If you're following the press, many so called industry experts are proclaiming that there is now a cloud of uncertainty gathering over SPARC recently in light of the recent Oracle-buying-Sun announcement. Most of this speculation largely coming off as competitive FUD you hear from IBM and HP is referring to the theory that Oracle really wants software from Sun and that the hardware side of the business is just the icing on the cake that Oracle will eventually throw away. Well, not so fast. It looks Oracle is actually quite enticed by SPARC and is planning to increase the investment into chip development. A quote directory from Larry Ellison:

"Q. Oracle's done integrated hardware and software design with the Exadata database machine. But Exadata uses standard Intel chips. Are you going to discontinue Sun's SPARC chip?

A. No. Once we own Sun we're going to increase the investment in SPARC. We think designing our own chips is very, very important. Even Apple is designing its own chips these days. Right now, SPARC chips do some things better than Intel chips and vice-versa. For example, SPARC is much more energy efficient than Intel while delivering the same performance on a per socket basis. This is not just a green issue, it's an economic issue. Today, database centers are paying as much for electricity to run their computers as they pay to buy their computers. SPARC machines are much less expensive to run than Intel machines."

You can find the transcript of the entire Q+A session with Larry at the following URL:

http://www.reuters.com/article/marketsNews/idINN0740285120090507?rpc=44

There is not as much ribbing on the Microsoft theme as it used to be in the Windows 95 days, but now and again there are still some gems popping up on the web. Here is a good piece on the theme of "If Everything Was Made by Microsoft" courtesy of Cracked.com (I almost split my sides laughing):

http://www.cracked.com/article_17323_if-everything-was-made-by-microsoft.html