Oracle sure has come a long way since its cardboard laptop days, but is it really ready to take on the likes of Acer, ASUS, HP and Dell in the netbook area? During a brief appearance at Sun's JavaOne conference today, Oracle's main man Larry Ellison proclaimed that his firm "might build a variety of devices as a result of its planned acquisition of Sun Microsystems, including netbooks." Sadly, there was absolutely no elaboration beyond that, but it's certainly interesting to think of what a netbook would look / feel like with a Sun flair to it. Who knows, maybe we won't even have to wonder in a few months.

As soon as the salary of a CEO reaches the $1 million a year mark, they should probably hush up about their peer's ridiculously inflated $74 million ones. Apply those numbers to Steve Ballmer and Larry Ellison respectively, and now consider that Ballmer is complaining about the latter's yearly figure. According to Forbes, Ellison has consistently hit the top ten of CEO compensation list, and is unarguably the most well paid CEO of a technology company, but does that give Ballmer any right to call him out on it? We're thinking maybe Ballmer should take stock -- of which he has 9.6% of Microsoft's total by the way -- and continue to count up his $15 Billion fortune. Sure, over-compensation of CEOs is a problem, but one that probably shouldn't be outed by a well-compensated CEO that earns double-digit multiples over the average Microsoft salary.

In a typical big-business outlay of money for no apparent reason, Oracle has begun to mail cardboard laptops to certain personages of distinction, touting "Information Rights Management" (or as we like to call it, Super Duper Security), which the company hopes to unload on willing consumers / companies / schoolmarms. Users who have received the laptops say the new systems are lightweight and stylish, although there have been complaints regarding the lack of an optical drive, screen, memory, trackpad, battery, motherboard, and processor.

[Via TheRegister]

Uh oh, we've got ourselves a true-blue corporate competitive intelligence espionage fiasco exploding on the international stage. Germany's SAP has admitted to "inappropriate downloads" from arch-rival, Oracle in the US. Oracle is suing SAP with claims that it is guilty of "corporate theft on a grand scale" after hacking into Oracle's computer network and stealing a "wide range of copyrighted software and other material" from their Peoplesoft business unit. Taking the presidential classic, "I didn't inhale" defense, SAP admits to stealing the data but claims it never left the systems of their wholly owned subsidiary, TomorrowNow (where SAP has "made changes" to management). Well, at least now we can more clearly see why the French are so concerned with their sensitive data being hosted outside of their immediate control.

Considering the sensational amount of knockoff gadgetry and counterfeit software that manages to emerge in China, it's only surprising that it has taken this long for a company (or two) to unveil a legitimate solution to at least curb the amount of black market goods that leave the country. Reportedly, Oracle will be teaming up with Hitachi to "jointly market wireless IC tags in China that can be used to identify whether products are real or not," meaning that tagged goods can now be easily identified as authentic when placed over a reader. The tags will be made and distributed by Hitachi and the duo of firms will promote the usage of said anti-piracy measures with the Tokyo-based Ubiquitous ID Center which issues and manages IC tags. Initially, the tags will purportedly be used with tickets for the upcoming Beijing Olympics and Expo 2010 in Shanghai, but there was no word on any planned rollouts or potential takers outside of these two events. Still, for Japanese wares makers that operate in China, ¥10 ($0.08) a pop for these piracy-thwarting tags sounds like an awfully fair deal. [Warning: Read link requires subscription]

[Via Yahoo]