Gadgetopia

Sun Sets Sights on IBM's AIX Customers: In the SCO/IBM drama, Sun is playing the role that SAP is playing in the Oracle/PeopleSoft production: Moving to profit from SCO Group's revocation of IBM's Unix license (which IBM denies SCO has the right to do), Sun Microsystems charged in to play ...

Sun Won't Join IBM-Led Java Tools Alliance: This is really too bad because Microsoft's history in the programming IDE market is so strong that all the other vendors really need to stick together. Sun Microsystems and IBM continue to battle over Java as Sun Wednesday officially declined to join the ...

Sun Embraces Open-Source Database: The only experience that I have with Berkeley DB is thought Movable Type, which uses it as its default data storage system. Odd that suddenly they would get a big contract with Sun. Good for them. "Sleepycat Software Inc. will announce on Wednesday that Sun, of ...

Moody's cuts Sun Micro's senior debt ratings: I knew Sun was in trouble, but this puts them one step above junk bonds. "Moody's Investors Service on Tuesday cut its ratings on Sun Microsystems's senior unsecured debt, citing the Santa Clara, California-based company's continued performance decline and challenges toward achieving profitability. ...

Wired 11.07: McNealy's Last Stand: A fascinating, albeit long, article about the fate of Sun. "...the story reduces down to this: McNealy spent the second half of the 1990s monomaniacally obsessed with everything having to do with Microsoft, from its monopoly-like practices to the general unreliability of the Windows operating ...

weblogs.java.net: Following on the heels of Microsoft's GotDotNet.com blogs, Sun has created their own developer blogging community.

Microsoft, Sun agree to extend support for Microsoft's Java: Never saw this coming. "Microsoft will offer technical support for its version of Sun's Java programming language through September 2004, nine months longer than previously planned, under an agreement being announced Tuesday. The agreement is between Microsoft and longtime rival Sun ...

Sun to unveil MS-displacing software for business desktops: This is good to hear. "In a move aimed squarely at Microsoft, Sun Microsystems on Tuesday will unveil a suite of software for businesses that want to dump or just can't afford the Windows operating system on their companies' desktop ...

Sun exec sees opportunity in Chinese software shift: Sun is awfully happy with the recent developments in the Asian OS market. "John Gage, Sun's chief researcher, told Reuters a Chinese plan to develop operating systems using either local or alternative software like Linux spelt the end of dominance by rival ...

Sun Censored but Not Silents: These are hysterical. There's more at the link. Top business publications refused to run our bold ad concepts because the headlines were thought too controversial. At Sun, we're the radical engineers that build "ass-whoopin" technology - we're not Miss Manners and we never want to ...

Sun Microsystems CEO steps down after 22 years at the helm: Much like when Bill Gates gave up his title cand become "Chief Software Architect," Scott McNealy is moving to a different position at Sun. Scott McNealy, a co-founder of Sun Microsystems (SUNW) said Monday that he will step down ...

Sun's Mad Hatter takes crack at desktop Windows: They demoed this a LinuxWorld today, so it's back in the news. "Mad Hatter, which Sun first disclosed a year ago, is Sun's effort to dislodge Microsoft and its Windows/Office combination from the desktop PC. Like StarOffice, Mad Hatter will include a ...

Bill Joy to leave Sun: It's tough to overstate the importance of this. The man invented vi, for goodness sakes. After more than 20 years at Sun Microsystems Inc., cofounder and Chief Scientist Bill Joy is leaving the company, Sun announced Tuesday. Joy, once called the "Edison of the Internet" ...

Old giants fight to reclaim glory days: A great article about once-great companies like Motorola, RCA, Kodak, and Sun (!), that have to change or die. "All those companies once were mighty names in tech. All have to fundamentally change to stay relevant. Whether they do matters to millions of ...

As part of their coverage of Microsoft's recent broad settlement with Sun, CNET has compiled a short list of Scott McNealy's snarky comments regarding Microsoft. A lot of it is a bit over the top, but it's all pretty funny. My favorite: "the Corvair of Web servers, unsafe at any ...

McNealy: Java won't be open source: Despite urging from competitors and open source advocates, Sun Microsystems Inc. of Santa Clara, Calif., will not open the source to its Java programming language anytime soon, said Sun CEO Scott McNealy during a news conference at the 2004 FOSE conference.

PHP: date_sunrise - Manual: I don't know how closely you all are looking at the PHP 5 function libraries, but I stumbled on this function today (and its sibling). date_sunset() returns the sunset time for a given day (specified as a timestamp) and location. The latitude, longitude and zenith parameters ...

Sun Microsystems is releasing an early version of their Project Looking Glass desktop environment into the GPL. What if windows were translucent so that you could see the multiple windows you're working on at the same time? What if you could tack a note to yourself right on the Web ...

Motorists steamed over hot fuel losses sue oil titans, retailers: When it gets hotter, gas expands. Ergo, you get less gas at the pump for the same amount of money. Predictably, someone is suing. The price of gas has been based since the 1920s on a formula that measures a ...

MySQL reserves features for paying customers; open-source community up in arms: This is interesting, and perhaps not surprising given the acquisition. Open-source darling MySQL is facing a new uprising within its customer base over plans disclosed this week to reserve some key upcoming features, and their source code, for paying ...

Sun Policy on Public Discourse: Tim Bray, XML inventor and all around tech God, has published blogging advice for his colleague's at Sun. I wouldn't call this a policy, it's just some good advice. In general, "sucks" is not only risky but unsubtle. Saying "Netbeans needs to have an easier ...

NASA prepares to catch a falling star sample: This is awesome. It's rare that the world of geeks and the world of action movie stars collides so enjoyably. To increase understanding of the sun's composition, NASA in 2001 launched the $264 million Genesis mission to collect samples from the solar ...

High-tech buildings use sunlight, sea water to save energy: Interesting article on how computers and technology are making more eco-friendly buildings. If this interests you, see this past post about The Robert Redford Building. At Dallas/Fort Worth Airport, the lights are controlled by sensors that measure sunlight. They dim immediately ...

How many of us when we were 12 used a magnifying glass to focus the sun's rays on something just to see it smolder? Grass, ants, paper, you name it. I suspect that most of you reading this did something similar in your youth. Well somebody has taken it a ...

List of User-Agents (Spiders, Robots, Browser): Comprehensive list of the User-Agent signatures of about every browser, spider, and bot under the sun. It's interesting to browse, though that probably makes me a dork.

In case you're sick of my inane blathering about every topic under the sun in your RSS reader, I've created individual feeds for each category, so you can just subscribe to what you want, like spam, content management, etc. The feed icon is the top of each category page.

FTPplanet.com - A community site for users of FTP: Not only does WS_FTP have every feature under the sun, they have a blog as well. A blog "for users of FTP." This is something I would suspect of being a corporate mouthpiece, but they posted a link to my WS_FTP ...

Apache group aims at J2EE applications: No more handing off stuff to JBoss or Tomcat Apache's doing Java natively. "Greg Stein, chairman of the Apache Software Foundation, announced in an open letter this week the formation of the Geronimo project, which will work to create Apache-compatible software for delivering ...

Internet language runs real, virtual Mars rover: Spirit runs on Java. I wonder if Beagle was running .Net? Java, the software developed by Sun Microsystems in the mid-1990s as a universal platform for Internet applications, gave NASA a low-cost and easy-to-use option for running Spirit, the robotic rover that ...

Iran's blogging boom defies media control: There's an opportunity here for me to spew some long-winded treatise about how blogging is changing the world...but I'll just label this one as "pretty cool" and call it good. Take one exasperated Iranian woman. Add a computer. Hook it up to the Internet. ...

Product News > Open-Source Scripting Language Becoming Dominant > November 6, 2003">Open-Source Scripting Language Becoming Dominant: I guess I dispute that PHP is "little-known," but this is still good news. "PHP, a little-known open-source scripting language, is becoming dominant on Web sites, according to Netcraft.com, the U.K. surveyor of ...

Java Developer's Journal - Is J2EE Too Big for Its Own Good? "I question whether Sun's current monolithic approach to the Enterprise Edition is either appropriate or effective: (1) Big projects tend to move at the speed of the slowest task. (2) Coping with problems caused by unstable and changing ...

Counter-Googling | An emerging consumer trend and related new business ideas: Instead of customers checking you out before doing business with you, apparently you should check out customers before doing business with them so you can provide them with better service. "A real-life Counter-Googling example? The Bel Air Hotel in ...

Click and the lights went out: No Impact Man shut down his electricity last night. He s going a year without it. Good luck to him. It s Sunday evening. I m rushing to write this post. The inverter that converts the DC power from my new solar panel is humming beside me, ...

David Heinemeier Hansson has published the first release of Rails, his MVC implementation for Ruby. Rails is the system David developed to power BaseCamp, the 37 Signals project management app. David had previously released Active Record, his O-R mapping layer for Rails, which is the slickest method of database access ...

Project Rave: One reason Visual Basic has flourished like it has is because it's always been backed up by a first-rate IDE that has made programming so easy. Sun is hoping to do the same thing for Java with its new "Project Rave" line of tools. The idea is to ...

Oracle and Zend announce general availability of Zend Core for Oracle: So, let's see, first Oracle buys a company responsible for a critical piece of MySQL, the database most commonly used with PHP. Now, Oracle and Zend -- the company behind PHP -- release a PHP platform tuned specifically for ...

Will Life Be Worth Living In 2,000AD?: Predictions of how life in the year 2000 will (would?) be, from a 1961 magazine article. It looks as if everything will be so easy that people will probably die from sheer boredom. You will be whisked around in monorail vehicles at 200 ...

Thinking Different, Saving Money: Apple finally beat someone on price. Of course, you need to buy 1,100 dual processor G5 with a healthy education discount, but the more you buy, the more you save. "Lockhart estimates the hardware cost $5.2 million, a reasonable price, he said, for a supercomputer that ...

Clarkson stung after bank prank: Jeremy Clarkson, host of the awesome Top Gear, thought people were too uptight about privacy breaches. So Clarkson published details of his Barclays account in the Sun newspaper, including his account number and sort code. He even told people how to find out his address. ...

The Eolas Patent: Don't Be a Victim: A well-written article on what the Eolas patent dispute means to you as a Web developer. "The ruling is likely to affect you either as a Web developer, or as a Web consumer. First, despite the fact that Eolas' lawsuit targeted only ...

Musical breast implants: Pam Anderson better have a lot of friggin' music. Computer chips that store music could soon be built into a woman's breast implants. One boob could hold an MP3 player and the other the person's whole music collection. BT futurology, who have developed the idea, say it ...

IBM Research | Deep Blue | Overview: IBM has preserved a Web site devoted to the 1997 match between Garry Kasparov and Deep Blue. In May 1997, IBM's Deep Blue Supercomputer played a fascinating match with the reigning World Chess Champion, Garry Kasparov. The event was captured live only on ...

Microsoft Blog Policy Coming Down the Pike?: A few weeks ago, we wondered when this would happen. It will be interesting to see how this plays out, given that the GotDotNet blogs are hugely popular and Sun has launched its own blog site. Some Microsoft employee blogs are hosted on ...

The Cassini Space Probe has photographed a frightening visitor lurking in orbit of Saturn. NASA is trying to play it off as the moon Mimas. Soon after orbital insertion, Cassini returned its best look yet at the heavily cratered moon Mimas (398 kilometers, 247 miles across). The enormous crater at ...

One of the links from the Oceania site that Deane talked about earlier is the Lifeboat Foundation. The Lifeboat Foundation is a nonprofit, nongovernmental organization, dedicated to providing solutions that will safeguard humanity from the growing threat of terrorism and technological cataclysm. Seems odd that they'd think to use something ...

According to an article on ThinkSecret, Apple Computer has assembled an Enterprise Sales Group that will focus on selling the Xserve and Xserve RAID to big-time IT management groups. The Xserve and matching RAID box have been catching on in IT circles, what with the combination of slick hardware and ...

Unswitch?: Tim Bray is getting upset with Apple's new commitment to secrecy and litigation. He's talking about "unswitching." My big gripe with Apple, of course, is their cult of hermetic secrecy. We at Sun and our esteemed competitors up in Redmond are engaged in a grand experiment: what happens when ...

Jeff Maurone, an intern at Microsoft, shares his experience having dinner at Bill Gates' home. Further and further you descend, past what seems to be an annex library, as it was certainly not the primary librarian that houses the Leicester Codex (Bill's original DaVinci notebook, for which he paid approx ...

Sun is doing some research to see if they can effectively create computer chips that don't connect to the board via wires. Instead, they are planning on creating chips that pass data wirelessly via induction. "It is not that on chip wires are evil. It is just that they are ...

From Christian Science Monitor: Deciding what kind of software Massachusetts wants to load on some 50,000 state computers may sound like something of interest only to uber-geeks. But that decision could spark a revolution in how software is developed and sold. The Commonwealth wants to adopt an "open document" standard ...

So it's 2000, and you're happily writing your web apps in ColdFusion. Then Allaire is bought out by Macromedia, the Sun sales rep drops by and takes your IT director to lunch, and now things are migrating to Java, your IT director has a snazzy leather jacket, and you're stuck ...

Meta Search Engines are Back: A "meta search engine" is an interface which submits your search to multiple other search engines. They were big in the late 90s, but with the emerging dominance of Google, they faded. Well, apparently, they're back in full force, and here's why. First, the meta ...

IBM is planning to announce that they'll be donating the Java-based Cloudscape database to the Apache foundation, to be released as open source. Most business applications require some database functions like storing and looking up price or customer information, whether in a Web page or a laptop program. Cloudscape is ...

Apple introduces dual-boot software Seems Apple wasn't too worried about folks hacking their new Intel Macs to boot windows. They've been working on a solution themselves and it appears to be much more polished than anything a guy who never sees the sun could ever hope to create. Apple today ...

Motorola Headset Dons Shades: Oakley and Motorola have teamed up to offer a cell phone handset embedded in a snazzy pair of sunglasses. Note that this is just a earpiece bit -- you still have to have the phone. But is this at all innovative? Or just profitable? That's right, ...

Cars are the most expensive iPod accessories: On the one hand, I was going to complain that all of this vehicle integration is for the iPod only, which means that users of other players are getting unfairly left out...but I suppose Apple users have been complaining about that same thing ...

Gentoo Linux has announced the release of their first-quarter build, with some cutting-edge enhancements. Gentoo Linux is proud to announce the release of Gentoo Linux 2004.0 for the x86, AMD64, PowerPC, Sun SPARC, and SGI MIPS architectures. Additionally, the Gentoo Hardened team is announcing the inaugural release of a security-enhanced ...

This morning, Joe and I were perusing through the Random Facts about Vin Diesel (don't click it if you can't afford to lose 15 minutes of your life). We saw a fact that went something like this: When the grocery store runs out of Vin Diesel's favorite ice cream, the ...

Lighting the key to energy saving: It's amazing that a massive change like this is so close to our reach, yet the human race will probably do nothing about it. A global switch to efficient lighting systems would trim the world's electricity bill by nearly one-tenth. [...] The carbon dioxide ...

I witnessed something this afternoon that made me a little angry, and I need some help in knowing what to do about it. I stopped to fill up my tank on my way back to work after lunch ($3.85 this afternoon, up 5 cents from yesterday, and an average of ...

SKY CAPTAIN AND THE WORLD OF TOMORROW / **** (PG): Some interesting information in Ebert's gushing review of this movie (it hits theaters today). Apparently there were no physical sets. Much will be written about the technique, about how the first-time director, Kerry Conran, labored for years to bring forth ...

I'm on one of my "shiny object" tangents lately. The latest thing is non-Microsoft software. I don't know why, but I suddenly feel the need to be all counter-culture-ish and find alternatives to the standbys. I've been browsing with Mozilla all week, and I don't think I'll go back to ...

Java is the SUV of programming tools: You may not be able to get to this link because Harvard is getting hammered by people trying to read this. "After researching how to do bind variables in Java, which turns out to be much harder and more error-prone than in 20-year-old ...

Whenever a new CPU comes out, it's often marketed by it's clock speed. "2GHz Pentium" means that the timing source in the chip operates at two gigahertz, which means, basically, that the chip completes a single CPU cycle in a whatever teeny-tinyth* of a second it takes for a 2Ghz ...

I bought "The Cluetrain Manifesto" to fill a four hour wait at the Orlando airport.  When I settled down to read it, I noticed the subtitle on the cover: "The end of business as usual."  I felt a sense of impending doom that phrase is as hackeneyed and worthless ...

A post over on Signal Vs. Noise got me thinking about weather forecasting. At least here in the Midwest (where weather occasionally kills you), the weather forecast is usually a very long affair consisting of discussions on front movements, dew points, barometric pressures, etc. Over time, we've all become accustomed ...