Results tagged “tech”

Doing what IBM failed to do earlier this month, Oracle will purchase computer server and software maker Sun Microsystems for around $7.4 billion, or $5.6 billion net of cash, 9.50 per share. Oracle megalord Larry Ellison boasted about the buy, saying in a statement, “Oracle will be the only company that can engineer an integrated system—applications to disk—where all the pieces fit and work together so customers do not have to do it themselves ... Our customers benefit as their systems integration costs go down while system performance, reliability and security go up.” This deal will also give Oracle control over Java programming language and Solaris. (Jason Brooks of eWEEK explains it all in finer detail, right here.)

Image credit: Michelle Malkin

-- And then Nancy was all, "Like, what the hell, you guys?" [SF Examiner] -- The Central Subway Project. [Transbay Blog] -- Now you don't have to leave your bedroom to travel. Ever again. Yay! [The Tech Chronicles] -- The seven rules for talking (and not screaming self-righteously) about gentrification. [Neighbors Project] -- Behold: SF Weekly's new food blog. [SFoodie] -- A censure-free DiFi. [SFBG] -- After it was revealed that he was, and...

-- Toshio Hirano: Local country music star -- alongside his trusty bassist, Kenan O'Brien -- croons tonight at 9 p.m. at Amnesia; free.

Kenneth Eng: remember him? "Why I Hate Blacks" and the weird dragon fetish? Well, after he got fired from his columnist gig at San Francisco's Asianweek, we've gotten quite a bit of news updates about him -- his YouTube clips, his weird statements after the Virginia Tech tragedy, and, most intriguingly, a copy of the book proposal he was shopping around -- but we decided as an editorial matter we weren't going to run anything else about the guy because he didn't deserve the attention. (which is why we're not giving you links to any of those news items as well.)

This is sort of out of SFist's coverage area, but in the wake of the Virginia Tech tragedy, and because the perpetrator is from Hayward, we're going ahead and putting something up: there was a shooting last night at Fresno State and one person is dead.

It's time for American Football Spectacular's capsule reviews of the 2007 NFL Draft. Adventure, excitement,measureables!

Sadly, because the Virginia Tech shootings have, in a perverted way, inspired copycats, City College today was shut down because a copy cat threatened to start shooting students.

More mysterious criminal events in Fremont! This time, someone dropped a five-foot tall safe off a truck in the middle of the road. The safe had been pried open, revealing...... a collection of about 70 Star Wars action figures, still in their original packaging. Somewhere, a broken-hearted fan weeps.

With all that went down this week, we thought we thought we'd cheer everyone up by giving everyone a double dose of dogs.

Here's todays wrapup of news stories.

The first weekend of the men's and women's NCAA basketball tournaments is in the books -- are you still alive in your office pool? Not if you took the Road to the Final Four less traveled.

If you went with the favorites, chances are you're sitting pretty. With the exception of the toothless male Badgers of Wisconsin, all first and second seeds in both tourneys advanced to the Sweet 16. That's not to say that a few high seeds didn't get a scare or that some middling seeds will never get a chance to germinate into full-blown Cinderellas, but overall, both tournaments are sticking to the script.

We've gotten a bunch of e-mails and complaints over the weeks that we're still having problems with the commenting. For that we apologize. Apparently, we still have some gremlins running around our system.

We've always wondered what would happen if there was a power outage somewhere in Silicon Valley. Would the stock market crash? Would we not be able to surf porn? Would we no longer be able to download "Buffy" reruns over iTunes? Well, we're about to find out as there's a blackout in one of the hearts of Silicon Valley, that being San Mateo County.

For the week that burners are most burnt out, there's a lot of mess on tap. Even (and maybe especially) excluding the postponed Women on the Web mixer.

There are few places where people get their collective geek on like Burning Man. A lot of folks are staying home this year -- Violet Blue gives some good reasons why -- and taking a chance to relax on the full-press coverage and pimp as much anti-party legislation as they can while the freak vote is out of town.

First off, if you're one of crowd that heads to Austin each year for South by Southwest ("South by So What to the locals, apparently), the polls are still open to vote for what panels you'd like to see at the Interactive portion. So vote now, and we hope to see you there next spring.

A new column devoted to the less-than-celebrated world of tech mixers, drinkups, LAN parties and other events for nerds and by nerds. Nothing says that computer junkies have to be anti-social!

The best professional road cyclists in the world are competing for the maillot jeune on the rolling plains and brutal mountain passes of Europe right now, but this weekend, we've got our own battle for cycling supremacy going on right here in the Bay Area.

Today through Sunday, road cyclists from Pro down through Cat 5 and beyond can compete in the Cougar Mountain Classic on and around the Infineon Raceway in Sonoma. As an added bonus, the Cougar is playing host to the USA Cycling Mountain Bike National Championships. That's the Nationals baby, right here, almost within sight of Mt. Tam, mountain biking's Hoboken.

With the advent of this Internet thingamabob, newspapers are finding themselves in quite a world of Darwinian hurt. In short, adapt or die. Lately, the Chron has been adapting by having some of their most favored writers do blogs on the SFGate side. Not a bad idea really as we're sure the idea of paying $30 a year to read Jon Carroll's cat columns is not going to bring in the cash money. How they've been getting the writers to do it is a good question as we have a feeling not many of them were that psyched on the idea. We're thinking either by gun point or with long-lost incriminating photos.

Tech news you should be interested in this week:

Here in the SFist Tech Labs, we're committed to two things: science, and our readers. So we'd never let anything like the debilitating headache we've been going through for the past 18 hours or so keep us from bringing you the links to tech news you deserve. While we read the symptoms on BBC's health page, you can follow along.

Cisco, Yahoo, Microsoft, and Google — the companies that internet wags are now calling "The Gang of Four" — were subjected to a verbal smack-down on Wednesday in a hearing about those companies' involvement with known Communists. CNet News.com has a transcript of the hearing, in which California Representative Tom Lantos grills a representative from each company, repeatedly asking "are you ashamed."

In an interview with Bloomberg News, Yahoo CFO Susan Decker said that Google has the dominating market share in Internet search, and it's no longer Yahoo's goal to be number 1 in the field.

This week saw contention between Google and the US Department of Justice, as the Bush Administration asked a federal judge to force Google to comply with a subpoena for search records. (Link to CNET News.com; they've also aggregated their complete coverage of the story). The records are intended to be used to support the validity of the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act. AOL, MSN, and Yahoo were also asked to turn over records, and those three companies complied with the request.

The Consumer Electronics Show is in full swing, and your SFist Tech Labs would totally be in Vegas covering it, if it weren't for a certain cocktail waitress and an even more certain restraining order.

I'm opening my Christmas gift from SFist now: the opportunity to write without the editorial "we" and with opinions I don't have to disguise with any pretense of objectivity (or being entirely San Francisco- or technology-related). Here are my picks for the best of 2005 and what I'm looking forward to in 2006:

This week in the Google and Apple News Korner SFist Tech Roundup: the same old familiar faces are giving money to each other and making life easier for you, the users of the internets.