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> Illegally? How so?

Microsoft added a message to Windows that gave a warning about incompatibility with DR-DOS. But Microsoft's own testing had shown DR-DOS's compatibility to be essentially perfect. The message was a lie, intended to defraud the public.

Microsoft also added intentional (and encrypted) incompatibilities to Windows 95, while keeping DR-DOS out of the Windows 95 test program. It was a deliberate act of sabotage.

But there are more recent examples of Microsoft's criminal activity:

Sabotage:

> "Strategic Objective [is to] kill cross-platform Java by grow[ing] the polluted Java market" -- Microsoft Pricing Proposal for VJ++ 6.0

Fraud:

> "As i [sic] told charlesf [Fitzgerald] on the phone, 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." -- Armstrong Decl., Ex. 23.

Extortion:

> Gates wrote, "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...."

> In Waldman's words: Sounds like we give them the HTML control for nothing except making IE the "standard browser for Apple?" I think they should be doing this anyway. Though the language of the agreement uses the word "encourage," I think that the spirit is that Apple should be using it everywhere and if they don't do it, then we can use Office as a club.

Almost every one of Microsoft's "victories" has involved similar illegal behavior.

The sabotage of Java alone has delayed the introduction of e-commerce by years, resulting in a loss of as much as $100 billion per year for the U.S. economy. And when you take that much wealth out of the world, people die.

Bill Gates doesn't deserve a Knighthood. He deserves to be in jail.

I love working on an OSS, but I think future Linux Worlds should try to make a better effort to attract end-users. I understand some companies might not want to be on the exibition floor if they are not going to increase sales, but the second you find out I am an end-user (not a developer/IT Manager/Purchase Order Manager) you should not give me polite push to the .org pavilion. I spent a lot of time updating my skills, and I plan to spend more time attempting to evangelizeing to people that migt attent future LWs (even in Boston) who might be in a position to make a large scale purchase.

Look a how that other Bi-Annual IDG Conferences value end-users.

I love working on an OSS, but I think future Linux Worlds should try to make a better effort to attract end-users. I understand some companies might not want to be on the exibition floor if they are not going to increase sales, but the second you find out I am an end-user (not a developer/IT Manager/Purchase Order Manager) you should not give me polite push to the .org pavilion. I spent a lot of time updating my skills, and I plan to spend more time attempting to evangelizeing to people that migt attent future LWs (even in Boston) who might be in a position to make a large scale purchase.

Look a how that other Bi-Annual IDG Conferences value end-users.

You can see official AMD benchmark results of various programs running on Windows XP 32-bit edition vs. Windows XP 64-bit edition beginning of page 36 of this PDF. The results have three columns: time in seconds on WinXP 32-bit w/ 32-bit executable, time in seconds on WinXP 64-bit with 32-bit executable, and time in seconds on WinXP 64-bit with 64-bit executable.

The results are quite impressive, but I'm not sure we can trust AMD, since obviously they want AMD64 to look good.

I am not sure of this, but I do not expect bytecode to include variable/method/property names.

In Java, they do. Moreover, there are punctuation marks (e.g. '/' for package name separators, other characters for type mangling etc) so case folding is not as simple as oring every character in the string. Take a look.

I am not sure of this, but I do not expect bytecode to include variable/method/property names.

In Java, they do. Moreover, there are punctuation marks (e.g. '/' for package name separators, other characters for type mangling etc) so case folding is not as simple as oring every character in the string. Take a look.

I am not sure of this, but I do not expect bytecode to include variable/method/property names.

In Java, they do. Moreover, there are punctuation marks (e.g. '/' for package name separators, other characters for type mangling etc) so case folding is not as simple as oring every character in the string. Take a look.

But you do remember that Java source code is assumed to be Unicode, do you?

That would be the killer argument, if you could use all those Unicode characters in identifiers. But you can't, identifiers can only use characters from the ASCII subset. Since this discussion is about identifiers, this point is moot.

Source: http://java.sun.com/docs/books/jls/second_edition/ html/lexical.doc.html.

That's not true!!

When you create an object in Java, you are, in a sense, creating a pointer. As a matter of fact it's easy to make a linked list or a binary tree with Java, the same way you do in C. Just because it's not explicitly called a pointer doesn't mean it isn't used.

Ever heard of a NullPointerException?

"Java doesn't have pointers" is a hype phrase still left over from the Dot Bomb era...

If I want to load RSS, I'll use an RSS reader for my phone. When I bought Opera for my N-Gage, I just switched to the "high volume" billing rate for GPRS and I switched Slashdot into the low bandwidth mode. If I want news, I view News.Google's text page -- Opera renders it quite well.

Kind of surprised the lawyers have not muzzled that moron yet.

I would have agreed with you, back when SCO was pretending it's lawyers were just working on contingency. In that case, the lawyers would be paid only if SCO won the IBM case, and so it would make sense for them to do everything possible (including shutting up Darl) to ensure a victory.

Now that we know that SCO's lawyers are getting paid even if they lose, we can no longer be certain that they're expecting (or even hoping) to win. In fact, it's possible that SCO's lawyers are quite aware of how they're getting paid and understand that Darl's media circus is more likely to extend those paychecks than to curtail them.

Try here, here, and here.

Mods, this is flamebait, pure and simple.

Not true. I've been using a Logitech TrackMan Pro for several years now, with the aid of a nifty box that converts PS/2 devices (has an input for a keyboard and for a mouse) into the Sun connector. It was a Sun part number, somewhat obscure, but definitely available and useful. It's called the "Sun Interface Converter" and the Sun part number is 595-3692. I'd recommend you go looking for one if you are having trouble coming up with Sun Keyboards & Mice or if you want to use your Sun system with a standard KVM switch (which is what I do at home).

you're only allowed to install a certain version of Windows 2000, with servicepacks up to a certain number, and one hotfix.

But I'm still waiting for a certificate for some SELinux version.

The real problem with certification is that it costs money, so it needs to have a business driver. In the case of solaris they needed the certification to sell to banks etc. SELinux is unlikely to have a similar financial incentive to takeup.

This JDS from Sun has quite a head start. How can they compete?

Sun recently sent me a CD with their Java Desktop on it, which for anyone who doesn't know, is a slickly-packaged Linux distro with a very user friendly interface, Sun's excellent StarOffice suite, Mozilla, etc etc. I've been having a play with it (I use StarOffice on Windows anyway) and I'm quite impressed. It's all nicely integrated with a mostly consistent look and feel, for the end user there's no messing around, anyone who's familiar with Windows and MS Office could pick this up in a day and be productive. As an old-skool Unix user, I'd personally prefer a NeXTSTEP or IRIX desktop, but as a normal Windows user, JDS is impressive.

That's the way to do Linux on the desktop - it has to be as near as possible seamless. Someone who knows what they're doing has to sit down and make it all work. Bundling together a package here and a package there as Red hat does just isn't going to cut it. If the objective is to actually get Linux on the desktop, then OSDN should throw its lot in with Sun. But it looks like this "initiative" is just bandwagoneering.

Is it true that spirit makes use of Java? Or does only the "client" software used to control it,use Java. Does it have an OS and if so which/or what type? Does it use a RTOS or Linux or a BSD?

Free implementation?

See OpenSSL and Sun's announcement for including ECC code in OpenSSL.

The JDS from Sun is a linux desktop. Home use will follow business as people want to use the same at home and work. All the toys will follow.

The Sun Blade 2000 has FC-AL disks.

and I've heard a maximum of 2.0GB RAM

Use those earsticks, dude :o)
From the specifications:

* Processor: One 1-GHz UltraSPARC IIIi processor
* Main memory: Up to 4 GB of registered DDR PC2100 ECC memory
* Network: 10/100/1000-Mbps (Gigabit) Base-T Ethernet port
* Expansion buses: Two separate PCI buses; one 66-MHz, 64-bit PCI slot on dedicated bus; two 33-MHz, 64-bit PCI slots; two 33-MHz, 32-bit PCI slots on the other bus
* Graphics and Imaging: The Sun Blade 1500 workstation supports up to three Sun XVR-100 or up to two Sun XVR-500 graphics accelerators.

Now, to performance:

On both workstations you can get XVR-600 which is lightning fast and extra high quality. It's a Wildcat 4 chip (3D Labs) with 10-bit pixel precision and dedicated texture ram. The least expensive card like this for the PC is around $1K5 (Wildcat 4 7110) Also you can't get Linux drivers for it yet.

As for the P4/1.8GHz story try this for a test : Install MySQL on your linux PC and create a database with a table of about 5-6GB. Run alter table on it. Wait for it CRUMBLE TO DUST as it hits past 2GBs. Then get a Sun.

Opteron might be the only challenger to sparc (which is why Sun is pushing for opteron-based servers), but it's main faults are :

Still has no real applications ported to it.

Can't scale beyond 8-cpu's. If you don't need that - well... Plenty people do - in servers at least. This isn't a workstation issue, but is a server one.

Integrated memory controllers are a bitch on multi-cpu systems if you need one cpu to access all memory, while the other is still doing something. This is the main reason why sun still sells Blade 2000, now that Blade 2500 has hit the market.

As for true workstation features check out Blade 2000 (2 cpu's, UPA graphics, FC-AL disks), or Blade 2500 (2 cpu's, scsi disks). Both more expensive (especially Blade 2000 which uses Ultra III CPU's without integrated memory controllers, but with a real crossbar switch instead), but they are still A LOT less expensive than their SGI or IBM counterparts. Sun isn't competing with the PC's with this WS, it's just for the people who need a cheap ws for home, remote work or something like that. As the author of the article puts it "make no mistake: this is a workhorse, not a pony or a racehorse"

Now, to performance:

On both workstations you can get XVR-600 which is lightning fast and extra high quality. It's a Wildcat 4 chip (3D Labs) with 10-bit pixel precision and dedicated texture ram. The least expensive card like this for the PC is around $1K5 (Wildcat 4 7110) Also you can't get Linux drivers for it yet.

As for the P4/1.8GHz story try this for a test : Install MySQL on your linux PC and create a database with a table of about 5-6GB. Run alter table on it. Wait for it CRUMBLE TO DUST as it hits past 2GBs. Then get a Sun.

Opteron might be the only challenger to sparc (which is why Sun is pushing for opteron-based servers), but it's main faults are :

Still has no real applications ported to it.

Can't scale beyond 8-cpu's. If you don't need that - well... Plenty people do - in servers at least. This isn't a workstation issue, but is a server one.

Integrated memory controllers are a bitch on multi-cpu systems if you need one cpu to access all memory, while the other is still doing something. This is the main reason why sun still sells Blade 2000, now that Blade 2500 has hit the market.

As for true workstation features check out Blade 2000 (2 cpu's, UPA graphics, FC-AL disks), or Blade 2500 (2 cpu's, scsi disks). Both more expensive (especially Blade 2000 which uses Ultra III CPU's without integrated memory controllers, but with a real crossbar switch instead), but they are still A LOT less expensive than their SGI or IBM counterparts. Sun isn't competing with the PC's with this WS, it's just for the people who need a cheap ws for home, remote work or something like that. As the author of the article puts it "make no mistake: this is a workhorse, not a pony or a racehorse"

The 2500 has IIIi CPU. The Blade 2000 is the only one offering a III, afaik.

Ewww... it gets worse, the red dot goes around the side.

Anyhows, it wins the 'best evil primary color feature on hardware' award. Not since I discovered that the green blob on the X-box lid didn't glow have I hated a case so much...

I'd second the idea that the reviewer doesn't entirely understand the target audience for this machine.

The article also includes a link to the product's PDF datasheet. Please read before you bash.

But just in case you don't feel like skimming through the PDF, the relevant points seem to be that it:

• Is meant to run Solaris
• Is compatible with Sun's XVR graphics accelerators
• Has built-in 10/100/1000 ethernet capability

To me, this looks like a box intended to do hugely accelerated 3D graphics in a unixish environment. That's it's niche. I'd bet it's 3D rendering performance is nothing short of stunning.

Remember - big companies have marketing departments, entire sections of the building dedicated to answering the question "what should we charge for it?" For someone who needs a machine like this I'll bet that it's worth every penny.

Saying that it sucks because it's dhrystone score is as low as a box 1/5th it's cost is like complaining that a hammer makes a lousy screwdriver. You're not using the tool for its intended job.

Weaselmancer

SUN also has an article on exactly how Java is being used on the ground for this mission.

Huh? You can get Solaris for Sparc and x86 for FREE

It provides technical ability to scale computing resources dynamically up and down to cope with fluctuating workloads.

It changes IT pricing from up-front investment to real-time, pay-as-you-go.

The fine-grained monitoring required to generate pay-for-use billing reports provides much greater visibility into IT operations, their costs, and their relationship to the business activities they support.

The question is - do we need a new paradigm (oops!) for that? Or are the existing strategies capable of providing a synergy (oops!). I mean, can't we do the same or better with the tools we already have?

1) Scaling resources. How necessary is that? Does you company need huge amounts of CPU power at one time and not at the other? I can't think of an example when you would need a supercomputer for a minute every day. With most existing applications you either need a lot of CPU or you don't. The variation is usually too small to warrant outsourcing, given that fast processors cost only 100$.
2) IT-pricing. Is there anything that a 3-year bank loan to buy all these computers can't do?
3) Completely irrelevant. They sound like a cellular operator explaining to a customer why pay-per-minute plan is extremely convenient to him.

Conclusion: stupid, stupid, stupid. Now I think I will get my Bluetooth-enabled WAP-phone and use location-based service to order some pizza from an e-business. That's what I call on-demand computing. :)

Here's a story about some of the software involved.

Brady

I gave my dad my old 17" monitor, which was a Viglen Envy (probably MAG or something) that my employer had dropped down the stairs whilst moving. It's still working.

The only old monitors I don't still use are my PAL Philips 8852 from my Amiga days, and the 15" Iiyama which I bought with my first PC, back in 1995 for about 300GBP. That's the most expensive monitor I've ever bought!

--

So why are you still able to buy Fortran compilers? Because the people who use the language tend to be engineers (the physical kind) and scientists, and thus spend a lot of money on high-end computers. No Fortran compiler, not fat contracts for your Starfire and Origin boxes. Which is why Sun and SGI both sell Fortran. And whose the leading vendor of Fortran for the Itanium? Good guess.

So is IBM trying to help Apple sell more Macs? Probably not. They'd make a little money from the extra CPU sales, but not enough to justify something like this. More likely they have this compiler to help them sell more high-performance PPC systems. As long as they have it, not that much extra effort to port it to the Mac.

And seems like cheap options have long been available DOS/Windows NFS clients for a long time. In 1994, this summary mentions XFS (shareware NFS client from Germany, not the SGI filesystem) TSoft and Sun's PC-NFS.

Nowdays you also have at least these option, and you are right, many are not cheap.

• HummingBird $300 My past impressions were always of good quality and features.
• Reflection $88 I know this name.
• ProNFS $40 (shareware?)
• DiskAccess $179
• SuperNFS $160 Found with google.

It was a back-in-the-day fully loaded dell inspirion 7000. It had a 15" screen (when they were new), PII 366 MHz, windows 98, and 256MB of ram. The ram alone was $800, and was more than any other machine in the office (even more than our sun workstations, which weren't the newest). Still a useful computer today.

I also had an old company-owned tadpole sparcbook... the newer ones are easily $8k, so a friend bought an old small sun for $150 off of ebay instead and ran it display-less (telnetting into that with his regular laptop)

Here is another link for a proposed Mars Calendar:
http://mars.complete-isp.com/time/zubrin.html

NASA has an Applet showing the current time on Mars.

Offtopic - NASA is really embracing Java lately. At least parts of the control and visualising software for the current mission uses Java, including Java 3D. Java not ready for user interfaces eh?
They also certainly seem to be considering Java and Linux for future missions and have built a concept vehicle using it. The SD times article is very preachy, and I'm sure people sceptical of Java can argue over many of the points, but it is interesting still.

Solaris...well....

Sun has purchased a whole string of licenses from the various owners of Unix, with SCO being the latest. As you can see from this press release, they're protecting their arses as best they can. I can't say I blame them....

--Mid

No but there have been other companies that have 'absolved' their user base of open source sins. Then they've pointed at IBM for not doing anything to 'save' them from the devil

Once again, Sun suffers because of windows.

From
The Java HotSpot Virtual Machine:

"Just-in-time (JIT) compilers are essentially fast traditional compilers that translate the Java technology bytecodes into native machine code on the fly. A JIT running on the end user's machine actually executes the bytecodes and compiles each method the first time it is executed...
[Hotspot] solves the problems of JIT compilation by taking advantage of an interesting program property. Virtually all programs spend the vast majority of their time executing a minority of their code. Rather than compiling method by method, just in time, the Java HotSpot VM immediately runs the program using an interpreter, and analyzes the code as it runs to detect the critical hot spots in the program. Then it focuses the attention of a global native-code optimizer on the hot spots. By avoiding compilation of infrequently executed code (most of the program), the Java HotSpot compiler can devote more attention to the performance-critical parts of the program, without necessarily increasing the overall compilation time. This hot spot monitoring is continued dynamically as the program runs, so that it literally adapts its performance on the fly to the user's needs."

Those complaints are now obsolete.

First off, SWT only performes well on windows, and stack on top of that that the principal native abstractions are taylored to a win32 environment. Based off of that it is easy to see how SWT performes quite nicely on Windows.

Elsewhere it sucks. MacOS, GTK, photon, Motif. Even porrly writeen swing programs outperform on those platforms.

But back to your FUD. Yes, bad programmers make ugly and poor performing GUI code. Swing is no different in that regard. But have you looked at recent swing programs in the 1.4.2 version of the JDK? Tried stuff like CleverCactus (a mail client)? Synced your MP3s on a new RIO? Used Yahoo's Site Builder to make a web site? There are excelent swing progams out there. Many you probobly don't realize are java swing apps!

But since SWT is only in early adopter land we haven't seen the real dogs of GUIs it can make yet, especially since you have to do such arcane and ancient tasks in SWT as managing your own event queue! :( Give the same bad programmer SWT and you won't get a bad GUI instead you will get a non-fucntioning GUI.

The benchmarks are poorly designed microbenchmarks. Why do people pay attention to such things? See Cliff Click's talk on "How NOT To Write A Microbenchmark".

We've done some of our own cross-language benchmarking. The NASA Advanced Supercomputing Parallel Benchmarks are problem statements for serious computation science problems, and solutions can be written in any programming language. We implemented the sparse Conjugate Gradient benchmark, and compared Java against fastest Fortran/MPI implementation on a cluster of 32 linux workstations. Java performed at essentially the same speed as Fortran/MPI (actually a little faster on 16 nodes). Although Fortran was slightly faster at the sparse matrix-vector product, Java communications using Java nio was faster than using the LAM implementation of MPI (the MPICH implementation was much worse than the LAM implementation).

Then, with more and more languages, especially ones with VMs, you get further and further away from the hardware. The end result: you lose performance. It does more and more for you, but at the expense of real optimizations, the kind that only you can do.

Now the zealots will come out and say, "Language X is better than language Y, see!" To me this argument is boring. I tend to use the appropriate tool for the job. So:

• Python for scripts, prototypes, proofs of concept, or components where performance generally is not an issue.
• For desktop apps, Visual Basic (yep, most IT apps are in VB). There is no justifiable reason for an IT department group to write a sales force reporting system in C++! If you want C++, go get a job at a software company. Stop wasting money and time making yourself feel like a hotshot. [I'd consider Kylix here if it was based on Basic. Why? Because honestly, Pascal is just about dead, and Basic is the king of the simple app. Let's just live with it and move on. I do want a cross-platform VB . . . ]
• For web apps, well, I stick around PHP/ASP.NET. Why? Portability! And moreover, the sticking point in a web-based app is not the UI layer; it's usually the underlying data extraction and formatting. Don't waste your time with lower level languages there. IMHO it's just not worth it. JSP and Java stuff, yuck! Too much time for too little bang.
• Java/C# (also consider mono/LISP for most production apps. Why? Portability! I want no vendor holding me by the balls. I want platform independence on the back end, and these are the few ways to achieve it. I'd include Haskell/OCAML here when appropriate. Perl? I'm loathe to use Perl as production, considering most Perl code cannot be understood 2 weeks after it's written. I'd rather take the hit in performance and be able to pass the code to someone else later.
• C++/C for components--just components--where performance is at an absolute premium or there exists some critical library that only has this kind of interface. But this step has to be justified by the team, with considerable explanation why a different architecture could not suffice. Otherwise, the team could waste time checking for dangling pointers when instead it could be doing other things, like finishing up other projects.
• Assembly? Only when there is not a C complier around. Embedded stuff. Nowadays, you just do not have the time to play.

Yes, my teams use many languages, but they also put their effort to where they get the biggest bang for the buck. And in any business approach, that's the key goal. You don't see carpenters use saws to hammer in nails or drive screws. Wise up!

I conducted my own tests pitting Java 1.4 against gcc 3.3 and icc 8.0 using his benchmark code, and found Java to perform significantly worse than C on Linux/Athlon.

From my experience Windows has always had the edge on the Java VM. But this could all be coming to a change:
Red Hat Linux 9 and Java 2 Platform, Standard Edition 1.4.2: A Winning Combination

A quote from the article states
"Internal tests reveal that performance of NPTL with a client/server application has been impressive. On a 2 X 1.6 Ghz P4 Xeon system, time to completion was 191% faster with J2SE 1.4.2 running on NPTL, compared with J2SE 1.41 running on the original Linux threads."

we did, luckily i caught it early enough, found the solution (updating to java 1.4.2_03 in our case), and updated live servers before too many transactions got fucked.

would have been nice if Sun and/or Verisign has told anyone about this in advance.

sure they put out the java release a couple of weeks ago, but only with a miniscule release note:

bug #4924896
Ship currently published CA certificates in cacerts file."

it should have had a big fat warning like "UPGRADE NOW OR YOUR SITE WILL BREAK ON JAN 7th!"

bastards.

Java 1.2.2_03 fixes the problem according to the release notes

That's what the resolution to the Sun alert notificatioin says...

Our chairman has challenged the IT organization, and indeed all of IBM, to move to a Linux based desktop before the end of 2005.

Hope this helps.

Sun has already invested money and resources for its own Java Desktop System.

IBM has invested resources to developing the Linux kernel. Will IBM also develop its own desktop system? If so, how will it be different from the competition? Will they contribute their code (some or all) to the Linux community under a GPL'd licence? Will it conform to some sort of formal standards? What of the system architecture? Will we see PPC IBM branded desktop computers and/or will it work on Wintel architectures?

He shure looks like one!
Jokes apart, Gerstner put this guy on top and it's the one that managed the first sniffing ceremonies towards Linux. Do I see a pattern? Companies on the point of extinction like Apple and IBM (big companies... as far as mindshare and cultural relevance) literally resurrected the moment they embraced OSS and played by it's rules. Other companies like sun are fading away and nasty M$ (Yah, troll me... I'm spelling is M$... yes, I'm biased) is yapping in fear. Folks, it's our time. Old PHBs are retiring to Florida's golf resorts, the evangelized decision makers are making space for the new illuminati... I hate to say it, actually I'm not pleased by the "feast or fast" attitude of this industry, but the cosmological pendulum is swinging our way (I just hope I won't be put aside as these fools are today).