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Would that make Project Blackbox the dark matter everybody is talking about?

Aren't they Solaris, and Coffee Beans, the N1 Star, and StarSuite, as well as GSun and iSun?

Aren't they Solaris, and Coffee Beans, the N1 Star, and StarSuite, as well as GSun and iSun?

Aren't they Solaris, and Coffee Beans, the N1 Star, and StarSuite, as well as GSun and iSun?

Aren't they Solaris, and Coffee Beans, the N1 Star, and StarSuite, as well as GSun and iSun?

The Java BluePrints web site has guidelines on using Ajax and Java: http://java.sun.com/blueprints/ajax.html It presents guidelines on using Ajax with the Java EE 5 and J2EE 1.4 SDK. The Java EE 5 sample code has been tested with Sun's open source application server (http://glassfish.dev.java.net/) -Larry Freeman Manager, Java BluePrints Sun Microsystems

> Look at the Java EE 5 API for yourself: http://java.sun.com/javaee/5/docs/api/

Then when you're baffled by reading reference docs, go read the tutorial: http://java.sun.com/javaee/5/docs/tutorial/doc/

> Look at the Java EE 5 API for yourself: http://java.sun.com/javaee/5/docs/api/

Then when you're baffled by reading reference docs, go read the tutorial: http://java.sun.com/javaee/5/docs/tutorial/doc/

This usually translates as "I don't understand all of the Java features - therefore it must be BAD.

Yes, it is very bad if your developers can't easily understand the tools they're working with. That directly leads to poor software systems that will often completely fail.

Look at the Java EE 5 API for yourself: http://java.sun.com/javaee/5/docs/api/

There are literally hundreds of interfaces and classes you'd need to understand to have a full knowledge of Java EE 5. Of course, that's in addition to the hundreds of interfaces and classes of the standard Java class library.

Just look at some of the class names. One particularly bad one is javax.faces.component.ActionSource2. Why the fuck is a class called "ActionSource2"? To me, that's a sign of very poor object design. Unfortunately, this is the sort of stuff we see throughout the Java world.

Project Looking Glass was 'way ahead of the Vista 3D presentation, and still offers some cool effects that aren't available on Vista yet. I predict that soon after Vista comes out the OS community revives Looking Glass, couples it with Croquet and humiliates Micrososft by doing it on half the power at a fraction of the development cost.

http://www.sun.com/software/looking_glass/

http://www.opencroquet.org/

Could this be done for java apps with the skinnable java package javax.swing.plaf.synth?
I am imaginging an SVG generating interface
http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.5.0/docs/api/javax/swin g/plaf/synth/package-summary.html

I'd love to see Sun implement this as an extention to their Project Blackbox. Now you can not only have a datacentre anywhere you like, but you can also move it about a little after the crane has gone ;-)

I'd love to see Sun implement this as an extention to their Project Blackbox. Now you can not only have a datacentre anywhere you like, but you can also move it about a little after the crane has gone ;-)

How does base development relate to preferred OS choice? It looks like Solaris 10 is the recommended 64 bit DB environment.

http://www.sun.com/smi/Press/sunflash/2005-11/sunf lash.20051115.4.xml

Now they've put in a box for burial?

This may seem weird but should not be so surprising. Autism is

classified as a neurodevelopmental disorder that manifests itself in markedly abnormal social interaction, communication ability, patterns of interests, and patterns of behavior...
...autism manifests itself in delays in "social interaction, language as used in social communication, or symbolic or imaginative play".

I have just been reading Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations where through a series of questions he gets to the complexity of language learning, how much of a social process it is, how much it involves games - should in fact be seen as a set of overlapping games. When playing with a human being, there is always immediate feedback between a child and the people and objects around it, which involves smiles, cuddles and frowns, movements, hopping up and down, hiding, etc. The people on kids programs try the best to do that, but they can never directly respond to the child's immediate emotions, and they are in the end only ever a two dimensional picture on a box. So that the objects they move don't have a physical presence for the child. If those objects fall they can't hurt the child, if the people speak about an object, the child can't participate, if the person lies the child can't be deceived.

Children placed all day in front of a TV may not cry, but there is something fundamental that they will be missing.

I wonder how easy the transition will be for them to leave Linux behind in favor of a sun powered setup.

Oh yes. I went there.

Its the same deal with Sun's current development ZFS: it lacks the option to decently make a backup.

See Solaris ZFS Administration Guide, Chapter 6 Working With ZFS Snapshots and Clones.

What amazes me is how many tools are out and available online regarding this sort of pattern recognition development. Since a lot of people know Java, I'm would encourage you to use the Java Media Framework (free from Sun). Once you have those libraries installed, it's quite easy to start editing sound, images & video. You might need to grab and install codecs if you're doing video analysis but I think almost all image codecs are supported.

I'm not going to lie, the video computation can be quite heavily but thankfully that framework is implemented such that the entire video doesn't have to be loaded into memory, just a one frame buffer analysis can be used if you want.

The last thing you would need is simply the know-how on programming these analysis algorithms. There are sites out there with a large wealth of up-to-date algorithms. An example would be the text book style site of pattern recognition or image processing. While this doesn't teach you how to do things, it does contain the raw resources and algorithms. General resources like the computer vision homepage exist that serve as links to all kinds of resources. Unfortunately, I know of no real solid books that contain everything out there because this field is so rapidly developing. My professors taught me from hand printed slides in a large compendium they had accumulated over the last couple years.

The last piece missing is the data to analyze. While you might not have the ultra high resolution Van Gogh images to do this yourself, it may be possible to visit museums with 6 MP cameras to obtain your own data. Failing that, there are repositories online that sometimes contain image information you can start with. While this may not satisfy your specific needs, it sure is great for the lazy developer like myself.

Lastly, I will mention citeseer and Google Scholar for cutting edge papers that you might want to try implementing. Distributing these algorithms and building a good GUI can be tricky but really anyone can build the backend. I heavily recommend experimenting with this if it interests you.

Here. A tad pricy though. The IBM Gigabit Ethernet-SX PCI-X Adapter is also nice.

> In fact, 315 TB should be enough for anybody.

No, 2^128 bits should be enough for anybody. Everybody, in fact.

In an environment that cannot even run on their machines or in their own operating system? They're basically saying "We're cool, we're tech 'leet, but our hardware and software are worthless!"

Damn, you're right! Except you're wrong. OK, you're right about one thing, they don't officially support Solaris, but it does run on their machines . Oh, and it sounds like there are projects out there that make the SL protocols available on open systems, which means if it can't be accessed from Solaris today, that's not going to be true for long.

But aside from that, and the point others made that there's no company in the world that makes everything necessary for their own survival, spot on.

you're right. you can't perform full diagnostics on the chip before it is packaged. tiny contact points that don't have wires yet and the chip would probably just go up in a puff of smoke if it wasn't in a package. you still can do optical validation, not that is worth that much.

I didn't consider the shearing from heating, how much you want to bet that there are patents for dealing with that.

cheaper prices are probably found in the volumes you do rather than any minor differences (like two wafers versus one big on in a package).

for either one if one to three cores have crapped you can still sell it as a single or dual core device. I would imagine. but likely nobody's yield would be so low for that to make sense. And you would probably would not want to mix real single/dual cores and quads that have been refurbed. (who knows, maybe Intel will try that)

I want an UltraSparc T2 soo bad. I wish they would make a little affordable devel workstation so us normal people could have one to devel on. Finally a machine powerful enough to run Java. (can execute 64 threads) ... even an UltraSparc T1 pulls 70 watts with eight cores. (32 threads)

you're right. you can't perform full diagnostics on the chip before it is packaged. tiny contact points that don't have wires yet and the chip would probably just go up in a puff of smoke if it wasn't in a package. you still can do optical validation, not that is worth that much.

I didn't consider the shearing from heating, how much you want to bet that there are patents for dealing with that.

cheaper prices are probably found in the volumes you do rather than any minor differences (like two wafers versus one big on in a package).

for either one if one to three cores have crapped you can still sell it as a single or dual core device. I would imagine. but likely nobody's yield would be so low for that to make sense. And you would probably would not want to mix real single/dual cores and quads that have been refurbed. (who knows, maybe Intel will try that)

I want an UltraSparc T2 soo bad. I wish they would make a little affordable devel workstation so us normal people could have one to devel on. Finally a machine powerful enough to run Java. (can execute 64 threads) ... even an UltraSparc T1 pulls 70 watts with eight cores. (32 threads)

You made up the first example too.

Sun's JRE 1.5 is about 15 MB for most platforms. The JDK, which you won't need unless you want to develop Java apps, is about 50 MB for Windows and Linux and it comes with the JRE.

There are other JDK distributions, bundled Netbeans or web services development pack for example, these are over 100 MB. Either you are trolling or you've downloaded the wrong package.

You made up the first example too.

Sun's JRE 1.5 is about 15 MB for most platforms. The JDK, which you won't need unless you want to develop Java apps, is about 50 MB for Windows and Linux and it comes with the JRE.

There are other JDK distributions, bundled Netbeans or web services development pack for example, these are over 100 MB. Either you are trolling or you've downloaded the wrong package.

System Maintenance in Progress
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Or buy the manufacturer's 4 year onsite warrantee and let them handle it. Not worth my time to bother with fixing a $6K computer. Just buy a new one and stay productive. I run the UNIX boxes. Takes about 1 day a month to keep them patched. We keep the hardware covered under warrantee until it is time to replace it. The Sun T1000 servers rock! http://store.sun.com/CMTemplate/CEServlet?process= SunStore&cmdViewProduct_CP&catid=153483

When I graduated from college almost 20 years ago, I made about $14/hr to start (I was salaried). After 7 years of very hard work and constant evening college courses, I was worth $50K/yr to my employer. I thought I was worth more, so I left. Three years later, I became a contractor at $125/hr - that's about $250K/yr if you are fully employed. Times changed and my rate had to go down. It is now about $85/hr after 20 years of IT experience. I'm no longer driven by money, time off is more important. I'm very near being able to retire and **never** have to work again.

I have ZERO certifications. When I was in a position to hire folks, I ignored certifications except Oracle and Cisco. Today, I'd also pay attention to Security certifications - more because IT security folks really need to have a network of contacts to stay current and have a real love for learning that the certs demonstrate.

For development talent, I ask questions (that is/was my skill) about their coding style, free time activities, and ask them to draw some UML diags. We've outsourced our UNIX admin overseas and some java, but we'll always need local architects and lead designers in-house.

Being qualified isn't just about knowing the C/C++/Java language (PHP, Python, JavaScript are tools - IMHO), it is about working with a team of other developers, understanding version control, design tools and techniques.

These: http://www.sun.com/training/certification/

That, and/or bind, bind, bind. Concatenating user input into your SQL statements is bad on both security and performance.

(not least that our data center is at best 100 Mb/s and our software is actually more data than computation heavy)

Sounds like a trade-auditing project I was once on.

If the 10,000 trades are easily broken into small groups, such as by the initial letter of the ticker symbol, and if all the data for the analysis is fetched in the first step, you can in fact spread the processing over 26-odd machines for a speedup of (fixed part + (per-ticker-symbol part/26)).

I have an article on doing the load-balancing part of this kind of processing, albeit on a large multiprocessor, at http://www.sun.com/blueprints/0605/819-2888.pdf[In PDF]. As you've already guessed, sometimes the problem doesn't decompose nicely into parts that can be distributed to machines far from the database.

The rule of the thumb is that grid does distributed computation, where you ship small amounts of data to many CPUs. If you have large amounts of data, you need to have previously distributed data stores, and then you ship the processing to reside with it, instead of the other way around. Alas, some folks call the latter grid, when it should be called something like "data grid" (;-))

--dave

I'm very sorry, but Java 6 is adding built-in JavaScript support (ref). I think Sun thought the issue was not confusing enough.

9600 * 100000 = 915 Mbps, or 114 MBps, or 410 GB per hour.

If the system works 24/7 it will be producing about 10 TB per day. To record all that you need just two Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 drives (750 GB each) that are rotated; one records the streaming data in real time, another gets asynchronously dumped onto the tape in an automatic tape changer. Sun offers 15 TB in a 4U rackmount box, as an example, for mere $10K. So a daily visit to swap the tapes would suffice. This particular unit has bandwidth of 576 GB per hour, faster even than is needed; there are 38 tape cartridges inside, switched automatically.

There don't seem to be any technical challenges to building such a system. Tape media is very inexpensive - as if the cost is an issue... and you need about 100 of such boxes to cover the whole country, and the government can afford to have a whole team of technicians sitting around, not just one visiting tech.

In reality you need less because voice calls are not continuous, and the codec will not be coding the silence, so your data rate is lower than that. Modem and fax calls can be received and stored as demodulated, digital data, so they will take very little space.

"For years, most operating systems have been designed for 2-4 processors, with some handling more [redhat.com],...".

I am reminded of the Dilbert cartoon with the Unix guru.

"Here's a nickel kid, get yourself a better computer."

No offense, kid, but I was on an 8 processor computer back in '89. You are too busy being all smart and shit and talking like you have a clue to actually find anything out.

"For years, most operating systems have been designed for 2-4 processors, with some handling more [redhat.com],...".

I am reminded of the Dilbert cartoon with the Unix guru.

"Here's a nickel kid, get yourself a better computer."

No offense, kid, but I was on an 8 processor computer back in '89. You are too busy being all smart and shit and talking like you have a clue to actually find anything out.

Ok, maybe they never called Java2 1.4 Java 4, but that's my point: with Java2 1.5, they officially changed this approach. There will never be anything called "1.6" when it is released (well, maybe somewhere buried in the code or in some arcane property)--it will be called Java 6. It's not a guess that they will be Java 6 or Java 7--that's the new naming scheme.

Which is what I was trying to get at--naming something FooBar2 3.4 is absolutely crazy from a branding and public relations perspective. Sure, it all makes sense from a code/product version number thing. But that stuff should be internal. And the fact that Intel isn't getting that is just weird to me--they made tons of money off of Pentium branding. How could they have thought Core 2 Duo was a good thing? Even something lame like CoreExtreme would have been better than the confusion that is going to come from Core 2 branding.

I have always felt Sun made a mistake calling Java 1.2 Java2/Java 1.2. They should have just called it Java 2.0. Sure, it was very similar, but it's not like code for 1.1 or 1.2 was easily interchangable. Then they could have had Java 1.3 be Java 2.1 and Java 1.4 be Java 2.2--because that's what they were like. Anything Java 1.2.x or greater was mostly compatible (save for library calls). But the differences between 1.1-1.2 and differences between 1.2-1.3-1.4 aren't even the same kind of differences.

Which means Java 5 would have been Java 3.0--and let's face it, with generics and autoboxing, it merits a new major revision number to communicate severe incompabilities.

Anyways, as a Java programmer who always wondered what Sun was thinking with their whole Java2 campaign, I'm just flabbergasted that Intel would fall in the same trap.

Might I suggest something else, that already runs on > 100 processors?

"Star Office is the commercial version: http://www.sun.com/software/star/staroffice/index. jsp [sun.com] , whereas is OpenOffice is the name for the free version."

I know, Star Office right now is a mere placeholder for the bigger companies that won't use something if it doesn't cost money. The only buyers of Star Office are those where Star Office is part of a service contract.

"Most non-techies I know still used MS-Office bought or pirated."

Most MS-Office (windows and mac) users I know had horrible problems with it that don't exist with Openoffice, with the only reason for staying with MS-Office is the 'status quo', or other people in any form (bosses/colleages requiring/using it, which is another form of status quo). It's never a reason of capabilities, the only other reason I've seen is compatability of the macro's in cases of horrible piles of connected 'office documents' with wads of half-broken macro's that together attempt to implement all sorts of business processes. In those cases, they stick with their now half-broken 'system' because it took so much time to get is to the state it is today and nobody dares touch it anyway because it's so broken.

Sun's UltraSparc T1 has 8 cores, 32 threads. So, will Intel catch up anytime soon?

Star Office is the commercial version: http://www.sun.com/software/star/staroffice/index. jsp , whereas is OpenOffice is the name for the free version. Most non-techies I know still used MS-Office bought or pirated.

WTF? Every ATCA blade server or CGL-compatible blade comes with RS232. Have you never heard of a serial port server? Those boxes are damn convenient. Oh, and... here's a 2006 ATCA blade server I worked with (and still do, sigh) that has a RS232 port: Sun Microsystems CP3020.

http://blogs.sun.com/sbullen/entry/who_buys_cisco_ 3750_s

It's a minor win for Linux. Despite the headline, this is not a PC, it's a "thin client". (In the original sense of the word, where the client did actual client-side work, as opposed to the graphic terminals that masquerade as "thin clients.) So this is just one of many systems that use Linux as an embedded OS. Nothing to sneer at, but not a major win either.

What would be a major win is if this were a "real" PC, with a word processor, spreadsheet, etc., all running under Linux. Not going to happen any time soon.

I don't think technicians can make a difference but the OSS community itself can. There are many cases where the OSS software simply doesn't cut it but using the original software is blocked because "its closed source" (or something similiar) and so people will have to cope with the OSS variants. Naturally you can overcome this, but by this time most people will have already gotten a first impression.

Example? I'm a Java developer and enthousiast. When it comes to Linux users who are interested in Java but run into weird problems the first question to solve this is: "Are you using the gcj compiler by any chance? Yes? Then ditch that P.O.S., goto http://java.sun.com/ and get the Sun JDK for Linux". I've explained numerous of times that gcj isn't Java but an OSS variant and simply doesn't work as the authors claim. And the fact that this is the defacto standard on new Linux environments can (and is) a turn off for many Java interested Linux users. There are a lot of people who became less enthousiast with OSS after this experience and as such approach it with a little reluctance.

How hard would it have been for the "OSS community" (I know; generalizing) to simply accept Java the way it is and instead of distributing a broken product just refer to Sun ? Ofcourse this is all seen from my Java-liking perspective, but I still think that people should be less anal about some things.

Im Java fan, and I always read Mr. Gosling blog, and one time he recommend BlueJ, I never test but should be for very beginners developers.

Actually, it would be just as funny if someone was actually storing XML in MySql or PostgreSQL. Come to think of it, I bet someone does.

Oh yeah... Sun's Identity Manager stores everything in a database (among which MySQL is a choice)... and pretty much all of it is BLOBs full of XML. Very disturbing...

Transmeta's original claim to fame was low power consumption. Sadly they haven't done that well in the market.

Sun is currently making big claims for its new multicore servers, dubbing it CoolThreads technology. Their blurb is 5x the performance for 1/5 the power and 1/4 the space.

A better way to show you what Java Web Start does is to just send you to Sun's Demo Page or, if you prefer, One of the sample applications.

A better way to show you what Java Web Start does is to just send you to Sun's Demo Page or, if you prefer, One of the sample applications.