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California + Oracle = $95 Million Fiasco
bahtama writes: "The Sacramento Bee is reporting that California apparently signed an agreement to purchase 95 million dollars worth of Oracle software that they really didn't need and that will not save them as much money as promised. They apparently purchased 270,000 licenses, which is more than all the state workers, including prison guards and others who would never need it." How do you think Oracle would treat the whole country?
No way. When did this start?
At $95 million they're practically giving that software away... ;)
aren't-you-glad-you-just-paid-taxes?
Not really. But some of us understand that we have a duty to pay, as citizens of a nation, so that our funds might be misdirected and misspent at the will of the legislature.
Ahem.
.sig last updated Jan. 14, 2000
This is the third year in a row that I got a refund from my Federal taxes, but I had to pay out to the state. I guess now I know why.
"Anything is better than IE, and you can quote me on that." -- Wil Wheaton.
Sounds to me as if the Oracle brass have been having lunch with the guys at Lockheed-Martin.....
How do you think Oracle et al make these huge amounts of cash. Is it via technical excellence or flogging to muppets on the golf course.
Actually apologies to Kermit he wouldn't be stupid enough. Barnum applies and these guys are just applying that law. Stupid people get fleeced, they should quit on grounds of low intellect.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
California did sign the agreement. Oracle expects them to abide by the contract. California should have thought a bit more before signing, perhaps, but there is no wrongdoing here. If they signed a contract to purchase 270,000 useless copies of Red Hat, no one would be complaining.
Where did Oracle trained their salesmen?? I need that kind of sales talent on my company. Do you think they would be interested in switching companies?
Aren't these the same guys who built the Great Firewall of China? We already know they're devoid of ethical businees practices. This comes as no surprise.
"To lead the people, you must walk behind them"
Maybe everybody issued a national ID card, or scanned by facial recognition technology, will require a license from Oracle before they can be tracked?
... to make up for all those millions and millions the BSA claims are lost to piracy. He was just buying licenses for them.
Watch the Teaser Trailer for "The Lightning Thief" Her
How long has THIS been going on?
Doh!
Pay typical state wages to those making decisions and get poor decisions in return. When the state becomes wage-competitive with other industries, you'll get higher quality people in state jobs and less sloppy decisions.
-S
--- What parts of "shall make no law", "shall not be infringed", and "shall not be violated" don't you understand?
Firebird is open source (read: free). It's based on the the well-known InterBase. It probably even outperforms Oracle, while simultaneously being a lot less complicated and buggy. California taxpayers may now commence screaming.
Steve Magruder, Metro Foodist
I dislike California and Larry Ellison.
As the deal stands, I can delight in California's discomfort.
Should the State's Attorney find a way to break the contract, I can delight in Larry's unhappiness.
And there is the possibility that people will look to this as an example of why they ought to be wary of Oracle.
Writers imply. Readers infer.
Caveat Emptor.
Sakhmet.
Ban the Nukes! Save the Whales! Screw it. Nuke the Whales!
And Ellison complains about MS's unfair business practices? It would seem that Larry and cohorts have been watching MS all too closely and have begun taking pages from the MS playbook. Granted, the State of CA should be more aware of its purchasing, but being fleeced by a major corporation shouldn't happen either....
...we are from the government - we are here to help...
went back to the private sector... after how much the US has stolen in taxes over these many years, call it a one time tax cut... I would rather the money be in private hands than in public hands (so do a lot of other people, its called the stock market).
And hey, at least its not MSSQL.
--Save money, vote Republican
I dunno. Based on Ellison's attitude in a privacy article in last weeks NYT Sunday magazine, I wouldn't doubt that the guy would do anything to boost sales and get Oracle's share price back up to 50-60 bucks a share. What an ego on this guy. This California fiasco makes Microsoft seem benign in comaprison.
My 2 cents....
...if you get pulled over in california:
"May I see your driver's license, proof of insurance, and your Oracle seat license please"
--- sig moved for great justice.
"How do you think Oracle would treat the whole country? "
Is it Oracles fault that states buys software? The buying is the buyers responsebility.
..Where Amy went car shopping at that "Malfunctioning Eddies" or wherever; and upon being sold a car (after haggling for it at a HIGHER price), the owner-robot exploded?
Why do I get the impression that there's quite a few Oracle employees who just exploded; and that California is going to be mightily pissed when they find that their new Oracle Software isn't going to come with quite as much Eagle as the salesmen promised...
If the poster would actually read the article, they'd see that the company Logicon sold the Oracle software to the state, not Oracle themselves.
"Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys" P. J. O'Rourke
If you read the article, it wasn't Oracle who should be blamed for this. It was the sales people from Logicon Inc who scammed them.
mp3's are only for those with bad memories
After reading the article, I get the scary feeling that the voices in my head that tell me to do things are getting into my computer too.
"DOIT was set up to try to steer the state clear of contracting disasters,"
"DOIT ignored these signs," the audit says.
A spokesman for Elias Cortez, the state's chief information officer and the head of DOIT,
FNORD
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
The irony of it all: a story lambasting Oracle for its unethical business practices and at the top of the page is an ad for Oracle 9i....
...we are from the government - we are here to help...
We're in a recession and companies are STILL laying people off, yet California has the gall to blow $95M on too many licenses and software they don't need?
Sadly, fiscal responsibility in the government still seems to be generations away. If I still lived in Cali I'd try and get a proposition on the ballot that new expenditures over $(n)M have to be approved by the voter. Ditto for raises for elected officials, we should be able to fire these idiots as easily as we elect them.
Hammer of Truth
Now California should start providing their extra copies of Oracle for free to whomever asks. First come, first serve. How do you like that Elison?
It was Logicon the brokered the deal and overstated how much it cost California each year. Sounds like they were actually the bad guys and Oracle is just a nice target.
What I'd really like to see happen is California take some initiative and put this software to good use! Yes, they've got WAY more licenses than they need. But, that's based on their CURRENT need. California has the chance now to do some really big things with information management.
My dad works for the State of Maryland. I can't even imagine how many millions (billions?) of dollars MD could save if they just restructured the way they maintain information. Welfare records are still being maintained using PAPER spreadsheets. Auditing this information takes months. The savings in this area alone could justify such a purchase. Auditing time could be cut drastically. Code could be written to locate discrepancies in the data. This doesn't even take into account things like payroll systems which could be automated. Doing that would allow the state to eliminate the positions of the hundreds of people with little-to-no education they have working in their payroll department.
Bill Gates (love him or hate him) really hit the nail on the head in his book Business @ The Speed of Thought. It really outlines how technology can be used to increase the flow of information, while at the same time reducing the cost associated with acting on that information.
Maybe someone in the California government will take charge and turn this bad situation into a golden opportunity!
omg thanks
'i wrote this CAD program last night in my parent's basement, it's at least as good as that $50,000 package you're using! physics simulation? watch this ball bounce around..'
Think different? I'd be happy if most people would just think...
"In one case, the audit found that Logicon's $3.6 million estimate of how much the state spent in one year on software maintenance was overstated by $3.2 million. This figure and others were used to bolster claims of the state's potential savings."
So, the audit is claiming that the entire state of California is only spending $400,000 a year on software maintenance? That's loaded salaries for only 3-5 people. Must be a very special group of people, to keep up the software for a whole state goverment.
So the state of California is stupid. They screwed up, cope. Its certainly not Oracle's responsability to make sure they make smart purchases. This kind of thing happens all the time at car dealerships, its just a bigger scale.
For Sale
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mp3's are only for those with bad memories
There's a slight difference here. What an obvious troll... At least nobody seems to be complaining about Mexico City's software purchases.
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
Let's not forget that this is the state that paniced and bought a ton of future energy contracts at the height of the market, burdening consumers with power prices double that in the rest of the coutry for decades to come. The state budget went up 37% in the last 3 years. Audits of most state agencies can't figure out where most of their money is spent. Agencies have a practice of keeping phantom employees on the payroll then using the money they're given to 'pay' these people for other operating purposes. Somehow this Oracle story doesn't surprise me.
While it'd be fun to solely blame Oracle for the price gouging, isn't California the same state that locked itself into an insainly expensive contract to provide power during last year's shortage? You know, as long as they're on this "buying stuff they don't need" kick, I have a few things in my garage I'm selling for only a couple million...
You need a FREE iPod Nano
How do you think Oracle would treat the whole country?
That they would take advantage of people stupid enough to let them? Am I missing something here?
Are we now supposed to support more legislation to protect people from their own stupidity?
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
All of this is meaningless, since within a years time California won't have any electricity!
I thought this was kind of sad, I mean they are basically screwed, so they might as well use some of the software.
But I guess they are just playing it safe in case the contract is nullified or something, which I highly doubt
It seems there are a lot of companies out there whose only business it seems is to fleece governments. There seems to be a serious lack of reading agreements before they sign them in the various governments.
--
Some weasel took the cork out of my lunch.
I live here in California, and I'm here to say we bought the right number of licenses.
You people just can't appreciate the number of illegal immigrants we have over here.
The exact same story surfaced here in Toronto about 3 or 4 months ago. The city purchased far more licenses than were required (I can't remember the value of the extra licenses, but it was definitely into the millions of dollars). Two incidents are hardly damning, but you have to wonder if there is any misrepresentation going on.
Bill Gates would!! Not to mention a lot of others.
And all over the $29.95 + tax that California would have spent at Frys to propogate those 270,000 copies of installed Red Hat at their organization (State of California). Oh my my, what an expense!!!
This sort of puts that in perspective, doesn't it? :)
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
...to help out the 270,000 disenfranchised Californians who have not yet founded a dot-com startup.
Step into a huge movement. Don't Tread In Me.
is that the CA Dept. of Information Technology (DoIT) that committed this colossal blunder was established just a few years ago precisedly to eliminate IT mismanagement and waste in State Agencies. I'm surprised Cortez (DoIT Director) still has a job, but that might not be true much longer. The legislature is considering abolishing the DoIT.
Do you realize that this software has to track every move you make as a citizen? It has to track every step you make, everything you buy, your religion, sexual life actions, etc, etc, etc.
Governments need this kind of database power to be able to track every molecule of your body and every thought in your mind.
Do you want them to put it in a simple text file? Come on, let them do it professionally!
Sounds like another option for the 'Schadenfreude' poll.
the salesman musta been a genius, and the signer a complete moron, cuz anything in between is impossible
This message was brought to you by the death of 30 brain cells.
Governments have a history of wasting our taxes, if they didn't waste that money on Oracle licenses they would've wasted it on other stupid things.
Don't name an agency "Do It" and expect them to be careful strategists.
The California state govt has a long history of misspent money. They blew over a billion on a DMV computer system that never saw the light of day. Oracle just sold them what they asked for.
A quarter of million would be an woefully low estimate. Besides, give the state employees a little education in how to use oracle and then they can go out and get higher paying jobs.
I live off of your tax dollars! I get SSI every month for sitting on my fat ass posting comments like this! Haha fuck you all! Pay your taxes!
"Angry legislators said Tuesday that the audit's findings should be pursued by Attorney General Bill Lockyer, especially the possibility that the Oracle contract may be invalid."
But he's too busy with MS to bother with this.
I realize that you were joking, but what is sad is that most businessmen actually do put a high value on such unethical behaviour.
The commercials were about how they would double your servers performance or pay you $1 million. They only failed to mention that even if they were unsuccessful, you'd still owe them several million for software + consultancy and you couldn't tell anyone that they failed.
Mmmm.. Donuts
So basically Logicon was hired to tell the state whether to sign large licsensing agreements and they came back with an answer of no. Then Logicon later helps negociate a huge licsensing agreement for the state. I think it's hilarious. I don't see why we should blame Logicon, they just played the system. If the system needs to change, the only way to change it is to expose its weaknesses.
Go ahead and waste your life with your inhibitions, just don't ruin other people's lives with your intolerances.
oracle said they've saved billions. you can too!!! and, how much did they charge for integration?
Gray Davis in prison for racketeering.
First he tries to convince the public of California that power companies are trying to extort them by raising their rates closer to what New Yorkers have been paying for the past 25 years.
He succeeds only part-way, managing to sign long-term energy contracts with the power generators at the peak of the energy market pricing, effectively screwing the citizens of California out of a huge amount of money through poor business sense.
In an attempt to endear himself to the public he screwed, he then raises his hand in the one-fingered salute to any sense of responsibility or rule of law and tries to sue his way out of contracts he foolishly got himself into.
But perhaps this last move was just a decoy. Someone should look into his relationship with the power generators, whom he made much richer through those contracts signed apparently in a fit of panic at the ridiculous prospect of even higher long-term prices. Can a single man be so dumb?
In the same way, someone should do an intersect of the set of large Oracle shareholders and the set of decision-makers in this situation.
[ home ]
In one case, the audit found that Logicon's $3.6 million estimate of how much the state spent in one year on software maintenance was overstated by $3.2 million.
What kind of auditor is this?
Let's suppose that a CA Deptartment of IT employee makes $80,000 a year (after you add in all the state benefits). You would have 5 people supporting the entire state's IT systems.
The auditor must think that when the database goes down, you just have to restart windows...
I... wanna ROCK'N'TROLL ALL NIGHT!!!
And TROLL everyday!!!
The legislature is going through major contortions to close a 17.5 billion budget gap, and there isn't much stomach for doing it via spending cuts. They're talking about tripling vehicle license fees, raising income taxes, higher sales taxes, etc. Whatever you've been paying up to now, it looks like it's going to get far worse. The only prayer we have is that it takes a two-thirds vote to approve a tax increase, and there are just enough Republicans left in the legislature that increases might fail.
I thought that Oracle was licensed per CPU, not per user? 270K CPU's?
This sounds like there is good grounds for breach of contract based on lack of genuine intention. I can't see this contract holding up in court at all.
It's not like this is the worst example. The total compensation of CEOs and top execs at most firms like Oracle and Cisco actually went up during last year while the stock value and book value cratered, even while they were shedding employees.
...
So indirectly all the taxpayers of California subsidized Larry Ellison's personal fortune and those who received massive options payouts, even though none of this created any real wealth for the people of California.
Of course, should Larry die, California gets a nice chunk of change from the estate taxes (I've actually had to pay California estate taxes, though most of the estate was properly using trusts to avoid it).
Did a little deeper and ask how much the State of California paid out for Cisco routers
-
--- Will in Seattle - What are you doing to fight the War?
...by anything with the word "technology" in front of it. If someone comes up to them with the promise of some whiz-bang system, it seems that the buying decision is predicated on the thin marketing veneer applied to whatever product is being hawked. Politicians are notorious for not "getting it" when it comes to technology.
270,000 licenses is too many to supply the needs of state workers, but may be very sesnible if it is to supply needs of online government services delivered over the internet to Californian residents.
If they cleaned up their processes and made most interaction with state government available to people over the internet, they may save bucketloads of time and money for everyone involved.
Of course this assumes that the government is competent to do so...
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
Are California girls so easy giving as the state or not_
"And people wonder why nobody can get a job as a programmer any more... "
Maybe you wonder that. But all the competent programmers who don't have severe personality defects seem to be doing very well.
I'm libertarian because I have no confidence in politicians, and this is a great example of why. Logicron screwed California. Why? As the saying goes, "A fool and his money are easily parted." Unless the fool is a government entity, because they can always raise taxes.
When a company makes a stupid purchase, the company suffers and may go under. Oh, well. A smarter company takes their place.
When a government makes the stupid purchase, taxpayers suffer and the politicians get a couple years to spin their way out of it before facing the next re-election. By then, voters are likely to have forgotten or given up.
The government is run by politicians and politicians are, well, political. Political does not imply any sort of managerial or financial sense.
... City of Largo, FL obtains more Linux licenses than it needs!!!! Mistake costs them.... um, nothing.
Miko O'Sullivan
This is a first. Everyone knows salespeople are completely honest. Have to give a hats off to Logicon, though. They pulled off the greatest sales pitch in quite a long time. I just wonder if they have a no refund or exchange policy.
First off, slow down, people. Read the article properly first. Now let's work out whose fault it was...
:)
:)
Oracle didn't do much wrong. Granted, they have high prices per seat, compared to MySQL, for example, but hey
And yes, they did push the contract through faster than they should. At the same time, the contract was being checked for legal accuracy, not for the pitfall of the incorrect seat numbers, etc. Oracle are also giving a massively reduced seat cost from their norm, which is hardly indicative of bad faith on their part. Remember that they weren't selling directly to the state. None of their sales people were actually approaching the state, rather, the contract, sizes, prices, etc. were being developed between the state and Logicon. Very much like buying a piece of software in a shop. Yes, you might get a reduced price, and that might be due to the manufacturer selling at a special discount to that shop, but if the shop shafts you, it isn't the manufacturer's fault.
Now, in the other hand, the broker, Logicon, was the culprit of the contract terms, and they are taking a huge profit from it. They brokered the specific terms and apparently in quite an agressive manner. Is any large company going to deal with them again? I don't think so...
Finally, the state. Now, maybe it is just me, but in my opinion, the state is reasonably responsible for its own side of the deal. If they order a set number of seats, then if that number is far too high, that is not the problem of the manufacturer, who are merely supplying the requisite licences. If I go out and buy eight copies of Dreamweaver for my only five machines and then complain that the retailer hs sold me three too many copies, despite my asking for that specific number, then where is the blame? Am I not an idiot for doing so?
At the end of the day, okay, Oracle charge high prices, and sometimes they claim more than they can deliver. However, on the issue of this contract, we have an over-zealous broker and an over-stupid group of civil servants.
And yes, the taxpayer would still be much better off if they got MySQL or PostGres and used the money they saved to employ a load of people to maintain it, rather than relying on external tech support lines and things. It would also return the money to the local economy directly and reduce local IT unemployment. Ah well... If management were only intelligent...
I remember the days before California went to witholding. Signing that bill was the single worst thing Reagan did as governor. Our tax rates have risen tremendously since then. As you say, if people were having to scrape the money together at the end of the year, they'd be much more aware of just how much state government is taking out of their pockets.
Don't be mad at Larry. Be mad at the idiot that forgot to keep the receipt.
They recently also spent a lot of money making a switch from Novell GroupWise, to Lotus Notes. Why? Nobody really knows, though it's suspected that it's because someone was looking at a supervisor's mail and he wanted an encrypting mail system. (Of course, GroupWise is encrypting, but they went with Notes anyway.)
They've spent hundreds of millions of dollars making the switch, and are spending more every day trying to keep it up to date and running.
California knows how to waste money.
using namespace slashdot;
troll::post();
It's not just government that does this. I believe many large corporations buy software they don't need. A good salesman can do amazing things. I wrote an article about this on K5. The poll there indicates other people have observed the same phenomenon.
Granted, $95 million is a lot of money. Too bad for the California taxpayers.
I know a lot more people who use Oracle because they don't know any better.
Sacramento (AP) - The California State Legislature today authorized the state's revenue department to serve Oracle executive Larry Ellison and several other members of Oracle's senior management and board of directors with a series of tax bills totalling some $95 million dollars.
"What goes around comes around," an anonymous resident of the Governor's private residence was quoted as saying this morning.
Let me tell you about our electric power...
668: Neighbour of the Beast
"What am I going to do with 40 subscriptions to Vibe?"
I don't think they will notice. My company recently did a project with the state of california. There was an issue with the way there databases are setup and the application we were developing. One of our software developers who happened to be an ex Oracle employ asked one of the DBA's about there schema's and the issue at hand. The response from the California DBA "Can't we just delete the Primary Keys" . Any body else find that statement scarry??
Gibt es ein prior Kunst bei den Hyperlinks?
Hyperlinks waren erst erfunden in 1993 an der CERN in Schweiz. (Der Schweiz ist ein Bundesstaat von Deutschland, welches ist Sued von Bavarien).
CERN original erschafft das Projekt "Welt Weit Waehlen" (WWW), das dann adoptiert von der MIT und jetzt wir nennen World Wide Web. Die auch erfunden die "Hoch Text marken Letter" (HTML) der wir nun kennen als Hyper Text Markup Language. Der ist wirklich der erste Implementation von Hyperlinks (oder "Hoch Lettern" wie er es genannt).
So weit fuer der Story der offiziell. Aber auch Deutschland mag geben eine Priorisch Kunst:
Konrad Zuse gepatentiert in 1947 ein technology welcher er genannt "ZuseConnect". Das war basisch eine Methode von Loeten zusamen Streifen von gestampfte Kupfer Blech, um zu werden gebaut in den original Zuse Computer als ein Mittel um zu kreuz-linken Inhalten in sein Memory.
Translation:
Is there any prior art concerning hyperlinks?
Hyperlinks were first invented in 1993 at the CERN in the state of switzerland. (Switzerland is a federal state of germany, located south of Bavaria).
CERN originally created the project "Welt Weit Waehlen" (WWW, which means World Wide Dialing) which then was adopted by the MIT and became known as what we now call the World Wibe Web. They also invented the "Hoch Text Marken Letter" (HTML), now known as hyper Text Markup Language. This is actually the first known implementation of Hyperlinks (or "Hoch Lettern" as they called it).
So far for the officcial story. But germany could as well provide some kind of prior art:
Konrad Zuse patented a technology in 1947, which he called "ZuseConnect". It was basically a method of soldiering together stripes of stamped copper tin, which had to be built into the original Zuse computer as a means of cross-linking contents into its memory.
Der Deutschen Fritz
"How do you think Oracle would treat the whole country?"
It doesn't take an...to figure that one out.
Aww shit. Nevermind.
He added, "This is a mess. And it's not one we need to sweep under the rug."
And what kinds of messes DO we sweep under the rug?
42 - So long and thanks for all the fish.
"We put the con, in Logicon."
Oh shit! I forgot to click "Post Anonymously"...
Almost every software company I've talked with will try to oversell their product. California is to blame for not fully understanding the purchase. It's scary that government can spend 95 million on software. I could think of thousands of better uses for tax payers money. California could of spent zero by going with MySQL.
I'd be pretty pisssed off if I lived in the state...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
The company's name was LOGICON. "CON" is part of their strategy. :)
creation science book
on the top of the slashdot home page. Pretty ironic.
To fully understand what happened, you have to read the California State Auditor's report on the issue. It'll take a couple hours to read, but it's definitely worth it.
(posting AC to protect the guilty)
I do IT work in the public health field. One northeastern state took three years to approve a $40K contract that people at the operational level considered vital. We had to meet with everyone from the state director of IT down to his lowest level minions (actually several times because they forgot they had met with us the process took so long), and our contract had to be personally reviewed by the secretary of state. By the time we finished with all the review meetings, we ended up making less than minimum wage on the project.
This was the worst case, but we have had a similar experiences in other states, including CA. By in large it means we have to charge the public more when we work for states to recoup cost of sales.
The problem is with a kind of tough guy politician zero tolerance talk. In a true zero tolerance regime, wasting thirty or forty grand is treated as being as bad as wasting a hundred million dollars. The converse is that in a sense hundred million dollar contracts may end up being treated like small ones. Their ability to prevent large losses is hindered by excessive attention paid to small losses. And while small losses can add up, still at some point you need to trust people with small decisions or hire people you can trust. If you ever have read Snow Crash Stephenson captured the attitude of the government towards its workers.
In some ways, protecting the state from financial losses should work like any other kind of security -- work harder to protect from big losses but rely upon detection and response for smaller losses.
This is, of course, assuming they made the copies themselves.
Perhaps we could have a Monty Burns icon for Oracle stories?
--
"we live in a post-ideological world..." - Billy Bragg.
My wife works for an arm of the .gov. She told me M$ has been auditing the .gov for license compliance on every level as a form of retaliation against the recent trials.
.gov is wanting to say buh bye M$, but the problem is a logistical one, how do you move and train all those employee's who were brought up on M$ over to *nix.
It's sort of a funny paradox, now the
Just a side note to the story I wanted to add, allmost ontopic.
No, no, no. This is not a sig.
Man, and to imagine if they ACTUALLY needed all these licenses, I would imagine they must have like the densest population of Oracle Certified Professionals and DBAs per square mile....
Come to think of it, does anyone have any statistics as to what is the number of say CCNP, CCIE, or MCSE just to name a few per given square mile in a region? Just thought it'd be interesting to toss out there...
When I worked for a K-12 school district, Oracle did the exact same thing. They sold us something like 200 licenses worth $90K for a product that exactly 2 people in the district were using.
Of course, this was buried with the rest of the contract, which had perfectly valid stuff. The people who reviewed the contract were not technical, and did not know the difference between the various developers' tools. The Oracle sales guy knew damn well we didn't need those licenses, and just padded the contract. What a scumbag.
Why is everyone so sure that California was conned? Shouldn't we consider the possibility that Larry Ellison and Gray Davis made a pact? Perhaps Davis agreed to give Oracle millions of taxpayer-supplied dollars, in return for large campaign contributions from Ellison in the future. It's worth looking into, especially since the article reports that the purchase was not made after competitive bidding.
If they sold follow-on maintenance at (say) 5-10% per annum then you not only have a white elephant but one which needs regular feeding !
Used ORACLE once... never again... the horror...
It was probably a audit done by Arthur Anderson.
Remember the transportation bill passed by Congress just after the Republicans won control of the House and Senate in 1994? Largest transportation expenditure ever passed and full of more pork than the Democrats had ever attempted.
Democrats: Tax More and Spend More.
Republicans: Cut Taxes and Still Spend More.
The Republican philosophy just means that its your children who will have to be taxed for your profligate ways. I'm not convinced that either party has a viable philosophy.
FreeSpeech.org
There was a recent release by the Gartner Group that "Gartner believes that Oracle sales staff has inappropriately imposed extra licensing fees on some database customers." I guess this just furthers their case.
Why not resell the extra licenses to companies and other states that need Oracle software?
In one case, the audit found that Logicon's $3.6 million estimate of how much the state spent in one year on software maintenance was overstated by $3.2 million. This figure and others were used to bolster claims of the state's potential savings.
The disparity "raises the question that Logicon may have misled the state," the audit says.
Raises the question?? I think it pretty much answers the question with a resounding yes..
This is not MS Word, its a database. Why do they need so many licenses? A database goes on the back end right? You have to pay per user, per connection? or per what??
To me, you buy the stinking database, and a service contrac and thats it.
1 db for parking tickets
1 db for taxes
1 db for campaign contributions
etc.
so what the hell is 170,000 db for?
Ugh.
Another company conned into buying a lot of not-needed Oracle licenses.
The State of California should resell their licenses... Maybe run an ASP or something, and recoup their cost...
And, I bet that head of DOIT will end up with a plum job inside Oracle or Logicon in six months...
You know, perhaps it's a good thing that we have a government that provides services and doesn't have to levy troops to put down a freaking tax revolt every April. Go ahead and complain about how high taxes are, but do you think you'd be reading /. right now if ARPA had never existed? The government does use our money in worthwile ways that would never occur to us individually.
This sig is not the Zahir. Lucky for you.
There's too many free db engines out there to ignore, plus Oracle may hinder license transfer.
You post on the RANT board don't you!!!?
>:)
I know you must at least READ the Rant board to pick up the term Crotch-fruit.
Glad to see there are other CFers on Slashdot that are tired of the way breeding assholes leech our hard earned money away.
Kintanon
Check out JoshJitsu.info for Brazilian Ji
This claptrap is "insightful?"
"after how much the US has stolen in taxes over these many years, call it a one time tax cut... I would rather the money be in private hands than in public hands (so do a lot of other people, its called the stock market)."
Hey, Chuckles, pull your cranium out of your posterior. Instead of that money being, possibly, spent back on public projects which you or I might actually gain something from, it's now in Larry Ellison's pocket, where you won't benefit from it at all unless he's your uncle or something.
As no less a conservative than Rush Limbaugh has said "it's your money." Oracle has no more business grabbing it than Washington does.
As a resident it pains me to see another California software/IT disaster. Years ago we had the $30 million (or was it 50) DMV debacle. The DMV spent that much on a new system before it was cancelled because it was determined it would never work or something like that.
"Hey! If you don't like it; go to Russia!"
The sad thing is, Russia's becoming more and more like what the US is becoming less and less of...
Forget the per-seat cost of an oracle license and read between the lines here. Exactly why did California officials decide to go with Oracle in the first place?
The only justification in the article is "claims of savings." In other words, Logicon handed California a balance sheet that said, "You can save $150m (or whatever) by using Oracle, therefore $95m is a deal." And California said, "Oh gee, the math works, sign us up!"
Nobody ever asked real-world questions like, what exactly do we need Oracle for? Who is going to install it? How difficult/costly will the changeover be? What alternatives are there?
Sounds to me like California believed the old hype that software is magic and that savings are automatic. This is what happens when you base too many of your decisions on "studies" and not enough on cold, hard logic.
How do you enumerate "savings" from installing a piece of software anyway? Is the existing system too slow? Are developers expensive? Is there too much red tape? It's such sketchy math.
If the existing system works, then it's probably not all that expensive. New systems should be based on a need for a faster, cleaner implementation, not on illusory "savings."
Ah, Logicon. They are very familiar with bilcking very governments out of our hard earned tax dollars.
As with most large contractors, they are all about
taking the most money they can from the government.
Providing a useful service in return is just an
accident if it happens.
Those who can do. Those who can't sue.
Think about it. This audit claims that Logicon vastly inflated claims of savings, and also inflated the number of licenses the state would need. I can't think of ONE salesperson or company that wouldn't do the same thing. It's common for companies like Oracle, IBM and Microsoft to give kickbacks to their busniess partners when they broker a deal. Hence, the business partner is going to try to make the deal as big as possible.
Logicon probably gave a crazy, high-ball figure with the expectaction that the state would counter with a lower number. When the state instead countered with "Okay, that sounds great", what would you expect Logicon to do (besides snicker)?
I don't understand how Oracle or Logicon could have rushed the contract. The state was paying $95 million dollars. If I was told by my Logicon rep that the offer of $95 million was going away next week, I would have said "so long." And he would have said "well, I might be able to squeeze another week out of Oracle..." and I would have said "no, no, you've gone to enough trouble already. On your way out, could you send in the DB2 salesman in the lobby?"
If I'm paying $95 million for something, the salesman will not only wait on my pleasure, he'll be my footstool for a week.
Anyone who loves or hates any language, platform, or manufacturer, doesn't know what they're talking about.
After all, everybody knows it's UNBREAKABLE.
Go ahead and complain about how high taxes are, but do you think you'd be reading /. right now if ARPA had never existed?
yes.. if it wasn't the military it would have been more the universitys
Logic Con sold CA this deal, acc to the article. At least they are straightforward in the name they chose for themselves.
David Brin, the noted SF author (ThePostman, etc) has some interesting essay about how future spy tech stuff will affect us. He thinks camera everywhere would be great (to very much paraphrase him).
I agree with him. I can hardly wait until the entire world is transparent, with cameras everywhere...no more lying, no more bullies, no more using secret advantages....bring on Big Brother, I say.
This post is protected under the DMTA (Digital Millemium Trolling Act). It is illegal to moderate it as a troll.
My employer has a full Oracle 8i and 9iAS install running, and let the licenses expire late last year. Perhaps the State of California would kindly give me a license or two?
Why Oracle?
What about MySQL/PostgreSQL ?
Here's the solution:
The state people get fired
Oracle gets a 20 year ban on sales to the state
Logicon's sales people get hired by Microsoft
They stab it with their steely knives,
But they just can't kill the beast.
I'd have been happy to set them up with PostgreSQL for $45 million.
Oh, what the heck. I'm bigger than that.
Guys --- if you manage to get yourself out of that Oracle boondoggle, I'll still be glad to get you PostgreSQL for $45 million.
I am such an old softie.
Due to the competitive licenses by MS forces on
OEMS, California is probably paying for 270,000
MSSQL licenses, even though they want to run Oracle.
Those who can do. Those who can't sue.
Terrorists won't waste any time on California bridges, not when they've got good 'ol Gray in here trashing the economy, the power grid, and the taxpayer. Nice work shithead!
Where do you think the universities get their money? A lot of it comes from the government in one form or another. The anti-tax argument only holds if you can make a case that 1950s and 60s corporations would have paid for the internet themselves and allowed the kind of freedom that has given birth to sites like slashdot.
This sig is not the Zahir. Lucky for you.
Yes I most certainly do.
The whole idea that it takes a government to fund a global network is stupid. Granted, it might not have been based on TCP/IP, and it certainly wouldn't have been called the Internet, but a global network would have come into being.
It might have been called Fidonet, or UUCPnet or hell, AOL, but it would have been there. You can argue that the Government sped up the process (or also that it slowed it down) but the network would have been here by now in any case.
Krazy Larry? Why, he wants to make the U.S. his bitch! Not that I'm any fan of Billy and his gang of thieves but I'd be much more worried about ol' Krazy Larry and what he's up to. His push for a national ID system is just plain scary.
Who was it that said "there's a sucker born every minute"? I think it was P.T. Barnum.
Anyway, as long as there are complacent idiots willing to spend this much , there will be someone there to sell it to them.
This is why we have things like AOL and MS Windows. People who don't know any better will buy them.
You want to do something about this? Go get a job with the California State government and show then how you really could have saved them some money by using free software.
"A terrorist is someone who has a bomb but doesn't have an air force." -William Blum
Of course a corporation can fund a global network. But I didn't ask whether you would have a network. I asked whether you would be reading slashdot. Do you think that a network that was not designed for the public benefit would have the diversity of content sources that produced slashdot? Or would you be reading Time's Netly News and marveling at its edgy take on the AOLNet?
This sig is not the Zahir. Lucky for you.
This is no surprise. Oracle put one of the nails into my old employer's coffin. They flat out lied about what they could do. The charged top dollar and delivered little for it. Their financials package crashed and their consultants couldn't make it go again. Oracle was a freaking disaster.
That company finally failed; Oracle is, IMHO, part of the reason.
Oracle screwed a government agency is news? News would be if Oracle played it straight with somebody for a change.
Thundercougarfalconbird!
That's amazing. You mean to tell me there's no way they could come up with a site licensing agreement that was more cost effective?
Where do they get off charging that much money for a couple CDs, regardless of how many CPUs its contents are running on.
Sounds like plain of profiteering to me.
Who ever said paks could spell, anyway?
...I'll take one.. no.. TWO Ferrari's please...
Polymorphism -- It's what you make of it.
Hmm. One way to look at this is like a subsidy to Oracle and Logicon. The government is not laying people off but these private corporations are - some of you that work at one of these companies should be happy that the state of california got suckered into this deal.
Maybe California should pass a special tax just for Oracle, 50M/month until they cancel the contract.
You post on the RANT board don't you!!!?
:)
>:)
I know you must at least READ the Rant board to pick up the term Crotch-fruit.
Glad to see there are other CFers on Slashdot that are tired of the way breeding assholes leech our hard earned money away.
Actually I do not personally RANT on Turtle's page, by my wife does, frequently and often. She reads rants to me every night while I am trying to Quake and most people are watching TeeVee. Sometimes I find it humorous, othertimes I just think people take teh world wayyyy to freaking seriously for their own good.
We are currently CF, but not adverse to having kids after we get a house and feel like we are grown-up people who are mature enough to raise kids. Which probably means never.
But I do like the creative, crude, crass ways that RANTers refer to the chil'rens. And some of the names parents pick for their children are just ROFLOL funny!
SlashSigTheorem: Humorous, Political, Critical, Constructive- If you have a
Oracle says to California, Oracle says: "Oracle employs x thousand Californians and pays $y tax to California each year. What the fuck are you gonna do for us?"
And then California gives them $95 million.
I could not justify my existence if I were a turkey farmer. Would I terminate myself? Undoubtably, yes.
I've been an Oracle developer and DBA for 8 years. And let me tell you, I STILL don't understand Oracle's licensing. It makes no sense, and I think that they keep it that way on purpose to confuse buyers.
Go to http://oraclestore.oracle.com/ and try to buy a database. You'll see "Named User" licenses and "Processor" licenses. And you need a minimum of 10 named user licenses for each processor that the database runs on. Think of it as "connections" to the database. Most Oracle licenses require far more "named user" licenses than 10 -- on an 8-processor Sun machine, you need to purchase licenses for no less than 80 named users. It's confusing, but no where in the article does it actually say that the licenses are "per seat". That's implied in the editorial content at the top of the Slashdot posting.
Also, it wouldn't only be state workers that were connecting to and using the databases. What if the DMV set up Oracle databases with an external web interface that all the citizens of California could use to register motor vehicles?
Oracle is not meant to be used on a per-seat basis anyway. It's meant to be used as the third or fourth tier (back-end data repository) in an n-tier application environment, not installed on a PC on every worker's desk.
A company I worked for bought a financial system from Oracle, only later to find the number of licenses (1,000) was insanely more than we actually needed. Trying to weasel back out of the contract was murder, as Oracle sales, screw goodwill, wouldn't release us from the obligation for the excess licenses. The question really was, between the spec and the signed contract, where'd all the extra come from. It pays, literally, to read a contact before putting pen to it. I'm not accusing anyone of slight of hand, but it sure looked like it.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
nuff said
>:) My Wife is also a frequent Ranter, I posted a couple, but usually don't care. We never plan on having kids, just plain don't want them. I spent too much of my life raising my younger cousins to want any more. I'm not as militant as some of the people on the Rant board who are definately wound way too tight, I just want everyone to THINK about their decisions before they make them. So many people just get married and get pregnat (not necessarily in that order) because the don't know of any other choices, and then they raise their kids poorly and the cycle repeats. Uggh... That kind of breeding just doesn't help anyone.
Kintanon
Check out JoshJitsu.info for Brazilian Ji
most Oracle developers are in India making sub-minimum wage.
For what its worth, the whole northeast follows the exact same laws.
I was just replying to the parent post, not speculating who actually paid for the internet.
Since the state bought more then they need why not give them away to the taxpayers that paid for them? Hand a bunch out to the universities first, then have some program where qualified, needy Oracle users could use them. I live in CA and will gladly take a license.
Or, they could start a corp to resell them, giving the profits back to the state. The corp would have to apply for a business license and resellers license though, which will take months to process.
The fact that Oracle is forcing the state to come through with the purchase makes me hate Oracle even more.
I always new something was screwed up on the west coast. Bunch of yahoo's (not all, but a lot seem to find their way to important positions). I'm reminded of just how strange california is everytime I pick up a package. 'Contains _stuff_ known to the state of California to cause cancer'. Oh yes, they know what's best. Or their 'special' automotive restrictions that haven't done crap for their smog ridden cities.
End Rant
I highly doubt that they've gone ahead and opened all 270,000 shrinkwrapped boxes already, so those that they haven't opened they can just take back to CompUSA, right?
Wouldn't it be nice if they could stick it back to oracle by reselling all the licenses at a large discount?
-Nuke the moon
Audit: State's Oracle deal was full of mistakes
I think more states should follow California's example and spend spuriously. It's good for the economy. An increase in government spending by one unit increases income by six units, and ultimately returns as tax revenue. People often fall into the trap of equating "government spending" to "losing/burning money". That simply isn't the case. I get more pissed off when they collect it and hold onto it.
I guess this means that the state could give "licenses" (i.e. by "hiring" employees for a penny or something) to startups to help them out and thust stimulate the economy like never before. This would rock!
"Your superior intellect is no match for our puny weapons!"
I dont think that its in the same ballpark as Oracle.
Until recently Interbase had a 4Gig file size limit, and maxed out around 400 transactions per second. The guys working on the sourceforge firebird project seem to have improved these specs.
Perhaps the State of California should just levy a $270M state property tax against Larry Ellison's private jet, to get revenge :-)
The game is already stacked against the taxpayers before these contracts ever even get written. Lately I've been working on some responses to some RFPs for the state of New Mexico and one of the really sad things is that all kinds of expensive proprietary stuff is specified before the "offerers" even get a look at it.
One of the really amusing things I saw was wording that was that they wanted a "...standard databases such as Oracle or Microsoft SQL Server. Proprietary databases will not be accepted." No matter how many times I read it, I couldn't figure out if Oracle and MS SQL Server were acceptable choices or not. So I ask the boss (he's got more common sense than me) what he thinks they mean, and he just chuckled. In real life, "proprietary" has a very different meaning than what computer guys would guess. "Not Proprietary" stuff is what is for sale at places like CDW, and "proprietary" stuff is what isn't. So I guess a PostgreSQL server running on FreeBSD won't do. We'll probably end up bidding Win2k and MS SQL, just to make sure that the desired level of waste and corruption is maintained. Another satisfied Microsoft customer.
If the people only knew...
On the plus side, I also looked at a RFP that specified a web app where it was explicitly stated that it had to run on Microsoft IIS. Then on the same day (this was about a week ago, I think) that the latest batch of IIS holes was reported, there was also an ammended version of the same RFP published, with the wording changed to "Microsoft IIS or comparable." So maybe I can use Apache and modify it a little to add some backdoors to it, to make it "comparable." ;-)
Oh, another thing I've noticed: some Adobe salesman has totally cleaned up and pulled the wool over everyone's eyes. A lot of these RFPs are written with the conviction that information should be stored in PDFs, because there's no way that a PDF can be altered after it has been created.(!!) They even use PDFs for storing simple bitmap pictures, instead of standard image formats like JPG, PNG, etc. Any idea how much more expensive and complicated that makes some types of software -- and in exchange for nothing? It's like flushing money down a toilet.
That CA, a filthy rich state compared to my lil' NM, would flush a few million bucks doesn't surprise me a bit.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
95 million dollars worth of Oracle software
I think Open Source is great but I've never been a crusader. I can't help noticing that this is an excellent case for it though.
$95 million can buy quite a bit of programming. What if they took the best available open source project and hired programmers? How much would it cost to build an equivilant system? And if $95 million isn't enough, other government agencies can join in and split the cost.
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
sounds like music to me. I'm the most middle of the road moderate there is, but this guy painted a portrait of what I see DAILY living here in Sacramento, CA.. There's few truths in this world. One is that the government would like to have every dollar you make. The other is that they would like to return as little of it as possible in the form of sensible, intelligent bills. You can 'vote' in the right man all you want, IT DOESN'T REALLY MATTER. The 'right man' in office will roll out the same pork as the 'wrong man'. It never changes
The internet was designed for the public benefit? Hmm. So all those stories about it being developed for the defense departement so that it could outlast a Nuclear war just just bullshit? (might be), I suppose thats for the public 'benefit' in a way, but im sure the ARPANET founders weren't considering the ability to comment on News for Nerds to be a major design goal. The internet evolved into its current state, it wasn't some government mandate, for a place with free expression of ideas.
Slashdot could replicate its community onto AOL in a heartbeat (well assuming that AOL can run perl....), after all its not like the government is footing the bill for slashdot right now.
Yeah we might have moderators (oh wait, we have those), and story approvers (oh wait, have those too), and it might not be run by AOL per se, just connected to the AOL network... hmmm sounds familiar..
The Internet came about, because it was the next step in the evolution of computing. Networking computers together for communication. The more that connect, the larger the value for all. The so-called network effect. That network effect was going to happen no matter who planted the seed. Whether it had been Wang, IBM, or Al Gore.
Like I said, government involvement (or interference) may have hastened or slowed the progress of the network, but the network would have come about in any case. And yes it would have been a place where you could exchange diversity of content sources. Why? Because thats what people want. It might be a huge Yahoo chat room, but it still would have been there.
It might have looked different and surely the protocols would be totally different, but we would have had a network. And I believe that once the network got to a certain size, the diversity of content would have happened.
Newspaper publishing has (had?) diversity of content, and the government didn't fund a single printing press. Transforming even that model to electronic digital form doesn't require a government either.
Oracle sucks... MySQL is great if you want speed, and Postgres is swell if your into alot of features. Why pay when you can get it for free? I never did understand people who think value has to cost...
But this is so fucking typical of gool old Uncle Sam.. always got it to spend even when he doesn't...
Just change the airport noise laws so that he can't land his jets in San Jose at all. Unless the laws have already been changed, he can't do this at night due to some noise/size restriction.
wow
Reminds me of what happened with the Altanta Airport and Oracle about two years ago. I wonder what happened with that fiasco. I have not heard about it in about a year now.
The internet isn't a (gummint) handout.
/. has tons of programmers.
You and I payed to create it, and we are paying to use and maintain it.
I'm sure
Who here made $60K starting salary?
Hop back on your ass and ride home.
Oracle is way ahead of you. They use a derived benefit model to define a user. So, not only will you have to buy an Oracle license for ourself, but for everyone that derives benefit by tracking you!
That $480k isn't the entire amount of money the state is spending on IT, only the amount that that it costs per year that the Enterprise Licensing Agreement (ELA) would cover. If you read the auditor's report, page 35, you'll see that the $480k was the actual amount spent in one year on software maintenance. The $3.2m extra that Logicon claimed came primarily from previous or future years, items unrelated to maintenance, and maintence that doesn't apply to the ELA.
So, it's Oracle's fault, not the company the consultant who actually sold those licenses to California.
Heaven forbid you blame the idiots in the CA government who are too stupid to figure out the $95 million dollar bill for themselves.
No, the *evil* corporation must always be at fault.
Why are you letting these clowns ruin our country?
California bought more licenses than they need.
Maybe someone very smart has anticipated growth.
Is this one of those $700.00 hammer stories?
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
>That kind of breeding just doesn't help anyone.
Guess we've been at peace too long.
Don't you understand why governments tend to encourage and reward breeding?
Where do you think soldiers come from?
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
No wonder they couldn't pay the light bill last summer.
Look how much they would have saved with SQL 2000.
Great Googily Moogily...
I work as a contractor for the Marine Corps, and the powers that be did this exact same thing. Then they had a meeting after the purchase so Oracle sales reps could tell them exactly what they spent thier defense budget on, since apparently no one knew.
"After three days without programming, life becomes meaningless." - Tao of Programming
This article is hillarious. Logicon gets crucified because the California IT department doesn't know what it's own software costs are, come on. What a total and complete joke.
I don't know who Logicon is, but it sounds like the entire problem was with the way IT is being managed in California.
Brian
Methinks Larry wants a new goldfish pond.
pr0n - keeping monitor glass spotless since 1981.
God I hate Oracle. If it is not them trying to set up a national ID system, to overcharging their customers (and apparently state governments as well), to false advertisements, to that weasle of a CEO, Larry "Slim" Ellison. It seems everytime I read the news this company is screwing somebody, whether it is locking their customers into an outrageously high contract for crappy software, to giving their execs the boot. I just hope one day they will subcome to a fate like Enron and we all can have a good laugh at their expense!
Don't laugh, it's not just California. Did anyone hear about something called a dot.bom?
Microsoft - Where would you like to go today, Maybe Jail?
Sun is the dot in dot.bomb.
And because of it there's probably more volume in Sun equipment on eBay than being shipped from the company itself anymore.
The situation is not exactly clear yet, but the article leads me to believe that the state will claim that Oracle and this Logicon company thinger may have misrepresented themselves during the contract negotiation process. Misrepresentation is definitely something that can cause contract to get nullified
Misrepresented huh? That's one way of saying it... Here's my favorite quote from the article: "In one case, the audit found that Logicon's $3.6 million estimate of how much the state spent in one year on software maintenance was overstated by $3.2 million."
"Overstated"??? The actual number was $400,000 and you were off by 3,200,000! That's not an 'overstatement', it's not even fucking close!
Oh well, I guess that's every businessman's daydream... to someday be on the receiving end of deal involving some dipshits trying to give away gobs of money. More power to 'em I guess.
Sometimes the best solution to morale problems is just to fire all the unhappy people.
Teachers? Our median salary is $60K/yr. But, if you do th e math, that is for a 1/2 time job. So, $120K/yr for the rest of us. Median income for the district? $42K/yr.
Police? How often has one KEPT you from being mugged, robbed, or otherwise violated? How often has one captured the perp that did you? Fact. I lived in a district where nearest cop was 28 miles away. Crime went UP, traffic fine revenue went way up, as did taxes, when they voted to pay for 4 local cops. Great... Lets pay for some more.
Fire/Ambulance? Volunteers. Work fine.
Big ticket items? Buying buildings, upgrading them, then selling them at a loss is a favorite. Building roads, then tearing them up to run new sewer pipes is always fun. Paying 1000x, yes 1000 times, too much for our insurance package was an interesting revelation too.
Cable and trash franchise supervision? Gimme a break.
In my opinion you could cut any tax budget from the district level to federal by 30-40% and see no failure of basic services. Assuming, of course, the local crooks don't just exploit the situation to punish an "ungrateful" population.
But, sometimes taking money from people allows others to make more. Take Oracle. If CA didn't buy those license Oracle might have missed their numbers. Jobs would have been lost, and the stock prices would have fallen.
Just, think of the widows and orphans that would have been hurt by that!
Fact is, in the US, Government has grown to become the primary economic driver behind nearly 50% of the economy. Corporate welfare, social welfare, call it what you want, but by taking 50% of every dollar earned and giving it to someone else (anyone else, however criminal) they make the world go 'round.
AOL can run anything they want, including Perl, on their computers. They will not let a subscriber run anything, including Perl on their computers, however. I'm not sure in what sense you think "Slashdot could replicate its community onto AOL". Not without AOL's permission, which would not be granted.
A universal network was probably inevitable. The exact kind of network we got was mostly luck, and could have turned out much worse. It is a content-neutral network with the intelligence at the endpoints, and it is a peer-to-peer network in which all hosts are basically the same, including routers. Neither of these decisions was inevitable, and neither one would be made by AOL or Microsoft or anyone else trying to build an empire of passive consumers.
I don't take this as a strong argument for increased government spending, however. I think we are simply very lucky to have the internet as it is.
Uggh... That kind of breeding just doesn't help anyone.
I've often said the same thing about zealots of any stripe - extreme liberals, extreme conservatives, religious whackos, people who claim that the poor are poor because they're too lazy to be rich, etc. If only these morons would just stop breeding the genetic pool wouldn't be so damned yellow all the time.
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
Fishbowl, that is an insightful remark. I prefer to think "more taxpayers" in lieu of "more soldiers."
Why do you think that the Mormon Church (and to a lesser degree, Catholic Church) encourage us to "be fruitful and multiply?" 10% times eight more wage-earners = shiny new glass temple downtown!!
SlashSigTheorem: Humorous, Political, Critical, Constructive- If you have a
Everything that is possible in Oracle is possible in a whole lot of other databases, only with a fraction of administrative overhead. I am no fan of Microsoft's but even SQL Server is better (and way cheaper too) There is too much crud in Oracle.
The whole thing should've been rewritten 20 years ago. People buy Oracle because they are lemmings.
If you must buy your Oracle, try Oracle rdb. They don't market it much, but it is way better than their main product.
Now, if you really want a database that will blow anything else out of the water, try kdb (www.kx.com, and no I don't work for them, but I promise you will be amazed)
BTW, before I encountered kdb, my favorite db was
PG. The comparison between it and Oracle is very legitimate. It seems PG is specifically targeting Oracle users and looks increasingly like Oracle to me. Let's see. In PG, you can write your stored procedures in TCL. PG/SQL or Perl. In Oracle, only in PL/SQL (The thing with Java is vaporware) The object extentions really do work in PG. In Oracle, they are again vaporware. (PG invented the 'object-relational' genre and has major headstart there. Two decades or some such)
1. Transaction support is a joke. Correct me if I am wrong, but doesn't compiling in Berkeley DB means each writer locks a whole table?
2. No subselects. My class project db did subselects, for Pete's sake!
3. Query planning/optimizing close to non-existent.
I have a whole list of things that Oracle should have fixed many many years ago. My guess that the intern that last touched the code is long gone :)
1. No readline support in shell SQL monitor. There is no good way to browse previous commands with one click.
2. Varchar is limited to some small and completely arbitrary number (I believe it was exactly 40000 bytes) I don't see the point in varchar anymore, anyway. Compare that to Informix/Postgres type 'text' - arbitrary large text of non-specific length. (40000 may be too small for some webpages for example. I know they sell a plug-in to store large text, but that means bye bye standard SQL)
3. I am sorry, but 56-digit long strings are a screwed-up way to represent numbers.
4. Non-support for ANSI SQL timestamp type. Oracle's best timestamp definition is 1 second, which for example renders it near useless for trading applications (timeseries data is often keyed on the timestamp) This is probably why so many financial firms use Sybase.
Positive things about Oracle:
Oracle writers do not lock readers, but you pay with 'handle expired' problem for that.
I find it really relatively quite stable, amazingly so for something this large and convoluted. Must be all that burn-in time from the many users.
Everything else you can get elsewhere, only with much less admin overhead. Oracle's got to be some sort of secret government public works project for Oracle admins.
I was trying to make a joke on the Perl part. I know AOL could host any software they choose.
I agree that it would require AOL's permission.. But why wouldn't they? Slashdot generates eyeballs, or page views, or whatever you want to call it. Same as Time Magazine online, and they host that. Sure we probably wouldn't have many anti-AOL stories (do we have many now?) but I'll bet we'd have more anti-Microsoft ones....
I also agree that the exact kind of network we got was mostly luck (you could say that about a lot of things... The United States for example), but I still think that even a "corporate" controlled network, would have had a "diversity" of opinion. And a site like slashdot. It didn't take government funding the ARPANET to guarantee diversity of opinion. Now it might not have had as much diversity as the Internet does (alt.sex.goatsex) but it would have had diversity of the kind that slashdot dishes up every day.
I guess my point is that the only way it could have grown to be a global network is if its NOT a network of passive consumers. I believe France had a similar network (pre-WWW), and it sucked* (Government controlled as I remember, part of the phone system). The thing that makes the internet work is that people can contribute. If people can't contribute, then the network doesn't grow, and alternative networks where people can contribute do.
Maybe im wrong, maybe the only way for this wonderful network to have existed was for some government somewhere in the world to have funded it. But in my view, the government is probably wanting to limit the "diversity" of opinion on the internet more than anyone.
*I could be wrong on the France part. Was doing too much LISP and Ada coding back then....rots the brain.
Wish I'd seen this posting when it originally came out. I once worked for the "fabulous" Eli Cortez, the State of California CIO responsible for this fiasco. Who -- for the record -- was once an employee of Oracle. This is not about government ineptitude as much as it is about having an unqualified pinhead given responsibility beyond both his personal expertise and his work history. As a Californian I'm outraged not by the purchase itself but by this glistening example of HR malaise in the hiring of an unqualified person who, with just a few phone calls, could have been verified as dangerous and inept by the previous organizations he worked for. This is the "Peter Principle" at its classic best.
+-+-+-+-+-+-+ "I don't know what's wrong with you, but I'm quite sure it's hard to pronounce."
Let me guess. You think your reproduction is my problem.
Loser. You're a loser, your parents were losers, and your children will be losers.
Loser.
"The poor do not choose to live poor"
Yes they do. When they have sex unprotected, they make a choice. When they smoke dope, they make a choice. When they choose to hang out with their friends instead of going to school, that's a choice.
Why do I have to pay for your laziness?
Our lower classes breed like rats and need assistence.
Its the government, Just have oracle raise the price of each unit, then you will have less copies per employee.
Why the slam against the Mormon and Catholic churches? Mormons in particular tend to take care of thier own, without any recourse to Government welfare programs. Believe it or not the high birthrate in the Mormon church actually probably costs more than you believe. It is difficult to keep up with the growth rate by building new chapels to meet in. The Mormon church at least would be much better off financially if they didn't have the growth rate, and the financial cost that it imposes.
Anyways one of the biggest problem the US is going to face is not too many kids, it is too few kids. You want to see where this is happening today, just examine Japan. Japan is greying so fast that in another couple decades, the whole country is going to be one big geriatric ward. We still have a long ways to go before this becomes an issue in the US, but we are slowly heading there.
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It was not necessarily a slam, as I am a recovering catholic; I'm just drawing an imaginary line between two teachings: Make sure you have lots of kids, and make sure everyone gives x% of the income for church works. I have a very close mormon friend who husband quit the church. True, MUCH of the money goes towards good deeds that the Mormon Church does for its community members... but the dark underbelly is the political side that has a giant beaurocracy and heirarchy of people who are paid handsomely for their service.
And look at the Catholic church! They had me tithing out of my allowance; how much of that money has gone to pay 1) defense funds for clergy accused of pedophilia, and 2) hush money to pay off victims of said pedophilia?
SlashSigTheorem: Humorous, Political, Critical, Constructive- If you have a
Hello faggot!
I wanted to ask if you're a drug user. Are you?
Btw: You should feel honored that such an important person like me slums it and sends a message to a wreckling like you.
Slashdot community, please notice: I am looking for a girlfriend.
Nave H. Weiss