Sun didn't have a problem marketing. EVERYONE knows who they are and what products they have. The problem is that in most situations the product is more expensive per unit of measurement over cost than competitors.

I've written professionally in Java (amoung many other languages) for more than a decade. If you think that A) re-writting a OS written in C in Java or B) ANY OS should ever be written in Java; then you clearly have no idea about either.

For starters, the strength of Java is that you don't need to compile it to native machine code. This is almost 100% true. Conversely for an OS to function it MUST be compiled and assembled into machine code. If you are going to do that why use Java? There are many other languages better suited. C for example, which is what the vast majority of Solaris is written in.

Next, do you have any idea how much time, how many developers it takes to write an OS. Even re-writing verbatim? That does not even count testers. We are talking about more than the total yearly cost of running Sun. It is in the hundreds of millions if not billions or tens of billions.

All for what? A product that runs on a few more machines? Not to mention Solaris runs on 90+% of all machines out there now anyways. Your suggesting they add a insanely huge workload for almost zero return!?

Lastly on that subject, if you wanted Solaris running on an embedded device, why not just INSTALL IT. That is it, you don't need any VM, you don't need any third part intermediary. Just have the device run Solaris natively. It is how it is done now. You can order such things from Sun/Oricle now and have been able to for some time.

As for your suggestion that open sourcing was to late/to little. I disagree. It was done wrong. There were no income streams tied to open sourcing most of the projects. They simply said, "ok, this is open source now". What they should have done (as suggested in other posts) is offer to help customize their systems to specific clients. Or offer consultation work. Anything really. But just shouting "hey, its free now" is never going to do anything to bring in income for a company.

I think you are simplifying and ignoring the details.

It seems his point was that the company should have open sourced things at a correct time and did not. They should have open sourced some products more aggressively early on and NOT open sourced many products they did at the end.

What does relevance have to do with anything!? Income is what is relevant to a shareholder. NONE of the projects that Sun open sourced in the last few years increased income for the company. If anything, because of the way Sun did things, they decreased the income.

!?! Do you know what Solaris and Java are? I literally, have no idea what this is supposed to mean.

How does that make any sense? The prosecution could simply make a motion to withdraw the case at any time. All they have to do is stand up and say, "never mind" and the case is done. They don't have to introduce any testimony or evidence to do that.

What happened here is going to be a big negative on the prosecutors record. It is BAD for him. It is not far off of getting fired (for cause) from a job because you were watching porn at your desk.

While slightly amusing your story makes no sense. If the prosecution wanted to drop the case they would simply withdraw the charges. That simple. Also the prosecution can not make a motion to dismiss their own case, the defense has to do that. Lastly in this instance such an dismissal is going to remain as a giant stain on the prosecutor's record.

I am willing to bet that if you were there, you would not call what the judge actually did, "abuse" or a "tirade". Most likely he did use pretty strong language. Most likely this was also still appropriate to the situation AND professional.

My guess is this got coverage because you almost NEVER see a judge sternly reprimand a prosecutor. You have to mess up really bad to deserve one and any competent attorney is going to prepare ahead of time to avoid any such situation. Most likely they simply would not bring the case to trial if they thought such a situation was going to arise.

Even the example language quoted in the summary is reasonable and mild, "serious concerns about the government's case."

My personal belife is that we have far to little information to be conclusive about anything. Speculation and work based on that is good, but to assume anything is without flaws is dangerous.

Having said that, I just had to point out that even in the article you linked includes other quite plausible reasons:

Also note that one additional dim stars are the most likely non-dark matter reason for such an occurrence. We just added 3 times the visible mass to the galaxy at large, calculations only require 6 times the visible matter in that cluster for the same effect without dark matter.

Again, as someone directly involved it is pretty obvious you have no idea what you are talking about. I can assure you that every time *I* have been involved in such a situation comcast continued until ordered to stop. They would have continue if not so ordered (or as part of the settlement).

To put it more concisely, without the two actions in question, comcast would have NEVER stopped the offending action. Your point is that they have done something bad for some time so there is no point in EVER doing anything about it. That makes no sense. While it is not good that comcast took egregiously bad actions in the first place it *is* good that they did stop those actions. Further more, both sets of actions are things that for the rest of time comcast can not do again without facing massive punitive damages.

Lastly neither set of lawsuits lasted even close to a year from inception. The first instance a restraining order was issued almost half a year from the start of the offending practice forcing them to stop. In the second instance comcast voluntarily stopped while the litigation was pending (part of the pre-settlement bargaining).

It is nice that you have opinions on these subjects, but when you are talking to a person who was actually involved please realize that making claims of fact *after* the person already stated what actually happened is pretty dumb.

As for the issue of our current Congress. Well, we will just have to disagree.

That is the point of the lawsuit. I am a little confused here on what you are trying to say. The reason *we* sued comcast was to force them to stop XYZ practice. When we won the two previous cases part of the settlement agreement/court order was that they stop XYZ practice, which they then stopped.

The likelihood of *THIS* congress doing anything is about slim to nil. Many may be "pro business" (this is a dumb term, no one is anti-business) but many are not and NONE of them agree with each other.

*I* pay for that service. That is the point of the customer paying for the internet, to get data streamed from other places to my box. If suddenly Comcast wants someone else to pay for my data stream that is fine, but they need to stop charging me too. Trying to charge two parties for the same data stream, that is unethical.

Further more, EVERY data stream from netflix to a comcast customer is paid for by the comcast customer already. Comcast wants it to be paid for twice.

As a current Comcast customer (for many years) I can assure you that while I don't give a flip about $15, however I have no problem suing Comcast again. Over the last decade I have been apart of 2 class action lawsuits against Comcast. Both were won. The real benefit is that this backasswards company stops doing whatever stupidity it is doing at the time, not the discount.

My prediction:

1) FCC is going to intervene.

2) If another company in this situation refuses to pay comcast and comcast blocks them it will take all of 3 days before a suite is filed asking for class action status.

Possession is irrelevant in copyright issues. It has never been a violation to possess a copy of something. It has been a violation to distribute a copy.

In this case the claim is that the service can be used to distribute copyrighted information. If it can be shown that a primary use of the service is to share the music between multiple "entities" then MP3Tunes is pretty much hosed.

Your story is interesting but not quite accurate. First you have to be a HIPAA covered entity to be liable. If Joe Smith gets a random email he has no liability under HIPAA, even if it is covered information.

Second, a single incident does not mean liability. If you have a process in place to handle such incidents, they are not endemic, your response (as the sender) meets HIPAA guidelines (and follows your in place policy) then you are still not liable (as the sender).

Lastly, it is the person/organization that SENT the message that is liable under HIPAA, not the recipient.

Many people get confused on this issue. No one is getting sued for downloading anything. They are being sued for distribution, aka uploading the movie.

I am uncertain as to your point? In our example why would you care if you had access to the underlying system? If you are a hacker targeting a commercial system and managed to get access to that systems primary database you *HAVE* what you want. There is little (if anything) of more value in that case.

Further, my point is this. A commercial server is *only* vulnerable when not administered correctly, regardless of what OS or components used.

Conversely a user's desktop is by nature more vulnerable. As another poster pointed out any combination of a modern browser with JavaScript enabled is a vulnerable attack vector. Any attempt at comparing the two separate worlds will lead to grossly unbalanced results.

Most "hackers" of commercial institution use SQL injection as the main attack vector. Notice that SQL injection attacks are OS independent. Badly designed systems are badly designed systems and you can have a bad system on any OS.