IBM Acquires Red Hat

Ben Thompson:

Yesterday Young’s story came full circle when IBM bought Red Hat for $34 billion, a 60% premium over Red Hat’s Friday closing price. IBM is hoping it too to can come full circle: recapture Gerstner’s magic, which depended not only on his insight about services, but also a secular shift in enterprise computing.

[…]

This is the bet: while in the 1990s the complexity of the Internet made it difficult for businesses to go online, providing an opening for IBM to sell solutions, today IBM argues the reduction of cloud computing to three centralized providers makes businesses reluctant to commit to any one of them. IBM is betting it can again provide the solution, combining with Red Hat to build products that will seamlessly bridge private data centers and all of the public clouds.

Kontra:

MySQL, Java, OpenOffice → Oracle
SpringSource, Zimbra → VMware
XenSource → Citrix
GitHub → Microsoft
JBoss → Red Hat → IBM

Open source toolchain company exits are good for open source?

[…]

And who’s next?

Update (2018-11-16): See also: Hacker News.

Acquisition Business IBM Open-source Software Red Hat

Why a Helium Leak Disabled Every iPhone in a Medical Facility

Daniel Oberhaus:

The answer, it seems, is because Apple recently defected from traditional quartz-based clocks in its phones in favor of clocks that are also made of MEMS silicon. Given that clocks are the most critical device in any computer and are necessary to make the CPU function, their disruption with helium atoms is enough to crash the device.

In this case, the leaking helium from the MRI machine infiltrated the iPhones like a “tiny grain of sand” and caused the MEMS clocks to go haywire. This isn’t news to Apple, however, which explicitly mentions that “exposing iPhone to environments having high concentrations of industrial chemicals, including near evaporating liquified gasses such as helium, may damage or impair iPhone functionality” in the phone’s manual.

iFixit has a detailed explanation of how this all works over at its blog.

Hardware iPhone Time