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Nor do they justify your using the word "idiot".

I never called you an idiot.

If you have digital cable, you may be using Java to look at the program listings. Oh and people play Java games on their cell phones... (*cough* embedded).

Java6 isn't really an issue (maybe IBM is waiting to see what happens with OpenJava) since Java6 apps aren't widely used yet. As for being able to run Java on PPC here is a link http://www.yellowdog-board.com/viewtopic.php?t=158 1&sid=4c349bb1bc422cb54a968bb97535feeb of a volunteer helping someone else with Java.

I'd be hard press to name a software vendor that is not paying attention to Linux... Even Microsoft is paying attention.

Embedded C/C++ also hide many of the details. Why arn't you writing in assembly?

Joking aside, Java is making inroads into embedded realtime systems.
http://java.sun.com/javase/technologies/realtime/i ndex.jsp

Thats not counting the processors available that have java bytecode as thier native instruction set.
http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=native+java+proce ssor&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-GB: official&client=firefox-a

matfud

I'd much rather prefer:

SGPJ - Solaris, Glassfish, PostgreSQL, Java

This is one of those moves where some abandonware is being open sourced. Usually this happens with software, but here it's happening for hardware. The SPARC line is in decline; Sun is moving to x86 machines. Sun's hardware business is on the same trajectory as SGI's, but about five years behind. (Remember SGI, the MIPS processors, the overpriced x86 workstations, the bankruptcy?)

That theory might hold water, if Sun hasn't seen one of it's best years in recent history.

Sun Microsystems Exceeds Profit Target; Reports Results for Fourth Quarter and Full Fiscal Year 2007
...
Net income for the fourth quarter of fiscal 2007 on a GAAP basis was $329 million, or $0.09 per share on a diluted basis. For the full fiscal year, net income was $473 million, or $0.13 per share, on a diluted basis, as compared with a net loss of $864 million, or ($0.25) per share, for fiscal 2006.

WebMink:

And... Oh, sorry, you were just trolling, right?

...mutter...mutter...gotta learn to shut up, and read further ahead more often...

Ahm, yea, right! They're just heading for financial collapse! They're just making lots of money along the way! Yea, Yea, that's the ticket! ;)

Shane

Just to quell the concerns of "abandonware" and cries of "performance benchmarks"

Linky on numbers

Summary:

* This puppy comes ahead of Power5 and top-dog (till now) Power6
* Highest single CPU integer and floating point performance

Oh, and it has 2 10G network interfaces on chip... and EIGHT crypto cores to keep them running full throttle too. All this with 8 core each with its own floating point unit and 8 threads.

Oh and BTW, Ubuntu guys just booted their distro on this puppy :-)

So yeah, it runs Linux (too)!

Yeah, but does it run linux?

Actually, yes - according to this Sun blogger Ubuntu already runs on it (see at the end).

According to the webcast Sun had about this chip today, the T2 has dramatic electrical savings for what it provides, I think I saw at one point something along the lines of 97 watts as opposed to 160 for the cloverleaf from intel. While priced at "Under $1000"*, that's for orders of over a 1,000 units. They did say they were planning on working on less powerful and more affordable solutions for the embedded market in the next year and that this was more of a flag ship for inclusion in the server market. I'm not sure if this is ever being designed for use in the Desktop market, but there was a lot of interest about ubuntu running on it soon (already runs on the T1). One developer was asking for laptops running these, and the EVP of Sun Systems also was interested, so who knows what they'll do with this.

Very exciting news in general, I think the built in crypto co-processors for each core will make this a deal breaker for most government agencies and a lot of financial institutions. If you're interested the full webcast is here: http://www.sun.com/featured-articles/2007-0807/fea ture/index.jsp?intcmp=hp2007aug07_ultrasparct2_web cast and requires RealPlayer and is roughly 1:17:17 or so.

Anyone else find it ironic that the processor itself is acclaimed for being open-sourced, among other things, while the podcast of the announcement is only available in Realplayer format?

Those Rackable guys http://www.rackable.com/solutions/greencompute.htm already did a DC powered system and they claim up to 30% of decrease in power consumption. Also Sun Niagara chipped servers http://www.sun.com/servers/coolthreads/se_t1000/fe atures.xml lower the energy consumption considerably compared to other x86 systems. They're naturally suitable for virtualization at the same time.

...whose servers are among the most power-efficient available, and even more so with Niagara 2.

Disclaimer: I own a tiny bit of Sun stock. (But I bought it because I believe in them, not vice versa!)

...whose servers are among the most power-efficient available, and even more so with Niagara 2.

Disclaimer: I own a tiny bit of Sun stock. (But I bought it because I believe in them, not vice versa!)

...whose servers are among the most power-efficient available, and even more so with Niagara 2.

Disclaimer: I own a tiny bit of Sun stock. (But I bought it because I believe in them, not vice versa!)

Open Firmware is the only firmware standard in existence to have its own song. Download or listen to Mitch Bradley singing the Open Firmware Song (278k).

So why can't I halt the iPhone into the OpenFirmware boot ROMs and hack around with the device registers in Forth? Maybe there's a way to hack OpenFirmware to use a $0.99 iTunes song instead of a $6.99 ring tone.

-Don

A crypto accelerator will do wonders for any server that needs to handle SSL. You can really get high performance if you put a hardware accelerator on any chip above 1 GHz. My C7 can do full SSL on 100Mbit with a truly slow processor, only because of the acceleration. No processor is going to match a hardware processor. That said, if you have a processor that is not fast on integer calculations, the benefits are twice as big.

Now read this (source: http://www.sun.com/processors/niagara/M45_MPFNiaga ra2_reprint.pdf)

"The third important change is a significant upgrade of the in-core, asynchronous cryptographic coprocessor. In Niagara 1, the crypto unit handled basic RSA/DSA public-key ciphers. The upgraded crypto unit in Niagara 2 handles just about any cipher that might be of interest, including RC4, AES, DES,and 3DES.It also handles MD-5 and SHA-1/256 hashes. Moreover, running at full core speed, it is designed to keep up with the two new,integrated 10Gb Ethernet ports, allowing encryption/decryption of packets to keep pace with the wire-speed flow of traffic off the network into memory, and out of memory into the network. The DMA engine in the crypto unit shares the core's crossbar port."

Now note that there will be 8 of these crypto-processors. This will be one of the most crypto-enabled CPU's we've seen in a while.

no, actually the previous poster was correct (sort of)
the original meaning of SUNW was Stanford University Network Workstation.
(Sun's original product line was mainly engineering workstations)

But the meaning has been updated for the new business direction that the
company is focused on and it now stands for "Sun Worldwide"

http://www.sun.com/aboutsun/investor/faq/index.htm l#04

The threads don't execute simultaneously anyway. They are there so that processes can continue when there are I/O waits, i.e. for memory. An FPU per core should be enough.

http://www.sun.com/2003-1014/feature/

Last I heard, they don't. However, the UltraSPARC line isn't really what you want in a laptop anyways. Much better to get an X64 laptop and run Solaris10/x86 on it. You can use the list of tested and proven hardware for Solaris x86 to make sure it'll run without fiddling.

There's been a lot of (justified) doubt in the past about Sun's commitment to Solaris x86, bit it clearly is the future of consumer-directed Solaris. And it rocks.

IBM Power5+ and later also had inter-core connections.
The Niagra line of processors is impressive, but you had to worry about workload AND what would happen in 18 months when the server was "reused" for some alternate need by folks that didn't know what floating point was?

I've tried to find a fit for the T1 servers in my work as a technical arch for the last year ... it always came down to the customer not wanting to risk it so a V490 at 4x the price would be used instead. http://store.sun.com/ Oh well. The IBM P5+ line was also used a bunch with great success - for home use, check out the P505Q http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/p/hardware/express_e ntry.html - for around $5k, you get a server equiv to a loaded V490 and you can run 40 OS instances of either AIX or Linux. That isn't a typo. Ok, 1 of those has to be AIX 5.3, but that hardly sucks. It's almost as nice as Solaris or Linux. Heck, at least it isn't HP-sUX!

I do about 25 projects a year - from start to finish, so I see a fair number of needs. The Niagra is an easy fit for a web farm. I just wish I had more of those projects that weren't wintel.

Sun will send you one to try out for free: http://www.sun.com/servers/coolthreads/tnb/

why doesn't Sun Microsystems make laptops

They do. Ultra 3 Mobile.

There are also the units from Tadpole, and I'm sure others

Charles Stuart Rolls and Frederick Henry Royce. the car is called a rolls-royce motor car. henry royce was always adamant that "rolls-royce" was an adjective, by the way. and i have nothing against humouring him considering his contributions to winning the battle of britain.

a true rolls-royce computer would probably be more like this one anyway: http://www.sun.com/servers/highend/sunfire_e25k/in dex.xml

I'm an IT architect with a 6000-person company, and yesterday added a clause to an XML repository vendor's contract with us:

"Nonconformance to W3C standards on HTML, CSS, XML, XSLT, etc resulting in interfacing problems with other standard-compliant applications, or platform or browser dependencies will be treated as bugs."

This means we can connect any other standard-compliant application to it, and also that if this application breaks that we can replace it with another application of the same function, without changing neighboring applications or interfaces. It prevents that company from choosing Windows-only solutions because they know they will have to fix it for free.

My next step is to also add these clauses to the requirements and contracts of all other applications we buy or develop. For office functionality the obvious choice will be ODF, and this can be edited by several programs: OpenOffice.org, but also MS Office with the SUN ODF plugin. The SUN ODF plugin allows you to set the default office format to ODF. Download it from http://www.sun.com/software/star/staroffice/index. jsp

Of course, once this ODF office format is our standard, it does no longer matter which application is used to interface with this format. Maybe our Solaris users want to stop using Citrix and MS office (slow combination), and use OpenOffice instead saving us Citrix, MS-office and Acrobat license costs. And maybe our PC users who have very basic editing needs would like to try OpenOffice too, saving more MS-office and Acrobat licenses... I'm sure a few power users will want to keep using the 'real' MS-office, so a 100% migration is unlikely, but 80% of 6000 persons times the licenses is a lot of money, even with corporate discounts. And for those of you who say it will not save us money because you cannot resell licenses, we can at least disable the maintenance fee for the software.

There is NOT support for ODF built into Office 2007. Microsoft started an open-source project to add that to Office 2007

However, if I recall correctly it does not put the option to save as an odf file in the "save as..." dialog but rather in a separate section. (screenshots of the converter are here)

Sun has their own ODF filter which makes ODF just another option in the save as dialog but according to that post there are some issues with Office 2007 reading ODF.

In audience terms, I'm thinking that the limiter is still hardware support.

Since 1982, we have maintained that the network is the computer.

http://www.sun.com/

Front page says (in the ad) POWER UP AND GO. :))

Indeed or chroot jails ? Sun's containerizationing solution

Solaris has Zones for that exact purpose. Lguest, I believe, offers something similar for Linux.

you can't really get anything other than Vista on a new PC

Maybe you just aren't looking hard enough.

Go here:

http://www.fftw.org/

Download and compile it (and get your free compiler here, because Sun Studio 12 is 5% or more faster than GCC even on Linux...). Do so on both AMD and Intel chips.

Now, benchmark both architectures.

FWIW, my 2.4GHz Opteron runs FFTW about 30 to 40% faster than my 3.2GHz Xeons. Even when the Opteron is running the 32-bit binaries compiled for the Xeon.

PS - when you compile FFTW, make damn sure you disable ALL inlining...

http://www.sun.com/servers/coolthreads/tnb/linux.j sp shows that Ubuntu and Gentoo are certified on their SunFire T1000 and T2000 servers.

Because we can't find people to train employees in SO8, which means our training funds from the state are wasted and because we are completely unsupported.

Sun gives away Star Office to educational institutions. Start here: http://www.sun.com/products-n-solutions/edu/soluti ons/staroffice.html
There is online training and unlimited support is practically free: http://www.sun.com/products-n-solutions/edu/soluti ons/staroffice/support.html

I've also heard good things about these people: http://www.getopenoffice.org/.

Because we can't find people to train employees in SO8, which means our training funds from the state are wasted and because we are completely unsupported.

Sun gives away Star Office to educational institutions. Start here: http://www.sun.com/products-n-solutions/edu/soluti ons/staroffice.html
There is online training and unlimited support is practically free: http://www.sun.com/products-n-solutions/edu/soluti ons/staroffice/support.html

I've also heard good things about these people: http://www.getopenoffice.org/.

BS - for anybody needing training in open office/staroffice here is a link.

http://www.sun.com/training/catalog/desktop/path.x ml

what a joke -

Microsoft will not "support" ODF in the sense that they will offer a version of their office productivity suite which allows for opening or saving ODF files.

Flash is a monopoly. More or less. But it's a monopoly that doeshn't suck as much as IE. In fact, I'm sure, as soon as a product shows up that is better than Flash, Flash will use marketshare inmediately. Flash gained it's position because it really *is* the best solution at hand for the stuff it's used for.
But as it's still the single most widespread plattform on the end-user internet available and the only MM plattform that runs on all major deskstop OSes it will remain at the top. And for good reasons too. No matter how much they screw around with the IDE.
Java actually is the only true potential competitor to date. But Sun have never show any effort beyond 2 man projects to really make inroads in the rich client / rich media internet. I really whish they would, now that Java is GPLd, but I don't think it will happen, no matter how much they anounce yet another Java MM initiative. The new JavaFX looks like a revamped JMF and has a little more oomph to it than the last attempt, but let's just wait and see how long that lasts. I'm not holding my breath just yet.

Since version 5, the Java platform introduced the Concurrency Utilities, a threading framework which significantly reduces the complexity, and increases the performance, of a large number of threading-related tasks. Things like creating controlled pools of threads that concurrently use data structures used to be very complex to implement, but now I teach my students this in a day. This, coupled with Just-In-Time compilation (and the clever optimisation possibilities this provides), may see Java as the best platform to develop software with in a future filled with multi-core machines. We are a small, specialist software development/training/consulting house, and Java's performance has allowed us to do unbelievable things with it, yet never having to sacrifice sound design for the sake of "performance optimisation". Java 6, which builds on this stuff, and includes full hardware-accelerated GUI, will (I believe) make very, very responsive and powerful GUI applications possible, without having to lock into some OS-specific framework (or X). Watch that space.

Actually, you cannot break to a label, you can only break from a labeled block. From the Java Language Specification: "this statement, which is called the break target, then immediately completes normally". This had me confused for quite a while when trying to figure out the behaviour of your program.

Of course, I wasn't saying java is some kind of perfect solution. Even in Sun's reference implementation there is plenty of bugs http://bugs.sun.com/bugdatabase/index.jsp.

I wasn't talking about the write once, runs everywhere Sun's paradigm either, that's another story ;-) Well written C/C++ code is pretty much write once, runs everywhere too.

I was just saying I like the product overall.

Just in case someone is interested, you can take a look at the Code Conventions for the Java Programming Language.

IBM is using 'By making this irrevocable patent covenant' language at http://www-03.ibm.com/linux/opensource/isplist.sht ml, which is linked from TFA. TFA contains some content from Sun about "Necessary Claims" while the IBM page provides the following definition:

IBM® Definition
Necessary Claims
"Necessary Claims" are those patent claims that can not be avoided by any commercially reasonable, compliant implementation of the Required Portions of a Covered Specification. "Required Portions" are those portions of a specification that must be implemented to comply with such specification. If the specification prescribes discretionary extensions, Required Portions include those portions of the discretionary extensions that must be implemented to comply with such discretionary extensions.

Part of Sun's comments was probably an effort to steal IBM's thunder, but Sun has definitely done some good things in this area as well. There's the OpenDocument stuff that most people here are already aware of, but also some specialized (but very cool, if you're in my business) stuff like the Sun OpenID Non-Assertion Covenant at http://www.sun.com/software/standards/persistent/o penid/nac.xml

BTW, you do know that it's madness to ask 'can they' questions about legal matters on Slashdot, right? :)

I completely agree with you about Sun's naming and versioning scheme (really, what's wrong with Java JRE 1.5.0_12 - it tells you what you need to know). However, I wanted to pass on some (hopefully) helpful info about the unattended installs.

Java JRE 1.4.2 accepted the same command-line options throughout all version, and they even kept the naming scheme fairly consistent. Java JRE 1.5.0 and JRE 1.6.0 accept a slightly different set of command-line options but it is consistent throughout those releases - the naming convention was a little less consistent but it's not really a big deal for unattended software deployments. The key to managing Java deployments is to remember that by default, the JRE installer (and JDK too, IIRC) will not remove any previous versions, simply install the new one and (usually) make it the default JVM. I used to do desktop software management (Microsoft shop, SMS 2003). Our install base was a mess when I started, with literally dozens of JRE versions in use. Keeping detail to a minimum (if you're that curious, email me), once we decided on an "approved" JRE, I built a wrapper around that JRE installer that would inventory other JREs installed on the box and remove them all before installing our standard JRE. Once most of our systems had a common JRE, it was simpler to manage the upgrade process. I had our SMS deployments structured so that it would identify "out-of-date" JREs and patch them automatically. Whenever we approved a new version it was about half an hour of work on the back-end (marking that version as "current" and tweaking the advertisements). Once the new version was slurped into the hierarchy, any "out-of-date" JREs would be updated in a week (most in considerably less than that).

FYI, the acceptable switches for JRE 1.5 and JRE 1.6 are (see this page):
{some-jre.exe} [/L] /s /v"/qn [ADDLOCAL=jrecore[,extra][,other_US] | ALL] [IEXPLORER=1] [MOZILLA=1] [INSTALLDIR=:\] [REBOOT=Suppress] [JAVAUPDATE=0] [CUSTOM=1]"

The only difference for JRE 1.4.2 is that it supported an additional parameter: [NETACAPE=1]. For 1.5 and 1.6, [MOZILLA=1] covers installing the Java plugin for both Mozilla and Netscape browsers.

I've found this worked well for us (we actually used some of the extra fonts): {some-jre.exe} /s /v"/qn ADDLOCAL=All IEXPLORER=1 MOZILLA=1 REBOOT=ReallySuppress JAVAUPDATE=0"

Alternatively, just extract the .MSI from the executable and deploy using the standard Windows Installer command-line parameters.

Open Firmware is the only firmware standard in existence to have its own song. Download or listen to Mitch Bradley singing the Open Firmware Song (278k).

-Don

No, because, sadly, many applications require a specific version of the javaVM. At university we had a vpn solution that only worked with 1.4.3, although 1.5 was already released.

Somehow I doubt the situation has changed much.

You can't write the whole thing in Java

First, for trusted code (for example, normal applications) avoiding native libraries has a potentially huge performance cost. I'm not talking so much about the overhead of Java itself, but portable OS- and application-independent code can't take advantage things like a native graphics API that's directly mapped to GPU operations. I'm sure you can call OpenGL from Java, but I would hope that you can't do it from a Java applet - so applications should perhaps not be held to such a strict regimen.

Second, one of the problems with Java as a "run anywhere" language for applications is that so much of Java is implemented in Java, emulating a Windows style user interface (I don't have a problem with Sun choosing Windows here, that's where the market is, but it does make Java less attractive to people wanting to "run anywhere".

Third, solving this problem for Java may be less useful when it comes to security than fixing the native libraries so they're secure whether they're called from Java or some other component for the display of untrusted content (like a browser).

For Item #1:
  Java 3D, in applet form no doubt:
      Java3D API: http://java.sun.com/products/java-media/3D/forDeve lopers/J3D_1_3_API/j3dapi/index.html
      Java3D Applets: http://www.garybeene.com/3d/3d-j3d.htm

For Item #2:
  Native GUI Widgets in Java:
      http://www.eclipse.org/swt/

For Item #3:
  Java Web Browser: http://html.xamjwg.org/java-browser.jsp

How you'd launch the Java-based JVM is not clear