When you go to the supermarket to buy fruits and vegetables, you put them in that bag you have trouble yanking off the roll. You don't pay for that bag. Computer hardware will soon be available on a roll.:)
Sun does have a leasing program for it's bigger servers as well as other companies for intel based hardware and sun and ibm mainframe resellers. Leasing in the computer industry is nothing new.
Most businesses IT budgets pay a lot more for software, support and consulting services than they do for hardware. The margins on hardware are also going down as there is increased competition.
Sun is already going after this with their JES system which will be a subscription based model that pays for all the consulting and software. Might as well throw in the hardware too and get the customer.
They've already started this. You can get a v20z (dual opteron) server for free when you agree to license their software stack for three years.
It makes sense in big companies. Computing power is becoming more of a utility. Just like you don't pay for your cell phone (in many cases), your water meter, your gas or electric meter, your hardware can be free. It is a viable way of doing things. Sun just has to ramp up it's software and consulting side to make it work. Their Java Enterprise System is pretty good and affordable compared to other solutions so if they can get more momentum for it, things will look good.
I don't think it will kill the home user pc market and you'll most likely be able to still buy computers, it will most likely be a very attractive option for companies that want it.
Re:what MS funded "study" about Linux isn't FUD?
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Stallman vs Ken Brown
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Just to play devil's advocate. There have been other kernel projects that have taken a lot longer than six months to create. Don't have to look past Stallman's own house to find one, The HURD.
At the end of six months Linus had a functional kernel. Nothing groundbreaking, nothing even really that great compared to other existing kernels. It was from the support of other developers that it was able to become better.
I am not trying to downplay what Linus did because not everyone could do it. Just saying there were other kernels out there including bsd. Without the contributions of other developers I don't think the linux kernel would be where it is today. Now with others contributing to it, it does make sense to keep a good log of where the code comes from. A little bit of hassle to prevent bigger hassles down the line.
To say he must have copied the code is a bit unfair. The best way to describe it is the way other scientific projects grow. Bill Joy said in an interview "At Berkeley, we had the model that software is the result of your research. The university tradition is that when you do research, you publish....... But the fundamental principle in my mind is that people get to see the results of other people's work in a way that they can stand on shoulders rather than on toes."
I don't know if it's so much of a nuissance as something they didn't feel they needed to do anything with.
People kept asking what was Sun's linux strategy and they didn't really have one. Then again neither does my mom. Except for McNealy who has his way of going over the top with things the majority of references from Sun regarding Linux have been positive. This is going back years now. I remember reading an interview with Billy Joy (maybe from 99?) Praised linux for what it was doing. He still thought Solaris was better for some things and he didn't seem to have an interest in doing anything with Linux. This is old news to him and a lot of people at Sun. Bill Joy has already started from square one with unix operating systems including SunOS and BSD. From a creative standpoint it would be like taking a step back for him and starting with something he's already done. As many of you will know, there isn't much satisfaction in that and he was working on other things (JINI). Why would sun want to tinker with a new start up OS when it is busy improving it's own popular one? If something comes out now that is better than linux, will all the developers abandon linux and work on that?
Sun has a really good unix os already that was much more mature than linux when people were complaining about Sun not embracing linux. That's like complaining that Harley Davidson didn't embrace the new engine designs and stuck with a V-Twin. (Okay, they have a water cooled engine now on the vrod).
IBM has said the same things about linux as sun has when IBM compared linux to aix. Sun is a much smaller company than IBM and has to make different decisions.
The whole "what's sun's linux strategy" questions have bothered me. I mean we don't ask RedHat what their AIX or Solaris strategy is and shun them if they don't come up with anything.
Meanwhile, Sun has come out with their own linux distro (though short lived they did have Sun Linux) and they are working on JDS. They are porting or working on porting a lot of their stuff to linux.
I'm hoping to see a lot of good things now from Sun in the low end server space with Andy Bechtolsheim coming back to Sun. They'll be selling Solarix x86 and Linux distros with the new servers. Obviously they're going to push Solaris more but unless something major happens they'll still be selling linux. Andy Bechtolsheim was one of the founders of Sun. He was tired of waiting for computer time at school and built his own workstation. Bill Joy was working on BSD. Then McNealy the MBA and someone else (the money guy I forget his name) started Sun. Bill Joy and Andy Bechtolsheim are true geeks in the best sense of the word. Their the hardware and software guys that Wozniak was to Apple. We see Sun now as McNealy and it puts people off. But there's a lot more to the company.
I just think people should lay off sun (and sun should be a little more careful of what they say) because the infighting in the unix community just creates a rocky foundation for someone else to stake a stronger claim in the server space. It happened with windows nt.
One of the new execs at JBoss is Bob Bickel. Bob Bickel was VP or something or other at Bluestone and then worked at HP (forgot title) when HP aquired Bluestone.
I had worked with Bluestone a lot. Really great product and company. It was a shame to see HP not carry through with it. Don't really know much about Fluery but Bob's always seemed like a nice guy.
Just wanted to point out the relationship between JBoss and HP that exists.
I used to mainly use text editors for many years rather than a pure ide solution. Recently I started looking into the free ide's available. I worked on a couple of projects with eclipse as well as netbeans.
Eclipse seemed faster in some cases but only in some minor things such as dialog boxes or new windows opening up. After using it for a while, there didn't seem to be that much of a difference between it and netbeans. Especially in terms of memory usage.
Eclipse seems to be a lot more stripped down than netbeans. Netbeans comes with a whole bunch of modules right out of the box to do gui development and web development. Whereas in eclipse you have to download third party modules. As you add more modules the size of the application starts to increase. Also, to get the quality of modules that come with netbeans you have to pay for them in eclipse. For building web apps I really like netbeans. Eclipse with things like myeclipse works pretty well. MyEclipse is pretty cheap but not cheaper than free.
Look at IBM's WebSphere Studio. Once it finishes loading it's taking up about 150 Megs of memory (not virtual).
Both are kind of lacking in certain features but that's part of the point in both of them. They want to be a platform to build tools on as well as an ide for third parties to build plugins and charge for them.
Netbeans has been around a lot longer and has some more built in functionality than Eclipse does. I like the way Eclipse is more ant-like but NetBeans has good ant integration and with 4.0 will have an ant based project system. I've played with the new project system and it's really nice.
I don't know what some people's hangups are with Swing. I've used a full blown IDE for developing web applications about 6 years ago, on typical hardware from 6 years ago and performance was fine. Right now, I'm runing with Tiger and swing performance is a lot better.
The thing I don't like about SWT is that you have to rely on the native widgets and some platforms may not have the same set of widgets and they usually don't look the same across platforms if they do. SWT seems like a good short term solution but with the performance enhancements coming out for Swing/AWT, SWT may be obsolete soon.
The bottom line for me was that I didn't have to spend time and money comparing different plugins I needed that would work the way netbeans does.
It's odd, while eclipse may be faster I am much more productive in netbeans. The keyboard shortcuts, code completion and interface just work better for me.
Refactoring can be a pain if you have to do it often. If it's a concern there is a module for netbeans called RefactorIT which blows the doors off of what eclipse provides for refactoring. It's pretty cheap too.
I wonder if people's opinions on netbeans is based on some tools built using netbeans and not netbeans itself. Sun' Studio 5 update 1 had some weird behavior. Every once in a while something seemed to go into an infinite loop and just pin the cpu utilization at 100% while seeming to do nothing. Wind up having to kill the process and restart the ide. Can be a big pain if you haven't saved your work. I hope they've fixed that because the few times that happened it really ticked me off. I've used NetBeans more and haven't seen that happen.
When doing GUI development though I have gotten a few NPE's in NetBeans when adding new components. I just make sure to save frequently and if that happens, closing the form editor and reopening it fixes the problem without restarting the IDE. I don't do much GUI development so I don't know if this is new to 3.6 and JDK 1.5 or not. I'm hoping that it's because 1.5 is still beta.
The task list in Eclipse is really cool and NetBeans has something similar now but I haven't really used it much. I also like the way Eclipse handles imports. You start typing in the cannonical class name and if it's not in your import list it will add
JDS is mostly a software stack that runs on top of the OS that gives it certain functionality that enhances the user experience as well as the managebility of a network of JDS systems.
Sun has said they want to create a JDS version that runs on Solaris as well. Definatley for Solaris x86 and maybe Solaris/Sparc as well but I don't remember.
To be fair, they also have their Java Enterprise System which now only runs on Solaris. Again, it's a software stack. They plan on releasing it for other OS's including linux and windows.
So the claim that they are looking to ditch linux for solaris isn't fair. They want it to run on thier own OS as well. That they released it under linux first and then moving to solaris should be a good sign of their adoption of linux. They could have done the same thing with JES and done solaris (x86 and sparc) first and then linux but with JDS they went the other way. They will still do linux JDS even when solaris JDS comes out from what they've been saying.
Maybe I don't know enough about Robert X Cringely, but it seems he's just a popular columnist and writer.
He focusses too much on the technology and not the logistics of doing something like this. To me, it would have been more effective if such an article came from someone that had success in building a business that had to focuss on customers as much as such efforts would.
You need to worry about billing, customer service, accounting, marketting, reliability, security, the staff to support all that, etc, etc, etc.
What you're more likely to see is a bunch of 69.95 boxes collecting dust and people trying to figure out why they aren't making moeny like their friend down the block is.
Sun's main marketting is towards the corporate world from all it's releases. It does sell some pre-installed versions with a hardware manufacturer's systems at walmart.
They also give a license for employees to take it home and install it on their home pc's if their company bought it.
The latter would tell me that I should be able to try it on any typical PC and I should expect it to work, just as Windows does, just as Linux does.
No, it should be able to install on all the systems that linux does as it's based on SuSE linux. Looking at http://hardwaredb.suse.de/searchForm.php?searchtyp e=extended&LANG=en_UK you'll see that a lot of the hardware the reviewer was using doesn't show up on that list.
But on top of that, the software was installed on the same top of laptop someone else on this thread installed it on that the reviewer tried to. So there might be something else at play.
I do think the review was stupid, how do you review something you never get working? It's like going to the bathroom, not being able to unzip your zipper and deciding to take a piss anyway.
With that many install problems something else should have been looked at. The support issue is obviously a big one though. But I wouldn't call what he wrote a review of JDS.
As indicated on other posts in this thread, JDS has been installed successfully on many other systems. One poster even menioned that he successfully got it installed on the same laptop the reviewer tried it on.
Sun decided to go with Suse before Novell bought it. Novell is now coming up with their own desktop linux distro and you have to wonder if that's going to cause any problems in the JDS-SUSE relationship.
To call this a review of JDS is just plain stupid. To review something you should review it for it's intended use. JDS is meant for small to large scale corporate deployments. Set up a small network, get some "users" and an administrator and see how things go. Don't try to install it on some random pc's, have it not work (even though others have) and then decide to write about it anyway. It's like going to test drive a car but the salesperson can't find the key and decides to read you the brochures, you wouldn't call that a test drive.
I don't understand a lot of the animosity towards Sun in the OSS community. I can understand why IBM would want to see Sun dissapear but I get the impression that some in the OSS community need to pick one over the other.
Personally, I'm still weary over IBM. While they have done a lot for linux, I don't think they've shed all that stuff people didn't like about them. Websphere's a good product but it didn't gain it's marketshare by being a good product. IBM sells it for a pretty steep price, but they cut a lot of deals to get it in the door.. Truck comes by to drop off your new main frame.. Truck driver says hey I got these websomething boxes in the back too, I need to bring the truck back empty so you want them or I'll throw them away. Buying a new AS/400? Want to seriously look at websphere too? Get them both at less than the price of one.
My point isn't to bash IBM. Actually, I like IBM in a lot of ways. My point is tou can say good and bad things about any large company. I just don't see what Sun has done to deserve tha bashing it's getting and the bias when it comes to sun. The linux/OSS community seems to becoming cheerleaders for IBM and their agendas. Basically, linux is riding the IBM wave rather than the other way around.
Sun has open sourced a lot of products. JFS is good but I don't know of many people using it and can't think of any distributions that use it as their default filesystem. What else has IBM open sourced?
With sun you have the obvious OpenOffice and NFS. They've also open sourced a lot of other software and have provided resources for other projects. Have a look at http://www.sunsource.net/ to see how much Sun contributes to open source projects. People don't like some of the licenses Sun uses because it gives Sun too much control still. Having something GPL'd doesn't make that any better. Just look at what happend with Emacs and XEmacs when a company started paying the FSF to make enhancements to Emacs that they needed but had an uphill battle with RMS who had final say into what happened with Emacs. That's when XEmacs was forked out of it.
Sun has contributed a lot of code to Gnome (accessibility api, work on sawfish, improved usability, tons of documentation and help). They do provide kenel patches, Tim Hockins used to be very active on the linux kernel mailing lists when Sun was working on Sun Linux and still supporting Cobalt servers.
Also Sun is pushing a linux desktop, JDS. And it's pushing hard in different areas. Where is IBM in this? IBM's take on linux, provide it with our servers since we can run websphere on it so that websphere seems cheaper because you don't "have" to buy a Windows Server OS.
Also do a search on the kernel mailing lists. You'll see more references to Solaris than to AIX. Sun had published a lot of papers regarding how they did things and these served as a good guide for many linux kernel hackers. You'll see lots of comparisons to how sun does things. Not just how well it performs to solaris but actually details on how it was implemented in solaris, especially in the case where solaris performed better.
Not saying that linux is a rip off of solaris in case anyone misreads that. I'm saying that Sun has a history for supporting open standards and shares a lot of what it knows and people could benefit from that. Tanenbaum
Everyone needs to remember Open Source is not Linux. Sun does a lot with the Apache Software Foundation.
Sun even provides "scholarships" for open source projects and non profit entities to pay for licensing of some of it's technology that for profit entities have to pay for.
Pointing to a list of kernel changes made in one version to indicate that IBM is the better open source participant is a limited view of open source.
I don't listen to much that RMS has to say. Only so many people in this world can be college proffessors, develop software for free and eventually get a few 100k every so often in awards and money in speaking engagments. The majority of software developers need to be able to make money developing software, they don't have the luxury of clinging to such lofty ideals. How far would all of this gone if RMS had a family to support? Maybe this is why RMS has no family to support? According to him, his child is the GNU project. How many of you can do something like that? Nothing against RMS, it takes a lot of dedication to do what he's doing but it's not very practical for everyone to be doing that.
The Java Community Process Sun set up is pretty good. Individual membership is free. You can help guide the direction of Java. It helps keep things from really going to far astray the way Sun set it up. Which is good for the people that build apps on Java.
Open sourcing Java doesn't really do much for the developer community as most developers build on top of Java, not in it. The people that would benefit would be people like IBM, BEA and Oracle as well as OS companies. The majority of the developer community is made up of the ones building their apps on top of j2se and j2ee. Open Source some great tools and then you're talking. Sun opensourced NetBeans. There's a lot of debate over NetBeans vs IBM's Eclipse. I'v
Well if you got it to work on your 3800, maybe it's just some weird problem that only effects reviewers from a site supported by Novell when they review distributions based on Suse that aren't sold by Novell;)
Until network IO can reach the type of performance that an integrated MP system can, an integrated system will be faster. Meaning with clustering, you depend a lot on the network to pass information between the different nodes, with multiprocessor systems, you depend on the system internals to transfer the information. While network speeds are getting faster, so are internal system bus speeds.
All the big chip manufacturers are going towards multi core chips as well. Having the different cores on the same die increases their ability to communicate even better.
You're going to get better scalling in a multi processor versus a multi node system. Don't have exact numbers, but where you might need 20 processors in a smp box, you might need 14 nodes (with 2 procs each) in a clustered settup. Along with high speed network switches, the overhead of the clustering software, etc. Though with clusters, you're generally talking about cheaper hardware for each node so comparing a 24 processor sparc server with a cluster normally means comparing an enterprise class system with a rack of commodoty hardware. The point is that clustering should make those commodoty servers more reliable. Look at google. Also you're comparing sparc's with intels or amd's which have the edge in performance.
With Sun's new management shift in their intel and amd server division, along with their recent purcahse of networking technology, and their grid engine, I think we can expect to see more clustering solutions from that are going to be very impressive. Their blade products seem to be getting better too. Can't wait for the niagra based blades to come out.
I don't think it was the reviewer as much as it was the person that posted it to slashdot calling it a "damning" review.
Personally, I don't believe much of the negative things said about Sun that come out of any OSDN site or site closely affiliated with Linux. Since Solaris had such a large portion of the of the Unix market, linux enthusiasts with the short sighted view of taking over Solaris will be good for Linux tend to bash the company to aid in Linux's acceptance over Solaris.
I don't understand the argument that people don't like McNealy for bashing linux considering the people at Sun haven't said anything about linux worse than IBM when they were comparing Linux to AIX. Yet IBM is the hero and Sun the vilain. My guess is IBM is behind it, using the linux community to weaken it's rival, a much smaller company that has beat it in the unix market and has been eating into it's mainframe market. I can't be the only one that feels this way? I mean, it's very good to have people like IBM and other big companies supportling linux, but at what point did we all decide to stop rooting for the little guy?
I don't know why Sun is using Suse 9.1. Maybe it's because Novell now own's Suse and won't license new versions the way Suse did when it was on it's own? With 50 million IBM dollars going to Novell which helped it buy Suse, the company Sun was working with on JDS, you really have to wonder.
A nice little image that indicates that linux.com is sponsored by Novell doesn't lead me to assume an unbiased review either.
JDS is primarily meant for corporate desktop use. None of the systems the reviewer used would be what you would typically see in a typical cubicle.
how is this offtopic? The guy claims he was slashdotted... which normally means the site gets so many hits it goes down. In AST's article it states that his site never went down and he referenced how good his sun box and apache software were. I also was able to see the site with no problem though it was slow.
I guess more importantly, how is this off topic when it references the parent post, comments on specifics in the linked text and adds my own opinion and observation related to the comment... while the original post isn't?
According to his article, he keeps writing about it because he keeps getting emails about it. If people would stop thinking it was a "feud" and that he "hates Linus" and stopped writing him about it. He would most likely stop explaining it.
Re:We should set up better Open Source Marketing
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More From Tanenbaum
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· Score: 2, Insightful
"What the Slashdot/unix/GNU/whatever community really should consider is how they can truely counter the 'lets convince the stupid masses' policy of Microsoft. (yeah I know I sound elitist, thats because I am..) "
My opinion, the easiest way to do this is sugested in your statement. The key is unix, not linux. Meaning linux is in the unix family. Promoting unix as a whole as an alternative to microsoft, especially in the server areas is important.
There are different types of unixes from proprietary to the bsd's to the linuxes. Promote the adoption of unix as an alternative and it gives linux more room to grow.
While it's not always the case, a lot of places where linux is making in roads is in replacing commercial unix installations. This is a short sighted strategy. Unix right now is competing with Windows server platforms. If linux takes over all the unix servers, then it will be linux competing with Windows server platforms. Meaning it won't be in any better position than it is now.
Though if we could foster support for greater unix deployments including bsd and linux in addition to the commercial unixes that have been there for years, windows servers would really have competition.
Slashdot Mirror
UltraSparc's are not dead. AMD and Intel don't make computers
When you go to the supermarket to buy fruits and vegetables, you put them in that bag you have trouble yanking off the roll. You don't pay for that bag. Computer hardware will soon be available on a roll. :)
Sun does have a leasing program for it's bigger servers as well as other companies for intel based hardware and sun and ibm mainframe resellers. Leasing in the computer industry is nothing new.
Uhm... do you realize the word "free" existed before people knew gnu as more than some goat looking news puppet?
Sun is already going after this with their JES system which will be a subscription based model that pays for all the consulting and software. Might as well throw in the hardware too and get the customer.
They've already started this. You can get a v20z (dual opteron) server for free when you agree to license their software stack for three years.
It makes sense in big companies. Computing power is becoming more of a utility. Just like you don't pay for your cell phone (in many cases), your water meter, your gas or electric meter, your hardware can be free. It is a viable way of doing things. Sun just has to ramp up it's software and consulting side to make it work. Their Java Enterprise System is pretty good and affordable compared to other solutions so if they can get more momentum for it, things will look good.
I don't think it will kill the home user pc market and you'll most likely be able to still buy computers, it will most likely be a very attractive option for companies that want it.
At the end of six months Linus had a functional kernel. Nothing groundbreaking, nothing even really that great compared to other existing kernels. It was from the support of other developers that it was able to become better.
I am not trying to downplay what Linus did because not everyone could do it. Just saying there were other kernels out there including bsd. Without the contributions of other developers I don't think the linux kernel would be where it is today. Now with others contributing to it, it does make sense to keep a good log of where the code comes from. A little bit of hassle to prevent bigger hassles down the line.
To say he must have copied the code is a bit unfair. The best way to describe it is the way other scientific projects grow. Bill Joy said in an interview "At Berkeley, we had the model that software is the result of your research. The university tradition is that when you do research, you publish. ...... But the fundamental principle in my mind is that people get to see the results of other people's work in a way that they can stand on shoulders rather than on toes."
I don't know if it's so much of a nuissance as something they didn't feel they needed to do anything with.
People kept asking what was Sun's linux strategy and they didn't really have one. Then again neither does my mom. Except for McNealy who has his way of going over the top with things the majority of references from Sun regarding Linux have been positive. This is going back years now. I remember reading an interview with Billy Joy (maybe from 99?) Praised linux for what it was doing. He still thought Solaris was better for some things and he didn't seem to have an interest in doing anything with Linux. This is old news to him and a lot of people at Sun. Bill Joy has already started from square one with unix operating systems including SunOS and BSD. From a creative standpoint it would be like taking a step back for him and starting with something he's already done. As many of you will know, there isn't much satisfaction in that and he was working on other things (JINI). Why would sun want to tinker with a new start up OS when it is busy improving it's own popular one? If something comes out now that is better than linux, will all the developers abandon linux and work on that?
Sun has a really good unix os already that was much more mature than linux when people were complaining about Sun not embracing linux. That's like complaining that Harley Davidson didn't embrace the new engine designs and stuck with a V-Twin. (Okay, they have a water cooled engine now on the vrod).
IBM has said the same things about linux as sun has when IBM compared linux to aix. Sun is a much smaller company than IBM and has to make different decisions.
The whole "what's sun's linux strategy" questions have bothered me. I mean we don't ask RedHat what their AIX or Solaris strategy is and shun them if they don't come up with anything.
Meanwhile, Sun has come out with their own linux distro (though short lived they did have Sun Linux) and they are working on JDS. They are porting or working on porting a lot of their stuff to linux.
I'm hoping to see a lot of good things now from Sun in the low end server space with Andy Bechtolsheim coming back to Sun. They'll be selling Solarix x86 and Linux distros with the new servers. Obviously they're going to push Solaris more but unless something major happens they'll still be selling linux. Andy Bechtolsheim was one of the founders of Sun. He was tired of waiting for computer time at school and built his own workstation. Bill Joy was working on BSD. Then McNealy the MBA and someone else (the money guy I forget his name) started Sun. Bill Joy and Andy Bechtolsheim are true geeks in the best sense of the word. Their the hardware and software guys that Wozniak was to Apple. We see Sun now as McNealy and it puts people off. But there's a lot more to the company.
I just think people should lay off sun (and sun should be a little more careful of what they say) because the infighting in the unix community just creates a rocky foundation for someone else to stake a stronger claim in the server space. It happened with windows nt.
Right, and they're J2EE app server that's part of JES doesn't have anything to do with java either, or their portal server.
I had worked with Bluestone a lot. Really great product and company. It was a shame to see HP not carry through with it. Don't really know much about Fluery but Bob's always seemed like a nice guy.
Just wanted to point out the relationship between JBoss and HP that exists.
uhm.... SAP/DB is now MySQL MaxDB
Eclipse seemed faster in some cases but only in some minor things such as dialog boxes or new windows opening up. After using it for a while, there didn't seem to be that much of a difference between it and netbeans. Especially in terms of memory usage.
Eclipse seems to be a lot more stripped down than netbeans. Netbeans comes with a whole bunch of modules right out of the box to do gui development and web development. Whereas in eclipse you have to download third party modules. As you add more modules the size of the application starts to increase. Also, to get the quality of modules that come with netbeans you have to pay for them in eclipse. For building web apps I really like netbeans. Eclipse with things like myeclipse works pretty well. MyEclipse is pretty cheap but not cheaper than free.
Look at IBM's WebSphere Studio. Once it finishes loading it's taking up about 150 Megs of memory (not virtual).
Both are kind of lacking in certain features but that's part of the point in both of them. They want to be a platform to build tools on as well as an ide for third parties to build plugins and charge for them.
Netbeans has been around a lot longer and has some more built in functionality than Eclipse does. I like the way Eclipse is more ant-like but NetBeans has good ant integration and with 4.0 will have an ant based project system. I've played with the new project system and it's really nice.
I don't know what some people's hangups are with Swing. I've used a full blown IDE for developing web applications about 6 years ago, on typical hardware from 6 years ago and performance was fine. Right now, I'm runing with Tiger and swing performance is a lot better.
The thing I don't like about SWT is that you have to rely on the native widgets and some platforms may not have the same set of widgets and they usually don't look the same across platforms if they do. SWT seems like a good short term solution but with the performance enhancements coming out for Swing/AWT, SWT may be obsolete soon.
The bottom line for me was that I didn't have to spend time and money comparing different plugins I needed that would work the way netbeans does.
It's odd, while eclipse may be faster I am much more productive in netbeans. The keyboard shortcuts, code completion and interface just work better for me.
Refactoring can be a pain if you have to do it often. If it's a concern there is a module for netbeans called RefactorIT which blows the doors off of what eclipse provides for refactoring. It's pretty cheap too.
I wonder if people's opinions on netbeans is based on some tools built using netbeans and not netbeans itself. Sun' Studio 5 update 1 had some weird behavior. Every once in a while something seemed to go into an infinite loop and just pin the cpu utilization at 100% while seeming to do nothing. Wind up having to kill the process and restart the ide. Can be a big pain if you haven't saved your work. I hope they've fixed that because the few times that happened it really ticked me off. I've used NetBeans more and haven't seen that happen.
When doing GUI development though I have gotten a few NPE's in NetBeans when adding new components. I just make sure to save frequently and if that happens, closing the form editor and reopening it fixes the problem without restarting the IDE. I don't do much GUI development so I don't know if this is new to 3.6 and JDK 1.5 or not. I'm hoping that it's because 1.5 is still beta.
The task list in Eclipse is really cool and NetBeans has something similar now but I haven't really used it much. I also like the way Eclipse handles imports. You start typing in the cannonical class name and if it's not in your import list it will add
Sun has said they want to create a JDS version that runs on Solaris as well. Definatley for Solaris x86 and maybe Solaris/Sparc as well but I don't remember.
To be fair, they also have their Java Enterprise System which now only runs on Solaris. Again, it's a software stack. They plan on releasing it for other OS's including linux and windows.
So the claim that they are looking to ditch linux for solaris isn't fair. They want it to run on thier own OS as well. That they released it under linux first and then moving to solaris should be a good sign of their adoption of linux. They could have done the same thing with JES and done solaris (x86 and sparc) first and then linux but with JDS they went the other way. They will still do linux JDS even when solaris JDS comes out from what they've been saying.
He focusses too much on the technology and not the logistics of doing something like this. To me, it would have been more effective if such an article came from someone that had success in building a business that had to focuss on customers as much as such efforts would.
You need to worry about billing, customer service, accounting, marketting, reliability, security, the staff to support all that, etc, etc, etc.
What you're more likely to see is a bunch of 69.95 boxes collecting dust and people trying to figure out why they aren't making moeny like their friend down the block is.
They also give a license for employees to take it home and install it on their home pc's if their company bought it.
No, it should be able to install on all the systems that linux does as it's based on SuSE linux. Looking at http://hardwaredb.suse.de/searchForm.php?searchtyI do think the review was stupid, how do you review something you never get working? It's like going to the bathroom, not being able to unzip your zipper and deciding to take a piss anyway.
With that many install problems something else should have been looked at. The support issue is obviously a big one though. But I wouldn't call what he wrote a review of JDS.
Sun decided to go with Suse before Novell bought it. Novell is now coming up with their own desktop linux distro and you have to wonder if that's going to cause any problems in the JDS-SUSE relationship.
To call this a review of JDS is just plain stupid. To review something you should review it for it's intended use. JDS is meant for small to large scale corporate deployments. Set up a small network, get some "users" and an administrator and see how things go. Don't try to install it on some random pc's, have it not work (even though others have) and then decide to write about it anyway. It's like going to test drive a car but the salesperson can't find the key and decides to read you the brochures, you wouldn't call that a test drive.
I don't understand a lot of the animosity towards Sun in the OSS community. I can understand why IBM would want to see Sun dissapear but I get the impression that some in the OSS community need to pick one over the other.
Personally, I'm still weary over IBM. While they have done a lot for linux, I don't think they've shed all that stuff people didn't like about them. Websphere's a good product but it didn't gain it's marketshare by being a good product. IBM sells it for a pretty steep price, but they cut a lot of deals to get it in the door.. Truck comes by to drop off your new main frame.. Truck driver says hey I got these websomething boxes in the back too, I need to bring the truck back empty so you want them or I'll throw them away. Buying a new AS/400? Want to seriously look at websphere too? Get them both at less than the price of one.
My point isn't to bash IBM. Actually, I like IBM in a lot of ways. My point is tou can say good and bad things about any large company. I just don't see what Sun has done to deserve tha bashing it's getting and the bias when it comes to sun. The linux/OSS community seems to becoming cheerleaders for IBM and their agendas. Basically, linux is riding the IBM wave rather than the other way around.
You don't even get a decent jsp editor with eclipse unless you pay for it.
With sun you have the obvious OpenOffice and NFS. They've also open sourced a lot of other software and have provided resources for other projects. Have a look at http://www.sunsource.net/ to see how much Sun contributes to open source projects. People don't like some of the licenses Sun uses because it gives Sun too much control still. Having something GPL'd doesn't make that any better. Just look at what happend with Emacs and XEmacs when a company started paying the FSF to make enhancements to Emacs that they needed but had an uphill battle with RMS who had final say into what happened with Emacs. That's when XEmacs was forked out of it.
Sun has contributed a lot of code to Gnome (accessibility api, work on sawfish, improved usability, tons of documentation and help). They do provide kenel patches, Tim Hockins used to be very active on the linux kernel mailing lists when Sun was working on Sun Linux and still supporting Cobalt servers.
Also Sun is pushing a linux desktop, JDS. And it's pushing hard in different areas. Where is IBM in this? IBM's take on linux, provide it with our servers since we can run websphere on it so that websphere seems cheaper because you don't "have" to buy a Windows Server OS.
Also do a search on the kernel mailing lists. You'll see more references to Solaris than to AIX. Sun had published a lot of papers regarding how they did things and these served as a good guide for many linux kernel hackers. You'll see lots of comparisons to how sun does things. Not just how well it performs to solaris but actually details on how it was implemented in solaris, especially in the case where solaris performed better.
Not saying that linux is a rip off of solaris in case anyone misreads that. I'm saying that Sun has a history for supporting open standards and shares a lot of what it knows and people could benefit from that. Tanenbaum
Everyone needs to remember Open Source is not Linux. Sun does a lot with the Apache Software Foundation.
Sun even provides "scholarships" for open source projects and non profit entities to pay for licensing of some of it's technology that for profit entities have to pay for.
Pointing to a list of kernel changes made in one version to indicate that IBM is the better open source participant is a limited view of open source.
I don't listen to much that RMS has to say. Only so many people in this world can be college proffessors, develop software for free and eventually get a few 100k every so often in awards and money in speaking engagments. The majority of software developers need to be able to make money developing software, they don't have the luxury of clinging to such lofty ideals. How far would all of this gone if RMS had a family to support? Maybe this is why RMS has no family to support? According to him, his child is the GNU project. How many of you can do something like that? Nothing against RMS, it takes a lot of dedication to do what he's doing but it's not very practical for everyone to be doing that.
The Java Community Process Sun set up is pretty good. Individual membership is free. You can help guide the direction of Java. It helps keep things from really going to far astray the way Sun set it up. Which is good for the people that build apps on Java.
Open sourcing Java doesn't really do much for the developer community as most developers build on top of Java, not in it. The people that would benefit would be people like IBM, BEA and Oracle as well as OS companies. The majority of the developer community is made up of the ones building their apps on top of j2se and j2ee. Open Source some great tools and then you're talking. Sun opensourced NetBeans. There's a lot of debate over NetBeans vs IBM's Eclipse. I'v
Except it's not Sun's installer. It's Suse's installer, yast. JDS is primarily the software stack on top of the OS which is Suse 8.1.
Well if you got it to work on your 3800, maybe it's just some weird problem that only effects reviewers from a site supported by Novell when they review distributions based on Suse that aren't sold by Novell ;)
You obviously didn't read the whole thing.
All the big chip manufacturers are going towards multi core chips as well. Having the different cores on the same die increases their ability to communicate even better.
You're going to get better scalling in a multi processor versus a multi node system. Don't have exact numbers, but where you might need 20 processors in a smp box, you might need 14 nodes (with 2 procs each) in a clustered settup. Along with high speed network switches, the overhead of the clustering software, etc. Though with clusters, you're generally talking about cheaper hardware for each node so comparing a 24 processor sparc server with a cluster normally means comparing an enterprise class system with a rack of commodoty hardware. The point is that clustering should make those commodoty servers more reliable. Look at google. Also you're comparing sparc's with intels or amd's which have the edge in performance.
With Sun's new management shift in their intel and amd server division, along with their recent purcahse of networking technology, and their grid engine, I think we can expect to see more clustering solutions from that are going to be very impressive. Their blade products seem to be getting better too. Can't wait for the niagra based blades to come out.
Personally, I don't believe much of the negative things said about Sun that come out of any OSDN site or site closely affiliated with Linux. Since Solaris had such a large portion of the of the Unix market, linux enthusiasts with the short sighted view of taking over Solaris will be good for Linux tend to bash the company to aid in Linux's acceptance over Solaris.
I don't understand the argument that people don't like McNealy for bashing linux considering the people at Sun haven't said anything about linux worse than IBM when they were comparing Linux to AIX. Yet IBM is the hero and Sun the vilain. My guess is IBM is behind it, using the linux community to weaken it's rival, a much smaller company that has beat it in the unix market and has been eating into it's mainframe market. I can't be the only one that feels this way? I mean, it's very good to have people like IBM and other big companies supportling linux, but at what point did we all decide to stop rooting for the little guy?
I don't know why Sun is using Suse 9.1. Maybe it's because Novell now own's Suse and won't license new versions the way Suse did when it was on it's own? With 50 million IBM dollars going to Novell which helped it buy Suse, the company Sun was working with on JDS, you really have to wonder.
A nice little image that indicates that linux.com is sponsored by Novell doesn't lead me to assume an unbiased review either.
JDS is primarily meant for corporate desktop use. None of the systems the reviewer used would be what you would typically see in a typical cubicle.
I guess more importantly, how is this off topic when it references the parent post, comments on specifics in the linked text and adds my own opinion and observation related to the comment... while the original post isn't?
According to his article, he keeps writing about it because he keeps getting emails about it. If people would stop thinking it was a "feud" and that he "hates Linus" and stopped writing him about it. He would most likely stop explaining it.
There are different types of unixes from proprietary to the bsd's to the linuxes. Promote the adoption of unix as an alternative and it gives linux more room to grow.
While it's not always the case, a lot of places where linux is making in roads is in replacing commercial unix installations. This is a short sighted strategy. Unix right now is competing with Windows server platforms. If linux takes over all the unix servers, then it will be linux competing with Windows server platforms. Meaning it won't be in any better position than it is now.
Though if we could foster support for greater unix deployments including bsd and linux in addition to the commercial unixes that have been there for years, windows servers would really have competition.