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AFAICS, it's basically a rip-off of the persistence mechanisms used in e.g. NextSTEP's or Delphi's UI frameworks. The idea has also been adopted in Java's "Long-Term Persistence for JavaBeans" facility, which is part of the java.beans package in JDK 1.4+.

The XAML files (as well as Delphi's .form files or the XML written by Java's bean framework) contain declarative descriptions of the object(widget) tree that makes up the form/window/page described by the XAML/XML/.form file. A tag name in an XAML is just the class name of the corresponding widget's class, the attributes inside the tag hold property values. The java.beans.XMLEncoder class in the JDK produces such a similar XML representation file for JavaBeans-based GUI elements and JavaBeans in general.

The idea is to have those files generated by a GUI editor at design time, then read them back in and recreate the corresponding window/form/etc. at runtime.

Now, XML is being used to specify the look and feel down to the last pixel.

Not necessarily. You can use "panels" which arrange their child controls in a more flexible manner.

By default, ASP.NET generates HTML that is located by absolute position, and text is specified with a particular font in a particular size...

Well, that's unfortunate, but certainly not a technical necessity...

AFAICS, it's basically a rip-off of the persistence mechanisms used in e.g. NextSTEP's or Delphi's UI frameworks. The idea has also been adopted in Java's "Long-Term Persistence for JavaBeans" facility, which is part of the java.beans package in JDK 1.4+.

The XAML files (as well as Delphi's .form files or the XML written by Java's bean framework) contain declarative descriptions of the object(widget) tree that makes up the form/window/page described by the XAML/XML/.form file. A tag name in an XAML is just the class name of the corresponding widget's class, the attributes inside the tag hold property values. The java.beans.XMLEncoder class in the JDK produces such a similar XML representation file for JavaBeans-based GUI elements and JavaBeans in general.

The idea is to have those files generated by a GUI editor at design time, then read them back in and recreate the corresponding window/form/etc. at runtime.

Now, XML is being used to specify the look and feel down to the last pixel.

Not necessarily. You can use "panels" which arrange their child controls in a more flexible manner.

By default, ASP.NET generates HTML that is located by absolute position, and text is specified with a particular font in a particular size...

Well, that's unfortunate, but certainly not a technical necessity...

Also, it's $50/year/user, but to get that pricing you have to have a Java Enterprise System (JES) subscription (which is $100/user/year, making it $150/user/year for JES + JDS).

What's not immediately clear is the fact that you must license 100 users as a minimum, making a minimum investment of $150,000/year! I spoke to Jonathan Schwartz shortly after all of this was announced and he confirmed the minimum requirement, but didn't rule out changing (reducing) it in the future.

http://www.sun.com/smi/Press/sunflash/2003-07/sunf lash.20030717.1.html

Two years ago I made a bet with a friend that Macromedia would release at least
one member of the dreamteam for linux. Obviously I lost the bet and now owe him
an icecream (cream, sauce and crunchy topping and all).
But I didn't lose because linux hasn't gained importance as I thought it would
have. On the contrary. Linux did gain importance, only macromedia has lost it. The
dot-bomb is long ago, all those wannabe dreamweaver-clickers are flipping burgers,
browsers actually support css now - a thing _nobody_ _ever_
thought would happen 3 years ago - and content management is the *only* way to
go for webstuff today, rendering dreamweavers impressive template engine
pointless. Impressive still, but yet pointless anyway.
As someone who has been doing web and internet design and programming
professionally for quite some time now I'd like to get some things straight in
the pro and con macromedia dreamteam flamewar:
1.) In the days when css was synonym for the crappiest implementation of
cross-plattform standards ever, Flash was the *only* way to make a good visual
appearance and be truly cross plattform. In fact, you'd be more compatible and
accessible with Flash than with anything beyond "table" and "href". That has
changed since then, with the appearance of NS 6.1 came a whole bunch of browsers
that manage css in a way that is fairly acceptable. Flash isn't needed for
professional design anymore. And since the macromedia people are the biggest
idiots in the entire universe when it come to building usable programming
plattforms and put an exceptional effort into keeping Flash MX and the
ActionScript object model just as crappy as ever one can almost rest ashure
that Flash will eventually fade into oblivion, just as Director is
(Praise the Lord!) doing now.
2.) Back in the we-don't-give-a-f*ck-about-webstandards time Dreamweaver was the
_only_ tool that would make webdevelopement possible. And I'm talking about real
webdevelopement - a concept argueably only grasped by the slashdot crowd on very
rare occasions. Actually Dreamweaver was the tool that would make sites
accessable for Linux. Nobody would handcode anything for NS 4.7, trust me on
that one. And dreamweaver still has features that strike an unexpierienced DW
user (read: less that 1 and a half years of DW usage) as perfect. Think of the
drag linking, it's ability to *not* touch hand edited code what so ever and the
template engine that was the only way to go when dynamic web application stuff
wasn't available. Yet most of these things are taken care of by the bazillion
server side technologies (and PHP CMSes) out there, so I - and all other
professionals I know of - haven't been using DW for 2 years or more.
Summary:
Flash and DW are both impressive apps (exclude anything that has to do with
programming in Flash/AS) - no matter what VI zealot keeps bullshitting about on /. -
but the bottom line is that they've both had their great time and it's doubtable if it will ever come back.
They've been outrun by JMF (that programming think that macromedia horribly failed at), OSS Content Management Systems and by
editors that blast DW/Homesite to chunky
kibbles.

Sun likes Elliptic Curve Cryptography. They have helped add it to Mozilla's Network Security Services and to OpenSSL.

declaring a new class/interface

I don't know C#, but you have to write something like enum Name { ... } in C# as well, don't you? I don't really see how this is an advantage over having to write class Name { ... } in Java.

being able to use the newly declared enumeration's new type name for parameters instead of just "int" - remember semantics?

You can do typed enumerations in Java by using the typesafe enumeration pattern.

Basically a typesafe enum is a class with a private constructor (so no new instances can be created) and all the actualy constants are declared as final class members. Like this:

public class Example {

// private constructor
private Example() {
}

// the constants
public final static Example A = new Example();
public final static Example B = new Example();
...
}

This allows you to do really nice things. For example, you could add some instance variables and methods to the class to add additional information to the constants (of course, initialize all the variables in the constructor and don't have any set methods, or your constants won't be constant any more!).

You have to be careful if you want to use serialization or similar stuff. You might want to take a look at Martin Fowler's great book "Effective Java," which describes this pattern and a huge number of other useful things. The typesafe enum description is in chapter 5, which is available online as one of four sample chapters.

Of course, even with typesafe enums, you still have to do lots of typing (even more, actually), so your point (b) might still be an advantage of C#. I think the JDK 1.5 will add support for creating typesafe enums in a more simple way, though.

Lots of little things like this, IMHO, make C# better than Java.

As I said, I don't really know C#, but still, from what I've heard about it, that's also the impression I got. I think Microsoft took a look at all the things Java didn't quite get right, and did them in a slightly better way. If I wanted to write a Windows-only application, it's very likely that I would use C# for the task. Or Python :-)

This is a specification coming out of Microsoft that hasn't gone through a standards body. Do we know whether there are any intellectual property restrictions on implementing the C# 2.0 specifiation?

It is a good sign that this document only has a copyright on it and doesn't require a license agreement to download. In contrast, the Java specifications you can only access under a restrictive license agreement that impose contractual obligations on you that go far beyond patents or copyrights (note to open source developers: don't access Sun's Java specifications--you'll be tainted).

But that still leaves patents for C# 2.0. Do we know whether there are any? ECMA C# (the previous version) appears to be free and clear, but what about this version?

Enums have been added, generics have been added, automatic iteration in for loops have been added, et cetera. True, it hasn't been released yet (the first Java 1.5 betas are due next quarter), neither is Whidbey, and the JSRs have been out for some time, and the prototype compiler with generic support has been available for months.

Enums have been added, generics have been added, automatic iteration in for loops have been added, et cetera. True, it hasn't been released yet (the first Java 1.5 betas are due next quarter), neither is Whidbey, and the JSRs have been out for some time, and the prototype compiler with generic support has been available for months.

When will java get features like generics - no time soon i guess.

• Composite files built at request time,
• The results of running a script,
• Interaction with a web application 1 2 3 4,
• Remote procedure calls and object access 1 2,
• Instant messenger communications, and sometimes
• Static files.

My question is this: is there a place for proprietary (read 'closed') applications on said open/free platforms and frameworks?

Yes.

WebLogic

Acrobat Reader

StarTeam, Together Control Center

StarOffice

WebSphere

That's just off the top of my head.

I have a tinfoil helmet too! Can I play?

Sure. Start by getting acquainted with SUN's FUD campaign about SCO's claim.

Does anyone know where I can get document templates for OOO and the like?

The easiest way is to just buy StarOffice for $79 USD (I believe the license still allows 5 users to use a single "network install"). It comes with lots of clip art, doc templates, presentation templates, etc. Buy it here.

If you want less stuff, but for free, I believe you can find files here and here.

The issues of audit trail tampering really brings home the point that they should really be using military-grade systems to do this kind of stuff. We already have commercially-available systems that provide a high level of auditing and capability-separation. I worked with B2 DG/UX in the past (for medical records), though I guess that since DG was purchased for their storage products, that's probalby not an option these days. Sun Trusted Solaris, a version of Solaris that is B1 equivalent, and includes x86 support. I'm sure there are a few other products out there that could be used.

Designing an audit system that isn't modifiable, even by someone who has superuser-level privelieges, isn't rocket science. Even if you don't have robust security features in your OS, you could do remote logging to a separate machine. It seems like a decent audit trail is the least we should ask for.

-Esme

Get one of These and you can hot swap cpu's...

Speaking as someone with a degree in civil engineering, who has been doing system administration for the last 8 years, I'd say that first, you should be informed about what all of the issues and variables you're not even thinking about. [eg, chilled air and warm air return issues, proper sizing of power systems, etc]. So, pick up a copy of Enterprise Data Center Design and Methodology, and read it.

Then, once you know what you need to be looking for, hire a professional -- odds are, there's stuff they'll know that's not in the book, and with years of practice, they'll have experience to fall back on that might fit your needs. [But with the info from the book, you'll at least be able to talk to them about your issues, and make sure that they're not trying to pull one over on you about your qualifications].

But let's look at this like sizing for a UPS ... you have to determine what the cost of the system is, and what the consequences are if you didn't have it. Then you have to compare the costs to the benefits, and see if it makes sense in your environment. [eg, if your SLAs for a system make no provisions about down time, then there's no reason to have them on a UPS or generator, as there would be cost without benefit. [you don't save money in the time of a power outage]]

Oh...and if you're completely cheap, read the first chapter online -- Data Center Design Philosophy

Speaking as someone with a degree in civil engineering, who has been doing system administration for the last 8 years, I'd say that first, you should be informed about what all of the issues and variables you're not even thinking about. [eg, chilled air and warm air return issues, proper sizing of power systems, etc]. So, pick up a copy of Enterprise Data Center Design and Methodology, and read it.

Then, once you know what you need to be looking for, hire a professional -- odds are, there's stuff they'll know that's not in the book, and with years of practice, they'll have experience to fall back on that might fit your needs. [But with the info from the book, you'll at least be able to talk to them about your issues, and make sure that they're not trying to pull one over on you about your qualifications].

But let's look at this like sizing for a UPS ... you have to determine what the cost of the system is, and what the consequences are if you didn't have it. Then you have to compare the costs to the benefits, and see if it makes sense in your environment. [eg, if your SLAs for a system make no provisions about down time, then there's no reason to have them on a UPS or generator, as there would be cost without benefit. [you don't save money in the time of a power outage]]

Oh...and if you're completely cheap, read the first chapter online -- Data Center Design Philosophy

I guess he doesn't know that Sun generally releases a T-Patch relatively quickly so that admins can get immediately relief while testing out the real patch.

at least he was lucky there where drivers. Try installing it on real server hardware, then even FreeBSD has more drivers for stuff like RAID controllers etc. Look at the Hardware Compatibility List.
If you are planning on installing Solaris in your enterprise enviroment you have to buy hardware that will work with Solaris x86 rather than the hardware you normally use. But then again, in a enterprise enviroment, I guess one would choose the Sparc platform or buy the Sun Intel hardware.

it's got the ancient vi

Solaris works for consistency and having a plane jane vi might be a good thing even if vim is better.

The awk/nawk are ancient

I don't use awk often, what's up with them?

and it doesn't ship with perl (last time I checked). Ditto for most of the Unix shell programs.

Yeah it ships with perl since Solaris 8, same with bash, tcsh and zsh.

The first thing I do when I get a Solaris system is to install a whole heap of GNU utilities, all of which come with any of the Linux distribution.

Yep, they're nice to have and don't take up much space if you pick and choose correctly. Here is everything you'll need as far as OSS utilities on SPARC/Solaris are concerned. They can be downloaded as a CD image or individually and are in Sun's package format.

Was Sun really serious about Solaris on x86?

On and off, evidently back on again. I've heard that back in the mid 90's a decent amount of customers used Solaris x86 on Compaq's. After a while they dropped support and over the next few years. Anyone confirm or deny (I know the second part is true)?

Here is a recent press release about Solaris x86. Disregard the marketing garbage, there's a lot of it.

They name a decent amount of customers, a biomedical place is one of them. Perhaps a transition from SPARC to x86 for sheer speed would be cheaping going from Solaris to Solaris instead of Solaris to Linux, that is assuming Solaris on x86 meets their needs.

Also, according to this article they have Solaris x86 for Opteron. Perhaps this would help convince big graphics apps such as Photoshop make a port to Opteron since Linux and the BSD's are already there.

They also have a POWER4+'esqe chip coming out in the first half of the new year. Two UltraSPARC III cores with 8 megs of cache and each running at 1.2 GHz each.

Sun has good things going for them but they need to expand into new areas and take another look at the current situation.

It's really a shame that the potential of JINI never materialized for this same problem.

Think of how nice it would've been to plug a device in and have it automagically make its platform independent driver and configuration software available to the local network. Theoretically, it wouldn't matter if the device was a printer, scanner or toaster or whether the machines on the network were Windows, Linux or eComstation or even a mixture of all of them. No drivers to install, simply plug in the device and it would just work. Although that's, surely an overly rosey view, it sure has a lot of appeal and it's a shame that there wasn't much of a serious effort to even try to make it work.

I was very surprised that there wasn't a huge demand from the user community for the universal adoption of JINI for this sort of application. Even the year after JINI was introduced, there was only ONE demonstration product on the show floor at JavaOne -- a JINI enabled digital camera. Now, JINI seems to be relegated to a specialized web services niche.

It's really a shame that the potential of JINI never materialized for this same problem.

Think of how nice it would've been to plug a device in and have it automagically make its platform independent driver and configuration software available to the local network. Theoretically, it wouldn't matter if the device was a printer, scanner or toaster or whether the machines on the network were Windows, Linux or eComstation or even a mixture of all of them. No drivers to install, simply plug in the device and it would just work. Although that's, surely an overly rosey view, it sure has a lot of appeal and it's a shame that there wasn't much of a serious effort to even try to make it work.

I was very surprised that there wasn't a huge demand from the user community for the universal adoption of JINI for this sort of application. Even the year after JINI was introduced, there was only ONE demonstration product on the show floor at JavaOne -- a JINI enabled digital camera. Now, JINI seems to be relegated to a specialized web services niche.

When it turns to night could participants use their sparcs, ultras, and enterprises to keep going? You did say Solar as in Sun right?

I guess your information is not very important since it can be wiped out by a power down or crash between the confirmation and the asynchronous background write.

Not if you use JMS. His code can emit a message within a transaction, commit it and immediately return. If the commit is successful, this means JMS is bound to deliver that message at some point in the future, no matter what the circumstance, even if the JMS server itself crashes.

Sun announced that Grid Engine software would be made available "an industry-accepted open source license". The targetted date for the open source release was last updated as being "early calendar 2001".

So, I work at an University that had a preferred buying Sun servers back in the early to mid-1990 until Sun sales decided that quote requests for systems that would cost $50,000 to $75,000 wasn't worth returning our calls for. But back in 2000 our Sun sales rep. started explaining how Sun was willing to now work "really hard" to get our business back. I ended put pointing out that in the past Sun was busy put the "dot in dot com" and our business is that of a "dot E-D-U." Well, the Sun sales rep. goes into this whole song and dance that Sun wants to make amends with the educational market and that Sun thinks Gridware is what will make educational market grow and that Sun is willing to do ANYTHING to get educational business back including open sourcing Sun Gridware.

Sooo... I declaired that we would start buying Sun again when Sun made good on releasing Sun Gridware under an industry accepted open source license then we will start buying from Sun again. The Sun sales rep. left looking all happy that I would "back" Sun with such a declairation. So, early calendar 2001 passed, late calendar 2001 passed, early calendar 2002 passed, late calendar 2002 passed, early calendar 2003 passed... and no one from Sun can explain when industry accepted open source license Gridware is available under.

The meeting with the Sun sales rep. is two hours of my life I'd like back ...and I can't explain why we would ever want to trust/buy Sun ever again.

I predict that by 2010 that SGI stock will be worth *MORE* than Sun.

Bottom line -- trust Sun only when you need promises printed on toilet paper.

[the building I work in has a Sun office downstairs, so I get to chat with both marketing *and* development staff daily - I listen far more to the later than the former]

1) Yes, Sun supports x86 for Solaris and they've recommited their efforts to doing so. See next item for pricing (same as SPARC).

2) No, and it doesn't make much sense for them to either. Solaris is stable, mature, and an all-around fine OS that has a long history with the SPARC architecture. What benefit does supporting Linux on SPARC give them? Don't go down the path of pricing, since Solaris 9, boxed media kit for SPARC is only $95. Toss on another $50 for the Data Encryption Suppliment if you'd like. Details here. This is definitely in line (actually lower!) than Red Hat Enterprise.

3) Kinda depends on what end of the market you're in, but they do offer a line of Linux products (both hardware and software), so it can't be "bad" in the sense that it's a "deadly competitor".

4) Your statement makes no sense. Why would you want to run Linux VMs *inside a different* OS? Now, you can partition the new, larger hardware (starting with the SunFire 3800 - a machine with the lineage of the E3000 and E3500) and run multiple OS' on these paritions.

Finally, don't delude yourself. Even Sun's internal Architecture Review Committee says Java blows dead goats. It's not exactly a profit center for them either.

I use Linux on x86 (SMP, up to 6-way) hardware and Solaris on SPARC (E6500s). Why? Easy. Linux gives me bang-for-the-buck on some solid x86 hardware (like HP NetServers) and the E6500s in a 30 CPU / 30GB RAM configuration can be had for a tick over 20K$USD today from numerous sources, giving me BIG bang for the buck in Sun Clusters running Oracle RAC on a combination that has a long history with both Sun and Oracle on SPARC. Really. Want to take 84K$USD and try and translate that into Opterons or Itaniums and put it up against a cluster of 120 400MHz SPARC v9's w/120GB of RAM?

-AC

"The Sun Fire V60x and V65x servers run the Solaris x86 Operating System or Standard Linux for powerhouse performance, choice, and flexibility--starting at $2,450. Prices for the new systems are better than those of comparable competitors - for example, $2650 for a standard Sun Fire V65x versus $2691 for an equivalent Dell 2650. The Sun outperforms the Dell on standard benchmarks and comes with web services and application software that costs extra on the Dell."

...the register have news about sun's new upcoming processor, UltraSparc IV.

Looks like mutli-core processor is trend of the future.

Maybe it was Sun crashing and burning?

I have never understood why Mac developers and users tolerate Apple screwing them over every couple of years.

In my case, I didn't. As a former Mac C++ developer, Apple killing OpenDoc was the last straw for me. On Solaris, Sun guarantees that apps from an earlier version of Solaris will run on the latest version. On WindowsXP, Microsoft provides "compatibility modes" so you at least have a chance of getting an app that doesn't to do so (and if it was 32-bit clean to start with, there aren't many of those). So Solaris and Win32 are my platforms of choice.

• Spellchecker and thesaurus
  
• Database component (Software AG Adabas D).
  
• Select fonts including Windows metrically equivalent fonts and Asian language fonts
  
• Select filters, including WordPerfect filters and Asian word processor filters
  
• Integration of additional templates and extensive clipart gallery
  

Pidget sounds a lot like Java ServerFaces so it's nothing new. What I find annoying is that the "best" way to make a dynamic site keeps changing. Last week it was to have your site generate XML and use style sheet translation, this week it's to assemble objects on the server and have the server convert all the objects to html.

According to Sun's press release, they will release hardware in "2005/2006" that is "expected" to increase throughput by 15 times for "Web, application serving, simple databases".

The 2005 number I took from this other link, which you might want to check out. The goal is 2 years to produce a CPU with 16 cores on its die, which would give you the "15 times current performance" figure (you probably lose a little performance due to scheduler overhead). That would be right around October 2005, but you're right, the other page says 2005/2006, so who knows? If they can offer half that increase in performance in two years I think there will be a sea change in the industry. Those little blade servers would be pretty amazing if each blade had the equivelant of 16 CPUs in it and the power/cooling requirements of only 1.

>> Vaporware

"You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."

Touche... I must admit that the Ultrasparc IV chips aren't released yet and are technically vaporware, but Sun hasn't really been known to wildly miss ship dates and I think it's fairly certain that they will at least hit the first couple of milestones.

Today we have two stories that about new processors that are about to be released. The Transmeta processor, while an incremental improvement, is nothing to really get excited about. The Clearspeed chip is simply vaporware.

Yet the one real story that is actually interesting "News for Nerds" was rejected by the Slashdot editors.

Sun Microsystems today announced it's roadmap for Throughput Computing. Remember how Sun has been talking about putting multiple cores on a single chip? Well, systems will be shipping in early 2004 that offer twice the performance of current top-of-the-line Ultrasparc IIIi chips. By late 2004, they will offer three times the performance. Coming in 2005, the second generation of this technology will offer 15 times the performance of current Ultrasparc IIIi technology. The roadmap extends to generation 3 (no date yet), which will offer 30 times the current performance.

This is way beyond Moore's Law and actually news that I want to read insightful Slashdot comments on.

With the anti-Sun bias the Slashdot editors show I guess I shouldn't be surprised...

[sarcasm]
Vaporware and anything having to do with Linus Torvalds' old employer are ever so more important than something that will radically change the computing landscape over the next few years.
[/sarcasm]

Building multiprocessor chips, or chips from arrays of processors has become a fairly hot design approach. There are a number of companies using it. It seems to be especially popular in the reconfigurable computing area. There is an interesting paper here. These processors go well beyond the current crop of dual CPU core chips like the P4, Power 5, and Ultrasparc IV.

Clearspeed's chip is a static 64 processor array chip aimed at FPU intensive applications, but there are many more things that you can do with array designs.

Mathstar is building a reconfigurable chip with hundreds of elements availble in various mixes of processors, memory blocks and other components. They are trying to replace ASICs and FPGAs as a platform for some part needs. There was a story on their architecture in EE Times a couple of months ago.

Intel is wokring on an array based processor aimed at the radio / communications market. I will be interested to see if their work with these chips ends up being used in other Intel chips. That could be deadly. So, the Pentium-X sucks at that task today? [Morph] Not now!

Phillips has what they call Silicon Hive technology which is another reconfigurable processor of functional blocks.

There have been plenty of companies using arrays and reconfigurable techniques too, like Altera and Chameleon.

Sun bought up a start up and is developing massivly multithreaded processors based on the start-up's technology. They call it Throughput Computing. They claim that in about two years they will have a chip 30x faster than todays designs. I'll be very interested to see if they can do that.

The next couple of years should be very interesting on the processor front.

How can an Open Standards UNIX company with its roots in BSD and contributions of millions of lines of code to the Open Source community (just look at OpenOffice.org) be a threat to Linux?

Sun's contributions to the open source community are useful and appreciated, but that doesn't change the fact that Java is not open and presents a threat.

By analogy, would you sign over ownership of your house to me if I gave you my old car for free? Probably not.

How can a company who is comitted to playing fair and abiding by Open Standards, with public documentation be a threat to Linux?

The Java documentation may be "public", but it comes with a several page long license attached to it that imposes strong constraints on anybody using the specification.

Why would Sun hate Linux when it keeps closed, proporietary, buggy, virus and trojan-infested, expensive Windows off PCs?

Your argument makes no sense. Sun is selling SPARC-based systems. Why would they want to keep buggy software off PCs? The worse PCs are technically, the easier it is for Sun to compete with them. Linux makes PCs into a very viable, low-cost alternative to Sun's products and that is destroying Sun's market. Of course, if Sun could wave a magic wand and make Linux go away, they would do so. However, since there is no way in hell they could succeed at that, they are living with an uneasy truce.

In any case, we don't have to guess what Sun management is thinking about Linux and Gnome, they are telling us. For example, Schwartz called it "open source crap" and the "Linux mistake". And McNealy is busy spreading FUD about Linux, comparing it to illegal MP3 file sharing and raising questions about copyright liabilities.

Some of you slashbots really need your heads examining!

Some of you Java zealots really need to get over this "we think Sun is a nice company and therefore we trust them" thing and look at actual licenses.

Java doesn't have delegates, because it would be difficult to introduce them that late in language development. As for get/set methods I don't see how they are an advantage - I'd rather know if I call a method or I access a field (not so obvious with C#).

Java also (unlike C#) doesn't have operators overloading, but it is a design choice - too often programmers in C++ used this features for things like
cout <<"See I can do this too!"<<endl;

As C# is mainly copy-cat from Java, Java 1.5 will be mainly copy-cat from C# :

1. Generics (introduced in .NET 1.1 I believe)
2. Enhanced for loop (equivalent of foreach in C#)
3. Autoboxing - in C# since 1.0
4. Enums - also in C#
5. Metadata - used mainly for Webservices, does away with all those tedious interfaces, also a feature in C#.

I think all major C# inventions will find their way back to Java. The only real things missing are the delegates, but they cannot be introduced that late.

As for different languages, I refer you Jython. I have found a page with something like 30 languages compilable to Java bytecode (most completely useless to me). But I think there is a need for one dynamic binding variable language and one static. I don't get how do I benefit from having both VB.NET and C#, other that I have to learn two very similar languages (people often don't get that i.e. you have only single inheritance with *every* .NET language and it cannot be changed, so you cannot port standard C++ to .NET).

Also I'd like to point out, that the main thing that stops Java from mass adoption and is a huge pain is Swing. It looks weird and is like 20 times slower than native GUI. You might argue what you want, but if I install Vi in Windows, in normal file open dialog boxes I can right-click a file and choose Edit with Vim. It is a normal behaviour I expect it from every program, that has a file open dialog. Alas, not so with Swing, which has reinvented the dialog box for completely unknown purposes (I don't get the "programs written in Java should look the same on every platform" - to me programs under Linux should look like Linux, under Windows like Windows). Java programmers sometimes refer to themselves that they live in a ghetto - every development environment produces normal looking programs, whereas if you use Swing, every one can tell it.

As to speed - in Forte reformatting 2000 LOC takes about 20 seconds, in Eclipse half a second. Maybe after Sun finally goes down, IBM will buy them and replace Swing with SWT/JFace

Multiple language support

operator overloading, support for delegates

native integration

superior class library

better reflection services

COM+ integration

built-in XML features

By using .NET Remoting, I can do that with ONE line of code and put all configuration in an XML file.

The point is silly though, since it's very easy on both platforms.

Hm, the REAL question is why people are so fond and liking of Sun. They are *at least* as evil as Microsoft..

Multiple language support

operator overloading, support for delegates

native integration

superior class library

better reflection services

COM+ integration

built-in XML features

By using .NET Remoting, I can do that with ONE line of code and put all configuration in an XML file.

The point is silly though, since it's very easy on both platforms.

Hm, the REAL question is why people are so fond and liking of Sun. They are *at least* as evil as Microsoft..

Would you be so kind to explain to me exactly how many technologies that .net has that makes it a superset of Java? Maybe you haven't investigated J2EE, J2ME and all the other technologies that are part of the Java platform. Besides, Java has a much larger free software community. Freshmeat, for example, lists 2382 Java projects (that's less than 100 frewer than C++). To be compared to the 46 C# projects.

Want to implement a SOAP web service? Check out GLUE. It allows you to distribute any java object as a SOAP service using only 2 lines of code (one to start the server and one to register the object).

And if you don't want to listen to me, why not read this list. It contains some good stuff.

Why people spend their precious time on a project like Mono with such an unstable (legally) base is beyond me. Why the Linux community seem to embrace .net more than java is even more boggling.

Would you be so kind to explain to me exactly how many technologies that .net has that makes it a superset of Java? Maybe you haven't investigated J2EE, J2ME and all the other technologies that are part of the Java platform. Besides, Java has a much larger free software community. Freshmeat, for example, lists 2382 Java projects (that's less than 100 frewer than C++). To be compared to the 46 C# projects.

Want to implement a SOAP web service? Check out GLUE. It allows you to distribute any java object as a SOAP service using only 2 lines of code (one to start the server and one to register the object).

And if you don't want to listen to me, why not read this list. It contains some good stuff.

Why people spend their precious time on a project like Mono with such an unstable (legally) base is beyond me. Why the Linux community seem to embrace .net more than java is even more boggling.

Would you be so kind to explain to me exactly how many technologies that .net has that makes it a superset of Java? Maybe you haven't investigated J2EE, J2ME and all the other technologies that are part of the Java platform. Besides, Java has a much larger free software community. Freshmeat, for example, lists 2382 Java projects (that's less than 100 frewer than C++). To be compared to the 46 C# projects.

Want to implement a SOAP web service? Check out GLUE. It allows you to distribute any java object as a SOAP service using only 2 lines of code (one to start the server and one to register the object).

And if you don't want to listen to me, why not read this list. It contains some good stuff.

Why people spend their precious time on a project like Mono with such an unstable (legally) base is beyond me. Why the Linux community seem to embrace .net more than java is even more boggling.

yp+ is the linux name for NIS+, NIS+ is standard in most large Solaris environments and is not difficult to configure under linux. As to NFS security, it's simple to configure, just see This link at docs.sun.com, it tells you how to enable KERBEROSEv5 authentication including traffic and authentication encryption. I'd hardly say that is undocumented! A NIS+ client and K5 client libraries should be available under any Unix and if you run windows there are commercial offerings from Hummingbirds and others (don't bitch about costs because you already went down the MS pay as you go road). SMB/CIFS is fine for some things but it does not mesh with the native UNIX security model so using it and complaining about security is just ignorant. Btw my setup is doable in the real world, we had it on ~12K Solaris desktops and ~5K linux desktops, most of the data was on Netapp filers so if someone HAD to have access to the data from windows we just reshared the data using CIFS and gave only those select users access to the share point.

Really blew it with the url there. http://java.sun.com/people/jag/SimulaHistory.html

An extra wide monitor (1920x1200) from Sun will run you about $3,600, and a pair of ordinary 19" LCDs costs about $600 each.

Heck, you could get a 3 x 18" multiscreen direct from Dell for about $2900.

An extra wide monitor (1920x1200) from Sun will run you about $3,600, and a pair of ordinary 19" LCDs costs about $600 each.

Heck, you could get a 3 x 18" multiscreen direct from Dell for about $2900.

Ultra 5 FCS date was December 1997 according to this.