Afaict the only part of java that lacks an x64 port is the sun browser plugin (icedtea have thier own gcjwebplugin based one but it doesn't work for all applets).
unfortunately one thing that sun has not opensourced yet is the java plugin. So icedtea are using a plugin based gcjwebplugin. Unfortunately this plugin does not support all the features that the sun plugin does:(
Today the best platform to run Java especially for end user is Windows. Java on i386/amd64 linux isn't bad either (though the lack of an official amd64 java plugin is a pita) and will hopefully getting a lot better in the not too distant future as distros begin to accept openjdk as thier default java.
I wonder if/when sun will release any more of thier JITs.
The problem with the Java API at this point is that there's been such an effort made to ensure that each new release is backwards compatible with all other releases that it's become a jumbled mess. This is why Java is continually getting trashed as being bloated. True, on the other hand that backwards compatibility is one of java's greatest strength. Why should application developers be forced to change thier code just to satisfy a few basement dwellers. I feel much more confident of my app continuing to work if I write it in java than if I write it in some language that is always dicking arround with the specs (e.g. php)
What I would suggest though would be to hide deprecated classes in the help by default and require a specific compiler switch to compile code that uses them.
And Sun should embrace the vibrant Java community and realize when others have solved a problem better than they have instead of the continual NIH syndrome they tend to have. If, instead of continuing to recommend their own substandard solutions, they were to advise that users use other solutions and then invest effort into improving those other projects and possibly incorporating them into core APIs (i.e. giving them either java.* or javax.*), One issue is that sun wants to keep the ability to sell java under any license they like. This makes it basically impossible for them to incorporate existing free software projects into the main java tree.
debian has had sun supplied java binaries in thier non-free repositry for a while, that is certainly an improvent over not having it packaged at all but it is still far inferior to having a proper package built from source in main for a couple of reasons.
1: non-free is not in the repositries list by default so unless someone manually edits the list they won't see it. 2: stuff in non-free cannot be included in any of the standard installation tasks 3: when some change in another library breaks sun java the debian guys can't really do anything to fix it.
unfortunately there are still a few small license inconsistancies in openjdk which have been causing the debian ftpmasters to reject it.
The problem isn't so much the raw price as other related considerations.
I can't just tell a non techie to buy themselves another gig of ram, I have to check what type it needs, check the motherboard and OS aren't at thier limits already (in which case tough luck, they simply can't have any more without making other potentially expensive changes). I may have to order more to make up for memory that is going to get pulled out (which drives up the effective cost per gig of the upgrade) and finally I will probablly have to fit it for them.
The same goes for disk space, they can't just pay 50 cents and get another gig of disk space, To get disk space at a reasonable price per gig they have to buy in units of at least 160 gigs or so. Again compatibility has to be checked, someone has to do the installation and depending on the machine an existing drive may have to be replaced (which in addition to it's affect on the effective cost per gig will also mean a load of downtime while the data is copied)
and then there are laptop users and worse users of flash based ultraportables to consider.
USB converts are on the whole junk and not very reliable. I have heard similar bad things about USB-PS2 converters. I have at least once found a keyboard that refused to work with the USB-PS2 converter I had (the keyboard worked fine on all motherboard PS2 ports I tried, the converter worked fine with another keyboard. My syspicion is that the converter was playing fast and loose with the specs of the PS2 interface but I never checked).
so for those of us with existing PS2 kvm switches motherboards with PS2 ports are very attractive.
Already I see my high bitrate, frame accurate miniDV camera becoming obsolete in the consumer arena in favour for highly compressed, not frame accurate, hard drive based cameras using MPEG4 video, moving to (consumer) HiDef cameras and they also use high compression MPEG4 and an awful audio codec instead of PCM audio (like for DV). What are the odds of any of these formats being playable in 20 years time, or just transcodeable? I would say pretty damn high, keeping support for older formats in your video playback/editing software costs very little so there is no real reason not to do it.
RAID5 does not last forever. If one drive fails, the array survives, provided you replace the failed drive before another one crashes. It sounds unlikely, but it does happen - sometimes there's another failure before you can replace the faulty drive. another issue with single redundancy raid is that sometimes a rebuild is not possible because while all but one of the drives are alive some of the drives that are alive have unreadable sectors.
raid and especailly single parity raid is not a substitute for backup (full backups also have the usefull side effect of testing all the sectors backed up for readability and making the drive remap any that are going weak)
unfortunately from what I can gather raid6 is a far more complex algorithm than raid5 meaning it is only seen on high end controllers.
Also, in my opinion, one of those types of media should be DVD, but not DVD for data, DVD for your DVD player. This is nearly a trivial exercise with OS X, and I'm sure there's software for Linux and Windows that can do it just as easily. the big problem i've found is finding software that can reliablly take video files (mediaportal recordings mainly but they aren't the only one) and turn them into video dvds. Nero vision hangs on quite a few files and ends up introducing audio/video desync on others. Other programs I tried were not much better.
plus even if you do find decent software the processing seems to take quite a lot of time and the inspection to ensure the results are acceptable does too.
Can you still buy a cassette player and even recorder in a store? Sure. Can you buy a cassette data drive for a computer? No. (If you can, I'd be very surprised.) That is true but remember storage of computer programs on tape was something from the pre-pc era when the market for computers was much smaller and fragmented into lots of incompatible types.
for computers that actually used audio tapes and decks it is actually often possible to digitise the tapes with a PC soundcard and then decode them in software.
The HD floppy lived a very long time and I don't see why CD-ROM and DVD-ROM would not live a similarlly long time. Especially as BD-ROM drives have backwards compatibilty with them.
I always thought the main advantage of raid was that it reduced the impact of a disk failure from some data loss (data collected/created since the last backup run) to zero data loss.
the trouble with raid is there are a lot of things it doesn't protect against so it must be regarded as a complement to backup not a replacement for it.
writing a java virtual machine is not a very big big deal (writing a fast one is but that isn't really a java specific issue more that fast VMs in general are hard to write) and several groups have indeed done it.
writing a java compiler isn't a big deal either.
what is a huge deal is writing a complete set of java class libraries. Java's standard library is HUGE and very complex and it's documentation ranges from mediocre to terrible.
if you were sensible enough to register the copyright you could also go for statutory damages which as we have learnt from the riaa cases are pretty damn high.
Simple really: the "free" (GPL) licence comes with restrictions; if you don't like them, negotiate a new licence that you do like...one for which the original author(s) may/will require payment. for better or worse as a project gets bigger that tends to get virtually impossible. Unless the project requires copyright assignment or at least a grant of rights to do anything with the code to the project (most don't afaict) you are faced with tracking down every single contributor and negotiating with all of them. Some of those people are likely to be uncontactable or even dead and the dead ones are likely to have not made proper provision in thier will leaving the ownership split between even more people.
if you insert a Ubuntu CD in Ubuntu it recognizes that there are packages there and will ask if you want to have the CD added to your repositories. Yet no software will be installed automatically. By adding a repositry to your apt sources you are placing a huge level of trust in the admins of that repositry. That repositry can trivially provide "updated" versions of core system packages so that on the next upgrade run the scripts included in those packages will be executed as root.
ouch, I didn't look at the home lines (though in the past I have found them to be poor value)
The XP downgrade itself was only £10 more than the corresponding non downgraded edition. Unfortunately the only edition they offer with that machine which comes with downgrade rights is ultimate which pushes up the price:(
If you want XP from dell thier small buisness line is probablly a better bet than thier home line, there is a wider selection of models with XP and the extra charge is far lower.
and the most I have seen them charge extra for XP is £10 (about $20), on the higher end optiplex machines it came at no extra charge.
I guess on the low end lines this is just another example of the usual practice of keeping the headline price low and then charging over the odds for any extras.
The other big thing that virtualisation can do is help you free up space for new hardware. If you have a load of old boxes doing relatively minor services and taking up lots of space you can replace them with one new server without having to mess with the software setup.
How about heat? Probablly the biggest problem for datacenters. Many datacenters use as much power running aircon as they do running the servers!
What about wires? Both a OHS issue, and a potential to kill off half your servers if you trip over an exposed power cord or network line. So you lay them under the floor? Sure but there is more to it that that. You want to keep power and data lines seperate for both regulatory and practical reasons. You want to be able to identify cables and remove redundant ones easilly (otherwise a few decades down the line you end up with risers and ducts stuffed full with mostly redundant cables). You need to ensure that any fiber runs are kept within bend radius requirements.
There are indeed board finishes that don't contain tin. but there are other tin surfaces. Most if not all solders contain tin (iirc some solder alloys are better from a whisker perspective than others but none of the new ones are proven to be as whisker resistant as tin-lead). Component finishes are also often tin or tin based.
Slashdot Mirror
Afaict the only part of java that lacks an x64 port is the sun browser plugin (icedtea have thier own gcjwebplugin based one but it doesn't work for all applets).
unfortunately one thing that sun has not opensourced yet is the java plugin. So icedtea are using a plugin based gcjwebplugin. Unfortunately this plugin does not support all the features that the sun plugin does :(
Today the best platform to run Java especially for end user is Windows.
Java on i386/amd64 linux isn't bad either (though the lack of an official amd64 java plugin is a pita) and will hopefully getting a lot better in the not too distant future as distros begin to accept openjdk as thier default java.
I wonder if/when sun will release any more of thier JITs.
You know any handset which has higher price than $70 and doesn't have J2ME? Take a guess :) ;)
The port-o-rotary
The problem with the Java API at this point is that there's been such an effort made to ensure that each new release is backwards compatible with all other releases that it's become a jumbled mess. This is why Java is continually getting trashed as being bloated.
True, on the other hand that backwards compatibility is one of java's greatest strength. Why should application developers be forced to change thier code just to satisfy a few basement dwellers. I feel much more confident of my app continuing to work if I write it in java than if I write it in some language that is always dicking arround with the specs (e.g. php)
What I would suggest though would be to hide deprecated classes in the help by default and require a specific compiler switch to compile code that uses them.
And Sun should embrace the vibrant Java community and realize when others have solved a problem better than they have instead of the continual NIH syndrome they tend to have. If, instead of continuing to recommend their own substandard solutions, they were to advise that users use other solutions and then invest effort into improving those other projects and possibly incorporating them into core APIs (i.e. giving them either java.* or javax.*),
One issue is that sun wants to keep the ability to sell java under any license they like. This makes it basically impossible for them to incorporate existing free software projects into the main java tree.
debian has had sun supplied java binaries in thier non-free repositry for a while, that is certainly an improvent over not having it packaged at all but it is still far inferior to having a proper package built from source in main for a couple of reasons.
1: non-free is not in the repositries list by default so unless someone manually edits the list they won't see it.
2: stuff in non-free cannot be included in any of the standard installation tasks
3: when some change in another library breaks sun java the debian guys can't really do anything to fix it.
unfortunately there are still a few small license inconsistancies in openjdk which have been causing the debian ftpmasters to reject it.
The problem isn't so much the raw price as other related considerations.
I can't just tell a non techie to buy themselves another gig of ram, I have to check what type it needs, check the motherboard and OS aren't at thier limits already (in which case tough luck, they simply can't have any more without making other potentially expensive changes). I may have to order more to make up for memory that is going to get pulled out (which drives up the effective cost per gig of the upgrade) and finally I will probablly have to fit it for them.
The same goes for disk space, they can't just pay 50 cents and get another gig of disk space, To get disk space at a reasonable price per gig they have to buy in units of at least 160 gigs or so. Again compatibility has to be checked, someone has to do the installation and depending on the machine an existing drive may have to be replaced (which in addition to it's affect on the effective cost per gig will also mean a load of downtime while the data is copied)
and then there are laptop users and worse users of flash based ultraportables to consider.
USB converts are on the whole junk and not very reliable.
I have heard similar bad things about USB-PS2 converters. I have at least once found a keyboard that refused to work with the USB-PS2 converter I had (the keyboard worked fine on all motherboard PS2 ports I tried, the converter worked fine with another keyboard. My syspicion is that the converter was playing fast and loose with the specs of the PS2 interface but I never checked).
so for those of us with existing PS2 kvm switches motherboards with PS2 ports are very attractive.
depends a bit on what you want to mount to but i'd imagine screws and studs would in general be the easiest way.
while the Zip drive was a flash in the pan.
Not really, they were never hugely popular but they survived a pretty long time.
there were a number of zip like drives though which came and went much much quicker.
CD and DVD seem to be pretty safe bets to me, they are supported by practically every PC sold and blue-ray drives can read CDs and DVDs.
Already I see my high bitrate, frame accurate miniDV camera becoming obsolete in the consumer arena in favour for highly compressed, not frame accurate, hard drive based cameras using MPEG4 video, moving to (consumer) HiDef cameras and they also use high compression MPEG4 and an awful audio codec instead of PCM audio (like for DV). What are the odds of any of these formats being playable in 20 years time, or just transcodeable?
I would say pretty damn high, keeping support for older formats in your video playback/editing software costs very little so there is no real reason not to do it.
RAID5 does not last forever. If one drive fails, the array survives, provided you replace the failed drive before another one crashes. It sounds unlikely, but it does happen - sometimes there's another failure before you can replace the faulty drive.
another issue with single redundancy raid is that sometimes a rebuild is not possible because while all but one of the drives are alive some of the drives that are alive have unreadable sectors.
raid and especailly single parity raid is not a substitute for backup (full backups also have the usefull side effect of testing all the sectors backed up for readability and making the drive remap any that are going weak)
unfortunately from what I can gather raid6 is a far more complex algorithm than raid5 meaning it is only seen on high end controllers.
Also, in my opinion, one of those types of media should be DVD, but not DVD for data, DVD for your DVD player. This is nearly a trivial exercise with OS X, and I'm sure there's software for Linux and Windows that can do it just as easily.
the big problem i've found is finding software that can reliablly take video files (mediaportal recordings mainly but they aren't the only one) and turn them into video dvds. Nero vision hangs on quite a few files and ends up introducing audio/video desync on others. Other programs I tried were not much better.
plus even if you do find decent software the processing seems to take quite a lot of time and the inspection to ensure the results are acceptable does too.
Can you still buy a cassette player and even recorder in a store? Sure. Can you buy a cassette data drive for a computer? No. (If you can, I'd be very surprised.)
That is true but remember storage of computer programs on tape was something from the pre-pc era when the market for computers was much smaller and fragmented into lots of incompatible types.
for computers that actually used audio tapes and decks it is actually often possible to digitise the tapes with a PC soundcard and then decode them in software.
The HD floppy lived a very long time and I don't see why CD-ROM and DVD-ROM would not live a similarlly long time. Especially as BD-ROM drives have backwards compatibilty with them.
I always thought the main advantage of raid was that it reduced the impact of a disk failure from some data loss (data collected/created since the last backup run) to zero data loss.
the trouble with raid is there are a lot of things it doesn't protect against so it must be regarded as a complement to backup not a replacement for it.
writing a java virtual machine is not a very big big deal (writing a fast one is but that isn't really a java specific issue more that fast VMs in general are hard to write) and several groups have indeed done it.
writing a java compiler isn't a big deal either.
what is a huge deal is writing a complete set of java class libraries. Java's standard library is HUGE and very complex and it's documentation ranges from mediocre to terrible.
if you were sensible enough to register the copyright you could also go for statutory damages which as we have learnt from the riaa cases are pretty damn high.
Simple really: the "free" (GPL) licence comes with restrictions; if you don't like them, negotiate a new licence that you do like...one for which the original author(s) may/will require payment.
for better or worse as a project gets bigger that tends to get virtually impossible. Unless the project requires copyright assignment or at least a grant of rights to do anything with the code to the project (most don't afaict) you are faced with tracking down every single contributor and negotiating with all of them. Some of those people are likely to be uncontactable or even dead and the dead ones are likely to have not made proper provision in thier will leaving the ownership split between even more people.
no you can't directly force them to give up the code but given the following two choices
1: give up your code
2: stop distributing your product and pay statutory damages (which as we know from the RIAA cases are scarily high)
most will opt for the former.
if you insert a Ubuntu CD in Ubuntu it recognizes that there are packages there and will ask if you want to have the CD added to your repositories. Yet no software will be installed automatically.
By adding a repositry to your apt sources you are placing a huge level of trust in the admins of that repositry. That repositry can trivially provide "updated" versions of core system packages so that on the next upgrade run the scripts included in those packages will be executed as root.
ouch, I didn't look at the home lines (though in the past I have found them to be poor value)
:(
The XP downgrade itself was only £10 more than the corresponding non downgraded edition. Unfortunately the only edition they offer with that machine which comes with downgrade rights is ultimate which pushes up the price
If you want XP from dell thier small buisness line is probablly a better bet than thier home line, there is a wider selection of models with XP and the extra charge is far lower.
and the most I have seen them charge extra for XP is £10 (about $20), on the higher end optiplex machines it came at no extra charge.
I guess on the low end lines this is just another example of the usual practice of keeping the headline price low and then charging over the odds for any extras.
The other big thing that virtualisation can do is help you free up space for new hardware. If you have a load of old boxes doing relatively minor services and taking up lots of space you can replace them with one new server without having to mess with the software setup.
How about heat?
Probablly the biggest problem for datacenters. Many datacenters use as much power running aircon as they do running the servers!
What about wires? Both a OHS issue, and a potential to kill off half your servers if you trip over an exposed power cord or network line. So you lay them under the floor?
Sure but there is more to it that that. You want to keep power and data lines seperate for both regulatory and practical reasons. You want to be able to identify cables and remove redundant ones easilly (otherwise a few decades down the line you end up with risers and ducts stuffed full with mostly redundant cables). You need to ensure that any fiber runs are kept within bend radius requirements.
IIRC there are exemptions in rohs for at least some types of battery (maybe all batteries i'm not sure off hand)
There are indeed board finishes that don't contain tin. but there are other tin surfaces. Most if not all solders contain tin (iirc some solder alloys are better from a whisker perspective than others but none of the new ones are proven to be as whisker resistant as tin-lead). Component finishes are also often tin or tin based.