Sun has launched The Big Mashup, “a unique online experience examining how the world of entertainment and news gathering is rapidly changing as the network blurs the line between audience and entertainer, viewer and newscaster, fan and producer.”

Initially, “The Big Mashup will feature a documentary with media and entertainment thought leaders, a community blog discussing the impact of changes brought on by the network, and Snapp Radio, an online music and photo application mashup developed by Sun Labs and featuring Last.fm and RadioParadise streams paired with Flickr images.”

On November 28, Sun announced the first round winners of its Open Performance Contest, part of the Try and Buy program that has seen over 3,000 systems evaluated at no cost by potential customers.

To participate, all customers have to do is try out a product from Sun’s Try and Buy list, and publicly publish performance result findings. By rewarding the free and uncensored publishing of performance results, Sun is taking the concept of transparency and openness to a new level. Each month all entries from the Open Performance Contest are judged by a panel of Sun engineers, product management and technical marketing and up to one winner per product is selected. The prize is getting to keep the system trialed – free.

Sun is extending the Open Performance contest through June 2007.

Highlights from a few of Sun’s Open Performance Contest winners:

“As it is, DigiTar will save between 50-75% of our MySQL operations costs by moving our mission-critical MySQL operations to a pair of [Sun Fire] T2000s. Overall, it will help us eliminate the need for 8 HP DL145 G2s, not to mention drastically simplify our HA environment and increase our possible capacity by a factor of 2.” DigiTar WhitePaper, Thomas Rampelberg.

“Overall, I’m pleased with the performance of the Sun Ultra 20 M2 … Another thing worth mentioning is that Solaris (and the Sun Studio compiler) outperformed Windows (and Visual C++) by almost 15%. Solaris outperformed Windows in almost every benchmark category, even outperforming Windows dramatically in some specific tests (such as some of the floating point benchmarks.) If you’re working with processor-intensive tasks, Solaris might be the operating system for you.” -John Poole, GeekPatrol.

“[Sun Fire] T2000 is an excellent machine to build big parallel computing clusters or big data centers. If we look at the SWaP results is clear that an array of [Sun Fire] T2000 machines will give us a powerful supercomputer and we will make big savings in power consumption and space.” -Mitch Theys, Assistant Professor, University of Illinois at Chicago.

“Our data center electricity bills cross my desk every month so I’m glad to see Sun pushing hard on this issue. The [Sun Fire] T2000 and T1000 that I tested both met or exceeded what Sun’s data sheet says they consume.” -Charles Lamb, Sleepycat Software.

The contest winners to date are: Nik Clayton with CRF Consulting LTD, Mitch Theys and the University of Illinois at Chicago, Charles Lamb from Sleepycat Software, Jon Emmons with Plymouth State University, Thomas Rampelberg of DigiTar, John Poole from GeekPatrol, Dirk Wetter of Dr. Wetter IT-Consulting, Stefan Rubner, and Colm MacCarthaigh with HEANet.

On November 28, Sun announced the first round winners of its Open Performance Contest, part of the Try and Buy program that has seen over 3,000 systems evaluated at no cost by potential customers.

To participate, all customers have to do is try out a product from Sun’s Try and Buy list, and publicly publish performance result findings. By rewarding the free and uncensored publishing of performance results, Sun is taking the concept of transparency and openness to a new level. Each month all entries from the Open Performance Contest are judged by a panel of Sun engineers, product management and technical marketing and up to one winner per product is selected. The prize is getting to keep the system trialed – free.

Sun is extending the Open Performance contest through June 2007.

Highlights from a few of Sun’s Open Performance Contest winners:

“As it is, DigiTar will save between 50-75% of our MySQL operations costs by moving our mission-critical MySQL operations to a pair of [Sun Fire] T2000s. Overall, it will help us eliminate the need for 8 HP DL145 G2s, not to mention drastically simplify our HA environment and increase our possible capacity by a factor of 2.” DigiTar WhitePaper, Thomas Rampelberg.

“Overall, I’m pleased with the performance of the Sun Ultra 20 M2 … Another thing worth mentioning is that Solaris (and the Sun Studio compiler) outperformed Windows (and Visual C++) by almost 15%. Solaris outperformed Windows in almost every benchmark category, even outperforming Windows dramatically in some specific tests (such as some of the floating point benchmarks.) If you’re working with processor-intensive tasks, Solaris might be the operating system for you.” -John Poole, GeekPatrol.

“[Sun Fire] T2000 is an excellent machine to build big parallel computing clusters or big data centers. If we look at the SWaP results is clear that an array of [Sun Fire] T2000 machines will give us a powerful supercomputer and we will make big savings in power consumption and space.” -Mitch Theys, Assistant Professor, University of Illinois at Chicago.

“Our data center electricity bills cross my desk every month so I’m glad to see Sun pushing hard on this issue. The [Sun Fire] T2000 and T1000 that I tested both met or exceeded what Sun’s data sheet says they consume.” -Charles Lamb, Sleepycat Software.

The contest winners to date are: Nik Clayton with CRF Consulting LTD, Mitch Theys and the University of Illinois at Chicago, Charles Lamb from Sleepycat Software, Jon Emmons with Plymouth State University, Thomas Rampelberg of DigiTar, John Poole from GeekPatrol, Dirk Wetter of Dr. Wetter IT-Consulting, Stefan Rubner, and Colm MacCarthaigh with HEANet.

According to the IDC Worldwide Quarterly Server Tracker released on November 22nd, Sun’s year-to-year total server market share grew 1.1 points, with year-to-year total server revenue growing by 15.8%. Sun’s factory revenue market share in the Unix segment grew by 3.6 points.

Sun has announced that Radia Perlman has been named a Sun Fellow in recognition of her considerable technical expertise and profound impact on the fields of network security and routing.

Perlman, Sun Fellow, Network Protocols and Security Project of Sun Laboratories, is best known for her invention of the Spanning Tree Algorithm, a key technology used in local-area networks, and for innovations that have made link state routing protocols robust, efficient, and scalable. Perlman has more than 80 patents issued with more pending, and her two books, Interconnections and Network Security, are widely used by engineers and as textbooks in universities. Her many awards include the USENIX 2006 lifetime achievement award, SVIPLA 2004 Inventor of the Year award, and an honorary doctorate from the Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden (KTH). She was named by both Network World and Data Communications Magazineas one of the most influential people in networking. She has a PhD in Computer Science from MIT.

Highly prestigious, the title of Sun Fellow is the most senior rank that can be attained within Sun’s engineering organization. Sun Fellows help guide Sun’s technical direction, identify new opportunities and advise the management team on technical issues. Radia’s appointment adds her to the elite group of Fellows at Sun—Nick Aneshansley, Richard Dee, Whitfield Diffie, James Gosling, Jim Hughes, Tim Marsland, Jim Mitchell, Mike Splain, Bob Sproull, Guy Steele, Ivan Sutherland and Marc Tremblay.

I’ve replaced the “Recommended Books” section of the site with the new SunHELP Store.

Sun has released all of its Java implementations under version 2 of the GNU General Public License.

Sun announced today at the Web 2.0 Summit that its new Startup Essentials program will give up to 55% discounts to (approved) startup companies on its Sun Fire x64 and CoolThreads servers, Solaris operating system, Java Enterprise System software, and Sun development tools.

Sun and Canonical have announced that the “GlassFish” reference implementation of the Java EE 5 Application Server will be made available for Ubuntu Linux.

Canonical furthered its push into the enterprise by announcing imminent certification and support for Ubuntu on Sun’s x64 (x86, 64-bit) hardware, powered by AMD Opteron processors. Canonical had earlier announced certification of Ubuntu on Sun’s UltraSPARC(R) processor-based Sun Fire T1000 and T2000 servers featuring CoolThreads technology. The expansion announced today includes support for the Sun Fire X4100 and X4200 servers, as well as the Sun Ultra 20 and 40 Workstations. This means that enterprises will now be able to run Ubuntu on Sun’s x64 systems with the confidence of five-year software support provided by Canonical.

Sun announced on Monday that Tony Ridder (chairman and CEO of Knight-Ridder, Inc.) and Peter Currie (president of Currie Capital LLC) have joined its board of directors.