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1) What I'm saying in regards to the space used is that in order to use IE, you *have* to have Windows, which has a certain space requirement. If you're running anything else, Firefox is just a small program to add to it. You can't use IE on Linux, for example. (disregarding WINE/Crossover Plugin)

It's still a bullshit comparison. You have to have any operating system. Every operating system has space requirements. Apple says MacOSX requires 2GB. Solaris requires 1-2GB. Even Redhat requires 1.7GB for the "personal desktop" install. Yes, you can fit linux in 500mb, but you can do that with any of them. It's just a matter of how much you can do without.

If you're running anything else, Firefox is just a small program to add to it.

Well since Firefox isn't included with any operating system, it's "just a small program to add" to every operating system it runs on, including Windows! Now if you're running Windows, IE is included so you don't have to install anything. You don't get a much smaller footprint than zero!

See how filesize is a bullshit argument?

2) If you had to add anything to the api layer (Or just a plugin) which would be easier to do? Firefox, which is open source, and you don't have to ask permission and sign away your rights and life, or IE, which you probably couldn't even get access unless you paid a crapload of money, or were already a "partner" with Microsoft.

Yes you can change the API, but you typically don't need to, and even if you do it's not always advisable. Doing so introduces all sorts of deployment issues, and isn't always as easy as it sounds.

Yes, it is MUCH cheaper to use OSS platforms over propretary plaforms. Assuming of course the platforms are equally effective for the application domain. If you have to patch the OSS platform and/or extend it in any significant way it can change the economics. (i.e. You spend more time and money developing the platform itself, than it would have to just gone and bought a proprietary platform.)

I'm not saying IE is superior. I'm not saying Mozilla is superior. I'm not even saying IE and Mozilla are equal. What I am saying is that there are plenty of arguments for why one should prefer Mozilla over IE without having to resorting to making up crap.

Do you want Sun's Solaris Software Companion CD? http://wwws.sun.com/software/solaris/freeware/s9do wnload.html "Welcome to Sun's Companion CD image download site for the Solaris 9 Operating System for x86 and SPARC platforms. This site enables users to download a CD (ISO) image of the Solaris Software Companion CD. Included are hundreds of Linux and other Open Source applications, tools, and commands built and packaged for the Solaris 9 Operating System (x86 and SPARC). The software is available in pre-compiled binary and source code format."

It runs linux apps side by side with solaris apps BETTER than they run on Linux natively. Using janus for the first time was great since I didn't have to fuck around with the mess/joke that is Linux in 2004.

You should try it. It is in the latest Solaris 10 beta.

A good place to start your liberation

Nope, no custom firmware. From: http://www.sun.com/desktop/workstation/w2100z/

The dual-processor Sun Java Workstation W2100z, first in a new line of AMD Opteron processor-based workstations from Sun, delivers ultimate performance, visualization-class graphics solutions, high I/O throughput, and the ability to deploy large data sets (up to 16 GB in size) across multiple operating systems, including the Solaris OS, Linux, and Windows.

Has Sun learned from the demise of SGI workstations that relying on one processor architecture is harmful?
Huh? The ultra 5, 10, sunblade 1500 and 150 were single processor. The ultra 60, sunblade 2000, sunblade 2500 are dual.
Sun was never relying on one processor, there have always been dual options.
The W1100z is the single processor version of the W2100z described in the article.
http://www.sun.com/products-n-solutions/hardware/d ocs/Workstation_Products/Workstations/index.html Suns workstation docs.

Since the article doesn't link it

http://wwws.sun.com/software/javadesktopsystem/

Its seems that Intel have lost their technology edge. Early in Intel's life, the company direction was driven by the engineers, but it over the last few years, highlighted by the mhz race, all tech R&D has been driven by marketing managers. This was probably to be expected. Marketers and non-tech managers are usually very good with people, very good at playing politics, and hence very good at influencing company direction; far better than most engineers. Intel is now paying the price for their incompetence by loosing out to smaller, more hungry competitors.

I don't know where the Itanic fits into this theory. I guess if it wasn't so late, and was made available during the tech bubble, Intel would now be on a fundamentally different track, rather than playing catch-up (poorly) with more innovative companies.

Now, onto multi-core chips. This is actually a very exciting direction. Sun has already demonstrated an 8 core, quad-hyperthreading 32-way chip http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/jonathan/20040910 (Project Niagra). Intel certainly has much catching up to do, but its time for a new race and hopefully they'll get their arse into gear and show us some exciting things in the years to come, that is, if the marketoids can be somehow dethroned from their positions of power.

Not Solaris 10. See here for details. - Bart

I would agree with you for the most part. However, I think she genuinely harbors some sort of grudge against IBM outside of the IBM vs. SCO theatrics. Take an article about Itanium from August - "Itanium-Armed Start-up To Menace IBM's Precious Mainframe Monopoly". The article itself is not particularly venomous towards IBM, but it certainly isn't an unbiased report on future competition for IBM. It just seems kind of absurd to go out of your way to prepare an article about a start-up company 'menacing' IBM's 'monopoly' when IBM already has plenty of more noteworthy competition.

But, as you said in another post, one has to wonder if she's doing this purely for the troll-value of it all.

The JVM spec is open:

"Open" means that you can implement the spec as you like, and the JVM spec is not open (and neither are the language or the libraries): read the license linked to at the bottom of the spec that you yourself point to. Also read Stallman's take on this if you don't believe me.

Yes, I agree, they don't have a big "ECMA" or "ISO" badge, but well... since when were those worth a penny.

They guarantee that Microsoft can't play the kinds of legal games that Sun has been playing with the Java specification.

C++ has been ISO certified for years or decades,

Yes, and that has achieved exactly what it should: creating a choice of a large variety of compilers from many different vendors.

OK... let's say this: I like Javas design, you like C# design; it's futile to discuss taste issues, so I won't.

That's like saying that the difference betwee a dump truck and a school bus is a question of "taste". In fact, it's a difference in functionality, and a well-understood one at that. See here for a more extensive technical discussion of what Java is lacking if you don't believe me (the people there seem to have pretty much given up on Sun and Java, too).

Oh! I almost forgot. The most important point in UCSD Pascal System was not Pascal itself but the p-code. Well the p-code allowed programs to be compiled to some intermediary form resembling assembler called (guess what!) p-code, which could then be run with a help of a simple interpreter on any machine, thus giving us a machine independent code. Seems familiar?

So others can have fun slashdotting other technologies, here are some websites. There are probably others, but this should keep those who do really want to move away from TCP happy.

• Actual sourcecode to transmit binaries by multicast
  
• IETF Reliable Multicast Transport - Charter + RFCs
  
• Introduction to Multicasting (a little old, doesn't cover things like IGMPv3)
  
• Lightweight Reliable Multicast Protocol
  
• Microsoft's Reliable Multicast
  
• SUN's Reliable Multicast system
  
• Navy Research Laboratory implementation
  
• Scalable Reliable Multicast
  
• Cooperative Reliable Multicast
  
• Reliable Multicast for Wireless environments
  
• Selectively Reliable Multicast
  

Similarly, the mainframe OSes don't bother trying to have advanced graphical capabilities

So are you saying Solaris isn't a mainframe OS, or GNOME doesn't offer advanced graphical capaiblities? (NOTE: I'm not arguing here either that Solaris is a mainframe OS or that GNOME does offer advanced graphical capabilities. I leave it to you to make arguments for or against those propositions.)

I must say that is mitigated by the fact the Java has hands down the best API documentation for any platform. Really what more could you ask for. Combined with the Swingset and there SWING component guide, who could ask for anything more in terms of documentation? Mind you I'll agree that getting used to all the layers can be a burden when first learning but it becomes elegant once you see the big picture.

Or, you could populate it using models.

Most have abstract implementations that only require that you specify the data; providing event support for you.

And I wonder whether eclipse and java had more to do with that than anything else? I recall that their compilers used to cost a fortune.

> Bill Gates' rise to fame and power is because of his skill as a businessman...

Wrong.

Bill Gates rose to power because he is a criminal, and nothing was done when he broke the law.

Gates had the good fortune to be working in an industry that involved a totally new technology, i.e. software. This meant that the government had no idea what to do about Microsoft's various acts of sabotage, fraud, etc. In a smarter world, the courts would have realized that you don't need new laws, rather, the same laws apply to software as apply to other property, and in other industries.

Bill Gates won because the leaders of the other companies in the software industry were basically-honest, good businessmen, whereas Gates was a criminal.

When the law is not enforced, a criminal will beat a businessman every time.

Let's look at some of Microsoft's history.

Microsoft was losing to DR-DOS at the start of the nineties, until Microsoft added a false message about the incompatability of DR-DOS (Gates knew it was false from Microsoft's own testing).

That's fraud -- a criminal act. The courts ignored it.

Also at that time, Geoworks was five years ahead of Microsoft in providing a modern, working GUI for DOS. DR-DOS and Geoworks were being pre-installed on a large percentage of PCs. But Microsoft made a change to DOS specifically to cause Geoworks to fail.

That's sabotage -- a criminal act. The courts ignored it.

WordPerfect had already beaten Microsoft in the Word Processing market. But Microsoft side-tracked Wordperfect when they promised the world that OS/2 was the new direction, then undermined WordPerfect on Windows by providing intentionally-broken API calls.

That's fraud and sabotage, ignored by the courts.

Netscape had already beaten Microsoft in the browser market, until Microsoft started doing things like paying companies to break their contracts with Netscape.

There were various criminal acts there, which were generally ignored by the courts (other than a partial invocation of the nearly-useless anti-trust laws).

And in Java, Sun provided a cross-platform language that was perfect for web-based applications, such as e-commerce. Microsoft had nothing similar to offer, and it has taken Microsoft ten years to catch up.

Once again, Microsoft stopped Java with sabotage and fraud. And this time, Microsoft's criminal acts were perfectly documented in Microsoft's own internal papers:

Sabotage:

"Strategic Objective . . . Kill cross-platform Java by grow[ing] the polluted Java market."

Fraud:

"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."

Some people point to Microsoft as an example of Capitalism at work, but it's not true. When criminals are allowed to get away with their crimes, it actually undermines Capitalism.

To repeat my initial point. Bill Gates is NOT a "skilled businessman" -- he is a criminal, whose various acts of sabotage, fraud, and so on, should have landed him in jail.

What about things like this

You could get 16 complete individual systems with hard drives in that baby.. :)

Currently i think you can only get 8 systems if you want individual hard drives instead of netbooting.

I think the push for IDE came around this time and the market died for 2.5" form factor SCSI. Nice to see it's being revived.

Wish I still had my trusty old Voyager - because it'd be fun to see if I could get one of these newfangled drives working in it with some sort of an adapter!

Windows at present is mostly based on the 32-bit Intel architecture. Microsoft did its worst dirty tricks in the last dying days of the segmented 16-bit architecture, using DOS dominance to get market share for its 32-bit attempt. It's going to have to chose between AMD-64 and Intel-64 anyway, or support both, and binary application developers will need to make the same choice, so I guess the submitter would argue that PPC-64 (which has been around longer) is a viable option. However, there's a big movement away from software that's tied down to one platform or another, which is good for Linux, Java, and all the other OS, hardware and software vendors, programmers, and users.

The limited adoption and big troubles implementing Wine suggests to me that there would be little interest in a Microsoft port of Windows to yet another architecture. Windows 95 was probably the most-memorable MS-Windows version ever, and yet Microsoft has had to fragment even that identity to keep up its sales, starting with that crazy desktop in XP. The claim that Windows has excellent backward compatibility is bogus, too; for instance, the copy of TeraTerm that I carry around on a floppy has never worked on any NT2k or later system I've touched, and the default installation of Microsoft Word can't read files created by any version of Microsoft Works. I could contiue this rant...

Mips: MIPS IV Instruction Set Section A.2.1

Alpha: Cannot find an authoritative resource for proof, but the way I understand it is that NT was IMPOSSIBLE to run on a big-endian-only CPU, hence the #1 reason it never made it beyond rumor stage on Sparc.

Solaris and Endianness.

I remember back in '96-'97 timeframe hearing from a number of Sun vendors about experiments with NT on Ultrasparc, but could never get a demo (and we had Sun workstation vendors falling all over us to give us hardware at the time).

I haven't seen any FC-AL or SCSI hard drives over 80 Gig actually in any machines yet,

My SAN uses 146GB FC-AL disks, and Sun's newer servers like the v890 can come with these too. A few months ago our SAN vendor said there were issues with the > 146GB FC-AL disks, but didn't elaborate.

which matters if you've got a set of big local Gigahertz Ethernet connections pulling huge amounts of data at top speed, but few of us do that,

Since we're originally talking about a SAN here, and some people don't understand the underlying concepts, it is important to point out that a SAN may be moving data at at least 2Gbps to an HBAC in a server. If you have a nice fabric set up, then you might be pushing 4 (or more) times 2Gbps.

For new people:
A SAN has fiber connections, usually 2 or more. These fiber connections run either directly to an HBAC (fiber controller card) in a server or to some fiber switches (these switches are a little different than your network switches), and then from those switches to the HBAC's. The setup with switches involved is called the fabric, the other is direct-connect.

If you have the money for a large fabric, and your SAN can support it, you could potentially have 100's of servers accessing your SAN, and to each server its space on the SAN will look like a local disk or two or more.

Since you potentially have many servers accessing many logical disks on many physical disks via many switches and many HBAC's, you need strong management software to handle the layout, as well as very fast disks and switches/HBAC's to handle the performance, as well as dually-redundant everything, like switches, HBAC's etc, and if you really want to be redundant, then a second SAN in a second location, which creates more management.

So, it is important to have very very good software that you can understand and use easily and quickly, and that anyone else coming in can use easily and quickly, and that is very, very well supported. This is a major difference between roll your own and a SAN that you buy.

Next week i hope someone brings up a new virtualization device on Slashdot.

I know it can go to 65TB and has been available for a while: http://www.sun.com/storage/midrange/6000/6920/

Keep your eyes out, Solaris is being open sourced. The pilot has been underway now for a few weeks. I'm sure that there will be a big announcement and press release when it happens, and you can bet that Jonathon will certainly mention it.

Before the license flames start, there is a commitment that the license will be OSI compliant. There would be little point to the exercise otherwise.

Tp.

So you shouldn't have checked exceptions because people might be dumb? [...] I could use the "people are dumb" argument to say that you should have checked exceptions as well.

No, one shouldn't have them because they complicate programming and provide no useful benefit in exchange. Someone *did* use the "people are dumb" argument to say checked exceptions are good. I was answering the claim that one could rely on throws clauses to document the exceptions a method might raise by pointing out that in practice those dumb people are too clever. Checked exceptions don't solve the problem. In context your reply is irrelevant.

Uh-huh. I haven't seen one that does this automatically for C#, it relies on the programmer to list them. Microsoft's own libraries have some documented exceptions that can be thrown but not all of them.

So? I made no claims about C# or any language other than Java. I said that the right way to ensure that exceptions get documented is to use an automated tool to collect that information without burdening programmers with busywork. Your comment does not address that.

Use a rapid prototyping language if that's what you want.

Rapid prototyping is important in any language. Sun agrees: see http://java.sun.com/docs/white/langenv/Intro.doc2. html for example. Nevertheless, I was not claiming that this is the only criteria by which a language should be judged. I was giving an example of one ways in which checked exceptions cause problems. Strict typechecking has disadvantages, but unlike checked exceptions it has advantages too.

if the new implementation you dropped in throws some random exception that I don't catch because I didn't know you could throw it,

Client code can use "catch (Exception e)" and have some default behavior for dealing with unanticipated exception types. This is the correct thing to do, because it gives library implementations maximum flexibility while still permitting exceptions to be caught and handled specially where necessary. Many times the interface implementation is effectively a callback mechanism for the client code, so they belong to the same codebase and there is no question about what exceptions can be thrown.

Nothing you've said can obscure the fact that checked exceptions offer no benefits but do impose substantial costs.

Solaris 8 Kernel Module Programming

What about Solaris?

I am under the impression that they aren't. There exists a open-source implementation of Java, but the virtual machine and SDK provided by Sun do not have the source with them, and it is generally not available. Sun rejected the pleas of the open source community to open-source Java (link)

The major version number denotes a backward compatibility change that in all likelihood the Java navigators have realized probably will never happen. So market via the second number, which is meant to denote an inability to run that version on older VMs and you're set with a much better reflection of the evolution of the platform. The third number is for bugfixes and minor API enhancements. 1.1.8 should run on a 1.1.2 VM for instance, but 1.2 will not necessarily run on a 1.1.8 VM.

I suppose this is better. Or this, for the JDK 5 documentation...

I suppose this is better. Or this, for the JDK 5 documentation...

C# is just one option for .NET eh?
Hmm... if only there were some other languages that could be compiled to JVM bytecode.

You aren't alone. See this thread.

Part of the confusion is that the name Generics implies that it is something it is not, to people with more experience than just java.

In a nutshell, java generics give you type-safe containers. Properly used, this will shift runtime ClassCastExceptions to compile time. You will not need to explicitly cast items coming out of the collection. That's all it does.

The real tragedy with generics is what it could have been. Just do a google search; a lot of people are unhappy about the consequences of erasure. And Sun's justification for erasure is not satisfying.

No, it's worse than that. It's called "Java 2 Standard Edition 5.0". And the SDK is called "Java 2 Standard Edition 5.0 SDK 1.5"

http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.5.0/index.jsp

Behold BigInteger and its evil twin, BigDecimal. They laugh at silly-big numbers.

Behold BigInteger and its evil twin, BigDecimal. They laugh at silly-big numbers.

No, he probably means like C#'s XML serialization / de-serialization

You mean, something like Java's XMLEncoder? Nope, Java was still there first. Perhaps you're referring to the way DOM nodes can be queried directly via XPath?

That's certainly a nice feature that's not part of the core. No matter, we've been using libraries like JDom to XPath for quite a long time. :-)

Java 1.5 supports templates/generics/whatever.

An XML Parser and stuff like MD5.

An XML Parser and stuff like MD5.

byte[] theTextToDigestAsBytes = "The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog's back".getBytes( "8859_1");
MessageDigest md = MessageDigest.getInstance( "MD5" );
md.update( theTextToDigestAsBytes );
byte[] digest = md.digest();

XML Parser

You mean like JAXP and JAXB?

XML Parser

You mean like JAXP and JAXB?

Perhaps /. will correct the error. I emailed the editor when the story was in preview, but it was too late.

Like this you mean?

omg, it hates me... trying one last time Java 1.5

Nobody else seemed to mention this yet so I thought I'd point out that Sun seems to be contradicting their latest monitoring framework:

JMX

By going along with this new specification. Network Management, monitoring, and other SNMP-like operations in Java are moving to the JMX or java media extension framework. In Java 5, the VM has JMX hooks built in for monitoring and control. Alas, I have to agree that SNMP is tired and old, but it still is in place in a lot of environments (and in routers, firewalls, and other hardware appliances) and is really easy to interface and use. I doubt this will catch on very quickly...

Sir, you are absolutely out of line. BSD is a thriving operating system. Have you never heard of FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and NetBSD? These operating systems are maintained by at least 7 different people. Why even here on Slashdot you'll see there is a seperate section dedicate entirely to BSD. This forum and these operating systems are used by at least 107 people.

Not only is BSD the world's most secure and open operating system in the world, it is extremely easy to use. Before I started using BSD I was using Linux for about 6 years, and Solaris and HP-UX before that. Once I switched to BSD, unencumbered by GUI interfaces, web servers, TCP/IP, and all the other "inventions" so frequently touted as progess I was able to easily produce text files in almost six weeks. I had to port vim from the source, edit it for my Amiga OS, and strip out most of the featurs so it would run in the free memory I have, but man it was awesome. I felt so free. Security and portability are integrated into BSD. You can configure a firewall, router, security, and a VpN in less than 3 days using the very friendly command line interfaces, man files, and well... you don't need any gui help interfaces. It even has lynx.

Anyways. BSD is definitely not dead. Me and 106 other people prove you wrong. If you're looking for a dead or dying OS try these on for size: option #1 and option #2.

Oh yeah, one of the best thing about BSD is that it's not encumbered by the viral GNU license or misappropriated intellectual property. Ditch Linux, ditch Windows, ditch VMS, get yourself BSD.

...that this will do absolutely nothing to alter Sun's opinion of Software Patents, irrespective of how utterly ludicrous this situation is. Sun quite happily admit to being an "Intellectual Property Company". Certainly they actually *create* IP, unlike SCO, but ultimately, they strongly believe in Copyright, Intellectual Property, and Patents. In fact, Johnathan Schwarz made a post on his Blog a couple of days ago, specifically stating his view on Intellectual Property:

I believe in intellectual property. In my view, it's the foundation of world economies, and certainly the foundation upon which Sun Microsystems was built. Copyright, trademark, patent - I believe in them all. I also believe in innovation and competition - and that these beliefs are not mutually exclusive.

...and how he recently refused to support a "CEO of one of the more popular Open Source companies" in campaigning against Software Patents:

And so I asked - "I'm not sure why you're asking my support to invalidate what Sun's stockholders have invested tens of billions of dollars to create, when you'd cringe if I told you to give away your largest asset, your copyright and brand." His answer, "You just don't understand." He was right, I didn't and don't. And we're going to agree to disagree. He and I, and I with a vocal minority of folks on the 'net who feel software should have no patent protection (leaving copyright and trademark untouched). I do not support that view, any more than I believe any other field of endeavor should be subjected to such a double standard. From drug discovery to academic work, the protection of IP is part and parcel of what incents inventors to invent, and investors to invest.

With an attitude like that, this case will not do us any favours. We're not going to get a new Anti-Software Patent ally out of this, when Sun realise the futility of patenting. They'll do their utmost to have the court's decision overturned, and possibly invalidate the patent, but at the end of the day, they'll sort out that patent and just move on to the next one.

Jonathan Schwartz has a much better analysis of this decision up on his blog now. He really hits on the relevant issues.