Seems pretty straightforward to me, really. Oracle's core business is selling their RDBMS. Their primary selling point against MySQL is that MySQL is a "toy" database because it's not ACID-compliant (among other things). MySQL AB has wasted a lot of breath over the years arguing that ACID-compliance is not as important as speed. To low end customers, that might make sense. To customers whose businesses depend on data integrity -- i.e., the BIG customers -- it doesn't.
Innobase makes a product that takes the "toy" database and allows it to be a plausible option for these clients. That threatens Oracle's business. With InnoDB, MySQL AB could start fishing in the same waters Oracle does.
So what to do? Oracle's move effectively checkmates MySQL AB's ambitions to scale up their business. By controlling the Innobase IP, Oracle presents MySQL AB with one of three options, all of which suck:
Abandon InnoDB. This would require MySQL AB to start from square one in making MySQL ACID-compliant, thus re-starting the clock on the day when MySQL is a true threat to Oracle.
Abandon ACID compliance. If MySQL AB chooses to not do that work, they will remain a "toy" database and never compete with Oracle in the "enterprise" space. Oracle is happy.
License InnoDB from Oracle. It may well be the case that it would be cheaper for MySQL AB to pay Oracle for continuing use of InnoDB than to replicate it themselves. This works out in Oracle's benefit too, because it means they could get a cut of all MySQL sales; this would soothe the pain of losing sales of their RDBMS somewhat. (It's always nice to have a major competitor in a position where he has to pay you to stay alive.)
Frankly this is a smart strategic move by Oracle no matter how MySQL AB responds -- and it's remarkably shortsighted of MySQL AB to have allowed themselves to be maneuvered into a position where it's possible.
If AOL terminated its contract, Google would feel some pain and its stock price could take a significant hit. Last Friday, the Wall Street Journal reported that TimeWarner and Microsoft, Google's main rival, are talking about forging an alliance between AOL and MSN. That can't come as welcome news in Mountain View, Calif.
If MSN bought AOL from Time Warner and terminated that contract, it would be a big blow to both the company's revenue stream and, presumably, its stock price. Thus Google (or, more specifically, all those Google execs and VCs with a mountain of paper wealth tied up in GOOG shares) has an interest in keeping AOL afloat as a separate entity from Big Redmond, as long as the cost of doing so is less than the money they make back in AdSense revenues from AOL.
I'm not a hard-core Java or C programmer, myself, so maybe there are fine technical details that I'm not privy to. But it seems to me that the primary lesson of the "Java is slow legend" is that proves the truth of the old saying:
You never get a second chance to make a first impression.
When Java first came out in the mid-90s, programs written in it ran sloooowly. This was especially true for the types of client-facing programs that people would notice were written in Java (things like applets).
Today the JVM has been massively improved, hardware has gotten a couple of orders of magnitude faster, and Java programs aren't slow anymore. But people still think "Java == slow".
Why? Because that was their first impression of Java. And it will take many years of contrary experience to overcome the power of that first impression.
From my layman's point of view, Java has really only seemed to be adequate performance-wise for a few years now (I remember Eclipse being the first Java app I saw that really felt as snappy as a native app, and it launched in what, 2001?). So a lot of people still probably have a lot of hours they need to log working with modern Java apps before the "myth" gets completely dispelled...
Hey, I don't feel stupid for dinging them -- that CBR article was about some mythical Web office suite in the sky. No mention of Sun, no mention of StarOffice -- the only connection between the two stories is the words "Google Office".
As for the guys in the story itself, though... yeah, they probably feel pretty stupid;-)
It's just an interview with someone who tried to build a Web-based office suite and couldn't pull it off. Then the guy speculates that "someone else will do it within a year" with absolutely zero evidence for that contention other than his gut feeling -- he doesn't claim to have talked to any company (Google included) about their plans. Then the journalist takes the guy's wild speculation and stretches it out to Google being the ones who will do it "within a year".
In other words, it's completely unsourced speculation. There's not even enough fact there for it to qualify as "rumor"!
It's bad enough that it's running on CBR's blog, but why does Slashdot just pass along the article, complete with wildly misleading headline? Aren't "editors" supposed to be more about critical thinking than regurgitation?
This sounds less like a problem with blogs than it is a problem with your firewall. With stupid policies like that, why does your sysadmin bother letting you connect to port 80 at all?
So it requires someone to file a special request under the law to check Mozilla's dealings.
Not true. As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation the Mozilla Foundation is required to file disclosure paperwork with the IRS every year. These disclosure filings (called Forms 990) are public and searchable via GuideStar (requires free registration).
The Mozilla Foundation's 990s are, it's true, only current to 2003. But that's not due to any deep conspiracy; it's just because they didn't file the 2003 990 until October 2004. So you shouldn't expect to see the 2004 disclosure until a year or so after that (October-November 2005).
If you want to spin a conspiracy theory, a more plausible one would involve the recent formation of the "Mozilla Corporation" as a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Foundation. It's unclear to me if money paid to such an entity would need to be disclosed or not (it would definitely have to be reported to the IRS, but possibly in a way that isn't public like the 990 data). If not, it's possible that one of the motivations for the formation of the Corporation would be to accept large donations from parties like Google without having them show up on the Foundation's public disclosures -- but that's unlikely since Google has been the default search engine in Firefox since 0.1, and the Corporation has only existed since August of this year. So any payments from Google would have to have been pretty recent for this to be plausible.
You can now go back to your regularly scheduled tinfoil-hat fashion show;-)
As I read it, it sounds like they are looking for a cutout.
This bit in the contest terms caught my attention:
1. System has no proprietary software imbedded / required.
So why would you set up a contest that you know nobody could win by following the rules?
Let's say that you represent an organization whose Windows emulation solution was to rip off someone else's solution (in this case, Crossover Office).
The owners of that original solution find out and you're busted. So now you're back to square one.
You could, of course, try to roll your own Windows emulator. But as others have pointed out, that's way more than fifteen days of work.
You could also license Crossover Office from Codeweavers. But for purposes of our discussion let's assume that you're a cheap SOB and won't do that.
So what you might do is decide to continue using ripped-off software, but this time, to do so using a cutout -- a third party standing between you and the code. In this case the cutout is the person who submitted the entry that won.
That way, when Codeweavers (or whoever) comes calling, you can say "But we're victims too! We were assured that the product didn't contain any proprietary IP! Look, it's right in the rules for submission!" And so the liability shifts from you to whover "fooled" you by submitting the ripped off software.
(Of course, if I were Codeweavers in that situation I'd argue that you should have inspected the software to ensure it met your rules before paying out the $10K. But maybe these guys haven't thought that far...)
By setting a ridiculously short deadline, you can be sure that any takers are going to be giving you exactly what you want -- someone else's ripped-off IP -- instead of trying to actually solve the problem from scratch.
Now you've got what you wanted without getting your hands dirty -- you have a fall guy to pass the buck to.
That's the only reasonable explanation I can come up with for why you would construct such a ridiculous contest, anyway...
Hiroshima-size or smaller atomic device detonated by terrorists in the heart of an American city during a business day.
Such an event would pose many of the same problems as Katrina -- massive destruction, huge numbers of refugees, etc. -- plus dramatically larger death tolls and lingering radiation for decades for miles downwind.
Filzip includes shell integration, handles just about every compression format (including.rar,.tar/.tar.gz, and.cab), and unlike WinZip, it
s 100% free as in beer. No fooling, no mucking around with a feature-deprived free version. Just grab it and go.
AJAX will work with nearly any major browser off the shelf. poof.
Bzzt. Wrong.
"AJAX" will work with Internet Explorer, Gecko-based browsers, and Apple's Safari, and nothing else, because these are the only browsers to have included implementations of the XMLHTTPRequest object yet.
Oh, your client uses Konqueror? Or a cell phone? Or may ever use a user-agent other than the big three? Now you have to program a second, stripped down, clunky version just for that contingency. Try using the most widely deployed enterprise "AJAX" app out there -- Microsoft's Outlook Web Access -- in IE and then Firefox and you'll see what I mean.
Why does OWE degrade in Firefox? Doesn't "AJAX" work "off the shelf" in all major browsers? Well, the problem is that each of these browsers has their own incompatible implementation of XMLHTTPRequest. So you have to sniff out which browser the client is using and do your "AJAX" according to what it's expecting. (This is because of XMLHTTPRequest's origins as a proprietary IE extension to the browser API.)
Microsoft, naturally, only supports the IE flavor of "AJAX" in OWE. But you're not Microsoft and you probably don't get to dictate browsers like that, so you'll have to code around and cover all of them. If you're using an "AJAX toolkit", you're not seeing all this cruft because it's being hidden under a layer of abstraction; but that doesn't mean it's not there.
Because there is no standardized, according-to-Hoyle way to implement "AJAX", when you use it you do so at the risk of sacrificing something important -- forward compatibility. For some applications that's not a concern, but you might want to think about whether that's true for your app before you run and rewrite the whole thing in "AJAX" just because that's teh new hotness.
"Atos Origin" sounds less like an IT consultancy and more like an Everquest character.
Once, long before the reign of Lord Xanthar, during the Great Peace of the Radrocks, there arose a mystic wizard of the West. His name was Atos Origin, and to the amazement of the common folk of the realm, he predicted the open source landscape to come...
Apple invented the hard drive-based portable MP3 jukebox?
Um, I had an Archos Jukebox long before the first iPod came out (and got lots of weird stares from people trying to explain to them what it was). And the Personal Jukebox came out even before the Archos did.
Apple didn't invent the hard drive-based portable MP3 jukebox -- they perfected it. May not seem like a big difference, but let's not write the people who did the actual inventing out of the history books...
Of course, YMMV. But if you're still going off impressions of Yahoo Search you formed back in 1997, you might want to give their new-and-improved engine a spin sometime...
Since nobody's mentioned it yet, let me recommend John Robb's excellent Global Guerrillas blog if you want to understand this stuff in more depth. John has been exploring the mechanics of massively-distributed terror networks for quite some time now.
Surely what is needed is for Yahoo to publish a rich, well documented set of APIs, rather like Google* has done - this would let any desktop software (Konfabulator, Dashboard, Linux stuff, whatever) access the information.
Slashdot Mirror
Seems pretty straightforward to me, really. Oracle's core business is selling their RDBMS. Their primary selling point against MySQL is that MySQL is a "toy" database because it's not ACID-compliant (among other things). MySQL AB has wasted a lot of breath over the years arguing that ACID-compliance is not as important as speed. To low end customers, that might make sense. To customers whose businesses depend on data integrity -- i.e., the BIG customers -- it doesn't.
Innobase makes a product that takes the "toy" database and allows it to be a plausible option for these clients. That threatens Oracle's business. With InnoDB, MySQL AB could start fishing in the same waters Oracle does.
So what to do? Oracle's move effectively checkmates MySQL AB's ambitions to scale up their business. By controlling the Innobase IP, Oracle presents MySQL AB with one of three options, all of which suck:
Frankly this is a smart strategic move by Oracle no matter how MySQL AB responds -- and it's remarkably shortsighted of MySQL AB to have allowed themselves to be maneuvered into a position where it's possible.
All these comments about why Google would be interested in AOL and I have yet to see anyone pointing out the one I think most compelling:
Google's revenue today comes almost entirely from advertising -- and AOL accounts for 12% of the revenue Google earns from AdSense.
If MSN bought AOL from Time Warner and terminated that contract, it would be a big blow to both the company's revenue stream and, presumably, its stock price. Thus Google (or, more specifically, all those Google execs and VCs with a mountain of paper wealth tied up in GOOG shares) has an interest in keeping AOL afloat as a separate entity from Big Redmond, as long as the cost of doing so is less than the money they make back in AdSense revenues from AOL.
I'm not a hard-core Java or C programmer, myself, so maybe there are fine technical details that I'm not privy to. But it seems to me that the primary lesson of the "Java is slow legend" is that proves the truth of the old saying:
You never get a second chance to make a first impression.
When Java first came out in the mid-90s, programs written in it ran sloooowly. This was especially true for the types of client-facing programs that people would notice were written in Java (things like applets).
Today the JVM has been massively improved, hardware has gotten a couple of orders of magnitude faster, and Java programs aren't slow anymore. But people still think "Java == slow".
Why? Because that was their first impression of Java. And it will take many years of contrary experience to overcome the power of that first impression.
From my layman's point of view, Java has really only seemed to be adequate performance-wise for a few years now (I remember Eclipse being the first Java app I saw that really felt as snappy as a native app, and it launched in what, 2001?). So a lot of people still probably have a lot of hours they need to log working with modern Java apps before the "myth" gets completely dispelled...
Hey, I don't feel stupid for dinging them -- that CBR article was about some mythical Web office suite in the sky. No mention of Sun, no mention of StarOffice -- the only connection between the two stories is the words "Google Office".
As for the guys in the story itself, though... yeah, they probably feel pretty stupid ;-)
No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame.
Why is this article getting play on Slashdot?
It's just an interview with someone who tried to build a Web-based office suite and couldn't pull it off. Then the guy speculates that "someone else will do it within a year" with absolutely zero evidence for that contention other than his gut feeling -- he doesn't claim to have talked to any company (Google included) about their plans. Then the journalist takes the guy's wild speculation and stretches it out to Google being the ones who will do it "within a year".
In other words, it's completely unsourced speculation. There's not even enough fact there for it to qualify as "rumor"!
It's bad enough that it's running on CBR's blog, but why does Slashdot just pass along the article, complete with wildly misleading headline? Aren't "editors" supposed to be more about critical thinking than regurgitation?
Oh, I forgot, this is Slashdot. Never mind.
LOL... tell us the name of your company so I can be sure to invest somewhere where they do not beat down their employees! ;-)
This sounds less like a problem with blogs than it is a problem with your firewall. With stupid policies like that, why does your sysadmin bother letting you connect to port 80 at all?
Not true. As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation the Mozilla Foundation is required to file disclosure paperwork with the IRS every year. These disclosure filings (called Forms 990) are public and searchable via GuideStar (requires free registration).
The Mozilla Foundation's 990s are, it's true, only current to 2003. But that's not due to any deep conspiracy; it's just because they didn't file the 2003 990 until October 2004. So you shouldn't expect to see the 2004 disclosure until a year or so after that (October-November 2005).
If you want to spin a conspiracy theory, a more plausible one would involve the recent formation of the "Mozilla Corporation" as a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Foundation. It's unclear to me if money paid to such an entity would need to be disclosed or not (it would definitely have to be reported to the IRS, but possibly in a way that isn't public like the 990 data). If not, it's possible that one of the motivations for the formation of the Corporation would be to accept large donations from parties like Google without having them show up on the Foundation's public disclosures -- but that's unlikely since Google has been the default search engine in Firefox since 0.1, and the Corporation has only existed since August of this year. So any payments from Google would have to have been pretty recent for this to be plausible.
You can now go back to your regularly scheduled tinfoil-hat fashion show ;-)
Ask and ye shall receive...
I can imagine a conversation with their sales guy:
SALES GUY: We support IEEE.
BUYER: "IEEE"? What IEEE standard are you talking about?
SALES GUY (confidently): All of them!
As I read it, it sounds like they are looking for a cutout.
This bit in the contest terms caught my attention:
So why would you set up a contest that you know nobody could win by following the rules?
Let's say that you represent an organization whose Windows emulation solution was to rip off someone else's solution (in this case, Crossover Office).
The owners of that original solution find out and you're busted. So now you're back to square one.
You could, of course, try to roll your own Windows emulator. But as others have pointed out, that's way more than fifteen days of work.
You could also license Crossover Office from Codeweavers. But for purposes of our discussion let's assume that you're a cheap SOB and won't do that.
So what you might do is decide to continue using ripped-off software, but this time, to do so using a cutout -- a third party standing between you and the code. In this case the cutout is the person who submitted the entry that won.
That way, when Codeweavers (or whoever) comes calling, you can say "But we're victims too! We were assured that the product didn't contain any proprietary IP! Look, it's right in the rules for submission!" And so the liability shifts from you to whover "fooled" you by submitting the ripped off software.
(Of course, if I were Codeweavers in that situation I'd argue that you should have inspected the software to ensure it met your rules before paying out the $10K. But maybe these guys haven't thought that far...)
By setting a ridiculously short deadline, you can be sure that any takers are going to be giving you exactly what you want -- someone else's ripped-off IP -- instead of trying to actually solve the problem from scratch.
Now you've got what you wanted without getting your hands dirty -- you have a fall guy to pass the buck to.
That's the only reasonable explanation I can come up with for why you would construct such a ridiculous contest, anyway...
ActiveX?
They run poker shows on InHD? Seems a bit like missing the point to me:
"Tonight on InHD! See some guy's knuckles in glorious high definition!"... yeah, that's what I shelled out the big bucks for an HDTV for.
Hiroshima-size or smaller atomic device detonated by terrorists in the heart of an American city during a business day.
Such an event would pose many of the same problems as Katrina -- massive destruction, huge numbers of refugees, etc. -- plus dramatically larger death tolls and lingering radiation for decades for miles downwind.
Or you could just, you know, use Filzip instead.
Filzip includes shell integration, handles just about every compression format (including .rar, .tar/.tar.gz, and .cab), and unlike WinZip, it
s 100% free as in beer. No fooling, no mucking around with a feature-deprived free version. Just grab it and go.
Bzzt. Wrong.
"AJAX" will work with Internet Explorer, Gecko-based browsers, and Apple's Safari, and nothing else, because these are the only browsers to have included implementations of the XMLHTTPRequest object yet.
Oh, your client uses Konqueror? Or a cell phone? Or may ever use a user-agent other than the big three? Now you have to program a second, stripped down, clunky version just for that contingency. Try using the most widely deployed enterprise "AJAX" app out there -- Microsoft's Outlook Web Access -- in IE and then Firefox and you'll see what I mean.
Why does OWE degrade in Firefox? Doesn't "AJAX" work "off the shelf" in all major browsers? Well, the problem is that each of these browsers has their own incompatible implementation of XMLHTTPRequest. So you have to sniff out which browser the client is using and do your "AJAX" according to what it's expecting. (This is because of XMLHTTPRequest's origins as a proprietary IE extension to the browser API.)
Microsoft, naturally, only supports the IE flavor of "AJAX" in OWE. But you're not Microsoft and you probably don't get to dictate browsers like that, so you'll have to code around and cover all of them. If you're using an "AJAX toolkit", you're not seeing all this cruft because it's being hidden under a layer of abstraction; but that doesn't mean it's not there.
Because there is no standardized, according-to-Hoyle way to implement "AJAX", when you use it you do so at the risk of sacrificing something important -- forward compatibility. For some applications that's not a concern, but you might want to think about whether that's true for your app before you run and rewrite the whole thing in "AJAX" just because that's teh new hotness.
(Oh, and have you given thought to what happens when visually-impaired people use your kewl "AJAX" app?)
"Atos Origin" sounds less like an IT consultancy and more like an Everquest character.
The much-missed sketch comedy show Mr. Show that HBO ran a few years ago beat you to this idea already...
Apple invented the hard drive-based portable MP3 jukebox?
Um, I had an Archos Jukebox long before the first iPod came out (and got lots of weird stares from people trying to explain to them what it was). And the Personal Jukebox came out even before the Archos did.
Apple didn't invent the hard drive-based portable MP3 jukebox -- they perfected it. May not seem like a big difference, but let's not write the people who did the actual inventing out of the history books...
You must be new here.
Have you actually tried Yahoo lately?
I've been finding that Yahoo's engine is as good at returning relevant results as Google, at least for my searches. In fact, in some cases it is even better at putting the most relevant hit in the first position than Google is.
Of course, YMMV. But if you're still going off impressions of Yahoo Search you formed back in 1997, you might want to give their new-and-improved engine a spin sometime...
Since nobody's mentioned it yet, let me recommend John Robb's excellent Global Guerrillas blog if you want to understand this stuff in more depth. John has been exploring the mechanics of massively-distributed terror networks for quite some time now.
Um, not to harsh your buzz or anything there, but you could always just go read the guy's resume if you don't think he has walked the walk. It's right there on his site, after all.
You mean like these?
Yahoo offers APIs for a much wider range of their services than Google does.