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My biggest concern is that Sun gear tends to overly pricey, but if they're addressing that I might just start buying from them.

While Suns tend to be pricey, it's because their built like tanks (both in terms of chasis/frame, and from CPU and internal layout). Like Macs, they're designed to work well, and you have to pay the designers.

A while ago AnandTech had a review on Sun's V40z.

You could also call up Sun and ask them for a loaner. They frequently let let people try out machines for a couple of weeks to run them through their paces. You can get either Solaris or Linux installed. BTW, make you open the box up and look at the internals: they're very well designed from a space, air flow, and maintenance point of view (part of the cost).

http://www.sun.com/desktop/workstation/ultra3/inde x.xml

A SPARC laptop runing Solaris is not new, neither would running Solaris on an x86 laptop be new. Both http://www.tadpolecomputer.com/ and http://www.naturetech.com.tw/_page/index.html have been offering SPARC based laptops for quite a while and any x86 laptop on Sun's hardware compatibility list http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/hcl/ can run Solaris x86. What's news is this is the first time I have seen Sun offer a first party solution for laptops that get the same service and support offerings Sun provides for their servers and workstations.

Sun is acquiring SeeBeyond for $387 Million. I guess they're pushing back to the server-side.

You need only check their website.

http://www.sun.com/aboutsun/investor/earnings_rele ases/pr/2005-q2.html

Sales of software, operating systems, Sparc and x86 servers, and providing services.

I know your post is being facetious, but...

Microsoft's Maps ... It never gives wrong directions. (Becasue it doesn't exist.)

It exists, and it does.

http://research.sun.com/dmp/patents.php?projectID= 11&show=all

start with these, these are just some of there scalability ones, but the previous poster is right, SUN have a whole swag of patents around Java. These are just the ones I have been recently dealing with.

a) Java was DESIGNED for embedded systems, first and foremost. That's why it is hardware-agnostic; because it allows the hardware makers to throw in whatever chips are cheap in bulk at the time, change on a whim, and still push out the same upgrade to everyone. Being cross-platform in the MacOS/Linux/Windows way was just sort of a side-effect. Think about how much this will benefit set-top manufacturers!!

You can argue it was designed for embedded, but I won't. That was its original intention- I don't know about saying it was designed for embedded. Because Java is not open, "your slap Java on any chip" sounds great until you need a VM. Sure, there are nice free attempts, but you still have problems without your slow, memory hogging VM. Might as well screw deterministic memory- something more than necessary with realtime embedded systems. There are some nice attempts though- I've seen a theoretical maximum of 300 ms in some places for "sitting around" which isn't half bad. Show me a embedded device with a Java device driver. What about an unlaughable scheduler? Directly interfacing with interrupts? Anyhow, it's fun to go back and see how Sun at least had an embedded link compared to now. Where's it going?

b) Java isn't interpreted anymore... its just-in-time compiled and then executed as native code. A bit of a start-up pause while the classes compile, that's all.

Maybe JIT moved Java from being fully interpreted, but it's still interpreted and "compiled" at runtime making it theoretically (a.k.a Javaly) and realistically on average always slower and more of a memory hog than unnamed alternatives, that's all. But, sometimes that's ok right? Look at how Java has taken over the desktop application market where that least matters. How many Java desktop applications do you run? Can you tell it's Java? If programming will always be hard, one might wonder what skeletons in the closets Java fanatics have at the price of conformity to an interface. Java version incompatibilities, buggy VMs, oh my.

What's next Java in my car? Yup, been done already.

I believe most of the stirring up regarding the Java Trap article was done by people who either did not read, or did not understand the article properly, and went off on wild tangents. Afair, RMS has not taken part in the ensuing flame wars.

You misunderstood the OOo issue, but that's understandable. As I explained in other places, Sun, Free Runtime developers and OpenOffice.org developers have sat together to figure out a good way to plug different VMs into OpenOffice.org. Various people tried their luck making Free Runtimes work with OOo (I, for example, failed making sense out of the build system, and the com.sun.secret.and.unspecified.Something classes referenced in the sandbox module, and eventually gave up trying to figure the largely undocumented code out.). Caolan, otoh, didn't give up, and made gcj work well as a runtime within OpenOffice.org. That was cool, and he managed to get his patches gradually integrated into OOo's main tree. Then he went for holidays, someone published an article about Sun sneaking in Java in the next version of OOo and all hell broke lose without anyone having a real clue what was happening for the first day or two. Then it got fixed, but Caolan was still on holiday away from his mail, so noone was able to tell how far along things really are. It turned out that they are very far along, and as you can see for yourself in Fedora Core 4, most things just work.

If you want to see Sun Specific APIs in action, please grep over the 1.0.x source code for imports of com.sun.* or sun.* namespaces. Those APIs are not specified, so they can not be implemented. See http://java.sun.com/products/jdk/faq/faq-sun-packa ges.html for details on why using Sun-specific APIs makes Java programs unportable and unreliable.

If you take some time to research OOo on gcj, you'll notice that the development has been beneficial for both OOo and gcj. Good thngs can positively encourage each other, and OOo is a very cool project to help along with.

I've got the idea that you are thinking that Sun is desparate from your continous stream of (mildly amusing) scenarious where Sun would be constrcuted to be threatening to me. They'd only run amok with funky IP claims if they were really, really desperate, though, as funky IP amok runs tend to leave the business in shambles as customers turn somewhere else. Sun is, these days, quite a few billions of dollars away from being desperate, though.

I believe you're boxing with your own shadow, here. On one hand you're the one saying 'Sun could have crushed OSS! They could find many reasons to sue you, personally, even now!' on the other hand you're nevertheless saying 'Sun will never sue OSS projects. They never did.'. I think you are simultaneously arguing both sides of a heated 'Sun is evil! No it's not!' debate taking place somewhere else.

You seem to take the pain, suffering, and (my goodness!) bad press that Sun gets pretty personally. Do you happen to work for Sun's PR team? Or are you by chance one of their Evangelists?

I'm no programmer, however isn't Java's appeal the fact that it's very easy to make Java apps cross-platform?

While Sun's intentions in open sourcing their products may not be neccesarily benign, they ARE giving *something significant* to the open source communuity. The best example I can give is OpenOffice.

Sun does have it's own commercial office suite called StarOffice which is derived from the OO suite, however OO is being developed into a very well-rounded competitor.

NeoOffice/J for OS X is a great opensource alternative for MS Office, and that project has its roots in the OpenOffice suite.

"No one uses Sun's app server cause its new and immature."

Um, the Application Server is the base of the Java Enterprise Edition SDK, the reference implementation of the Java Enterprise Edition (nee J2EE) platform.

After iPlanet fell apart, Sun combined the SDK team with the remaining iPlanet team to produce the Application Server/Java EE SDK. The code base has been around since the platform was invented.

Granted, the Application Server's gone through way too many name changes (thanks, marketing!), which has probably caused this confusion. But, in a rare bout of sanity, note that J2EE is now Java EE, and J2SE is now Java Standard Edition.

used to be netscape application server before that

http://www.iplanet.com/

goes to Sun's software page where Sun Java System Application Server is one of the products listed.

"Platform Edition 8.1" is the currently shipping release.

GP was talking out his ass when he said their app server was called Platform Edition 9 and no one uses it because it is new and immature.

iPlanet has been around long time, used to be available for free and was included in the Solaris media kit.

googled up a thread on a 2001 giga report that has them at 3% market share:

http://www.theserverside.com/news/thread.tss?threa d_id=3362

"In August 1999, Giga published Comparison of Three EJB Application Server Solutions: IBM, BEA Systems and iPlanet (Sun/Netscape) We chose to include the iPlanet application server in that comparison because, at the time, we expected it to be a clear third in market share compared to IBM and BEA. So far, that has almost, but not quite, happened, due to iPlanet's entry into the market a year or more later than BEA and IBM, and we are projecting that iPlanet will take a 9 percent share of the 2000 market, considerably smaller than IBM and BEA. Still, among the vendors capable of moving closer to the IBM or BEA level of market share in 2001, iPlanet is one of the leaders, along with Sybase ....." -- The GIGA Group

Any advice? Solutions?

• JDS
• Sunray
• RHEL
• ClamAV and ClamWin
• Fedora
• Debian
• etc.. etc.. lots of other virus-free OSS solutions out there.

Pick one or more of the above natural remedies for your MS related affliction...

Any advice? Solutions?

• JDS
• Sunray
• RHEL
• ClamAV and ClamWin
• Fedora
• Debian
• etc.. etc.. lots of other virus-free OSS solutions out there.

Pick one or more of the above natural remedies for your MS related affliction...

Some developers are simply ignorant of the standards and alternatives, and/or they don't understand the long term consequences of letting one company control the standards.

Some developers understand the alternatives, and the long term consequences of not using open standards, but they are simply too lazy, or amoral, to be bothered doing anything about it.

And Microsoft, of course, is practising their usual brand of sabotage, trying to pollute the standard so only their products will work.

Microsoft's schemes have always relied on the ignorance and laziness of developers and users. In this case, Microsoft intentionally tweeks products like Frontpage and MS Word to produce non-standard HTML.

This was an even bigger problem in the past, when Microsoft could use HTML that relied on bugs in Netscape to cause it to crash. But Mozilla and Firefox are, fortunately, higher quality products.

This was part of a bigger plan to stop Netscape, and leave Microsoft with a monopoly on web browsers, and thus the Internet itself. Other steps Microsoft took included paying companies to break their contracts with Netscape, threatening Apple with the loss of MS Office for the Mac, if Apple didn't stop supporting Netscape, and so on. You can read more about it the the DOJ case against Microsoft.

In recent years, Microsoft's strategy of polluting standards was expanded to try to block the progress of Linux and other Open Source products, as one Microsoft analyst stated in Microsoft's infamous Halloween document:

> OSS projects have been able to gain a foothold in many server applications because of the wide utility of highly commoditized, simple protocols. By extending these protocols and developing new protocols, we can deny OSS projects entry into the market.

And, finally, you can see another example of Microsoft's strategy at work, when they used it to try to sabotage the Java standard, as shown in the evidence in Sun's case against Microsoft, in the following quote from a Microsoft marketing presentation:

> Strategic Objective [is to] kill cross-platform Java by grow[ing] the polluted Java market.

Along with Microsoft's reliance on the ignorance and laziness of their customers, as shown in this quote:

> At this point its [sic] not good to create MORE noise around our win32 java classes. Instead we should just quietly grow j++ share and assume that people will take advantage of our classes without ever realizing they are building win32-only java apps."

So, it's up to you. You can be lazy and use development tools that create websites that only work in Internet Explorer. The long term result will be an Internet that is largely controlled by a single company, and, as history has shown, is essentially stagnant.

Or, you can support shared and open standards, and ensure an Internet where innovation and free enterprise can thrive, and the people in developing nations can afford to get a foot in the door to help lift themselves out of poverty.

For myself, I always start out by developing websites that follow standards. I then test them in Mozilla, Firefox, Safari, and Opera, and they usually work fine, with some minor adjustments.

Then I test them in Internet Explorer, and decide how much additional effort I am going to spend. Getting around the non-standard quirks in IE can often double my development effort. I will be glad when IE's share shrinks to the point where Microsoft is forced to fix their product, and follow standards.

How much quicker could we have had NeoOffice on MacOS if it were written in an easily-ported language like Java?

If I'm going to spend $38,000 on a Sun V40Z, soon to have 4 dual-core Opterons, 16 GB RAM, dual fast SCSI disks, wouldn't I spend another $500 to keep it busy? If the product really works, it would be cost effective for squeezing a dollop of additional performance out of mid-to-high end "commodity" servers ($5-50K). Not everything is a $2k white box server or desktop. There are a lot of applications (Oracle, Apache, third party app servers) where it is already cost effective to buy the fastest processors and lots of memory. Paying a 10% premium (or less) for better network performance is easy to justify.

Wonder how if differs from Sun's Network Coprocessor, which used an onboard 16 MHz M68000 to offload TCP packet processing from the mighty 40 MHz SPARC processors in an SS690. Sounds like the Level 5 company's product (not Level 3, as the intro implies) also includes "improved" networking protocols that are supposed to be compatible.

IBM's prices aren't as ridiculous as you make out either. Here's an example. It's expensive at around $5,600, but over $10,000?

I'm not going to comment on SGI or HP, as they live in their own worlds. But anyway, the point is you're wrong. Totally wrong. I hope you're embarassed, I mean, I'm embarassed for you. My advice? Change your name. Seriously. That's about the only way you're going to get your reputation back.

Not true according to Sun you can use Solaris for free "As software business models are evolving Sun is taking an innovative lead role in making the Solaris 10 OS freely available for commercial use - and at zero cost." Though this does not extend to previous versions of Solaris like Solaris 9. Those you can only use for testing and development. RedHat doesn't even let you do that with RHEL. They only give you a 30 day trial license.

Just to emphasize... According to Eric Boutilier in his blog "under the new Solaris/Opensolaris model, in order for a Sun developer to put code into regular Solaris (the Solaris that Sun ships), he/she will have to put it into Opensolaris first."

In case the Open Solaris site goes down or you just don't feel like clicking two links on the page

Torrents!

I assume you mean it's silly because IBM is the only source for POWER, so it's not very open. Schwartz wrote as much in his blog entry on OpenPower. His main gripe is that the box doesn't run AIX (that's a bad thing?!). So the real question is, does POWER's awesome integer (read database) performance justify double or treble the hardware cost of an x86 server?

Hate the name. Running linux doesn't make the architecture "Open". For an affordable power based workstation look here. It runs a few different distros of linux and other os's and more are in the works.

I don't really agree with all the hype around IBM's open source moves. Seems like a lot of what they are doing is using open source as a way to get salespeople in the door to sell proprietary IBM solutions. That's not necessarily a bad thing depending on how it's done. Look at some of the Apache projects, things like Jetty where IBM was a big supporter until they decided it was good enough to fork it internally for WebSphere Portal. That's not so bad, the license allows it but it's still a bit messed up in my opinion.

But other things like Derby and Geronimo are different all together. Take a look at the IBM Cloudscape pages. Cloudscape is not open source. It's "open source-based". They released the code as the Apache Derby project, but Cloudscape is not an open source project. The download link says "trials and betas". It may be free now but it has the potential of not being free when IBM senses it can charge for more than just support. Why would IBM release this? It's not because there weren't other open source java based RDBMS's out there. Hypersonic and Mckoi were already quite popular in that space and there are more. The difference is, Cloudscape has been designed to be a stepping stone to DB2. The java rdbms's have a niche market. One segment of which is users that want an easy portable system to develop on with little administrative requirements. These types generally outgrow the capabilities of such database systems and the user needs to migrate. If you're already using Cloudscape, the logical migration path is DB2. Which definately isn't free.

Also look at their recent acquisition of Gluecode. This gives them the developers of the Geronimo project. It's going to turn into Websphere-Lite. Same type of deal with Cloudscape. Both of these will be at the expense of open source software that is trying to be real open source, not just a carrot on a stick. Hopefully people see this and projects like Jonas and JBoss continue to grow.

I feel IBM is abusing the phrase "Open Source" in it's marketting where it's not appropriate. Like a couple of days ago when they announced they were moving to a more open source type of development for all their projects. They didn't say they were open sourcing all their projects, just that they will be using open source methodologies within IBM. I guess you could call it the Bazaar in the Cathedral. Yet so many mistakenly took the news to mean that ibm was doing more with open source and releasing more products via open source.

To me it looks like IBM is turning Open Source into shareware. They have their free versions to tinker around with but when you're ready for the real thing, a non crippled version, you have to pay for it. From Jonathan Schwartz's Weblog we have this quote:

"Jonas (Red Hat's app server) is just a toy, it's just for the low end" said IBM's exec at the Smith Barney Tech Conference I just attended in NYC.

A similar message is presented (though a little less harshly) when IBM compares AIX to Linix

Also look at Eclipse. It's used as an IDE but in many respects it is crippled in that regard, it's real purpose is as a tools platform. To get real productivity out of it you need to purchase plug-ins or upgrade to professional tools based on Eclipse like WebSphere Studio. The Eclipse Foundation is working on a number of open sourc

One of the snippets in the article refers to a supposedly alarming comment in dtrace.
The author of the comment has explained(*) it in his blog.
(*) explained in a way that probably only makes sense to hardware/assembly geeks. (i.e. Not me)

http://sunsolve.sun.com/search/document.do?assetke y=urn:cds:docid:1-1-4256482-1

Work Around:
Don't bang on the keyboard like a wild monkey

> Not letting them sell a product the way they want to in the name of "competition" is BS.

That is correct. As Ayn Rand has explained, the antitrust laws are contradictory, and ineffective, and have mostly been used to punish success. I disagree with them, even when used against a desrving target like Microsoft.

Instead, the law should be going after Microsoft for their real crimes. These generally involve extortion, sabotage, and fraud, and there are many examples:

1. Extortion:

Bill Gates threatens to harm Apple, if Apple does not stop doing business with Netscape:

> Gates informed those Microsoft executives most closely involved in the negotiations with Apple that the discussions "have not been going well at all." One of the several reasons for this, Gates wrote, was that "Apple let us down on the browser by making Netscape the standard install." Gates then reported that he had already called Apple's CEO (who at the time was Gil Amelio) to ask "how we should announce the cancellation of Mac Office...."

2. Sabotage:

Microsoft strategy to destroy shared standards, in order to block competition from Linux:

> OSS projects have been able to gain a foothold in many server applications because of the wide utility of highly commoditized, simple protocols. By extending these protocols and developing new protocols, we can deny OSS projects entry into the market.

A Microsoft marketing presentation describes how they will sabotage Java:

> The "strategic objective" is to "kill cross-platform Java by grow[ing] the polluted Java market."

3. Fraud:

Microsoft's plans to defraud their customers regarding the Java compatibility of J++:

> "At this point its [sic] not good to create MORE noise around our win32 java classes. Instead we should just quietly grow j++ share and assume that people will take advantage of our classes without ever realizing they are building win32-only java apps."

Once you get away from the antitrust laws, and start looking at the real crimes, then the proper punishment becomes more obvious, namely, jail time for various Microsoft officials.

The public is best served by Free Market competition. It is also our right to compete in a free society.

Unfortunately, competition can be subverted by those who are willing to break the law. And by methods similar to the above, and other fraudulent means (paying people to lie, in magazine articles, letters to the editor, etc.), Microsoft has managed to destroy better products and competitors without actually having to compete. Microsoft's behavior, and methods, are more like those of a crime syndicate, than a competitive business.

When there is competition, some people become very rich, while increasing the wealth of society as a whole. But when companies use criminal means, they can become rich, while causing great damage to society as a whole. The latter is the case with Microsoft.

And the damage has been great. To give just one example, Microsoft's sabotage of Java in web clients has delayed the development of e-commerce by at least half a decade, at a cost to the world of tens of billions of dollars. I sometimes wonder what that would translate to in lost lives.

Similarly, Microsoft used sabotage and fraud to stop competition in the PC OS market (DR-DOS, Geoworks, OS/2), in PC applications market (WordPerfect), and in the PC browser market (Netscape). As a result, new developments involving the PC (thin clients, PVRs, grid supercomputers, 64-bit computing), and the Internet (tabs, interactive web clients) stagnated for years until new competitors, such as Linux and Mozilla, came along, enabling the new development

> Not letting them sell a product the way they want to in the name of "competition" is BS.

That is correct. As Ayn Rand has explained, the antitrust laws are contradictory, and ineffective, and have mostly been used to punish success. I disagree with them, even when used against a desrving target like Microsoft.

Instead, the law should be going after Microsoft for their real crimes. These generally involve extortion, sabotage, and fraud, and there are many examples:

1. Extortion:

Bill Gates threatens to harm Apple, if Apple does not stop doing business with Netscape:

> Gates informed those Microsoft executives most closely involved in the negotiations with Apple that the discussions "have not been going well at all." One of the several reasons for this, Gates wrote, was that "Apple let us down on the browser by making Netscape the standard install." Gates then reported that he had already called Apple's CEO (who at the time was Gil Amelio) to ask "how we should announce the cancellation of Mac Office...."

2. Sabotage:

Microsoft strategy to destroy shared standards, in order to block competition from Linux:

> OSS projects have been able to gain a foothold in many server applications because of the wide utility of highly commoditized, simple protocols. By extending these protocols and developing new protocols, we can deny OSS projects entry into the market.

A Microsoft marketing presentation describes how they will sabotage Java:

> The "strategic objective" is to "kill cross-platform Java by grow[ing] the polluted Java market."

3. Fraud:

Microsoft's plans to defraud their customers regarding the Java compatibility of J++:

> "At this point its [sic] not good to create MORE noise around our win32 java classes. Instead we should just quietly grow j++ share and assume that people will take advantage of our classes without ever realizing they are building win32-only java apps."

Once you get away from the antitrust laws, and start looking at the real crimes, then the proper punishment becomes more obvious, namely, jail time for various Microsoft officials.

The public is best served by Free Market competition. It is also our right to compete in a free society.

Unfortunately, competition can be subverted by those who are willing to break the law. And by methods similar to the above, and other fraudulent means (paying people to lie, in magazine articles, letters to the editor, etc.), Microsoft has managed to destroy better products and competitors without actually having to compete. Microsoft's behavior, and methods, are more like those of a crime syndicate, than a competitive business.

When there is competition, some people become very rich, while increasing the wealth of society as a whole. But when companies use criminal means, they can become rich, while causing great damage to society as a whole. The latter is the case with Microsoft.

And the damage has been great. To give just one example, Microsoft's sabotage of Java in web clients has delayed the development of e-commerce by at least half a decade, at a cost to the world of tens of billions of dollars. I sometimes wonder what that would translate to in lost lives.

Similarly, Microsoft used sabotage and fraud to stop competition in the PC OS market (DR-DOS, Geoworks, OS/2), in PC applications market (WordPerfect), and in the PC browser market (Netscape). As a result, new developments involving the PC (thin clients, PVRs, grid supercomputers, 64-bit computing), and the Internet (tabs, interactive web clients) stagnated for years until new competitors, such as Linux and Mozilla, came along, enabling the new development

and hey a 64Bit java plugin would be nice.

kstat -p | grep -a link_up | awk -F: '{print $1$2}' | sort -u

kstat -p | grep -a link_up | awk -F: '{print $1$2}' | sort -u

kstat -p | grep -a link_up | awk -F: '{print $1$2}' | sort -u

try the support forum at http://forum.sun.com/

I have a feeling OpenWindows wouldn't be the best choice of names.

The 7 second boot was for a zone within a Solaris instance, so this was not a complete boot.

It looks like the complete boot took 32.6 seconds.

See:

http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/eschrock/20050106 #boot_chart_results

Yes! That was true, but not as of Solaris 10. The reason core files needed to be on the same machine that produced them was because they didn't include all the necessary information. In particular, they didn't include read-only data. Their genesis was around debugging on a given machine and in that case, dumping the read-only sections is kind of pointless. This was a frustration that affected every application developer who cared about post-mortem analysis; we in Solaris really care about debugging from first failure.

In Solaris 10, I did some work to make the content of core files adjustable and added text (aka code) to the default. Now when you get a core file, you can debug it on any other system regardless of the patch level, libraries installed or the version of your application that was running. Using coreadm(1M) you can adjust the content to, say, add the symbol table to the core dump or omit the gigantic ISM segment that you don't care about for.

So, yes, mdb(1) had some limitations in the past -- we've tried to address them in Solaris 10. If you have other issues preventing you from using mdb(1), post a comment on the OpenSolaris site.

I thought I was going to have to find a shill to ask that question... "Sir, we've never met before, have we?"

"See http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/tpm/20050510#the_ xen_summit [sun.com] (it seems to be down right now)."

Let me guess? Solaris?

This should give you something useful to learn from: http://www.sun.com/cddl/CDDL_why_details.html

See OpenSolaris.org. There are two other options: The Sun Download Center and genunix.org No registration is required.

DTrace lets us examine just about anything, with minimal impact on the system. It's way cool, and other OSes have nothing that is close (for details covering the Linux Trace Toolkit (LTT), DProbes, K42 and Kerninst see the USENIX paper.

DTrace solves disk I/O by PID, network activity by PID, elapsed and on-cpu times for syscalls, libcalls and user funcs, and much more.

DTrace is great if you are a programmer with a little kernel knowledge, but if not you may find the DTraceToolkit helpful - it is a collection of ready-to-roll scripts.

For a list of many OpenSolaris features with screenshots, see the OpenSolaris Guide.

DTrace lets us examine just about anything, with minimal impact on the system. It's way cool, and other OSes have nothing that is close (for details covering the Linux Trace Toolkit (LTT), DProbes, K42 and Kerninst see the USENIX paper.

DTrace solves disk I/O by PID, network activity by PID, elapsed and on-cpu times for syscalls, libcalls and user funcs, and much more.

DTrace is great if you are a programmer with a little kernel knowledge, but if not you may find the DTraceToolkit helpful - it is a collection of ready-to-roll scripts.

For a list of many OpenSolaris features with screenshots, see the OpenSolaris Guide.

It seems that Solaris 2.9 wasn't going to come out for x86 because that was after Sun had bought Cobolt. Then a bunch of happy Solaris x86 users got Sun to change their mind.

I have had a Solaris 9 x86 server since about the time it came out and it runs just fine.

Some Sun guys are doing a port to Xen. This'll give you near-native performance for Solaris apps, along with the comprehensive device support provided by a Linux (or NetBSD) "domain 0" (host virtual machine).

See http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/tpm/20050510#the_ xen_summit (it seems to be down right now).

http://www.sun.com/software/solaris/get.jsp. Requires registration though.

Also check out Jim Grisanzio's blog. It explains a bit about what's been going on with the pilot program.

• Free Sun Compiler Tools!
  
• Torrent Downloads for Solaris (I've been wanting this for a LONG time.)
  
• Complete CVS Access
  
• Public Bug Database

• Free Sun Compiler Tools!
  
• Torrent Downloads for Solaris (I've been wanting this for a LONG time.)
  
• Complete CVS Access
  
• Public Bug Database

Wow...

Now we can actualy use those extra frames to render slight different angled scenes, so you can look around at you monitor searching for targets without actually using the mouse to turn around!

And I guess this will create some degree of stereoscopic effect on the image, leading to "real" 3D without the need of special glasses!

This can really improve the gaming experience! But wait, I guess it would be usefull with project Looking Glass too (http://www.sun.com/software/looking_glass/)!

Actually, Parallel Make (i.e. gmake -j, http://developers.sun.com/solaris/articles/paralle l_make.html, or pmake, http://www.llnl.gov/icc/lc/DEG/pmake/pmake.html) can make project builds significantly faster.

Yes, but the poster I was responding to was talking about building a single source file (the one just modified, usually) and linking it. "make -j" doesn't do anything useful if there aren't multiple source files out of date.

I agree with the rest of your comments.