This week we shed more light on interoperability and the recent
Sun/Microsoft agreement [13277]. The Sun RayTM Users Group aims to unite
resources in order to facilitate technological collaboration [13303].
Sun Labs' Dr. Radia Perlman has been recognized as an Inventor of the
Year [13296].
The Features section offers interviews with John Fowler [13305], John
Gage [13252] and Piper Cole [13294].
In the JavaTM Technology section, mobile data service growth is
getting a helping hand from Java technology [13270]. Beginning and
intermediate developers will benefit from the new book, "Covert Java:
Techniques for Decompiling, Patching, and Reverse Engineering"
[13288].
The Free and Open Source Software section previews MozillaTM 1.8
Alpha 1 and Thunderbird 0.7 [13299], and announces new releases of
Mozilla 1.7 [13298] and OpenOffice.org version 1.1.2 [13318].
Our industry section this week is Government, with articles on the US
Army's expansion of its recruitment document management system [13229]
and Sun's new division: Global Government Office [13312].
While one of the results of the Sun/Microsoft agreement will surely be
a growing variety of interoperable solutions, customers needn't wait
for those fruits to ripen if interoperability figures prominently in
their IT planning. Sun is already in the business and has available an
impressive list of market-ready interoperable solutions.
The Sun Ray Users Group (SRUG) is an environment for collaborative
and best practices assistance with Sun Ray technology. Created by Sun in
response to customer demand, this collaborative Web site is hosted by
the Santa Clara County Office of Education at www.sun-rays.org.
Dr. Radia Perlman, distinguished engineer with Sun Laboratories, was
named Inventor of the Year by SVIPLA for her contributions to the
technical arts. Selected by a vote from her peers, Perlman was
acknowledged for her work on network security and routing technologies
that has had a profound impact on the Internet.
Each week, we determine which articles have been most frequently referenced by logged in subscribers to provide you with the most popular articles of the current and last volumes. The Web version of this article has the top 10 articles. The top article last week was "Clearing the Air on the Sun/Microsoft Agreement" [13227]. The top article for this volume is still "Sun Confirms Plans to Open Source Solaris Operating System" [13199].
Sun has a new x86 server division and a new executive VP to lead the
group, John Fowler, who recently shared his view of the division's
prospects with Timothy Prickett Morgan of Computer Business Review
Online.
John Gage is the chief researcher and vice president of the Science
Office for Sun. He recently spoke out on several different topics
including N1 and how Sun plans to continue to evolve the models it
uses to design systems. Gage also outlines how Sun benefits from taking
a pro-change view of its work in the industry.
Sun's Web site recently posted an interview with its VP of Global
Public Policy, Piper Cole. She discusses the issues involved with stock
option expensing, focusing on questions about the Financial Accounting
Standards Board (FASB) and why the requirement to expense stock options
is so significant.
For nearly two decades, First State Bank of Waynesboro, Mississippi,
had run its core banking applications on an IBM mainframe that ran the
VSE operating system. When it became clear that the legacy system had
reached capacity, First State Bank opted for a Sun solution.
The Sun Java System Portal Server now comes with Fatwire Software's
latest portal content management solution called Spark 6 pCM. This new
release uses the Sun Java Identity Server user and group management
for single sign-on authentication and authorization, plus it supports the
latest standards including JSR 168.
The Sun Java Desktop System Release 2 is garnering approval from the
enterprise desktop Linux community. Both CRN and eWeek have reviewed
Sun's latest corporate desktop system and recommend it for its
management enhancements and installation ease.
Sun Java System Portal Server Mobile Access 6 2004Q2 (formerly
Sun ONE Portal Server Mobile Access) not only works for games and
specialty programs, but also increases enterprise productivity and
in-house development. It recognizes and supports hundreds of devices,
multiple mark-up languages, protocols and standards.
Understanding N1 architecture and the concept of strategic flexibility
is covered in chapter seven of the upcoming Sun BluePrints book "Building N1 Grid Solutions: Preparing, Architecting, and Implementing
Service-Centric Data Centers," by authors Jason Carolan, Scott
Radeztsky, Paul Strong and Ed Turner.
The SaverBeans Screensaver software development kit (SDK) allows
developers to write a set of Java classes, along with an XML
description of the screensaver settings, and produce a screensaver with
native behavior running on either the Windows, Solaris Operating
System (Solaris OS) or Linux platforms.
Download Sun's newest and most popular softwares currently listed at the download center. These include the Sun StorEdge 6920 System Host Installation Software for Solaris 1.0 Operating System (Solaris OS), Sun Fire V60x and Sun Fire V65x Hot-Swap Controller (HSC) Update, Sun Java Studio Standard 5 update 1 and Java Communication API 3.0 Early Access.
This article is a calendar of upcoming events, with links to the articles about them. Click on the article numbers in the calendar to get more details about the event and how to register.
This companion event to the 2004 JavaOne Conference will preview
the latest NetBeans release and look inside NetBeans technology.
Speakers include James Gosling, the father of the Java language and
CTO for Sun's Developer Platforms Group, and Steve Wilson, Sun
Engineering Director responsible for NetBeans development. Registration for NetBeans Software Day is free.
This annual educational event hosts an end-user-driven agenda bringing
together end users, vendors and Burton Group analysts and consultants in a
dynamic forum presenting in-depth information about IT infrastructure.
Three conference tracks are available: Application Platform Strategies,
Directory and Security Strategies, and Network and Telecom Strategies.
Interested individuals can take the opportunity to Meet the Authors at
the upcoming Java technology event on June 30th in San Francisco.
Authors Simon Roberts, Bert Bates, Kathy Sierra, Sang Shin and Daniel
Brookshire will all be present for a book signing and reception.
Several breakout sessions will be offered by the authors, as well.
Sun is offering a new trade-in promotion that allows customers to trade
in any Sun workstation to receive a 20 percent allowance towards the
purchase of a Sun Blade 1500 or Sun Blade 2500 workstation.
This program offers the potential for savings that are more than double
the standard program trade-in allowance.
The Sun Blade 2500 workstation now has a standard configuration of
73 GB, 10,000 rpm, Ultra SCSI 320 hard disk drive at no additional
cost. Customers will now have faster access and twice the capacity of
the previous configuration, minimizing the need for network or attached
storage.
An Australian call center decided three years ago to wager on upgrading
its computer system to the country's first large-scale, mission-critical implementation of Sun Ray ultra-thin clients. Now, the company reports that its bet has paid off with slashed IT administration costs, extra revenue by offering its resources to other companies and more.
Download Mozilla 1.7 for Windows, Linux and Mac and try out its new
features and bug fixes in the browser, mail and Chatzilla. Size and
performance improvements increase startup by 7 percent, window opening
by 8 percent, page loading by 9 percent and decrease
binary size by 5 percent when compared to Mozilla 1.6.
The Symbiont Workstation Manager is a Linux-based thin client
management tool that allows network administrators to connect diskless
thin clients to a Linux server and to configure and control them while
offering the look and feel of a full version of a management
suite. SourceForge.net and TheSymbiont.com are hosting the free
download.
The Mozilla organization has released two technology previews for
users to try and report any bugs they encounter. Mozilla 1.8 Alpha 1
and Thunderbird 0.7 are pre-release products and are reliable enough to
performance tasks appropriately in most cases, however they should not
be relied upon for mission-critical tasks.
OpenOffice.org 1.1.2 is now available for download. This latest stable
release of the open source office suite will initially be available on
Windows (98/ME/NT/2000/XP), GNU/Linux (X86 and PowerPC) and Solaris
Operating System (Solaris OS) (SPARC Platform Edition) and (x86
Platform Edition). This version introduces the FontOOo Autopilot and other improvements.
Sun Preventive Services (SPS) is an innovative subscription-based
service from Sun that exposes, mitigates, measures and
manages leading risk indicators to improve system availability and
drive down operating and support costs. Early deployments of the SPS
portfolio have provided customers with dramatic improvements in risk
reduction and system availability.
Among the new features in Solaris 10 Operating System (Solaris OS)
is a self-healing architecture that enables Sun systems and services to
maximize availability in the face of software and hardware faults. This
first set of technologies includes Solaris OS components that implement
predictive self-healing for CPU, memory and I/O bus nexus components.
Marc J. Rochkind wrote one of the foundation texts in UNIX
programming in 1985, "Advanced UNIX Programming." Now in its second
edition, the book amounts to an entirely new work. Only 70 or so system
calls were included in the first edition; the second edition includes
around 300.
One way to manage system resources for a group of Sun Ray appliance
users is with the Solaris Resource Manager software. The author of
this Sun BluePrints article, Marcel Guerin, suggests approaches to
integrating and using the software to achieve a fair distribution of
system resources when users insert and remove smart cards from their
Sun Ray appliances.
Sun credits Java technology with driving growth in the mobile data
services market. "Java is everywhere," said Juan Dewar, marketing and
business strategy, consumer and mobile systems senior director of Sun
Microsystems during his presentation at Sun Network 2004.
Java Specification Request (JSR) 168 effectively puts an end to the
vendor lock-in many portlet developers suffered in implementing
enterprise portals developed by Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition
(J2EE) vendors to host internal and external applications.
Recognizing the possibility that both hackers and non-hackers will find
value in the techniques discussed in his book "Covert Java: Techniques
for Decompiling, Patching, and Reverse Engineering," Alex Kalinovsky
nevertheless made its contents public with this caution: "Any
book... can be used for good or ill. This book is for the good guys, and
if you are a bad guy please stop reading right now...."
The Army Accessions Command is implementing a document management
system for use by its recruiters that will facilitate the sharing of
information among interested Army systems and recruits themselves. The
Sun IT infrastructure was chosen for its scalability and because of the
potential it poses for moving in the direction of a paperless
operation.
Looking to advance secure network computing solutions within the
government sectors, Sun created the Global Government Office and
appointed Clark Masters as executive vice president, naming him
president of Sun Microsystems Federal, Inc. as well. The new division
will focus on governmental, individual and technological needs and
advancements.
Sun has released its Secure Network Access Platform (SNAP), based on
the Trusted Solaris Operating System, in the UK where it will offer
government clients secure access to highly sensitive data and important
applications. SNAP will also ensure safe collaboration between
government organizations, dramatically reducing the threat posed by
viruses, worms and hackers to the integrity of their networks.
Metatomix Inc. will provide its SMARTE for Operational Risk solution
to the financial services industry on both the Solaris Operating
System (Solaris OS) (x86 Platform Edition) and RedHat Linux. The product
delivers financial messaging and risk-management solutions.
Sun and The Aluminum Company of Egypt have deployed an integrated
solution incorporating software applications and Sun hardware. As part
of a major initiative to integrate operations at two of EgyptAlum's key
sites, this installation is listed among the largest enterprise
resource planning (ERP) projects in Egypt's manufacturing sector.
Sun has joined the Flarion Alliance Program in support of IP-friendly
mobile broadband. Fujitsu and Amdocs also recently joined this alliance
created by Flarion Technologies, the architect of the FLASH-OFDM
wireless broadband system. Flarion Alliance Program members will
cooperate to accomplish many IP-based wireless objectives.
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