Oracle recently made a set of presentations which outlined what their strategy was in terms of hardware, software, markets etc.. Each speaker had a slide show to accompany their talks, and each of the slideshows was quite extensive.
Speaker
Webcast
Presentation
Charles Phillips: Welcome and Oracle + Sun: Transforming the Industry
His slideshow has one slide; a picture of a racing yacht with Oracle and Sun logos on it! This for me sums up his character. Hes got a ton of energy and sees his company more like something that he needs to guide and be successful with, and at the same time looks good whilst doing it!
In this respect, Oracle have made it very clear what they want to do with the portfolio they have acquired from Sun, and this does include investing heavily in SPARC processors. Given the kind of performance we saw with the T1000 on Heanets review, I’m personally looking forward to the day when Oracle manage to further commoditise this cool hardware
According to this blog post from the SourceForge team, IP addresses from Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Sudan, and Syria will be blocked from accessing the site.
Since 2003, the SourceForge.net Terms and Conditions of Use have prohibited certain persons from receiving services pursuant to U.S. laws, including, without limitations, the Denied Persons List and the Entity List, and other lists issued by the U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of Industry and Security. The specific list of sanctions that affect our users concern the transfer and export of certain technology to foreign persons and governments on the sanctions list. This means users residing in countries on the United States Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) sanction list, including Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Sudan, and Syria, may not post content to, or access content available through, SourceForge.net. Last week, SourceForge.net began automatic blocking of certain IP addresses to enforce those conditions of use.
I can appreciate that these nations have been placed under sanction, but theres a few things that the US gov should probably keep in mind:
Its very easy to get around this denial of access: just use an open proxy from an IP thats not banned
How does the US gov measure whether or not a site is major enough to warrant putting specific restrictions on its export? Surely the correct measure would be to determine how useful the code is, as opposed to the volume? With this in mind, surely every Linux distribution should also ban those IPs?
Will the US gov now prosecute any bloggers/ “small scale” producers of code who don’t conform to this law?
Bellow is a picture of a new type of skimmer being used in the USA use to skim ATM cards. The construction is HIGHLY convincing, and the placement of the pinhole camera is quite something! Even the tone of the colour of the original receiver has been matched!
Thankfully, many ATMs in the UK use a recess instead of a protrusion, so it should be more difficult to develop a device which fully fills the gap in a convincing manner.
This little box seems to be quite far ahead of its time. I can imagine that there must be so many futurologist out there just waiting to see their ideas come into the mainstream, and then jump for joy when it finally does!
It has been announcedtoday that approval has finally been given for Oracle to merge with Sun Microsystems. The process began in September 2009 which means that its been long enough for plenty of rumours to go around about whats going to happen both internally with head count cuts, and of course with the product line itself. Most importantly, the people with power to make decisions in these two structures now actually have the opportunity to go ahead and make those decisions.
If Larry is true to his word about what he sees for the future of the Sun product line, I for one would certainly say that the future is going to be fairly bright.
Mr Ellisons (CEO of Oracle) own words:
“We are keeping everything. We are keeping tape, we are keeping storage, we are keeping x86 technology, we’re keeping SPARC technology, we’re going to increase the investment in it…”
“…we are NOT going to spin anything off.”
The discussions about improving data center power consumption efficiency and increasing demand for online services place the T-series equipment very well for those who know just how good they are. Coupled with the fact that Sun had famously invested early in the R+D for this kind of technology, theres also a great opportunity to get OpenSolaris beefed up in terms of packages and installers, and deployed in these environments.
I’m looking forward to seeing how its all going to pan out!
