Apparently much of my email from the weekend has gone into the ether…I’ll try to reconstruct later. Also, for those trying to contact by phone, it pains me to relate the untimely demise of my cell phone, which was the victim of a Sunday afternoon trip through the rinse cycle of the Maytag. If you need me by phone, try using 4092 instead of the standard 4091 for the last 4 digits. Of course, I’m in a building which is the cell phone equivailent of a black hole, so service is spotty, at best.
Category: Technology
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Sun Buys MySQL
An interesting move – and for most of you thinking “this doesn’t affect me” I can tell you you’re dead wrong. You see over the past couple years, MySQL has become the back end database for a good deal of the web. If you’re CEO doesn’t have his own Gulfstream, chances are that some of your mission critical applications and quite probably your own website is using MySQL for something, if not everything.I’ll withhold judgment on the whole thing for now. There’s more important issues here.
You see, we’ve come to the point that Open Source solutions, the LAMP solutions are winning out over enterprise solutions. The days when you needed an Interwoven or Vignette CMS system, constructed over an incredibly expensive Oracle database, running on servers the size of refrigerators are over. IBM realized this and embraced PHP. Sun has bought MySQL. The message is out.
Back in the day, the open source stuff was consider the province of the bootstrapper. Now the bottom tier is reaching up and its pressuring not just the middle level systems, its challenging the staid old favorites of business. MySQL 5.0 has many of the features that had kept the earlier versions out of the enterprise, such as stored procedures.
If you are running a business, you owe it to yourself to keep an eye on open source solutions, especially before buying any big, proprietary system.
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How Google Changed the World (again)
They’ve changed the way we look at our world – literally. Google Earth, with it’s high resolution satellite images has become so many things we never considered. First, when billionaire Steve Fossett disappearred, teams poured over the latest images, looking for wreckage, and even though they found none, it was a watershed moment (personally, I think he just headed off to his secret Isle of Doom). Now we’ve got word that police are looking at Google Earth images to help solve the murder of a woman in Victoria, NSW, Australia. What a small world it’s become.
There’s also been a lot of concern over their street view, which has shown some rather interesting images since it launched.
Okay, so maybe the change hasn’t completely happened, but this one you can see as it unfolds. We’ll never see things the same again.