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Solaris is free to download and install and to use for ONLY 90 DAYS! They changed this licence only few days ago. http://www.sun.com/software/solaris/popup.jsp?info=17 Quote: Solaris 10 Download Customers bla bla bla... Please remember, your right to use Solaris acquired as a download is limited to a trial of 90 days, unless you acquire a service contract for the downloaded Software.

If you want the source you can get the info to obtain it from here http://wikis.sun.com/display/OpenSSO/CVS+Tags

I'm grabbing the source now.

OpenSSO is not a trademark of Oracle/Sun, you can see a list of trademarks for Sun at http://www.sun.com/suntrademarks/

just what the point of this hire is? Apple-bashing aside, is it just to put the shiny open-source face on Google? That didn't exactly save his previous employer, who also hired him for apparent PR value and where he accomplished nothing of sufficient significance to merit inclusion on his Wikipedia bio.

Perhaps if Apple is very, very lucky, Google will hire Jonathan Schwartz too.

Better not: they'd know that SETI is useless and a waste of money.

If they understand orders of magnitude, they might know that Paulson's 800 Billion bank bailout or the $ 1 trillion (and counting) Iraq/Afghan wars could have funded SETI for more than 150,000 years which is a respectable percentage of our life as modern humans. That the costs

And for all those languages, nobody wants to implement a DirectX wrapper library. Since you can’t use it on any platform other than Windows anyway. And so it’s an annoying waste of time.

Oh really?

DirectPython
Java3d
DirectX SDK For Delphi
DirectX Bindings for Haskell
OCaml library that uses DirectX

In the long run, DirectX will go the way of Internet Explorer 6.

Such has been claimed since the mid 90s and all who have claimed such have been wrong over and over.

You obviously have a huge bias against Java for emotional reasons, but may I point out that extremely comprehensive 3D desktop effects existed in Java with Project Looking Glass long before they became standard fare on Windows. From Nasa WorldWind to Jake2 to JSatTrack and a zillion custom (usually vertical) apps, a lot of folks have dispelled the myth that Java is slow for 3D work. In addition, there are plenty of people doing 2D scenegraph work in Java to create some fairly revolutionary UI's, such as Project Piccolo. It's actually more than fast enough to keep a GPU occupied.

Why don't more desktop packages use Java? Not sure, but it's not due to speed. I use OpenOffice, Eclipse, and XMind on a regular basis and there's a lot of Java in there. I've played online Java games, although they tend to use Flash a lot these days.

Okay, I can't find any definite reference (I guess that would be HotSpot source code, ultimately), but all I've found so far agrees that object overhead in Java is 2 machine words - so, 2*4=8 on 32-bit, 2*8=16 on 64-bit. That makes sense, since it would directly correspond to vtable pointer + monitor pointer.

Integer would add an extra word to that (on 64-bit it would be an extra 8 bytes, not 4, even thought int is always 32-bit - this is because objects on heap are always padded to word boundary).

Apparently many integers are pre-allocated. I can't remember if it's 0-255, or -127-127.

It's documented in JLS - when boxing any integral type in range -128..127, results of all boxing operations must compare equal for identity (i.e. be the same object). The requirement doesn't, technically, extend to valueOf(), but it makes sense that it follows suit.

I seem to remember experimenting further with ArrayLists - I'm pretty sure ArrayLists boost their capacity by just 6 elements every time they fill up.

I only have JDK 6 handy, so the following is from the source code for ArrayList in that:

int newCapacity = (oldCapacity * 3)/2 + 1;

and initial capacity is 10.

When you do ensureCapacity, it then picks either the result computed by that formula, or the one you specified as an argument, whichever is larger.
So ensureCapacity(11) gives 16 - or 6*4=24 extra bytes; and the following ensureCapacity(17) gives 25, or 8*4=32 extra bytes - which matches the values that you've provided.

Also, the JavaDoc for the class says:

The details of the growth policy are not specified beyond the fact that adding an element has constant amortized time cost.

The highlighted part precludes any kind of policy that increments in constant-size chunks.

I remember talking to a friend working with C#, and he said it had more sane allocation sizes. (though he presented no proof of it)

That one is easy to check as well. From the source code for List in .NET 3.5 SP1:

int newCapacity = _items.Length == 0? _defaultCapacity : _items.Length * 2;

So it doubles capacity every time. Default capacity is 4, though that is only used when list has at least 1 item - for an empty list, a shared empty array instance is used.

Sometimes I wished `break` could take argument of how many levels it should break out of

It can in PHP. Java and Perl have a different solution: label the start of a loop and then use that label as the argument of break. In C, it's just a matter of discipline to use goto only to replace a throw or labeled break.

It's interesting what Schwartz has to say about how things work "on the inside". Companies bluffing and calling each other's bluff. Showing up and going "I'm watching you". His description makes it sound a bit like Jobs & Gates hadn't really thought their cunning plan all the way through, which I would think is unlikely. I'd have guessed they were just testing Sun's resolve, finding out how Sun evaluated their own patent portfolio, investigating whether these projects (Looking Glass and OpenOffice) were just a tech demo or were something that Sun wanted to stand by and protect. What his blog post didn't mention was on how many occasions Sun did the same thing to another company, big or small. It would be laudable if they refused to do that but it would also mean they were deliberately pulling their punches, so it would be a bit surprising from a large corporation.

NetApp sued sun over patents ZFS arguably violated: http://www.sun.com/lawsuit/zfs/. But NetApp alleged that Sun had first demanded patent royalties from NetApp and that they were acting in response to that: http://blogs.netapp.com/dave/2007/09/sun-patent-team.html

Who knows where the truth lies over the ZFS case but it does open the prospect that Sun wasn't sitting passively by and getting threatened by other companies. On the other hand, there could be more to this story than meets the eye (e.g. the kind of high level meetings Schwartz refers to, preceeding the legal letters) in which case it might not be anything like so simple. We've not generally seen Sun visibly holding back (or trying to) the marketplace using patents as much as, say, MS or Apple might have done. But it doesn't mean that given their investment in patents they didn't try to use them.

http://www.sun.com/processors/UltraSPARC-T2/

And the future Ultrasparc T3 will have 16 cores and 8 threads per core for a total of 128 threads per chip

http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2010/02/two-billion-transistor-beasts-power7-and-niagara-3.ars?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss

On Solaris 10, you can avoid the need for root entirely by allowing the http user to bind to port 80.

Get a real high-performance file system. One that's also mature and can actually be recovered if it ever does fail catastrophically. (Yes, ZFS can fail catastrophically. Just Google "ZFS data loss"...)

I just did. On the first page, I got just one result on the first page relating to an event from January 2008 - Joyent. And they managed to recover their data. I did another search - "ZFS lost my data". One example running on FreeBSD 7.2, in which ZFS was not yet production ready. Other examples existed in which people were eventually able to get their data.

The following is an interesting message - http://www.sun.com/msg/ZFS-8000-8A - that seems pretty scary but someone was able to get back their data anyway. All in all, the lack of datapoints for ZFS losing data is actually encouraging. If this were really a problem, I would expect to see a lot more forum posts about this, and people piling on as well. The others are singing ZFS's praises.

People tend not to advertise their failures. And in the enterprise computer arena, losing data is a massive failure.

Or you can just go dig through the OpenSolaris forums...

Get a real high-performance file system. One that's also mature and can actually be recovered if it ever does fail catastrophically. (Yes, ZFS can fail catastrophically. Just Google "ZFS data loss"...)

I just did. On the first page, I got just one result on the first page relating to an event from January 2008 - Joyent. And they managed to recover their data. I did another search - "ZFS lost my data". One example running on FreeBSD 7.2, in which ZFS was not yet production ready. Other examples existed in which people were eventually able to get their data.

The following is an interesting message - http://www.sun.com/msg/ZFS-8000-8A - that seems pretty scary but someone was able to get back their data anyway. All in all, the lack of datapoints for ZFS losing data is actually encouraging. If this were really a problem, I would expect to see a lot more forum posts about this, and people piling on as well. The others are singing ZFS's praises.

Or, you can go to an external provider as others have mentioned. There are more out there than just Amazon, some specializing in data integrity (amazon specifically does NOT guarantee your data, let alone any sort of redundancy/integrity for it Link).

-Tm

That's what ZFS is for.

mount -t gmailfs /disk1 -o username=gmailuser,password=gmailpass
mount -t gmailfs /disk2 -o username=gmailuser,password=gmailpass
mount -t gmailfs /disk3 -o username=gmailuser,password=gmailpass
mount -t gmailfs /disk4 -o username=gmailuser,password=gmailpass
mount -t gmailfs /disk5 -o username=gmailuser,password=gmailpass

zpool create gzfs raidz1 disk1 disk2 disk3 disk4 disk5

Actually.... I think I just found my project for the evening. I mean it's already been done with 12 USB drives

ZFS + L2ARC & ZIL on SSD.

It really doesn't care how big your drives are. Just take all your drives, shove them into a RAIDZ1, (you will be limited by the smallest size hard drive).

Then put ZIL and L2ARC on the SSD cards. Fast AND big.

http://blogs.sun.com/brendan/entry/test

I can't give opinions on all of these (and some are still in development at this time anyway), but here's a list of some languages with paralellism designed in:

• Erlang -- Very popular message passing/actor model based language.
• Scala -- A functional language with actor model concurrency for the JVM.
• Oz -- An exceptionally multiparadigm language.
• Occam-pi -- The modern version of the old occam for transputers; CSP style concurrency (I believe).
• Chapel -- Cray's parallel programming language for supercompters. Cray's entry into DARPA's HPCS programming language competition.
• X10
• Fortress -- Sun's language for serious scientific computing. It was Sun's entry into DARPA's HPCS programming language competition, but lost and is now open sourced.
• Eiffel SCOOP -- An effort to take a CSP model and make it elegantly compatible with object oriented programming

And one of the things one learns early on is to reach for Knuth

Knuth is for computer scientists. Not everybody who writes code meets that definition. A lot of us (and I include myself) don't even qualify as "engineers".

For most programmers, the best way to write good "select random x from 1..n is not to brush up on our algorithmics. That's like fabricating a car part instead of going to the auto supply. (Hey, there's a good reason the car analogy keeps popping up!) You need to rely on standard, well-tested libraries. Josh Bloch even refers to this use case as an example of why you should rely on library code.

I'm a senior programmer, over 10 years experience. I don't think I would have EVER imagined a solution to randomizing that would involve a sort comparison function returning a random result. This is because I have an understanding of the implicit (and in some languages, explicitly documented) total ordering contract imposed on the comparator function.

But you know what? If Microsoft doesn't care for nice things like correctness, why would any big software development company? Excepting cases like Wolfram Research's Mathematica and Autodesk's AutoCAD, of course. And yet they have the balls to call their people software engineers?

I'm not disagreeing with the conclusion that the quick and cheap way is sufficient and satisfactory from both the business standpoint and for this problem the technical standpoint. I'm simply saying that, as a profession, the field is so compromised with crap like that this that it's no wonder most software sucks. It's easy to see how an experienced and knowledgeable developer can be replaced by a couple of best-low-bid hacks.

Of course management rarely sees or understands the difference between throwing a hacked up function at an unimportant problem like this one, and doing the same thing when designing the firmware for a car, a risk calculation algorithm for derivative investments, or the math portion of a CPU. As a result, they'll promote the hack who spewed out this junk to a position working on something important, and the same bad algorithm will get used when it matters, and off we go with the people dying and the lawsuits and the congressional investigations.

Although there might be lots of reasons to use Perl rather than Java (and vice-versa), security against SQL injections is not one of them. Java JDBC has been supporting wildcards (parameters) (using statement.setObject(pos,value);) since day one.

That's not really any different from Fedora, yet businesses still use Redhat.

Uh, what? Redhat is RHEL, for which support is available. Fedora is RHEL beta, and is unsupported. Solaris is supported, OpenSolaris is unsupported. So in fact, it is entirely different.

Why are you trolling Martin?

The Sun page linked to in the article summary (http://www.sun.com/software/solaris/lifecycle.xml) has a section titled "Life Cycle Model for the OpenSolaris Operating System".

The page linked by the Phoronix article lists support dates for OpenSolaris 2009.06 (the last regular release) out to 2014.

One big difference between the regular Solaris ten-years-for-every-version support and OpenSolaris support is that if a new OpenSolaris release already exists, Sun may choose to make fixes in the current version only and ask you to upgrade if you want-- i.e. backport requests are not automatically approved.

Anyone know a good place to get access to ZFS in another place? Would BSD or FUSE on Linux be better?

FreeBSD - ZFS is no longer in experimental status as of version 8.0. I haven't heard anyone recommend FUSE on Linux. As far as other BSDs go, I know that at least OpenBSD has no plans to include it at this stage.

http://kerneltrap.org/mailarchive/openbsd-misc/2009/1/17/4750954 - But that was over a year ago.

At the moment I'm learning FreeBSD over OpenSolaris because I want ZFS, FreeBSD is fully free and open source, FreeBSD looks to have a wider array of ports, which should be easy to install, even though with the LiveCD of OpenSolaris it boots up straight to X. On a production server or maybe even workstation, I think the choice would be down to FreeBSD versus Solaris, rather than OpenSolaris. Someone correct me if I'm wrong. Solaris does have a lot of nice features though, FMA (fault management architecture - lets you know when something has gone kaput and what to do about it.) And FreeBSD will lag in terms of the version of ZFS it supports. Deduplication looks to be a pretty cool feature - if you copy some data to another part of the HDD, and then you leave it a bit and your hoarding nature kicks in and you don't know whether you can delete it or not - no fear, ZFS will recognize the data as the same, only store it in one place (unless modified of course) and so there is no benefit to deleting the copy other than being a neat freak.

I'm presently wrestling with setting up FreeBSD on wireless. After that I have to get X set up. It would be nice if FreeBSD had version specific handbooks ala PostgreSQL, but they don't. So it's a combination of man pages, handbook, googling, etc to get me where I want to go. It's a bit of a contrast to Ubuntu which I set up on another box in the space of about an hour, including updates. Unmetered FOSS mirrors on ISPs kick ass!

Anyway, I suspect that the user base of FreeBSD will grow by leaps and bounds when people realize the advantages of ZFS and don't want to wait for BTRFS or whatever the results of this meeting might be: http://blogs.sun.com/bonwick/entry/casablanca

Hmm you'd probably have to put it into some kind of sandbox that doesn't allow stuff like local file access...

But still, you'd need support for 3D graphics. If only such a thing would exist...

Too bad.

If you want to learn how to use Java's APIs, you can have a look at Sun's Java Tutorial at this address: http://java.sun.com/docs/books/tutorial/index.html There are quite a few tutorials to cover the basics, and then there is the specialized trails section which you can read when they become needed.

Don't be discouraged by the people that learn by example. They just have a different way learning. Its no better or worse.

I think the OP is coding. The quizzes and assignments he speaks of include coding. Some of it more difficult than what a career programmer does on a daily basis.

There's two paths... 1. Learn more, or 2. Apply what you've learned.

If you decide to learn more (we're alway learning, right?), Servlets, Applets, MIDP are great paths to follow. They'll challenge you even more, and make you more hire-able than the millions of students out there that know classes, interfaces, data types and gui libraries.

Learning anything Thread related is great too. The concurrency packages introduced in more recent versions (Since 5.0 I believe) are great for writing server applications. Research Openfire as an excellent server project example that will win resume points.

To apply what you've learned (if you have the time, and it sounds you do), start a small project that solves a particular technology issue and make the world just a little bit better. It will all mesh together for your career.

-Tres

My suggestion would be to sign up on the Sun Java Forums (now confusingly branded as the 'Oracle' forums in some places; and looking rather ugly) and try and answer questions that newbies post. Sure, some will be really dumb and some will be of the help-me-get-my-assignment-done kind, but you'll also see questions that make you wonder 'yeah, why *does* it work that way?'. I found that explaining what I already knew helped make the concepts concrete for me, and looking at the explanations that others gave helped me learn new things and new ways of doing things.

Of course, the suggestions that were already given - picking a project and working on and visiting sites like projecteuler.net or topcoder.com and working on problems posted there - are much better; the forums will mostly help you improve your Java skills and occasionally give you some general insights into programming and problem-solving.

• Learn some common algorithms, and how to implement them in that language. Sounds like you've got yourself an algorithms textbook, which is great. Just make sure you're understanding why they work, not just going through the motions.
• Learn the standard library of the language. Obviously Java's is enormous, and there's no way a human being could possibly keep it all in their head, but you should check out the Java API and get a sense of, "what things are available to me in case I need them?" Java in particular makes it very likely that something you're trying to write already exists in some form, and there are a lot of programmers who waste valuable time reinventing the wheel every day because they don't know enough about the standard library (the flipside though, is that, just like algorithms, you need to make sure you know what you're using. Way too many programmers throw in a java.util.LinkedList without knowing what the hell it is)
• Experience! Write real code! This is the most important thing of all. The best experience comes from working in a group on a larger project, although of course that's not always possible. Try writing some larger programs on your own, making sure you keep your good design principles (use interfaces, abstraction, modularization, etc.) from start to finish. When you feel you're ready, there are plenty of open-source projects on Google Code in Java: download one and tinker with the source until you understand it. Hell, join the project if you're ready.

Good luck, and godspeed.

Effective Java by Joshua Bloch. Will give you some deep insights into the workings of the language.

If you want to go real fast http://www.sun.com/storage/disk_systems/sss/f5100/ OK, not something that you would use in home setting, but it shows that there is still lot of room for innovation in the SSD space. But to your point, rather than using traditional SSDs Sun created a "SO-DIM" with flash that allows for higher packing density as well better performance. Info on the flash modules. http://www.sun.com/storage/disk_systems/sss/flash_modules/index.xml

If you want to go real fast http://www.sun.com/storage/disk_systems/sss/f5100/ OK, not something that you would use in home setting, but it shows that there is still lot of room for innovation in the SSD space. But to your point, rather than using traditional SSDs Sun created a "SO-DIM" with flash that allows for higher packing density as well better performance. Info on the flash modules. http://www.sun.com/storage/disk_systems/sss/flash_modules/index.xml

But a system or an office suite are very simple applications. You need some know-how, but it's not rocket science.

There is nothing simple about an OS or an office suite.

In 2003-2004 OpenOffice.org had reached 9 to 12 million lines of code. Build FAQ for OpenOffice.org. OpenOffice.org statcvs (Lines of code)

Microsoft spends an enormous amount of time and money on studies of office work and the office worker. That is why it can take a chance on something like the ribbon and win - and why competitors like OpenOffice.org are left playing catch-up.

Climate models for the most part do not conserve energy and/or have unphysical boundary conditions, and all of them are parameterized in unphysical ways. Anyone who isn't sceptical of them is missing something.

Here are links to the source code for many GCMs. Please name the model which doesn't conserve energy. If you're feeling generous, it would also be nice to know how to reproduce this (obviously serious!) problem.

Last year, you said something similar:

But you're not a computational physicist, or you would have noticed the lack of energy conservation in some models (it is added by hand as a correction on each time step) or unphysical boundary conditions in others (ocean surface in particular). If you were a computational physicist you'd know how big a deal these approximations are in long-term integrations of even very simple systems, much less complex ones like GCMs. I was a lot more convinced by the AGW argument before I started looking at the models than I am now. [radtea, July 28 2009, @07:57AM]

I'm baffled by these statements. Energy conservation is a fundamental law of the universe, but floating point calculations are necessarily imprecise. Correcting for roundoff errors that affect energy conservation in every time step seems like good programming practice.

Also, there are other reasons to apply conservation laws "after the fact." Several years ago I studied the gravitational effects of shifting precipitation patterns. The GRACE satellites measure the global gravity field every month, which changes because of heavy rainfall, droughts, etc. Comparing the GRACE monthly gravity field to the gravity field implied by hydrology models like GLDAS revealed interesting discrepencies like a consistent phase lead in the GLDAS model which we hypothesized was due to a flawed river model.

But none of that would have been possible if I hadn't "added in mass conservation by hand as a correction in every time step." You see, GLDAS only provides the mass of water over the land every month. If this total mass is integrated, it's not constant in time. Which just shows that the water is being swapped between the land and the oceans. So I wrote a short script to add a spatially uniform layer of water to the ocean each month that forced the total amount of water on Earth to be constant. (Obviously this was only a first order estimate because I neglected water vapor and oceanic circulation patterns which violate the assumption of spatial uniformity.)

Incidentally, my confidence in GCMs is drawn primarily from their demonstrated skill in completely different validation techniques. I'm not surprised or concerned that tuning parameterizations simplify microphysics, perhaps to the extent of oversimplifying them. As my comments in that linked conversation show, I do consider such imperfect approximations to be good reason not to consider GCMs sophisticated enough to produce regional climate predictions. But their track record with global averages seems impressive.

I'm also not sure what you mean by unphysical boundary conditions at the ocean surface, but I'm eager to learn what you meant by that statement.

There is definitely a "certain degree" of lock-in, but it's like being trapped in a prison with a key-making machine and full details on every lock in the place. Sure, it'll take a bit of time and effort, but you can get out pretty simply.

Is it really all that simple?

OpenOffice.org for most of its existence has been - for all practical purposes - a wholly-owned subsidiary of Sun.

12 million lines of code in 2004. OpenOffice.org statcvs (Lines of code) Forking projects on that scale can break you.

Integrated solutions that go beyond the office suite have proven to be be a formidable challenge for corporations with the size and strength and wealth of IBM.

I guess you've never tried to buy and install Mac OS X on your own (yet perfectly compatible) hardware, or wanted to try peeking into the memory of certain processes.

Credit where it's due. MS did not write the original MS Office ODF support. Sun did.

I remember a Microsoft spokesman, in his official capacity, saying that it would be "impossible" to support ODF in Office. Then Sun went and did it. Oh yeah, I'll give Sun the credit for doing it first. (And if anyone can give me a URL to one of the news stories quoting that Microsoft spokesman, please do. I've been trying to find evidence to support my memory...)

What I'm curious about now, is: was microsoft dumb enough to re-write the ODF support when they did cave, or did that at least run with what they had? Re-writing would be my guess, just so they could claim ownership and also introduce bugs..

Look, I'm ready to shoot arrows at Microsoft over the whole OOXML fiasco, but you are being really unreasonable here.

First, Microsoft needs to have clear ownership over their converter, so they can ship it legally with Office. Unless the original plugin was released under a BSD-ish license, Microsoft could not possibly use it at all. And the Sun converter is not under a BSD-ish license. (I don't even think Sun is releasing the source code; it seems to be free-as-in-beer.)

Second, Microsoft Office applications already have a whole framework for import/export converters, and Microsoft would want to use that. I don't believe Microsoft ever published open specs so that people could write free software converters, so I don't think Sun used the Office converter framework.

Finally, I am not quite paranoid enough to think that Microsoft would deliberately introduce errors with their ODF converters. It's not like Norway is going to just take Office, never test it, buy ten million copies, and then say "uh oh, ODF doesn't work". Norway would test Microsoft Office, find that it does not handle ODF well, and say "this software is not qualified for our use. We will just have to adopt OpenOffice.org and not pay anything, instead of buying Microsoft Office." Thus, any attempt by Microsoft to screw up the ODF converters would only keep Microsoft from ever selling Office to ODF users. And Microsoft isn't stupid enough to think this would work.

What I could easily believe is that Microsoft might put only one or two developers on the task, then internal Microsoft politics could lead to the developers being yanked away when the converter was only half-baked. That's stupid, but stupid is more plausible than the deliberate errors scenario.

steveha

Willie did blog about why he does this

Yes, sounds like someone didn't read What Every Computer Scientist Should Know About Floating-Point Arithmetic.

MS is just as free to implement the OpenDocument format as anyone else; and they have in fact implemented ODF support.[1]

[1] Microsoft resisted the inclusion of ODF import/export filters for some time, but finally decided to include them:
http://www.groklaw.net/articlebasic.php?story=20050930181153972
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDocument_software

steveha

Credit where it's due. MS did not write the original MS Office ODF support. Sun did. And they open sourced their plugin for MS Office. What I'm curious about now, is: was microsoft dumb enough to re-write the ODF support when they did cave, or did that at least run with what they had? Re-writing would be my guess, just so they could claim ownership and also introduce bugs.. but I'm really curious. And it would appear I guessed right.

By taking this move, the Danish government has dealt themselves a blow to their ability to interoperate with other people.

You're probably a MS shill but the simple fact is that there exists free plugins so that MS Office users can use ODF. One of them is made by Sun which currently is the only one with Enterprise support. Surprisingly the only company that does not make a plugin is MS itself. So who's appears to be hindering interoperability here?

Going forward this means higher costs will be needed by both the government and every company that does business with them, meaning higher taxes and a reduced standard of living.

I would like see the logic at which you arrived at this conclusion. Open Office is free so there is no higher cost there. ODF is an open format which means anyone can write applications that use it. The list of existing applications that use it includes Google Docs, WordPerfect, Lotus Symphony, etc. If anything, using MS Office incurs a higher cost because Danish citizens will be required to purchase it from MS to see Office proprietary formats.

I don't think the issue is so much dealing with HP and Dell as it is the lack of marketing. Sun's Startup Essentials program offers some decent pricing on the lower-end gear for smaller companies, but seems to be almost totally unknown. I've been totally happy with the low-end Sun gear I've bought, but with the discontinuation of the X2100 line it seems that they're abandoning the low-end market that they could probably have completely taken from SuperMicro, had anyone actually known they were available.

I remember seeing Sun's 3D desktop, Project Looking Glass, back in 2003.

Compiz "was released as free software by Novell (SUSE) in January 2006"

Vista went retail in January 2007...

Compiz Fusion, is "the default window manager" in Ubuntu since 7.10 (October 18, 2007).

Hundreds of videos suggest that exponentially more people have been using compositing. Some since WAY before Vista ever released...

Band wagons don't just spontaneously appear just because Microsoft finally decides to hop on board.

We will wait until the IPv4 addresses run out and then force businesses to start using IPv6 if they want to get on the internet.
There will be a temporary boon for networking manufacturers as companies will have to change their equipment

And much wackiness will ensue when plans for new servers have to be put on hold until the infrastructure is upgraded. That kind of delay costs businesses a lot of money. Plus we'll have zero time to work out the kinks. What about all the people out there who just don't have IPv6 stacks on their machines? Or who do have IPv6 installed, but have never tried to access one of those new-fangled addresses — anybody really sure all that software actually works under real-world conditions?:

I've told this story a couple of times already on Slashdot, but one more won't hurt: when I was at Sun, I would occasionally raise the issue of IPv6 support on our service processors. I think some implementations have it, but none of the ones I documented did. The response I always got was that it won't be a priority for Sun until it's a priority for Sun's customers. And apparently it won't be a priority for them until we actually run out of addresses. Why does this all remind me of the Global Warming debate?

As a side curiosity, I wonder how many public IPv4 IPs are actually in use.

I've got one! Speakeasy, as part of being the Geek-Friendly ISP, gives one to every customer.

One entity that will never run out of IP addresses: the Department of Defense. They own what used to be 8 class A networks (now /8 network spaces). That's over 14 million IP addresses. Too bad I'm too old to join up.

Umm, Solaris is free. So, of course support is above and beyond what you pay for it.

Ahem, you mean OpenSolaris. From the license agreement:

B. Terms of the License -- the Entitlement
In order to use the Solaris 10 software for perpetual commercial use, you must obtain the Entitlement Document. The Entitlement Document is delivered to you either with a new Sun machine, from Sun Service as part of your service agreement, or via email when you register your machines through the Sun Download Center. For this reason, ensure that you have the correct email address in your Sun Download Center account before trying to register your Solaris 10 machines. If you do not receive the Entitlement Document, you are only allowed to use the software for 90 days of evaluation usage.

The format is trivial, but oddly enough a secure parser is not.

One of the exploitable Firefox bugs this year is in the GIF parsing code, in a situation where there are multiple images in a GIF file, and one has a small color map and is malformed in a specific way, followed by one with a larger color map.

See https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=511689 for more details.

Java and windows have also had GIF parsing security bugs in the past:
http://sunsolve.sun.com/search/document.do?assetkey=1-26-102760-1
http://www.checkpoint.com/defense/advisories/public/2008/cpai-02-Sepa.html

Remember, this GIF parsing is but one of the things I mentioned, and I only mentioned a small faction of the potential bugs in any web browser.

This is why security is hard: Secure software is perfect software, and we don't write perfect software.

The gripes are, unfortunately, mostly off target. But you can't blame a developer for having gripes. They deserve an answer. So here goes:

1. Open Source

The heart of this gripe appears to be "What's worse is Google knows how to protect valued code; Its Maps, Gmail, and Store applications aren't open source. Figuring out when it's okay to include one of those in your own application requires a crack legal team with a hotline to the EFF. "

This is a non-issue. Google hasn't released any proprietary code. Using the capabilities of these applications, or any other FOSS or proprietary applications in Android by means of their remote method interfaces or their Intent filters is OK unless the APIs require a key, as with the maps APIs. The process of getting a Google Maps API key is described here: http://code.google.com/apis/maps/signup.html and most introductory Android programming books cover it, too (http://www.amazon.com/dp/0596521472 in chapter 7). J2ME, BREW, and Symbian all require app signing and all support protected APIs.

2. The Tyranny of the Activity

Android has a unique programming model. It wasn't designed just to make a coder's life difficult. It was designed to prevent a small-screen UI from becoming a maze of hierarchical screen transition and enable re-use of functionality across applications. Android makes "shoveware" ports look bad, which is what Haseman seems to be griping about.

3. Device Debugging

This "gripe" is not really a gripe, but good-natured praise for the ease of debugging on Android.

4. Applications Never, Ever Quit

Android has an interesting and powerful application lifecycle. And, since Android is multi-tasking, more developers will notice that their application has a lifecycle.

5. The Developer Cooperative

This is a valid gripe: On the one hand, Android can manhandle your application's lifecycle, and on the other hand, it is fairly easy for applications to become battery-eaters. Google's developers could have done a better job of automatically detecting battery vampires. Use the "Battery use" in the "About phone" menu in "Settings" to find the applications and other system functions using the battery. That's a tip taken from this article: http://answers.oreilly.com/topic/862-ten-tips-for-android-application-development/

6. Java—Thanks, But I'll Take It from Here

Haseman says: "While it might speed time to market by freeing us from chasing down heap corruptions and memory leaks (two of my least favorite tasks), it can make it nearly impossible to, say, write an anti-aliased font library that renders in a reasonable amount of time. Sure, a developer can write custom libraries in C with their NDK, but now we're debugging two languages instead of one."

Java in Android runs on the Dalvik VM, which, up to now, is a pure interpreter: No precompiler, no JIT. It relies completely on the ability to mix in libraries in C via JNIs http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.5.0/docs/guide/jni/spec/jniTOC.html and the NDK http://developer.android.com/sdk/ndk/1.6_r1/index.html.

Why? The short answer is it is hard to put a JIT compiler in a battery powered device. So the developer has to decide what code belongs in Java and what code belongs in C.

7. "Intents"

Here I am right with Haseman, since his gripe is having to write (http://www.amazon.com/Android-Essentials-Firstpress-Chris-Haseman/dp/1430210648/) about classes with names that lend themselves to drifting into being nouns. The Activity, Intent, and Service classes in Android twist up one's prose worse that quarks tha

Here's a nice old story about a Microsoft software user that got audited, sued, fined and dragged through the press. Apparently they sell guitars. Of course a loss for somebody is naturally a win for somebody else.

The writer's mistake is more basic than just conflating threads and processes. You left out the parenthesis:

still lacks support for multi-threading (running on different processors)

Which not only conflates cores and processors, but also suggests that multithreading isn't useful if you don't have multiple cores/processors.

When I was writing the concurrency chapter in the Java Tutorial, the experts would give me a very hard time if I allowed even a vague suggestion that this was true. The fact is, threads are extremely useful even if you only have one core to work with. For example, any well-written GUI program will not handle user interaction in the same thread with other functions; if it did, the GUI would freeze every time the program were waiting on something.

Multithreading is a big topic these days because everybody wants to maximize their utilization of all these n-core processors. But it's not a new topic.

This mistake seems to be very common. Which leaves me confused as to what's new here. It's not parallel downloading of files — Mozilla/Firefox has always done that. A more robust parallelism mechanism? Or maybe they're copying Chrome and giving each tab its own process (not thread!).

The documentation is not GPL, a move defended quite weakly by Sun. That article does address one of the real reasons for what Monty is doing though: "MySQL forks should have their own, specific, documentation". Monty doesn't want to recreate all that from scratch, so forcing that into more open licensing would make his life easier.

> (a leftover relic from the mainframe era that needed to die over a decade ago)

No no no. Binary coded decimal is necessary and useful. When you divide 1 by 10, you should get 0.1, not 0.10000000000000001 (which is what you get if you for instance open up a python interpreter and ask for 1.0 / 10.0).

Monetary amounts, and currency conversion rates are examples of something you should never, ever use standard binary floats for.

Fact: Many major databases use some form of BCD for representing currency values. Enough so that IBM added a dedicated decimal FPU for their power6 series - it's so common on business database servers that it actually saves a lot.

Here's a useful document from Sun on the matter (warning: pdf). The title is absolutely spot on: "What Every Computer Scientist Should Know About Floating-Point Arithmetic"