At a special meeting Thursday, a 62 percent majority of Sun’s common stock owners–not including CEO Jonathan Schwartz and board chairman and co-founder Scott McNealy, who, oddly, did not attend–approved the deal, which calls for Oracle (ORCL) to acquire Sun (JAVA) for $9.50 per share in cash, a total of $7.4 billion.

The vote was quick and painless, I’m told. It began at 10:02 am PDT and closed at 10:05 am. The end of Sun’s 27-year history was decided in under five minutes.

Of course, the merger still faces antitrust scrutiny, but Oracle insists it will be completed by the end of the summer. Oracle is probably right. And with ownership of Sun’s Java programming language and the Solaris operating system, Oracle will be a systems and software powerhouse capable of taking Microsoft (MSFT), Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) and IBM (IBM) to the mat.

[Image credit: Ars Technica]

Of course it is. The combination of Oracle (ORCL) and Sun (JAVA) will result in more interesting and viable solutions! The market will thrive! The customer will benefit from greater choice and flexibility!

“It’s absolutely a good thing.”

And more so now than ever since the Department of Justice is said to be finalizing its clearance decision of the companies’ deal any day now, right?

Right!

Thing is, this wasn’t always Sun’s opinion. In fact, the company’s touting of the benefits of the Oracle acquisition is, dare I say, a tad ironic given its preacquisition opinion of Oracle’s prices. Consider this handy calculator Sun built to show potential customers how much they could save by going with Sun’s SOA platform over Oracle’s WebLogic Suite (click on the image below).

$8,610,000 for Oracle Fusion? $2,200,00 for Sun SOA Perpetual? Why the choice is clear: Sun, ALL THE WAY. “Oracle WebLogic Customers–Reduce Costs and Eliminate Vendor Lock-in with this limited time offer,” Sun shouts from the page.

Eliminate Vendor Lock-in.

Heh. Act now before the DOJ clears the merger….

Welcome back to Weekend Update, where we showcase some of the highlights from this site over the past week.

In the umpteenth round of the old media versus new media match, the Associated Press in its annual meeting this week played into the stereotype of the grizzled no-nonsense editor who shakes his fist at the new interweb thing (or was it intertube?) and its feisty friend Google News, who are running amok on his lawn. In addition to trying to “protect news content from misappropriation,” AP board chairman and MediaNews group CEO Dean Singleton emphasized that print was the “meat,” while online was merely the “salt and pepper.” Unimpressed, BoomTown thought Singleton was singling out the steak while missing the sizzle.

In response, Google (GOOG), or He Who Was Not Named, posted a polite, if rather ambiguous, statement on its public policy blog, which was just begging for translation. Also doing some interpreting of his own, AP executive Jim Kennedy spoke with MediaMemo on just what all the fire and brimstone was about. In quieter newspaper-related news, The Wall Street Journal continues on its quest to spread pay content online, possibly through niche content, according to WSJ.com Executive Editor Alan Murray. Also experimenting online is the recently opened news Web site, True/Slant, a heady combination of journalism, social networking and advertising.

Another news item that’s gotten people talking is the fallout from the collapsed IBM-Sun merger, aka Sun pulls a Jerry Yang. (Oh Jerry, the Internet kids because it loves… loves to kid! Pwn-age.) Following the news of the collapse, Sun (JAVA) shares dropped more than 27 percent, leading analysts and Digital Daily to predict difficult times ahead for the company, here and later here as the stock continued its fall over the week. Besides quashing its own stock price, Sun also quashed rumors that chairman and co-founder Scott McNealy would replace CEO Jonathan Schwartz.

Other nonthematic highlights this week:

BoomTown got the exclusive on the anticipated talks between Yahoo’s (YHOO) Carol Bartz and Microsoft’s (MSFT) Steve Ballmer in which the two CEOs discussed the possibility of a search and advertising partnership. Speaking of exclusivity, Google and Microsoft like totally want to be Twitter’s new bff, or maybe go steady if Twitter’s interested.

Digital Daily ruminated on speculations of Time Warner (TWX) doing an AOL spinoff, especially after its hire of former Google exec Tim Armstrong and its attempts to amend debt agreements as per an SEC filing. Also in the rumor mill: The iPhone 3.0 may support onboard video editing. Less of a rumor and more of a slap in the face, to Apple (AAPL) at least: Elan Microelectronics has taken off the gloves (and taken up the lawsuit) because it believes that Apple’s products infringe on its touchscreen patents.

MediaMemo goes over the facts about Vevo, the new online music video hub that’s a partnership between Google’s YouTube and Vivendi’s Universal Music Group, with interesting ramifications for both. Meanwhile, iTunes has put in place its new tiered-pricing system, in which songs will now cost 69 cents, 99 cents, or $1.29. But in a question that shocked no one: Where are the all the lowest-tier songs? Don’t worry your pretty little heads, said Big Music, they’re on their way.

In a new Mossblog, Walt Mossberg reports from the battlefield of the growing Smartphone Wars, in which iPhones, BlackBerries and others are engaged in mortal combat. In the Mossberg Solution, Katherine Boehret reviews BumpTop, an application that takes your flat, plain old X-Y plane of a desktop to the next dimension, that is, the third dimension.

More next week!

Whether that is a true vote of confidence remains to be seen. Certainly, Yahoo (YHOO) made similar remarks about Jerry Yang during its ill-starred negotiations with Microsoft (MSFT), and we all know how that worked out for him…

When Sun Microsystems (JAVA) Gadfly-in-Chief Scott McNealy made his infamous statement about online privacy in 1999, there was a horrified hubbub at the time that he had the audacity to say such a thing.

You know, that he actually uttered such a terrible thing as the truth.

What a shock then that everyone is now in yet another tizzy about Facebook changes to its Terms of Service, which pretty much state the obvious again by noting that Facebook archives info you posted, even if you quit the service.

As in, you probably can’t delete it.

No, you can’t–because you shared it, whether it be a photo, an email, a Wall post, whatever, already.

Because the fact of the matter is–since the moment the first caveman sent the first email to another Neanderthal–there has never been true online privacy for anyone who has chosen to participate in this highly interactive medium.

Here’s the key definition of interactive: “mutually or reciprocally active.”

That means once you send something to others, it is out there in cyberspace forever, never ever to return.

And that goes double on social-networking sites, where–let’s be honest–people egregiously overshare and then get all righteous when it is explained to them that sharing means, um, sharing.

As in: You cannot take it back, if you have shared with 476 of your closest “friends,” your bikini shots from Cabo.

Now, BoomTown has learned to live with some very unfortunate haircut choices preserved forever online and does not often agree with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg (I and everyone else slapped him silly on the Beacon debacle until he gave in, for example).

But he is technically right on this, even if Facebook could have done a much better job communicating the changes it made to its ToS, especially since ToS controversies are the Bermuda Triangle of the online arena.

This lack of clarity has always a major Facebook weakness, but it was the same for AOL–now owned by Time Warner (TWX)–back in the day when it was raising privacy red flags all the time.

But that does not make Facebook wrong, as Zuckerberg finally said clearly in a post on Facebook:

People want full ownership and control of their information so they can turn off access to it at any time. At the same time, people also want to be able to bring the information others have shared with them—like email addresses, phone numbers, photos and so on—to other services and grant those services access to those people’s information. These two positions are at odds with each other. There is no system today that enables me to share my email address with you and then simultaneously lets me control who you share it with and also lets you control what services you share it with.”

Zuckerberg then notes that users are just going to have to trust services like Facebook with their data, which is up to the individual to decide before posting whatever online.

And, if regrets come later? Well, try this quote from the great playwright Arthur Miller: “Maybe all one can do is hope to end up with the right regrets.”

Since BoomTown did an obsessive countdown after Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang last year unwisely promised a 100-day, top-to-bottom look at the company, with “no sacred cows” spared (as it turned out, they all were), I decided that–after the month-mark had passed since Microsoft (MSFT) made its unsolicited bid for Yahoo (YHOO)–it was time for a count-up!

Thus, Day 32 (we’re counting from Friday, Feb. 1, when the offer was made public)!

And, frankly, with the added Leap Day this year to add to Yahoo’s agony, this battle is getting about as exciting as Yang’s 100-day slog–with nothing really page-turning on the horizon since Yahoo’s board kicked Microsoft’s $31-per-share offer to the curb several weeks ago.

Now, of course, Microsoft is returning the favor by loudly prepping a proxy fight and trotting out Silicon Valley companies like TellMe to report that a Microsoft takeover is just hunky-dory.

“We are pretty much doing everything we were doing before–just a lot more of it,” said TellMe head Mike McCue to the Associated Press, with the cheeriness of someone with acute Stockholm syndrome and $800 million in Microsoft money.

And if happy, shiny, Windows-cash-gorged tech people don’t impress, according to several sources close to Microsoft, perhaps a little fear factor will work better.

Said these sources, there will be “three to four big-name CEOs” on its list of new board members that Microsoft must nominate in the next two weeks for its slate of directors to replace Yahoo’s current board.

BoomTown recently reported that the software giant was sniffing around for prospects in Silicon Valley.

But, sorry to say, I still cannot figure out what CEOs these are, despite a lot of effort to find out.

So, I started trying to figure it out myself, focusing on tech and Web execs, who are the obvious choices.

Nonetheless, after going over a long list of possible execs, none of the ones I considered seems likely to turn on Yahoo.

Intel? No, CEO Paul Otellini is on the board of Google.

eBay? No, that’s too big a move for the new CEO John Donahoe.

Sun? No, after Scott McNealy’s funny diatribes against Microsoft for so long, CEO Jonathan Schwartz simply cannot.

Dell? No, CEO and Founder Michael Dell has his hands full.

Amazon? CEO and Founder Jeff Bezos is sassy and lives up near Microsoft, but it would be a real slap at another Web icon like Yang.

WPP Group’s Sir Martin Sorrell? Well, to include an ad biggie would be a good move and Sorrell likes to make pointed remarks about Google, but not that sharp.

Frankly, other than non-tech companies, of which there are probably many choices who owe Microsoft in some way, I am officially out of guesses.

Well, of course, except for one Web 2.0 CEO, who has a big name and is in great–and I mean, great–debt to Microsoft.

In fact, $240 million worth of IOUs. In other words, Facebook CEO and Founder Mark Zuckerberg.

It would be ironic (Yahoo tried to buy Facebook a little more than a year ago), it would be poetic (only in Silicon Valley does the young eat its old) and it would be really fun to watch the fireworks (Facebook is no friend of Google’s).

Most of all, Zuckerberg on the board of Microsoft’s Yahoo would be Steve Ballmer’s ultimate SuperPoke at Yahoo.

Please see this disclosure related to me and Google.

“The implications of this [deal] for the Internet advertising market–and for the Internet as a whole–are profound and potentially far reaching,” the Senators wrote. “A core part of Google’s business is placing contextual advertising–that is, text-based ads placed on third-party Web sites which are relevant to the content or to the likely reader of the Web site. Google has a dominant market position with respect to the placing of these contextual ads. DoubleClick has a leading market position in placing another form of Internet advertising–display advertising which also resides on third-party Web sites. Industry experts that we spoke to in the course of our inquiry raised serious concerns that combining these two companies’ leading positions in these two forms of Internet advertising could cause significant harm to competition in the Internet advertising marketplace.”

The acquisition is potentially problematic for reasons of privacy as well. “DoubleClick collects an enormous quantity of information on individual Web users’ preferences, and privacy advocates have expressed very serious concerns regarding the consequences of this data coming under the control of Google due to the fact that Google is the dominant Internet search engine and can also track individuals’ search requests,” the senators note. “Therefore, we believe that this deal raises fundamental consumer privacy concerns worthy of serious scrutiny.”

The senators’ arguments echo ones we’ve heard before–from the European Union and Microsoft, and from the Electronic Privacy Information Center, the Center for Digital Democracy and the U.S. Public Interest Research Group. Though, as Danny Sullivan notes over at Search Engine Land, they’re a tad bit more hysterical. Certainly, Microsoft’s $6 billion purchase of digital-ad firm aQuantive suggests the barriers to entry in the Internet advertising marketplace aren’t more than knee high. And as for privacy, well, Sun chairman Scott McNealy once said: “You have no privacy, get over it.”

Extending a partnership first struck in 2004, Sun will now resell and install Windows on its x86-based servers. For Sun, the deal is a way to drive broad adoption of its technologies. “One hundred percent of Sun’s customers use both Solaris and Windows,” said Sun Executive Vice President John Fowler. “We have an opportunity to extend our technology leadership in this critical area with customers that we share.”

For Microsoft, it’s a way to better compete in the virtualization market. Under the terms of today’s agreement, both companies pledged to optimize their server operating system for virtualization of the other’s software. And that’s an important issue for Microsoft. As Microsoft Watch’s Joe Wilcox notes, Windows Server 2008 and Microsoft’s next-generation Viridian virtualization technology have both been delayed. Said Wilcox, “Virtualization interoperability provides a place for Windows Server 2003 on Solaris and an opportunity to better position Windows Server 2003 for consolidation of Solaris servers.”

Extending a partnership first struck in 2004, Sun will now resell and install Windows on its x86-based servers. For Sun, the deal is a way to drive broad adoption of its technologies. “One hundred percent of Sun’s customers use both Solaris and Windows,” said Sun Executive Vice President John Fowler. “We have an opportunity to extend our technology leadership in this critical area with customers that we share.”

For Microsoft, it’s a way to better compete in the virtualization market. Under the terms of today’s agreement, both companies pledged to optimize their server operating system for virtualization of the other’s software. And that’s an important issue for Microsoft. As Microsoft Watch’s Joe Wilcox notes, Windows Server 2008 and Microsoft’s next-generation Viridian virtualization technology have both been delayed. Said Wilcox, “Virtualization interoperability provides a place for Windows Server 2003 on Solaris and an opportunity to better position Windows Server 2003 for consolidation of Solaris servers.”

And now it’s adding voice data. Or rather, more voice data than what it’s already collecting with Google 411. This morning, Google announced its plans to buy GrandCentral Communications, making the universal phone service its 12th purchase in six months. No terms were disclosed; though GrandCentral reportedly fetched a bit north of $50 million.

“GrandCentral offers many features that complement the phone services you already use. If you have multiple phone numbers (e.g., home, work, cell), you get one phone number that you can set to ring all, some, or none of your phones, based on who’s calling,” Google product manager Wesley Chan wrote in the Google Blog. “This way, your phone number is tied to you, and not your location or job. The service also gives you one central voice mailbox. You can listen to your voice mails online or from any phone, forward them to anybody, add the caller to your address book, block a caller as spam, and a lot more. You can even listen in on voice mail messages from your phone while they are being recorded, or switch a call from your cellphone to your desk phone and back again. All in all, you’ll have a lot more control over your phones.”

And Google will have a lot more control over your voice data, which it will presumably harvest for future use in voice search applications, something it’s already doing with Google 411. From Google’s 411 Privacy Policy: “We also collect and store a copy of the voice commands you make to the service, so we can audit, evaluate and improve the voice-recognition capabilities of the service.“

What was it Sun Microsystems Chairman Scott McNealy once said? “You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it.”