Look, I get it, working on a dissertation can make you go crazy. That said, armed with his advanced degree, Chang should at least be able to get a job at Google answering customer-support calls or keeping an eye on toddlers at the Kinderplex.

Young used his time on stage during the keynote to show off a 10-disc Blu-Ray project that included almost every song he'd ever recorded, in chronological order. Sun's role? In providing Sony the Java code that allows for interactive features on Blu-ray. Young said that while he'd been working on the project for 15 years, only now was the digital audio quality up to standard. Each track had visual accompaniment from the relevant era. When a recording from the compact disc era appeared, he joked "We took a giant dump at this point." He also mentioned that he was working to create a car that didn't require stops for refueling, which also has some tangential relationship to Java, showing off an American mid-century model he's entering in the automotive X-Prize challenge.

Interestingly enough, us bloggers with our hair-trigger deadlines were given first crack at asking questions of Young (and indulging in the complimentary fruit plate), while the print reporters with their leisurely deadlines had to wait outside. As we waited for Young and his entourage to arrive, O'Reilly Media founder Tim O'Reilly showed off his Livescribe pen for recording audio in time with written notes to News.com editor-in-chief Dan Farber, who remarked sagely about the need for special Livescribe paper, "So they're selling the razors and the blades." But the two quickly went into fanboy mode when Young arrived, peppering the man with questions before anyone else could get a word in edgewise.

The car project, part of a documentary Young's working on with filmmaker Larry Johnson, a longtime collaborator, seems to be a bit of a lark. He wants to create a superefficient car that doesn't need to stop for gas or electricity, and he wants it to be heavy. While I might have gotten a C+ in college physics, it's enough to know that you can't run a Lincoln Continental on unicorns and rainbows. "It's very kooky. When you try to do something like this, people say you're nuts." Wonder why?

I mostly went on behalf of my father, who's pretty much a superfan (to the point where, besides the mutton-chop sideburns and dark glasses, he and Young seem to have identical fashion sense). My question had to do with the fact that my father had already bought Young's work on vinyl, then again on CD, and will now probably buy it all over again on Blu-ray in the fall. "I think it's the same as Microsoft selling the same applications every year with new bells and whistles." He then made this vinyl collector very happy by lambasting the quality of digital audio, and saying that he still records and edits everything in analog.

Young was at his best when he pierced through the Sun marketing hype of the morning. When O'Reilly asked how the musician felt about the "free" aspects of Sun's open-source efforts with Java, Young veered well of the "Keep on rockin' in a free world" tagline I assume Sun paid dearly for: "The free aspect... I think that's a word, that's a marketing thing." Touché.

The company then trotted out the likes of Ian freed, Amazon.com's VP on the Kindle project, and Rikko Sakaguchi, SVP at Sony Ericsson, to explain how their devices were using Java. A Sun software engineer and designer showed off Java-powered apps, such as the ConnectedLife widget which travels from Facebook to desktop client to mobile device. (He did not mention that Facebook has dropped support for Java.) Green announced that the latest build of the Java software was available today, and that the developers suite, OpenJDK, now supports popular Linux distributions Ubuntu and Red Hat, with a Fedora release within a month.

A software-emulated mobile device was shown running Google's Android — presumably the two companies have made nice. But beyond the OpenJDK announcement, nary a word was spoken about the enterprise market and if any role for Java in datacenter applications was mentioned, I missed it. I was listening for Green or CEO Jonathan Schwartz to say something, anything, about the company's quarterly earnings and new revenue streams. Instead, he talked about how the latest Java releases will be free and open-source.

I guess the company will make their coin providing support to the device manufacturers who use the JavaME mobile platform or the JavaFX suite of multimedia tools — competing with other application development environments such as Adobe Flash and Microsoft Silverlight. Problem is, Sun's tools for content developers require a level of Java expertise well above that required by Adobe's easy-to-use Flash tools, and both Flash and Silverlight are also being licensed for free to device manufacturers. But hey, did we mention Neil Young?

• Sun promises to make Java open source. It will be the loss leader for a lovely set of Sun steak knives. [VNUnet]
• Blue Security dies. USA Today publishes graph showing the Blue Frog mascot being slowly cooked. [Washington Post]
• "I wouldn't take that so literally." — Yahoo CFO Susan Decker, about projected revenue of $4.6 billion to $4.85 billion. Apparently those numbers were metaphorical. [CNN Money]
• Napster almost made money this quarter. Who'd have thought that an RIAA-approved walled garden piggybacking off the brand recognition of a stick-it-to-the-man filesharing network wouldn't be a cash cow? [CNET]
• Oh, looks like the Internet is just for child porn. At least on Orkut. [Bloomberg]