I miss Sun

Yeah, I said it. I miss Sun Microsystems. Sun was a company that had some way-cool stuff years ago. They also had probably the best commercially available UNIX on the market (note I sad HAD) for quite a while (side note - I'm partially biased as I have certifications for Solaris 7 and 8 but I also think IBM's AIX is way cool). Then Linux happened. That threw a wrench in all of the UNIX vendors plans. Sun, IBM, DEC (Digital Equipment Corp.), Compaq (who I still despise for killing DEC), SCO, etc....all weren't really prepared for what hit them. Linux (as well as the BSD's of the world) weren't really any more feature rich than other UNIX OS's - in fact, they lacked many of the features that commercial versions had. Skip forward about 15yrs and Linux is fully featured and can go toe-to-toe with any commercial UNIX OS on the market. Commodity hardware available from a countless number of vendors combined with Linux was completely contrary to these old giants of technology. Each had their own CPU, own OS and varying degrees of compatibility with other OS's. Sun (among others) saw their whole business model basically crumble. Oracle, a company who I mostly respect and stay mad at about 50% of the time, bought them for peanuts.

So if you're reading this and thinking "I've never heard of Sun" I'd bet you've probably heard of Java. Java is on about every computer out there as a plug-in so you can run a few apps here and there. It also hugely popular for mobile phone makers because of it's portability. Today, the last remnants of Sun died. The Java update I just installed on my sole Windows box tried to install McAfee antivirus. ARGH. At least Larry Ellison still hates Bill Gates (even though he is acting like him)