Today Was The Last Day of Sun Microsystems • Hacker News Board

Re: Today Was The Last Day of Sun Microsystems

#21

Post by jf » Thu, Jul 16, 2009, 11:48 PM UTC

malkia wrote: post #13

jf wrote: post #4

Sun is gone, but they left behind an amazing collection of Open Source Software: Java, OpenSolaris, OpenSPARC, VirtualBox. I'll miss Sun and the amazing people I knew there.

Well, wasn't VirtualBox developed outside, then bought? But you forgot Self (it was done by Sun right?), and other cool things :)

Yes, you're correct about VirtualBox. And I left out many things from the long of stuff that they open sourced ...

Re: Today Was The Last Day of Sun Microsystems

#22

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Jul 17, 2009, 12:08 AM UTC

old-gregg wrote: post #16

jf wrote: post #4

Sun is gone, but they left behind an amazing collection of Open Source Software: Java, OpenSolaris, OpenSPARC, VirtualBox. I'll miss Sun and the amazing people I knew there.

Java never felt "new" to me: rather unnecessarily bloated and slow and not offering enough high-level language features to justify the performance penalty over C. Managing memory in C never felt "hard" and when I needed something for quick hacking I could use VB and/or Delphi. Funny, but in many ways Visual Basic has been far superior RAD tool for enterprise SQL pushing. Yes, it was garbage-collected, ran in its own…

[deleted]

Re: Today Was The Last Day of Sun Microsystems

#23

Post by rjurney » Fri, Jul 17, 2009, 12:15 AM UTC

sengan wrote: post #18

jf wrote: post #4

Sun is gone, but they left behind an amazing collection of Open Source Software: Java, OpenSolaris, OpenSPARC, VirtualBox. I'll miss Sun and the amazing people I knew there.

You forgot Open Office which they bought and opened up and which has changed the competitive landscape in many ways. I'm struck by the number of non-geeks I know who use it daily. SPARC was a great architecture, and the Sun workstations of yesteryear were where a lot of cutting edge research was done... It'll be interesting to see how many more OpenSolaris features Darwin picks up (ZFS?). It has dtrace already.

Darwin already pickup up ZFS. You can mount zfs volumes in OS X 10.5. You can patch the kernel module of OS X desktop to write to them (but don't, its really slow).

Re: Today Was The Last Day of Sun Microsystems

#24

Post by ucdaz » Fri, Jul 17, 2009, 12:25 AM UTC

jf wrote: post #4

Sun is gone, but they left behind an amazing collection of Open Source Software: Java, OpenSolaris, OpenSPARC, VirtualBox. I'll miss Sun and the amazing people I knew there.

And don't forget to mention MySQL. I just hope they'll keep it all alive or my apps are screwed!

Re: Today Was The Last Day of Sun Microsystems

#25

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Jul 17, 2009, 12:49 AM UTC

[deleted]

Re: Today Was The Last Day of Sun Microsystems

#26

Post by ucdaz » Fri, Jul 17, 2009, 12:58 AM UTC

jingsong wrote: post #19

andeka wrote: post #11

Sun - The stanford university network.

Bill Joy was from Berkeley though.

It was two Stanford guys and one Berkeley dude. 2 Votes for Stanford Univ Networks 1 Vote for UC Berekeley Networks

Bill Joy: "$%^&! I want it to be called UCBN! It has a better ring to it! No?"

Re: Today Was The Last Day of Sun Microsystems

#27

Post by drawkbox » Fri, Jul 17, 2009, 2:25 AM UTC

ucdaz wrote: post #24

jf wrote: post #4

Sun is gone, but they left behind an amazing collection of Open Source Software: Java, OpenSolaris, OpenSPARC, VirtualBox. I'll miss Sun and the amazing people I knew there.

And don't forget to mention MySQL. I just hope they'll keep it all alive or my apps are screwed!

Yes but they didn't build it. They bought it. Maybe to sweeten the deal for a buyer. MySql might not have sold to Oracle directly?

Re: Today Was The Last Day of Sun Microsystems

#28

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Jul 17, 2009, 3:42 AM UTC

[deleted]

Re: Today Was The Last Day of Sun Microsystems

#29

Post by jussij » Fri, Jul 17, 2009, 3:43 AM UTC

old-gregg wrote: post #16

jf wrote: post #4

Sun is gone, but they left behind an amazing collection of Open Source Software: Java, OpenSolaris, OpenSPARC, VirtualBox. I'll miss Sun and the amazing people I knew there.

Java never felt "new" to me: rather unnecessarily bloated and slow and not offering enough high-level language features to justify the performance penalty over C. Managing memory in C never felt "hard" and when I needed something for quick hacking I could use VB and/or Delphi. Funny, but in many ways Visual Basic has been far superior RAD tool for enterprise SQL pushing. Yes, it was garbage-collected, ran in its own…

> while cool kids were coding C on Windows or playing with Linux. Yes, Microsoft was fun back then: it felt young, modern and innovative

Ah those where the days, I remember them fondly :)

Re: Today Was The Last Day of Sun Microsystems

#30

Post by cubedice » Fri, Jul 17, 2009, 4:25 AM UTC

old-gregg wrote: post #16

jf wrote: post #4

Sun is gone, but they left behind an amazing collection of Open Source Software: Java, OpenSolaris, OpenSPARC, VirtualBox. I'll miss Sun and the amazing people I knew there.

Java never felt "new" to me: rather unnecessarily bloated and slow and not offering enough high-level language features to justify the performance penalty over C. Managing memory in C never felt "hard" and when I needed something for quick hacking I could use VB and/or Delphi. Funny, but in many ways Visual Basic has been far superior RAD tool for enterprise SQL pushing. Yes, it was garbage-collected, ran in its own…

Mostly tangential, but I have to code in MFC at the day job (legacy code base). God, the winapi guys must have had a sadistic sense of humor when they designed it. My guess is they were so used to low level programming that they saw object orientation as a crutch for the infirm. I imagine them shoving random subroutines into objects while laughing maniacally to themselves: "let's see these pansies make sense of DDX controls! muahaaha!"