99% of the businesses and people on this planet don't need oracle (or sql server or db/2)
That's almost true. The problem is you buy application X and it says it runs on SQL Server, Oracle, or DB/2 as the backend. So to run this application which your organization needs, now you need SQL Server, Oracle, or DB/2. This is really common in large enterprises.
You're right, of course, that many of those ISVs are not using features in Oracle, etc. that are not present in PostGreSQL.
Depends on your religion. I mean, that's really the crux of it, right?
Personally, no, I'd like to live my four score or so and go on to what's next. Cheating death doesn't get you closer to the Big Questions: What is reality? Why are we here? What is the ultimate nature of the universe? What happens after we die? Those are all more interesting questions (explored through either Zen or death) than getting rich or having X more sensory experiences.
I also suspect, from a Buddhist perspective, that getting so attached to your life that you want to live for 1,000 years is not healthy.
Also, living forever puts too much weight on life. Right now, you live a while and you die. Thank God! That really takes the pressure off, doesn't it? No matter how badly you screw up, it's not forever! 1,000-year lives are about the equivalent of forever. No thanks.
I'm not suicidal or depressed - I'm chock full of happiness. But I like life the way it is. And yes, I'm old enough that I'm not saying that because I'm in my 20s.
Other religious viewpoints:
Judaism/Christianity/Islam: If you are inclined towards Western religion, then obviously a 1,000-year life span is contrary to what you profess to desire (heaven, reunion with family, etc.).
Hinduism: If you're a Hindu, this just slows down the cycle of samsara and your quest for spiritual perfection. In other words, your soul will evolve more slowly, so you wouldn't want this.
Norse: I wonder what the Norse would say. They believed that your lifespan is fixed when you're born (by the Norns). It's a string and you can do anything you want but the start (birth) and end (death) are fixed points. This is partly why they were so ferocious in battle - you're not going to die before you are fated to die.
And if you're a Gemini like me, you just never know what to...thhhhhhhuk!
I prefer to say "might" make systems management much easier. The problem with the One Big Box is the same whether it's Sun, HP, Linux, etc.:
Something bad happens to the One Or Two Critical Components. If you know of any open systems box has no one single point of failure, I'd sure like to see it. If you want one big box without a single point of failure, you buy a mainframe. Every open systems big box I'm aware has at least one or ten SPOFs...and I've had the backplane go out on more than one Sun E10K. At that point, you don't lose just one system, you lose everything if you've consolidated to one 64-way box.
It's time to do some hardware maintenance. Good luck coordinating that with 32 different user groups. "Ah, but we can do everything hot with this big box." Always sounds good on paper. I've always run into things for each of them that required a power-off maintenance.
Or perhaps it's not even maintenance...it's just something weird. I had a Big Box once where a power supply made a popping noise and emitted a small puff of smoke. It burned out. Not a big deal in the end - it could be replaced hot - but it was a nervous couple of hours. Versus a cluster where you'd fail over to the spare (yes, I know you could cluster your Two Big Boxes, but we start getting into financial justifications).
ISVs say things like "You want to run XYZ 1.0 on your 64-way box? That's a tier 9 platform and that will be $100,000, thank you." "But I'm only using it on one 2-way partition!" "You might dynamically reconfigure it after we sell you the license and our software isn't that smart, so it's $100K or no deal. And then you can use it on all your partitions!" "But I don't need it on all of them!" You'd be amazed how many prominent software companies tier based on the overall box and don't support virtual partitions, etc. from a licensing perspective. And you're guaranteed to have a user who needs one of their products.
Department B bought SAN gizmo X and your big box is exotic enough that there is no driver for it. They really want SAN gizmo X, so they go off and buy a new 4-way box for themselves. Or they want to run SuSE and SuSE doesn't support your box. Or everyone wants his own gig-E or two and you don't have 128 ports out the back. Etcetera - there are lots of scenarios where you can't get the technical architecture brainiacs to think ahead or you can't get the vendors' stars to line up and you wind up with people who don't want to be on the big box...and pretty soon the data center is proliferating again.
Etcetera...of course, there are just as many if not more problems with the "we'll just build a giant cluster of 64 boxes and scale across it!" approach...I'll rant on that some other day.
It's all trade-offs. And no matter which way you go, you'll discover some truly ugly hidden costs that never seem to show up in those vendor white papers. And none of it works exactly the way it should or you'd like it to. But I'm not jaded or anything;)
There seem to be a few misperceptions here about what's happening.
IT people are not being laid off. Back-office people are being laid off. When you merge two companies, you wind up with two payroll departments, two HR departments, two legal departments, two accounting departments, etc.
Fifty years ago, you mostly kept everyone because everything was done manually. Today, if you have a (computerized) payroll system that can handle 40,000 employees, it can probably handle 55,000. If it can't, you generally add more hardware/IT resources, not more people. The same thing is largely true about most back-office jobs.
So, what do you do with thousands of redundant people? It's not realistic to think that you can retrain them all, or that they all want to be retrained ("hey, mister SPHR-certified HR specialist with 20 years' experience, here's a book on Java!")
The people who usually survive mergers are (a) people in the acquiring company, (b) people in the acquired company who are responsible for making/developing the product, and (c) good salespeople in the acquired company. That is certainly the pattern here.
I'm not saying that Oracle/Ellison is some lilly-white invisible-glad-hand or that the Oracle-Peoplesoft merger is a good thing...just saying that is the way it works in business and this wasn't really any surprise. This notion that "Wall Street loves job cuts" or "corporate America is so short-sighted" etc. doesn't survive that "well, what would you suggest instead?" test.
Wasn't it the "Mythical Man Month" that said (I'm paraphrasing from memory), "Plan to do it twice, because you're going to do it twice."
Beyond a certain point, it's hard to completely pre-plan large IT projects. The only way to do them is to do large-scale mockups (aka the first attempt).
I've never seen a "wicki" that did any of that either. (Yeah, I know it's a spelling flame, but still, you're pretty darn clueless).
None of the wicki interfaces I've seen handle table and table formatting at all.
To pick two prominent wikis at random, MediaWiki and Twiki both do tables.
None of the wicki interfaces I've seen handle styles. You do know what css is, right?
To pick two prominent wikis at random, MediaWiki and Twiki both do css.
None of the wicki interfaces I've seen let experts enter any and all html code, php, javascript, perl, etc., that the user might need to when designing the web page.
To pick...oh, never mind.
Do you understand what templates are in real web page design or are you just stupid?
Yes, someone in this thread sure comes across as stupid and ill-informed...
I'm really disappointed in the new Google Groups Beta. So are a lot of people (you might want to read Slashdot).
Specifically:
- search by date is EXTREMELY USEFUL.
- what's up with hiding e-mail addresses? Stupid.
- I really miss the interactivity and features of the old Google Groups. For example, I could click on the author's name and see all of his/her posts...now I can't do that.
- the new interface is way too cluttered. There's not even a "next" at the bottom of the article view.
To be honest, I really miss DejaNews. Google Groups was a less feature-rich substitute (no MyDeja, no killfiles, etc.) Google Groups Beta is a disaster that will send me looking for some other USENET archive...
"as offensive to the senses as a three day old mackerel". (For non-lawyers, yes, that is the legal standard used. The precedent in question is a funny read.)
Do you have a link that goes into that? I couldn't google anything up and can always use funny things to read.
I would anticipate objections from lawyers thought, because they wouldn't be able to see the reactions of jurors and modify their presentations in real-time. In well-funded defenses, someone is always watching the jury, and there is much strategizing about how #2 The Soccer Mom looked bored during witness X's testimony, etc., and they change their questioning, arguments, etc. as time goes along.
Also, that would be one helluva editing session..."Your honor I move that the 16.5 seconds between timestamp X and timestamp Y be ruled inadmissible..."
Mind you, those are bullshit reasons and your idea is better, but that is the sort of objection that will be brought up.
Not to mention what 53,048 sq km would cost...that's something like 56 million acres. Can you buy land for $1,000 an acre? If so, where do you get $56 billion? What if it's $10,000 an acre? Now you're talking a half-trillion dollars in land...
Something tells me this is not included in the calcuations...
On the contrary, the E450 was one of Sun's greatest commercial successes. Perfect meeting of the market demand at the time (mid-range box with lots of I/O) with engineering.
4 E450s is not exactly a large sample. I was running a data center with hundreds of them in the 99-00-01 time frame and they performed admirably.
In fact, I think that was Sun's high-water mark...
On the contrary, it had several reproducible results, immediately, at MIT, Texas A&M, and many others.
No, it didn't. MIT retracted when they realized the errors in their calorimetry. By Texas A&M I assume you mean Bockris, you who is a crank with tenure. Regardless, there were some spotty "confirmations" - but no sustainable experimental confirmation. The essence of science is that I can write down how to do an experiment and you can go and do it and we get the same results. No one in cold fusion was getting five or even four sigma events based on recreating the P&F paper or anything else - they'd do 1000 experiments and in one of them there was an anomaly and that was a "confirmation".
The history of cold fusion really needs some clarification. It was really discovered in 1986, not 1989, by Steven Jones of BYU.
Jones was working on peizonuclear fusion and his lab books make it pretty obvious that he glommed on to P&F's work after hearing about it.
Their avenue of approach focused a lot on calorimetry, while Dr. Jones had been focusing on looking for nuclear products (neutrons, tritium, helium-3, etc).
Yeah, from inside volcanos...uh-huh...
That was to be on March 24th, 1989. Instead, Pons and Fleischman had a press conference on March 23rd, completely stabbing Jones in the back.
True enough. Pons is slime - he later tried to bilk the state of Utah for hundreds of thousands in special equipment to do CF experiments...which conveniently only his company made.
They had a data chart which showed an energy spike at 2.5 MeV, and when somebody pointed out to them that it should have been 2.2 MeV for a d+d reaction, they adjusted the chart downward for their next presentation.
Exactly - it's fraud.
Gratefully, there have been quite a few who decided to continue working in the field. Researchers from Los Alamos, MIT, Naval Research, all over Japan and Italy, BYU, for a good while Texas A&M (there was some controversy there),
What a charitable way to put it! Dr. Bockris was walking around spiking cells with tritium to get positive results...
Bwaaaahahahaha! The reason cold fusion got the "cold shoulder" is that it has no reproducible results and is very bad science. If you can't reproduce results and publish your work in a peer-reviewed journal, you are not doing science.
The only people who claim there is a conspiracy to shush up cold fusion are crackpots.
The physics community would have carried Pons and Fleischmann on sedan chairs to Sweden if they'd really discovered cold fusion. But they didn't, and they ignored all scientific process. They refused to share details of their experiment and refused to acknowledge errors in their experiments.
Read Taubes' _Cold Fusion_ or Huizenga's book for a clear understanding.
Experimenting on animals to cure serious human diseases is one thing...experimenting on them just to satisfy curiosity, justify research dollars, get written up in a journal, etc. is quite something different.
Slashdot Mirror
Good Lord. She looks like she should be reaping souls or something.
That's almost true. The problem is you buy application X and it says it runs on SQL Server, Oracle, or DB/2 as the backend. So to run this application which your organization needs, now you need SQL Server, Oracle, or DB/2. This is really common in large enterprises.
You're right, of course, that many of those ISVs are not using features in Oracle, etc. that are not present in PostGreSQL.
Personally, no, I'd like to live my four score or so and go on to what's next. Cheating death doesn't get you closer to the Big Questions: What is reality? Why are we here? What is the ultimate nature of the universe? What happens after we die? Those are all more interesting questions (explored through either Zen or death) than getting rich or having X more sensory experiences.
I also suspect, from a Buddhist perspective, that getting so attached to your life that you want to live for 1,000 years is not healthy.
Also, living forever puts too much weight on life. Right now, you live a while and you die. Thank God! That really takes the pressure off, doesn't it? No matter how badly you screw up, it's not forever! 1,000-year lives are about the equivalent of forever. No thanks.
I'm not suicidal or depressed - I'm chock full of happiness. But I like life the way it is. And yes, I'm old enough that I'm not saying that because I'm in my 20s.
Other religious viewpoints:
A great admin frontend. I'm still waiting for a great, easy-to-use frontend builder like Microsoft Access.
I prefer to say "might" make systems management much easier. The problem with the One Big Box is the same whether it's Sun, HP, Linux, etc.:
Etcetera...of course, there are just as many if not more problems with the "we'll just build a giant cluster of 64 boxes and scale across it!" approach...I'll rant on that some other day.
It's all trade-offs. And no matter which way you go, you'll discover some truly ugly hidden costs that never seem to show up in those vendor white papers. And none of it works exactly the way it should or you'd like it to. But I'm not jaded or anything ;)
IT people are not being laid off. Back-office people are being laid off. When you merge two companies, you wind up with two payroll departments, two HR departments, two legal departments, two accounting departments, etc.
Fifty years ago, you mostly kept everyone because everything was done manually. Today, if you have a (computerized) payroll system that can handle 40,000 employees, it can probably handle 55,000. If it can't, you generally add more hardware/IT resources, not more people. The same thing is largely true about most back-office jobs.
So, what do you do with thousands of redundant people? It's not realistic to think that you can retrain them all, or that they all want to be retrained ("hey, mister SPHR-certified HR specialist with 20 years' experience, here's a book on Java!")
The people who usually survive mergers are (a) people in the acquiring company, (b) people in the acquired company who are responsible for making/developing the product, and (c) good salespeople in the acquired company. That is certainly the pattern here.
I'm not saying that Oracle/Ellison is some lilly-white invisible-glad-hand or that the Oracle-Peoplesoft merger is a good thing...just saying that is the way it works in business and this wasn't really any surprise. This notion that "Wall Street loves job cuts" or "corporate America is so short-sighted" etc. doesn't survive that "well, what would you suggest instead?" test.
Beyond a certain point, it's hard to completely pre-plan large IT projects. The only way to do them is to do large-scale mockups (aka the first attempt).
One EMP pulse and you're disarmed. Thanks, but we're not interested.
None of the wicki interfaces I've seen handle table and table formatting at all.
To pick two prominent wikis at random, MediaWiki and Twiki both do tables.
None of the wicki interfaces I've seen handle styles. You do know what css is, right?
To pick two prominent wikis at random, MediaWiki and Twiki both do css.
None of the wicki interfaces I've seen let experts enter any and all html code, php, javascript, perl, etc., that the user might need to when designing the web page.
To pick...oh, never mind.
Do you understand what templates are in real web page design or are you just stupid?
Yes, someone in this thread sure comes across as stupid and ill-informed...
Did not do either of these things to me, on three different PCs.
Uh...like the rest of the Internet is so different ;)
Good idea. Here's mine:
I'm really disappointed in the new Google Groups Beta. So are a lot of people (you might want to read Slashdot).
Specifically:
- search by date is EXTREMELY USEFUL.
- what's up with hiding e-mail addresses? Stupid.
- I really miss the interactivity and features of the old Google Groups. For example, I could click on the author's name and see all of his/her posts...now I can't do that.
- the new interface is way too cluttered. There's not even a "next" at the bottom of the article view.
To be honest, I really miss DejaNews. Google Groups was a less feature-rich substitute (no MyDeja, no killfiles, etc.) Google Groups Beta is a disaster that will send me looking for some other USENET archive...
Really, I beg you not to do this.
-Drew
SUN is Sunoco, you fathead. You want SUNW.
"Enterprise-level games"...you're killing me here...
Do you have a link that goes into that? I couldn't google anything up and can always use funny things to read.
No, Oregon doesn't.
All voting in Oregon is via mail. There are no voting booths or voting machines of any kind.
Particularly because you can't remove it from your home page. Unfortunately, my bugzilla to fix this was ignored.
I would anticipate objections from lawyers thought, because they wouldn't be able to see the reactions of jurors and modify their presentations in real-time. In well-funded defenses, someone is always watching the jury, and there is much strategizing about how #2 The Soccer Mom looked bored during witness X's testimony, etc., and they change their questioning, arguments, etc. as time goes along.
Also, that would be one helluva editing session..."Your honor I move that the 16.5 seconds between timestamp X and timestamp Y be ruled inadmissible..."
Mind you, those are bullshit reasons and your idea is better, but that is the sort of objection that will be brought up.
Something tells me this is not included in the calcuations...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goatse.cx
4 E450s is not exactly a large sample. I was running a data center with hundreds of them in the 99-00-01 time frame and they performed admirably.
In fact, I think that was Sun's high-water mark...
No, it didn't. MIT retracted when they realized the errors in their calorimetry. By Texas A&M I assume you mean Bockris, you who is a crank with tenure. Regardless, there were some spotty "confirmations" - but no sustainable experimental confirmation. The essence of science is that I can write down how to do an experiment and you can go and do it and we get the same results. No one in cold fusion was getting five or even four sigma events based on recreating the P&F paper or anything else - they'd do 1000 experiments and in one of them there was an anomaly and that was a "confirmation".
The history of cold fusion really needs some clarification. It was really discovered in 1986, not 1989, by Steven Jones of BYU.
Jones was working on peizonuclear fusion and his lab books make it pretty obvious that he glommed on to P&F's work after hearing about it.
Their avenue of approach focused a lot on calorimetry, while Dr. Jones had been focusing on looking for nuclear products (neutrons, tritium, helium-3, etc).
Yeah, from inside volcanos...uh-huh...
That was to be on March 24th, 1989. Instead, Pons and Fleischman had a press conference on March 23rd, completely stabbing Jones in the back.
True enough. Pons is slime - he later tried to bilk the state of Utah for hundreds of thousands in special equipment to do CF experiments...which conveniently only his company made.
They had a data chart which showed an energy spike at 2.5 MeV, and when somebody pointed out to them that it should have been 2.2 MeV for a d+d reaction, they adjusted the chart downward for their next presentation. Exactly - it's fraud. Gratefully, there have been quite a few who decided to continue working in the field. Researchers from Los Alamos, MIT, Naval Research, all over Japan and Italy, BYU, for a good while Texas A&M (there was some controversy there),
What a charitable way to put it! Dr. Bockris was walking around spiking cells with tritium to get positive results...
The only people who claim there is a conspiracy to shush up cold fusion are crackpots.
The physics community would have carried Pons and Fleischmann on sedan chairs to Sweden if they'd really discovered cold fusion. But they didn't, and they ignored all scientific process. They refused to share details of their experiment and refused to acknowledge errors in their experiments.
Read Taubes' _Cold Fusion_ or Huizenga's book for a clear understanding.
...yeah, dude, I remember that scene from Deus Ex, it was cool...
Experimenting on animals to cure serious human diseases is one thing...experimenting on them just to satisfy curiosity, justify research dollars, get written up in a journal, etc. is quite something different.