Gadgetopia

Oracle and Zend announce general availability of Zend Core for Oracle: So, let's see, first Oracle buys a company responsible for a critical piece of MySQL, the database most commonly used with PHP. Now, Oracle and Zend -- the company behind PHP -- release a PHP platform tuned specifically for ...

Connecticut joins Oracle fracas: It's like a soap opera. Connecticut's attorney general announced Wednesday that he plans to file an antitrust lawsuit against Oracle, seeking to defeat the company's proposed buyout of rival PeopleSoft. We count four lawsuits now: Oracle v. PeopleSoft, PeopleSoft v. Oracle, J.D. Edwards v. Oracle, and ...

Oracle Buying Open Source Companies?: Some good commentary about Oracle's aquisition spree. We've talked before about how Oracle is seriously trying to screw MySQL. How much damage would they do if they just went and bought Zend? All of these moves prompt one question, will Oracle start to play hard ...

There can be no doubt now: Oracle is trying to destroy MySQL. Consider: They buy Innobase, the company responsible for the back end data format that makes MySQL go. They forge a partnership with Zend, the company responsible for PHP, which is the lanuguage most often used with MySQL on ...

PeopleSoft CEO: Oracle saga is over: The CEO of PeopleSoft is claiming that the Oracle bid is dead in the water. "As far as Conway is concerned, Oracle lost steam in July, after PeopleSoft sealed its $1.8 billion purchase of J.D Edwards. Oracle had initially wished to stop that deal, ...

Study: Oracle's Takeover Bid Could Hurt Sales: Public opinion of Oracle is sliding. "The study, Techtel Corp.'s Technology Demand Index, released on Wednesday, showed that positive opinion of Oracle within the approximately 800 companies surveyed fell from 59.8 percent to 57.2 percent, and its negative opinion increased from 14.5 percent ...

What's Larry going to do?: An short look at the status of the Oracle / PeopleSoft imbroglio, and the obstacles that Oracle faces. In my opinion, it's looking more and more like this isn't going to happen. There are two many issues outstanding. "It's decision time for Oracle and Larry ...

Oracle ups PeopleSoft offer: Larry's not messing around. The offer is up from $16 to $19.50. Analysts were saying that they'd need at least $20 per share to make it happen. And, not surprisingly, Oracle has filed a lawsuit against PeopleSoft and J.D. Edwards for resisting the takeover attempt. Oracle ...

Why Oracle must move in on Content Management: About a year ago, Chris predicted that Oracle would buy Interwoven. After EMC's acquisition of Documentum, this doesn't seem as far-fetched now as it did then. And then I read this: Oracle has been promising to make big moves in content and ...

Oracle snags open-source database company: Berkeley DB was the first data storage system behind Movable Type. Still gets used a lot for it. The purchase of Sleepycat, which has been rumored for weeks, gives Oracle another open-source product to accompany its proprietary database offerings. At an investor conference last week, ...

Oracle Acquisitions are not about MySQL: He refutes my theory. Trying to put MySQL out of business would be a fairly short-term tactical move. I think Oracle is looking 5 years down the road and seeing what the world looks like as the commoditization of enterprise scale infrastructure software components ...

Oracle to acquire Siebel Systems for $5.85B: Larry Ellison is either going to rule the world, or he's setting himself up for a massive fall. The deal further bolsters Oracle's aggressive drive to overtake SAP as the world's largest maker of business applications software -- the computer coding that automates ...

Oracle tried to buy open-source MySQL: I guess if you can't buy them, screw them instead. MySQL Chief Executive Marten Mickos confirmed the acquisition attempt in an interview at the Open Source Business Conference here but wouldn't provide details such as when the approach was made or how much money ...

Justice lawyers against Oracle's bid for PeopleSoft: This throws a wrench in the gears. Justice Department lawyers are recommending that Oracle's (ORCL) hostile takeover bid for business software rival PeopleSoft (PSFT) be blocked for antitrust reasons, a step that could kill the proposed $9.4 billion deal before shareholders get a ...

Oracle lowers PeopleSoft bid to $7.7 billion: After raising the bid twice, (the last time just two months ago and that coming just four months after saying they weren't going any higher), they're now lowering it. I can't even speculate on the implications of this. Business software maker Oracle ...

Oracle buys Innobase. MySQL between rock and hard place?: This is interesting. Oracle bought Innobase, which is a close partner of MySQL, that company having used InnoDB as a storage architecture for years. MySQL is now faced with the prospect of licensing technology they cannot ship without from their biggest ...

PHP vs. ASP.NET: Oracle published this article on the Oracle Technology Network. In it, they compare PHP and ASP.NET for use with Oracle. Their verdict was pretty simple: "Use PHP." ...we must consider not simply the price tag of the initial investment, which, in the case of PHP, is obviously ...

Oracle confirms bid for bigger PeopleSoft | CNET News.com: Since PeopleSoft has swallowed J.D. Edwards, it's become a little fatter for the feast. Consequently, Larry coughed up another billion. "Oracle reaffirmed its bid to acquire PeopleSoft Thursday, following the successful completion of PeopleSoft's offer for J.D. Edwards last week that ...

Software maker Oracle raises bid for PeopleSoft: We haven't talked about this one in quite a while, but it's still on the table. Business software maker Oracle Corp. raised its hostile takeover bid for rival PeopleSoft Inc. by 33 percent to $26 per share today. This is the second rasing ...

Oracle wins right to pursue rival: PeopleSoft may have played their last hand: Ellison and Henley wasted no time in firing off a letter to PeopleSoft's board, requesting a meeting to hammer out a deal, potentially the largest tech merger since Hewlett-Packard and Compaq Computer in 2002. We started covering ...

PeopleSoft gives in, accepts Oracle's $10.3B bid: I knew Larry would get what he wanted eventually. Ending 18 months of bad blood, Oracle is snapping up bitter rival PeopleSoft for $10.3 billion to create the world's second largest maker of business applications software. I wonder how long it will take ...

Oracle May Drop PeopleSoft Bid Over Refund Offer: Looks like PeopleSoft's poison pill may succeed in the end. "Oracle Corp. says it may be forced to abandon its hostile $7.3 billion bid for PeopleSoft Inc. if the Pleasanton, Calif., software company continues to offer its customers licensing-fee refunds in the ...

The Justice Department is moving to block Oracle's acquisition of PeopleSoft, I suppose arguing that it would create a sort of CRM monopoly. Charles Cooper seems to think Larry Ellison is reaping what he's sown: Setting aside the question of whether Uncle Sam has a case or not, Gates surely ...

States Consider Fight Against Oracle's Bid for PeopleSoft: Because, you know, there just weren't enough lawsuits. "Looking to put additional pressure on Oracle Corp. to halt its hostile takeover bid of enterprise software rival PeopleSoft Inc., Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal has contacted every state in the union asking them ...

Ringside at PeopleSoft Bout, SAP Hopes to Share in the Prize: Good article about how SAP is trying to poach customers from the Oracle / Peoplesoft mess. "By positioning itself as a safe haven, SAP hopes to pick up the storm-tossed customers of its three main competitors, Oracle, PeopleSoft and ...

Oracle chief reportedly mulling NFL team purchase: Maybe he could just get a team in a hostile takeover. Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, one of the world's richest people, is looking at possibly owning a National Football League franchise, the Los Angeles Times reported Thursday. Representatives for both the NFL and ...

Scoop: Job Cuts at PHP Startup Zend Could Be Aimed With An Eye Towards a Sale: Very interesting. [Zend s] job cuts could be an attempt to pretty itself up for a sale. Back in 2006, Oracle wanted to buy it for $100 million to $200 million. It might still be ...

Oracle says it won't raise bid: More twists and turns than a soap opera. "An Oracle executive said Wednesday that it's unlikely the company would raise its $7.25 billion unsolicited bid for rival PeopleSoft before regulators weigh in on the deal, if ever."

PeopleSoft's Board Rejects Oracle's Second Bid: Last time they had two issues: price and anti-trust concerns. With Larry's new bid, they just have one: "PeopleSoft Inc. on Friday urged stockholders to reject Oracle Corp.'s unsolicited $6.3 billion takeover offer, citing the possibility of regulatory objections to the deal between the ...

PeopleSoft Turns Down Latest Bid By Oracle: PeopleSoft stock closed at about $22-and-a-quarter yesterday, so $26 a share is a nice premium. How long can they keep saying no? PeopleSoft Inc. yesterday rejected Oracle Corp.'s $9.4 billion hostile takeover bid, saying the $26-a-share offer is too low and expressing serious ...

PeopleSoft Offers Oracle Poison: (second story down). A "poison pill" is a move to make your company worth less to a buyer. PeopleSoft just swallowed one to try and fend off Oracle: "PeopleSoft said over half those sales would come from contracts covered by a new customer protection program that ...

Sun Sets Sights on IBM's AIX Customers: In the SCO/IBM drama, Sun is playing the role that SAP is playing in the Oracle/PeopleSoft production: Moving to profit from SCO Group's revocation of IBM's Unix license (which IBM denies SCO has the right to do), Sun Microsystems charged in to play ...

Ellison 'determined' to acquire PeopleSoft: According to Larry, it's not over yet. "Oracle Chief Executive Larry Ellison repeated on Tuesday his determination to acquire rival PeopleSoft, but was cagey about whether he would raise the offer price of his hostile takeover bid. Questioned on Tuesday about whether Oracle could acquire ...

Content software scramble ahead?: Someone I know told me he thought Interwoven was going to get purchased by Oracle. I scoffed. Now, in the wake of Documentum's acquisition by EMC, analysts are saying the same thing: "Charlie Brett, an analyst for research firm Meta Group, expects large technology companies to ...

World s Richest Person: In my mind, it s not true until Forbes says it s true, and they re not issuing a new list until next April. Gates has been on top of that list for 12 years now. Mexican tycoon Carlos Slim is the world s richest man, worth an estimated $67.8 billion, ...

PeopleSoft investors want more cash | CNET News.com: PeopleSoft's big investors tell Larry how much it will take: "Institutional investors say they would want to see an offer well in excess of $20 a share before they consider tendering their stock to Oracle."

Using MySQL 4.0 with .NET: An article you don't see much of these days: using MySQL in a .Net environment. Aside from Oracle, I've never heard of a non-Microsoft product being used with .Net, but maybe I haven't been paying attention.

PeopleSoft Acquires J.D. Edwards: This part is done, which may or may not just fatten the calf for the Oracle butcher. It's like the picture of the little fish about to get eaten by the bigger fish, which is, in turn, about to get eaten by a shark.

As I become a more experienced developer, I'm learning when you should and shouldn't break the rules. While following every rule of programming and data modeling is wonderful, sometimes you need to bend the rules for the sake of simplicity and expediency. Always remember, an app in the hand is ...

Here's a question on blogging practice: what do you do for follow-up posts or updates to an existing post? Do you make a new post? Update the original post? Post a comment? I have examples of all three options so far, and I have yet to figure out which one ...

Movable Type Enterprise is out after years of rumors. A few big new features that make it enterprise-friendly: Support for Oracle DB: Supports version 10g. [...] LDAP Authentication: Single sign-on using your existing LDAP or Active Directory database. Movable Type 3.3 is also out, which includes tag support (we've talked ...

CNN.com - MySQL: A threat to bigwigs?: A good article on MySQL: "Yahoo's Zawodny makes a different analogy: 'MySQL is to Oracle as Linux is to Windows. It will slowly but steadily creep up the food chain, just like Linux has.' ... Mickos is already seeing real headway. 'I estimate ...

Beyond Proprietary Databases: Helen Borrie on the Future of Firebird: Here's an interesting interview with one of the people behind Firebird, an emerging open-source, multi-platform database server. It's a fork of a mature commercial database called InterBase. InterBase is an enterprise-level database Firebird is the same, but better. You'll ...

Blogging Solutions for Business - Movable Type Enterprise: I guess the only big differences I'm seeing from the standard version are LDAP integration and Oracle as a possible data backend. Of course, these are both huge for a lot of companies. The most popular platform for business blogging now offers ...

SCO Mobilizes for IBM Unix Battle: Between this and the Oracle/PeopleSoft imbroglio, enterprise IT has become a soap opera lately: SCO will seek to stop IBM from selling its version of Unix, AIX, which has been shipping since 1990 and accounted for 15 percent of all Unix server operating system ...

Cunningham & Cunningham, Inc.: This is apparently the first wiki ever produced the wiki seed from which all others grew, if you will. It's also known as the Portland Pattern Repository. It's kind of the oracle of all things wiki. There are pages on wiki and Extreme Programming philosophy, ...

Symantec Says No To Pro-Gun Sites: The new version of Symatec's Internet Security 2004 has filtering software that will block most pro-gun and gun-rights sites under the category of "weapons." This includes all of the NRA's Web site. "My rather informal test still raises the spectre that a large corporate ...

Suit shows Oracle CEO urged to cut spending: Emails have come to light in a lawsuit against Larry Ellison that show how he spends his money. Very well, it turns out. Software billionaire Larry Ellison, one of the world's most conspicuous consumers, was advised to go on a crash financial ...

IBM Celebrates 40 Years of Mainframe Technology: Chris once programmed one of these to play Doom. Seriously. Today, IBM marks the 40th anniversary of the System/360, the mainframe that sparked a revolution in computing and business. The System/360 was considered by many to be the most sophisticated computer of its ...

Microsoft Holding Onto Stockpile: Microsoft is sitting on $62 billion in cash and investments. That's billion....with a "B." "In an unusual move, Connors detailed exactly how Microsoft's cash and reserves are broken down. Its total portfolio of $62.7 billion is made up of a treasury-managed portfolio of $53.5 billion, with ...

Survey Ranks Top Ten Biggest, Most Popular Databases: Let's try to do an import of one of these databases into Microsoft Access. Taking home the prize for largest database size for all OS environments and Unix, for the DSS portion was France Telecom boasting 29.2TB. France Telecom uses Oracle Corp. ...

Spectrasource: Macromedia has put Spectra into open-source. What is Spectra? "Spectra is an application framework that helps organizations build and manage large-scale content management and e-commerce solutions that deliver rich, personalized customer and visitor experiences. It incorporates features such as content management, workflow and process automation, roles-based security, personalization, and ...

Gates still the richest, but Google guys moving up: Once again, I am not on the list. But, once again, it's dominated by geeks. Bill Gates, Microsoft's co-founder and chairman, was the nation's wealthiest person for the 11th straight year with a net worth of $51 billion [...] Perhaps more ...

eZ components: New competition for Zend PHP Framework: eZ Systems, makers of the ultra-awesome CMS eZ Publish, are expanding their offerings to include PHP components for general (non-CMS) use. This article at SitePoint opines that this is in direct competition to what Zend and Oracle are trying to do. While ...

IBM sets DB2 database free: This slipped under the radar about a week ago: there's now a free version of DB2. DB2 Express-C is the same database as IBM's commercial offerings but the company places limits on what kind of hardware it can run on. It can be deployed on ...

Don t Be a Sharecropper: An enlightening essay by Tim Bray on software development: Are You a Sharecropper? If you re developing software for the Windows platform, yes. Or for the Apple platform, or the Oracle platform, or the SAP platform, or, well, any platform that is owned and operated by a ...

One of the continuing quandries I've had with XML is the management of multiple XML documents. If I have one, big XML document, then it's easy to work with to parse with an API, to transform with XSLT, to query with XPath. But what if I have many documents? ...

IBM is planning to announce that they'll be donating the Java-based Cloudscape database to the Apache foundation, to be released as open source. Most business applications require some database functions like storing and looking up price or customer information, whether in a Web page or a laptop program. Cloudscape is ...

Microsoft's Most Exclusive Franchise: Included in the European Union's report on Microsoft was a memo to Bill Gates from a Microsoft executive. In it, he talks about how hard it is to move away from the Microsoft Windows API once you've started using it to build your software: It is ...

Here's an idea for a good service: a database of products, and some way to match them up with their chief competitors. I was looking for a certain type of product today. I found an example of one, and I wanted to find others. But how do you do that? ...

Perls of wisdom in a sea of site mismanagement: As I work with content management more and more, I believe more and more in what this guy has written: ...the vendors' ideal of a generic site-management system "is completely wrong", Berk says. "The development overhead is very, very high ...

On Piracy, or, Nick Bradbury is an Amazing Idiot: This was written in response to Nick Bradbury's bit about piracy from yesterday. ...most people who pirate his software probably would never use it anyway, so they aren't costing him any money and they're providing him with free advertising. This is ...

Create ASP code for your database with ASPRunner: This is pretty good software. I downloaded the demo, walked through the wizard, and within 3 minutes (from download to finished interface) I had a complete set of pages to view, edit, add, print, search, and export a database table on my ...

That post I made about attribion got me thinking about the format and content of blog postings. The way I see it, there are basically three types of postings. Original Content, No Target This is where you actually write something yourself, and there's no "target" of the post no ...

Red Hat Signs Agreement to Acquire JBoss: This is interesting, but we all knew it was coming. Red Hat will acquire JBoss for approximately $350 million in initial consideration, plus approximately $70 million subject to the achievement of certain future performance metrics. The transaction consideration is composed of approximately 40 ...

The H-1B swindle: The H-1B program allows U.S. employers to apply for a visa for a foreign worker if they can't find anyone qualified to fill the position they need filled. The idea is that people shouldn't bring in overseas workers unless they've tried to find a U.S. worker to ...

We've been tossing around the idea of applying a business model to Gadgetopia for quite some time now. Don't get us wrong, this is fun and all, but it takes time and there's always the nagging desire to "take it to the next level," to overuse a cliche. However, I ...

Thoughts on Content Management: This guy and I think alike. In the beginning of the article he touches on the same things I talked about when I compared open and closed content management systems. Then, he runs into the same problem: there are too many types of content, each storing ...

Joel on Software - Fire And Motion: I just found this two-and-a-half year old essay by Joel Spolsky, and I'm frankly aghast at how aptly it describes how I code. For me, just getting started is the only hard thing. An object at rest tends to remain at rest. There's ...

Here's the problem with taxonomies and content categorization schemes: no one will maintain them. You can set up the greatest content tree or grouping structure in the world, but sooner or later, content authors (yourself included) are going to get complacent. That's because the value-add is on the reader's end ...