Links for September 24th through September 27th

• The Supply Side of the Consumerization of Enterprise Software
  More from Israel Gat on applying consumer procurement patterns to enterprise procurement: 'The growing gap between “this lovely application on my iPhone” and the “headache of licensing traditional enterprise software” is an immense incentive for up-and-coming software vendors to use the ‘$7.99 experience’ as the heart of a new business design.'
• The cost of free
  Hey, I can never get enough of the "free" unmaskers.
• Coders tip Google Android for eclipse of the Steve
• Offline/Online Convergence, Mobile Commerce, and Life After Check-ins
  I hope you're enjoying that shaping of your behavior: "This is precisely why check-ins are incredibly powerful—they give the offline merchants an opportunity to shape your behavior before you buy or consume."
• Enterprise Software Spending to Rise 4.5 Percent This Year
• Oracle Gets Systems Design, and Starts Proving
  "The Exalogic Elastic Cloud is a funky name for a cluster of machines designed to run a highly tuned version of Oracle’s WebLogic application server and its JRockit and HotSpot Java virtual machine."
• Microsoft Technologies Gaining Ground in the IBM Midrange
  “When we go into an AS/400 shop, we run into a lot of packaged apps,” Hester reports. “That package is maybe 60 percent of their workload with 40 percent of their workload being all this custom stuff that’s written around it. So the migration is a combination of rehosting, rewriting, and replacement of that packaged app. The same is true on Unix, but on the mainframe side we would rarely see 60 percent of the workload coming from a package. It’s more likely to be 60 percent coming from custom apps.”
• Power 720: Same Entry Price, But More Room to Grow at Less Cost
  It's little wonder x86 mania is do wide when you have to make your own "monster charts" to figure out pricing.
• Bringing shared computing to the enterprise
• Sharp outs little'n'large e-mag tablets • reghardware
• At This Price, Mobile Subsidies May Not Be The Right Medicine For Tablets
  Casting doubts on Samsung's Galaxy tablet from the marketing and pricing angles.
• Oracle aims to boost client-side Java with JavaFX improvements
  "Oracle has decided to discard JavaFX Script and is instead going to supply bindings so that Java programmers can use JavaFX capabilities with the language of their choice, including Java, JRuby, Groovy, and JavaScript. Oracle expects to issue the next major JavaFX release in the third quarter of 2011, with new APIs and a more language-neutral model. Another one of Oracle's goals is to improve support for natively rendering HTML inside of JavaFX, which will potentially make it easier for developers to build content-centric mobile Java applications."
• How to Fold a Pocket Square
• Bob Woodward: The man with the key to the Oval Office | Ed Vulliamy
• Cloud Security: Austin Cloud User's Group – September 21, 2010
  Cloud Security, talk from second meeting of the Austin Cloud User's Group. Nice that they're recording it now!
• Oracle finally outlines roadmap for mobile Java • The Register
  Firming up Java ME and Java Fx – "We want the nine million Java developers in the world to never have to chose a different environment to build a great looking UI ever again," SVP Thomas Kurian
• Details of the JPMorgan Chase Oracle database outage
  Profile of database failure at JPMC.
• Working at Rackspace with OpenStack | Just Write Click
  Tech pub innovator Anne Gentle now working on Rackspace OpenStack. A good hire for Rackspace.
• Apple's 11.6in MacBook Air release imminent? • reghardware
• Oracle on the Prowl for Chip Firms
  "it’s clear that Oracle is attempting to become the Apple of the enterprise sector. It’s building custom boxes, software and whatever else to deliver a user experience for the cloud that is simple to run and deploy, but proprietary as heck. No wonder the majority of the enterprise software geeks are slamming it."
• Aggregators: the good ones vs. the looters
  I haven't come across this kind of anti-blogger talk in awhile. It's fun to encounter again: "How come a story that cost the original publisher $10,000 or $30,000 to report, edit and produce gets transformed into a mere one-gulp self-sufficient capsule? That’s the internet, baby. If the publisher doesn’t want his stuff to be e-looted, he should put it behind a paywall, or into a smartphone application. (Which is exactly what needs to happen in order to avoid certain death)." Party like it's 2004! Remember the phrase "mainstream media"? MSM! (Also: he has an excellent point.)

Disclosure: see the RedMonk client list for clients mentioned.