One of the reasons a stock goes up or down is because it beats or misses analyst estimates.
If a bunch of analysts estimate that company A will have a quarterly EPS of.20 and they come in with an EPS of.15, the stock price goes down.
If a bunch of analysts estimate that Company B will have a quarterly loss of.80 per share and the company comes in with a loss of only.70 per share, the stock price goes up.
Easy to manipulate.
I think it says more about the analysts than it does about the company.
Sun was also a leading contributor to the lawsuit brought by SCO against IBM, and their customers.
There are a lot of reasons to choose Solaris over Linux but one of them for me is the community. These type of childish remarks get old quick. Seems Linux wants to be what Solaris was in the Unix OS space and what Microsoft was in the FUD space.
Other languages don't require as much boilerplate to begin with, and thus benefit less from an IDE.
Completing boilerplate code for me isn't the reason I value a good IDE. Years ago I had written macros in a simple text editor that would generate accessor methods and even if I just typed them by hand it doesn't take much. This is probably 80% of the boilerplate code Some people just make their fields publicly available but I like sticking with the bean design pattern.
What I use most in an IDE is the integrated debugger and version control. I find it much faster to have all that under one roof. If you're not using an interpreted language the build system is very nice. What I like about Netbeans is that it uses ant and if I need to make a small change I can fire up a text file then run ant from the command line.
Netbeans profiler is very good too but I haven't had much need for it yet.
IF I'm doing web development, tomcat or glassfish runs within and is controlled by the ide. Saves a step and the hassle of configuring an external server. The server output is right in the IDE so I can trace log messages or errors.
You write your programs in a number of iterations, each adding some features or fixing some bugs, and then you test to see if it works as you intended. Compile time can be a significant part of this process
I can't think of one build system that doesn't do incremental builds. With Netbeans and Eclipse, they compile on save. In Netbeans, you can enable deploy on save. If I make a change to a class file, the changes are deployed to the running app instance before I can even alt-tab to the browser.
Cleaning and building a project is also pretty fast. For me, the slowest part of the whole process is FTPing the new archive.
This causes small, short, and linear (not a lot of loops or repetition) to underperform (e.g. you wouldn't want this behavior for Unix commands).
The JIT compiler is pretty efficient and gets up to speed pretty fast.
It does take a couple of seconds for the VM to load but it's gotten much better. It's not as fast for making command line programs where you want to see instant output, but for long running applications such as servers, it's great.
And let's be honest. Few people are making a living these days writing command line programs.
Can any free Java IDE Just Work(tm) with making simple executable.jar files?
I know you're a troll but out of curiosity I just went into the dist directory of one of my projects and typed jarfile.jar at the command line and the application started.
I didn't do anything special to make that happen and since I always run it from within the IDE I never bothered to do anything special to set it up. I took a look at the manifest.mf in the archive and it automatically added the correct info.
You must have done something wrong.
The Matisse editor in Netbeans is powerful and full featured. I can tweek every little ass-hair of every little component. Wait - what's all that crap in my source editor? It dosen't look familiar, and to add insult to injury, Netbeans is telling me that I can't edit some code?
Some parts of the code are tied into the visual editor so it doesn't make sense to edit them by hand. Some of the methods, like for actions, may be confusing to people who aren't experienced with swing, but it all starts to make sense after a while.
It's a brilliant strategy to discourage inexperienced folks whose time matters(the operative phrase since we don't have 20 hours a day to roll dice trying to get things to work) from studying computer science.
A tool can't make you a programmer, it can only help you be a more effective programmer. If you don't know how to fix cars, the best tool set in the world won't teach you how to replace a timing belt.
I guess you could muddle through some easy stuff that "Just works" like the good old VB, but don't get me started on that.
I have to admit i've always been at a total loss as to why redhat could have the same sort of market cap as someone like Sun (at least pre-takeover rumours).
I suppose it's certainly more profitable to take other people's work and package it up, but what does that offer to a buyer?
What they do for the buyer is make sure that their distro will work with certain software so that ISV's can certify the platform.
For example... You want to run SAP CRM. Maybe you can get it to work on Debian or Ubuntu, but SAP won't support it, and you likely need SAP support. They have certified it to run on RedHat Enterprise Linux so you can use that.
That's what most people care about. ISV support. If all you're doing is running a LAMP stack, then you probably don't care and will run CentOS, Debian, Ubuntu Server, etc. In fact, I believe a lot of hosting companies have been switching to CentOS ever since RedHat no longer provided a free version other than fedora.
Even under the assumption that Debian is more important than the Linux kernel, Sun/IBM contributions to the kernel are far more important than Sun/IBM contributions to Debian.
That depends on your perspective. A tiny fraction of people use the kernel directly. A larger portion of people use the software above the kernel. Debian is an entire OS on top of the linux kernel. Sun and IBM don't just make hardware. They also create software, standards and provide consulting services. In IBM's case, services is a big deal and they've been moving away from hardware in some areas.
For some people, GNU is the most important project. I know that I was using GNU tools before I ever even heard of BSD or linux.
If you're just an office user, Firefox and OpenOffice.org might be all you care about.
Web developer? Chances are you visit apache.org a lot.
I'm not sure why the linux kernel gets so much attention. The linux kernel was the last bit that GNU needed to complete an operating system.
As someone that's using BSD, are you not familiar with the history of BSD, Sun's relationship with BSD and who Bill Joy is?
I would think a BSD user would care more about Sun's contributions to open source than IBM's contributions to Linux???
Search the lkml archives. The word Solaris shows up much more than aix or any other unix operating system, except BSD. And it's not always negative:) You'll also see some sun.com email addresses there.
Some people involved with the Linux kernel really hate sun and solaris. Some of it might be because Sun is their biggest competitor. For all the talk about Microsoft, it's really the Solaris market they're after. It's a shame.
Correct. The win is *maintaining* fewer lines of code.
Still I consider that a bogus argument. If you're organization has 50 Java developers, the effort needed to train them to be Python developers is not trivial. Then you can't just rewrite everything because you still have all that Java code to maintain.
It's not like Python is significantly less lines of codes than Java or anything. Especially now with annotations. Maybe 2x as many LOC for a significant increase in performance and using your existing developer pool.
The example in the link is simple but there are others you can find online with similar LOC counts.
Plus, I don't think fewer LOC means greater maintainability.
Let me give an example using a pizza recipe intead of a programming language.
Fewer instructions would be something like:
Prepare the bread. Put the sauce on the bread. Put the cheese on the sauce on the bread. Bake.
More instructions would be.
Prepare dough: Mix flour, yeast, water. Knead the bread Let it rise Punch it down Roll out round shape
Prepare the sauce: In large pot heat tomato sauce add oregano, garlic, salt, pepper stir frequently.
ladle an even coating of sauce over the dogh. Evenly spread shredded mozerella over the sauce.
Bake in a 400deg oven for 15 minutes.
Clearly the first example is the easiest to write, but not the easiest to follow.
In the end, you're going to abstract a lot of that so you don't see it all upfront. You have to trace it back and you might use a library or code generate to take care of the boiler plate.
For example. One of my projects that took maybe 2-3 weeks to write, then some additions here and there. That includes all the database planning as well. It's maybe 80k lines of code. 60% of that was auto-generated by an open source DAO tool that handles all the persistence. Throw in the import statements, field accessors and other code that the IDE adds in for me and I probably only wrote about 20k lines of code for the project.
If you use JPA, EJB3 for the persistance, you might have even fewer lines of code. Maybe I shouldn't still be using DAO but I like it and didn't need much more for this project.
The main problem I see though. In 5 years, a lot of those Python developers are probably going to be working in a different language all together.
Cloud computing meant different things at different times. Right now it seems to mean a virtual data center.
You can have a virtual server or a series of virtual servers. So think of it as if you were planning the hardware for a start-up. You might need 2 webservers, 4 application servers and a database server.
That's a lot of hardware to buy. Instead you can use virtual servers. There is no upfront cost and you only pay for them while they're running. In the beginning you may only need 2 app servers then one day demand spikes and you need more. Instead of ordering servers and waiting for them to be installed at your colo facility, you just provision a virtual server and it goes online. If you no longer need the extra capacity, you turn it off. If your startup fails, then you don't have to worry about liquidating hardware on ebay.
Now lets say you want a staging environment that mimics your production environment so you can test your monthly code changes. Instead of buying a duplicate set of equipment that only gets used once a month, you just provision a new set of virtual servers and only pay for it's usage while you're doing your testing.
Another application is HPC type stuff where you may need to run a simulation or other highly parallel application. It takes 2 days to complete on your machine, but if you had 10 servers you could finish it in 2 hours. Buying 9 more servers you only use once in a while is expensive. Provisioning 10 virtual servers is more affordable. This is was called Grid computing but it will also be part of the cloud.
I think this is one of the coolest videos I've seen that relates the process of using Amazon EC2 for HPC applications. The video gets interesting about 3 minutes into it. In the example, they have 2 live servers and 2 real servers as spares. If the load grows it can also dynamically provision virtual servers from Amazon EC2 and then once the load goes down, the EC2 instances and the spares go back into the pool.
Google has a type of cloud (app engine), Sun is coming out with their cloud and so are other vendors. The goal of a consortium on cloud computing is to develop some sort of specification and a cross platform API that will allow you to do what was done in that video above using any cloud provider. So one day you decide that XXX Cloud is cheaper than YYY cloud you can easily switch and don't need to buy/download a whole new set of tools.
Cloud computing is also used in terms of using a thin client desktop and all your applications and storage resides in the cloud. That's probably a ways off in public use, though thin clients on private networks and application hosting does work well.
How is Java faster? If it's a trivial program, than it just doesn't matter. Actually, if it's a trivial program, for your own use, a Pythoneer will write the script and run the interpret (no compile!) before you can fire up Eclipse and type "private static void".
You know you can write trivial java programs without using an IDE such as Eclipse. I started out in the late 90's writing Servlets in vi and notepad. The time it takes to compile is meaningless. You only need to do it once. You don't have to recompile every time you run the application.
If we are talking about a non trivial program, then algorithms, data structures, caching, micro-optimization (like re-writing bits in C) and profiling can improve things by many many orders of magnitude. Too bad if the code has so many layers and adapters that any real change will be prohibitively expensive.
Or they could use any of the many java libraries available so they don't have to write those parts of the code. Since they've been around for years, they've already been optimized.
The productivity gains of writing fewer lines of code seems stupid to me. Programmers aren't secretaries. I can't type maybe 90wpm but a few lines of code might take an hour to get right. It doesn't matter what the language is.
Those times I've done web admin stuff, I've rarely come across servers that have compression enabled.
Not sure why you would see that. Even for small sites that don't come close to hitting their minimum bandwidth allocation, using mod_gzip increases the visitor's experience because the HTML and CSS files download a lot faster and the processing overhead is minimal.
As for this story, I think whoever wrote it had this epiphany while they were stoned. There are so many other ways that Facebook could save bandwidth if they wanted to that would be easier.
75Mb/s is probably nothing to a site like Facebook. Let's assume $100/mbs which is probably high. That's $7,500/month. That's peanuts compared to their revenues which are in the hundreds of millions.
I know you're trying to be funny but... If you're talking plain Java vs Python, Java looks to be quite a bit faster. You don't have to look hard to find benchmarks that show java is faster.
You can set a quota on a per filesystem basis. If you mean how to set a per user quota, you can't really do that yet but it's coming. There's nothing stopping you from creating a filesystem for each user and then assigning a quota to that filesystem.
Or perhaps how you run it in a cluster environment?
If you're interested in high availability there are options with Sun Cluster (which is free) and ZFS. If you need a cluster file system that's a whole different beast. Might want to read this ZFS for Lustre information.
It looks like you're in the UK. Did they start censoring websites such as Google so you couldn't answer your own questions?
Gee that's a whole lot of assumptions you're making there.
How about what is publicly available on the matter. Sun buys MySQL. Shortly after the MySQL guys announce some new features will only be available in the paid version or with paid support.
Sun's CEO says, no, it's going to be part of the open source trunk.
Sounds to me more like the MySQL guys didn't want to be part of Sun's overall open source strategy and instead wanted to be their own profit center instead.
If you love Sun so much, why aren't you selling their rack servers?
I don't sell any servers. That's not what the site is about and that one page that's up now is just a teaser while the rest of the site is being developed.
Because that's one of the most comprehensive studies performed on corporate contributions to open source. I'm not in a position to take the time and resources to do my own study. Here's another look at how much Sun has contributed to open source.
Debian is also a popular distro that many other distros are based on. (Ubuntu, Xandros, KNOPPIX, DSL, Linspire)
The Linux Kernel is is not the only Open Source or Free Software project out there. I'd argue it's not even the most important one. If the linux kernel one day disappeared, the rest of the open source world could continue. But without the rest of the open source world, the linux kernel is worthless.
Have you ever had IBM salespeople come in to spec out a project? You might be surprised what they have to say on AIX vs Linux. This document is old, but still available on the IBM website. It talks about how AIX is better than Linux.
Until recently IBM had made orders of magnitude greater contributions to the Open Source community than Sun.
Prove it. There was an EU study in 2006 that analyzed the corporate contributions to Debian. Sun was the largest with about 4 times the peron months attributed to it than IBM who came in second place.
That's only what came with Debian and doesn't count open sourcing Solaris or Java or any of the other projects they recently open sourced.
A different view is this old post from Ben Rockwood that they contribute equally but in different ways. Even if that were true, that's like your rich friend and really really rich friend donating the same amount of money to charity.
I think IBM gets way too much credit because they got sued by SCO. Remember. IBM didn't come in to save Linux because SCO sued Linux, SCO sued IBM.
I've switched over to Netbeans a long time ago. One of the reasons I like open source software is because it's free. Doing mainly web development and sometimes swing apps, Netbeans rocks and I don't have to buy any plugins to do what I need.
For the past few years I haven't heard much about IBM's thin client strategy. They just formed some sort of alliance with Wyse on this front so not sure how Sun Ray's will fit in.
Right now it looks like to get a thin client solution from IBM you'd be using Wyse thin clients, and VMWare/Citrix on the back end. With Sun's technology, they would have their own end to end solution.
Years ago, IBM had a bigger push into thin client market but it didn't go anywhere. I attended a seminar at one of IBM's facilities around that time and those little black network computers were everywhere. It was a multi day session so I stayed on site and there was one in my room.
The cool thing you can do with the Sun setup, if you're using the right server software, is not only have a remote desktop but run applications remotely. So you can launch a windows application from your Solaris desktop.
If your organization can justify the cost of Perforce, they should be able to justify the cost of using IdeaJ which supports Perforce.
I'm a big fan of Netbeans but I've used IdeaJ and I think IdeaJ is better than both Netbeans and Eclipse but Netbeans has been narrowing the gap more than Eclipse has.
I just don't understand the logic of using a proprietary, expensive source code management system with an open source IDE. If anything, I would have gone the other way around.
What is it about Perforce that makes it more appropriate than Subversion, Mercurial or CVS that you wound up selecting it?
Their products are not bad, but way too expensive, for anything not requiring massive amounts of horse power.
Expensive compared to what? Large companies don't buy white box hardware. They are either buying Sun, IBM, HP or Dell for the most part.
Dell is usually the cheapest. A Sun X2250 and a Dell PowerEdge 1950 III are very similar.
Configured almost identically with the same dual quad core CPUs, 8gigs of RAM and 2 250GB Sata drives, the Dell comes out to $2,643, the Sun is $2,457.
Now if you're talking about the $30,000+ systems they usually don't have direct competition from people like Dell and while they've had their 8core/8thread chips out for a while and even running them with up to 8 CPUs per server, Intel is just now comming out with an 8 core 2 thread chip.
Slashdot Mirror
One of the reasons a stock goes up or down is because it beats or misses analyst estimates.
If a bunch of analysts estimate that company A will have a quarterly EPS of .20 and they come in with an EPS of .15, the stock price goes down.
If a bunch of analysts estimate that Company B will have a quarterly loss of .80 per share and the company comes in with a loss of only .70 per share, the stock price goes up.
Easy to manipulate.
I think it says more about the analysts than it does about the company.
Sun was also a leading contributor to the lawsuit brought by SCO against IBM, and their customers.
There are a lot of reasons to choose Solaris over Linux but one of them for me is the community. These type of childish remarks get old quick. Seems Linux wants to be what Solaris was in the Unix OS space and what Microsoft was in the FUD space.
Other languages don't require as much boilerplate to begin with, and thus benefit less from an IDE.
Completing boilerplate code for me isn't the reason I value a good IDE. Years ago I had written macros in a simple text editor that would generate accessor methods and even if I just typed them by hand it doesn't take much. This is probably 80% of the boilerplate code Some people just make their fields publicly available but I like sticking with the bean design pattern.
What I use most in an IDE is the integrated debugger and version control. I find it much faster to have all that under one roof. If you're not using an interpreted language the build system is very nice. What I like about Netbeans is that it uses ant and if I need to make a small change I can fire up a text file then run ant from the command line.
Netbeans profiler is very good too but I haven't had much need for it yet.
IF I'm doing web development, tomcat or glassfish runs within and is controlled by the ide. Saves a step and the hassle of configuring an external server. The server output is right in the IDE so I can trace log messages or errors.
You write your programs in a number of iterations, each adding some features or fixing some bugs, and then you test to see if it works as you intended. Compile time can be a significant part of this process
I can't think of one build system that doesn't do incremental builds. With Netbeans and Eclipse, they compile on save. In Netbeans, you can enable deploy on save. If I make a change to a class file, the changes are deployed to the running app instance before I can even alt-tab to the browser.
Cleaning and building a project is also pretty fast. For me, the slowest part of the whole process is FTPing the new archive.
This causes small, short, and linear (not a lot of loops or repetition) to underperform (e.g. you wouldn't want this behavior for Unix commands).
The JIT compiler is pretty efficient and gets up to speed pretty fast.
It does take a couple of seconds for the VM to load but it's gotten much better. It's not as fast for making command line programs where you want to see instant output, but for long running applications such as servers, it's great.
And let's be honest. Few people are making a living these days writing command line programs.
It's not just Solaris.
According to this, in 2006, sun was the leading corporate contributor to open source projects that were in the Debian distro.
Here's another look at Sun's open source contributions.
Can any free Java IDE Just Work(tm) with making simple executable .jar files?
I know you're a troll but out of curiosity I just went into the dist directory of one of my projects and typed jarfile.jar at the command line and the application started.
I didn't do anything special to make that happen and since I always run it from within the IDE I never bothered to do anything special to set it up. I took a look at the manifest.mf in the archive and it automatically added the correct info.
You must have done something wrong.
The Matisse editor in Netbeans is powerful and full featured. I can tweek every little ass-hair of every little component. Wait - what's all that crap in my source editor? It dosen't look familiar, and to add insult to injury, Netbeans is telling me that I can't edit some code?
Some parts of the code are tied into the visual editor so it doesn't make sense to edit them by hand. Some of the methods, like for actions, may be confusing to people who aren't experienced with swing, but it all starts to make sense after a while.
There are a ton of great Netbeans examples on the Netbeans site.
It's a brilliant strategy to discourage inexperienced folks whose time matters(the operative phrase since we don't have 20 hours a day to roll dice trying to get things to work) from studying computer science.
A tool can't make you a programmer, it can only help you be a more effective programmer. If you don't know how to fix cars, the best tool set in the world won't teach you how to replace a timing belt.
I guess you could muddle through some easy stuff that "Just works" like the good old VB, but don't get me started on that.
I have to admit i've always been at a total loss as to why redhat could have the same sort of market cap as someone like Sun (at least pre-takeover rumours).
I suppose it's certainly more profitable to take other people's work and package it up, but what does that offer to a buyer?
RedHat is the leading corporate contributor to the Linux Kernel.
What they do for the buyer is make sure that their distro will work with certain software so that ISV's can certify the platform.
For example... You want to run SAP CRM. Maybe you can get it to work on Debian or Ubuntu, but SAP won't support it, and you likely need SAP support. They have certified it to run on RedHat Enterprise Linux so you can use that.
That's what most people care about. ISV support. If all you're doing is running a LAMP stack, then you probably don't care and will run CentOS, Debian, Ubuntu Server, etc. In fact, I believe a lot of hosting companies have been switching to CentOS ever since RedHat no longer provided a free version other than fedora.
They also have other products that run on RHEL.
Citi also had the idea to push for less bank regulation and was a big player in subprime and CDOs.
How could you not take their advice?
Even under the assumption that Debian is more important than the Linux kernel, Sun/IBM contributions to the kernel are far more important than Sun/IBM contributions to Debian.
That depends on your perspective. A tiny fraction of people use the kernel directly. A larger portion of people use the software above the kernel. Debian is an entire OS on top of the linux kernel. Sun and IBM don't just make hardware. They also create software, standards and provide consulting services. In IBM's case, services is a big deal and they've been moving away from hardware in some areas.
For some people, GNU is the most important project. I know that I was using GNU tools before I ever even heard of BSD or linux.
If you're just an office user, Firefox and OpenOffice.org might be all you care about.
Web developer? Chances are you visit apache.org a lot.
I'm not sure why the linux kernel gets so much attention. The linux kernel was the last bit that GNU needed to complete an operating system.
As someone that's using BSD, are you not familiar with the history of BSD, Sun's relationship with BSD and who Bill Joy is?
I would think a BSD user would care more about Sun's contributions to open source than IBM's contributions to Linux???
Search the lkml archives. The word Solaris shows up much more than aix or any other unix operating system, except BSD. And it's not always negative :) You'll also see some sun.com email addresses there.
Some people involved with the Linux kernel really hate sun and solaris. Some of it might be because Sun is their biggest competitor. For all the talk about Microsoft, it's really the Solaris market they're after. It's a shame.
Correct. The win is *maintaining* fewer lines of code.
Still I consider that a bogus argument. If you're organization has 50 Java developers, the effort needed to train them to be Python developers is not trivial. Then you can't just rewrite everything because you still have all that Java code to maintain.
It's not like Python is significantly less lines of codes than Java or anything. Especially now with annotations. Maybe 2x as many LOC for a significant increase in performance and using your existing developer pool.
The example in the link is simple but there are others you can find online with similar LOC counts.
Plus, I don't think fewer LOC means greater maintainability.
Let me give an example using a pizza recipe intead of a programming language.
Fewer instructions would be something like:
Prepare the bread.
Put the sauce on the bread.
Put the cheese on the sauce on the bread.
Bake.
More instructions would be.
Prepare dough:
Mix flour, yeast, water.
Knead the bread
Let it rise
Punch it down
Roll out round shape
Prepare the sauce:
In large pot heat tomato sauce
add oregano, garlic, salt, pepper
stir frequently.
ladle an even coating of sauce over the dogh.
Evenly spread shredded mozerella over the sauce.
Bake in a 400deg oven for 15 minutes.
Clearly the first example is the easiest to write, but not the easiest to follow.
In the end, you're going to abstract a lot of that so you don't see it all upfront. You have to trace it back and you might use a library or code generate to take care of the boiler plate.
For example. One of my projects that took maybe 2-3 weeks to write, then some additions here and there. That includes all the database planning as well. It's maybe 80k lines of code. 60% of that was auto-generated by an open source DAO tool that handles all the persistence. Throw in the import statements, field accessors and other code that the IDE adds in for me and I probably only wrote about 20k lines of code for the project.
If you use JPA, EJB3 for the persistance, you might have even fewer lines of code. Maybe I shouldn't still be using DAO but I like it and didn't need much more for this project.
The main problem I see though. In 5 years, a lot of those Python developers are probably going to be working in a different language all together.
Cloud computing meant different things at different times. Right now it seems to mean a virtual data center.
You can have a virtual server or a series of virtual servers. So think of it as if you were planning the hardware for a start-up. You might need 2 webservers, 4 application servers and a database server.
That's a lot of hardware to buy. Instead you can use virtual servers. There is no upfront cost and you only pay for them while they're running. In the beginning you may only need 2 app servers then one day demand spikes and you need more. Instead of ordering servers and waiting for them to be installed at your colo facility, you just provision a virtual server and it goes online. If you no longer need the extra capacity, you turn it off. If your startup fails, then you don't have to worry about liquidating hardware on ebay.
Now lets say you want a staging environment that mimics your production environment so you can test your monthly code changes. Instead of buying a duplicate set of equipment that only gets used once a month, you just provision a new set of virtual servers and only pay for it's usage while you're doing your testing.
Another application is HPC type stuff where you may need to run a simulation or other highly parallel application. It takes 2 days to complete on your machine, but if you had 10 servers you could finish it in 2 hours. Buying 9 more servers you only use once in a while is expensive. Provisioning 10 virtual servers is more affordable. This is was called Grid computing but it will also be part of the cloud.
I think this is one of the coolest videos I've seen that relates the process of using Amazon EC2 for HPC applications. The video gets interesting about 3 minutes into it. In the example, they have 2 live servers and 2 real servers as spares. If the load grows it can also dynamically provision virtual servers from Amazon EC2 and then once the load goes down, the EC2 instances and the spares go back into the pool.
Google has a type of cloud (app engine), Sun is coming out with their cloud and so are other vendors. The goal of a consortium on cloud computing is to develop some sort of specification and a cross platform API that will allow you to do what was done in that video above using any cloud provider. So one day you decide that XXX Cloud is cheaper than YYY cloud you can easily switch and don't need to buy/download a whole new set of tools.
Cloud computing is also used in terms of using a thin client desktop and all your applications and storage resides in the cloud. That's probably a ways off in public use, though thin clients on private networks and application hosting does work well.
How is Java faster? If it's a trivial program, than it just doesn't matter. Actually, if it's a trivial program, for your own use, a Pythoneer will write the script and run the interpret (no compile!) before you can fire up Eclipse and type "private static void".
You know you can write trivial java programs without using an IDE such as Eclipse. I started out in the late 90's writing Servlets in vi and notepad. The time it takes to compile is meaningless. You only need to do it once. You don't have to recompile every time you run the application.
If we are talking about a non trivial program, then algorithms, data structures, caching, micro-optimization (like re-writing bits in C) and profiling can improve things by many many orders of magnitude. Too bad if the code has so many layers and adapters that any real change will be prohibitively expensive.
Or they could use any of the many java libraries available so they don't have to write those parts of the code. Since they've been around for years, they've already been optimized.
The productivity gains of writing fewer lines of code seems stupid to me. Programmers aren't secretaries. I can't type maybe 90wpm but a few lines of code might take an hour to get right. It doesn't matter what the language is.
Those times I've done web admin stuff, I've rarely come across servers that have compression enabled.
Not sure why you would see that. Even for small sites that don't come close to hitting their minimum bandwidth allocation, using mod_gzip increases the visitor's experience because the HTML and CSS files download a lot faster and the processing overhead is minimal.
As for this story, I think whoever wrote it had this epiphany while they were stoned. There are so many other ways that Facebook could save bandwidth if they wanted to that would be easier.
75Mb/s is probably nothing to a site like Facebook. Let's assume $100/mbs which is probably high. That's $7,500/month. That's peanuts compared to their revenues which are in the hundreds of millions.
The Xint option is used in very rare cases if you encounter a bug with the compiler. I have never run into one case where I needed it.
I think some people are working on JIT compilers for Python and other interpreted languages but I'm not sure of the status.
I know you're trying to be funny but... If you're talking plain Java vs Python, Java looks to be quite a bit faster. You don't have to look hard to find benchmarks that show java is faster.
Jython seems to be about 2-3 times faster than CPython according to those test.
This could give CPython the performance edge over Jython, but it still has a way to go to catch up to Java.
Or perhaps how you set a quota?
You can set a quota on a per filesystem basis. If you mean how to set a per user quota, you can't really do that yet but it's coming. There's nothing stopping you from creating a filesystem for each user and then assigning a quota to that filesystem.
Or perhaps how you do HSM?
How's this on ZFS and HSM?.
Or perhaps how you run it in a cluster environment?
If you're interested in high availability there are options with Sun Cluster (which is free) and ZFS. If you need a cluster file system that's a whole different beast. Might want to read this ZFS for Lustre information.
It looks like you're in the UK. Did they start censoring websites such as Google so you couldn't answer your own questions?
Citty-frakkin'-slickers... Jackrabbit and an Antelope. We've got them all over western Nebraska...
You Rube! It's a myth!
There's no such thing as western Nebraska.
The spec is probably the most important part of Java.
There was a time when using IBM's JVM gave some performance improvements but since 1.5 that hasn't been the case from what I've seen.
IBM's been slow to release new versions. The most recent version available for download is 1.5.
Gee that's a whole lot of assumptions you're making there.
How about what is publicly available on the matter. Sun buys MySQL. Shortly after the MySQL guys announce some new features will only be available in the paid version or with paid support.
Sun's CEO says, no, it's going to be part of the open source trunk.
Sounds to me more like the MySQL guys didn't want to be part of Sun's overall open source strategy and instead wanted to be their own profit center instead.
If you love Sun so much, why aren't you selling their rack servers?
I don't sell any servers. That's not what the site is about and that one page that's up now is just a teaser while the rest of the site is being developed.
Why did you pick Debian as a metric?
Because that's one of the most comprehensive studies performed on corporate contributions to open source. I'm not in a position to take the time and resources to do my own study. Here's another look at how much Sun has contributed to open source.
Debian is also a popular distro that many other distros are based on. (Ubuntu, Xandros, KNOPPIX, DSL, Linspire)
The Linux Kernel is is not the only Open Source or Free Software project out there. I'd argue it's not even the most important one. If the linux kernel one day disappeared, the rest of the open source world could continue. But without the rest of the open source world, the linux kernel is worthless.
Have you ever had IBM salespeople come in to spec out a project? You might be surprised what they have to say on AIX vs Linux. This document is old, but still available on the IBM website. It talks about how AIX is better than Linux.
This is a crazy idea, but what if this was all a setup to make Sun an easy takeover target.
We've seen how the market can be manipulated. What if this was just a big scam so that IBM could buy Sun and get Java cheap?
Until recently IBM had made orders of magnitude greater contributions to the Open Source community than Sun.
Prove it. There was an EU study in 2006 that analyzed the corporate contributions to Debian. Sun was the largest with about 4 times the peron months attributed to it than IBM who came in second place.
That's only what came with Debian and doesn't count open sourcing Solaris or Java or any of the other projects they recently open sourced.
A different view is this old post from Ben Rockwood that they contribute equally but in different ways. Even if that were true, that's like your rich friend and really really rich friend donating the same amount of money to charity.
I think IBM gets way too much credit because they got sued by SCO. Remember. IBM didn't come in to save Linux because SCO sued Linux, SCO sued IBM.
I've switched over to Netbeans a long time ago. One of the reasons I like open source software is because it's free. Doing mainly web development and sometimes swing apps, Netbeans rocks and I don't have to buy any plugins to do what I need.
For the past few years I haven't heard much about IBM's thin client strategy. They just formed some sort of alliance with Wyse on this front so not sure how Sun Ray's will fit in.
Right now it looks like to get a thin client solution from IBM you'd be using Wyse thin clients, and VMWare/Citrix on the back end. With Sun's technology, they would have their own end to end solution.
Years ago, IBM had a bigger push into thin client market but it didn't go anywhere. I attended a seminar at one of IBM's facilities around that time and those little black network computers were everywhere. It was a multi day session so I stayed on site and there was one in my room.
The cool thing you can do with the Sun setup, if you're using the right server software, is not only have a remote desktop but run applications remotely. So you can launch a windows application from your Solaris desktop.
If your organization can justify the cost of Perforce, they should be able to justify the cost of using IdeaJ which supports Perforce.
I'm a big fan of Netbeans but I've used IdeaJ and I think IdeaJ is better than both Netbeans and Eclipse but Netbeans has been narrowing the gap more than Eclipse has.
I just don't understand the logic of using a proprietary, expensive source code management system with an open source IDE. If anything, I would have gone the other way around.
What is it about Perforce that makes it more appropriate than Subversion, Mercurial or CVS that you wound up selecting it?
Their products are not bad, but way too expensive, for anything not requiring massive amounts of horse power.
Expensive compared to what? Large companies don't buy white box hardware. They are either buying Sun, IBM, HP or Dell for the most part.
Dell is usually the cheapest. A Sun X2250 and a Dell PowerEdge 1950 III are very similar.
Configured almost identically with the same dual quad core CPUs, 8gigs of RAM and 2 250GB Sata drives, the Dell comes out to $2,643, the Sun is $2,457.
Now if you're talking about the $30,000+ systems they usually don't have direct competition from people like Dell and while they've had their 8core /8thread chips out for a while and even running them with up to 8 CPUs per server, Intel is just now comming out with an 8 core 2 thread chip.