Roundup: DOJ approves Oracle-Sun deal, Gamestop falls short, Twitter’s charming memory loss

Here’s the latest action:
The Department of Justice cleared Oracle’s purchase of Sun — Larry Ellison’s $7.4 billion acquisition of the Valley’s rockstar server maker and owner of the rights to Java software, is a transaction on the scale of Yahoo’s ad sales deal with Microsoft. European antitrust regulators are still evaluating whether or not to launch an investigation. The Wall Street Journal reports that an issue about the way Sun licenses rights to Java had held up approval. What’s in it for you? Oracle will be able to sell integrated systems that bundle its database software with Sun’s hardware and widely-used Java software.
GameStop profits miss the mark – The world’s largest video game retailer reported a second quarter net income of $38.7 million, down from $57.2 million last year. The Grapevine, Texas-based firm’s CEO claimed on a conference call that a lack of compelling new releases was part of the problem. Bloomberg has the long version.
Lehman Brothers, the movie — The BBC is producing a TV movie about the collapse of the financial services firm scheduled for the anniversary of last year’s September 15th bankruptcy filing, the largest bankruptcy in U.S. history. The Brits see the story differently, since Barclays picked up the firm’s North American investment banking and trading divisions. The New York Times reports on who’ll play who.
Xbox 360 failure rate is above 50 percent, survey says — The Red Ring of Death is all too familiar to owners of Microsoft’s game console. In a survey of 5,000+ owners, 52.4% reported having experienced either the Red Ring of Death, the E74 error, or another hardware failure. Sony’s Yellow Light of Death only hits 10.3% of owners. Nintendo owners lack a clever name for when their stuff breaks.

Twitter founder apparently forgot that they tried to trademark “tweet” once already — Why do we love Twitter? Partly because the management team behind the inexplicably super-popular messaging service exudes the messy-haired charm of a couple of college kids who haven’t slept because, you know, they got sucked into working on this Twitter thing. In today’s episode, computer scientist Sam Johnston points out that Twitter founder Biz Stone claimed the company has applied to trademark the word “tweet” because “it is clearly attached to Twitter from a brand perspective.” Johnston links to US Patent and Trademark Office records that show the Twitter team already applied to trademark the word in April. Their application, being for the word “tweet,” was turned down the same day.