We spend well north of 300k per year with Oracle, and I've been disgusted with the support we receive from them. Coming from a mysql / Postgresql background, I was expecting a lot more when I started working with and supporting Oracle systems, but Oracle's support staff are consistently hard to understand and not able to function when your problem falls outside their script. Escalation can be time consuming and even then you're not guaranteed a solution.
If the answer isn't in metalink, you're in trouble.
A couple of weeks ago we ran into a problem with a RAC cluster. After 3 hours of downtime, we logged a call with Veritas as Oracle were insisting that Veritas was the problem. I really wished we logged that call a LOT earlier... The guy at Veritas took about 2 minutes to explain which Oracle component was at fault and how to fix it.
Having said that, Red Hat support is pretty appalling too. I've had some classic responses to support questions from them, including advice NOT to hotswap disks on an HP DL380 (despite it being designed for this).
Mostly, I just dislike Red Hat lately because of their draconian licensing policies on some of their products... I can't even get eval versions of products that have my code in them:( So anything that forces them to compete and rethink their business approach is fine with me.
I love your response... It is exactly what the Linux community as a whole need to learn to do to further their aims. You've been polite, helpful and not railed on about anything being the user's fault for not working out how to fix it. Lovely!
I discovered quicksilver about 2 years ago, and as far as I am concerned, you don't have a 'complete' mac until you have this.
I recently had to do something on my wife's laptop, and after about 10 minutes of messing around, I just installed quicksilver so that I could use the sodding thing. I've forgotten how much it hides from you since I've been using it:)
Delicious Library is EXTREMELY practical. Give it a whirl, and you'll be surprised. Now if I could just wrest the iSight and the laptop AWAY from the wife and stop her scanning stuff, that would be progress!
Re:Why EXT4 ?
on
EXT4 Is Coming
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Actually, I think you'll find that ZFS has been out as a production release (GA or Generally available) for just under 2 weeks now. That's weeks!
There is no way in hell that ZFS is even _remotely_ proven in the field. And since we're still fighting with a bug with Sun Disksuite where you can't boot off the second disk when a disk in a mirror breaks, I'd be VERY loathe to mention Sun, Filesystems and Disk management as being stable right now.
The teacher who was the housemaster when I was at boarding school was shot and killed in his classroom in front of a class of around 30 11-year old kids by an older student.
That's a reduction of a round 9 billion US dollars a year in revenues. The shareholders might (rightly) feel that allowing this to happen is NOT doing everything to maximise their value.
Red Hat view (or at least did when I was in Raleigh last September) FC as an incubator for RHEL.
I discussed the release frequency and period of support, and they were pretty unsympathetic to the user's point of view. Their requirement is fast turnaround of new releases to ensure a strong test of new technologies / versions of new packages.
This has some upsides, like the multipathing support in RHEL4, Update 3 which means we can finally do away with Veritas on most of our machines. But it can suck for the user.
I have one simple rule when dealing with people - be nice. Be nice for as long as you possibly can. Then lose your shit in the most public, noisy and abusive way that you can. Two spectacular incidents that happened recently are on my blog at http://anonymouslemming.blogspot.com/2006/05/ghost -of-customer-service-past.html
I don't want to have to flip out just to get someone to do their job, and it creates more stress than I need. If everyone just did their job right, the world would be a much happier, less stressed place. It's the age old story of a few people ruining it for everyone:(
Still this primitive ?
on
Ubuntu Hacks
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· Score: 1
I've used Linux for about 10 years now, and recently helped move RH into an investment bank. But I stay away from it on the workstation these days, and this review is a good example of why...
And considering that the number of laptop users are ever increasing, there is a need to explain how to configure and take care of ones laptop running Ubuntu - like prolonging the battery life, configuring the wireless card on the laptop, hibernating, setting up bluetooth connection and so on
A need? Only if something, somewhere is broken. The only thing I need to know to run my powerbook is that occasionally I need to charge the battery. Configure the wireless card? No, it just works. Setup bluetooth? No, it just works. Hibernating? Dunno about that, but if I just close the lid the laptop goes to sleep.
With the level of trust that SCO has, I'm guessing the entries will be thin on the ground.
That should make it MUCH easier to scoop that top prize. I already know what I'm going to build...
A wireless solution for filing frivilous lawsuits and releasing bullshit 'press releases' to artificially prop up a failing company... I'm onto a winner here, I just know it!
Don't get me started about men in nursing right now. There is apparently a case in the UK where a guy did all the training required to become a nurse, but when he showed up on the ward, was told he had to have a female staff member accompany him when he was examining / treating female patients.
If that isn't flat out sexual discrimination, then I don't know what is! Female nurses can treat / examine men without a chaperone (sp?). Hell, I've been PLENTY embarrased by being examined by female nurses, and I just have to accept that as part of life. But women are special, so we can't _possibly_ put them in a position where they are embarrased, can we ?
If Creative have the patent on this, why does the management of music and navigation on their devices suck so hard? If they patented all this goodness, why didn't they implement it ?
I have other people to think about. My wife has a pension that she has been contributing to that requires that she be resident in this country to participate. She doesn't want to walk away from that. We've only owned the house for 3 years, so it's not appreciated enough to make it worth selling, but without that we can't afford to buy elsewhere.
If I could move somewhere else with a guarantee of not being forced out of the country by the government if things beyond my control happen, I would. I'm still looking at Australia as an option for this.
My issue is the risk of moving to the USA, working my ass off for 3 years, and then being sent home because the company I end up working for declares losses 2 years running.
UK Knife law is odd to say the least. I grew up carrying a knife. At first a swiss army knife, then later a leatherman. At various times I've carried a puma or a Spyderco folding blade. None of these had a blade length over 3 inches, they were all for utilitarian purposes not combat:)
When I moved to the UK, I was astonished to find that carrying these items may be illegal, but even after asking police officers and checking local knife sites, I've never been able to get a clear answer.
Mr Graham states that one driver of startups is the fact that America allows immigration. That's at odds with my own story.
When I was growing up, all I ever wanted to do was move to the USA. When I finished school, my parents could not afford to send me to university, so I had to start work straight out of school. I spent 5 years working my way from cable laying guy to networks guy to Unix guy, and then tried to move to the USA. After 2 years of trying, I gave up and moved to the UK.
Next year, I will _finally_ be eligible to apply for an H1B visa, but I won't be. Because I don't have a degree, I need 12 years work experience. The first 8 years of that experience are no longer technically relevant to anything I do today. Sure, it taught me a lot about dealing with people and integrating into the 'real world', but I don't see how that is relevant since I would have been eligible for entry fresh out of university with none of that experience.
Even if I did want to apply, I would have no guarantee of permanent settlement. I would have to 'emmigrate' to the USA knowing that if the company I was working for went under, or declared a loss for a number of years running, or laid off too many other people, I would have to pack my life back into boxes and go home. 30 is too damn old to be taking that kind of chance.
I took that chance coming to the UK at 25, and even then I was almost guaranteed permanent settlement when I moved here. It was certainly never tied to the company that I moved here to work for. At 25, I could take those risks, but not anymore.
So instead of adding to the US economy, I've got a successful life adding to the UK economy. Overall, the US immigration policy is NOWHERE near as friendly as many places in Europe.
I'm a big Apple fan, but I'm strongly against this DRM.
I bought some tracks from the iTMS. Before a trip to South Africa, I dumped them to my laptop because I figured my dad would get a kick out of hearing them.
9000KMs from home with no 'net access, I realised I had forgotten to ask Apple for permission to play the audio that I had bought from them on the specific device I was taking with me. I hadn't authorised those tracks for my laptop.
Sure, I paid for the bits with real money, but because I forgot to ask for permission to use them on two computers instead of one, I was screwed.
That was the first and last purchase I made from iTMS.
If you are not familiar enough with the product to argue against it, as it states in the summary, should the owner really have hired you to help with the re-write ?
Actually, the GP was right. As a UK citizen, I travel to the US on the visa waiver programme. This means that I don't need to get a visa before I fly, but my entry to the US is approved at immigration when I land there.
Slashdot Mirror
How is this a troll?
Oracle starts offering Oracle support.
:( So anything that forces them to compete and rethink their business approach is fine with me.
We spend well north of 300k per year with Oracle, and I've been disgusted with the support we receive from them. Coming from a mysql / Postgresql background, I was expecting a lot more when I started working with and supporting Oracle systems, but Oracle's support staff are consistently hard to understand and not able to function when your problem falls outside their script. Escalation can be time consuming and even then you're not guaranteed a solution.
If the answer isn't in metalink, you're in trouble.
A couple of weeks ago we ran into a problem with a RAC cluster. After 3 hours of downtime, we logged a call with Veritas as Oracle were insisting that Veritas was the problem. I really wished we logged that call a LOT earlier... The guy at Veritas took about 2 minutes to explain which Oracle component was at fault and how to fix it.
Having said that, Red Hat support is pretty appalling too. I've had some classic responses to support questions from them, including advice NOT to hotswap disks on an HP DL380 (despite it being designed for this).
Mostly, I just dislike Red Hat lately because of their draconian licensing policies on some of their products... I can't even get eval versions of products that have my code in them
I love your response... It is exactly what the Linux community as a whole need to learn to do to further their aims. You've been polite, helpful and not railed on about anything being the user's fault for not working out how to fix it. Lovely!
I discovered quicksilver about 2 years ago, and as far as I am concerned, you don't have a 'complete' mac until you have this.
:)
I recently had to do something on my wife's laptop, and after about 10 minutes of messing around, I just installed quicksilver so that I could use the sodding thing. I've forgotten how much it hides from you since I've been using it
Delicious Library is EXTREMELY practical. Give it a whirl, and you'll be surprised. Now if I could just wrest the iSight and the laptop AWAY from the wife and stop her scanning stuff, that would be progress!
Actually, I think you'll find that ZFS has been out as a production release (GA or Generally available) for just under 2 weeks now. That's weeks!
There is no way in hell that ZFS is even _remotely_ proven in the field. And since we're still fighting with a bug with Sun Disksuite where you can't boot off the second disk when a disk in a mirror breaks, I'd be VERY loathe to mention Sun, Filesystems and Disk management as being stable right now.
The teacher who was the housemaster when I was at boarding school was shot and killed in his classroom in front of a class of around 30 11-year old kids by an older student.
:(
So just occasionally, the fear is justified
That's a reduction of a round 9 billion US dollars a year in revenues. The shareholders might (rightly) feel that allowing this to happen is NOT doing everything to maximise their value.
Red Hat view (or at least did when I was in Raleigh last September) FC as an incubator for RHEL.
I discussed the release frequency and period of support, and they were pretty unsympathetic to the user's point of view. Their requirement is fast turnaround of new releases to ensure a strong test of new technologies / versions of new packages.
This has some upsides, like the multipathing support in RHEL4, Update 3 which means we can finally do away with Veritas on most of our machines. But it can suck for the user.
I have one simple rule when dealing with people - be nice. Be nice for as long as you possibly can. Then lose your shit in the most public, noisy and abusive way that you can. Two spectacular incidents that happened recently are on my blog at http://anonymouslemming.blogspot.com/2006/05/ghost -of-customer-service-past.html
I don't want to have to flip out just to get someone to do their job, and it creates more stress than I need. If everyone just did their job right, the world would be a much happier, less stressed place. It's the age old story of a few people ruining it for everyone :(
I've used Linux for about 10 years now, and recently helped move RH into an investment bank. But I stay away from it on the workstation these days, and this review is a good example of why...
And considering that the number of laptop users are ever increasing, there is a need to explain how to configure and take care of ones laptop running Ubuntu - like prolonging the battery life, configuring the wireless card on the laptop, hibernating, setting up bluetooth connection and so on
A need? Only if something, somewhere is broken. The only thing I need to know to run my powerbook is that occasionally I need to charge the battery. Configure the wireless card? No, it just works. Setup bluetooth? No, it just works. Hibernating? Dunno about that, but if I just close the lid the laptop goes to sleep.
With the level of trust that SCO has, I'm guessing the entries will be thin on the ground.
That should make it MUCH easier to scoop that top prize. I already know what I'm going to build...
A wireless solution for filing frivilous lawsuits and releasing bullshit 'press releases' to artificially prop up a failing company... I'm onto a winner here, I just know it!
BASE is a pretty severe suggestion just because the guy is bored. Start out slow, like a tandem or something!
Don't get me started about men in nursing right now. There is apparently a case in the UK where a guy did all the training required to become a nurse, but when he showed up on the ward, was told he had to have a female staff member accompany him when he was examining / treating female patients.
If that isn't flat out sexual discrimination, then I don't know what is! Female nurses can treat / examine men without a chaperone (sp?). Hell, I've been PLENTY embarrased by being examined by female nurses, and I just have to accept that as part of life. But women are special, so we can't _possibly_ put them in a position where they are embarrased, can we ?
GRRR!
If Creative have the patent on this, why does the management of music and navigation on their devices suck so hard? If they patented all this goodness, why didn't they implement it ?
I have other people to think about. My wife has a pension that she has been contributing to that requires that she be resident in this country to participate. She doesn't want to walk away from that. We've only owned the house for 3 years, so it's not appreciated enough to make it worth selling, but without that we can't afford to buy elsewhere.
If I could move somewhere else with a guarantee of not being forced out of the country by the government if things beyond my control happen, I would. I'm still looking at Australia as an option for this.
My issue is the risk of moving to the USA, working my ass off for 3 years, and then being sent home because the company I end up working for declares losses 2 years running.
I think what the OP is actually saying is "Why don't we have something just like NDISWRAPPER but that lets us use freebsd drivers in Linux"
I don't think he was suggesting putting windows drivers into OpenBSD
UK Knife law is odd to say the least. I grew up carrying a knife. At first a swiss army knife, then later a leatherman. At various times I've carried a puma or a Spyderco folding blade. None of these had a blade length over 3 inches, they were all for utilitarian purposes not combat :)
When I moved to the UK, I was astonished to find that carrying these items may be illegal, but even after asking police officers and checking local knife sites, I've never been able to get a clear answer.
Mr Graham states that one driver of startups is the fact that America allows immigration. That's at odds with my own story.
When I was growing up, all I ever wanted to do was move to the USA. When I finished school, my parents could not afford to send me to university, so I had to start work straight out of school. I spent 5 years working my way from cable laying guy to networks guy to Unix guy, and then tried to move to the USA. After 2 years of trying, I gave up and moved to the UK.
Next year, I will _finally_ be eligible to apply for an H1B visa, but I won't be. Because I don't have a degree, I need 12 years work experience. The first 8 years of that experience are no longer technically relevant to anything I do today. Sure, it taught me a lot about dealing with people and integrating into the 'real world', but I don't see how that is relevant since I would have been eligible for entry fresh out of university with none of that experience.
Even if I did want to apply, I would have no guarantee of permanent settlement. I would have to 'emmigrate' to the USA knowing that if the company I was working for went under, or declared a loss for a number of years running, or laid off too many other people, I would have to pack my life back into boxes and go home. 30 is too damn old to be taking that kind of chance.
I took that chance coming to the UK at 25, and even then I was almost guaranteed permanent settlement when I moved here. It was certainly never tied to the company that I moved here to work for. At 25, I could take those risks, but not anymore.
So instead of adding to the US economy, I've got a successful life adding to the UK economy. Overall, the US immigration policy is NOWHERE near as friendly as many places in Europe.
Sounds like you just want a dog :D Sure, number 2 is still a problem, but other than that ...
You work in marketting and you say things like and just as good as (better than?) MicroSoft Virtual Server
And to make it even worse, you're saying this about a product that just wipes the floor with Virtual server. Be more positive man!
I'm a big Apple fan, but I'm strongly against this DRM.
I bought some tracks from the iTMS. Before a trip to South Africa, I dumped them to my laptop because I figured my dad would get a kick out of hearing them.
9000KMs from home with no 'net access, I realised I had forgotten to ask Apple for permission to play the audio that I had bought from them on the specific device I was taking with me. I hadn't authorised those tracks for my laptop.
Sure, I paid for the bits with real money, but because I forgot to ask for permission to use them on two computers instead of one, I was screwed.
That was the first and last purchase I made from iTMS.
Haven't we already seen this story ?
If you are not familiar enough with the product to argue against it, as it states in the summary, should the owner really have hired you to help with the re-write ?
Actually, the GP was right. As a UK citizen, I travel to the US on the visa waiver programme. This means that I don't need to get a visa before I fly, but my entry to the US is approved at immigration when I land there.