Sure, voice recognition that does Klingon, neato. But I've been waiting for voice recognition that can understand my Scots accent. You'd hope that, being a Star Trek game, that would be included.
"Its the dilithiummm crystals cap'ain, they jus' canny handle it"
The web linking status of any document is not fixed but a matter of mathematics. It can be defined with just a simple rule: L = 1/(D*X)
Where L is the number of links, D is the level of desperation you have in trying to find the info, and X is the number of search engines you've tried so far (including the number of times you've refined searches to weed out the 3000 pr0n entries you find when you search for 'linux AND driver AND scsi')
However, a parallel formula exists where: D=X^10
At levels of D>200 a sit down with a beer and a few good tunes is highly recommended.
IANAL (but I start all my posts like that) - Sorry, had to get that out of my system:>) Seriously, I don't know if eazel are aiming at that kind of user base for cash-in. In the corporate world it matters little about the ins and outs of most of the libraries. There they'll be looking to create a new config and roll it out to a large number of users (all or a sub-set of the company) at one time. Preferably all at once and preferably without any hitches. At the moment this is an expensive task for which large departments are allocated in v.large companies to do almost constantly. Having been at the receiving end of many of these rollouts its never a happy experience. Many attempts in the Windows arena have been made to get round this and much expensive technology has been brought in. If Eazel can step into this area and offer company wide desktop maintenance and rollouts then I think they'll make a lot of in-roads. Expand this idea to supporting the desktop as well and they might end up with outsourcing contracts worth a lot.
Well, not really an easy answer but as previous posters have pointed out, its difficult to determine the staffing levels if you don't knwo the business terms.
One of the best methods I've encountered is taking close metrics on some basics 1: Time to answer initial phone call 2: Number of dropped calls to help desk 3: Time to resolve (to user satisfaction) call 4: Satisfaction level of user to response given
Point 3 should be judged against your SLA's (Service Level Agreements) for the differing priority of calls.
The whole problem with implementing these kind of metrics is that it can end up as simply a rod to beat your helpdesk team with. If thats the case it will quickly collapse. If done well it should help get to the root of user disatisfaction with the help desk.
To hell with a fighting fund, at the rate M$s stock is dropping in price why don't we all just stick 2c in the bucket and buy them out in a couple of months?
I've been working with Oracle dbs for 10 years now and whats annoyed me more and more since around v7 is the continuing 'bloat' thats going into the product.
Some areas, such as database replication, table partitioning and direct loads are useful. Others, such as java integration, web features etc are not. They may offer an easier path for developers to get data to where they want it, I admit, but methods not much more complex existed anyway
I guess the real gripe I have about these areas is the impact they have been having on Oracle support which is slowly going down-hill. Unless you have the (mega) bucks to pay for gold support the response you get from front-line support people is getting worse and worse. A while back you could guarantee that the person you got on the end of the phone at the first call had some knowledge of DBA work in a production environment. Nowadays I sometimes feel like I'm speaking to someone who wouldn't know how to connect without a GUI. I'm convinced that Oracle is pulling more and more resources into these 'e-fads' and away from basic RDBMS development and support.
Postie just might be able to pull things back to where they should be, fast and secure data storage and retrieval.
The other obvious area Oracle falls down on is administration. There are damn few really good DBA's around and without one even the simplest app can fall over on performance in a badly configured environment. There is no 'out of the box' solution with Oracle, its all very much a matter of knowing the insides of the beast.
A side note, Oracle is stable on features that have been around for a while but its down-right dangerous on new areas. Check the bug lists on partitioned tables for a laugh, or on parallel query execution. The cost based optimiser mode which was intended to make performance tuning SQL eaiser took from v7.0 to v7.3 (a number of years) to become close to stable. Only to be near superseded in Oracle 8.1 (Oops Oracle8i, that is - another bad sign, suddenly departing from normal version numbers for no apparent reason).
Basically, get me back to basics. Data in, Data out, Real Fast. And make tuning as 'black box' as possible without removing the possibility of tweaking it where its needed and I'll be well happy using Postie.
A lot of work has been in the creation of update packages (MandrakUpdate is nice-ish), so why each time there is a point release of a distro do we have to download the ISO or buy the CD. What I'd like to see is the possibility of upgrading using only the package differences.
To my mind the most worrying part about this is that MS discover a possible critical security problem and its users get to hear about it only as a leak to the press.
One of the biggest endightments of proprietary commercial software is the fact that when a problem is doscovered the first people to move into action from the the company concerned are the marketing department, usually in full denial mode.
What users need is an immediate alert that a problem exists, followed by a fulfilled promise to get a technical team on it until its resolved, after which a release will be made ASAP. What they get is 'There is no problem' then 'Ok, theres a problem, but its not that bad' followed belatedly by 'Alright, it was a major issue, but look the fix is here now. Just pay for the upgrade'
With open source the answer might be 'We'll work on it as soon as we can' but at least theres no denial phase.
Usually there are all sorts of get out clauses in software licenses to excuse a company from any liability for problems that bugs might cause, but what about the case where a problem is discovered by the company that could be potentially fincancially damaging to its clients but it refuses to issue notice of the problem in a timely fashion?
To reply to both replies and clear up what I intended to mean:
I agree completely that technology, as a tool of human society, is an essential part of any philosphical understanding of society as well as being influenced by society. Our laws and institutions both inhibit and encourage technological advancement and are influenced to change by that advancement. But it is wrong to imply that by creating laws or having 'morals' we have the ability to control the advancement of technology. Look to the ruling elites of the past who have fallen to technological advances, often that they themselves brought about. Britain introduced the railways to India to drive forward profit from the region and create a way to move troops. Ghandi used those self-same railroads to spread his message to the furthest corners of the country and provoke a revolt that helped end British domination. Neither Ghandi nor Britain controlled the technology in the sense that they had no more than a passing influence on its implementation and use. In fact, if Ghandi had not used the railroad in the way he had someone else would have. The technology existed and its influence had to be felt.
Britain HAD to bring the railways to the region, it was a monetary and military necessity. If they had not used the technology for the purpose other countries would have had a chance to bring that same technology to play against them. Even if some far-sighted official had at the time realised the dangers of the ensuing socialisation there would have been no way to stop it, only delay it. It would have been implemented but with a view to attempting to control its influence. The technology was brought about by one force and used to the detrement of that same force.
During much the same era the unionisation of workers in factories was coming about. Factories were seen as the means to greater exploitation and profit. With the industrial age the technology decreed that workers would no longer work as small groups of individuals in a village but as larger groups in the factory. This brought about an increase in socialisation that would change the employer/employee relationship for good. When large numbers of people were brought together in a social setting they realised their common goals and began to act together, forming unions and pushing back the dominance of the owners. In some countries this even lead to revolution. But even with the example of others to go by the push towards industrialisation hit every modern country. There was no way for profits to survive without it, they could only hope, once again, to control its influence.
In the same way today many countries are worried about the influence that the internet might have over their citizens. Or, rather, the influence that their citizens might have on each other given a new medium of communication. But the imperative of the financial gains to be made exists and it is a dominant one. They fear the possible changes that could occur but have no choice other than to attempt to force the route that technology takes. The problem they face is that they are battling not the technology here, but yet again its social use. I've seen a lot of paranoia around about the potential for technology to be used to control people by wire-tapping the internet. The governments of the world may hope to use this as a mechanism for control and it may work against small groups of people, but if an idea for social change is uttered and spread it spreads as just that, an idea and it is not possible to stop. And if a hundred million people decide to act on that idea and use the internet to communicate about it then all that the NSA will gain from their listening is the safe knowledge that its time to say goodnight. To switch the internet off would leave them with too great a loss in profit, they are constricted by their need for technology.
Technology exists and changes. It changes our society and our understanding and we use those changes to push technology further. Thus the impression of the 'feeback loop'. Technology is however, always at a point beyond the current society. Its influence exists but is yet to impact our morals, our laws and our institutions. Only a society that has the telephone can create the internet but even the most advanced society at the point of the telephone cannot predict the changes that will occur with the internet - an invention it has not yet realised. Science fiction writers and dreamers can perhaps give us a glimpse of the possibilities but they cannot create a readiness for the changes. Only the solid reality of implementation can do that.
On the topic, because its late and I'm rambling and still suffering from a hangover;>) My original point was that you can create a philosophy to understand how change occurs through technology in current society and try to use it to predict its future influence on the structure of our society but since technology is in itself the dynamic force that creates the possibility of such change and is always by necessity out of our current reach in philosphical realist terms we cannot create a 'Philosophy for technology'.
Science and technology are an accumulation of our current understanding of the world and their existance/creation changes that understanding. As such they cannot exist within a philosophy. We can only attempt to comprehend the impact of change on our current society and at that only in wide terms with a philosophy that accounts for our current society and extrapolates. This is the limit of the philosohpical scope of any realist.
What would be the constituent parts of a technological philsophy? Morals, laws, human relations, captial relations? All of these are changed by technology.
What I am saying at heart is that our philosophy, our institutions, our society can all only follow what technology does. We can attempt to apply current social values to new technology but that is vanity and folly. If there is any enduring 'philsophy' we can apply it boils down to one phrase - The dynamic of change.
This sounds like it stops you from developing 'killer app for Tru64' and then selling it. This is a mistake. If the intention is to allow people to 'get used' to Tru64 then fine, but I fail to see what administering a single CPU, me and my dog as users box has in common with running a 100+ user live system.
If they are trying to encourage developers onto the platform then why not go more in line with what Oracle offer. Their technology track license allows you to develop and sell your app as long as you do not use it to process data. This means you can get something together and its only your clients who pay for the run-time licensing and support. Smart, allows a lot of hobbyist developers a legitimate leg-in to the development of apps for the platform.
Oracles development tools such as Forms and Reports run using Java for the front end. I've used a Linux box as a Java front end to Oracle Applications (not supported at the time, but I had to try it) and it works quite well.
This is the whole Oracle concept at the moment, Java at the front and back end and the db controlling it all.
The problems start when you think about how the software runs the front end. It basically consists of a huge jar file that gets shipped from the server and is used to run the gui. It takes a little while to initialise but once thats done its relatively ok. On PC's you can switch it to cache the jar files. You have then the chance of missing out any updates made to the files so the administration of the client comes back again. Can you cache in a similar way on NC's?
If not what you end up with is something that is relatively ok for most of the time, but at 9am you have a complete jam as every NC in the enterprise starts dl'ing java apps.
The other big thing is the NN thing. Windows/Linux/Any Other OS, I just can't find any combination of browser/OS thats stable
You're just gonna end up with a whole lot of bald order entry clarks as they constantly tear their hair out at having entered 100 items in an order only to have the browser die on them when they hit the commit button. Actually, most data entry people seem to prefer character mode, nothing beats it for speed of entry. Gui's are fine for people who just submit reports now and again or enter just a few transactions a day, but real data entry people just need a keyboard that works real well and an app that never fails. Hey, Larry, make sure this box has a telnet client.
Sorry about this but I could only find it on Metalink which needs an account that is tied to your oracle license.
If you have access the direct link is http://support.oracle.com/ml/plsql/knowledgebase.g etcr?textkey=239049
If you can't get access to it I'll be summarising something similar on a new web page about Oracle that I'll be creating in the next couple of weeks. Send me your email and I'll drop you a note when its ready.
Basically it discusses keeping objects grouped into tablespaces by size and enforcing keeping the same initial and next extent sizes for all objects in a tablespace. It also goes some way into pointing out why the 'my tables in 100 extents' panic is a myth.
If you are looking for a 'black box' to put your data in be aware that Oracle, even at only 40G of data, requires some heavy administration at times. You may want to consider MySql for an easier ride on admin.
As well as knowledge on tuning the database you'll have very specific Oracle SQL tuning to do. I've been doing this type of thing for a number of years now and I still don't know 100% of what is needed - there are always knew features to get aquainted with.
In saying that there are some good resources to get you started. Have a look at http://www.orapub.com for white papers and before you even start to lay the database down see the Oracle white paper (from their website) 'How to stop defragmenting and start living'.
You should also take into account that 8i is a new-ish release of Oracle. Keep an eye on the bug lists for it and make sure you won't be impacted by anything.
Apart from the warnings, I've run around 60G Oracle db's on Linux and as long as your server is beefy enough you should have no problem.
One big thing, if you do go down the Oracle route have t-shirts made up with 'I've looked at v$system_event today, have you?' written on them and wear them. If there is one way of finding what your performance problems are/will be its this table. The only real exception is bad SQL which you need to trap in other ways
I've been a DBA for a good few years, done a lot of performance work on many different platforms. From my day-to-day work getting reports/transactions to run in a timely fashion I can tell you what this means to me. Squat.
The TPC benchmarks have to be analyzed properly to understand what they really are telling you. Not just that, the real point here is that we have two multi-million companies throwing their weight around and posturing. It doesn't help people trying to admin databases at all. It benefits some egos of some rich guys and ups the profit margin for a while.
Under OSS this kind of challenge would become 'Hey, I just found this neat way to make this box go faster. Why don't you have a look at the code and see if you can use or improve it?'
This whole shooting match just further exposes the true weakness of proprietary software. If knowledge is held under guard, copyrighted and isolated its benefits wither and die. It serves to make money for a few for a short while and nothing more. The progress that has been made in database technology over the past 10 years that I have worked in the industry has been produced by chance from short-sighted industry players following fashions like butterflys in the wind. (what a crap analogy)
Slashdot Mirror
Sure, voice recognition that does Klingon, neato. But I've been waiting for voice recognition that can understand my Scots accent. You'd hope that, being a Star Trek game, that would be included.
"Its the dilithiummm crystals cap'ain, they jus' canny handle it"
ZamZ
The web linking status of any document is not fixed but a matter of mathematics. It can be defined with just a simple rule:
L = 1/(D*X)
Where L is the number of links, D is the level of desperation you have in trying to find the info, and X is the number of search engines you've tried so far (including the number of times you've refined searches to weed out the 3000 pr0n entries you find when you search for 'linux AND driver AND scsi')
However, a parallel formula exists where:
D=X^10
At levels of D>200 a sit down with a beer and a few good tunes is highly recommended.
IANAL (but I start all my posts like that) - Sorry, had to get that out of my system :>) Seriously, I don't know if eazel are aiming at that kind of user base for cash-in. In the corporate world it matters little about the ins and outs of most of the libraries. There they'll be looking to create a new config and roll it out to a large number of users (all or a sub-set of the company) at one time. Preferably all at once and preferably without any hitches. At the moment this is an expensive task for which large departments are allocated in v.large companies to do almost constantly. Having been at the receiving end of many of these rollouts its never a happy experience. Many attempts in the Windows arena have been made to get round this and much expensive technology has been brought in. If Eazel can step into this area and offer company wide desktop maintenance and rollouts then I think they'll make a lot of in-roads. Expand this idea to supporting the desktop as well and they might end up with outsourcing contracts worth a lot.
Well, not really an easy answer but as previous posters have pointed out, its difficult to determine the staffing levels if you don't knwo the business terms.
One of the best methods I've encountered is taking close metrics on some basics
1: Time to answer initial phone call
2: Number of dropped calls to help desk
3: Time to resolve (to user satisfaction) call
4: Satisfaction level of user to response given
Point 3 should be judged against your SLA's (Service Level Agreements) for the differing priority of calls.
The whole problem with implementing these kind of metrics is that it can end up as simply a rod to beat your helpdesk team with. If thats the case it will quickly collapse. If done well it should help get to the root of user disatisfaction with the help desk.
To hell with a fighting fund, at the rate M$s stock is dropping in price why don't we all just stick 2c in the bucket and buy them out in a couple of months?
ZamZ
Some areas, such as database replication, table partitioning and direct loads are useful. Others, such as java integration, web features etc are not. They may offer an easier path for developers to get data to where they want it, I admit, but methods not much more complex existed anyway
I guess the real gripe I have about these areas is the impact they have been having on Oracle support which is slowly going down-hill. Unless you have the (mega) bucks to pay for gold support the response you get from front-line support people is getting worse and worse. A while back you could guarantee that the person you got on the end of the phone at the first call had some knowledge of DBA work in a production environment. Nowadays I sometimes feel like I'm speaking to someone who wouldn't know how to connect without a GUI. I'm convinced that Oracle is pulling more and more resources into these 'e-fads' and away from basic RDBMS development and support.
Postie just might be able to pull things back to where they should be, fast and secure data storage and retrieval.
The other obvious area Oracle falls down on is administration. There are damn few really good DBA's around and without one even the simplest app can fall over on performance in a badly configured environment. There is no 'out of the box' solution with Oracle, its all very much a matter of knowing the insides of the beast.
A side note, Oracle is stable on features that have been around for a while but its down-right dangerous on new areas. Check the bug lists on partitioned tables for a laugh, or on parallel query execution. The cost based optimiser mode which was intended to make performance tuning SQL eaiser took from v7.0 to v7.3 (a number of years) to become close to stable. Only to be near superseded in Oracle 8.1 (Oops Oracle8i, that is - another bad sign, suddenly departing from normal version numbers for no apparent reason).
Basically, get me back to basics. Data in, Data out, Real Fast. And make tuning as 'black box' as possible without removing the possibility of tweaking it where its needed and I'll be well happy using Postie.
ZamZ (these opinions are my own, I think)
A lot of work has been in the creation of update packages (MandrakUpdate is nice-ish), so why each time there is a point release of a distro do we have to download the ISO or buy the CD.
What I'd like to see is the possibility of upgrading using only the package differences.
One of the biggest endightments of proprietary commercial software is the fact that when a problem is doscovered the first people to move into action from the the company concerned are the marketing department, usually in full denial mode.
What users need is an immediate alert that a problem exists, followed by a fulfilled promise to get a technical team on it until its resolved, after which a release will be made ASAP. What they get is 'There is no problem' then 'Ok, theres a problem, but its not that bad' followed belatedly by 'Alright, it was a major issue, but look the fix is here now. Just pay for the upgrade'
With open source the answer might be 'We'll work on it as soon as we can' but at least theres no denial phase.
Usually there are all sorts of get out clauses in software licenses to excuse a company from any liability for problems that bugs might cause, but what about the case where a problem is discovered by the company that could be potentially fincancially damaging to its clients but it refuses to issue notice of the problem in a timely fashion?
ZamZ
I agree completely that technology, as a tool of human society, is an essential part of any philosphical understanding of society as well as being influenced by society. Our laws and institutions both inhibit and encourage technological advancement and are influenced to change by that advancement. But it is wrong to imply that by creating laws or having 'morals' we have the ability to control the advancement of technology. Look to the ruling elites of the past who have fallen to technological advances, often that they themselves brought about. Britain introduced the railways to India to drive forward profit from the region and create a way to move troops. Ghandi used those self-same railroads to spread his message to the furthest corners of the country and provoke a revolt that helped end British domination. Neither Ghandi nor Britain controlled the technology in the sense that they had no more than a passing influence on its implementation and use. In fact, if Ghandi had not used the railroad in the way he had someone else would have. The technology existed and its influence had to be felt.
Britain HAD to bring the railways to the region, it was a monetary and military necessity. If they had not used the technology for the purpose other countries would have had a chance to bring that same technology to play against them. Even if some far-sighted official had at the time realised the dangers of the ensuing socialisation there would have been no way to stop it, only delay it. It would have been implemented but with a view to attempting to control its influence. The technology was brought about by one force and used to the detrement of that same force.
During much the same era the unionisation of workers in factories was coming about. Factories were seen as the means to greater exploitation and profit. With the industrial age the technology decreed that workers would no longer work as small groups of individuals in a village but as larger groups in the factory. This brought about an increase in socialisation that would change the employer/employee relationship for good. When large numbers of people were brought together in a social setting they realised their common goals and began to act together, forming unions and pushing back the dominance of the owners. In some countries this even lead to revolution. But even with the example of others to go by the push towards industrialisation hit every modern country. There was no way for profits to survive without it, they could only hope, once again, to control its influence.
In the same way today many countries are worried about the influence that the internet might have over their citizens. Or, rather, the influence that their citizens might have on each other given a new medium of communication. But the imperative of the financial gains to be made exists and it is a dominant one. They fear the possible changes that could occur but have no choice other than to attempt to force the route that technology takes. The problem they face is that they are battling not the technology here, but yet again its social use. I've seen a lot of paranoia around about the potential for technology to be used to control people by wire-tapping the internet. The governments of the world may hope to use this as a mechanism for control and it may work against small groups of people, but if an idea for social change is uttered and spread it spreads as just that, an idea and it is not possible to stop. And if a hundred million people decide to act on that idea and use the internet to communicate about it then all that the NSA will gain from their listening is the safe knowledge that its time to say goodnight. To switch the internet off would leave them with too great a loss in profit, they are constricted by their need for technology.
Technology exists and changes. It changes our society and our understanding and we use those changes to push technology further. Thus the impression of the 'feeback loop'. Technology is however, always at a point beyond the current society. Its influence exists but is yet to impact our morals, our laws and our institutions. Only a society that has the telephone can create the internet but even the most advanced society at the point of the telephone cannot predict the changes that will occur with the internet - an invention it has not yet realised. Science fiction writers and dreamers can perhaps give us a glimpse of the possibilities but they cannot create a readiness for the changes. Only the solid reality of implementation can do that.
On the topic, because its late and I'm rambling and still suffering from a hangover ;>) My original point was that you can create a philosophy to understand how change occurs through technology in current society and try to use it to predict its future influence on the structure of our society but since technology is in itself the dynamic force that creates the possibility of such change and is always by necessity out of our current reach in philosphical realist terms we cannot create a 'Philosophy for technology'.
Z
What would be the constituent parts of a technological philsophy? Morals, laws, human relations, captial relations? All of these are changed by technology.
What I am saying at heart is that our philosophy, our institutions, our society can all only follow what technology does. We can attempt to apply current social values to new technology but that is vanity and folly. If there is any enduring 'philsophy' we can apply it boils down to one phrase - The dynamic of change.
Z@mzm1.demon.nl
Only tier-1? Oracle have only recently stated they will make Linux a tier-1 OS.
If they are trying to encourage developers onto the platform then why not go more in line with what Oracle offer. Their technology track license allows you to develop and sell your app as long as you do not use it to process data. This means you can get something together and its only your clients who pay for the run-time licensing and support. Smart, allows a lot of hobbyist developers a legitimate leg-in to the development of apps for the platform.
Z
This is the whole Oracle concept at the moment, Java at the front and back end and the db controlling it all.
The problems start when you think about how the software runs the front end. It basically consists of a huge jar file that gets shipped from the server and is used to run the gui. It takes a little while to initialise but once thats done its relatively ok. On PC's you can switch it to cache the jar files. You have then the chance of missing out any updates made to the files so the administration of the client comes back again. Can you cache in a similar way on NC's?
If not what you end up with is something that is relatively ok for most of the time, but at 9am you have a complete jam as every NC in the enterprise starts dl'ing java apps.
The other big thing is the NN thing. Windows/Linux/Any Other OS, I just can't find any combination of browser/OS thats stable
You're just gonna end up with a whole lot of bald order entry clarks as they constantly tear their hair out at having entered 100 items in an order only to have the browser die on them when they hit the commit button. Actually, most data entry people seem to prefer character mode, nothing beats it for speed of entry. Gui's are fine for people who just submit reports now and again or enter just a few transactions a day, but real data entry people just need a keyboard that works real well and an app that never fails. Hey, Larry, make sure this box has a telnet client.
Z
If you have access the direct link is http://support.oracle.com/ml/plsql/knowledgebase.
If you can't get access to it I'll be summarising something similar on a new web page about Oracle that I'll be creating in the next couple of weeks. Send me your email and I'll drop you a note when its ready.
Basically it discusses keeping objects grouped into tablespaces by size and enforcing keeping the same initial and next extent sizes for all objects in a tablespace. It also goes some way into pointing out why the 'my tables in 100 extents' panic is a myth.
ZamZ@mzm1.demon.nl is my email BTW
As well as knowledge on tuning the database you'll have very specific Oracle SQL tuning to do. I've been doing this type of thing for a number of years now and I still don't know 100% of what is needed - there are always knew features to get aquainted with.
In saying that there are some good resources to get you started. Have a look at http://www.orapub.com for white papers and before you even start to lay the database down see the Oracle white paper (from their website) 'How to stop defragmenting and start living'.
You should also take into account that 8i is a new-ish release of Oracle. Keep an eye on the bug lists for it and make sure you won't be impacted by anything.
Apart from the warnings, I've run around 60G Oracle db's on Linux and as long as your server is beefy enough you should have no problem.
One big thing, if you do go down the Oracle route have t-shirts made up with 'I've looked at v$system_event today, have you?' written on them and wear them. If there is one way of finding what your performance problems are/will be its this table. The only real exception is bad SQL which you need to trap in other ways
I've been a DBA for a good few years, done a lot of performance work on many different platforms. From my day-to-day work getting reports/transactions to run in a timely fashion I can tell you what this means to me. Squat.
The TPC benchmarks have to be analyzed properly to understand what they really are telling you. Not just that, the real point here is that we have two multi-million companies throwing their weight around and posturing. It doesn't help people trying to admin databases at all. It benefits some egos of some rich guys and ups the profit margin for a while.
Under OSS this kind of challenge would become 'Hey, I just found this neat way to make this box go faster. Why don't you have a look at the code and see if you can use or improve it?'
This whole shooting match just further exposes the true weakness of proprietary software. If knowledge is held under guard, copyrighted and isolated its benefits wither and die. It serves to make money for a few for a short while and nothing more. The progress that has been made in database technology over the past 10 years that I have worked in the industry has been produced by chance from short-sighted industry players following fashions like butterflys in the wind. (what a crap analogy)
ZamZ