The article says Oracle compares its US$15G/yr revenue to MySQL's US$30M/yr. But as Paul Graham says, it is OK to shrink a US$30G/yr industry to US$30M/yr, if your absolute share of the new US$30M is bigger than the one on US$30G was. Or in other words, MySQL will laugh to the bank on growing from US$30M, while Oracle will strive to keep their US$15G.
Also, IBM, Oracle and Intel did not make Linux. Richard Stallman created GNU, Linus used GNU and complemented it with Linux, and now IBM, Oracle and Intel help Linus with Linux and RMS with GNU.
I wonder how long will IBM and Oracle continue think they can sell proprietary servers on free platforms, without facing significant competition from free servers too. And how long Intel think they can sell proprietary machines to run free software without facing competition from free (think 'open') hardware? Now they are winning, IBM and Oracle using GNU/Linux to face competition from Microsoft, and Intel to crush proprietary RISC (think they ignoring OpenFirmware); but how long before we are running PostgreSQL (or better yet, Rel) on some OpenCores system booting with OpenFirmware or something the like? Not on the short term, for sure, but eventually maybe it is inevitable, unless DRM forces us into a police state.
with the human population increasing, the future will have less land available for such uses as a fuel crop.
Wrong. Natality decreases faster than mortality, so that the trend is population stabilisation. Absent major cultural shifts, we would see even a decrease. Japan has already started to shrink, and Europe won't be long.
Economics is all about how we deal with scarcity. Prices go up, alternatives are found. If prices went up, we'd go 220V to use thinner wires, we'd prefer local sources of energy to use shorter lines, we'd go all fiber for data and voice, and so on... and we'd find new sources, alternative metals.
This is purely a matter of meeting the demands of your users
It is to protect the government and the general public from ignorant users that standards compliance is (theoretically) obligatory for vendors to the government. Users can't demand what they don't know or understand.
I can't count the number of people who've seen me using Emacs at work, start to launch into some sort of vi-advocacy rant
You are so incompetent you don't know standards from popularity.
So even the US government does not really care anymore for its own standards. I guess Oracle will feel relieved with their 'ISO SQL 92 minus datatypes and a few other essentials' product. It kind of makes the efforts of PostgreSQL and others toward ISO SQL:2003 (hint: each ISO SQL standard cancels the former one) futile.
Thus giving Intel a lead over everyone else who already implemented an open standard. Just as Microsoft also ignores open standards to impose their own. Apple is becoming even more evil by association with such tugs.
What's particularly ironic about the old CISC vs RISC wars, is that it was RISC that held the promise of quick ramping and ultra-high clock speeds
That is still true technically. It is only the scale of production of x86 and the huge amounts of money Intel gets that enable them to still perform. Witness that even Intel tried to dump x86 for RISC or VLIW, at least four times (i432, i860, i960, Itanium).
RISC was never about high IPC (or "efficiency" if you prefer), RISC was about high clock speeds and lots of registers.
Even in RISC you can have either speed daemons or brainies. Either way, at the same process and performance, RISC will cost less to design and manufacture, be smaller and save energy.
if apple had gone with Alpha, they _still_ wouldn't have a laptop
It was Apple's decision to go PowerPC that delayed the Alpha mobile chips until Intel killed them.
those things run hotter than a p4
You have to compare similar performance and processes. Alphas, like any RISC, are much more efficient than x86, no matter what Apple and Intel tell us.
Simply not true. And if Firewire didn't became more popular, it was Apple's fault, first by failing to including it in initial iMacs and then trying to charge US$1 per port.
there's an ExpressCard slot for expansion
Never heard about these. How they compare with CardBus? Why only one?
a lot slower?
More efficient?
But in fact, Apple has killed the PowerPC much earlier, when it botched the Mac clones. You can't have an architecture with a single vendor.
So they did have to take two very interesting -- can we say essential? -- features to get a decent notebook with Intel processors. Sad. What could have the MacBook been if they had stayed with Power or went AMD? Or if they had went with Alpha in the first place?
I was all for Power, and FireWire, and I don't want to be limited by the lack of CardBus in such an expensive machine. And I try to run all free software. So this launched has killed the Mac for me. Good-bye, Apple. Hello, Pegasos
Where's the open source equivalent to Access, a database with a friendly, customizable front-end and no constricting row limits on tables?
OpenOffice.org Base is trying to get there, as is Rel. And at least when used together with PostgreSQL, Base can avoid the fundamental MS Access errors.
SQL has a strong theoretical underpinning in set theory
Only that it forfeited it when IBM chose to populate System R with people who never understood Codd's work and refused to learn from him, in a move many interpreted as trying to create a failure in order to preserve the IMS/DB cash cow.
A clear replacement has yet to emerge.
Yep, but this is not a technical issue, only a market one.
Tutorial D is certainly technically nice
Only that no one defined yet an Industrial D. Rel may yet define it, perhaps, if it ever changes its current exclusive educational focus.
XQuery is a mess and ODBMSs (and their query tools) really haven't caught on.
Thanks God, this would be a 35-years regression into graph-based, pre-relational systems.
SQL tables aren't relations, SQL data types are way too limited, NULLs are broken, classes are equated to tables, there are pointers... the ISO SQL standards themselves have long given up on even using relational terms.
He's talking about Office/Mac. Even though I'm biased against Microsoft, I can admit that the Mac version is pretty good (better than the Windows version!).
True enough, just not as reliable as OpenOffice.org. At least with pre-Mac OS X versions of MS Office I still lost some complex document formatting in MS Word.
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That is why I said free as in open. I don't mean free of cost, but open designs such as OpenCores'; free as in freedom.
Touché.
The article says Oracle compares its US$15G/yr revenue to MySQL's US$30M/yr. But as Paul Graham says, it is OK to shrink a US$30G/yr industry to US$30M/yr, if your absolute share of the new US$30M is bigger than the one on US$30G was. Or in other words, MySQL will laugh to the bank on growing from US$30M, while Oracle will strive to keep their US$15G.
Also, IBM, Oracle and Intel did not make Linux. Richard Stallman created GNU, Linus used GNU and complemented it with Linux, and now IBM, Oracle and Intel help Linus with Linux and RMS with GNU.
I wonder how long will IBM and Oracle continue think they can sell proprietary servers on free platforms, without facing significant competition from free servers too. And how long Intel think they can sell proprietary machines to run free software without facing competition from free (think 'open') hardware? Now they are winning, IBM and Oracle using GNU/Linux to face competition from Microsoft, and Intel to crush proprietary RISC (think they ignoring OpenFirmware); but how long before we are running PostgreSQL (or better yet, Rel) on some OpenCores system booting with OpenFirmware or something the like? Not on the short term, for sure, but eventually maybe it is inevitable, unless DRM forces us into a police state.
Their time will come. The trend is global, wherever secularity and prosperity advance.
Wrong. Natality decreases faster than mortality, so that the trend is population stabilisation. Absent major cultural shifts, we would see even a decrease. Japan has already started to shrink, and Europe won't be long.
Halving the amperage is actually just having more efficient devices.
Don't ask me the specifics. I just know that for similar devices 220V networks need thinner wires than 110V.
Economics is all about how we deal with scarcity. Prices go up, alternatives are found. If prices went up, we'd go 220V to use thinner wires, we'd prefer local sources of energy to use shorter lines, we'd go all fiber for data and voice, and so on... and we'd find new sources, alternative metals.
Nice excuse.
It is to protect the government and the general public from ignorant users that standards compliance is (theoretically) obligatory for vendors to the government. Users can't demand what they don't know or understand.
You are so incompetent you don't know standards from popularity.
So even the US government does not really care anymore for its own standards. I guess Oracle will feel relieved with their 'ISO SQL 92 minus datatypes and a few other essentials' product. It kind of makes the efforts of PostgreSQL and others toward ISO SQL:2003 (hint: each ISO SQL standard cancels the former one) futile.
Thus giving Intel a lead over everyone else who already implemented an open standard. Just as Microsoft also ignores open standards to impose their own. Apple is becoming even more evil by association with such tugs.
That is still true technically. It is only the scale of production of x86 and the huge amounts of money Intel gets that enable them to still perform. Witness that even Intel tried to dump x86 for RISC or VLIW, at least four times (i432, i860, i960, Itanium).
Even in RISC you can have either speed daemons or brainies. Either way, at the same process and performance, RISC will cost less to design and manufacture, be smaller and save energy.
Why oh why use EFI instead of OpenFirmware?
Like it did with Firewire 800 and internal FireWire? Don't kid yourself.
It was Apple's decision to go PowerPC that delayed the Alpha mobile chips until Intel killed them.
You have to compare similar performance and processes. Alphas, like any RISC, are much more efficient than x86, no matter what Apple and Intel tell us.
Simply not true. And if Firewire didn't became more popular, it was Apple's fault, first by failing to including it in initial iMacs and then trying to charge US$1 per port.
Never heard about these. How they compare with CardBus? Why only one?
More efficient?
But in fact, Apple has killed the PowerPC much earlier, when it botched the Mac clones. You can't have an architecture with a single vendor.
Not available as portables yet.
So they did have to take two very interesting -- can we say essential? -- features to get a decent notebook with Intel processors. Sad. What could have the MacBook been if they had stayed with Power or went AMD? Or if they had went with Alpha in the first place?
I was all for Power, and FireWire, and I don't want to be limited by the lack of CardBus in such an expensive machine. And I try to run all free software. So this launched has killed the Mac for me. Good-bye, Apple. Hello, Pegasos
OpenOffice.org Base is trying to get there, as is Rel. And at least when used together with PostgreSQL, Base can avoid the fundamental MS Access errors.
Then what you really need is a relational database, perhaps with a spreadsheet-like interface. DBMSs can scale, spreadsheets can't.
Only that it forfeited it when IBM chose to populate System R with people who never understood Codd's work and refused to learn from him, in a move many interpreted as trying to create a failure in order to preserve the IMS/DB cash cow.
Yep, but this is not a technical issue, only a market one.
Only that no one defined yet an Industrial D. Rel may yet define it, perhaps, if it ever changes its current exclusive educational focus.
Thanks God, this would be a 35-years regression into graph-based, pre-relational systems.
SQL tables aren't relations, SQL data types are way too limited, NULLs are broken, classes are equated to tables, there are pointers... the ISO SQL standards themselves have long given up on even using relational terms.
Not for those who haven't learnt data fundamentals.
By defining and manipulating relations.
It is not. Lisp is, Scheme, Haskell, not SQL. Never was, nor intended to be.
SQL tables are not relations. The very words relation and relational have been dropped from the ISO SQL standards since 1999 at least.
SQL has too many defects -- it isn't relational, it is badly designed. Better dump it for Tutorial D or D4.
True enough, just not as reliable as OpenOffice.org. At least with pre-Mac OS X versions of MS Office I still lost some complex document formatting in MS Word.