James Gosling Grades Oracle's Handling of Sun's Tech 223
snydeq writes "With the four-year anniversary of Oracle's Sun Microsystems acquisition looming, InfoWorld reached out to Java founder James Gosling to rate how Oracle has done in shepherding Sun technology. Gosling gives Oracle eyebrow-raising grades, lauding Oracle's handling of Java, despite his past acrimony toward Oracle over Java (remember those T-shirts?), and giving Oracle a flat-out failing grade on what has become of Solaris OS."
Forgetting OpenOffice.org (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Forgetting OpenOffice.org (Score:5, Insightful)
You are taking about the product itself, not Oracle's handling of the project.
Yes, OpenOffice could open your documents fine. It did all that stuff before Oracle came along, alienated the developer base and ran the project into the ground.
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My understanding was the developers simply left because Oracle acquired the product, not because of anything they did.
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Then you would be wrong.
There was much written about their views at the time.
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It actually does (did?) load faster than MS office, if one tweaks their system to prevent the pre-emptive loading of MS office, or allows the OO.o pre-emptive loader to run.
Haven't seen QuickStarter in awhile though. Maybe they did away with that.
Quickstarter still exists (Score:4, Informative)
It is still there as an optional item in the installer, not selected by default (because that is the way it should be).
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Agreed. And thanks for the confirmation. :)
Re:Forgetting OpenOffice.org (Score:4, Informative)
Even though it's since transitioned to Apache, Oracle still deserves to be graded on their handling of OO.o.
Gosling didn't "forget" to grade OpenOffice.org; he was the (co)creator of Java. That's why this article is treating his assessment of Java as special. You wouldn't get that with OO.o.
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and Hudson automated build system (Score:3)
I hate Oracle with passion, although they seem to be doing OK job with Java.
--Coder
That James Gosling fella is of no consequence... (Score:5, Interesting)
While I applaud James for his contribution to Java, I am afraid he's of no consequence to its direction now.
It would have been better if he proposed some kind of direction Oracle should have taken with Java.
Re:That James Gosling fella is of no consequence.. (Score:4, Funny)
I think it's too early to tell, as James Gosling just lacks the experience most people are used to from those like him — there's still a lot left for him to learn from his father, industry veteran Jim Goose. Once his father retires, though, I think James will get to chance to really spread his wings, and we'll probably see some very good ideas of his take flight. For now, though, I think he's just a bit green around the beak.
To know Oracle... (Score:2, Funny)
To know Oracle is to hate Oracle.
An Oracle Field Engineer shared the secret meaning for the name, "oracle".
One
Rich
Arse
Called
Larry
Ellison
No mention of SPARC? (Score:5, Insightful)
SPARC has seen more advances in the 4 years under ORACLE then in the previous 15 years under Sun. I actually enjoy reading about their tech every now and then. But unless they open up Solaris again to attract the open source community the only thing that keeps it alive is backwards compatibility of legacy software.
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All of the work that you're seeing now on SPARC was started well before ORACLE picked up. What happens in the next 5 will be most telling of ORACLE's influence.
Hardware, unlike software, has a very long lead time (years).
From Larry's perspective, source code is the most valuable asset. Thus they want to keep as much of it behind closed doors as possible. That's the lesson he learned from developing the database business that is ORACLE's foundation. And there is only one opinion that counts in the company: L
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What advances would that be? The ones out of Fujitsu? The T chips are just now catching up with workloads that they can run reasonably. I have work loads that a 15 year old Sparc IIi will out perform a few year old T2. The V100 was a $1000 appliance box yet the base T2 was selling for more than $6,000. If the UltraSparc IIIi was made at 22 nm (unlike its original 130 nm) and it would scream for most web appliance roles. It would even be a nice cpu for the Lights Out Management system and it could even
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What advances would that be? The ones out of Fujitsu? The T chips are just now catching up with workloads that they can run reasonably. I have work loads that a 15 year old Sparc IIi will out perform a few year old T2. The V100 was a $1000 appliance box yet the base T2 was selling for more than $6,000. If the UltraSparc IIIi was made at 22 nm (unlike its original 130 nm) and it would scream for most web appliance roles. It would even be a nice cpu for the Lights Out Management system and it could even run Solaris unlike their current LOM which is running Linux.
Your T2 can do up to 64 parallel execution threads. Your IIi, not so much. That's the difference. More cores, not faster ones.
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No, the t2 can preserve the context of 64 threads but it can and will only run no more than 8 execution threads at a time. In most cases, the pipeline is so starved, it won't even manage 8. When it is running 8 at a time, it is doing each at a much slower rate that the older CPUs would be doing if they were made using the same process.
The II/IIi/IIIii can preserve something like 4 processes executions context at a time. Sometimes that is better. It is better on nearly all of my workloads.
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True, my mistake. At the end of the day it comes down to that it depends.
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Early Java was nothing other than a mess of pointers to pointers to pointers to pointers to more pointers all in a multi threaded system. The T1 addressed that problem but the concept of "All problems in computer science can be solved by another level of indirection*" is false and at some point compiler writers fix part of it. When they win, concepts like the T1 fail.
Sun tried great things with the T1 and it was like a great chess move that failed. The problem is they did a pawn sacrifice of their core b
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the T1 was quite a revolutionary chip - massively multi-core for the time, and the multi-threaded idea was pretty new too - I saw workloads that struggled on a multi-CPU multi-core intel box fly on a T2000 with an 8-core T1 CPU. Of course, you could flatten the T2000 by running two gzips at the same time.
How revolutionary. If I do that on a single-core Linux box, the scheduler still lets me have resources for other tasks, including CPU.
Re:No mention of SPARC? (Score:4, Interesting)
He did grade SPARC. He said that it was tough to tell, since SPARC was floundering well before Oracle took over.
SPARC is interesting, but for the OpenSPARC/sparc.org consortium. I don't see how Oracle gains squat by promoting SPARC: the only reason SPARC is alive is Fujitsu SPARC64. Otherwise, SPARC would have been EOLed, just like the SPARCstations.
I think SPARC has a limited market, since routers are now MIPS and maybe ARM, consoles were MIPS & Power and moving to AMD, servers are x64 and later maybe ARM64.
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When I hear embedded, I think either MIPS or Microcontrollers. Who makes SPARC any more? Ross is dead, Cypress is out, and what Fujitsu makes is purely for legacy market servers. Japanese companies value their long time relationships the way the Suns & HPs of yesteryear used to: hence, they still make them.
For application servers, all I can think of is x64s, simply b'cos both Wintel & Lintel apps run on that platform. Linux on all RISC platforms was just a proof-of-concept, rather than an act
An F- for the handling of Solaris (Score:3)
Solaris name dead, but OSS code lives on (Score:4, Informative)
While Solaris itself is no longer relevant outside of some enterprise niches, it has an actively-developed OSS fork named "illumos", developed by former-Sun hackers working at several different private companies. There are several distributions -- I use SmartOS in particular, and OmniTI's OmniOS is also excellent.
Re:Solaris name dead, but OSS code lives on (Score:4, Informative)
Illumos is itself an x64 only OS, which makes it worthless for most Solaris users who run it on SPARC, but there is a derivative of that, called Schillix, which is a SPARC specific open Solaris.
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is totally merited. Solaris was and still is brilliant, one of the best operating systems ever made. The scalability and reliability are legendary. I do not know of any OS that can run on a tiny PC AND on a big-mama cluster with exactly the same code.
How about the BSDs? NetBSD? FreeBSD? OpenBSD?
Re:An F- for the handling of Solaris (Score:5, Interesting)
I completely agree. Solaris "was" a great OS. With some very notable monster issues. Oracle has effectively killed Solaris. I simple can't use it anymore. The licensing costs of it and the software that runs on it are more than my total IT budget. Despite it's fantastic attributes I can no longer afford to put this in my Datacenter. With on demand virtualisation I can not afford to have to worry about things like. "Am I going to violate my license conditions if I spin up X more?"
I had an Oracle sale rep try to sell my that ridiculous Oracle stack in a box Exadata/logic. I was almost crying in laughter by the end of the sales presentation. 2/3 of the way through I stood up and wrote on the white board "Tell me how this isn't vendor lock in?". I called time at the 1 hour mark. I ended the meeting with the simple statement. Everything you have shown me is all about "vendor lock in" every word out of your mouths just re-enforced this concept. I had one question for you the entire meeting and you simple could not in any way respond to it.
So I priced everything I might need on Amazon. Using free and commercial AMI's with the odd vendor SW package tossed in. My first year spend was 1/25th of the Exadata discounted opening price. Nothing on the EC2 list had anything to do with Solaris. This is how you kill something. Make it financially ridiculous.
Issues with Solaris. That should have been addressed in the Oracle years.
- Package manager was brain dead. apt, yum are far better. ( Sorry Solaris 11 was too late. Too much legacy out there. )
- Patching made no sense. You have no idea what packages are patched with a patch. Patches were just binary disk vomit that spewed crud all over the system. Impossible in the real world to build any sort of verification around them. ( Sorry Solaris 11 was too late. Too much legacy out there. )
- Zones: Are a nightmare of security and privilege. I don't care what any says a zone is just a change root jail. Which means you will only every be as up-to-date as the host system. And it means you must be compatible and tested against the host system. Which is really no different than not having zones. Zones are a horrible horrible mess.
- No dependable only repository of packages that is robust or up to date. Far to much package hunting still required to locate software for solaris. Most packages are months to years behind there linux counterparts.
- Java performs better on x64 than Solaris/SPARC. This has boggled me for years. Only recent sparc architectures let java and other highly threaded applications stacks really perform well. Why do I even have to know about processor binding for processes?
Re:An F- for the handling of Solaris (Score:4, Insightful)
No dependable only repository of packages that is robust or up to date. Far to much package hunting still required to locate software for solaris. Most packages are months to years behind there linux counterparts.
This is something that has boggled my mind for nigh-on twenty years. Eighteen of them, I guess. Linux came with all the latest tools, but in order to get them for Solaris you'd have to download some old tools and use them to build some new tools. Ultimately I think it's really all about selling you the sunspro compilers, or whatever they're called now, two decades on. If it's too easy to just use gcc, nobody will ever buy sunspro, for which they want a massive stack of cash. It's the only compiler that generates very good SPARC code, and it costs a million billion dollars so many people didn't bother to buy it, and went GCC instead. And then they were throwing away performance. If you're going to run those tools, you might as well run them on x86-Linux. And in fact, that's been eroding Solaris steadily for all this time.
VirtualBox? (Score:5, Interesting)
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I'd agree. I'm a huge fan of Virtual Box and it's kept improving, all the time, no matter which company "owned" it, Innotek, Sun, Oracle. A really great job by everyone involved. I've hardly used VMWare Workstation ever, and as far as I can see, whatever lead that had over Virtual Box years ago, has vanished, in terms of features and compatibility. Virtual Box is certainly smaller than VMWare Workstation.
Re:VirtualBox? (Score:4, Informative)
Indeed. As VmWare networking is now completely unusable, unless you are fine with not being able to ssh-in etc. in the free version, I have moved to Virtual Box, and there are simply no such stupid issues.
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Definitely. It's great software and hopefully it'll stay that way.
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Where is the grade for VirtualBox. As opposed to the others on the list, I would give them an A+ for their stewardship of VirtualBox so far. They have released regular updates and bugfixes. I have run into zero problems running Linux, FreeBSD, and Windows in VMs.
Too bad it still doesn't work. Problems like not using VT even when it's clearly present and activated, or the D3D driver pretty much always crashing the VM completely. Stuff that works fine in vmware, which also has superior performance. I'd really like to like Virtualbox, but it doesn't work.
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From the Open Watcom wiki [openwatcom.org], "An Open Source license from Sybase allows free commercial and non-commercial use of Open Watcom." How much more free do you want it?
If you want a sense of history, compile it on OS/2. ;-)
solaris (Score:2)
Solaris is dead. Long live Solaris!
(Illumos/illumian/Nexenta/SmartOS, that is...)
Reach out (Score:2)
No. He didn't "reach out to Oracle", he "contacted Oracle" or "asked Oracle". He didn't "reach out" like some emo teenager to their ex girlfriend. It's not as if the phrase "reach out to" is shorter, it's three words where one word will do.
Will I be able to afford them in the future? (Score:2)
The problem with products bought by Oracle is that if you're small and they suddenly decide to ask for a lot of money for what was previously free, you're screwed.
Better to take preemptive action and switch away from them as soon as possible.
Oracle Killed Sun (Score:3)
Personal opinion of course.
We have SPARC gear along with Solaris 10. When we wanted to upgrade the hardware from the T2000's, the cost for Oracle licenses went through the roof. So we stuck with T2000's (still have them). It kept us from purchasing new Sun hardware. No new hardware, no new business for Sun.
After much investigation, we went with Dell hardware and Redhat and have been spinning up Redhat VM's right and left. For the mission critical stuff we're using HP gear and HP-UX. We've been spinning up Informix, MySQL, and PostGreSQL in place of Oracle as well.
[John]
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What? They were doing a pretty good job of pushing you to their AMD servers by making the price/performance ratio of the SPARC gear shit for years.
Gosling's Solaris alternatives? (Score:3)
I have had to convert all my Solaris systems to Linux. I weep'.
What has he done - gone w/ Debian? Since Red Hat seems to have stopped supporting the SPARC ages ago, and I'm assuming that Gosling's Solaris systems are SPARCstations or similar. Which makes me wonder - couldn't he have gone w/ OpenIndiana or Schillix? Especially since it seems to have been more recent? I'm assuming that the BSDs were not an option, since he probably wants an SVR4 based Unix.
Re: Gosling's Solaris alternatives? (Score:2)
Probably SusE, its the best choice.
http://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:SPARC
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What has he done - gone w/ Debian? Since Red Hat seems to have stopped supporting the SPARC ages ago, and I'm assuming that Gosling's Solaris systems are SPARCstations or similar. Which makes me wonder - couldn't he have gone w/ OpenIndiana or Schillix? Especially since it seems to have been more recent? I'm assuming that the BSDs were not an option, since he probably wants an SVR4 based Unix.
Or he could have regular x86 machines. Solaris is available on x86 as well, not just Sparc.
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for ignoring solaris in favor of linux
I admined solars for years and it was always a confusing blend of bsd and system v, it is hard to imagine how much cruft could have built up over the past three decades. It is not difficult to see how focusing on linux would seem appealing
But didn't Sun move away from BSDisms when they moved from BSD based SunOS to SVR4 based Solaris?
Ignoring their x86 servers in favor of selling pricey sparc gear (because the sales reps made bigger commissions) was part of the reason that sun passed away in the first place
But had they gone w/ x86 servers, they'd have been trampled by the likes of Dell, HP/Compaq/DEC, IBM - all of who were far more established in that space. Besides, had they gone w/ x86, they'd have been right up against Microsoft Windows Server as well. So it made sense for Sun to stick w/ SPARCS.
What they could have done - try proliferating the market w/ SPARC boxes at different configurations w/ different
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Solaris was made in a time when there were almost hundreds of flavors of UNIX. Everyone had their own different variant.
When SunOS 1.x to 4.x were out, those were extremely BSD. It wasn't until the renaming to Solaris and Solaris 2.x when Sun moved to a SVR4 base.
I do miss Sun though. SPARC hardware was extremely well built. Now, Oracle hardware just looks like any other machine sitting in a rack. Plus, it was nice having another CPU architecture than x86 that was commonly available.
Re:hard to fault Oracle (Score:5, Informative)
ZFS is on the right path but it still isn't quite where it needs to be. For example I can't tell it not to reallocate blocks on write so I can't force overwrites of sensitive data -- which is required in several industries that Sun used to be strong in. Someone in ZFS land needs to create an ioctl/fctl to fix that. The boot system also needs to be clear if it is trying to mount a ZFS or UFS disk since that is a bit tricky when the disk looks like both. They should also fix the fsck stub so it knows about ZFS and have a /usr/lib/zfs/fsck even if it is just a link to zfs status.
How is SMF better than init? They even bothered to break init so you can't pull SMF out the system if you don't want it. They now link init and smf to a number of libraries that have horrible security records. Do you want the main process in your system linking in libraries that need security updates on a monthly basis?
I know how SMF is worse, it is slower to start up, it is indeterminate in its start up state and order, it keeps its data in unauditable binary files an it takes far longer to shut down. It also isn't very good at what init was, which was making sure programs always ran. Solaris 11.1 turns off auditing, then syslog before killing off all user processes which means you have no idea what a rogue process did when it was told the system is shutting down. That appears to be a result of someone at Oracle deciding all the disks need to be mounted before starting syslog, which requires lots of extra crud to be running like NFS, RPC and whatever YP is called this decade and it appears that stuff is all trusted to shut down cleanly without the need of logging. At least with init, you could have two different syslog entries for the different run levels so you could make sure everything was logged and audited.
The number of bugs in Solaris 10 is far worse than Solaris 9. You can't build a light weight Solaris 10 or 11 system. Under 10, you could build a Solaris 9 container which would only run a bare number of processes but not any more since that feature was pulled out of 11. I have a number of Solaris 9 systems that are running less than a dozen packages but I'm one of the people who feel that if there isn't any unneeded software on a system, hackers can't use it hack the system.
Solaris 11 also has managed to break decades of sanity of using ifconfig to build network stacks. Now there are other tools that do part of the job and then can allow ificonfig to finish the job.
At least with Solaris 11.1 they created a tool to create smf xml files which means they are now no longer hand crafted which means a tool can be written to turn them back into rc.X scripts and they can be put back where they belong. Now if I could just remove svc.* without installing a fake to keep the contract open, I would be back up to the integrity level of a Solaris 9 system.
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I know that you have such requirements forced on you by others, but with respect that one is quite ridiculous and appears to be a rule from tape or other removable storage or disk disposal that has been badly misapplied to filesystems possibly by accident or teenager writing Quality Assurance rules. If someone gets to your drives at a block level via root on your system or by physical access to the s
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Have you read "man inittab" on any system V derived? action=respawn means it will ALWAYS run at the listed run levels. Sort of like how it runs the svc daemon does now. Whoever planned the new system just didn't get "init".
SMF only runs things as long as the contract system works.
As far as writing sensitive data to disks, do you know about the "real world?" Take a look at any online credit card system in the world. You will find people enter their card number as their email address, shipping address,
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I don't agree. I need local sockets and their performance is atrociously bad on Solaris 10 (no, I cannot use shared memory or the other alternatives). Linux performs something like 30 times better. Thread creation, memory management, etc. are also pretty bad. Unfortunately my customer cannot migrate to Linux at the moment, but they are thinking about it pretty intensely.
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The tech is stellar and arguably better than Linux in many respects, but I agree that with the failure of Sun and Oracle to find addressable market with SPARC and no real chance of displacing Linux on x64 that it really is a dead end now. It's too bad Oracle won't invest any time to port some of the better aspects of Solaris to Linux.
The issue he had was w/ Oracle's pricing of Solaris, and the pricing of their support to the OS, which has effectively killed it. Since Gosling himself had to convert to Linux due to that. He wasn't commenting on any technical aspects to what Solaris now is.
Solaris packaging options (Score:2)
The only thing that (IMO) sucks is the reliance on the sysv style package manager (which they've since replaced with IPS in Solaris 11; not too familiar with it since our company has largely abandoned Solaris thanks to Oracle, but I am of the opinion they should have went with rpm/yum or dpkg/apt).
A better option would have been FreeBSD's combination of Portsng and PBIs
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Solaris 11 has had a couple security changes that are interesting. For example, root is gone by default until you use rolemod. Instead, UID 0's functionality is a role, where you su for that access, similar to how one uses UAC in Windows to access administrator functionality that your account has.
ZFS is also one of the most useful features of the OS. No LVM to worry about, and far better bitrot catching than any other filesystem except for MS's Storage Spaces + ReFS.
I still like Solaris and SPARC, but fo
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Solaris is appealing in environments that you don't want to change or break. It's very stable.
Think of ZFS along the lines of RAID - it's not a backup or disaster recovery solution. It's performance and disaster prevention (like Shadow Copies in Windows).
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Solaris is relevant only in environments where one is stuck w/ a legacy SPARC based environment. Particularly since the OSs that support SPARC have dwindled - right now, it's just Debian on the Linux side, but all the BSDs - F/O/N on the BSD end.
Otherwise, if one wants ZFS, one could go w/ FreeBSD on either Intel (x64 OR Itanic) or POWER or MIPS.
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> If your server handles anything worth actual money, OpenBSD on Sparc64 is the way to go.
You're funny.
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You're absolutely correct. We are a Solaris shop transitioning out to Linux on VMs. Solaris is wonderfully stable and reliable and Sun supported it well. We liked it a lot. But it was already becoming unaffordable before Oracle took them over and now you simply can't afford it, no matter how pretty it is. We won't be buying any more SPARC hardware, ever.
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ZFS is a decent alternative to having a "smarter" SAN. One can buy a VNX and have real time deduplication, encryption, snapshots [1], async replication, etc.
Intead, one can buy a "dumb" array, something that might just take disks, run JBOD, or go with RAID5, or RAID6, and let the OS do the work from there with deduplication, encryption, etc. With ZFS, a directory of critical files can be protected with RAID1 while everything else on that filesystem is RAID5 or RAID6. An occasional scrub of the pool will
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Integer priorities mean I have absolute control.
The current system has no guarantee of any order of anything. This means if you get hacked at a non privileged user level, that process can hang around until it gets the "system is shutting down" signal, then do a quick fork/exec a few times and keep running until the system sends it a kill -9. Meanwhile it has a system without syslog running and without any auditing running. Take advantage of something running a broken xml library that runs setuid, and you
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> Why the fuck would they want to port Solaris' better aspects to their competitor, when Solaris is still a billion dollar business for Oracle?
Linux is even bigger business for Oracle. Even 10 years ago, companies were trying to figure out how to ditch the large boxes that you are trying to drool over so hard.
Oracle helped quite a bit in that regard.
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The POWER8 will be an interesting CPU architecture. It is the first since PowerPC that is available for license to anyone other than IBM. May not mean much, but I'd love to have a generic PC or server running Linux and not x86, although in reality, this is a pipe dream.
I wonder if SPARC is still an open CPU model, although the days of the Tatung or other clones are gone.
Solaris fees & SPARC (Score:2)
Are you counting 'Sun' as non-Oracle hardware? B'cos the only vendors who really sold Solaris were SPARC based vendors. HP, Dell or any x64 vendor offers only Linux. But the only people who were left high & dry by Oracle's licensing fees were SPARC owners: others could easily go to Linux or any of the BSDs.
Right now, isn't Solaris really a SPARC only OS, since Oracle supports x64 w/ OEL?
Re: Solaris fees & SPARC (Score:2)
I can't speak for oracle Solaris but all the opensolaris community forks that are based on illumos are pretty much exclusively amd64 now.
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Google probably would have made a better offer initially if they had reason to suspect how things were going to play out with oracle. Although I'm sure that everybody realized as soon as Oracle had made an offer for Sun that Google would have been a far better choice than Oracle for Sun's IP, I don't think anyone else expected just how colossally bad Oracle was going to be with it.
I have mixed feelings about the idea of MS being a better choice.
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MS only knows how to do one platform: Windows. When they make new languages, they're completely tied to their own platform, and useless on others. No one uses C# outside of Windows.
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What is funny is that MS had a Java Virtual Machine in the late 1990s that was infamous for its extensions that led to a Sun lawsuit which eventually led to it being discontinued.
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Just as an aside it was also very fast compared to the standard (Netscape) one. Arguably the Microsoft Java VM is what made Java viable for clients and led to the success of Java. I understand why Sun did what they did, in that suit but even in retrospect it is hard to evaluate if they made the right choice.
Java in the server, in the client, in the browser (Score:5, Insightful)
Are three very different things. Java in the server and in the client is alive and very very much healthy. Ugly and slow applets in the browser thankfully are almost dead — Because HTML5 delivered way better. But applets dying off does not in any way mean Java is any less healthy!
You forgot Minecraft! (Score:2)
Minecraft, as ugly as it is, is rather popular and written in Java and leveraged the JVM quite a bit. As long the children have a desire to try and find Hero Brine or build their own little words, Java will be around for a while.
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Considering they've ground-up rewrote Minecraft 3 times for iOS, Android, and XBox, I have a feeling that Minecraft may not always be in Java.
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Sometimes reliability is more important then having a pretty UI.
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And that's where Java really shines... ah no, wait...
Re:Java in the server, in the client, in the brows (Score:5, Funny)
It reliably dumps a longer stack trace than my scrollback can handle, anyway.
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You can have a native platform UI with Java if you use SWT instead of Swing or JavaFX. There is some benefit to be had from Java applications looking uniform across all operating systems, however.
Re:Java in the server, in the client, in the brows (Score:4, Interesting)
An outdated hack? That sounds mean... SWT was great at the time when it was needed. It is the reason why Eclipse never felt like a bloated, slow memory hog, in comparison to other Java applications of similar scope, like Netbeans. With SWT you had native, memory efficient UI components, whereas AWT/Swing duplicated everything into inefficient Java heap memory with slow Java2D rendering. It is true that now, with all the performance improvements Java and Swing have received, you barely notice a difference, so SWT isn't as essential as it used to be, but I still think it has the nicer API. Today I would probably use JavaFX
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All java apps that I've been used for years (IDE's, various clients) have a native look-and-feel, you can't tell it's not native.
Yes, I can.
Pretty much every Java app uses non-native File Open/Save dialog boxes, even when the rest of the app does look correct.
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I'd agree that Java UIs are not as good as native ones. But, in the niches where you typically see Java clients such as enterprise apps, what do you do? You can write web applications, which are often not better if they're anything more than a simple or one-off interaction. You could use Flash/Adobe AIR, which is also not better in UI terms. (My favourite gripe is that neither handle keyboard interaction well, but it's far from the only one). Or you could encourage your IT department to write a native appli
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I wish java apps would die, along with the people who wrote them, because they NEVER follow the native platform UI.
Client side Java would be alive and popular if they'd made the Windows Look-and-feel the default. Or just given up on Metal entirely.
Your other complaints are the fault of the developer, not the platform.
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All fine and good, until you go to your next platform.
Java is nice in although your UI get kinda antiquated, the program will run on Windows, Linux, OS X and some other. So if you have a major upgrade to your OS and it still supports Java, chances are your App will still run.
Unlike say going from Windows XP 32bit to Windows 7 64bit. Where you old app written back for Windows 98 will no longer run.
Re:Java in the server, in the client, in the brows (Score:4, Insightful)
So what can you program in that those execs will give you a green light for? I mean they really don't make good decisions off of their choices. They really just pick what they think they like.
PHP/Python/Ruby etc... It is those nasty open source freeware programs that may be out of style in a few year, we don't want to use those. (and they don't seem to have those mythical enterprise features that they want, but yet never tell us what they are)
C/C++ Too cumbersome to code in, doesn't allow for Rapid Development
C#/VB.NET Well they are fine for little apps, we want something a little more heavy duty. Sometimes you will get a better debate about needing a more scailable servers then what Microsoft can provide.
COBOL/FORTRAN/FoxPro etc... These old languages.
Unfortunately Java, even with its security problems is seen as the best enterprise choice, because Companies thinks for some ungodly stupid reason that Enterprise software is some how good.
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wha? .net? me?
I think you have me confused with someone else.....
I do serious software, where my skill with the tools mean I don't have such a productivity hit as others who need java or .net to keep up. I prefer C/C++ but I do turn my hand to quite a few different technologies as appropriate.
Server side programming in C/C++ can be done and many do, but I would question why? Since most server side work is to serve up various web pages, they tend to be constrained by IO not memory or cpu. Not only is there the initial development time, which seems not to be an issue for you, given your sill level, but there is also maintenance work, where the next person might not have your level of expertise in C/C++.
Just like Java can be used for client side programming, although it isn't optimum, it would se
Re:Oracle's JAVA (Score:5, Informative)
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If a VM uses a register base instead of a stack base, does that change the entire VM altogether, rather than simply make it more efficient?
It changes it altogether, op codes, and the lot. Its like a different CPU (e.g. Arm or Intel) programs have to be compiled differently to run on them and some things may be more efficient on one and other on the other.
Re: (Score:2)
They both use the Java language.
They both use Java language compiled to different byte codes, just as if you could write a C program and compile it for an arm machine or an intel machine.
Re:Oracle's JAVA (Score:4, Interesting)
as many people do - get a copy of an app inspector - I recommend Addons Detector - and use it to see what dev tools were used for build the apps on your phone. You'll be surprised to see just how many were built with the NDK. All the fast and responsive games are at least.
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Maybe the guts of it aren't. To a developer though, Dalvik is 95% Java.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Just to be clear, you're upset that Google's attempt to take over the web doesn't play well with competing technologies? I do hope you're not surprised by this. You're helping Google shit on the web.
I'm still sad... (Score:3)
That MySQL's space was/is being transferred to MariaDB, instead of just dying a relatively quick death.
Why bother with MySQL if you can just migrate over to PostgreSQL? Yes, of course, some of the weirdest bits won't work, and errors will now (for a change!) actually interrupt your work instead of silently losing information. But it seemed like a good way to kill that ugly beast!
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If MySQL did not exist, Postgresql might not be as good as it is.
Competition is good, it permits the market to try out new ideas.
Lots of us are using MySQL without problems because someone else has handled the details, and we don't care if it's stupid. If postgres were easier to use, maybe more people would use it.
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that piece of software/tech tends to perish
Except when it doesn't. VirtualBox hasn't perished.
A colleague of mine speculated that perhaps Oracle had forgotten about VirtualBox and thus it has been spared the obligatory ruining. Perhaps there is a gang of hard core emulator developers quietly slipping in and out of the building each day, carefully avoiding notice.
Netbeans does actually suck less than Eclipse. That's a low bar, to be sure, but it appears to be acquiring more users than it is repulsing, so there's another counterpoint.
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Perhaps there is a gang of hard core emulator developers quietly slipping in and out of the building each day, carefully avoiding notice.
Hey, that has worked before [youtube.com].
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VirtualBox has a commerical revenue stream.
Basically when Oracle took over they went around all the departments and asked them what their revenue stream was and so justify their existance within Oracle.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:oracle and aquisitions (Score:4, Informative)
This comment, and the other 3 that replied to it before me, show a huge lack of knowledge or care. Oracle isn't very transparent, but it only takes a small amount of effort to see that neither MySQL or VirtualBox are in danger of perishing. There are many people who left Oracle/Sun/MySQL for Percona and MariaDB/SkySQL, but most of those people left for their own reasons and *many* left before and Sun or Oracle influence was upon them.
I get to see it from the inside, and MySQL is growing and has more market share than either of the other competitors. The newest developments are really spectacular improvements. I get to see the walled garden from the inside, and it's anything but dying, it is in better shape as a product than it has ever been. Oracle is anything but stupid and doesn't have a track record of making stupid decisions with their products, which can't be said for some companies. Oracle is putting a lot of resources into MySQL to make it even better.
VirtualBox is a fairly decent team and they are not just working on VirtualBox, there is a reason it continues to be developed and the technology doesn't have a dead end to it.
I think that most of the comments I've read are uneducated and purely people spouting off uninformed opinions mixed with conjecture and hyperbole. The people I work with are the brightest group of people I've ever had the privilege of working with, there are some really notable folks that work on MySQL and you wouldn't know it unless you paid attention to the blogosphere.