Keep in mind that Oracle tried to release their own entry level DB product for free a few years back (Oracle Express). The purpose was to get smaller companies using free Oracle, so that when they got big enough they'd want to buy enterprise Oracle. The product never got much traction though.
Now, Oracle has a DB product that's already wildly popular with small businesses. If Oracle can steer those companies using MySQL into using Oracle as they get bigger, it will be a huge win for Oracle.
Re:The internal announcement
on
Oracle Buys Sun
·
· Score: 1
If they were dumb enough to allow external mailings to their internal lists, they would have been being spammed to death already. Or did you think an email address like "allsun@sun.com" was just to obfuscated for the spammers to figure it out?
Much of government incompetence has come from the fact that a lot of people in the government believe in the political philosophy that government is no good, and private enterprise should do everything. When the people in charge of the government believe that government is incompetent, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The fact is, even in the United States the government is capable of doing a lot of things very well that the private sector simply can't or won't do. However, we've been so overtaken by this notion that government can do nothing right that we give up on government and starve it of all its resources, thereby assuring that government will not be able to do anything right.
Additionally, if IT goes around imposing such a policy without the business asking for it, they'll open up a huge hornets' nest. The IT department can suggest it as a way for the business to save money, and maybe some IT departments have been lax in not doing so, but without the business actually telling them to do it IT is not going to. In fact, the business would be pretty pissed off if they did.
You may be right, but if you present it that way how is a geeky theoretical physicist going to get grant money to go hang out with the hot chicks in the psychology department?
I wonder if the spammers were taken out on a main street and shot, would that discourage spammers? Or would it just give us all a smug feeling of satisfaction?
Seems like NASA learned a valuable lesson about the utter foolishness of using Internet polls to make any kind of even vaguely significant decision. I see nothing wrong with the direction they went, except for the fact that they decided to try and poll the Internet in the first place.
Maybe they figured out that everyone immediately jumped to Firefly when they heard Serenity, and they didn't want that association. On the other hand, I question the wisdom of giving it a name that already is hugely significant in the annals of space travel, since it was also the name of the Apollo 11 moon landing site, but what are you gonna do. Every name has some issue with it.
I would have liked them to name the commode after Colbert instead, but this is a pretty clever compromise on its own, and its in keeping with the government's practice of creating cumbersome acronyms for ordinary objects, so I guess it works.
NASA has done segments with Colbert before, such as when the astronaut aboard the ISS was interviewed on his show. I would imagine Colbert's core audience of young college students appeals to NASA quite a bit. The trick, as for anyone that shows up on his program, is to go with a good non-ridiculous name and present it in a funny way on his show.
I think their best bet would be to name the node itself Serenity and name the actual urine recycling unit inside "Colbert". That should appease his audience and make for good TV as well.
Isn't this basically the exact same story Slashdot ran before Windows Vista was released? Guess what guys: Businesses tend to be conservative by nature, and aren't going to do a massive upgrade without a good plan. For any reasonably large business, it will take several months to certify all of their internal software with any new OS release, not to mention the actual time it takes to execute the switch. They would be saying the same thing if you asked them when they would be switching from RHEL 5 to RHEL 6.
Yes, but as always happens when you open source software, a huge community will immediately spring up from the ground to fork it and start adding features to it. After a few months, that community will decide what it really needs is a ground-up rewrite. After 5 years and several hundred alpha releases, you'll be able to download the first beta of the rewritten app, which by this point will have morphed into an entire Linux distribution which, unfortunately, lacks decent software update capabilities.
That's it! The solution to our economic crisis! We'll just hire massive amounts of new soldiers and post one every 50 yards along the route of every buried cable in the country. We might have to import some people from other countries too, but we could be the first country ever to have 0% unemployment!
Unless we're shooting for the Guinness Book record for fastest bankruptcy in history, I would caution against letting Slashdotters decide anything more significant than which goatse mirror site to try and get people to click to.
Putting Access as a competitor to Oracle...that's funny.
In Oracle's class would be guys like MS SQL Server and IBM's DB2. Access is the DB small companies foolishly build apps on and then deal with pain and ridicule until they move off it.
That's not good enough for a company like Microsoft. They need to block your ability to upgrade from one beta to another, because if they don't you're going to run into all sorts of weird problems because you followed an unsupported upgrade path and upgraded from one piece of test software to another. After you find these glitches, maybe you decide to blog about how much the new Windows 7 beta blows. Before you know it, some tech rag picks up on your blog, publishes a story about it, and it gets spread all over the Internet.
Then, since everyone is eager to believe any sort of bad press about MS, everyone believes that Windows 7 is garbage, even though your glitches only happened because you decided to install one buggy piece of test software on top of a differently buggy piece of test software rather than wipe the machine like you're supposed to in any kind of test environment. Before you know it, MS is looking at a PR nightmare because someone decided to disregard standard testing procedure. I'm sure they would like to avoid that as much as possible.
Good point...after decades of studying sunspot activity, it's only natural for the Sun to get self-conscious about everyone staring at its blemishes all the time. It's only natural it would try and hide them by turning the other way.
The boom-bust cycle that has plagued the economy for so long is clearly due to the Sun's influence. Our only hope of a stable economy is to destroy the Sun once and for all.
For too long we've been at the mercy of the whims of the Sun. Sure, we built that fancy iron core and produced a magnetic field to protect us from the harshest of the Sun's radiation, but the Sun still has almost total control over our precious climate. This situation is simply untenable. Millenia of effort and animal sacrifice have shown that the Sun simply cannot be negotiated with...our only chance is a massive nuclear strike.
I agree, and even if the article is 100% accurate, you are still saving more than 50%.
About 3 months ago I decided to switch over, and since then I've been slowly replacing all my incandescents with CFLs as they burn out. I was initially afraid of the flicker factor, since the flourescent tubes in my laundry room flicker like crazy and give me headaches when they are first turned on, especially when it's cold. However, I haven't really noticed any flicker with the CFLs so far.
As for the lifespan, it is kind of silly how they report it (9 years, but only if you use each bulb less than 3 hours a day), but it's still longer than an incandescent.
So basically yah, CFLs aren't the best we can do, but they're the best affordable replacement for incandescents we have so far.
Actually, Jesus came back from the dead for the sole purpose of taking his revenge out on all those lamoids who kept shouting out "Hey Jesus, how's it hangin'?" while he was up there on the cross. He spent most of his time between the resurrection and his final ascension into Heaven giving out wedgies and telling people to "stop hitting themselves".
Of course, much of that has been lost in the various translations of the Gospels.
Slashdot Mirror
Keep in mind that Oracle tried to release their own entry level DB product for free a few years back (Oracle Express). The purpose was to get smaller companies using free Oracle, so that when they got big enough they'd want to buy enterprise Oracle. The product never got much traction though.
Now, Oracle has a DB product that's already wildly popular with small businesses. If Oracle can steer those companies using MySQL into using Oracle as they get bigger, it will be a huge win for Oracle.
If they were dumb enough to allow external mailings to their internal lists, they would have been being spammed to death already. Or did you think an email address like "allsun@sun.com" was just to obfuscated for the spammers to figure it out?
Much of government incompetence has come from the fact that a lot of people in the government believe in the political philosophy that government is no good, and private enterprise should do everything. When the people in charge of the government believe that government is incompetent, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The fact is, even in the United States the government is capable of doing a lot of things very well that the private sector simply can't or won't do. However, we've been so overtaken by this notion that government can do nothing right that we give up on government and starve it of all its resources, thereby assuring that government will not be able to do anything right.
Additionally, if IT goes around imposing such a policy without the business asking for it, they'll open up a huge hornets' nest. The IT department can suggest it as a way for the business to save money, and maybe some IT departments have been lax in not doing so, but without the business actually telling them to do it IT is not going to. In fact, the business would be pretty pissed off if they did.
You may be right, but if you present it that way how is a geeky theoretical physicist going to get grant money to go hang out with the hot chicks in the psychology department?
which is why I make sure every cat I put in a box has been killed beforehand. Suck on that, Schrodinger.
That's because no self-respecting /.er uses facebook.
Are you trying to imply that self-respecting /.ers use Digg?
Okay, I'll start:
Requirement #1: Don't even think about releasing yet another stupid toolbar.
I wonder if the spammers were taken out on a main street and shot, would that discourage spammers?
Or would it just give us all a smug feeling of satisfaction?
Only one way to find out...
That's what I was referring to in the second sentence. My apologies if that wasn't clear.
Seems like NASA learned a valuable lesson about the utter foolishness of using Internet polls to make any kind of even vaguely significant decision. I see nothing wrong with the direction they went, except for the fact that they decided to try and poll the Internet in the first place.
Maybe they figured out that everyone immediately jumped to Firefly when they heard Serenity, and they didn't want that association. On the other hand, I question the wisdom of giving it a name that already is hugely significant in the annals of space travel, since it was also the name of the Apollo 11 moon landing site, but what are you gonna do. Every name has some issue with it.
I would have liked them to name the commode after Colbert instead, but this is a pretty clever compromise on its own, and its in keeping with the government's practice of creating cumbersome acronyms for ordinary objects, so I guess it works.
The fact that someone named Thomas Crapper came up with an invention called the ballcock has to be the greatest semi-useless factoid ever.
NASA has done segments with Colbert before, such as when the astronaut aboard the ISS was interviewed on his show. I would imagine Colbert's core audience of young college students appeals to NASA quite a bit. The trick, as for anyone that shows up on his program, is to go with a good non-ridiculous name and present it in a funny way on his show.
I think their best bet would be to name the node itself Serenity and name the actual urine recycling unit inside "Colbert". That should appease his audience and make for good TV as well.
Right, because there's never been any good natured ribbing between those two shows before. They've certainly never played off each other for laughs.
Isn't this basically the exact same story Slashdot ran before Windows Vista was released? Guess what guys: Businesses tend to be conservative by nature, and aren't going to do a massive upgrade without a good plan. For any reasonably large business, it will take several months to certify all of their internal software with any new OS release, not to mention the actual time it takes to execute the switch. They would be saying the same thing if you asked them when they would be switching from RHEL 5 to RHEL 6.
Yes, but as always happens when you open source software, a huge community will immediately spring up from the ground to fork it and start adding features to it. After a few months, that community will decide what it really needs is a ground-up rewrite. After 5 years and several hundred alpha releases, you'll be able to download the first beta of the rewritten app, which by this point will have morphed into an entire Linux distribution which, unfortunately, lacks decent software update capabilities.
That's it! The solution to our economic crisis! We'll just hire massive amounts of new soldiers and post one every 50 yards along the route of every buried cable in the country. We might have to import some people from other countries too, but we could be the first country ever to have 0% unemployment!
Unless we're shooting for the Guinness Book record for fastest bankruptcy in history, I would caution against letting Slashdotters decide anything more significant than which goatse mirror site to try and get people to click to.
Putting Access as a competitor to Oracle...that's funny.
In Oracle's class would be guys like MS SQL Server and IBM's DB2. Access is the DB small companies foolishly build apps on and then deal with pain and ridicule until they move off it.
That's not good enough for a company like Microsoft. They need to block your ability to upgrade from one beta to another, because if they don't you're going to run into all sorts of weird problems because you followed an unsupported upgrade path and upgraded from one piece of test software to another. After you find these glitches, maybe you decide to blog about how much the new Windows 7 beta blows. Before you know it, some tech rag picks up on your blog, publishes a story about it, and it gets spread all over the Internet.
Then, since everyone is eager to believe any sort of bad press about MS, everyone believes that Windows 7 is garbage, even though your glitches only happened because you decided to install one buggy piece of test software on top of a differently buggy piece of test software rather than wipe the machine like you're supposed to in any kind of test environment. Before you know it, MS is looking at a PR nightmare because someone decided to disregard standard testing procedure. I'm sure they would like to avoid that as much as possible.
Good point...after decades of studying sunspot activity, it's only natural for the Sun to get self-conscious about everyone staring at its blemishes all the time. It's only natural it would try and hide them by turning the other way.
The boom-bust cycle that has plagued the economy for so long is clearly due to the Sun's influence. Our only hope of a stable economy is to destroy the Sun once and for all.
For too long we've been at the mercy of the whims of the Sun. Sure, we built that fancy iron core and produced a magnetic field to protect us from the harshest of the Sun's radiation, but the Sun still has almost total control over our precious climate. This situation is simply untenable. Millenia of effort and animal sacrifice have shown that the Sun simply cannot be negotiated with...our only chance is a massive nuclear strike.
I agree, and even if the article is 100% accurate, you are still saving more than 50%.
About 3 months ago I decided to switch over, and since then I've been slowly replacing all my incandescents with CFLs as they burn out. I was initially afraid of the flicker factor, since the flourescent tubes in my laundry room flicker like crazy and give me headaches when they are first turned on, especially when it's cold. However, I haven't really noticed any flicker with the CFLs so far.
As for the lifespan, it is kind of silly how they report it (9 years, but only if you use each bulb less than 3 hours a day), but it's still longer than an incandescent.
So basically yah, CFLs aren't the best we can do, but they're the best affordable replacement for incandescents we have so far.
But it worked for Jesus!
Actually, Jesus came back from the dead for the sole purpose of taking his revenge out on all those lamoids who kept shouting out "Hey Jesus, how's it hangin'?" while he was up there on the cross. He spent most of his time between the resurrection and his final ascension into Heaven giving out wedgies and telling people to "stop hitting themselves".
Of course, much of that has been lost in the various translations of the Gospels.