It's very easy to download the Sun JRE or JDK from Sun's website and to install it. Not much more effort that typing apt-get install.
I've been using Debian, Fedora and CentOS recently after years of using Slackware and Solaris, and I can tell you that all the package managers have their advantages and disadvantages, but really, downloading and installing the Java distribution from Sun really isn't that difficult.
Sun may have some strange attitudes towards the redistribution of Java, but from what I can gather this is due to stupidity and ignorance rather than malice. The wheels of beaurocracy turn very slowly in Sun.
Hotels have had them for years... so where's the innovation?
Now, I know as well as the next pro-Windows shill that Open Sores copies everything Windows does, so give it a year or two and I'll have unlimited free beer, whisky, chocolate and peanuts.
All they have to sort out is free hookers and I'll be sorted.
I worked for a few years after graduating in the state-owned arm of the British nuclear industry (Magnox reactors).
The first thing to be aware of is that all of the nuclear reactors were protected by analogue safety circuits such as thermocouples, amplifiers, relays and LADDECs (sp?).
The reactors were either controlled manually with the control rods on a gang switch attached to a grumpy old man awaiting his early retirement golden wheelbarrow of cash, or simple analiogue feedback circuits overseen by said gentlemen. We're talking 1950s technology.
The instrumentation was usually analogue guages, chart recorders and the like (or their digital replacements). Our powerstation even had a Honeywell 316 for front-line temperature monitoring.
The proper computers were Microvaxen running VMS for Emergency Plume Gamma Monitoring (which thankfully never got put to the test).
The office network was two 16 mbit Tolkein Rings with a bridge, OS/2 and LAN Manager, with Win 3.11 clients, all upgraded to NT4 just as Microsoft was withdrawing support for it (NT4, that is).
The network used to go down 2 to 3 times a week, and due to being SMB, everyone had to log off. I pointed out that nice, cheap ethernet would be better but the pointy-hairs insisted that Token Ring was far better and more reliable, and we were a nuclear powerstation after all. Just because the oil industry who were paranoid about losing any productivity at all settled on ethernet in the 1980s didn't have any sway.
I sneaked Slackware 4.0 onto my PeeCee with WP8 to use during outages...
If they mass-produced lots and lots of porm at, say, $1 per DVD the market would be enormous and it wouldn't be worth anyone's trouble trying to copy it illegally.
Because on a hot summer's evening, when you're sitting playing halo with a cold beer you don't want a space heater with a leaf blower in your front room.
SGI uses Itanium for their Altix line of products that run Linux. They need Itanuim for its ability to handle hundreds of processors in one system with cc:NUMA, and its huge physical address space for their customers who need several terabytes of RAM in one system.
Strange, that.
SGI once had its own line of very sophisticated and top-performing 64-RISC processors called MIPS that did exactly that until they drank the intel itanic Kool Aide. (And Windows NT as well, but that's a whole nother rant).
There is nothing wrong with the SPARC design, or the instruction set itself. In fact it's better than the Pentium which is handicapped by backwards compatablity with the poorly designed x86 instruction set.
The SPARC instruction set may be better, but even UltraSPARC IV still doesn't do out-of-order execution and those old fixed-size register windows really kill performance when you have to execute spill and fill traps i.e. when the register window isn't big enough for the function.
To do an Intel, and get the clock speed up, Sun would need Intel's massive financial resources.
So how come AMD does so much better with Opteron at clock speeds comparable to US IV? 1.4GHz Opterons are very fast indeed.
x86 is no longer handicapepd by the instruction set. Internally all modern x86 processors are 64-bit RISC (or even VLIW) processors with many registers and superscalar execution units. The x86->RISC translation units are very sophisticated, so I'm told.
intel was right about processor design. It was wrong about one thing though : itanic was not the future.
No, Niagara is suitable for web serving only. As usual, TI can't fab a chip for toffee so Sun's having to sell some as 6-core (two broken cores disabled) and underclocked to 1GHz to get their money's worth out of the poor yield.
All Sun's servers have been 64-bit for the last about 10 years.
Except for the LX50 which was Pentium III.
so why even mention the 64-bitness? ctually, it would be more a news if sun were to release a 32-bit server.
It's news to the Windows-toting PeeCee people who are still buying 32-bit Pentiums from intel, which is 80% of the audience here, and 99% of Western business.
Sun always boasted it had the second-largest CPU design team on the planet. So why is UltraSPARC so slow?
If I were Sun, I'd be asking AMD very nicely to make an Opteron processor with a SPARC V9 translation layer on it instead of an x86 one.
In fact, if Opteron were anything like the Transmeta processors, AMD should be able to put multiple translation layers on the chip. It would be totally and utterly cool if it could run AMD64 and SPARC V9 in hardware, on the same processor and be software switchable. You could run 64-bit SPARC and x86 and 32-bit SPARC and x86 binaries all on the same chip, concurrently under the same OS.
Sun has a comprehensive roadmap for UltraSPARC going forward and combining forces with Fujutsu on SPARC64.
These new servers absolutely rock, and at superb prices.
I once had the pleasure of a 4-way Opteron v40z with a development version of 64-bit Solaris 10. It was a screamer, especially compared to our 4-way Dell P4 Xeon box, and 64-bit.
It was plenty fast enough to host 4 zones and several developers working on KDE, gcc and all manner of other stuff.
At last, Sun looks like it's turning the corner (despite the best efforts of some of its PHBs - no names mentioned).
Yes, Sun did a remarkable job of shooting itself in the foot with its schedule and feature set for Solaris 10. Project "Flatline" (aka Greenline - the windows-style registry) went in at the expense of ZFS and Linux emulation.
Then there was a slight HR issue with many of the engineers...
Slashdot Mirror
I see what you mean.
Hopefully, eventually, gcj and GNU CLASSPATH will address the Java issue and provide us with Java freedom.
It's very easy to download the Sun JRE or JDK from Sun's website and to install it. Not much more effort that typing apt-get install.
I've been using Debian, Fedora and CentOS recently after years of using Slackware and Solaris, and I can tell you that all the package managers have their advantages and disadvantages, but really, downloading and installing the Java distribution from Sun really isn't that difficult.
Sun may have some strange attitudes towards the redistribution of Java, but from what I can gather this is due to stupidity and ignorance rather than malice. The wheels of beaurocracy turn very slowly in Sun.
Hotels have had them for years... so where's the innovation?
Now, I know as well as the next pro-Windows shill that Open Sores copies everything Windows does, so give it a year or two and I'll have unlimited free beer, whisky, chocolate and peanuts.
All they have to sort out is free hookers and I'll be sorted.
I worked for a few years after graduating in the state-owned arm of the British nuclear industry (Magnox reactors).
The first thing to be aware of is that all of the nuclear reactors were protected by analogue safety circuits such as thermocouples, amplifiers, relays and LADDECs (sp?).
The reactors were either controlled manually with the control rods on a gang switch attached to a grumpy old man awaiting his early retirement golden wheelbarrow of cash, or simple analiogue feedback circuits overseen by said gentlemen. We're talking 1950s technology.
The instrumentation was usually analogue guages, chart recorders and the like (or their digital replacements). Our powerstation even had a Honeywell 316 for front-line temperature monitoring.
The proper computers were Microvaxen running VMS for Emergency Plume Gamma Monitoring (which thankfully never got put to the test).
The office network was two 16 mbit Tolkein Rings with a bridge, OS/2 and LAN Manager, with Win 3.11 clients, all upgraded to NT4 just as Microsoft was withdrawing support for it (NT4, that is).
The network used to go down 2 to 3 times a week, and due to being SMB, everyone had to log off. I pointed out that nice, cheap ethernet would be better but the pointy-hairs insisted that Token Ring was far better and more reliable, and we were a nuclear powerstation after all. Just because the oil industry who were paranoid about losing any productivity at all settled on ethernet in the 1980s didn't have any sway.
I sneaked Slackware 4.0 onto my PeeCee with WP8 to use during outages...
Let some other schmuck take care of that mess of melted aluminum and plastic on the floor.
Serves you right for hosting your site on itanic. :-)
IBM has always had some of the best marketing in the world, and it milks slashdot for all its worth.
IBM releases a laptop with a new tin. It gets a slashdot story. Sun releases new 64-bit processors. Not a peep.
How long before the authorities start getting serious and sending in the jack boots to sort out the pirates?
They'll just keep tightening the screws.
If they mass-produced lots and lots of porm at, say, $1 per DVD the market would be enormous and it wouldn't be worth anyone's trouble trying to copy it illegally.
Because on a hot summer's evening, when you're sitting playing halo with a cold beer you don't want a space heater with a leaf blower in your front room.
Strange, that.
SGI once had its own line of very sophisticated and top-performing 64-RISC processors called MIPS that did exactly that until they drank the intel itanic Kool Aide. (And Windows NT as well, but that's a whole nother rant).
Look at poor SGI now.
There is nothing wrong with the SPARC design, or the instruction set itself. In fact it's better than the Pentium which is handicapped by backwards compatablity with the poorly designed x86 instruction set.
The SPARC instruction set may be better, but even UltraSPARC IV still doesn't do out-of-order execution and those old fixed-size register windows really kill performance when you have to execute spill and fill traps i.e. when the register window isn't big enough for the function.
To do an Intel, and get the clock speed up, Sun would need Intel's massive financial resources.
So how come AMD does so much better with Opteron at clock speeds comparable to US IV? 1.4GHz Opterons are very fast indeed.
x86 is no longer handicapepd by the instruction set. Internally all modern x86 processors are 64-bit RISC (or even VLIW) processors with many registers and superscalar execution units. The x86->RISC translation units are very sophisticated, so I'm told.
intel was right about processor design. It was wrong about one thing though : itanic was not the future.
Quite :-)
No, Niagara is suitable for web serving only. As usual, TI can't fab a chip for toffee so Sun's having to sell some as 6-core (two broken cores disabled) and underclocked to 1GHz to get their money's worth out of the poor yield.
Except for the LX50 which was Pentium III.
so why even mention the 64-bitness? ctually, it would be more a news if sun were to release a 32-bit server.
It's news to the Windows-toting PeeCee people who are still buying 32-bit Pentiums from intel, which is 80% of the audience here, and 99% of Western business.
If I were Sun, I'd be asking AMD very nicely to make an Opteron processor with a SPARC V9 translation layer on it instead of an x86 one.
In fact, if Opteron were anything like the Transmeta processors, AMD should be able to put multiple translation layers on the chip. It would be totally and utterly cool if it could run AMD64 and SPARC V9 in hardware, on the same processor and be software switchable. You could run 64-bit SPARC and x86 and 32-bit SPARC and x86 binaries all on the same chip, concurrently under the same OS.
I'm surprised no one has thought of this yet.
Niagara is an interesting engineering research project and a first attempt at multithreaded CPUs.
What do you know about ROCK that we don't? Englighten us.
These new servers absolutely rock, and at superb prices.
I once had the pleasure of a 4-way Opteron v40z with a development version of 64-bit Solaris 10. It was a screamer, especially compared to our 4-way Dell P4 Xeon box, and 64-bit.
It was plenty fast enough to host 4 zones and several developers working on KDE, gcc and all manner of other stuff.
At last, Sun looks like it's turning the corner (despite the best efforts of some of its PHBs - no names mentioned).
Good luck Sun.
I seem to remember being quite supportive of Solaris around here, and the Sun engineers.
Now, the PHBs. That's a different story.
Just for the record: Solaris : good, Java : good, RedHat : bad.
Opteron : good. UltraSPARC : mediocre and falling behind.
Pentium : bad.
Linux : OK. Solaris : better.
Windows : Bad.
Unrestrained capitalism : bad.
I hope that clears a few things up. If you want to know my shoe size and inside leg measurement, just ask.
Then there was a slight HR issue with many of the engineers...
You can link a closed-source program to an LGPL'd one, but if you link to a GPL'd one, your program must also be GPL'd
Nothing. It's just a ruse to get the hard-of-thinking interested in space exploration.
Neutrons don't care about "magnetic shields." They only understand dense atomic nuclei.
Sometimes it hurts to be a Scotland supporter. :-)
In Saudi Arabia, they would order someone to have his hand cut off for the national prestige.