Sun snaps up MySQL

Sun Microsystems elbowed into the enterprise database market yesterday with the announcement of a proposed $1 billion acquisition of MySQL, an open source database software company, says Forbes.

The deal, which Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz calls the "most important acquisition in the company's history", makes Sun one of the first major public companies to offer open source software. It also puts the company head to head with the three big vendors in the $15 billion database market: IBM, SAP, and its former database partner, Oracle.

Compared to those three goliaths, which provide database software to 86% of the enterprise software market, according to Forrester Research, MySQL offers a simpler and cheaper solution.

You could hear the collective sigh from the crowd. When Steve Jobs unveiled the newest member of the Macintosh fold, the skinny MacBook Air laptop, the Mac-faithful sighed with pleasure. But it was just a momentary exhale, reports Forbes.

Once the magnetic effect of Jobs' personality wore off, even fans who had lined up by the thousands at the Macworld Expo in San Francisco to hear Jobs on Tuesday morning were groaning.

"Lame," said software developer Jukka Laiho, when asked for his opinion of the keynote address.

Apple has unveiled its much-awaited iTunes Movie Rentals. By linking major movie studios with its popular iTunes store and a revived version of its Apple TV device, the company aims to get films on to consumers' computers, television sets and iPods, hoping to make movies as universal and portable as digital music, says Chicago Tribune.

The online rental market has been hotly contested for years. Both AOL and Wal-Mart abandoned online movie download services last year. Netflix has seven million subscribers and ships 1.8 million DVDs every day, but selection at its online streaming service is small.

Newcomers, such as CinemaNow, offer movies that can be downloaded to rent or own, but are considered niche competitors. And cable television companies such as Comcast want consumers to use set-top boxes to access a wider breadth of on-demand digital content but haven't yet connected the living room with computers or handheld devices.

Researchers at Duke University Medical Centre have used a monkey's brain activity to control a robot on the other side of the globe, says Information Week.

In what researchers tout as a first-of-its-kind experiment, monkeys' thoughts controlled the walking patterns of a robot in Japan.

"They can walk in complete synchronisation," said Dr Miguel Nicolelis. "The most stunning finding is that when we stopped the treadmill and the monkey ceased to move its legs, it was able to sustain the locomotion of the robot for a few minutes, just by thinking, using only the visual feedback of the robot in Japan."