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Purchase it? You can get it for free.

Yes, I have, and ps supports -ef just fine.

Check your path. Solaris also has BSD tools for people who prefer a different version of ps.

Yes, I have, and ps supports -ef just fine.

Check your path. Solaris also has BSD tools for people who prefer a different version of ps.

How about GNU/TrustedSolaris?

Sun Ray Server 3.1 works on Solaris x86, so it should work in Debian Solaris too. You can download 90 day eval from
http://www.sun.com/software/sunray/get.xml

Dunno about this specifically, but Solaris has been freely available for developers since I was a student, at least 5 years. Hell, they even posted me the CDs. Still is, by the looks of things.

I'm no lawyer, so I may be wrong.

You probably know of one patent, the Eolas "browser plug in" patent, which threatens to kill every known web browser out there. And you probably know that Microsoft is fighting the patent, because it's being sued. And that everyone went about it the wrong way.

So (given I have not even read the actual patent details) I thought "wait, there's this function in Unix called 'dlopen' that is commonly used in Netscape and Mozilla to load in plugins. It's even described that way. Where does it date back to?"

A google search results in a Nov 16th, 1995 Sun Microsystems document describing a bug in SunOS 4.1.4's dlopen() call.

The patent was awarded in 1998. dlopen() existed since late 1995, at least two, if not three, years before the patent.

Whoops! I belive we got prior art from Sun! Quick, someone sue the Patent Office with this evidence!

I don't think anyone would seriously use their PDA as a server, however. At least not in any kind of professional enviroment.

If you are serious about your infrastructure, you'll use serious tools, with serious software. If you're not serious, I guess you can settle for one of the ameteur projects which you can use on a motely collection of toys.

I don't think anyone would seriously use their PDA as a server, however. At least not in any kind of professional enviroment.

If you are serious about your infrastructure, you'll use serious tools, with serious software. If you're not serious, I guess you can settle for one of the ameteur projects which you can use on a motely collection of toys.

If this is what you suggest
http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.4.2/docs/api/java/nio/p ackage-summary.html

Yes, I tried it and I found no more Java advantage. Source became even more complex and harder to read than C++

Both Java and .Net have the same problem. Sloppy memory. [...] No direct memory control, GC waited until it was too late, and everything started to crawl.

I would hardly call it sloppy: Read this article on tuning GC ergonomics. Object allocation/deallocation is highly organized and much of it can be tuned.

With the default Throughput collector full gc does not happend until the young generation is full. So your application may not fill the young generation; Additionally, collection in the young generation is parallel so memory reclaimation can implictly take advantage of multiple processors.

The example you give where allocation/deallocation happens in a loop over 2^32 iteration can be made to run by knowing something about how/whats being allocated. With smaller objects you could decrease the size of the young generation to make incremental collections faster. With variable size object you could set and adaptive resize policy for the tenured/young generation size-- this would allow the heap to grow and shrink as needed (this can make GC faster since it may have to collect on a smaller space). You can also increase the amount of GC can consume; sometimes gc can be too timid and allow memory allocation to get out of control, resulting in a heap that grows too big for GC to collect in a reasonable amount of time.

That said there are still times when it would be nice to have direct memory access, but there are always to get around this (such as JNI and managing your own memory/reusing objects).

I guess there are more reasons than these, but those were the ones that came to mind at the moment.

Java 1.5 introduced the two things that make me willing to consider Java as a practical language for real work (as opposed to a "safe to let untrained programmers run rampant, too bad about the 10000k LoC required to do anything" language). Those two things are collections and generics.

sorry, but collections have been around since 1.2, see the api doc.

I was forced to use Java 1.2 some time ago [...] Java also largely ceased to suck, so having to work on it again and finding that sort code that would've been hundreds and hundreds of repetitive lines can now be expressed using a short set of comparitors and a collections-based sort was ... refreshing.

uhm, let me get this straight: you think that with java 1.2 you've had to write hundreds of lines of sort code? again, this is wrong, ie so says the api doc.

i think the big change you talk about took place from version 1.1 to version 1.2. 1.5 adds generics, foreach, autoboxing and what not.

so for the records: java 1.1 and below: applet crap. java 1.2 and above: java.

Java 1.5 introduced the two things that make me willing to consider Java as a practical language for real work (as opposed to a "safe to let untrained programmers run rampant, too bad about the 10000k LoC required to do anything" language). Those two things are collections and generics.

sorry, but collections have been around since 1.2, see the api doc.

I was forced to use Java 1.2 some time ago [...] Java also largely ceased to suck, so having to work on it again and finding that sort code that would've been hundreds and hundreds of repetitive lines can now be expressed using a short set of comparitors and a collections-based sort was ... refreshing.

uhm, let me get this straight: you think that with java 1.2 you've had to write hundreds of lines of sort code? again, this is wrong, ie so says the api doc.

i think the big change you talk about took place from version 1.1 to version 1.2. 1.5 adds generics, foreach, autoboxing and what not.

so for the records: java 1.1 and below: applet crap. java 1.2 and above: java.

Some are speculating that Sun may not have offered much in the way of support to disabled people in OpenOffice.org, and that Sun may have absolutely no experience in that area. The truth is that Sun actually supports OO.o more than the Gnome desktop. Further, this award doesn't mean that OO.o is the very best in disabled worker productivity, but I find it highly unlikely that a company that wins an award like this would suddenly turn it's back on people (and I don't seem to recall Microsoft winning any similar award). Take a look at the link.
http://www.sun.com/smi/Press/sunflash/2002-09/sunf lash.20020924.1.html
Yes, they won the Hellen Keller award in 2002. I suspect the problem isn't support in OO.o for visually disabled people. Perhaps the real problem with OO.o is politically disabled politicians that Microsoft bought and prostituted, and those base polititians and convicted monopolists getting into bed together to play on the disabled for their own (greedy) intentions.

blinux
"emacspeak the complete audio desktop"
Orca
"Sun's StarOffice 8 (based on OpenOffice.org) was released earlier today. In fact, already one University campus has standardized on it! There are many new features, including improvements to Microsoft Office compatibility, support for the new OASIS OpenDocument format (which the State of Massachusettes is adopting - see pages 18-19 of the Massachusettes Enterprise Information Technology Architecture version 3.5 [available in OpenDocument format too of course]), support for the W3C XForms standard, and new migration tools to help convert the Visual Basic macros in MS Word and Excel documents to StarOffice Basic."

But the new features I most want to highlight are the accessibility enhancements. To my mind, the key accessibility improvements in StarOffice 8 (and the shortly-to-be-released OpenOffice.org 2.0) are:

      1. Dramatic improvements in desktop theme support. StarOffice 8 (and OpenOffice.org 2.0) now do an excellent job of conforming to things like the High Contrast theme in MS-Windows, or the High-Contrast-Large-Print theme in the GNOME desktop on Solaris and GNU/Linux systems.

      2. Numerous improvements to PDF export support. StarOffice 8 now supports Tagged PDF documents. Tags in PDF files are how the new Adobe Reader 7 exposes all of the accessibility information to assistive technologies and via it's own "self-reading" functionality.

      3. The usual collection of accessibility bug fixes (including one that allows Gnopernicus to properly read spreadsheet cells).

You can get a copy of StarOffice 8 right now for Windows, Linux, Solaris x86 or Solaris SPARC; in English, French, Spanish, German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, or Swedish!

It's nice to that at the same time that StarOffice accessibility improves, acceptance and adoption of StarOffice goes up. Some might question an implied cause and effect relationship between those two facts, but I'm content to know we're clearly on the right track in both of these areas. (2005-09-27 13:55:00.0) Permalink Comments [1]

Plenty more at Google where I found these if your interested. Interesting reading, maybe some of you will even find something you want to contribute to. Considering it regards Americans with disablities, you might even be able to get a grant to do some of the work.

blinux
"emacspeak the complete audio desktop"
Orca
"Sun's StarOffice 8 (based on OpenOffice.org) was released earlier today. In fact, already one University campus has standardized on it! There are many new features, including improvements to Microsoft Office compatibility, support for the new OASIS OpenDocument format (which the State of Massachusettes is adopting - see pages 18-19 of the Massachusettes Enterprise Information Technology Architecture version 3.5 [available in OpenDocument format too of course]), support for the W3C XForms standard, and new migration tools to help convert the Visual Basic macros in MS Word and Excel documents to StarOffice Basic."

But the new features I most want to highlight are the accessibility enhancements. To my mind, the key accessibility improvements in StarOffice 8 (and the shortly-to-be-released OpenOffice.org 2.0) are:

      1. Dramatic improvements in desktop theme support. StarOffice 8 (and OpenOffice.org 2.0) now do an excellent job of conforming to things like the High Contrast theme in MS-Windows, or the High-Contrast-Large-Print theme in the GNOME desktop on Solaris and GNU/Linux systems.

      2. Numerous improvements to PDF export support. StarOffice 8 now supports Tagged PDF documents. Tags in PDF files are how the new Adobe Reader 7 exposes all of the accessibility information to assistive technologies and via it's own "self-reading" functionality.

      3. The usual collection of accessibility bug fixes (including one that allows Gnopernicus to properly read spreadsheet cells).

You can get a copy of StarOffice 8 right now for Windows, Linux, Solaris x86 or Solaris SPARC; in English, French, Spanish, German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, or Swedish!

It's nice to that at the same time that StarOffice accessibility improves, acceptance and adoption of StarOffice goes up. Some might question an implied cause and effect relationship between those two facts, but I'm content to know we're clearly on the right track in both of these areas. (2005-09-27 13:55:00.0) Permalink Comments [1]

Plenty more at Google where I found these if your interested. Interesting reading, maybe some of you will even find something you want to contribute to. Considering it regards Americans with disablities, you might even be able to get a grant to do some of the work.

See this page for details.

Sun added many accessability features to StarOffice, including support for blind users a while back:

http://www.sun.com/software/star/staroffice/7/acce ssibility/index.xml

Hopefully someone decides to talk to Sun and ask them if StarOffice has these types of features before their meeting.

Belgium DOES NOT have an RFID enabled passport (and neither does Norway IIRC). The Belgian passport has a simple smartcard chip (a Sun Java Card to be precise) like the ones found on bank/creditcards. It can only be read when inserted in a smartcard reader.

Please inform yourself before spreading FUD.

I think the OS is the very, very last thing that Google would aim for. They'd go for all the application and framework space first.

You mean, like, Java?

Your argument is void. The Sun Grid uses x86 PCs (Source).

For those of you too lazy to do the math, this comes out to $8,760/cpu/yr, or for a typical 2-way server, $17,520/yr. Over a typical 3-year lifecycle (YMMV), this is $52,560 in expense for a 2-CPU server. Of course, this includes administration of the service, such as backups, sysadmin, power, data center space, etc...

Compare this to buying a 2-way Sun V240 at about $7,245 (pre-discount), and you have $45,315 worth of TCO cost-savings to justify to management over the same 3-year window to make this worthwhile. Now I don't pretend to speak for others, but our SA's administer multiple systems, typically at least 20/SA, so unless your SA's make more than $300k/yr, I can't see this being feasible.

I just found out about maestro(Google cache) It's basically the software NASA uses to control the rovers and process their datasets. Looks quite interesting. I'm getting the datasets as I type this.(200MB)

If you're on gentoo,
emerge maestro maestro-data
If not, check your distro repos or get it from here.

Sure, it quite possibly *can* be done. In the same way that you could theoretically build a spaceshuttle from a T-Ford and lots of old spraycans!
When you're aiming for extreme solutions, you have to use quite extreme components. Think http://www.sgi.com/products/storage/ http://h18006.www1.hp.com/products/storageworks/xp 12000/index.html or even http://www.sun.com/storage/highend/9990/index.xml.

The only imaginable way to get petabyte on commodity hardware that I can think of is to build a seriously huge Beowulf cluster. But putting a singular FS on about ~500 seperate computers in a cluster is rather madness...
Take the good advice many fellow slashdotters has made, do NOT use a singular filesystem that spans 1 PetaByte or more...

I think you're waiting for ZFS, the last word in filesystems. Interesting stuff here.

I think you're waiting for ZFS, the last word in filesystems. Interesting stuff here.

BigAdmin has an article that describes storing Snort alert output in a MySQL database and using the web front end BASE to analyze the data. Sounded pretty interesting... http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/features/articles/snor t_base.html

Let's see... 1000/16 = 62 LUNs ... not too bad.

Runs on Solaris servers and supports Solaris and Linux clients @ $150 each.
Not cheap on the server side... $8K to $100K++.

Kailash Nadh writes to tell us ABC News is reporting that IBM is teaming up with several other companies to form a group called Aperi. This group will attempt to "push the open source idea deeper into computing" and "free up the bottlenecks that can occur when a business has bought tape and disk storage systems from a variety of vendors." The partnership is to include companies like Cisco, Sun, Fujitsu, and several others.

The filesystems going to be the hardest component of this. I know of no open-source fs that could handle this. I'm assuming this is all online storage, and there is no desire to nearline it to tape. Ideally, you'd want something that could contcatenate multiple LUNs (of RAIDed storage) without having to run through a volume manager. Nothing agaist volume managers, but it'd be another component to support. Looking at proprietary FSs, you've got CXFS from SGI, which could easily handle the PB requirement and plays nice on Linux. Sun's got QFS, which would max out at 1PB and could do the volume management bit easily. Linux support was a little flakey last time I used it, but it's a free download and evaluation, you could go get it right now.

IBM's SAN-FS would also meet the capacity needs and would have the advantage of providing nearline capability, if you're into that. Sun's SAM-FS is basically the QFS product with nearline-to-tape capability. Linux is only supported as a client OS there. Of course, if you buy the mantra that Solaris is 'open-source,' then that might not be an issue.

As for hardware with any of the above solutions, you're going to be looking at using multiple RAIDing disk enclosures of some kind. At a budget, probably SATA disks talking to the controller, and iSCSI to the host. FibreChannel to the host would be a little more costly, but might be worth it since iSCSI is just getting mature enough to be usable in production.

The filesystems going to be the hardest component of this. I know of no open-source fs that could handle this. I'm assuming this is all online storage, and there is no desire to nearline it to tape. Ideally, you'd want something that could contcatenate multiple LUNs (of RAIDed storage) without having to run through a volume manager. Nothing agaist volume managers, but it'd be another component to support. Looking at proprietary FSs, you've got CXFS from SGI, which could easily handle the PB requirement and plays nice on Linux. Sun's got QFS, which would max out at 1PB and could do the volume management bit easily. Linux support was a little flakey last time I used it, but it's a free download and evaluation, you could go get it right now.

IBM's SAN-FS would also meet the capacity needs and would have the advantage of providing nearline capability, if you're into that. Sun's SAM-FS is basically the QFS product with nearline-to-tape capability. Linux is only supported as a client OS there. Of course, if you buy the mantra that Solaris is 'open-source,' then that might not be an issue.

As for hardware with any of the above solutions, you're going to be looking at using multiple RAIDing disk enclosures of some kind. At a budget, probably SATA disks talking to the controller, and iSCSI to the host. FibreChannel to the host would be a little more costly, but might be worth it since iSCSI is just getting mature enough to be usable in production.

Although ZFS is not immediately available, it should be before long. Though this does not address your hardware concerns, choosing hardware compatible with either Solaris 10 or OpenSolaris would be beneficial, in my opinion.

A good ZFS introduction.

Although ZFS is not immediately available, it should be before long. Though this does not address your hardware concerns, choosing hardware compatible with either Solaris 10 or OpenSolaris would be beneficial, in my opinion.

A good ZFS introduction.

Although ZFS is not immediately available, it should be before long. Though this does not address your hardware concerns, choosing hardware compatible with either Solaris 10 or OpenSolaris would be beneficial, in my opinion.

A good ZFS introduction.

You can wait for Sun to release ZFS, install Solaris 10 on an X86 box (or buy a new Sun X4100) Purchase as many Promise Vtrak 15200's as you require, configure them as iSCSI targets, and then use the Solaris 10 iSCSI initiator, and mount them. Then put them in your ZFS pool.

Use your head when configuring redundancy, and glory in your new found storage availability and capacity.

Good luck!

You can wait for Sun to release ZFS, install Solaris 10 on an X86 box (or buy a new Sun X4100) Purchase as many Promise Vtrak 15200's as you require, configure them as iSCSI targets, and then use the Solaris 10 iSCSI initiator, and mount them. Then put them in your ZFS pool.

Use your head when configuring redundancy, and glory in your new found storage availability and capacity.

Good luck!

Watch Executive Vice President Jonathan Schwartz demo Project Looking Glass. The video is kind of old but first time I saw it was pretty impressed relative to the desktop eye candy at the time:
http://webcast-east.sun.com/archives/GSN-1312/GSN- 1312_forjds.mov

Sun URLs show several different slideshows of what this interface looks like in use. It's pretty cool, if gratuitous and annoying, and I wouldn't waste screenspace on it unless I had a much larger screen than my laptop has. Basically you've got a 3D space, and instead of windows being parallel to your screen, they can be turned arbitrarily, stacked in front of each other, etc. So you can have windows sitting half-sideways in perspective scattered around an image of Stanford campus or your apartment, like an improved version of the Microsoft Bob Family Room, just waiting for your cursor to be a friendly animated dog.

The main page for looking glass: http://www.sun.com/software/looking_glass/ Video demos of the desktop environment and screenshots: http://www.sun.com/software/looking_glass/demo.xml

The main page for looking glass: http://www.sun.com/software/looking_glass/ Video demos of the desktop environment and screenshots: http://www.sun.com/software/looking_glass/demo.xml

The link is down before the FP!
Here are some screenshots for Looking glass from Sun's site:
http://www.sun.com/software/looking_glass/details. xml

Do people out there really use DOS? I can understand an old point of sale system that might still be running DOS 3.3 or 5.0, but why upgrade something that is still working fine. And if you do upgrade, why to DOS?

--
http://blogs.sun.com/javawithjiva

Fact: PHP was released on June 8, 1995.
Fact: The Java Servlet spec (first server-side Java) was released over 4 years later on October 1, 1999.

After 5 years, Java as caught up with and far surpassed PHP in terms of usage, tools, maturity, etc. Java is showing no signs of slowing down. I don't know what iPlanet Marc is on, but on my planet, if you want to do any server-side web programming, you better know J2EE or .NET.

Also funny was this quote from TFA:

"I think Flash is one of the most exciting technologies out there that's almost on the verge of great success and never quite achieving it," Andreessen said.

You are correct that they did not deliver a Java version of Netscape client (Navigator). But they supposedly tried.

http://www.sun.com/smi/Press/sunflash/1997-08/sunf lash.970826.4.html

I am not sure if the HTML component in the JDK is from Netscape or not, but I do know that it is really lame.

independent software vendors may choose not to target the Linux desktop

From TFA:

Some big names in the computer industry are pledging to make the development of desktop applications for the Linux operating system much easier than it has been.

I'm all for a good set of standards; installation already varies across apts, rpms, and make installs. The article raises the issue of a standard desktop installation method, question is, will we see yet another install method?

How will this impact server systems and installation methods (apt/rpm) for non-desktop systems? What about software that operates desktop framework components and what you'd typically consider 'server' stuff...will there be two installation methods, one for the desktop and another for the service?

Cross-desktop compatibility...

I'm sure everyone here knows of KDE and Gnome as the two most popular desktops - so will these standards just be targeted at these? Or just one of these? What about the (near infinite) variety of other windowing systems - the only common thread is X-Windows (and not always that...what's about Sun's JDS Java Desktop System?)

Packaging Photoshop for linux will always be difficult because of this variety - Adobe can only support so many variations. The only way this will work is if they standardise on a single desktop system, killing off the others.

TFA talks about 'the first specification for Linux desktop software' and 'It plans to give compliant applications a "Linux Standard Base Desktop" certification mark.'. This does indeed suggest the death knell is sounding for variety on the linux desktop.

Many moons (1997) ago the JDK didn't run on linux. So I guess blackdown helped sun port it or something. I'm not clear on all the details. http://bugs.sun.com/bugdatabase/view_bug.do?bug_id =4097810

I have seen the MS strategy first hand when it comes to servers. What they go for is large #s of servers that have one main task and also have enough excess capacity to serve as seemless redundancy for other server's tasks should they fail. That is why you will see the DNS/DHCP on it's own server because it will frequently serve as a backup domain controller and/or file server. The Domain Controller will in turn serve as a backup DNS/DHCP server and so on...

They have built Server 2003 so that the replication to keep such servers up to date with each other is nice and seemless and the handover in the event of a failure is also seemless. In order for this all to work though you need alot of servers so that there is enough excess capacity to ensure that in the event one or two of them failing nothing is interrupted and the performance is still adequate.

This is an appropriate solution when money is no object and 100% uptime is 100% essential - extra capacity and redundancy never hurt anyone. For the sort of situation you described it sounds like you could have made due with far fewer servers and the MS solution still would have worked fine (I have seen AD, DNS/DHCP, Web, Exchange, File and Print all on one beefy Sun $8,000 Dual Dual Core Opteron server for an organization the size you mentioned work pretty well)- but the reseller/partner would have sold alot less servers and made alot less money and MS would have sold less licenses and made less money too. So, in short, MS Server 2003 = better than you made it out to be though MS and Partner = greedy as hell ;)

P.S. The Sun Fire X4200 is sweet as hell. The system I menioned above is the "Extra Large" and it does indeed run Windows Server 2003 for those so inclined.

http://store.sun.com/CMTemplate/CEServlet?process= SunStore&cmdViewProduct_CP&catid=138713

iPlanet Calendar Server, formerly Netscape Calendar Server, and SunOne Calendar Server before being renamed Sun Java System Calendar Server, uses LDAP for its authentication. (to be specific, the Netscape/iPlanet/SunOne/SunJava System Directory Server, or whatever they're calling it this week)

The calendar server uses LDAP not just for authentication, but also to store user's preferences. (as do sun's mail server and other products)

iPlanet Calendar Server, formerly Netscape Calendar Server, and SunOne Calendar Server before being renamed Sun Java System Calendar Server, uses LDAP for its authentication. (to be specific, the Netscape/iPlanet/SunOne/SunJava System Directory Server, or whatever they're calling it this week)

The calendar server uses LDAP not just for authentication, but also to store user's preferences. (as do sun's mail server and other products)