A Fool and his Words are Soon Parted

Oops! Maybe eBay is Solar Powered? February 19, 2006

Perhaps it’s just a nasty coincidence, but it appears that eBay’s move from Windows boxes to Sun servers is not quite complete. A post from Boing Boing about a 17″ G4 iMac going on sale has the following link:

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=5869550238

It doesn’t take a rocket surgeon to recognize that that the URL appears to be calling into an ISAPI DLL on a Windows box of some kind (ISAPI, or Information Server API, was Microsoft’s pre-ASP answer to creating CGI applications). However, in the upper right corner of this page, you’ll notice this logo. Java Technology? Powered by Sun? Is it possible that Sun made a bit too much noise about this move?

Well, to be fair, they didn’t say exactly what the Sun systems were powering. Maybe they’ve got the Sun Fire x64 boxes monitoring the UPS. Anybody got a better explanation?