Sun Surges Into Research, Virtual Worlds 56
An anonymous reader writes "Sun Microsystems appears to be shifting its focus back to research, after several years of promoting its commodity servers and Java software. Earlier this week, it talked about its new Andy Bechtolsheim-designed video server in the New York Times. Yesterday, it invited reporters in to preview its plans to develop faster switches, new programming languages, and 3-D virtual workplaces. Robert Sproull, director of Sun Labs, made clear that Sun has big ambitions. 'General purpose computers have to be rethought,' he said. Among the projects close to leaving the labs is Project Crossbow, an evolution of the networking stack in Solaris; Project Sedna, a next generation switch for storage-area networks; and MPK20, a virtual workspace built on top of Sun's Darkstar gaming server."
Fortress : replacement for Fortran? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Fortress : replacement for Fortran? (Score:5, Funny)
Revolutionary New Interface! (Score:2)
The result is a server system capable of permitting hundreds of thousands of computer users to interact in a three-dimensional simulated on-screen world described as a "metaverse."
Rumor has it Sun's designed this amazing new USB interface for this system: thought-activated, bio-compatible, and self-sustaining, provided you don't mind floating in goo [dictionary-of-matrix.com]
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Re:Fortress : replacement for Fortran? (Score:5, Interesting)
I guess what it comes down to is that of all the failing of FORTRAN, the fact that its math is less pretty than LaTeX does not seem like an important one. I know Fortress has some other features, but the whole pretty math character thing seems to be the one that comes up most.
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Seriously, languag
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All that parallel loop stuff is potentially very interesting. I work mainly with a parallel MHD code. If we could get rid of all or most of the MPI statements from the code it would dramatically simplify the code. I spent most of Monday hunting down a stupid little MPI bug.
So, from my perspective, Fortress is main
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Although in my defense, the fact that when I read it, the closest thing there was to a compiler for it was an implementation of it that runs over the java virtual machine. And while that may be a good thing for language research, it isn't all that attractive from a numerical perfor
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Obvious, -1 (Score:4, Funny)
Open Source Video Card (Score:1)
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graphics people now work at nVidia.
Also, Darkstar is has nothing to do with graphics. It's a transaction server.
Someone like WoW or Second Life could replace all their backend servers with Darkstar
to make one contiguous 'world' instead of shards and separate servers for players.
Jonathan Schwartz (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Jonathan Schwartz (Score:4, Insightful)
"You don't want to switch to a
"Oh yeah? Well James Gosling is a poo-poo head!"
No one wins in these dealings except Microsoft. Let me jump on the "good to see Sun doing something constructive" bandwagon.
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I agree (Score:3, Insightful)
Ah, you sun fan boys (Score:2)
Just because McNealy lies like Nixon or Bush, does not mean that he gets to have a free ride. The simple fact is that he funded SCO alongside MS.
Oh yeah, research this (Score:2, Funny)
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Re:Sun's New Direction (Score:5, Informative)
In the enterprise. Java in the browser is widely acknowledged to be not-so-spectacular at best, even given modern advances. But most business-level development these is being done in either Java (or occasionally C#, for the suckers) and Java still dominates in a truly amazing way. In its way, it's the modern COBOL- somewhat verbose and clunky, but EVERYWHERE, and Going Nowhere. Fortunately for the world, it's brain-damage factor is a puny fraction of what COBOL's was.
In summary, if you'd like to say that Java on the desktop was ultimately a pretty lukewarm experience, that's certainly one thing. But you said it yourself - servers and OSs and server-side stuff.
Oh my god... (Score:1)
Lawsuits... (Score:3, Interesting)
[ot] Re:Lawsuits... (Score:1)
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Sun is dying. (Score:1)
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What's In a Name? (Score:2)
Sun Grid Utility + Darkstar = profit? (Score:1)
Darkstar would be one way of showcasing how their Grid could be used to benefit developers
of server intensive application.
3-D Virtual Workplaces? (Score:2, Funny)
Why is it called MPK20? (Score:3, Informative)
with IBM's cell and multi core processors (Score:1)