It's the Tax Foundation's numbers, not mine. Are they lying? Or could your experience not be the average experience?
Guess what - you're both right!
The "Tax Foundation" is quoting income tax. "mellon" is quoting "my taxes", which includes income tax + sales tax + everything else.
California not only has an obscenely high income tax rate, but also a very high sales tax rate (8%+), and a very high car registration fee (something like 3% of the value of your car, every year). Also, California has every possibly fee you can think of, and fines for anything are ridiculous ($400 speeding tickets, etc.) Property taxes also are not cheap.
So while Oregon, for example, has a higher income tax rate, they have no sales tax. California's income tax rate is a little lower, but it has a huge sales tax. Overall tax burden is higher in California than in other states.
Bad joke. If California were a separate nation, it would be the eighth largest economy in the world, right after Italy and before Spain, Canada, Brazil, Russia, India, and on and on. Australia is an entire continent, and its economy is less than half the size of California's.
Big. Deal.
I hate to be the one to tell you surfer dudes this, but Texas ($1.2 trillion GDP) is also India-sized, and so is New York ($1.1 trillion GDP). Hell, New York + New Jersey (=$1.6 trillion GDP) is almost California's size. ($1.8 trillion GDP)
People pull out this "if California were a separate nation" stuff as if to say "California is SO HUGE" but it's really not compared to other states. It's the biggest, but not by that much.
If both the original developers and the knowledge they had have been lost, then it is probably already too late to perform any major maintenance on this code base. The project has already entered its “servicing” stage.
At that point, you basically have two possible approaches that actually work: you can restrict maintenance to small-scale changes, which may be sufficient if the goal is just to keep the project ticking over for a while, or you can accept The Big Rewrite (which isn’t so big in this case) in order to get a project that can be properly maintained.
Sorry, but I think that's absurd. Asking a team of new programmers to step in, learn, and maintain an intermediate-sized legacy codebase is hardly an unreasonable request. I have done just this.
I'm not saying it's easy or there isn't a cost in time to it, but if I hired you as a programmer and you looked at our source code and said, "sorry, it isn't documented sufficiently, your only choices are to restrict to small fixes or to completely rewrite it," you'd be shown the door. You could certainly say "btw, this will take a few weeks to read through, and we better test the hell out of any changes until we get it down", and perhaps we'd make a choice about cost effectiveness - that is reasonable. But this dogmatic "sorry, not enough documentation = Big Rewrite" is nonsense. Oftentimes - most times? - it's more effective to master and modify than to rewrite.
Big Rewrites are fun. Reading code is not. Programmers prefer fun to cost effective, which is hardly a surprise.
Well, bellicose political rhetoric and cock-walking strutting around got us to the point where we thought we needed a fucking space-laser system to fight our enemies. For a fraction of that cost we could try diplomacy and negotiation.
No, it would end the threat of large scale nuclear attacks on the USA and any allies we sold/give the technology to. On the flip side, it would increase the chance that someone in the US government would level Tehran, Moscow, or Damascus knowing that it could completely escape retaliation.
Perfect. In all seriousness, the world would be a better place if Iran and Syria were large dog parks.
How about something like this (feel free to democratically suggest improvements or point out issues): When a law finally makes it's way through all the courts and the Supreme Court finds it unconstitutional how about putting *every single last bastard* who voted for it on trial for treason?
Because it's not treason? Have you read the Constitution? Treason is clearly defined therein, and what you are discussing is not evenly remotely in the same universe.
Oracle is selling Linux. Or at least "support" for it, which includes patches.
That is a very powerful "at least". Oracle does not sell Linux. You can download OEL. You cannot buy it. You can buy SUPPORT for it, but there is no way to "buy" OEL.
Standy databases. Yes, I know MySQL and PostgreSQL have some replication, but it's nothing like DataGuard. Do you want physical or logical? Log shipping or transactional? How about maybe you'd like to activate and test your standby database and then press a button and it's back to where it was?
Oracle streams - a form of SQL-level replication. Master-slave, multimaster, transformational, complex business rules, etc. Nothing like it in open source.
The whole family of Flashback: e.g., "I'd like to do a query and have the results as of the state of the database four hours ago". Or "I'd like to immediately change the database back to its state at 01:20:03am". Or "oops, I dropped a table, please bring it back instantly." Etc.
High-performance compression that in many cases is faster than non-compression. You can encrypt it, too.
For nearly every DB feature, Oracle has "more". It's great you have B-tree indexes - Oracle also offers bitmap and there are cases where they are really useful. It's nice that you offer hash partitioning (if you do), but Oracle can partition on a half-dozen different things. Etc.
RAC (Real Application Clusters) - active/active (or as many "Actives" as you'd like) clusters, all instances talking to the same DB.
Online redefinition (change your tables, views, etc. and have Oracle store everything up until you snap everything over at once - great for reducing downtimes).
Very sophisticated introspection. By this I mean the amount of stats the DB collects on itself. There is an insane level of instrumentation and it's very easy to see where waits and delays are.
Ability to generate and playback workloads.
A lot of migration assistance - e.g., "here is how your database would run if you upgraded it", "here is the SQL that will not run as well if you upgrade", "here is the recommendation for fixing your PL/SQL to run better in the next version," etc.
Query analysis is enormously better than open software (explain plans, etc.)
Auditing is several orders of magnitude more advanced
Star queries, OLAP, cubes, spatial, all of that.
XML and text support are much better.
Virtual Private Databases
PL/SQL, Java, etc. native to the DB, as well as an entire GUI-front-end building system (Application Express)
A fully-integrated volume/filesystem manager (ASM), cluster software, and VM, all manageable by the DB;-) ASM is really very nice.
I'm sure I'm missing some things - those were off the top of this Oracle DBA's head. Here is a quick list of features.
I love PostgreSQL as well, and MySQL to some extent, and even SQL Server. But they're not Oracle. DB/2 is the only thing approaching its class (along with more specialized niche players like Teradata). Most of the features I mentioned above don't come into play until you're in a 24x7 high availability environment, are trying to minimize downtime, or are working at big scale.
Font smoothing had been done before, but nothing that made use of subpixel rendering. At least, not to the best of my knowledge... please correct me with a citation. (Or, alternatively, stop spreading bullcrap when you have no citation. Thank you.)
People who ask for "citations" on SlashDot need to learn how a discussion forum is different than Wikipedia.
Yeah, but like 90% of Americans travel less than 25 miles a day for their commute.
But, like, 25 miles doesn't matter because, like, if it takes you 40 minutes to go, like, 25 miles, then you still have to burn, like energy that whole time regardless. It'd be different if you could drive, like, 55mph the whole way, but most people are driving more like 15-20mph.
Shall we pitch in for a remedial math course for Timothy? Because "the ruling that reduced Jammie Thomas-Rasset's $1.92 fine for file sharing to $54,000" implies a pretty basic misunderstanding of how to count.
The first world being marked by places like Sweden and S. Korea, where things like 100 Mbit data to your home or office is cheap and available. Where 3G or better wireless coverage is pervasive, including not only 90%+ of the population, but the majority of the landmass as well.
The second world is marked by places like the U.S. and Canada, where there are large stretches of open land where the best you can get is ISDN or dial-up. They aren't all that populated, but there are still a lot of them.
Allow me to speculate that there are more square miles that are covered by broadband or 3G in the USA than in either South Korea or Sweden, or probably both combined. You're really comparing apples and oranges.
Newspapers are out because no-one has the time to read them.
Which is why The Economist folded. Oh wait, I guess not - the densest newsmagazine on the planet continues to thrive. Hey look, bookstores are still open. Turns out people do have time to read! Who knew!?!?
*Three years later* EDS would come back with the sign-off and a purchase order. Compaq would give them 10,000 of the dregs of the warehouse. They would all surpass the three-year-old spec in the contract. Massive profit for Compaq.
I imagine the salesman made a pretty decent bonus too.
I've heard that chestnut in different forms involving government contracts. That story should be on Snopes, it's so old.
It's nonsense, particularly in computers. It MAY have been true once forty years ago in pipe fittings or something, but in computers it's implausible.
Computer manufacturers don't make things and sit on them for three years. They sell them because beyond a certain point, it's better to sell them at a loss than keep them in a warehouse. 10,000 computers at $1000 each is $10 million dollars in inventory that HP allegedly sat on for three years? I know the story talks about the "dregs" meaning HP could scrape together anything it had sitting around, but the reality is they just don't have that much sitting around - just in time inventory, etc.
What is far more likely to happen is that EDS came back and said "can you honor this" and HP pointed to the bottom where it said the quote was good for 90 days. At that point they negotiated a new deal. HP had some systems that weren't selling well, perhaps about to be dumped, and EDS bought them for full price not knowing.
So, seriously, besides your own enlightened opinion, care to cite something meaningful, or do you just want to keep knob-polishing?
Let me be the first to welcome you to Slashdot. Unlike Wikipedia, we don't have to cite things here. You might enjoy learning the difference between an encyclopedia and a discussion forum.
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California is as much an object lesson in the stupidity of Reganism as "liberal ideas"
Well, yes, getting yourself possessed by the devil is kind of stupid. But I think that was just an isolated incident, not a fiscal policy.
It's the Tax Foundation's numbers, not mine. Are they lying? Or could your experience not be the average experience?
Guess what - you're both right!
The "Tax Foundation" is quoting income tax. "mellon" is quoting "my taxes", which includes income tax + sales tax + everything else.
California not only has an obscenely high income tax rate, but also a very high sales tax rate (8%+), and a very high car registration fee (something like 3% of the value of your car, every year). Also, California has every possibly fee you can think of, and fines for anything are ridiculous ($400 speeding tickets, etc.) Property taxes also are not cheap.
So while Oregon, for example, has a higher income tax rate, they have no sales tax. California's income tax rate is a little lower, but it has a huge sales tax. Overall tax burden is higher in California than in other states.
Bad joke. If California were a separate nation, it would be the eighth largest economy in the world, right after Italy and before Spain, Canada, Brazil, Russia, India, and on and on. Australia is an entire continent, and its economy is less than half the size of California's.
Big. Deal.
I hate to be the one to tell you surfer dudes this, but Texas ($1.2 trillion GDP) is also India-sized, and so is New York ($1.1 trillion GDP). Hell, New York + New Jersey (=$1.6 trillion GDP) is almost California's size. ($1.8 trillion GDP)
People pull out this "if California were a separate nation" stuff as if to say "California is SO HUGE" but it's really not compared to other states. It's the biggest, but not by that much.
If both the original developers and the knowledge they had have been lost, then it is probably already too late to perform any major maintenance on this code base. The project has already entered its “servicing” stage.
At that point, you basically have two possible approaches that actually work: you can restrict maintenance to small-scale changes, which may be sufficient if the goal is just to keep the project ticking over for a while, or you can accept The Big Rewrite (which isn’t so big in this case) in order to get a project that can be properly maintained.
Sorry, but I think that's absurd. Asking a team of new programmers to step in, learn, and maintain an intermediate-sized legacy codebase is hardly an unreasonable request. I have done just this.
I'm not saying it's easy or there isn't a cost in time to it, but if I hired you as a programmer and you looked at our source code and said, "sorry, it isn't documented sufficiently, your only choices are to restrict to small fixes or to completely rewrite it," you'd be shown the door. You could certainly say "btw, this will take a few weeks to read through, and we better test the hell out of any changes until we get it down", and perhaps we'd make a choice about cost effectiveness - that is reasonable. But this dogmatic "sorry, not enough documentation = Big Rewrite" is nonsense. Oftentimes - most times? - it's more effective to master and modify than to rewrite.
Big Rewrites are fun. Reading code is not. Programmers prefer fun to cost effective, which is hardly a surprise.
Well, bellicose political rhetoric and cock-walking strutting around got us to the point where we thought we needed a fucking space-laser system to fight our enemies. For a fraction of that cost we could try diplomacy and negotiation.
Please explain how that worked against Hitler.
No, it would end the threat of large scale nuclear attacks on the USA and any allies we sold/give the technology to. On the flip side, it would increase the chance that someone in the US government would level Tehran, Moscow, or Damascus knowing that it could completely escape retaliation.
Perfect. In all seriousness, the world would be a better place if Iran and Syria were large dog parks.
What will you be willing to offer Iran to stop their nuclear program?
As many megatons as it takes.
Did you ever bother to look up an answer?
I think he just assumed we were having a friendly chat. Aren't we?
I know people who work on weapon systems.
I'm sure you do. Now go back to playing with your GI Joes.
How about something like this (feel free to democratically suggest improvements or point out issues): When a law finally makes it's way through all the courts and the Supreme Court finds it unconstitutional how about putting *every single last bastard* who voted for it on trial for treason?
Because it's not treason? Have you read the Constitution? Treason is clearly defined therein, and what you are discussing is not evenly remotely in the same universe.
Oracle is selling Linux. Or at least "support" for it, which includes patches.
That is a very powerful "at least". Oracle does not sell Linux. You can download OEL. You cannot buy it. You can buy SUPPORT for it, but there is no way to "buy" OEL.
I'm sure I'm missing some things - those were off the top of this Oracle DBA's head. Here is a quick list of features.
I love PostgreSQL as well, and MySQL to some extent, and even SQL Server. But they're not Oracle. DB/2 is the only thing approaching its class (along with more specialized niche players like Teradata). Most of the features I mentioned above don't come into play until you're in a 24x7 high availability environment, are trying to minimize downtime, or are working at big scale.
eBooks devalue resale. In fact, they devalue it to zero. Why buy something you can't own after you pay for it?
Font smoothing had been done before, but nothing that made use of subpixel rendering. At least, not to the best of my knowledge... please correct me with a citation. (Or, alternatively, stop spreading bullcrap when you have no citation. Thank you.)
People who ask for "citations" on SlashDot need to learn how a discussion forum is different than Wikipedia.
You don't start by making a $2,000 car. You start by making a $100,000 car, then a $50,000 car, then a $35,000 car....
Quick, somebody tell Toyota, because they've just screwed up the last 60 years.
Yeah, but like 90% of Americans travel less than 25 miles a day for their commute.
But, like, 25 miles doesn't matter because, like, if it takes you 40 minutes to go, like, 25 miles, then you still have to burn, like energy that whole time regardless. It'd be different if you could drive, like, 55mph the whole way, but most people are driving more like 15-20mph.
The average commute in the USA is, like, quite long in terms of, like, minutes.
.
Even if gas was $20/gal, I still wouldn't spend $80,000 on a Tesla.
8. There's hatred of Flash itself out there, maybe HTML5 will rise to the challenge.
Ah, HTML5. We are all waiting eagerly for it to be finished in 2022
.
(seriously, letting a website patch critical system files is just bad design).
You do realize that 90% of those reading this site downloaded their operating system from a web site, right? ;-)
Shall we pitch in for a remedial math course for Timothy? Because "the ruling that reduced Jammie Thomas-Rasset's $1.92 fine for file sharing to $54,000" implies a pretty basic misunderstanding of how to count.
The first world being marked by places like Sweden and S. Korea, where things like 100 Mbit data to your home or office is cheap and available. Where 3G or better wireless coverage is pervasive, including not only 90%+ of the population, but the majority of the landmass as well.
The second world is marked by places like the U.S. and Canada, where there are large stretches of open land where the best you can get is ISDN or dial-up. They aren't all that populated, but there are still a lot of them.
Allow me to speculate that there are more square miles that are covered by broadband or 3G in the USA than in either South Korea or Sweden, or probably both combined. You're really comparing apples and oranges.
Newspapers are out because no-one has the time to read them.
Which is why The Economist folded. Oh wait, I guess not - the densest newsmagazine on the planet continues to thrive. Hey look, bookstores are still open. Turns out people do have time to read! Who knew!?!?
I would like to see Database Transactional off-load processors down to the I/O level .. such as TCP offload engines
...which is what Oracle built with their new Database Machines, right?
*Three years later* EDS would come back with the sign-off and a purchase order. Compaq would give them 10,000 of the dregs of the warehouse. They would all surpass the three-year-old spec in the contract. Massive profit for Compaq.
I imagine the salesman made a pretty decent bonus too.
I've heard that chestnut in different forms involving government contracts. That story should be on Snopes, it's so old.
It's nonsense, particularly in computers. It MAY have been true once forty years ago in pipe fittings or something, but in computers it's implausible.
Computer manufacturers don't make things and sit on them for three years. They sell them because beyond a certain point, it's better to sell them at a loss than keep them in a warehouse. 10,000 computers at $1000 each is $10 million dollars in inventory that HP allegedly sat on for three years? I know the story talks about the "dregs" meaning HP could scrape together anything it had sitting around, but the reality is they just don't have that much sitting around - just in time inventory, etc.
What is far more likely to happen is that EDS came back and said "can you honor this" and HP pointed to the bottom where it said the quote was good for 90 days. At that point they negotiated a new deal. HP had some systems that weren't selling well, perhaps about to be dumped, and EDS bought them for full price not knowing.
They do a good job of things like hosting and infrastructure (in fact they host most of the airline reservations systems worldwide)
Hopefully you just chose a bad example ;-)
So, seriously, besides your own enlightened opinion, care to cite something meaningful, or do you just want to keep knob-polishing?
Let me be the first to welcome you to Slashdot. Unlike Wikipedia, we don't have to cite things here. You might enjoy learning the difference between an encyclopedia and a discussion forum.