ShadowRAM: February 9, 2004

One simple explanation: Chip makers Intel and AMD have both recently updated their notebook lineup,Intel, for example, began shipping an 802.11g version of its Centrino offering, so vendors now may want to burn off older versions of Centrino before ramping up on the next rev.

Talk about much ado about little. Oracle made a big hooh-hah last fall about its $5,995-per-CPU Standard Edition One database. This was the company's long-awaited response to that snippy but increasingly credible SQL Server, which costs about a grand less for the standard edition.

But Microsoft and some disinterested parties make an interesting point. Oracle restricted the use of that database to single-processor machines. Now, just try to find a single-processor server these days. It's like finding an optimistic Red Sox fan,talk about your small universes. Perhaps stumbling unavoidably into this truth, Oracle decided with the 10g release to up the CPU limit to a whopping two processors for the database. Way to go, guys.

Who's backing whom? Sun Microsystems co-founder Bill Joy contributed $2,000 to Howard Dean's presidential campaign this election cycle, and high-tech financier John Doerr kicked in $2,000 to erstwhile presidential candidate Joe Lieberman. HP CEO Carly Fiorina, meanwhile, is betting on the incumbent: She's listed as a $2,000 contributor to President Bush's re-election drive, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

Microsoft bigwig Sanjay Parthasarathy recently wowed some partners with a "gee-whiz" realtime demonstration that integrated satellite imaging and mapping into a 3D spin-around.

The demo was designed to show off some of the performance benefits and features of Microsoft's forthcoming Longhorn operating system. Partners were impressed, although they admitted no one knew exactly what hardware was on the back end of that little piece o' showbiz.

One partner at the demo said Parthasarathy showed more of the Avalon subsystem. Of the 3-D aerial flyover view and magnifying-glass views of the next-generation Longhorn GUI, he said, "Everything looks like '[The] Matrix.' "

The partner also noted the show was an attempt to upstage Computer Associates International's recent Looking Glass demo at LinuxWorld, which showed the next 3-D GUI planned for the GNOME GUI that runs on Sun's Enterprise Java Desktop, Novell's Ximian and Red Hat.