Oracle Acquires Sun: Internal Communication

Posting Below is the letter sent to all Sun employees from their CEO..it’s a sad day for MySQL I fear, though I hope I find my fears unfounded. On the other hand, could be great news for Java / NetBeans.

From: Jonathan I. Schwartz
To: allsun@sun.com
Subject: Today’s Sun/Oracle Announcement
Date: Mon, 20 Apr 2009 04:34:16 -0700 (07:34 EDT)

Today’s Sun/Oracle Announcement

This is one of the toughest emails I’ve ever had to write.

It’s also one of the most hopeful about Sun’s future in the industry.

For 27 years, Sun has stood for courage, innovation, a willingness to blaze trails, to envision and engineer the future. No matter our ups and downs, we’ve remained committed to those ideals, and to the R&D that’s allowed us to differentiate. We’ve committed to decade long pursuits, from the evolution of one of the world’s most powerful datacenter operating systems, to one of the world’s most advanced multi-core microelectronics. We’ve never walked away from the wholesale reinvention of business models, the redefinition of technology boundaries or the pursuit of new routes to market.

Because of the unparalleled talent at Sun, we’ve also fueled entire industries with our people and technologies, and fostered extraordinary companies and market successes. Our products and services have driven the discovery of new drugs, transformed social media, and created a better understanding of the world and marketplace around us. All, while we’ve undergone a near constant transformation in the face of a rapidly changing marketplace and global economy. We’ve never walked away from a challenge - or an opportunity.

So today we take another step forward in our journey, but along a different path - by announcing that this weekend, our board of directors and I approved the acquisition of Sun Microsystems by the Oracle Corporation for $9.50/share in cash. All members of the board present at the meeting to review the transaction voted for it with enthusiasm, and the transaction stands to utterly transform the marketplace - bringing together two companies with a long history of working together to create a newly unified vision of the future.

Oracle’s interest in Sun is very clear - they aspire to help customers simplify the development, deployment and operation of high value business systems, from applications all the way to datacenters. By acquiring Sun, Oracle will be well positioned to help customers solve the most complex technology problems related to running a business.

To me, this proposed acquisition totally redefines the industry, resetting the competitive landscape by creating a company with great reach, expertise and innovation. A combined Oracle/Sun will be capable of cultivating one of the world’s most vibrant and far reaching developer communities, accelerating the convergence of storage, networking and computing, and delivering one of the world’s most powerful and complete portfolios of business and technical software.

I do not consider the announcement to be the end of the road, not by any stretch of the imagination. I believe this is the first step down a different path, one that takes us and our innovations to an even broader market, one that ensures the ubiquitous role we play in the world around us. The deal was announced today, and, after regulatory review and shareholder approval, will take some months to close - until that close occurs, however, we are a separate company, operating independently. No matter how long it takes, the world changed starting today.

But it’s important to note it’s not the acquisition that’s changing the world - it’s the people that fuel both companies. Having spent a considerable amount of time talking to Oracle, let me assure you they are single minded in their focus on the one asset that doesn’t appear in our financial statements: our people. That’s their highest priority - creating an inviting and compelling environment in which our brightest minds can continue to invent and deliver the future.

Thank you for everything you’ve done over the years, and for everything you will do in the future to carry the business forward. I’m incredibly proud of this company and what we’ve accomplished together.

Details will be forthcoming as we work together on the integration planning process.

Jonathan

Tweet Circuit City, tweet

@CircuitCity
09:30: Hey Guys Sales!
09:32: Please don’t go to Best Buy.
09:35: Wow, lot of cars in that lot next to us.
09:40: Hmm…wish someone would buy us
10:25: Oh Hey Block Buster!
10:26: We’re worth WHAT? Get out of here.
10:40: We’re in HOW MUCH DEBT? Hmm..wish BlockBuster came back.
10:42: Hey Guys some really great sales coming up!
10:50: Yeah..I’ll give you like 40% off that plasma.
1 Month Later: Closed.

Taking Shares

Recently, I’ve had a few friends talking about being offered either shares or options in companies they work at. I even saw an article at Slashdot on the subject. You should read the comments on it, it says it all. But to sum it up I have to say..95% of the time, it’s a bad idea. Unless you need some toilet paper.

Before a company goes public the stock is generally worth almost nothing. When it does go public your shares may be dilutted to low / next to no worth before you can use them. Options ussually have a price threshold that can keep you from ever exercising them.

I’m sure I’ll write more on the subject at a later time.

Ah, Science

He entertains me with his mockery. Though he is foolhardy. We have observed the one in the box, therefore the experiment is null and void!

Mushy Meat

Test Tube Meat anyone?

Straight from Wired:

What if the next burger you ate was created in a warm, nutrient-enriched soup swirling within a bioreactor?

Edible, lab-grown ground chuck that smells and tastes just like the real thing might take a place next to Quorn at supermarkets in just a few years, thanks to some determined meat researchers. Scientists routinely grow small quantities of muscle cells in petri dishes for experiments, but now for the first time a concentrated effort is under way to mass-produce meat in this manner.

Henk Haagsman, a professor of meat sciences at Utrecht University, and his Dutch colleagues are working on growing artificial pork meat out of pig stem cells. They hope to grow a form of minced meat suitable for burgers, sausages and pizza toppings within the next few years.

Currently involved in identifying the type of stem cells that will multiply the most to create larger quantities of meat within a bioreactor, the team hopes to have concrete results by 2009. The 2 million euro ($2.5 million) Dutch-government-funded project began in April 2005. The work is one arm of a worldwide research effort focused on growing meat from cell cultures on an industrial scale.

“All of the technology exists today to make ground meat products in vitro,” says Paul Kosnik, vice president of engineering at Tissue Genesis in Hawaii. Kosnik is growing scaffold-free, self-assembled muscle. “We believe the goal of a processed meat product is attainable in the next five years if funding is available and the R&D is pursued aggressively.”

A single cell could theoretically produce enough meat to feed the world’s population for a year. But the challenge lies in figuring out how to grow it on a large scale. Jason Matheny, a University of Maryland doctoral student and a director of New Harvest, a nonprofit organization that funds research on in vitro meat, believes the easiest way to create edible tissue is to grow “meat sheets,” which are layers of animal muscle and fat cells stretched out over large flat sheets made of either edible or removable material. The meat can then be ground up or stacked or rolled to get a thicker cut.

“You’d need a bunch of industrial-size bioreactors,” says Matheny. “One to produce the growth media, one to produce cells, and one that produces the meat sheets. The whole operation could be under one roof.”

The advantage, he says, is you avoid the inefficiencies and bottlenecks of conventional meat production. No more feed grain production and processing, breeders, hatcheries, grow-out, slaughter or processing facilities.

“To produce the meat we eat now, 75 (percent) to 95 percent of what we feed an animal is lost because of metabolism and inedible structures like skeleton or neurological tissue,” says Matheny. “With cultured meat, there’s no body to support; you’re only building the meat that eventually gets eaten.”

The sheets would be less than 1 mm thick and take a few weeks to grow. But the real issue is the expense. If cultivated with nutrient solutions that are currently used for biomedical applications, the cost of producing one pound of in vitro meat runs anywhere from $1,000 to $10,000.

Matheny believes in vitro meat can compete with conventional meat by using nutrients from plant or fungal sources, which could bring the cost down to about $1 per pound.

If successful, artificially grown meat could be tailored to be far healthier than any type of farm-grown meat. It’s possible to stuff if full of heart-friendly omega-3 fatty acids, adjust the protein or texture to suit individual taste preferences and screen it for food-borne diseases.

But will it really catch on? The Food and Drug Administration has already barred food products involving cloned animals from the market until their safety has been tested. There’s also the yuck factor.

“Cultured meat isn’t natural, but neither is yogurt,” says Matheny. “And neither, for that matter, is most of the meat we eat. Cramming 10,000 chickens in a metal shed and dosing them full of antibiotics isn’t natural. I view cultured meat like hydroponic vegetables. The end product is the same, but the process used to make it is different. Consumers accept hydroponic vegetables. Would they accept hydroponic meat?”

Taste is another unknown variable. Real meat is more than just cells; it has blood vessels, connective tissue, fat, etc. To get a similar arrangement of cells, lab-grown meat will have to be exercised and stretched the way a real live animal’s flesh would.

Kosnik is working on a way to create muscle grown without scaffolds by culturing the right combination of cells in a 3-D environment with mechanical anchors so that the cells develop into long fibers similar to real muscle.

The technology to grow a juicy steak, however, is still a decade or so away. No one has yet figured out how to grow blood vessels within tissue.”In the meantime, we can use existing technologies to satisfy the demand for ground meat, which is about half of the meat we eat (and a $127 billion global market),” says Matheny.

Sounds..nasty.

But hey, if you live in Nigeria I bet it sounds like not-starving.

so..woo…if the price ever comes down from about $5400 dollars a ton.

Adobe Photoshop CS4 is 64-Bit, but only if you have Windows

Not a bad thing, for about 90% of us, though it doesn’t help us.

I hear that other 10% screaming in agony though.

I’ve read a lot about it online and honestly, I just want to sum it up easily.

Adobe used the old method of doing things, an API to OSX called Carbon.

Apple is not making Carbon a 64-Bit API.

So…Adobe has about a million lines of photoshop code if I had to guess that needs to be re-written if they want it to work on OSX in 64-Bit glory.

Ars Technica made a nice blame chart:

Blame Apple: If Apple had not discontinued the 64-bit port of Carbon, Adobe could have shipped Photoshop CS4 as a 64-bit Mac OS X application as planned. At WWDC 2006, there were many sessions about developing 64-bit Carbon applications. At WWDC 2007, 64-bit Carbon was canceled. Adobe found this out the same time everyone else did, at WWDC. By canceling 64-bit Carbon so suddenly, Apple screwed Adobe.

Blame Adobe: The death of Carbon was inevitable. Adobe should have seen it coming and planned accordingly. It’s been clear for years that Cocoa offers many advantages to Mac application developers. Adobe should have started its Cocoa port of Photoshop years ago. By willfully ignoring Cocoa for so long, Adobe screwed Apple.

Sources:

http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/04/04/1247246&from=rss
http://arstechnica.com/staff/fatbits.ars/2008/04/02/rhapsody-and-blues

The Most Advanced Piece of Technology You Will Ever Pee On

Anyone seen the new Clear Blue Easy Pregnancy test advertising?

It’s kind of … odd.

I can’t believe on TV they show a big stream of..you know hitting a stick. 0.o

I find this one to prove it wrong though. Pee on THAT!

Nyanroll

Nyanroll, it’s a thing.

Drupal 6.0 Released! Woo!

Drupal 6.0 is released, and man is it fancy looking. It’d got all the features of an iGoogle-esque web portal built into it if you ask me.

Thanks to the tireless work of the Drupal community, over 1,600 issues have been resolved during the Drupal 6.0 release cycle. These changes are evident in Drupal 6’s major usability improvements, security and maintainability advancements, friendlier installer, and expanded development framework. Further, from bug fix to feature request, these issues follow-through on the Drupal project’s continued commitment to deliver flexibility and power to themers and developers.

That commitment is something you don’t see everywhere, and by people who do it in their spare time, and for the cause, makes me proud. =)

One of the coolest features is OpenID support. That means anyone with an OpenID can come to your site, not have to register, and have a user account at whatever permission level you assign them. It helps grow a user base without the hassle of maintaing the records of one. It’s a neat project, though personally I still use my own, it can be helpful in a lot of applications.

Oh and sorry for the lack of posts over the weekend, it was V-Day!

Achewood Writes Women So Well?

Oh man, I nearly spit out my morning coffee on this one guys, it’s golden.