I agree. My Passport running 10.3 is extremely stable. I haven't had it crash since I got it about 3 months back. The only issue I did have was the odd screen flicker glitch that would pop up occasionally but the latest 10.3 update fixed that.
The Passport is a wonderful phone. Love the large screen and the clever touchpad/physical keyboard. Best phone I've ever had.
For OS I personally would stay in the Solaris realm. I'd try out the the open source Ilumos/Opendiana based distribution that Martin Bochnig has been working on :
http://opensxce.org
Speaking of labours of love, Martin's one man effort to port the open source fork of Solaris back to the SPARC platform would be a good fit.
I saw an opt-in/opt-out notice last night on Facebook for this change. I'm not sure why others have not. Perhaps they are rolling it out in waves or perhaps it depends on country (I'm in Canada).
OTOH, Solaris is much better at backward compatibility than Linux.
No kidding. I kept several old applications that was built on pre-Solaris machines (SunOS 4.1.4) running for many years on newer Sun OS' all the way through to Solaris 10. There were occasional blips in there that were less sucessful (Solaris 7 was a pain) but Sun takes backwards compatibility very seriously.
I can't believe how many of you are crying about 'what we did to Saddam'. You all need to remember what culture this man is a part of.
Huh? What culture Saddam is part of?? What exactly does that mean and why should that affect how decently the U.S. military should treat its prisoners? Should prisoners receive different levels of abuse based on their origin culture???
"The company culture between Sun and IBM are too different for a successful merger."
Success: [n] Chomp, chomp, gulp.
Just ask the former employees of Sequent, Informix, or Rational.
Speaking of Rational, I've been really underwhelmed with what IBM has done with the Purify products they acquired with their annexation of Rational. The product looks like it has hardly been updated at all since I first used it way back in '95 or so. Plus it is a huge struggle to get it to work, no thanks to IBM. And if you want to change your licensing or contact information, good luck with dealing with the huge IBM bureaucracy. I for one dread seeing IBM take over Sun. It'll make HP start to look good.:p
I did find it odd that this story made it on to the front page so late in the day considering the official release was in the morning. But then again, this is Slashdot where it's fun to hate Sun.:-P
Is there a version of this for sparc? Anyone have a link? I don't think so. I've been looking and haven't found an image for a SPARC version yet of the OpenSolaris (Indiana) 2008.05 CD.
With ZFS you can smash a hard drive and keep the system running:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=CN6iDzesEs0 There was a new version of this from the Sun's Community One opening today which involved smashing one drive with a sledgehammer and going at the other with a drill. One of the more impressive ZFS demos.
I think ZFS might mean something to some home users with large video or music collections. Want to build a cheap and safe raid system with no special hardware? ZFS will allow this.
I use ZFS on production systems at work and it's already saved my bacon. I don't see any reason why not to extend it to the home/personal file server space as well.
I haven't had any problems getting OpenSolaris up and running on anything I've tried putting it on since back around build 58. Of course I've been trying it on fairly old hardware, so there may be known drivers for this. Never had a problem with the installer. I've actually had more problems getting the latest version of Fedora up and running on the same old hardware.
Every starter kit I ordered (3) did not show up at my doorstep. When I questioned Sun, they said it was either at the post office (which it wasn't) or it was "lost in transit, feel free to order another kit at no cost."
Cheers, thanks Sun. That's strange, I've received every starter kit, or other free media package for Solaris or OpenSolaris I've ever requested. Where are you located? Perhaps they are having trouble with shipping to particular countries/districts.
I actually liked having the option of giving a monster class levels. It allowed you to construct encounters on a more level playing field without having to deal with different mechanics for players and monsters.
4. Spells are unlimited use, per encounter, or per day - a big improvement over memorization/preparation/whatever.
I strongly dislike this for two reasons: (1) The old Vancian spell system forced the player to make some tactical choices. (2) The new approach sounds kind of bland and I suspect it will get old after a while with the smaller set of options available.
And I suppose there is a third thing that bothers me. They've pushed the whole at will/per encounter/per day out to every single character class so everyone is equivalent and balanced. It sounds bland.
8. No spells require experience point expediture to cast. The Wish spell is also gone.
Wish has always been a bit problematic, but it was always one of the big features in the game that players used to dream of acquiring. I'll miss it, and all its associated issues. I never had a problem with some spells exacting a cost on the spell caster. Ditto for creating magic items. That fits the fantasy genre well enough. There were some class balance issues, however, with spell casting players advancing slower because of spending experience.
9. No level drain from undead or spells.
That is unfortunate. I never had a problem with handling energy drain in any of the previous versions of the game.
10. Fewer magical items can be worn, to reduce that complexity.
Was it ever really so complex that it had to be simplified with more arbitrary limits (such as rings only work for Paragon level characters)?
11. Fewer buff (temporary improvement) spells, and fewer buff spells that overlap, so your group doesn't spend 10 minutes in spell preparation before each combat.
Version 3.5 created the 10 minute prep time issue with the much shorter durations on the buff spells.
13. Full attacks are removed.
Why? Some weird idea of balancing everyone by allowing players to only get to do one thing (attack, spell, whatever) a round? Again, I'm worried they are making the game too bland.
14. The rules for attacks of opportunity are (supposedly) simplified and clarified.
They always seemed pretty simple in our games and were rarely an issue. I've never understood why other people had problems with them.
15. Monsters can be scaled down for lower level encounters.
A DM could always do something like this in any version of the game. I suppose what you mean is that they've explicitly written a new simple mechanic of achieving this. That or they've decided to introduce a bazillion stock example monsters (e.g. orc archer, elite orc archer, orc brawler, orc minion, orc chief, etc etc ).
16. Other class abilities get moved to the same once per day, once per encounter, or unlimited use mechanic as spells.
While I'm sure this makes the game easier for some, it sounds very bland to me. It sounds more like something I'd expect in a computer game.
17. Characters get healing surges, which let them recover from damage outside of combat more quickly without requiring a caster with healing magic. This mitigates the need to have a priest healer in every gaming party.
It also makes the characters far more heroic and 'cinematic' which would make running a realistic gritty game more difficult. While I see some elegance in the mechanic, it's a huge change from previous versions of D&D and not something I personally want to use. I can see why it might appeal to some.
18. The skill system is dramatically simplified. PCs have trained skills and other skills, and no individual skill ranks in (potentially) d
This reminded me when Ken always insisted that Cape Breton is not the same as Nova Scotia, despite being the same province. Maybe regional independence, or identity.
Well, of course it's not the same although those mainlanders like to pretend it is when convenient such as back when we drove the economy of Nova Scotia in the first half of the 1900s. Once upon a time, we were the most industrialized part of Nova Scotia.
Ah, if not for the annexation of 1820 we'd be our own province and in control of our own destiny.
That's what everybody says.... until they try to use it to serve anything over Samba or NFS. Just google zfs nfs for some horror stories. Bottom line is, ZFS is not ready for real world adoption.
I've been serving ZFS via samba for over 6 months now and I have not noticed any problems. Do you have any references to these horror stories because we have had no problems at all with ZFS so far.
Plenty of things, like trying to market Solaris as a superior alternative to Linux, rebranding Gnome as a "Java desktop system", deliberately picking incompatible licenses for their open source releases, misrepresenting Java as an open standard, trying to sabotage Harmony, failing to follow through on their commitment to having Java become an ISO/ANSI standard, their involvement with SCO, their involvement with Microsoft, not accepting contributions under open source licenses to projects like Java, etc. That's in addition to foisting lousy technologies like NFS on the world.
Excuse me? How does Sun promoting Solaris somehow count as something bad? Sun considers Solaris to be one of the company jewels so why shouldn't they promote their own product? Does this also make all of the other Unix projects out there bad (FreeBSD, OpenBSD) ?
As for rebranding Gnome as the Java Desktop System, that was just silly, not bad. Plus some Linux companies come up with their own rebranded names for the desktop. I would hardly call that bad.
Sure, Sun dickered around with open sourcing Java for a long time, but you have to understand what they went through with Microsoft attempting to embrace and extend (and effectively break) Java. In the end, they eventually did move towards an open source license. Hardly bad.
How are they bad for contributing NFS to the world? Just because you don't like it or think the product is not as good as you would like, how does that make Sun bad?
It's pretty clear the ZFS simply was not ready to ship. Leopard was to be "Feature Complete" by yesterday and ZFS was not ready, so it gets cut. Even Sun can't make it so that ZFS is bootable on a production version of Solaris. Also the "user land" utilities are not quite what a typical Mac user would want.
Speaking of Solaris 10 and ZFS, I've started moving a number of my servers over to Solaris 10 with ZFS. ZFS is probably going to keep us on Solaris for some time to come.
I don't have a SATA controller in my Athlon, so I cannot speak to that. However I believe that the machines coming from Sun have SATA so I assume that it must work.
Newer Sun Workstations (both in the x86 and SPARC worlds) have SATA drives. I have some Ultra 40s and Ultra 45s at work and both models use SATA.
I do not believe that Solaris 10 is supported on notebook computers, so I do not believe that wireless cards are typical hardware for Solaris. That said, during my Googling around I did see that someone has some experimental wireless drivers, but I have not looked at them in detail nor have I attempted to use them, so I cannot speak to how well they work.
Solaris 10 does work on laptops. I have it installed on my Toshiba Tecra M2 and it works fine there (wireless as well). OpenSolaris (and its offshoots) also work fine on laptops. As for official Sun support on those platforms, I'm not sure. There is certainly support for SPARC based laptops (Tadpole, Naturetech, etc). There is a very active support/developer community built around Solaris on laptops over on the OpenSolaris site/mailing lists.
This is interesting. I've been slowly moving from the Unix world (Sun/Solaris) to Linux for a while. As part of that, we have been porting applications to Fedora/Red Hat. Lately though, I've been more and more impressed with Solaris 10 (and OpenSolaris). Frankly, I don't see much of an incentive anymore to run Linux on a production server. The only thing Linux seems to deliver better at the moment is x86 driver support and desktop apps. While I don't think we'll necessarily stop our efforts to create a more platform neutral set of applications, I suspect we'll be staying on Solaris for some time. Incidentally, I have no trouble receiving patch support for any of Solaris 10, 9 or 8 production servers. I like the longer support time lines that Sun offers (and much of it for free by the way).
Re:Scientific consensus not quite there yet...
on
An Inconvenient Truth
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· Score: 2, Informative
"Both the Antarctic and Greenland ice caps are thickening. The temperature at the South Pole has declined by more than one degree C since 1950. And the area of sea ice around the continent has increased over the last 20 years." -- Dr. R.M. Carter, professor, Marine Geophysical Laboratory, James Cook University, Townsville, Australia. - - - "From data published by the Canadian Ice Service, there has been no precipitous drop-off in the amount or thickness of the ice cap since 1970 when reliable overall coverage became available for the Canadian Arctic." -- Dr./Cdr. M.R. Morgan, FRMS, formerly advisor to the World Meteorological Organization/climatology research scientist at University of Exeter, U.K. - - -
Either your sources are inaccurate or woefully out of date.
Number of Windows : Depends on OS and role
on
How Many Windows?
·
· Score: 1
How many windows?
As others have said, it all depends on OS and whether this is one of my work computers (I have several) or one of my home systems.
Considering home first. On the Windows XP machine that I'm using now there are 8 windows open (Quickbooks, 4 open office and 3 Firefox at the moment - each Firefox instance has multiple tabs). That's pretty typical for this machine. These windows typically don't stay open longer than a couple of days. This computer also typically doesn't stay up 24/7.
Over on the other side of the room is a Fedora system which serves as both a desktop and server for various things. That system is never shut down and some windows, especially mail and terminal clients are up for many days, typically weeks at a time. Typically there are probably 20 or so gnome terminals, instances of Firefox, gimp sessions, and always at least one mail client opened - scattered across 4 gnome desktops.
At work, my main computer is a Sun workstation (again a Gnome based environment). There I'll have one desktop dedicated to software development (Sun Studio tools with all its own windows and tabs), an instance or two of a software build that I'm testing, a Firefox app for some research I'm doing, and a gnome terminal window (with tabs) for various other things. Another gnome desktop will be used mostly for communication/email and there I'll have 3 or 4 gnome terminals, mail client and web browser. The web browser (Firefox) typically has multiple tabs as do the gnome terminals that on this desktop I use to connect to other systems I administer. As for the other two gnome desktops (I stick to the default 4 desktops) I use them if I have something not tied to development or communication/administration. I try to use the desktops to better multi-task. I actually find it hard working in a standard windows xp environment because of the lack of built-in multiple desktops. Yes, I know there are some tricks you can use to pretend that you have a true multi-desktop system in MS Windows XP, but it really isn't the same thing. I never shut down this work machine unless I'm testing something or upgrading something that requires a shut-down/reboot so the windows can be open for a very long time - weeks to a couple of months.
One of my coworkers never, ever shuts down his development machine (also a Sun blade) and he probably has 50+ windows open for many months at a time. He gets really upset when his gnome terminal windows crash after 3+ months of being open.
I also have a windows based workstation that typically only has one application running all day (a corporate email client) with maybe up to 5 other windows/applications opened at the same time.
In summary I guess you could say it depends on whether it is a MS Windows based machine or a Unix/Linux machine. Modern Unix/Linux really lends itself to having lots of windows open and lets the user manage them efficiently. So if you're really using these machines (for work or play) you'll have lots of windows open - and often leave them open for extended periods especially if it is for work. On the other hand, MS Windows really doesn't handle massive numbers of windows well (without resorting to a downloaded hack/patch) so I rarely have more than 7 or 8 windows open in that environment, often much less.
Nobody would blink if Sun took a cheap shot at HP. But making fun of two recently deceased Silicon Valley icons, both of whom are still deeply respected by many in the industry, is pretty poor form.
I disagree. I don't think that Sun is making fun of HP's founders. What actually happened is that the HP brass fumbled the ball and refused to allow the cut-outs into HP HQ. They made it as far as the gate, but HP wouldn't let them in. That is the really sad story here. HP should have at least smiled and played along and let their founders make it into the buildings, had some photos taken, and made a donation to the causel what is $6000 to HP? Instead they locked them out and Sun came to the rescue and had some good natured fun at the expense of current HP management who somehow dropped the ball on this. If anyone was being disrespectful, it was probably HP for rejecting the art when it first arrived, or at least not letting them into the building.
Because Sunrays are really sucky. take it from a former Sun Microsystems instructor. They really are. You're better off with a Linux solution, for Multiple reasons (not going to go into all of them, now. Just research it. Start with cost-factor and go from there).
Come on, you're going to have to give some additional information than that. We use Sun Rays quite a bit in our classrooms and labs and if you have the bandwidth and a good server on the other end, you're in the money. Sessions can be keyed to an access card and will follow you around the campus. If a Sunray breaks down, just swap in a new one and the session continues exactly as you left off. Pull your card, come back in a week, and pick up exactly where you left off. Everything resides on the server. No maintenance required at all on the client side.
What version of the Sun Ray server software were you using that made it so "sucky"? From my experience, they worked great for us. The only downside we had is that streaming video over Citrix to the Sun Rays didn't work so hot. However, streaming video natively from the Sun Ray server to the thin clients worked fine so the problem there was probably with Citrix Metaframe.
Sun has also recently upgraded the Sun Ray thin clients so they have gigabit ethernet, plus they now hsve a more complete end-to-end solution that will allow you to run Windows apps on your Sun Ray (in addition to all the Solaris/Unix apps) thanks to their Tarantella purchase. You'll still need some Terminal Server licenses, but you'll save on the Citrix.
You could try calling the local Sun reps and see if they'll give you a demo. They did that for us - drove 6 hours to our workplace and set up a server and clients to demonstrate it for us.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree. My Passport running 10.3 is extremely stable. I haven't had it crash since I got it about 3 months back. The only issue I did have was the odd screen flicker glitch that would pop up occasionally but the latest 10.3 update fixed that.
The Passport is a wonderful phone. Love the large screen and the clever touchpad/physical keyboard. Best phone I've ever had.
There is a port of open source Illumos / Opendiana that should work on this hardware :
http://opensxce.org
Solaris 11 will not work on this hardware, but sxce should work.
For OS I personally would stay in the Solaris realm. I'd try out the the open source Ilumos/Opendiana based distribution that Martin Bochnig has been working on :
http://opensxce.org
Speaking of labours of love, Martin's one man effort to port the open source fork of Solaris back to the SPARC platform would be a good fit.
I saw an opt-in/opt-out notice last night on Facebook for this change. I'm not sure why others have not. Perhaps they are rolling it out in waves or perhaps it depends on country (I'm in Canada).
OTOH, Solaris is much better at backward compatibility than Linux.
No kidding. I kept several old applications that was built on pre-Solaris machines (SunOS 4.1.4) running for many years on newer Sun OS' all the way through to Solaris 10. There were occasional blips in there that were less sucessful (Solaris 7 was a pain) but Sun takes backwards compatibility very seriously.
I can't believe how many of you are crying about 'what we did to Saddam'. You all need to remember what culture this man is a part of.
Huh? What culture Saddam is part of?? What exactly does that mean and why should that affect how decently the U.S. military should treat its prisoners? Should prisoners receive different levels of abuse based on their origin culture???
"The company culture between Sun and IBM are too different for a successful merger."
Success: [n] Chomp, chomp, gulp.
Just ask the former employees of Sequent, Informix, or Rational.
Speaking of Rational, I've been really underwhelmed with what IBM has done with the Purify products they acquired with their annexation of Rational. The product looks like it has hardly been updated at all since I first used it way back in '95 or so. Plus it is a huge struggle to get it to work, no thanks to IBM. And if you want to change your licensing or contact information, good luck with dealing with the huge IBM bureaucracy. I for one dread seeing IBM take over Sun. It'll make HP start to look good. :p
I did find it odd that this story made it on to the front page so late in the day considering the official release was in the morning. But then again, this is Slashdot where it's fun to hate Sun. :-P
http://youtube.com/watch?v=CN6iDzesEs0 There was a new version of this from the Sun's Community One opening today which involved smashing one drive with a sledgehammer and going at the other with a drill. One of the more impressive ZFS demos.
I think ZFS might mean something to some home users with large video or music collections. Want to build a cheap and safe raid system with no special hardware? ZFS will allow this.
I use ZFS on production systems at work and it's already saved my bacon. I don't see any reason why not to extend it to the home/personal file server space as well.
I haven't had any problems getting OpenSolaris up and running on anything I've tried putting it on since back around build 58. Of course I've been trying it on fairly old hardware, so there may be known drivers for this. Never had a problem with the installer. I've actually had more problems getting the latest version of Fedora up and running on the same old hardware.
Cheers, thanks Sun. That's strange, I've received every starter kit, or other free media package for Solaris or OpenSolaris I've ever requested. Where are you located? Perhaps they are having trouble with shipping to particular countries/districts.
1. Monsters no longer must have class levels.
I actually liked having the option of giving a monster class levels. It allowed you to construct encounters on a more level playing field without having to deal with different mechanics for players and monsters.
4. Spells are unlimited use, per encounter, or per day - a big improvement over memorization/preparation/whatever.
I strongly dislike this for two reasons :
(1) The old Vancian spell system forced the player to make some tactical choices.
(2) The new approach sounds kind of bland and I suspect it will get old after a while with the smaller set of options available.
And I suppose there is a third thing that bothers me. They've pushed the whole at will/per encounter/per day out to every single character class so everyone is equivalent and balanced. It sounds bland.
8. No spells require experience point expediture to cast. The Wish spell is also gone.
Wish has always been a bit problematic, but it was always one of the big features in the game that players used to dream of acquiring. I'll miss it, and all its associated issues. I never had a problem with some spells exacting a cost on the spell caster. Ditto for creating magic items. That fits the fantasy genre well enough. There were some class balance issues, however, with spell casting players advancing slower because of spending experience.
9. No level drain from undead or spells.
That is unfortunate. I never had a problem with handling energy drain in any of the previous versions of the game.
10. Fewer magical items can be worn, to reduce that complexity.
Was it ever really so complex that it had to be simplified with more arbitrary limits (such as rings only work for Paragon level characters)?
11. Fewer buff (temporary improvement) spells, and fewer buff spells that overlap, so your group doesn't spend 10 minutes in spell preparation before each combat.
Version 3.5 created the 10 minute prep time issue with the much shorter durations on the buff spells.
13. Full attacks are removed.
Why? Some weird idea of balancing everyone by allowing players to only get to do one thing (attack, spell, whatever) a round? Again, I'm worried they are making the game too bland.
14. The rules for attacks of opportunity are (supposedly) simplified and clarified.
They always seemed pretty simple in our games and were rarely an issue. I've never understood why other people had problems with them.
15. Monsters can be scaled down for lower level encounters.
A DM could always do something like this in any version of the game. I suppose what you mean is that they've explicitly written a new simple mechanic of achieving this. That or they've decided to introduce a bazillion stock example monsters (e.g. orc archer, elite orc archer, orc brawler, orc minion, orc chief, etc etc ).
16. Other class abilities get moved to the same once per day, once per encounter, or unlimited use mechanic as spells.
While I'm sure this makes the game easier for some, it sounds very bland to me. It sounds more like something I'd expect in a computer game.
17. Characters get healing surges, which let them recover from damage outside of combat more quickly without requiring a caster with healing magic. This mitigates the need to have a priest healer in every gaming party.
It also makes the characters far more heroic and 'cinematic' which would make running a realistic gritty game more difficult. While I see some elegance in the mechanic, it's a huge change from previous versions of D&D and not something I personally want to use. I can see why it might appeal to some.
18. The skill system is dramatically simplified. PCs have trained skills and other skills, and no individual skill ranks in (potentially) d
This reminded me when Ken always insisted that Cape Breton is not the same as Nova Scotia, despite being the same province. Maybe regional independence, or identity.
;-)
Well, of course it's not the same although those mainlanders like to pretend it is when convenient such as back when we drove the economy of Nova Scotia in the first half of the 1900s. Once upon a time, we were the most industrialized part of Nova Scotia.
Ah, if not for the annexation of 1820 we'd be our own province and in control of our own destiny.
Down with the Causeway!
That's what everybody says.... until they try to use it to serve anything over Samba or NFS. Just google zfs nfs for some horror stories. Bottom line is, ZFS is not ready for real world adoption.
I've been serving ZFS via samba for over 6 months now and I have not noticed any problems. Do you have any references to these horror stories because we have had no problems at all with ZFS so far.
So what if they have done bad things in the past?
... odd.
Plenty of things, like trying to market Solaris as a superior alternative to Linux, rebranding Gnome as a "Java desktop system", deliberately picking incompatible licenses for their open source releases, misrepresenting Java as an open standard, trying to sabotage Harmony, failing to follow through on their commitment to having Java become an ISO/ANSI standard, their involvement with SCO, their involvement with Microsoft, not accepting contributions under open source licenses to projects like Java, etc. That's in addition to foisting lousy technologies like NFS on the world.
Excuse me? How does Sun promoting Solaris somehow count as something bad? Sun considers Solaris to be one of the company jewels so why shouldn't they promote their own product? Does this also make all of the other Unix projects out there bad (FreeBSD, OpenBSD) ?
As for rebranding Gnome as the Java Desktop System, that was just silly, not bad. Plus some Linux companies come up with their own rebranded names for the desktop. I would hardly call that bad.
Sure, Sun dickered around with open sourcing Java for a long time, but you have to understand what they went through with Microsoft attempting to embrace and extend (and effectively break) Java. In the end, they eventually did move towards an open source license. Hardly bad.
How are they bad for contributing NFS to the world? Just because you don't like it or think the product is not as good as you would like, how does that make Sun bad?
Your examples of Sun being bad are quite
It's pretty clear the ZFS simply was not ready to ship. Leopard was to be "Feature Complete" by yesterday and ZFS was not ready, so it gets cut. Even Sun can't make it so that ZFS is bootable on a production version of Solaris. Also the "user land" utilities are not quite what a typical Mac user would want.
. It may not be in Solaris 10 production systems yet, but it is clearly coming soon.
ZFS is bootable in recent OpenSolaris builds http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/zfs/boot/
Speaking of Solaris 10 and ZFS, I've started moving a number of my servers over to Solaris 10 with ZFS. ZFS is probably going to keep us on Solaris for some time to come.
I don't have a SATA controller in my Athlon, so I cannot speak to that. However I believe that the machines coming from Sun have SATA so I assume that it must work.
Newer Sun Workstations (both in the x86 and SPARC worlds) have SATA drives. I have some Ultra 40s and Ultra 45s at work and both models use SATA.
I do not believe that Solaris 10 is supported on notebook computers, so I do not believe that wireless cards are typical hardware for Solaris. That said, during my Googling around I did see that someone has some experimental wireless drivers, but I have not looked at them in detail nor have I attempted to use them, so I cannot speak to how well they work.
Solaris 10 does work on laptops. I have it installed on my Toshiba Tecra M2 and it works fine there (wireless as well). OpenSolaris (and its offshoots) also work fine on laptops. As for official Sun support on those platforms, I'm not sure. There is certainly support for SPARC based laptops (Tadpole, Naturetech, etc). There is a very active support/developer community built around Solaris on laptops over on the OpenSolaris site/mailing lists.
Speaking of the telnet bug, it looks like a patch fixing the exploit was out within 24 hours:
l nerability_solaris_10
http://solaris.reys.net/english/2007/02/telnet_vu
This is interesting. I've been slowly moving from the Unix world (Sun/Solaris) to Linux for a while. As part of that, we have been porting applications to Fedora/Red Hat. Lately though, I've been more and more impressed with Solaris 10 (and OpenSolaris). Frankly, I don't see much of an incentive anymore to run Linux on a production server. The only thing Linux seems to deliver better at the moment is x86 driver support and desktop apps. While I don't think we'll necessarily stop our efforts to create a more platform neutral set of applications, I suspect we'll be staying on Solaris for some time. Incidentally, I have no trouble receiving patch support for any of Solaris 10, 9 or 8 production servers. I like the longer support time lines that Sun offers (and much of it for free by the way).
"Both the Antarctic and Greenland ice caps are thickening. The temperature at the South Pole has declined by more than one degree C since 1950. And the area of sea ice around the continent has increased over the last 20 years." -- Dr. R.M. Carter, professor, Marine Geophysical Laboratory, James Cook University, Townsville, Australia.
n ment-poll.html) with global warming despite the fact that the ruling Conservative minority government is falling in line with George Bush's views(http://www.cbc.ca/cp/national/061019/n101958 .html). There have been alarming recent reports on the warming trends in the Arctic (http://www.cbc.ca/canada/newfoundland-labrador/st ory/2006/11/17/tech-arctic.html,http://www.cbc.ca/ canada/manitoba/story/2004/11/09/mb_arctic20041108 .html,http://www.cbc.ca/canada/north/story/2004/06 /14/nun-Ivorygulls06142004.html) and the thinning of the ice (http://www.cbc.ca/canada/north/story/2005/07/29/a rctic-ice-29072005.html,http://www.cbc.ca/canada/n orth/story/2003/09/23/sep23wardhuntice23092003.htm l) and it is causing great concern.
- - -
"From data published by the Canadian Ice Service, there has been no precipitous drop-off in the amount or thickness of the ice cap since 1970 when reliable overall coverage became available for the Canadian Arctic." -- Dr./Cdr. M.R. Morgan, FRMS, formerly advisor to the World Meteorological Organization/climatology research scientist at University of Exeter, U.K.
- - -
How old are these quotes?
Up here in Canada we're very concerned (http://www.cbc.ca/canada/story/2006/11/08/enviro
Either your sources are inaccurate or woefully out of date.
How many windows?
As others have said, it all depends on OS and whether this is one of my work computers (I have several) or one of my home systems.
Considering home first. On the Windows XP machine that I'm using now there are 8 windows open (Quickbooks, 4 open office and 3 Firefox at the moment - each Firefox instance has multiple tabs). That's pretty typical for this machine. These windows typically don't stay open longer than a couple of days. This computer also typically doesn't stay up 24/7.
Over on the other side of the room is a Fedora system which serves as both a desktop and server for various things. That system is never shut down and some windows, especially mail and terminal clients are up for many days, typically weeks at a time. Typically there are probably 20 or so gnome terminals, instances of Firefox, gimp sessions, and always at least one mail client opened - scattered across 4 gnome desktops.
At work, my main computer is a Sun workstation (again a Gnome based environment). There I'll have one desktop dedicated to software development (Sun Studio tools with all its own windows and tabs), an instance or two of a software build that I'm testing, a Firefox app for some research I'm doing, and a gnome terminal window (with tabs) for various other things. Another gnome desktop will be used mostly for communication/email and there I'll have 3 or 4 gnome terminals, mail client and web browser. The web browser (Firefox) typically has multiple tabs as do the gnome terminals that on this desktop I use to connect to other systems I administer. As for the other two gnome desktops (I stick to the default 4 desktops) I use them if I have something not tied to development or communication/administration. I try to use the desktops to better multi-task. I actually find it hard working in a standard windows xp environment because of the lack of built-in multiple desktops. Yes, I know there are some tricks you can use to pretend that you have a true multi-desktop system in MS Windows XP, but it really isn't the same thing. I never shut down this work machine unless I'm testing something or upgrading something that requires a shut-down/reboot so the windows can be open for a very long time - weeks to a couple of months.
One of my coworkers never, ever shuts down his development machine (also a Sun blade) and he probably has 50+ windows open for many months at a time. He gets really upset when his gnome terminal windows crash after 3+ months of being open.
I also have a windows based workstation that typically only has one application running all day (a corporate email client) with maybe up to 5 other windows/applications opened at the same time.
In summary I guess you could say it depends on whether it is a MS Windows based machine or a Unix/Linux machine. Modern Unix/Linux really lends itself to having lots of windows open and lets the user manage them efficiently. So if you're really using these machines (for work or play) you'll have lots of windows open - and often leave them open for extended periods especially if it is for work. On the other hand, MS Windows really doesn't handle massive numbers of windows well (without resorting to a downloaded hack/patch) so I rarely have more than 7 or 8 windows open in that environment, often much less.
Nobody would blink if Sun took a cheap shot at HP. But making fun of two recently deceased Silicon Valley icons, both of whom are still deeply respected by many in the industry, is pretty poor form.
I disagree. I don't think that Sun is making fun of HP's founders. What actually happened is that the HP brass fumbled the ball and refused to allow the cut-outs into HP HQ. They made it as far as the gate, but HP wouldn't let them in. That is the really sad story here. HP should have at least smiled and played along and let their founders make it into the buildings, had some photos taken, and made a donation to the causel what is $6000 to HP? Instead they locked them out and Sun came to the rescue and had some good natured fun at the expense of current HP management who somehow dropped the ball on this. If anyone was being disrespectful, it was probably HP for rejecting the art when it first arrived, or at least not letting them into the building.
This is actually a pretty old story. Here's a good link to a register story from Aug. 17th.
Because Sunrays are really sucky. take it from a former Sun Microsystems instructor. They really are. You're better off with a Linux solution, for Multiple reasons (not going to go into all of them, now. Just research it. Start with cost-factor and go from there).
Come on, you're going to have to give some additional information than that. We use Sun Rays quite a bit in our classrooms and labs and if you have the bandwidth and a good server on the other end, you're in the money. Sessions can be keyed to an access card and will follow you around the campus. If a Sunray breaks down, just swap in a new one and the session continues exactly as you left off. Pull your card, come back in a week, and pick up exactly where you left off. Everything resides on the server. No maintenance required at all on the client side.
What version of the Sun Ray server software were you using that made it so "sucky"? From my experience, they worked great for us. The only downside we had is that streaming video over Citrix to the Sun Rays didn't work so hot. However, streaming video natively from the Sun Ray server to the thin clients worked fine so the problem there was probably with Citrix Metaframe.
Sun has also recently upgraded the Sun Ray thin clients so they have gigabit ethernet, plus they now hsve a more complete end-to-end solution that will allow you to run Windows apps on your Sun Ray (in addition to all the Solaris/Unix apps) thanks to their Tarantella purchase. You'll still need some Terminal Server licenses, but you'll save on the Citrix.
You could try calling the local Sun reps and see if they'll give you a demo. They did that for us - drove 6 hours to our workplace and set up a server and clients to demonstrate it for us.