BeachRider

100% Gainers and Their Estimated P/Es

JAVA on this list, too? Although this list is backward-looking, I can't help thinking that people are looking at entries that will continue this performance.

JAVA is being purchased by ORCL, as soon as Belgium clears it. If something happens and ORCL drops the acquisition plan (very low chance), then JAVA will decline in value.

Buy JAVA if you believe that the difference from today's price to the ORCL purchase price will give you enough value for the risk. The minor chance of significant falloff is what is causing the gap today.

I wish ORCL and JAVA well on this venture, but it will be a roller coaster for a little while!

30 Attractive Companies Under $30: Fidelity's Low Priced Stock Fund Part II

ORCL is on the edge with its Sun integration plan. Although they expect it to ADD to their top-line, many of us are anxious to see how that would-ever happen.

Will Energy Accelerate the Computer Refresh Cycle?

So the CPUs got cooler, but the memory and memory-control got hotter. The net is 20-45% power savings on servers. In a 4-way (Quad core, 12GB high-speed memory) Intel server, that amounts to annual savings of $260-$600/yr (with a 550-800W AC power supply) versus a similar four-year old machine. If that new machine incurs a $7K purchase/implement cost, then payback takes 11 years. An older air conditioning system might halve that payback period, but it is still quite long. Only power-utility rebates and tax-breaks accelerate these decisions.

Will Intel's New Processor Be a Game-Changer?

Raising the capability of the high-end is a good thing for Intel. They will create price pressure on IBM, existence-pressure on SPARC and judgment pressure on HP (for choosing Itanium in the UNIX market).

This isn't widely applicable to home-machines. Perhaps 5% of home computer users will have much use for this. Not trivial, but not a game changer.

These are still IA-32 chips. Acceptance/Understanding of x64 is a problem. Intel must make it clear that they have a long term solution and sever-off Itanium. Then the future will be clear.

Technically the Core i7 at 45 nm is still substantially slower than the Power 6 at 65 nm (core-per-core). Both are available as true quad-core setups, for several months now.

Saving electricity on a by-core basis will always be in SPARC's favor. The just run the thing at low GHz and cram 8-16 cores in each CPU. I am not sure how that translates into server-buy decisions, though.

Top Ten Tech Surprises in 2009: Low Probability, High Consequence Edition

Isn't Cisco trying to enhance their Intel-blade offerings? Doesn't Sun have a substantial knowledge of doing that from their Intel/AMD blade products? I don't know how the Sun/STK disk stuff would sell at Cisco, they don't have any offering in that area (could be good, though). The freeware might be useful to Cisco to augment existing Cisco products for Network monitoring that presume the use of Sun/Solaris. Purchasing Sun can't really be that expensive, anyway.

I would like to see these two get together.