You know what I think? I think I didn't put enough emphasis on the word firing. That should have really read, "all those in favor of FIRING Sun's marketing department". Maybe even with a little asterisk that said in bold print, "* As in kicked out on the street, deported from the mainland US, and told they're never going to work in this country again, fired."
No sterilization was necessary to catch mice in the grain. All they needed was a proper podium with counter-measures against mice reaching the grain. Since they were already familiar with the reproductive cycles of humans and most animals, it only made sense that such an experiment should be tried.
I'll grant you that maggots from meat would have been harder to disprove, but after disproving the mice theory it would have taken little time to observe the lives of maggots, understand that they became flies, then make the connection that the flies were landing on the meat and reproducing in some form.
Airtight jars were only necessary to understand microscopic concepts like spores, fungi, and pathogens. (Even then, I don't doubt they could have found suitable experiments if they put their minds to it.)
Make sense? Next order of business, then. May I have a call for all those in favor of firing Sun's marketing department? (Slashdot crash in 3... 2... 1...)
Wow. Netscape Enterprise Server. Now there's a name I haven't heard in a long time. I was actually pretty excited about looking at the code to satisfy my historical interest. There's a lot of old Netscape technology that's bitten the dust over the years!
Unfortunately, this appears to be the modern Java Enterprise Server code. There's even Java 1.5 classes to read in modern XML configuration files. I can't find any sign of some of the really interesting stuff from days gone by. (e.g. LiveScript - a technology that was before its time and thus under-implemented compared to what it could have been used for.)
Still, this is a very interesting bit of history and I'd like to thank Sun and Mr. Aker for releasing it! I'm going to dig through the versioning history and see if there's anything in there. Anyone else here find something interesting?
One thing that impresses upon me about this server is how little code their is. Weighing in at only 13 MBs, it's far too small of a project to be of commercial interest today. But back then, this was some pretty big stuff!;-)
Semantics nothing. Platonic Solids was simply an incorrect line of reasoning. Solids vs. Gases vs. Liquids vs. Plasmas are all the same elemental materials. The difference is in the amount of energy in the system. Plato thought they were fundamentally different particles with fundamentally different microscopic shapes.
They found empirical data that seems to match a theory that was proposed earlier (so it was not made up in response to the data). I think that puts it ahead of string theory
Actually, this is a proposed aspect of String Theory according to TFA. So the two appear to be a bit intertwined. (Pun not intended.)
I'd be careful about how much stock you put in their philosophies vs. the way the universe actually works. Plato and Aristotle floated a lot of ideas. Being the first of their kind, they had a pretty open slate to work with. But let's not forget that Plato and Aristotle held the world back for thousands of years with some of their ideas. e.g. Mice spontaneously generated out of meat. All matter was composed of the elements of nature (earth, wind, fire, water) which were each composed of "platonic solids" (microscopic 3D shapes like cubes and tetrahedrons). The existence of the "aether", a material that bound all things together through open space.
Some of their ideas had merit and simply needed more investigation to prove or disprove. But some mistakes like abiogenesis should not have been accepted as fact for as long as they were. It's incredible to my mind (inconceivable!:-P) that for all the intelligence and know-how of the ancient world, no one worked out a simple experiment to prove or disprove spontaneous generation!
So let's say that instead it's on http://www.malware.lol/ - why would a script on a page from malware.lol be allowed access to a resource - in this case 'pinging' the 'lock.gif' - *on* https://www.mybank.com/ ?
There's a great deal of internet history behind this one. Originally, there were no barriers what so ever. Anyone could link anything from any page. Of course, as Javascript entered the scene and grew in sophistication, this was soon realized to be a problem. In result, most browsers adopted security behaviors for the really powerful stuff like XMLHttpRequest and locked out scripting across frames.
However, that still leaves a hole like this one. And it's not an easy hole to plug. Quite a few sites are actually structured around the idea of cross-site linking. (e.g. The HTML may be www.mainsite.com while the images come from the web server media.mainsite.com.) Interestingly, this sort of structure is actually a solution to the problem posed. So it's difficult to dispose of it out of hand.
Some of the web standards are moving toward highly restrictive models for HTTPS sites. e.g. HTTPS resources can only be accessed by pages whose origin is the same HTTPS site. More likely though, I expect to see more explicit security configurations along the lines of what Flash does. Flash uses a crossdomain.xml file on the target site to broadcast if a resource can be accessed or not. This scheme allows for situations like a media server separate from the primary site, but it also allows for those cross domain accesses to be tightly restricted.
Of course, the scheme is not without its problems. Nothing prevents an attacker from transmitting information he may have collected TO a server that he has configured with a permissive policy file. If he finds a vulnerability that allows him to collect the information in the first place, he's going to be able to make off with the info scott-free.
In result, web security is an ongoing area of research. It's incredibly complex due to the nature and history of the web, but standards bodies are working hard to find more reliable solutions that don't negatively impact existing sites and current usage.
BTW, for those of you who are curious about this attack (and are too lazy to RTFA), this basically uses a common image set behind a protected login. e.g.
If you ping the blasted thing for long enough, you will be able to detect the user logging in. One pop-up later and you've stolen their info.
Now protecting against this sort of issue is an interesting question. Ideally static resources should never be behind closed doors. But that answer is a bit of a cop-out. The next best thing is to ensure that session cookies are maintained inside the login tab ONLY and that persistent cookies are not used for auto-login.
(Interesting question: I wonder if Chrome is vulnerable? With process isolation, this trick would require that the main Chrome process delegate the handling of session cookies. Which seems like a bad idea anyway, so I would hope they implemented the browser in a more secure manner.)
Here's the novel part of it: it doesn't involve any of the typical attack vectors we all know and love.
A cross-site scripting attack sounds like a pretty typical attack vector to me. Javascript should not be able to "detect" if they have a banking site open. Pure and simple.
I agree. It's hard to think of it in such terms, but a lot has changed in technology since Bush took office. Obama is not the first to be shot with a digital camera because he's so tech savvy (as the summary implies), but rather because in the last eight years, digital film has almost entirely replaced film photography.
To put this into perspective, when Bush took office only early adopters had digital cameras. I got my first one (VGA resolution, even!) about the time Bush was sworn in. High resolution cameras capable of replacing film were simply impractical and too expensive for even professional photography. Fast forward eight years and a 'friggin cell phone can take multi-megapixel photos. The professional gear is just as affordable, if not more so, than the analog stuff and can produce resolutions that are more than comparable to a good film. The advantages of the new technology (e.g. zero film cost, easy manipulation, digital transfer, quick reproduction, etc.) are too numerous to fully name. In result, there are very few photographers who still use film-based cameras.
Thus my point is simply this: This is a whole lot of non-news.;-)
That doesn't prevent there from being a rather significant pool of classic media. Take the old Superman cartoons as an example. They all fell into public domain long before they could be grandfathered back into existence. Thus just about anyone who wants to host them, edit them, use them in a new work, or otherwise make use of those old films is able to do so. Also, some of those films are likely to be new works that are gifted into the Creative Commons in the same way the Wikipedia article text is. Think of a shark in its natural environment, a tour of a famous building, or even a re-enactment of a historical battle.
There's even work that's been done to show how Wikipedia might use the HTML5 tag if and when it becomes widely deployed. (See this page for a dev version of Opera and 2 example Wikipedia pages that support & fallback content.) Despite the seeming incongruity of allowing videos inside Wikipedia pages, the demos shown is actually quite natural.
That is my understanding, yes. Though that doesn't completely remove potential conflicts of interest. Trading political favors comes to mind as one way to work around a divestment of assets.
how could you possibly miss the unending (and extremely irritating) ads on all the main broadcasting stations about the change,
Simple. It depends on your geographical location. The FCC focused on a few early-cutover areas to launch massive advertising campaigns. If you live in one of those areas, you've been annoyed to death over the changeover. If you happen to live in some other area (especially many of the rural areas the government is concerned about) you've probably seen a minimum of changeover commercials.
That minimum of commercials appears to be causing more confusion than anything else. Consumers are basically coming away with the message, "Changeover == TV Ain't Gonna Work".
Now personally, I think the people they're concerned about are simply not capable of understanding what's going on. (Mostly because they lack a good understanding of technology and background rather than because they're outright stupid.) If the government just makes the changeover, these folks will manage to find some smart young'un to help them get their TV working again.
There are certain sectors where conflicts of interest are unavoidable. Financial Investing and Politics are two them. The general remedy in these situations is full disclosure rather than suffer a chain of recuses every time you try to get something done. With full disclosure, at least the opposition can frame your decisions properly and decide whether or not they are motivated by personal interest.
That's why Cheney received only a minimal amount of heat for his Haliburton connection. Everyone knew up front what his interests were and had ample opportunity to question his motives.
Barack Obama's call to delay the DTV transition would affect not only millions of analog TV viewers, but also powerful companies with a vested interest in the changeover date--including at least one with an executive on Obama's transition team.
That doesn't mean an issue does not exist. Just because some big company is going to benefit from a delay in DTV rollouts, does that mean we should cut off our nose to spite our face?
President Elect Obama has a reasonable argument that the market is not ready for DTV. I personally think that it will never be ready for the DTV changeover and that we'll need to do it the hard way anyway, but that's just my opinion. The government had a specific way they wanted this done. They have yet to achieve that goal.
Specifically, many consumers are still unaware of the changeover, or believe that they will need a new television or cable/satellite provider to continue receiving service.
Until the FCC gets much closer to achieving their goals for this changeover, Mr. Obama has a reasonable point.
It's kind of naive the way you blame pirates for the excesses of the industry.
Excesses of the industry? We're talking about Nintendo handhelds here. You're probably the only one in history who has considered that market "excessive". (Whatever that's supposed to mean.)
On the other hand, such lock out can easily prevent honest customers from exercising their rights (first sale), and create difficulties for them that they just won't easily resolve. May even drive some to piracy to avoid all the headaches.
Did you miss the part where we were talking about a handheld console? Right of first sale is NOT impeded by encryption of DS game cards any more than the NES lockout chip impeded the right of first sale. And you're going to have to backup your comment about "headaches" with some solid data here. We're not talking about PCs. We're talking about a ROM-based handheld game console. You know, the things where you plug the game in and it works right the first time, every time?
Region codes have nothing to do with piracy
Normally they don't. But in this case, they do. Nintendo has produced seven generations or so of handheld game consoles. Not a single one supported region codes until the DSi. It stands to reason that if Nintendo wasn't trying to lock out pirates with new protection technology, there's a good chance the region codes never would have made it into this system.
Way to drink the flavor-aid.
Way to stick your head up your ass. If we were talking about PC games you might have a point. But not a single comment you made applies to this particular market. Which means that you've just gone from having a potentially reasonable point to becoming an apologist for illegal and immoral behavior.
People are going to pirate your software, no matter how hard you try to protect it, there was even devices for the original gameboy.
Thus the release of the DSi. Not only will it lock out R4 cards for classic DS games, but Nintendo has added significant upgrades to the protection on DSi games. They've even added region coding to round out the new protection bundle. (Thanks a lump, ya bunch of pirates!)
I doubt these changes will completely eliminate piracy. As you said, there are always those who will make the effort. However, it may stem the rather rampant degree of DS piracy and bring it back down to reasonable levels.
I imagine these protections are particularly important for the DSi since it has downloadable titles that can be saved to an SDCard. If Nintendo failed to encrypt these games like they did with the Wii, everyone could give their friends copies just by swapping SD Cards.
Due to the fact that the sun is MUCH larger than this 12,000km shield, the shadow will actually get smaller as it gets closer to the sun.
Not quite. We're talking about perspectives here. The moon is significantly smaller than the earth, but it can cast a shadow large enough to block out the majority of the Sun's radiation. (i.e. A solar eclipse.) That means that 3500 km in diameter is sufficient at ~0.0025 AUs from the earth. The quantity necessary will decrease with distance as long as the shield appears to be larger than the sun in the sky. Eventually, we reach a point of diminishing returns where the sun appears larger in the sky than the shield. At that point the shield becomes useless.
If that doesn't seem right, consider how easy it would be to orbit a small satellite to blot out your favorite star from the sky. Many of those stars are many times larger than our sun, but their extreme distance means that a much smaller object can easily blot out dozens or even hundreds of those stars by occupying a very small space.
This is the same sort of stuff we hear on Slashdot every day. The actual evaluation at the end of nearly every entry says, "Not very likely".
Though I do think that Sun needs to expand their product strategy or face extinction. Their current high-end market may be lucrative, but it's continually being eaten away at by cheaper and cheaper equipment.
Personally, I think Sun would do well to enter the desktop market. Their Mad Hatter system was a good first try, but they abandoned it before it had a chance to mature! (Speaking as one of Sun's customers who paid money for the software just to be left out in the cold.)
You know, shadows cover a much larger volume the farther away the object is from the object it's darkening. Place the shield closer to the sun, and you wouldn't need anywhere near 12,000km to provide protection for the earth. Orbital calculations might be a bit tricky, but that's NASA's job.
Slashdot Mirror
You know what I think? I think I didn't put enough emphasis on the word firing . That should have really read, "all those in favor of FIRING Sun's marketing department". Maybe even with a little asterisk that said in bold print, "* As in kicked out on the street, deported from the mainland US, and told they're never going to work in this country again, fired."
I dunno. What do you think?
Wow. Talk about being twenty years too late...
P.S. I just got a Wireless printer. No USB required, and no RS-232 port included. Might want to get with the times there, chief. ;-)
No sterilization was necessary to catch mice in the grain. All they needed was a proper podium with counter-measures against mice reaching the grain. Since they were already familiar with the reproductive cycles of humans and most animals, it only made sense that such an experiment should be tried.
I'll grant you that maggots from meat would have been harder to disprove, but after disproving the mice theory it would have taken little time to observe the lives of maggots, understand that they became flies, then make the connection that the flies were landing on the meat and reproducing in some form.
Airtight jars were only necessary to understand microscopic concepts like spores, fungi, and pathogens. (Even then, I don't doubt they could have found suitable experiments if they put their minds to it.)
Those were different products often bundled as part of a complete Netscape (later IPlanet) solution. Those are now sold as Sun Java System Directory Server Enterprise Edition and Sun Java System Messaging Server, respectively.
And this code isn't the dead version of Netscape Enterprise Server. It's the core to Sun Java System Web Server, yet another piece of the Sun Java Enterprise System.
Make sense? Next order of business, then. May I have a call for all those in favor of firing Sun's marketing department? (Slashdot crash in 3... 2... 1...)
s/LiveScript/LiveWire/g
Sorry, my memory is a bit rusty on that point. Here's a fun developer's guide to make up for it:
http://docsrv.sco.com/INT_LiveWire/CONTENTS.html
(Can you believe that it's still on SCO's servers? I thought they'd finally divested all of that nasty business of owning assets and whatnot. :-P)
Wow. Netscape Enterprise Server. Now there's a name I haven't heard in a long time. I was actually pretty excited about looking at the code to satisfy my historical interest. There's a lot of old Netscape technology that's bitten the dust over the years!
Unfortunately, this appears to be the modern Java Enterprise Server code. There's even Java 1.5 classes to read in modern XML configuration files. I can't find any sign of some of the really interesting stuff from days gone by. (e.g. LiveScript - a technology that was before its time and thus under-implemented compared to what it could have been used for.)
Still, this is a very interesting bit of history and I'd like to thank Sun and Mr. Aker for releasing it! I'm going to dig through the versioning history and see if there's anything in there. Anyone else here find something interesting?
One thing that impresses upon me about this server is how little code their is. Weighing in at only 13 MBs, it's far too small of a project to be of commercial interest today. But back then, this was some pretty big stuff! ;-)
Semantics nothing. Platonic Solids was simply an incorrect line of reasoning. Solids vs. Gases vs. Liquids vs. Plasmas are all the same elemental materials. The difference is in the amount of energy in the system. Plato thought they were fundamentally different particles with fundamentally different microscopic shapes.
Derrr... that was a miscommunication between brain and fingers. It's supposed to read "grain". Meat was maggots.
Actually, this is a proposed aspect of String Theory according to TFA. So the two appear to be a bit intertwined. (Pun not intended.)
I'd be careful about how much stock you put in their philosophies vs. the way the universe actually works. Plato and Aristotle floated a lot of ideas. Being the first of their kind, they had a pretty open slate to work with. But let's not forget that Plato and Aristotle held the world back for thousands of years with some of their ideas. e.g. Mice spontaneously generated out of meat. All matter was composed of the elements of nature (earth, wind, fire, water) which were each composed of "platonic solids" (microscopic 3D shapes like cubes and tetrahedrons). The existence of the "aether", a material that bound all things together through open space.
Some of their ideas had merit and simply needed more investigation to prove or disprove. But some mistakes like abiogenesis should not have been accepted as fact for as long as they were. It's incredible to my mind (inconceivable! :-P) that for all the intelligence and know-how of the ancient world, no one worked out a simple experiment to prove or disprove spontaneous generation!
...was not going to be televised? So much for common wisdom. :-P
There's a great deal of internet history behind this one. Originally, there were no barriers what so ever. Anyone could link anything from any page. Of course, as Javascript entered the scene and grew in sophistication, this was soon realized to be a problem. In result, most browsers adopted security behaviors for the really powerful stuff like XMLHttpRequest and locked out scripting across frames.
However, that still leaves a hole like this one. And it's not an easy hole to plug. Quite a few sites are actually structured around the idea of cross-site linking. (e.g. The HTML may be www.mainsite.com while the images come from the web server media.mainsite.com.) Interestingly, this sort of structure is actually a solution to the problem posed. So it's difficult to dispose of it out of hand.
Some of the web standards are moving toward highly restrictive models for HTTPS sites. e.g. HTTPS resources can only be accessed by pages whose origin is the same HTTPS site. More likely though, I expect to see more explicit security configurations along the lines of what Flash does. Flash uses a crossdomain.xml file on the target site to broadcast if a resource can be accessed or not. This scheme allows for situations like a media server separate from the primary site, but it also allows for those cross domain accesses to be tightly restricted.
Of course, the scheme is not without its problems. Nothing prevents an attacker from transmitting information he may have collected TO a server that he has configured with a permissive policy file. If he finds a vulnerability that allows him to collect the information in the first place, he's going to be able to make off with the info scott-free.
In result, web security is an ongoing area of research. It's incredibly complex due to the nature and history of the web, but standards bodies are working hard to find more reliable solutions that don't negatively impact existing sites and current usage.
BTW, for those of you who are curious about this attack (and are too lazy to RTFA), this basically uses a common image set behind a protected login. e.g.
If you ping the blasted thing for long enough, you will be able to detect the user logging in. One pop-up later and you've stolen their info.
Now protecting against this sort of issue is an interesting question. Ideally static resources should never be behind closed doors. But that answer is a bit of a cop-out. The next best thing is to ensure that session cookies are maintained inside the login tab ONLY and that persistent cookies are not used for auto-login.
(Interesting question: I wonder if Chrome is vulnerable? With process isolation, this trick would require that the main Chrome process delegate the handling of session cookies. Which seems like a bad idea anyway, so I would hope they implemented the browser in a more secure manner.)
A cross-site scripting attack sounds like a pretty typical attack vector to me. Javascript should not be able to "detect" if they have a banking site open. Pure and simple.
I agree. It's hard to think of it in such terms, but a lot has changed in technology since Bush took office. Obama is not the first to be shot with a digital camera because he's so tech savvy (as the summary implies), but rather because in the last eight years, digital film has almost entirely replaced film photography.
To put this into perspective, when Bush took office only early adopters had digital cameras. I got my first one (VGA resolution, even!) about the time Bush was sworn in. High resolution cameras capable of replacing film were simply impractical and too expensive for even professional photography. Fast forward eight years and a 'friggin cell phone can take multi-megapixel photos. The professional gear is just as affordable, if not more so, than the analog stuff and can produce resolutions that are more than comparable to a good film. The advantages of the new technology (e.g. zero film cost, easy manipulation, digital transfer, quick reproduction, etc.) are too numerous to fully name. In result, there are very few photographers who still use film-based cameras.
Thus my point is simply this: This is a whole lot of non-news. ;-)
That doesn't prevent there from being a rather significant pool of classic media. Take the old Superman cartoons as an example. They all fell into public domain long before they could be grandfathered back into existence. Thus just about anyone who wants to host them, edit them, use them in a new work, or otherwise make use of those old films is able to do so. Also, some of those films are likely to be new works that are gifted into the Creative Commons in the same way the Wikipedia article text is. Think of a shark in its natural environment, a tour of a famous building, or even a re-enactment of a historical battle.
There's even work that's been done to show how Wikipedia might use the HTML5 tag if and when it becomes widely deployed. (See this page for a dev version of Opera and 2 example Wikipedia pages that support & fallback content.) Despite the seeming incongruity of allowing videos inside Wikipedia pages, the demos shown is actually quite natural.
That is my understanding, yes. Though that doesn't completely remove potential conflicts of interest. Trading political favors comes to mind as one way to work around a divestment of assets.
Simple. It depends on your geographical location. The FCC focused on a few early-cutover areas to launch massive advertising campaigns. If you live in one of those areas, you've been annoyed to death over the changeover. If you happen to live in some other area (especially many of the rural areas the government is concerned about) you've probably seen a minimum of changeover commercials.
That minimum of commercials appears to be causing more confusion than anything else. Consumers are basically coming away with the message, "Changeover == TV Ain't Gonna Work".
Now personally, I think the people they're concerned about are simply not capable of understanding what's going on. (Mostly because they lack a good understanding of technology and background rather than because they're outright stupid.) If the government just makes the changeover, these folks will manage to find some smart young'un to help them get their TV working again.
There are certain sectors where conflicts of interest are unavoidable. Financial Investing and Politics are two them. The general remedy in these situations is full disclosure rather than suffer a chain of recuses every time you try to get something done. With full disclosure, at least the opposition can frame your decisions properly and decide whether or not they are motivated by personal interest.
That's why Cheney received only a minimal amount of heat for his Haliburton connection. Everyone knew up front what his interests were and had ample opportunity to question his motives.
That doesn't mean an issue does not exist. Just because some big company is going to benefit from a delay in DTV rollouts, does that mean we should cut off our nose to spite our face?
President Elect Obama has a reasonable argument that the market is not ready for DTV. I personally think that it will never be ready for the DTV changeover and that we'll need to do it the hard way anyway, but that's just my opinion. The government had a specific way they wanted this done. They have yet to achieve that goal.
Specifically, many consumers are still unaware of the changeover, or believe that they will need a new television or cable/satellite provider to continue receiving service.
Until the FCC gets much closer to achieving their goals for this changeover, Mr. Obama has a reasonable point.
Excesses of the industry? We're talking about Nintendo handhelds here. You're probably the only one in history who has considered that market "excessive". (Whatever that's supposed to mean.)
Did you miss the part where we were talking about a handheld console? Right of first sale is NOT impeded by encryption of DS game cards any more than the NES lockout chip impeded the right of first sale. And you're going to have to backup your comment about "headaches" with some solid data here. We're not talking about PCs. We're talking about a ROM-based handheld game console. You know, the things where you plug the game in and it works right the first time, every time?
Normally they don't. But in this case, they do. Nintendo has produced seven generations or so of handheld game consoles. Not a single one supported region codes until the DSi. It stands to reason that if Nintendo wasn't trying to lock out pirates with new protection technology, there's a good chance the region codes never would have made it into this system.
Way to stick your head up your ass. If we were talking about PC games you might have a point. But not a single comment you made applies to this particular market. Which means that you've just gone from having a potentially reasonable point to becoming an apologist for illegal and immoral behavior.
Thus the release of the DSi. Not only will it lock out R4 cards for classic DS games, but Nintendo has added significant upgrades to the protection on DSi games. They've even added region coding to round out the new protection bundle. (Thanks a lump, ya bunch of pirates!)
I doubt these changes will completely eliminate piracy. As you said, there are always those who will make the effort. However, it may stem the rather rampant degree of DS piracy and bring it back down to reasonable levels.
I imagine these protections are particularly important for the DSi since it has downloadable titles that can be saved to an SDCard. If Nintendo failed to encrypt these games like they did with the Wii, everyone could give their friends copies just by swapping SD Cards.
Not quite. We're talking about perspectives here. The moon is significantly smaller than the earth, but it can cast a shadow large enough to block out the majority of the Sun's radiation. (i.e. A solar eclipse.) That means that 3500 km in diameter is sufficient at ~0.0025 AUs from the earth. The quantity necessary will decrease with distance as long as the shield appears to be larger than the sun in the sky. Eventually, we reach a point of diminishing returns where the sun appears larger in the sky than the shield. At that point the shield becomes useless.
If that doesn't seem right, consider how easy it would be to orbit a small satellite to blot out your favorite star from the sky. Many of those stars are many times larger than our sun, but their extreme distance means that a much smaller object can easily blot out dozens or even hundreds of those stars by occupying a very small space.
This is the same sort of stuff we hear on Slashdot every day. The actual evaluation at the end of nearly every entry says, "Not very likely".
Though I do think that Sun needs to expand their product strategy or face extinction. Their current high-end market may be lucrative, but it's continually being eaten away at by cheaper and cheaper equipment.
Personally, I think Sun would do well to enter the desktop market. Their Mad Hatter system was a good first try, but they abandoned it before it had a chance to mature! (Speaking as one of Sun's customers who paid money for the software just to be left out in the cold.)
You know, shadows cover a much larger volume the farther away the object is from the object it's darkening. Place the shield closer to the sun, and you wouldn't need anywhere near 12,000km to provide protection for the earth. Orbital calculations might be a bit tricky, but that's NASA's job.