Posted 3:55 PM (0) comments

Larry Ellison - my Hero?

I thought the SCO suit was ridiculous, but now J.D. Edwards is suing Oracle because it "illegally interfered in its proposed merger with PeopleSoft."

First, its not a merger - PeopleSoft wants to buy J.D.Edwards outright. And, not surprisingly, nothing in Oracle's offer to buy PeopleSoft requires that the acquisition of J.D.Edwards not go forward. In other words, Bob Dutkowsky (CEO of J.D.Edwards) is in a snit that he won't get all the perks he was expecting from the PeopleSoft acquisition. All he's managing to do, though, is to make Larry Ellison look like the good guy. That's hardly ever been done before and must qualify Dutkowsky as bozo of the year if not of the century. The stockholders of J.D.Edwards (as well as those of PeopleSoft) need to look closely at what's happening and decide what's in their best interests. If they do that, they may just be surprised to find that Larry Ellison, the Rogue of Redwood City might just be the real white knight!

Posted 10:43 AM (0) comments

The Godfather's Web Services?

Fusion announced that Microsoft will buy a Romanian antivirus company (GeCAD) which is virtually unknown in the US but markets products for Windows, Linux, Exchange and Groupwise throughout Europe.

The article quotes Microsoft senior director Jonathan Perera as saying that Microsoft will "... provide fee-based antivirus services at some point."

Since most viruses, trojans and worms are aimed at Microsoft products, it strikes me as highly unethical for MS to sell you a product which is susceptible to a virus then turn around and offer to sell you a product which will block the virus. That's just wrong. I can envision Steve Ballmer saying "people who don't buy our protection services, bad things happen to their network."

Posted 8:47 AM (0) comments

Ned Ludd Rides Again!

A kidnapped young girl was recently reunited with her family in San Jose. Police were helped, in part, by a videotape shot from a surveillance camera mounted on a neighbor's garage (see "San Jose Police Release Videotape Of Nine Year Old Girl's Kidnapping"). The militant privacy advocates are already asking if this is another step towards Big Brotherism. Get over it! The camera is looking at a public street. Anyone walking by, driving by or standing on the corner could have seen what the surveillance camera recorded. There's no privacy being invaded here!
Chalk up the reaction as just one more bit of evidence that the neo-Luddites are even present within the high tech community.

Posted 10:33 AM (0) comments

Linux Learns Marketing

Merrill Lynch VP of "Global Technology & Services" Mark Snodgrass gave a presentation at the recent Enterprise Linux Forum in which he claimed that Linux saves money, at least compared to Windows servers. But, as I read the article, he simply proves that virtual servers are less costly than multiple physical servers - that's hardly a revelation.

I'm still trying to fathom why you'd want multiple virtual file servers running on one big piece of iron, though. That strikes me as a recipe for more frequent disasters, more frequent down time for re-configuration and a more expensive administrative payroll coping with the virtual space.

Maybe Merrill, Lynch should stick to insider trading problems rather than skewed logic on OS deployment. But, then, its probably skewed logic that got its stock trader Peter Bacanovic (and Martha Stewart) in trouble to begin with.