I think it's been obvious for years, now, that Sun's motivation is: toppling Microsoft while being competitive against IBM, HP, Dell, SGI, etc.
The Java Desktop System, plus the Java Enterprise System (aka Sun ONE), plus Solaris, plus Java is their portfolio to this end. You say only Java, but taken together Sun's product line is very formidable. For example, I'd still choose Solaris x86 on some servers without regretting it, and, then, using Linux where Linux-specific (read lazily programmed and non-portable) software is needed.
And flea markets, and selling your friend your lawnmower, and basically everything for the poor, and the arguably-innocent black-markets for some drugs, and pawn shops, and prostitution...
You know, anyone who tries to make these things mandatory definitely has an agenda, because anyone else wouldn't care one way or another.
because Ancient Hebrew the word for "day" could be translated several ways and somebody picked "day" instead of "era" or "eon".
I also seem to remember that the Hebrew word for God doesn't imply a gender, yet the translators chose to call God "He." Just a matter of word choice that causes centuries of social turmoil.
I think this is the first time I've ever been glad that America is over-run by fundamentalist Christians...
Well, there is a religion-agnostic way, too. It's called Freedom. People who really care about Freedom would never require any other person to carry an implanted ID.
What stops people now from rummaging through your garbage, finding your bank statements, and draining your bank accounts?
A shredder...or an incinerator for the really paranoid.
For example, with separate-from-body devices, all it takes is some responsibility to control them. A quick call to a bank, a second to shred something, keeping different passwords on each account, being suspicious of e-mail or phone calls soliciting information, etc. If I want to dispense of a credit card, all I need to do is call the bank and cut the card into 100 pieces...what if the card is in my arm???
What is so terribly sad is that many people don't do this. They'd rather live on borrowed money and face the consequences later. It's irresponsible. It's pathetic. Quite honestly, I wouldn't be suprised if it leads to another Great Depression.
1) What happens when it is obselete? 2) How many people will get infections at the implant site? 3) How long until every doorway and chair at a person's workplace has transducers in them tracking employees at an unprecedented level? 4) When it is cracked, what then? 5) How does this fit into the Fourth Amendment? 6) How about the Fifth Amendment?
Don't reinvent the wheel unless there's a good reason for it.
I agree, but the problem I saw was basically a project buying a new wheel, ignoring the user's manual (or just reading chapter 1), and then being clueless and defensive when they got a flat. Sadly, I think this is pretty common in software projects.
Another problem I've run into is when complex frameworks are adopted and then the project can't keep up with the evolution of those frameworks. When the project can't afford more than a couple developers, having the OS, some primary applications, and a couple frameworks all go through two or three major revisions during development, when they want to be able to sell a fairly modern package, can become unbearable. Salespeople feel awkward pitching a two or three year old platform. Clearly, this project is underfunded for its complexity, but I feel that taking a slightly more home-grown approach initially would have mitigated a lot of the uncontrolled obselesence.
Well, I've driven past it once; does that count? The mirrored windows hide that there is actually a stable inside complete with hay piles, manure shovels, and a shearing booth.
And how do you know that engineers didnt speak up?
What would be interesting is finding out the rate of turnover at Diebold. The people who aren't sheep find a way out, while the losers who gain tenure move up the ladder. I'd bet that a project that smells as bad as their voting machines is a high-turnover project with most of the work done by fresh sprouts from college (at least, then, they have ignorance in their defense).
Please let me know somewhere that I can lounge around doing nothing all day w/o the need for money.
Well, work is necessary, with or without money. Corn comes the result of hard work, as does fresh meat, and readily-available fresh water. Money merely abstracts the bartering that would otherwise occur.
As far as doing nothing, you can vote for a Democrat and sit and watch the country decompose from the inside out as tax pressures balloon out of control (hint: this is not an argument for any Republican canidates...I need to say this because of the strictly polarized idea of politics most people have).
SPARC and UNIX are not proprietary, yet there are proprietary implementations of those families of standards. The vendors of those implementations most definitely provide as much support as your wallet can handle, even for Linux. As for source, Sun made Solaris 8 source available to those who wanted it, only you needed their compiler to build it.
Sun isn't Microsoft, by any measure. Sun's architectures and interfaces are more open than anything from Intel and Microsoft combined.
Exactly, because if we used Zetabyte, we would most certainly get sued by Mrs. Jones (or slapped with a restraining order if we took "byte" literally. Yum.)
Sheesh, these things are already implemented by most sysadmins.
My impression of dtrace is that is allows sysadmins to implement even better and finer grained tools. One example provided by a Sun engineer was about tracking down very short-lived processes that were causing a system slowdown (very hard to detect with regular ps-like tools and top).
The other features are both catch-up and leap-frog. Also, how many new deployments of HP-UX are there? Further, Linux really doesn't have all the features of Solaris or aren't as well tested or supported in the deployed configurations (how many Linux kernel developers really do have racks and racks of fibre channel arrays sitting in their living rooms? I know IBM is changing this somewhat, but it'll take time).
(Which, for those of you who don't know, has CDE for its GUI which is basically the motif interface from more than 12 years ago largely unchanged!)
When you buy Solaris, you do it for the kernel, the hardware support, and some of the tools, but not the GUI. GNOME will change this somewhat, but fundamentally, the nice things about Solaris are really invisible to the end-user (i.e., the user will probably take for granted the lack of crashes and the generally graceful degradation of performance as utilization approaches 100%).
it's no longer necessary to even think about writing low-level code.
Well, what's even funnier is that this is pretty much the exact same thing people said about Fortran and, then, C.
When people say things like "finally you don't need to write low level code," they are really advertising how ignorant they are about software engineering and history.
One open, free frameworks it's often fixed before you even know about it.
It should be stressed that frameworks are most helpful when they are open-sourced. Fixing the bug first and, then, notifying the maintainers later is something that really saved my ass once.
Since they do stuff you were going to do anyway, they can save tons of development time.
This is the ideal, but it doesn't always work out in practice. From what I've seen in the real world, a common thing is to adopt a framework, like Struts or J2EE, then think it isn't necessary to really study it and learn its nuances, then look confused when the application breaks and is very hard to debug due to the two or three extra layers of software. The result is a bunch of programmers pointing fingers until enough time passes for the issue to more or less become forgotten until the next breakage reminds everyone creating a new round of finger pointing and forgetfulness. There seems to be a desire among programmers to adopt a framework because it feels like a good thing to do, even if their appliction would be perfectly suited by a "primitive" or "obselete" CGI program in perl or C or even just using JSPs without all the baggage of servlets and beans.
Sheep are free, too, when they aren't inside a fence and the domain of a shepherd.
Sure the engineers at Diebold could leave if they wanted, but employment where real thought isn't required and no one cares about quality is addictive to people who don't want a real job but need that paycheck twice a month.
In the US we stress problem solving above all else
Then why do so many Americans completely freeze up whenever independent thought is required? If you trace how people are socialized (not just in the US), a lot of people simply do what their daddy says or their pastor says or what their boss says or what the good ol' pres of the USA says. Many people are just like sheep, only less intelligent.
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I am curious about Sun's motivation.
I think it's been obvious for years, now, that Sun's motivation is: toppling Microsoft while being competitive against IBM, HP, Dell, SGI, etc.
The Java Desktop System, plus the Java Enterprise System (aka Sun ONE), plus Solaris, plus Java is their portfolio to this end. You say only Java, but taken together Sun's product line is very formidable. For example, I'd still choose Solaris x86 on some servers without regretting it, and, then, using Linux where Linux-specific (read lazily programmed and non-portable) software is needed.
What about people who have more than one credit/debit card??
Just imagine a person who is really into body piercings. I'd say your eyebrow is good for at least a dozen credit accounts.
This elimiates the anonymous purchase.
And flea markets, and selling your friend your lawnmower, and basically everything for the poor, and the arguably-innocent black-markets for some drugs, and pawn shops, and prostitution...
You know, anyone who tries to make these things mandatory definitely has an agenda, because anyone else wouldn't care one way or another.
because Ancient Hebrew the word for "day" could be translated several ways and somebody picked "day" instead of "era" or "eon".
I also seem to remember that the Hebrew word for God doesn't imply a gender, yet the translators chose to call God "He." Just a matter of word choice that causes centuries of social turmoil.
I think this is the first time I've ever been glad that America is over-run by fundamentalist Christians...
Well, there is a religion-agnostic way, too. It's called Freedom. People who really care about Freedom would never require any other person to carry an implanted ID.
What stops people now from rummaging through your garbage, finding your bank statements, and draining your bank accounts?
A shredder...or an incinerator for the really paranoid.
For example, with separate-from-body devices, all it takes is some responsibility to control them. A quick call to a bank, a second to shred something, keeping different passwords on each account, being suspicious of e-mail or phone calls soliciting information, etc. If I want to dispense of a credit card, all I need to do is call the bank and cut the card into 100 pieces...what if the card is in my arm???
Pay your credit card off every month.
What is so terribly sad is that many people don't do this. They'd rather live on borrowed money and face the consequences later. It's irresponsible. It's pathetic. Quite honestly, I wouldn't be suprised if it leads to another Great Depression.
1) What happens when it is obselete?
2) How many people will get infections at the implant site?
3) How long until every doorway and chair at a person's workplace has transducers in them tracking employees at an unprecedented level?
4) When it is cracked, what then?
5) How does this fit into the Fourth Amendment?
6) How about the Fifth Amendment?
Don't reinvent the wheel unless there's a good reason for it.
I agree, but the problem I saw was basically a project buying a new wheel, ignoring the user's manual (or just reading chapter 1), and then being clueless and defensive when they got a flat. Sadly, I think this is pretty common in software projects.
Another problem I've run into is when complex frameworks are adopted and then the project can't keep up with the evolution of those frameworks. When the project can't afford more than a couple developers, having the OS, some primary applications, and a couple frameworks all go through two or three major revisions during development, when they want to be able to sell a fairly modern package, can become unbearable. Salespeople feel awkward pitching a two or three year old platform. Clearly, this project is underfunded for its complexity, but I feel that taking a slightly more home-grown approach initially would have mitigated a lot of the uncontrolled obselesence.
You still need to understand how the code works inorder to utilize it properly.
And to debug bugs in the inconveniently-opaque-yet-it-felt-so-right framework.
Well, I've driven past it once; does that count? The mirrored windows hide that there is actually a stable inside complete with hay piles, manure shovels, and a shearing booth.
And how do you know that engineers didnt speak up?
What would be interesting is finding out the rate of turnover at Diebold. The people who aren't sheep find a way out, while the losers who gain tenure move up the ladder. I'd bet that a project that smells as bad as their voting machines is a high-turnover project with most of the work done by fresh sprouts from college (at least, then, they have ignorance in their defense).
exabyte...zettabyte...yottabyte
Interesting, they went from greek to Southern.
Every competent Solaris admin has a spare nutsack as a hotswap.
The best part is that my wife believed me when I told her this! She thinks I'm the smartest bestest Solaris admin, ever!
Please let me know somewhere that I can lounge around doing nothing all day w/o the need for money.
Well, work is necessary, with or without money. Corn comes the result of hard work, as does fresh meat, and readily-available fresh water. Money merely abstracts the bartering that would otherwise occur.
As far as doing nothing, you can vote for a Democrat and sit and watch the country decompose from the inside out as tax pressures balloon out of control (hint: this is not an argument for any Republican canidates...I need to say this because of the strictly polarized idea of politics most people have).
SPARC and UNIX are not proprietary, yet there are proprietary implementations of those families of standards. The vendors of those implementations most definitely provide as much support as your wallet can handle, even for Linux. As for source, Sun made Solaris 8 source available to those who wanted it, only you needed their compiler to build it.
Sun isn't Microsoft, by any measure. Sun's architectures and interfaces are more open than anything from Intel and Microsoft combined.
That's "Zettabyte", guys, not "Zetabyte"...
Exactly, because if we used Zetabyte, we would most certainly get sued by Mrs. Jones (or slapped with a restraining order if we took "byte" literally. Yum.)
Microsoft completely rewrote the core stack for Windows 95.
Why is it that I can't tell whether this was meant to imply progress?
Sheesh, these things are already implemented by most sysadmins.
My impression of dtrace is that is allows sysadmins to implement even better and finer grained tools. One example provided by a Sun engineer was about tracking down very short-lived processes that were causing a system slowdown (very hard to detect with regular ps-like tools and top).
The other features are both catch-up and leap-frog. Also, how many new deployments of HP-UX are there? Further, Linux really doesn't have all the features of Solaris or aren't as well tested or supported in the deployed configurations (how many Linux kernel developers really do have racks and racks of fibre channel arrays sitting in their living rooms? I know IBM is changing this somewhat, but it'll take time).
(Which, for those of you who don't know, has CDE for its GUI which is basically the motif interface from more than 12 years ago largely unchanged!)
When you buy Solaris, you do it for the kernel, the hardware support, and some of the tools, but not the GUI. GNOME will change this somewhat, but fundamentally, the nice things about Solaris are really invisible to the end-user (i.e., the user will probably take for granted the lack of crashes and the generally graceful degradation of performance as utilization approaches 100%).
it's no longer necessary to even think about writing low-level code.
Well, what's even funnier is that this is pretty much the exact same thing people said about Fortran and, then, C.
When people say things like "finally you don't need to write low level code," they are really advertising how ignorant they are about software engineering and history.
One open, free frameworks it's often fixed before you even know about it.
It should be stressed that frameworks are most helpful when they are open-sourced. Fixing the bug first and, then, notifying the maintainers later is something that really saved my ass once.
Since they do stuff you were going to do anyway, they can save tons of development time.
This is the ideal, but it doesn't always work out in practice. From what I've seen in the real world, a common thing is to adopt a framework, like Struts or J2EE, then think it isn't necessary to really study it and learn its nuances, then look confused when the application breaks and is very hard to debug due to the two or three extra layers of software. The result is a bunch of programmers pointing fingers until enough time passes for the issue to more or less become forgotten until the next breakage reminds everyone creating a new round of finger pointing and forgetfulness. There seems to be a desire among programmers to adopt a framework because it feels like a good thing to do, even if their appliction would be perfectly suited by a "primitive" or "obselete" CGI program in perl or C or even just using JSPs without all the baggage of servlets and beans.
Sheep are free, too, when they aren't inside a fence and the domain of a shepherd.
Sure the engineers at Diebold could leave if they wanted, but employment where real thought isn't required and no one cares about quality is addictive to people who don't want a real job but need that paycheck twice a month.
In the US we stress problem solving above all else
Then why do so many Americans completely freeze up whenever independent thought is required? If you trace how people are socialized (not just in the US), a lot of people simply do what their daddy says or their pastor says or what their boss says or what the good ol' pres of the USA says. Many people are just like sheep, only less intelligent.