If you're a developer coming to JavaOne this year, visit the Solaris pod (#800) at the Sun booth to check out what the most advanced operating system on the planet has to offer.

Bring us your Java(TM) applications (on a CD-ROM, USB drive or a plain old laptop with an ethernet card) and we'll use DTrace (yes, DTrace now has Java VM agents) to improve their performance. If we can't find any additional performance gains for your app, you'll win a cool prize such as an iPod or an iShuffle. It's really that simple.

Please bear in mind that this only applies to real world applications, "Hello World" and benchmarks don't really count (we'll take a shot at them but if we don't get an improvement, you don't get a prize).

While your apps are being DTrace'd, you can take the opportunity to race a Sun Executive or fellow JavaOne attendee on the Virtual Streets of San Francisco in 2049. Yep, come by the JavaOne Playground to show off your driving skills - you might get to race Scott McNealy, Mary Mary or even Duke!

The Legal Stuff (TM) Offer open to all conference attendees 18 years of age or older, except employees of Sun Microsystems and residents of countries subject to US embargo. Offer valid only while supplies last.

As a product Solaris 10 has an incredible number of innovations that are unavailable in any other OS. At every presentation I do it's very rewarding to see even the die-hard skeptics in the room acknowledge the fact that we really have a very special product on our hands.

What makes it especially interesting, and keeps it fresh for me, is that it's only been available as a shipping product for about 5 months (over 1.6 million registered licenses and growing) and we've just begun to see it's true potential. Mike Shapiro and I were talking on Tuesday evening about what we were each going to present in Boston and he casually dropped some startling numbers into the conversation.

Based on a just completed Markov model of existing systems and Sun data, the Predictive Self-Healing functionality in Solaris 10 is delivering anything from a 42-52% reduction in annual interruption rate and a 32-46% reduction in annual downtime, depending on the sort of system it's running on. I'm sure Mike will be writing something about this soon so I won't go into any more detail but that is amazing.

And you can get it for free.

With the cost of downtime skyrocketing, that can add up to some significant savings.

We're not just giving Solaris away for free folks, we're practically allowing you to download big bags of cold hard cash.

Did I mention it's open too?