Silicon Valley vs. Your Privacy

TreeRat submits word of an article in the New York Times' magazine section, including mention of the proposed national database which has been talked about on Slashdot before. "The story goes into great detail with Larry Ellison, who is still pushing hard to bring 'Big Brother' to life. When asked if this database will be created, and run on Oracle, Larry's response was 'I do think it will exist, and I think it is going to be an Oracle database. ...And we're going to track everything.' There's a lot more than Ellison in this piece, though, and much of it is scary.

Comments

Stay far away

[RealisticWeb.com]

I have had bad run-in's with Oracle before. I once was upgrading the db and the java-based installer wouldn't work. It was the most stupid thing. We are using the UNIX version, and they do not even offer a text based installer! After being up for almost 24 hrs with our website down the whole time, we gave up, and restored the old database. Before we upgraded and had problems thier tech support would say "we can't help because you need to upgrade" so we try to upgrade, and their response was "well it's a new product, so we can't help you becuase you are pioneering new ground". WTF! A few months later we found the answer in thier online help file. It was the NUM LOCK key. If the num lock key is on, it would not install. NO WHERE was this mentioned in the documentation, on the screen or by the tech monkey we called. I don't even know how to check for the numlock key in Java! I would think that they would have go out of thier way to make a product this bad.

My point is, why bother if there is an open souce alternative? MySQL is good enugh for NASA, it's good enugh for me! Let Oracle be the big brother, and I'll just be the Red-Headed stepchild.