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I wonder how it would run with the PC card?

When i do get a sun box, i will get one of these.

Would-be dummies might be intersted in free Solaris ISO downloads for personal use.

Before anybody asks, no there is no goddamn Bittorrent.

Sun is also trying to get into the corperate market w/ their thin clients.

This book might be good for a user of those.

One of Suns big things, like ours, is kill M$, which this does aid.

The best part of Solaris 9 is that it will run all progs for Linux natively w/o recompile. So if you run Solaris x86, you can take progs for x86 Linux distros, and run them.

Many people don't like Solaris because of it not being free, and they don't understand it. Remember, it is probably the most developed *nix. It is far more stable than Linux.

The reason they switched to GNOME is because they wanted to have a common look and feel to the *nix family, and now that they are using it, will probably help develop it to a point where it is as easy to configure as some of the other ones.

I agree with you about M$ windows being good w/ app availability, but you have to consider its purpose, hard-core data processing, and the web. I personally run winXP pro (striped down) and Mandrake 9. I have played w/ Solaris quite a bit, and when I get money, will get a Blade 150 or Blade 2k.

The best part of Solaris 9 is that it will run all progs for Linux natively w/o recompile. So if you run Solaris x86, you can take progs for x86 Linux distros, and run them.

Many people don't like Solaris because of it not being free, and they don't understand it. Remember, it is probably the most developed *nix. It is far more stable than Linux.

The reason they switched to GNOME is because they wanted to have a common look and feel to the *nix family, and now that they are using it, will probably help develop it to a point where it is as easy to configure as some of the other ones.

I agree with you about M$ windows being good w/ app availability, but you have to consider its purpose, hard-core data processing, and the web. I personally run winXP pro (striped down) and Mandrake 9. I have played w/ Solaris quite a bit, and when I get money, will get a Blade 150 or Blade 2k.

Is there really a need for a Dummies book about Solaris? It's not like you can just walk into CompUSA and pick up Solaris 9.

Better yet, you can just download it from Sun's website. Free. Then you can install it on a cheap Sparc from eBay.

Save some money, man

You don't need a smartphone - just a cell phone that supports Java 2 Micro Edition. As for typing, well, you can use one of those clip on thumboards.

Thank you. I actually did go and read it.

My experience is largely in .Net, learning Java from a guy I am simultaneously teaching .Net to. Info like this is much appreciated. I wonder - with the high churn/release cycle of many OSS projects, why don't more use Package?

The big difference between the ASP.NET paradigm and that of, say, Java Servlet Pages, or XSP, etc. lies in the event-based nature of ASP.NET pages.

Anyone in the J2EE community looking for similar event-based behavior should be keeping an eye on JavaServer Faces. One big problem is getting it to work on the existing JSP architecture, though, as JSP still has no server-side component model.

Wasn't jini supposed to do this?

ms and sun "licensed unix from sco" - i think they gave sco some money to play with without getting their own hands dirty.

Of course its a conspiracy, what else could it be? Sun doesn't have any products that lack anything, like, say, drivers that Cald^H^H^H^H SCO would be in a strong position to provide by license. And everyone knows that Microsoft can't have more than, what, one or two products directly related to Unix that having source code from SCO would be useful to help improve, or for which a license would help remove any doubt about IP rights.

They are just pretending to improve and sell their products to meet Wallstreet expectations when everyone knows its just a plot to undermine Linux. Linux will still crush them and rule all. Go Tux!!

ms and sun "licensed unix from sco" - i think they gave sco some money to play with without getting their own hands dirty.

Of course its a conspiracy, what else could it be? Sun doesn't have any products that lack anything, like, say, drivers that Cald^H^H^H^H SCO would be in a strong position to provide by license. And everyone knows that Microsoft can't have more than, what, one or two products directly related to Unix that having source code from SCO would be useful to help improve, or for which a license would help remove any doubt about IP rights.

They are just pretending to improve and sell their products to meet Wallstreet expectations when everyone knows its just a plot to undermine Linux. Linux will still crush them and rule all. Go Tux!!

Everytime passwords get mentioned on slashdot, I say they suck with little to no moderation. Regarding the lack of standard protocols and software packages try:

Multos
EMV (Europay-Mastercard-Visa) Specifications
JavaCard
OpenCard
PC/SC Workgroup
Standards Committees and Standards Related to Smart Cards

I attended the 10th annual smartcard convention in 1999, yet have not seen a smartcard outside of the places I used to work programming them. Maybe its time... The cards then were 1 or 2 dollars and the readers were about 6 or 7, hardly an expensive periferal on your computer.

Let me reiterate. Passwords have nothing to do with authentication, they only say that someone knows your password. Even having a magstripe card at least says that you know a password and were able to obtain phyisical access to the card. The best is a biometric reader with a smartcard. I think bioreaders are about 50 dollars.

The article uses the phrase "trusted systems". From what I've seen of XP and Longhorn, they're not Trusted systems. This is a trusted operating system. Does XP or Longhorn prevent users who don't have high enough security clearance from copying (using software) text from a document they are reading? This is what Trusted Operating Systems are all about - preventing people who don't have appropriate security clearance from gaining access to information they shouldn't be allowed to see, and preventing people from making data on the system available to others.

Well, not sure what everyone's doing in this space. But its not what Sun is doing.

I looked at Sun's whitepaper: The Java HotSpot Virtual Machine, v1.4.1. When they're talking about hotspots, they just mean running the JIT on the most-used sections of code. They're trying to get Java bytecode to match the speed of optimized C code.

The Psyco stuff I mentioned is talking about dynamic optimimization of functions you've already selected. They are trying to surpass the speed of optimized C code.

Even if you're not a fan of Python, I'd recommend reading the stuff on the Psyco site, just to get some interesting ideas.

Coincidentally, I just published an article on this subject: http://wireless.java.sun.com/midp/articles/picture /

MMAPI includes support for a camera, with a special locator capture://video used to create its Player. An application can use the VideoControl to display a viewfinder on the screen, then take a picture using VideoControl.getSnapshot(String imageType). The default image format is PNG. You can use the imageType parameter to select any other supported format, and query the system property video.snapshot.encodings to find out what formats are supported.

Developers building Java applications for wireless handheld devices have been looking forward for some time now to the release of devices supporting version 2.0 of the Connected Limited Device Configuration (CLDC), and version 1.1 of the Mobile Information Device Profile (MIDP).

Developers building Java applications for wireless handheld devices have been looking forward for some time now to the release of devices supporting version 2.0 of the Connected Limited Device Configuration (CLDC), and version 1.1 of the Mobile Information Device Profile (MIDP).

And what choice do they have? It's either take the job or be unemployed and have no money food etc, and hope that your familiy can support you. (Welfare? doesn't exist of course)

What choice do they have? Lets see, they could work for Sun, Cisco, Microsoft, Motorola, Yahoo, Adobe, Hughes, EDS or Oracle, to name a few employers in India.

What makes you think that IBM are even looking for the best talent?

How much bargaining power in the job market do you think these Indian workers have?

you seem to be woefully misinformed about the Indian job market. The number one concern of employers is how to retain their employees for more that 6 months due to aggressive recruiting techniques and incentives from competitors. Check out Monster India, Naukri or Career India for a clue, or just look at the results for this Google search.

Krishna

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 u*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 as gconf, 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 complaining home user. it's more important for

Even during an Eclipse, it's still unsafe to look at Sun.

Indeed. Not only that, but since the line between OS and IE is so blurry, its so easy to wright these click and "oh shit" scripts. Some Operating Systems simply run the OS as a userspace program, the way it was meant to be. Of course, certain other operating systems limit what software users can install in the first place.

A good place to get your feet wet is with Sun's ADL.
ADL is an awesome framework for unit and regression testing. It is free, too.

If you buy a workstation from Apple, the difference in price between the 1CPU and 2CPU version is only $600 ($2399 vs $2999).

No, I expect the "base configuration" to contain 4 processors, but probably at the slowest speed. So I would look for something with four 1.6GHz CPUS, and perhaps 2GB of RAM as the base system. (You're probably right about the high-end box costing $10,000+, but that's with probably 32GB RAM and 500GB+ of high-speed disk.) C'mon people, they need to compete with Dell and Sun here, so they're at least going to be in the same price/performance ballpark.

$3,500 is for an entry level system, probably single CPU and 256/512MB of RAM and a single disk. To get it up to a quad CPU system will cost a fair bit; I've seen IBM price sheets and commonly the 2nd and subsequent CPUs cost about the same as the base system (i.e. you're probably looking at about $14k for four CPUs and you can add another significant amount for adding RAM). The prices are good, but I'll see the full price sheet and compare to similar systems before saying the prices are brilliant.

SCO is a professional secure, and most importantly real unix, based on the original unix source code. Sometimes hobbyist projects such as fetchmail and linux can be used as cheaper alternatives to professional software, if you are a student or someone else with lots of time and no money. But for a succesfull american corporation, you will quickly find out that you need the real stuff if you are to succesfully compete in todays difficult marketplace.

Throughout the computer industry, SCO is commonly recognized as the best unix out there, and as the forthcoming lawsuit will show, probably the only legal. There are companies, such as IBM, Sun, SGI, and others, that have their own version of unix, but their unixes are nothing but cheap off-shoots from the original SCO source code, and their legality is certainly questionable. Some of these companies are even founded by famous hackers, such as Bill Joy.

Switching to linux may be the worst of all possible alternatives. While it is possible that other companies, such as IBM or Sun will be able to license the original unix source code, there seems to be no hope for the linux community to come up with the money needed for that. Among those with knowledge and an interest in the forthcoming SCO trial, there is no doubt that linux will probably become not just unavailable, but it will most likely be a federal offense. Betting on linux in these times, is as stupid as not accepting jesus and the lord as your savior.

I think that by betting on SCO, you are putting your money on a real winner! There is no doubt that SCO will continue to dominate the marketplace for as long as we can predict the future. Nevertheless, SCO is still pretty old technology. If you some day bring your kids to work, they will be frustrated by the lack of modern games on your server system. If this is a thought that bothers you, I would recommend upgrading to the industry-standard Windows 2000 system, surely a system for a new millenium!

PCI expansion enclosure? I'm intrigued. Do you have a link?

Sun Netra E1

This one is what popped out of my memory while figuring out the best way to support all the DVD standards. I'm not too sure whether it would work on PCs, but the E1 would allow an additional four SCSI controllers for an additional 56 DVD drives in your Sun rack-mount setup! You do have a rack of Netra servers in your living room, right? Sheesh, who doesn't anymore? (actually, I don't either...)

I've used JIMI before and it worked like a charm. I used it for basic resizing and cropping. Keep in mind though that it is outdated. You should probably hack away at JAI until you get it right.

Because it solves a lot of scalability problems for applications that use lots of files/sockets/etc. Before NIO, and application (like a web server) would have to spawn a thread for each connection it is servicing. If you have a web server that is serving 100 simultaneous clients (or Freenet, which makes many connections to neighboring nodes), you've got to create a thread for each one. That can be very expensive on some platforms. Also, those threads are almost always waiting for data to be read from or sent to the socket/file.

One of the features of NIO is the concept of "selectors", which is very similar to the POSIX select() call. In other words, instead of creating a thread for each connection, an application can register channels with the selector, and in a loop, ask the selector for the list of channels that are ready for I/O. As a result, far fewer threads are needed to handle the I/O for many more connections.

See this for more information.

I would like to point out, for the benefit of those who didn't notice, that Apple's firmware is an open standard.

Conscious as I am of the incomparable force of bald assertion in /. debates, I venture to direct the attention of all those interested to the API linked in my earlier post.

Take a look at methods such as getChannel() on stream implementation classes such as FileInputStream.

Now recall that channels are part of NIO and did not exist prior to 1.4. A reasonable deduction is that the implementation of IO has changed to use NIO.

Though reasonable, I cannot claim to have made it since it appears in the book "JDK 1.4 Tutorial". Those possessing sufficient literary stamina and dedication to reach page 2 will be rewarded with the following:

"The New I/O API model coexists peacefully with the original I/O libraries from the java.io package. In fact, to a substantial degree, the original I/O libraries have been rewritten to take advantage of the New I/O API."

For what it's worth (and I appreciate that this may be very little) my experience is that since 1.4, java.io socket calls are throwing additional run-time exceptions, including more descriptive variants of IOException. This, to me, indicates that revised mechanisms are in operation beneath the covers.

I trust that this conclusion will not be too shocking to those of delicate disposition.

• non-blocking I/O similar to a Unix select()
• no-copy buffering
• file locking
• memory-mapped files

• non-blocking I/O similar to a Unix select()
• no-copy buffering
• file locking
• memory-mapped files

And here's the link. Also Roedy Green maintains a pretty extensive Java Glossary.

Don't forget that Sun has a excellent set of Java tutorials online for free:

Tutorials & Short Courses

These are essentially the contents of the Sun press line of books.

This is far, far, too far away from being the best book on Java.

I'll even argue that this is not a good book at all. As always Mr. Eckel is going on and on with a 2-3 pages of reflections and a small piece of programming practices(everyone who've tried to read the C++ thinking, know for what I'me talking about), so my point is :

1) The book will be confusing for a beginner programmer.

2) It'll be useless for the most part to a person with some general programming culture.

Anyway, the best book to start with java is "On to Java", I don't even remember the authors but it's everything: Short, explicit and well structured. A problem may be that it should be a bit outdated.......

Of course, all one really need to start programming in Java is here

Another misconception he seems to have is that JavaScript isn't object oriented. It actually uses an interesting object system that uses "prototypes" rather than classes. This system, while somewhat strange, is actually more flexible than a lot of class-based systems. (IIRC, one of the more extreme examples of a prototype-based language is "self". It's worth checking out if just to help you understand by counterexample exactly what's going on when you use classes in a normal OO langague.)

if you want to learn a particular Java aspect look at Sun Java Tutorials. (they are excellent a free).
If you want to leatn OO programming and Java I would suggest Think In Java (it's the best and it's free).

...that bastard Scott is right?

The network really is the computer?

Where'd I put that mousepad......

Hi Everyone:

I'll probably try to get around to replying to many of your posts directly (will, the really useful ones at least :) ), but I wanted to take a moment to thank everyone for their input thus far, and reply to some of the recurring ideas and themes.

The jSyncManager has, in fact, been around for quite a while. I started working on it back in 1997. It eventually became my thesis project. Shortly after graduating from Brock University, I joined up with IBM, working at their Toronto Software Lab.

At this time, the project was closed source (a bit of a mistake on my part). As with many big software firms, I had to sing the restrictive "IBM owns everything you develop" employment contract, which made continued work on the jSyncManager difficult (this was at a time when IBM was still formulating its rules for employees participating in Open Source projects).

As an in-between solution, I entered into an agreement with my local legal department to offer the jSyncManager through IBM in a co-copyrighted manner, where I retained the copyright to everything as it existed prior to joining IBM. Due to some problems IBM had with the name, it was changed to IBM ManplatoSync for Java. My original agreement was that the project was to be released as Open Source under the IBM Public License -- but while I kept working on the project (in my own time mind you, and for no money), the IBM lawyers kept passing the buck, and permission to actually release the project source to the public was never granted.

After leaving IBM early last year, I decided to dig up the pre-IBM source, fix it up somewhat, and make the jSyncManager Open Source myself.

In the time I've been working on the project, we've had several mentions in the press (Chapter 11 of O'Reilly's "Java Cookbook" mentions the jSyncManager in passing, the May 2000 issue of Java Pro reviewed us against Palm's own CDK for Java (very favourably I might add :) ), and we got a mention in "Assistants", an Australian publication for Chartered Accountants), and I've spoke about the jSyncManager at a few conferences (Wrox Wireless 2001 in Amsterdam, WarpStock 2001 in Toronto, and CASCON 2001 (sponsored by IBM and the National Research council of Canada), also in Toronto). Unfortunately, all of these happened before I released the jSyncManager as Open Source. Things since have been pretty dry (even though IMO we have a much better product now!).

So, we're in a good position to attract attention and funding -- we're a mature project that is rock-solid (we do have to work on our initial setup a bit, as getting end-users to grab all of the necessary third-party libraries we rely upon is curruntly an issue, but it's something we'll work on by creating installer versions that include the necessary libraries once we get closer to our next GA release), and has been received favourably in several communities.

(I do want to note that when I wrote up my story submission, I was quite aware of the potential marketing implications of getting such a story on Slashdot, as some readers here have observed. This wasn't really my intention, which is why I'm trying to ask generic questions to see what ideas every has -- I'm hoping other projects can benifit from this discussion as well. Getting our website /.'ed is an unintended side benifit :) ).

Something I've learned in the six years I've been developing the jSyncManager is that while I'm an excellent coder (well, at least I think so ;) ), and a good project administrator, and while I don't mind blowing my own horn somewhat, I know that I am _not_ a sales/m

One of the things holding back open source groupware is the absence of stuff that does true client/server group calendaring and scheduling. This shouldn't be the case -- the Netscape/iPlanet/SunONE calendar server has been talking WCAP for ages, and the calendar client in Netscape 4.7 spoke WCAP fluently. The protocol is well-documented. So why hasn't Ximian stepped up to the plate and implemented it?

This is exactly what Sun does now on their SunRay Network Appliances. They call it Hot Desking (flash presentation). Click on Take a Closer Look, and then Hot Desk Architecture.

I first saw this back in 2000 when Sun deployed these at the University I was at. The state of your login in preseved on the server, and when you stick your smartcard back in, it picks up where you left off. Perhaps the coolest thing was that it even remember where you were if you were watching a movie -- it would resume play from exactly when you reomve the smartcard!

Now the smartcard is a bit kludgy, but the Apple implimentation seems pretty slick.

This is exactly what Sun does now on their SunRay Network Appliances. They call it Hot Desking (flash presentation). Click on Take a Closer Look, and then Hot Desk Architecture.

I first saw this back in 2000 when Sun deployed these at the University I was at. The state of your login in preseved on the server, and when you stick your smartcard back in, it picks up where you left off. Perhaps the coolest thing was that it even remember where you were if you were watching a movie -- it would resume play from exactly when you reomve the smartcard!

Now the smartcard is a bit kludgy, but the Apple implimentation seems pretty slick.

You can try to whitewash Microsoft's behaviour all you like. You can pretend that Microsoft is just a normal company, winning through honest competition. But history shows otherwise...

> > Imbedded Tiny Basic into MS DOS - removing all language competitors

> Which explains why we're all still programming in Basic.

Microsoft has always messed with the APIs to block competition, and make everyone dependent on Microsoft for their programming tools.

But when Java proved to be too tough, Microsoft switched to stronger methods:

Sun Versus Microsoft

Microsoft tried to sabotage Java, as shown in this quote from a Microsoft document:

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

Microsoft also committed fraud against J++ users, as shown in this quote:

"At this point its 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."

And while we're at it, note how this Microsoft e-mail demonstrates the earlier poster's point about Microsoft giving things away for free to drive out competition:

"What I think Bill says: . . . We give away the Java VM to ISVs (to ship without royalty), but only on Windows. (I think he confirmed that we could charge OEMs a royalty for our VM, once it became ubiquitous)"

Note the bit about charging for their JVM later, once people were hooked.

> > Included Disk Compression, virtually putting Stacker out of business.

> Live Disk compression should be a function of the operating system, if Stac can do it better, all power to the them.

But Stac _was_ doing it better. Microsoft's own data compression code was buggy, and had a reputation for losing data, which is why Stac was winning the competition.

So what did Microsoft do? They stole Stac's code, and put it in Windows.

As a result, Stac took Microsoft to court, and won.

> > Gave away the browser, causing serious financial strain to Netscape

> Netscape's fault if they couldn't compete.

Oh, please. The evidence in the DOJ case showed that it was _Microsoft_ who couldn't compete:

DOJ Findings of Fact

As Microsoft's James Allchin wrote in a memo:

"I don't understand how IE is going to win. The current path is simply to copy everything that Netscape does packaging and product wise. Let's [suppose] IE is as good as Navigator/Communicator. Who wins? The one with 80% market share."

And later, Allchin wrote:

" You see browser share as job 1. . . . I do not feel we are going to win on our current path. . . . I am convinced we have to use Windows -- this is the one thing they don't have. . . . If you agree that Windows is a huge asset, then it follows quickly that we are not investing sufficiently in finding ways to tie IE and Windows together."

A memo by Microsoft's Brad Chase put it simply:

"We will bind the shell to the Internet Explorer, so that running any other browser is a jolting experience."

Other steps that Microsoft took, as described in the Findings of Facts, included interfering with Netscape's development by keeping API information secret, and paying off ISPs to stop using Netscape.

But the strategy of sabotaging Netscape would only work on Windows. Microsoft also needed a way to push Netscape off of the Macintosh. Here they resorted to a form of extortion.

As Microsoft's Greg Maffei explained:

"The pace of our discussions with Apple as well as their recent unsatisfactory response have certainly frustrated a lot of people at Microsoft. The threat to cancel Mac Office 97 is certainly t

Some examples:

See here for some info on the common C++ ABI for g++. I think everything discussed on this thread (including vtable layout) is mentioned as part of this ABI.

The Macintosh ABI covers: The PowerPC ABI, Structure Alignment and Bit Field Layout, Name Mangling, Class Object and V-Table Layout, RTTI, Exception Handling, Special C++ Calling Conventions

The Sub C++ ABI covers:

The C++ ABI includes the C ABI. In addition, it involves the following features: layout of hierarchical class objects, i.e., base classes, virtual base classes layout of pointer-to-member passing of hidden function parameters (e.g. this) how to call a virtual function vtable contents and layout location in objects of pointers to vtables finding adjustment for the this pointer finding base-class offsets calling a function via pointer-to-member managing template instances external spelling of names ("name mangling") construction and destruction of static objects throwing and catching exceptions some details of the standard library implementation-defined details typeinfo and run-time type information inline function access to members

The name-mangling algorithm is part of the ABI, because it defines how a compiler must generate external references and definitions for program entities. If two compilers or compiler versions do not mangle equivalent declarations the same way, a program composed of parts compiled from the two compilers will not link correctly.

Enough said?

Of course, a vendor could choose to follow the C ABI but not the C++ ABI. That would give you the ability to at least call native C functions. But disregarding the platform ABI for any language is not something that a vendor would ever do lightly.

The Sun website is inconsistent:
Look here

They already added that, the new variant is called Java.

Are you sure about that?