And Sun (NASDAQ: JAVA) is already down quite a bit.

Makes sense … right? If a bank doesn’t need it, it should give it back, with interest. This is what we want. It is the right thing to do. Unless there is something else going on. Ummm … er … ah …

Once, a long while ago, back during my SGI days, SGI had been pummeled for missing our numbers one quarter. There was a brief rally, someone asked if we had turned things around. Experienced commentators talked about how even “dead cats bounce”. Not exactly the most pleasant of images, but there it was. Obviously, you know how that story turned out. I raise this situation now, as there has been a market rally over the past few days.

6+ inches of snow (15cm for those using sane units) expected. Of course, the last time they predicted snow, we got 45 degree sun-shining days. Unfortunately, they appear to be right this time. [ ](http://www.accuweather.com/radar-large.asp?partner=forecastfox&traveler=0&site=MI_&type=SIR&anim=0&level=state&large=1)

Q: When is an array not an array? A: When it is a Fortran90 allocatable array, and you are pulling out your remaining (&^&$#% hair trying to pass it to a C routine. Ok, I have found some hope, appealing to some F2003 bits which this compiler supports. But still … the most likely scenarios is that I have to create an array of pointers to get to the data … which means that we are likely to have some memory performance hit.

Not sure if someone else is offering more. Sun apparently said they didn’t want to be negotiating exclusively with IBM, so IBM yanked the bid. I expect Sun’s shares (NASDAQ: JAVA) to plummet in the morning, unless they announce their new suitor. Shades of Yahoo+Microsoft. Someone on the Yahoo side did a really bad thing by their shareholders. And got fired for it. [update] More at WSJ. Sun’s board rejected the offer as too low.

So Velocibunny now has a shiny new set of 5502 Nehalem CPUs in it, 12 GB ram, and 24 SSDs. For laughs, I ran BenchmarkSQL on it. Ok, not for laughs, but the folks who were originally all hot an bothered to run on it sort of disappeared, so I had to come up with some benchmark tests. Oddly enough, BenchmarkSQL was written by one of them. Go figure. I am attempting to understand, in the simplest possible classification scenario, what a good score is and what a bad score is.

John West at InsideHPC comments and links to a Forbes article with a gedanken experiment. The net of this is that huge swaths of Sun offerings would be EOLed. Huge swaths. Which is similar to what John and I said in separate articles. The Forbes article notes something that should give customers some pause: We agree. This would end a proprietary product, with no real chance of followon going forward. One of the huge dangers in any IT purchase is the possibility of an un-recoverable bricking at some point.

* @[herrold](http://twitter.com/herrold) Yes.... she's dead Jim ... this time, it looks like for real. The zombie doesn't look like its going to walk any time soon [in reply to herrold](http://twitter.com/herrold/statuses/1431586144) [#](http://twitter.com/sijoe/statuses/1435454318) Powered by Twitter Tools.

I didn’t have access to all the information (and still don’t), just what seeps out in reports. Here is a good report, which suggests that this might not be as pretty a face (and it wasn’t pretty) as SGI suggested in its customer letter. Critical aspects not mentioned in public until now appear to be I had heard it was shopping itself around. But what real value did it have? And what about its liabilities?