Going Blue. The day's big tech news is the potential acquisition of Sun Micro by IBM. I call this one a good move for both parties. Sun has been known to be strategically compromised for years. In spite of their attempts to transition into the open source market, their core hardware and Solaris business has been under attack by commodity architecture - both linux and Wintel. They are being slowly reduced to a low-volume supplier of specialty hardware, which is a fancy way of saying 'dying'. IBM would pick up a customer base, a robust enterprise Unix platform, an entry level database, consolidate dominance over the enterprise Java market, and can work out a hardware convergence strategy in the next generation. Also IBM, unlike Sun, has figured out how make money from open source based services. That lets them do this deal while HP, hopelessly compromised to Microsoft, has to watch it happen.
Hurrah for the State Board of Ed. I don't throw bouquets to the CA state government very often, but credit where it's due: The board of education overruled the San Mateo County and Sequoia school boards to allow a charter school in the county. The One may be backing charters, but word hasn't spread to the local educrats. The Sequoia district, where I have the misfortune to live, has a long history of trying to squash charters and indeed any form of competition or accountability. (And if anyone from that district happens to find their way here, you can note that our household is two reliable NO votes on any funding proposal you put on the ballot, until you accept choice. And we're not the only ones.)
Hazardous ground. Shannon Love has a great post on moral hazards at ChicagoBoyz. She (blush) He comes up a with an analogy that I wouldn't have thought of, making the problems created by Fannie and Freddie a good deal more comprehensible. RTWT.
Read things before you sign them, OK? So Countryside Mortgage pal Chris Dodd, frantically trying to take the bonuses away from AIG execs, turns out to be the one who wrote protections for them into the pork bill. And Obama, now fulminating against the payouts, and his Treasury officials, have known about the payments for months. (HT: Dan Riehl.) So while the Congress scrambles to pass a bill of attainder to confiscate the proceeds, perhaps we should ask whether any of these 'lawyers' holding high office actually read anything, including the Constitution. The only good news, with the Obama adminstration calling the AIG bonus protection the 'Dodd amendment', is that the Senator is about to go under the bus. Update: Heh.