Planet Solaris
May 16, 2008
The OGB has
started a discussion
about a potential reorganization of the OpenSolaris community. This
grew out of the re-org that started last year with the previous OGB and
also discussions on various lists and at the OpenSolaris Summit in
California last week. We talked about it earlier this week on our call,
too.
I have a couple of interests here: First, I'm a member of the board and
I want us to have a flexible community with a minimum of governance and
process, and second, I very much want to complete the fixing of the
user groups and this re-org will provide an opportunity to do that.
With respect to the user groups, I moved all of them to projects when I
merged the old User Group Community, the Marketing Community, and the
Immigrants Community into the Advocacy Community Group (which was part
of the first community re-org attempt last year). The good part of this
is that
the UGs are projects now
and have their own spaces on the site. That was Stephen's idea. Love
it. It took me three months, but it fixed the mess we created by
stuffing individual UG pages inside one community until everything
broke. But the UGs are still somewhat buried inside the
Advocacy CG,
and the vast majority of UG members are not at all involved in Advocacy
and are not on advocacy-discuss. The user groups really need to be
their own collective group with top level billing along side Projects,
Community Groups, SIGs, Consolidations (or whatever mix of terms we
come up with and hopefully a reduced mix).
I can't predict where any of this will go. Can you? It will be interesting, though, that's for sure.
"Heard of filebench? Want something similar for networking? Look no further! Today we opensourced uperf, a tool to benchmark networking performance. uperf, just like its cousin filebench,1 is a framework that takes a description of a workload/application (called a profile), and generates load to match the profile. uperf is quite heavily used by the performance groups at Sun to study networking performance."
Read More.
Several months ago, I installed the latest and greatest version of Apache web server. In addition, I installed PHP and MySQL. Well, I found that effort a little trickier to tackle on my box. Fortunately, an acquaintance recommended using XAMPP from
Apache Friends.
I found
XAMPP easy to install, a time saver, and to use - just download, extract and start.
Available for the following platforms:
XAMPP for LinuxThe distribution for Linux systems (tested for SuSE, RedHat, Mandrake and Debian) contains: Apache, MySQL, PHP & PEAR, Perl, ProFTPD, phpMyAdmin, OpenSSL, GD, Freetype2, libjpeg, libpng, gdbm, zlib, expat, Sablotron, libxml, Ming, Webalizer, pdf class, ncurses, mod_perl, FreeTDS, gettext, mcrypt, mhash, eAccelerator, SQLite and IMAP C-Client.
XAMPP for WindowsThe distribution for Windows 98, NT, 2000, 2003, XP and Vista. This version contains: Apache, MySQL, PHP + PEAR, Perl, mod_php, mod_perl, mod_ssl, OpenSSL, phpMyAdmin, Webalizer, Mercury Mail Transport System for Win32 and NetWare Systems v3.32, Ming, JpGraph, FileZilla FTP Server, mcrypt, eAccelerator, SQLite, and WEB-DAV + mod_auth_mysql.
XAMPP for Mac OS XThe distribution for Mac OS X contains: Apache, MySQL, PHP & PEAR, SQLite, Perl, ProFTPD, phpMyAdmin, OpenSSL, GD, Freetype2, libjpeg, libpng, zlib, Ming, Webalizer, mod_perl, eAccelerator, phpSQLiteAdmin.
WARNING: This version of XAMPP is still in the first steps of development. Use at you own risk!
XAMPP for SolarisThe distribution for Solaris (developed and tested with Solaris 8, tested with Solaris 9) contains: Apache, MySQL, PHP & PEAR, Perl, ProFTPD, phpMyAdmin, OpenSSL, Freetype2, libjpeg, libpng, zlib, expat, Ming, Webalizer, pdf class.
WARNING: This version of XAMPP is still in the first steps of development. Use at you own risk!
Here is the download link for
XAMPP and it is free of charge.
I use
Solaris zones a lot.
We've got a number of
X2200s, in two variants. Some just run web front ends, and are fitted with SATA drives (once running, the only disk activity is the web server logs); the database back-ends have SAS drives.
OK, so the SAS drives are expected to be a bit quicker - we did get them for that purpose. Based solely on the rotational speed, there's about a factor of 2 difference in performance.
However, if you take zone creation time as a metric, the performance difference is rather larger than a factor of 4. Something else makes the SAS drives fly and the SATA drives crawl.
I've been using Live Upgrade on my Solaris servers recently. Normally I would prefer a fresh install, as that gives you more of an opportunity to fix up any mistakes you made, but sometimes you need to preserve the application data or can't afford the downtime.
One word of warning, though: if you're starting with Solaris 8, you can go to Solaris 10 8/07 (update 4), but not to Solaris 10 5/08 (update 5). Even when upgrading from Solaris 9 or 10 you'll need the 7zip patches, but those don't exist (yet, anyway) for Solaris 8.
Google Translate adds 10 new languages, among them is Polish.
Read more about it.
May 15, 2008
We announced the results of our third fiscal quarter (Q3) on Thursday last week, and the results weren't what I, or any of us, wanted.
As you can read in the press release, we delivered $3.267 billion in revenue for Q3, roughly flat with a year ago. On that revenue, we delivered a GAAP loss of 4 cents (equal to the charge associated with the acquisition of MySQL, which closed within the quarter) - on that revenue, we generated around $320m in cash.
The low light of the quarter was revenue in the US - which declined year over year by nearly 10%, a big step down for a geography that typically contributes 40% of our total revenue. The highlight of the quarter was our India performance, up 30% year over year - and our chip multi-threading Niagara systems, which grew (billings) 110%.
We had growth in 12 of 16 geographies in which we sell, but a shortfall in the world's largest economy (and the largest in Sun's portfolio), is tough to make up elsewhere. So we showed no growth at the corporate level.
Despite a weak US economy, we still see growth and opportunity across the world. We are going to be making some changes as a result of the quarter, certainly, but not in our core vision or strategic direction - network infrastructure is being built out across the world, developers will continue to define its architecture and shape demand, and we will continue to position ourselves to drive and capture that market.
With that, I'll go through a few questions:
What happened in the US?
Late in the quarter, we saw a fairly aggressive slowdown - among smaller customers, and for larger systems (like enterprise servers and large tape libraries). As you recall, we left Q2 with a healthy backlog, lots of momentum, and feedback from customers that we were totally on the right track, so we were as surprised as anyone that deals started stalling in early March.
Why did big systems slow?
It's counterintuitive, but larger systems and purchase orders's are easier to slow down than smaller purchases. When you sell the systems and storage behind a big buildout, it's typically a long selling cycle, and a fairly long implementation process (systems aren't powered up the day they arrive). So holding off for a few weeks, either because you're spooked about the US mortgage crisis or because your CFO decided to put a pause on capital spending, is fairly straightforward.
And remember, our business is a portfolio - from high growth, low end blades and training services, to slower growth, high end enterprise systems an infrastructure software. There is no one system or product for all workloads, it's a portfolio.
So how are you going to adjust going forward?
We'll continue to diversify our business - geographically, and with the introduction of our Open Storage initiatives this past week and acquisitions like MySQL and Vaau, we'll continue moving into adjacent markets.
We also announced a restructuring plan, through which we'll be making targeted reductions in operating expenses. The net result will be the elimination of up to 2,500 jobs.
To be clear - we are taking assertive, and prudent steps to focus on growth opportunities, and to pull our cost structure in line with our business model. As we've done in years past, we're doing both - making choices to invest and disinvest.
Evolving companies are never done making choices.
Where did you grow in the quarter?
In 12 of the 16 geographies we serve - including India (up 30%), Brazil (up 20%), up in China, Russia, the Middle East, Canada, to name a few places. In general, the world continues to look to technology as a source of growth, automation and efficiency. Even our Wall Street business was up this past quarter.
On the product front, our focus on energy efficiency continues to pay off, with Niagara systems grew (billings) 110% year over year, and our newest (AMD, Intel and SPARC) blade systems growing at an even higher clip. The MySQL team delivered a great growth quarter, and Service revenues were up 3% (a major portion of which are software related, of course). Disk storage billings were up 6%.
Deferred product revenues were again up nicely, more than 25% - these deferred revenues tend to be for higher end systems and more complex configurations, with gross margins above the corporate average. Deferred Services were down, attributable to the ERP transition I mentioned earlier (we expect to recover that in Q4).
What didn't go well?
Enterprise systems, which were great growers in Q1 and Q2 (20% and 8% growth, respectively), were down in the quarter - and not specifically attributable to competition. We saw exceptional performance on our APL systems built with Fujitsu, and a strengthening partnership. Tape libraries were also down, although media sales were strong.
Given the size of both these line items, our higher volume lower end businesses were not yet at a sufficient scale to eclipse the slowdown on the lower volume, high end systems.
Why don't you just stop giving your software away?
Because we prioritize developer adoption. Let me give an example.
Last week, we saw a very high profile media company raise a considerable sum of money. They had not otherwise been on our radar. I sent a note to the head of our global sales team, given the fundraising had cited a growing infrastructure buildout, and asked if we'd made contact.
He said no, but we were immediately reaching out - and it turns out they're completely built around MySQL.
So before we arrived, before we were engaged, and before they began building out a large infrastructure, the MySQL team had scored a design win - ahead of the proprietary competition. What should we have charged them beforehand? No matter what it was, they wouldn't have used the product - startups and developers don't pay for software. But here's a diffrent question: what would we have paid them to select MySQL over the proprietary alternatives before embarking on a massive expansion?
Right question. We didn't pay them, the MySQL team earned their adoption.
Will they buy a license now? Maybe not, but we'll be well positioned if and when they, like Facebook or Nokia or the New York Times, do. And in the interim, it costs us nothing for the reference. I was with a bunch of startups at our StartupCamp this morning, and asked how many folks in the audience *didn't* use free software... no hands were raised. Why are we focused on startups? Because we're focused on all developers, in big companies and small.
How do you feel about the competition?
Just fine, we looked at the deals slowing in the US, competition wasn't our big issue - it's not that someone else was getting the purchase order, it's that no PO was being issued in the quarter. We're more exposed to the US markets, and potentially more exposed to discretionary purchases (although I don't really believe that servers are more discretionary than storage - they're converging). Avnet, one of our big distributors, had a similar experience in the US.
Why didn't you pre-announce the quarter?
We wanted to be sure, when we made our announcements, to have finalized our numbers and our plan to adjust our cost structure going forward. Given we're in the midst of an ERP transition, we were still finalizing work late into April. Secondarily, we needed to review our FY 2009 restructuring plan with the board before going public. We announced as soon as we'd met, reviewed and approved the plan.
How did you lose money compared to a year ago profit?
Well, although we generated a lot of cash in the quarter (more than $320m from operating activities), we also incurred a number of charges which reduced our net income. These included non-cash items related to stock-based compensation and amortization of acquisition-related intangible assets as well as other acquisition-related charges - all of which added up to 20 cents worth of charges.
Are you repurchasing your own shares?
We don't comment on buyback plans, but we'll report any potential purchases at the end of the quarter.
When will the US recover? Will the malaise spread overseas?
We build network innovation at Sun, we don't predict the global economy.
And with that, you've hopefully got a clearer sense of what we saw, and what we see. So I'll end on a particuarly vexing question,
"Why does Sun's CEO waste time writing that blog?"
Because I believe in providing clarity surrounding our strategy and operations - not just once a year in the Annual Report. I believe clarity behind our direction is useful for our shareholders, customers, partners and employees.
In good times, and in challenging ones.
________________
Safe Harbor Statement
Jonathan's blog contains forward-looking statements regarding the future results and performance of Sun including statements with respect to the effects of our restructuring plan, and expectations for deferred revenue. These forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties and actual results could differ materially from those predicted in any such forward-looking statements. Factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those contained in such forward-looking statements include: risks associated with developing, designing, manufacturing and distributing new products; lack of success in technological advancements; pricing pressures; lack of customer acceptance of new products; the possibility of errors or defects in new products; competition; adverse business conditions; failure to retain key employees; the cancellation or delay of projects; our reliance on single-source suppliers; risks associated with our ability to purchase a sufficient amount of components to meet demand; inventory risks; and delays in product development or customer acceptance and implementation of new products and technologies. Please also refer to Sun's periodic reports that are filed from time to time with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including its Annual Report on Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended June 30, 2007 and its Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q for the fiscal quarters ended September 30, 2007 and December 30, 2007. Sun assumes no obligation to, and does not currently intend to, update these forward-looking statements.
Why Twitter Matters:
"How could tiny Twitter ever become such a titan? It's not the core
technology, which is simple, but instead the community." -- Stephen
Baker, BusinessWeek
Earlier today I had the opportunity to meet
Lionel Lim, the new president of Sun Japan.
I was impressed. His rhetoric was friendly, direct and honest, and he
sounded like a guy looking to inspire people to get more innovative and
take the opportunities out there. There is huge potential for Sun to
gain more share of multiple markets in Japan. Also, as Sun grows in
Japan by engaging more partners and customers, we can simultaneously
engage more developers and users with more innovative community
development operations. We are not doing nearly enough developer
outreach in Japan, and I hope that changes because community
development is quite literally market development. In fact, there is no
distinction whatsoever, and Id argue this point with just about anyone.
So, I´m looking forward to this new leadership. Should be fun.
Sun Japan press release in Japanese.
The /usr/ucb/
from UNIX command prints out the mail header lines in your mailbox file. It shows you who the mail is from. Here is an example run for this command.
Display mail header lines in your mailbox file
# /usr/ucb/from
From root Sun Mar 16 03:15:01 2008
From root Sun Mar 23 03:15:00 2008
From root Sun Mar 30 03:15:01 2008
From root Sun Apr 6 03:15:01 2008
From root Sun Apr 13 03:15:01 2008
From esoft Thu May 15 19:50:10 2008
Display mail header for mail sent by sender
# /usr/ucb/from -s esoft
From esoft Thu May 15 19:50:10 2008
Display mail header lines for a user's mailbox file
# /usr/ucb/from soft
From soft Sun Feb 10 03:10:41 2008
From soft Sun Feb 10 03:15:01 2008
From soft Sun Feb 17 03:10:41 2008
From soft Sun Feb 17 03:15:01 2008
From soft Sun Feb 24 03:10:41 2008
Takanobu Masuzuki, developer marketing manager at Sun Japan, announced next week's launch details --
[osol-announce] Japan Launch event for OpenSolaris 2008.05. Space filling up fast.
-
It's not mentioned often but OpenSPARC continues to be very active and is having a huge effect globally in how microelectronics is taught.
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A press outing for Dalibor in his new role, and he's spot on with his comments.
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Whoa. High praise from Jason. I'd agree with most of what he says here, 2008.05 is an excellent start.
There is
a new map of the Sun Campus Ambassadors on the Sun Developer Network site. There are over 500 of these guys, and the list promises to grow dramatically next year.
May 14, 2008
ZFS had a problem with properly throttling intensive writers like a simple dd if=/
dev/null of=/
zfs/file which would usually produce "jumpy" writes instead
os steady write stream. There is a new way of throttling in
ZFS which should solve the problem - I have not tested it yet. The new code was integrated into build 87. Roch has
posted a good
explanation of the old and the new
behavior.
Direct Binding refers to a symbol search and binding model that has
been available in Solaris for quite some time. See
Library Bindings.
At runtime, a symbol reference from an object must be located by the runtime
linker
(ld.so.1(1)
). Under direct bindings, symbol definitions are searched for directly in
the dependency that provides the symbol definition. The provider of the
symbol definition was determined by the link-editor
(ld(1))
when the object was originally built.
This direct binding model differs from the traditional symbol search
and binding model. In the traditional model, the symbol
search starts with the application and advances through each object that is
loaded within the process until a symbol definition is found.
Given that direct binding capabilities have been available for some time, and
a number of other consolidations have been happily using them, why did it
take so long to get this model employed to build the OSNet consolidation?
(that's the Solaris core OS and networking).
Basically, there were a number of corner cases to solve. One advantage of
direct bindings is that this model can protect against unintentional
interposition. One disadvantage of direct bindings is that this model can
circumvent intentional interposition. Determining whether interposition
exists, and whether it is intentional or unintentional is the fun part.
The core Solaris libraries seem to be a frequent target of interposition.
So first, what is interposition? Suppose a process is made up of several
shared objects, and two shared objects, libX.so and
libY.so, export the same symbol xy(). Under
the traditional symbol search model, any references to the symbol
xy() will be bound to the first instance of xy()
that is found. So, if libX.so is loaded before libY.so
,
then the instance of xy() within libX.so is used
to satisfy all references. The instance of xy() within
libX.so is said to interpose on the instance in
libY.so.
Now, suppose that two other shared objects within the process,
libA.so and libB.so, reference xy().
Under the traditional symbol search model, both of these objects will bind
to libX.so. But, if libA.so was built to
depend on libX.so, and libB.so was built to
depend on libY.so, and both employed direct bindings, then
libA.so would bind to xy() in libX.so,
and libB.so would bind to xy() in
libY.so.
One avenue to observe this difference in binding is to employ
lari(1),
a utility that looks for interesting binding events. Not surprisingly,
most interesting events revolve around the multiple instance of a symbol.
From our example, the traditional symbol search model will reveal:
% lari main
[2:2E]: xy(): ./libX.so
[2:0]: xy(): ./libY.so
Here, we see the two instances of xy(), with
libX.so
being the recipient of the two external bindings (2E).
However, if libA.so and libB.so employ direct
bindings then the symbol search model will reveal:
% lari main
[2:1ED]: xy(): ./libX.so
[2:1ED]: xy(): ./libY.so
Here, both libX.so and libY.so are the recipient
of one external, direct binding (1ED).
The question now is what did the developer of libX.so intend?
Did they want to capture all bindings to xy()?, or was their
choice of the name xy() an unintended name-clash with the existing
symbol in libY.so?
It is this latter name-clash issue that was
one of the main motivators in having the OSNet consolidation use
direct bindings for all system libraries. There have been numerous instances
of user applications breaking system functionality by unintentionally interposin
g
on a symbol that exists within a system library. However, although we
wished to protect our libraries from unintentional interposition, we still
wished to provide for interposition where it was intended.
Although the direct bindings implementation prevents unintentional interposition
,
the implementation does allow for interposition. However, if you want
interposition then you now need to be explicit. Explicit interposition can
be achieved with LD_PRELOAD (an old favorite), or by tagging the
associated object with -z interpose, or by identifying
symbols within an executable with INTERPOSE mapfile directives.
Alternatively, if you design a library with the intent that users be
allowed to interpose on symbols within the library, you can disable
direct binding to the library. Disabling can be achieved for the whole library
using
the link-editors -B nodirect option, or by identifying individual
symbols with NODIRECT mapfile directives or as singletons.
If you suspect an issue with direct bindings in effect, you can return to the
tradition symbol search model by setting the environment variable
LD_NODIRECT=yes. A suggestion for investigating the issue further
would be:
% lari main > direct
% LD_NODIRECT=yes lari main > no-direct
% diff direct no-direct
Standard interposition dates from an era where applications had very few
dependencies. Times have changed, and the number of dependencies have
dramatically increased. Although interposition
can be powerful, it can also be fragile and scale badly. Diagnosing the
occurrence of interposition can be a challenge.
Given the ability to time
travel, direct binding would probably have been the only model for symbol
binding, and explicit interposition the only means of defining an interposer.
Having to support direct bindings and the traditional model with the
various flags and options is the cost of backward compatibility. However,
the ability of ELF to stretch this far speaks to the overall quality
of its initial design, warts and all.
The OSNet consolidation uses the various binding-control flags to
both identify interposers, and prevent direct bindings to commonly interposed
upon symbols. All the gory details of direct binding, the various flags that can
be used, and examples of their use, can be found in the
Direct Binding
Appendix of the Linker and Libraries Guide.
Technorati Tag:
OpenSolaris
Technorati Tag:
Solaris
I will be speaking around the Bay Area, the first of which is be BayLISA tomorrow, Thurs. May 15th, at Yahoo in Sunnyvale.
I will be handing out some OpenSolaris usb sticks which have the OpenSolaris image on it, so you can install from it. These are really handy, and a nice piece of swag. Jesse Silvers did a great job at getting these made up, a very nice design. Also joining me will be John Weeks to give some backing on the FMAC project. Don't miss these events, should be a good time for all.
BayLISA - Thursday, May 15th at Yahoo in Sunnyvale
Silicon Valley Linux Users Group (SVLUG) - Wednesday, June 4th at Symantec/Veritas in Mountain View
East Bay Linux Users Group (EBLUG) - Wednesday, June 18th at Hurricane Electric in Fremont
Hope to see you folks there! Especially look forward to seeing some of my friends in the Linux communities.
First look: OpenSolaris 2008.05 a work in progress: "The most impressive aspect of OpenSolaris is the installation
experience, which is painless, intuitive, and easily on par with Ubuntu
and Fedora." -- Ryan Paul, Ars Technica
I agree. And this is a big deal for regular people like me
(non-engineering types, I mean). When I started on the OpenSolaris
project four years ago, I could not install the pre-Solaris 10 builds,
and I struggled with subsequent versions of Solaris Express. I always
had to get help. Solaris was always for pretty high end people, but
that's all changed now. Actually, the install has been pretty easy for
about a year now, but with OpenSolaris 2008.05 so many other things
just work. Beautiful.
-
Cory's new book has hit Amazon UK. Time to grab a copy.
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I've previously found that hearing poems read by their author adds a new dimension to their meaning. Hearing TS Eliot read The Waste and was transformative. So I'm looking forward to this arriving.
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While I think this correctly diagnoses the problem I think the solution is to be found elsewhere than trying to make a developer community hire a PHB.
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Truly excellent. The lesson to be learned is that the best way to get Java everywhere was to work with the community rather than expect the community to work with Sun. Let's hope that lesson sticks and spreads.
AMD released their new roadmap today. Several references to the Barcelona delays (AMD Quad Core, delays which have impacted Sun's release schedule) are scattered throughout and positioned as a major setback for AMD to overcome in the next several years. Whether you follow the news or not its obvious to anyone in or around IT that AMD has given up a tremendous lead over Intel in the last 2 years and Intel is continuing to pummel 'em. Lets hope that AMD can really pull it together and stay in the game.
JavaOne wrapped up on Friday. We hosted individuals from across the globe, and from every industry: consumer electronics and gaming, to enterprise IT, space exploration, factory automation, the automotive industry, academia - like the network itself, Java delivers something for nearly everyone, everywhere.
This year's biggest announcements centered around Java's role in the future of rich internet applications (or RIA's). What's a rich internet application? It depends on your perspective - from mine, it's any network connected application that persists in front of a user, typically outside a browser, that can operate when disconnected from the network.
On the one hand, I'd claim Java's always been a RIA platform - before the world really wanted one. Early Java applets delivered interactivity, but at the expense of development complexity and, in the early days, performance - when a browser, and more recently Javascript, would suffice.
But browser based applications are hitting complexity and performance limits, and content owners are striving for higher levels of engagement (via high definition video, or advanced interactivity). Developers are demanding something new - the browser's a wonderfully accessible programming model, but it's a weak deployment model for rich/disconnected applications.
An unspoken driver of RIA is also business model evolution - many companies behind rich applications are seeking independence from browsers and search engines, whose default settings and corporate parents present a competitive threat. There's a growing appetite for locally installed applications that build rich, direct and permanent engagement with consumers. No one wants to pay a toll to meet their own customers.
With that in mind, as we looked to reinvent the Java platform, we heard a consistent set of requirements. And not just from coders, but from sports francishes seeking to directly engage their fans, media companies wanting to bypass browser defaults, to artists and businesses and device manufacturers - everyone's looking to uniquely engage consumers via the network. These audiences have nearly identitical requirements for a RIA platform - they want technology that:
- Reaches every internet consumer - on desktops, mobile, and new devices, too.
- Delivers high performance - and the ability to engage creative professsionals in the design process.
- Leverages existing skills and enterprise infrastructure.
- Is totally free, and open source.
- Provides content owners with control and ownership of their own data.
At JavaOne last week, we addressed every one of those issues - here's how:
First, RIA developers want to reach every consumer on earth, and on every device.
Why? Because the market is in front of consumers - no matter what screen they may be using. Desktop, mobile phone, personal navigation, digital book - you name it. The market's in front of all the screens in your life, not just a PC.
That said, on PC's alone, Java's popularity has grown in the last few years, as measured by runtime downloads - we routinely download 40 to 50 million new Java runtimes a month, and update more than a billion every year.
The adoption of the Java platform exceeds the adoption of Microsoft's Windows itself - Sun's Java runtime environment (JRE) is preloaded on nearly every Windows machine (from HP, Dell, Lenovo, etc.), but also runs on Apple's Macintosh, Ubuntu, Fedora, SuSe, Solaris and OpenSolaris desktops. In addition, a JRE is present on billions - yes, billions - of wireless and mobile devices, from automobile dashboards and navigation devices, to Amazon's Kindle (did you know Amazon's Kindle is a Java platform?).
Which is to say, the Java platform reaches more people than any other software technology the world has ever seen.
Second, RIA developers want performance, functionality AND simplicity.
Why? Because content owners and application developers want to engage consumers - and want to engage artists and creative professionals in the workflow.
Java's history with simplicity isn't perfect - which is why our teams have rewritten the applet model, and focused so intently on making the new consumer Java runtime environment (download a beta version here) exceptionally fast to load within a web page, exceptionally performant for complex interactivity, and trivially accessible to consumers. We've also simplified Java with a scripting language, JavaFX script, that enables creative professionals to engage with coders to create immersive experiences, while embracing the creative tool chain (from interaction design to pixel manipulation) used by the worlds designers and digital artists.
And I'm really pleased we've solved the desktop installation problem, by making JavaFX applets separable from a web page with a simple drag and drop (click the image above to watch this demonstrated). Developers can now bypass the browser to trivially install apps on desktops - once the applet's dropped on the desktop, content owners have a direct relationship with their consumers.
You might have also seen that we're adding full high quality audio and video codecs to Java on every platform on which it runs - resolving another gap for RIA developers, support for time-based media (click here for a demo of high performance video).
Third, enterprises want to reuse their existing Java skills and assets in moving to RIA.
Nearly every enterprise employs programmers with Java skills - it's still the number one internet language taught across the world, and found pervasively in global business infrastructure. As businesses move to engage their customers via RIA platforms, reusing existing skills, and connecting RIA's to existing systems, gives the Java community a unique ability to build from what exists - rather than attempt to replace it.
This familiarity also allows businesses and developer teams to focus on engaging with consumers - rather than irritating IT with new infrastructure requirements (JavaFX developers simply link to existing enterprise infrastructure, vs. requiring new systems for RIA apps).
Fourth, RIA developers want free and open platforms.
Why free? Because developers don't want to encumber their applications with royalty bearing dependencies, or use technologies that predefine where consumers might appear. You don't build developer communities around closed source, you build user communities -
and this is an instance where developer selection and adoption will define the broadest RIA marketplace. JavaFX will, like all of Sun's software platforms, be made freely available as open source, and it'll be released via the GPL (v2) license.
And lest you think free and open software is the province of those with goatees and tattoos... we're seeing a rising tide of developing nations mandating free and open software in government and academic procurement. Why? To protect choice, and build indigenous opportunity - there's no reason to build dependencies upon proprietary software if you can avoid it.
Lastly, lets face it, the real value in Web 2.0 is the data - not the app. And that data is YOURS.
If you've been watching the social media space as carefully as we have, you understand the value of instrumentation and intentionality in building a business on the web. Knowing what users are doing with your product, whether it's a fantasy cricket league or a consumer banking application, enables more innovative business models, the delivery of higher value services, placement of more valuable ads - data allows for better decisions, and better value creation (and bluntly put, higher CPA).
But most rich internet applications are built, then deployed - into a fog. Developers who leave the confines of the browser either lose access to information about what their users are doing, or have to rely upon a technology provider that's inserting itself into their data stream. And some of those technology providers compete with content developers.
With a project code named Project Insight, we'll be instrumenting the Java platform to enable developers to harvest the data stream generated by their RIA content. JavaFX developers can focus on their business models - rather than enhancing someone else's.
_______________________
With all that said, what's the success of JavaFX worth to Sun?
By definition, it's worth more to Sun than the adoption of someone else's platform (known as "positive option value") - and the proprietary infrastructure used to serve it (don't forget, RIA's have rich internet back-ends (RIBs?). And in the RIA world, all the options are going to be priced at free, anyways - this isn't a contest to be won on price.
From where I sit, the platform likely to win will be the one that sets developers free - to pursue markets, opportunities and customer experiences as they define them, not as vendors define them. Now, setting developers free - that's where we can excel. It's in the DNA of everything we do.
For developers, learn more at JavaFX.com. And be sure to check out NetBeans - like Java itself, it's starting to rock the free world...
The
OpenSolaris community in Japan
will hold a launch event for OpenSolaris 2008.05 here in Tokyo on
Friday May 23rd --
OpenSolaris
2008.05 リリース記念セミナー. The event will be led by Sun's Globalization
engineers, Ohsone-san and Hasegawa-san, as well as Ohta-san and Sato-san from OpenNSUG/OSUG.
It's great to see the
Sun community offering resources to help
the people affected by the natural disasters in Myanmar and China.
Sun's relief drive is year round, of course, but there are two
immediate needs. Those who are far away watching these horrible events
unfold need not feel helpless. Financial contributions are the best way
help to get food, medicine, and supplies into the hands of rescue
workers. Also, as employees contribute, the Sun Microsystems Foundation
has a matching funds program. All the best to everyone out there. And
remember, these things can happen to anyone, anywhere, any time.
May 13, 2008
It looks like I missed making a configuration change last update, and opensolaris.org has been
dropping my mail messages for the past week as a result. Sorry—if you're waiting for mail from me, you may need to ping me again. Otherwise, I'll try to reinsert myself in various threads...
So
Sun are now - finally - pushing quad core Opterons in the
X4140,
X4240, and
X4440.
The X4240 is a new one. I like it. Yes, whereas
I complained before, this one does have 16 internal drives.
-
Mark explains why controlling none of the components has no bearing on his ability to control the release cycle for Ubuntu.
-
Dalibor gets quoted straight off the blocks. The article itself seems to lack insight, unfortunately.
-
This article is depressingly ignorant of history. Clearly the author is unaware of the history of Tomcat, or of any of Sun's open source activities around OpenOffice.org, NetBeans, Mozilla etc etc.
-
Very informative graphic that shows clearly why maize-grown biofuel may well be more of a problem than a solution.
-
Students who review OpenSolaris or NetBeans can win prizes from Sun.
-
The blogging guidelines move to v2.0 and end up as a great guiding light for all our interactions in the virtual world.
-
The awards are up for nomination again.
Sumitomo Electric in Japan is switching 15,000 desktops to OpenOffice
--
住友電工が
OpenOffice.orgを採用. Cool. I wonder who loses out on that deal? More
importantly, I'm hearing about more of these corporate deployments here
in Japan, so the OpenOffice community must be strong and growing here.
Check this out --
Beijing OpenSolaris User Group 16th Meeting (May 20th, 2008). The Beijing OpenSolaris User Group is doing a joint meeting with the Beijing Linux User Group to hear
a preso from Louis Suarez-Potts on OpenOffice. Cool. Nice to see the communities collaborating more and more like this.
Sometime ago i was talking with others PoaOSUG members, about the creation of a custom GDM theme for the user group. So we can create a IPS package and give the users the option to personalize their desktops (laptops), with our own theme. Ok, that’s the beauty of open software, we don’t need to create it from scratch, we can use it, modify, redistribute…
So, looking around, i could find this nice theme (by Chandan), and have decided to use it as a start point. For now, i just changed the background for this nice one(Creative Commons license), and have made some changes to the card(you can put your picture - 103×127). I have made some minor changes to the theme.xml file too. Actually, this is just an experiment to learn the complexity involved to create a GDM theme. And it is way to simple, like i think all good software should be.
The next step is continue the conversation within the PoaOSUG discussion mailing list, to decide the background image, how to insert informations like PoaOSUG website, etc.
Please, let me know what you think too!
Peace.
I'm supposed to be putting the finishin touches on another customer presentation this morning (in the light of one I gave yesterday). I simply had to stop doing that and get my thoughts down as I was finding it hard to focus.
Yesterday I made a comment on a colleague's blog about the earthquake, as I am also travelling in the region. I noted that I was giving a presentation to a customer at the time and actually didn't notice. I had it pointed out to me that we had had a tremor or a 'quake after I finished.
I got back to one of the offices in Beijing that afternoon and had an Australian colleague in a chat session point me at an article in an Australian newspaper about the incident mentioning a loss of life of about a hundred. This in itself was incredibly sobering, as any such loss of life is tragic.
This morning I woke up and flipped on BBC World and was utterly gobsmacked to hear 10,000 dead!
I find myself at a loss to describe my feelings. On one hand I am incredibly grateful for my own safety, but 10,000 people?
Oh my god!
This is beyond tragedy.
The loss of human life on this scale is beyond comprehension.
The China Daily lists the numbers lost in various areas. One in particluar leaps out at me. In comparison to some of the other areas the numbers are small but how can the following not tug on your heart?
Dujiangyan: Over 50 dead in a middle school. Many more are buried beneath rubble.
I almost dread going into the office today as there are certain to be people who either know that they have lost family and friends, or perhaps worse, don't know whether or not they have. My heart goes out to all of these wonderful people who have made me feel so welcome here.
I wish I knew what more to say.
Update#1
I just called my manager in Sydney to let him know that I was fine. He told me that the Australian news services are reporting on 900 kids in a collapsed school.
I am fearful that the news is only going to get worse!
May 12, 2008
It's been nearly 5 months since I've last blogs. Clearly I'm in the realm of the non-blogging heathen. No excuses. Mea culpa.
The good news is that the GlassFish community has been plugging away at GlassFish with substantial progress. There have been hiccups along the way and surely there are more to come, but overall GlassFish is forging ahead nicely. Here's a summary of GlassFish happenings at JavaOne 2008.
- Product name change. "Sun Java System Application Server" was renamed to "Sun GlassFish Enterprise Server". The new name inherently describes the relationship between open source product and the Sun product. Simply stated, Sun offers support of GlassFish through the Sun GlassFish Enterprise Server.
- GlassFish Enterprise Server Unlimited. Deploy as much GlassFish Enterprise Server as you want, starting at $25K. That's less than deploying some competitive application servers to a single T5140. I don't have the web page up for the Unlimited offering yet. This is one of those afore-mentioned hiccups.
- Partner Initiative for Sun Partner Advantage program. Over 40 GlassFish partners! Check out the partner showcase. Want to become a GlassFish partner? Here's how.
- GlassFish v3 Technology Preview 2. You may recall Technology Preview 1 (TP1) at last year's JavaOne. Since then we have been busy delivering multiple releases of GlassFish v2. Not resting on our GlassFish v3 laurels, Technology Preview 2 delivers the following over last year's Technology Preview 1. I'm sure I'm forgetting something but I'll chalk it up to being way past my bedtime
- Support for OSGi
- Dynamically extend GlassFish v3 by adding modules to the lib directory.
- Java Persistence API, JDBC Connection Pooling
- File & JDBC Realm support, SSL support
- Complete asadmin command line interface support.
- NetBeans support, with GlassFish v3 available in NetBeans update center
- Update Center support with Solaris IPS packaging. The following components are available using the update center:
- Web administration console (subset of GlassFish v2 console)
- Partial EJB 3.1 support (stateless session beans w/local interface)
- EclipseLink
- jMaki, JSF, Woodstock
- JRuby runtime, Grails support
- Project Jersey REST apis (JAX-RS)
- Metro Web Services stack
- Project WebSynergy. Bringing together the best of LifeRay and OpenPortal with GlassFish. Check out The Aquarium writeup.
- GlassFish ESB. Read all about it.
- Sun GlassFish Communications Server. Sun's SIP-enabled application server based on Project SailFin. SailFin, in turn, is based on GlassFish.
- GlassFish Unconference. Arrived late due to a delayed flight. However, I had the pleasure to lead the "Production & Performance" discussion. Learned a lot about how folks are deploying GlassFish. Looks like we can improve NetBeans integration by addressing a bug or two. The good news is that we received multiple kudos for GlassFish ease-of-use and for call flow monitoring.
- GlassFish Party. I can neither confirm nor deny I over-consumed alcoholic beverages. Hiccup (unrelated to afore-mentioned hiccups).
- GlassFish BOF. Picked up some good feedback at the BOF on how to improve GlassFish.
Believe it or not, I only had the chance to attend one session the entire conference - the opening general session. Had to go back to
UStream to
watch GlassFish v3 start global thermonuclear war during Bob Brewin's afternoon
keynote. The rest of the time was dedicated to talking to partners, customers and long-time friends.
I have had a busy couple of months. After wrapping up work on
Solaris 8 Containers (my teammate Steve ran the Solaris 9 Containers effort),
I turned my attention to helping the Image Packaging
team (rogue's
gallery) with their efforts to get OpenSolaris 2008.05 out the door.
Among
other things, I have been working hard to provide a basic level of
zones functionality for OpenSolaris 2008.05. I wish I could have gotten
more done, but today I want to cover what does and does not work. I
want to be clear that Zones support in OpenSolaris 2008.05 and beyond will evolve
substantially. To start, here's an example of configuring a zone on
2008.05:
# zonecfg -z donutshop
donutshop: No such zone configured
Use 'create' to begin configuring a new zone.
zonecfg:donutshop> create
zonecfg:donutshop> set zonepath=/zones/donutshop
zonecfg:donutshop> add net
zonecfg:donutshop:net> set physical=e1000g0
zonecfg:donutshop:net> set address=129.146.228.5/23
zonecfg:donutshop:net> end
zonecfg:donutshop> add capped-cpu
zonecfg:donutshop:capped-cpu> set ncpus=1.5
zonecfg:donutshop:capped-cpu> end
zonecfg:donutshop> commit
zonecfg:donutshop> exit
# zoneadm list -vc
ID NAME STATUS PATH BRAND IP
0 global running / native shared
- donutshop configured /zones/donutshop ipkg shared
If you're familiar with deploying zones, you can see that there is a lot which is familiar here. But you can also see that donutshop isn't, as you would normally expect, using
the native brand. Here we're using the ipkg brand. The
reason is that commands like zoneadm and zonecfg have
some special behaviors for native zones which presume that you're using
a SystemV Packaging based OS. In the future, we'll make native less
magical, and the zones you install will be branded native as you would expect. Jerry is actually
working on that right now. Note also that I used the relatively new
CPU
Caps resource management feature to put some resource limits on the
zone-- it's easy to do!. Now let's install the zone:
# zoneadm -z donutshop install
A ZFS file system has been created for this zone.
Image: Preparing at /zones/donutshop/root ... done.
Catalog: Retrieving from http://pkg.opensolaris.org:80/ ... done.
Installing: (output follows)
DOWNLOAD PKGS FILES XFER (MB)
Completed 49/49 7634/7634 206.85/206.85
PHASE ACTIONS
Install Phase 12602/12602
Note: Man pages can be obtained by installing SUNWman
Postinstall: Copying SMF seed repository ... done.
Postinstall: Working around http://defect.opensolaris.org/bz/show_bug.cgi?id=681
Postinstall: Working around http://defect.opensolaris.org/bz/show_bug.cgi?id=741
Done: Installation completed in 208.535 seconds.
Next Steps: Boot the zone, then log into the zone console
(zlogin -C) to complete the configuration process
There are a couple of things to notice, both in the configuration
and in the install:
- Non-global zones are not sparse, for now
- Zones are said to be sparse if /usr, /lib,
/platform, /sbin and optionally /opt are
looped back, read-only, from the global zone. This allows a substantial
disk space savings in the traditional zones model (which is that the zones
have the same software installed as the global zone).
Whether we will ultimately choose to implement
sparse zones, or not, is an open question. I plan to bring this question to the Zones community, and to some key customers, in the near future.
- Zones are installed from a network repository
- Unlike with traditional zones, which are sourced by copying bits from the global
zone, here we simply spool the contents from the network repository.
The upside is that this was easy to implement; the downside is that
you must be connected to the network to deploy a zone. Getting the bits
from the global zone is still desirable, but we don't have that implemented
yet.
By default, zones are installed using the system's
preferred authority (use pkg authority to see what
that is set to). The preferred authority is the propagated into the
zone. If you want to override that, you can specify a different
repository using the new -a argument to zoneadm install:
# zoneadm -z donutshop install -a ipkg=http://ipkg.eng:80
- Non-global zones are small
-
Traditionally, zones are installed with all of the same software
that the global zone contains. In the case of "whole root" zones
(the opposite of sparse), this means that non-global zones are about
the same size as global zones-- easily at least a gigabyte in size.
Since we're not supporting sparse zones, I decided to pare down
the install as much as I could, within reason: the default zone
installation is just 206MB, and has a decent set of basic tools.
But you have to add other stuff you might need. And we can even
do more: some package refactoring should yield another 30-40MB
of savings, as packagings like Tcl and Tk should not be needed
by default. For example, Tk (5MB) gets dragged in as a dependency
of python (the packaging system is written in python); Tcl (another
5MB) is dragged in by Tk. Tk then pulls in parts of X11.
Smallness yields speed: when connected to a fast package repository
server, I can install a zone in just 24 seconds!.
I'm really curious to know what reaction people will have to such
minimalist environments. What do you think?
Once you start thinking about such small environments, some new concerns surface: vim (which in 2008.05 we're using as our vi implementation)
is 17MB, or almost 9% of the disk space used by the zone!
- Non-global zones are independent of the global zone
-
Because ipkg zones are branded, they exist independently
of the global zone. This means that if you do an image-update
of the global zone, you'll also need to update each of your zones,
and ensure that they are kept in sync. For now this is a manual
process-- in the future we'll make it less so.
- ZFS support notes
- OpenSolaris 2008.05 makes extensive use of ZFS, and enforces ZFS
as the root filesystem. Additional filesystems are created for
/export, /export/home and /opt. Non-global zones don't yet follow this convention.
Additionally, I have sometimes seen our auto-zfs file system
creation fail to work (you can see it working properly in the example above). We haven't
yet tracked down that problem-- my suspicion is that there is a bad interaction
with the 2008.05 filesystem layout's use of ZFS legacy mounts.
As a result of this (and for other reasons too, probably), zones don't
participate in the boot-environment subsystem. This means that you
won't get an automatic snapshot when you image-update your
zone or install packages. That means no automatic rollback for zones.
Again, this is something we will endeavor to fix.
- Beware of bug 6684810
-
You may see a message like the following when you boot your zone:
zoneadm: zone 'donutshop': Unable to set route for interface lo0 to éÞùÞ$
zoneadm: zone 'donutshop':
This is a known bug (6684810); fortunately the message is harmless.
In the next month, I hope to: take a vacation, launch a discussion with
our community about sparse root zones, and to make a solid plan for
the overall support of zones on OpenSolaris. I've got a lot to do,
but that's easily balanced by the fact that I've been having a blast
working on this project...
Looks like Alfred's hard work has paid off. You can pull down a package of Songbird for OpenSolaris (see Alfred's blog entry for the links). Songbird is a next-gen media player built atop the Mozilla platform. Although I've had it crash once, on the whole it has worked quite well. SteveL's mashtape extension is really neat, and you can see it in action in the screenshot below (it's the thing offering pictures, youtube videos, etc. at the bottom of the window).
Next steps would be to get this into the OpenSolaris package repository-- I hope that someday soon you will be able to pkg install songbird.
Nice work guys!
Very interesting. A little Japanese inside China --
[i18n-discuss] Solaris Teacher Training and Sun University Tour- Dalian.
Next time I visit China, I have to spend some time in Dalian to explore
this China-Japan connection. I first read about this in a
Tom Friedman column, but it's not talked about that much here in Japan. Gotta check it out.
Nice to see the Sun blogging policy evolving --
Sun Guidelines on Public Discourse.
Linda Skrocki has all the details.
With thousands of Sun employees blogging and participating openly in public forums these last four years, it's amazing to see the
quality standards remaining so high. We in the OpenSolaris community
can learn from Sun's blogging experience. In fact, at the OpenSolaris
Summit last week we discussed this issue a bit, and I think the OGB
will be driving for set of guidelines on list participation.
Be sure to visit www.connectathon.org and see when the talks are scheduled. These are open to the public.
Sun Microsystems, Inc. is involved with 6 presentations and then NetApp has 5 of them. I'll be giving two of them, but I'm actually more excited about the one on nfsreplay by Shehjar Tikoo and the Linux development git one by Bruce Fields and Benny Halevy.
Normally we can't share images of the event, but here is one from before the other vendors setting up their gear:
Each of the Sun workstations is probably a node in a pNFS community.
May 11, 2008
Great article in Newsweek from Fareed Zakaria --
The Rise of the Rest
-- about how large chunks of the world are dramatically improving and
growing significantly in an era of ever reducing violence. Finally. A
positive view of globalization, and one distinctly lacking all the fear
about the US falling to second class (or even third class) economic
status (which is nothing more than propaganda). The gloom-and-doomers
and isolationists in the US are an obviously and obnoxiously vocal
minority, and they will miss this positive view because it's actually
based on embracing the entire world with that nasty word --
immigration. Zakaria says that "the potential for a new burst of
American productivity depends not on our education system or R&D
spending, but on our immigration policies. If these people are allowed
and encouraged to stay, then innovation will happen here. If they
leave, they'll take it with them."
Can You Become a Creature of New Habits?: "Whenever we initiate change, even a positive one, we activate fear in
our emotional brain. If the fear is big
enough, the fight-or-flight response will go off and we’ll run from
what we’re trying to do. The small steps in kaizen don’t set off fight
or flight, but rather keep us in the thinking brain, where we have
access to our creativity and playfulness." -- New York Times on M. J. Ryan, author of the 2006 book “This Year I Will...”
Take one step at a time. And small steps are best. The tiny, continuous improvements add up, though, and this is actually a very efficient way to just get things done and better in the process.
Kaizen.
You catch that Fortune article --
You
have 7 years to learn Mandarin
-- about China surpassing the United
States economically in seven years? Whether it's seven years or fifty
doesn't really matter, I suppose, since people will be arguing
about how to measure this for a while. And the measurements themselves
are changing, it seems. How convenient. Whatever. I think it's cool
either way because it offers new opportunities, and that´s what I´m
after. In fact, aside from the word freedom, I can´t think of another
word that describes Americans better than the word opportunity. Can you?
But Fortune seems defensive. We are supposed to "worry" about this, and we are told that American individuals "can avoid
competition with Chinese workers by
doing place-based work, which ranges in value from highly skilled
(emergency-room surgery) to menial (pouring concrete). But the many
people who do information-based work, which is most subject to
competition, will have to get dramatically better to be worth what they
cost. For government leaders: Improve U.S. education above all."
The first part of that paragraph is ridiculous. You can't "avoid
competition" in a global economy, and I´m not "worrying" at all. Why
not embrace the change as an opportunity? In fact, wouldn't be cool to
live in China for a bit to check all this out first hand? Wouldn´t it
be cool to learn some Chinese and interact with Chinese from their
perspective for a while? I don´t see very many people in the US
thinking this way about the rise of China (and India, for that matter,
and some other emerging markets around the world, too). In fact,
Sin-Yaw
Wang has it right when he comments about the Fortune piece: "The
new generation of business leaders, now in their 20s or 40s, must
learn to do business in China and with Chinese. 7 years is not that
long to master a language, especially when one is not even trying." I agree. And I´m
reading this view (the not trying bit) over and over again. It´s defensive.
Oh, well. I suppose that´s an opportunity for those who see it differently, right?
My current home machine is a first generation (ordered the day after the announcement) PPC Mac Mini. I initially ordered it with 512Mb RAM and no WiFi or Bluetooth. It has since been upgraded to 1G (the max this machine can take) and had the WiFi/Bluetooth added (and it now lives in the UK rather than California where it was bought). When I first bought it it was as a secondary machine to learn where MacOS was, I hadn't used MacOS since System 7 at that time. It soon became my our primary home desktop and got given gifts of a (wired) Mac keyboard and 20" Cinema screen in addition to its upgraded memory and wireless capabilities.
It has been serving us well but I feel like a new machine. While I love OpenSolaris and spend a huge number of hours developing for it and using it MacOS is what I want to continue using for my personal stuff for now (I like iTunes, iPhoto, Safari and more importantly so does my wife). So if the current PPC Mac Mini is to be repurposed it needs to be Apple hardware.
I titled this "Missing Apple Mac hardware", why ? I can't find a non laptop Mac that actually fits what I want in terms of computing resources and cost. Disk space isn't an issue I'd buy the machine in the lowest possible disk configuration because all my data is stored on a ZFS on a separate system running OpenSolaris and mounted on the Mac using NFS.
The best CPU/RAM combination I get buy on a current Intel Mac Mini is 2GHz and 2G RAM for £558. The next option is a Mac Pro and that starts at a wallet breaking £1,749, it is a nice workstation but out of budget for my desktop machine. There is Mac hardware in between that price range but with, for me, a fundamental problem because it has an integrated LCD and comes with a keyboard. Now integrated systems are great I remember fondly using the Sun ELC workstations at University and my current Sun machine at home (and the office) is a Sun Ray 270 (ultra thin client with integrated LCD). However I like my 20" Apple Cinema display and I want to keep using and it doesn't need to be replaced, same for the keyboard/mouse.
The Apple Mac I want to buy would have a CPU around 2.4 to 3GHz and 4G RAM, a single disk and a reasonable graphics card - this isn't a games machine (I use consoles or my phone for games these days) - for helping with photo processing. Of course it should be "green" in that it should allow me to reuse my existing LCD monitor and keyboard (both Apple products!).
Pretty much something like a Sun Ultra 20M2but capable of legally running MacOS X 10.5 and for about that price
So Apple where is my missing Mac ?
Update:
I know I can do dual monitor on with an iMac (first saw that on a mono SE30 with an external colour display and putting windows "across" the boundary it was done perfectly!) but I already have two monitors on the desk (the Sun Ray 270 mentioned above) and I don't really have space for another one. The big issue with the top end Mac Mini is the memory only goes to 2G according to Apple and some of that will be taken away by the Intel GMA graphics. One of the reasons I need at least 4G RAM is that there is always two users logged in (with fast user switching) to this machine. A bit of space to upgrade beyond 4G of RAM would be nice.
May 10, 2008
Stephen Hahn,
Bart Smaalders, and Danek Duvall
talk about the new OpenSolaris Image Packaging System
that enables users and developers to get the software they need when
they need it. IPS is also a new tool for community growth as
developers around the world build and maintain packages and contribute
the software to the network repository. To contribute, go to
the IPS project.
David Stewart is back on YouTube --
OpenSolaris on Xeon video, Episode 2 - Saving Power
-- talking about how to improve power management, which is certainly a
good thing for a world using way too much juice. If you want to
contribute to this effort, go to the
Tesla Enhanced Power Management Project and also the
OpenSolaris Intel project.
At the 49 second mark of this YouTube clip --
Sun Headline News: CommunityOne 2008
-- you'll see me, Bonnie Corwin, and Shawn Walker sitting together at
the OpenSolaris keynote on Monday. That's cool. I remember the guy
pointing his camera at us. But what gets me is this: there was
practically no light in the audience at all. How did that camera pick
up so much detail under those conditions? Amazing. Anyway, I also saw a
quick shot of Michelle Olson, and Peter Tribble actually gets a little
talking role at the end. Thanks to Bill Rushmore for pointing out the
video.
Elite Korean Schools, Forging Ivy League Skills and
South Korea's Top Students:
"It is 10:30 p.m. and students at the elite Daewon prep school here are
cramming in a study hall that ends a 15-hour school day. A window is
propped open so the evening chill can keep them awake. One teenager
studies standing upright at his desk to keep from dozing. Kim
Hyun-kyung, who has accumulated nearly perfect scores on her SATs, is
multitasking to prepare for physics, chemistry and history exams. 'I
can’t let myself waste even a second,' said Ms. Kim, who dreams of
attending Harvard, Yale or another brand-name American college." -- New
York Times.
Can't waste even a second, eh? Humm. I wasted a lot of seconds when I
was in school. Mostly on sports, but a lot in school, too. Oh, well.
I'm working hard now. Next life I'll start a bit earlier.
On Visit to Japan, China's Hu Has No Time for Old Grudges:
"China has become Japan's largest trading partner, with the trade
volume between the two nations at $236 billion last year. More than
20,000 Japanese companies operate in China, many of them selling
precision equipment and industrial materials that are essential to its
export-driven boom." -- Washington Post.
20,000.
After reviewing statistics for my topsite
blog directory, I observed traffic from a website that uses redirects and frames to exploit my website with questionable advertisements (porn). Here is the format: http://????????.com/go/?/301??/http://www.topbloglists.com. I inserted the "?" as substitutes.
Obviously, I felt my site was being hijacked and I was miffed. But this was not the first time this happened to me.
Approximately two months ago, I emailed the webmaster three times requesting their members NOT be allowed to employ links that use frames to create banner-like ads above my pages. I never received a response to my emails, but the activity did stop until today.
Luckily, I found this script to deal with the issue. Place it within the <_head>. Here is the script's source along with
a post on questionable linking.
May 09, 2008
Well, it seems it's more than just a panel, eh? Barton has all the details -- GNU/Linux Distro Smack Down! Only at CommunityOne. Should be a lot of fun.
Update: Here are the guys from the panel last week:
Karsten Wade, Fedora; Barton George, Sun (moderator); Glynn Foster, OpenSolaris; Jono Bacon, Ubuntu; Zonker Brockmeier, OpenSUSE.
Where I work is very much a pure Microsoft shop in terms of user environment - ie. desktops.
(The company makes its money using real Unix servers.)
I'm one of the very few who actually run
Solaris on a
Sun workstation. And, yes, sometimes I feel like I'm being pushed into a ghetto.
A world where you have to talk to Microsoft Exchange to read your mail, which means Outlook Web Access (which, frankly, is a shockingly poor attempt at being a mail client); where you're sent documents in Office 2007 format that you can't read; where half the company intranet simply doesn't function. Catering to those of living outside the walls simply isn't in Microsoft's world view, it would seem.
So, given the
list of features, I'll have to grab the
OpenOffice 3 beta and give it a try.
Seems like for some reason I didn't actually post this when I wrote it on Jan 10th 2008, so I'll post it now
I've just read over the PC World "10 Worst Keyboards of all time" article. Out of the 10 there was only 3 I hadn't actually used (the IBM PCjr, the original PET, and the Atari 400. All the others I've actually used at least once. I found it interesting on the selection of the Sinclair keyboards, the ZX Spectrum one suffered all the same problems as the Timex 1000 but the metal "cover" also came off over time. I replaced the key membrane on my speccy at least once and upgraded the heat sink to try and stop it failing again (didn't really help in the long run)).
My current vote for the worst keyboard of all time is actually the iPhone/iTouch - yes it doesn't have a real keyboard but an on screen touch one instead, and the later lacks Bluetooth for connection of a "real" keyboard. I don't own an iPhone/iTouch just played with friends so maybe it gets better over time.
My favourite keyboard - Sun Microsystems Type 7 (USB) US UNIX layout. The layout is critical despite being a Brit I hate the UK keyboard layout with a passion it sucks for writing C or shell code because " and # get moved! The UNIX layout is also important so that Control is on the same row as return - caps lock has no use since I stopped writting COBOL code.
I've been playing around today with
VirtualBox, after finding that the latest version claims to run on
Solaris 10.
Which is true, but you need to jump through a few hoops first.
First, you need to make sure that libGL.so can be found. I guess this varies a bit depending on whether you're using mesa or have the nividia drivers, but I ended up setting LD_LIBRARY_PATH_64 to /usr/X11/lib/amd64.
Then you need libXinerama; if you're running an older version of Solaris (my test machine was running S10U3 == 11/06) then applying patch 125726-02 will do the trick.
Then if you're running 64-bit you'll need a copy of libdlpi. I just snarfed a copy off one of my test
opensolaris boxes (actually
indiana preview 2 - I have seen comments that the one from the official
OpenSolaris release won't work as it's too new).
(Yes, I realize there might be a bit of a chicken and egg situation there!)
Then I tried booting the
indiana preview 1. Which worked just great. No network, but I expected that. The only glitch I had was the key to escape from the guest - which is set to Right Ctrl by default, which I discovered I don't have. I reset that to some other key that I do have and don't use for anything else.
Having learnt from that, I had a go at the
OpenSolaris 2008.05 release having found a CD that I had brought back from CommunityOne, and that worked fine (and picked up the network).
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