Apple would not easily abandon tens of millions of AT&T subscribers who own iPhones by forcing them to spend another $100 a month with a new carrier. Would they?

About five years ago, Sun seriously considered killing Solaris on X86. What Sun customers said was "Do that and your SunFire servers will be out on the street as quickly as we can get them unplugged". These customers included the major NY city investment and merchant banks, and Sun was in no position to destroy relationships with key customers. Fast forward. Those same large financial institutions are still running Solaris, including Solaris on Sun-supplied X86. But the reason this rumor makes no sense is that Sun and Oracle grew on Wall Street together as less expensive alternatives to Big Iron IBM mainframes.

Kill Sun Solaris and Oracle commits suicide. Makes no sense at all. Won't happen.

If you do not enroll in a "qualified" health plan (and do not assume that your current health plan will qualify) and submit proof of enrollment to the federal government (i.e., IRS), then you'll be tracked down and fined (sections 3101, 6055). The fine will be enough "to accomplish the goal of enhancing participation in qualifying coverage" (section 161). Oh, and if you think the pain will be shared equally with the ruling political class, think again. Congress and federal employees are exempt from the tight, HMO-style controls in this bill (section 3116). Any American citizen who supports this bill as health care progress has to be either suicidal or filthy rich.

January 2010. OK, so I take my new Windows 7 laptop back to my Paris hotel. Too bad I accidently dropped the old one in the Seine. I start it up and select a browser to download. Oops, hard stop. The hotel, like many, requires a web browser present in order to authenticate and establish an Internet connection. No web browser, no connection, no browser download. Thanks, EU competition bureaucracy, for making it impossible to fulfill the EU-mandated requirements. (Unless the EU is going to put always-on Internet access ports in all public places. Not.)

The really significant costs to enterprises, who do half their development in Java (source: Aberdeen Group market research), is not in Java development. There are plenty of developers. No, the costs are in Java execution. Java's garbage collection hiccups, for example, make it difficult to meet response time SLA's as volumes scale.

Azul Systems is a company that specializes in accelerating Java workloads on Sun, IBM, and X86 machines. I see Azul as being at least as important to a "complete" Java solution as SpringSource and Hypernic..

Our politicians believe the way to avoid brownouts is to require all traffic to fight for bandwidth at the same time. No protocol or user can be inhibited in their God-given right to use the Internet with as much bandwidth as they want, when they want. This is called net neutrality. I predict growth in private networks like Akamai as public nets are inundated. Then again, the next dip in the recession may knock a few tens of millions of the 'Net, avoiding the brownouts for a while longer.

In brief, Oracle will have the hardware and software to BE the cloud. However, it's not clear to me that they WANT to be the cloud. But neither Apple nor Oracle -- or together -- is likely to make a huge (> 10%) dent in Microsoft's Office monopoly anytime soon. Open Office has been out there for five years, and Apple is unwilling to invest to sell to the enterprise as it costs a lot more to make a sale than it does an iPod (as a percent of sales).

My own market research shows enterprise developers doing roughly 40% in Java (the rest is .Net and legacy). Oracle has the entire OS-to-application stack. With Sun, they pick up Java and the Java Virtual Machine, Solaris (an enterprise hit) to offer along side Linux, and an ongoing home for Sun's large developer community. I see nothing but profits for Oracle from the software side of the Sun acquisition.

But the hardware business becomes a boat anchor. Much of Oracle's expensive direct selling is done in joint bids with hardware vendors like IBM, HP, and Dell. Are HP sales reps going to call in Oracle if the Oracle-Sun hardware sales team becomes another dance card at the party? History says an emphatic "No". So don't be surprised if Oracle sells/spins off the hardware and hardware services business quickly.

Presuming that many readers have never driven in a NYC taxi before, picture a 10" LCD TV set with a vaudeville-voice happy-talk announcer blaring at you to "buckle up for safety" every 30 seconds. There is also weather forecast and Bloomberg financial news (it's New York) as well as other options.

There is a GPS map option already and it's pretty accurate. But it sure doesn't tell you whether the cab driver is taking you by the most direct route or whether there are traffic jams ahead.

Best idea is to kill the incessant "be safe and be happy-talk" voiceover.

Thanks laing. You got my point exactly.

It costs $10,000 a pound to put an object into space. I sure am glad I am not a California rate-payer stuck with the requirement that 20% of electric power come from "alternative energy sources" by 2020.

Does anybody want to take a SWAG at the cost per kilowatt hour of this "free energy"?

Mid-April. New order entry system turned on New Year's Day because that would be easier on Accounting. Orders are wrong. Physical inventory is a joke. Basic bookkeeping does not add up. SEC regulations require this NYSE company to report to stockholders within 30 days of quarter end. Nixon's wage and price controls are in effect, so you can go to jail for raising prices in a screwed up digital price list.

The order-entry inventory control system is so screwed up that it was hard to tell where to start. With not enough rerun, compile and test time available, jobs were sent out to a local data center. That is, until the 17-year old driving the van flipped it on the interstate, dropping digital media all over the highway. Oh, and did I mention the bomb scares every other day?

Ran two Intel X-25's for five months in RAID 0 under Vista Ultimate (32 bit) before they went down with symptoms of Windows Update installation taking longer than 24 hours to complete. Unable to recover or reinstall Windows on the RAID pair, so I yanked them. Too bad because the read performance is phenomenal.

These threads are wandering all over the place and getting away from the obvious: Intel's Atom will be a widely used processor for the next decade and beyond, so Intel needs to make Atom available in ways that Intel itself would not want to manufacture.

Atom first appeared in consumer devices such as Netbooks. Millions of chips ... but not the billions of chips in the addressable market.

As Atom is designed into embeddable products which require special characteristics such as automobiles (e.g., embeddable, low voltage, extreme temperatures), customers will want to save money by adding application-specific "logic blocks" to the silicon, creating a single "system on a chip".

Intel's fabs are not well suited for economic production of small, custom chip runs to make these custom chips. TSMC is in the business of making such chips as the go-to fabricator for the world's soft fabs. So, Intel is handing off custom fab business it does not want to TSMC, while at the same time expanding the Atom market and nailing down a world-class "second source".

Hey, you're replying to a former BMW Car Club of America officer. Yes, ten year old German cars are typically OK (excepting Trabants, of course). But that's the German law.

Keeps the car workers busy too.