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Oracle Dumps PeopleSoft Employees
curtain writes "The first move in Oracle's dismantling of PeopleSoft has begun. The cuts will affect about 9% of the 55,000 staff of the combined companies.
From the article:
"We're mourning the passing of a great company," Peoplesoft worker David Ogden as saying. Other employees said they would rather be sacked than work for Oracle."
of that name
FRIST POST!!@!#111one
And all the jobs are going to India.
zelfmoord...
Unix lovers believe in the purity, virtue, and beauty of pipes. They extol pipes as the mechanism that, more than any other feature, makes Unix Unix. "Pipes," Unix lovers intone over and over again, "allow complexprograms to be built out of simpler programs. Pipes allow programs to be used in unplanned and unanticipated ways. Pipes allow simple implementations." Unfortunately, chanting mantras doesn't do Unix any more good than it does the Hari Krishnas.
/var/spool/mail/$USER | \ cut -c5- | \ awk '{ for (i = 1; i = NF; i++) print $i }' | \ sed 's/,//g' | grep -v $USER | sort | uniq
Pipes do have some virtue. The construction of complex systems requires modularity and abstraction. This truth is a catechism of computer science. The better tools one has for composing larger systems from smaller systems, the more likely a successful and maintainable outcome. Pipes are a structuring tool, and, as such, have value.
Here is a sample pipeline:
egrep '^To:|^Cc:'
Clear, huh? This pipeline looks through the user's mailbox and determines which mailing lists they are on, (well, almost). Like most pipelines, this one will fail in mysterious ways under certain circumstances.
Indeed, while pipes are useful at times, their system of communication between programs--text traveling through standard input and standard output--limits their usefulness.4 First, the information flow is only one way. Processes can't use shell pipelines to communicate bidirectionally. Second, pipes don't allow any form of abstraction. The receiving and sending processes must use a stream of bytes. Any object more complex than a byte cannot be sent until the object is first transmuted into a string of bytes that the receiving end knows how to reassemble. This means that you can't send an object and the code for the class definition necessary to implement the object. You can't send pointers into another process's address space. You can't send file handles or tcp connections or permissions to access particular files or resources.
At the risk of sounding like a hopeless dream keeper of the intergalactic space, we submit that the correct model is procedure call (either local or remote) in a language that allows first-class structures (which C gained during its adolescence) and functional composition.
Pipes are good for simple hacks, like passing around simple text streams, but not for building robust software. For example, an early paper on pipes showed how a spelling checker could be implemented by piping together several simple programs. It was a tour de force of simplicity, but a horrible way to check the spelling (let alone correct it) of a document.
Pipes in shell scripts are optimized for micro-hacking. They give programmers the ability to kludge up simple solutions that are very fragile. That's because pipes create dependencies between the two programs: you can't change the output format of one without changing the input routines of the other.
Most programs evolve: first the program's specifications are envisioned, then the insides of the program are cobbled together, and finally somebody writes the program's output routines. Pipes arrest this process: as soon as somebody starts throwing a half-baked Unix utility into a pipeline, its output specification is frozen, no matter how ambigious, nonstandard, or inefficient it might be.
Pipes are not the be-all and end-all of program communication. Our favorite Unix-loving book had this to say about the Macintosh, which doesn't have pipes:
"The Macintosh model, on the other hand, is the exact opposite. The system doesn't deal with character streams. Data files are extremely high level, usually assuming that they are specific to an application. When was the last time you piped the output of one program to another on a Mac? (Good luck even finding the pipe symbol.) Programs are monolithic, the better to completely understand what you are doing. You don't take MacFoo and MacBar and hook them together." --From Life wit
there is an old joke here in germany.
little fritz comes to his dad and asks him: dad, what's the difference between theory and practice?
his father sais: go and ask your sister whether she would sleep with a stranger for a million euros.
little fritz quickly goes asking. he returns and sais: yes, she would.
now ask your mother the same thing, sais his father.
little fritz goes asking and returns with the same answer.
well my son, sais the father. here is the difference. in theory, we are rich. in practice we have two whores in the house.
the morale of the story is: maybe you should get a life and learn the difference yourself.
Conservatism: The fear that somewhere, somehow, someone you think is your inferior is being treated as your equal.
Here, "Chinese" refers to anyone from mainland China, Taiwan province, or Hong Kong.
To understand how inhuman Chinese society is, consider the following list of donations to the tsunami relief effort.
1. USA, $350 million plus hundreds of millions of dollars in indirect aid (per the military rescue effort in South Asia)
2. Japan, $500 million
3. Australia, $810 million
4. Norway, $183 million
5. China (including Taiwan province and Hong Kong), $80 million
As you can see, Western society is, at least, 1 order of magnitude more compassionate and kind than Chinese society. We can literally measure the amount of compassion in dollars.
Note that Norway has only a population of 4.5 million, is much smaller economically than Taiwan, and does not enjoy the special business privileges that Taiwanese companies enjoy in China to reap billions of dollars of profit in the Chinese market. Taiwan gave a measily $7 million, and Norway gave $183 million.
What is "going down" here? Chinese society is barbaric.