Not to mention that Solaris threads are more efficient, due to the use of thread mapping vs. kernel scheduling for all threads.
Solaris IS a better OS in many ways right now. It's less convenient to use, but runs better and is easier to debug, and has decent support, all like you said.
However, it's not the better technology that wins, it's the more common technology.
This site: http://www.booksinprint.com claims it will be live on July 5. It includes an "Add/Update in Books In Print" link which doesn't currently work.
It would be nice if there was also a free IMDB service. It used to be that IMDB would let you access their database for free. Now they refuse any access -- but they were also bought by Amazon not too long ago.
The Library of Congress apparently does not stock all books ever printed, ans one might think. I did a search for a Simpsons book (ISBN 0-06-019348-4) at their search page and got back nothing. One less reason to go to D.C. I did not try their gateway service, which seems to include a lot of Universities, which is nice, but probably also not a catalog of all books ever printed.
However, Google returned the right hit at the top when I sear ched for the ISBN number. Of coursem the top link was to an Amazon affiliate. All the other links were to amazon affiliates as well. Hmmm....
The site another poster mentioned, http://isbn.nu, is also an Amazon Affiliate run by Glenn Fleishman, a seemingly know-it-all kind of guy. They are at least a comparison-shopping service.
Ask Jeeves just returns a short list of places like Amazon and Borders when asked "where can I search for books by ISBN number." When asked, "What is an ISBN number," -- which includes intresting information such as how place of origin is encoded into the number (a 0 or 1 as the first digit means 'english-speaking country', 4 is Japan, 9963 means Cyprus, etc). Here is an interesting bit (emphasis mine):
Do I need an ISBN?
If you want to make any sales to bookstores, you need to have an ISBN. If you want people to be able to find your book in the Books in Print directory, you need an ISBN. If you are publishing a book, odds are that not having one will do nothing but hurt your sales.
Anyone know why that is?
One thing I've not found is how ISBNs came to be, who governs them -- i.e., is it a government-regulated thing or it more like Dun & Bradstreet numbers? Might be an interesting answer in light of the quote above.
Funny how Sun's operating systems used to be open source. SunOS was BSD -- they even gave you a compiler and the kernel source. Bill Joy wrote the BSD license -- which later proved to his benefit when he founded Sun.
Now the latest incarnation of their OS -- Solaris 8 or 9 or 2.9 or 3.14159256 or whatever -- is "opening" a little, ahtough SCSL is hardly an open source license. It's more of a way to contaminate other companies' "clean rooms" -- you can peek at it, but can't change it. Once you peek at it, you're infected with Sun Intellectual Property and should be careful about "appropriating" their ideas in your own code. If you do change the Solaris source, you have to give it to Sun to lock in a vault at the bottom of the atlantic ocean right next to the secret underwater illuminati bowling alley. Okay, so maybe they'll actually include changes in the next release or patch or whatever -- let's say they do -- you still won't own copyright or anything about your code. You have to get permission from Sun to distribute your changes. With GPL, you at least retain rights to what you do. With SCSL, you become unpaid employees of Sun Microsystems.
I'm dogging on SCSL here, but there is at least one nice thing about it, if they ever actually release the source: people writing programs for Solaris can at least look in the code to see why the published APIs are acting all funny, or to see how to best interface with the Solaris VFS, etc.
That's more than we can say for Microsoft. Not a whole lot more, but more.
Solaris is a nice enough OS. I wish it had some Linux-type features, such as/etc/ld/so.conf. But it scales well, and these days the price is right (free for 8 processors). UltraSparc processors perform a little more poorly than current x86, PPC and Alpha processors, though, and Solaris x86 is kind of a joke.
With Linux running on pretty much all of the commodity hardware these days (not as much as NetBSD, though, I think), I think it stands to become the standard Unix. Companies are probably more afraid to contribute to BSD systems than GPL ones, because competitors can snatch up their BSD-licensed code and use it against them via closed-source products. With GPL, companies cannot take the code private, so the original developers' IP is protected better.
It will be nice to have Unix largely unified again. There will always be special versions -- that's part of the beauty of Unix. Cary's UniCOS and other variants for special hardware will probably exist for a long time, because they're designed to take advantage of specific hardware. But the alure of a single API -- write once, compile and run anywhere -- is very tempting. IBM's even making Linux available on its 390 machines. BSD includes linux emulation, as does Solaris.
Must be a new Microsoft tactic... I suppose they chose the "linux" topic because there is no "penguins" topic. Or "enviro" topic -- which would be nice, btw.
Slashdot Mirror
I didn't realize Sun would pay for and seek permission to distribute patches. Neat!
Not to mention that Solaris threads are more efficient, due to the use of thread mapping vs. kernel scheduling for all threads.
Solaris IS a better OS in many ways right now. It's less convenient to use, but runs better and is easier to debug, and has decent support, all like you said.
However, it's not the better technology that wins, it's the more common technology.
It would be nice if there was also a free IMDB service. It used to be that IMDB would let you access their database for free. Now they refuse any access -- but they were also bought by Amazon not too long ago.
The Library of Congress apparently does not stock all books ever printed, ans one might think. I did a search for a Simpsons book (ISBN 0-06-019348-4) at their search page and got back nothing. One less reason to go to D.C. I did not try their gateway service, which seems to include a lot of Universities, which is nice, but probably also not a catalog of all books ever printed.
However, Google returned the right hit at the top when I sear ched for the ISBN number. Of coursem the top link was to an Amazon affiliate. All the other links were to amazon affiliates as well. Hmmm....
The site another poster mentioned, http://isbn.nu, is also an Amazon Affiliate run by Glenn Fleishman, a seemingly know-it-all kind of guy. They are at least a comparison-shopping service.
Ask Jeeves just returns a short list of places like Amazon and Borders when asked "where can I search for books by ISBN number." When asked, "What is an ISBN number," -- which includes intresting information such as how place of origin is encoded into the number (a 0 or 1 as the first digit means 'english-speaking country', 4 is Japan, 9963 means Cyprus, etc). Here is an interesting bit (emphasis mine): Anyone know why that is?
One thing I've not found is how ISBNs came to be, who governs them -- i.e., is it a government-regulated thing or it more like Dun & Bradstreet numbers? Might be an interesting answer in light of the quote above.
Funny how Sun's operating systems used to be open source. SunOS was BSD -- they even gave you a compiler and the kernel source. Bill Joy wrote the BSD license -- which later proved to his benefit when he founded Sun.
/etc/ld/so.conf. But it scales well, and these days the price is right (free for 8 processors). UltraSparc processors perform a little more poorly than current x86, PPC and Alpha processors, though, and Solaris x86 is kind of a joke.
Now the latest incarnation of their OS -- Solaris 8 or 9 or 2.9 or 3.14159256 or whatever -- is "opening" a little, ahtough SCSL is hardly an open source license. It's more of a way to contaminate other companies' "clean rooms" -- you can peek at it, but can't change it. Once you peek at it, you're infected with Sun Intellectual Property and should be careful about "appropriating" their ideas in your own code. If you do change the Solaris source, you have to give it to Sun to lock in a vault at the bottom of the atlantic ocean right next to the secret underwater illuminati bowling alley. Okay, so maybe they'll actually include changes in the next release or patch or whatever -- let's say they do -- you still won't own copyright or anything about your code. You have to get permission from Sun to distribute your changes. With GPL, you at least retain rights to what you do. With SCSL, you become unpaid employees of Sun Microsystems.
I'm dogging on SCSL here, but there is at least one nice thing about it, if they ever actually release the source: people writing programs for Solaris can at least look in the code to see why the published APIs are acting all funny, or to see how to best interface with the Solaris VFS, etc.
That's more than we can say for Microsoft. Not a whole lot more, but more.
Solaris is a nice enough OS. I wish it had some Linux-type features, such as
With Linux running on pretty much all of the commodity hardware these days (not as much as NetBSD, though, I think), I think it stands to become the standard Unix. Companies are probably more afraid to contribute to BSD systems than GPL ones, because competitors can snatch up their BSD-licensed code and use it against them via closed-source products. With GPL, companies cannot take the code private, so the original developers' IP is protected better.
It will be nice to have Unix largely unified again. There will always be special versions -- that's part of the beauty of Unix. Cary's UniCOS and other variants for special hardware will probably exist for a long time, because they're designed to take advantage of specific hardware. But the alure of a single API -- write once, compile and run anywhere -- is very tempting. IBM's even making Linux available on its 390 machines. BSD includes linux emulation, as does Solaris.
Good times!
I think "Delerium" would work nicely...
It's well known that Yahoo runs on FreeBSD. Now its search engine will run on Linux. Tell that to people who ask "is it good enough?"
Must be a new Microsoft tactic... I suppose they chose the "linux" topic because there is no "penguins" topic. Or "enviro" topic -- which would be nice, btw.