Greetings, fellow members. This week, we have a talk on OpenSolaris, and a nice cat.

OpenSolaris http://ox.compsoc.net/termcards/2009/hilary/OpenSolaris/ ===========

Speaker: Dr Clive King

Wednesday 28th January, 19:00 Jean Robinson Room, Keble College http://ox.compsoc.net/venues/Jean_Robinson_Room__44___Keble_College/

You can't listen to music on an Operating System ------------------------------------------------

An OS doesn't upload data to your MP3 player, iTunes does. An OS does not enable you bid for things you don't want or need on EBAY when you are drunk, a gaggle of software components from your web browser to the EBAY database do that. Operating systems just manage resources such as cpu, memory, network, disk, displays and your attention on behalf of applications which make requests for resources through the OS.

When things do go wrong, data gets corrupted, performance is poor or programs die, the OS as master of resource scheduling is often the best place to start debugging errant behavior of the wider system.

This talk assumes zero previous knowledge of Solaris, but hold on to your hats, some of it might get quite technical.

The speaker hopes you will leave this talk with an understanding of the what, why and how for some of the ground breaking technologies in Solaris such as DTrace, ZFS and Zones.

About the speaker -----------------

Dr. Clive King is a Senior Staff Engineer at Sun Microsystems. He has no idea how to write a PowerPoint presentation, but is content when doing live demo's of Solaris technology and setting it in a wider content. His core role is troubleshooting and fixing performance, data integrity and availability problems for Sun's largest and most demanding customers worldwide. He is also Sun's UK Operating Systems Ambassador for Education, a member of the B.C.S. Academic Panel and a B.C.S. Fellow.

As usual, we'll be waiting at the Porter's Lodge to show people to the room. Make note that this talk is at the earlier time of 7pm, and that we're also allowing anyone in, at the request of the speaker, so bring anyone you think will be interested!

And, finally:

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Andrew