Solaris has a poor threading implementation, even Sun's own engineers admit that. However, that shouldn't be taken as proof that all M:N implementations are poor. In a demonstration at BSDCon Japan 2003, NetBSD's scheduler activations outperformed FreeBSD 5 and Linux NPTL. See the tech-misc mailing list thread that starts from here: http://news.gw.com/netbsd.tech.misc/701.
OpenBSD has ported the SMP work from NetBSD, giving it multiprocessor support in an amazingly short amount of time. I think this porting was largely the work of one programmer, which is some achievement. From postings on the OpenBSD Journal it appears that support is available for SMP on sparc and i386 at least.
I'm running -current on sparc, vax and i386. I also thought about putting it onto my NeXTstation, but I'd miss NeXTstep too much.
FFS2 is not totally trustable yet, although I do use it on my laptop. As for SMP, it now works on a number of ports including i386. I'm sure I also saw someone mention that it could spin up a second processor on an SMP Vax(!) machine. On the more popular SMP ports (i386, sparc, sparc64) the SMP support actually *uses* the extra processors as well as recognising them.
The other big feature in NetBSD 2.0 is the native threading support. This is based on scheduler activations, which is far more scalable than more common threading implementations. It took a while to get stable, but has uncovered numerous bugs in multithreaded applications. This is because the pthread implementation that sits on top of scheduler activations was quite exacting in it's conformance to the POSIX specification. This meant that sloppy thread programming that was acceptable on other platforms showed up more readily on NetBSD.
The only outstanding issue that I ahve with thr release candidates is that gdb seems to be a bit flaky. This may be a problem with missing support for SA threading, but it's not something that I have any time to look into.
Unforunately, Braben had the author of The New Kind remove the source code from his website. The Makefile and wrapper script you point to are not much use without the code. It's a shame, as TNK was perfect...
He certainly comes across as someone suffering from Tourette Syndrome. I've been considering the possibility of being classified as a sufferer myself. That way I can "legitimately" shout obscenities at my boss in planning meetings.
Am I not the only one who has realised that Groklaw is a very successful attempt at viral marketing? IBM saw the grass roots revulsion at SCO when they tried to scupper Linux, and used a website fronted by a third party to put across their case. After all, who had heard of Groklaw before the SCO-IBM case? What else did it report on in the early days other than the SCO-IBM case? Now that the credibility of Groklaw is established in the eyes of Linux users, IBM are pushing more obvious astroturfing articles onto it. Sun are IBM's biggest competitor in the high end markets, so we see an increasing amount of Sun bashing articles. The one mentioned in this Slashdot article is a classic - unsubstantiated rumour and the musings of researchers (and a Forrester one at that) reported as Sun's official policy.
Groklaw has done a great job uncovering the shaky basis of SCO's case against IBM, acting as a huge network of paralegals. However, don't lose sight of the likelihood that PJ's family connections to IBM are not her only links to Big Blue.
Yup it's teletext in the UK as well, Ceefax is just the BBC branded version of it. The company I work for (The Press Association) does the teletext for most if not all UK terrestrial TV stations. Several of my colleagues have crappy portable tellys on their desks to view the pages they're working on.
Sun's Opteron is high end for most Slashdot readers (who think a computers performance is measured by how well it runs Doom 3), but compared to something like an E25K they're distinctly entry level...
They run on most UltraSparcs (not sure about the UltraSparc IV), but they don't handles large numbers of CPU's or massive loads as well as Solaris does. This is only to be expected, as few people have access to high end Sun kit to do Linux hacking on it. Despite Schwartz's use of the "open architecture" mantra (something the OpenBSD guys would find contentious seeing as they can't get UltraSparc IV documentation), Sun's vendor lock in is Solaris. That's why they are pushing Linux on their low end Opteron stuff, but limiting their high end UltraSparc stuff to running Solaris.
Sun's current line of workstations are pretty poor compared to the SparcStations of yesteryear. Back in the mid 1990's they were well worth the expense if you wanted a reliable Unix machine on the dekstop. My SS5 is still whirring away as a firewall and webserver at home. however, if I wanted a decent RISC workstation nowadays then I'd go for a Mac and dual boot either Linux or NetBSD on it.
Sun's servers are still excellent though, and they're my first choice for serious database machines. Alphas were a good alternative until DEC got melted down by Compaq, and I'm not really aware of what IBM market in this area (the Z Series?).
I read an article on/. not too long ago that talked about the great lenghts Microsoft programmers went through to make sure that future versions of Windows were compatible with previous releases of software already in the wild - this is exactly why they have over 90 percent marketshare and 50 billion in the bank.
If backwards compatability was the main reason for MicroSofts success, then NetBSD would give them a run for their money. NetBSD is backwards compatible with previous releases all the way to 4.3BSD. Can you still run DOS program from the same era as 4.3BSD on you WinXP box? Unlikely. The true reason for MicroSofts dominance is somewhere else.
RedHat may well have provided tweaked packages with their distro which included the work of one of their hackers, Chris Blizzard. He has done a lot of work on Mozilla, and I recall seeing a post from him in which he said he was working on making Moz honour themes. He also did much of the work of porting Moz to GTK+ 2.x.
It's not a RedHat thing, as my laptop is running NetBSD. The Mozilla family uses XUL, which is a way of specifying an interface in XML - broadly similar to libglade. The interface is then rendered using the underlying toolkit, which is GTK+ on Unix, although there is or was a rare Xlib interface at some point.
Thunderbird doesn't use the system themes, nor does Firefox or the Mozilla suite, they aren't GTK apps.
That's strange. I wonder why Firefox and Thunderbird depend on GTK+ on my laptop. Must be a packaging error. It's also strange that when I installed the GTKstep theme Firefox and Thunderbird started using NeXTstep like widgets as well as my GTK+ applications.
Sweet lovers are bemoaning the latest legal action by Nestle, manufacturer of popular sweet mixtures such as "Quality Street" and "Roses". In recent years, many sweet lovers have been acquiring sweets without paying for them, an activity which the industry is now trying to stamp down on.
One "sweet sharer" whined: I got taken to court for allegedly stealing toffee whirls, which is totally out of order. I like the toffee whirls and believe I should be able to have them without paying for the pack."
To all you file sharers - quit whining. The RIAA is acting within the law. If you don't want to pay for your music then listen to the fucking radio. If you do "share" copyrighted music, then be prepared to face up to the penalty.
As an alternative to trying to contribute to the Sun java and javax libraries, people could contribute to the Classpath libraries. Getting these complete means effort could then be expended on useful extensions and perhaps some optional improvements to the standard libraries. If Classpath could get some serious impetus (from IBM for instance), then Sun may have to open the development of their reference implementation or risk being left behind.
I guess you're referring to Gtk# as an alternative to Windows.Forms. That's not really going to help, as the majority of C#/.NET coding is going to be targetted primarily at Windows, where Gtk# is not going to be the first choice.
I did notice in the comments for the linked article, that Miguel mentions work is underway on Windows.Forms support for Mono. That would be quite an achievement, and one that would *really* make Mono a viable cross platform alternative to Java.
I'm quite happy with using Java Servlets and JavaServer Pages - they're great technologies that clearly address shortxcomings on what came before.
However, Enterprise Java Beans make my brain ache. I've tried reading a couple of books that had reasonable reviews on Amazon, but I've still not got much confidence that I could use them well. Can anyone recommend some decent books on EJB's, or is it not worth the bother?
I have to second your enthusiasm for the Glib library. On the one occasion that I haven't been able to shoehorn a JVM onto an emebedded PC, I used Glib and GTK+ instead. This was a crane controller with a touchscreen, and the app had to fit (along with a stripped down Linux distro) into 32Mb of flash RAM. As well as GTK+, I also got ORBit onto the machine, which meant I was able to duplicate pretty much everything I'd have done in Java. I did have to write a C replacement for Java's resource bundles, but that was no great hardship.
java applications are difficult to install - many users do not already have a copy of the java virtual machine installed on their machine. For these users, installing a java application means downloading and installing the java runtime, which is quite large and can be difficult to configure.
Well, you must be pretty hopeless not to be able to install the Java runtime. Last time I installed it on Windows, it took half a dozen mouse clicks and a couple of minutes tops.
java applications start up slowly - even the smallest java applications can take several seconds to start up, since the virtual machine needs to be loaded first.
I run Java on very low spec embedded PC's, and it's no slouch there. Even if there is a couple of seconds wait at startup, the JIT compiler means a well written app will run without being appreciably slower than a "native" app once the JVM is bootstrapped.
java applications have slow, unresponsive user interfaces--- on slower machines, using java-based user interfaces can be frustrating (resizing the application window can mean taking a coffee break).
That's strange, it must be their inability to code an interface and data models in an efficient manner. I write warehouse control software, where we are dealing with vasts amount of data that must be collated and displayed to the user. Very rarely do we have to resort to doing major grunt work on the server as opposed to doing it in the Java client.
java applications use a lot of memory - on most platforms, the virtual machine itself requires several MiB of memory, even for small applications that use very little memory. For more complicated applications, such as konspire2b, the virtual machine adds a lot of memory overhead. For example, kast currently uses about 1 MiB of memory when it's up and running. konspire 1.0 server (written using java) uses about 12 MiB. The interesting point is that konspire2b is far more complex that konspire 1.0 server (for example, the server portion of konspire 1.0 doesn't even have a user interface).
If this is really an issue for you, then you can tweak the runtimes environment. Yes, Java does requisition a lot of memeory when an untweaked JVM starts up, but the inmpact depends on the machine running the program.
java applications leak memory
This could be rephraed as "bad Java programmers leak memory". I have client-server Java applications that run 24x7 without leaking memory. Perhaps it's because I'm an unsually good Java programmer? Probably not, as I'm just an average one. What I don't do is immediately blame problems on the tools I use until I'm sure it isn't my lack of skill with the tools.
But how many companies do you see requiruing wxWidgets experience? Not to knock it as a cross platform development toolkit, but rightly or wrongly it's overlooked by virtually every company I've ever worked at. The exception is my current employer, where it was evaluate along with Qt and Java as a means to write cross platform GUIs. Java won, as C++ proved far too troublesome on a previous project.
.NET is actually a back handed compliment to Java. Java was so good that MicroSoft had to clone it. With Mono now at version 1.0, then perhaps C# is in a position to threaten Javas cross platform crown, although perhaps not without Windows Forms support.
It's strange how so many people say "Java is dying" or now that it patently isn't, they're saying "Java's back". If you go to any of the recruitment websites in the UK, the most popular requirement is Java Enterprise experience, hardly the mark of a development system that's been in decline... The only explanations for this misrepresentation of Java that I encounter on sites like Slashdot and Linux Today is the following:
A large part of the readership are students, and therefore don't really know what's going on in the software industry.
The prepondereance of GNU fanboys means that Java gets dissed for not being Free(tm).
Slashdot Mirror
Solaris has a poor threading implementation, even Sun's own engineers admit that. However, that shouldn't be taken as proof that all M:N implementations are poor. In a demonstration at BSDCon Japan 2003, NetBSD's scheduler activations outperformed FreeBSD 5 and Linux NPTL. See the tech-misc mailing list thread that starts from here: http://news.gw.com/netbsd.tech.misc/701.
Did you rebuild both the kernel and userland after the ipfilter update? I couldn't get NAT working until my userland was back in sync with the kernel.
OpenBSD has ported the SMP work from NetBSD, giving it multiprocessor support in an amazingly short amount of time. I think this porting was largely the work of one programmer, which is some achievement. From postings on the OpenBSD Journal it appears that support is available for SMP on sparc and i386 at least.
I'm running -current on sparc, vax and i386. I also thought about putting it onto my NeXTstation, but I'd miss NeXTstep too much.
FFS2 is not totally trustable yet, although I do use it on my laptop. As for SMP, it now works on a number of ports including i386. I'm sure I also saw someone mention that it could spin up a second processor on an SMP Vax(!) machine. On the more popular SMP ports (i386, sparc, sparc64) the SMP support actually *uses* the extra processors as well as recognising them.
The other big feature in NetBSD 2.0 is the native threading support. This is based on scheduler activations, which is far more scalable than more common threading implementations. It took a while to get stable, but has uncovered numerous bugs in multithreaded applications. This is because the pthread implementation that sits on top of scheduler activations was quite exacting in it's conformance to the POSIX specification. This meant that sloppy thread programming that was acceptable on other platforms showed up more readily on NetBSD.
The only outstanding issue that I ahve with thr release candidates is that gdb seems to be a bit flaky. This may be a problem with missing support for SA threading, but it's not something that I have any time to look into.
Unforunately, Braben had the author of The New Kind remove the source code from his website. The Makefile and wrapper script you point to are not much use without the code. It's a shame, as TNK was perfect ...
He certainly comes across as someone suffering from Tourette Syndrome. I've been considering the possibility of being classified as a sufferer myself. That way I can "legitimately" shout obscenities at my boss in planning meetings.
Am I not the only one who has realised that Groklaw is a very successful attempt at viral marketing? IBM saw the grass roots revulsion at SCO when they tried to scupper Linux, and used a website fronted by a third party to put across their case. After all, who had heard of Groklaw before the SCO-IBM case? What else did it report on in the early days other than the SCO-IBM case? Now that the credibility of Groklaw is established in the eyes of Linux users, IBM are pushing more obvious astroturfing articles onto it. Sun are IBM's biggest competitor in the high end markets, so we see an increasing amount of Sun bashing articles. The one mentioned in this Slashdot article is a classic - unsubstantiated rumour and the musings of researchers (and a Forrester one at that) reported as Sun's official policy.
Groklaw has done a great job uncovering the shaky basis of SCO's case against IBM, acting as a huge network of paralegals. However, don't lose sight of the likelihood that PJ's family connections to IBM are not her only links to Big Blue.
Yup it's teletext in the UK as well, Ceefax is just the BBC branded version of it. The company I work for (The Press Association) does the teletext for most if not all UK terrestrial TV stations. Several of my colleagues have crappy portable tellys on their desks to view the pages they're working on.
Sun's Opteron is high end for most Slashdot readers (who think a computers performance is measured by how well it runs Doom 3), but compared to something like an E25K they're distinctly entry level ...
Linux runs on Sparc, as does FreeBSD.
They run on most UltraSparcs (not sure about the UltraSparc IV), but they don't handles large numbers of CPU's or massive loads as well as Solaris does. This is only to be expected, as few people have access to high end Sun kit to do Linux hacking on it. Despite Schwartz's use of the "open architecture" mantra (something the OpenBSD guys would find contentious seeing as they can't get UltraSparc IV documentation), Sun's vendor lock in is Solaris. That's why they are pushing Linux on their low end Opteron stuff, but limiting their high end UltraSparc stuff to running Solaris.
Sun's current line of workstations are pretty poor compared to the SparcStations of yesteryear. Back in the mid 1990's they were well worth the expense if you wanted a reliable Unix machine on the dekstop. My SS5 is still whirring away as a firewall and webserver at home. however, if I wanted a decent RISC workstation nowadays then I'd go for a Mac and dual boot either Linux or NetBSD on it.
Sun's servers are still excellent though, and they're my first choice for serious database machines. Alphas were a good alternative until DEC got melted down by Compaq, and I'm not really aware of what IBM market in this area (the Z Series?).
He wouldn't last five minutes in a school playground.
I read an article on /. not too long ago that talked about the great lenghts Microsoft programmers went through to make sure that future versions of Windows were compatible with previous releases of software already in the wild - this is exactly why they have over 90 percent marketshare and 50 billion in the bank.
If backwards compatability was the main reason for MicroSofts success, then NetBSD would give them a run for their money. NetBSD is backwards compatible with previous releases all the way to 4.3BSD. Can you still run DOS program from the same era as 4.3BSD on you WinXP box? Unlikely. The true reason for MicroSofts dominance is somewhere else.
RedHat may well have provided tweaked packages with their distro which included the work of one of their hackers, Chris Blizzard. He has done a lot of work on Mozilla, and I recall seeing a post from him in which he said he was working on making Moz honour themes. He also did much of the work of porting Moz to GTK+ 2.x.
It's not a RedHat thing, as my laptop is running NetBSD. The Mozilla family uses XUL, which is a way of specifying an interface in XML - broadly similar to libglade. The interface is then rendered using the underlying toolkit, which is GTK+ on Unix, although there is or was a rare Xlib interface at some point.
Thunderbird doesn't use the system themes, nor does Firefox or the Mozilla suite, they aren't GTK apps.
That's strange. I wonder why Firefox and Thunderbird depend on GTK+ on my laptop. Must be a packaging error. It's also strange that when I installed the GTKstep theme Firefox and Thunderbird started using NeXTstep like widgets as well as my GTK+ applications.
Odd that. Unless you're talking out of your arse.
Sweet lovers are bemoaning the latest legal action by Nestle, manufacturer of popular sweet mixtures such as "Quality Street" and "Roses". In recent years, many sweet lovers have been acquiring sweets without paying for them, an activity which the industry is now trying to stamp down on.
One "sweet sharer" whined: I got taken to court for allegedly stealing toffee whirls, which is totally out of order. I like the toffee whirls and believe I should be able to have them without paying for the pack."
To all you file sharers - quit whining. The RIAA is acting within the law. If you don't want to pay for your music then listen to the fucking radio. If you do "share" copyrighted music, then be prepared to face up to the penalty.
Metacity is incapable of remembering window placement or minimised/maximised state, which as far as I am concerned, is a WM's job.
No, that's a session managers job, and has been since the X Window System included the xsm program.
As an alternative to trying to contribute to the Sun java and javax libraries, people could contribute to the Classpath libraries. Getting these complete means effort could then be expended on useful extensions and perhaps some optional improvements to the standard libraries. If Classpath could get some serious impetus (from IBM for instance), then Sun may have to open the development of their reference implementation or risk being left behind.
I guess you're referring to Gtk# as an alternative to Windows.Forms. That's not really going to help, as the majority of C#/.NET coding is going to be targetted primarily at Windows, where Gtk# is not going to be the first choice.
I did notice in the comments for the linked article, that Miguel mentions work is underway on Windows.Forms support for Mono. That would be quite an achievement, and one that would *really* make Mono a viable cross platform alternative to Java.
I'm quite happy with using Java Servlets and JavaServer Pages - they're great technologies that clearly address shortxcomings on what came before.
However, Enterprise Java Beans make my brain ache. I've tried reading a couple of books that had reasonable reviews on Amazon, but I've still not got much confidence that I could use them well. Can anyone recommend some decent books on EJB's, or is it not worth the bother?
I have to second your enthusiasm for the Glib library. On the one occasion that I haven't been able to shoehorn a JVM onto an emebedded PC, I used Glib and GTK+ instead. This was a crane controller with a touchscreen, and the app had to fit (along with a stripped down Linux distro) into 32Mb of flash RAM. As well as GTK+, I also got ORBit onto the machine, which meant I was able to duplicate pretty much everything I'd have done in Java. I did have to write a C replacement for Java's resource bundles, but that was no great hardship.
java applications are difficult to install - many users do not already have a copy of the java virtual machine installed on their machine. For these users, installing a java application means downloading and installing the java runtime, which is quite large and can be difficult to configure.
Well, you must be pretty hopeless not to be able to install the Java runtime. Last time I installed it on Windows, it took half a dozen mouse clicks and a couple of minutes tops.
java applications start up slowly - even the smallest java applications can take several seconds to start up, since the virtual machine needs to be loaded first.
I run Java on very low spec embedded PC's, and it's no slouch there. Even if there is a couple of seconds wait at startup, the JIT compiler means a well written app will run without being appreciably slower than a "native" app once the JVM is bootstrapped.
java applications have slow, unresponsive user interfaces--- on slower machines, using java-based user interfaces can be frustrating (resizing the application window can mean taking a coffee break).
That's strange, it must be their inability to code an interface and data models in an efficient manner. I write warehouse control software, where we are dealing with vasts amount of data that must be collated and displayed to the user. Very rarely do we have to resort to doing major grunt work on the server as opposed to doing it in the Java client.
java applications use a lot of memory - on most platforms, the virtual machine itself requires several MiB of memory, even for small applications that use very little memory. For more complicated applications, such as konspire2b, the virtual machine adds a lot of memory overhead. For example, kast currently uses about 1 MiB of memory when it's up and running. konspire 1.0 server (written using java) uses about 12 MiB. The interesting point is that konspire2b is far more complex that konspire 1.0 server (for example, the server portion of konspire 1.0 doesn't even have a user interface).
If this is really an issue for you, then you can tweak the runtimes environment. Yes, Java does requisition a lot of memeory when an untweaked JVM starts up, but the inmpact depends on the machine running the program.
java applications leak memory
This could be rephraed as "bad Java programmers leak memory". I have client-server Java applications that run 24x7 without leaking memory. Perhaps it's because I'm an unsually good Java programmer? Probably not, as I'm just an average one. What I don't do is immediately blame problems on the tools I use until I'm sure it isn't my lack of skill with the tools.
But how many companies do you see requiruing wxWidgets experience? Not to knock it as a cross platform development toolkit, but rightly or wrongly it's overlooked by virtually every company I've ever worked at. The exception is my current employer, where it was evaluate along with Qt and Java as a means to write cross platform GUIs. Java won, as C++ proved far too troublesome on a previous project.
.NET is actually a back handed compliment to Java. Java was so good that MicroSoft had to clone it. With Mono now at version 1.0, then perhaps C# is in a position to threaten Javas cross platform crown, although perhaps not without Windows Forms support.
It's strange how so many people say "Java is dying" or now that it patently isn't, they're saying "Java's back". If you go to any of the recruitment websites in the UK, the most popular requirement is Java Enterprise experience, hardly the mark of a development system that's been in decline ... The only explanations for this misrepresentation of Java that I encounter on sites like Slashdot and Linux Today is the following:
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