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No, I'm sorry, but I'm sick of people with no clue about a) computers and b) politeness using the net and making it all the worse for all of us. I remember the web back in the early 90s when it was first opened up, and their was *gasp* informative content readily available.

crappy homepages (who cares what your dog is called? And your picture is so fucking ugly!)

Perhaps people who are dog lovers, vets, or hold animal-related positions will care about this first peice of information, and as for the second, perhaps the picture is used to convey the person's appearance to someone geographically distant who would otherwise not be able to view the person in question.

Now, as for the commerical factor, no matter how you slice it, companies have been involved with the Internet's expansion from the time it has been opened up. Certainly, it's conception and implementation was intially handled by scientests, miliatry scientests and university hackers, but the actual expansion - which has led to it becoming the worldwide network it has become, is largely a result of corporate funding.

And with the newbies have come the script-kiddies, people who think they're 31337 because they can fuck other people's computers up. Now that's progress!

And, of course, with technology like the Transmeta Crusoe CPUA JVM could be built into the CPU using Transmeta's impressive Code Morphing(tm) technology, creating in effect, a "Java chip". Personally, that's the way I think AOL and Transmeta *should* go here, no eliminating Linux by any means, because Linux is an excellent platform, and I'm impressed with their insightfulness at choosing this operating system - but rather, to run Java and Linux side by side, perhaps implementing a customized JVM on top of the embedded Linux system.

In any event, it's good to see technologies such as Linux being used in devices such as this. I believe that with robust technologies such as Linux and Java, the embedded market could soar to new heights, and be used to improve human communication by orders of magnitude, part of which would involve humanising technology that would otherwise be frightening to the man in the street.

- Sun Certified Programmer for the Java Platform

- Sun Certified System Administrator for Solaris

I think you're wrong about this, mate. The folks at Transmeta are doing something that not many other companies have considered, and they've ended up with quite an innovative product. Whether that product can be implemented and marketed well enough is yet to be seen, but I beleive it can.

I'm not going to repeat what other Slashdotters have already said about power consumption/mobile computing benefits, but I see something in this product that noone else has mentioned: The chip's code morphing technology could be used as an interpreter for the robust Sun Microsoft Java 2(tm) platform. I believe that there are already ongoing projects for hardware Java interpretation, but Transmeta is in a unique position in that the Crusoe chip could use its code morphing ability to run classic applications and systems in addition to the Java 2(tm) platform, and of course, as others have mentioned, when you throw mobile computing and embedded computing into the mix, Transmeta could become a leading company in embedded systems as well.

Charles Balthazar Rotherwood,

- Sun Certified Programmer for the Java Platform

- Sun Certified System Administrator for Solaris

Many people underestimate badly the need to run Windows apps

Hmmm. Let me think about this. I guess in many ways you're right. But is it really a *need* to run Windows software, or is it just a comfort-zone thing? Most people are now comfortable with Windows, and a lot of them don't see it's obvious bugs as a reason to change over. It all has to do with perceived reality/actual reality. Tech savvy people are more inclined to get to the guts of things - the under-reality, rather than the flashy illusion that is Windows. But for most people, this isn't the case.

Ok, I agree about the utilities to a certain point, but even that's not a total argument. Freshmeat is a prime example of small utils that you're talking about, usually with full source code too.

I think where WINE could really come in handy is for entertainment and esoteric software. I mean, look at the multitude of games for Windows, if WINE managed to get up to a level where it could run most of those without a problem, it would be an extreme boon Linux and other UNIX platforms. but besides games and some very specialized software, I think that UNIXen are most of the way there already:

Charles Balthazar Rotherwood,

- Sun Certified Programmer for the Java Platform

- Sun Certified System Administrator for Solaris

Many people underestimate badly the need to run Windows apps

Hmmm. Let me think about this. I guess in many ways you're right. But is it really a *need* to run Windows software, or is it just a comfort-zone thing? Most people are now comfortable with Windows, and a lot of them don't see it's obvious bugs as a reason to change over. It all has to do with perceived reality/actual reality. Tech savvy people are more inclined to get to the guts of things - the under-reality, rather than the flashy illusion that is Windows. But for most people, this isn't the case.

Ok, I agree about the utilities to a certain point, but even that's not a total argument. Freshmeat is a prime example of small utils that you're talking about, usually with full source code too.

I think where WINE could really come in handy is for entertainment and esoteric software. I mean, look at the multitude of games for Windows, if WINE managed to get up to a level where it could run most of those without a problem, it would be an extreme boon Linux and other UNIX platforms. but besides games and some very specialized software, I think that UNIXen are most of the way there already:

Charles Balthazar Rotherwood,

- Sun Certified Programmer for the Java Platform

- Sun Certified System Administrator for Solaris

Many people underestimate badly the need to run Windows apps

Hmmm. Let me think about this. I guess in many ways you're right. But is it really a *need* to run Windows software, or is it just a comfort-zone thing? Most people are now comfortable with Windows, and a lot of them don't see it's obvious bugs as a reason to change over. It all has to do with perceived reality/actual reality. Tech savvy people are more inclined to get to the guts of things - the under-reality, rather than the flashy illusion that is Windows. But for most people, this isn't the case.

Ok, I agree about the utilities to a certain point, but even that's not a total argument. Freshmeat is a prime example of small utils that you're talking about, usually with full source code too.

I think where WINE could really come in handy is for entertainment and esoteric software. I mean, look at the multitude of games for Windows, if WINE managed to get up to a level where it could run most of those without a problem, it would be an extreme boon Linux and other UNIX platforms. but besides games and some very specialized software, I think that UNIXen are most of the way there already:

Charles Balthazar Rotherwood,

- Sun Certified Programmer for the Java Platform

- Sun Certified System Administrator for Solaris

Many people underestimate badly the need to run Windows apps

Hmmm. Let me think about this. I guess in many ways you're right. But is it really a *need* to run Windows software, or is it just a comfort-zone thing? Most people are now comfortable with Windows, and a lot of them don't see it's obvious bugs as a reason to change over. It all has to do with perceived reality/actual reality. Tech savvy people are more inclined to get to the guts of things - the under-reality, rather than the flashy illusion that is Windows. But for most people, this isn't the case.

Ok, I agree about the utilities to a certain point, but even that's not a total argument. Freshmeat is a prime example of small utils that you're talking about, usually with full source code too.

I think where WINE could really come in handy is for entertainment and esoteric software. I mean, look at the multitude of games for Windows, if WINE managed to get up to a level where it could run most of those without a problem, it would be an extreme boon Linux and other UNIX platforms. but besides games and some very specialized software, I think that UNIXen are most of the way there already:

Charles Balthazar Rotherwood,

- Sun Certified Programmer for the Java Platform

- Sun Certified System Administrator for Solaris

When I invented the precursor to Postscript (an audacious claim that I can back up -- it started as a replacement for NAPLPS which I proposed while Manager of Interactive Architectures for Viewdata Corp of America back in November of 1981 -- the Xerox PARC guys found my approach of what they called a "tokenized Forth" communication protocol to be an intriguing way to encode text and graphics), I was interested in having a Forth virtual machine migrate into silicon (ala Novix) so it could evolve from mere graphics rendering into a distributed Smalltalk VM environment (ala Squeak) as videotex terminal/personal computer capacities increased. But I was _not_ interested in object-oriented programming as the long-term semantics of distributed programming environments. (I still have some of the hardcopy of the communiques with Xerox PARC and others from this period.)

Rather, relational semantics were what I saw as the ultimate direction for distributed programming. I had a bit of a go at Tony Hoare's "communicating sequential processes" paradigm and its Transputer realization because he was, at least, starting with the hard problem of parallelism rather than making like the drunk looking for his keys under the light post the way everyone else seemed to be doing (and still are, save for Mozart, since threads, etc. are always an afterthought). But, because there were other hard problems like abstraction, transactions and persistence that he ignored, I christened his approach "Occam's Chainsaw Massacre" in my communiques (in honor of his distributed programming language "Occam") and dropped it in favor of relational programming, which has inherent parallelism resulting from both dependency and indeterminacy. (BTW: Dr. Hoare seems to have finally come to his senses about this issue.)

Unfortunately, the only researcher doing hardcore work on relational programming (meaning, getting to the root of relational semantics in a way that Codd had failed to do) at the time was Bruce MacLennan, then, of The Naval Postgraduate School, and he just didn't have the glamour of Alan Kay at places like Xerox PARC to attract the attention of guys like Steve Jobs. Bruce had a bit of a blind-spot, too, when it came to transactions and persistence, which I attempted to remedy by bringing David P. Reed's work on distributed transactions for the ARPAnet to him, but although he wrote a white paper on a predicate calculus (close to a relational) implementation of Reed's thesis (MIT/LCS/TR-205), he didn't really "get it", IMHO. Reed and MacLennan abandoned their work for other pursuits (ironically, Reed was chief scientist at Lotus while Notes was being developed but did not contribute his ideas on distributed synchronization to that development despite the fact that we had a mutual acquaintance from my Plato days by the name of Ray Ozzie -- so, I share some of the blame for this failure) even as Steve Jobs botched the embryonic object oriented world by abandoning Smalltalk and giving us, instead, a lineage consisting of Object Pascal on the Lisa/Mac which begat Objective C on Jobs's NeXT which begat Java at Sun via Naughton and Gosling's experience with NeXT.

This brings us to the present -- a world in which Javascript-based technologies like Tibet promise to not only salvage the object oriented aspect of the Internet from the birth defects of Jobs's spawn, but actually provide an advance over Smalltalk in the same lineage as CLOS and Self. But it is also a world in which there is growing confusion over the proper role of "metadata" in the form of XML -- particularly when it comes to speech acts and distributed inference. I would call Tibet "the next major Internet advance" except for the fact that the basic idea for a Tibet-like system has been around and well understood since the early 1980's. When it is finally released, Tibet (or a system like it) will put the Internet back on track. I call that a "recovery", not an "advance".

We are now poised to move forward with type inference based on full blown inference engines, thereby dispensing with the nonterminating arguments over statically vs dynamically typed languages that allowed Steve Jobs's spawn to get its nose in the tent. If you want to declare a "type" in a declarative language, just make another declaration and let the inference engine figure out what it can do with that information prior to run time. See how easy that was? Well, there is more to it than that, but not that much: Assertions have implications and assertions made prior to run time have implications prior to run time. Live with it and don't repeat the mistakes of the past.

The confusion over semantic webs, and the reason Berners Lee et al will fail, is essentially the same as the confusion that has beleaguered all inferential systems such as logic programming and "artificial intelligence" over the years: logic is irrational and the real world demands rationality -- otherwise nothing makes sense. By "rationality" I mean that reasoning must literally incorporate "ratios" -- or, as John McCarthy would put it, doing arithmetic so things make sense. By making sense, I mean there is a sense in which one interprets the sea of assertions that clearly dominates for a particular purpose. With logic not only are you limited to 0 and 1 as effective quantities; you have no adequate theoretic basis from which to derive more accurate quantities with which to make sense by taking ratios and determining which inferences are dominant.

Fuzzy logic and expert systems incorporating probabilities have typically failed because they are not based in the first principles of probability and statistics. As Gauss, the premiere probability theorist put it, "Mathematics is the study of relations." He didn't say, "Mathematics is the study of multisets." There are good reasons that relational databases, and not set manipulation languages, have come to dominate business applications -- and Gauss was aware of these differences when he began to derive his laws of probability. Subsequent axiomatizations of mathematics based on set theory were similarly misguided and have led to the idea that "fuzzy sets" are the way to introduce rationality into programming. Rather than sets, relations are the foundation, not just of mathematics but of rationality in the same sense that Gauss realized when he derived his theory of probability from the study of relations.

Rationality allows for judgment which is recognized as inherently fallible -- but which allows one to procede without exponentiating all possible paths of inference. Judgment also allows various identities to limit sharing of information to that needed -- thereby creating speech acts and a basis for rational measures of credibility associated with those identities. Since credit-rating is a degeneration of credibility, it should come as no shock that the invention of negative numbers, originating as they did with the Arabic invention of double entry account keeping, has its analog in something that might be called "logical debt" with which negative probabilities are associated.

And now we have come to the "quantum" aspect of rational programming. It is precisely the "credibility debt" aspect of rational programming that corresponds, in mathematical detail, to the various equations of quantum mechanics and their negative probability amplitudes. (Von Neumann's quantum logic failed to properly incorporate logical debt which has led to much confusion.) Logical debt is important to distributed programming for the same reason debt is important to financial networks. Logical debt is a way of handling poor synchronization of information flow in the same way that financial debt is a way of handling poor synchronization of cash flow. As in any rational system, there are both limits to credit and limits to credibilty that influence one's judgments and actions, including speech acts.

The object oriented folks may, in a sense, have the last laugh here because when we divide up inference into identities that engage in speech acts, we are reintroducing the notion of objects that hide information via exchange of speech act messages that can be thought of as "setters" (assertions) and "getters" (queries). However, I believe it is only fair to recognize that the excellent intuitions of Johan Dahl and Kristen Nygaard did need the added insights and rigor of philosophers like J. L. Austin and T. Etter.

But ANYWAYS...

It all depends on what setup your seeking. IBM offers many products that may suit your needs. I've used a lot of ibm's storage hardware and believe it's top quality. Check out IBMs storage site and see for yourself. They have many good business solutions. Sun is also a good manufacturer for mass storage. Check out Sun's storage site for more information from them.

I suppose you just want storage space? Or do you want reliability and redundancy? If you do, the price is going to be jacked up, especially for a tall order weighing in at around 1tb. I don't forsee a big IDE+SCSI chasis full off 528 meg drives :-)

Java has some problems which prevent it from being used in serious applications, but it should be fine to use for people just starting out. It takes away much of the complexity about programming, and contains many functions that make it easy to do things that should be simple. It's also powerful enough to lead them into GCC.

Plus, the SDK is free (as in beer), so that the cost is low. (And if you don't mind signing a NDA, you can actually get the source...) It also has some Linux support, so that programs they write can run under Linux, but they needn't leave Windows if they'd rather not.

There are plenty of tutorials and documentation that can be gotten off the web and the documentation which can be gotten from Sun is fairly comprehensive.

The link to the Sun page is http://java.sun.com/ and there are links to the various JDKs from there. (Direct link to the JDK 1.3 page is here, but it's missing non-Windows support right now, so the Java2 Second Edition page may be a better place to start.

Good luck!

Java has some problems which prevent it from being used in serious applications, but it should be fine to use for people just starting out. It takes away much of the complexity about programming, and contains many functions that make it easy to do things that should be simple. It's also powerful enough to lead them into GCC.

Plus, the SDK is free (as in beer), so that the cost is low. (And if you don't mind signing a NDA, you can actually get the source...) It also has some Linux support, so that programs they write can run under Linux, but they needn't leave Windows if they'd rather not.

There are plenty of tutorials and documentation that can be gotten off the web and the documentation which can be gotten from Sun is fairly comprehensive.

The link to the Sun page is http://java.sun.com/ and there are links to the various JDKs from there. (Direct link to the JDK 1.3 page is here, but it's missing non-Windows support right now, so the Java2 Second Edition page may be a better place to start.

Good luck!

Java has some problems which prevent it from being used in serious applications, but it should be fine to use for people just starting out. It takes away much of the complexity about programming, and contains many functions that make it easy to do things that should be simple. It's also powerful enough to lead them into GCC.

Plus, the SDK is free (as in beer), so that the cost is low. (And if you don't mind signing a NDA, you can actually get the source...) It also has some Linux support, so that programs they write can run under Linux, but they needn't leave Windows if they'd rather not.

There are plenty of tutorials and documentation that can be gotten off the web and the documentation which can be gotten from Sun is fairly comprehensive.

The link to the Sun page is http://java.sun.com/ and there are links to the various JDKs from there. (Direct link to the JDK 1.3 page is here, but it's missing non-Windows support right now, so the Java2 Second Edition page may be a better place to start.

Good luck!

Fortunately Sun has signalled their intention to open source Forte (Community Edition at least) under the Mozilla Public License - I'm really looking forward to that (although they said it would be ready in April 2000!). It's cross-platform (almost pure Java I believe, apart from the installer) and it would probably give you 80-90% of the code that you would need to write an IDE with support for other languages than Java (in my ill-informed opinion).

most people that are Christians are not true Christians. They do not attend Church twice a week and pray every night

A 'true Christian' (your term, not mine) would go to Church more frequently than twice a week (how about twice a day?), and would pray more regularly than every night. A true Christian would praise God with everything he says and does.

A place where Christianity is taboo has a much larger proportion of programmers than almost any other website I know of.

Christianity is not a taboo on Slashdot, what rubbish. However, Slashdot is a Linux website and discussions of Christianity would be off-topic. In fact, Slashdot gives a free platform from which Christians (such as myself) are able to air our views. Try Advogato and The Stile Project for even less coverage of Christian issues. You will then realise how tolerant Slashdot is to the discussion of Christianity and Christian issues.

Fourth: a farmhand is likely to have grown up in Middle America, a place of strong moral fiber, and to be free from many of the evil influences that the city brings.

Utter nonsense, trollboy. Middle America is a place of very poor moral fibre - it is an inherently racist region and a region ruled by violence. Guns (the tools Satan uses to turn man against his fellow man) are widespread in America, and the majority of Americans worship the ideals of consumerism rather than God. It is down to individual choice whether or not to follow Evil, and in this respect no region is better than any other. As far as "evil influences" of cities, surely cities have more churches per area than small less densely populated villages, therefore cities are intrinsically holy?

Most people with a Computer Science degree are lucky to remain with the slightest few sheds of religion that have not been indoctrinated out of them.

Hello? Computer Science degrees make no attempts influence people's religious views. While they may indoctrinate people that Python is better than Perl, Solaris is better than BSD, vi is better than EMACS and Microsoft is better than everything put together, these are not religous arguments. They are trivial.

Please, think before you post next time.

If you don't mind managing your own session table, you can do sessions with a slight variation on URL rewriting. Instead of embedding the session ID in the parameter section of the URL, you put it in the path section. You then have a servlet that is invoked for every reference to that path.

For example, you set up a servlet to handle /appdir/. Now every request for /appdir/, like /appdir/index.html goes through the servlet. The trick is, you generate a random session ID and send the user to something like /appdir/9859738579834/index.html. When they click on a link in index.html, assuming the link is relative to index.html, the phone will request /appdir/9859738579834/whateverlink.html or a servlet/JSP. All you need to do in your /appdir/ servlet is parse the key, look up the session-oriented data, place it in the request object and then do a forward to the real page.

There was a message about something similar (doing multiple sessions for a single browser instance) on the JSP interest mailing list.

I haven't tried it for WAP, but I suspect it would work.

There are several choices for solaris. dtbuilder, which is very simple and featureless but free and already in CDE/solaris. Sun's forte development environment, which can be try-n-buyed for 30 days or bought for anywhere between 300 (edu price) and 3500 USD. Both Kdevelop and GLADE work under solaris. Teleuse is actually not sold by telesoft, but by a company called aonix.

Just choose one of those options and you will be fine. If I had a choice myself I would use either Kdevelop or forte. Kdevelop because it uses qt so it is entirely c++ (which seems to be a requirement for you) as well as the possibility of portability since qt runs on windows. Forte, because Sun makes it so it will have Sun support as well as having a significant performance advantage on sparc.

If you decide on motif as your windowing toolkit and use forte and you have oodles of money in your pocket. Consider adding XRT. Very many high quality widgets which can improve the look of just about any gui.

Suspicious, I consulted my friendly install of StarOffice on my Linux machine. He didn't answer back, which is what I woudl have expected from M$ Office, and StarOffice continued to happily to my word processing without bother or error.

Moving back over to my Windows machine with M$ Office... that little MechWarrior like droid was not at all happy! He threatened to allow the 'I love you' worm to work its way through my machine via its evil powers of VB scripting.

Flustered... I then remembered who should be in control of the computer in the first place... ME! I promtly played my own ace-in-the-hole against that evil little M$ droid, named "F1", and hit the power button on the computer.

With F1 no longer being a concern, and no virus or VB script security problems on my Linux machine... I moved back over to the screen with the Gnome footprint eagerly waiting to do what I request without problem or crash.

I donned my red hat and rode off in into the lovely sunset with my StarOffice at my side.

Suspicious, I consulted my friendly install of StarOffice on my Linux machine. He didn't answer back, which is what I woudl have expected from M$ Office, and StarOffice continued to happily to my word processing without bother or error.

Moving back over to my Windows machine with M$ Office... that little MechWarrior like droid was not at all happy! He threatened to allow the 'I love you' worm to work its way through my machine via its evil powers of VB scripting.

Flustered... I then remembered who should be in control of the computer in the first place... ME! I promtly played my own ace-in-the-hole against that evil little M$ droid, named "F1", and hit the power button on the computer.

With F1 no longer being a concern, and no virus or VB script security problems on my Linux machine... I moved back over to the screen with the Gnome footprint eagerly waiting to do what I request without problem or crash.

I donned my red hat and rode off in into the lovely sunset with my StarOffice at my side.

Suspicious, I consulted my friendly install of StarOffice on my Linux machine. He didn't answer back, which is what I woudl have expected from M$ Office, and StarOffice continued to happily to my word processing without bother or error.

Moving back over to my Windows machine with M$ Office... that little MechWarrior like droid was not at all happy! He threatened to allow the 'I love you' worm to work its way through my machine via its evil powers of VB scripting.

Flustered... I then remembered who should be in control of the computer in the first place... ME! I promtly played my own ace-in-the-hole against that evil little M$ droid, named "F1", and hit the power button on the computer.

With F1 no longer being a concern, and no virus or VB script security problems on my Linux machine... I moved back over to the screen with the Gnome footprint eagerly waiting to do what I request without problem or crash.

I donned my red hat and rode off in into the lovely sunset with my StarOffice at my side.

Better yet, to help with your eval you can do a 'try and buy', but you better have a good net connection because the download is huge.

It is actively supported by Sun, although updates come in fits and starts - over 2 years between version 3 and version 5 (no version 4), and a year later version 6.

I'd be interested to know how you go. The Java GUI should run slightly slower.

I didn't need the OOP theory (having written a book myself that taught OOP to people without any prior programming experience). I didn't need the Perl introduction (having just forced myself to learn perl after avoiding it for being the blight of a PL that it is (albeit useful) in order to change slash). So what did it it offer?

• Using Perl packages as objects? Nope. Got that from the Ostrich.
• Subroutines as methods? Nope. Second thing I did (after twinking a calendar package to use slash's user table and cookies) was create a Slash::Sql wrapper around the "do/execute/fetchrow" nonsense of DBI.
• Persistence? Nope. Third thing I did was make a Slash::Object class, which could read itself from an Sql database, and had an AUTOLOAD corresponding to the columns in the table.
• Multimethods? Okay, this was slightly useful. I caught from skimming the book that there was a multimethod package on cpan. Went there, did a search, then did perl -MCPAN -e "install Class::Multimethod" and I was done.

Perl's syntax is often opaque (especially if you didn't already know all the Unix utilities, shell scripting langs and programming langs it is based on). It ispowerful, but this book didn't quite seem to get it all. Closures, non-class-based inheritance (a la Self), or even some more useful examples? (the fourth thing I did was make a Slash::Handler class to interface to Apache, automatically placing query args or form input into fields on itself - subclass and override "handle" to decide what to do) (fifth thing was a subclass of Slash::Handler to use Text::Metatext to generate the page).

A nice enough book, but I think I'm gonna have to write one myself before I see one I really like :-)

JDK 1.2 was re-named Java Platform 2 as part of the re-arrangement of the Enterprise, Standard and Micro editions. See SUN's Java site for more information on this, and the differences between the versions.

IBM are definitely at the head of the queue for this one !

I'm looking forward to being able to use some critical Java Platform 2 features, and remember this is the enabling technology for Enterprise Java Beans...

I don't think the problem is the format that the data comes in as much as it is the viewer used to get at that data. Star Office and Word Perfect have shown us that it is possible to open foreign binaries without much difficulty. The trick comes in deciding how it's displayed. Netscape and Microsoft can't agree on how HTML is to be displayed, and HTML was supposed to be the great equalizing formatting language way back when. Netscape and IE render XML differently now, and it doesn't look like they will agree on it either.

The biggest problem is getting everyone to agree what the finished output will look like.

You're both sorely in need of catching up with the program:

RFC 2246 defines (and has for well over a year now) the protocol, and the latest commercial releases of sendmail implement it.

So does the Sun Internet Mail Server

Finally, Weitse Venema's postfix MTA has a freely-available TLS patch that implements SMTP encryption for those of us who don't want to pay for it.

There's even an RPM available.

Postfix, BTW, which used to be called vmailer, is the IBM Alphaworks free MTA project that was covered here in /. back in the day.

As, indeed, was this entire portion of this thread.

--

It might be interesting to see how Microsoft reacts to this. I understand they offered a great deal of money for linux.com when it was for sale. I was recently at the Boeing/Microsoft technical lookahead and they see Sun as their primary competitor. Perhaps Unix.com is in their strategic plan. Sounds like Sun should be the primary customer for this...
--
Quantum Linux Laboratories - Accelerating Business with Linux
* Education
* Integration
* Support

Linux will never achieve a significant market share in the corporate desktop market so long as it lacks a version of MS Office.

Sure it lacks Microsoft® Brand Office, but it has another brand of Office, the StarOffice suite from Sun Microsystems. Still binary, but at least it's free beer. So go download it and get liquored up :-)

I felt someone had to stand up for AIX, cause well, it got me a job at one point, and you're the only one who will! `8r) but I still say I was dead on about the 'smit' crack. heh

As far as the a brand new IBM box beating a Solaris box.... that's not bad for a box that first started shipping in March 1997. It just got leapfrogged 3 years later for some odd reason... `8r)

--
Gonzo Granzeau

So laris 2.5.1 used to run on powerpc

I was using telephony hardware from Dialogic Corp. The cards were ISA based and handled either 4 or 16 POTS lines or up to 2 T1 terminations.
The cards shipped with libraries that had a C-based API and a straight-forward state machine was able to capture the interaction model very nicely. The whole system was implemented in C with a Motif GUI.
I think we were using Solaris x86, I noticed that there doesn't appear to be a mention of linux on the Dialogic site. This might be problematic. Perhaps other cards are available, I noticed that the more recent kernels have support for the PhoneJack hardware -- perhaps it can be used for this purpose.

These days, Dialogic offers their QuadSpan VoiceSeries PCI based cards that look like the modern version of the old cards that I was using. I implemented a tight table driven state machine for the interaction model. It was fun and very straightforward.
The system was used to call people in communities and alert them of changes in oil and gas drilling operations in their vicinity, as required by law.

Java IMHO is a hardcore OO language.

Some have dared go further

I don't like when I ask a question in the context of a certain programming language and get an answer about how I should use a different language, so please understnd I am not advocating one over the other.

I believe it would be a clean approach to use a Java Application server such as JServ or Websphere and take advantage of the multi-lingual capabilities of JAVA on the server-side.

I don't like when I ask a question in the context of a certain programming language and get an answer about how I should use a different language, so please understnd I am not advocating one over the other.

I believe it would be a clean approach to use a Java Application server such as JServ or Websphere and take advantage of the multi-lingual capabilities of JAVA on the server-side.

I don't like when I ask a question in the context of a certain programming language and get an answer about how I should use a different language, so please understnd I am not advocating one over the other.

I believe it would be a clean approach to use a Java Application server such as JServ or Websphere and take advantage of the multi-lingual capabilities of JAVA on the server-side.

Java internationalization is a really cool solution. It takes a day or two to master the fine points. But it'll pay off in the long run.

Hope this helps!

For that kind of work, you probably don't want a cluster, but a Sun E6500 or a similar machine instead. They are built specifically for buisness applications, like huge databases and that sort of thing. Clusters are generally useful for scientific computing, which is another thing.

You and I seem to be talking past each other.

>If Java is so great at creating the programs that fill these niches, why is no vertical market app vendor shipping a Java product to do so?

Asked and answered. These niches that you refer to are inherently specific. While you can lump them up and say, for instance, "servlets for accessing a database," the particulars vary. Company XYZ may require an *entirely* different servlet than Company ABC, because of the configuration of their database, how they intend to access and display the retrieved data, and any number of other variables. Company XYZ could package that up and ship it, but it would be doubtful that anymore than a handful of other companies would find the software useful without serious modification.

The next step above that would be to sell a generic servlet. But again, you run into the configuration issue. How much do you have to architect the servlet before it becomes applicable to more than a small handful of situations? How bloated does it have to become to encompass the vast variety of configurations out there? Many corporations would find it easier to simply write their own from scratch, ensuring that the servlet would be completely designed for optimal performance for a particular configuration.

As a result, much of the Java work that is done is done for company-specific purposes, and is not sold or otherwise distributed because it would be of extremely limited value to others without the source code to modify. It would be like the United States trying to sell the programming instructions inside a Patriot missile. Unless you *have* a Patriot missile (raise your hands, please) the code isn't going to be of direct value to you, and if you happen to have another type of missile, the Patriot code isn't going to work without serious modifications.

If you want to see what exactly is being shipped, I suggest you look at Java Solutions Marketplace, where you can browse through the Java-related products and services to see whether anything qualifies for your stringent criteria.

>The only possible exception to the above are problems so crazy and stupid (and small) that no sane company would make a product to fix it.

You seem to want Java products that you can walk into a store and buy. It doesn't work like that. Should I dismiss Perl because I can't walk into CompUSA and buy a pure Perl software package? Perl has it's place as the glue that holds together the web. Java also has it's place in the software world - it's just not the visible, retail shelves that you are so desperate for.

>Now we're back to non-real-world uses.

I'd be interested in seeing how you define non-real-world uses. If it optimally solves a problem for a company, as far as I'm concerned that IS a real-world use (and is a much better real-world-use than some generic packaged product that has to be shoehorned into being merely an adequate solution).

Very true in the first release, have a look at JDK1.3 the speed up in Swing is impressive. The other option is to get the Truffle lightweight version for Personal Java which is very sleek (not sure why Sun don't push it more).

Again just from the Sun industry news page.

Headline News From Around The Industry April 11, 2000

Informative Graphics aims to make Java visualization tool standard front-end to Documentum
Documentum ,the leading provider of Internet-scale content management solutions for powering e-business applications, today announced that Informative Graphics Corp., a leading developer of ...
(PR Newswire: April 11, 2000, 08:04 AM)

SilverStream to bundle Java e-business integrattion technology with application server suite
Cerebellum Software,Inc., and SilverStream Software, Inc., , today announced at the SilverSummit 2000 User's Conference that the Cerebellum(TM) Internet data integration product will be bu...
(PR Newswire: April 11, 2000, 08:03 AM)

Netcom Systems brings Java-based security to Cisco Security Associate program
CA-WORLD 2000 --NetCom Systems netForensics v1.2 has received validation from Cisco Systems, Inc. to become part of the Cisco Security Associate program. NetCom's netForensics(TM) , end-...
(PR Newswire: April 11, 2000, 08:03 AM)

BravePoint to resell and implement Cerebellum Java e-business integration technology
Cerebellum Software, Inc., whichdevelops the Cerebellum(TM) Internet data integration technology for linking e-business applications with corporate data systems, today announced an agreemen...
(PR Newswire: April 11, 2000, 08:03 AM)

Oracle8i adoption reaches 17,000 customers, 500,000 downloads
Oracle Corp. , the largest provider of software for e-business, today announced that since March 1999 more than 17,000 companies have purchased Oracle8i(TM), making it the fastest growin...
(PR Newswire: April 11, 2000, 08:02 AM)

RSA Security ads Java PKI to product lineup
Highlighting this week's inaugural RSA Conference 2000 Europe, RSA Security Inc. , the most trusted name in e-security, today unveiled an easier, faster and safer way to create Java-based PK...
(PR Newswire: April 11, 2000, 08:02 AM)

Merinta basks in limelight of Virgin Magastores Java Net appliance launch
Merinta, Inc., a subsidiary ofBoundless Corporation , announced today that its first customer, Internet Appliance Network began rollout of the first 10,000 Webplayer(TM) Internet Applian...
(PR Newswire: April 11, 2000, 08:01 AM)

QuickVideo for Linux shines with Java Media Framework
LAS VEGAS, Apr 11, 2000 - InfoValue Computing Inc. unveiled the industry's first complete, end-to-end video streaming solution for Linux workstations at NAB this week in Las Vegas....
(Business Wire: April 11, 2000, 06:45 AM)

Silverstream Software Licenses Sun's Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition-J2ee-
WASHINGTON, Apr 10, 2000 - SilverStream eBusiness Platform Based on J2EE Standard SilverStream Software, Inc. , The eBusiness Platform Company, today announced a strategic alliance...
(Business Wire: April 10, 2000, 09:21 AM)

Passcall And Jacada Partner to Deliver Enterprise

can anyone point me to a real-world application or website that actually uses Java? I mean properly, not just a tiny applet showing the time or something.

Off the top of my head, let me see Mail.com uses Java to serve its pages. Does Oracle's new Enterprise database count?

And from Sun's page of industry news, we have companies like RSA, Oracle, Netcom, SAAB, Delta Air etc. using Java in mission critical situations on a daily basis.
Posts like this make me wonder about who composes slashdot's readership. Because only script kiddies and so-called web developers (HTML and javascript kiddies) use Java as a web app language. Also no one in his right mind uses Java for GUI development if the application has any degree of complexity. But as a middleware development language it is practically untouchable. When it comes to speed of development, maintainability and expandability for business applications few things beat Java. Add a native GUI or web interface depending on your application and a rock solid app has been created.

PS: Myth dispel mode Oh yeah, by the way Java pages are faster or at the very least as fast as CGI, it has to do with being memory resident a la the VM as opposed to being read from disk. Here's a benchmark and a link or two.

You're probably an MSCE aren't you?

Java is an amazingly easy language and has great in support with the online API and the online tutorial that explain every aspect of the language. Last fall, I had no prior knowledge of Java and was an intermediate C++ programmer. With the above links as my primary guides I am now an excellent Java developer.
In fact, at the start of my spring break I wanted to create an online survey with the data stored in an Oracle database. With no prior knowledge of JDBC or servlets I created my survey within 3 days (most of which was spent configuring, java web servlet engines & battling the fact that Oracle doesn't support jdk 1.2).

My point is this, languages change and mature all the time. C today is not C of 20 years ago. C++ has changed enough in the last decade that a large number of developers in industry are mystified by several aspects of the language (STL? exception handling? namespaces?). Java is a mere 5 years old and to believe the language will not evolve further before stabilizing is wishful thinking. But at least in Java's case clicking a few webpages on Sun's webpage bring you up to speed rapidly.

PS: The MSCE crack is not a flame but a genuine question. I have noticed that MSCE's unlike computer science majors believe that once one learns something that's all they have to know. I guess it comes from getting certification after taking a few exams while CS majors usually use several languages in school and also since they spend 4 years in school usually see how languages change/mature before they get into the real world.

PPS: You actually have Swing as an item in your resume? Interesting.

You're probably an MSCE aren't you?

Java is an amazingly easy language and has great in support with the online API and the online tutorial that explain every aspect of the language. Last fall, I had no prior knowledge of Java and was an intermediate C++ programmer. With the above links as my primary guides I am now an excellent Java developer.
In fact, at the start of my spring break I wanted to create an online survey with the data stored in an Oracle database. With no prior knowledge of JDBC or servlets I created my survey within 3 days (most of which was spent configuring, java web servlet engines & battling the fact that Oracle doesn't support jdk 1.2).

My point is this, languages change and mature all the time. C today is not C of 20 years ago. C++ has changed enough in the last decade that a large number of developers in industry are mystified by several aspects of the language (STL? exception handling? namespaces?). Java is a mere 5 years old and to believe the language will not evolve further before stabilizing is wishful thinking. But at least in Java's case clicking a few webpages on Sun's webpage bring you up to speed rapidly.

PS: The MSCE crack is not a flame but a genuine question. I have noticed that MSCE's unlike computer science majors believe that once one learns something that's all they have to know. I guess it comes from getting certification after taking a few exams while CS majors usually use several languages in school and also since they spend 4 years in school usually see how languages change/mature before they get into the real world.

PPS: You actually have Swing as an item in your resume? Interesting.

"Many of my old Java applets don't display correctly. This might just be my bad programming, but given my horrible memories of trying to get applets to function under Netscape/Mac I'm a bit worried."

FWIW, Mozilla (I'll still call it that, and Netscape be damned) renderd java.sun.com just fine. Maybe it is bad programming; I don't know how well you code.

I figure if it renders the java that the java folks write, it must be doing something right ;-)


Here's my copy of DeCSS. Where's yours?

A decent, modern JIT (Symantec, Borland and even MS have *very* good ones) will run Java with a similar, or even better, performance than C++

True enough for Java but Swing is another story. Swing is a very nice, full featured, well structured, flexible GUI API but its performance is still abysmal. I mean sure, it is passable under Windows if you have a late model box with enough RAM but even the tiniest real application under Swing has a memory footprint of at least 15Mb. Even if you have enough memory to keep it from paging to disk it still has to slogging all that stuff around on the heap. It is noticeably slower than a native app.

But don't take my word for it. Go download Sun's Forte for Java IDE, which is itself written in Java, and see for yourself. Running on Windows under JDK 1.2.2 it uses over 50Mb before you even open a file.

InstallAnywhere is a difficult initial setup, but after the first one, it's pretty easy to just copy/paste the first configuration files into a new project and make a new application. You can bundle all the applications together into one install, so you can install more than one application at one time.

The tool that actually does this conversion is called, not surprisingly, HTMLConverter. It can be gotten from Sun's page .

It turns out that a lot of the actual library space is shared between VM's, so while the initial memory requirement is pretty steep, every additional VM is not much more expensive. If you turn on native threads under linux and do a 'top', it will appear as though there are at least 4 java programs running that are using 8M a piece, but they are actually using a lot of the same space.

Hope this helps a little
Adam

>Miguel shares the deadly truth about GNOME, the >shocking story of the future of Bonobo and CORBA, >and the titillating tale of adventure and >intrigue that lies deep within the bowels of >popular Free Software development projects.

Hey man, you've been watching too many of those Sun commercials...

"Gnome, it's the DOT in DOT.ORG"

The minor time of his dawn may be the minor time of your dusk, but it is on yOUr words that the sun will set. To spin the truth on four corners is aRt. To hide in the corner of your indoctrination is a lie.

come out and let the sun shine upon you, so that you may be free of alleged bliss.

No planemaker will rule the one who trods upon his own vertices...

I've been spending the past few days working with Maple in one of my university's Math labs... on a Sun Ray 1 terminal/network applicance. I've only read of these things up until now, works pretty much like an xterm, except I can "logout" mid session and login on the a different machine with my session exactly the same (great for power outtages, etc). Did some research, sun sells these in packs of 20, 50, and 100, server included, for about $290 - $300 seat to education cutomers. That's SunRay 1, keyboard, 17" monitor, and a server (20 = Ultra 10, 50 = Enterprise 250, 100 = Enterprise 450). Still have to wire them up to 100bt switch, but seems like a pretty good deal to me. Suppose there are some PCs now for $300/seat. Any thoughts on this?

http://store.s un.com/docs/specials/education/startsmart_common.j html
http://www.sun.com/products/sunray1/ index.html

I've been spending the past few days working with Maple in one of my university's Math labs... on a Sun Ray 1 terminal/network applicance. I've only read of these things up until now, works pretty much like an xterm, except I can "logout" mid session and login on the a different machine with my session exactly the same (great for power outtages, etc). Did some research, sun sells these in packs of 20, 50, and 100, server included, for about $290 - $300 seat to education cutomers. That's SunRay 1, keyboard, 17" monitor, and a server (20 = Ultra 10, 50 = Enterprise 250, 100 = Enterprise 450). Still have to wire them up to 100bt switch, but seems like a pretty good deal to me. Suppose there are some PCs now for $300/seat. Any thoughts on this?

http://store.s un.com/docs/specials/education/startsmart_common.j html
http://www.sun.com/products/sunray1/ index.html

...is the .edu price (students, instructors, administrators, schools, and research), $2000 is the Joe price.
http://www.sun.com/edu

Personally, I'd probably use a K6 or Athlon system with a decent disk subsystem as a server unless I could afford something like an Enterprise 250.

you might want to take a look at solaris 8 before you go off again. Perl is included, or at least it is according to
http://www.sun.com/software/solaris/whatsnew.htm l
--

The Sun Ray does something like this (though it doesn't run Linux). Everything is done on the server, but I think the client machines still have video memory and run X. One cool feature is that smart cards are used to manage sessions. You can remove your card, take it to another machine, plug it in and resume where you left off. No client administration/upgrades are ever needed, but you need to make sure the server is *extremely* reliable.