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Do you think the current owners are hanging onto their address spaces out of pure spite? If they rely on the Internet to do business, this crisis hurts them more than anybody.

This mess happened because of the simplistic addressing schemes that were implemented without taking into account the explosive growth of the Internet. One result is that that some early adopters ended up with Class A networks (16 million addresses) because they needed more than the 64 thousand addresses in a Class B network. Only one Class A space belongs to a university (MIT). (There used to be two, but Stanford gave its IP space back.) Other owners include Halliburton, Apple, IBM, and Xerox PARC. HP has two, counting the one that was originally issued to DEC. DoD has eight.

Reassigning all these addresses would be a logistical nightmare, because you're changing the basic logic of network routing. Imagine all the routers that would have to be reprogrammed or replaced, and the expensive down time that would result. Much more cost effective to just go to IPv6 already. Plus there are other features of IPv6 we really, really need.

Except that nobody's doing it. I used to work at Sun, where I kept suggesting that our embedded lights-out management system (all Sun servers have them) start supporting IPv6. The answer I always got was, "customers aren't asking for it." Which means that everybody is putting off this problem until the last minute. As usual.

Have a look at the 'Sun Rays' from Sun - they've been around for years; they are cheap and very reliable: http://www.sun.com/software/index.jsp?cat=Desktop&subcat=Sun%20Ray%20Clients The prices shown on the Sun site are list-price - we get a Very healthy discount off of this, which brings the prices down even further.

In practice, no-one cares. If you access what looks like a field of any object other that "this" in .NET, it is invariably a property. Similarly, when you write your class in Java, you always wrap all your fields in gettors/settors, since your clients expect to see such a pattern.

Right up to the point that there is a name for a class that has a no-arg constructor, implements Serializable, and has getters/setters for every field: JavaBean.

I guess I should have been more specific on the performance thing. Mostly I was referring to two things: GUI performance, since Swing has traditionally been pretty turgid, and the ability to easily link with native libraries, which I have always assumed C# handles more elegantly than Java+JNI. As for general purpose performance, the jury's still out on that:

C# beats Java (most of the time): http://reverseblade.blogspot.com/2009/02/c-versus-c-versus-java-performance.html

C# beats Java: http://www.bentuser.com/article.aspx?ID=323&AspxAutoDetectCookieSupport=1

Java beats C#: http://blogs.sun.com/dagastine/entry/sun_java_is_faster_than1

When it comes to WORA, again it depends on what you're doing. Recently I had to write an app to do serial port communication on Windows. Unless I missed something, that's only achievable in Java land by using a native library via JNI, meaning my code won't run elsewhere. Another example is when I used to work at IBM about seven years ago. We frequently had UI or I18N issues with our Java code that only cropped up on certain platforms (e.g. AIX) but not others (Windows).

That said, the non-graphical server code I write using Java runs pretty much everywhere. So for that class of application WORA really works.

which find method? http://java.sun.com/javase/6/docs/api/java/lang/String.html

there is none if you mean indexof that has been working cross platform since day zero.

Just as a point of information, this information is available fairly clearly and obviously in the errno reference pages for various independent or widely diverged OSs/C libraries.

GNU/Linux (GNU C library)
FreeBSD (BSD libc)
Solaris (SYSV-derived)

See an example http://mystuffisallhere.com/blog/post/2009/06/09/And-thate28099s-whye280a6-you-done28099t-use-floating-point-for-currency-values.aspx

It happens in every language, there are intrinsic problems to use floating points for currency calculations.

If you want some math http://docs.sun.com/source/806-3568/ncg_goldberg.html

Sun prepared interesting material on the Colosse supercomputer

- Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1qyCH2G8epo
- Interactive presentation: http://www.sun.com/ws/vid.jsp?wcwid=10B02221_01&size=880x600
- Promo sheet: http://www.sun.com/customers/servers/clumeq.xml

Sun prepared interesting material on the Colosse supercomputer

- Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1qyCH2G8epo
- Interactive presentation: http://www.sun.com/ws/vid.jsp?wcwid=10B02221_01&size=880x600
- Promo sheet: http://www.sun.com/customers/servers/clumeq.xml

definitely...

Here are some MTTDL charts that, though tailored for thumpers, are still useful.

http://blogs.sun.com/relling/entry/zfs_raid_recommendations_space_performance
http://blogs.sun.com/relling/entry/raid_recommendations_space_vs_mttdl

With a 1x2-disk mirror using ZFS, MTTDL is over 10,000 years. I'd say that's pretty good - and of course, you would definitely want to compliment that with off-site backup.

I suspect that that is long enough for most people.

definitely...

Here are some MTTDL charts that, though tailored for thumpers, are still useful.

http://blogs.sun.com/relling/entry/zfs_raid_recommendations_space_performance
http://blogs.sun.com/relling/entry/raid_recommendations_space_vs_mttdl

With a 1x2-disk mirror using ZFS, MTTDL is over 10,000 years. I'd say that's pretty good - and of course, you would definitely want to compliment that with off-site backup.

I suspect that that is long enough for most people.

It is news on smart phones which started with lessons learned from Desktop and mobile trojans themselves. Apple ignored those lessons and now paying for it.

http://wiki.forum.nokia.com/index.php/Symbian_Platform_Security_Model
http://developers.sun.com/mobility/midp/articles/permissions/
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc512651.aspx

In fact, security scene kind of gave up on iPhone&iPod. Let whoever buys makes his/her own mind.

More info at:

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

Well, in languages such as Java, the finalize() method may never be called. You have to manually call a "close"/"destroy" type method since finalize() isn't really a destructor. Even C# recommends you implement explicit destruction (See "Explicit Release of Resources" in the linked page.) I quote:

The programmer has no control over when the destructor is called because this is determined by the garbage collector. The garbage collector checks for objects that are no longer being used by the application. If it considers an object eligible for destruction, it calls the destructor (if any) and reclaims the memory used to store the object. Destructors are also called when the program exits.
[...]
If your application is using an expensive external resource, we also recommend that you provide a way to explicitly release the resource before the garbage collector frees the object.

In other words, the lazy destruction in a "managed" language can really bite you in the hindside, since who knows when the GC will get around to releasing your resource? Why else would a managed language have an entire standard interface devoted to the problem?

In contrast, in C++ (an unmanaged language), objects' destructors are always called automatically when they go out of scope or when you delete them.

Really? And what kind of hardware does Solaris run on? What kind of hardware does HPUX run on? What kind of hardware does AIX run on?

You are right with HPUX/AIX - but as for Solaris there's much more than you'd think:

http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/hcl/

Different thing, the clause is wider and it is telling you not to use the software for very mission critical applications:

* This software is not designed or intended for use in on-line control of
  * aircraft, air traffic, aircraft navigation or aircraft communications; or in
  * the design, construction, operation or maintenance of any nuclear
  * facilit. Licensee represents and warrants that it will not use or
  * redistribute the Software for such purposes.

http://java.sun.com/applets/jdk/1.4/demo/applets/Clock/Clock.java

Huh, haven't you heard of BigInteger like data types ?

They are pretty common in accounting in various languages...

http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.5.0/docs/api/java/math/BigInteger.html

Interestingly enough, there is talks about implementing “soft tail call” and "“hard tail call” optimization in the JVM:

http://blogs.sun.com/jrose/entry/tail_calls_in_the_vm

Also, SPARC is dying

Beg your pardon, sir, but do you care to offer a citation for that reference? Perhaps a Netcraft confirmation of some sort?

Didn't think so....

For the record, it's just a tad over your head.

And for the record, SPARC isn't out of the game just yet...

...according to their 1st quarter results from FY2010, things are looking up.

Well, assuming that the behavior you describe isn't configurable (I'm pretty ignorant of Solaris CIFS) then yeah, there would be applications for which Samba is a better fit. But there are also applications where this isn't an issue. IMHO, sharing files between Windows and Unix-like systems is one of these, especially when you consider that doing a better job of supporting Windows is the main reason Solaris CIFS even exists..

You'll notice that the blog posting I just linked appeared a couple months after Sun and Microsoft buried the hatchet and agreed to (among many other things) work together to improved Solaris/Windows interoperability. Probably not a coincidence.

Well, assuming that the behavior you describe isn't configurable (I'm pretty ignorant of Solaris CIFS) then yeah, there would be applications for which Samba is a better fit. But there are also applications where this isn't an issue. IMHO, sharing files between Windows and Unix-like systems is one of these, especially when you consider that doing a better job of supporting Windows is the main reason Solaris CIFS even exists..

You'll notice that the blog posting I just linked appeared a couple months after Sun and Microsoft buried the hatchet and agreed to (among many other things) work together to improved Solaris/Windows interoperability. Probably not a coincidence.

On paper, I don't think the performance difference between this and something like an Intel X-25m is going to justify the 4 fold price difference.

This is the perfect caching layer for ZFS. One command to insert it as a read cache between the OS and a big array can make a huge difference in IOPS. I can't easily convince my boss to buy a machine with 80GB of RAM that will be used for nothing but filesystem caching, but I wouldn't hesitate to ask him for a PCIe card to drop into the servers we already have.

I work in a Python shop, but I catch IndexErrors all the time when trying to parse files. For example, we have tools to work with CSV files (serializations of arrays of arrays as tab- or comma-separated text files) to list products on web stores. If I'm parsing a CSV file, the CSV reader class returns a Python type equivalent to Java's java.util.ArrayList. If I know some rows will be shorter than others (such as optional elements or the empty row at the end of some files), I can catch the IndexError from getting an element and continue past the row. (Java likewise throws the IOOBE.)

http://blogs.sun.com/BestPerf/entry/tpc_c_world_record_sun

That non-competitive SPARC stuff recently trounced IBM and HP in performance/dollar, performance/watt and performance/rack. I'd hate to see what you define as competitive.

Sun has some very cool hardware and software, not to mention an open source friendly attitude...

Sun has a Machiavellian attitude towards open source. They are open-source friendly when it suits their needs (public image). They are certainly not friendly to all open source projects. Need an example? Look at GCC. They feel free to rip off the GCC front-end for GCCFSS. They contribute virtually nothing to the GCC or binutils software in return.

Want to know how the GCC devs feel about it? Read the mailing list thread.

All their customers want is a fast and portable compiler for Sun hardware. Sun's own compiler sucks for C++ development. You have to use a non-standard, obsolete and soon to be deprecated C++ standard library just to have a slight chance of compiling any modern C++ software.

If you want to see just how screwed up their C++ development environment is going to get, you just have to read this thread: http://opensolaris.org/jive/thread.jspa?messageID=289188&tstart=0

Oracle plans to not only broaden and accelerate its own investment in the Java platform, but also plans to increase the commitment to the community that helps make Java an ubiquitous, innovative platform unified around open standards.

Does that mean Sun will now stop reneging on their promise to open source the new Java plugin? http://blogs.sun.com/darcy/entry/openjdk_and_the_new_plugin

Yes, both Netbeans and Eclipse are also RCP platforms, but how many real Netbeans platform apps are there?
Well, apart from VisualVM which is a very nice profiling tool (and even included in the JDK these days) you also have the Java ME SDK (version 3.0).

But most of all, if you would have bothered to check the NetBeans website you would have found the platform showcase. So to answer your question about how many real applications: dozens, as you can see for yourself.

Not to flame; but your comments about Eclipse vs. NetBeans would have had much more impact if you would actually have done some real investigating of your own.

Yes, both Netbeans and Eclipse are also RCP platforms, but how many real Netbeans platform apps are there?
Well, apart from VisualVM which is a very nice profiling tool (and even included in the JDK these days) you also have the Java ME SDK (version 3.0).

But most of all, if you would have bothered to check the NetBeans website you would have found the platform showcase. So to answer your question about how many real applications: dozens, as you can see for yourself.

Not to flame; but your comments about Eclipse vs. NetBeans would have had much more impact if you would actually have done some real investigating of your own.

SPARC is still quite relevant; there are few things as nice as running a multi-threaded set of applications on the Sun Niagara chips. If I were a database software outfit I would want to make sure there were two architectures out there (IBM POWER and something else) focusing on enterprise performance rather than media creation/encoding.

Take a look. Is there anything in the Intel or AMD product pipeline that will get you 2 x 10 Gb ethernet, 64 thread pipelines, and 128 GB of RAM in a 1U box? Even better, the price is really competative with buying the same performance worth of x86 gear in multiple boxes by the time you think about rack space, cooling networking and all the rest of the data center head aches.

Too true, sadly. To be fair, most programming languages make this much harder than it should be. Even in a relatively modern language like java, which by default uses unicode for strings, you have a "char" datatype that can't actually completely represent all unicode characters. As a result, you have all kinds of libraries that assume that one char = one character, while this is not true. But you'll never find out until you have people using your application with, say, Han characters outside the BMP.

And I shudder to think how few applications can probably handle different writing directions, like the right-to-left of Hebrew.

thin clients are OK but ultra-thin clients are likely better - see for example:

• Wikipedia on thin clients
• Sun's "Sun Ray" client hardware

You get low-cost screens, the ability to add a user-tagged card that carries session info with them, and a few other advantages.

Not sure about the touch-screen aspect, as I've never looked into that.

have fun!

That fix is kind of a pain because you have to use OS X. I've found a much more logical fix here

- As to overwriting. This occurs because the update events follow behind the UI. The problem is resolved by the composite extension, or by enabling backing store -OR- by increasing network bandwidth. Some old X Servers didn't have backing store (and certainly no compositing), AND ran over constrained pipes. It hasn't been a problem with desktop X for years.

- X is extensible by design. Multiple display support, accelerated 3D, video playback and compositing do work. For $DEITY sake, I use these features on my stinky little Acer Aspire One using Linpus! No particular problems -- "it just works" (tm). I don't like transparent windows, so I just don't bother, but it does work. Why the hell would a user want to know about the alphabet soup? Just use a packaged OS. The alphabet soup comes about because the development of X is an open process.

- And, in comparison with the Mac, you do notice that Apple packages an X Server with OS X? When running in a heterogeneous environment, it's necessary.

- Finally, you bring up the Unix Hater's Handbook. Ok, let's break it down:

1 - xload, xterm and xclock are possibly among the LEAST used programs under modern X based systems. They weren't
even installed on my Acer when I got it.

2 - Motif isn't used anymore.

3 - Cut and Paste really isn't an issue anymore, either.

4 - ssh -Y is usually used to remote X servers - authentication isn't an issue anymore either.

5 - Gnome and KDE provide the "customization methods"; since xterm isn't used anymore (or xcalc, or xedit),
the xresources issues are also gone.

6 - imake has been deprecated for YEARS.

7 - Pretty much nobody uses raw X protocol or XLib anymore either.

8 - NeWS was "killed" because IBM and DEC didn't want a repeat of NFS - they didn't want to send SUN any more money. So, they marketroids forced the issue. I agree the superior technology didn't win, but X is still around. Sucks to be the customer when they get what they have been told to ask for.

The UGH was relevant in the early '90s. No longer.

The "MAC UI Experience" could be planted on top of X. I am disappointed that Apple isn't driving that. It would involve developing several extensions that would be useful to X users. But, if Apple doesn't want to do it, others will:

http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/CompositeExt
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XRender
http://keithp.com/~keithp/talks/randr/randr/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_video_extension
http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/doc/801-6662/6i1196cd6?l=ja&a=view

The first four are generally implemented. The last is not (X/DPS). But, MAC OS X only implements a subset of X/DPS anyway (and, of course, it isn't compatible).

• HaikuOS alpha 1
• OpenSolaris 0906 x86
• Kubuntu Alternate 9.04 AMD64
• Kubuntu Alternate 9.10 AMD64
• Kubuntu Alternate 9.10 i386
• Kubuntu Netbook 9.10 i386
• Ubuntu Server 9.10 AMD64
• Ubuntu Alternate 9.10 AMD64
• Ubuntu Netbook 9.10 i386
• Xubuntu Alternate 9.10 AMD64
• Xubuntu Alternate 9.10 i386
• Xubuntu Desktop 9.10 AMD64
• Xubuntu Desktop 9.10 i386

M$ and RIAA can stop right now with their bullshit about Linux == Piracy. For that matter they can stop with that Solaris == Linux, OS X == Linux, HaikuOS == Linux, BSD == Linux, Java == Linux, Perl == Linux, Ruby == Linux, !MS == Linux and so on.

You can download Sun's prebuilt storage appliance VM here.

It gives you a free GUI storage appliance wrapper around OpenSolaris and ZFS, so you can start using the features without being an expert in either (just like NetApp with BSD and WAFL). You can replace the virtual disks with real ones if you want to store serious data.

... strategically populate the available space with duplicates of commonly read blocks, for increased fault tolerance and performance?

yes, it can.

That is covered very clearly in the blog article referenced from the Register article. http://blogs.sun.com/bonwick/en_US/entry/zfs_dedup

According to the bechmarks made by INRIA (French scientific & supercomputing outfit) the Sun Java Hotspot VM has surpassed C for speed in many applications and is now approaching FORTRAN (which is considered the fastest in supercomputing circles). Please see: http://blogs.sun.com/jag/entry/current_state_of_java_for

Your post is very misleading. It's not "for many applications", it's for a very specific class of applications, namely HPC. The report with the benchmarks is titled "Current State of Java for HPC". As for the paper itself, the only place applicable to JVM proper is when they review the performance of int and double arithmetic in Java, and find it fast (which is kinda not surprising - any JIT can do those just as well as a C compiler can). The rest of it is about distributed computations, with an emphasis on efficiency of inter-node communication; they are also effectively cheating to disable GC by presetting the heap size to a very high amount.

According to the bechmarks made by INRIA (French scientific & supercomputing outfit) the Sun Java Hotspot VM has surpassed C for speed in many applications and is now approaching FORTRAN (which is considered the fastest in supercomputing circles). Please see: http://blogs.sun.com/jag/entry/current_state_of_java_for

What Every Computer Scientist Should Know About Floating-Point Arithmetic

Maybe this will apply some pressure on Garmin and/or TomTom to not gouge quite so heavily for updated maps.

Mr. ZFS agrees with you on that.

I agree that a full blown desktop/server JVM would be OTT. The CDC (connected device configuration) profile is designed for devices which are smarter than the bog-standard Java-ME phone, but not up to running a full SE stack. Have a look at the overview here. A cut and paste of the 'target devices' section:

The CDC configuration was designed to bring the many advantages of the Java platform to a broad range of network-connected consumer and embedded devices, including smart communicators, high-end PDAs, and set-top boxes.

Devices that support CDC typically include a 32-bit microprocessor/controller and make about 2 MB of RAM and 2.5 MB of ROM available to the Java application environment.

What's more, the open source implementation released by Sun has an excellent ARM targeted JIT compiler. All in all, apart from the out of date GUI implementation (QT3 based) it would be an ideal Java platform for something like the N900.

Existence of the NetApp/Sun suit, while most likely a loss for NetApp, is IMHO enough to prevent Apple betting the farm on ZFS in the heart of OS X.

That is, assuming that having the file system and the volume manager tied to each other is a good thing. I think I can come up with a bunch of reasons for why this is a pretty terrible idea and why modularity here is a good thing.

And some other people might disagree with your reasons.

You may want to check out SUNs ceo's comments on the netapp issues... This dates all the way back to 2007. From the comments above this appeared to be something new. http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/harvesting_from_a_troll

EMEA accounts for 1/3 of Suns' income. That's what for..

First off, if you install Java even if you wanted to install it just for IE, or just to run a local program that runs java, it installs the Java Plugin for FireFox as well as ask you for the toolbar of the day. The same goes for Adobe Acrobat Reader if you just wanted to view a PDF, and is actually worse since the earlier installers would install Adobe AIR Without permission. Flash doesn't install to both by default, but the problem with Flash for FireFox is that it does not automatically update. (don't know why. The ActiveX Flash has an updater.)

Second. Again, I'm all for the blacklisting, Especially the 1.0 version since uninstall was not possible until 1.1. What I'm saying is that this needs to happen with other plugins with similar security issues and not just with Microsoft's because a few zealots are butthurt because they see a MS product in their Microsoft free FireFox.

In February, .NET 3.5 framework comes out and it has 2 verified exploits (See Here). In that period of time, Adobe flash has had 4 exploits and Acrobat Reader had 8 (See Here). Java had 15 (not too sure of this number See Here) Now considering that none of the affected Adobe or Sun Plugins were blocked (as they should have been) Is this more of a political move because it's Microsoft or is it because Firefox cares about the security of their browser? (which they should.)

Hey, I could get a Date if I wanted! But it seems that the docs are advising against it these days anyway... ;/

The tool has support for majority of the system components. It does not run on windows but you can download a boot cd/usb image and do your testing. http://www.sun.com/oem/products/vts/

There are plenty of real world case studies that prove your personal experience to not be the general case for Java:

http://www.sun.com/customers/index.xml?soln=31a8487e-0f60-11da-99bc-080020a9ed93&page=1&sort=date&asc=false

This case study is particularly relevant:

http://www.sun.com/customers/servers/transact_tools.xml

This page is rather out of date, but shows that Java was performing well even in 2003:

http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=8142

Java has become the number one most prominent language in business with good reason. It's flexible, and can cater to pretty much anything you throw at it if you understand the tools and technologies available, and which ones are suited to your particular problem. Garbage collection really just comes down to having an understanding of the way the garbage collector works and being able to develop with that in mind. See here for an example discussion of just that from back in 2003:

http://java.sys-con.com/node/37613

here's a slightly more recent (but still relatively dated in technology terms) article:

http://articles.techrepublic.com.com/5100-10878_11-6108296.html

The problem Java and .NET seem to face is people approaching the language, from say a C++ background and not understanding what's different about it and how it works to be able to implement a solution in it to an equivalent level of their C++ application. This does not mean experienced Java/.NET programmers cannot do just that though- they can, and do. Again, it's really a question of competence in a particular skillset rather than inherent flaws in a particular technology.