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I give specific reasons for not bowing to arguments from authority. You whine factlessly about my rejection of your favorite authority.

Then change the mozilla mission statement so that it doesn't include "standards compliance" as one of its points. A standard is inhernetly an authority. If you want to reject W3C, then you are appointing yourself as the authority. I prefer the community based approach that has proven it can work by producing successes like HTML and XML. As much as I respect your technical skills, I don't think you can forge standards better than W3C.

Just because the w3c endorses a specification does not mean that spec is a good or necessary standard

W3C has a pretty good track record. HTML, XML, RDF, SVG, XForms are all good specs, with broad support across the industry that standardize things that need to be standardized. I suppose they've probably created a lemon once or twice -- no one is perfect. A bad standard is one that is ignored, so that explains why none come to mind. In most cases having an open standard is an end in itself. Consensus and broad industry acceptance reduces IT costs MORE than absolute technical merit.

The consequent neglect of HTML, DOM level 0, and other under- or un-specified de-facto standards used by billions of web pages, has aided and abetted MS in cementing its monopoly.

Huh? MS had cemented their monopoly long before IE came along. They didn't seem to care much at all about IE breaking the standards you mention. In fact, they kind of like it because it results in IE only websites. If you want to wait to adopt standards until somebody invents a process with no warts that will somehow restrain Microsoft from its bad behavior it won't happen. That is an unreasonable expectation. What standards give you is a way for other groups who want to ignore Microsoft to cooperate and interoperate with you. When you reject the standards process based on technical quibbling like this you are throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Even if Mozilla supported XForms, web content authors in a few years are much likelier to use XAML than XForms.

Based on the marketing fluff I've read, XAML is more of a direct competitor to XUL and XBL than to XForms. XForms is about binding widgets to an XML data record. But that is beside the point.

The content authors who have been captured by Microsoft aren't going to be using Mozilla no matter what you do. Forget about them and compete for the people who haven't shut you out. The arena where XForms could have tremendous benefit for Mozilla is in enterprise applications. The dominant player in this space is Oracle, not Microsoft. Oracle is developing an XForms plugin for IE, by the way. Care to comment on this?

If your "I want a standards compliant browser" demand means anything here, it can only mean that this is all about *you* and *your wants*.

You act like I'm the only person who wants standards compliance and likes the W3C. The fact that 534 people voted for the XForms bug is dissed out of hand by you. Why even have voting? You obviously don't want to listen to what it tells you about what the Mozilla community wants. If XForms is so crazy, why would Oracle spend the money to make an XForms plugin?

If on your planet, XForms matters, get busy implementing it in Mozilla. We're accepting patches.

Is this a serious offer? Why would I spend the time when it isn't clear that you perceive it to have value or would accept it?

If, as you claim, everybody is going to be using XAML in a few years anyway, why would I want to learn XUL and XBL? Why shouldn't I just switch to IE and use the Oracle plugin? At least Oracle doesn't act like I'm from another "planet" for advocating XForms.

By the way, I took your past suggestion and posted my view of the pro-XForms case on netscape.public.mozilla.layout . I hope that can be a constructive conversation and stay away from flames.

Pushing the data integrity code to the app instead of asking the RDBMS to do all the heavy lifting will come to bite you in the arse when scalability becomes important.

Hell, I don't even care about scalability. How about simply being able to trust your data? I'm currently working on a database-backed project that has aboslutely no foreign key constraints at all (among other problems, though the SQL engine is not MySQL and we are slowly but surely fixing the issues). We're constantly trying to clean up our data sets (not fun when you're talking about several tens of millions of rows) and track down the offending code so we can add constraints and then handle the insert errors properly, but it's been a long and arduous process. We're actually at the point where we're willing to throw away the current system and start over (or, well, run side-by-side for a while). It's not fun.

If MySQL works for the majority of installations, so be it. You never get to be number one in your pack by following the pack. You have to innovate and do what you do really well. "Good enough" only gets you outsourced.

Very true. Let me also add for those who think that MySQL is a good learning tool -- it's not. While MySQL does support much of the ANSI standard, you're going to run into problems (some of which are MySQL's fault, some aren't):

• The tricks and hacks you have to do to work around MySQL's limitations (subselects, views, stored procedures, triggers, etc) are unnecessary in a real RDBMS, but you won't know that because you only know MySQL.
• More importantly, the hoops you have to jump through in MySQL often lead to suboptimal SQL code. You may not really notice this on the light data sets where MySQL excels, but you will as soon as you try to migrate this knowledge to a larger system.
• MySQL gives you a false sense of performance. Your data sets are small (ideally, otherwise you're going to be in for some shit with MySQL), and so you don't care about proper indexing, whether you're doing index seeks versus table scans, whether your data is well-normalized versus normalization trade-offs for performance, etc. What performance tuning you do learn from MySQL likely won't translate well to other systems.
• MySQL has its own non-ANSI syntax additions that don't apply to other RDBMSs (AUTO_INCREMENT column type, for example)
• Similarly, other RDBMSs have their own set of specific keywords, so you still have to put in the time to learn them (do you know how to do an auto-incrementing column in SQL Server? MySQL won't teach you that)

Oracle's lame license definition page

"For the purposes of counting the number of processors which require licensing, a multicore chip with "n" processor cores shall be counted as "n" processors."

I guess they have it in for Sun.

Here's a linkified working location.

As the subject says, you don't really cluster in the database world for performance. You do it for a number of reasons: 1) Cause in Oracle is cool tech to work on (most importantly) 2) If one node goes down your database keeps chugging alot, just slightly slower. 3) Cause its cool. Saying that the largest that I know of run off of big SMP systems like the HP Superdome. Oracle did a presentation on linux clusters and told us it was cheaper than large SMP boxes and could scale better. Well, recently we had a new project interested in RAC and for our test server we wanted 2 dual cpu blade servers, hardware wise cost 20k. Well, the Oracle licencing on top of that added 80k. I have no idea how running RAC could be cheaper than a single SMP box cause the licensing will kill ya. But anyways, you cluster so you reduce the points of failure and for scalability. Its well noted that Oracle scales excellent in a clustered environment, so you buy a couple of cheap boxes and just toss more in as you need extra capacity.

My company just went through this.

You should check out the Oracle Collaboration Suite. It's the new rave in collaboration software...everything is stored in an Oracle DB and interfaced through an application written on top of Oracle Application Server. Last time I checked, most every document format imaginable was index-able so the collab suite can run a credentials based search, create a quick html view (like cached documents on google), there's full ability to do check-in/check-out, and ability to create "workflow" processes. The main document interface is done over webdav ( oss ) and drives can be mapped just like the old days.

Oh yeah, and it is designed to be a replacement for Exchange/Sharepoint...which means email, contacts, calendaring, and the like are all taken care of. The cost varies on size, but for my company it was about 40% that of a full blown MS collaboration solution (hardware, consulting, migration, software).

If you're into spending extra money, Sharepoint is a great product. I evaluated both, but it came down to security, reliability, and cost.

Sun's speciality has always been giant boxes/OS packages to handle things like multiple terabyte, specificially Oracle databases.

These days Oracle is pitching clusters of low-cost Linux PCs, even -- no wait, especially -- for large, mission-critical databases that Must Stay Up.

They've seen the future... and it's Linux, apparently...

Greger47 said: VALUES is a table constructor; interleaving identifiers and literals only makes sense if you're inserting a single record.

I said: No, it's not. insert values (...) and insert (...) values (...) always insert a single record. values does not occur anywhere else in SQL, AFAIK.

Greger47 replied: Nope, you can insert multiple records with one statement, the syntax is: insert into foo (x,y,z) values (1,1,1), (2,2,2), (3,3,3),...

I've never seen that syntax before, and it's not allowed by the Oracle grammar or the PostgreSQL grammar.

In all the Microsoft bashing, we might want to realize that this could be a bad thing. Especially if it's more broadly applied. It could be applied against ANY "for review" software provided for free. For example, any of us who attends trade shows will get review software. If this is applied here, we could be forbidden from taking this software. Or downloading "for review" software from "Oracle Technical Network", Sun, Java (remember it's offered on CD by subscription for $), or even Open Source Software that's offered Commercially like RedHat Linux. For us developers, it could make it very hard for us to evaluate new software. At least without having to spend large amounts of money (often our own) to purchase the software.

Check out Steltor CorporateTime by Oracle. It has a web based Calendering Client, integrates in Outlook, and support Sync to Palms and other PDAs.

Anybody got Photoshop handy?

Here's a bigger version: here

Hi!

I can understand why filing a patent costs a lot of money. But if a bad patent is granted it should be easy to have it revoked, not $9000+. After all, we're essentially doing the job that the reviewer should have done in the first place.

Or, we're abusing the patent process to jerk around a competitor. Or we're abusing the process to defeat the nefarious schemes of companies we despise. Or maybe we're senior citizens that have adopted filing patent claims as a hobby....

Once upon a time patents cost very little--and the actual costs of the USPTO (like lots of parts of the U.S. government) were borne by the average taxpayer. In the 1970s and following the government moved toward "user fees"--charging the recipients of a federal program for its costs. Thus visitors to most national parks pay a fee, cruise ship operators pay a fee for Coast Guard inspections, and children pay an annual fee to participate in 4-H. This is the same thing: the people who do business with the USPTO help fund its operation. And the cost structure deters people (hopefully) from clogging it unnecessarily.

Trolling, but I'll bite. I'd be interested in seeing these industry benchmarks. Just yesterday I was looking for some Oracle info, and the very first thing on their front page is their release on how using Linux on Itanium they have set performance records. Additionally Itanium is leading in most or all spec benchmarks. The last generation Itanium processors had some serious speed issues, but I think perhaps you haven't kept up to date on the performance numbers. Otherwise I'd be interested in seeing links to some of the numbers you HAVE seen lately.

If you have lots more updates than accesses, you need your redo logs etc on RAW devices, no filesystem required, these will be your biggest bottleneck.

Despite all the wisecracks about the name, our sentimental favorite should be GPFS because of a certain well known geek who works for the filesystem group at IBM Almaden.

Oracle had a nice agreement whereby if you had any issue at all that affected the operation of your database, they would troubleshoot it to the end no matter if the cause turned out to be an OS issue; provided that you:

1) Maintained an active Oracle support contract and
2) Maintained an active support contract with one of the UnitedLinux vendors.

They also have that same deal with RedHat. I was hoping to move from AIX to SuSE Enterprise Server later this year for our Oracle DB server, but now I may be forced to go with RedHat. :(

Does anyone know how this affects the Oracle deal?

-- Cameron

So why would anyone write software that is specifically "for Mozilla", especially a database vendor?

And no one said they're writing apps specifically for Mozilla. They're saying they'll officially support Mozilla (with their apps). What that means is that when you go complaining to Oracle saying that their app is not working with Mozilla, they'll fix it.

So why would anyone write software that is specifically "for Mozilla", especially a database vendor?

And no one said they're writing apps specifically for Mozilla. They're saying they'll officially support Mozilla (with their apps). What that means is that when you go complaining to Oracle saying that their app is not working with Mozilla, they'll fix it.

So why would anyone write software that is specifically "for Mozilla", especially a database vendor?

And no one said they're writing apps specifically for Mozilla. They're saying they'll officially support Mozilla (with their apps). What that means is that when you go complaining to Oracle saying that their app is not working with Mozilla, they'll fix it.

So why would anyone write software that is specifically "for Mozilla", especially a database vendor?

And no one said they're writing apps specifically for Mozilla. They're saying they'll officially support Mozilla (with their apps). What that means is that when you go complaining to Oracle saying that their app is not working with Mozilla, they'll fix it.

So why would anyone write software that is specifically "for Mozilla", especially a database vendor?

And no one said they're writing apps specifically for Mozilla. They're saying they'll officially support Mozilla (with their apps). What that means is that when you go complaining to Oracle saying that their app is not working with Mozilla, they'll fix it.

JInitiator (even the pre-Mozilla versions) work like a charm on Mozilla - I use it day in and day out. Ofcourse the old installers don't recognize Mozilla (they only recognize IE and Netscape 4.x) but on Windows you can copy the plugin DLLs to your Mozilla plugins directory. Obviously we don't want to suggest these "hacks" to customers and so this would be an example where we improve the installer to do the right thing and place the seal of Oracle support. This is true even on Linux and Solaris because at it's core JInitiator is Java-based.

The newer self-service applications built in the past three years all work on Mozilla. They are built with UIX which elminates all the raw HTML coding from our Apps developers. The core technology team ensures compliance across all browsers including Mozilla. Just FYI this also helps us support a host of PDAs and smartphones. The same is true for ADF which is simply the next generation of UIX and related tools.

Disclaimer: I work at Oracle in the applications technologies division but these statements are mine and do not reflect Oracle's position. Posting anonymously for obvious reasons.

JInitiator (even the pre-Mozilla versions) work like a charm on Mozilla - I use it day in and day out. Ofcourse the old installers don't recognize Mozilla (they only recognize IE and Netscape 4.x) but on Windows you can copy the plugin DLLs to your Mozilla plugins directory. Obviously we don't want to suggest these "hacks" to customers and so this would be an example where we improve the installer to do the right thing and place the seal of Oracle support. This is true even on Linux and Solaris because at it's core JInitiator is Java-based.

The newer self-service applications built in the past three years all work on Mozilla. They are built with UIX which elminates all the raw HTML coding from our Apps developers. The core technology team ensures compliance across all browsers including Mozilla. Just FYI this also helps us support a host of PDAs and smartphones. The same is true for ADF which is simply the next generation of UIX and related tools.

Disclaimer: I work at Oracle in the applications technologies division but these statements are mine and do not reflect Oracle's position. Posting anonymously for obvious reasons.

But most Linux users would prefer that to be the case. So, if a company wants to create a non-free app that runs on Linux, it best be very functional and relatively cheap. Otherwise, it likely won't reach a critical mass of acceptance.

Sirius Cybernetics == Microsoft? That would have been some foresight

You're right, Mr. Adams would indeed have to have had lots of foresight to see how Big and how Ugly Micro$soft would become.

As it turns out, Douglas Adams did have that much foresight; see his anti-MS rants here, here, here, and... oh, shit, just Google for "Douglas Adams + Miscrosoft" and you'll see :-)

(Disclaimer: I love everything about Douglas Adams, and work for a company famous for opposing Microsoft.)

It can be found here.

Right. You wouldn't want stuff to be easy to find, have sample code that actually compiles, runs AND does what it says, and actually stays up for longer than an hour at a stretch. Try this example instead.

Sorry, just bitter. Oracle's docs are a heaping pile of crap.

Gosh, like PostgresQL or Oracle?

I am using Fedora Core 1 now and find it very stable, fast and well put together. The only problem is that it is a little "bleeding" edge for 3rd party apps. My Netlock VPN client doesn't work with the stock FC1 kernel so I had to install a Red Hat 9 kernel. I cannot get the Corda graphing server to run, and various issues with the newer NPTL and glibc stuff that requires patches to get Oracle to run. Though with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 with similar packages, the 3rd party support should pick up soon. Overall it is a good desktop, especially with freshrpms.net to get tons of extra packages.

Oh look, these people are patently under 14</sarcasm>

That in under a minutes googling. Now crawl back under a rock troll.

And for people who STILL believe that Java is slow, download eclipse (the url is above, for those of you can't google for it, or even guess it) and have a play...it's written in Java and *GASP* is not only a)amazingly useful, but b)damn snappy, seriously, those people who said Java would never work on the desktop because its too slow, they can start eating their hats.

Plus, I just did a job search for c++ vs. Java on a uk job site and guess what, the number of results returned was nearly identical, so by the look of things, lots of people and companies use Java. IMHO, for enterprise n-tiered applications its the shiznitz.

The reason that Java can be faster is because you can do some really nifty optimisations during runtime with the latest JIT compilers that are impossible (or at least monumentally difficult) to do with compile c/c++ code.

In closing: Here is another benchmark...maybe because he has a domain name you'll trust him more?

Access has the most overhead according to this.

Here's a link to a discussion where the poster states that Access is not good for large installations...

You might check with IBM (DB2), Oracle, MySQL, or Postgres for help as well...I'm sure they'ld be more than happy to help.

Cross platform compatability. Students with Windoze, Linux, or Macs can run most SQL servers...not so with Access...

And then there's the corporate settings...most companies are using DB2, Oracle, MySql, or something that is ANSI-SQL compatible...not M$ SQL...

You also have more utilities and help available for SQL than Access...

There's GUI tools, schema browsers, etc all available for SQL...

If your school runs its website on a *NIX server, you could up-play the compatibility angle...you know, senior projects and such...

One major advantage of SQL is that all of the companies/organizations that I mentioned are free or have a free educational version...I doubt M$ does...

OTOH, I've been using XFS to store and edit 36-bit film scans (40+ MB file sizes) and XFS has been serving me extremely well, without data corruption of any kind - differently from Reiser 3, which needs a reiserfsck every time I boot Win2k (not that this happens very often).

Finally, according to Oracle, even ext3 blows ReiserFS 3 off the water:

http://otn.oracle.com/oramag/webcolumns/2002/techa rticles/scalzo_linux02.html
--------
Outgoing mail is certified Virus Free - after all, I use Mandrake Linux!
Get my public PGP signature at http://www.paulo.fessel.nom.br

...and they DO contribute to the Open Source community.
http://oss.oracle.com/

That's Extremely Relevant.
Please, somebody mod the parent UP!

The results for Best Modeling Tool (scroll to last chart) are:

• Winner: Visio 2003 - 37%
• 1st Runner up: Rational Rose - 18%
• 2nd Runner up: Oracle9i/10g JDeveloper - 7%

Well, how about Oracle 10g?

OTN is what you're looking for. Free downloads of eval versions of pretty much anything they've got. Registration required, of course :)

I believe the answer is "Yes".

"a link to any information regarding those Oracle optimizations?"

The Linux page on OTN would be a good place to start.

I believe the answer is "Yes".

"a link to any information regarding those Oracle optimizations?"

The Linux page on OTN would be a good place to start.

Your 2C has been devalued!

I was just reading about that dillemma here:

http://otn.oracle.com/oramag/oracle/02-nov/o62odev _java.html

If you ask me, the whole thing is retarded. Whenever you get these high level abstract frameworks, they imply limitation and slowness, both in running and writing. (Examine Zope as a perfect non-java example.) People forget that learning new frameworks takes lots of time, time that could have been spent just writing code. They also limit what you can do for everything they give half the time.
I used to use j2ee on tomcat, but I found that for many projects the faster to write faster to run solution was via fastcgi.
http://www.fastcgi.com
The principle in my sig seems to hold true the better I get.

"...but linux can be a gateway drug to other Open Source/FREE software"

For now, I don't think this is a (serious) risk. Oracle has been distributing Apache now for a number of years, for example. If you know anything about the history of Oracle, the success it has achieved is more about sales and marketing than about having a superior (or cheaper) product (remember Ingres??). If you're an CTO for a Fortune 500, are you going to move your corporate databases to MySQL? I don't think so. You are going to stick with the database vendor that's running corporate databases for most of the rest of the Fortune 500. If you're the kind of company that has a budget so tight that you NEED to run MySQL or Postgres for core systems, Oracle doesn't want or need you. Maybe the best weapon Oracle has against MySQL and Postgres is the fact that you are able to download the complete version of Oracle from OTN. There are many unlicenced Oracle implementations around the world as a result of this free download facility.

I'm all for Postgres and MySQL pushing into the enterprise world, but MSSQL should be the first target. If Oracle are prepared to put real money into backing Linux, let's support them...

What you're asking for is a SAN.

I just installed a Network Appliance FAS250 in my server room. It speaks CIFS, NFS, and iSCSI.

By the way, you're wrong... Oracle will run perfectly using CIFS shares (I'm running it now, and have been for the past few months), and NetApp has plenty of documents in their tech library showing all the different ways to use attached storage with Oracle and many other pieces of software.

With respect to speed, it really depends on the network infrastructure. I've got a Cisco GigE switch attaching 6 machines directly to a GigE port on the NetApp Filer. It is literally twice as fast than the directly attached RAID 5 (caching, etc.) arrays that it replaced.

I think that Microsoft Exchange can be installed to a CIFS share, but if not, you should look at iSCSI. My company uses Lotus Notes 4.6.7 (sweet, merciful Christ, please put me out of my misery), and it works great from a CIFS share on the NetApp.

Microsoft has a free iSCSI Initiator for Windows that will mount an iSCSI device just like any other SCSI drive in Windows. You can find several iSCSI targets for linux here.

I have about 50 Mac's on our network (graphics department) that needed to talk with the new filer. Instead of installing a klugy piece of software to make the OS9 Macs talk to the SAN at $150/seat, I installed a linux box using samba to talk to the SAN through CIFS and netatalk (AppleTalk for linux) to re-share out the samba mounts. Becides some quirks (Mac's don't see the linux gateway in the AFP browse list, but can connect directly through IP), it works rather well.

Look at iSCSI, it does exactly what you're looking for.

"Soon the Enterprise solutions will follow them in the dump because no one will bother learning RH anymore."

I totally disagree with this (troll???). If you've got Debian or Slackware at home, it's not going to be too much of a jump to configure a RH box is it??? I work with lots of blue chips, fortune 500s and public sector organisations, and a few hundred for a server support contract is not going to worry any of them... But not having to spend 50k on a new Solaris or HP-UX box is a mighty big carrot to dangle in front of any IT manager - especially if he knows his enterprise software vendors are backing and promoting a cheaper alternative platform (as for example Oracle are backing RH and to a lesser extent SUSE right now).

I'm not pleased that my RH9 installs aren't going to be supported any more, but I'm happy to move to something else knowing that RedHat are pushing Linux into the heart of the enterprise. A low cost and low risk alternative to Microsoft, fighting them where Sun never could. If Novell can get their act together with SUSE, then they'll have something to fight Microsoft with too. And that can't be a bad thing...

The irony is that Oracle also requires payment to supply you with security patches. I disagree with that of course, however I would call you attitude inconsistent... you already have a gun pointed to your head.

Oracle Security Alerts

Red Hat looks like it has a very bright future. I thought about buying shares at about $10 too, but IMHO I think there are echoes of dotcom enthusiasm about the RHAT share price. If you compare the market cap to the turnover they are generating, I don't think it adds up to a great investment. That said, I think Red Hat is a company going places. I am talking as someone who until very recently worked for a large database vendor (let's call it O$). In the last couple of years, O$ have jumped on the Linux bandwagon. I think this shift, maybe more than anything else will kill Sun. At O$, Red Hat clients are popping up all over the place (from Consultant laptops to developer's workstations). At the back end, O$'s Apps development databases (for example) run on Linux. O$ have recognised the Enterprise needs rock solid support (or at least the Enterprise needs to believe that it has access to rock solid support). They see Red Hat as the best chance to get this in the Linux world, with a little help... Oracle Technology Network: Oracle and Red Hat signed a "Cooperative Technical Support Agreement" in order to provide joint customers with the highest level of technical support where Oracle will provide critical (Priority 1) OS level support to customers running any Oracle product on the Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS/ES. For issues below P1 in severity, Oracle will work closely with Red Hat to jointly resolve these issues. Oracle will provide any Red Had Linux Advanced Server OS critical bug fixes/patches to Red Hat for inclusion in their future maintenance releases. I'm working at a Fortune 500 now that runs HP-UX and Oracle. They've said no to the first recommend of Linux, but with O$ and Red Hat beginning to look like a serious proposition, pretty soon No will become PoC and then PoC will become production. That's good news for Oracle (customers have a low cost hardware alternative to M$), and great news for Red Hat and the Linux community. I'm not saying that the words "Oracle on Solaris" or "Oracle on HP-UX" won't be heard in IT departments, I'm just saying we'll hear more of "Oracle on Linux". The big danger for O$, is that in introducing the suits to Linux, somewhere down the line they are going to look at the open source options available in the database world too...

From what I have read, Oracle's founders had the best solution to the problem of customers holding off buying until version 2.0: "This first Oracle was named version 2 rather than version 1 because the fledgling company thought potential customers were more likely to purchase a second version rather than an initial release."

SamsungContact
SuSE Openexchange Server
Oracle Collaboration Suite
and
Lotus Notes

are viable products that don't rely on AD and MSFT-products.

I use qmail for myself, but it's not something for people who need calendaring.
Disclaimer: my company re-sells SuSE's product.

• Decision logic tables. (An early attempt at table-driven programming.)
• The Kepner-Tregoe method (One of the earlier management fads.)
• Single entry, single exit coding. (Popular with people who blither about formal methods in programming but haven't actually done proof of correctness work.)
• Hungarian notation. (Once upon a time, C didn't check types.)
• The CODASYL DBMS. (Read up on this if you're looking at "object oriented databases". Explicit linking was tried in the 1960s. There were problems. Find out what went wrong the last time around.)
• Machine-processable comments. (UNIVAC had this in the 1960s; flowcharts could be generated from suitably commented assembly code. This idea keeps coming back as PerlDoc, JavaDoc, "literate programming", etc. But it never really works when the programming language and the comment language are disconnected.)
• Compilation into a stack machine form interpreted in software. (SNOBOL, 1960s. Slow. USCD Pascal, 1970s. Slow. Microsoft P-code, 1980s. Slow. Java, 1990s. Slow.)

I haven't explored many other vendors sites but I think DB2 does this as well.

Personally I think it makes sense for vendors to allow people to use their products free for personal use and provide documentation. If these people are put into a position where they have to evaluation or use software, what are they going to pick? Software they are familiar with.

Right, big tech companies obviously avoid Linux -- say big tech companies like:

• IBM
• SAP
• HP
• Oracle
• Dell
• Intel
• AMD
• Sun

Or which big technology companies were you referrring to exactly? Sure, it was a troll, but hey -- who isn't supporting Linux that doesn't make a competing OS? I mean, heck Sun, HP and IBM do make competing OSes and they've all jumped on the Linux bandwaggon.

Interesting - according to MetaLink the platforms on which Oracle is available are:

Data General Intel Unix
Fujitsu-Siemens BS2000/OSD
Fujitsu-Siemens RM200-600E Reliant Unix
HP Alpha OpenVMS
HP Tru64 UNIX
HP-UX Itanium
HP-UX PA-RISC
IBM AIX -Based Systems
IBM NUMA-Q DYNIX/ptx
IBM S/390 based Linux
IBM z/OS (OS/390)
Linux x86
Microsoft Windows 2000
Microsoft Windows NT for Intel
Microsoft Windows XP
NEC UX/4800
Novell NetWare
SGI Unix
Solaris Operating Environment (SPARC)
Solaris Operating Environment x86
UnixWare (SCO)

Maybe the OSX edition is development-only, not supported in production.