Oracle just bought Sun

Larry Ellison hasn’t lost his penchant for buying cool stuff. Oracle just bought Sun Microsystems for $7.4 billion.

Presser blurb:

On April 20, 2009, Oracle announced it has entered into an agreement to acquire Sun Microsystems (Sun). The proposed transaction is subject to Sun stockholder approval, certain regulatory approvals and customary closing conditions. Until the deal closes, each company will continue to operate independently, and it is business as usual.

The acquisition combines best-in-class enterprise software and mission-critical computing systems. Oracle plans to engineer and deliver an integrated system—applications to disk—where all the pieces fit and work together so customers do not have to do it themselves. Customers benefit as their system integration costs go down while system performance, reliability and security go up.

There’s of course the big Kahunas – Java and Solaris, but lets not forget that they also get MySql and the ability to fully integrate everything from application to hardware.

This begs the question – is Oracle going to be the Apple of Enterprise IT? An Oracle financials application which runs off of an Oracle DB running Java (now Oracle’s) middleware on Oracle hardware. With the powerful presence that the Oracle DB has in enterprise storage, I would not be surprised.

I’m also curious to see just how much pain 2 very large, very powerful and very different companies go through to integrate things. Both product portfolios are vast and confusing and will probably get worse before it gets better.

correlation does not equal causation!!!!

So apparently, facebook messes with your grades.

I get quite irritated when so-called researchers, pull a survey and then ‘extrapolate’ results from it.

Get the point. People who work for a 3.5 – 4.0 are going to put it more hours than people who get 3.0 – 3.5. Whatever the environment.

Why? Because people who get those kind of grades work neurotically for them. As well put by a slashdot commenter, they ‘cannot see past their GPA’.

The crowd who get those grades got them  before facebook, and will continue to do so after. If they have a facebook account. they won’t admit it. facebook users will spend time socializing anyway, they dont need facebook to do so.

It’s times like these when I miss writing on actual paper and stabbing a writing instrument through the page.

Sunday Linkdump

I’ve not been posting very frequently this last month. There have been numerous reasons, all of them remarkably stressful. I, of course, am too manly to unload tales of woe on my blog and thus turn this into. well, a diary. eww.

anyway, I’ll slowly ramp back up to mightier than ever.For now, LIIIIINNNNKKKDUUUMP!!!

I’ve been wanting to post about this for some time. I come across a lot of seriously amazing images as a i trawl the ‘net, and visualizeus has turned into an ideal way to save them all. (without the pain of downloading them). A handy (if annoyingly slow on the download) firefox extension makes things easy.

Shaun Wolfe via FastCompany. witty, my Dear Watson.

Intel just ranked their processors. Nice and useful for people who dont want to care about FSBs, L2 cache and overclocking. My late-2006 personal laptop with a Core 2 Duo gets 3 stars. My newer work laptop running a single core celeron (a vintage piece with .5 mb L2 cache) gets 1 star. Now guess which one is running Vista. (Hint: its not both, and I’ve mentioned this before on this blog).

Elections are coming up in India. Politicians have gone berserk wooing the illiterate masses who overwhelmingly outnumber smart people. (note: this is a global phenomenon and not restricted to India). I will not be voting. I know there are a lot of ‘get-out-the-vote’ esque campaigns running across the country, i know the usual arguments about not having the right to complain if i dont vote when the time comes blah blah, I know the national-duty argument yadda yadda….but the vote is a powerful thing. It signifies support and agreement. It takes a stand. Not voting is not so much as apathy as taking a stand against everyone. That’s what I’m doing. I will vote when I come across someone worth voting for.

I’m very interested in the latest Cognitive Daily’s Casual Friday.

Brilliant take on the Global Recession

“When the balance sheet of a company does not capture the true costs and risks of its business activities,” and when that company is too big to fail, “you end up with them privatizing their gains and socializing their losses,”

- Nandan Nilekani. Co-Chairman, Infosys; talking to Thomas Friedman.

Sums up the whole sordid mess pretty well. But doesn’t really say anything for what needs to be done. After all the hoo and haah, it looks like still no-one knows what to do. One thing seems certain, a big cultural shift may be in order. It needs to be both at a common-man level (save more, live on credit less) and at a regulatory level.

Am I daft in thinking that a regulator needs to regulate? – Smoothen the bumps, both high and low?