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keithjr writes "As part of an earlier promise to put for $1 Million open-source rewards program, Sun Microsystems has announced the OpenSPARC Community Innovation Awards Contest. There will be seven categories for submissions, with each category's winner receiving $20,000, as well as a Grand Prize of $35,000 for the best overall. The contest period will run from January 28th, 2008 until June 30, 2008."
http://www.opensparc.net/community-innovation-awards-contest.html

keithjr writes "In keeping with what has become an almost humorous tradition, tech writer John Dvorak has put forth an opinion article expressing his dissatisfaction with the latest hot topic: Sun's acquisition of MySQL. Dvorak writes, "Sun Microsystems Inc. gobbling up MySQL is perhaps the worst single event I have ever witnessed in the history of tech mergers and acquisitions." He even goes as far as to imply that the deal was brokered by Oracle via proxy, stating " I'm close to being convinced that Oracle wanted to buy MySQL to kill the product, but knew that it couldn't pull off the stunt itself. It would be too obvious, especially to European Union regulators. So it sent in a stooge to do the job." Evidence to back up this dubious claim of a "Puppetmaster Oracle" is, unsurprising, lacking."

keithjr writes "As promised during the UltraSPARC T2 Launch, Sun has announced the release of the RTL (register transfer level) source code for the OpenSPARC T2 to the open-source community. The source code can be found a Opensparc.net. Sun also announced five Universities are official OpenSPARC Technology Centers of Excellence: the University of California, Santa Cruz; University of Texas, Austin; University of Michigan, Ann Arbor; University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign; and Carnegie Mellon University."
http://www.sun.com/aboutsun/pr/2007-12/sunflash.20071211.1.xml

petrus.burdigala writes "I work for a mid-sized commercial software company (~20 Mloc) and we are frequently challenged by our supervisors to get fixes around the clock. Overall, we manage to get a 'bullet-proof' patch in about 4-5 weeks (from coding->QA->Build/Packaging->shipment), which I consider not so bad. But the other day, we got an urgent request from our support team to come up with a decent fix in 48 hours. I think they're a tiny bit unrealistic. So I wanted to get feedback from my peers: are we doing that bad? It takes months for other software vendors to issue zero-day exploit fixes, are our customers being unreasonable?"

"PC Gaming is dying," the analysts tell us. "The Massive genre is the only viable business model left," websites report. That they're off the mark is obvious to anyone that's actually played a PC game in the last few years; games like Sam and Max , Battlefield 2 , or any of the numerous puzzle titles available online prove the flexibility and strength of the PC platform. Then, every once in a while, you get an offering like the Orange Box. A value-packed storm of content from Valve, this single sku offers five complete games at an amazing price. That would be great, even if the games weren't any good ... but they are. They're very, very, very good. Read on for my impressions of Half-Life 2: Episode 2, Team Fortress 2, and (the cake is a lie) Portal.

keithjr writes "During a public webcast today, Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz, joined by several members of the Sun technical and marketing staff, unveiled their latest multithreaded System-on-Chip product, the UltraSPARC T2. The new processor sports 64 threads over 8 cores, with a nominal power consumption of 95 Watts. 10Gbps Ethernet, PCI Express I/O, and cryptographic acceleration are all integrated on-chip. Like its predecessor, the T2's Verilog RTL source code and test benches will be released to the OpenSPARC community under the GPL, along with a Programmer's Reference Manual and Microarchitecture Specifications."
http://www.sun.com/featured-articles/2007-0807/feature/index.jsp?intcmp=hp2007aug07_ultrasparct2_webcast

keithjr writes "The city of Brookline, MA plans to open the first border-to-border Wi-Fi network open to commerical and residential use. The wireless canvas, touted as the first of its kind, has been free for preview by Brookline residents. Upon launch, it will be available with a subscription fee. The multi-use service network will also serve as a means of relaying public safety information among city departments, as well as providing Internet access. Free Internet service will also be available in various parks and hotspots throughout the town. The official "wirecutting" information can be found at the Brookline Wireless official website."
http://www.boston.com/business/ticker/2007/07/brookline_is_se.html