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Why?

"The goal is to make it more difficult for hackers to deface and/or hijack the website," said Lieutenant Colonel Ellen Krenke.

"In the meantime, overseas voters can contact their embassy or consulate, use the FVAP toll-free number or contact their local election official or secretary of state via telephone or the internet for more information on obtaining an absentee ballot," said Lieutenant Colonel Krenke.

More info on this here.

It's called JIT, or Just In Time, compilation. Wanted to verify this name before I added it into a comment - I really shouldn't doubt myself.

T.

Who had thought Java would be more than a web-developers language 5 years ago?

Could we please try lo list why "operator overloading" is such a troublesome feature?

The statement "since it is so easy to misuse" doesn't count: I'd like to know WHY it is so easy to misuses.

The statement "you'd better use other languages for mathematical calculus" doesn't apply either: I'm in a financial project and we use Java, and there are some pretty complicate expression even in economics.

The statement "I used it in C++ and it was a mess" is also not appropriate as an answer to my question: if Java will ever consider this feature, there's no reason why it should copy the C++ style.

On the other side (the operator overloading fans):
the statement "I'm not going to" doesn't apply; your colleague could do and you would kill him after tracing a bug

The statement "The expressive power of this feature is more important than the possible misuses" doesn't apply either: Java tries to avoid misuses by forcing programmers to behave properly and we should respect this philosophy (not meaning I'm against the feature.. only I'd like to have it without the major cons)

My opinion:
"Why it is so easy to misuse and mantain?"

1) At first glance you could not realize if the symbol "+" is a simple primitive "sum" or a more elaborate object operator

2) sometimes the notation is simply "out of this world" (ehm... meaning "not natural" :-)

Example: (let me write in pseudo-Java)
Vector v1=new Vector();
Vector v2=new Vector();
Vector v3=v1+v2; //ok, concatenation of the 2 vectors
Vector v4=v2-v1; //what the hell does that mean?

3) if we choose a C++-like implementation we could have a "operator+" (-/*) method that has its own implementation (possibly different from add() or any other method in the class)

4) if we choose a C++-like implementation we wouldn't have just one place to look at to understand the meaning of operators (they could be overloaded twice or more times in the class hierarchy)

Any other reason in your opinion?
Then when we have all the reasons listed we could consider if there could be a way (compatible with "Java guidelines") to add this feature without incurring in all this misuse problems.

If we (or Sun :-) can't find such a way, or is not justified by the advantages (cleaner syntax in economics and mathematical expression) then we would not ask for it...

Last thing:
you can vote for this feature (or stand against it ) at this URL (registration needed) http://bugs.sun.com/bugdatabase/view_bug.do?bug_id =4905919

BTW, HP is probably doomed too, unless they can win back all the people pissed about Dell's crash-happy NAS devices. Overpriced hardware are belong to us. At least Sun has Java...

Well, the Sun Opteron boxes are selling like hot cakes. The sales of UltraSPARC kit has increased by several 10s of percent in the last couple of quarters, so I suppose one or two people must be installing new Sun kit.

If we believed everything intel and HP were trelling us, we'd realise that every 64-bit platform other than itanic is doomed since itanic is taking over the world and resistance is futile.

But then what would I know? I'm just part of the slashbot groupthink.

Well, the Sun Opteron boxes are selling like hot cakes. The sales of UltraSPARC kit has increased by several 10s of percent in the last couple of quarters, so I suppose one or two people must be installing new Sun kit.

If we believed everything intel and HP were trelling us, we'd realise that every 64-bit platform other than itanic is doomed since itanic is taking over the world and resistance is futile.

But then what would I know? I'm just part of the slashbot groupthink.

1. Justice Department blocks M$'s acquisition of Intuit Quicken in 1994, fearing it would raise software prices and diminish innovation
   
2. embracing Sun's Java into their own Windows-specific API which resulted in a lawsuit that ended in Sun's favor
   
3. the infamous Halloween memos that outlined M$ strategy to blocking Linux from the market
4. The web browser war against Netscape now Mozilla
5. M$ was found to be bankrolling the SCO/IBM/Linux debacle against the open source movement
   
6. neutralizing w3c compliance by distributing Windows-eccentric webpage API libraries that lock Internet webpages into IE
7. ITEF rejecting M$ patent pending proprietary Sender-ID as too restrictive and puts too much control into M$'s hands
8. A list of M$ innovations^W plagliarisms
   

Expenses for file-server workloads under Windows, compared to LinuxOS

They compared Microsofts IIS to the Linux 7.0 webserver

Application development and support costs for Windows compared to an opensores solution like J2EE

A full Windows installation, compared to installing Linux, on an Enterprise Server boxen: Is nearly three hours faster; Requires 77% fewer steps

Compared to the best known opensores webserver "Red Hat", Microsoft IIS:

Reliable companies with tried and tested products, or that bedroom coder Thorwaldes who publicly admits that he is in fact A HACKER???

MCSE, MCDST, MS Office Specialist, widely respected Amigan

I'd say OpenFirmware has fans because it's been doing most of what EFI promises to do 'real soon now' since the late '80s, and has been doing it as an IEEE standard for a decade.

And of course, there's the fact that OpenFirmware is still the only firmware standard out there with it's own official theme song. Ha!

Next thing you know Microsoft will start asking Windows pirates to come forward on their own volition.

Never gonna happen.

(Sheesh, this is like the time I discovered that there were 13 months in the year, according to Java, or bytes didn't necessarily have 8 bits)

If a user runs a executable that contains a virus, they have facilitated it themselves.

If a user runs a executable that contains a virus, they have facilitated it themselves.

You can find some more technical information about ZFS in my weblog. Check out the comments to my first entry about ZFS, there are a few juicy details there and I'll do my best to answer any questions posted to my blog.

Disclaimer: I work on ZFS at Sun.

You can find some more technical information about ZFS in my weblog. Check out the comments to my first entry about ZFS, there are a few juicy details there and I'll do my best to answer any questions posted to my blog.

Disclaimer: I work on ZFS at Sun.

The only slow programs in java are poorly implemented and use the Swing GUI toolkit in the wrong way. I personally like using Swing, and I use it efficiently, but in many cases the SWT toolkit by Eclipse will be jsut fine as well. SWT is a lighter, faster, toolkit that uses the native toolkit of the system. Java is extrememly fast, easily as fast as C++, if you need something faster then Java you should be using assembly. Read this. Also, the new JVMs by Sun have a feature called Hotspot, what this does is pretty much learn how your program works and adapts your program in real time to optimize it. What I mean is, the longer your program runs, the faster it gets because Hotspot learns what your program does more often and optimizes the bytecode in real time. You can not do this with native applications, itd be like rewriting the program on the fly without ever stopping it and having the effects take place instantly. This, along with no worries of buffer overflows, is a very good reason to use java. Java is a great language and any real coder knows that (just look at how many Apache projects are Java based), you'll only hear amateurs complain about java, just ignore them:)
Regards,
Steve

"We're absolutely trying to make disk storage more like memory, and often use that analogy in our presentations. For example, when you add DIMMS to your computer, you don't run some 'dimmconfig' program or worry about how the new memory will be allocated to various applications; the computer just does the right thing. Applications don't have to worry about where their memory comes from. Likewise with ZFS, when you add new disks to the system, their space is available to any ZFS filesystems, without the need for any further configuration. In most scenarios it's fairly straightforward for the software to make the unequivocably best choices about how to use the storage. If you want to tell the system more about how you want the storage used, you'll be able to do that too (eg. this data should be mirrored but that not; it's more important for this data to be accessed quickly but that can be slower). We hope that with relatively modern hardware, all but the most complicated and demanding configurations will be handled adequately without any administrator intervention." read more

According to the information given in this blog it is possible to "show how much space is used in each disk. If you want to reduce the amount of space in a pool by removing a disk, you could use this to choose the least-full disk, thus minimizing the time it will take to migrate that data to other disks".

There is some interesting information in Matthew Ahrens's blog.
And some Val Henson papers here and here.

ZFS achieves its impressive performance through a number of techniques:
* Dynamic striping across all devices to maximize throughput
* Copy-on-write design makes most disk writes sequential
* Multiple block sizes, automatically chosen to match workload
* Explicit I/O priority with deadline scheduling
* Globally optimal I/O sorting and aggregation
* Multiple independent prefetch streams with automatic length and stride detection
* Unlimited, instantaneous read/write snapshots
* Parallel, constant-time directory operations

ZFS has some similarities to NetApp's WAFL in that it uses "copy on write".

One of the fun things with ZFS is that it automatically stripes across all the storage in your pool. Disk size doesn't matter - it's all used. This even works across SCSI and IDE.

One of the important things is that volume management isn't a seperate feature. Effectively, all the current limitations of volume managers are blown away:

Just as it dramatically eases the suffering of system administrators, ZFS offers relief for your company's bottom line. Because ZFS is built on top of virtual storage pools (unlike traditional file systems that require a separate volume manager), creating and deleting file systems is much less complex. Not only does this eliminate the need to pay for volume manager licenses and allow for single support contracts, it lowers administration costs and increases storage utilization.

ZFS appears to applications as a standard POSIX file system--no porting is required. But to administrators, it presents a pooled storage model that eliminates the antique concept of volumes, as well as all of the related partition management, provisioning, and file system sizing problems. Thousands--even millions--of file systems can all draw from ZFS' common storage pool, each one consuming only as much space as it needs. The combined I/O bandwidth of all of the devices in that storage pool is always available to each file system.

This is also part of the stuff making admin and configuration far far simpler. The thing I like is that it should be far harder to go wrong with ZFS (not available in Solaris Express yet so I haven't seen this for myself).

The very high degree of reliability as standard is very welcome too:

Data can be corrupted in a number of ways, such as a system error or an unexpected power outage, but ZFS removes this fear of the unknown. ZFS prevents data corruption by keeping data self-consistent at all times. All operations are transactional. This not only maintains consistency but also removes almost all of the constraints on I/O order and allows changes to succeed or fail as a whole.

All operations are also copy-on-write. Live data is never overwritten. ZFS writes data to a new block before changing the data pointers and committing the write. Copy-on-write provides several benefits:

* Always-valid on-disk state
* Consistent, reliable backups
* Data rollback to known point in time

"We validate the entire I/O stack, start to finish, no guesswork involved. It's all provable data integrity," says Bonwick.

Administrators will never again have to run laborious recovery procedures, such as fsck, even if the system is shut down in an unclean fashion. In fact, Solaris Kernel engineers Bill Moore and Matt Ahrens have subjected ZFS to more than a million forced, violent crashes in the course of their testing. Not once has ZFS lost data integrity or leaked a single block.

For more technical info see Matt Ahrens's and Val Henson's blogs - since they're among the engineers who worked on it.

ZFS achieves its impressive performance through a number of techniques:
* Dynamic striping across all devices to maximize throughput
* Copy-on-write design makes most disk writes sequential
* Multiple block sizes, automatically chosen to match workload
* Explicit I/O priority with deadline scheduling
* Globally optimal I/O sorting and aggregation
* Multiple independent prefetch streams with automatic length and stride detection
* Unlimited, instantaneous read/write snapshots
* Parallel, constant-time directory operations

ZFS has some similarities to NetApp's WAFL in that it uses "copy on write".

One of the fun things with ZFS is that it automatically stripes across all the storage in your pool. Disk size doesn't matter - it's all used. This even works across SCSI and IDE.

One of the important things is that volume management isn't a seperate feature. Effectively, all the current limitations of volume managers are blown away:

Just as it dramatically eases the suffering of system administrators, ZFS offers relief for your company's bottom line. Because ZFS is built on top of virtual storage pools (unlike traditional file systems that require a separate volume manager), creating and deleting file systems is much less complex. Not only does this eliminate the need to pay for volume manager licenses and allow for single support contracts, it lowers administration costs and increases storage utilization.

ZFS appears to applications as a standard POSIX file system--no porting is required. But to administrators, it presents a pooled storage model that eliminates the antique concept of volumes, as well as all of the related partition management, provisioning, and file system sizing problems. Thousands--even millions--of file systems can all draw from ZFS' common storage pool, each one consuming only as much space as it needs. The combined I/O bandwidth of all of the devices in that storage pool is always available to each file system.

This is also part of the stuff making admin and configuration far far simpler. The thing I like is that it should be far harder to go wrong with ZFS (not available in Solaris Express yet so I haven't seen this for myself).

The very high degree of reliability as standard is very welcome too:

Data can be corrupted in a number of ways, such as a system error or an unexpected power outage, but ZFS removes this fear of the unknown. ZFS prevents data corruption by keeping data self-consistent at all times. All operations are transactional. This not only maintains consistency but also removes almost all of the constraints on I/O order and allows changes to succeed or fail as a whole.

All operations are also copy-on-write. Live data is never overwritten. ZFS writes data to a new block before changing the data pointers and committing the write. Copy-on-write provides several benefits:

* Always-valid on-disk state
* Consistent, reliable backups
* Data rollback to known point in time

"We validate the entire I/O stack, start to finish, no guesswork involved. It's all provable data integrity," says Bonwick.

Administrators will never again have to run laborious recovery procedures, such as fsck, even if the system is shut down in an unclean fashion. In fact, Solaris Kernel engineers Bill Moore and Matt Ahrens have subjected ZFS to more than a million forced, violent crashes in the course of their testing. Not once has ZFS lost data integrity or leaked a single block.

For more technical info see Matt Ahrens's and Val Henson's blogs - since they're among the engineers who worked on it.

From the article:

Unlimited scalability
As the world's first 128-bit file system, ZFS offers 16 billion billion times the capacity of 32- or 64-bit systems.

Microsoft immediately countered by saying WinFS will now support "twelveteen million billion times" as much storage as Sun's ZFS, and is "a bazillion times" more secure.

When reached for comment, Sun CEO Scott McNealy replied "neener neener". Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer responded by putting gum in Sun President Jonathan Schwartz's hair.

From the article:

Unlimited scalability
As the world's first 128-bit file system, ZFS offers 16 billion billion times the capacity of 32- or 64-bit systems.

Microsoft immediately countered by saying WinFS will now support "twelveteen million billion times" as much storage as Sun's ZFS, and is "a bazillion times" more secure.

When reached for comment, Sun CEO Scott McNealy replied "neener neener". Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer responded by putting gum in Sun President Jonathan Schwartz's hair.

there's currently no way to get Solaris for free.

er... Free (Beer-style) Binary Licensing Program

As you might expect, working on this involves lots of time spent meeting with lawyers about licenses and such. Obviously we have to worry about the legal stuff, but I'm also interested in hearing from other people outside the company about what you think we should do. Clearly we'll need to release the code under an open source (i.e., OSI approved) license . . .

The term "open source" essentially refers that the source is open, meaning you can see it, read it, but they're very unclear about choosing the appropriate license itself.

They can even restrict it from redistribution, which means there can't be a GNU/Solaris, etc. If Sun's intention is to attack GNU/Linux, it should be GPLed IMO.

But that would again lead to forking (which is good anyways :-) ).

I used Solaris threads via C for years before Java was widely used and found that Solaris' threads/mutexes/condition-variables/etc was not really stable - random weirdness and crashes happened from time to time. Enter Java and a million Java programmers writing every possible crazy threaded program you can think of... great - an army of bug finders free of charge for Sun. (Can you say Thread.stop()?) Five years and ten major thread library patches and a thread library rewrite later - Solaris threads became pretty darn reliable. It's probably now as good as Dave Butenof's (spelling?) implementation for Tru64 UNIX. As a side note - I'm glad Sun ditched the M to N model for thread to lightweight process mapping and adopted the more intuitive 1:1 model that almost every other modern OS uses.

Clearly we'll need to release the code under an open source (i.e., OSI approved) license, but beyond that, what do you think are the requirements?

The Solaris kernel is modular as well.

I made no claims about modularity. What does modularity have to do with being bloated?

Do you have any basis for claiming that the Solaris kernel is bloated?

Sun proudly proclaims so themselves; just look at feature lists.

Sun's Opteron is high end for most Slashdot readers (who think a computers performance is measured by how well it runs Doom 3), but compared to something like an E25K they're distinctly entry level ...

Sun's Opteron is high end for most Slashdot readers (who think a computers performance is measured by how well it runs Doom 3), but compared to something like an E25K they're distinctly entry level ...

TSol is one of the most secure OS's I've administered. I had the opportunity to speak with one of the kernel developers and the one quote I'd like to convey about what we talked about is "That which is not explicitly permitted is implicitly denined."

However, Linux can have this level of security also. If you go here you will see the webpage for Security-Enhanced Linux (SELinux). Although, it is only a technology demonstration and may not be suitable for a real world environment.

These OS's are based on mandatory access control policies using roles. This is where the quote comes in to play. If you do not specifically give permission for an executable or a user to perform a specific action, that action will fail. There is no root user. Regular users have no rights themselves but are granted roles they can assume. These roles are given the rights and permissions to perform the tasks they have been asigned. You can create a "backup-admin" role so that it will have access to the tape drive and be able to read all files on the system, but not write anywhere but the tape drive and not be able to do anything else.

Now, I have not read if this part of the code will be "Open Sourced" and it was not discussed in the article. However, it has to be deeply embedded into the OS kernel for it to work so I must assume that it will be a part of it.

Mark my words: Mandatory Access Control, Labeled Security, and Role Based Access are the future of secure operating systems. If an operating system does not do these things it will not be considered for use in environments that have a high priority for information security (infosec). IMO, anything that connects to the Internet or a WAN or hosts sensitive data should have infosec as a high priority. If SELinux is not further developed, or a suitable replacement is created, then Linux will fall off the infosec curve.

You all really should look at the Solaris Security Toolkit and custom Jumpstart. It will install the patches on top of whatever Solaris version and release, then it will harden it according to predefined, customizable finish scripts. What you get out of that build process is a server with only non-root-login SSH open. No one should even be thinking of using Solaris 8, the latest solaris without built-in SSH. Solaris 9 also has a much better default inetd.conf that keeps more services closed than open (unlike 2.6, 7 and 8).

we finally got back a Sparcstation 5 here at work, and I've just finished installing OPENSTEP 4.2 on it.

(the Lighthouse office suite)

So does this mean that Sun is going to give up trying to squeeze $20,000 from me just for upgrading my 10-proc Ultra Enterprise from Solaris 7 to Solaris 10?

Reality Check available here. Heh!

Sun License Info

To put Solaris on a piece of hardware with more than two (2) CPUs - you can't use the "Free Binary License" - thus you have to hope you can get the Solaris license along with that used Sun hardware you got off Ebay.

This is what has stopped me from fully populating the 8 CPU max on my SparcSERVER 1000 (7 years old, but still going strong). Hopefully with the OSS version of Solaris, I'll be able to hit Ebay up for some SPARC hardware upgrades.

Hmm, Poor Jonny..He better that that cpu out soon..
is it just me.. http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/ errors out
I get a net timeout error on his blog... Perhaps that's the TRUE test, put one of those fan-dangled 32-way core-thingys, and post on /. and see if it can hold it's own......??

Certainly not.

One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered Project Niagra community when IDC confirmed that Project Niagra market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that Project Niagra has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. Project Niagra is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.

You don't need to be a Genius to predict Project Niagra's future. The hand writing is on the wall: Project Niagra faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for Project Niagra because Project Niagra is dying. Things are looking very bad for Project Niagra. As many of us are already aware, Project Niagra continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.

All major surveys show that Project Niagra has steadily declined in market share. Project Niagra is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If Project Niagra is to survive at all it will be among processor dilettante dabblers. Project Niagra continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, Project Niagra is dead.

Fact: Project Niagra is dying

One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered Project Niagra community when IDC confirmed that Project Niagra market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that Project Niagra has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. Project Niagra is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.

You don't need to be a Genius to predict Project Niagra's future. The hand writing is on the wall: Project Niagra faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for Project Niagra because Project Niagra is dying. Things are looking very bad for Project Niagra. As many of us are already aware, Project Niagra continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.

All major surveys show that Project Niagra has steadily declined in market share. Project Niagra is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If Project Niagra is to survive at all it will be among processor dilettante dabblers. Project Niagra continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, Project Niagra is dead.

Fact: Project Niagra is dying

Can someone say haircuit?

This man clearly has no time to support his hair, because it is not part of his core business. Haircuts designed by an underpaid committee simply don't cut it. We suggest that he should open source his haircut using a GPL style license and let the community do all further development. ESR is already preparing a groundbreaking new paper named "The wig museum and the hairdresser's shop".

Yeah, this sucks.

Time to start a new google bomb:

Pompus Asshole

There!

Wow.

Can someone say haircuit?

So, when will Sun sue Sun?

here

Pfft. That's already been done.

Infrasearch was working on this, until Sun paid $8M for the company, them had them work on something else, then Gene Kan committed suicide. Be careful what you work on.

Both have a very similar stack, and both do all their operations on the stack in the same way.

Some of the first java chips were modified Forth chips (from patriot scientific). Others (the one from icompression) were very simple stack-based designs as well.

What advantage do you think Forth has over a VM? Both do well on stack-based architectures.

C works well on non-stack-based architectures with lots of registers (mips, arm, sparc, etc).

Both work about equally well (or you could sya, neither work well) on register-starved x86 based architectures.

Assembler is a different concept altogether. Note that when I was writing the high-level java bytecodes for a chip which ran Java bytecodes natively, I was using assembler _and_ a java VM at the same time.

Java code, that generates java code? I would hate to see that.

Can't one just use the Java Media Framework API to stream movies over Java applets? http://java.sun.com/products/java-media/jmf/index. jsp