Yes, it's true, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison has bought 98% of the Hawaiian Island of Lanai for $500m.  The island was previously owned by David Murdock who bought Dole in 1985.  The island has 3,200 residents, two luxury resorts, two golf courses and is 88,000 acres (141 square miles) in size. 

Here are some alternate headlines & subheads

Ellison Buys Island of Lanai
Declares Bill & Melinda Gates Marriage to be in Violation of Oracle Terms of Service

Says "What Island?  I only wanted a closed off veranda.  Doesn't anyone listen to me?"

Thanks Safra Catz for …

Larry Ellison makes it very clear that Oracle believes in a back to the future model where software and hardware meld together into “systems”, purpose-built, integrated solutions. In other words you won’t buy an Oracle database and a server and configure it to run a data warehouse, instead you’ll buy the “Oracle Data Warehouse Server.” The first such system is Exadata, which is apparently doing quite well, according to Ellison.

This is a classic bundling, although some may call it a tying strategy. Microsoft, seeing that they couldn’t win each office productivity segment individually—including word processing, spreadsheet and presentations—decided to play to their strength and bundle them into a solution that no individual company could compete with. This is bundling. The tying strategy is where Microsoft used their dominance in …

A controversial issue in the UK this week is the BBC’s decision to invite the British National Party - the far-right, whites-only political party - to appear on Question Time, the BBC’s flagship political debate programme.

Critics fear that the move will legitimise the BNP’s far-right views, while the BBC has defended the invitation on the grounds that its role as a politically neutral public service broadcaster would be undermined if it excluded the BNP - which won its first European Parliament seats this year with an estimated million votes.

To me it is clear that no matter how abhorrent the BNP’s policies on certain issues may be the BBC has a duty to invite it to participate as it is a legitimately recognised political party. We live in a society …

Oracle is keeping MySQL. Yahoo is selling Zimbra. Linus is feeling bloated. And more.

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# Larry Ellison reportedly said Oracle has no intention of spinning off MySQL.

# Yahoo is trying to sell Zimbra, according to All Things D.

# Linus Torvalds said Linux is “bloated and huge”.

# GroundWork Open Source released GroundWork Monitor 6.0.

# Zend launched Simple API for Cloud Application …

hannahadams and I were laying awake tonight being kept awake by the naughty puppy. We talked a bit about database vendors, and she asked me "so, who is behind Oracle?" I told her that some people call him Darth Ellison. She grunted and said that it sounds to her as if he was not played with enough as a young boy, and that his insatiable appetite for consuming information-related companies indicates that he just needs some hugs.

She was much more eloquent than I, of course :)