In News this week, Sun has reported a profit and shown server unit
growth in its fourth fiscal quarter [13459]. Sun has signed a
multi-million dollar deal with Telecom [13448] and offered some
clarification on its previously announced deal with Fujitsu [13446]. Sun
CEO Scott McNealy discusses the future of Sun and his own job [13447].
The Features section focuses on Sun executives, with John Loiacono
discussing the open source future of the Solaris Operating System
[13413]. Whitfield Diffie looks at the secure computing environment [13414]
and Vic Winkler examines the role of government and the DoD in
architectures [13416].
The Free and Open Source Software section checks out the MozillaTM
Foundation's one-year anniversary [13435] and its quick fix for a
Mozilla vulnerability [13417]. The developer section looks at
translation technology [13415].
The JavaTM technology section compares the Web Services performance
of the Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EETM) and .NET
framework [13445]. The Sys Admin section examines a white paper on "Identity
Anarchy" [13422].
Note: One article from last month, [13348], failed to specify that the
new J2SETM 5.0 release was the beta 2 edition.
The fiscal fourth quarter report for Sun Microsystems shows a revenue increase
over Q403 of 4.3 percent and a decrease in gross margin as a percent of
revenues of 4.3 percent, compared to the same period. Net income was also
up, increasing to $0.24 per share as opposed to a loss of $0.32 per share
for Q403. Sun generated $2.172 in cash from operating activities during the quarter, creating a balance of cash and marketable securities of $7.608 billion.
Who can guess what the future holds for Sun Microsystems? Industry and
stock market leaders' opinions vacillate from day-to-day with
speculations on the company's inevitable demise or surety of its
definite recovery. However, there is one person whose opinion has not
changed, and that is Sun CEO Scott McNealy.
The Sun and Fujitsu development deal announced last month is expected
to propel the release date of the much anticipated Rock processor-based
systems due to both companies' collaborative efforts. During a recent
press conference, Sun officials noted that the companies' combined
roadmaps benefit everyone involved.
Sun and Telecom have signed a multimillion dollar, five year contract
through which Sun will supply the Australian-based online and communications
company with backend servers and software solutions. Telecom technology
strategy and capability general manager Greg Patchell said one of the
keys to solidifying the deal was the forthcoming Solaris 10
Operating System (Solaris OS).
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 top articles for the three most recent issues were:
77.2: Gary Grimes to Retire as Sun's VP for Channel Partners
77.1: "Solaris OE Guide for New System Administrators"
76.5: Merging PDF Files in Linux Without Adobe Acrobat
Each month, we determine which articles have been most frequently referenced by logged-in subscribers to provide you with the most popular articles of the last volume. The top articles three article for Vol 76 were:
Java Programming Language Skills Running Hot [13218]
Sun Confirms Plans to Open Source Solaris Operating System [13199]
Clearing the Air on the Sun/Microsoft Agreement [13227]
Sun's Executive VP for Software John Loiacono shared his insights on the
imminent open-sourcing of the Solaris Operating System (Solaris OS)
with COMPUTERWORLD's Carol Sliwa.
Whitfield Diffie has been a contender in the field of secure computing
environments at least since 1975, when his book "Privacy on the Line:
The Politics of Wiretapping and Encryption" was published. That's a
long time to have been dealing with the legions of hackers who have
come and gone without losing a fundamental optimism about solving the
problems of computing security.
Vic Winkler, chairman of Sun Security Ambassadors, identified three
primary challenges that confront government and the military for the
online edition of Military Information Technology.
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.
"What's Happening in the Java Community Process?" -- Tuesday, August 17
at 11:00 a.m. PDT (6:00 p.m. GMT) and "Fast Track to Solaris 10
Adoption: Predictive Self Healing" -- Wednesday, August 18 at 10:00
a.m. PDT (1:00 p.m. EDT).
javaBin, the Java Users Group in Norway, is arranging the third annual
JavaZone, a conference on Java technology. The JavaZone is probably
best described as a miniature JavaOne Conference. JavaZone 2004 offers a
combination of technical talks and exhibitors in an intimate atmosphere
with 500-700 participants expected. JavaZone 2004 is scheduled for
September 15, in Oslo, Norway.
OpenOffice.org, now used by millions throughout the world, has a
conference of its own, OOoCon 2004, where you can meet the community of
developers, users, and businesses that are contributing to this
invaluable open source solution. The conference is set for September 22-24, 2004 at Humboldt University in Berlin, Germany.
New configurations are available for the Sun Fire V210 server and
Sun Fire V240 server that offer double the disk capacity and come
pre-installed with the Sun Java Enterprise System software and
Solaris Operating System (Solaris OS). The new configurations now
come with 73GB hard disk drives.
The Sun Fire B1600 Blade Platform recently received a "very good"
rating from InfoWorld's Alan Zeichick, who rated the blade platform's
performance, scalability, availability and serviceability above
average. The one fault he found was its manageability, which he
identified as a "command-line oriented management system that relies
primarily upon terminal and Telnet-based administration."
If interested in learning specifics about the Sun Fire V20z server
architecture, then this Sun technical white paper is worth reading. It
covers all aspects of the server beginning with a basic architectural
overview to its CPU specifications, I/O subsystem, service processor
and Motherboard layout.
According to TechWeb News, a recently discovered vulnerability in the Windows version of the
Mozilla browser and email client family has been quickly patched,
with the fix currently available on Mozilla's Web site. The
vulnerability was originally brought to light on the public security
mailing list Full Disclosure.
In the recent article, "The Ins and Outs of Open-Source Licensing,"
Matthew Broersma, writing for eWEEK, details how several companies,
such as Sun, are increasingly looking at open source software license
models and the benefits they offer. The open source business model,
recently proven successful by companies such as Mozilla and Red
Hat, is now becoming attractive to larger enterprises.
The Mozilla Foundation is celebrating its one year anniversary with
the release of Mozilla 1.8 Alpha 2. Over the past year the foundation
has achieved great reviews for its products and it continues to enjoy
strong consumer and enterprise interest in its products.
AbiWord is an open source word processor becoming more and more popular
as a result of its useful features designed for daily work, personal
needs or just basic typing. The application is compatible with Windows,
Linux, QNX, FreeBSD or the Solaris Operating System (Solaris OS),
and is capable of seamless integration with all of these operating
systems.
Given a volume of some 40 million words per year that need translating
in Sun's product localization efforts, the use of technology is vital
in that endeavor since not even employing one translator per language
would be sufficient to meet demand. Tim Foster, a member of the
Software Globalization team at Sun, explains how it all happens.
The Java Virtual Machine Tool Interface (JVMTI), a replacement for
the Java Virtual Machine Profiling Interface (JVMPI), provides a
programming interface that allows developers to create a debugging and
profiling tool (also called a software agent) that can monitor and
control Java programming language applications.
Ann Rice's Tech Tips article on "Multithreaded Programs and dbx"
demonstrates the advantages of multithreading and shows how to avoid,
or detect and remove, the bugs that sometimes creep into operations
using the dbx command-line debugger.
A Sun business white paper discusses a new solution called Federated
Identity Management that deals with a frequent problem plaguing many
enterprises -- no central data store of identity information and no
single authoritative source of user access privilege and profile
information that the paper labels as "Identity Anarchy."
Sun Labs staffers Daniel Nussbaum and Christopher Small teamed up with Harvard
University doctoral candidate Alexandra Fedorova in researching and
developing a toolkit that exploits chip multithreading (CMT)
capabilities. The three identify this product as the Sam CMT simulator
toolkit and have written a white paper describing its features and
benefits.
Sun is offering an instructor-led course on the N1 Grid Service
Provisioning System Software Administration for UNIX. Designed for
highly experienced system administrators, technical and system support
engineers, field service engineers, Sun Professional Services
engineers and others administering or supporting this product, the
curriculum is a combination of lectures and labs.
James Gosling is pinning his hopes for Sun's success in the tools
business on the adoption of what he described to Carol Sliwa of
COMPUTERWORLD as the much improved NetBeans 3.6 software and the
even better NetBeans 4.0, which he said will be released within the
year.
Developers can download Java 2 Platform, Standard Edition
(J2SE) 5 Beta 2 for a chance to try the features new to J2SE 5
(formerly known as J2SE Version 1.5 -- Tiger). The adventuresome
developer might also like to have a look at the Beta 3 release, which
is available in "snapshot" form. Sun advises only the most experienced
developers to download Beta 3, however.
The authors of this paper on Web Services performance compare the two
leading middleware platforms, Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition
(J2EE) and .NET, both of which offer similar features for creating and
using Web Services. The comparison treats a basic Web service method called
with different types and sizes of arguments in both platforms. Findings
show the J2EE platform outperforms .NET in all types of calls.
A provider of EPC/RFID middleware, epcSolutions, is releasing its
ThingsNet middleware, which is designed to be a fully integrated,
reliable and manageable RFID solution that meets or exceeds the latest
mandates of Wal-Mart, Tesco, Albertson's and DoD. The solution can be
downloaded for free at the company's Web site.
Virtuozzo 2.6 offers enterprises and hosting providers a wealth of new
features including server consolidation, utility computing and more.
The new solution, from SWsoft, offers more than 50 features designed to
address a wide range of enterprise scenarios. Virtuozzo is currently
available for Linux/UNIX, and will be available for Windows and the
Solaris Operating System (Solaris OS) in the fall.
A new line of Data Protection Units (DPUs) are available from the
developer of data protection products and services, Unitrends Software
Corp. The new solution is designed to offer small and medium-sized
businesses a wide range of fully integrated data protection. The DPUs
are offered in both desktop and rackmount configurations.
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