Sun prepares to axe Cobalt products?

According to some posts on the Cobalt Forum, the Sun Knowledge Base has apparently dropped all Cobalt-related content (including a set of instructions for recompiling PHP on the Qube that I had a link to), so I have documented here everything I know about getting the latest versions of PHP to run on the RAQ550 and Qube without breaking the administration interface.

It's a shame that Cobalt was acquired by Sun only to kill off what had to be the best all-around server appliance in the market - without removing the threat Linux still presents to Solaris...

Speakeasy has always been of some interest to me, because they operate (what at least used to be) a profitable ADSL business in the US and were used by many people as a yardstick for ADSL penetration (if only because they were reasonably forthcoming with information and placed minimal spin on it). They probably mean zip to Portuguese techies, but you can say that about a lot of interesting things.

The real news here is that Speakeasy now allows people to resell their bandwidth, which is a logical consequence of it being fundamentally infeasible to control (not impossible, because there are ways to find out about those things). Their TOS already allowed for connection sharing, but this allows them to both expand their registered user base (by local procurement) and sell more services (mailboxes, typically), hence (theoretically) increasing their profits.

Gartner on Hotspots

After almost, but not quite contradicting itself, Gartner used the same forecast figures twice for WLAN Hotspot locations worldwide, so they must be true:

Public WLAN Hot Spot Locations Worldwide, by Type

Location        2001    2002    2003    2004    2005
Airports        85      152     292     378     423
Hotels          569     2,274   11,687  22,021  23,663
Retail Outlets  474     11,109  50,287  82,149  85,567
Enterprise
Guesting Areas  84      624     1,762   3,708   5,413
Stations and
Ports           -       88      623     2,143   3,887
Community
Hot Spots       2       266     5,637   20,561  30,659
Others          -       240     790     1,526   2,156
Total Market    1,214   14,752  71,079  132,486 151,768

Source: Gartner Dataquest (June 2003)