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One corporation claims to have complete immunity to SCO's legal threats. Interestingly enough, they happen to be one of IBM's competitors in the high-end server market. And dispite all those take-over rumors, they have around $5.5 billion in the bank..

And now there's this Big Blue blood in the water. If you were an IT head, whose sales pitch would you listen to? Hmm....

Unfortunately, Taco et al have drank the Jobs Kool-Aide and have become little more than a drooling fanboy WRT Apple's hardware. Thus, they ignore apple's many shortcomings, including price, compatibility, their obnoxious hardware design, etc. As Apple is the last computer maker to head into the modern era with a 64 bit processor -- something other makers have had for months, if not years -- they're trying to generate hype for themselves and other fanboys so they can keep saying to themselves that the money they spent on the crapware from cupertino was somehow worth it.

Java and C# are improper subsets of each other--both have distinct features. For example, C# has no checked exceptions (a horrifying mistake) or what Java calls nonstatic nested classes (syntactic sugar, but typesafe--unlike delegates).

Features like XML serialization can and should be language-independent, supported for all languages by the platform. And as far as standardization, is there any doubt that the language specification Sun has published is complete and sufficient to enable independent implementations? I'd be impressed if IETF or ISO took ownership of C#, but who died and gave "ECMA" any clout?

Erm.... If Sun Microsystems is getting hit so hard, can you explain why they appear to be promoting it?

So looking at Hyper Transport, at this stage, I'm a tad leery of it because it didn't come from Apple. I'm worried that it might have some kind of negative impact on the technology.

The necessary question is; is this going to be the next evolutionary step for Apple, or is it just an added hardware feature that is relatively minor?

From everything I've read about the "speed issue" on Apple hardware over the past few years, the biggest thing holding current generation Macs back isn't the PowerPC chips, but the frozen in evolutionary time speeds of the boards those CPUs plug into. Apparently you can only expect a 20-30% speed bump by adding a second G4 processor to one of these systems, but it's not because the chips are slow -- they're really not all that bad -- but because they're bandwidth starved.

Hyper Transport is specifically aimed to address this bottleneck. No, it cannot be a "relatively minor" thing, because if it lives up to its promise and relieves the biggest bottleneck in the current generation machines, a good chunk of the gap between PPC and x86 machines will be closed. That's a big deal.

Of course, I couldn't resist joining in the fun. This is a picture of me opening JavaOne'98 about to pie one of the stage hands wearing a Bill Gates mask.

It just proves that on a top of Sun management, their major beleif is in hate. They hate enimies: the other Unix companies, Microsoft, now Linux.

I don't love Microsoft either, but I would consider myself as a psyco if I would dream of hitting the face of Bill Gates with a cake.

Now, why are we listening to him? What kind of smart ideas are in his proposals? Generic programming with self-reflections? It's done for decades in Lisp and MOP. Syntax-free programming language? It's alreadydone in FlatCurry (Curry is LP ancestor of FP language Haskell).

What he is done? Besides Java, everything else he's invented is dead. Java is designed conceptually so badly that it survives only due to a huge money investment from Sun. All his dreams about Java on the thin-client side are dead: web-designers prefer Flash rather than Java Applets. SWING is dead. The only place where Java is still demanded (by whom? by non-programming hype-addicted managers?) is the server room with Solaris servers (no wonder, huh?).

By the way, he was one of who killed Tcl (the best scripting language of that time (1995) b/c it was extremely extensible, i.e. OOP, FP, tcl2c, extensions), by kicking out the project of John Osterought, the Tcl inventor who worked for Sun that time.

Now all he is doing is reading old (and thus not very well known among the public) LISP/MOP books as well as academic FlatCurry papers (also not very well known) and stealing ideas for his Jackpod project.

Of course, I couldn't resist joining in the fun. This is a picture of me opening JavaOne'98 about to pie one of the stage hands wearing a Bill Gates mask.

It just proves that on a top of Sun management, their major beleif is in hate. They hate enimies: the other Unix companies, Microsoft, now Linux.

I don't love Microsoft either, but I would consider myself as a psyco if I would dream of hitting the face of Bill Gates with a cake.

Now, why are we listening to him? What kind of smart ideas are in his proposals? Generic programming with self-reflections? It's done for decades in Lisp and MOP. Syntax-free programming language? It's alreadydone in FlatCurry (Curry is LP ancestor of FP language Haskell).

What he is done? Besides Java, everything else he's invented is dead. Java is designed conceptually so badly that it survives only due to a huge money investment from Sun. All his dreams about Java on the thin-client side are dead: web-designers prefer Flash rather than Java Applets. SWING is dead. The only place where Java is still demanded (by whom? by non-programming hype-addicted managers?) is the server room with Solaris servers (no wonder, huh?).

By the way, he was one of who killed Tcl (the best scripting language of that time (1995) b/c it was extremely extensible, i.e. OOP, FP, tcl2c, extensions), by kicking out the project of John Osterought, the Tcl inventor who worked for Sun that time.

Now all he is doing is reading old (and thus not very well known among the public) LISP/MOP books as well as academic FlatCurry papers (also not very well known) and stealing ideas for his Jackpod project.

They cite competition from Safari as the reason for this decision.

So what's their excuse for dropping IE for Solaris and HP-UX? Competition from HotJava? Hahaha -- that silly little "browser" has been EOL'd (end-of-life'd) by Sun. Or maybe it's the mighty Netscape 7, or Mozilla (both of which are a.k.a. "Solaris-crasher")? No, folks, the answer is . . . Opera! They are afraid of Opera. Or Lynx. One or the other. :)

Funny, in that IE UNIX link above, they left the original meta tags from the release in the page, so a search engine snippet might mislead someone into thinking IE Solaris and HP-UX were just released. Google shows: "Internet Explorer 5 Service Pack 1 (SP1) and Microsoft Outlook Express are now available on both Solaris and HP-UX.", but once you click through the full page says:

Internet Explorer for UNIX

We sincerely apologize, but Internet Explorer technologies for UNIX are no longer available for download. Visit the Internet Explorer Web site for more information on Internet Explorer.

For Support options, visit the Internet Explorer for UNIX newsgroups at news://msnews.microsoft.com/microsoft.public.inete xplorer.unix.

Note: Microsoft employees do not monitor these public newsgroups.

Or, search the Microsoft Knowledge base.

yes, Lights Out Management (LOM) is wayyy cool!

Not a great deal there yet, but if you're interested in Jackpot then the Jackpot home page would be worth bookmarking for future reference. Their early work on source code metrics is interesting and the published papers listed are a good starting point for more detailed information than can be delivered in an interview.

here ya go

"My view is that Sun should focus on providing software and services for enterprise wide LAN management and integration since this is one area where Linux needs some help"

Sun already is with the N1 provisioning server. Right now it is just for the Sun Blade servers but in the future it will manage just about anything on the network. Check it out here

http://wwws.sun.com/software/solutions/n1/index.ht ml

You mean like this? http://www.sun.com/lowcost/feature/v60-v65.html

Oh yeah, despite the doom and gloom of declining revenue everyone is seeing, Sun still makes money. That's more than can be said for many companies, especially ones that don't have monopoly rents to fall back on.

• docs.sun.com: Every one of Sun's documents, all right there, free.
• sunsolve.sun.com: a wealth of information, patches, and bug reports.
• Sun Freeware: Free binaries of common open source programs, includes documentation.
• groups.google.com: Duh, tons of Solaris help here.

• docs.sun.com: Every one of Sun's documents, all right there, free.
• sunsolve.sun.com: a wealth of information, patches, and bug reports.
• Sun Freeware: Free binaries of common open source programs, includes documentation.
• groups.google.com: Duh, tons of Solaris help here.

However, to you, it would appear that the facts, although interesting, are irrelevant.

Looking for administrative tools? What, you mean "admintool?" Or SMC? The former is featureless and the latter is new, slow, and full of bugs.
You are right, they suck.

volume management? Oh, you mean DiskSuite, which only very recently acquired the ability to expand a filesystem/volume?
Not true. You have been able to do that since at least Disksuite 4.1 which is like 5 years old.

NIC failover in Solaris is still just a glorified shell script
Wrong. in.mpathd is a deamon (ELF executable, not a shell script).

and there's no adapter teaming or round-robin capability to speak of
There is round-robin for outbound connections IF you have 2 active interfaces. You can buy SunTrunking for a better load-balancing solution

(a 10-second delay for failover is rather pathetic, too.
You can adjust that to a minimum of 100ms in /etc/default/mpathd.

I also thought the article poorly described Sun's new chip design initiative. Here's one article on the new asynchronous chip design. Here's another.

Check the hardware compatibility lists, such as this one.

Also, Solaris 9 runs in vmware.

A couple points: at a recent talk given by some Sun dude, he mentioned that all Solaris capabilites on Sun exist on x86 (as long as it's not hardware based, of course) and will continue to be so. And supposedly Trusted Solaris will be merging with vanilla Solaris, so eventually Trusted will be kernel config away.

I'd love to see an 8-way intel box running a few hundred trusted solaris zones.

That's why updating Java on MacOS X is so much better than on Windows - it's done by Apple, not Sun :)

Sun is trying to improve the situation somewhat by offering a "net download" for Windows, but I don't know how much of a solution that is. There's also the net-based Get Java thingy, but I think that's more for applets than the complete JRE.

That's why updating Java on MacOS X is so much better than on Windows - it's done by Apple, not Sun :)

Sun is trying to improve the situation somewhat by offering a "net download" for Windows, but I don't know how much of a solution that is. There's also the net-based Get Java thingy, but I think that's more for applets than the complete JRE.

I also wonder why they didn't compare the new entry level sparc servers priced at 3000$ 3500$
with the IBM o Dell equivalents.

I also wonder why they didn't compare the new entry level sparc servers priced at 3000$ 3500$
with the IBM o Dell equivalents.

Its not really difficult to try out Solaris either. They will ship an x86 version to you at the cost of the media. Link here. It was a slashdot article some time ago. You are also given free CDs at tradeshows and stuff. You can try walking into a Sun Office/Shop and ask for a CD. They might give one off

I whole heartedly agree. I have been dissecting linux implementations for a few years now to become effective in it's administration. I cannot do that as easily with Solaris. There is a cornicopia of info for linux on the web. Solaris? NADA.

What about:
docs.sun.com
sunsolve.sun.com
blueprints

I whole heartedly agree. I have been dissecting linux implementations for a few years now to become effective in it's administration. I cannot do that as easily with Solaris. There is a cornicopia of info for linux on the web. Solaris? NADA.

What about:
docs.sun.com
sunsolve.sun.com
blueprints

I whole heartedly agree. I have been dissecting linux implementations for a few years now to become effective in it's administration. I cannot do that as easily with Solaris. There is a cornicopia of info for linux on the web. Solaris? NADA.

What about:
docs.sun.com
sunsolve.sun.com
blueprints

and I have 20 or so sun boxes left that I haven't cleared Solaris from. You can get a free copy from sun.com for testing or eductational purposes.

In all fairness, I've been running Linux for quite a while longer. Here in Tennessee, Sun hardware has no street value of any kind. Case in point: I got a lot of 20 big Sun monitors for only $20 at auction.

What crack are you smoking? If you compare a 4-way V480 with 8Gbytes of RAM, it's a bit cheaper than that IBM (and comes with an enterprise class OS too): $34,995.00
...and you'd probably be running Solaris 9 on it nowadays, not Solaris 8.

Sure it's more difficult (if you don't want to pay $20), but certainly possible even for the poorest college students.

Although I have never actually used goto in a program, I can concieve of a severely nested loop with an exit condition that would have to be propagated all the way out of a the loop.

Java has labeled statements, so you can put a label on the outermost loop statement and then simply write "break label;" when you have to exit all the loops.

outermost: for (...) {
//lots of nested for statements here
if (something) {
break outermost;
}
}

Another entry into programming is creating web pages, by tweaking them with JavaScript, and eventually CGI scripts. Really anything that allows tweaking is good, such as tweaking Mozilla or the computer desktop. Programming is about tweaking the world.

Once they feel ready to transition to a full programming language (Java, C++, etc.), there are ways to ramp up to that too. JavaScript is a great way to learn object-oriented concepts. Learning game programming really motivates kids and they learn about 3D graphics too (Nehe and GameTutorials). For building real desktop applications, NetBeans and the free JBuilder edition let you visually design java user interfaces, but something like Thinlets simplifies java development greatly (and introduces you to XML, see also other XUL-based development tools). Of course there are thousands of resources out there for learning java, see Sun's New to Java center.

Lastly, I think kids should keep a blog or a journal somewhere. If you have webspace, set them up a MovableType blog and let them tweak everything they want (adding commenting, shoutboxes, javascript goodies, etc.).

I think this all of the other detriments noted in the comments are to be expected when comparing a product that's been in development for near 20 years against a project that became open source only a few years ago. If you're evaluating OpenOffice.org as a replacement for Microsoft Office on Win32, chances are it will fail. It's much more then simply a Win32 Office replacement. For example, OOo has:

• support of alternative platforms - Now users on Solaris, FreeBSD, Tru64, IRIX, DarwinPPC, LinuxPPC, LinuxARM, and other platforms still to come can use their computers in a corporate setting. I doubt Microsoft will ever release Office for any of those platforms.
• Unicode support - Unicode is pervasive in the entire suite, and vertical/right-to-left language support is coming in 1.1. It can be diffiicult to do full Unicode editing in MS Office (at least on a Mac)
• Language support - You can use OpenOffice.org on a Mac with the interface completely translated into Greek. There are other translations into languages like Estonian, with more being added each day. Microsoft probably won't translate Office into every language, and the entire world doesn't speak English.
• Full XML support - XML support is a key in OOo 1.0, and uncompressed XML is in 1.1. And the schemas are public. One of the provisions of the SISSL license is that closed source derivatives, like StarOffice, must adhere to the public schemas. This means if you're doing a document content storage & retrieval system, you can store OOo XML documents without losing formatting as is the case with the Office XML exporters in development.
• Free - Aunt Jane and Uncle Bob shouldn't be forced to pay $300 just to type a resume. And with the advent of Office XP product activation and Office v.X network licensing, it's nice to know there's an alternative that you can use to get your work done on time for a deadline even when your company's run out of licenses!
• Open source - If you don't like something with it or want to enhance it, you can...if a bug is irking you, you can fix it...that is, if you're willing to trudge through the source. NeoOffice is an example GPL variant that is working to port to Cocoa, and other projects are underway to port to XUL and other platforms.

Is OOo ready to replace MS Office? No. For certain users, however, it provides options that simply didn't exist before OOo, and options that Microsoft will probably never provide. Complaints about OOo are fine and dandy, but don't overlook the strengths that it provides today and the options that it's given to thousands of users Microsoft has no intention of supporting.

Actually, StarOffice 6.0 (*not* OpenOffice, AFAIK) includes such an animal -- it's basically a reworked Adabase component.

Sun's free Documentation, especially The Java Tutorial and the API Docs, is all you need to learn.

Sun's free Documentation, especially The Java Tutorial and the API Docs, is all you need to learn.

Sun's free Documentation, especially The Java Tutorial and the API Docs, is all you need to learn.

Why has no one release a product like the SUN PCiii card for Apple?
The beauty of this setup is that x86 apps run natively, thus there is no emulation performance lag. You effectively get two computers in one.

MIDP for Palm is supported.

It's not as versatile as PersonalJava (which is now called CDC/Personal Profile), but because it's put in a lot of mobiles (and more to come), it's interesting nevertheless.

midp4palm.

Sun Microsystems announced today that they are sueing the University of Maine for illegal use of their trademark "Sun." Mike Johannsen, a member of Sun's legal counsel, stated that "the University's use of our trademark is confusing to the marketplace" and that they "should take immediate action to rename the Sun model." Alternate names suggested include "Sol," "Yellow Star at the Middle," and "The Celestial Body Formerly Known as The Sun."

d00d, This Sun 24" Flat Panel kicks your IBM's ass...(Also see on Sun's website)

Why doesn't somone do a review of this thing? And, where have you geeks been? This thing's at least a few months old...

sorry somehow fcked the link

I still have one question that I haven't seen answered, yet, though.

Exactly how much did Sun have to payM-DelM-DelM-DelM-Deldid they expect to make as independent consultants - the splintering JBoss group?

Who? what? when? why? how? If someone could answer those five basic questions about this story, many of us would appreciate it.

I'm not sure why the first post got a +4 informative as it was just a cut and paste of the CDN Web page.

JBoss (project page project page is a Java Application Server for Enterprise Java Beans (EJB's). They are working on a free implementation of J2EE. It includes JBossServer which is the application server, JBossCX for JCA, JBossCMP for persistence, JBossMQ for JMS, JBossMail (obvious), JBossSX for JAAS, JBossTX for JTA/JTS, and more that you can see on the project page.

There is always the Google cache too.

The reason that Apple is so hot for the 970 is that it offers dual channel DDR memory -- quite a change from the 133mhz SDR that the G4 is limited to.

PowerQuiccIII/MPC8560 supports not only DDR memory, but two Ghz ethernet controllers and a RapidIO controller.

Check Out the Specs

Apple likes to blame everyone except Apple for their problems. Motorola would have developed a new processor for Apple if Apple would have coughed up the dollars for a new pipeline design. Instead, Apple blames Mot for their speed problems while Apple haggles with IBM over how much to pay for a new chip design.

But what do you expect from Apple? Hardly the most honest company out there... Oh, sorry, I forgot, there are lots of people on slashdot these days who believe their 800Mhz G4 can beat any supercomputer. The G4 is fast, but not faster than, say, your E15000. And, sad to say, not as fast as what AMD or Intel have to offer. Sorry to burst your bubble.

How does this bug relate, technically, to RFE 4144488, which is pretty high on the vote count already? It seems they are requesting pretty similar stuff, so I'm curious if this is a tactical move to ensure the tiger is variant. Should we vote for both, or just this one?

I want both of them, anyway. Good luck.

From http://forum.java.sun.com/thread.jsp?forum=316&thr ead=389987&start=15&range=15&tstart=0&trange=1 5:

> I can't quite get my head round what combination of
> VM, compiler and/or language changes would iron out
> the following incompability between arrays and
> generics:
>
> Cat[] cats = new Cat[10];
> Animal[] animals = cats; // legal
>
> List cats = new List(10);
> List animals = cats; // illegal
> according to JSR-14

This problem is addressed in the "variance" extension to
the generic type system, which will be included in the
imminent JSR14 prototype 2.0. Details are enclosed in
the prototype.

Also a link to a MIT research paper on variance from that thread.

Dear reader the GNOME armageddon has started,

First of all I want to clarify that this text was meant to be a source of information otherwise i wouldn't have spent so much time into writing it.

Belive me it took me a couple of days writing this text in a foreign language.

Even if you don't care at all for GNOME, you may find some interesting information within this text that you like to read. please try to understand my points even if it's hard sometimes, otherwise you wake up one day and feel the need to switch to a different operating system.

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

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

Unfortunately these advantages changed with the recently new released version of GNOME. The core development team somehow got the idea of targeting GNOME to a complete different direction of users, the so called corporate desktop user.

In other words they're targeting people that aren't familiar or experienced with desktop environments. usually business oriented people who are willing to pay money for getting GNOME on their computers.

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

Some of the new ideas, features and implementations such 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