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Unix Layouts move the Caps Lock key AND the Backspace keys to 'better' locations:
Happy Hacking Keyboard Lite 2
Sun Type 7 Unix

Now, to find the Dvorak Unix keyboard that is remapped in hardware (to render those accessibility features obsolete)...

A Sun Enterprise x4500 running ZFS on Solaris ?

Does the hardware have a console with a network port?

Examples:
- On DELL systems, there are these DRAC cards allowing a https connection to the console.
- On SUN hardware, there is ILOM (x86) and RSC (sparc).
- IBM xSeries has this thing.
- You may be to connect a serial line to ttyA from another server to 'tip' for console, making the security a little easier. See this.
- I'm sure there are others for HP, etc...
- Fancy "KVM swicthes.
- There may even be a 3rd party PCI option

Advantages:
- Console sessions require login/pass (some even accept keys)
- You can set your firewall rule to specific IP endpoints
- Minimal cost
- Minimal techy techy knowledge
- No extra software to install

To solve your 'tail -f' requirement; run nrpe/nagios, or even simpler use *.* @loghost in /etc/syslog.conf and set the correct loghost in /etc/hosts.

I understood that you presently run X11, if that isn't necessary with a hardware option and shipping logs, you may be able to run a straight terminal on the host. Unless, of course, your number cruncher requires it.

Sun make pretty neat thin-client terminals called Sun Ray. Can work with either Linux or Solaris servers.

NB: I'm biased, as I work for Sun.

not only that, 1.4.2 is going out of maintenance very soon: http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.4.2/

Sure enough. I stand corrected.

http://www.sun.com/aboutsun/media/features/mars.html

1. The original plan for Java was as a language for embedded systems. The other applications were added as an afterthought, effectively.

this is not entirely correct; I met with Arthur van Hoff (he of java.lang.String fame) back in the late 90's when a large chunk of the original java team went to Marimba to develop Castanet - they really thought that the future of Java would be centralised software as a service style apps that would download to your thin 'pc' 'workstation' etc as you needed them and would always be up to date.

When I say originally, I really do mean originally. Van Hoff didn't join the Java team until they'd been working on it for two years, with the primary goal being a language to enable more advanced applications for 'digitally controlled consumer devices'. The focus was already shifting by the time he joined the team, so I'm not surprised he felt differently about it.

For those that are confused I think the parent might be referring to this.

From the CDDL FAQ at OpenSolaris.org:

If you wanted a copyleft license, why didn't you just use the GPL or LGPL? We needed an open source license that allowed files released under the license to be linked with files released under other licenses. While a license like LGPL would allow this for dynamically-linked code, we also needed to be able to release software that statically links source files available under different licenses. In addition, we wanted to allow others to add externsions to OpenSolaris with different license terms. This was only possible under a license like the MPL; however, we could not use the MPL because it is not a "template" license allowing reuse by others. Consequently, we crafted a variant of the MPL, taking the opportunity to make it a template license as a step towards reducing license proliferation for others finding themselves in a similar position.

If Sun were "out to get Linux", it would relicense StarOffice, Java and MySQL in a way which would prevent it from running on GNU/Linux.

There is a really nice document showing the redlined diffs from the MPL license. GPL is a great license in theory but it hasn't been tested in court and does run into problems in the real world where it hurts Linux's long-term hardware compatibility and stability, prevents many multimedia codecs (e.g. DVD+MPEG2+CSS) from ever being legally supported in a GNU/Linux distribution.

Speaking as a Sun employee: you're welcome.

But do remember that there's an element of self-interest in this open-sourcing strategy. It's all part of our fiendish plot to sell people hardware and services.

Take Solaris, for example. By opening it up, we do lose the income we would have had from selling it to people. But that's been dwindling anyway, as Solaris loses ground against Linux and Windows. By opening up the OS, we make it a better product through user contributions, and encourage its spread. More Solaris users means more people who will seriously consider out products and services.

Of course, even Linux and Windows people should be looking at us anyway, since we are now serious about products that run those OSs. (I work on documenting several of them.) But if you're already a Solaris user, then your options go beyond our x64 systems to the systems that are still the core of our business: the SPARC machines.

There are many reasons SPARC systems have been losing ground. But a big one is that they don't run "standard" operating systems. Promoting Solaris through open-sourcing (and through other means, such as supporting it on other vendor's hardware) drastically changes that particular equation.

Speaking as a Sun employee: you're welcome.

But do remember that there's an element of self-interest in this open-sourcing strategy. It's all part of our fiendish plot to sell people hardware and services.

Take Solaris, for example. By opening it up, we do lose the income we would have had from selling it to people. But that's been dwindling anyway, as Solaris loses ground against Linux and Windows. By opening up the OS, we make it a better product through user contributions, and encourage its spread. More Solaris users means more people who will seriously consider out products and services.

Of course, even Linux and Windows people should be looking at us anyway, since we are now serious about products that run those OSs. (I work on documenting several of them.) But if you're already a Solaris user, then your options go beyond our x64 systems to the systems that are still the core of our business: the SPARC machines.

There are many reasons SPARC systems have been losing ground. But a big one is that they don't run "standard" operating systems. Promoting Solaris through open-sourcing (and through other means, such as supporting it on other vendor's hardware) drastically changes that particular equation.

Speaking as a Sun employee: you're welcome.

But do remember that there's an element of self-interest in this open-sourcing strategy. It's all part of our fiendish plot to sell people hardware and services.

Take Solaris, for example. By opening it up, we do lose the income we would have had from selling it to people. But that's been dwindling anyway, as Solaris loses ground against Linux and Windows. By opening up the OS, we make it a better product through user contributions, and encourage its spread. More Solaris users means more people who will seriously consider out products and services.

Of course, even Linux and Windows people should be looking at us anyway, since we are now serious about products that run those OSs. (I work on documenting several of them.) But if you're already a Solaris user, then your options go beyond our x64 systems to the systems that are still the core of our business: the SPARC machines.

There are many reasons SPARC systems have been losing ground. But a big one is that they don't run "standard" operating systems. Promoting Solaris through open-sourcing (and through other means, such as supporting it on other vendor's hardware) drastically changes that particular equation.

Their big mistake has been ignoring commodity hardware

Similarly, the primary focus of the Java codebase is the x86 platform first, remaining platforms later.

Sun is also a massive seller of AMD64 and Intel Xeon based servers and workstations. Amazingly, Sun's prices have even come out of the stratosphere and are extremely competitive with other manufacturers like Dell.

Sun is even working to virtualize these "commodity platforms" with their surprisingly good OpenxVM project. I actually passed on a free copy of Parallels because Sun's VirtualBox was working so well for me.

I know Sun has the stigma of selling only overpriced iron, but the truth is that they're fairly well in tune with their customers and are working hard to provide them with the products and services they need. Along the way, the Open Source community is benefiting greatly.

Their big mistake has been ignoring commodity hardware

Similarly, the primary focus of the Java codebase is the x86 platform first, remaining platforms later.

Sun is also a massive seller of AMD64 and Intel Xeon based servers and workstations. Amazingly, Sun's prices have even come out of the stratosphere and are extremely competitive with other manufacturers like Dell.

Sun is even working to virtualize these "commodity platforms" with their surprisingly good OpenxVM project. I actually passed on a free copy of Parallels because Sun's VirtualBox was working so well for me.

I know Sun has the stigma of selling only overpriced iron, but the truth is that they're fairly well in tune with their customers and are working hard to provide them with the products and services they need. Along the way, the Open Source community is benefiting greatly.

Their big mistake has been ignoring commodity hardware

Similarly, the primary focus of the Java codebase is the x86 platform first, remaining platforms later.

Sun is also a massive seller of AMD64 and Intel Xeon based servers and workstations. Amazingly, Sun's prices have even come out of the stratosphere and are extremely competitive with other manufacturers like Dell.

Sun is even working to virtualize these "commodity platforms" with their surprisingly good OpenxVM project. I actually passed on a free copy of Parallels because Sun's VirtualBox was working so well for me.

I know Sun has the stigma of selling only overpriced iron, but the truth is that they're fairly well in tune with their customers and are working hard to provide them with the products and services they need. Along the way, the Open Source community is benefiting greatly.

It's not a claim:

JavaScript Programming Language: The language everyone loves to hate

Javascript and LISP

Douglas Crockford's page on Javascript

As far as your last point regarding how Javascript is being widely taught and used, all it states is a major problem with the way the language is understood. Just because a language is taught a certain way doesn't mean that the language IS that way. If you delve deeper into Javascript you'll see that it's more like lisp and less like C or Java.

I've used GWT. Here's the long and short of it...

Pros: GWT is very cool in that you can quickly write Java-based interfaces that run in the web browser as Javascript. Because GWT includes a wide variety of components, interfaces are super-simple to create. You can even make your own widgets and reuse them as libraries to make even more complex widgets.

Cons: (Better grab a seat.) It's nearly impossible to debug code outside of the GWT test shell. Which really sucks if your code relies on a web application in some way, but you can't decipher "Error in line 127: b is null". Which brings me to the next major problem. GWT does not integrate with Javascript very well. You can use a JNI-style interface to run bits of Javascript code in a Java method, but for the most part the worlds stay far apart. Which means that you can't easily use GWT objects or Javascript objects interchangeably to solve problems. More often than not, a Javascript object would be faster than the Java code you're writing. But since you can't intertwine them...

Which brings me to the next con. Because the layout is determined by the construction of the built-in widgets, it's often difficult to achieve a layout that meets the specs. Doing simple things like removing spaces from tables, or applying pre-existing styles invariably end up more difficult to do than they should be. And even when you can apply a style, it applies the style to an element which is inside a container element (or vice-versa), thus preventing you from styling the layout of the specific element you're trying to target.

Another frustrating aspect is that GWT dumps out hashed file names. Different hashes for every compile, too. Which wreaks all kinds of havoc with source control systems. Ideally you'll want to generate the Javascript code at compile-time because of this mis-feature. Unfortunately, GWT does not ship with an ANT plugin. You can find a few that people have made, but I haven't yet found one that's of particularly high quality.

Generated GWT code is obviously quite large. Whatever you save with GWT's obfuscator is more than made up for by the fact that GWT compiles in its libraries every time.

Last but not least (and quite possibly the most frustratingly), you can only plug the components together at compile time. Mixing and matching renderers, data models, and I/O backends at runtime is pretty much a no-no. You get it right when you compile it. Period. Which really reduces the flexibility of the technology. Instead of being able to combine plugins at runtime, you have to create a new project for every variation of the component. Alternatively, you can write your code to have a half-billion runtime settings.

--

If you want my advice, learn Javascript. GWT may provide you with a good stop-gap solution, but the trade-offs can be incredibly painful at times. And since Javascript is obviously not going anywhere, you know you'll get a good return on investing in the education. If you need a good place to start, Douglas Crockford has an excellent introduction to the language here. Also, trying READING the Javascript Client Guide. It really does explain the language well, including some of its incredibly advanced features. (That 95% of so-called JS coders have no idea exist.) :-)

I have come down thoroughly on the side of The Cathedral in my development methodology, because I feel that The Bazaar doesn't serve the needs of end-users. It unnecessarily subjects them to buggy, incomplete software.

I can see how The Bazaar would work well for highly technical users, for development tools, text editors and the like, but not for an audio application.

I was up all night last night trying to figure out how to use OpenOffice to print address labels from a database. When I couldn't get it to work, I downloaded the 3.0.0 Beta, only to find that all the same bugs were still there.

It didn't appear to me that the label printing function had been touched by the developers at all between 2.4.0 and 3.0.0, with the exception of a native OS X print job dialog for the Mac version.

Folks, this is a supposedly mature, full-featured and commercial-quality office productivity application, published by one of the world's largest computer companies, yet one cannot do even such a basic task as printing labels from a database?

That's just inexcusible!

I've done quite a lot of work on Ogg Frog, but it's still in a primitive state, and there are lots of bugs. I fear that if I released it, not even the version I have now, but future snapshots, it would get uploaded to all the shareware sites, where it would be downloaded by unsuspecting novice users, who would find it unpleasant to use.

That wouldn't serve their needs, and further, it would give me and my project a bad reputation. Quite likely I wouldn't get a second chance: my wife now flatly refuses to use Free Software, having had such bad experiences herself with Mozilla, The Gimp, and OpenOffice.

I know that I have the greatest chance of success if I wait until I have something rock-solid before I make its first public release.

Now, that doesn't mean the software isn't being tested, or that real end-users aren't giving me feedback. I have a small circle of testers, both end users and other developers, who are testing it for me - privately.

And that's how I think every Free and Open Source Software project ought to be run.

It does mean I get a lot of crap for not releasing yet, as evidenced by Kuro5hin's A Trolled Englishman. But it's a small price to pay for what I am confident will be my ultimate success.

People seem to think it's a replacement for RAID, and it isn't.

How is a Raid-Z not a replacement for a Raid-5?

with Windows 95. Then they started acting like a monopoly.

Exhibit 1: "Government interest in Microsoft's affairs had begun in 1991 with an inquiry by the Federal Trade Commission over whether Microsoft was abusing its monopoly on the PC operating system market. ... the Department of Justice opened its own investigation on August 21 of [1993], resulting in a settlement on July 15, 1994 in which Microsoft consented not to tie other Microsoft products to the sale of Windows ..." (timeline)

See MS Litigation page and Court TV Library for more details.

Another former competitor, approximately coëval with Windows 95, was BeOS. Microsoft settled an anti-competitive complaint brought by Be Inc. in 2002.

Windows 95 had barely been released when Sun launched complained of breach of contract followed by serious anti-competitive claims in 2002 regarding Microsoft's Java tactics.

This is not the legal record of an honest company. The leopard never changes its spots. Gates was a "sharp" businessman from the day he opened office. (Which is a polite way of saying, white collar criminal.)

Nothing in the definition of "open standard" says that "someone else" has to implement it.

Sun's own definition says so:

http://www.sun.com/software/standards/definition.xml

The pathology runs deeper than you are implying. Mike Dillon , general counsel for Sun, goes so far as to compare patent portfolios to a cold war style nuclear arms race. Far from being 'frivolous', most companies today think that if they don't try to patent every little thing, they'll be sued into oblivion by the companies that do. It is this defensive mentality, not the patent trolls, that has lead to the current state of the patent system.

As someone whose first patent was published just this week, it is a little bittersweet. I'm happy that I was involved in a project that generated some truly innovative stuff, and that I've actually made a little money from the licensing of the rights to the patent. But the innovative parts of the project are not what got patented, the company that licensed the technology appears to be sitting on it as part of their defensive war chest, and I've had to battle their legal counsel to avoid their repeated attempts to get a patent on the software that I wrote for the project (which is useful, but not even remotely innovative).

I think as a patent holder, I see the needs for reform even more clearly now. Much like the cold war, I don't see the 'arms race' slowing down until company is holding so many patents that no one can make a move in any arena for fear of being destroyed by someone else. Mutually assured destruction is a technique for maintaining the status quo, and eventually, it will kill the ability to truly innovate in America. And when it does, another number of other nations will gladly step in and relieve us of our 'superpower' status.

I'm pretty sure .NET has Java beat in several areas. For example, generics. In Java generics are just syntactic sugar for casting everything from java.lang.Object to something else. Each cast is a runtime type check, which comes at a performance penalty that I don't believe is trivial. .NET actually generates unique code without that casting.

APIs, maybe, I don't know, but language features, definitely not.

Of course, we can search for enlightenment ourselves!

OpenJDK FAQ

Cheers!

I'm not sure how much more performance you could achieve simply by culling the unused stuff. Java already dynamically loads only the classes you use into memory. We have gotten to a point where people don't want to rewrite their own XML parsers, sorting algorithms, cryptography libraries, UI components, network connection handling functions, and all the other wonderful stuff provided by the .net and Java APIs. We're probably a lot better off because of it. Less time wasted writing code that someone has already written a million times. If you still want a smaller version of the JDK, there's always the Java Micro Edition Platform.

c'mon guys
http://research.sun.com/projects/lively/

Instead of everyone hiring their own designer and doing a one off solution, go for the data center in a shipping container. Cost you less than the architects will charge you for thr building design, and a proper industrial design can make the HVAC more efficient and save lots of $$ in the long run.

ZFS works great with flash drives. For a video demo check out: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7760232806099469333 There is a english dubbed version of the video at http://blogs.sun.com/constantin/entry/csi_munich_how_to_save but I like the original german one better.

You forgot the most important feature. You know, the one about boiling the oceans of the world...

Unless you have multiple volumes in your device/environment you probably won't benefit much. For a brief description of the features and benefits of ZFS take a look at Jeff Bonwick's blog:
http://blogs.sun.com/bonwick/en_US/category/ZFS
especially the "Friday May 04, 2007 Rampant Layering Violation?" post. In the first paragraph you get a summary of the features, and after the mathemagical diversion you get a brief summary of the "layers" comprising ZFS and some of the rationale behind the design.
Or, of course, take a look at the Wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zfs#Features
I think the main benefits for clients would be the ginormous volume sizes, snapshot/clones, and variable block sizes. But I think the filesystem is aimed at servers with multiple volumes attached.

Yeah, self-reply. Some links on the matter:

ZFS: The last word on filesystems

Why ZFS for home

Why ZFS Rocks

ZFS: what "the ultimate file system" really means for your desktop -- in plain English!

But it sounds like some of them are seemingly so well known. You've mentioned Dave Airlied and Keith Packard but what about Eric Anholt (Intel), Carl Worth (Red Hat), Daniel Stone (Nokia), Adam Jackson (Red Hat), David Reveman (Novell), Matthias Hopf (Novell), Alex Deucher (AMD), Ian Romanick (IBM), Alan Coopersmith (Sun). I believe that Tungsten Graphics also employ people who work on X (or X related infrastructure).

However do projects have to have paid devs to succeed? If there is the manpower perhaps paid people are not so key?

No platform that incorporates the need for the vendor (or someone equally expensive) to "bless" your application by signing it will ever, ever enjoy the wide-spread adoption that common PCs do.

Surprisingly little people know this, but to deploy an application in J2ME, Symbian or iPhone, that does anything outside the trivial ("hello, world"), the application needs to be digitally signed (think SSL certificates) by a company the phone firmware "trusts". If you're lucky, this is one of the big authorities like Thawte, if you're unlucky this means every single mobile provider that sells phones as a part of their contracts or service.

What this means in practice is a significant monetary barrier to entry, at least compared to the Windows and Linux platforms, because every company that wants to deploy mobile phone applications needs to buy expensive certificates every couple of years (because they expire). This is also the reason why the open-source and freeware smartphone applications are a) few and far between and b) mostly very simple and crappy since they can't use the advanced APIs.

The official reason for the signing requirement is to protect users from viruses, etc. - which is completely wrong since it's obviously a failure (as demonstrated by the appearance of anti-virus software for smartphones). The real reason is the greed of phone companies and manufacturers. In the very unlucky case, an application developer needs to have his application signed by every single operator on whose phones he wants to deploy the application.

References:

• How midlet signing is killing j2me
• How j2me signing kills mobile innovation
• Problems with signing...
• Which certificates are valid on which handsets?

There's a large number of similar rants if you Google them.

Ultimately applets never really caught on for a several of reasons, including

1. machines back in the 90s weren't powerful enough to run an interpreted execution layer with ease. Try running any modern environment like Java, .Net or parrot within a web browser with less than a 1ghz machine with 1/2 a gig of RAM - it won't be pretty.
2. Microsoft sabotaged Java. Sun successfully sued them for releasing an incompatible version.
3. Sun's implementation required a ~ 10MB download and then took several seconds to load each time.

As far as accessing the browser DOM, Java applets can via LiveConnect.

As for speed and size, Sun have been addressing this in their consumer JRE. Further, the LiveConnect Javascript bridge has been rewritten for FireFox 3.

BTW, I've never seen anything run in an applet beside Java.

How would you know? It's all compiled down and distributed as the same bytecode - the source language code be java, python, groovy or ruby. Just as would be supplied to parrot - the difference being that javascript is generally distributed in source form rather than bytecode. And by the way, the UI toolkit (AWT/Swing) != Java the platform. It supplements HTML with a cross-platform toolkit, something parrot won't support[1]. But no one's forcing developers to use it; as I've mentioned, Java can directly manipulate the DOM.

[1] Ok, there's XUL but that will only work in firefox and related browsers.

Ultimately applets never really caught on for a several of reasons, including

1. machines back in the 90s weren't powerful enough to run an interpreted execution layer with ease. Try running any modern environment like Java, .Net or parrot within a web browser with less than a 1ghz machine with 1/2 a gig of RAM - it won't be pretty.
2. Microsoft sabotaged Java. Sun successfully sued them for releasing an incompatible version.
3. Sun's implementation required a ~ 10MB download and then took several seconds to load each time.

As far as accessing the browser DOM, Java applets can via LiveConnect.

As for speed and size, Sun have been addressing this in their consumer JRE. Further, the LiveConnect Javascript bridge has been rewritten for FireFox 3.

BTW, I've never seen anything run in an applet beside Java.

How would you know? It's all compiled down and distributed as the same bytecode - the source language code be java, python, groovy or ruby. Just as would be supplied to parrot - the difference being that javascript is generally distributed in source form rather than bytecode. And by the way, the UI toolkit (AWT/Swing) != Java the platform. It supplements HTML with a cross-platform toolkit, something parrot won't support[1]. But no one's forcing developers to use it; as I've mentioned, Java can directly manipulate the DOM.

[1] Ok, there's XUL but that will only work in firefox and related browsers.

http://h20219.www2.hp.com/integrity/cache/342254-0-0-0-121.html
or http://www.sun.com/servers/x64/x4600/specs.xml
PCs may have higher shipping volume, but servers are no slouch either, and produce higher margins.

The Java world has plenty of MVC frameworks. Struts and Spring are the first two that come to my mind. Sun itself recommends MVC as a design pattern for J2EE applications. http://java.sun.com/blueprints/guidelines/designing_enterprise_applications_2e/web-tier/web-tier5.html

So, if it's good for about everybody in Java, why should it be poor for Ruby? Granted, what's good for everybody might be a poor-but-well-marketed product, but I developed many MVC web applications and always liked it.

What other design patterns do you use for web applications?

Imagine the repercussions if a large technology company like Sun Microsystems helped the development and support of OpenOffice.

They could twin its codebase with their own corporate version and then the sky would truly be the limit.

it should really help out the LivelyKernel.
javascript + svg
http://research.sun.com/projects/lively/

I should correct that - I didn't mean to suggest WinFS was part of MinWin, only that WinFS and MinWin were being developed concurrently for Vista (before Vista's move to 2003) and reportedly had been tuned and tied fairly heavily together before the move. In some form or another it has existed since Cairo in the 1990s (went through that era's naming merry-go-round, too, but the only names I remember are from products that were released like the COM-DCOM-OLE-ActiveX). Some features of WinFS reportedly depended entirely on the kernel being MinWin, and I'm pretty sure kernel and ADO.NET dependencies were cited as why it was pulled from the release (it's been a while).

You're right on Win 2008, though - I had thought Vista was being built concurrently with Windows 2008 on top of the Windows 2003 kernel but it seems the projects were merged when Vista moved to 2003 and 2008 itself was indeed built on top of Vista.

I wasn't aware that NTFS supported arbitrary metadata tagging - it certainly isn't exposed, even in Vista and the only information I can find on it is limited. NTFS itself isn't a terrible FS, but it is slow compared to some other modern filesystems (Sun claims ZFS is 7.5x faster, for instance) and is one of the few OS's left with a 255 character path + filename limit. Capacity limits in the exabytes is decent, but not future-proof (I work with at least one customer with data in the exabytes already, but they are a Solaris house).

Java Desktop
Over 91% of Internet-connected PCs have Java enabled (Source: Omniture, April 2007).
This includes over 63% of Sun JRE in the US, and over 65% of Sun JRE in Italy/Spain/UK (Nielsen//NetRatings, January 2007)

92% (and growing) of JRE installs (Java.com, J.S.C.) are now Java SE 6 (April 2007, Sun)

Estimated Worldwide Java SE penetration per Operating System and VM vendor (Source: Sun estimate, April 2007)

* Sun JRE (Windows): 65%
* Microsoft VM (Windows): 21%
* Apple VM (Mac OS): 3.5%
* Other (including Java SE on Linux and other OS: 1.5%
PC OEMS representing over 60% of all shipped PCs in Q4 2006 have signed Java SE redistribution agreements with Sun. (Sun, based on IDC #206152, March 2007).

9 of the top 10 PC OEM vendors have a JRE redistribution agreement with Sun. (Sun, based on IDC #206152, March 2007).

I would like to mention that I work with Java for a living. And I don't really know what you are talking about. True, Java was a hog back in the day. But as of right now, Eclipse beats the pants off of Visual Studio. For that matter, even NetBeans is a very fast and functional alternative, especially if you want to get up and running real fast. And I think NetBeans has better support for Ruby than any IDE out there period, yes, even Ruby specific ones. http://blogs.sun.com/tor/

Fortran syntax is a useful way to type out formulas. Something like gfortran would be reasonable for teaching simple scientific programming ideas. I'm looking forward to trying out the new opensource implementation of Fortress which should prove to be rather handy owing to its concurrent programming support. I can see it becoming a language of choice for supercomputing applications. It has the advantage of an easy syntax, very similar to old FORTRAN, but has been updated to be a 3rd gen language.

As many others have mentioned also though, Python is pretty excellent really for all manner of sophisticated data processing programs. As a mechanical engineer, I use it all the time at work now that I took the time to learn how to use it. It really is an invaluable tool for me. Python has superb number crunching abilities and the realitively easy to use tkInter GUI toolkit among other nice things. Its indentation block syntax isn't really that much of an issue for small scientific type applications, and its other strengths are pretty tough to top.

I would not use C, C++, or Java for teaching science programming because more time would be spent explaining the language and less time focused on the actual science. Python makes for short concise programs which are pretty intuitive to understand, and Fortran variants have possibly the most straightforward manner of expressing a mathematical equation in computer language syntax, so I think that both are valuable.

The best single document would be the classic Goldberg paper on "What Every Computer Scientist should Know about Floating Point Arithmetic" http://docs.sun.com/source/806-3568/ncg_goldberg.html (originally published as an ACM paper; kindly corrected and republished by the Sun Floating Point Group (Goldberg worked at Xerox). It should be required reading.

Beyond understanding the differences between conventional mathematical arithmetic and what computers actually do, the student really should have a formal introduction to data structures.

Lastly, and why I hung the comment on this one, Numerical Recipes is well known to not be a good numerical choice. Making it the foundation of a class would be a real crime against computing.

The exact language isn't so important as is flow control, file handling, basic methods/technique, basic resource management, and troubleshooting.

A solid understanding of the nature of floating point numbers wouldn't hurt either. For example, something like David Goldberg's What Every Computer Scientist Should Know About Floating-Point Arithmetic.

As to the language not being important, I don't know that that's entirely true. Each language offers a choice of types and some sets of choices are more instructive than others. I personally think Lisp or Scheme are good teaching candidates because they offer arbitrary precision integers and rational numbers in addition to basic floating point number types so that it's easy to see side-by-side the trade-offs being made between correctness on one hand and space/speed on the other hand that go along with choices in this regard.

Plus, if you go the Scheme route, you get teaching materials focusing on good abstraction like Sussman and Wisdom's Structure and Interpretation of Classical Mechanics , the proper companion to Abelson and Sussman's popular CS text Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs !

Javadoc, reflection, String class pretty much cover all of what you just did. And they all offer features richer than the basic ones provided by Python.

I have used many, many languages from Java to Objective C to Scheme to Ruby to PHP. Python is the only modern one I specifically avoid. Sorry, had enough of whitespace dependent code with Fortran, it cramps my style.

Javadoc, reflection, String class pretty much cover all of what you just did. And they all offer features richer than the basic ones provided by Python.

I have used many, many languages from Java to Objective C to Scheme to Ruby to PHP. Python is the only modern one I specifically avoid. Sorry, had enough of whitespace dependent code with Fortran, it cramps my style.

Javadoc, reflection, String class pretty much cover all of what you just did. And they all offer features richer than the basic ones provided by Python.

I have used many, many languages from Java to Objective C to Scheme to Ruby to PHP. Python is the only modern one I specifically avoid. Sorry, had enough of whitespace dependent code with Fortran, it cramps my style.

Leopard's Spaces had been criticized for making it hard to organize virtual desktops by task rather than by application (for example at http://blogs.sun.com/bblfish/entry/why_apple_spaces_is_broken and http://www.dribin.org/dave/blog/archives/2007/11/13/spaces/).

10.5.3 seems to address most of these criticisms with two small changes: Command-Tab now tries to find application windows in the current space before switching spaces, and there's a new preference to not switch spaces at all when switching applications.

This makes a big different in the usability of Spaces!

Oh, I was talking out of my ass, then. How exotic.

On second thought, I might have confused f5 with netapp. They seem to use bsd in some appliances (search for BSD in the post).

I know nothing about tcp/ip stacks, but it's interesting that netcraft's monitoring service claims to be able to separate generic linux machines from f5 ones, in my experience they don't recognize that many specialized OS'es (I've developed have some sort obsession with netcrafting sites I visit). Netapp and f5 are among the only special OSes i've seen detected properly on netcraft.