Time for fun in the Sun

Yesterday, my bosses at Sun announced a mandatory vacation for the first week of July for all employees. I haven’t seen the email yet but I understand that you either take some accrued time off or take the days unpaid, but one way or the other you take the days off. This will help quite a few people, who will maybe remember there is life in other places than their office, whether they like it or not. I suppose it doesn’t effect me since I’m still on leave then. Anyway, this is a nice money saver that shouldn’t hit anyone too hard and has been used by quite a few other companies, such as HP, before.

Mr. Consolidation visits the database market

C|Net is reporting that IBM will purchase the Informix database unit for $1 billion. IBM plans to continue marketing and development of the product, giving them a two pronged path. Having lived through this scenario when Sun bought NetDynamics and then partnered with AOL on iPlanet, I have serious doubts that this will do anything but hurt IBM. The biggest questions will be:

– Customer uncertainty, regardless of IBM statements, that Informix will continue to be supported and enhanced; and,

– Salesforce uncertainty over which product to sell, especially (but not only) to new customers. If they stop selling Informix to new accounts, eventually the business will wither away.

All in all, while initial analyst reaction is positive, I doubt this will be sucessful.

Greil Marcus interview: Dylan, Elvis, and the art of writing

Greil Marcus has been one of the leading music critics since the late ’60s and he still has interesting, relevant things to say. In a recent interview, he talks about his books on Dylan, Elvis, and the Sex Pistols as well as his current Salon column. Best quote: “I try not to walk through the world with preconceptions and rules, that something is good if it fits certain categories in certain ways.”

Will market conditions trigger tech takeovers?

C/Net is reportings that tech companies are taking measures to ward off takeovers, what with many of them having cash assets far above current market caps. This is something I’ve been wondering about lately, thinking that consolidations in the ebusiness space hasn’t gone as far as one might expect. Ariba is one high-flier that might be ripe now with a market cap just over $2 billion, compared to over $32B back last summer. They have great market position, good technology, and a book value of about $13/share. If Oracle’s stock was doing a little better, they would be a good match; Oracle is moving strongly into ebusiness but doesn’t have position in the B2B marketplace niche.

Superheroes: Where are they when we need them?

Headhunter.net has posted this job opening for a Super Hero. Pay ranges anywhere from scraps ($17k) to gobs ($420k) working for the not-for-profit Justice League of America. I’d take the job but (a) I’m on vacation (b) I don’t have blue hair and (c) I can’t fly.

TV: Weakest Link is too weak to watch

There may have been nothing weak about NBC’s “Link” launch, that is the ratings may have been great, but I watched last night’s show and it wore out quickly. This show features a sarcastic, condescending host and eight contestants in a mix of “Who Wants to be a Millionaire” and “Survivor” to answer several rounds of questions with one contestant being voted off by the others after each round. I think Anne Robinson is going to go insane soon and walk around saying simply “You are the weakest link. Goodbye.” to one and all.

Update: NBC is planning a special episode, to run against the Survivor II finale, featuring several Survivor I cast members (Richard, Susan, Gervaise, and so on). But, and here’s the catch, they can’t use the word Survivor when promoting the episode!

Work goes on, even when you’re away

eWeek reports on iPlanet efforts to woo developers, specifically the new iPlanet Developer Pack and app server Test Drive. The test drive was one of my major projects before beginning the leave I’m currently on. Having an evaluation version of the product easily available should help generate new business and not having it was a definite strike against us in competing with BEA.

Don’t Let Architecture Astronauts Scare You

Joel Spolsky, in the latest Joel on Software, reminds us that even though abstraction is a good tool to use in system design, there are those among us who have a tendency to take abstraction to ridiculous heights, where it does more harm than good.

Last Night’s Movie: Stormriders

Feeling sickly, it actually took me until this afternoon to finish watching this 1998 Hong Kong historical fantasy martial arts flick, released in Asia under the title Feng Yun. Sound like a recent Oscar winning fantasy flick? I’m not aware of any personnel or studio connections between the two films but the heavy use of wire work (so the characters can fly, for example) and other SFX as well as the reliance on Chinese folklore for plot makes one wonder. I wish the DVD had an English dubbing option instead of just English subtitles but I did enjoy watching. For a martial arts film, there’s a suprising amount of plot and character development and not as much fighting, which is fine, but the one sex scene–don’t worry, no female semi-nudity–wasn’t worth the 120 seconds of screen time. The film, which was one of the highest grossers in Asia at its release, is an adaptation of a bestselling HK comic book series. DVDReview.com has a good writeup.

Nothing like scaring the competitor’s customers

I got to this page by clicking on an ad on Yahoo that simply said “Sybase users, safeguard your business! Switch to Oracle.” Now, Oracle may or may not be a better database than Sybase, but it certainly is a robust, widely-used product. More importantly, I’ve never heard of any Sybase customers who have had a major data loss due to the product. Is this the fear part of Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt?

Another AMT horror story but this time, a plan to fight back

Jeff Chou, a Cisco engineer who faces a $2.5M AMT tax bill, is taking his protest over AMT public. Besides speaking out to the press (and selling everything he owns to pay Uncle Sam), he’s launched campaign to push for reform of the Alternative Minimum Tax focusing on HR1487 – Proposed AMT Relief Bill. 1487 is viewed as a low probability for passage this year but, if passed, would eliminate AMT consideration for incentive stock options.

The other side of the Chinese coin

Here in the US, most people are furious that it took 11 days to get our soldiers back and that the Chinese leadership was fussing over a word or two in the apology. In China, though, the citizenry is furious at their leadership for giving in too easily. “We’ve seen what happened after the embassy bombing. A few more incidents like this and the leadership won’t be able to maintain its hold on power,” said one man. What would happen to US/China relations if there was another (perceived as) bungled incident and Chinese hardliners came into power? Nothing good, I’m sure.

Stretching the Boundaries of Moore’s Law

We all want faster CPUs, memory, and so forth, meaning the chips have to get smaller and pack more transistor equivalents on them. Today, Intel and a consortium of chip companies announced they have successfully developed the first prototype of a 10-foot-tall cylindrical lithography machine. The machine could help produce chips running tens of times faster than today’s quickest. Go team go!