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Sun's McNealy: The iPod is doomed

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--Sun Microsystems Chief Executive Scott McNealy consistently credits Apple Computer for good marketing--to the point where he listed what he believes will be his own company's glorious iPod moments. But McNealy said Wednesday believes the iPod itself will be replaced in coming years by music stored in the network.

"Your iPod is like your home answering machine. It's a temporary thing," McNealy said at a panel discussion featuring reminiscences by Sun's four cofounders at the Computer History Museum here. "It's going to be hard to sell a lot of iPods … Read more

Sun: Apple nearly moved to Sparc chips

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--Apple Computer's processor preferences are in the limelight as the computer maker on Tuesday began selling models using Intel processors instead of the PowerPC chips from IBM and Freescale Semiconductor that have been the computers' preferred brains since the mid-1990s. But another processor choice came to light Wednesday when Sun Microsystems cofounder Bill Joy revealed that Sun's Sparc chips were in the running during the last Apple switch, when it was moving off Motorola's 680x0 family.

"We got very close to having Apple use Sparc. That almost happened," Joy said at a … Read more

Report: Korean FTC could investigate Apple-Samsung

Korea's top antitrust regulator reportedly said on a local radio show that authorities there may look into whether Apple's purchase of flash memory from Samsung Electronics may have violated any of that country's competition laws.

According to a report by Yonhap News, Korean Fair Trade Commission (FTC) Chairman Kang Chul-kyu said that his agency could look into allegations that Samsung sold the memory chips to Apple at below-market rates.

Apple reportedly grabbed a significant share of Samsung's flash capacity in order to introduce its new iPod Nano. Analysts also speculate the computer maker got a significant discount … Read more

Duke University iPods tap into public radio

update Duke University students who wish to tune in to radio shows "The World" and "Studio 360" will soon be able to so for free on their iPods. The university has struck a deal with Public Radio International to provide faculty members with segments of the shows for use in their classrooms. The trial program will run from September to December.

Currently, file downloads of the shows are only legally available for a fee. For instance, one episode costs $3.95 on Audible.com, or you can sign up for a weekly subscription at a discount. … Read more

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