Slashdot Mirror
Sun Java Desktop 2 Review
Anon. writes "Linux.com is carrying a pretty damning review of Sun Java Desktop System version 2. JDS seemed to have issues with almost each and every machine the author tested it on, support was quite bad - and to top it all, the software comes with a seven page license document. Something seems to be terribly wrong somewhere - otherwise why would Sun decide to ship JDS with kernel 2.4.19 at this stage?" (Slashdot and Linux.com are both part of OSDN.)
Something seems to be terribly wrong somewhere - otherwise why would Sun decide to ship JDS with kernel 2.4.19 at this stage ?"
I dunno. Why are you not asking a similar question of Debian???
Wow, they really shortened it.
meh..i would have thought that they are one of the few people who stand to lose out from linux becoming more usable
I have discovered a truly remarkable sig which this post is too small to contain.
Corporate clients are far more interested in stability than in the latest & greatest. Look how long RH goes between updates of their workstation and advanced server lines.
Java Desktop R2 seems to be more of an upgrade to the bundled apps. Nothing really major here.
Paper documentation would be nice. How are you supposed to read PDF files on a CD if you can't even get the system working?
Maybe they have to say in the box to use any Windows PC to read the manual before install.
Trouble with hard disks, especially SATA but also regular ATA, seems to be a common problem this guy is having. That should not be a problem with any modern Linux distro, and why Java Desktop manages to screw it up I suppose we'll see.
I'm waiting for the next version.
The Cheese Stands Alone.
Sun isn't flavour of the month in the media just now, and especially in the "Linux" media, where Sun is considered to be in league with Microsoft and SCO. To expect a fair and balanced review from linux.com is therefore misguided.
Stick Men
I guess Sun deserves what it gets, but I think the reviewer was a bit irresponsible. Perhaps he had a deadline and couldn't wait around for replacement media (assuming that you still couldn't rule out defective media) or for Sun support to resolve the issue. I think however that it would have been a much more useful review if the reader found out exactly why the reviewer couldn't get it installed on all but one machine and couldn't get it to run on the machine on which it did install.
I'm left wondering if it wasn't in fact defective media, and just how bad Sun's support is: meaning, what does it take to get a problem resolved.
quiquid id est, timeo puellas et oscula dantes.
Used it on P4 2.4GHz, Geforce4 Ti 4200, 1GB RAM
It's so sluggish on this particular machine.
SUSE 9.1 Live CD works better on this particular machine.
That's what I've experienced.
asdf
Sun's pretty much a dead company walking.
Their hardware is more expensive, and slower.
Their OS is less feature rich, but has more bugs, and doesn't perform as well in most cases as Linux.
Look around, everyone who possibly can is getting off of Suns and onto Linux x86. The major things holding most of Suns customers back in this regard are proprietary software support, and that's improving all the time.
And as to Java... I'm not sure exactly how they intend to make money there... IBM does the Java services market SOOOO much better than Sun does.
In the past, I've had lots of problems with ATA hard drives, as well as controllers, in Solaris x86. YMMV, but I've only successfully installed it on two controller/drive combos. The five or six that failed were nowhere near top-of-the-line, but they weren't generic cheapo product either. I dunno. Long-standing problem with Sun x86 products, though.
The Linux distro scene is in a rather bad state ATM:
:-(.
1) Debian sarge release was pushed further on - and you have to go via knoppix to install Debian on a modern SATA machine, leaving the system in a messy state. Obviously the Debian (non-)release is a standing joke, but Sarge will be so late, it's not even funny anymore
2) FC2 was released, and it has several showstopper bugs (it keeps on crashing for me, it eats partition tables for dinner, keyboard layouts don't work, etc, etc). I'm sticking with FC1. FC1, OTOH, seriously rocks, once you beef it up with KDE 3.2 and kernel 2.6. FC1 is the best Linux I've ever used, and I was hoping it wouldn't stay that way after FC2
3) Suse is still non-free-beer. Come on Novell, letting hobbyists dabble with it at home isn't going to hurt anyone.
So what's left, then? Mandrake, Gentoo? Warez version of RHEL? WBEL?
And on the topic of JDS: they are always thrashed in reviews, but the media keeps hyping how "integrated" the system is, and finally Linux is of commercial quality. Go figure.
Save your wrists today - switch to Dvorak
what hardware would it run on, then? Seems like the guy tried quite a lot.
All these distro reviews are so superficial. This one was worse than most. Rather than complain about how his fave window manager isn't included, he complains about how he couldn't intall it on his hot-rodded PC. So having not installed it, he doesn't have too much to bitch about.
I'm probably the only one around here who wants to know how a distro functions for the purposes of doing usefull work. Reviews of the install process are pretty pointless, unless your interest is in cloning large numbers of X clients or servers. Next!
With all this abysmal hardware support and horrid tech support, I often recall that Sun has made many a conficting statement in the past, and also that Solaris, Sun's glowing flagship, is still Top Dog as far as this 7-page-license company is concerned.
I would believe that running JDS on linux is just a prototype, to generate hype especially among the linux crowd.
Sun seems to be going out of its way to implement this on Solaris...perhaps the final incarnation of JDS will be on Solaris itself, without any Linux or GNU code at all, and completely proprietary. It seems that they will say "Linux just isn't up to par, but if you upgrade to the $599 Solaris JDS, all your hardware will work."
Or so it seems.
Defenestrate Windows...
JDS isn't really another distro; it's preconfigured SuSE. What JDS offers, which no one else does, is ready plugability into Sun's Java Enterprise System server stack. (Unlike JDS, JES actually is substantially Java-based).
The usefulness of JDS would hinge on how good JES is. So far I haven't found a good review of it, either alone or in comparison with similar stacks from Novell, IBM, Microsoft, etc.
C'mon, OSDN, let's get with the program.
Google confirms: Ruby is the world's most beloved programm
Hmm, you do realize that Java has almost nothing to do with the Linux-based Java Desktop System... right?
Don't let Sun's use of Microsoftian branding throw you, big guy.
BTW, You should probably let IBM know that Java is a dead language. I'm sure Big Blue would be interested in hearing about that.
Software
Hardware
- 600 Mhz Intel Compatible processor or better
- 512 MB of RAM
- 160 GB hard drive, at least 400 MB of free disk space in the directory
/var
- 10/100 Base-T Ethernet network interface
Kinda steep on the HD size. Plus, what the deal with requiring Red Hat? Doesn't Sun have its own linux or Solaris for x86? For what's it worth, Sun has a great opportunity in the corporate desktop market. I hope the can get some traction with this effeort.Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day.
Teach him to eat and he will fish forever.
So Sun is hoarding Java in the interest of not 'diluting the trademark' and then proudly slaps it on this...
The rest of your comment is troll-ish. If you want people to use your language, you either do a media blitz (Ada, Java, C#, Borland this and that, etc) or else you wait a long time (5-10 years) for word-of-mouth to spread (C, Perl, Python...). I can't think of any languages that just appeared one day and suddenly became popular.
Am I part of the core demographic for Swedish Fish?
An email was sent to SUSE to settle an ongoing discussion on the legality of copying the CDs in the local unix/linux newsgroup chile.comp.unix :)
This is from the response email from Frank Schmachel of the SUSE sales team:
Many thanks for your inquiry to our SUSE PreSales Service and your interest in SUSE LINUX.
Most applications that come with the SUSE LINUX distribution are licensed with GPL or LGPL, some have their own licenses.
Each of these licenses applies to the single package it comes with and allows you to make as many copies of the software as you want and give them to whoever you want, provided you do not _sell_ the software. You may sell support for the software, but not the software itself. Also, you have to make the source code available for free.
SUSE LINUX as a Linux distribution is a work with its own rights. Our license can be found on CD1 as /COPYRIGHT.yast. This license too allows
you to make as many copies and installations as you want from one set of
discs, provided you do not long for or get any kind of reward for it. Reward implies value in money, benefit in kind and supply >of services.
This also implies that it is _not_ allowed to install SUSE LINUX on machines that you will sell except that you will sell a full license (boxed CD set and books) with the machine to the customer.
So you can copy the SUSE cds. Why don't they offer the ISOs directly is beyond me. More user familiarization with the product would lead to more recommendations when it comes to buying enterprise-supported linux.
I don't want to start a flamewar over which language is best, but what do you suggest one should program cross platform apps in? C and C++ seem too low-level for most applications, but is doable when using a crossplatform gui toolkit such as wxWidgets,QT or GTK., VB isn't portable, so its out of the race. C# is mainly Windows (although it may not be the case for too much longer with mono and GTK# kicking some serious ass). So I guess the only language per say left is Java/Swing or something of that nature. Keep in mind, I am not a Java fanboy, I program in it every once in a blue moon, but would rather not. So again to restate the question, what do you suggest one writes corssplatform apps in?
Jisho - A Japanese English German Russian French Dictionary for the rest of us.
Something seems to be terribly wrong somewhere - otherwise why would Sun decide to ship JDS with kernel 2.4.19 at this stage ?
Keep in mind JDS was a rebranded SuSE distro. SuSE Server 8 ships with the same kernel, so no real surprises there. I'd chalk it up to Sun wanting to invest the minimum amount of skin to get something up and running that also had a fair amount of application support.
As for why they did not just fold in the latest-greatest 2.6 kernel, I have an idea. I recently rebuilt my workstation and decided to go the Gentoo route with the 2.6 kernel. Got a new laptop and installed the new SuSE Server 9 beta with the same. All was good, until I tried shoveling on the first of the commercial software. DB2 v8.1 just had a fit with the GUI installer. With a wee bit of elbow grease I got it going, but I don't even know if my code is going to work yet, much less the app server and ldap. It should, but...
(Stir Crazy voice)The 2.4.19 kernel - safe, not sexy.
+++ UGUCAUCGUAUUUCU
My vote would be C/C++ with cross-platform libraries. This language has stood the test of time without the need to have a (tm) after it, or millions of dollars in advertising.
Actually, I'd say Java is far from dead or dying. It's simply proliferating at a market segment that it wasn't originally marketed. Server-side Java development has been growing at a fast pace since the J2EE spec were introduced in the late 90's. If you browse any Java development magazines and articles, you'll see that the focus of Java development has been on server side for a long time. Java, when used in conjunction with plenty of open sourced development tools, makes server-side development easy and fast.
Furthermore, Java is very good as an educational aid for object oriented programming. It's pretty well and cleanly designed and implemented, and the syntax is easily transferrable to any of the C derivatives (except for Objective-C, which is quite a bit different from personal experience). In studying CS, a lot of theories are involved, and it's not necessarily a professional program. So using Java to learn OOP is not a bad thing at all.
-B
BTW, You should probably let IBM know that Java is a dead language. I'm sure Big Blue would be interested in hearing about that.
Umm, yea, you're probably right. IBM's never made any mistakes before over their choice of technology. Why should they now?
- Not science folks like me, given the lack of (f2c or g77) fortran, which means no Octave for my analysis and no R for statistics.
- Not home users, given the non-inclusion of e.g. a working movie viewer. (Their java media player was completely busted -- it showed a few frames and then died.)
- Not cutting-edge linuxers, given the use of
the 2.4 kernel.
- Not the home market, given the use of
soffice (aka openoffice) which still won't handle complex msoffice documents well, and given the use of a stumbling movie viewer.
- Not future java-app users, since the java
apps included (movie viewer, text editor) are ugly and slow.
Having noted the above in my own tests, I switched back to Fedora for my home box [my work boxes are osx and solaris]. Using fedora [core 2] gives me (a) a newer kernel, (b) newer versions of software such as openoffice and mozilla and (c) easier updates.The real advantage may be in work-groups that have loads of existing Suns as well as linux boxes; there is benefit in having a similar GUI and similar software on each. This reveals the answer to the question of my subjectline, I argue.
We had a rep into our office to demo JD from SUN. I haven't tooled around with the live CD that we were given, but to be honest I wasn't very impressed. We asked about why everything is so old on it and they said it was designed that way for stability. The market focus in their mind was for large numbers of very simple desktops, like call centers. The strength of the system is that it can be completely remotely managed on the fly. Application and OS properties can be manipulated on a central server which are then replicated to the desktops. This was demonstrated by changing the desktop colors on the central repository. After a few minutes the background magically changed on the desktop machine. The modifications can be made to a set of standard apps like mozilla, evolution and staroffice. For example you could push out a new proxy server setting to every client. The limitation is that you can't add to the managed apps. For example if you wanted to use KDE instead of the default Gnome you could no longer remotely manage it. Or if you wanted to use opera instead of mozilla, etc. Keep in mind this is still a very young product and they were frank in telling us that a lot of work is still being done. That being said I just don't see this desktop catching on. Suse 9.1 on the other hand is a terrific product that Novell is spending a pile of development dollars on. SUN shouldn't be wasting it's time fragmenting the desktop competition. Let RedHat and Suse duke that one out.
WURD!!
even linux 2.4 could handle more than 8, and now you can google people running 2.6 on 64. So it's getting there, but you're right, Solaris still scales better at the high end.
C and C++ seem too low-level for most applications
Ten plus years ago, I might have agreed with you.
But that was back when developers could count on a stable environment in which to deploy their apps. These days, the biggest fear of most developers is that the bloat of the OS, the constant intra-corporate battles over standards, and conflicts over devices, peripherals and plug-ins that endeavor to hook into everything running, have necessitated the need for developers who want solid apps to code in lower levels, hopefully bypassing as much of the crap in the OS as possible. It's a shame it's come to this, but at least I remember the days when a "bug" in an application was actually a "bug in an application."
Java is an excellent implementation of a pure object oriented language that has a very C-like syntax, an important feature for many persons for some reason, and an emphasis on performance and enterprise-suitibility that makes it suitible in many situations that (for example) stock Python would not be. The fact that it was at one point overhyped has nothing to do with the fact that it has many positive points and many good applications and uses.
I think a more apt comparison than Fortran or Cobol would be to Pascal. Both are problematic languages in some ways but Java is excellent for teaching, for the same reasons Pascal was. If you want to teach someone how to write good OO code-- and in most cases, once you get past the simple "here's how to build and traverse a linked list using pointers", outside of maybe an Operating Systems course this is in fact what most instructors these days want to teach-- then Java is vastly preferable to the many distractions, and perversions of the object orientation concept that C++ offers. Java therefore offers a great compromise between the basic tenet of CS teaching (you want to teach *how to program*, not *how to program using C++* or *how to program using Java*) and the desire of instructors to offer something that students will be at least more likely than not to have a practical use for once they get out into "the real world" (as opposed to, say, LISP).
-- Super Ugly Ultraman
no complaints. why do you seem to think it's not a viable option?
That's quite an facile editorial but you can't expect better from normal users. My screenshot looks better than yours. Evolution is better than KMail, GNOME looks more polished than KDE and so on. I do use XChat, Abiword, Rhythmbox.... ...usually you get stuff like these from normal users. And this is ok since you can't blame them for stuff they simply don't know about or don't have a slighest knowledge about.
Such editorials are hard to take serious since they are build up on basicly NO deeper knowledge of the matter. Most people I met so far are full of prejudices and seek for excuses or explaination why they prefer the one over the other while in reality they have no slightest clue on what parameters they compare the things.
If people do like the gance ICONS over the functionality then it's quite ok but that's absolutely NO framework to do such comparisons.
I do come from the GNOME architecture and spent the last 5 years on it. I also spent a lot of time (nearly 1 year now if I sum everything up) on KDE 3.x architecture including the latest KDE 3.2 (please note I still do use GNOME and I am up to CVS 2.6 release myself).
Although calling myself a GNOME vetaran I am also not shy to criticise GNOME and I do this in the public as well. Ok I got told from a couple of people if I don't like GNOME that I simply should switch and so on. But these are usually people who have a tunnelview and do not want to see or understand the problems around GNOME.
Speaking as a developer with nearly 23years of programming skills on my back I can tell you that GNOME may look polished on the first view but on the second view it isn't.
Technically GNOME is quite a messy architecture with a lot of unfinished, half polished and half working stuff inside. Given here are examples like broken gnome-vfs, half implementations of things (GStreamer still half implemented into GNOME (if you can call it an implementation at all)) rapid changes of things that make it hard for developers to catch up and a never ending bughunting. While it is questionable if some stuff can simply be fixed with patches while it's more required to publicly talk about the Framework itself.
Sure GNOME will become better but the time developers spent fixing all the stuff is the time that speaks for KDE to really improve it with needed features. We here on GNOME are only walking in the circle but don't have a real progress in true usability (not that farce people talk to one person and then to the next). Real usability here is using the features provided by the architecture that is when I as scientists want to do UML stuff that I seriously find an application written for that framework that can do it. When I eye over to the KDE architecture then as strange it sounds I do find more of these needed tools than I can find on GNOME. This can be continued in many areas where I find more scientific Software to do my work and Software that works reliable and not crash or misbehave or behave unexpected.
Comparing Nautilus with Konqueror is pure nonsense, comparing GNOME with KDE is even bigger nonsense. If we get a team of developers on a Table and discuss all the crap we find between KDE and GNOME then I can tell from own experience that the answer is clearly that GNOME will fail horrible here.
We still have many issues on GNOME which are Framework related. We now got the new Fileselector but yet they still act differently in each app. Some still have the old Fileselector, some the new Fileselector, some appearance of new Fileselectors are differently than in other apps that use the new Fileselector code and so on. When people talk about polish and consistency, then I like to ask what kind of consistency and polish is this ? We still have a couple of different ways to open Window in GNOME.
- GTK-Application-Window,
- BonoboUI Window,
- GnomeUI Window,
Then a lot of stuff inside GNOME are hardcoded UI's, some are using *.glade files (not to mention that GLADE the interface buil
In future, if Sun really wants something it can call the Sun Java Desktop, it would have all the applications in Java, and a Java runtime which is perfectly integrated into the OS, like OS X's Java environment.
-----------
WAP Apache software
See... we can never have a decent debate on Java because the Java sycophants mod anything critical to troll status. This wasn't meant as a troll. A few people brought up some really interesting things here. Just because I have my criticisms of the language and its practicality and integration in with something like Sun Java Desktop doesn't mean this is off topic or a troll.
Modding me down doesn't change the reality that corporate-controlled computer languages that don't really offer anything unique to the industry don't have a long term future. That's my opinion, but I guess if you disagree with me, then I'm a troll.
We call this hugetlb, or did. The name keeps changeing. All this really means is that you support shared memory locked into RAM, hopefully with some sort of large-page notion.
a performance counter interface
We call this oprofile. We also have the user-space kcachegrind and the perfmon patch, so you get some choice on Linux.
hot-swappable CPU support
We have this too. It works great on IBM's zSeries mainframe. Oh, PC hardware? Solaris can't do that either because the hardware will die if you go ripping out a CPU.
solid device driver interface
Nice non-factual FUD there... you work for Sun? Linux has a sane, clean, simple, and high-performance driver interface. This is because the kernel developers don't contort the design to be more tolerant of binary drivers.
And the future is multiprocessors...
Your "beyond 100" is nothing to a 512-way SGI Altix running Linux. There are 1024-way systems under development. Sun can't touch this.
that this server serves over 500k database-backed pages (not hits) per day. So it's no yahoo, but it's a bit more than the average falls-over-when-it-smells-slashdot-coming hobby site can brag about. :)
yeah...
I have not tried the JDE, but i wasn't able to get Suse 8.1 and even Suse 9.0 installed as delivered on my machine due to SATA issues. Pretty much same error - installer couldn't find a place where to drop the OS.
My suspicion is that it may be the same issue.
SATA only got seriously addressed at the end of 2.5 kernel tree, as i recall Redhat had its own version of kernel 2.4 that incidentally supported serial ATA, but Suse was behind on this front. Of course, for Sun not to include such support is just a shame, since more and more users switch to Serial ATA storage.
Just my 2c
Do we really need another distro?
A few years ago when Gentoo popped up, a lot of people said "Do we really need another distro? We already have RedHat, and Debian, and SUSE."
Now, a few years later, RedHat has abandoned its consumer line to a group of volunteers (Fedora), Debian is just.. years behind the other distributions in terms of installed software and catching up at a snail's pace (leaving its excellent toolset and great stability a bit frustratingly useless in practice for the main distro), and SUSE has been purchased by Novell (which has turned out to be benevolent, but it might as likely have turned out not to be). Meanwhile Gentoo, while still not yet a general purpose solution, is maturing at a great rate and is currently a far more attractive solution for many people's purposes than any of these.
I'd say then that the answer to "Do we really need another distro?" Is always yes. The more the merrier. Choice and redundancy are good things.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
Maybe you're right about the deadline, I hope so anyway.
But you can download the freakin' media. The reviewer doesn't say how he got his copy (download and burn or order), or mention grabbing new media, or even askin Sun for new media.
Really, that was a poor "review" more like a rant...
Um.. the fact you are discussing the Java Language in an article about the "Java Desktop" Linux distribution does, in fact, make it off topic. That is, in fact, the definition of "off topic".
Score:-1 is obviously an unfair rating for your Java comment. However I am fucking sick and tired of every single person who formulates their opinion poorly saying that any non-positive response that they recieve is due to some kind of jihad of "zealots" with moderator points trying to quash discussion. Maybe people are disagreeing with you (and with other people who use this "oppressed by sycophants" theory) because they disagree with you, not because they're "zealots"? Because the alternative is to adopt the theory that everyone who gets moderator points is a simultaneously "zealot" for Sun Microsystems, for Apple, for Linux, for Microsoft, against Sun Microsystems, against Apple, against Linux, and against Microsoft. That's a lot of biases for one person to hold.
---
As for "troll", well, if you're a troll, it's because you make statements like this:
Modding me down doesn't change the reality that corporate-controlled computer languages that don't really offer anything unique to the industry don't have a long term future
Without solidly establishing or even providing a compelling argument that either of the following statements are accurate:
- Corporate-controlled computer languages that don't really offer anything unique to the industry don't have a long term future.
- Java is a corporate-controlled computer language that doesn't really offer anything unique to the industry.
And yet you state them to be "fact"....why the windows crowd continues to dismiss linux users as a bunch of fanboys with so much success. :-|
I think the reviewer needs to take into account the target audience of JDS. The reviewer certainly dose not fall into this category.
I have installed JDS 2 on a Emachines 6805 Athlon 64 notebook with almost no trouble. The only issues were ACPI, built in wireless and Video. The video was an ATI Radeon 9600 that was not supported by the version of the XF86 driver in JDS. Simply download the ATI FGL drivers from ATI and install/configure. Worked great. As far as ACPI is concerned your just going to have to disable it. Most mainboard implementations of ACPI are horribly buggy anyways and Linux kernels have not until 2.6.3(read the change logs, almost everything was from Intel and ACPI related) had very good/complete support of it anyways. The built in wireless was something that had windows only drivers and I did not have the time to try the NDIS wrappers tool.
I have people in my office that have JDS2 running with little effort on IBM T40's, Toshiba Tecra M1/S1, Toshiba M100, various desktops including Dell PW650, Tyan K8W based Dual Opterons, HP XW4100 workstations, plus all kinds of misc homebrew machines.
As I believe someone else has pointed out, JDS is not intended to run on the latest hardware, it is designed to run very well on slightly older but much stabler hardware. It is intended to be a corp desktop, easy to deploy from a reference image to tens or thousands of similar machines and then work consistently. How many people need a 3.2Ghz P4 Prescott to run StarCalc? Mozilla? Your certainly not going to game under it.
This really brings up one of my favorite aspects of Linux, its adaptability to different tasks. The Sun JDS "envronment" servers a different purpose than Fedora or Gentoo. It dose several things much better than either of those two do with minimal work on the users part. Sure you can probibily get Gentoo or Fedora to do the same thing that JDS dose but it would take a great deal of work and even more so to make it easily reproduceable.
On a slightly differeny note I do really get tired of all the Sun bashing that goes on. Just as I have grown tired of all the Microsoft bashing the used to go on at the top of Sun. Sun is just a company with a great deal of excellent people working there that generally are working towards a common goal: building better software and hardware that makes peoples lives easier and more enjoyable and have a good time in the process. Sun is not dying. Far from it. They are only becomming stronger.
I must insert this disclaimer: I work for Sun in Solaris OS Engineering. I have for the last 8 monthes and been enjoying every day of it.
is they recently moved to a dual-release model.
A few months ago Mandrake 10 "community edition" was released. Then when the bugs were shaken out they released "official" which is what I'm running. So you get the cutting-edge software (I really, really wanted a 2.6 kernel) but it's not as half-baked as some of their old releases infamously were.
Clusers don't share memory, making them a pain to program for. Clusters require more space, power, parts, and so on. SMP is getting cheap. Linux does a damn fine job with a few dozen CPUs.
First of all, you can get hyperthreading. By treating one CPU as two, you typically get an extra 30% of performance. (it varies greatly by load)
Second of all, multi-core chips are coming in about a year. This gives you multiple fully-independent CPUs on a single chip.
Third of all, glueless SMP is making SMP boards cheap. Making an Opteron board support 2-way SMP just requires an extra socket and a larger power supply. (extra memory sockets are nice too) I recently saw a cheap 4-way board.
Now put all that together: 2-way hyperthread, 4 cores per chip, and 4 chips per board. That's a 32-way system squeezed onto a normal-sized server motherboard. For a desktop, maybe it will be 16-way due to having only 2 CPU sockets.
Beyond that, sure, cluster away if your app has the features to allow doing so.
Umm, yea, you're probably right. IBM's never made any mistakes before over their choice of technology. Why should they now?
But you aren't arguing that Java is "bad" or a "mistake". You're arguing it's dead. The point is that its use by IBM, and the large number of customers who have adopted Java by way of IBM, seem to indicate Java is very far from "dead", and in fact has a very significant customer pool.
Using subtle clues and hints in his first-person narrative to imply emotion and intention, Jem Matzan's critically acclaimed writing style is truly unique among fiction authors. Jem's extraordinary characters and distinct dialogue decorate his fantasy universe while coaxing readers' imaginations into providing the specifics.
Also a professional actor and model, Jem spends much of his time performing in such productions as television commercials, stage plays, and interactive variety shows.
Biography provided by the author, October 2002
from here : http://www.scifan.com/writers/mm/MatzanJem.asp
Thats simple. Thats the version of Linux kernel they have licensed from SCO.
I've had this flamewar before too. I decided to write an essay to address my points in one shot:
_ like_java.php
http://www.patd.net/~ciggieposeur/writings/i_dont
I agree with you in general. Java has its uses, but its enthusiasts are flat out wrong that it's the best language for any job, or even "most jobs". Comparing Java to COBOL is almost exactly right.
Java is dead
.Net must be dead, and Visual Basic and C++ as well. If you scan the job markets, they are all less in demand than Java.
What are you smoking?
if Java is dead, then
Consider C++ with STL. Most compilers support it properly now, and the STL implementations have basically become complete across the board. You can also bind C++ onto pretty well anything provided the interfaces themselves aren't templated.
Dave
I write a blog now, you should be afraid.
I used to work across the floor from the WebSphere developers. They're very smart people, and WebSphere after version 4.x is quite nice. Add Portal Server (I know more of them that WAS) and you've got some slick stuff.
:)
But building anything NON-webapp/portlet-like (e.g. isn't focused on users clicking links from a browser and is not web services) inside WebSphere is probably a mistake when objectively compared to the alternatives. I'm talking about things like desktop software, high-performance batch processing, and of course games.
Not trying to get into a flamewar, just want to remind you that there's plenty more under the sun that works really well too. The GP was talking about CSCI in general, and outside the server room there's still a LOT of CSCI that needs to get done before we reach our Star Trek interface.
Lord folks - why was this even posted? After three machines it's pretty obvious that the install media had a problem. What possible use is a "review" that basically says "Well, I couldn't get it to install, and now I'm going to whine about it."
The support system doesn't sound like it's much better or worse than what most companies offer these days, although there is a legitimate discussion to be had about support desks that don't speak english (or your language) adequately.
Next time let's wait until someone get's a reasonable install and can talk about what JDS actually does and how it performs. "It didn't work for me" is pretty much useless.
Three Squirrels
In our experience learning OOP using Java is very difficult. All right, the bulk of students aren't that bright, but I think they would do a lot better if they learnt Python or SmallTalk using Squeak first. We kill a lot of interest in programming by using Java as the first programming language.
SATA drives are a problem with this kernel, but I have no idea why this reviewer had so much trouble with ATA drives. I've seen installfests where dozens of users installed JDS on _laptops_, all were successful. I've never seen it fail on a non SATA desktop.
Before you all think I'm a doofus, hear me out:
1. There are a bunch of already-existing and very high quality Linux distributions, all of which make a huge number of very useful packages available. So, Sun weighs in with a Beta distribution which includes almost no packages other than their custom Sun stuff?
2. With all the aforementioned very high quality Linux distros out there which are more or less unencumbered by license issues (besides GPL, which we all like), Sun encumbers its new O/S with a seven page license agreement?
3. With all the downloadable distros which can be had for no more than bandwidth costs, Sun goes with a subscription model? And then provides shaky support to boot?
4. With all the other distros offering a league of choices, KDE, Gnome, Blackbox, etc, configurable on a user-by-user basis, Sun forces you into using only one specific window manager across the board?
5. And, sun releases this system without (apparently) adequately testing their installer against popular types of hardware?
Like I said, maybe it's me, but this is kind of a "WTF" moment for me. Why is Sun trying to reinvent the wheel like this? Why are they doing so much to make their distro much weaker than existing ones? What's going on?
I thought their rotating windows trick was kinda cool, but I think I'm going to stick with Slackware and OS/X on my machines. I've got the JDK installed on both, and Eclipse, too. It seems to be working a lot better than their new setup...
Farewell! It's been a fine buncha years!
No it DOES NOT fucking BEG the QUESTION. Google for that phrase to see why not.
I've heard decent things about it and it will be supported for like 5 years, so worth a look. It will be going on my main server at home but I just haven't got around to it yet.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
SPARC contexts run out. Then you are faced with more registers than x86 or x86-64 has to deal with. The register stack engine isn't a bright idea; see the intro of the Alpha architecture manual where the DEC engineers tear into it. You're saving more, or less, context than you need to save. This is wasteful. When you run out of on-CPU resources, you take an expensive trap. What's more, recent chips from AMD have a hidden context mechanism that works entirely without OS help.
The features may or may not be cool and all, but it's the end result that matters.
Linux also supports IBM's POWER4, the IA-64 systems from SGI, and so on. Solaris doesn't.
You'd think this following statement he made would have been a clue that there was probably something wrong with the way he partitioned the 80 GB drive he claimed should have been able to handle the install:
The guy says the partition configuration he used for the JDS didn't work for SUSE 9.1 either, and had to repartition it to have enough space to complete the install! It appears to me that the only difference between this and the problem he had with JDS was that it sounded like JDS gave the warning a bit earlier in the install.
I believe that a JDS install should alleviate the user as much as possible complications from partitioning. Yet, we don't know if he had used "advanced" options that permitted him to create the limitted partition sizes, or a default install. In fact, we know nothing about the options he was given and the options he chose for partitioning.
Open Standards Portal
Because the feature freeze was six months ago. That's how commercial UNIX works, and SUNW are traditionally a commercial UNIX company. If you want to be an über-l33t Linux h4>
Debian/Testing is quite current. Debian/Unstable is as bleedin'-edge as they come.
Gentoo's nice too, but don't pick on Debian because Stable is old. Stable's not meant to be used by people who want the latest and greatest, it's for people who want a system that they can set up without things changing nightly.
The statement was the disc was partitioned without problem then there was an error message saying there was lack of sufficient space. Could one of these partitions been too small for the installation?
At least one of the responses claimed they had no problem with what seemed to be recent hardware.
I am no fan of Sun, but I will await other confirming assessments prior to fully believing their product is a complete disaster.
and I may dislike java
I think we picked that up.
but I'm a huge fan for common sense.
I'm also a fan of tennis... just not very good at it myself. I think there is a parallel here.
To imply Linux is dying because doesn't have the market share for residential OSs, is as ridiculous as your logic.
To imply that a language (Java) is dying when it has the largest market share, and is the most in-demand language in the world, is a strange and unusual definition of the term 'dying'.
Java is dead. Sun is grasping for air with this one.
And IBM, Apple, HP... those sad companies must all be mistaken. GNU Java is obviously a total waste of time as well.
It's slow
About the speed of C++ these days. I'd love to see what fast language you are using?
it's old
Yeah - a full ten years since the first version.
Gosh! We had better give up on C++ and C then... if Java is old, they are senile.
it's not an open language.
Yeah, its such a bad closed idea that IBM, HP, Apple etc. are so foolish to have implemented it.
It was a great idea, and the intentions were good, but Sun fucked it up.
Yeah. It only ended up as one of the main development languages for server software, and got used everywhere from mainframes, applets, app servers, and client applications. Its use as the primary language for the enormous mobile device market (especially games) and its presence on millions of mobile phones is obviously nothing but a minor passing fad. All the colleges teaching Java as a key skill for students must be informed!
Its such a disaster.... and its shocking no-one else has noticed. Good thing you did!
I eagerly await your next few posts:
"Windows - Microsoft's failed idea"
"The web - it may be everwhere but it's doomed"
"Intel - the chip that no-one used."
And vice versa. Which makes it hard to compare the two.
And the future is multiprocessors...
According to whom? Sun? There's a lot of high end work that's massively parallel, and clusters on commodity hardware are becoming huge. That said, if you want to pay for a 256 CPU Linux box, SGI will sell you one. Including hot swappable CPU support.
I wouldn't be surprised if page locking wasn't available in Linux too.
If you want the system management utilities and development tools they must be installed afterward.
I wonder when Sun are going to get their act together and start fixing the basic toolchains available on their environments. We work on Sun slices at work, and we're prevented from having access to all sorts of basic tools we need.
Now I can understand wanting to restrict access to compilers, scripting languages, etc.
But perl *is* available on the environment, yet the halfwits who set policy in our server sections prevent us from having access to tools like less (yes, we have to use more, tail and head forall of our gigabyte-log-scanning needs because the version of vi on these environments won't read long lines or too-long files); vim (sigh) or (perhaps less controversally) lsof.
And the reason?
These are disallowed for 'security reasons'.
This is the second place I've worked at where my team has been limited like this. When are Sun going to get a clue and learn to install the basic tools geeks need to be happy?
Until they do - avoid Sun.
Believe with me, my saplings.
Comparing Java to COBOL is almost exactly right.
Cobol does not have an object-oriented structure, templates, sophisticated threading and thread-safe collection classes, network and socket management, exceptions, a fast IO library, reflection, dynamic class loading, portable bytecode, a standard cross-platform client GUI library, standard libraries for encryption, and compression, customisable security management, cross-platform portability of compiled code, a standard framework for clustered server deployment (J2EE), built-in unicode support, standard libraries for high-performance cross-platform graphics (Java2D), a standard for web interface development (JSF), multimedia handling facilities and a very widely-supported standard for deployment on portable devices (J2ME).
Apart from that, its very much like COBOL, in that both languages are widely deployed, robust, reliable and used by some of the largest companies to handle critical data.
That's not the way to get users to pick up your product. SuSE is the only linux distro that's wholly "pay for product" -- and even they have a liveCD and an ftp-installer ISO available. I understand Sun wants to get the product out...but does Sun understand that?
FreeBSD for the impatient.
Cobol does not have...blah blah blah.
And neither does C, yet we still see 3D games written in C before we see them in COBOL or Java. Java doesn't have templates, multiple inheritance, a free-as-in-speech runtime environment, or a best-of-breed desktop application of any kind.
Apart from that, its very much like COBOL, in that both languages are widely deployed, robust, reliable and used by some of the largest companies to handle critical data.
Precisely. Java and COBOL are both used for business applications and not much else, when compared to the alternatives. Java has the sweet spot of just enough OO-ism without too many confusing abstractions plus a big enough standard library to cover 95% of most uses. But once you leave the business logic arena, Java has a very long way indeed to catch up.
Here's a simple thing in C that I do almost every day: "initscr()" Where's the equivalent functionality in java.* or javax.*? Without initscr() you'll never have a Java equivalent to BitchX, slrn, tin, aptitude, or mc. We should all thank the efforts of Rob Pitman for addressing this rather huge class of use cases. But Sun and IBM couldn't care less. Banks and online retailers don't use (n)curses, so Java will never get that functionality as part of a standard installation.
And as the parent poster originally inferred: a computer science degree should be useful for far more than just business logic code.
this is my first post to /. with my new system, FC2. I just finished installing it awhile ago, been customizing, got my mp3 media streams working. Now here's the weird part. At first, it would NOT install. Got it in the mail this afternoon and went to it. Kept aborting some where's near the beginning of the install. Now I don't have a lot of new machines to try, mostly I have this old PP200 with 228 meg ram as my "main" machine, this is what I use. What I found out, it wasn't the media, it was the dang Cd player! I tried 4 different old Cdplayers out of the junk box until I found one that was smooth as silk, zip bap boom, I did a custom install, here I am. Same old crummy small HDD of 8 gigs, same old 1996 computar, but, it wouldn't read the disk *well enough* except with one of these other (old no name brand whatever, "aafrey" on the label for a name)Cd drives, which I will now permanently install in the machine. Right now it's hanging on the top by the cables. Now, why would that be? All the CD drives *work*, just not with these install disks, not good enough anyway. The one that was always with the machine always worked before, and managed to start the install fine, several times, just wouldn't finish it.
You tell me, I know not why this is. I will say the only clue I can see is it is the alleged fastest cd, at 40x. The others are all older 2,4,8 whatevers, but still functional.
FWIW
BTW, FC2 is *very nice*. A scosh faster, default fonts seem nicer, all in all like it better than FC1 so far. I did an all Gnome install, then some other stuff, the newer gnome is nice as well, but I don't like the newer gedit layout arrangement, but it's still useable. Haven't looked much past that yet, though, just browsing and listening.
Anyway, one of my little bros is a small boss-action honcho at sun, I will be sure to razz him a good one on your experiences... heh heh heh
Java doesn't have templates,
.so compiled on an Intel architecture and load it on PowerPC. I can, of course, do that with a Java .class.
Yes it does, in JAVA 1.5
multiple inheritance, a free-as-in-speech runtime environment, or a best-of-breed desktop application of any kind.
Yes it does - the eclipse development environment. But who cares? The desktop environment is a absolutely tiny part of the market. The main market for everything the web, where Java rules.
Precisely. Java and COBOL are both used for business applications and not much else, when compared to the alternatives.
No. Java mobile games alone dwarfs almost all other software in terms of deployments. Java is also becoming widely used as a numerical and engineering language: C/C++ and other just did not cut it as a replacement for Fortran. Java does.
Java has the sweet spot of just enough OO-ism without too many confusing abstractions plus a big enough standard library to cover 95% of most uses.
Rubbish. Java has far more OO features than C++. Multiple inheritance was abandoned long ago by mainstream OO language designers as a flawed idea. The interface/contract system, as used by Java, is considered superior. There is no (standard and guaranteed) ability to dynamically load classes and inspect their properties in C++. I can't take a
I guess Java fails because its library does not cover 100% of uses. Well, in that case, all languages and development systems ever shipped are failures. Personally, I think 95% is pretty good for a standard library.
But once you leave the business logic arena, Java has a very long way indeed to catch up.
A bizzare statement. I have used Java for business, numerical simulation, websites, mobile device programming, multi-threaded networking and device interfacing. My code is fast and I need to make not a single line change when switching between platforms. Can C++ do that? Of course not! Its C++ that has a long way to go before it can do it, assuming it ever can.
Java is backward because it doesn't do curses? Big deal! That is like saying that Linux is backward because it doesn't provide DOS as standard. Both are legacy.
Don't forget Madrake, who almost went out of business before ending up not going out of business. Not a bad distro in its own space, IMHO.
It's a single system image. It runs exactly one
copy of Linux. Call it what you like, but it acts
like a big NUMA box -- which is, aside from
memory latency differences, just SMP.
> It's not my fault they shipped a prehistoric kernel.
And since you knew that, why didn't you try JDS on an older PC? After all, JDS is SuSE -- you know that it will install just fine on 90+ percent of the office PCs out there.
And if you _had_ installed it on an older PC, then you could have actually _reviewed_ JDS (which would have served your readers), and you could have explained about the older kernel (also serving your readers), and then you could have complained about that specific point, instead of trashing the whole thing.
But what you did was dishonest, and did'nt serve anybody (except Microsoft, of course).
I think you purposely chose hardware that was too new to be supported by the Linux kernel included in Sun's JDS.
I think you're just another damned FUD writer.
Yes it does, in JAVA 1.5
... }".
.so compiled on an Intel architecture and load it on PowerPC. I can, of course, do that with a Java .class.
Which has a gold release? And runs on how many platforms? And has which professional J2EE servers using it?
I can say Language FOO has any features I want -- if I pull the beta that runs only on one or two operating systems.
Yes it does - the eclipse development environment. But who cares? The desktop environment is a absolutely tiny part of the market. The main market for everything the web, where Java rules.
First, Eclipse bypasses completely the Java Swing library when using SWT (which just about everyone uses). How can Eclipse be a "real" Java app when it had to violate such a fundamental part of the true Java way just to run at a decent clip? Also, Eclipse cost $30 million to develop before it was released as open source; it was originally intended to take out Visual Studio. The only anecdote I can offer (since I use Emacs) is that my friends who use Eclipse, VS and NetBeans generally put it last on their list of favorite environments. I would expect a real best-of-breed product to be able to swing them around.
Second, are we talking market for paid professional work, or market for all applications? If you mean the former, sure the web is where it's at right now. If you mean the latter, go get out more. Do you see any Java 3D games in the store? Consumer-grade productivity software? CAD? Education? Maybe I've been looking on the wrong shelves...
No. Java mobile games alone dwarfs almost all other software in terms of deployments. Java is also becoming widely used as a numerical and engineering language: C/C++ and other just did not cut it as a replacement for Fortran. Java does.
Sorry, beg to differ. You're changing the rules mid-stream: if you want to argue that every cell phone or gameboy on the planet counts as a real Java deployment, I'll have to pull out FORTH and beat your numbers with every washer, dryer, toaster, microwave, and parking gate meter. Or I could go one further and point out that every Java VM is a C deployment too. Or will you say that "C is assembly language" so that doesn't count?
Yes, Java is gaining ground in science. It still has a very long way to go before it replaces the embarassingly-parallelizable Fortran or the custom bleeding-edge C/C++ code out there.
Rubbish. Java has far more OO features than C++. Multiple inheritance was abandoned long ago by mainstream OO language designers as a flawed idea. The interface/contract system, as used by Java, is considered superior.
I probably ought to stop here. (Go ask a Smalltalk developer how much OOP Java really has.)
We could argue MI, but I'll instead ask: why NOT MI in Java? Why re-create every non-overlapping function from the implemented Interfaces rather than just direct-MI all the code? Why force the creation of an abstract class? You probably have an immediate response handy regarding the diamond inheritance pattern, but I'm asking you to just step back, breathe a moment, and remember all the times you've copied the same dozen functions into multiple implementation classes when you wouldn't have needed to if you could have said "public class MyClass extends BusinessClass1, BusinessClass2 {
There is no (standard and guaranteed) ability to dynamically load classes and inspect their properties in C++. I can't take a
True. And how often do you need to? I've used Reflection many times to simplify life on the EJB client and server side, and of course I had to Reflect away the Oracle BLOB accessor, but generally my applications, once built, don't change until someone really needs them to change. If I were writing an application server, I would absolutely love the ClassLoader heirarchy and the ability to just set a pointer to null to wipe out a deployed EAR. But I don't write appl
I agree with choice, but I agree with gparent, we have enough redudancy. I might agree with you if every problem inherent with linux were properly solved, but they're not. At this point, we have far too much wheel reinvention, and that's not generally a good thing.
Do we really need another distro?
That is a great question that every company needs to ask before it considers coming out with a new distro. I agree that there exists an overabundance of distros. The problem with this is there are so many resources being put towards meaningless redundancy.
A better way to state the above question would be whether or not this particular distro is needed. Distros with different purposes are great. Giving another option, if the option truly is different, is a wonderful thing. But with so many distros, there's nothing new, nothing different, no reason to exist.
I cannot really say anything about the 'Sun Java Desktop System'. I have not yet been able to run the live demo CD !!! On an old AMD K6-2 400 MHz I get an illegal instruction error during startup. Under VMWare 2.0.1 I get something about an illegal video mode. When I try setting one of the syggested modes I get a kernel panic shortly after. So IMHO the minimum configuration described on the CD does not fit the bill, and I could not be bothered to spend more time on the CD.
After further thought, I think we are talking at cross purposes here. Number of processors that can be attached to a system image is not at all related to the scalability of the operating system. The operating system itself (functions such as filesystem and memory access) may show no effective speedup after the addition of a relatvely small number of processors. This number of processors is a lot smaller for Linux than for Solaris (although the 2.6 kernel is far better). Those additional processors can be used by user software, often using specialised multiprocessing facilities such as PVM.
You mean is that A4 or Letter?
I could go and cover all the points. To make a start.... (but before you reply, please read my final point)
I am a Smalltalk developer, and have been for 20 years. I love the language, but poor performance and stupid licencing of commercial implementations cut back on my use.
Java 1.5 is out beta now, full next month.
Your points about sockets and files on different platforms are irrelevant: With Java you code general handling of possible timeouts. Who cares about specific machines?
(As an example, there is not a single line of code in major Java network apps, such as Tomcat, that says 'if we are on solaris, do the following..').
I could talk about serial port and USB device use in Java.
I could go on about the nature of the word 'legacy'.
I could describe the many uses to which I have put reflection.
and on and on....
My final point: this is all irrelevant to the argument! The point that was made is that Java is like COBOL. This is a plain silly comparison. For goodness sake, you know full well its silly. Show me the COBOL games, the COBOL network apps, the COBOL applets, the COBOL midlets, the COBOL portable GUI apps. Just because Java doesn't suit *you* does not make it poor language for general developers in a wide range of situations. Have a look at freshmeat - see Java being used for collaboration, games, multimedia, science. Java is not like COBOL!
If you're a Suse user and you try out JDS, the impression it leaves is "strip mined" rather than "preconfigured."
Now before I get modded down, I be to remind whoever might read this that what I am saying is FACT. - bogaboga
BTW I'm glad we're coming back on topic -- sorta (the whole thread is off-topic to JDS). My original jumping in to the thread was to support the OP who got modded -1 in like 30 seconds or so. He didn't articulate very well what (I think) he meant. And FWIW this is the coolest-headed argument I've yet seen on Slashdot related to Java, thank you.
... Have a look at freshmeat - see Java being used for collaboration, games, multimedia, science. Java is not like COBOL!
I'll stay off-topic just to illustrate a little more and then wind back into COBOL at the end...
I am a Smalltalk developer, and have been for 20 years. I love the language, but poor performance and stupid licencing of commercial implementations cut back on my use.
My old team was had three former developers from the Smalltalk group. Good people, good code, but they hated how the platform dwindled into oblivion. Java clearly won't suffer that fate, especially with efforts like GNU Classpath out there.
The socket timeout example was from the *client* side. The client needs a very long-lived connection open, and the server (you're exactly right) has no code in place to ensure a long-lived connection. The server in this case is Apache talking through a plugin to WebSphere -- code that clearly cannot be changed -- and the client is a JSP requester. The architecture is plain wrong: the client should do its work without the use of TCP/IP, but that was not my call and it was too late to change it. The point of the example was that host semantics bubbled straight up through the JVM layer as one workaround after another failed to keep the client alive. Similarly with the file example: production-quality code on the backend needs to predictably run the same whether its Windows or Linux, and that requires either dumbing down to the most restrictive platform or doing a check at runtime.
One final example that I think supports the OP when he said "bugs used to mean application bugs". The JVMs themselves are responsible for many application crashes. We had to support all the "Group I" languages including Korean and Japanese on Solaris, AIX, Linux, and Windows. Bugs abounded in the AWT font rendering in all the available JVM's such that we had to create a matrix of "Language to install in" versus "JVM to use" and keep that around for the support staff. One combination (Solaris + Japanese I think) had NO JVM's available that didn't core. I'm sure you have many stories yourself of "100% Pure Java(tm)" code that led straight to a javacore.txt file.
The point being: write once run anywhere has its limitations.
Anyway, back to COBOL...
My final point: this is all irrelevant to the argument! The point that was made is that Java is like COBOL. This is a plain silly comparison.
But I'm not talking technical points, I'm talking business priorities. Java is being developed and paid for disproportionately towards business logic users. Yes, it's got the libraries out there to do games and networking, and sure COBOL can't possibly touch Java technically especially as COBOL predates both TCP/IP and the GUI interface. Comparing Java to COBOL sounds silly on the surface, but it's still the most apt comparison when you look at what a developer's job often boils down to: moving data from here to there, only now over SOAP or EJB or RMI/CORBA or whatever the next successor to EDI is supposed to be. People didn't come to dislike COBOL entirely for its odd syntax and language features.
Just because Java doesn't suit *you* does not make it poor language for general developers in a wide range of situations.
I'm not trying to make you or anyone else stop developing in Java. The more people make demands of Java in areas outside business logic the faster it will get there. It's a Turing-complete language, and you've always got JNI to wrap low-level code in, so Java can be made to do anything with a computer's hardware you can think of to do (except
I think I see where you are coming from.
My view is that you are hugely exaggerating what 'business' programming is; I feel you are saying that its anything but technical uses?
I feel a far better comparison is with Pascal. Java is far more like Pascal - Turing complete, general purpose, but not what you would use to write device drivers!
For some strange reason, Java enthusiasts (I' talking other people, not you) keep insisting with almost religious fervor that their platform is the one true solution to everything software
I know - this seems to be a strange aspect of developers! But - I think there is a point: There are few things messier than a mixed-language project or an organisation trying to build up a repository of re-useable code in multiple languages.
I'm sure you have many stories yourself of "100% Pure Java(tm)" code that led straight to a javacore.txt file.
Actually no, never - not once, and I have been using Java from when it first came out, but I can see what you are saying.
Personally, I feel Java is kind of unique.... it has so many simultaneous benefits that I haven't seen in any other language in close to 30 years of development experience. (Smalltalk came close, but blew it, which was a damn shame: I adored VisualWorks):
Its free.
Its (these days) fast.
It really, really is portable in the vast majority of cases. Better still, its portable *after you have compiled it*.
It has a working cross-platform GUI (you may think its crap, but at least its there).
It has a decent multi-threading model.
It is supported by multiple vendors.
Its got a reasonable object model.
Nothing else comes close, as far as I can tell, for *general purpose* (not just 'business') coding. Its not perfect, and of course there are bugs, but its a pretty awesome idea.
My view is that you are hugely exaggerating what 'business' programming is; I feel you are saying that its anything but technical uses?
...etc
Well, mainly I mean that 'business' programming is focused on the problem of automating the movement of dollars, inventory, or items around database tables. Computers are basically just "input ==> function ==> output", but business programming is really restricted beyond that. It's "fun" to see where SOAP and EJB can take you (smoothly spanning multi-node systems on the front OR the backend), but after a few years you notice that you haven't:
Implemented a cool algorithm
Used a floating point number
Drawn on a real screen, or played a sound through some speakers
It's just a big data pump to replace the paperwork of clerical staff. That's what I see all these jobs advertising ("web site developer $55K!" "database application developer $65K!" etc.).
That's the crux of our argument really: Java as it's really used today versus what it's claimed to be used for. *I* think Java is primarily being used to first move backend data around and provide human interface to business data, and second for scientific crunching. The games are neat and probably going to eventually penetrate via cell phones, but I think it'll be a long while before Java is featured in a $100 million console game.
Java *is* a good general-purpose language for the companies paying for internal software development (you're dead on with the mention of an organization seeking a re-usable code library BTW -- that's a good point). It's a good sweet spot of what we know works well in a programming language: OOP, compile-time exception checking, and garbage collection. (You can get similar features working in Perl or C++, but it's harder.)
I like the problems Java is trying to tackle, but I think it needs more time to reach critical mass outside the banks and e-tailers. I can certainly understand your perspective -- seeing the industry fragment Smalltalk, C++, Unix, and every other good idea to come along. We finally have an OOP language that all the big iron vendors are willing to standardize on and yet can still be used at home.
My experience was going through school during the early 90's games boom (iD headquarters was 30 miles away) and going through Pascal, C, Visual Basic, Kornshell, Perl, C++, and Java. By the time I got to C++ garbage collection and pthreads were available, and every compiler knew how to do templates. So going to Java I see more what's missing (not yet duplicated) than what is there.
Three suggestions: /etc/hosts so that gnome doesn't have to round trip to your DNS server to gethostbyname.
3) Try another theme.
1) If you don't have a configuration server, turn off APOC 2) Add your hostname to
So going to Java I see more what's missing (not yet duplicated) than what is there.
I think there is a pretty good reason for this. My reading of the history of Java was that what Sun really wanted was Smalltalk, but negotiations failed, so instead they devised a language that was supposed to be somewhat like Smalltalk, and with a minimal C-style syntax. The core principle was that the language should be safe: secure enough to be distributed over devices and networks and it should not just allow, but *enforce*, certain coding standards: hence compulsory exception handling. They wanted to avoid what many considered the mistakes of C++, which was adding too many features without understanding the implications for making code cryptic and potentially unsupportable; this is why they are so resistant to MI and operator overloading, and why they have been very cautious about templates.
I think this is why so many coders really hate Java: it is not a 'quick hack' language, and it can be verbose and tedious to code sometimes. My view is that having seen how the use of a 'do anything' language like C/C++ for general purpose (rather than system) use wrecked so many software projects over the past 15 years, I find the wide use of Java to be a significant and healthy step forward in the IT industry. I would have preferred a more dynamic and interactive language, like LISP or Smalltalk, but the IT industry is reactionary, and the C-ish syntax was probably a major factor in Java's success.