Sun Surges Into Research, Virtual Worlds 56
An anonymous reader writes "Sun Microsystems appears to be shifting its focus back to research, after several years of promoting its commodity servers and Java software. Earlier this week, it talked about its new Andy Bechtolsheim-designed video server in the New York Times. Yesterday, it invited reporters in to preview its plans to develop faster switches, new programming languages, and 3-D virtual workplaces. Robert Sproull, director of Sun Labs, made clear that Sun has big ambitions. 'General purpose computers have to be rethought,' he said. Among the projects close to leaving the labs is Project Crossbow, an evolution of the networking stack in Solaris; Project Sedna, a next generation switch for storage-area networks; and MPK20, a virtual workspace built on top of Sun's Darkstar gaming server."
Re:Sun's New Direction (Score:5, Informative)
In the enterprise. Java in the browser is widely acknowledged to be not-so-spectacular at best, even given modern advances. But most business-level development these is being done in either Java (or occasionally C#, for the suckers) and Java still dominates in a truly amazing way. In its way, it's the modern COBOL- somewhat verbose and clunky, but EVERYWHERE, and Going Nowhere. Fortunately for the world, it's brain-damage factor is a puny fraction of what COBOL's was.
In summary, if you'd like to say that Java on the desktop was ultimately a pretty lukewarm experience, that's certainly one thing. But you said it yourself - servers and OSs and server-side stuff.
Why is it called MPK20? (Score:3, Informative)