Posts by ayank

Expanding Right To Be Forgotten slippery slope to global censorship, warn free speech fans

Extending national sovereignty is a terrible idea...

The problem here is one of extending one nation's sovereignty over other nations involuntarily.

Remember that Google France is a distinct legal entity than Google USA, both of which are owned by Alphabet. What the EU court is deciding is whether or not Google France can be held legally liable for actions of Google USA, simply because both are owned by Alphabet.

That's a huge problem, because, as Free Speech advocates point out, it means that countries such as Russia can then enforce their laws on Google USA or Google France due to Google Russia being subject to Russian law. That is, Russia can simply threaten Google Russia's very existence if Google USA doesn't comply with Russian demands.

This isn't International Law here. This is attempting to extend one particular country's law over other country's, in a de facto sovereignty grab.

The EU court should VERY carefully consider this and reject the idea. Pretty sure that the EU doesn't want EU companies being held hostage to US law, even though they never sold a single product in the USA?

Analysts see no Oracle hardware-biz recovery on horizon

Oracle had no interest in sales of general-purpose hardware

Asa former Sun->Oracle employee in the Java group, and who watched what happened during the takeover, I can tell you this:

Oracle had ABSOLUTELY ZERO interest in selling hardware as General Purpose computing. They bought Sun for the software (primarily Solaris and Java, though MyQSL was a side-benefit), and to have dedicate hardware to create "Super Appliances" on. This was completely obvious in the re-closing of Solaris with the subsequent change in Solaris support (All Pay, All the Time), and the major chopping of the hardware product lines.

Oracle is interested in selling turn-key solutions, which mean tightly integrated Hardware with Solaris with Java or OracleDB, all tuned to the Nth degree. That's what they're selling, and that's it.

Too bad, since Sun kit was actually really nice (the x86 stuff was significantly superior in features to anyone else, and was cost-competitive, while the T-class stuff was interesting for certain niche things), and OpenSolaris actually had a pretty bright future.

If you're running Sun hardware with Solaris nowadays, if you're not looking to move off it in the next year, you deserve what's going to happen to you - orphaned and screwed, and paying a vast fortune to Oracle to "support" that legacy stuff, since there's no (Oracle) replacement.

The Oracle appliance things (Exa* and ZFS Storage) are nice, though. Costly, but nice...