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McNealy, wisecracking and serious on education

SAN FRANCISCO--Educational issues were at the forefront of Sun Microsystems Chief Executive Scott McNealy's thoughts this week at the JavaOne trade show here. It's not a surprise, given that his sons are 3, 5, 7 and 9 years old.

There was the serious call to arms, when McNealy urged involvement in a project to create a shared online educational materials for students in kindergarten through 12th grade.

Then there was the barb at his peers: "Steve and Bill and Steve, they all dropped out of school early, but I got my degrees, so I got a late … Read more

Time is right for OpenSolaris mascot

Sun Microsystems is hoping its efforts to reinvigorate Solaris will make it a more viable competitor to Linux. But wouldn't it be easier to visualize that competition if the Solaris camp could attack with something more animate than 5 million lines of source code?

Happily, now that Solaris has begun its metamorphosis into the OpenSolaris open-source project, it's possible there could soon be an OpenSolaris mascot to take on Linux's penguin, Tux.

"We did have a conversation on a mascot a couple of months ago, but decided to shelve it till we were open so the … Read more

SEC, meet the blogosphere

Removing the last shreds of doubt that blogs have become a corporate phenomenon, Sun Microsystems President Jonathan Schwartz included regulatory disclaimers in a Monday posting about his company's planned acquisition of StorageTek for a net sum of about $3.1 billion.

He included in his blog the standard " safe harbor" disclaimer. "I was going to be frustrated at the requirement, until it occurred to me we'd just set a bit of corporate communications history--blogs are now an official communications vehicle at Sun. We should tell the SEC to update the regs," he said of … Read more

Tiger box won't have any CDs

Apple Computer has made sure that Tiger will run on most of the machines running prior versions of Mac OS X, but not all Mac owners will be able to use it out of the box.

That's because Tiger ships on a DVD and a good number of Macs out there that are capable of running Tiger only have CD drives.

Apple does have a program in which customers can pay $10 and send in their installation DVD and then get CDs of Tiger sent back via U.S. mail. Information about the program is posted on Apple's Web site. … Read more

Moxi's own version of the Mini

Moxi is looking to break into the cable mainstream, and part of its effort is a little box that looks a whole lot like the Mac Mini.

At this week's cable industry trade show, Moxi showed off a new set-top box that will run Moxi's software and be built by Samsung. Moxi also showed off a second, smaller box that can either serve as a basic set-top box or work in conjunction with a bigger box in another room to offer features such as digital video recording.

While the box resembles Apple's small new desktop, it is, … Read more

IBM releases Linux-on-Power programming tool

Linux on IBM's Power processors today isn't widely used, but Big Blue has added a little more meat to the bones of an attempt to make it commercially viable. IBM announced Thursday it's released programming software called the Performance Simulator for Linux on Power to help programmers fine-tune programs that run on Linux on Power.

With the software, "Users of Linux on Power will be able to examine how their code executes on various IBM Power processors so that they can identify and avoid common performance hazards on these processors," IBM said on its AlphaWorks … Read more

Retro blogger takes potshot at Apple

Forget podcasting. Think papercasting.

It's the latest in blogging, at least according to this guy.

He writes his thoughts on a pad of paper and then posts images of the pad on his Web site. The seemingly low-tech idea employs some high-tech automation to scan, process and publish the entries. Anything underlined is actually a hyperlink.

But the papercaster could headed down the same paths as other bloggers who have run into trouble. One entry is a sketch of an Apple Computer "iPad" (and companion iPad Staple) that could be the hardware of choice for papercasting.

It … Read more

A night at the Oscars for iPod

The iPod is so hot it even got a plug at Sunday night's Academy Awards ceremony from comedian Robin Williams.

Don't worry if Pixar's "The Incredibles" doesn't nab an Oscar, Williams said before announcing the winner for best animated feature, because the producers own "iPod stock." He was referring to the connection between Pixar Animation Studios and iPod maker Apple Computer, the two companies run by Steve Jobs.

As it turned out, "The Incredibles" did win--a "two-fer." Jobs got a plug, too, during the acceptance speech. So it … Read more