What If Oracle Bought Sun Microsystems? 237

Posted by timothy on Thursday April 09, 2009 @02:40PM from the ask-the-oracle dept.

snydeq writes "Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister believes Oracle is next in line to make a play for Sun now that IBM has withdrawn its offer. Dismissing server market arguments in favor of Cisco or Dell as suitors, McAllister suggests that MySQL, ZFS, DTrace, and Java make Sun an even better asset to Oracle than to IBM. MySQL as a complement to Oracle's existing database business would make sense, given Oracle's 2005 purchase of Innobase, and with 'the long history of Oracle databases on Solaris servers, it might actually see owning Solaris as an asset,' McAllister writes. But the 'crown jewel' of the deal would be Java. 'It's almost impossible to overestimate the importance of Java to Oracle. Java has become the backbone of Oracle's middleware strategy,' McAllister contends."

Ruby 1.9.1 Released 226

Posted by kdawson on Sunday February 01, 2009 @01:12AM from the yet-another-gem dept.

Janwedekind writes "Yuki Sonoda yesterday announced the release of Ruby 1.9.1 (Ruby Inside coverage with lots of links). The VM of Ruby 1.9, formerly known as YARV, was initiated by Koichi Sasada and has been in the making for quite some time. Ruby's creator Yukihiro Matsumoto has already presented many of the upcoming features in his keynote at RubyConf 2007. Most notably, Ruby 1.9 now supports native threads and an implementation of fibers. A lot of work also went into encoding awareness of strings. The 1.9.1 version is said to be twice as fast as the stable 1.8.7. It will take some time though until the majority of existing Ruby extensions get ported to 1.9."

Hacked Business Owner Stuck With $52k Phone Bill 300

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Friday December 19, 2008 @03:19PM from the build-a-better-mousetrap dept.

ubercam writes "A Canadian business man is on the hook for a $52,000 phone bill after someone hacked into his voice mail system and found a way to dial out. The hacker racked up the charges with calls to Bulgaria. The business owner noticed an odd message coming up on his call display (Feature 36), and alerted his provider, Manitoba Telecom Services. They referred him to their fraud department, who discovered the breach. MTS said that they would reverse the charges if the hacked equipment was theirs, but in this case it was customer owned. The ironic part is that the victim's company, HUB Computer Solutions, is in the business of computer and network security. They even offer to sell, configure and secure Cisco VoIP systems. Looks as though they even couldn't manage to secure their own system, which doesn't bode well for their customers." This certainly isn't the first time someone has exploited the phone system and stuck another with the bill. Maybe it's time for the phone company to get their fraud detection and prevention services at least on par with the credit card companies'.

Oops! Missed One Fix — Windows Attacks Under Way 292

Posted by timothy on Wednesday December 10, 2008 @04:31PM from the don't-blame-microsoft-alone dept.

CWmike writes "Microsoft says attackers are now exploiting a critical Windows bug that it didn't get around to fixing in its biggest batch of security patches in more than five years, issued yesterday. Microsoft said that 'limited and targeted' attacks are in progress by hackers exploiting an unpatched vulnerability in the WordPad Text Converter, a tool included with all versions of Windows. If Microsoft patches the WordPad problem on its monthly schedule, the first opportunity for fixing the flaw would be Jan. 9, 2009." Update: 12/10 22:28 GMT by T : OK, there might have been more than one: reader Simon (S2) writes "There is an even more serious flaw ... From SANS: 'There is a 0-day exploit for Internet Explorer circulating in the wild. At this point in time it does not appear to be wildly used, but as the code is publicly available we can expect that this will happen very soon. This is a brand new exploit that is *not* patched with MS08-073 that was released yesterday. I can confirm that the exploit works in a fully patched Windows XP machine. The exploit is a typical heap overflow that appears to be exploiting something in the XML parser.'"

Microsoft Plans VR Simulation of Everything? 217

Posted by CmdrTaco on Wednesday December 10, 2008 @10:45AM from the ok-readers-why-is-this-one-evil dept.

Ian Lamont writes "Microsoft recently updated ESP, a virtual reality modeling platform that until now has primarily been used to model aircraft and flight simulations. Microsoft has plans to expand it to other industries such as real estate and urban planning, but one of the most interesting possibilities could be what one observer refers to as a 'simulation of everything,' based on Virtual Earth and perhaps even user-generated content. Indeed, Microsoft's research chief has been promoting the idea of commerce applications and other tools built on top of what he calls the 'Spatial Web', a blend of 3D, video, and location-aware technologies. He gave an example of a shopkeeper creating 3D models of his store's interior and goods with Photosynth and then uploading the results into a large 3D model of local shopping district. Customers could 'visit' the area, browse products, and order them for real-world delivery."

Comment Scanner destruction (Score 1) 1144

by DrBungalow on Thursday January 20, 2005 @02:02PM (#11421695) Attached to: Most expensive hardware you've wrecked?

Some years ago trying to install a ~$300 SCSI scanner drove me to a nervous breakdown: I had to reinstall Windows 95 countless times but never managed to make it work, only got infinite BSODs. Same deal with Windows 98. After weeks of frustration I destroyed the scanner and threw it in the garbage.