“Starfire”, a vision of computing’s future

Posted by Bill Bradford on Aug 26, 2007

Bruce Tognazzini has a great page up describing “Starfire“, a short concept film from 1992 produced at Sun that was “an effort to both predict and guide the future of computing”. (found via Paleo-Future)

Sun changing trading symbol to “JAVA”

Posted by Bill Bradford on Aug 23, 2007

According to this post by Jonathan Schwartz, Sun will be changing its stock trading symbol next week from “SUNW” to “JAVA”.

“JAVA is a technology whose value is near infinite to the internet, and a brand that’s inseparably a part of Sun (and our profitability). And so next week, we’re going to embrace that reality by changing our trading symbol, from SUNW to JAVA. This is a big change for us, capitalizing on the extraordinary affinity our teams have invested to build, introducing Sun to new investors, developers and consumers. Most know Java, few know Sun – we can bring the two one step closer.

To be very clear, this isn’t about changing the company name or focus – we are Sun, we are a systems company, and we will always be a derivative of the students that created us, Stanford University Network is here to stay. But we are no longer simply a workstation company, nor a company whose products can be limited by one category – and Java does a better job of capturing exactly that sentiment than any other four letter symbol.”

Korn Shell updated in OpenSolaris

Posted by Bill Bradford on Aug 20, 2007

According to this mailing list post from opensolaris-announce, the “ksh93” version of the Korn Shell has been added to OpenSolaris (build 72 and later) as /usr/bin/ksh93.

The previous version of ksh (aka “ksh88”) is still available as /usr/bin/ksh.

Sun to introduce memory locking feature

Posted by Mike on Aug 16, 2007

According to this internetnews.com article, Sun is in the process of extending its multithreading support to protect applications and data alike from accidentally stepping on each other and corrupting memory or data. The mentioned feature is similar to that of RDBMS locking mechanism but applies to system memory.

IBM adds support for Solaris on System X and BladeCenter servers

Posted by Bill Bradford on Aug 16, 2007

Sun announced today that IBM will be distributing Solaris (and associated subscription services) for select IBM x86-based System X and BladeCenter servers through its own sales channels.

OpenSPARC T2 information released

Posted by Bill Bradford on Aug 8, 2007

Sun has released a preliminary set of documentation as part of the process to release the entire chip design under the GPL:

Sun to cut workforce

Posted by Mike on Aug 7, 2007

Sun is planning to cut its workforce in the second half of the year. According to this CNET News.com article, Sun’s board of directors have approved the workforce reduction.

Sun releases UltraSPARC T2

Posted by Bill Bradford on Aug 7, 2007

Sun has released the UltraSPARC T2, their followup to the successful UltraSPARC T1 (“Niagara”).

Available for sale separate from Sun’s own systems, this new processor is the industry’s first volume processor with eight cores and eight threads per core. Formerly known as the “Niagara 2” project, the UltraSPARC T2’s world-record performance raises the bar on commodity processors while boasting the industry’s highest energy efficiency per thread. With each thread capable of running its own operating system, the chip delivers a whopping 64-way system on a single chip. Sun will provide the UltraSPARC T2 processor design to the free and open source community via the GPL license.