Daily Cuppa: Oracle OpenWorld, Apple apologises
It's a Tuesday that feels like a Monday for those of us who were lucky enough to have a public holiday yesterday. To catch you up on the weekend news, we've got the latest from Oracle, Apple, and Google.
Oracle OpenWorld has kicked off for another year, with CEO Larry Ellison decked out in his finest turtleneck, singing the praises of Oracle's cloud strategy. He wants Oracle customers to work in the public and private cloud space using Oracle hardware and software. He spoke about the "cathedral" of Oracle's self-contained cloud, versus the "slums" of Amazon's and Google's less proprietary, free-for-all models.
There was a bit of criticism that Ellison's speech was just a sales pitch, but you've got to expect that, right?
Oracle president Mark Hurd went in to a bit more depth, outlining all of the areas that Oracle plays in, touching on the rise of big data and the associated storage costs, as well as Oracle's R&D and how that will save costs for Oracle's customers.
Late on Friday evening, Apple CEO Tim Cook put out a statement on Apple's website, stating that Apple's Maps application in iOS 6 "fell short" of expectations, and that Apple is working on making it better. ZDNet's Larry Dignan said that Apple's statement was good enough to allay customer anguish, especially because Cook took time out to point out the alternatives available to Maps.
Apple might also be in trouble with Europe again, with claims that Apple's advertisements of its one-year warranty fail to acknowledge that in Europe, consumers are guaranteed an automatic two-year warranty. The EU justice commissioner has advised the EU's 27 member states to examine Apple's warranty practices in their countries.
A number of banks including the Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, and the US Bank have all been hit with denial-of-service (DoS) attacks since September 19. We have all the details here.
Finally, the security researcher who discovered the Samsung Galaxy S III remote-wipe flaw has said that other Android devices, including some models of HTC and Sony Ericsson phones, may be vulnerable to the flaw if they have not been updated since June.