Practical Technology

It should have been a great day on the London Stock Exchange. The U.S. government had announced on the Sunday before that it was coming to the rescue of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. Trading would have been extremely brisk, but then, at 9:15 AM GMT, the Exchange’s software failed due to "connectivity issues." Six-hours [...]

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It’s not easy going from being number one of a small company, MySQL, even one worth a cool billion, to being one of many number twos in an even bigger company, Sun. Many former CEOs in that position quickly quit and it sounds like Monty Widenius, founder of MySQL, will be the next to leave [...]

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WhitePages.com does exactly what you’d expect from the name — it tries to provide phone book-style listings for both the U.S. and Canada. Of course, there’s nothing new about that, so WhitePages.com tries to do an especially thorough job. The company claims that at the end of 2007, it had 180 million U.S. adults, about [...]

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For an executive who had just had his company bought for a cool billion a few months ago and was on the eve of announcing a major update to his business’ flagship database program, former MySQL CEO Marten Mickos, now Sun Microsystems’ senior vice president for databases, didn’t look comfortable. Mickos had come to the [...]

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Some people can’t believe Sun actually spent a billion dollars for MySQL; I can’t believe they got such a great deal. If you believe my long-time colleague John C. Dvorak, Sun purchasing open-source database power MySQL was “perhaps the worst single event I have ever witnessed in the history of tech mergers and acquisitions.” Nonsense! [...]

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