Sun Surges Into Research, Virtual Worlds

An anonymous reader writes "Sun Microsystems appears to be shifting its focus back to research, after several years of promoting its commodity servers and Java software. Earlier this week, it talked about its new Andy Bechtolsheim-designed video server in the New York Times. Yesterday, it invited reporters in to preview its plans to develop faster switches, new programming languages, and 3-D virtual workplaces. Robert Sproull, director of Sun Labs, made clear that Sun has big ambitions. 'General purpose computers have to be rethought,' he said. Among the projects close to leaving the labs is Project Crossbow, an evolution of the networking stack in Solaris; Project Sedna, a next generation switch for storage-area networks; and MPK20, a virtual workspace built on top of Sun's Darkstar gaming server."

Comments

Fortress : replacement for Fortran?

[Palmyst]

From my experience, the FORTRAN community is the most resistant among programmers to switch languages. Even F99 hasn't got much traction with them. So, best of luck with Fortress.

Re:Fortress : replacement for Fortran?

[Timesprout]

Its easy. Sun plan to send samples of FORTRAN code to the police saying it scares them and all FORTRAN coders will be arrested for writing such disturbed text. No more FORTRAN community and a greenfield for SUN's new language. Problem solved.

Re:Fortress : replacement for Fortran?

[Framboise]

On the contrary the Fortran user community has been using an evolving language that allows code reuse over 50 years. Only the outsiders have a frozen and outdated opinion about what is Fortran today. Heh F99 doesn't exist. Fortress seems an attracting language for Fortran users because it allows to express algorithms in a way close to what mathematicians do since over a century. For example by using Unicode Fortress has finally a charatcter set matching the ones used by scientists.

Re:Fortress : replacement for Fortran?

[UtucXul]

For example by using Unicode Fortress has finally a charatcter set matching the ones used by scientists.

I do a lot of my work in FORTRAN 77, but I'm interested in programming languages, and tend to switch my smaller tools around from one language to the next (currently I like Python a lot). So I probably fall right into the class of people who Fortress is interesting to. But the idea of Unicode using programming languages seems like a really bad idea for a language that is trying to replace a numerical workhorse. The last time I looked at Fortress, I seem to remember that if you don't use a unicode aware editor, there was some LaTeX-like way to input math also, but even that seems a little heavy weight for numerical programming.

I guess what it comes down to is that of all the failing of FORTRAN, the fact that its math is less pretty than LaTeX does not seem like an important one. I know Fortress has some other features, but the whole pretty math character thing seems to be the one that comes up most.

Re:Fortress : replacement for Fortran?

[Coryoth]

I think you'll find that the Unicode character set is the one that gets commented on the most because that's the only feature you can glean from a supreficial skim of the quite long and detailed spec. If, on the other hand, you actually read the spec you'll find a lot of other very nice features, good concurrency control, software transactional memory, a very nice component system, an interesting parametric polymorphism system, some good functional programming primitives, and more. It is worth actually reading the spec.

Obvious, -1

[bricriu]

Anyone who comments on how their virtual workspaces could be called "DarkSun" will be shot with a railgun. That is all.

Jonathan Schwartz

[alienmole]

Sun's new CEO is the driving force behind this. Quite a change from Scott McNealy.

Re:Jonathan Schwartz

[mandelbr0t]

Indeed. My experience with Sun vs. Microsoft politics is that Sun was clearly willing to sink to Microsoft's level. They played heavily with vendor lock-in, trashing of un-(Sun)-certified techies and various other tactics that I had only really associated with Microsoft. I found these politics to be most like something you'd hear on a primary school playground.

"You don't want to switch to a .NET deployment. Java programmers are only slightly more cultured than cavemen, and Solaris SysAdmins are known to hang out at Furry parties. Besides, where are you going to find parts for all those Ultra-2s in your basement?"

"Oh yeah? Well James Gosling is a poo-poo head!"

No one wins in these dealings except Microsoft. Let me jump on the "good to see Sun doing something constructive" bandwagon.

Oh yeah, research this

[Anonymous Coward]

I still haven't received my Solaris 10 DVD.

Re:Sun's New Direction

[FooAtWFU]

Java is an astounding success, and a wildly popular language.

In the enterprise. Java in the browser is widely acknowledged to be not-so-spectacular at best, even given modern advances. But most business-level development these is being done in either Java (or occasionally C#, for the suckers) and Java still dominates in a truly amazing way. In its way, it's the modern COBOL- somewhat verbose and clunky, but EVERYWHERE, and Going Nowhere. Fortunately for the world, it's brain-damage factor is a puny fraction of what COBOL's was.

In summary, if you'd like to say that Java on the desktop was ultimately a pretty lukewarm experience, that's certainly one thing. But you said it yourself - servers and OSs and server-side stuff.

I agree

[WindBourne]

I have been quick to point how much damage that McNealy has done to Sun (while the fan boys defend him and has lousy last 5 years). Schwartz is the guy who might just bring Sun back again. He still has a LONG ways to go, but at least he is no longer lying and playing costly games such as funding SCO against Linux (huge waste of good will for Sun) or going after MS on Java. At one time, McNealy was good, but that was when the industry was much smaller and they had lots of room to maneuver. Now that they are the lumbering beast (like MS and IBM), it is hard to stay on top unless you do real research.

Lawsuits...

[ragtop70]

Sun should watch out by naming anything Darkstar... As the former owner of darkstar-reserarch.com, I was approached by someone (forgot the name, but then again, that's also being polite) from Illinois who claims to own every possible use (patents and copyrights) of the terms "Darkstar" and "Stealth" and provided documentation to the effect that he had forced Fortune 100 companies to stop using either term when referring to any product if they had not licensed the use of the term from him. This guy had nothing to gain by pursuing legal action against me (a hobbyist who simply wanted a domain name for e-mail and personal web hosting), but he has nothing to lose, really, by bringing legal action against Sun.

3-D Virtual Workplaces?

[FlyingSquidStudios]

"We'll need to do a meeting with Bob in accounting. He's the giant floating eyeball with tentacles."

Why is it called MPK20?

[ChrisGilliard]

MPK stands for Menlo Park (where Sun's headquarter's is located). There are 19 buildings on the Sun Menlo Park campus. Hence, MKP20 is the vitual building.