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All of this to show your IT manager how easy it can be. Then show your homework, and you could likely get one justified for every UNIX administrator in your company. Want to make the argument, compare that to what it costs your company for 25 Windows stations for the same people. I think you'll find the argument compelling. Typical lifespan of a thin client is 7-10 years, you won't need to replace it in three years as you would with typical desktops.

Typical Sun Ray cost for 25 users (assuming they would use existing monitors/keyboards, estimated numbers):
Sun Microsystems T1000 w/ 8-core CPU & 8GB RAM w/ 3-yr Support: $8500
Sun Ray 2 Display Clients + RTU + Support (3yr): $500 ea ($12,500 for 25)
Your labour & time to install/manage: $55/hr * 2 hours/week * 3 years = $17,160
Total 3-year Cost: $38,160.00

This should justify itself.

All of this to show your IT manager how easy it can be. Then show your homework, and you could likely get one justified for every UNIX administrator in your company. Want to make the argument, compare that to what it costs your company for 25 Windows stations for the same people. I think you'll find the argument compelling. Typical lifespan of a thin client is 7-10 years, you won't need to replace it in three years as you would with typical desktops.

Typical Sun Ray cost for 25 users (assuming they would use existing monitors/keyboards, estimated numbers):
Sun Microsystems T1000 w/ 8-core CPU & 8GB RAM w/ 3-yr Support: $8500
Sun Ray 2 Display Clients + RTU + Support (3yr): $500 ea ($12,500 for 25)
Your labour & time to install/manage: $55/hr * 2 hours/week * 3 years = $17,160
Total 3-year Cost: $38,160.00

This should justify itself.

However if you use the BigDecimal class, scale and precision are very important and do determine equality (unless you use the compareTo()) method.

Also, as a general point, having soft buttons that remap to specific key combinations is not a bad idea on an ultraportable - a single COPY button or PASTE key might be handy. Friggin' Linux zealots.

I'm not sure what that last sentence was supposed to mean. The UNIX world has had access to keyboards with extra function keys (cut, copy, paste, and several others,) for decades.

Calling it a fork is extreme - it's a branch. All changes are merged back into upstream as and when possible. And Sun and Novell have agreed to work on VBA compatibility together, merging this code and extending it: http://blogs.sun.com/GullFOSS/entry/sun_and_novell _work_together More info here: http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/VBA

here

However, many of us believe that the current lot are living on Stanislaus Lem's Solaris already.

Yes. At last year's JavaOne Matt Howitt demoed a Playstation 1 emulator written in Java. He ran three or four different games simultaniously without any performance problems, and went through some of the code. And this was with software rendering only, no OpenGL layer. He said he would open source it, but unfortunately no code has appeared yet.

So running a little x86 emulator should be no problem...

Eclipse and NetBeans are both written in Java, albeit with different GUI toolkits. Eclipse uses SWT, while NetBeans uses Swing.

You'd think that Eclipse would be faster due to SWT interfacing with the native widget set, but I guess this shows that GUI speed isn't everything. As a side note, Azureus also uses SWT.

Actually Java provides a CipherOutputStream supporting all of the AES candidates right out of the box. It wouldn't be too hard to write something yourself. Although for real security, I'd put my trust in the experts. You can screw up encryption if you do it wrong. Truecrypt is pretty slick and the price is right.

All systems have vulnerabilities, how can they say that with a straight face?

Alternatively, you could go out and buy something like this. I've seen one of these things in action, and while it might be overkill for all but the biggest operations, it's still really, really damn cool.

As I see it, this is actually one instance where you only fear something if you've done something wrong; I mean ... why should you fear an audit if you're using legal software?

How do you prove it is legal software? Just show the shrinkwrap box? Bzzzt! Try again. The BSA wants proof of purchase; that includes sales receipts. Frankly, I am not sure I could find the shrinkwrap boxes for any of my legal copies anymore, let alone the damned receipts. There is no presumption of innocence; contrary to all US law, you must prove yourself innocent - the BSA does not have to prove you are guilty.

Check this case:
http://www.sun.com/customers/storage/ernie_ball.xm l

The company was found to be out of compliance by a mere eight percent for its Microsoft desktop products (and even that small figure was accidental non-compliance, resulting from PCs being passed down to administrative staff without first having the hard drives wiped clean). Rather than fight the accusations, the company elected to pay the $90,000 in fines and legal fees...

• J2ME CLDC
• J2ME CDC
• J2ME JSR-184
• J2ME M3G

It was a dark day for Linux when Linus said he didn't believe in kernel debuggers.

Last time I had a good look at what was on offer while developing a filesystem for multiple operating systems, I compared the tools for Linux to Windows, MacOSX, IRIX and Solaris.

Windows was clearly the best for remote kernel debugging with windbg and I don't see that changing anytime soon. A fully fledged debugger, automatic download of kernel symbols from Microsoft and your own repository, reliable capture of dumps etc. That and the API documentation made the black box nature of the O/S a much smaller issue than the open source community would like us to believe. I was always so much more confident if we had a crash due to our software at a customer site that with Windows we had the best chance of capturing and hopefully identifying the problem.

For live debugging IRIX was the best with icrash. Its port to Linux, lcrash, was not as good and reliable at the time, maybe its better now but the lack of symbol files it need on Linux always made it frustrating. And now IRIX is dead.

I've heard some really good things about dtrace, so Solaris and Mac look to have the best live debugging and tracing tool there is today...I see some progress on Linux ports which is great to see.

But when it comes to kernel debugging on Linux, the picture is still bleak.

"Javascript is object oriented? I didn't know that.", but nobody seems keen to tell anyone else

Bowen cited several reasons why he finds Google Apps attractive. "It's a different sort of computing strategy," he said. "It takes the desktop out of the way so you're running a very thin client. From a security and management standpoint that would have some advantages."
....
Bowen said he's in talks with the aviation safety agency's main hardware supplier, Dell Computer, to determine if it could deliver Linux-based computers capable of accessing Google Apps through a non-Microsoft browser once the FAA's XP-based computers pass their shelf life. "We have discussions going on with Dell," Bowen said. "We're trying to figure out what our roadmap will be after we're no longer able to acquire Windows XP."

Entry level users need a lot of hand-holding at learning their new computer. Their learning will not consist of back-end computer administration; but, instead, it will be how to use their new word processor (OpenOffice.org), their web browser (Firefox, Opera, whatever), whatever antivirus product might be out there for Linux (careful, if Dell does start selling Linux to the common user, Linux will gain market share and the eyes of the cracker crowd), and how to install games and other apps through some sort of GUI package manager (such as Synaptic Package Manager in Ubuntu).

Hopefully, Dell will remember to install Shockwave Flash and Java. Like it or not, the common user will need this when visiting sites like http://www.shockwave.com/ or http://games.yahoo.com/ to play their favorite games. And as I recently learned, installing Java on Linux is not the easiest thing to do. The user is not going to want to type wget http://java.sun.com/; apt-get install java java-doc ...; and watch the scary text fly by and maybe understand what they see to comprehend any errors that come up.

To get a little off topic, but avoid posting in two different areas: one thing Dell can do is use all Intel parts. The fully integrated Intel motherboards (audio/video/LAN onboard) would be a good thing to use. As I understand it, Intel is writing a lot of drivers for the Linux community.

http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/hcl/hcts/index.html

For Solaris you can still use zdump, just with a timezone entry instead of /etc/localtime:

zdump -v US/Eastern | grep 2007

From BigAdmin

A few weeks ago Sun released a plugin for Word that allows it to read and wright .odf (i.e. OpenOffice.org) documents.

It's free.

I always knew that Sun's new blackboxes (http://www.sun.com/blackbox) put out so much heat that they're heating the Earth, but I never dreamt that the blackboxes' heat would reach Mars!

--deckert

Sun employee acknowledges somehow that info ..

http://blogs.sun.com/chrisg/date/20070303

''
That there was a worm that successfully exploited the telnet vulnerability in Solaris 10 running around the Internet and more specifically within Sun last week is not news.
''

Ah... it is only $400 per server. But I am happy to sell you the patch for 10,000.

http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/features/techtips/sola ris_dst_addendum.jsp

For MS you can apply the patch to all systems. For Solaris before 8 the cost is $400 _per server_ or _$150K_ for more than 375 servers. See

http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/features/techtips/sola ris_dst_addendum.jsp

Is there actually a patch from Redhat/Suse/etc for systems that are as old as Win2k available?

Sun offers patches for Solaris 8.

Heck, last week I found some Documentation discussing manual workarounds for Java 1.1 (Written around 2005, when several nations first passed their DST changes); although I can't find the link now, and I think you need a Sun Support Contract to view the documentation .

Sigh.

As Schwartz put it recently, there are two kinds of disk: Those that have failed, and those that are going to.

I stand corrected - see: http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/doc/819-6764/6n8onr7p d?a=view

But, the installer does explain (in no uncertain terms) that you should probably disable Network Services - you can alway enable the services you need...

Thanks,

As Zed Shaw [zedshaw.com] says, "if you're ssh'ing in to your servers more than once a week, you haven't automated things enough."

Dude, many data centers have thousands of servers. Sun itself sells a blade system that puts 20 servers in a single rack. In that kind of environment, if you ever ssh into your systems, you haven't automated things enough!

.... but wasn't this just fixed?

http://blogs.sun.com/tpenta/entry/the_in_telnetd_v ulnerability_exploit

tji wrote:

The slashdot crowd has a short memory.. This is not a simple issue of "embarassing the management", as the summary states. In fact, in all the original writeups, I don't remember ever hearing executive passwords being an issue.

I remember reading this in a column in a free weekly computer rag, shortly after it happened. The author of the column wasn't willing to mention "Intel" by name... but he was willing to mention that a vice-president of the company was using the password "vicepresident".

In point of fact, I have a long memory. It is not always very good, however, but in this case I think I did okay (though the password in the story is "pre$isdent"...):

• System Administration as a Criminal Activity or, the Strange Case of Randal Schwartz
• Vulnerability scanning can be hazardous to your career
• The Case of Randal Schwartz

I've experienced Solaris and its predecessors from the early 80's. Their kernels used to crash

You have experience with Solaris but don't realize that Solaris is based on a different code base than predecessors from the early 80's? Solaris is built upon SVR4 while SunOS 4.x and before were based on BSD.

The reason why Solaris was the OS of the dot com era was because is was so reliable. At the Brokerage firms I've worked at you always see Linux crash or hang and Solaris just keeps on running. That's been my experience.

And remember Solaris was designed from the beginning to support SMP, threading, and soft real-time. Things that Linux only later had hacked on (and soft real-time is still not part of Linux).

Solaris 10 is so far ahead of Linux that it's not even worth comparing the two but if you must just look at these New features.

I've experienced Solaris and its predecessors from the early 80's. Their kernels used to crash

You have experience with Solaris but don't realize that Solaris is based on a different code base than predecessors from the early 80's? Solaris is built upon SVR4 while SunOS 4.x and before were based on BSD.

The reason why Solaris was the OS of the dot com era was because is was so reliable. At the Brokerage firms I've worked at you always see Linux crash or hang and Solaris just keeps on running. That's been my experience.

And remember Solaris was designed from the beginning to support SMP, threading, and soft real-time. Things that Linux only later had hacked on (and soft real-time is still not part of Linux).

Solaris 10 is so far ahead of Linux that it's not even worth comparing the two but if you must just look at these New features.

Ok, I can see why someone might of thought this is flamebait. Here's some proof.

http://docs-pdf.sun.com/817-0574/817-0574.pdf

Then, check this patch out:

http://sunsolve.sun.com/search/document.do?assetke y=urn:cds:docid:1-21-118833-36-1

Then, check out which problems this patch solves, but obsoletes older patches that didn't solve the problem all the way. Next, check out which problems this patch fixes for other patches applied. Finally, check out which problems this patch causes (Note 74) !!!!!

Now tell me you'd rather use this shitfest then something like debian or RH.

Ok, I can see why someone might of thought this is flamebait. Here's some proof.

http://docs-pdf.sun.com/817-0574/817-0574.pdf

Then, check this patch out:

http://sunsolve.sun.com/search/document.do?assetke y=urn:cds:docid:1-21-118833-36-1

Then, check out which problems this patch solves, but obsoletes older patches that didn't solve the problem all the way. Next, check out which problems this patch fixes for other patches applied. Finally, check out which problems this patch causes (Note 74) !!!!!

Now tell me you'd rather use this shitfest then something like debian or RH.

My understanding is that JSE6 is not GPL'd because they did not want to delay its release. This means that the old licensing concerns with distributing Java on GPL'd platforms are still a concern. Though much if not most of the JVM has already been "open source," they were not GPL'd. JSE7 will be GPL'd if all goes according to plan, however, and Sun is now aiming to go straight to the GPL3. Here is JSE6's current license.

I'd suspect Sun holds this patent..

Java Strings can't capitalize themselves for security and performance reasons. Immutable strings prevent people from mucking with the string's contents while you aren't paying attention (from another thread, or in a subclass of String), and having a constant fixed length prevents unnecessary memory allocation. The class is also implemented as final for these reasons. StringBuffer is the class that should implement the capatalize() function, but unfortunatley it's missing there too. =P

You really should look at Solaris Event Port Completion. It may not have everything you're looking for, but it should help. It does a good job of bridging what exists in Unix while adding a lot of functionality.

The referenced sun.com documents are quite old, and don't include anything in modern Solaris and OpenSolaris derived OSs.

Realtime support has been included in the mainline kernel for almost a whole four months now.

You are talking mostly bollocks, probably because you don't program using the Windows API

Anyway, PThreads is better. The reason is that Win32 gives you a fixed set of synchronization primitives. If you can solve your problem with those primitives. they work great. If you can't, you are completely stuck.

And PThreads also gives you a fixed set of primitives. In some respects they are more powerful, in others they are weaker. This is a bullshit strawman.

For example, it used to be that a socket handle was not a synchronization object, so you couldn't integrate select() calls with other synchronization primitives.

WTF?

1. select() has nothing to do with synchronization. Although it does have something to do with scheduling.
2. select() can't wait on "synchronization primitives" under *nix. Really. Try man select . It works with FDs, only.
3. select() is not a core function of the Windows API. It is part of Winsock, which uses lower level scheduling primitives.
4. Finally, if you want to do asynchronous development with Windows you use Async IO, not select. Async IO is built on top of Events, which are synchronization primitives.

That brings me to the next point: in Unix there is no wait to wait on multiple synchronization primitives (as opposed to FDs) at once, and only a few primitives support a timed wait. In Windows you have WaitForMultipleObjectsEx. Look it up.

Let me be clear on the difference: in Windows the scheduler API for waiting on IO and synchronization primitives is fully integrated - you can wait on any combination of IO and sync objects in the same Wait call. You must of course be using Windows Async IO which uses Events rather than FDs as the waitable object. Under *nix you can wait for multiple condition variables, or multiple file descriptors, or a single mutex / thread / process. There is no way to link an FD to a condition variable.

PThreads gives you condition variables. They are harder to program, but once you understand them, you can use them to synchronize on absolutely anything. You aren't dependent on the OS to have foreseen your special needs and provided special synchronization primitives to meet them.

In Windows you have Mutexes, Events and Semaphores. Events alone are sufficient to provide almost identical functionality to condition variables. You may have missed that memo.

I say "almost identical" because the underlying scheduler behaviour is slightly different, which makes it very difficult to perfectly emulate Pthreads on Win32. Read Strategies for Implementing POSIX Condition Variables on Win32.

If you really want the Win32 model, it is easy enough to build it on top of PThreads, but there is no way to build PThreads on top of Win32.

Cough. Bullshit. Cough. Read Porting of Win32 API WaitFor to Solaris Platform to get a clue. It is possible to build Pthreads on top of Win32, and vice versa. Neither emulation is particularly efficient though.

The complaint about lost signals in PThreads means that the author is using them incorrectly.

The complaint about weakness in the Win32 scheduling API means that the author is using it incorrectly.

This initial plug-in application will support the conversion of text documents (.doc/.odt) only and full support of spreadsheet and presentation documents will be available in the final version, expected in April.

Based on StarOffice code owned by SUN which has a cross-liscensing agreement w/ MS. MS might not want to cavalierly toss patent-nukes that way. At worst, StarOffice is cheap relative to MSOffice or even Corel WP here.

I actually did publish a book that I authored in HTML. More precisely, we used HTML run through a really ugly preprocessor that one of the original authors of the book created while she was teaching herself Perl.

Fortunately, our publisher found an SGML/XML wizard who did a very good job of converting the HTML to XML, which then got converted PDF using an off-the-shelf XSL-FO processor. I was very impressed with his work, without which the conversion would have been a total nightmare. It was still very tedious, though, because HTML is not a true structured format, and you cannot completely automate its conversion.

It would, of course, have been much more efficient to have authored the document in XML in the first place. I remember this actually being proposed back in 1998 for an earlier version of the book. (I was not a co-author back then, but I was working for the department that owned the content.) The manager who responsible for this had zero interest: HTML got the job done, she didn't have the resources to do a big XML conversion. Never mind the huge inefficiency of authoring that book, and a lot of other content related to the Java SE platform, in plain HTML. Only now, after this manager has left the company and it has become painfully obvious that they can no longer afford to hack such a huge mountain of HTML code, is the company getting round to making the conversion.

HTML is just not a good format. It's barely adequate for creating web pages, and totally useless for anything else.

Once you have determined that a device can be replaced, use the zpool replace command to replace the device. If you are replacing the damaged device with another different device, use the following command:

# zpool replace tank c1t0d0 c2t0d0
# zpool status tank
    pool: tank
  state: DEGRADED
reason: One or more devices is being resilvered.
action: Wait for the resilvering process to complete.
      see: http://www.sun.com/msg/ZFS-XXXX-08
  scrub: none requested
config:
                NAME STATE READ WRITE CKSUM
                tank DEGRADED 0 0 0
                    mirror DEGRADED 0 0 0
                        replacing DEGRADED 0 0 0 52% resilvered
                            c1t0d0 ONLINE 0 0 0
                            c2t0d0 ONLINE 0 0 0
                        c1t1d0 ONLINE 0 0 0

Once you have determined that a device can be replaced, use the zpool replace command to replace the device. If you are replacing the damaged device with another different device, use the following command:

# zpool replace tank c1t0d0 c2t0d0
# zpool status tank
    pool: tank
  state: DEGRADED
reason: One or more devices is being resilvered.
action: Wait for the resilvering process to complete.
      see: http://www.sun.com/msg/ZFS-XXXX-08
  scrub: none requested
config:
                NAME STATE READ WRITE CKSUM
                tank DEGRADED 0 0 0
                    mirror DEGRADED 0 0 0
                        replacing DEGRADED 0 0 0 52% resilvered
                            c1t0d0 ONLINE 0 0 0
                            c2t0d0 ONLINE 0 0 0
                        c1t1d0 ONLINE 0 0 0

Sun Ray Clients.

Bull. Swing implements its own 100% Java widget toolkit with various custom "look and feel" hooks. It cares not-a-bit what GTK+ theme you are using. It doesn't even know what GTK+ is.

Wrong. Starting with Java 1.4.2, Swing uses GTK+'s theme under UNIX - if it's available, of course. Unfortunately it doesn't like certain GTK+ theme engines, which is where my original "blank widget" problem came from.

Eclipse writes everything to a workspace, which the user chooses on startup and can exist anywhere on the file system.

Also wrong.

Ever notice how Eclipse asks you which workspace you want to use when it starts up? (And that you can tell it to use one by default?)

Ever wonder where it stores the information?

It's a directory called "configuration" under the Eclipse install. Go ahead, go look for it.

Within that directory there's a directory called ".settings" (so ls -a) and within that there's a file called "org.eclipse.ui.ide.prefs". This contains the preference information for the IDE.

And it's stored in the Eclipse install.

It's this reason that Eclipse won't work under Vista unless you're running as Admin with UAC turned off.

Note that, obviously, this information can't be created if the directory is read-only, so you may have to try running Eclipse as root before you'll see it create the data. And obviously if you haven't been running it as root you'd have to set the workspace directory every single time since it won't have been able to save that configuration data.

Or, if running Eclipse as root makes you uncomfortable, make /usr/local/eclipse3.2/configuration world-writable and see what happens.

FYI - maybe you know this already - SUN as well as other JAVA vendors provide a tool to patch older JAVA versions.

I am currently going through the patching process.

It is pretty straightforward. Nevertheless this silly excercise reinforces my believe that DST is one of the single most stupid endeavors humanity ever engaged in. I just want it to go away.

How the hell do we update our old Solaris boxes that haven't had support in years?