
Sun.com Will Disappear After June 1 - there
http://blogs.sun.com/OTNGarage/entry/sun_com_will_disappear_after
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joebananas
Kinda sad. It's the twelfth oldest .com. Registered on the 19th of mars 1986.

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cletus
For reference, 100 oldest domain names:

<http://www.whoisd.com/oldestcom.php>

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AgentConundrum
Wow. I was just shy of two weeks old when the oldest domain was registered.

I suppose it says something about my generation and our view of technology to
consider that the internet has simply _always_ been there for us.

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bane
It's funny, the internet was not really common until quite a bit after
highschool for me. But I honestly don't really remember what people did for
many common tasks before the internet. It's like that entire part of my memory
was wiped clean by simple, quick and convenient access to global communication
and LOLcats.

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AgentConundrum
_Anything that is in the world when you're born is normal and ordinary and is
just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that's invented
between when you're fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and
revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after
you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things._

    
    
         - Douglas Adams

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wazoox
I don't get it. Currently www.sun.com redirects to some oracle.com page, just
like www.digital.com redirects to hp.com. What will be the change exactly?
Some parts of the site will disappear, but the current site already has little
in common with what was sun.com before the acquisition.

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sjs
If sun.com is decommissioned then it will no longer be in service, i.e. it
will not even redirect.

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VMG
But it will still belong to oracle, right? Otherwise it will be a available to
the market again.

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alexk7
A few newspapers named "Sun" might be interested...

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ashconnor
They could sell to the British tabloid, might raise some revenue.

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ChuckMcM
Interesting, I wonder what this means for the naming scheme for Java classes.

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bane
Note to self, when designing a future language, don't use impermanent and
perishable domain names for namespaces.

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bartonfink
It's not a bad idea as far as conventions go. It makes it fairly easy for
nearly anybody to distribute interoperable software without having to either
register with Sun/Oracle for some sort of key or to deal with the possibility
of collisions. I think it's a pretty smart decision to piggyback atop an
already extant naming system. Further, it's just a convention - there's
nothing in the language design that requires that packages use your own domain
names or even domain names at all.

There are plenty of legitimate gripes to have with Java, but I'm not sure that
their namespacing decision is one of them.

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bane
I remember when I was first learning Java many years ago...about this
convention and asking why one would use this as a namespacing convention. Even
back then domain ownership was fast and fleeting and it never seemed to serve
any particular purpose. I think because it was always couched that the Java
namespace convention was supposed to help you track down the originator of the
code even without documentation that I always found it strange. Now with this
change, vast swaths of the primary codebase no longer map to the originator of
the code!

Are namespace issues such a big deal in other languages that something like
this is needed? <http://search.cpan.org/> seems to muddle through more or less
okay without it. (But then it requires a centralized namespacing system as you
pointed out).

So yeah, I do see your point regarding leveraging an existing system. It has
just always struck me as a bit oddball.

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bartonfink
Fair point, but remember that this convention predates modern search engines.
I'm sure you remember what the Internet was like in 1995, for example, and how
difficult it could be to find precisely what you were looking for. That's the
world Java and its package convention was born into, and in that world it made
more sense for the reason you pointed out.

That said, at least Sun was smart enough to not package core classes as
com.sun.* - they reserved the java.* packaging for core language constructs,
so at least that's not broken.

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bane
You are absolutely right! I keep letting my myopic worldview of instant
information at the end of a search get in the way of my memory.

ha, relevant <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2318310>

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grigy
But why? Oh I know. Oracle is trying to make money on everything. They may try
to sell the domain name.

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dholowiski
Why not, it must be worth a small fortune.

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socksy
Is there really any good reason for this, or is it just asserting dominance? I
know it's often ignored, but I think with a site as important (and as
entrenched in links around the web) as Sun's old site really should heed this:

<http://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI.html>

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prodigal_erik
It was a serious and looming mistake for the web to rely so critically on the
identities of content publishers, because it gives some knuckle-dragger in
marketing a motivation to _break working URLs_ for pure branding reasons. This
could be a valuable service for someone like archive.org, a view of the web as
if everyone were competent stewards of their namespaces.

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drinian
Considering Oracle's MO, I wouldn't be surprised if they try to wipe out the
Internet Archive's backup of Sun webpages for copyright reasons. Sigh.

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aj700
<http://playground.sun.com/>

this may go too, or disappear into different parts of oracle.com, so have a
look at it now.

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swombat
I had a look. I'm not sure what I'm supposed to find of interest there? Some
printer drivers on a page that looks like it was built in 1996?

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th
It was made in 1996:
[http://replay.waybackmachine.org/19961225213604/http://playg...](http://replay.waybackmachine.org/19961225213604/http://playground.sun.com/)

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adrianwaj
<http://thesunalsosets.com/Editorials.html> \-- "This writer started this
website on September 1, 2003, with a mission of removing Scott McNealy as CEO
of SUN Microsystems. With the help of many of my readers, this goal was
accomplished on April 21, 2006. One reader asked, "…having achieved your goal
against all odds , why don’t you just declare victory, close your website, and
end your other activities related to SUN?" My answer is to do so would leave
SUN continuing in the same direction. To quote Shakespeare, 'The fault, dear
Brutus, lies not in the stars but in ourselves.' We cannot allow McNealy to
continue his failed policies and practices by letting him use his hand-picked
puppet on a string continue to lead SUN Microsystems."

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va_coder
Oracle is a classic case where being first was everything. In Oracle's case,
being first in number of databases sold.

I am on a new project in an 'enteprisey' environment and a decision was made
to use Oracle database simply because that's what most people know.

Oracle became dominant (for a generation) -> lot's of dba's learned Oracle ->
now many (in 2011) still choose it because that's all they know.

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dotcoma
Sun: we were the dot in .com

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ChuckMcM
Get is right, "Sun, we're the dot in oracle.com" :-)

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bane
Yeah, those registration fees and redirects are back breaking expenses.

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KaeseEs
Wonder if this will break anything hardcoded to point to java.sun.com/foo

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hnfwerr
Not unexpected from Oracle... I wonder if their management == Yahoo's ?

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mathgladiator
Seems like a bad idea from an SEO perspective.

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callumjones
Do you think Oracle needs SEO? They're quite popular on their own.

