| BEA’s stance on Oracle deal pummeled
The reaction to BEA's rejection of a $17 a share takeover offer from Oracle is brutal. Of course, billionaire Carl Icahn has issues. But analysts aren't too thrilled either. Either BEA knows something the rest of us don't or is delusional. A sampling of comments: Credit Suisse analyst Jason Maynard, in a research note titled 'Hope isn't a strategy,' wrote: BEA's shares could easily trade back to the $12-$14 level absent activist pressure and Oracle's bid. While BEA has reduced expenses, it still hasn't offered a sustainable strategy and demonstrated consistent execution to warrant a standalone share price above $17 let alone $21. We think the $17 per share proposal is more than reasonable, and certainly worth the time and effort of BEA's management team to begin earnest negotiations.
January 2006
If you have this page bookmarked, make sure the last three letters after the final slash are "hbo" instead of the original "nhb" (No Holds Barred). The pageview numbers ran from 4555 to 7514 Monday thru Saturday on the hbo site. We should hit 125,000 for January, which is light years ahead of the 38,133 posted in January 2005. Onward and upward. And here's your first Wild Card of the week ... .
Carlin is more hippy than dippy
He worked in radio for a time, teamed for a couple years with fellow comic and longtime friend Jack Burns and eventually began to appear on every TV talk show of the day. But somehow it never felt quite right. "I was always out of step," he says now. "I left school in ninth grade, I got kicked out of the Air Force, I got kicked out of the choir and the altar boys and summer camp and three schools and I was a pot smoker when I was 13 in the early '50s. I was always a lawbreaker and a kind of outlaw rebel." Still, the dean of counterculture comedians might have soldiered on in the suit and tie had it not been for one thing: the 1960s. "I went through some changes, as the whole country did, in the '60s and I took on a much more personal point of view and started doing a lot of autobiographical things about my childhood, my neighborhood, being Irish-Catholic, being a kid from Harlem.
The scoop on ‘green’ computers
Dear EarthTalk: As an online gamer, I spend a lot of time in front of my computer. What's the environmental impact? And are "greener" PCs available? -- Bob Grant, Burlington, VTOnline gamers and other heavy computer users are definitely leaving an environmental mark. Depending on when it was made and how it was designed, a standard desktop PC can use anywhere from 60-300 watts when in use, while an inefficient gaming PC with powerful graphics card, multiple hard drives and optical drives, flash memory reader and a 30-inch LCD might consume as much as 750 watts, or about as much as a typical refrigerator. Until July of 2007, government Energy Star requirements only measured a computer's energy use while in standby mode, which allowed the majority of brands to carry the label. New stricter efficiency requirements have brought greener models.
Ask AP: Product Recalls, Obama's Faith
If you have your own news-related question that you'd like to see answered by an AP reporter or editor, send it to newsquestions@ap.org, with "Ask AP" in the subject line. --- What becomes of all the recalled poisonous pet food, lead-tainted toys and antifreeze-flavored toothpaste? Are they incinerated? Buried? William Gazdagh Belleville, Ill. --- Recalled products that are taken back to stores are returned to manufacturers, which generally destroy them, through incineration or other measures, or send them to a landfill. Depending on the nature of the recall, though, food products are sometimes reprocessed. In the past, if a recall involved a bacterial pathogen that could be destroyed by cooking at a high temperature, recalled meat was further processed until it was deemed safe, and then sometimes reused in pet food.
What's in Store for SOA in 2008?
OSGi software is best known as the platform for Eclipse tools, but it is starting to gain favor at the runtime level as well. This will lead to better support for SOA software modularity and improved manageability. Enterprise integration patterns and their subset, SOA patterns, are also gaining traction with enterprise developers. As more and more applications move toward SOA, repeatable patterns of use are becoming clearer and gaining adoption, such as service design, interface, message exchange, security and performance patterns. Integration patterns such as message splitting and aggregation, data modeling and validation, message routing and transformation, and reliable, transactional interactions are also growing in adoption. Domain-specific languages are also starting to help speed the implementation of SOA-based applications by offering improved abstractions for encapsulation, data manipulation and access, interaction with messaging systems, and user interactions.
Murray stuns Federer
Andy Murray claimed a remarkable three-set victory over world number one Roger Federer to progress to the second round of the Dubai Open. The British number one narrowly lost the first set 8-6 on a tie break but clinically took the first break point in the second set to break Federer's serve in the sixth game. Murray then broke Federer in the fifth game of the third set before he served out for a 6-7 (6/8) 6-3 6-4 win, his second straight victory over the Swiss having defeated him in Cincinnati in August 2006. Both players held serve in an entertaining first set but the world number one was able to break Murray twice during the tie break to win it 8-6. In the second set Murray led 3-2 and, after over an hour of the match, he was given his first opportunity to break the defending champion's serve at 30-40.
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