Well, if they sell licenses for it, they're keeping it a big secret. Go to the http://www.mysql.com/products/enterprise/>EE web page and click on "Buy Now". How many licensing options do you see? They're all support contracts.
All the editors had to do was add one word to the headline: "Nokia Claims an External Memory Card Slot..." Because the headline makes it sound like the phone doesn't have expandable memory, when it actually has an internal memory card slot. In which it is exactly like 90% of the smart phones out there.
That would have saved people from writing dozens of lame, pointless RTFA posts. Oh well, it's not like they had anything better to do.
Hey a good scientific breakthrough, and you can convert matter to energy. Then you could accelerate enough for time-dilation to cut in, and get back in in just a few years of ship time. Of course, you'll come back to an Earth inhabited by talking apes...
Seriously though, I wonder at the people who keep talking about the Moon and Mars and interstellar travel when we don't even have a reliable LEO delivery system and no serious plans to build one. We're like the hero in that stupid TLJ movie all big plans, and no sane way to implement them.
Seriously though, governments do do stuff that you need. Yes, they waste a lot, but that doesn't justify this lame All Government is a Waste meme. It's the stupidest legacy of old Ronald Reagan — who actually didn't do much about government waste. Beyond, that is, telling stupid stories about it. He did cut taxes a lot, so of course he was a great leader! Hey, never mind the resulting deficit.
Yeah, government is fucked up. Stop whining about it as if it had nothing to do with you.
So, non-coding genes don't create any external proteins, but do help make the genome as a whole work? That still does away with the concept of junk DNA.
Gee, I dunno. Suppose you went around buying $200 million yachts and $500 million islands. Then you woke up one day and found you were down to your last $10 million. To a middle class American, you'd still seem absurdly rich (just as that middle class American seems absurdly rich to a Punjabi subsistence farmer). But hey, no more America's Cup sponsership. You'll need to sell your Gulfstream V (Larry's is worth $40 million) for working capital, and make do with a smaller private jet, probably one that can't cross the Pacific, so you'll be reduced to buying an airline ticket when you want to travel overseas. The Horror.
No, that missing $27.99 billion was definitely not petty cash!
And hey, guess how much money they make from licensing MySQL? Nothing. It's Open Source. Any money they make off it is by selling support — something anybody can do.
I keep getting reminded of that New Yorker cartoon where the lawyer is talking to a potential client. "I reviewed your documents and believe you have a very good case. What you need to decide now is this: exactly how much justice can you afford?"
Actually, between 1987 and 2007 Sun changed GUIs at least twice. When I first worked for them in 1997-98, Open Look was just getting phased out in favor of CDE. (And Sun employees who didn't want to switch were less than happy about it.) Not that either was a all that impressive. Actually, I came to loathe CDE.
Then when I returned in 2005-06, they'd switched to Java Desktop, which was just a Sun branded version of GNOME. (And which had no connection with Java, beyond the branding.) An improvement over CDE, but non-developers like me had to run it on big servers via Sun Rays.That meant all configuration had to be handled by IT, which was horribly conservative about it.
Eventually didn't matter to me. My next step was to move from the Java group to x64 West (basically a mash-up of two acquisitions, Cobalt Networks and Kealia) and get hired as a regular employee. Windows laptops had become more and more prevalent since they revoked the "Big Rule" forbidding employee use of Microsoft products, but at x64 west, Thinkpads were standard issue, along with Sun Rays. I eventually gave up on Sun Rays and Java Desktop and did all my Solaris stuff by running Cygwin/X on my laptop (along with two external monitors when I was at my desk).
OK, not an impressive history of GUIs. But if you're not asleep yet, I'll just point out that all this GUI stuff is pretty much a sideshow. Despite their workstations (which had almost disappeared by the time I left) and the Sun Rays, most of Sun's income came from selling servers. Oracle bought them for the servers. Sun software was at best a sideline.
Various fields borrow terminology from each other. Not that big a deal. My toaster has a "cancel" button. An old-fashioned "eject" would make more sense to me, but I guess mechanical terminology is less familiar to most people.
Actually, Android is open source — no licensing fees. Google does make a fair amount from Google Play commissions and embedded advertising. A profitable business, but not one that would seriously affect their bottom line if it went away.
Lanai isn't analogous to your home. Larry doesn't live there, and (as you yourself point out) it represents a fraction of his net worth. So his being able to go out and buy a half-billion dollar property without worrying about whether it's worth the money (Lanai is kind of in trouble economically) does indeed make $1 million petty cash.
Sigh. I was working for Sun during most of the acquisition process, and I get so tired of hearing that the acquisition was about Java. Sun cost Oracle $5.6 billion. No way is a not very profitable piece of software worth that much.
The one thing everybody knows about Sun is that they invented Java, so everybody takes it for granted that Java was an important profit center for Sun. It most assuredly was not. Most of Sun's income came from selling hardware. Oracle was promising to make billions moving Sun hardware through Oracle sales channels. This was plausible not only because Oracle's sales organization was huge (at the time, it employed more people than all of Sun), but because anybody who buys Oracle software also has to buy a computer to run it on.
(I was so looking forward to working for Oracle; Sun middle management was a nasty combination of old hands who still thought that SPARC had a future and mindless bureaucrats who made bad decisions because it kept the paperwork tidy. Alas, the mindless bureaucrats decided I was a nuisance. Shouldn't have tried so hard to do good work for them.)
This acquisition didn't work out, but that had nothing to do with Java. The problem is that the name-brand hardware is a dying business. HP is in trouble. Dell is in trouble. IBM isn't in trouble, but only because they've deemphasized hardware in favor of service. It's hard to tell if Lenovo is in trouble, because they're basically owned by the Chinese government, but it wouldn't surprise me.
Name brand hardware can't compete with cheap generic hardware. Its only selling point is that it's more powerful and reliable than generic hardware. But if you're running a cloud-oriented data center, you don't care about power or reliability. You buy more systems to make up for the decreased power, and you set up the cloud so that unreliable systems don't impact overall reliability.
Oracle's mistake was to try to become IBM at a time when IBM was following the more sensible course of becoming Oracle.
Deflating a joke is not pretentious when the joke is stupid and ignorant.
This joke derives its humor from the Greedy Lawyers meme, which I consider supremely stupid. Americans sue each other at the drop of a hat (literally!) and we make fun of lawyers for cashing in?
Anyway, the distinction between copyrights and patents is important (and I still think this specific judgment was about copyrights, even if the larger case originally involved patents) and there's nothing nitpicky about pointing out the difference.
Or else Larry can postpone his next yacht purchase for a few weeks.
There's a lot of free DBMS software out there, but Oracle's isn't a clone of it, any more than Windows is a clone of Linux. Oracle has a gigantic ecosystem of users who depend on the fact that there's a big pool of Oracle-trained developers out there. And of course a lot of users are locked in by having Oracle-based infrastructure that's taken them decades to develop. None of these are in a position to move to PostgreSQL, never mind MySQL.
Google asked for $4 million. Of that, $3 million was for electronic discovery, which the judge disallowed. Groklaw says that it's usual for a claim to be reduced, but that doesn't explain why he disallowed this particular cost.
Electronic discovery is basically about using advanced software to do forensic analysis of discovery documents. I find it really interesting that Google spent three times as much on this as they spent on paying lawyers to actually argue the case.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, if they sell licenses for it, they're keeping it a big secret. Go to the http://www.mysql.com/products/enterprise/>EE web page and click on "Buy Now". How many licensing options do you see? They're all support contracts.
All the editors had to do was add one word to the headline: "Nokia Claims an External Memory Card Slot..." Because the headline makes it sound like the phone doesn't have expandable memory, when it actually has an internal memory card slot. In which it is exactly like 90% of the smart phones out there.
That would have saved people from writing dozens of lame, pointless RTFA posts. Oh well, it's not like they had anything better to do.
Hey a good scientific breakthrough, and you can convert matter to energy. Then you could accelerate enough for time-dilation to cut in, and get back in in just a few years of ship time. Of course, you'll come back to an Earth inhabited by talking apes...
Seriously though, I wonder at the people who keep talking about the Moon and Mars and interstellar travel when we don't even have a reliable LEO delivery system and no serious plans to build one. We're like the hero in that stupid TLJ movie all big plans, and no sane way to implement them.
Right, and how many countries have you invaded?
Seriously though, governments do do stuff that you need. Yes, they waste a lot, but that doesn't justify this lame All Government is a Waste meme. It's the stupidest legacy of old Ronald Reagan — who actually didn't do much about government waste. Beyond, that is, telling stupid stories about it. He did cut taxes a lot, so of course he was a great leader! Hey, never mind the resulting deficit.
Yeah, government is fucked up. Stop whining about it as if it had nothing to do with you.
Bah. You think that's vendor lockin? Consider the same vendor that created this OS also owns the entire universe. Now that is lockin.
So, non-coding genes don't create any external proteins, but do help make the genome as a whole work? That still does away with the concept of junk DNA.
That 10% of the brain thing was the usual pop culture nonsense, but I've heard a lot of reputable scientists talk about junk DNA.
Gee, I dunno. Suppose you went around buying $200 million yachts and $500 million islands. Then you woke up one day and found you were down to your last $10 million. To a middle class American, you'd still seem absurdly rich (just as that middle class American seems absurdly rich to a Punjabi subsistence farmer). But hey, no more America's Cup sponsership. You'll need to sell your Gulfstream V (Larry's is worth $40 million) for working capital, and make do with a smaller private jet, probably one that can't cross the Pacific, so you'll be reduced to buying an airline ticket when you want to travel overseas. The Horror.
No, that missing $27.99 billion was definitely not petty cash!
And hey, guess how much money they make from licensing MySQL? Nothing. It's Open Source. Any money they make off it is by selling support — something anybody can do.
For which Google gets zero money. Zip. Nada. Read the rest of the thread.
And yet you can't recover costs for it?
I keep getting reminded of that New Yorker cartoon where the lawyer is talking to a potential client. "I reviewed your documents and believe you have a very good case. What you need to decide now is this: exactly how much justice can you afford?"
Actually, between 1987 and 2007 Sun changed GUIs at least twice. When I first worked for them in 1997-98, Open Look was just getting phased out in favor of CDE. (And Sun employees who didn't want to switch were less than happy about it.) Not that either was a all that impressive. Actually, I came to loathe CDE.
Then when I returned in 2005-06, they'd switched to Java Desktop, which was just a Sun branded version of GNOME. (And which had no connection with Java, beyond the branding.) An improvement over CDE, but non-developers like me had to run it on big servers via Sun Rays.That meant all configuration had to be handled by IT, which was horribly conservative about it.
Eventually didn't matter to me. My next step was to move from the Java group to x64 West (basically a mash-up of two acquisitions, Cobalt Networks and Kealia) and get hired as a regular employee. Windows laptops had become more and more prevalent since they revoked the "Big Rule" forbidding employee use of Microsoft products, but at x64 west, Thinkpads were standard issue, along with Sun Rays. I eventually gave up on Sun Rays and Java Desktop and did all my Solaris stuff by running Cygwin/X on my laptop (along with two external monitors when I was at my desk).
OK, not an impressive history of GUIs. But if you're not asleep yet, I'll just point out that all this GUI stuff is pretty much a sideshow. Despite their workstations (which had almost disappeared by the time I left) and the Sun Rays, most of Sun's income came from selling servers. Oracle bought them for the servers. Sun software was at best a sideline.
Jeez, I can't think of any kitchen appliance that wouldn't be improved by such a feature. Alas, entropy is an issue.
Which licensing agreement would be no more than a portion of Google's Android-related revenues. Which, as I've already pointed out, are not that big.
Am I misinterpreting this, or is the usual belief that many genes are obsolete sequences that have no current function being called into question?
Yep, and the OS can get reprogrammed by viruses.
Various fields borrow terminology from each other. Not that big a deal. My toaster has a "cancel" button. An old-fashioned "eject" would make more sense to me, but I guess mechanical terminology is less familiar to most people.
Actually, Android is open source — no licensing fees. Google does make a fair amount from Google Play commissions and embedded advertising. A profitable business, but not one that would seriously affect their bottom line if it went away.
Lanai isn't analogous to your home. Larry doesn't live there, and (as you yourself point out) it represents a fraction of his net worth. So his being able to go out and buy a half-billion dollar property without worrying about whether it's worth the money (Lanai is kind of in trouble economically) does indeed make $1 million petty cash.
Sigh. I was working for Sun during most of the acquisition process, and I get so tired of hearing that the acquisition was about Java. Sun cost Oracle $5.6 billion. No way is a not very profitable piece of software worth that much.
The one thing everybody knows about Sun is that they invented Java, so everybody takes it for granted that Java was an important profit center for Sun. It most assuredly was not. Most of Sun's income came from selling hardware. Oracle was promising to make billions moving Sun hardware through Oracle sales channels. This was plausible not only because Oracle's sales organization was huge (at the time, it employed more people than all of Sun), but because anybody who buys Oracle software also has to buy a computer to run it on.
(I was so looking forward to working for Oracle; Sun middle management was a nasty combination of old hands who still thought that SPARC had a future and mindless bureaucrats who made bad decisions because it kept the paperwork tidy. Alas, the mindless bureaucrats decided I was a nuisance. Shouldn't have tried so hard to do good work for them.)
This acquisition didn't work out, but that had nothing to do with Java. The problem is that the name-brand hardware is a dying business. HP is in trouble. Dell is in trouble. IBM isn't in trouble, but only because they've deemphasized hardware in favor of service. It's hard to tell if Lenovo is in trouble, because they're basically owned by the Chinese government, but it wouldn't surprise me.
Name brand hardware can't compete with cheap generic hardware. Its only selling point is that it's more powerful and reliable than generic hardware. But if you're running a cloud-oriented data center, you don't care about power or reliability. You buy more systems to make up for the decreased power, and you set up the cloud so that unreliable systems don't impact overall reliability.
Oracle's mistake was to try to become IBM at a time when IBM was following the more sensible course of becoming Oracle.
Deflating a joke is not pretentious when the joke is stupid and ignorant.
This joke derives its humor from the Greedy Lawyers meme, which I consider supremely stupid. Americans sue each other at the drop of a hat (literally!) and we make fun of lawyers for cashing in?
Anyway, the distinction between copyrights and patents is important (and I still think this specific judgment was about copyrights, even if the larger case originally involved patents) and there's nothing nitpicky about pointing out the difference.
Too bad this isn't Stackoverflow. Then I could give you a "good answer" upmod.
The Hawaiian island Larry bought cost $500 million. $1 million is petty cash for this guy.
Or else Larry can postpone his next yacht purchase for a few weeks.
There's a lot of free DBMS software out there, but Oracle's isn't a clone of it, any more than Windows is a clone of Linux. Oracle has a gigantic ecosystem of users who depend on the fact that there's a big pool of Oracle-trained developers out there. And of course a lot of users are locked in by having Oracle-based infrastructure that's taken them decades to develop. None of these are in a position to move to PostgreSQL, never mind MySQL.
RTFA, This was about copyrights, not patents.
Google asked for $4 million. Of that, $3 million was for electronic discovery, which the judge disallowed. Groklaw says that it's usual for a claim to be reduced, but that doesn't explain why he disallowed this particular cost.
Electronic discovery is basically about using advanced software to do forensic analysis of discovery documents. I find it really interesting that Google spent three times as much on this as they spent on paying lawyers to actually argue the case.