A summary of the changes, including why they felt the MPL didn't give them entirely what they wanted - they make it clear that they didn't want to create yet another license.
The CDDL is similar to the MPL and its derivative licenses (CPL, SPL, etc.) in terms of combination with software distributed under other licenses. As with the MPL, files made available under the CDDL can be linked together with files made available under another license, as long as the other license does not prevent such linkage. This means that (for example)
files licensed under the CDDL can be linked together with files licensed under the MPL, SPL, CPL (or other licenses that allow files under different licenses to be linked together) as well as with code released under "academic" licenses such as BSD, AFL, Apache, and X11. In addition, source code licensed under the CDDL can be combined in the same file with code licensed under an academic license, as long as the resulting source file is distributed under the CDDL.
When Red Hat raised their prices, I think it suddenly made life a lot easier for Sun. For Solaris 10, Sun is charging $120/processor/year for basic support and $360/processor/year for premium support. Sun has been doing a lot of price comparisons with Red Hat (on same hardware) lately.
Basically, with their pricing moves, Red Hat gave Sun a stick to beat them with. That said, I still expect Red Hat to continue growing, but they'll be coming under increasing pricing pressure as time goes on.
PS If you consider basic laws of supply and demand, higher prices means less demand. In short, by raising prices, Red Hat stalled their own (unit) growth momentum.
Sun's patent app sounds simpler (and a bit different) to what you describe here. I've no idea how to go about trying to discuss things with the USPTO - maybe there's something on their web-site.
The patent is basically for Sun's "Java Enterprise System" middleware stack subscription. Which is $100/employee/year. The employee count is based on SEC filings for public companies (or similar for other countries) and trust for other companies or legal entities (eg government). It's a yearly subscription which includes services and support and infinite right to use.
Basically, it makes the licensing really really simple... at least relative to today's licenses. There is also no subdivision or slicing it up depending on what bits you use. You can use as little or as much as you want, it all costs the same, regardless of how many employees are actually using it or how many customers or clients are using it.
It doesn't come out cheaper for everyone, but Sun still offer "traditional" licensing. Sun have over 400,000 employees-worth subscribed already ($40m/year).
It's really nice for companies since their licensing costs become very predictable. They don't pay extra when they use new stuff. A lot of headaches simply go away. It also works for Sun since bigger companies pay more, basically. Which does make you wonder why nobody thought of this before. There is certainly the demand for something simpler.
With regards to it being a stupid patent or not... I think Sun have little choice but to try. If not, somebody else would and then try to screw Sun.
I have a program that runs 24/7 on a server, doing a bunch of networking and text processing stuff. It has no memory leaks and runs flawlessly. It didn't even require much effort to get it to run this stabily - only found 1 bug since I started doing this.
Also, if WinXP is going pear-shaped on you, sounds like an OS problem. Why are you blaming it on Java? If you have some long running apps that are causing problems, you can re-start them. Saying you have to re-start the OS sounds rather suspicious.
ZFS achieves its impressive performance through a number of techniques: * Dynamic striping across all devices to maximize throughput * Copy-on-write design makes most disk writes sequential * Multiple block sizes, automatically chosen to match workload * Explicit I/O priority with deadline scheduling * Globally optimal I/O sorting and aggregation * Multiple independent prefetch streams with automatic length and stride detection * Unlimited, instantaneous read/write snapshots * Parallel, constant-time directory operations
ZFS has some similarities to NetApp's WAFL in that it uses "copy on write".
One of the fun things with ZFS is that it automatically stripes across all the storage in your pool. Disk size doesn't matter - it's all used. This even works across SCSI and IDE.
One of the important things is that volume management isn't a seperate feature. Effectively, all the current limitations of volume managers are blown away:
Just as it dramatically eases the suffering of system administrators, ZFS offers relief for your company's bottom line. Because ZFS is built on top of virtual storage pools (unlike traditional file systems that require a separate volume manager), creating and deleting file systems is much less complex. Not only does this eliminate the need to pay for volume manager licenses and allow for single support contracts, it lowers administration costs and increases storage utilization.
ZFS appears to applications as a standard POSIX file system--no porting is required. But to administrators, it presents a pooled storage model that eliminates the antique concept of volumes, as well as all of the related partition management, provisioning, and file system sizing problems. Thousands--even millions--of file systems can all draw from ZFS' common storage pool, each one consuming only as much space as it needs. The combined I/O bandwidth of all of the devices in that storage pool is always available to each file system.
This is also part of the stuff making admin and configuration far far simpler. The thing I like is that it should be far harder to go wrong with ZFS (not available in Solaris Express yet so I haven't seen this for myself).
The very high degree of reliability as standard is very welcome too:
Data can be corrupted in a number of ways, such as a system error or an unexpected power outage, but ZFS removes this fear of the unknown. ZFS prevents data corruption by keeping data self-consistent at all times. All operations are transactional. This not only maintains consistency but also removes almost all of the constraints on I/O order and allows changes to succeed or fail as a whole.
All operations are also copy-on-write. Live data is never overwritten. ZFS writes data to a new block before changing the data pointers and committing the write. Copy-on-write provides several benefits:
* Always-valid on-disk state * Consistent, reliable backups * Data rollback to known point in time
"We validate the entire I/O stack, start to finish, no guesswork involved. It's all provable data integrity," says Bonwick.
Administrators will never again have to run laborious recovery procedures, such as fsck, even if the system is shut down in an unclean fashion. In fact, Solaris Kernel engineers Bill Moore and Matt Ahrens have subjected ZFS to more than a million forced, violent crashes in the course of their testing. Not once has ZFS lost data integrity or leaked a single block.
For more technical info see Matt Ahrens's and Val Henson's blogs - since they're among the engineers who worked on it.
Tastes differ of course, but you'll probably like the 2nd series more! The third series is very good too, but a change of pace, and is just 10 episodes.
There's a 3rd banner of the stars novel which hasn't been animated yet - came out in 2001. I'm not sure if any new novels are expected. There's also 2 short stories that haven't been animated (a third one is an OVA).
Gundam barely got a mention. No shoujo (girl's) anime mentioned at all. Not much mention of anime TV series...
Lot of good anime is based on novels too, though they're rarer. I feel that most novel conversions are great (though my Japanese isn't good enough to read novels) but I often feel let down by anime based on an original manga series. Patlabor, Hellsing, Azumanga Daioh and Gunslinger Girl are good examples of manga conversions though. I'm probably picker than average though.
Some examples of anime based on novels: Slayers (TV series a lot more slapstick than novels though), Read or Die, Scrapped Princess, Crest of the Stars (and follow-ons), The Tweleve Kingdoms.
Crest of the Stars is one of my favourite series - battles in a 2D universe, the interesting Abh culture and language (the author made up his own language and character set), and some very interesting characters. In pretty much any western series, if you have a race of genetically engineered people, it pretty much has to be a distaster - not so in CotS. Also, democracy vs royalty - democracy has to be superior... but not in CotS. Pretty fun. Ahh... if they'd only make another series...
The Tweleve Kingdoms is awesome too. Doesn't seem that way at the start, but it has some incredible plots and character development. More!
Sun Rays are dead silent (no moving parts), very low power (20W) which also saves you on air-con, last forever, require no maintenance on the client side, are very secure (air traffic control for Air Force One is run off a network of Sun Rays) and easy to setup.
Version 3.0 of the server software also runs on Linux. V3 is also bandwidth efficient enough that you can deploy over broadband or a group over 10Mb Ethernet.
As for how much they cost, on modern hardware the main thing to bear in mind is the amount of main memory you have. Sun have a sizing guide to help. For lightweight usage, eg a library, they suggest you can run 40 clients off a server with 4GB of main memory.
So 40x Sun Ray 1g = $359 * 40 = $14.4K (re-use monitors from your existing systems). On server side, a Sun Fire v20z with 2x Opteron 250s and 4GB of memory is $7k, though you could get a model with slower CPUs and pay for more memory. As a library, you should be able to get an educational discount too.
Competition Commissioner Mario Monti on March 24 said forcing the Redmond, Washington-based company to disclose the inner workings of the software that powers more than 90 percent of personal computers was necessary to ensure it doesn't exploit its monopoly. Microsoft argued the ruling will cause ``irreparable harm.'' The following week, it agreed to license technology when it settled its decade-long dispute with Sun.
``One could be forgiven for wondering whether this agreement and the huge payment to Sun were really needed, given that Microsoft has consistently stated there is no interoperability shortcoming beyond natural technological barriers,'' Lafitte said.
JDS release 3 will be supported on Solaris - I think it'll be the default UI on Solaris 10 (shipping in Q4 this year). This is for both Solaris SPARC and x86.
This was the plan all along, so it makes sense that they didn't put "Linux" in the normal title, but maybe they should have called what's shipping now "JDS for Linux" or something.
N1 Grid Containers is a breakthrough approach to virtualization with multiple software partitions per single instance of the OS. N1 Grid Containers make consolidation simple, safe and secure.
* Superior Resource Utilization. N1 Grid Containers dynamically adjust resources to business goals within and across the container. With little management overhead (less than 1%), it offers over 4,000 containers per system. * Increased Uptime. With N1 Grid Containers, applications are isolated from each other and from system faults. Using Instant Restart, each Container can be restarted in just seconds. Boot time in large systems can be reduced by as much as 70%. * Reduced Costs. N1 Grid Containers simplifies and accelerates consolidation. It also significantly reduces system, admin and maintenance overhead.
The containers (previous called Solaris Zones) can also each have their own root password and own IP address, as well as min/max/QoS resource settings.
What's certainly true is that there's a lot more to having good security than getting rid of the monoculture problem. Probably the most important thing is to care about security from the start...
Anyway, something the DoD and others have done for some time is to have triple barriers for certain things like firewalls. So instead of having the same firewall product and system all over the place, for each firewall, you have a series of 3 systems: one is a "hardware" firewall (an appliance basically), followed by two different firewall products running on two different architectures. This way a single flaw on one firewall or system will not comprimise overall security.
They also turn the IT infrastructure into compartments, each walled out with firewall groups. So you have one compartment for front-end servers, one for desktop users, one for your data, etc.
Yeah it adds to complexity, but this is what the paranoid types do to give themselves peace of mind.
Apparantly the "Looking Glass" demo (running on a little Sony Vaio) was one of the most popular demos at Comdex. I liked the desktop layout as well - very clean and simple, but amazingly flexible.
I think it's pretty obvious what they've done - just turn each window into a texture map, then project that in a 3D environment. That's why they can flip the windows, have multiple copies etc running very smoothly (3D accelerated), and also why you can do alpha blending very easily, or have the entire backdrop being a 3D projection (eg 360 degree world view.
This is probably using the OpenGL wrappers in Java... Sun will be feeding the "looking glass" technology into the Java Desktop System over the next 6-12 months. They weren't originally going to be so agressive, but due to the huge interest, they said they decided to accelerate the schedule. One nice side benefit of this becoming a "must have" is that the 3D cards guys will probably get more serious about doing proper, complete OpenGL drivers for Linux (the current situation ain't that great).
Like some of the others here, I do wonder just how productive it would be, but it didn't seem hard to use at all. It does give Linux (and Unix since it can run on Solaris too) a very nice wow factor - the Sun guys gave it a kinda "who cares about waiting a few years for Longhorn, here's what you can do today!". Will help dispell the bad perception that Linux has for desktop use.
PS The original demo was written by a guy in Sun Japan in his spare time. Yep, a real demo...
Along with the Opteron systems, Sun announced a big win for its Java Desktop System. The Chinese government will roll out 500,000 to one million PCs with the software over the next year.
"This, I believe makes us the number one Linux player on the planet," McNealy said. "The goal is to reach the Chinese government's goal of 500 million alternative desktops, and you can decide what alternative means."
The FCS release of Sun's Linux Desktop will start shipping soon and is expected to be profitable for Sun on release - see this article at The Register.
Sun have had a number of StarOffice customer wins for over 10,000 seats, and a few for the Linux desktop bundle it seems (reading around a bunch of press articles). However, most of this is outside the US - see this article:
Not among those seeking a Microsoft desktop alternative are customers in the United States, Schwartz said. "I will be blunt in saying North America has the least sensitivity to price of any nation on Earth," he said.
Except that, since StarOffice can read/write MS Office files very well, they could make available both StarOffice files and MS Office files, and accept both. StarOffice has filters for WordPerfect too, so they could accept such files too.
I think what he meant was that "we don't have a Linux strategy" means "we don't do Linux only products or development" and "Linux doesn't play a role on the server" means "Don't write/develop to the OS" - ie could say the same thing about Solaris if you contort it that much. Possibly being overly generous, but it's about the only logical thing I can think of. (unless you assume the guy's gone nuts.)
Last month Jonathan Schwartz did a fairly in depth response on his thoughts on Linux on general, though nobody seems to have reported it: Schwartz Seeks to Clarify Sun's Linux Strategy
He doesn't really clarify his statements, but kinda starts from the beginning. Among other things he talks about ISV support, open standards, Debian (which he's a "big fan" of), and also indemnification - which Sun offers both on Solaris and Linux.
Like IBM and HP, Sun's high-end systems are still getting poor sales - all big projects are having trouble getting funding in the current climate. Sun haven't helped themselves by being late with new products - UltraSPARC IIIi was quite late and UltraSPARC IV still isn't out yet (though coming soon).
Interestingly, a high-light of the quarter was Sun's sales of low-end servers - their 1-2 way UltraSPARC systems as well as their low-end x86 systems.
Except that's wrong. Running Hello World involves booting up what is, in effect, an entire operating system (the Java VM, with virtual memory, threading, everything, the works).
Merrill Lynch owns $1.1Bn Microsoft shares
on
Merrill Lynch Rips Sun
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
The "analyst" here hasn't even talked to Sun execs for some time, is always negative on Sun, wants Sun to drop all their products that compete with Microsoft (pretty much) and force all their existing customers through a complete product and architecture change (by dumping SPARC), which would have them up in arms.
see here for some detail of "the loon" as The Register call him.
Main memory bandwidth limits HPC today
on
Grid Processing
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
If even with one CPU core, if your system is main memory bandwidth limited (or mostly), then extra cores won't help (much). So this kind of design looks good only for non bandwidth limited tasks, which is a much smaller market.
They don't seem to be considering business servers here, but they are more main memory latency limited than bandwidth limited, so multiple cores can help a lot. But you need more than simply lots of cores to have a good design. A critical thing to have is major software support which means using an existing ISA, not a new one.
So I'd expect this to be quite an obscure product in reality.
# a "talkback" style crash reporter to collect stacktrace and error information # new command line parameter -start to automatically start a presentation after the document is loaded # ability to update existing OpenOffice.org 1.0.x single user installations # support for drawing objects in headers and footers # an example XSLT filter for Office 2003 XML format # support for MS Excel 95 and older form controls # UNO python bridge - python is now a first class language for creating UNO components for OpenOffice.org # built in spell checking dictionaries for English (UK) and Italian # built in hyphenation support for Danish, English (UK), German and Russian # integrated Bitstream Vera fonts # improved spelling suggestions using n-gram scoring
Slashdot Mirror
A summary of the changes, including why they felt the MPL didn't give them entirely what they wanted - they make it clear that they didn't want to create yet another license.
A details description of the differences.
In their submission they also say:
When Red Hat raised their prices, I think it suddenly made life a lot easier for Sun. For Solaris 10, Sun is charging $120/processor/year for basic support and $360/processor/year for premium support. Sun has been doing a lot of price comparisons with Red Hat (on same hardware) lately.
Basically, with their pricing moves, Red Hat gave Sun a stick to beat them with. That said, I still expect Red Hat to continue growing, but they'll be coming under increasing pricing pressure as time goes on.
PS If you consider basic laws of supply and demand, higher prices means less demand. In short, by raising prices, Red Hat stalled their own (unit) growth momentum.
Sun's patent app sounds simpler (and a bit different) to what you describe here. I've no idea how to go about trying to discuss things with the USPTO - maybe there's something on their web-site.
The patent is basically for Sun's "Java Enterprise System" middleware stack subscription. Which is $100/employee/year. The employee count is based on SEC filings for public companies (or similar for other countries) and trust for other companies or legal entities (eg government). It's a yearly subscription which includes services and support and infinite right to use.
Basically, it makes the licensing really really simple... at least relative to today's licenses. There is also no subdivision or slicing it up depending on what bits you use. You can use as little or as much as you want, it all costs the same, regardless of how many employees are actually using it or how many customers or clients are using it.
It doesn't come out cheaper for everyone, but Sun still offer "traditional" licensing. Sun have over 400,000 employees-worth subscribed already ($40m/year).
It's really nice for companies since their licensing costs become very predictable. They don't pay extra when they use new stuff. A lot of headaches simply go away. It also works for Sun since bigger companies pay more, basically. Which does make you wonder why nobody thought of this before. There is certainly the demand for something simpler.
With regards to it being a stupid patent or not... I think Sun have little choice but to try. If not, somebody else would and then try to screw Sun.
I have a program that runs 24/7 on a server, doing a bunch of networking and text processing stuff. It has no memory leaks and runs flawlessly. It didn't even require much effort to get it to run this stabily - only found 1 bug since I started doing this.
Also, if WinXP is going pear-shaped on you, sounds like an OS problem. Why are you blaming it on Java? If you have some long running apps that are causing problems, you can re-start them. Saying you have to re-start the OS sounds rather suspicious.
ZFS achieves its impressive performance through a number of techniques:
* Dynamic striping across all devices to maximize throughput
* Copy-on-write design makes most disk writes sequential
* Multiple block sizes, automatically chosen to match workload
* Explicit I/O priority with deadline scheduling
* Globally optimal I/O sorting and aggregation
* Multiple independent prefetch streams with automatic length and stride detection
* Unlimited, instantaneous read/write snapshots
* Parallel, constant-time directory operations
ZFS has some similarities to NetApp's WAFL in that it uses "copy on write".
One of the fun things with ZFS is that it automatically stripes across all the storage in your pool. Disk size doesn't matter - it's all used. This even works across SCSI and IDE.
One of the important things is that volume management isn't a seperate feature. Effectively, all the current limitations of volume managers are blown away:
Just as it dramatically eases the suffering of system administrators, ZFS offers relief for your company's bottom line. Because ZFS is built on top of virtual storage pools (unlike traditional file systems that require a separate volume manager), creating and deleting file systems is much less complex. Not only does this eliminate the need to pay for volume manager licenses and allow for single support contracts, it lowers administration costs and increases storage utilization.
ZFS appears to applications as a standard POSIX file system--no porting is required. But to administrators, it presents a pooled storage model that eliminates the antique concept of volumes, as well as all of the related partition management, provisioning, and file system sizing problems. Thousands--even millions--of file systems can all draw from ZFS' common storage pool, each one consuming only as much space as it needs. The combined I/O bandwidth of all of the devices in that storage pool is always available to each file system.
This is also part of the stuff making admin and configuration far far simpler. The thing I like is that it should be far harder to go wrong with ZFS (not available in Solaris Express yet so I haven't seen this for myself).
The very high degree of reliability as standard is very welcome too:
Data can be corrupted in a number of ways, such as a system error or an unexpected power outage, but ZFS removes this fear of the unknown. ZFS prevents data corruption by keeping data self-consistent at all times. All operations are transactional. This not only maintains consistency but also removes almost all of the constraints on I/O order and allows changes to succeed or fail as a whole.
All operations are also copy-on-write. Live data is never overwritten. ZFS writes data to a new block before changing the data pointers and committing the write. Copy-on-write provides several benefits:
* Always-valid on-disk state
* Consistent, reliable backups
* Data rollback to known point in time
"We validate the entire I/O stack, start to finish, no guesswork involved. It's all provable data integrity," says Bonwick.
Administrators will never again have to run laborious recovery procedures, such as fsck, even if the system is shut down in an unclean fashion. In fact, Solaris Kernel engineers Bill Moore and Matt Ahrens have subjected ZFS to more than a million forced, violent crashes in the course of their testing. Not once has ZFS lost data integrity or leaked a single block.
For more technical info see Matt Ahrens's and Val Henson's blogs - since they're among the engineers who worked on it.
Tastes differ of course, but you'll probably like the 2nd series more! The third series is very good too, but a change of pace, and is just 10 episodes.
There's a 3rd banner of the stars novel which hasn't been animated yet - came out in 2001. I'm not sure if any new novels are expected. There's also 2 short stories that haven't been animated (a third one is an OVA).
Gundam barely got a mention. No shoujo (girl's) anime mentioned at all. Not much mention of anime TV series...
Lot of good anime is based on novels too, though they're rarer. I feel that most novel conversions are great (though my Japanese isn't good enough to read novels) but I often feel let down by anime based on an original manga series. Patlabor, Hellsing, Azumanga Daioh and Gunslinger Girl are good examples of manga conversions though. I'm probably picker than average though.
Some examples of anime based on novels: Slayers (TV series a lot more slapstick than novels though), Read or Die, Scrapped Princess, Crest of the Stars (and follow-ons), The Tweleve Kingdoms.
Crest of the Stars is one of my favourite series - battles in a 2D universe, the interesting Abh culture and language (the author made up his own language and character set), and some very interesting characters. In pretty much any western series, if you have a race of genetically engineered people, it pretty much has to be a distaster - not so in CotS. Also, democracy vs royalty - democracy has to be superior... but not in CotS. Pretty fun. Ahh... if they'd only make another series...
The Tweleve Kingdoms is awesome too. Doesn't seem that way at the start, but it has some incredible plots and character development. More!
Sun Rays are dead silent (no moving parts), very low power (20W) which also saves you on air-con, last forever, require no maintenance on the client side, are very secure (air traffic control for Air Force One is run off a network of Sun Rays) and easy to setup.
Version 3.0 of the server software also runs on Linux. V3 is also bandwidth efficient enough that you can deploy over broadband or a group over 10Mb Ethernet.
As for how much they cost, on modern hardware the main thing to bear in mind is the amount of main memory you have. Sun have a sizing guide to help. For lightweight usage, eg a library, they suggest you can run 40 clients off a server with 4GB of main memory.
So 40x Sun Ray 1g = $359 * 40 = $14.4K (re-use monitors from your existing systems). On server side, a Sun Fire v20z with 2x Opteron 250s and 4GB of memory is $7k, though you could get a model with slower CPUs and pay for more memory. As a library, you should be able to get an educational discount too.
Dynamic Instrumentation of Production Systems - this paper was presented at Usenix, and describes how Dtrace is actually implemented.
Dtrace user guide.
A collection of Dtrace scripts
JDS release 3 will be supported on Solaris - I think it'll be the default UI on Solaris 10 (shipping in Q4 this year). This is for both Solaris SPARC and x86.
This was the plan all along, so it makes sense that they didn't put "Linux" in the normal title, but maybe they should have called what's shipping now "JDS for Linux" or something.
There is an alternative introduction on the main Solaris 10 page too. Eg:
The containers (previous called Solaris Zones) can also each have their own root password and own IP address, as well as min/max/QoS resource settings.
What's certainly true is that there's a lot more to having good security than getting rid of the monoculture problem. Probably the most important thing is to care about security from the start...
Anyway, something the DoD and others have done for some time is to have triple barriers for certain things like firewalls. So instead of having the same firewall product and system all over the place, for each firewall, you have a series of 3 systems: one is a "hardware" firewall (an appliance basically), followed by two different firewall products running on two different architectures. This way a single flaw on one firewall or system will not comprimise overall security.
They also turn the IT infrastructure into compartments, each walled out with firewall groups. So you have one compartment for front-end servers, one for desktop users, one for your data, etc.
Yeah it adds to complexity, but this is what the paranoid types do to give themselves peace of mind.
Apparantly the "Looking Glass" demo (running on a little Sony Vaio) was one of the most popular demos at Comdex. I liked the desktop layout as well - very clean and simple, but amazingly flexible.
I think it's pretty obvious what they've done - just turn each window into a texture map, then project that in a 3D environment. That's why they can flip the windows, have multiple copies etc running very smoothly (3D accelerated), and also why you can do alpha blending very easily, or have the entire backdrop being a 3D projection (eg 360 degree world view.
This is probably using the OpenGL wrappers in Java... Sun will be feeding the "looking glass" technology into the Java Desktop System over the next 6-12 months. They weren't originally going to be so agressive, but due to the huge interest, they said they decided to accelerate the schedule. One nice side benefit of this becoming a "must have" is that the 3D cards guys will probably get more serious about doing proper, complete OpenGL drivers for Linux (the current situation ain't that great).
Like some of the others here, I do wonder just how productive it would be, but it didn't seem hard to use at all. It does give Linux (and Unix since it can run on Solaris too) a very nice wow factor - the Sun guys gave it a kinda "who cares about waiting a few years for Longhorn, here's what you can do today!". Will help dispell the bad perception that Linux has for desktop use.
PS The original demo was written by a guy in Sun Japan in his spare time. Yep, a real demo...
Get the November edition of Solaris Express.
It has DTrace. Free download. For SPARC and x86.
JDS (Java Desktop System) runs off Gnome etc.
Solaris is moving to Gnome (ie JDS) to be default UI.
ie if you had a Sun system and a Linux/x86 system with JDS side by side, the UI would be identical.
At Comdex they had JDS running on a Sun Ray (which runs of SPARC/Solaris servers)
So, you'll get your wish ^-^
Sun have had a number of StarOffice customer wins for over 10,000 seats, and a few for the Linux desktop bundle it seems (reading around a bunch of press articles). However, most of this is outside the US - see this article:
Here's another quote from him, from this article:
Except that, since StarOffice can read/write MS Office files very well, they could make available both StarOffice files and MS Office files, and accept both. StarOffice has filters for WordPerfect too, so they could accept such files too.
That gives people more choice.
Appears in this article again.
I think what he meant was that "we don't have a Linux strategy" means "we don't do Linux only products or development" and "Linux doesn't play a role on the server" means "Don't write/develop to the OS" - ie could say the same thing about Solaris if you contort it that much. Possibly being overly generous, but it's about the only logical thing I can think of. (unless you assume the guy's gone nuts.)
Last month Jonathan Schwartz did a fairly in depth response on his thoughts on Linux on general, though nobody seems to have reported it:
Schwartz Seeks to Clarify Sun's Linux Strategy
He doesn't really clarify his statements, but kinda starts from the beginning. Among other things he talks about ISV support, open standards, Debian (which he's a "big fan" of), and also indemnification - which Sun offers both on Solaris and Linux.
Like IBM and HP, Sun's high-end systems are still getting poor sales - all big projects are having trouble getting funding in the current climate. Sun haven't helped themselves by being late with new products - UltraSPARC IIIi was quite late and UltraSPARC IV still isn't out yet (though coming soon).
Interestingly, a high-light of the quarter was Sun's sales of low-end servers - their 1-2 way UltraSPARC systems as well as their low-end x86 systems.
Except that's wrong. Running Hello World involves booting up what is, in effect, an entire operating system (the Java VM, with virtual memory, threading, everything, the works).
Not true when you use VM sharing.
For more info, see Sun's project Barcelona
The "analyst" here hasn't even talked to Sun execs for some time, is always negative on Sun, wants Sun to drop all their products that compete with Microsoft (pretty much) and force all their existing customers through a complete product and architecture change (by dumping SPARC), which would have them up in arms.
see here for some detail of "the loon" as The Register call him.
If even with one CPU core, if your system is main memory bandwidth limited (or mostly), then extra cores won't help (much). So this kind of design looks good only for non bandwidth limited tasks, which is a much smaller market.
They don't seem to be considering business servers here, but they are more main memory latency limited than bandwidth limited, so multiple cores can help a lot. But you need more than simply lots of cores to have a good design. A critical thing to have is major software support which means using an existing ISA, not a new one.
So I'd expect this to be quite an obscure product in reality.
New features in OpenOffice.org 1.1rc over OpenOffice.org beta2 release:
# a "talkback" style crash reporter to collect stacktrace and error information
# new command line parameter -start to automatically start a presentation after the document is loaded
# ability to update existing OpenOffice.org 1.0.x single user installations
# support for drawing objects in headers and footers
# an example XSLT filter for Office 2003 XML format
# support for MS Excel 95 and older form controls
# UNO python bridge - python is now a first class language for creating UNO components for OpenOffice.org
# built in spell checking dictionaries for English (UK) and Italian
# built in hyphenation support for Danish, English (UK), German and Russian
# integrated Bitstream Vera fonts
# improved spelling suggestions using n-gram scoring