This is a great example of doing well AND doing good. Proof positive they're not mutually exclusive.

Well, it looks like we're partway there. The URL http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=java currently displays "invalid ticker symbol" just beside a flash ad for Scottrade with a description of Sun Microsystems.

Give it a few more hours...

Jonathan Schwartz has been doing great things for Sun. he seems to know the market well, and he has done some very bold things with our IP that have been paying off.

Once in a while, though, you have to scratch your head in wonder. There have been a fair number of responses to the stock symbol name change, both pro and con, and I've been thinking about it too.

Many of the reactions remind me of similar reactions to relabeling Pluto as a "dwarf planet". Those reactions also varied from positive to negative. Those against the change were saying that they grew up having learnt that Pluto was a planet and nothing was going to change their minds about it. Those for it felt that Pluto just didn't fit in with the other eight somehow.

This isn't the first time the CEO has done something in an attempt to use a popular item in order to increase awareness - consider the time he tried to use the iPod to sell storage racks. So now he's trying to use the more well-known technology, Java, to sell the Sun brand.

Some might dislike giving up 'SUNW', to which I respond 'eh, it's just a sequence of letters'. Some might consider the move an unreasonable one to make. After all, we're not renaming the company. My response is to wait and see. It didn't cost a lot of money (relatively speaking) to implement the stock symbol change. If it does nothing, we haven't lost much. If it works, well then. We'll have gained much for almost nothing.

If you still think it unreasonable, consider again that well-worn saying about unreasonable people.

An exciting milestone has been reached in ZFS land. Mark Shellenbaum has just checked into the Nevada gate some bits that will allow non-root users to have access to zfs. The short version: with two new zfs subcommands, 'allow' and 'unallow', a sysadmin can grant specific permissions to users (taking snapshots, setting properties, &c). The long version: see Mark's blog entry I just linked to.

I know I'm being pedantic, but sometimes I just can't help myself. Especially when it involves coding.

This is from that Temple of the Sun game. What's wrong with this picture?

Over at OSDev, 'chase' is converting from Solaris x86 to Linux. His primary reason is the work involved in installing new packages in Solaris and maintaining those packages.

Here's an interesting quote:

The other thing is ext3 seems to handle power failures a little better than UFS w/logging. As cool as ZFS is it's not bootable yet. Even though the data center has power generators I've still lost power a couple of times.

Leaving aside the fact that ZFS is currently bootable in Nevada build 62, let's look at that comparison: ext3 > UFS+logging. Let's assume for the sake of argument that's correct. Given that ZFS > ext3, and that, even though S10 needs a UFS partition to boot from, the rest of the disk and any other disks can be put into a ZFS pool, this is not a valid reason for choosing ext3.

Here are some comparisons to consider: Losing power = data corruption; ext3 = data corruption; UFS+logging = data corruption. All three are silent. All three result in degradation over time. All three cause servers to fail with no warning.

ZFS at least gives you warning, even if it can't repair the damage.

The bottom line is that Solaris is hard to administer (yeah, it's a fair cop), so server data is just going to have to suffer. Hopefully some day Solaris will be as easy as redhat, or debian, or ubuntu, or <insert name of distro here>. Some day. Meanwhile, I'll choose data integrity over ease of administration.