According to this TECHWEB article, Sun is attempting to work with the Eclipse group over standardization and interoperability between Java tools.

According to this NEWS.COM article, Sun will announce a dual-Opteron server next month with four- and eight-processors systems availability at a later time. In addition, the article includes a timeline for the introduction of Sun’s own UltraSparc IV processor.

Sun.com began as a box in a closet. A small team of engineers used it to post a single page of type as the Sun home page on the Internet. That was ten years ago this week.

Today, sun.com is a large federation of Web sites served from four data centers, housing 2,000,000 pages and serving more than a million visitors a day. It’s powered by a dozen machines, each twenty times as powerful as the original little box.

Hassan Schroeder was the first sun.com Webmaster. “I was in a small group working to get Sun online with its first Web site,” says Schroeder. On January 28, 1994, a co-worker typed in a page of Sun’s Annual Report as the only content. “All text, not even a Sun logo,” remembers Schroeder. The page was hosted from a single-processor SPARC station located in a networking lab the size of a closet. Schroeder was there to plug the machine in. “That evening, I logged in from home on a 9600 baud modem and saw that we had received our first e-mail addressed to webmaster@sun.com. It just said, ‘Cool!'”

According to this NEWS.COM article, Sun is to move its entire UK branch office to thin clients running over a wide area network.

According to this Register article, Sun shipped more than 5,000 AMD Opteron-based servers to select customers last quarter. No Opteron-based products have been officially announce as available and for sale yet.

NextCom has announced the first sub $2,000 UltraSPARC 64 bit Solaris Notebook and mobile server.

The NextBlade160 product family brings the power of Sun Microsystems 64-bit UltraSPARC IIe architecture and 64 bit Solaris operating system to a portable PC style notebook package without compromising performance.

A $1,995 priced configuration includes a 14.1″ high resolution TFT display, UltraSPARC IIe 400Mhz RISC processor, 2D/3D graphics, 40GB Hard drive, 256MB SDRAM, 10/100 Ethernet, 2nd removable HDD bay, Solaris 8 or 9, 2x USB ports, Sun’s Star Office suite and an innovative Hardware Security ID feature. 650MHZ based configurations start at $3,200. Systems can be used both as a mobile workstation, SunRay equivalent thin-client and mobile or small footprint server.

Technical details can be found at: http://www.nextcomputing.com/nextblade.pdf.

Finally the new year can begin! Sun has released Solaris10 Build 48 for your edification. Some of the new features include dynamic resource pools, expanded disk set support in SVM, mail config stuff that was in /usr/lib is now properly placed in /etc/mail/cf, IPv6 Advanced Sockets API, user commands for the Solaris Cryptographic Framework, and IKE configuration params. There has also been updates to the linker and libs that developers and porters are going to find extremely useful, and updates to the new coreadm command that SA’s are going to love.

OS News has put up an article by Tony Bourke in which he reviews his aging and forgotten Sun Ultra5. This is the begining of a series of articles he’s writing about the system, including reviews of various BSD’s on the box, and investigating the myth that 32bit binaries are slower on UltraSparc. While it might not be of much interest to old-time Sun folks, with all the buzz about Athlon64 its a good reminder that many of the 64bit questions aren’t new ones.

According to this article at the Inquirer and other places, Sun may obtain Windows certification for its x86 hardware line. This is being done in case customers want an “end to end” hardware vendor and need to run Windows on a few machines for certain functions; they can run Microsoft software on x86 hardware from Sun and still have both hardware and software support.

Sun invites you to join the Sun Net Talk Program, an online discussion series. This series will enable IT
professionals to obtain the relevant business and technology intelligence needed to meet the demands of their evolving profession.

For more information, please visit: http://www.sun.com/nettalk

Deploying the Sun Java(tm) Enterprise System:
Start Here Wednesday, January 28, 2004
9-10am PT/12-1pm ET

According to this NEWS.COM article, Sun is willing to assist IBM in its migration to a corporate-wide Linux-based desktop.

According to this TECHWEB article, Sun has debuted their linux.java.net portal.

According to this NEWS.COM article, Sun plans to expand its Linux software portfolio including: Java Enterprise System, Java Development Tools, and Linux versions of Sun’s SunRay desktop computers.

According to this NEWS.COM article, Sun plans to acquire Nauticus Networks, a start-up that build switches for balancing traffic. These switches are often referred to as layer 4-7 switches.

Java Technology and the Mission to Mars details how Sun’s Java technology is being used to control the Mars Spirit rover.