Sun changes ticker to Java

Sun Microsystems will change its long-time Nasdaq ticker symbol from SUNW to Java, effective today, reports The Street.

The company said it's making the change to capitalise on the brand-awareness of its Java software and to better reflect the company's current strategy.

Java is a computer programming language that allows Internet applications to run on a broad range of electronic devices, from cellphones to servers. The technology was developed internally at Sun and was publicly introduced in 1995 in the early days of the commercialisation of the World Wide Web.

A dispute over some open source software used for model railroads resulted in an important decision last week, involving the scope of open source licences and the remedies available when they are violated, says The Register.

The decision has triggered alarm in the open source community, with a prominent open source licensing advocate charging that the court fell asleep at the switch in its legal analysis of the case.

The suit involves Robert Jacobsen, a scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and a key member of the Java Model Railroad Interface Project, which develops open source model train software. Jacobsen sued Matthew Katzer and his company, Kamind Associates, alleging violation of federal copyright law. Kamind is a software company that sells software for running model railroads to enthusiasts.

The multi-core buzz is everywhere. Pick up a newspaper and the local electronics mega-store is advertising multi-core desktops and laptops to the consumer, reports Sys-con.

It says there will be implications to the Java programmer. Multi-core technology will especially affect applications that must process large amounts of data in a non-transactional (outside of a database context) manner. For this class of applications, the implications of multi-core are huge.

One result of these processor changes is that a single-threaded application may actually slow down on a multi-core system.