techno-culture

That was the big announcement out of Oracle OpenWorld, and the centre of Larry’s keynote. Oracle and HP are teaming to produce the Exadata storage server and a grid array in a box called the Database Machine that utilises the Exadata plus some database servers. Oracle is claiming the Exadata gives minimum 10x speed increases over existing storage configurations because it has big connection pipes that transfer data at 1gb/sec plus Intel quad core chips in the storage server side, which means data is sorted on the storage end, saving time and bandwidth in transferring it to database servers. To translate for the layman, Larry opted for that metric du jour — how does it compare to an iPod? (1400 times the size and space for “a lot of songs”; the music companies must have had heart failure at that quip).

Disappointingly the advertised Mark Hurd keynote turned out to be just a brief video link-up and we got Ann Livermore on stage instead.  Intel’s Paul Ottelini gave an interesting keynote about memory , speed and microprocessors that didn’t translate well into an article for me, though. And post the Exadata announcement, I could see why the usual keynote by Michael Dell went off the agenda. The other CEO keynotes were a bit thin this year generally, which was disappointing to me as they are one of the main reasons I like to attend this particular conference. I miss good old Scott McNealy, who always did both a lively keynote and a rigorous Q&A with press afterward (the last of the CEOs who would do press conferences after their keynote, not a great trend for OpenWorld). Boy wonder Jonathan Schwartz had taken over McNealy’s slot last year but I guess Sun and Oracle are bit too much in direct competition now for Sun to be on the speaker’s list any more.

There was a heavy green and social networking angle to the whole show and the final night’s party featured Elvis Costello, UB40, Seal, and others out on Treasure Island. But I skipped that in order to head down the peninsula for a few days with my parents in Silicon Valley. I am hoping to pop over the to the Computer History Museum which has its new Babbage Machine on show; and the Tech Museum is said to have a fabulous Leonardo exhibit too (but that may have to wait til I am out again in November).

I did get a chance to cross the street from the Moscone Center and see the Frida Kahlo exhibit before it winds up at the SF Museum of Modern Art. No queue to wait for tickets on a Tuesday (and as the show is reaching the end of its run. Really fabulous and her portraits are even more striking and quite beautiful, in person. I was fascinated by a little clip of colour home movie showing Kahlo and Diego Rivera at home. She was quite handsome (not pretty, but very handsome), with a vitality that comes across on film. A difficult and tragic life, though, filled with emotional and great physical pain.