PALO ALTO, Calif., July 19/PRNewswire/ -- Today at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention in Monterey, California, Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Nasdaq: SUNW - news) announced it will release the source code of its StarOffice(TM) Suite, a leading, high quality, office productivity application software suite, to the open source community under the GNU General Public License (GPL). Sun also announced OpenOffice.org will be formed and managed by Collab.Net and will serve as the coordination point for the source code, the definition of XML-based file formats, and the definition of language-independent office application programming interfaces (APIs).
btw, the GPLd version will be v6, which is a complete re-write according so some things I've heard. Apparantly, since the takeover, Sun have quadrupled the number of developers! btw, Sun reps have also clearly stated recently, that even with StarPortal, they expect people to be using the normal StarOffice product for many years.
Also, Sun actually have about 4 'source available' license in use - SCSL, MPL (mozila public license), the "Open Source (tm)" certified one they're using for 'technical' things like the NFS 4 release, and also the license for Solaris. This makes 5. Quite a wide range.
In Q1 this year, Sun's revenue grew 35% year on year (that's faster than Dell for the same period AFAIK), and it's expected that Q2 will be fairly similar. Their low-end server range is also growing fine (despite the fact that this is where Linux competes most with Sun) at somewhere around 30-35%...
Not bad particularly since they haven't done much in the way of new servers or new CPUs in 2 years. (there's been some little things though...). Come on Sun - hurry up and launch the UltraSPARC-III! (would be nice to finally see just how it goes) Looks like it might come out around July or something...
Another thing to chew up - around 50% of Sun's revenue comes from systems that take 8 or more CPUs - ie the E3500, E4500, E5500, E6500 and E10000. Each one of those generates over $1Bn in revenue per year. (actually, the 2-way E250 and 4-way E450 also generate about $1Bn per year each too)
Since I came across it earlier today, I thought I might as well post it - J2SE 1.4 "Merlin" public review at the "Java Community Process". It's 59 pages long, though that's mostly because it is quite detailed. If you want to influence the direction of future Java development... now's the time - they do want response to this...
this page has a list of all the filters and file types StarOffice can handle... Pretty damn long list!
Nobody asked yet, but StarOffice for Mac is expected to be out by the end of the year.
Source code for StarOffice not available yet. I wonder what license Sun will use - they're using quite a few at the moment. Hopefully they'll use the MPL (Mozilla Public License) like for their "Forte for Java Community Edition" IDE.
Most of the time when I see something about the Itanium these days, I just tend to ignore it. I've looked at the architecture quite a bit, and talked to people who actually design and develop chips, and I have yet to find someone who thinks the IA-64 architecture is actually any good....
The ISA is very big and complex and doesn't actually look any simpler than the x86 ISA. The designers also seem to have pretty much missed on what a good new architecture should actually do - they concentrated on trying to maximise IPC (Instructions Per Cycle - ie how many instructions you can issue per clock cycle), when current designs have pretty much already gotten as good as practically possible. So, all that complexity to increase IPC is pretty much going to go to waste...
I'm not that surprised it's late, consumes huge amounts of power (100W at 600MHz or something), and slower than expected. Also, given that they're going to cost $2000-$4000 each, and that Intel's own Pentium 4 (Willamette) will beat it in terms of pure performance, as well as price/performance, I don't think there's going to be much demand. (and multiprocessor Athlon motherboards will be out before too long, and there's plenty of good stuff from the RISC vendors if you wish to splash out...)
Intel/HP would have been much better off doing something like the Alpha 21464 (a few years away), the MAJC (few months away), or some of IBMs recent POWER chips - already on sale. I kinda pity the poor guys who actually have to implement the design since the higher level architects seem to have introduced the concept of bloatware to chip design...
Sorry, kinda been wanting to say this for a while now.
Sun distribute their Java code (just follow the click-through license) - it comes as standard with the SDK. Sun still have the copyright on Java. (this is actually the reason why Sun pulled out of the ISO/ECMA stuff - they were told/thought they'd be able to keep the copyright, but when they found out they couldn't, they pulled out)
Bill Gates will say just about anything to protect the Windows monopoly and is playing to the court of (non technical) public opinion mostly these days. He'd also tell you that Windows is 'open' if you asked - reminds me of that joke "How many Microsoft people does it take to change a lightbulb? None - they redefine dark as light".
Just got back from the first day of JavaOne. I'm happy to say that Sun sounds like they're fairly serious about Linux support. Lots of Linux visibility at the conference, several talks and BOFs. The biggest news I heard is that Java 1.4 ("Merlin") should be released simultaneously on Windows, Solaris, and Linux.
That they'll all be simultaneous for 1.4 isn't exactly new news - they've been saying it for about 2 months now. It's also possible you might see a point release (eg J2SE 1.3.X) which is simultaneous for all 3. Btw, Sun haven't done the final release for J2SE 1.3 on Solaris yet either, and the final release for Linux is only going to be about a month later than for Solaris.
Yay! Pretty much all the standard J2SE and J2EE stuff should be coming out for Linux, including Hotspot (client & server), Java plug-in, etc.
Btw, the Linux beta already has HotSpot Client and Server. AFAIK the current Linux Java port is not the same code-base as the Solaris one, but they're going to merge them.
x86 releases only for now.
AFAIK Sun are leaving non x86 Linux ports to Blackdown who are already working on them...
It's even worse than that - some tests show one on at top at the start, and someone else on top at the end... Very easy for press release writers to selectively choose what to show.
This is why most 'real' benchmarks are actually a suite of tests, and the final result is just an average.
I actually spent about 5 hours trying to find a nice FFT in C that I could easily convert to Java. In the end I found an FFT routine written in Java (though the author ported it from a C routine) and converted it to C. However, I was more interested in testing the compiler/optimiser and generic language differences than trying to come up with a really good FFT.
Btw, when you say "There are some things a C compiler can't optimized because of aliasing", do you literally mean it would be impossible for any (legal/correct) C compiler?
If you have a nice FFT that can easily to 'converted' to another language, I'll be happy to try it out...
I'll check it out fully sometime, but some things are definately out of date. (the authors also seem to have a flair for the dramatic) I haven't done a great deal of FP work in Java, but I'm quite happy with the results.
1.2 was slow. (from what I hear, this is basically because a load of develoeprs went to Sun and said "we can't live without X,Y,Z,etc" and doing all that slowed things down a lot). 1.3 managed to recover from this - ie back to 1.1 levels.
From what I hear, there's a big wodge of effort going into improving graphics performance for 1.4, and it's already well underway. Of course, it'll be at least a year away, *sigh*
The embedded Java market seems to be taking off though...
If you're actually running a simple chat server, then the results are okay, but Volano doesn't actually test Java optimisations very well as it spends most of it's time in pre-compiled static code, including the OS kernel.
Hi, I actually posted this to Slashdot last night... and it's still sitting in the pending queue, heh.
Another post I sent in last night which quickly got rejected was this:
Although Sun released Java 2 Standard Edition 1.3 for Windows a few weeks ago, until now there hasn't even been a beta from Sun for either Linux or Solaris, until tonight.
J2S E 1.3 for Linux Beta (for x86) which also includes HotSpot Server. This was with the help of the Blackdown guys, though the credits are in a somewhat obscure place. J 2SE 1.3 for Solaris Beta SPARC and x86 (includes HotSpot Server) was also announced today. In the future, releases for all platforms will be at the same time.
Unfortunately, that release came a little too late for me to do much about, though I have quickly tested the Solaris x86 (on the same hardware as the Windows tests), and the rests are pretty much identical, though Solaris was a bit faster. (but then, I was running without the desktop running which does help).
Also coming a bit too late was results from IBM's Windows 1.2.2 JDK, which I found a bit surprising - it did worse on some tests, and better on others, though I didn't have much time to test things.
Thanks for the replies... kinda makes it all worth it - it took me about 100 hours over 4 weeks to do this. (took up a lot of my evenings)
I better re-install Linux sometime so I can test on it again... (my last install stopped working for unknown reasons)
It'll probably be some time before I update the article - first I want to finish off my MAJC article, which really is too damn big. (22,000 words... ouch).
In this story at EETimes, a guy from Sun talks about the pre-confiured "server farm" solutions Sun announced yesterday.
An interesting quote is this:
While it's debatable whether buying a preconfigured compute farm is cheaper than stringing together a few PCs and running Linux, Tallman said the latter scenario "would work well in university and government research centers where there is a lot of free labor, but not in a company that needs to get products out the door and can't spend time developing core competencies in compute farms."
(though you'd probably want to have Java 2 or later for this). I wrote myself a pretty nifty charting program with anti-aliased fonts and lines in Java in about 5 hours the other day. (First thing I've done using the Java2D libraries too). I've extended it a bit since then though.
Having a bit of fun doing some comparisons between Java and C at the moment, and using my own charting program to show this, heh. (perhaps the most surprising result, to me anyway, is that GCC 2.95.2 kinda beats Microsoft's Visual C in the more complex tests, and MSVC is supposed to be really hot too...)
The case will likely be with the Supreme Court by then, and if that happens the DoJ won't be able to drop it. Still, there are things a stupid president can do to influence things - Ronald Reagan got the DoJ to drop the case against IBM when he came to power. He also appointed a lot of like-minded thinking judges etc. However, I think think that even if GWB got in, he might be too late...
It'll be interesting to see if it becomes a campain issue...
btw, Al Gore supports the current case, so vote for him!
Billy boy and others have also been selling a lot of shares over the last year. Gee, I wonder why...
btw, it wasn't really the DoJ's job to fine M$ $40B, or whatever it would take to reduce their liquid assets to zero. (they have about $22B in cash and about the same in shares and similar investments). That's the job of all the ambulance chasing lawyers suing on behalf of ripped-off consumers...
The Register has a lengthy article summarising the DoJ's Proposed Final Judgement, and some analysis. The breakup part of the Judgement may have gotten almost all the attention but there are several other important details, especially for the short term, because they will go into force as soon as the Judge decides, while the breakup would be delayed until about 1 year after all appeals are settled. Well worth reading.
btw, personally, I would like to see the current directors (and other high-level types) fired, and outsiders brought in... After all, it's mostly those guys who broke the law.
I agree with the above. In some benchmarking I did on the "life" algorithm, using exactly the same method to solve it (as best as the languages allowed), Java was 200-400x faster than Perl, depending on what JVM I was using. It was even faster than C sometimes (just compiled with -O though, but to be fair, I didn't use any optimisations for either...)
I've been doing web/CGI programming for 5 years, and haven't really seen any books on good programming practices for web programming, but I haven't really looked. To some extent, these would be similar to good practices in general.
However, some specific things I can think of are:
Seperate out HTML/text and code as much as possible. Ideally, there should be no, or almost no, HTML in the code. This makes life easier for the HTML designers, and also means you get bugged less to alter the code to alter the output.
Make it as simple/easy/reliable/quick/painless as possible to stop/start any server processes. I've worked on a project where we had a perl process, but stopping/restarting had some unpleasant side-effects, meaning we had to restrict doing such an operation to the quietest hours.
Make sure you have a good and accurate test environment. Having some tools to help you debug the running site itself is very usefull - retesting doing a whole load of operations by hand is very labourious.
Test and code for both availability and scaleability. You want good resiliant code with minimum service downtime (which means using reliable OSs and development enviroments - don't just choose the latest).
Make sure you can say "no" to the management. You *will* get PHBs trying to force new features on you when the current ones aren't even working right yet. Make sure your code is flexible though as it'll be changing/evolving a lot anyway. Also make sure you don't get stuck doing fire-fighting - ie stamping out so many little bugs that you can't fix the fundamental problems. (this is the kinda problem M$ has with it's code development...)
Personally, I wouldn't say that C, C++, Perl and PHP promote good programming practices. Java's certainly much better here. I'm not sure about other development environments. (don't worry about server side Java's speed as on a good server, it'll be close to C/C++. I'm not kidding.)
It's mostly the higher ups that are the ones who directed the monopolistic policies, so get rid of them, and get some new ones from outside MS - prevent the lower-downs from getting promoted too.
There's some other things they should do too of course...
Slashdot Mirror
btw, the GPLd version will be v6, which is a complete re-write according so some things I've heard. Apparantly, since the takeover, Sun have quadrupled the number of developers! btw, Sun reps have also clearly stated recently, that even with StarPortal, they expect people to be using the normal StarOffice product for many years.
Also, Sun actually have about 4 'source available' license in use - SCSL, MPL (mozila public license), the "Open Source (tm)" certified one they're using for 'technical' things like the NFS 4 release, and also the license for Solaris. This makes 5. Quite a wide range.
Not bad particularly since they haven't done much in the way of new servers or new CPUs in 2 years. (there's been some little things though...). Come on Sun - hurry up and launch the UltraSPARC-III! (would be nice to finally see just how it goes) Looks like it might come out around July or something...
Another thing to chew up - around 50% of Sun's revenue comes from systems that take 8 or more CPUs - ie the E3500, E4500, E5500, E6500 and E10000. Each one of those generates over $1Bn in revenue per year. (actually, the 2-way E250 and 4-way E450 also generate about $1Bn per year each too)
Since I came across it earlier today, I thought I might as well post it - J2SE 1.4 "Merlin" public review at the "Java Community Process". It's 59 pages long, though that's mostly because it is quite detailed. If you want to influence the direction of future Java development... now's the time - they do want response to this...
IBM triples capacity of world's smallest hard disk drive.
Nobody asked yet, but StarOffice for Mac is expected to be out by the end of the year.
Source code for StarOffice not available yet. I wonder what license Sun will use - they're using quite a few at the moment. Hopefully they'll use the MPL (Mozilla Public License) like for their "Forte for Java Community Edition" IDE.
I already read it yesterday ^-^
It's not trying to say "the x86 ISA is obsolete", far from it.
The ISA is very big and complex and doesn't actually look any simpler than the x86 ISA. The designers also seem to have pretty much missed on what a good new architecture should actually do - they concentrated on trying to maximise IPC (Instructions Per Cycle - ie how many instructions you can issue per clock cycle), when current designs have pretty much already gotten as good as practically possible. So, all that complexity to increase IPC is pretty much going to go to waste...
I'm not that surprised it's late, consumes huge amounts of power (100W at 600MHz or something), and slower than expected. Also, given that they're going to cost $2000-$4000 each, and that Intel's own Pentium 4 (Willamette) will beat it in terms of pure performance, as well as price/performance, I don't think there's going to be much demand. (and multiprocessor Athlon motherboards will be out before too long, and there's plenty of good stuff from the RISC vendors if you wish to splash out...)
Intel/HP would have been much better off doing something like the Alpha 21464 (a few years away), the MAJC (few months away), or some of IBMs recent POWER chips - already on sale. I kinda pity the poor guys who actually have to implement the design since the higher level architects seem to have introduced the concept of bloatware to chip design...
Sorry, kinda been wanting to say this for a while now.
Bill Gates will say just about anything to protect the Windows monopoly and is playing to the court of (non technical) public opinion mostly these days. He'd also tell you that Windows is 'open' if you asked - reminds me of that joke "How many Microsoft people does it take to change a lightbulb? None - they redefine dark as light".
- Just got back from the first day of JavaOne. I'm happy to say that Sun sounds like they're fairly serious about Linux support. Lots of Linux visibility at the conference, several talks and BOFs. The biggest news I heard is that Java 1.4 ("Merlin") should be released simultaneously on Windows, Solaris, and Linux.
That they'll all be simultaneous for 1.4 isn't exactly new news - they've been saying it for about 2 months now. It's also possible you might see a point release (eg J2SE 1.3.X) which is simultaneous for all 3. Btw, Sun haven't done the final release for J2SE 1.3 on Solaris yet either, and the final release for Linux is only going to be about a month later than for Solaris.J2SE 1.4 is winding it's way through the Java Community Process - see the (incomplete) specification lead.
- Yay! Pretty much all the standard J2SE and J2EE stuff should be coming out for Linux, including Hotspot (client & server), Java plug-in, etc.
Btw, the Linux beta already has HotSpot Client and Server. AFAIK the current Linux Java port is not the same code-base as the Solaris one, but they're going to merge them.- x86 releases only for now.
AFAIK Sun are leaving non x86 Linux ports to Blackdown who are already working on them...direct article link. Since it doesn't seem to be there in the blurb at the top...
This is why most 'real' benchmarks are actually a suite of tests, and the final result is just an average.
Btw, when you say "There are some things a C compiler can't optimized because of aliasing", do you literally mean it would be impossible for any (legal/correct) C compiler?
If you have a nice FFT that can easily to 'converted' to another language, I'll be happy to try it out...
I'll check it out fully sometime, but some things are definately out of date. (the authors also seem to have a flair for the dramatic) I haven't done a great deal of FP work in Java, but I'm quite happy with the results.
From what I hear, there's a big wodge of effort going into improving graphics performance for 1.4, and it's already well underway. Of course, it'll be at least a year away, *sigh*
The embedded Java market seems to be taking off though...
If you're actually running a simple chat server, then the results are okay, but Volano doesn't actually test Java optimisations very well as it spends most of it's time in pre-compiled static code, including the OS kernel.
Another post I sent in last night which quickly got rejected was this:
Unfortunately, that release came a little too late for me to do much about, though I have quickly tested the Solaris x86 (on the same hardware as the Windows tests), and the rests are pretty much identical, though Solaris was a bit faster. (but then, I was running without the desktop running which does help).
Also coming a bit too late was results from IBM's Windows 1.2.2 JDK, which I found a bit surprising - it did worse on some tests, and better on others, though I didn't have much time to test things.
Thanks for the replies... kinda makes it all worth it - it took me about 100 hours over 4 weeks to do this. (took up a lot of my evenings)
I better re-install Linux sometime so I can test on it again... (my last install stopped working for unknown reasons)
It'll probably be some time before I update the article - first I want to finish off my MAJC article, which really is too damn big. (22,000 words... ouch).
An interesting quote is this:
Having a bit of fun doing some comparisons between Java and C at the moment, and using my own charting program to show this, heh. (perhaps the most surprising result, to me anyway, is that GCC 2.95.2 kinda beats Microsoft's Visual C in the more complex tests, and MSVC is supposed to be really hot too...)
It'll be interesting to see if it becomes a campain issue...
btw, Al Gore supports the current case, so vote for him!
btw, it wasn't really the DoJ's job to fine M$ $40B, or whatever it would take to reduce their liquid assets to zero. (they have about $22B in cash and about the same in shares and similar investments). That's the job of all the ambulance chasing lawyers suing on behalf of ripped-off consumers...
btw, personally, I would like to see the current directors (and other high-level types) fired, and outsiders brought in... After all, it's mostly those guys who broke the law.
I agree with the above. In some benchmarking I did on the "life" algorithm, using exactly the same method to solve it (as best as the languages allowed), Java was 200-400x faster than Perl, depending on what JVM I was using. It was even faster than C sometimes (just compiled with -O though, but to be fair, I didn't use any optimisations for either...)
However, some specific things I can think of are:
Seperate out HTML/text and code as much as possible. Ideally, there should be no, or almost no, HTML in the code. This makes life easier for the HTML designers, and also means you get bugged less to alter the code to alter the output.
Make it as simple/easy/reliable/quick/painless as possible to stop/start any server processes. I've worked on a project where we had a perl process, but stopping/restarting had some unpleasant side-effects, meaning we had to restrict doing such an operation to the quietest hours.
Make sure you have a good and accurate test environment. Having some tools to help you debug the running site itself is very usefull - retesting doing a whole load of operations by hand is very labourious.
Test and code for both availability and scaleability. You want good resiliant code with minimum service downtime (which means using reliable OSs and development enviroments - don't just choose the latest).
Make sure you can say "no" to the management. You *will* get PHBs trying to force new features on you when the current ones aren't even working right yet. Make sure your code is flexible though as it'll be changing/evolving a lot anyway. Also make sure you don't get stuck doing fire-fighting - ie stamping out so many little bugs that you can't fix the fundamental problems. (this is the kinda problem M$ has with it's code development...)
Personally, I wouldn't say that C, C++, Perl and PHP promote good programming practices. Java's certainly much better here. I'm not sure about other development environments. (don't worry about server side Java's speed as on a good server, it'll be close to C/C++. I'm not kidding.)
There's some other things they should do too of course...