Valleywag
real estate
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patrick byrne
Wacky Overstock.com chief presides over massive financial deception
For years, Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne has maintained a loony crusade against Wall Street traders, claiming there was a conspiracy to sell his company's stock short. (He may well have been onto something — but then again, a stopped clock is right twice a day.) CIO reveals a far more serious problem affecting Overstock's financials: A botched installation of Oracle software which has led to the restatement of five years' worth of earnings. In 2005, Byrne apologized to shareholders for a $14.2 million quarterly loss related to the troubled installation. Today's restatement suggests he was too busy chasing naked shorts to actually fix the problem. Why didn't he just blame it on the software all along? -
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schadenfreude
Party at Larry's house!
We hear there's some kind of party happening tonight at the Pacific Heights mansionette of Larry Ellison, Oracle's multibillionaire CEO. He's not in town, so it should really be a rager. The occasion: The 10th anniversary of NetSuite's founding. Our invite was lost in the mail, but we're glad to hear Ellison's still doing his part for the local economy — especially considering how he just lost $6.6 billion in the stock market — more than any other tech CEO, according to the Wall Street Journal. -
larry ellison
Larry's buying!
At today's annual meeting, Oracle's top dog told shareholders, "Acquisitions that we have been looking at for some time may now be more attractive." He wasn't any more specific than to say he meant small, growing companies rather than large, public ones. Ooh, I know this great little blog network. Does Oracle have dental?(Photo by AP/Paul Sakuma) -
100-word version
Death of the database
PBS pundit Robert X. Cringely says he realized at last week's MIT Technology Review conference that cloud computing means, in short, "No database." Cringely sees it as the end of Oracle's dominance of information technology. I expect Oracle Cloud any day now. Here's a summary of Cringely's long article, plus the joke about Ellison's sex life, minus Cringely's references to himself: More » -
Larry Ellison on cloud computing buzzword: "Complete gibberish"
"The computer industry is the only industry that is more fashion-driven than women’s fashion." So says Larry Ellison, who told analysts yesterday that "other than change the wording of some of our ads," the company has no plans to make any actual changes to its business in order to jump on the cloud-computing bandwagon. Really, Ellison needs to get another monkey to do the infomercial thing on stage — he's far more charming when he's being rude but honest. [WSJ] (Photo by AP/Paul Sakuma)
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confonz
Oracle's OpenWorld conference closes with Treasure Island party
Please welcome back ConFonz, the man who goes to technology trade conferences so Valleywag doesn't have to. The Conference Fonzerelli, a veteran of many OpenWorld conferences, thinks Oracle has pumped up its image this year. The show is much more huggy-touchy-feely-bloggery. Despite the fact that most Oracle employees of use are hiding under rocks. Quite a change from the days when Oracle at your door meant you were either out of a job, out of memory, or simply out of your mind. If anyone in the technology industry is wondering how to run a conference, this is the one to emulate. Oracle OpenWorld pulls 45,000 people, and twice as many service workers to support it. That's why Howard Street is closed and why you can't get a good picnic spot in Yerba Buena Park. More » -
larry ellison
HP's big iron helps Oracle ease pent-up server stress
At yesterday's Oracle OpenWorld conference, CEO Larry Ellison donned his best tan and announced a new partnership with Hewlett Packard to sell a hardware and software to speed up databases. A rack of eight devices will include 168 terrabytes of storage and a total of 64 processing cores on 16 Intel microprocessors and will be optimized for Oracle's database software. The idea, as haltingly explained by Ellison in the video above, is to clear the bottleneck between storage servers that hold the data and the database servers that process the requests. We've condensed the speech down to around a minute, but left in the awkward bits so you can wince along with the audience. More » -
caption contest
Enabling intimate one to one customer relationships
Can't afford one of the "obviously scalable" ladies hanging out in the lobby of the W hotel during this week's Oracle convention? The Market Street Cinema has you covered — or, should I say, no-covered. Think up a better headline, leave it in the comments, and maybe you can dethrone actionhero11 who won for the second time in a row yesterday with "ConnectU's uniques spike 50%." (Photo by Jameth) -
sex trade
Highly available ladies, for a fee, at Oracle conference
Larry Ellison didn't provide escorts for attendees at this week's Oracle OpenWorld at San Francisco's Moscone Center. Well, certainly not for all of them. But with 45,000 geeks — the kind of geeks who can afford Oracle's software — in town, it's bonus week for local working girls. "Jet-setting adventuress" Kimberlee Cline eyed a few obviously scalable women gliding in and out of the W Hotel, a short stiletto strut from the show. Thanks, Kimberlee — and whatever you do, don't say "exponentially" to a DBA unless you're sure it's not more of a step function.
