In he Sun Also Rises Dept.: With Oracle buying out Sun Microsystems, another Silicon Valley icon bites the dust. If the economy ever recovers, all the valuable real estate owned by companies such as Sun will eventually pay for the deal. The fact is that nobody really knows why Oracle bought Sun. It’s possible that it was a defensive measure since IBM wanted the company so badly. Some say it was so that Oracle could get control of Java. But why? I assume it has something to do with hidden assets. And it’s also possible that Oracle would like to sell a turnkey database server built on Sun hardware. There would be nothing like it on the market. And despite what people say about the various flavors of Unix, Solaris is one of the genuine workhorses in the industry. I was recently told about some Solaris-based server that was taken offline for a replacement. It had been running for something like eight years solid with never a reboot. This sort of reliable uptime is actually rare nowadays with both Linux and Windows servers. Death Has a Partner Dept.: According to at least one researcher, ultra wideband (UWB) transmission will be completely dead as a consumer/business technology by 2013. While it looked good on a Power-
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Point presentation, it never managed to get past the critics and the FCC. The closest it got to me was a wireless USB product that I heard about but never actually owned. The technology remains in the military and is used for ground-penetrating radar. Emerging Wi-Fi variants will replace it in the home and office. Der Kindle Ist Der Bomb Dept.: The newest Kindle from Amazon is getting a lot of attention lately, and now everyone is coming out of the woodwork either to condemn the device as a looming threat to the publishing industry or to praise it as its savior. I have mixed feelings about it, but I’ve talked to a lot of heavy readers who love the thing. I’ll reserve judgment until I actually use the device for a while. Meanwhile, Hearst and Dow Jones are considering a larger-format version of an e-reader for their newspapers. Let me assure you that while reading a trade paperback on the Kindle might be viable, perusing a newspaper on a reader like this is not. Newspapers are meant to be read and discarded. With an e-reader you are essentially carrying around a boat anchor to read the newspaper. Dumb idea of the decade. In related news, there is a strong rumor that Barnes & Noble intends to compete with the Kindle with a device of its own. In the future the e-book people will be able
