Larry Ellison Says 'Amazon's Lead is Over' As Oracle Unveils New Cloud Infrastructure (venturebeat.com)

Oracle has unveiled its second generation of cloud infrastructure for third-party developers to run their applications in Oracle data centers. What is interesting about the announcement is that Oracle co-founder and chief technology officer Larry Ellison claiming that "Amazon's lead is over. Amazon's going to have serious competition going forward." From a VentureBeat report: One particular instance, or virtual-machine (VM) type, that Oracle is making available in this second-generation offering -- the Dense IO Shape -- offers 28.8TB, 512GB, and 36 cores, at a price of $5.40 per hour. This product offers more than 10 times the input-output capacity of Amazon Web Services (AWS), specifically the i2.8xlarge instance, said Ellison. Currently, AWS leads the cloud infrastructure market, with Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, and IBM trailing behind. Oracle's public cloud was not included in the most recent version of Gartner's highly regarded cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS) Magic Quadrant, which was released last month. "Oracle also does not have enough market share to qualify for inclusion," the authors of the report wrote.

Comments

That'll to be one to avoid PRICE HIKES on then

[Anonymous Coward]

Oracle, ever the embrace, and HIKE THE SUPPORT PRICE, MOAR! MOAR! GOUGE THAT CUSTOMER WALLET!

Never mind. Hopefully they'll go away like the other dinosaurs did.

Re: That'll to be one to avoid PRICE HIKES on then

[Esteanil]

* license fees not included. All computers connecting to the cloud must be separately licensed. Unlicensed connectees will be charged to site owner at a 600% penalty. Any use of competing cloud services incur license fees for all computers operating in or connecting to the entirety of said cloud service, charged to site owner.
Site owner agrees Oracle holds title to first- through fifth-born.

Re: That'll to be one to avoid PRICE HIKES on then

[Streetlight]

Oracle also will own copyright to any content stored on their servers. Those placing their copyrighted materials on the server will face copyright infringement consequences.

Re:That'll to be one to avoid PRICE HIKES on then

[Anonymous Coward]

Oracle, ever the embrace, and HIKE THE SUPPORT PRICE, MOAR! MOAR! GOUGE THAT CUSTOMER WALLET!

I've asked more than once in the past whether Oracle's primary business model should be seen- and indeed, whether it *is* seen by them- as being that of a database (and related services and products) vendor, or whether those are merely a means to lock customers in to what is ultimately- in effect- an entirely legal extortion scheme.

Re: That'll to be one to avoid PRICE HIKES on then

[jeff4747]

Wow. They're really loosening their licensing terms.

Re: That'll to be one to avoid PRICE HIKES on then

[Anonymous Coward]

License fees don't make as much sense when you're essentially renting the software, as happens in "cloud" services. Take the Bloomberg terminal financial data service for example. You pay a monthly rental fee for each workstation installed at your site, another monthly fee for the privilege of connecting, which also includes a set number of pre-paid data inquiries. After that you pay for every query made. They have you coming and going. Oracle will definitely go with the Bloomberg model with their cloud service pricing.

Re:That'll to be one to avoid PRICE HIKES on then

[silentcoder]

It WAS Databases. It hasn't been in a long time. With open source DB's becoming ever more competitive Oracle's DB business has been shrinking for years - and they've been branching out into other areas for more than a decade now, with varying degrees of success.

Source: I'm a former Oracle employee who never even met anybody who worked on the DB products.

Oracle?

[Anonymous Coward]

The same Oracle that has fucked over many states with their POS software for the Affordable Care Act?

No thanks.

Larry's bombast

[Anonymous Coward]

Does anyone fall for Larrry's bombast anymore? Sorry Larry, but 10X greater I/O on a super-high end server that practically no one will need/us is too little, too late to catch up with AWS' lead which is by now, unsurpassable by you. The only company that might have a chance of competing head on is Microsoft, and even then they would need to dramatically cut their prices in a number of areas. I think I calculated that it cost 20X more to host my videos online with Microsoft at $1.95/GB than Amazon Cloudfront (about 0.10 per GB).

Re:Larry's bombast

[ndykman]

On what service?. Azure has CDN services with similar pricing structure as AWS. No free tier, though.

Of course, cloud pricing is very tricky, overall, but the cost structures between Amazon and Azure are more and more in line these days, The competition between the two is starting to show some pricing benefits.

Re:Larry's bombast

[AK Marc]

Azure is insanely expensive for VMs. Azure is MS's cloud play to extend Windows developers into the cloud. A hosted API is cheap. A hosted VM is insane (and not portable). With most hosted VMs you can use an OVA or other container to move seamlessly between platforms. With Azure, you can't even move seamlessly between Hyper-V and Azure, and they are both MS VM platforms. You develop for a Windows box, but rather than running it as a .NET on a web server, you run it on Azure. If you want to run a windows-only service, Azure may be reasonable. But certainly not for "hosting" VMs.

Re:Larry's bombast

[HiThere]

Apple could probably catch up with Amazon if they wanted to...or at least it could have back when Jobs was "inspiring" them. It wouldn't have been cheaper, but that's not the only way to win.

Re:Larry's bombast

[postbigbang]

No, not quite.

Whether OVA or VMDK, moving workloads back and forth among cloud vendors isn't quite simple, but it is do-able on Azure, or if you think about it, other cloud vendors. The control plane to do this is immature, but it might not make much difference if the herd moves from VMs to container fleets.

Full compute costs are cheaper on AWS, for now, but Windows on AWS vs Windows on Azure isn't "insanely more expensive", not even "moderately more expensive".

Oracle, however, largely requires a customer to be in lockstep with 1) the OS 2) need the musculature the platform supports 3) be willing to waste a lot of compute unless the denominator of workload is comparatively huge and 4) want to swallow the Oracle KoolAid.

Oracle's biggest problem is Oracle. They once drove markets, but no longer. Now they're missing revenue targets, and making lots of clientele unhappy, the recent settlement with the State of Oregon just one emblematic failure in several high-profile stains.

Aw hell no

[TFlan91]

I can 100% see some fine print in their ToS that binds that person from ever using any other cloud vendor ever again.

All this bad news recently circling Oracle doesn't lead credence to their reliability as a cloud vendor.

Re:Aw hell no

[Anonymous Coward]

They don't need fine print in the ToS, Oracle doesn't play nice with anything unrelated to Oracle nor is it remotely straightforward to migrate to another DB. The lock-in effect is even worse than it is for Microsoft products.

Re:Aw hell no

[tnk1]

At this point, just the name Oracle is enough to make me stay well away from their cloud. I have seen what they have done with their database and how they manage to wring what money they can out of the unsuspecting and have no interest in feeding that beast, even if their prices are rock bottom.

AWS has its problems, but their pricing and product offering is not bad enough that I would go into the gutter to let that disease into my organization. I'd go Azure long before I'd go Oracle in any event. (Not that such a thought is something I consider appetizing either...)

Re:Aw hell no

[Anonymous Coward]

Looks like you have never used Oracle. Oracle DB once supported 91 operating system and even today, it supports more operating system than next 3 database vendors COMBINED. Oracle has adapter for virtually all apps including SalesForce, SAP etc. It is the largest DB vendor even on Windows. It sells more x86 hardware despite owning silicon to software with its Sparc. It is the only enterprise software company with pretty much full price list of its standard software offering (try to get price of IBM Websphere or mainframe or SAP and you know what I am talking about)

Re:Aw hell no

[Anonymous Coward]

I am in business for 20 years. I don't do business based on my personal hatred. I do by crunching numbers and at the end of the day, that is far more useful than satisfying my ego. Good luck to your employer.

Re:Aw hell no

[Anne Thwacks]

I don't do business based on my personal hatred.

This, a thousand times this.

I would rather crunch numbers on a chain gang in Alabama than use an Oracle product ever again.

Re:Aw hell no

[Jailbrekr]

Asa businessman then, you understand the concept of risk vs reward. Oracle has proven it to be too big a risk for any marginal reward.

Re:Aw hell no

[Gr8Apes]

It's true that Oracle could have an awesomely compelling offering from silicon to software. Unfortunately, while their hardware is definitely better on the high end (Sun made some awesome high end products) their software products at this point have enough stipulations associated with them to give anyone pause. It's an all in option, much like any ERP purchase.

Re:Aw hell no

[Anonymous Coward]

Im an IT guy with 25 years and if you are buying based only on the cost and nothing else then you should be fired!

Too many times the cost is a short term gain while the TCO makes the long term investment a bad decision. Add to it the overall risk of the product/licensing agreement and in most cases it is a bad decision all around.

But you can save $1,000,000, get your bonus, and be promoted before anyone realizes the bad decision.

Re:Aw hell no

[tnk1]

What part of having seen what they actually do, first-hand, count as "personal hatred"?

Their business practices are abusive, to put it mildly. Only a poor businessman looks at only the bottom line in the short term without an eye to what will happen to their organization later. If you're going to chase Larry's bargain basement loss leader pricing so Oracle can get their foot in your front door, then perhaps the pity should be for your employer, not mine.

Re:Aw hell no

[Anonymous Coward]

Too many times the cost is a short term gain while the TCO makes the long term investment a bad decision.

Thank you for explaining the difference between "purchase price" and "total cost of ownership." But you know, we knew all this already.

The person you're responding to says he makes his choices by "crunching numbers," not by "looking at the sticker price." It's reasonable to presume that he is actually comparing TCO estimates when he is crunching numbers.

Re:Aw hell no

[Anonymous Coward]

The keyword here is "have", but the question is whether it "does it today"?

Re: Aw hell no

[Anonymous Coward]

Obviously you're an Oracle consultant. Nobody else would fight one bit for Oracle.

Re:Aw hell no

[Anonymous Coward]

I said "crunching numbers". Never said "only on cost". But you are obviously not literate enough understand the difference.

Re:Aw hell no

[Anonymous Coward]

I have used Oracle products since 1997 and found the company to be very responsive and helpful.
Of course the place I worked at most recently did a billion a year in revenue and paid out a million or so in licensing and support fees for that helpfulness.
Oracle did a big licensing true up about ten years ago that caught some people off guard, but since 80% of the company ran on some aspect of the ebusiness suite, it was more than worth it to stick with Oracle.

Re:Aw hell no

[jellomizer]

Even if it is better is it really that much better to justify the cost.
We have 2 major open source Databases MariaDB and PostGreSQL and we have inexpensive Microsoft SQL which all do more than what most people need anyways.
Back in the old days if someone needed a Database they went with Oracle because they had too however computing has advanced and Oracle is the dinosaur in the market a relic of the mainframe days praying on the stupid CIO who's head is still stuck in the 1980s

Re:Aw hell no

[Anonymous Coward]

Im an IT guy with 25 years and if you are buying based only on the cost and nothing else then you should be fired!

Too many times the cost is a short term gain while the TCO makes the long term investment a bad decision. Add to it the overall risk of the product/licensing agreement and in most cases it is a bad decision all around.

But you can save $1,000,000, get your bonus, and be promoted before anyone realizes the bad decision.

But you can spend $1,000,000 on Oracle, get fired, and be promoted to the unemployment line due to the bad decision.

Re:Aw hell no

[Anonymous Coward]

probably your baseless Azure bash ? Azure is fine.

Re:Aw hell no

[tnk1]

Azure is usable. But it is not really right to criticize Oracle for their business practices and not point out that Microsoft is not exactly saintly in that regard either.

Back in the day the original SCO didn't have horrendously bad software, but we know what happened when they decided to shake everyone down for money. You really couldn't separate their products from their business practices at that point.

Does Oracle have its uses? Sure. It has a high end database which is useful, if overpriced, and I am sure their cloud is at least semi-competent. But you can't really ignore who they are when looking at the tech specs.

Well if Larry says it's true it must be true

[DeVoh]

Amazon may just as well shutdown today.. Larry says it's done.

Re:Well if Larry says it's true it must be true

[Jawnn]

Amazon may just as well shutdown today.. Larry says it's done.

Looks like Larry's been reading the Trump presidential campaign playbook.

Re:Well if Larry says it's true it must be true

[Anonymous Coward]

Amazon may just as well shutdown today.. Larry says it's done.

Looks like Larry's been reading the Trump presidential campaign playbook.

Who's playbook? Who's out saying the other team has already lost and should not bother to take the field and embarrass themselves? I don't think that's Trump's cheerleaders saying that.

Re:Well if Larry says it's true it must be true

[Anonymous Coward]

Amazon may just as well shutdown today.. Larry says it's done.

Looks like Larry's been reading the Trump presidential campaign playbook.

Who's playbook? Who's out saying the other team has already lost and should not bother to take the field and embarrass themselves? I don't think that's Trump's cheerleaders saying that.

COUGH! COUGH!

Re:Well if Larry says it's true it must be true

[Anonymous Coward]

"Who is" or Whose? Learn proper English even b4 you post on /.

No.

[dmomo]

Amazon's lead is over when they've lost the market share, not when someone who wishes it were over announces it as such.

Re:No.

[bursch-X]

But Oracle is going to be huuuuge. And they'll totally bury crooked Amazon. And they'll build a firewall and they'll have Amazon pay for it.

Trusting oracle with all your infrastructure

[j14ast]

What could go wrong?

  (too lazy to link every single letter in that sentence a different oracle security and or biz fail, so use google)

Re:Trusting oracle with all your infrastructure

[arth1]

Well, it does come with 28.8TB, which should be enough for a couple of weeks of Oracle logs.

A coworker said...

[Anonymous Coward]

A Coworker from Oracle said that company is where people go to retire.
For a tech company, that's REALLY REALLY BAD.

Re: A coworker said...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd go join a tech start up so I can retire - I'd need to work my bollucks off first, but going to a tech company to retire isn't always bad, but for Oracle-probably.

Wishful thinking

[cyberthanasis12]

I don't trust/like the "cloud". I don't like AWS in particular. But if there was the slightest possibility that I had to use Oracle cloud, I would rather marry Amazon to escape.

Re:Wishful thinking

[hcs_$reboot]

Devil advocate: VirtualBox. That's one thing Oracle does well, and for free.

Re:Wishful thinking

[John Allsup]

"Use but don't trust." is my general motto for cloud stuff. What you gain from cloud services is only truly yours when removal of those cloud services cannot take it away from you. "May be cancelled for business reasons at short notice" and similar are caveats to essentially all cloud services (given that those 'business reasons' may involve insolvency, which overrides any contracted obligations to you).

Re:Wishful thinking

[HiThere]

What's the use case where VirtualBox is the best choice? I know it's one of the top three virtualizers, but I, personally, have never had the need for anything beyond qemu.

Re:Wishful thinking

[guruevi]

Most of Sun's tech they purchased is still free but has been very much neglected by Oracle. There are some minor improvements to VBox over time but in comparison to KVM/QEMU, it's very minor.

Re:Wishful thinking

[silentcoder]

And like everything else they do marginally well... it's because they bought it. Every good Oracle product was developed by a company that wasn't Oracle.

VirtualBox represents one of the few cases where they bought something, kept it alive and managed NOT to royally fuck it up 3 months later. There are plenty of cases where they failed at that though. Many even from the same purchase that got them virtualbox. SunOS/Solaris is basically dead now. MySQL they screwed up so badly that the world is being taken over by a fork. OpenOffice - ditto, they started out owning the biggest office suite outside redmond, which SUN had steered well for more than a decade and in less than a year their terrible mismanagement got it forked... twice.

Then there is JAVA - the jury is still out on that one I think, but the google lawsuit spells ever greater trouble ahead. If I was somebody who developed on Java, I would be seriously rethinking that decision, you may actually be safer switching to C# and using mono !

Re:Wishful thinking

[Anonymous Coward]

Oracle bought VirtualBox. Hard to give them much credit for it's success.

a little too late

[nimbius]

Oracle has unveiled its second generation of cloud infrastructure

Cloud isnt something for which there exists a second generation market (only old fashioned servers and hardware have generations, the cloud is eternal so they say.) in other words, you dont get a chance to upstage your competitor after the opening bell rings. You can undercut them in terms of price but Ceph and about a dozen other cloud providers are already very well known and accepted by the community.

truth be told no ones heard of the oracle "first generation" cloud if there was such a thing. Most people are however very familiar with the acronym ORACLE: One Rich Asshole Called Larry Ellison. Youve branded yourself too expensive to sustainably do business with...heck, Oracle licensing is part of the reason things like REDIS, haproxy, maria and percona exist. You drove the exodus, so there is nothing for you to embrace.

Re:a little too late

[OverlordQ]

Ceph is software not IaaS.

x86 or SPARC?

[Anonymous Coward]

Will my code even run on Uncle Larry's super duper VM?

Ellison is a terrorist

[gavron]

Larry Ellison is a sociopath http://www.canadianbusiness.co... who has singlehandedly done more damage to the software world https://www.wired.com/2014/05/... than any other man since software became a thing. His self-aggrandizing attention-seeking narcissism https://books.google.com/books... proves that when you have money and you're a dick the media still loves you.

Larry Ellison is a liar.

If he says Amazon's lead is over you can rest assured knowing that three things are true:
1. Amazon's lead is not over
2. Larry is hoping to create a self-fulfilling prophecy so that it will be true
3. He's going for the free PR that he's getting by saying outrageous thing. It's a Trump thing.

E
P.S. The subject line I wrote is "Ellison is a terrorist." Given all the explosives he's set off in Java, APIs, Harmony, etc. the man should be locked up.

Re:Ellison is a terrorist

[Anonymous Coward]

When Darth Vader said "pray i don't alter it further". He was actually quoting Oracle. There is no way I'd uump into anything Oracle is doing, even if the specs looked better on paper. You know it is somehow going to cost you more in the end.

Re:Ellison is a terrorist

[Darkness Of Course]

Well said, you not only said what I was thinking but said it better.

Re:Ellison is a terrorist

[Jack9]

> who has singlehandedly done more damage to the software world

That title is reserved by Bill Gates. WTF has Larry done to software? Nothing. I mean they took the baby MS steps of creating a walled garden of substandard software and letting their once decent product line fester and slowly moulder. Positioning to do it again is not any worse. Oracle fails to even come close to setting poor standards, wiping out standards, wiping out companies, creatior locking down hardware that MS achieved. What a warped perspective to imagine Oracle has affected the software profession (much less industry).

Re:Ellison is a terrorist

[baboon]

Thank you. I post less than once a year, but I have to speak now. Modding up would not be good enough.

I have stated almost this exact quote many, many times throughout my life, but always attributing the honor to "Bill Gates". It is truly tragic to consider where we could have been now, or even twenty years ago, if that ill-conceived cardboard substitute for an operating system hadn't been unleashed upon the world. Let us not forget.

Windows is like a hollow plastic hammer. It appeals to the timid who are afraid of breaking anything. But once you actually try to get some work done, you realize that you are only playing with a toy.

You're still using Windows? When you buy a frame, you're supposed to throw away the sample picture it comes with.

Re:Ellison is a terrorist

[spire3661]

Ellison and Oracle were heavily involved in Iron Man 2. I mean was Justin Hammer basically just Larry as a weapons dealer? All he had to do was tack on 'the press is about to run out of ink' line and his ascendance to James Bond villain would be complete.

Re:Ellison is a terrorist

[chaboud]

You may not like Windows (note: none of my computer equipment, phones, or work machines run Windows), but it normalized a pretty significant set of operating system features ranging from preemptive multitasking to pluggable filesystems to a workable fast userspace mutex. Windows also maintained a *wildly* long history of binary compatibility well beyond virtually any other OS out there.

They did some next level shit.

I was an Amiga user, a Mac user, a Linux junkie, etc. To call Windows "playing with a toy" is to demonstrate an utter lack of awareness of the depth of that operating system and its facilities.

Of course, I'd rather use Linux or mac OS (and there were others, like NeXTSTEP, along the way), but let's give credit where it's due.

Re:Ellison is a terrorist

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, dumbass. If it hadn't been for the network effects and economies of scale brought about by Wintel, your Linux box would cost $20,000 and run about 10% as fast as it does.

You're welcome, freeloader.

Re:Ellison is a terrorist

[Anonymous Coward]

You are clearly not remembering anything before NT. Windows and DOS before it were spectacularly bad, and if not for microsoft's underhanded tactics, something else (and almost certainly better) would have filled the gap. (Though, Intel's equally terrible architecture certainly didn't make it easy for system developers.)

Even the binary compatibility and eventually passable system were still self-serving to maintain lock-in and marketshare. At least they went after the enterprise market though. As awful as the user interface is, modern windows is reasonably solid, not like the polished turd that Apple delivers.

Re:Ellison is a terrorist

[Anonymous Coward]

Right, because if the monopolists hadn't been there to crush competition, we wouldn't have any alternatives today.

Are contributors to OSS "freeloaders" in your book as well?

Re:Ellison is a terrorist

[lusid1]

The difference is the anti-Oracle sentiment is universal. If this were about Microsoft some supporters would be jumping to their defense. The only people who ever defend Oracle are on their payroll.

Re:Ellison is a terrorist

[Anonymous Coward]

Whether Oracle is successful or not, I like the idea of serious competitors entering the market against Amazon. An aggressive Oracle will force Amazon to compete and keep them honest on pricing. I expect that consumers will benefit from Larry's strenuous efforts to muscle in on the cloud computing business, even if Oracle ultimately captures only a minority share. Competition is healthy. Competition is good. It makes for better products at better prices. The tech business needs more of that, not less.

Re:Ellison is a terrorist

[TheRaven64]

DOS wasn't too bad. Remember, the competitor for DOS was CP/M, not UNIX or VMS. It ran a command interpreter, TSRs, and launched a single program. That was about all that you needed it to do on an 8086 with 64-640KB of RAM. Windows 3 was fairly comparable with GEM. Both just about ran with 640KB of RAM, but Windows looked better (for example, colour icons). More importantly, Windows 3.1 provided an incremental upgrade path that started to use features from the 386.

The competition to Windows 3.1 was OS/2, which was a lot better, but needed a lot more RAM. Back then, 4MB of RAM cost about £125. Windows 3.1 ran happily in 4MB, OS/2 needed at least 8MB (so did NT 3.51) and cost a lot more for the software license. The extra functionality wasn't worth £200/seat for better hardware and more expensive software to most businesses.

There were other DOS clones (I particularly remember DR DOS) which gave 32-bit protected memory, multitasking, and multiple VTs, but these features are not that useful on a desktop without a GUI and GEM was killed as a separate product before DR DOS gained these features. iRMX (and PL/M86) was more interesting, but was so closely tied to the x86 architecture that it didn't get the early adoption from people who weren't convinced that the m68k was dead as a desktop computer CPU.

Re:Ellison is a terrorist

[silentcoder]

And even then only *while* on their payroll. The day I resigned my job at Oracle I became one their most vocal attackers on /.

Nothing makes you hate Larry like having worked for the fucker...

Re:Ellison is a terrorist

[sad_]

Ellison is to enterprise software what microsoft is to consumer software.

Re:Ellison is a terrorist

[Deagol]

I still lament the fact that Desqview/Desqview-X never gained much traction. That shit was robust and multi-tasked circles around Windows 3 at the time.

Re:Ellison is a terrorist

[baboon]

Ah, yes, I took the Amiga route, probably far longer than it merited, up until about the point where I got a military-supplied SGI workstation to use in my roach-infested college apartment.

To be fair, I only used Windows for any serious purpose up through XP, for cross-platform fully-abstracted simulation software as well as large-scale PC/Console games. It's reassuring to hear that things have dramatically improved since then, although it is odd I'm just hearing about it now. I found a prospering industry that is not shackled to Windows, or even Mac, so I suppose I've just lost touch with those worlds. When all you deliver is pixels, no one cares what you used to assemble them.

So, lack of awareness, huh. Ooh, let's play a game, presumably just for my own amusement. Off the top of my head, no cheating and looking things up, let's harken back to ye olde... a decade or so ago and recall my foggy memories of the PC as it once was...

* Each DLL has its own heap, so cross-DLL malloc/dealloc causes crashes. Likewise, you can't inherit C++ implementations across DLLs, or something related to that. There is a non-obvious non-trivial fully-functional fix for this, but since every expert I asked said "deal with it", I had to come up with the answer on my own.
* Symbol visibility is off by default and you can't change the default. You have to mark up your code with import and export even for small projects, where it is just a waste of time. Arguably, that made us all ready for gcc visibility, but it's no excuse.
* Emaciated CLI.
* File paths contain backslash, which is also a string special character and just pointlessly different than the existing standard.
* Drives are a single letter and follow a forced inconvenient pattern. The colon isn't a real problem, so much, but rather a constant reminder that makes you feel stupid for even being in that situation.
* 8.3 filenames were pointlessly out of date at the start and absurd for how long it lasted. Likewise, isn't it /more/ work to annoyingly ignore and/or remove case in filenames?
* No symbolic links.
* No NFS except with sketchy third party pay software. Samba was arguably worse, but the choice was usually more about where the files had to be than which solution was less intolerable. So, the "choice" was generally forced on you.
* The symbol "color" was already defined somewhere in a common Win32 header, but not in a way that simply reported as such. If you did something as outlandish as use a local variable named "color", you would get a cryptic assembly error.
* No valgrind.
* Fully reinstall the OS once or twice a year, watching it slowly fall apart each time.
* Something about a "registry". I don't really recall why I had to keep going back to that, but I associate the word with deep feelings of dissatisfaction.
* No remote display, although VNC kinda filled in the gap late in the game.
* Window decorations are apparently baked into each program, not provided by the window manager, so a slow or frozen program isn't particularly manageable.
* Oh right, there's no real window manager, so you you can't replace the simplistic naive "default" with something useful. I'd say this one counts for about as much as all the rest combined.

There's going to be a dozen more that pop into my head after I press "Submit".

Re:Ellison is a terrorist

[Tablizer]

honor [of evil] to "Bill Gates". It is truly tragic to consider where we could have been now, or even twenty years ago, if that ill-conceived cardboard substitute for an operating system hadn't been unleashed upon the world.

To be fair, some other corporate slimeball would probably screw up real competition if Gates hadn't. It seems to be the historical IT pattern. Before it was IBM, and now it's Google and Apple narrowing our choices.

Gates was probably thinking, "Somebody's gotta be the Wizard of Oz, might as well be me."

Re:Ellison is a terrorist

[david_thornley]

The original Windows was a graphic interface on top of MS-DOS, and a lot of the stuff was slow to change for compatibility reasons. MS-DOS was a takeoff on CP/M, so the ancestry goes back to the mid to late 70s.

Emaciated CLI.

You had MS-DOS commands, typically, which were good enough to run the machine.

File paths contain backslash, which is also a string special character and just pointlessly different than the existing standard.

There was a standard back then? CP/M used slash for command arguments, much like Unix uses hyphen. In what languages besides C was backslash a string special character back then? You're looking at Windows and saying they should have made it the same as Unix, which would have been nice, but there was no reason to do it early on.

8.3 filenames were pointlessly out of date at the start and absurd for how long it lasted. Likewise, isn't it /more/ work to annoyingly ignore and/or remove case in filenames?

8.3 filenames were standard in CP/M, and removing case is easy and fast in ASCII. Monocase was fairly common way back then, and typically capitalization doesn't change meaning in English, so case-smashing had advantages. Later versions of Windows hid the 8.3 names so you didn't have to worry about them except when diving into the internals.

Fully reinstall the OS once or twice a year, watching it slowly fall apart each time.

I typically have more issues than usual with Microsoft software, and I didn't run into that.

Something about a "registry". I don't really recall why I had to keep going back to that, but I associate the word with deep feelings of dissatisfaction.

Basically, an overcentralized and fragile substitute for config files. Definitely worth complaining about.

A lot of your complaints seem to be that Windows isn't Unix, which doesn't seem reasonable to me.

Re:Ellison is a terrorist

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree, if we are talking about Windows NT.

It's OK not to like it, but it's not a toy product. If you would have developed device drivers or complex software for Window you would know that.

Competition....from Oracle?

[MAXOMENOS]

Oracle is going to beat Amazon? Not Google, not Microsoft? Oracle? That strikes me as VERY unlikely. They might have the tech, but they're not going to have the customer base.

Re:Competition....from Oracle?

[The-Ixian]

I agree. They have a hell of an uphill climb... though they do have enterprise customers.

But does Oracle have any customer loyalty? I don't think I have ever heard anyone recommend Oracle anything (not talking about Sun's ex-products).... only grudgingly accept it as the only viable option due to vendor lock in.

Re:Competition....from Oracle?

[Anonymous Coward]

Oracle's DB is still a solid product for its intended purpose (Things like active/active replication for global enterprise) - But I wouldn't touch anything else they use with a 5000ft pole.

Re:Competition....from Oracle?

[Anonymous Coward]

Go 20 years and see how many companies were after beating Microsoft. Oracle was not even in top 10 software vendor. Today, Oracle is number 2 leaving behind giants like IBM. Oracle is credited as number one company which halted microsoft in enterprise.

Re:Competition....from Oracle?

[Mysticalfruit]

Think about the fact that Intel currently runs entire batches of CPUs customized for Amazon EC2. Yeah, for some small scale cluster Oracle's got some blisteringly fast cluster with kick ass interconnects and fast storage. However unless they're ready to invest the billions Amazon has already invested in AWS/EC2, they'll never be able to compete with amazon at scale.

Also, no matter what oracle does it's still trapped in Amazon's paradigm. Whatever they make for a cluster still has to adhere to amazon's standards so customers can migrate their data over...

Oracle may have built a one off super car, but it still has to drive on amazon roads... Good luck!

Re:Competition....from Oracle?

[aralin]

Oracle is the only company that can beat Amazon. They got a way to bring the customers there as all the enterprise stuff will run in Oracle Cloud and if it does not, they will buy the company or run it out of business. Eventually the startups will go where the customers are as the interconnectivity and closeness to data, latency to service, etc will start to be an issue. Oracle can pull this off technically and they even hired former Amazon people to do it.

So in my expert opinion it might be the best time to start learning Oracle Cloud skills as they will be in demand no matter how many Oracle hating techies there are on Slashdot. Not only that, but as the Oracle Hate will be driving factor slowing adoption, the skills will be even further in demand, the Cloud instances will be less loaded, the prices might even go further down, there are gonna be promotions for early adopters, this is the first Cloud price war and it will be ugly, but the few early adopters are going to benefit a lot.

Just make sure to avoid any tie-in that you don't have a plan to get out of and you should benefit from Oracle's ego driving the lower operating costs for your business.

Re:Competition....from Oracle?

[TheRaven64]

But does Oracle have any customer loyalty?

Oh yes, lots. Mostly from C?O types though - people who fly a lot and see the Oracle and SAP adverts outside the First Class lounge, but don't have to deal with the technology on a day to day basis and don't mind paying high premiums for having someone to blame at the next board meeting if things go wrong.

Re:Competition....from Oracle?

[Anonymous Coward]

I was in the TSC taking Solaris support calls from the late 90's to mid-2015. I saw the rise, the fall, the takeover and the aftermath. As soon as the ORCL-SUN merger was announced, I mean on the very DAY, the customers started talking about how they would be removing/replacing their Sun equipment with (mostly) Dell. Did they suddenly develop a hatred for Solaris? Nope, they just didn't want to do business with Oracle. In some cases, Oracle was not allowed in their place of business, or they were not getting into any further deals with Oracle. ORCL has always survived despite the horrid reputation is has for service and pricing, not to mention the infamous customer audits. Will that last forever?

I doubt it

[The-Ixian]

Who in their right mind would agree to more Oracle lock-in than they absolutely have to?

Oracle is definitely one of those companies who would not hesitate to hold you over a barrel once you are all cozy in their infrastructure.

Oh, look, you are running our DB software... on 1000 cores....

Re:I doubt it

[whoever57]

Who in their right mind would agree to more Oracle lock-in than they absolutely have to?

I don't know if they were in their "right mind", but the state of Oregon just did

Re:I doubt it

[jroysdon]

Uhm, I don't think you read that article correctly. Oregon walked away from $260M they paid Oracle and went to the Federal Exchange. Oregon has DBs & apps (probably mostly internal) that use Oracle already, and they're getting to use them for "free" as part of the settlement for a time. They were already locked-in for many other uses, but didn't stick with them for their health exchange.

Re:I doubt it

[whoever57]

Um, I don't think that you read the second paragraph of the article. Oregon got unlimited use of Oracle software for 6 years and some amount of support.

What do you think those Oracle support people are going to be doing for the next 6 years? Do you think that they are going to be promoting alternative solutions? Or do you think they might be promoting more dependence on Oracle, which, remember, is free for the next 6 years?

Oracle blah blah blah....

[petergriffinismyhero]

Oracle has screwed over almost their entire customer base including myself due to licensing shenanigans. So no I will not be purchasing anything from that company ever again.

I have never seen Cloud services priced hourly

[Anonymous Coward]

like that. They need to give us figures convertible to AWS norms for a customer to make an intelligent decision. Like with AWS 1 core moving 15GB of data across 300 monthly request costs me 9 cents a month. That's the so-called "beanstalk default." This $5.40 figure doesn't tell me how many connections we are talking about or if things start getting funky if the transfers are inter or intra regional. The pricing formulas are pretty damn complex in real life.

Re:I have never seen Cloud services priced hourly

[Anonymous Coward]

like that. They need to give us figures convertible to AWS norms for a customer to make an intelligent decision. Like with AWS 1 core moving 15GB of data across 300 monthly request costs me 9 cents a month. That's the so-called "beanstalk default." This $5.40 figure doesn't tell me how many connections we are talking about or if things start getting funky if the transfers are inter or intra regional. The pricing formulas are pretty damn complex in real life.

If you have to ask how much these things cost, then you obviously cannot afford it. Oracle's marketing types will surely make it seem cost competitive, until you actually start to use it and then, like the airlines and their baggage check fees, costs will mount until the level of profitability desired is achieved.

Game Over

[Anonymous Coward]

The only thing that is over is Oracle.

One raging asshole

[wbr1]

Want to really piss larry off? Lease some Oracle cloud instances and do nothing but run Android VMs and maybe some bigtable databases inside them. Say it's for app testing.

Re:One raging asshole

[Anonymous Coward]

Better yet, MS SQL server. Or IBM DB/2

Good luck, Larry. You're gonna need it.

[geekmux]

Based on the way his flagship Frankenstein product works, I only have one thing to say; Good fucking luck convincing your customers you can get this shit right.

One can only imagine the terrorist licensing model they'll invoke regardless of performance.

Does it require and NDA and support contract?

[Anonymous Coward]

Does it require and NDA and support contract to use the service?

Oracle's touch is poisonous

[Wokan]

Oracle DB - Licensing prices capable of bringing down even the richest empire
Java - Dead language walking on the client side. Server side use waning, though still has a lot of life remaining from Sun's stewardship (even with Sun's missteps).
OpenOffice.org - About to be put out of its misery by Apache. Long live Libreoffice.
VirtualBox - Decent for desktop virtualization and trying out other OSs. No real potential as an enterprise tool. Has somehow avoided getting screwed up by Oracle so far, but I expect the extensions package to monetized and licensed into oblivion any day.
MySQL - lapped by MariaDB for anyone serious about security (see recent root access exploit)
ZFS on Linux would be a non-issue if a company other than Oracle was involved in the matter.

Re:Oracle's touch is poisonous

[Anonymous Coward]

I am sure you have not used any paid license of either Oracle or its competitor.
Java: Still the number 1
OpenOffice: Not sure if Oracle was ever interested. However, they were using some OO code in their proprietary software, so the best way to open source was via Apache route which they did (unlike IBM whose Lotus Notes is rotting and no one ever complained).
VirtualBox: My experience is on desktop and is pretty good
MySQL: Still more people prefer mysql over MariaDB
ZFS: what is wrong with it?

Re:Oracle's touch is poisonous

[Anonymous Coward]

Pretty hard to call Java dying when it's what you write Android apps in.

Re:Oracle's touch is poisonous

[Anonymous Coward]

VirtualBox could do with an updated OpenGL driver. It has incomplete support for OpenGL 3.0 and I ended up buying a VMWare license just for that. OpenGL 2.1 with few extensions is rather outdated.

Re:Oracle's touch is poisonous

[Trogre]

Sssh! We call that one Dalvik!

Re:Oracle's touch is poisonous

[phantomfive]

ZFS on Linux would be a non-issue if a company other than Oracle was involved in the matter.

Sun purposely made the license incompatible with Linux.

Re:Oracle's touch is poisonous

[aralin]

I wish you were right, but Java is far from dead. Every single fucking application in the Enterprise is written in that piece of bloatware and half of the SaaS world uses it too. Not to mention that all Oracle apps, all Android apps, ... Google is really heavy on it. I mean... why? *sigh*

Re:Oracle's touch is poisonous

[Anonymous Coward]

Oracle has nothing to do with ZFS on Linux. The codebase comes straight from the old Sun sources, and has diverged since then. Oracle maintains their own copy, and ZFS on Linux is maintained under the CDDL. If Oracle wants to share then they have to re-license their code under CDDL. Likewise, Oracle can't take CDDL code and call it their own.

Re:Oracle's touch is poisonous

[Anonymous Coward]

Java's fine. What's your problem, stuck in some shitty Node.JS environment that you think is superior?

Re:Oracle's touch is poisonous

[Anonymous Coward]

ZFS on Linux would be a non-issue if a company other than Oracle was involved in the matter.

Sun purposely made the license incompatible with Linux.

And who do you suppose is responsible for it remaining under an incompatible license, years after Sun no longer exists?

Re:Oracle's touch is poisonous

[aralin]

My problem stems from having to maintain Java codebase. The difficulty the language posses to patching, backporting, automated merges, etc. When you add class dependencies and other build time issues it is just HELL to maintain a Java project with some reasonable number of developers over a longer period of time. The constant under the rug refactoring done by IDE without developers even noticing is another issue. The unnecessary verbosity another one. It just needs to die.

Re:Oracle's touch is poisonous

[DarthVain]

I somewhat recently tried to suggest VirturalBox as an enterprise tool to solve a particular problem with incompatible OS deployments and a legacy application... I was pretty much told to take a hike by security... :(

i.e. local security policy disables virturalization in an enterprise desktop environment and there was zero willingness to change that

I liken Java not so much as being "Dead" but rather "Undead" in that Zombie language seems to be impossible to kill without a direct headshot

Re:Oracle's touch is poisonous

[fishCannon]

Dude, you just described maintaining ANY software. None of those problems are unique to java.

Re:Oracle's touch is poisonous

[Tablizer]

I wish you were right, but Java is far from dead.

Agreed. The problem is that there are insufficient practical alternatives for those who want strong-typed and/or compiled languages.

C-sharp is also proprietary. I don't see any on the horizon that have enough market share to make them safe "enterprise" investments.

Part of the problem is that a static language is harder to design and get right than a dynamic one. Dynamic languages are easier to fudge and plug the holes of with dynamacy itself.

If one thing is off in a compiled language, you get no executable: it stops. Thus, it needs careful rules about name-spaces, type conflicts, etc. to not only compile properly, but have a syntax and model clear enough to be fixable by programmers.

Re:Oracle's touch is poisonous

[aralin]

You are clearly too young to know... but I have managed a C code base that was ported to 14 architectures, through 4 major versions, each with 3 minor versions, at least three major refactoring efforts, hundreds of thousands of tests, with at least 500 customers with their own branches full of patches on top of those versions. Thousands of developers. But I was still able to automatically merge backported bugfixes to most of the 10 year old code. There is no way I could get any of that even over 6 months of heavily developed Java code by no more than 100 developers. I had smaller products in other languages, again no problem. The only thing that was constantly breaking the dev process were the Java products. It was just too expensive because all merging and all backports of bug fixes to older versions had to be done by humans. Constant exceptions to automation requiring human attention. I see that as a major bug.

That is when I predicted that there would be single branch development with CI/CD on all Java products and the only way they would be delivered eventually would be SaaS, as no other model can possibly work in a moderate to long term with that crappy piece of shit.

Migrating

[fluffernutter]

I'm looking to migrate to a small cloud server and AWS seemed very expensive to me. I was surprised that such a large company could not beat a smaller one suck as Linode on price. I have no allegiances, so Oracle is either going to cheaper and more useful, or more expensive and less useful. Most people will base their opinions solely on that. So the question is, has Larry talked price yet?

Re:Migrating

[Bigbutt]

Yea, I looked over moving my personal physical server over to an AWS instance and the cost of AWS for an equivalent system was double what I'm paying for a physical system.

What I'd really need to do is take what I have on this system and start reviewing the costs of putting the bits in various services on the 'net. It's possible I can have it cost less by splitting up what I do but it would certainly complicate managing the environment.

[John]

Re:Migrating

[fluffernutter]

I've read some interesting things about bittorrent filesystems, sounds like it's the kind of thing you're looking for. Your files get encrypted and broken up into the torrentsphere. I haven't tried them personally, but some people seem to like them.

Re:Migrating

[bad-badtz-maru]

On AWS you're paying a premium for the ability to scale. The entire design is for dynamic computing requirements, such as ad-hoc computation or solutions that need to temporarily scale (think of Amazon's ecommerce site itself). If you just need a fixed number of servers it's not the economical choice.

Re:Migrating

[Anonymous Coward]

It gets more interesting when you consider that AWS hasn't lowered prices for storage in the last few years. S3 was 0.03 per gig/month in 2014. It's still that price today.

So... AWS is rent seeking and lock-in at its best. The cost to move back to in-house are way too much for anyone to bother with, and yet the prices paid on these turn-key systems are quite a bit higher than the market should have. If you google for historical AWS price drops, they're somewhere around 3-10% a year... yet everyone knows compute/storage costs drop by more than that every year...

Re:Migrating

[lgw]

I've been looking at that as well. Depending on instance type, the 3-year contracts can be pretty cheap if paid upfront. I want a little web server for some toy pages (and I don't just want to put the pages somewhere - I want to play with different host stacks/frameworks). If I can fit in 1 GB that's about $150 for three years.

If you really want a server, scroll through all the reserved instance prices looking for what's deeply discounted. There are some good prices here and there IMO. Just remember the "cores" are low-clock Xeon cores for the most part (high core count Xeon chips all run pretty slow), if you're actually doing something CPU-bound. (For batch compute jobs, find a way to use Spot - man that's cheap if you can use it).

Re:Migrating

[jon3k]

You're not really the target customer. For a single VM there are probably cheaper options. When you want a few hundred or thousand (reserved) instances and negotiated pricing, AWS becomes very competitive.

Re:Migrating

[fluffernutter]

Yet I've read if you go much past $10K/year you might as well have your own servers. Especially if you can do your own administration.

Re:Migrating

[jon3k]

Got a source for that figure? There are a lot of financial considerations around moving to the cloud. Like moving from capital to operational expenses and the flexibility to scale up/down with M&A or divestitures. Sometimes the flexibility provided by PaaS can deliver much better value to an organization.

Re:Migrating

[fluffernutter]

No source that I would be able to find again.. but I saw three similar separate kinds of comments with 10-15K being the general cutoff point.

Re:Migrating

[jon3k]

I don't believe anyone could claim a single number would be applicable to all environments. I don't buy that at all, to be honest.

Use our cloud and get free license auditing!

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, no thanks, I'll worry about my own license auditing thank-you.

Re:Use our cloud and get free license auditing!

[Anonymous Coward]

You are talking as if Oracle is the only one who does license auditing. Admire your gullibility.

Re:Use our cloud and get free license auditing!

[HiThere]

Well, the FSF has never tried to audit my system, and they're the only people with grounds.

(Yeah, I know that's not true, as the FSF doesn't hold title to the copyrights. But the Licenses explicitly give me the right to have a copy without caring about how I gout it.)

Troll post

[Anonymous Coward]

The only reason Slashdot would have posted this is because they were trolling for comments..

Seriously, can we just ignore Oracle exists at all so that they go bankrupt sooner?

Re:Troll post

[hcs_$reboot]

That's all over the news ; that'd be weird if /. wouldn't talk about it.

Re:Troll post

[HiThere]

If that's the reason, not only was it a successful troll, but I don't even feel taken advantage of.

Evil Beard

[decipher_saint]

He does kinda have a supervillain beard

I mean I just expect him to be terrorizing the world from a giant mechanical spider to which our weapons are useless ...the only way to stop it is to install the latest Java security update -- something-something hubris etc

Re:Evil Beard

[Anne Thwacks]

I mean I just expect him to be terrorizing the world from a giant mechanical spider to which our weapons are useless

expect? I would link to the videos but the NDA prevents it.

Re:Evil Beard

[chaboud]

Fortunately for humanity, that giant mechanical spider is sitting in the basement of Oracle, half built and mired in scaling issues.

The next time you decry human idiocy, remember that it was all that saved you from Larry Ellison...

BWAHAHAHAHA

[ilsaloving]

Oracle... Thinks it now has a lead over Amazon.... BWAHAHAHAHA.

*wipes tear*

Sure, I would love to pay 100x market price for equivalent service without any value-add! Really!

Re:BWAHAHAHAHA

[gtall]

You don't get it. Oracle's cloud is Uncle Larry's ego. It has infinite storage capacity, able to out-lie even Trump, and is more irritating than Jeff Bezos.

Re:BWAHAHAHAHA

[AK Marc]

" 28.8TB, 512GB, and 36 cores, at a price of $5.40 per hour."

Sure, I would love to pay 100x market price for equivalent service without any value-add! Really!

Where do you get those specs in a server for $0.054 per hour? I'll move my stuff to there (unless it's your basement).

Re:BWAHAHAHAHA

[ilsaloving]

Well, I was being facetious. Everything else Oracle does comes with ludicrous costs. Even if their upfront cost is cheap, once they are entrenched they will tighten the vice and milk you for everything you've got.

Oracle doesn't do *anything* unless they heavily weigh it in their favour. They make Microsoft look like the Make-a-Wish foundation.

So even if their cloud prices look good, there's gonna be a catch somewhere. It may not be immediate, but it will most certainly be there somewhere.

Oracle has done something that is not easy

[Anonymous Coward]

They have made Amazon's ugly AWS website look modern and magnificent compared to the mess they rolled out (https://cloud.oracle.com/). Anyone have luck finding a price list or technical specs anywhere??

Re:Oracle has done something that is not easy

[lgw]

They have made Amazon's ugly AWS website look modern and magnificent compared to the mess they rolled out (https://cloud.oracle.com/). Anyone have luck finding a price list or technical specs anywhere??

There's this. https://cloud.oracle.com/en_US...

I'm not sure what anything actually costs, but it looks like $0.10 per core-hour? They seem memory-heavy, but AWS memory-heavy instances are a bit over over $0.08 per core hour.

If it were anyone else, I'd assume I was reading it wrong, but for Oracle, yeah, just charging 20% more seems like what they'd do.

WHat lead?

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh you meant Lead......as in the element. Because Jeff Bozos never had "lead" in his pencil while he was calling for robots to replace his workers.

HAHAHAHAHA

[Anonymous Coward]

haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahahaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

I mean co-

haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahahahahaaaa

So why?

[frank_adrian314159]

Why would anyone want to do business with Larry Ellison and Oracle? Cyanide's preferable.

Breaking News

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

"New cloud provider guy says those other cloud provider guys are no good"; film at 11.

Larry Ellison Says 'Amazon's Lead is Over'

[sconeu]

Larry Ellison says a lot of things. Some of the may even be true, but I doubt this one is.

Netbeans, best free IDE EVAR...

[Anonymous Coward]

Thankfully moving to Apache.

lol...

[Anonymous Coward]

like amazon and microsoft can't just flick a switch and have the same, or better, if they wanted.

Amazon's lead in what?

[Anonymous Coward]

Complex, overpriced billing?

Outside of entrenched Oracle shops (which admittedly include some heavy hitters - most of whom have their own infrastructure), the Oracle cloud adds no value and offers no incentives.

Oracle is over

[Anonymous Coward]

They're know in the industry as patent trolls. They ceased innovating a long time ago, and can only their vast wealth buying more innovative companies out but everything Oracle touches turns to shit. Their flagship product is a me-too SQL database in a world of me-too SQL databases. So stop giving Larry your money. If you're doing commercial-grade DB work, PostgreSQL is your friend. Larry isn't. Larry's an asshole.

Oracle's motto: Make nothing, sue everybody: http://techrights.org/2016/05/...

He's just a tech CEO Was Re:Ellison is a terrorist

[atrimtab]

None of these tech company leaders are "nice guys." Most of them exaggerate for effect and press. Most of them treat employees as "replaceable cogs." Many lie about what their company's have to ship and only fix it later (if ever) with an update.... of course such "misrepresentation" will get them the customers money now, rather than later or never.

Oracle

[Anonymous Coward]

is a criminal organization. Enough said.

Going Postal

[The Evil Atheist]

This is the point of the story where Reacher Gilt unveils his plans for new mobile clacks towers.

margins

[markhahn]

Oracle: hey, rent this hardware for 10x the capex+opex.

Seriously, Amazon is making a killing from cloud, so how surprising is it that other companies want some of that honey?

This server costs about $12k, and would cost the standard 10%/year to power and cool.
Yet over a 3-year rental life, Oracle is charging $142k.

Usual BS

[vikingpower]

As usual, ever since he became CEO, Larry Ellison is full of shit. He's the imaginably the closest living CEO to Dilbert's one.

Steer away

[silentcoder]

I worked for Oracle, in the team that developed this. WIthout smearing my former employer too much... I would not advise anybody to choose Oracle cloud.

VirtualBox

[tbuskey]

* Runs on Windows, Linux, Mac and Solaris
* Can run headless and detached from GUI
* can teleport VMs between hosts, even if they run different OSs
* free and easy to install/use.

I don't find that VMware workstation is any better in general. VMware can run virtualize ESXi easily and work as in interface to a full ESXi though.
KVM with Virt-Manager is comparable to VirtualBox IMO. It can be extended with oVirt and OpenStack. It's Linux only which hurts it for desktop, but not servers.

In general, if you need something quick on your desktop, VirtualBox is great. As you get into details, different hypervisors offer different advantages.

On a clay tablet somewhere in Iraq...

[Anonymous Coward]

"Here me oh world and tremble at my pronouncement. I do proclaim for all time that the day of the unworthy sack is at an end. Yea and verily the sack shall be no more. I, Larasonix Ellisoniasia, have brought forth with the blessings of Toth and in full sight of the great lords Gil-ga'mesh and tar-Abor, the new and revolutionary form of storage. Form this day hence let all people rejoice! Now is the time I reveal the creation of the ages. and it will be called...
The BOX."

shut up larry , nobody wants to listen to bullies

[Anonymous Coward]

yeah well larry i dont do business with bullies , and thus will not be even proposing any oracle services to any of my clients you want to piss off the entire android community for 4 lines of comment in a freaking header file for JAVA ? well fuck you , sticking with AWS

I think they're safe

[Anonymous Coward]

If Oracle's could services are as slow as their database is, Amazon has nothing to worry about...

Re:Ellison is a terrorist and so is Oracle

[Anonymous Coward]

No company has done more damage to Open Source than Oracle.

Cool API developed in BSD/Linux and you want to copy it and implement the same interface for compatibility reasons on your platform?

That is now a copyright violation thanks to Oracle.

Larry's software: Java OpenOffice Solaris MySQL

[emil]

Would you say that any of this software has done well under Oracle? Is the user community satisfied?

And a hush of fear and dread descended over SLU

[Anonymous Coward]

I’m sure Jeff Bezos pissed his pants on hearing the news

because he started laughing so hard that he lost control of his bodily functions.