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I've been told that all programs can be traced back to a copy & paste of Hello, World. In this limited case, I actually believe what I've been told. The first open/free code was that very same Hello, World example in the first coding manual, wherever it is now, and there are likely a handfull of possible "ultimate parents" of every application that's out there.

Really, though, when's the last time you started a piece of code to be used in production from a completely blank text file? I've even got a VIm macro that shoves in...

public class fileName
{
} .. whenever I try to edit a Java file that doesn't exists. My ADO.NET code was likely originally stolen from the MSDN help files (will likely only work if you've got the .NET SDK installed). My Java networking code likely started somewhere in Mr. Harold's Java IO book from O'Reilly. My Swing code came, in large part I imagine, from The Java Tutorial.

Are any of these sources the "father" of my crappy shareware app, much less my "professional code"? Of course not. Nor would they want to be!

I wonder if this will have an adverse effect on Sun's Project Looking Glass?

A truly open market will provide options.

• HP
• Apple
• Sun
• Penguincomputing
• pogolinux

SunRays can do some/most of this over fast Ethernet, plus you can move your entire session around to any SunRay unit in a different part of the building (never log out again).
It's kind of eerie to work in an office without the usual hum of computer disks and fans.

Dear reader the GNOME armageddon has started,

First of all I want to clarify that this text was meant to be a source of information otherwise i wouldn't have spent so much time into writing it.
Belive me it took me a couple of days writing this text in a foreign language.
Even if you don't care at all for GNOME, you may find some interesting information within this text that you like to read. please try to understand my points even if it's hard sometimes, otherwise you wake up one day and feel the need to switch to a different operating system.

On the following lines i'm trying to give you a little insight of the GNOME community. the things that are going on in the back, the information that could be worth talking and thinking about.

Many of us like the GNOME desktop and some of us were following it since the beginning. GNOME is a promising project because it's mostly written in C, easy to use, configurable and therefore fits perfectly into the philosophy of *NIX, only to name some of its advantages.

Unfortunately these advantages changed with the recently new released version of GNOME. The core development team somehow got the idea of targeting GNOME to a complete different direction of users, the so called corporate desktop user.
In other words they're targeting people that aren't familiar or experienced with desktop environments. usually business oriented people who are willing to pay money for getting GNOME on their computers.

Having this new target in mind, the core development team mostly under contract by companies like RedHat,Ximian and Sun decided to simplify the desktop as much as even possible by removing all its flexibility in favor of an easy clean simple interface to not confuse their new possible customers. So far the idea of a clean easy to use desktop is honourable.

Some of the new ideas, features and implementations such asgconf, an evil Windows Registry-like system, new ordering of buttons and dialogs, the removal of 90%-95% of all visible preferences from the control center and applications, the new direction that GNOME leads and the attitude of the core development team made a lot of users really unhappy. These are only a couple of examples and the list can easily be expanded but for now this is enough. Now let me try to get deeper into these aspects.

You may imagine that users got really frustrated because their beloved GNOME desktop matured into something they didn't want. During the time, the frustration of a not less amount of people increased. more, more and more emails arrived on the GNOME mailinglists where users tried to explain their concerns, frustrations and the leading target of GNOME.

But the core development team of GNOME don't give a damn about what their users are thinking or wanting and most of the time they come up with their standard purl. The reply they give is mostly the same -- users should either go and 'file a bug' at BugZilla or the user mails are being turned so far that at the end they sound like being trolls or the user feedback is simply not wanted. whatever happens the answers aren't really satisfying for the user. even constructive feedback isn't appreciated.

If you gonna think about this for a minute then things gonna harden that they are directing into the commercial area. The core development team actually don't care for the complainin

At 1.1PB per L550 Silo, from Sun Microsystems.

Well, yes :) Its not free, nor open source.. But its good, its better than exchange in a lot of areas. But sun's E-Mail, Calendar, & Collaboration software works very well. It also has connectors for evolution if you want a thick client.

unlike pure Web applications...mobile users...can connect, quickly access applications and disconnect to do work offline

So this is not a purely web based application. This is an interesting application. It must utilize something more than HTML because it can obviously persist a session over long periods of time. it also means this is more than a thin client. Would something like this be web service based? interested to hear the actual press release from IBM. Either way, this is a good thing as having another office suite with real corporate backing , not the fake kind, is a good thing.

I only say sun is the fake kind because they are
0wNzEd by microsoft now. ;)

I've played around with Java Web Start and it seemed like a good idea, in theory at least.

The idea is when you're running the Java plugin in your browser, you can 'launch' full applications right from the site. It can be either in a single JAR file, or split amongst many (JWS is supposed to download the pieces as they are needed).

Anyway, it is pretty neat and it's come a long way. With some improvements it might be viable to launch full-blown apps such as Office and whatnot (assuming you can get them running well enough in Swing or whatever), although the downloader still needs work to more intelligently decide which pieces to get.

I've written a few JWS apps already and it seemed pretty good, but they really do have some bugs to work out before it's ready for prime time.

Mind you, I can't wait until these dual core Opterons come out. I feel an 8-way workstation coming on....better start saving my pocket money :-)

Now all we need is an Opteron port of Slackware.

The current IBM POWER4 and upcoming POWER5 chips are both dual-core chips. Here is a nice presentation(PDF format) about the POWER5; you can see in the die photos where there are two cores. There have also been rumors of a dual-core PowerPC based on it, but nothing concrete yet.

Broadcom (which bought SiByte) markets a dual-core, 1GHz 64-bit MIPS chip called the BCM1250 which has a lot of integrated networking goodies.

Finally, it bears pointing out that on the other side of Intel's severed corpus callosum, they're also working on a dual-core chip.

Well, I could get a few 911 Turbos for the price of a SunFire. So yeah.

(Yes, I realize you meant the shitty Pontiac.)

We've seen what happens to those who trust Microsoft.

IBM and WordPerfect trusted Microsoft's promise of support for OS/2, and look what happened to them.

WordPerfect trusted Microsoft again when they moved to Windows, only to discover that Microsoft had kept the good API calls hidden, while the API calls provided to WordPerfect were slow and unreliable.

Go (the company) trusted Microsoft with their Pen Computing technology. Go is now suing Microsoft for having stolen that technology. Stacker also successfully sued Microsoft for having stolen Stacker's disk compression technology.

Sun trusted Microsoft, when Microsoft contracted to provide Java support on Windows. But, Microsoft had no intention of living up to their promises, as later shown by Microsoft's internal memos:

> When I met with you last, you had a lot of pretty pointed questions about Java, so I want to make sure I understand your issues/concerns....
> 1. What is our business model for Java?
> 2. How do we wrest control of Java away from Sun?
> 3. How do we turn Java into just the latest, best way to write Windows applications?

Or, as a Microsoft marketing presentation put it:

> Kill cross-platform Java by grow[ing] the polluted Java market.

Of course, Java developers also trusted Microsoft, and here's another memo showing what Microsoft thought of that trust:

> 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.

But none of this should surprise us. We've known exactly what Microsoft was planning, ever since the publishing of the 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.

XAML is just Microsoft's decommoditized copy of Mozilla's XUL, or XML User Interface Language. If Microsoft had been honest about sharing standards, then Microsoft would have simply used XUL, which has become a published standard.

I think what Microsoft is really afraid of is that, by the time Longhorn and XAML come out (plus the two more releases to get them to work acceptably), Mozilla and XUL (and Gnome, and Mono) will have already filled the Internet-based application development niche. Thus, these Open Source technologies could end up doing to Longhorn what Apache did to IIS, and then it's bye bye Microsoft monopoly.

As a result, Microsoft is borrowing another page from their anti-Java strategy:

> We decided rather than trying to outrun sun at their game to change the rules.

Or, as Microsoft VP John Ludwig put it:

> Subversion has always been our best tactic... subversion is almost invariably a better tactic than a frontal assault... it leaves the competition confused, they don't know what to shoot at anymore...

PizzaTool used a GUI to let you select your toppings, crust, etc., and even provided a cute little graphical rendition of your pizza which you could "spin" to get all the various pixels to blend together and simulate the melted cheese, etc. I think it was written using their "NeWS" system. It ordered by FAX and went to Tony & Alba's Pizza, which has been a consistent favorite in the SF Bay Area for at least 15 years or so. It even had a cool warning that popped up when you hit the "order" button that said (roughly) "WARNING! This is about to send a *real* FAX to a *real* pizza parlor, who will deliver a *real* pizza and ask you for *real* money! Are you sure you want to continue?"

Since my friends and I were in school in Buffalo, NY at the time, we were pretty sure they wouldn't deliver to us, but it definitely gave us an early glimpse into the importance of pizza in the workplace in early Silicon Valley culture, not to mention introducing me to the existence of Tony & Alba's! (When I moved here a couple years later, I made a pilgrimage and they've been a favorite ever since.) This only worked in Mountain View, CA, at the time, but that's where Sun was concentrated then. (Still is.) Tony & Alba's has 7 shops around the Bay Area, now, and their own website - http://www.tonyalba.com/

PizzaNet used a web-to-FAX system that would submit the order using the existing Pizza Hut FAX ordering system, and your pie would arrive in about 1/2 hour. I used it once around May/June of 1994 and it worked wonderfully. This one only worked around Santa Cruz, CA, but again, that's where SCO was concentrated, then. It was written by my friend, Steph, who had been the IS Director at SCO for years at that point, and knew that Engineers were mainly fueled by pizza and caffeine (still are!) so he made sure pizza was easily available at the touch of a few keys. (There were free soda fountains in all SCO buildings.) This SCO "easy pizza" policy, like the Corporate Hot Tub, also went away as the "Age of the Suits" began to take over in the mid-late 1990's.

The neat thing about both systems, aside from providing a really geeky way to get pizza (which obviously still amuses us to this day, given this article's appearance on /. ), was that they both interfaced with the existing FAX-based systems the pizza parlors had in place, and didn't bother any of the pizza makers/delivery folks with any new interfaces or computer details, allowing them to focus on what they did best, and allowing us to get pizza easily. (Remember that both of these were many years before most people/businesses had even *heard* of the Internet, and in the case of PizzaTool, before the WWW even existed! When did *you* first hear of them?)

There are lots of good ideas floating around. Especially in computers and software. However, there are far fewer that are actually original or new ideas. Dig into the history a bit. It's fun, and you'll likely be surprised. You may also save yourself a whole lot of coding-time. :-)

-Pat

... looks like Microsoft is going to need to find a new puppet company to attack Linux...

SUN?

I took some precautions with my computer to prevent spyware but my roommate managed to mess it up pretty good, since then I have taken the correct steps to ensure protection. This is what I recommend if you want to keep a Windows computer safe from everything without paying for anything.

Whenever possible enable Automatic Updates for all applications (including Windows itself), if that's not an option update manually on a weekly basis.

System Protection:

Only use admin account when necessary.

Virus/Worm Protection/Removal:

Install AVG
Don't use Outlook Express use Thunderbird

Hacker/Worm Protection:

Enable XP Firewall (easiest) or Zonealarm or Kerio (my favorite)

Adware/Spyware/Pop-up Protection:

Don't use Internet Explorer use **** Frefox ****
If you have to use IE install the Google Toolbar
Run Spyware Blaster to give IE &/or Firefox more protection.
Install Spyware Guard and place in all users startup group to give real-time protection.

Adware/Spyware Removal:

Run SpyBot & Ad-Aware
In my experience each product alone doesn't get rid of everything, using both is the best way to go.

OR

Just take the Absolute Cheapest & Most Effective route and install Linux.

********
If you install Firefox you will want the following plugins, use Firefox to download the plugins.

Shockwave
Flash
Java

Here's a somewhat relevant anecdote.

I interviewed at a company that makes a big deal about being super duper technical on their web site. They had a written coding problem as part of the interview. (A good sign!)

They left me in a room with a non-networked PC with instructions get as far as possible in writing a program in Java to take an initial date and a number of days to add or subtract, and figure out what the resulting date would be. The test instructions contained a detailed explanation of the workings of the Gregorian calendar system. The PC had Windows and the JDK installed on it, and just about nothing else. They gave me a pretty short period of time to do it in - 15 or 20 minutes, if I remember right.

At first I had to call the interviewer back in so that I could show him that there were about TEN different past solutions still stitting on the hard drive, and that I was going to delete them all while he watched and ask him to start the clock again. (Lamers...)

When I read the problem I realized that it was very easily solved using the java.util.GregorianCalendar class that comes with the JDK. I didn't remember exactly how to use it but fortunately the installed JDK on this PC also included the JDK source. I javadoc'd the source to GregorianCalendar and Calendar and read the docs, wrote my app, and tested it thoroughly. Of course it didn't take long to get it working, since the hard work was already done. I had to walk all over the office looking for the interviewer, who apparently wasn't expecting me to actually complete the task within the allotted time.

When I reviewed my very short program with the proctor and explained all of the things that I had done in order to do it that way, he seemed upset, as though I cheated. I tried to make a case for the fact that I had passed up a chance to actually cheat and then been resourceful, but he wasn't convinced. I didn't do it exactly the slow and tedious way they wanted, so I was wrong. I pointed out that if I was on a project and caught a developer duplicating base JDK functionality due to plain ignorance of the class library, I'd consider that a *bad* thing, not an example of technical excellence.

The rest of the interview went OK, but they eventually called me back and said there was a hiring freeze. Well maybe so, since it was in 2000 or 2001 (I don't remember exactly when), or maybe not. I wasn't exactly crushed.

Since then, the hard-skills tests that I use when interviewing developer candidates includes something like this for the relevant environment... kinda like you said. Something like "read in a text file, sort the lines, and print it out in sorted order". If their program includes a sort routine, BZZT, they failed the test.

One place that you can see the IBM influence is that the SL-6000 dropped the Insignia Jeode Java Virtual Machine that was used in the 5000 series and used the IBM J9 VM.

Unfortunately, both are J2ME Personal Profile VM's, so most java programs have to be ported to work on them. It's too bad that SUN laid down the law and told SavaJe and others that handheld devices are only allowed to run J2ME and not J2SE, even if SavaJe did manage to port it and make it work. So, no applets in your web browser :(

Another Java issue is that you can't simply tap on a jar file and expect it to run. Instead, you have to jump through all sorts of hoops to create a special installation package just for the Zaurus. This makes it difficult to use PersonalJava applications that were designed to work on any platform without doing some re-packaging. Although I understand the impetus to use the linux-ish packaging system they use for linux based applictions, it's disappointing that they didn't use something like JNLP for PersonalJava applications.

One place that you can see the IBM influence is that the SL-6000 dropped the Insignia Jeode Java Virtual Machine that was used in the 5000 series and used the IBM J9 VM.

Unfortunately, both are J2ME Personal Profile VM's, so most java programs have to be ported to work on them. It's too bad that SUN laid down the law and told SavaJe and others that handheld devices are only allowed to run J2ME and not J2SE, even if SavaJe did manage to port it and make it work. So, no applets in your web browser :(

Another Java issue is that you can't simply tap on a jar file and expect it to run. Instead, you have to jump through all sorts of hoops to create a special installation package just for the Zaurus. This makes it difficult to use PersonalJava applications that were designed to work on any platform without doing some re-packaging. Although I understand the impetus to use the linux-ish packaging system they use for linux based applictions, it's disappointing that they didn't use something like JNLP for PersonalJava applications.

One place that you can see the IBM influence is that the SL-6000 dropped the Insignia Jeode Java Virtual Machine that was used in the 5000 series and used the IBM J9 VM.

Unfortunately, both are J2ME Personal Profile VM's, so most java programs have to be ported to work on them. It's too bad that SUN laid down the law and told SavaJe and others that handheld devices are only allowed to run J2ME and not J2SE, even if SavaJe did manage to port it and make it work. So, no applets in your web browser :(

Another Java issue is that you can't simply tap on a jar file and expect it to run. Instead, you have to jump through all sorts of hoops to create a special installation package just for the Zaurus. This makes it difficult to use PersonalJava applications that were designed to work on any platform without doing some re-packaging. Although I understand the impetus to use the linux-ish packaging system they use for linux based applictions, it's disappointing that they didn't use something like JNLP for PersonalJava applications.

One place that you can see the IBM influence is that the SL-6000 dropped the Insignia Jeode Java Virtual Machine that was used in the 5000 series and used the IBM J9 VM.

Unfortunately, both are J2ME Personal Profile VM's, so most java programs have to be ported to work on them. It's too bad that SUN laid down the law and told SavaJe and others that handheld devices are only allowed to run J2ME and not J2SE, even if SavaJe did manage to port it and make it work. So, no applets in your web browser :(

Another Java issue is that you can't simply tap on a jar file and expect it to run. Instead, you have to jump through all sorts of hoops to create a special installation package just for the Zaurus. This makes it difficult to use PersonalJava applications that were designed to work on any platform without doing some re-packaging. Although I understand the impetus to use the linux-ish packaging system they use for linux based applictions, it's disappointing that they didn't use something like JNLP for PersonalJava applications.

Actually... Scott McNealey would have to use the patents... .NET falls under most of the Java VM patents.

Somewhat true but, unfortunately, irrelevant.

Sun and Microsoft Settle Litigation
Posted by michael on Fri Apr 02, '04 11:20 AM
from the I-guess-we-can-all-just-get-along dept.
spurious cowherd writes "According to The Register Sun Microsystems & Microsoft have reached a settlement in their several lawsuits against each other. Sun gets $2B and both parties agree to share intellectual property." There's a press release to read as well.

Also Update: Sun, Microsoft settle suit in billion-dollar pact

• Pentium II-compatible processor, 266 MHz
• 4-GB hard disk
• 128-MB RAM
• 800x600 screen resolution

BTW, recomended is:

• Pentium III-compatible processor, 600 MHz or faster
• at least 4-GB hard disk
• at least 256-MB RAM
• 1024x768 screen resolution or better

Pentium III-compatible processor, 600 MHz or faster; at least 4-GB hard disk; at least 256-MB RAM; 1024x768 screen resolution or better"

But the real killer is Sun Java System Active Server Pages...
http://wwws.sun.com/software/chilisoft/index.html

Need more horsepower... the Opteron 4-way boxes (HP 4-way), crush the Intel Xeon's (as do the two ways) in most web and DB benchmarks. Oh yeah, they are usually priced comparably or cheaper than the Intels as well.

When will the linux desktops going to "lead" in innovation instead of lagging, continually trying to replicated some outdated version of windows?

Although you've been modded as a troll, you are right in large part it seems linux tries to emulate windows. It's not a bad thing, because it allows people to switch when they get too disgruntled with windows. However, the bigger payoff would be if someone developed a desktop enviornment that was BETTER than windows. Not just in preformance, but in look in feel

and that is exactly what sun is trying to do with project looking glass.

Check out some of the movies and screenshots of it if you haven't seen them yet (it's been posted on slashdot) they are pretty badass imo.

> No, you just have no idea what the fuck you are talking about, and the parent is being modded down because they are comparing two things which are entirely different.

The details may be different, but the original poster's central point is absolutely correct. The law is not being applied equally.

Bill Gates has committed sabotage:

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

Bill Gates has committed consumer fraud (same link):

> "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."

Bill Gates has committed extortion:

> "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...."

Those were deliberate crimes -- deliberate acts of destruction. And his crimes have been costly to us all. By sabotaging Java, Gates delayed the introduction of modern e-commerce by years, which has cost the economy $hundreds of BILLIONS -- more costly than any virus or worm.

Meanwhile, Martha Stewart sold a stock she knew would drop, and saved herself a few $hundreds of thousands. A crime, perhaps, but piddling compared to the various crimes of Gates and company.

Yet Martha goes to jail, and Gates gets a slap on the wrist.

It is an extreme case of injustice, brought about by a corrupt government (not just the Republicans), and a cowardly justice system.

• Include it by default, or at least make it SUPER EASY to install. (It's not click-and-run like some other extensions are, because it's not pure XUL -- there's a native library involved.)
• Allow Thunderbird to handle sending and receiving of meeting invitations (I understand this is in the works)
• Schedule meetings while looking at the invitees' free/busy times. Since Thunderbird already has LDAP support, it should be trivial to look in LDAP for someone's free/busy list URL.
• Most importantly of all, it needs to support server-side calendar store! The open source community appears to want to standardize on IMAP (just a folder called "Calendar" full of vCalendar objects), and that's just a dandy way of doing it. Nobody (and I mean nobody at all) has implemented CAP because it's so damn hairy. WCAP has a small following because it's what Netscape...iPlanet...SunONE Calendar Server uses, but IMAP is still the better solution because every mail program already supports it.

Java invented the dynamic analysis and handling of stack traces, not just exceptions.
If you are into dynamic analysis and recovery of exceptions -- that is, self-healing software --, that is a very powerful tool.

Sorry, you're mistaken. See this part of the Java Spec, toward the end of the page: http://java.sun.com/docs/books/jls/second_edition/ html/statements.doc.html#236365 Basically, if the condition of your if() is a constant (static final boolean), then the compiler 'may' drop the block entirely. The standard compiler does it. Eclipse doesn't.
See also the log4j cookbook, which says that leaving dynamic if() for logging statements all over the place has no mesurable performance impact.

Using assertions in 1.4 will allow this the addition of switchable runtime debugging without the need for testing with an if statement.

What you talkin' bout foo? GOTO has been long supported by Java, it just hasn't been used by its developers.

So, the Java language does not support goto. Trying to use a goto will result in a compiler error.

Tim

Ok, I'll bite. Sun is in the application server market, they have their own product. Is it one of the big names? No, it's not. Would they like that to change? I am certain they would. Just that it doesn't seem to be working too well at the moment. If you think for a moment that Sun isn't interested in controlling the direction of Java, google a bit for the rants people have written on how "heavy handed" and "autocratic" (I quote those terms because I don't completely agree) they can be in the JCP process.

IBM already has the source, they have an implementation of the JDK, there is nothing to stop them from making competing products. The fact of the matter is that for IBM or anyone else, once you open source Java, they can fold it back into your own product, but nothing can prevent someone else from doing the same. We, as consumers, have the freedom to decide which implementation we wish to use. Do you honestly think that BEA and other application server makers won't scream blue murder ?

I can't make a decision either way. On one hand, yes, there would be benefits to open sourcing Java. The community *could* get more involved in contributing extensions and patches to how Java works. The developer community surrounding Java being such, I think the pace of development would proceed at a much higher pace than Sun does. Another worrying factor is that if Sun has to fight for it's survival, it needs to make some tough decisions down the road. How many engineers will be pulled off a project which doesn't (strictly speaking) provide Sun with any revenue ? If Java development is left solely in the hands of a company who's survival is uncertain, then Java development will suffer as a result and I don't like seeing that happen.

On the other hand, Sun hasn't done badly in it's role as "steward" of the directions in which Java goes.. They've (their marketing has) driven the Java brand relentlessly forward and I think the sheer size of the developer community is a good thing. I can't think of any reason why it would be advantageous for them to spend 8+ years promoting and developing the product, only to "give" it away to the masses. Even the Linux kernel has Linus at the helm. Who else can be trusted to take the helm of such a commercially valuable piece of intellectual property ? Who would resist the temptation to subvert it to their own ends?

One final note to everyone who wants Java open sourced just so their favourite distro can start packaging it.. please, think a bit. Not all useful software is open sourced now, nor will it be in the foreseeable future. If it's your only reason for Sun to cast out a decade or more of research and development, it's not enough.

What you talkin' bout foo? GOTO has been long supported by Java, it just hasn't been used by its developers. Using a GOTO statement in OO code is a rediculous thing to do. Even semi-functional languages like C have no need for GOTO statements.

BigAdmin Portal
http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/

for ones who want to tweak your Solaris box.

If solaris were available for free, i have a feeling many students would install it on their system, just to more easily use these apps if for nothing else.

Well, you can actually get Solaris for free already.

If solaris were available for free

For personal/evaluation/educational/etc uses, it already is.

http://wwws.sun.com/software/solaris/binaries/get. html

It's pretty fussy about hardware etc, though, and very obviously not the equal of Solaris/Sparc.

They have free versions for educational use. Just download it or order the CD set for some dollars.

Actually they can tell the difference between individual RFID tagged items. See this link from Sun - Enhance Your Supply Chain for information about tracking an individual item.

Excerpt

For one thing, RFID tags have far greater capacity than bar-code labels for storing information. While the familiar universal product code (UPC) labels on typical retail packaging fit only 12 to 14 bits of information, current-generation RFID tags could accommodate up to 96 bits. Consequently, while bar-code labels are only capable of identifying that the item is a 1-pound box of cornflakes, RFID tags could identify exactly which box it is. Additionally, the new generation of RFID technology is being reinvented to work using the Internet. That unique product identifier could be hyperlinked to additional information, including manufacturing batch and production history, product handling instructions, storage or delivery instructions, expiration dates, and other details. The possibilities are limited only by the imagination.

So yes, they will likely be able to figure out who you are, unless you revert to paying cash for your purchases.

what a load of marketing BS .. didn't realize how much both Cisco and IBM have been struggling for new ideas. Sun's been doing this for over a year now with their blades and specialty blades .. they just don't invest the same $$ in advertising smoke and mirrors

what a load of marketing BS .. didn't realize how much both Cisco and IBM have been struggling for new ideas. Sun's been doing this for over a year now with their blades and specialty blades .. they just don't invest the same $$ in advertising smoke and mirrors

Sun has had its B1600 blade shelf fitted with a pair of Cisco derived switches since day 1. Seems like IBM is playing a bit of catchup here. We've got one of these shelves sitting in one of our departments racks, and I can confirm that it the switches are definitely cisco running IOS.

I agree this is where they are doing well now but the PC world has been catching really quickly. Here is a interconnect/bandwidth picture of the Sun 12/15k"> Look at the memory/system bus (fig 4-4). If I have a memory i/o nonparallelizable job (i.e. something that does not feed to a cluster/multiple cpu bound job) I am feeding from local memory to cpu. The local memory cpu bandwidth is only 2.4 GB or dropping one of the cpu's for maximum bandwidth 4.8 GB over the dataswitch. The G5 mac I have at home has dual 8 GB channels feeding each CPU separately at 8 Gb for 16GB of bandwidth. I don't have a crazy shared 43 gigabyte backplane which feeds each dual node at 5 gigabytes but in this day and age commodity 10 gigabit switches will become cheap soon which will feed a gig to each dual.. Its a lot of money obviously but still very competitive if you comparing it to a sun 15k. Redundancy hotswapping failover will all be brought to the PC world reasonably soon. For a single cpu/ I/O bound job that sits in memory PC's are faster. If you have disk systems or other cpu's on the backplane unless you raid across the backplane you bottlenecked on the 4gigabyte port anyway.

-bloo

Sun's COs claim that they need to maintain tight control over the Java library source code and standards to insure Java cross vendor "write-once" portability. This was the main point for Sun's lawsuit against Microsoft. In fact, in the DOJ case the federal appeal court did find that Microsoft had deceived Java developers, which the court decided was in breach of the Sherman Antitust act.

For Sun to call their settlement anything but a sellout, Sun could at least persuaded Microsoft to create or adopt a modern release of Java to replace the 1997 eon MSJava JVM. Instead Microsoft gained the right to extends life of its Java Virtual Machine to December 31, 2007. Microsoft have stated that it will not be improving ( or updating ) the old JVM and Microsoft's J# "upgrade path" still uses non-standard interfaces for GUI's and .NET libraries. This leaves Microsoft free to play the old "standard" embrace, extend and enclose anti-competitive tactics.

Sun' s James Gosling claims, in response to this article and some "slashdot flamage" from the same author that though the new settlement, Sun has gained the right to selectively access Microsoft's Communications Protocol Program. This ablity to selectively pick and choose and other "flexabilities" was a detail left out of Sun's press release, and more interestingly, the recent joint status report on Microsoft's complicance with the US DOJ final antitrust judgement.

So let's say I have a massive computing need for, oh say, chip design. Chip designers, like Texas Instruments, Cirrus Logic, or General Semiconductor, require massive amounts of CPU time and even more memory. Sun's ultra-high-end offerings are worthless, since you simply can't cram enough RAM into their higher-end Enterprise servers.

That is nonsense. How about you show me a PC that takes from 96 to 192 Gigs of ram and can use most of that in a single process? You can't. Sun's midrage servers can do that sort of thing.

If you are doing BIG chips, you are almost certainly going to need either an IBM, HP, or Sun Unix box somewhere in the design flow. Linux just isn't there yet to handle the really big stuff.

Your idea about distributed processing is great... if the software supports it. There is still a lot of EDA software that is single threaded doing tasks that are either hard to split, or can't be split. And that is assuming that you can afford the extra seats of software to actually use it in a distributed computing scheme. Since there are tools that cost $750,000+ per seat there don't tend to be a lot those those dedicated to grid computing.

And now that major vendors are offering Linux versions of their design tools, we are no longer tied to Solaris.

I doubt that you would have ever really been tied to Solaris. You could always go to HP or IBM for most vendors. Now you can also do to Linux for the stuff that will fit. Not all of it will fit though if you are doing anything substantial.

Oh, you want those servers to load balance/load share? To be in a cluster? More $$$'s.

Free and open source from Sun.

Want RAID?

Disksuite is free from Sun.

Want some kind of SAN solution? ... But when they're Linux, clustering is free (software-wise.) And while the hardware costs for RAID and SAN remain high, the software to make them work is dirt cheap compared to anything you would have to buy for Solaris.

So, what software would you use on Linux that you wouldn't or couldn't use on a Sun?

... no longer do we stick Ultra 5's and 10's on the designer's desktops, now they're running their tools on Microsoft Windows 2000/XP.

I would guess from this that you aren't doing anything too tough since practically every serious EDA vendor (Synopsys, Cadence, Mentor Graphics, etc) has pretty much bailed from Windows for their tools to do real chips as opposed to FPGAs.

Based on your comments it looks to me like you have been out of touch with what Sun has been doing for quite some time.

They announced ROCK recently too, which addresses just that.

• Sun Fire V440 --> $16,395
  
• HP DL580 G2 --> $34,374
  

• Sun Fire V440 --> 702/1054/26.5/33.0
  
• HP DL580 G2 --> 1491/1208/61.6/30.7
  

I agree fully. I've also got a couple of SPARC systems at home, running OpenBSD. They just don't die! And, some of the newer systems, such as the V210 are simply sweet! I can't think of a better server for the price. (Think reliability and stability.)

That said, it makes me sick to think that they let the SPARC die. It would not have cost that much to bring it up to date. Sigh....