Sun is now selling the Ultra 40 and Ultra 45 workstations.

The Ultra 40 has up to two single or dual-core Opteron 200-series processors, 16G of PC3200 registered ECC memory, four internal Serial ATA drives, and one optical drive. Prices start at $2,995.

The Ultra 45 has up to two 1.6Ghz UltraSPARC-IIIi CPUs (1M L2 cache each), 16G of DDR ECC memory, dual Gigabit Ethernet ports, four internal SAS or SATA drives, and one optical drive. Prices start at $3,695.

It appears that Sun has new 19″ and 20.1″ flat panel LCD monitor offerings to go along with the new systems.

O’Reilly’s “Distributing the Future” podcast features information about the recent governmental wiretapping controversy.

Wiretapping doesn’t require someone lurking in the bushes with a directional antenna and headphones, or a pair of aligator clips and a tape recorder, or someone sneaking into your room while you’re out to place a transmitter on your phone. In the U.S., if it’s the government doing the wiretapping, it’s technically simple.

At the O’Reilly Emerging Telephony Conference Jack Herrington, author of “Podcasting Hacks” interviewed Electronic Frontier Foundation Chairman of the Board Brad Templeton about the technical, social, and political aspects of wiretapping. At the end there’s a nice juicy hint about upcoming action from the EFF with regards to the recent NSA wiretapping case.

Sun reported results today for its fiscal second quarter, which ended December 25, 2005.

Revenues for the second quarter of fiscal 2006 were $3.337 billion, an increase of 17 percent as compared with $2.841 billion for the second quarter of fiscal 2005. The year over year revenue increase was driven by recent acquisitions. Total gross margin as a percent of revenues was 42.6 percent, an increase of 0.4 percentage points, as compared with the second quarter of fiscal 2005.

Net loss for the second quarter of fiscal 2006 on a GAAP basis was $223 million or a net loss of ($0.07) per share, as compared with net income of $4 million, or earnings per share of $0.00, for the second quarter of fiscal 2005.

Cash flow used in operations for the second quarter was $191 million and cash and marketable debt securities balance at the end of the quarter was $4.276 billion.

O’Reilly’s Safari Books Online has just announced a new service called Rough Cuts that gives you early access to content on cutting-edge technologies months before it’s published. Rough Cuts allows you to purchase work-in-progress manuscripts of selected titles. You’ll even have the chance to shape the final product by sending feedback to the author and editors. The beta version just debuted with four works-in-progress covering Ajax, Ruby, and Flickr. A FAQ is available as well.

Titles now available:
Ajax Hacks: Rough Cuts Version
Flickr Hacks: Rough Cuts Version
Ruby Cookbook: Rough Cuts Version
Ruby on Rails: Up and Running: Rough Cuts Version

Sun and Oracle have announced that Sun will be providing Oracle licenses with their high-end servers. After the first year, the customer will be responsible for support costs from Oracle.

EWeek included Solaris 10 and Java Studio Creator 2 on its list of Top Products of 2005.

Sun came out on the top in this poll about major IT vendors done back in December by The Register.