ebay...now in a different shade of blue

Someone on echo pointed out that eBay has switched from IBM technology (servers + WebSphere as I recall) to Sun. The URL for the powered by link still reads http://pages.ebay.com/ebay_IBM.html but it links to a page reading:

eBay is Java© Powered
Running on powerful Sun
Solaris© SPARC® servers
Supported by Sun services and solutions

eBay has chosen Sun’s Solaris Operating System, the most advanced operating system on the planet and its Solaris servers and Java software to help power The World’s Online Marketplace. If you’re running a business like eBay’s, or have similar aspirations, get some Sun.

Now, it's possible it's a glitch, but given that the graphic has changed as well as the text, it appears that IBM has lost a major reference customer for WebSphere and DB2.

Of course, as we're no longer an IBM family I don't really care.

Update

Related: eBay runs on Sun's servers and IBM's URLs (The Register)

Quicken...please, please, isn't there an alternative?

I was just talking about Quicken with my friend Pete today. Unbeknownst to me it was wreaking havoc on my laptop as I ate lunch with him and Cameron Ferstat.

See, I got to lunch early.

Stop laughing, it does happen occasionally, usually when I'm so late for my last thing I end up early for the next one.

Anyway, I get to the Applebee's in Hawthorne and have about twenty minutes to kill. I fired up Quicken to check some bills and enter some data. I then closed my laptop like I do maybe ten-fifteen times a day. Normally that causes it to go into suspend mode. Suspend mode is not a new technology, it's been around for, oh, a decade.

Quicken 2005 does not handle suspend mode, and in fact, prevents the computer from suspending.

So, I got home hours later after running some errands, and fire up my laptop, only to be surprised that the battery is now at 4% with every possible alarm going off that the computer is about to end its earthly existence, if only for awhile.

Add this to the other annoyances I've run into with this version of Quicken:

• When it does "web update" it pops up a modal dialog box that prevents you from doing anything else with Quicken.
• It has decided that all of our AXP accounts are in fact the same account, and debits all payments from my business checking account, which is 99% incorrect.
• It was a forced update, Intuit having killed off web support in the earlier version I was using (and apparently transmitted an update which specifically wiped out web update, since there was no end-of-life warning when I bought Quicken 2002 in 2003
• It's become one of the clunkiest applications on Windows I have to use on a regular basis. And yes, I have to use it, because I've been using one version or another of Quicken since 1994, and until this version had no major reason to change.