on getting a "IP Dial Tone" - ie that you know you'll always be online or able to get a connection, like the phone line whose uptime is like 99.999 something percent.

Some links to prove are..

• F5 Labs: Making the Internet as reliable as the telephone network
• Keeping Current on 1998 predictions
  9. IP dial tone will remain IP busy signal through the end of '97. Yes, it is a great idea. Yes, I think it will happen. Just not in 1998. No applications, no infrastructure, too many firms trying to make a "standard" at this point. Much more likely for 1998 will be the explosion of service-level agreements (SLA). However, although these will be misunderstood by users. They are likely to be confused by mixed marketing messages, SLAs that fail to specify true goals, and a lack of metrics for judging SLAs.
• Follow-up to 98 predictions
  Fred Said: "IP dial tone will remain IP busy signal through the end of '97."
  Scoreboard ... Direct Hit. Don't confuse the use of IP for voice services (which has happened) with IP dial tone (which hasn't happened just yet). The ability to plug into the IP network and call away still has a long way to go. Too many technology issues, too many standard bearers and not enough market demand have temporarily derailed this scheme. But, just like computer-telephone integration, it has still got legs for 1999.

That sounds a lot like Sun's vision for its Jini technology.It is an interesting idea, if nothing else.It is inevitable that some technology of this sort will find its way into modern households.

The Jini homepage is here, but you seem to be mistaken about its capabilities: Jini makes it possible to hot-plug devices that offer services into a network and have clients find the servers without being specifically told where they are. Jini has not security features whatsoever.

The Hotspot VM does something very similar to code morphing. Hotspot calls it "dynamic compiling," which is technically accurate (if you remember that "compile" can apply to bytecodes as easily as to source code) but not very sexy ("What? Another compiler?"). Calling the a simple code translation "morphing" is a little silly, but hey, that's marketing.

Ironically, Hotspot was invented at a company called Animorphic Systems (a reference to a language concept, not to mutant teenagers) before being bought out by Sun.

Uhm they do, try researching a bit before you post. BSDi's LAPand Sun'S lxrun solution. Now go and do some research on your own.

Q: What are these same companies contributing to these "core values" of Linux? A: With the partial exception of IBM, nothing.

Just some examples to show that these companies make valuable code contributions to the free software comunity:

HP
Mauve
A free (GPL) test suite for the Java[tm].

Compaq
iPAQ port
Compaq Ports Linux to iPAQ Handheld Computer.

They should also be mentioned for their Linux work regarding 64bit processor architectures (Alpha, Intel).

SUN
StarOffice
Under the motto: Lets use the best of breed components (read filters) in our GNOME office suite. And let us not forget their donations to the Debian developers for the UltraSparc port.

SGI
SGI OSS Projects
Look at this long project list ... it speaks for itself I think.

- Just my Euro 0.02c

Even the samurai
have teddy bears,
and even the teddy bears

What do you mean?

That link points to a Sun product which helps YOU port a Linux driver to Solaris.

Sun's product doesn't use any GPL'd code and isn't GPL'd (from what I can see.)

If anything, it reinforces the original point. If the Linux drivers weren't GPL'd, Sun could just integrate them into Solaris and ship them with the main OS.

Since the drivers are GPL'd, Sun has to say "We're not gonna port it ... you port it!"

Well, it's not the full stack, but-
Sun doesn't seem to have a problem with the GPL.

Firstly: yes, Swing is a bit slow (i haven't used 1.3, so i can't comment on that); this seems to be mostly due to rather dim implementations (using the win32 GDI rather than DirectDraw, not using hardware acceleration, etc), which will get fixed in the not-too-distant future. I have to admit that Swing is an embarrassment to Java: by far the most slow and buggy package.

Secondly: cache locality? I'm sorry to see that you know nothing whatsoever about modern OO compiler research - it's fascinating 8). There were some lovely papers in an ACM SIGPLAN bulletin a while back on just this; you can build a VM that tunes memory layout to improve locality, eg by clustering objects which are accessed together (only possible if you have a sophisticated GCish memory model, like Java) and splitting up objects so that the hot parts are clustered together (where they can get cached) and the cold parts are somewhere else (only possible if the VM has control over the code, as object splitting requires code rewriting). I don't think any of this research has made it into production VMs yet (we're also waiting for funky new GC strategies), which is a shame.

Thirdly: sockets; guilty as charged! The lack of asynchronous IO in Java is a crime. JSR-51 is sorting out bringing it in, but i don't know when it will make it into the releases. Saying "use a real operating system!" is not an answer, by the way - passing the buck doesn't help Java and doesn't help Java programmers (except that maybe Sun will sell more boxen, make more money and invest more in Java ...).

A java garbage collecter may (not must) garbage collect any objects that are unreachable. But unreachable from where? The "starting point" for reachability is defined to be all executing non-daemon Threads.

So in your example, the ListenerServer's would NOT be garbage collected, because they're Threads. Basically, this rule means that any memory which could possibly be reached by any code executing anywhere can NOT be garbage collected -- ie, nothing you could possibly care about can disapear.

All of this, of course, leaves out the "new" (well... not so new anymore) soft, weak, and virtual references that were introduced to allow more flexible garbage collection behavior. These allow all kinds of fancier GC behavior if you want to develop for it.

-- Michael Chermside

You will be surprised. Ever had any "finalize" hacks around? When you memory consumption is critical, knowing what gc is doing is rather important.

Yes, I know some people have had trouble with the fact that things aren't cleaned up in a deterministic way, and that sometime fnalize isn't called.

Java 2 (1.2 and 1.3) support Reference Objects, so you can get pretty fine control over when things are deallocated. If you need finer control than that, you probably want to use JNI.

That still doesn't explain the author's original comment though:

the solution depended on objects *not* being automatically destroyed, as they were supposed to exist separate from the main object hierarchy and would take care of their own destruction when the time was right.

This implies that he wanted the GC to not destroy the objects, because they were supposed to "exist separate from the main object hierarchy" (whatever that means). The GC only cleans up things when they're unreachable, so why did he want it to not clean them up?

The JVM is not required to do mark-sweep GC. The JVM spec ifically leaves the implementation of storage management unspecified.

This is good because it means that Java can use modern, higher-performance GC strategies like stop-and-copy or generational GC, both of which have been in use in Lisp and Scheme systems since the 1980's. I strongly suspect that C# will have to use mark-sweep or some other non-relocating GC, since you're allowed to go down below it to assembler, exposing pointers that might need relocation.

Do most JVM implementations really still use mark-sweep GC? Despite James Gosling and Guy Steele both being ur-Lisp hackers?

Some pieces that free software could do much better:

• dynamic optimization rather than a simple JIT (see also Self),
• layers of intermediate representation carrying more semantic information, giving a big boost to projects with code available,
• a more powerful security model,
• using the same deduction framework to assist with optimizations and parsing,
• going even further and integrating the language into the programming environment,
• completely kick-ass garbage collection,
• and so on...

Re-inventing OLE / DCOM is silly. There's so much else to do with much greater pay-offs...

Some pieces that free software could do much better:

• dynamic optimization rather than a simple JIT (see also Self),
• layers of intermediate representation carrying more semantic information, giving a big boost to projects with code available,
• a more powerful security model,
• using the same deduction framework to assist with optimizations and parsing,
• going even further and integrating the language into the programming environment,
• completely kick-ass garbage collection,
• and so on...

Re-inventing OLE / DCOM is silly. There's so much else to do with much greater pay-offs...

What makes SETI successful (in terms of data analyzed, and not finding green men) is that the whole system of taking part is competition. Some users, most users, join a group within Seti to compete angainst other groups. Companies vs. Companies and individuals vs. individuals. Give me a client application that uses idle CPU time and in the meantime I compete with my company vs. Pixar Studios, then I will stick with it and run that as my screensaver.

It's that sense of competition, wanting to be first, but knowing you will never catch SUN. It's why you keep playing UT, to see your stats get better and better, even knowing that the guy on top of the ladder is some 14 year old that plays 12 hours a day with 60 frags/hour.

Although you have good points for number of machines running Brand Y OS, it is fairly hard to count multiple installs off of one license, or downloads from sites that don't publish the information.

Also by discussing the number of licenses sold they can address the issue of how each platform has, is essence, cashed in on the growth of the market, along with keeping track of how the market grows. The figures that they are stating are extremely intertwined with measurable growth of the market. These numbers are very important for the market and its trends.

Once again, Linux doesn't fit into the normal boxes used to judge these things

Linux isn't the only one, if you go to Sun Microsystems web site you can see the statistics for the number of Solaris 8 downloads, which is over 700,000 right now, and you can install it on multiple clients. Also, other than really big companies, not many places follow the actual licenses given them by MS and will install the product on several machines.

These numbers ARE a very good guestimate of where the market is right now. Frankly, I am very glad to see MS drop below the 90% control range.

Wrong and kinda wrong. First of all, the vulnerabilities were in the netscape.* packages - all of Sun's stuff is in the (not surprisingly) sun.* packages. As for Java not being Open Source, you can obtain the source code for Sun's implementation of Java free of charge - but there's an NDA and rather restrictive licence involved. The information is available at http://www.sun.com/software/communitysource/index. html. As far as I know, Netscape's implementation is completely closed.

IIRC the book's examples are in C. A decent companion text is Java Cryptography (O'Reilly), which while light on theory, is a fairly good tutorial in use of the java.security package's crytographic classes. Unfortunately the book is rather shallow (read the reviews on Amazon for elaboration) and also rather dated; do not expect to find coverage of JCE 1.2 (Java Cryptography Extension) or other recent (year < 1.0) releases.

I'd love to hear others' favorite cryptology-related books.

---------///----------
All generalizations are false.

Word 6.0 was for Win 3.1. Word for Windows 95 was Word 7.0... anyway, Microsoft merged their DOS and Windows Word trees at that point, and adopted the Word for DOS version number (6.0) instead of the next Word for Windows version number. Microsoft doesn't skip version numbers just to look good (*cough* *cough*).

Damn. Sorry about that last post... I forgot a closing tag symbol. I know... use the preview.

from the jar tool documentation :

...jar is a general-purpose archiving and compression tool, based on ZIP and the ZLIB compression format...

You can even use winzip (ug) to crack jars open.

--d

from the jar tool :

...jar is a general-purpose archiving and compression tool, based on ZIP and the ZLIB compression format...

You can even use winzip (ug) to crack jars open.

--d

http://www.sun.com/xml/
download page

http://www.sun.com/xml/
download page

What I think is one of the coolest things about java is the late binding. You can take a running program and introduce a new class, and the program can use the new class either by knowing about one of the new class's parents or via reflection. This is what allows things like Jini to work. I often write programs that use this for extensibility.. need to add a new functionality module to the program? Just extend my base class and then tell me the name of the class you created.. no restart required.

Anyway, I would hate to loose that. In what they themselves describe as a very disconnected world, I think that having the ability to load new code into a running program over the network is going to be increasingly important to do.

Oh, one more thing. One of the big things that I like about Java is that it is not a "Kitchen Sink" language. I do not want to use a language that keeps me so tied up in the intricacies of implementation that I loose the big picture of the architecture. A good architecture is the key to any good software and no other language lets you take your concepts and implement them cleanly as well as Java does. I am also pretty in to UML and the symmetry between UML and Java is a beautiful thing.

Of course, for a more radically "innovative" approach, Microsoft already hired Simon Peyton-Jones, of some "fame" in the world of Functional Programming, and furthermore, he already had C--, Still Another "BCPL stepchild."

There are probably a whole pile of "cool things" that have been deployed internally that might actually be good things that will never see the light of day because, as Matt Welsh observes,

What you end up with, after running an operating system concept through these many marketing coffee filters, is something not unlike plain hot water.

That can apply as well to languages as to OSes...

Take a look at this - it's the tech specs for suns E10000 Starfire server. Not quite in the supercomputer leagues and yet it has a memory bandwidth of 102.4GBit/s and a latency less than 500nS.

As a fellow of conscience, though, I must attempt to dissuade you from this path. SCO may be cheap, but Linux and BSD are free and come with tons of apps (in the distros and ports, respectively). By contrast, if you want emacs (or gcc, or anything) on SCO, you're either buying a CD of precompiled GNU stuff from SCO or you're compiling it yourself. If you need a Linux/BSD CD, you can get one for under $5 from cheapbytes.com or myriad other vendors. If you absolutely must learn the quirks of a proprietary OS, do yourself a favor and pick up Solaris for Intel, which is also available for about $20 (to students, developers, and home users), without the SCO enfeeblements. Furthermore, Sun is liable to remain financially solvent for the period of time it takes you to attain proficiency with their system.

Ask yourself "Why am I doing this?" If your aim is masochistic self-gratification, then I cannot recommend a better solution than an SVR3-based proprietary Intel UNIX that "features" Open DeathTrap. However, if you want to be productive or have fun, Linux or BSD will suit you much better. (Bear in mind that most free software is developed on either Linux or BSD -- even though most stuff is portable, you're much more likely to have luck getting random stuff to run on a free unix. That's not FUD; just pragmatism.)

Perhaps you think that mad SCO skills will make you an employable, in-demand UNIX pimp. However, if you thought that, you'd be horribly wrong. A quick dice.com search revealed 578 jobs with the keyword "SCO". That might seem like a lot until you see that dice has 6,195 "Linux" positions and over 15,000 "Solaris" jobs in its database. (A quick vgrep of these results also reveals that Linux or Solaris nerds are paid a lot better than SCO Acheivers.)

There's also that little matter of the vultures circling around SCO, as any number of /. articles will attest.

In any case, good luck picking up the UNIX skills (wherever you choose to hone them). The community is great, and you're in for a fun ride!

~wog