Sun.com Will Disappear After June 1 | Hacker News Reader

Sun.com Will Disappear After June 1

blogs.sun.com

73 pointsthere41 comments

Kinda sad. It's the twelfth oldest .com. Registered on the 19th of mars 1986.

For reference, 100 oldest domain names:

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

Oracle doesn't seem to give a crap about history here. There takeover strategy has always been to try to destroy the old brand of the company and absorb what is left.

Sad sad end for a iconic company.

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.

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.

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

I'll always consider people who are currently under 30 Internet noobs :) leave the real innovation to people who know what they're doing.

would have to agree. i honestly don't think the younger crowd (ie people 20-25) really gets technology in the same way.

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.

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

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

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

It should belong to Oracle. They can't release www.sun.com but still keep other subdomains (blogs.sun.com for instance).

Doesn't make sense. Why anyone in his right mind would do that?

> [...] in his right mind [...]

Exactly. Interesting way to kill loads of programming links already available via google. Then again - they already worked hard on moving the content around without leaving any redirects behind.

It's sort of like the new wife (husband) clearing the home of all pics/references_to the ex. Or maybe:

...of the ex. whom she killed. :)

Completely to be expected from people bent on total domination.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Why not, it must be worth a small fortune.

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

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.

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.

>It was a serious and looming mistake for the web to rely so critically on the identities of content publishers

How else are you going to make a decentralized identifier?

http://playground.sun.com/

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

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?

It was made in 1996: http://replay.waybackmachine.org/19961225213604/http://playg...

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."

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.

Sun: we were the dot in .com

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

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

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

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

Seems like a bad idea from an SEO perspective.

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

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