Well you seem to forget that the reason linux needs all the GUI tools is because it is trying to compete on the desktop market against Windows and Mac0S. Solaris isn't. It is meant to run mission critical apps on 106 cpu server and engineering apps on workstations not play DVDS or Games. So you are comparing apples to oranges.
A better comparison would be how has solaris improved and an OS in performance, scalability, stability? Lets see since 2.5 solaris has added support for 64 bit, COMA/NUMA, >64 cpu scaling, Dynamic Reconfiguration support etc to name a few. Which are more important to Sun's real customers than an installer that fancy features or if gnome has many beta quality apps as linux distros.
Let's see linux has only been able to boot on a 32 way NUMA-Q system with a preemptible kernel so far with the 2.5 kernel, boot!= perform without race conditions. Solaris has been running mission critical apps with a fully preemptible kernel on >64 way systems for more than 5 years now.
So solaris has improved leaps and bounds since 2.5 but just not in the way you wanted. But in a way customers who will pay millions wanted!!
I think it is the other way around SCSI drives are dumb but their HBAs (Host Bus Adapters) are smart. IDE drives are smart but thier HBAs are dumb. IDE is Integrated Drive Electronics. I am not sure if either takes more CPU time because if the controllers are doing DMA, cpu shouldn't be an issue.It is very controller dependent.
The problem with IDE is that it was designed to be a low cost PC class device and therefore reliability,quality and scalability were not paramount design decisions. SCSI was built for servers. Now in the present economic times people want cheaper but reliable drives. So the push for IDE in the server market and an effort from the manufacturers to increase performance, reliability and also scalability(SATA).
Manufacturers are now trying to balance cost and quality now to enter the entrylevel and midlevel server market. IDE drives usually have a MTBF of about 300,000 hrs where as SCSI drives would be 1.2million hours+. The drive in this review seems to have about the same MTBF as a SCSI drive. So the target market is clear, from WD's perspective.
>> Solaris (not SunOS) NFS support until 2.6 was crap. Solaris is SunOS + Environment.
"I had to be a design authotity on something like 100+ Netra T1s with Solaris running the most elementary services like DNS, news, mail, etc. And frankly I have not seen so many hardware failures and memory leaks in the core OS anytime before and anytime after."
Really do you have bug IDs for those memory leaks. How many of those hundred units did fail and what components. Every manufacturer has a failure rate, did the hard disks fail? CPU? memory?
"Basically white boxes from a bandit corner shop have lower failure rate and most linux kernels in the 2.3.x and 2.5.x series were more reliable."
I doubt that, parts OEMs like Sun and other companies usually use are of a higher quality than the ones you can buy as a consumer. This info comes from my dealing with my dealings with seagate and other drive vendors.
Your post looks like it is biased towards linux. Solaris has a industry wide acceptance of being stable.
Our school switched to dell running linux from HP/HP-UX. Our mail server which used to run for hundreds of days at a time hardly stays up for a few days anymore. Our DHCP/DNS server running on an ultra1/Solaris 2.6 has been running with many year uptimes.
Heck even Aceshardware is running the entire website on one SunBlade-100. Linux has its strong points and weak points just like another OS does.
The first site is pakistani which rules it out. I would gladly send you a few hundred accounts of women being treated much worse in pakistan. A majority of the others you point out are muslim sites which also rule them out. Do you know how they treat women in parts of the muslim world? Have you heard of female genital mutilation? Lastly one of them is written by a beef lover who obviously can't fathom the idea that he can't eat all the cows in india.
In fact a lot of the sites you pointed out look madeup.
I dare you to find pork in an islamic country. And what about snake worshippers in the US.
There is a lot of criticizim about the ranking many of them are relevant points. But to talk about the freedom of press in the US. A few months ago it became glaringly obvious to me how narrow minded and conservative the US press really is.
One incident in recent times, There were large protests against Bush's war on terror in San Francisco and New York with 20,000+ protestors each a few weekends ago. There was a 400,000 person protest in england with many many important people speaking thier minds against the war at each of these events. Not one word about this was mentioned in any of the mainstream US media. Tim Robbins (actor) spoke out against the war in the New York protest and he didn't get any coverage. Where as CNN covered Spielberg and Tom Curise who were pro-war.
I it is hilarious when the name of a cat rescued by a firefighter is mentioned on CNN but the name of a person who pulled out three people to safety from a minivan that crashed into the ocean is unmentioned.
Why a a cat rescue is news worthy? Why do events from the rest of the world hardly ever get a mention? It seems as if there is nothing happening in the rest of the world when you live in the US. A major train collison in say China/ India is less newsworthy than a cat stuck in a tree!!!!
I have lived in the middle east in Kuwait and oman. We used to get BBC world and CNN in Oman. It is very blatantly obvious how sensationalized and ridiculous the news is in the US. Even countries that are placed lowest on the list have a news around the world section. I live in the US for the past 6 years.
Most Americans are ignorant about the rest of the world. It is very evident in the colleges of this country where time and again I have been asked stupid and ignorant questions about India and the Middle East by so called educated people.
This looks like more of an issue with your manager and you, not Sun. Sun does ban certain applications and OSes but what you are claiming here isn't true. My friend who works for Iplanet uses his windows box more than his solaris box. I work for sun too and my group or manager doesn't have any such rules.
No one forces any one to use vi at sun, you can always use anything you want. I have gedit, kate, emacs, gvim.... and a few text editors installed and use any of them I wish. all of the above are comparable to if not better than most windows based text editors.
A creative person can be creative with anything. You sound like the proverb "A bad workman always complains about his tools".
I work for Sun and have my own office( no cubicle) and my own workstation because my job requires it.I work on Solaris drivers and cannot be displaced from my lab. I am not pressured to not use a laptop or a mac(my group owns a windows laptop, I would never use it for work just for testing new devices by choice not pressure). I was encouraged to try out linux on SPARC and many opensource tools to evaluate them.
SlashChick's coments do not reflect Sun's work culture. She seems like a person who gets into a comfort zone and won't adapt to new surroundings. If a developer understands the language he/she codes in, a piece of paper and a pen is all it takes to be creative. Creative minds don't leave because they don't have the tools they are used to, they improvise.
If they support Solaris, then they can make the rules - but watch as their market shares erodes thanks to that "cheap, open system".
What cheap open system are you talking about. Intel x86??? how is sparc and less open than x86? have you visited http://www.sparc.org lately.
Now that AMD is whoring to microsoft for sledgehamer. Who else is left to compete in the market place. Intel and IA64. Do you think IA64 is open just because multiple vendors are putting it in thier boxes. Or is SPARC open because anyone can get the spec and implement it.
Anti virus companies deemed terrorist by the Bush administration.
Three US anti-virus software makers failed to comply with the FBI on its key logging software called Magic Lantern. Magic lantern will help the FBI track and hunt down terrorists (Hackers). The Pentagon claims that these companies are harboring terrorist and might be targets in the war against terrorism.
Symantec, McAffee and Network Associates have joined the list along with Somalia, Iraq and North Korea as targets of America's new war on terrorism president bush said yesterday.
"calling the Matrix spiritual and plot-laden is ridiculous. How is "Programmer finds out that the world is an illusion and that he is humanity's digital messiah" so much deeper than "Man finds out that alternate dimension version of himself is killing all the others to steal their power"?"
The Matrix
The concept that the world is and illusion is the fundamental belief of Hinduism and Buddhism. Therefore teh matrix draws parallels to those religions and the concept of a messiah is not new to Judaism, christianity or Islam therefore drwing parallels to those religions. Jesus was a carpenter, Mohhamad was a shepard and neo is a programmer. See any similarities here.
The one ( haven't seen it but read the reviews)
Talks about 124 multiverses and killing one person in each of the multiverses distributes the power of that person to his parallels in the others. So if the bad jet li kills all 123 of his clones he becomes the one and as strong as 123 men.
Need I say more. That the matrix was a good movie that gave the laymen insite into philosophical topics that have baffled philosophers for centuries. The One on the other hand is a bunch of SCi-Fi garbage with no basis either in theology, philosophy or science.
Please india has a very big market for PCs. You can buy a decent PC(600 celeron) with sound and speakers for $600(Rs.28000). Many people in India have PCs at home and many are able to afford it.
Have you ever visited India to make that generalization? Are you aware of the buying potential of individuals in that country?
>>The real reason to object to the mass importation of H1B IT workers is that it is ruining the education system in this country, distorting the employment marketplace, and destroying the attractiveness of technical careers in the minds of the youth in this country.
How So? Making unfounded claims is not what educated people do, where is the proof to back up this claim??????
Do you seriously think that you would have had such an explosion in the US economy and Tech industry if no H1-B visas were ever issued.
Look again, I can show you that nearly 40% of employees in big shot companies like Intel, Microsoft, Sun Microsystems and Cisco are or were H1-B visa holders from India or China. The pentium chips lead designer was an Indian and hotmail was started by an Indian to name a few. I don't this the above named comapnies would be where they are today if it were not for the H1-B visa and guess what neither would the US economy. This article would never have been published or would have been titled "IT labor shortage: REAL".
>>Who wants to become a computer programmer when you are going to be working in a group of expatriats?
You and your Ancestors came to this country about 200 years ago as expatriats or should I say parasites.
>>What is the potential for long term career advancement when you are in that sort of atmosphere?
Atmosphere?? What people 10 times smarter than you, around you, that makes you feel stupid and write such narrow minded posts.
>>In reality is it any different than saying that you want to become a farm worker and compete with illegal immigrants in their labor market?
If the Illegal Immigrant is smarter and more interested in working why not, Surrvival of the fittest. If you have more right to stay in this country because you were born here then native americans have more right to live here than you do, ethically speaking.Moreover H1-B's are not illegal.
Discalimer: I usualy do not right narrow minded emails such as this but, it drives me up the wall when people write without analyzing the situation at hand.
I think People Don't really get mozilla. Mozilla is a cross platform tools set. Mozilla is proving its tools set by building a browser with it. The fact that you have many browsers and file managers using gecko as thier rendering engine is proof of Mozilla's success. For Example, chameleon,galeon, Nautilus.......to name a few
Kde is not completely cross platform. Mozilla is. Mozilla is a great product that was built from scratch with long term goals in mind. Kde uses Qt for thier widget set which is already stable. Mozilla created a new cross platform widget set.
Nothing went wrong with mozilla? Something is wrong with people not understanding software development. People want it and they want it now. That's not how the world works. If you want a baby you got to wait for 9 months you cant expect to concieve and give birth to a child in one week( as Humans atleast).
As far as i can see this tool violates the GPL as gcc violates the GPL by targeting executables to various ISA. These tools inform the compatibility of thier apps between Linux and Solaris. The score tool I think converts all the system calls and library routines from linux to Solaris, atleast asmuch as it can. And tells you about stuff that is incompatible.
Am I violating the GPL if look at a piece of GPL C code and translate it bug for bug to PASCAL compile a binary and only distribute it? I think the license applys to the original code and not a derivative of the code.
from the Solaris Developer Connection website.
Solaris--Linux Compatibility Tools
June 21, 1999
Score--Application Compatibility
Overview
The score utility analyzes C and C++ source files to determine what needs to be done to make them compatible with Solaris.
Score provides a quick way to estimate the total effort required, and to identify the compatibility issues in your source files.
Score enables developers to print various reports, depending on the options given. These reports can either estimate the effort required, or give detailed information about the specific changes needed.
How Score Works
The score tool works by parsing C/C++ source code files. In the process, score identifies all function calls and looks them up in an issue database.
Solaris--Linux Compatibility Tools
June 21, 1999
Scriptran - Script Compatibility
Overview
The scriptran utility scans your shell scripts and reports any compatibility issues caused by differences between Linux and Solaris.
Passing shell scripts through the scriptran filter will identify most issues.
How scriptran Works
Scriptran scans Bourne shell scripts looking for calls to system commands. Each command is checked for the following conditions:
Command is unavailable on Solaris.
Command is in a different location and the location is not in the user's path.
Command uses a flag which does not exist on Solaris.
Command uses a flag which has different functionality on Solaris than Linux.
Output of a command is different and is redirected.
Newtons Laws are not inventions or creations they are discoveries. Music, art, literature and any thing that is created of invented is intellectual property.
I am personally sick of all the cry babies that want others hard work for free and want it very well knowing that they can not do anything better or come up with any thing radically new. Nothing the open source world has come out with is radically new. Open source and FSF were started to provide clones of commercial software from free. Examples, Linux is a UNIX clone (From the Linux kernel source README file), Gnapster, Licq. Almost everything the open source world has produced has a closed source commercial product that came out before it.This is a fact and there is no denying it.
Don't get me wrong I am all for open source. I am posting this from Mozilla running on Linux and Linux is all I run. But I am getting tired of this Open source ego and bitching. No one has the right to demand something from someone when they don't want to give it up. Make something better and then compete fairly.
Operating systems and environments
on
Is UNIX An OS?
·
· Score: 1
I think there is a big confusion between an operating system(OS) and an operating environment(OE). Since the article chooses to use Sun as an example, Sun ever since they released Solaris has always called it an OE and the OS layer was always and even now is SunOS 5.X. Solaris is SunOS+ X windows+CDE+DT apps+Services.
OSes by fundamental definition is the software that manages resources (hardware and software). All the GUI layer abstactions are not required to manage hardware and software there fore UNIX was and always will be an OS.
MacOS X is an enivronment for programs to run,share data and code. MacOS X is a graphical shell with a set of APIs(carbon,cocoa, quicktime. OpenGL...) for user level programs to use and be developed on. This shell runs on the unix kernel/OS.
OSes have applications on many places other than the desktop for example RTOSes,embedded OS's, Server OSes, none of this fit the paradigm of MacOS X or Windows. To think that the desktop is the only place for an OS is very narrow minded. Thus the author doesn't really understand OSes.
Fred Moody is the author of I Sing the Body Electronic: A Year with Microsoft on the Multimedia Frontier and of The Visionary Position: The Inside Story of the Digital Dreamers Who Made Virtual Reality a Reality. His column appears on alternate Wednesdays.
What made IE so Succesfull and capture the mass market? Microsoft's huge marketing machine.
Microsoft basically put IE on everyones desktop you had no choice. AOL put IE on your desktops too. Now Netscape has a huge marketing machine as well,AOL. If AOL chooses to switch browsers 23 million people are going to be running netscape 6.0. Why? because they don't care as long as the can do what they want to do. Now that will put a huge dent in IE's market. What about Internet appliances, mobile computing, Unix Linux and the whole load of platforms that netscape/mozilla supports.
Basic functionality is a relative thing? If mozilla has to capture the end user into switching to it, It has to have something that IE doesnot. If Mozilla didn't have a pasword manager, form completer, auto complete and other stuff that IE already has and people have come to use everyday. Nobody will swtich to it. Mail, News, Composer and all that are a part of communicator. If they suddenly ditched all the pieces that made communicator and just released navigator they risk loosing the faithful user base that uses these tools daily.
I think that the mozilla team is extremely focused and are doing an excellent job. They came up with a completely new technology, tools and a pretty close communicator in two years. That is an accomplishment in its self. They broke away from the evils of porting to a million platforms and APIs and came up with tools that will make netscapwe 7.0 easier and faster on a tonne of platforms. All that in two years and a skeletal team, management changes and a loss of 1500 developers, is an achievement.
patience people. I am posting this from a nightly build of 07302000 and It has reached a long way from when it started. All the best mozilla, excellent work.
I have a crapy graphics card so my whole computer is a piece of crap!!!
Just because UNIX lacks in some resuable code in it's graphical shell it sucks. What about the fact that I can do almost everything i need to maintain a system over a serial port.
Unix needs a lot of changes inorder to become a desktop OS. UNIX was designed for mainframes Three decades ago. X and desktops came into existence decades afterwards. Miguel's analogy is like saying a 1960 automobile doesnot have airbags so it sucks. But the basic engine and chasis design is the same only todays cars have improvements.
Resuable code.... Just count the number of OSes out there that were built using a UNIX kernel.UNIX must have done something right.
I wouldn't say X sucks, I would say X is too old for todays standards. Just like a PDP11 is old by today's standard.
What the *nix world needs a newer grphical shell that defines a standard API that people can utilize. You can write all the Window Managers you want as long as you confirm to that API.
The API should include: 1) Unified standard printing architecture. 2) Resuable components for the primary functions of applications. 3) a standard for user interface (menu options e.t.c) Like edit->prefrences and not tools->options and file properties and every other place . 4) A standard method for software installation. Like src goes here and binaries go here and so on.An API to make installation easy such that icons get put in the menu and links get crated automatically on the desktop.
All this and many more standardizations are key to Unixes entry into the desktop. Standardization doesnot mean one window manager but that the basic UI should remain consistent. The only reason people like windows (Yes,seven out of ten people I talk to think windows is great) is that it functions the same every where it runs. Most people don't want to learn every option on every application and every platform. Trust me i have experience with computer novices.They want consistency.
Till we realise this and look at it from a consumer point of view I don't see unix or linux on every desktop in the world.
How is.NET different from Jini and Sun's SunRay. Sun Rays have their state saved so you can unplug a sun ray without loosing your session. Jini does the same thing with appliances. The only difference is that the Microsot.NET crap will force you to use microsoft crap on your servers and appliances and jini from Sun will not because it is based on java. Java has penetrated into the market so much that java and XML are the hottest technology of the day. Another classic case of embrace, extend and extinguish or should I say copy, paste and inovate from Microsoft. Remember Dos, Basic and all the other microsoft copy, paste and inovate.
Sun is more worried about the splintering of Solaris than anything else. I don't think Linus would like to see some one fork off the kernel do a piss poor job and call it linux.
The key differences between linux and Solaris are : 1. Linux is the kernel, Solaris is a complete distribution.(GNU tools make linux a complete OS). Therefore SOlris source is definitely larger and more complex than Linux(kernel). Even the Solaris kernel is huge.
2. Solaris and its license are a money stream for some, not the only but some. Linux is not the only money stream for Linus, Alan Cox and many other developers. They make money and code Linux during the free time.
3. Sun has customers, shareholders and an image to take care off. Linus is under no such obligation. If linux cause some damage because it crashed who do you blame. With Sun thay have to be careful that this doesn't happen.
4. It is wrong for Sun to call Solaris open source. Similarly it is wrong for the open source community to expect people to give up thier income stream and property. If you have the resources(brain power and talent) build your product to be better.
Techincally speaking. First to make it clear I am a linux advocate and use only linux primarily and will always. But there are a few things linux really needs to improve on. Being objective.
Linux Great Multiplatform solution. Light and efficient.Free.designed for servers-targetted market everything(Laptops-Mainframes).Not very scalable to meet enterprise needs. Good for webservers, desktop and midrange servers.
Linux is trying to be the jack of all trades and the master of none. It needs to heavily improve on usability(average user), scalability(Enterprise) and reliability. If it needs to be the best O.S.
Solaris is amazingly reliable and scalable. It works great with the hardware it supports. It is a bit resource intensive. But so is Linux (Try running X on a pentium 75 Mhz with 32 mb ram).
Linux is not going to eat into Suns market any time in the near future. So Sun is not scared. Linux has a long way to go and I hope it does on its own merits.
I really don't get the attitude of the open source community. Don't take wrong I only run Linux at home and support it all the way. But the attitude of the community is what puzzles me.
If open source software is so good then why are we bothered about solaris, Aix,HP-UX or Windows or whatever. Why do we care about the SCSL or what ever license. There are tonnes of GPL software out the and tonnes of developers. Why do we need closed sourced software to look at and improvre. Why not compete healthly instead of throwing mud at each other. Linux is this popular today because of companies like RedHat,Caldera and the such exist and make it usable by the average person. Companies need to make money as does the average open source developer. How many opensource developers are out there that are sitting at home and writting linux only software without making money elsewhere? People have to earn for a living. Companies that sell software cannot give awy all the control they have on thier product which they have maintained, developed and put together.
Instead of all this useless quarrel why not make linux better than solaris with out looking at how Solaris is written and let Sun take Solaris where it wants. Let the OS win on its merit and not because it is open source or closed source.
Ask Linus, ALan cox and all the open source developers to leave their jobs and develop linux full time, with out any stream of income from Linux,to make it better and that day all the companies will give you thier souce.
Slashdot Mirror
Well you seem to forget that the reason linux needs all the GUI tools is because it is trying to compete on the desktop market against Windows and Mac0S. Solaris isn't. It is meant to run mission critical apps on 106 cpu server and engineering apps on workstations not play DVDS or Games. So you are comparing apples to oranges.
A better comparison would be how has solaris improved and an OS in performance, scalability, stability? Lets see since 2.5 solaris has added support for 64 bit, COMA/NUMA, >64 cpu scaling, Dynamic Reconfiguration support etc to name a few. Which are more important to Sun's real customers than an installer that fancy features or if gnome has many beta quality apps as linux distros.
Let's see linux has only been able to boot on a 32 way NUMA-Q system with a preemptible kernel so far with the 2.5 kernel, boot!= perform without race conditions. Solaris has been running mission critical apps with a fully preemptible kernel on >64 way systems for more than 5 years now.
So solaris has improved leaps and bounds since 2.5 but just not in the way you wanted. But in a way customers who will pay millions wanted!!
I think it is the other way around SCSI drives are dumb but their HBAs (Host Bus Adapters) are smart. IDE drives are smart but thier HBAs are dumb. IDE is Integrated Drive Electronics. I am not sure if either takes more CPU time because if the controllers are doing DMA, cpu shouldn't be an issue.It is very controller dependent.
The problem with IDE is that it was designed to be a low cost PC class device and therefore reliability,quality and scalability were not paramount design decisions. SCSI was built for servers. Now in the present economic times people want cheaper but reliable drives. So the push for IDE in the server market and an effort from the manufacturers to increase performance, reliability and also scalability(SATA).
Manufacturers are now trying to balance cost and quality now to enter the entrylevel and midlevel server market. IDE drives usually have a MTBF of about 300,000 hrs where as SCSI drives would be 1.2million hours+. The drive in this review seems to have about the same MTBF as a SCSI drive. So the target market is clear, from WD's perspective.
>> Solaris (not SunOS) NFS support until 2.6 was crap.
Solaris is SunOS + Environment.
"I had to be a design authotity on something like 100+ Netra T1s with Solaris running the most elementary services like DNS, news, mail, etc. And frankly I have not seen so many hardware failures and memory leaks in the core OS anytime before and anytime after."
Really do you have bug IDs for those memory leaks. How many of those hundred units did fail and what components. Every manufacturer has a failure rate, did the hard disks fail? CPU? memory?
"Basically white boxes from a bandit corner shop have lower failure rate and most linux kernels in the 2.3.x and 2.5.x series were more reliable."
I doubt that, parts OEMs like Sun and other companies usually use are of a higher quality than the ones you can buy as a consumer. This info comes from my dealing with my dealings with seagate and other drive vendors.
Your post looks like it is biased towards linux. Solaris has a industry wide acceptance of being stable.
Our school switched to dell running linux from HP/HP-UX. Our mail server which used to run for hundreds of days at a time hardly stays up for a few days anymore. Our DHCP/DNS server running on an ultra1/Solaris 2.6 has been running with many year uptimes.
Heck even Aceshardware is running the entire website on one SunBlade-100. Linux has its strong points and weak points just like another OS does.
The first site is pakistani which rules it out. I would gladly send you a few hundred accounts of women being treated much worse in pakistan. A majority of the others you point out are muslim sites which also rule them out. Do you know how they treat women in parts of the muslim world? Have you heard of female genital mutilation? Lastly one of them is written by a beef lover who obviously can't fathom the idea that he can't eat all the cows in india.
In fact a lot of the sites you pointed out look madeup.
I dare you to find pork in an islamic country. And what about snake worshippers in the US.
There is a lot of criticizim about the ranking many of them are relevant points. But to talk about the freedom of press in the US. A few months ago it became glaringly obvious to me how narrow minded and conservative the US press really is.
One incident in recent times, There were large protests against Bush's war on terror in San Francisco and New York with 20,000+ protestors each a few weekends ago. There was a 400,000 person protest in england with many many important people speaking thier minds against the war at each of these events. Not one word about this was mentioned in any of the mainstream US media. Tim Robbins (actor) spoke out against the war in the New York protest and he didn't get any coverage. Where as CNN covered Spielberg and Tom Curise who were pro-war.
I it is hilarious when the name of a cat rescued by a firefighter is mentioned on CNN but the name of a person who pulled out three people to safety from a minivan that crashed into the ocean is unmentioned.
Why a a cat rescue is news worthy? Why do events from the rest of the world hardly ever get a mention? It seems as if there is nothing happening in the rest of the world when you live in the US. A major train collison in say China/ India is less newsworthy than a cat stuck in a tree!!!!
I have lived in the middle east in Kuwait and oman. We used to get BBC world and CNN in Oman. It is very blatantly obvious how sensationalized and ridiculous the news is in the US. Even countries that are placed lowest on the list have a news around the world section. I live in the US for the past 6 years.
Most Americans are ignorant about the rest of the world. It is very evident in the colleges of this country where time and again I have been asked stupid and ignorant questions about India and the Middle East by so called educated people.
This looks like more of an issue with your manager and you, not Sun. Sun does ban certain applications and OSes but what you are claiming here isn't true. My friend who works for Iplanet uses his windows box more than his solaris box. I work for sun too and my group or manager doesn't have any such rules.
No one forces any one to use vi at sun, you can always use anything you want. I have gedit, kate, emacs, gvim.... and a few text editors installed and use any of them I wish. all of the above are comparable to if not better than most windows based text editors.
A creative person can be creative with anything. You sound like the proverb "A bad workman always complains about his tools".
I work for Sun and have my own office( no cubicle) and my own workstation because my job requires it.I work on Solaris drivers and cannot be displaced from my lab. I am not pressured to not use a laptop or a mac(my group owns a windows laptop, I would never use it for work just for testing new devices by choice not pressure). I was encouraged to try out linux on SPARC and many opensource tools to evaluate them.
SlashChick's coments do not reflect Sun's work culture. She seems like a person who gets into a comfort zone and won't adapt to new surroundings.
If a developer understands the language he/she codes in, a piece of paper and a pen is all it takes to be creative. Creative minds don't leave because they don't have the tools they are used to, they improvise.
If they support Solaris, then they can make the rules - but watch as their market shares erodes thanks to that "cheap, open system".
What cheap open system are you talking about. Intel x86??? how is sparc and less open than x86? have you visited http://www.sparc.org lately.
Now that AMD is whoring to microsoft for sledgehamer. Who else is left to compete in the market place. Intel and IA64. Do you think IA64 is open just because multiple vendors are putting it in thier boxes. Or is SPARC open because anyone can get the spec and implement it.
Anti virus companies deemed terrorist by the Bush administration.
Three US anti-virus software makers failed to comply with the FBI on its key logging software called Magic Lantern. Magic lantern will help the FBI track and hunt down terrorists (Hackers). The Pentagon claims that these companies are harboring terrorist and might be targets in the war against terrorism.
Symantec, McAffee and Network Associates have joined the list along with Somalia, Iraq and North Korea as targets of America's new war on terrorism president bush said yesterday.
The Matrix
The concept that the world is and illusion is the fundamental belief of Hinduism and Buddhism. Therefore teh matrix draws parallels to those religions and the concept of a messiah is not new to Judaism, christianity or Islam therefore drwing parallels to those religions. Jesus was a carpenter, Mohhamad was a shepard and neo is a programmer. See any similarities here.
The one ( haven't seen it but read the reviews)
Talks about 124 multiverses and killing one person in each of the multiverses distributes the power of that person to his parallels in the others. So if the bad jet li kills all 123 of his clones he becomes the one and as strong as 123 men.
Need I say more. That the matrix was a good movie that gave the laymen insite into philosophical topics that have baffled philosophers for centuries. The One on the other hand is a bunch of SCi-Fi garbage with no basis either in theology, philosophy or science.
Please india has a very big market for PCs. You can buy a decent PC(600 celeron) with sound and speakers for $600(Rs.28000). Many people in India have PCs at home and many are able to afford it.
Have you ever visited India to make that generalization? Are you aware of the buying potential of individuals in that country?
>>The real reason to object to the mass importation of H1B IT workers is that it is ruining the education system in this country, distorting the employment marketplace, and destroying the attractiveness of technical careers in the minds of the youth in this country.
How So? Making unfounded claims is not what educated people do, where is the proof to back up this claim??????
Do you seriously think that you would have had such an explosion in the US economy and Tech industry if no H1-B visas were ever issued.
Look again, I can show you that nearly 40% of employees in big shot companies like Intel, Microsoft, Sun Microsystems and Cisco are or were H1-B visa holders from India or China. The pentium chips lead designer was an Indian and hotmail was started by an Indian to name a few. I don't this the above named comapnies would be where they are today if it were not for the H1-B visa and guess what neither would the US economy. This article would never have been published or would have been titled "IT labor shortage: REAL".
>>Who wants to become a computer programmer when you are going to be working in a group of expatriats?
You and your Ancestors came to this country about 200 years ago as expatriats or should I say parasites.
>>What is the potential for long term career advancement when you are in that sort of atmosphere?
Atmosphere?? What people 10 times smarter than you, around you, that makes you feel stupid and write such narrow minded posts.
>>In reality is it any different than saying that you want to become a farm worker and compete with illegal immigrants in their labor market?
If the Illegal Immigrant is smarter and more interested in working why not, Surrvival of the fittest. If you have more right to stay in this country because you were born here then native americans have more right to live here than you do, ethically speaking.Moreover H1-B's are not illegal.
Discalimer: I usualy do not right narrow minded emails such as this but, it drives me up the wall when people write without analyzing the situation at hand.
I think People Don't really get mozilla. Mozilla is a cross platform tools set. Mozilla is proving its tools set by building a browser with it. The fact that you have many browsers and file managers using gecko as thier rendering engine is proof of Mozilla's success. For Example, chameleon,galeon, Nautilus.......to name a few
Kde is not completely cross platform. Mozilla is. Mozilla is a great product that was built from scratch with long term goals in mind. Kde uses Qt for thier widget set which is already stable. Mozilla created a new cross platform widget set.
Nothing went wrong with mozilla? Something is wrong with people not understanding software development. People want it and they want it now. That's not how the world works. If you want a baby you got to wait for 9 months you cant expect to concieve and give birth to a child in one week( as Humans atleast).
Posted proudly from Mozilla build 2000092108
As far as i can see this tool violates the GPL as gcc violates the GPL by targeting executables to various ISA. These tools inform the compatibility of thier apps between Linux and Solaris. The score tool I think converts all the system calls and library routines from linux to Solaris, atleast asmuch as it can. And tells you about stuff that is incompatible.
Am I violating the GPL if look at a piece of GPL C code and translate it bug for bug to PASCAL compile a binary and only distribute it? I think the license applys to the original code and not a derivative of the code.
from the Solaris Developer Connection website.
Solaris--Linux Compatibility Tools
June 21, 1999
Score--Application Compatibility
Overview
The score utility analyzes C and C++ source files to determine what needs to be done to make them compatible with Solaris.
Score provides a quick way to estimate the total effort required, and to identify the compatibility issues in your source files.
Score enables developers to print various reports, depending on the options given. These reports can either estimate the effort required, or give detailed information about the specific changes needed.
How Score Works
The score tool works by parsing C/C++ source code files. In the process, score identifies all function calls and looks them up in an issue database.
Solaris--Linux Compatibility Tools
June 21, 1999
Scriptran - Script Compatibility
Overview
The scriptran utility scans your shell scripts and reports any compatibility issues caused by differences between Linux and Solaris.
Passing shell scripts through the scriptran filter will identify most issues.
How scriptran Works
Scriptran scans Bourne shell scripts looking for calls to system commands. Each command is checked for the following conditions:
Command is unavailable on Solaris.
Command is in a different location and the location is not in the user's path.
Command uses a flag which does not exist on Solaris.
Command uses a flag which has different functionality on Solaris than Linux.
Output of a command is different and is redirected.
What Industry Standard benchmarks????
-
- -
A 480MHZ US-II(100-120MHZ Frontside bus) outperforms a 1GHz pentium III(with pc800 800MHz frontside bus RDRAM) in Floating point CFP2000 benchmarks.
-----------------------------------------------
int: base 225 peak 234
Fp: base 274 peak 291
HARDWARE
--------
Hardware Vendor: Sun Microsystems
Model Name: Sun Enterprise 450
CPU: UltraSPARC II
CPU MHz: 480 MHz
FPU: Integrated
CPU(s) enabled: 1
CPU(s) orderable: 1 to 4
Parallel: None
Primary Cache: 16KBI+16KBD on chip
Secondary Cache: 8MB(I+D) off chip
L3 Cache: None
Other Cache: None
Memory: 512MB
Disk Subsystem: 2*9.1GB(7200 RPM)
-----------------------------------------------
int: base 407 peak 410
Fp: base 273 peak 284
HARDWARE
--------
Hardware Vendor: Intel Corporation
Model Name: Intel VC820 (1.0 GHz MHz Pentium III)
CPU: 1.0 GHz Pentium III processor
CPU MHz: 1.0 GHz
FPU: Integrated
CPU(s) enabled: 1
CPU(s) orderable: 1
Parallel: No
Primary Cache: 16KBI + 16KBD on-die
Secondary Cache: 256KB(I+D) on-die ECC
L3 Cache: N/A
Other Cache: N/A
Memory: 256 MB PC800 RDRAM non-ECC
Disk Subsystem: IBM DJNA 371800 ATA-66
Other Hardware: Diamond Multimedia Viper 770 Ultra TNT2 AGP
Newtons Laws are not inventions or creations they are discoveries. Music, art, literature and any thing that is created of invented is intellectual property.
I am personally sick of all the cry babies that want others hard work for free and want it very well knowing that they can not do anything better or come up with any thing radically new. Nothing the open source world has come out with is radically new. Open source and FSF were started to provide clones of commercial software from free. Examples, Linux is a UNIX clone (From the Linux kernel source README file), Gnapster, Licq. Almost everything the open source world has produced has a closed source commercial product that came out before it.This is a fact and there is no denying it.
Don't get me wrong I am all for open source. I am posting this from Mozilla running on Linux and Linux is all I run. But I am getting tired of this Open source ego and bitching. No one has the right to demand something from someone when they don't want to give it up. Make something better and then compete fairly.
I think there is a big confusion between an operating system(OS) and an operating environment(OE). Since the article chooses to use Sun as an example, Sun ever since they released Solaris has always called it an OE and the OS layer was always and even now is SunOS 5.X. Solaris is SunOS+ X windows+CDE+DT apps+Services.
OSes by fundamental definition is the software that manages resources (hardware and software). All the GUI layer abstactions are not required to manage hardware and software there fore UNIX was and always will be an OS.
MacOS X is an enivronment for programs to run,share data and code. MacOS X is a graphical shell with a set of APIs(carbon,cocoa, quicktime. OpenGL...) for user level programs to use and be developed on. This shell runs on the unix kernel/OS.
OSes have applications on many places other than the desktop for example RTOSes,embedded OS's, Server OSes, none of this fit the paradigm of MacOS X or Windows. To think that the desktop is the only place for an OS is very narrow minded. Thus the author doesn't really understand OSes.
"It's bloated because, as I said, I would need GNOME to use Galeon."
Hmm, Kmeleon is bloated because I would need to install windows to use it.
Another reporter who will sing Microsofts praises
Fred Moody is the author of I Sing the Body Electronic: A
Year with Microsoft on the Multimedia Frontier and of
The Visionary Position: The Inside Story of the Digital
Dreamers Who Made Virtual Reality a Reality. His column
appears on alternate Wednesdays.
http://www.securityfocus.com/vdb/stats.html
Here is the statistics page from security focus.
What made IE so Succesfull and capture the mass market? Microsoft's huge marketing machine.
Microsoft basically put IE on everyones desktop you had no choice. AOL put IE on your desktops too. Now Netscape has a huge marketing machine as well,AOL. If AOL chooses to switch browsers 23 million people are going to be running netscape 6.0. Why? because they don't care as long as the can do what they want to do. Now that will put a huge dent in IE's market. What about Internet appliances, mobile computing, Unix Linux and the whole load of platforms that netscape/mozilla supports.
Basic functionality is a relative thing? If mozilla has to capture the end user into switching to it, It has to have something that IE doesnot. If Mozilla didn't have a pasword manager, form completer, auto complete and other stuff that IE already has and people have come to use everyday. Nobody will swtich to it. Mail, News, Composer and all that are a part of communicator. If they suddenly ditched all the pieces that made communicator and just released navigator they risk loosing the faithful user base that uses these tools daily.
I think that the mozilla team is extremely focused and are doing an excellent job. They came up with a completely new technology, tools and a pretty close communicator in two years. That is an accomplishment in its self. They broke away from the evils of porting to a million platforms and APIs and came up with tools that will make netscapwe 7.0 easier and faster on a tonne of platforms. All that in two years and a skeletal team, management changes and a loss of 1500 developers, is an achievement.
patience people. I am posting this from a nightly build of 07302000 and It has reached a long way from when it started. All the best mozilla, excellent work.
What he is saying is.....
,seven out of ten people I talk to think windows is great) is that it functions the same every where it runs. Most people don't want to learn every option on every application and every platform. Trust me i have experience with computer novices.They want consistency.
I have a crapy graphics card so my whole computer is a piece of crap!!!
Just because UNIX lacks in some resuable code in it's graphical shell it sucks. What about the fact that I can do almost everything i need to maintain a system over a serial port.
Unix needs a lot of changes inorder to become a desktop OS. UNIX was designed for mainframes Three decades ago. X and desktops came into existence decades afterwards. Miguel's analogy is like saying a 1960 automobile doesnot have airbags so it sucks. But the basic engine and chasis design is the same only todays cars have improvements.
Resuable code.... Just count the number of OSes out there that were built using a UNIX kernel.UNIX must have done something right.
I wouldn't say X sucks, I would say X is too old for todays standards. Just like a PDP11 is old by today's standard.
What the *nix world needs a newer grphical shell that defines a standard API that people can utilize. You can write all the Window Managers you want as long as you confirm to that API.
The API should include:
1) Unified standard printing architecture.
2) Resuable components for the primary functions of applications.
3) a standard for user interface (menu options e.t.c) Like edit->prefrences and not tools->options and file properties and every other place .
4) A standard method for software installation. Like src goes here and binaries go here and so on.An API to make installation easy such that icons get put in the menu and links get crated automatically on the desktop.
All this and many more standardizations are key to Unixes entry into the desktop. Standardization doesnot mean one window manager but that the basic UI should remain consistent.
The only reason people like windows (Yes
Till we realise this and look at it from a consumer point of view I don't see unix or linux on every desktop in the world.
How is .NET different from Jini and Sun's SunRay. Sun Rays have their state saved so you can unplug a sun ray without loosing your session. Jini does the same thing with appliances. The only difference is that the Microsot .NET crap will force you to use microsoft crap on your servers and appliances and jini from Sun will not because it is based on java. Java has penetrated into the market so much that java and XML are the hottest technology of the day. Another classic case of embrace, extend and extinguish or should I say copy, paste and inovate from Microsoft. Remember Dos, Basic and all the other microsoft copy, paste and inovate.
Next slashdot heading after the RIAA employs a few more people like this guy.
"RIAA flips napster the bird."
Sun is more worried about the splintering of Solaris than anything else. I don't think Linus would like to see some one fork off the kernel do a piss poor job and call it linux.
The key differences between linux and Solaris are :
1. Linux is the kernel, Solaris is a complete distribution.(GNU tools make linux a complete OS).
Therefore SOlris source is definitely larger and more complex than Linux(kernel). Even the Solaris kernel is huge.
2. Solaris and its license are a money stream for some, not the only but some. Linux is not the only money stream for Linus, Alan Cox and many other developers. They make money and code Linux during the free time.
3. Sun has customers, shareholders and an image to take care off. Linus is under no such obligation. If linux cause some damage because it crashed who do you blame. With Sun thay have to be careful that this doesn't happen.
4. It is wrong for Sun to call Solaris open source. Similarly it is wrong for the open source community to expect people to give up thier income stream and property. If you have the resources(brain power and talent) build your product to be better.
Techincally speaking.
First to make it clear I am a linux advocate and use only linux primarily and will always. But there are a few things linux really needs to improve on. Being objective.
Linux
Great Multiplatform solution. Light and efficient.Free.designed for servers-targetted market everything(Laptops-Mainframes).Not very scalable to meet enterprise needs. Good for webservers, desktop and midrange servers.
Linux is trying to be the jack of all trades and the master of none. It needs to heavily improve on usability(average user), scalability(Enterprise) and reliability. If it needs to be the best O.S.
Solaris is amazingly reliable and scalable. It works great with the hardware it supports. It is a bit resource intensive. But so is Linux (Try running X on a pentium 75 Mhz with 32 mb ram).
Linux is not going to eat into Suns market any time in the near future. So Sun is not scared.
Linux has a long way to go and I hope it does on its own merits.
I really don't get the attitude of the open source community. Don't take wrong I only run Linux at home and support it all the way. But the attitude of the community is what puzzles me.
If open source software is so good then why are we bothered about solaris, Aix,HP-UX or Windows or whatever. Why do we care about the SCSL or what ever
license. There are tonnes of GPL software out the and tonnes of developers. Why do we need closed sourced software to look at and improvre. Why not compete healthly instead of throwing mud at each other. Linux is this popular today because of companies like RedHat,Caldera and the such exist and make it usable by the average person. Companies need to make money as does the average open source developer. How many opensource developers are out there that are sitting at home and writting linux only software without making money elsewhere? People have to earn for a living.
Companies that sell software cannot give awy all the control they have on thier product which they have maintained, developed and put together.
Instead of all this useless quarrel why not make linux better than solaris with out looking at how Solaris is written and let Sun take Solaris where it wants. Let the OS win on its merit and not because it is open source or closed source.
Ask Linus, ALan cox and all the open source developers to leave their jobs and develop linux full time, with out any stream of income from Linux,to make it better and that day all the
companies will give you thier souce.
Microsoft: "We are the NET int the .NET"