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Just buy one of these

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

4 GiGE ports
5 PCI-X slots
Up to 16GB memory
4 SAS Channels with RAID 0,1

Fully suppored on Windows, Solaris, RHES, SUSE

AMD is apparently content with having Sun do it for them.

Off-Topic, but you might want to check out:
http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.5.0/system-configuratio ns.html

It lists Linux 64-bit operation on AMD64/EMT64 processors as of Java 5 update 2.

One way to break into games and earn a living is to build a small team and develop for a new market such as cell phones.

During the early '90s, shareware authors focused on creating games for the newly-popular desktop PCs. That's much tougher nowadays, due to direct competition from untold thousands of shareware developers and the larger studios. During the late '90s, Palm OS and Pocket PC popped up (another new market). At that time, it was possible to spend a week or two of development on a simple-but-enjoyable PDA puzzle game with a grossly disproportionate number of sales (with respect to development costs) during the first few months, and a decent long tail a year or two out.

These days, the buzz seems to be around casual/cell phone games, on the basis that a) it doesn't take [as] much to develop a cellphone game, and b) there are many millions of cellphone users. Java isn't my cup of tea(!), but J2ME offers individual developers and small teams a way to develop content for the myriad mobile platforms.
_________________________
www.dejobaan.com

[ ...Sun to do a 64-bit verison of Java]

There is a 64 bit Linux version of Java available at the bottom of this URL.

https://jsecom15.sun.com/ECom/EComActionServlet;js essionid=DA5B35C261DED503304CFE10857DC842

I couldn't get the installer to run on FC4 when I tried but the package clearly does exist.

That's a good MS promoter!
If it doesn't run on Windows, it's Jerry-rigged, and pushing companies to write cross-platform software would just be pushy.

Here's a little-known-fact about linux: Many major software manufacturers write software that runs on linux. The ones that don't, are doing it based on marketing strategies. If the market changed, so would their coding practices. As a business owner, I do not have the type of money to back up a Microsoft platform, and I also cannot justify using the software due to quality and corporate tie-ins. When I'm bigger, maybe I'll dig myself a hole and dive in head first (Microsoft said they already have it started for me whenever I feel like jumping).

Honestly, if Adobe made their software for Linux, then I would guess at least another 29 million people would switch over to linux. I just love how software like Blender 3d, Firefox, Thunderbird, OpenOffice.org, Zend Studio, Star Office, MySQL, Oracle, Apache, PHP, and many many others all work on Windows and Linux, and oftentimes MacOSX, but lazy companies like Adobe/Macromedia, Autodesk, and most gaming companies choose to single out one or two platforms to target simply because of marketing strategies.

Microsoft has chosen time and time again to refuse to implement global standards simply because they want to lock people into using their software. Your post proves that their marketing strategy works.

Also keep in mind that hardware working with the operating system says more about the hardware manufacturers than the operating system. Microsoft has been known to strongarm hardware manufacturers to not create linux drivers, and many hardware manufacturers are just too lazy to work with the linux community.

So while Linux, being about half the age of windows, is still lacking in a few areas, it is still more stable and provides enough features for me to use. I still keep a windows box around at work for troubleshooting other users' microsoft office problems, and for running the Adobe Creative Suite, but you can bet I'll be formating every windows box I own as soon as Adobe releases Linux binaries. (considering how closely related OSX and Linux are, I still don't understand why they don't make a linux port)

In short, if industries really did shift to linux, companies that write software wouldn't hesitate to change as well. It is our fear of something different that keeps us on Windows, and keeps software developers from writing linux code, resulting in jerry-rigged solutions like Firefox, Thunderbird, PHP, Apache, Oracle Enterprise server, and others. (note the sarcasm)

So I take it that you've looked at the new features that were part of
Solaris 10
and the community that has already formed around
OpenSolaris and the new
Niagara-based line
along with the new AMD64 servers, before deciding that there isn't anything
original being done?

Who would you say is doing original things in these areas then?

So I take it that you've looked at the new features that were part of
Solaris 10
and the community that has already formed around
OpenSolaris and the new
Niagara-based line
along with the new AMD64 servers, before deciding that there isn't anything
original being done?

Who would you say is doing original things in these areas then?

I'm curious why you term CDDL as a vanity license? Given the effort that went into evaluating
open source licenses for OpenSolaris and other open-source projects that Sun is sponsoring, it
would have been far cheaper to have use something like MPL. However, there were specific issues
with the other licenses (see some of the rationale)
that would have prevented OpenSolaris from being released. And though Sun could have waited and
tried to get those licenses rev'ed, it decided to instead make some clear and rather small modifications
to an existing license and get that OSI-approved. It seems Sun was damned if they had waited for the
other licenses to be changed and damned if they proposed their own (and rarely credited for basing their
license on something established like MPL and then making the necessary small changes to that it could
be used for these open-source projects).

Also, where have you ever seen Sun says it invented open-source (single-handedly, no less?) They
certainly have tried to make it clear that they're not new to the open-source ballgame and what's wrong
with that, given the general ignorance and hostility seen on forums like this?

The difference is no longer an order of magnitude or two even for the SMP boxes that you are talking about. Googling a bit, I have found these reasonably priced Opteron boxes. These are variations of the same opteron v40z boxes that Sun sells. Quad Opteron boxes w/ hot swap power supplies and hot swap hard drives w/ ECC memory for reasonably cheap for the chassis.

I've never seen a terabyte of ram on a single domain but the
very high end sun boxes will allow you to use either 576 or 288 gigs of ram on a single box, so I will use that as the base. The maximum in SMP mode for the opteron boxes you can homebrew is probably one based on the iwill motherboard which supports 64 gigs, which is now grabbing the midrange line of the sun server series.

In fact HP makes the ProLiant DL585 with opteron chips. They will sell you this machine w/ up to 128 gigabytes of ram, redundant roms, redundant power supplies, hot swappable hard drives, ECC memory.

Its not quite at the high end server sun range but the opteron chip and its use in machines built by traditional "big iron" builders is not really an order or magnitude off. Its really about a factor of 5 from the really high end (aka $1m+ sunfire installations).

And as the IWILL MB points out its not even that far away from home brew or at the very least a $100k officebrew given the amount of ram one has to buy.

Also its worth pointing out the processor supports up to a terabyte, the issue is the memory sticks/mb's are not available yet.

And here we are only talking about the SMP/redundancy style computing . For distributed style computing platforms (aka everything on the top 500 super computers), the 10th and 11th fastest computers in the world are Cray machines based on opterons currently running at Sandia National Labs and Oakridge National Labs respectively.

Now perhaps in your world the top 500 super computers are not considered big iron because they are distributed but i'm w/ the joe slashdotter crowd that considers "big iron" to include the top 500 fastest computers in the world.

The difference is no longer an order of magnitude or two even for the SMP boxes that you are talking about. Googling a bit, I have found these reasonably priced Opteron boxes. These are variations of the same opteron v40z boxes that Sun sells. Quad Opteron boxes w/ hot swap power supplies and hot swap hard drives w/ ECC memory for reasonably cheap for the chassis.

I've never seen a terabyte of ram on a single domain but the
very high end sun boxes will allow you to use either 576 or 288 gigs of ram on a single box, so I will use that as the base. The maximum in SMP mode for the opteron boxes you can homebrew is probably one based on the iwill motherboard which supports 64 gigs, which is now grabbing the midrange line of the sun server series.

In fact HP makes the ProLiant DL585 with opteron chips. They will sell you this machine w/ up to 128 gigabytes of ram, redundant roms, redundant power supplies, hot swappable hard drives, ECC memory.

Its not quite at the high end server sun range but the opteron chip and its use in machines built by traditional "big iron" builders is not really an order or magnitude off. Its really about a factor of 5 from the really high end (aka $1m+ sunfire installations).

And as the IWILL MB points out its not even that far away from home brew or at the very least a $100k officebrew given the amount of ram one has to buy.

Also its worth pointing out the processor supports up to a terabyte, the issue is the memory sticks/mb's are not available yet.

And here we are only talking about the SMP/redundancy style computing . For distributed style computing platforms (aka everything on the top 500 super computers), the 10th and 11th fastest computers in the world are Cray machines based on opterons currently running at Sandia National Labs and Oakridge National Labs respectively.

Now perhaps in your world the top 500 super computers are not considered big iron because they are distributed but i'm w/ the joe slashdotter crowd that considers "big iron" to include the top 500 fastest computers in the world.

Except the fact that most Opteron based Sun machines were designed by Newisys.

Look at these pictures:
Sun V40z
Newisys 4300

Newisys was one of the first places to design Opteron based systems.

Not just that, but some suggest Sun's new servers are also designed to be used by Google, which if I recall correctly, has over 100,000 estimated servers.

Sun is also on the right track to target Developers with their very affordable Ultra 20 in addition to their higher performing, and more costly, workstations.

Who cares about some "PC technology curve"?

What really is important is the performance, power consumption, and price at which you can accomplish your computing goals. The Operton's have a great balance of all three factors and Sun is packaging, yes PACKAGING, some great hardware at a great price and very low power consumption in their x86 line. Who really cares if Sun has the chip designed/made from scratch when at the end of the day all you really should care about is results and not who made your machine so you can brag about it.

If you really think you need Sparc, you could likely double your power by using Sun's high-quality x86 products in place, such as their amazing quad dual-core Opteron V40z servers.

For the record, I have a Sun W2100z x86 Opteron system but could care less about having Sparc as the current equipment is more than capable and provides excellent performance at a fraction of the cost of Sparc for my use. Sparc certainly is a great product and I welcome it and wished it were the standard instead of x86, but until that is ever realized, I'm simply results oriented.

The apparent x86 motto: "Do more with less" [you define 'less']
The apparent Sparc motto: "Work smarter, not harder" [and anyone/thing smart always costs more]

It seems to me that people think Sun is jumping on the bandwagon because Sun insists on using its own vanity license, rather than any of the pre-existing open source licenses. This leads people to believe that Sun is only putting one toe into open source but reserving the right to jump out any time the water gets too hot for it. Sort of an "open source license hokey-pokey."

I can't say whether that is or is not the intent of the CDDL; I can't speak for Sun. But from where I sit, the fact that Sun execs go around telling people that Sun is and always has been an open source friendly company, nay, that indeed it practically invented open source single-handedly -- well, that's not helping Sun's case. It makes the whole effort seem disingenuous.

They are trying to take on Dell in the lower end, thru to the SMP "big iron" machines as well.

> Well done. Come back when it's released and you can run it safely on a production system. Can you
> elaborate your claims? ("Linux has SystemTap, which goes above and beyond what DTrace is
> capable of....")
Here is a short summary of what it does better. These are taken from Solaris Dynamic Tracing Guide

Dtrace understands Structs, Unions, Type and Constant Definitions, systemtap does not, to get this functionality you have to use guru-mode, in other words kiss stability and safety good bye. Of course the systemtap will develop work arounds for defined kernel routines, but if you are developing a drive or in userland there is no support.

Aggregations this is one of the most powerful features, it allows you graph data and see trends, and is smart enought to capture trends and not store huge amounts of data to do so, far more advanced than systemtraps version.

Intelligent and configurable Buffers and Buffering, dtrace trys it best to capture the data you can adjust the size of its buffers to meet your needs, but knows when its overwhelmed and drops a probe activation, but it always records the event and lets the user know about it. No such feature exists in systemtap.

Output Formatting, systemtap is just now getting this feature, of course systemtap inability to handle structs, unions, and typedef makes systemtap version servely limited.

Speculative Tracing is a feature unique to dtrace, the ability to tentatively trace data and then later decide whether to commit the data to a tracing buffer or discard it.

Options and Tunables, dtrace is configurable to the needs of the script writer, systemtap is not. dtrace also has an extensive list of probes it can use, systemtap has 3 or 4 types of probes, dtrace probes go from high level concepts that allows the programmer to deal with highlevel abstracts, or low level probes that deal with the kernel on a per funcion basis.

High Level: lockstat Provider, profile Provider, syscall Provider, vminfo Provider, sysinfo Provider, proc Provider, sched Provider, io Provider, fpuinfo Provider

Low Level: fbt Provider, sdt Provider, mib Provider, plockstat Provider, fasttrap Provider User Process Tracing Perhaps someday it will be intergrated into systemtap, but with the lacking of struct, union and typedefs, they are useless, you want to crash your kernel because you needed to see how your code was interacting with a struct?

Statically Defined Tracing for User Applications: "DTrace provides a facility for user application developers to define customized probes in application code to augment the capabilities." This is how developers can use dtrace with interpeted languages like, php, java, ruby, etc. It can also be expanded to server processes, for instance, you can create a probe that fires everytime your webserver is connected to.

Postmortem Tracing "extraction and processing of the in-kernel data of DTrace consumers. In the event of a system crash, the information that has been recorded with DTrace may provide the crucial clues to root-cause the system failure. DTrace data may be extracted and processed from the system crash dump to aid you in understanding fatal system failures." Crashdumps alone are something that linux doesn't do, an Oops is not a crashdump. A crashdump is a core file for the whole system that can be loaded into a debugger so you can look at complete system at the moment of the failure not just the kernel stack and a few variables.

>>kprobes can do all the same stuff, dtrace is just packaged nicely .... Unless it has been improved significantly, no it cannot. Please see the following blog post by Bryan Cantrill which debunks this: http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/bmc?anchor=dtrace _vs_dprobes_ltt

Just because there's a version of NT that can run on a 128-CPU SMP box doesn't mean it scales that in real-life situations.

If it did, with all Microsoft's billions of dollars, how come there's no NT equivalent to this for Linux, or this for Solaris?

Those two bad boys scale damn near linearly. I know that, I don't have assume that. I can afford a 7-figure house because I can make those things sing. That Sunfire E25K has 72 CPU slots, and each UltraSPARC-IV chip has 2 full CPUs on each die. The IBM 595 has 64 CPU slots, and when I was at SC-04 in Pittsburgh last year, IBM claimed they were working on an 8-way version of their Power CPU. That's 512 CPUs on an SMP box.

There's nothing like that in the NT world that anyone could buy. And you don't have to sign some NDA that would keep you from getting a job in a lot of places to see the source code for either OS.

Keep your damn toy OS, and your self-admitted assumption that "NT knows how to handle more than 2 processors", because there's no commercially-available system to support that assumption.

Java Web Start does a lot of what you want.... Platform independent, distributed, automatic updates without any extra work for the user OR the programmers. Limited to a specific programming platform though. :-)

Puzzle Pirates is a neat game that uses it. It was amusing to see how astonished a lot of posters on Slashdot were when it was announced that they were releasing a game simultaniously for PC, Mac, Linux, BSD...
"How is it possible!?!"

OpenSolaris source code *is* available.

Download it http://www.opensolaris.org/os/downloads/

Or search the source online http://cvs.opensolaris.org/source/

Please, next time do your homework before posting, you just look like a troll otherwise.

Also, your Sun rep should be fired--lying about Linux like that.

Sun is a hardware company, yes, but they're a software company too.

http://www.sun.com/software

http://www.sun.com/download/index.jsp

Sun have been pushing the Java Enterprise System, Java Desktop System, and StarOffice products pretty hard--to the point where it seems like they're forgetting that they are still a hardware vendor too. However, they know Solaris isn't the only OS, or even the best one for particular needs--which is why they sell both Sparc systems for Solaris and x86_64 systems for Solaris_x86, Linux, and Windows. Of course they would prefer you buy Sparc/Solaris, but they're trying to compete in a much wider marketplace.

Incompatible licenses are are one of the deterrents to cross pollonization of the Unices; compare CDDL with GPL. The other is significant differences in the underlying software architectures and interfaces. You can't just copy and paste code for both reasons. Ideas can still flow between kernels, and they do. But frankly, independent implementations of similar ideas is better for software biodiversity. Software needs variety. Keep using Solaris, Linux, and all the *BSDs. Don't rule out any of them yet.

OpenSolaris source code *is* available.

Download it http://www.opensolaris.org/os/downloads/

Or search the source online http://cvs.opensolaris.org/source/

Please, next time do your homework before posting, you just look like a troll otherwise.

Also, your Sun rep should be fired--lying about Linux like that.

Sun is a hardware company, yes, but they're a software company too.

http://www.sun.com/software

http://www.sun.com/download/index.jsp

Sun have been pushing the Java Enterprise System, Java Desktop System, and StarOffice products pretty hard--to the point where it seems like they're forgetting that they are still a hardware vendor too. However, they know Solaris isn't the only OS, or even the best one for particular needs--which is why they sell both Sparc systems for Solaris and x86_64 systems for Solaris_x86, Linux, and Windows. Of course they would prefer you buy Sparc/Solaris, but they're trying to compete in a much wider marketplace.

Incompatible licenses are are one of the deterrents to cross pollonization of the Unices; compare CDDL with GPL. The other is significant differences in the underlying software architectures and interfaces. You can't just copy and paste code for both reasons. Ideas can still flow between kernels, and they do. But frankly, independent implementations of similar ideas is better for software biodiversity. Software needs variety. Keep using Solaris, Linux, and all the *BSDs. Don't rule out any of them yet.

and sun is also the name of a star...
and there is a fruit called apple...

The base embedded subset of OpenGL leaves out display lists, any geometry more complicated than a triangle, and all the new programmable shader stuff. It's basically what an SGI machine had twenty years ago.

This may or may not be useful for cell phones, but it will be useful for things like car navigation systems and other embedded devices.

seems like "delegates" are little more than function pointers, of a sort.

Personally, I find delegates useful, although I'm not fond of the fact they introduce a large amount of separation between the object and the event handler. It's far too easy to rename an object in VS.Net, and start having delegates that have function names that don't reflect the object they're handling (Button1_Click() anyone?).

Properties seem to be an interesting syntactic sugar on private member vars and public getter/setters.

There are some critiques of these features and other C# features at this page, but author writes like he has an axe to grind against C#, and most of the dangers of the features are quite overstated. In the example of delegates, he badly misuses them to show the dangers of them (but he is correct that they are not as type-safe as they should be). In the rant against properties, indexers, etc, he overstates the performance impact of them by ignoring the fact the optimizer is capable of inlining such function calls during JIT just as Java VMs are. And the user-defined implicit type conversions rant largely consists of telling the story about how VB4's preset type conversions caused havoc, therefore it must suck in C#, too. I would have to agree with him on structs (nearly useless and endlessly confusing on what the proper use for them is) and the problems with unchecked exceptions (which makes programming initially easier until you actually need some exception handling), though.

Do take an evening to back through the newer features added to java lately.

Sounds like the Sun Ray system. Load of thin clients with centralized logins and smartcards.

here and from the horses mouth

Calling the gc method suggests that the Java Virtual Machine expend effort toward recycling unused objects in order to make the memory they currently occupy available for quick reuse.

You really have to love languages where a invocation "suggests" that the method "expend effort"

When control returns from the method call, the Java Virtual Machine has made a best effort to reclaim space from all discarded objects.

Good effort! You did your best, son! Good hussle out there. It's too bad you're still gobbling up 100MB of RAM, but don't worry tiger, we'll get 'em next time.

As I recall, WordPerfect had developed a relatively robust web-based wordprocessor in 1997. It ran in a basic Java environment and downloaded pretty quick. They had the prototype up for awhile but never had the revenue model worked out? (This has probably changed)

Maybe they will try again?

http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.4.2/docs/api/java/lang/ ref/SoftReference.html

It's been in the JDK for quite a while, and is exactly what you say is missing.

Have you looked at the java.lang.ref package? I typically use a combination of WeakReferences, SoftReferences, and ReferenceQueues to solve this problem. SoftReferences allow the garbage collector to collect softly reachable Objects when the JVM needs the memory (before a OutOfMemory error is thrown). ReferenceQueues allow you to find out when Objects are considered garbage by the JVM.

Personally, I have been programming with JDK 1.5 for quite some while now and find my productivity greatly improved. Using "generics", the Java container classes are now as powerful (or even more so) as C++. The extended for-loop is now as easy to use as foreach in many scripting languages (Python etc.), but much faster and strongly typed.

Sebastian

Apparently, Google is not your friends: JavaOS.

I don't know why some people think Self is a very different language than Smalltalk-80. With the optional parser and GNU Smalltalk classes you can even file in Smalltalk-80 code and run it.

http://research.sun.com/self/papers/smalltalk.pdf

I don't remember who said "Self is like Smalltalk, only more so" but that is a great definition. To avoid having to repeat this discussion all the time I have renamed my Self/R project as Neo Smalltalk.

Another example - Chrome. Don't know "how much Java" it is, but it received a Duke's Choice Award last year.

This was fixed as of Java 1.5

Look for autoboxing / unboxing :
article

This is why you can call System.gc() to give the JVM suggestions about when to run the garbage collector.

Most developers shouldn't be thinking about this stuff though. Let the JVM worry about optimizations and garbage collections! The article provides a very nice example of this philosophy: java developers don't have to worry about allocating objects on the stack or the heap. The JVM will make the optimal decision based on escape analysis, in a way that is completely transparent to the developer.

In .NET OTOH, you are encouraged to manually declare value types (=objects allocated on the stack). Unfortunately the semantics of your code depend on this decision when you start boxing and casting your objects. "Applied Microsoft .NET Framework programming" by Jeffrey Richter has a good example of Value Type weirdness on page 333.

Here's a link in case you ever get the urge to write some Java code.

Valid point... for 1999. But Java has been through a lot of changes since "the original JBuilder" came out. There have been three major changes to the class libraries (1.2, 1.4, and the 5.0).

Honestly, I understand why people are down on Java -- it's because there have always been two strengths to the Java "platform":

1. It provides a simple programming model (single inheritance, indirect memory management, ...)
2. A rich class library for specific tasks that are easy to learn (but difficult to master, obviously).

...and early implementations weren't able to keep up with native code in any way, shape or form.

That said, I think you hit the nail ont the head -- people are still thinking in terms of 1999 and not 2005 when they think of Java -- at least on Slashdot. But the typical Java developer is busy writing enterprise apps, not writing kernel code, device drivers, or anything else that requires C/C++.

Valid point... for 1999. But Java has been through a lot of changes since "the original JBuilder" came out. There have been three major changes to the class libraries (1.2, 1.4, and the 5.0).

Honestly, I understand why people are down on Java -- it's because there have always been two strengths to the Java "platform":

1. It provides a simple programming model (single inheritance, indirect memory management, ...)
2. A rich class library for specific tasks that are easy to learn (but difficult to master, obviously).

...and early implementations weren't able to keep up with native code in any way, shape or form.

That said, I think you hit the nail ont the head -- people are still thinking in terms of 1999 and not 2005 when they think of Java -- at least on Slashdot. But the typical Java developer is busy writing enterprise apps, not writing kernel code, device drivers, or anything else that requires C/C++.

Valid point... for 1999. But Java has been through a lot of changes since "the original JBuilder" came out. There have been three major changes to the class libraries (1.2, 1.4, and the 5.0).

Honestly, I understand why people are down on Java -- it's because there have always been two strengths to the Java "platform":

1. It provides a simple programming model (single inheritance, indirect memory management, ...)
2. A rich class library for specific tasks that are easy to learn (but difficult to master, obviously).

...and early implementations weren't able to keep up with native code in any way, shape or form.

That said, I think you hit the nail ont the head -- people are still thinking in terms of 1999 and not 2005 when they think of Java -- at least on Slashdot. But the typical Java developer is busy writing enterprise apps, not writing kernel code, device drivers, or anything else that requires C/C++.

The stack comes for "free" in C. If you need to store something too large, you need the heap. But then, you can allocate it once, and don't even consider freeing it until you finish with it

Or NOT consider freeing it when you forget about it... as the case may be.

Try writing a Java program that eats less than 32k.

No problem at all.

I have a nokia 6230. This is a regular joe - standard nokia candy bar form factor series 40 - phone. Its not a smart phone / mobile computer / email executive toy. This is a phone marketed to kids / fashion crowd. An updated version is already in the shops marketed as free with a 12 month contract (i.e. in j6p's eyes this is a completely free phone).

now using just dvd-decryptor and the software (transcoder) that comes with the phone you can copy a complete dvd-film to the memory card. a film takes up about 100MB. I have a 1GB of cf memory. I generally carry a couple of films and several mp3/aac albums everywhere i go.

Cons:
1. The screen is low resulution so the quality is pretty bad.
2. have to break the drm on the dvd. No legal way to get mainstream content.
3. nokias pc software sucks. Its really really bad - can't stress that enough. If it was even 60% as good as itunes interface i'd be happy.
4. syncs over bluetooth, not fast enough for me, but newer faster bluetooth versions are already here.

Pros.
1. uses .3gp video format which is just a rebadged cutting-edge highdef format repurposed for embedded devices. really gets amazing small file sizes, with acceptable picture.
2. Can share music/videos with other peoples phones with a few button presses - all don over bluetooth. No drm thankyou very much.
3. Phone has a built in speaker so several people can watch (squint at) the film.

This phone is a gameboy,video player, ipod,crackberry,phone,pager, calendar,internet browser,wap browser ... You can download the j2me toolkit from sun and write your own programs/games for free. There is open source community around j2me for instance I use j2meVNC for remote desktop access which is useable if not a pleasure. All this rolled into one device Yes it sucks at almost all its 2ndary roles - but then it is virtually FREE!

So for me all apple would be bringing to party is a slick interface, some nasty DRM, and a big fat price tag. It might sell but only because j6p doesn't know how good his 6320 could be.

Apple had better release the iphone in the next couple of years or they're spent.Nokia, sony and microsoft will eat them for breakfast.

Question: IANAL, so I'm confused. That seems, to me, to be a wrong conclusion by the Debian people. I agree that the license fragments listed by them indicate that:

Basically, this means that if you implement any part of the new 1.2 API or Jini API, even from scratch, Sun will "own" your implementation and you will have to pay them for the right to use it. (source)

However, the license for the documentation of said interfaces states:

NOTICE; LIMITED LICENSE GRANTS: Sun Microsystems, Inc. ("Sun") hereby grants you a fully-paid, non-exclusive, non-transferable, worldwide, limited license (without the right to sublicense), under the Sun's applicable intellectual property rights to view, download, use and reproduce the Specification only for the purpose of internal evaluation, which shall be understood to include developing applications intended to run on an implementation of the Specification provided that such applications do not themselves implement any portion(s) of the Specification.

That seems, to me, to say that you can use the documentation to write an application that uses the specs. So Sun does not "own" any application that uses the spec to Java. Note that interfaces and classes designed to be implemented or subclassed in the Java sense of those words are being used as intended, so I think that "implements a spec" is different from implements in the Java sense. That is, implemening java.util.Iterator doesn't make your code an implementation of the spec.

Implementations of the spec, it seems to me, is software that runs applications that use the spec. Like a JVM and its associated classes/interfaces for instance. In those cases, the following holds:

Sun also grants you a perpetual, non-exclusive, worldwide, fully paid-up, royalty free, limited license (without the right to sublicense) under any applicable copyrights or patent rights it may have in the Specification to create and/or distribute an Independent Implementation of the Specification that:

1. fully implements the Spec(s) including all its required interfaces and functionality;
2. does not modify, subset, superset or otherwise extend the Licensor Name Space, or include any public or protected packages, classes, Java interfaces, fields or methods within the Licensor Name Space other than those required/authorized by the Specification or Specifications being implemented;
3. passes the TCK (including satisfying the requirements of the applicable TCK Users Guide) for such Specification.

(source)

That basically states, to me, that you can't implement a core class that deviates from its spec. Since the entire specification is a set of specs of individual classes, you can choose which classes you support (as long as they fulfill the contract specified by the docs). So in that way you are not allowed to intentionally write incompatible software.

I don't know if that is a good thing or not, but it doesn't seem as bad to me as what you and Debian are implying. However, I am probably wrong as IANAL and often get confused by this license stuff. Can anyone help me?

Question: IANAL, so I'm confused. That seems, to me, to be a wrong conclusion by the Debian people. I agree that the license fragments listed by them indicate that:

Basically, this means that if you implement any part of the new 1.2 API or Jini API, even from scratch, Sun will "own" your implementation and you will have to pay them for the right to use it. (source)

However, the license for the documentation of said interfaces states:

NOTICE; LIMITED LICENSE GRANTS: Sun Microsystems, Inc. ("Sun") hereby grants you a fully-paid, non-exclusive, non-transferable, worldwide, limited license (without the right to sublicense), under the Sun's applicable intellectual property rights to view, download, use and reproduce the Specification only for the purpose of internal evaluation, which shall be understood to include developing applications intended to run on an implementation of the Specification provided that such applications do not themselves implement any portion(s) of the Specification.

That seems, to me, to say that you can use the documentation to write an application that uses the specs. So Sun does not "own" any application that uses the spec to Java. Note that interfaces and classes designed to be implemented or subclassed in the Java sense of those words are being used as intended, so I think that "implements a spec" is different from implements in the Java sense. That is, implemening java.util.Iterator doesn't make your code an implementation of the spec.

Implementations of the spec, it seems to me, is software that runs applications that use the spec. Like a JVM and its associated classes/interfaces for instance. In those cases, the following holds:

Sun also grants you a perpetual, non-exclusive, worldwide, fully paid-up, royalty free, limited license (without the right to sublicense) under any applicable copyrights or patent rights it may have in the Specification to create and/or distribute an Independent Implementation of the Specification that:

1. fully implements the Spec(s) including all its required interfaces and functionality;
2. does not modify, subset, superset or otherwise extend the Licensor Name Space, or include any public or protected packages, classes, Java interfaces, fields or methods within the Licensor Name Space other than those required/authorized by the Specification or Specifications being implemented;
3. passes the TCK (including satisfying the requirements of the applicable TCK Users Guide) for such Specification.

(source)

That basically states, to me, that you can't implement a core class that deviates from its spec. Since the entire specification is a set of specs of individual classes, you can choose which classes you support (as long as they fulfill the contract specified by the docs). So in that way you are not allowed to intentionally write incompatible software.

I don't know if that is a good thing or not, but it doesn't seem as bad to me as what you and Debian are implying. However, I am probably wrong as IANAL and often get confused by this license stuff. Can anyone help me?

Solaris: not yet distributed by google.

Dude, they invented C#! Well, sort of...

Java based programs doesn't imply running in the browser. More than likely, if it's java based and a program of that size it will be a WebStart. WebStart is a software delivery mechanism. When you click on a link to launch a WebStart application it will download the app and store it locally. The next time you run the application it will launch it from the local drive. If there's an update it will notify you and you can download a new version.

The application is just a standard java client app that runs on your jvm. The only difference is how it's packaged and linked online.

I find it very interesting that these two big companies only mention OpenOffice. They don't talk about StarOffice at all.

Read the press releases from Sun & Google: Sun's Press Release, sun.com Featured Article, Google's Press Release . None of these mention "StarOffice". They all discuss "OpenOffice".

Normally when Sun talks about StarOffice/OpenOffice, they mostly talk about their own StarOffice product. I wonder why they don't talk about it in regards to this partnership? Does OpenOffice simply have better mindshare? Are there funny licensing reasons preventing Google from distributing StarOffice? Does Google want to distribute a more pure OSS project? Has Sun given up on StarOffice outside the corporate environment?

I find it very interesting that these two big companies only mention OpenOffice. They don't talk about StarOffice at all.

Read the press releases from Sun & Google: Sun's Press Release, sun.com Featured Article, Google's Press Release . None of these mention "StarOffice". They all discuss "OpenOffice".

Normally when Sun talks about StarOffice/OpenOffice, they mostly talk about their own StarOffice product. I wonder why they don't talk about it in regards to this partnership? Does OpenOffice simply have better mindshare? Are there funny licensing reasons preventing Google from distributing StarOffice? Does Google want to distribute a more pure OSS project? Has Sun given up on StarOffice outside the corporate environment?

9 times out of 10, Notepad.exe will run on Wine. :-)