Archive for April, 2009

Thoughts On Oracle and Sun Deal

Sun and Oracle announced today a definitive agreement for Oracle to acquire Sun for $9.50 per share in cash. The transaction is valued at approximately $7.4 billion, or $5.6 billion net of Sun’s cash and debt. An agreement that will make of Oracle the first competitor to IBM by having Sun technologies in hardware, Java, Operation system (Solaris), Open Office and even the most popular open source database for the web MySQL ! “The acquisition of Sun transforms the IT industry, combining best-in-class enterprise software and mission-critical computing systems,” said Oracle CEO Larry Ellison. “Oracle will be the only company that can engineer an integrated system – applications to disk – where all the pieces fit and work together so customers do not have to do it themselves. Our customers benefit as their systems integration costs go down while system performance, reliability and security go up.” The deal could have very positive effect on Oracle business as mentioned Oracle CEO, especially by providing full solution from hardware, operation system, Java, in addition to Oracle business and database solutions.

Google Images Got Colors, the power of tagging

Darren pointed to a new feature in Google images search letting you to filter results by color ! The results looks very accurate that you will be interested to know how google are indexing colors ? Are they using image recognition techniques to index every image in their database ? That will be crazy if you think about it, but the answer could be easily found in something launched about three years ago, an ajax game, letting everyone to tag images and get scored on that : The image labeler . Because the results are very accurate and fast, it can only be something based on a real human indexing ! You can see below for example if you search for a car model, you can get the result you are looking for, but imagine you want to see only gray cars in results, the filter can really give you what you are looking for. While if you used “gray” as keyword in search you will get something else completely different.

Zend Released Zend Server and Zend Server Community Edition

Zend Technologies announced today the availability of Zend Server for High Performance, Reliable, and Secure Deployment of PHP-Based Web Applications, in addition to the FREE Zend Server community edition for Developers and PHP Application Users. The new Zend Server is a complete Web application solution that includes PHP, native install, an enhanced code accelerator, and advanced monitoring and problem diagnostics for applications designed for deployment on a single server. In addition, Zend Server automates software updates, hot fixes, and security patches on both Linux (native RPM and DEB based repositories) and Microsoft Windows (MSI), for quick and easy installation in less than 5 minutes. Zend Server supports the most popular databases, including Oracle® Database, MySQL, and Microsoft® SQL Server, as well as leading operating systems from Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Ubuntu/Debian to Microsoft Windows Server and more. Zend Server CE is a completely free version of Zend Server that runs on Linux, Microsoft Windows, and Mac OS X, specifically tuned to address the needs of non-critical server deployments and for developer desktops/laptops everywhere. Zend Server CE comes with the same high-performance opcode caching and easy-to-use PHP administration capabilities as the commercial Zend Server. Zend Server Pricing starts at $1,195 for an annual product subscription