Scott McNealy is stepping down as CEO of Sun. He will stay on as chairman.

Once a silicon darling, Sun has fallen on hard times since the dot-com bust. Their problems weren’t dot-com related, though; they’ve been torpedoed by some very basic business problems.

Their bread and butter was proprietary systems running their own version of Unix called Solaris (oddly named, given that the book and movie entity named Solaris drives people insane). Solaris was, in its heyday, easily the best such animal available. Sun’s hardware, too, was impressive at the time, and for a while at least was synonymous with computing power in a time when Intel hardware was barely capable of running Win3.1. We remember being amused and amazed when, in 1997, we helped deploy one of the first web stores with Oracle, Netscape Application Server, and the Netscape web server all on one fairly low-end Sun (an Ultra 5 — just like the one we use a doorstop in Heathen World HQ now). Of course, now the much-cheaper Xserve that runs Heathen is completely capable of running all that and more, and in fact does.

The the world changed. Intel hardware got much better, and did so very quickly. Linux came out of nowhere and caught all the expensive, proprietary Unixes flat-footed; the combination has been huge for Sun. Other firms were caught, too, but some managed to be more agile; IBM in particular adopted Linux as its own, and has been busily giving back to the FOSS community. Sun, on the other hand, became convinced that they could give away hardware and make it up on software — i.e., the still proprietary Solaris — and survive. They were, and are, wrong. Sun hardware may still be an acceptable choice for HUGE database applications, but those jobs are few and far between, and Sun no longer owns the market. For 95% of the applications, there’s no reason to buy fancy hardware or software, and that’s the problem. For 100% of the applications, there’s no reason to use Solaris and be tied to Sun when choosing a supported enterprise Linux keeps your options open.

Sun has given the world Java, of course. Their vision for Java has never been completely in line with reality, but that’s Silicon Valley for you. Java remains a solid contender for server-side development (and even the occasional client-side app); aspects of the language make it a much better choice than almost any other compiled language. However, you still need a pretty big app to justify it over options like the stack, or Ruby on Rails, or other open source offerings. The world of Java is often an overly complex one full of cargo-cult dogma and huge codebases nobody actually understands; more recent approaches tend toward the simple, with attendant increases in maintainability. Java was and is free, however, so it’s not about to fix Sun’s bottom line issues; the minute they try to charge for it is the minute the FOSS options bury it.

So that’s what Sun’s got: expensive hardware of dubious value, a white-elephant operating system, and a language/technology they gave away for free. Vanishingly few people want the first two, and the third can’t save them. And all this has been true for years. The surprise isn’t McNealy’s departure; the surprise is that it took the board this long to do it.

“Man dies after plummeting into large hole that opened beneath his home.” Via BoingBoing.

But it’s not over, and if you stay informed, you’ll be better able to help save it.

The Internet is a giant open network that, basically, no one has been allowed to exert much control over, even bandwidth companies. They’re expected to carry all traffic, and treat it equally, and this is how we’ve gotten this far. If the telcos had their way, the Internet as we know it would never have happened; now they’d like to be able to block traffic they don’t like, or charge more for some kinds of traffic, because they think they can make more money that way. Is your ISP also your cable company? Maybe they’d rather you didn’t get to watch TV at iTunes anymore. Is your ISP also your phone company? Kiss Skype goodbye, and ditto any other competitive VOIP service.

This is real. Pay attention.

FOX — Fox! — has Bush’s approval rating at THIRTY THREE PERCENT, or several bucks less than half the cost of a barrel of oil today.

The Heathen wonder what the floor is. We mean, presumably, there exists a hardcore cult-of-personality segment who will approve of Bush’s administration even if he and Rove do a televised tag-team gang-rape of the Olsen Twins in prime time (like they haven’t been doing that to Lady Liberty for 6 years already…). What is that chunk? 30% 25%?

(Via TPM.)

The jackbooted government thugs are desperate to sift through the papers left by muckraking journalist — and therefore agent of liberty — Jack Anderson. They’re insisting he may have gotten some secret papers, or something, and that they have the right to review, remove, and redact that which constitutes the most valuable segment of his estate. Fortunately, his heirs are none to pleased about this, and are fighting the demands in the courts.

The F.B.I. is seeking to go through the files of the late newspaper columnist Jack Anderson to remove classified material he may have accumulated in four decades of muckraking Washington journalism. Mr. Anderson’s family has refused to allow a search of 188 boxes, the files of a well-known reporter who had long feuded with the Federal Bureau of Investigation and had exposed plans by the Central Intelligence Agency to kill Fidel Castro, the machinations of the Iran-contra affair and the misdemeanors of generations of congressmen. Mr. Anderson’s son Kevin said that to allow government agents to rifle through the papers would betray his father’s principles and intimidate other journalists, and that family members were willing to go to jail to protect the collection. “It’s my father’s legacy,” said Kevin N. Anderson, a Salt Lake City lawyer and one of the columnist’s nine children. “The government has always and continues to this day to abuse the secrecy stamp. My father’s view was that the public is the employer of these government employees and has the right to know what they’re up to.”

(Local PDF.)

Best. Headline. Ever. It’s Onionesque.

Hertz is going to add Shelby Mustangs to its rental fleet again.

Sy Hersh reports in the current New Yorker that the Administration is deep in the planning phases for a possibly nuclear military campaign against Iran.

Apparently, AT&T has been routing its Internet traffic to the NSA. The EFF is suing.

So, remember a while back, when one of the new talking points from the White House was that the Vice President’s powers included the ability to declassify information? People wondered a little about why this was important, but the reason is pretty transparent: if Libby flips on Cheney and says that it was the Veep who told him to link Plame’s identity, their fallback position is that because Cheney is VP, his order to disclose Plame’s classified status means he was declassifying her status. Ergo, no classified leak exists. It’s an end run around the laws concerning classified material, but certainly par for the course with this most mendacious of administrations.

Now the story’s getting more interesting, as Libby is asserting that the order came from Bush. We can assume that the GOP noise machine will immediately start in with a variant of the “if the President does it, it’s not illegal” canard that is so dangerously close to Louis XIV’s (in)famous pronouncement in re: state-monarch unity. However, it ain’t necessarily so, and I pray that won’t fly. Bush deciding to leak Plame’s CIA identity would and should remain a crime. Surely Bush cannot simply decide to declassify her status as political payback and get away with it. At least, I’d be sure of that if we still lived in a country that enjoyed the rule of law a bit more universally; Bush’s imperial presidency has already done substantial damage to that most basic of governmental ideals. It remains to be seen how much more damage he’ll do.

(Thanks for the heads-up, Triple-F!)

Harry Taylor is my hero. Somehow, a non-ass-kisser managed to get into a Bush Q&A PR event in Charlotte. Harry rules.

They’ve killed a network neutrality measure, paving the way for folks like AT&T to rape and ultimately destroy the Internet as we know it.

Wired is running a story on the gradual disintermediation of local NPR affiliates in favor of podcasts, mp3 downloads, and online streaming of the popular shows. NPR is different than, say, the RIAA in that they’re not pretending that their business model doesn’t need to evolve, and Wired makes much of this, but they don’t make one key point quite clear enough.

Lots of affiliates suck unmitigated ass. The Heathen household is a big NPR consumer, but we don’t sponsor the local station. Why? They’re awful. Their programming choices are pedestrian, and their locally produced content is amateurish at best. We view KUHF as a necessary evil, and the only reason we ever tune in is to get the national programming. In that sense, they are indistinguishable from the television broadcast network affiliates; we’d ditch them, too, if it were convenient to just get a national feed. It’s only under very rare circumstances that local broadcast media provide anything of value to us — e.g., during Hurricane Rita — and when that happens, we’ll gladly use rabbit ears. For the other 99.9% of the time, the local stations are the people screwing up our Tivo’s attempts to capture Letterman because they’ve decided people really want a 45 minute evening news show.

But back to NPR. We’d happily pay money directly to NPR for a feed of their national programs — Morning Edition, ATC, Marketplace, Fresh Air, etc. — as long as they were blissfully free of local interruption. They’re worth at least as much as HBO. Disintermediation is happening to the KUHFs of the world now because the internet makes it possible, but also because the affiliates offer nothing of value. It’s not just the pledge drives. It’s pledge drives in service of overwhelmingly half-assed programming. Radio is easy; getting content from the Internet is orders of magnitude more difficult compared to turning on the radio. That people are opting for that despite the higher barrier is an indictment of the local affiliate system. The desire to disintermediate is, in this case, a prerequisite to the actual disintermediation. It’s a choice listeners are making consciously and deliberately; it’s the market speaking. NPR and its affiliates would do well to listen carefully, and act accordingly.

A: When it’s in Arizona, and you’re the son of the state Senate president. Holy crap.

Oh, yes, of course the politico in the picture is a Republican. Did you really have to ask?

And we love him for it. Telephonic cryptography for the masses, from the guy who gave us easy public key crypto. With the GOP content to allow George to eavesdrop on whomever he likes with no oversight, widespread unbreakable crypto is probably the only way to keep your communications private.

You’re idiots.