But companies are waking up. In another couple of years, most databases are going to be distributed databases running on networks of PCs, just like web servers and middle ware already are. Sun's server business is going to implode.
There is no evidence for this. True distributed database are very hard to implement and very expensive to buy. Most web servers are the exact opposite of distributed - they run on virtual hosts on a single machine.
Where clustering is implemented, its usually between a few machines, not a huge network of small servers.
The big new thing in the enterprise industry is partitioning - providing very vast and dynamic virtual machines on massively multiprocessing Unix mainframes.
Anyway, got a feeling that Oracle is keeping the tuning stuff so hard because if they made it simple, they would pull the rug away from thousaqnds of poor contractors who specialise in tuning oracle dbs.;-)
Things changed for the better with Oracle 9i and later. You get a huge speed improvement over previous versions without any tuning. Its both fast and simple.
When MySQL has full referential integrity, really good safe transactions and the ability to do 'select thing from table1 where otherthing in (select yetanotherthing from table2)', I'll take a look.
I totally agree. The Java/.Net 'war' reminds me of the so-called battle between Windows NT and UNIX in the early 90s. Huge sales of NT were leading some to suggest that UNIX would die. But, of course, they weren't competing. NT was replacing Windows for Workgroups, Netware and Vines.
True, it is a pittance, but it means Java development at Sun is self-funding. This is a huge difference from Java being a liability for Sun, which is what some suggest.
They aren't planning to stop selling high margin servers. They believe that increased visibility of Sun and Java on the client side will boost server sales.
.NET is still struggling to gain market share on java, thats part of the reason microsoft did this deal, so they can hedge their bets. If.NET fails then they can fall back onto java and vice-versa.
The so-called Java/.NET war is much misunderstood. In most cases they aren't in competition at all..Net is being mostly used as an upgrade for client-side development, with C# replacing VB and C++. It has made little impact on the server side. Java is being mostly used for portable server applications, and for rewriting legacy mainframe/enterprise code. It has made little impact on the client side.
All versions of Oracle took days to install, and I found tuning information to be very difficult to find and comprehend via free or paid-for resources
Eh? I have just installed Oracle 10g on a Linux box. Took 3 hours from start to finish. Detailed documentation about how to do this was available on-line at Oracle.
9i and 10g were able to complete the tests, but at half the speed of MS or PG. Perhaps if we'd hired a consultant they'd have been able to get better numbers, but no one was willing to pay to find out when we had two perfectly good platforms which cost much less.
Bizarre. After the 3-hour install, Oracle was up and running and giving at least a five-fold performance boost over Postgresql, with no fiddling or tuning.
I'm afraid that you seem to be the clueless one. Sun makes money out of J2EE. Implementors of J2EE who want to provide app servers which are compliant have to pay for testing and certification and licences. That includes IBM and BEA for example.
Sun also makes money by selling and supporting products such as Sun Studio that use Java.
Java1 or whatever Sun planed with Iplanet and J2EE is too little and too late. They lost.
Nonsense. Most new IT jobs are Java. Most Java jobs are J2EE. Most server systems are not Microsoft. Virtually no high-end (enterprise level) servers are Microsoft. This is where J2EE is king.
The biggest new market for software is mobile devices. The most important software development platform for these devices is mobile Java (increasingly on embedded Linux).
Sun may have financial problems in the server sales market, but they have wisely expanded their range from Solaris/Sparc to include J2EE and mobile Java licencing. Their long-term prospects are very good indeed.
In terms of installations the vast majority of Java is not server side, but in mobile devices, specifically mobile phones. The Java Games market for mobile phones is huge and is likely to expand exponentially over the next few years.
The "meant to be" statement is nonsense, however..
"Giant meteorites burning through our atmosphere & hitting the ground with such force that it blasts rocks containing live bacteria at escape velocity out past Mars & the asteroids, narrowly avoiding Jupiter's gravity well & gently touching down in a hospitable place on Io - and you call that probable? Like it happens on a daily basis."
Not daily, but every million years or so, yes, actually, this is very likely indeed.
Asteroid collisions and solar wind have been splattering bits of our planet and atmosphere all over the system on a regular basis for billions of years. Bits of other planets rain down on us all the time, in the form of meteor fragments. It is well-established that both living bacteria and spores survive could easily survive such interplanetary trips. If there is life on Mars, Io, Europa or wherever, you can be sure its all the from the same source, and cross-contamination would be a regular occurrence.
Apple had about a full percent of the market more than Linux, I haven't seen any numbers for 2003.
I said that Apple and Linux had at least 3-4% each of desktop sales. Well, 2.8 is around 3%, and a full percent more than that is around 4%.
What is broken about that?
The original post was implying that the Linux desktop market is as small compared to the Mac desktop market as the Mac is to Windows. This is clearly nonsense.
The threat to Microsoft is not the fine. Its restrictions on bundling and opening up APIs, and its likely that these are going to imposed pretty much immediately. The reason these are significant is because of Microsoft's business model. They rely on sales, not services. This means that they need users to buy software and upgrades and they need to constantly expand to new markets. At the moment, these strategies aren't working very well. There are major complaints about support and licencing of existing installations and the attempts to expand look successful at first but are loss-makers: Last year MS server sales made a loss, and X-Box has always been hugely subsidised. Even worse for Microsoft, they are being threatened in their core market, as Linux on the desktop is starting to be taken seriously - especially in the corporate market. Microsoft is desperate to expand into the multimedia market: they want you to use Microsoft TVs, home media centres and portable media players. To do this they have to be able to sell XP embedded and bundle media player. These are key parts of the on-going EU investigation.
Microsoft is a lot less strong than it looks - its all based on share value. If in a few years time desktop share starts to fall due to corporate Linux use, users are even more reluctant to upgrade yet again or purchase 6GHz machines with 4GB memory to run Longhorn, and they have no escape route into other markets because of EU action, they won't be a happy company.
Apple sales figures came from: http://www.macminute.com/2003/03/12/desktopsales. (3.8%) Linux desktop sales: http://www.newsfactor.com/perl/story/22675 .html (suggests 2.8% in 2003).
The Mac desktop market dwarfs Linux the same way that the Windows market dwarfs it.
Actually, No. In terms of sales, both Mac and Linux desktops are each 3-4% of the desktop market. Sales is not a good measure of Linux though, as its freely distributable. Also, a considerable number of desktop systems are purchased as Windows and then have Linux installed, so the Linux could well be at least a few percent higher. Incidentally, this implies that MS Windows sales don't correspond to use.
But it does have a lot to do with Java. There is Java pre-installed, a reasonable number of Java applications and tools, and StarOffice which has Java as the main way to interface with databases and write extensions.
The problem for policy makers is, among other things, how do you spend money on grand space visions when social security is running out of money, public services have little money and millions of Americans are without primary healthcare?
Space travel - even manned space travel - is not expensive. The Apollo missions cost a mere fraction of a percent of gross national product of the USA. Even a manned Mars mission would be inexpensive compared with defence spending. Its just a matter of priorities. If defence spending were cut, even by a little, there would be plenty of money for both public services and space.
in the long term (not that long - think in terms of centuries) manned space travel will be kind of vital, unless someone comes up with effective defences against asteroid impacts, vulcanism, tsunamis and climate change. We have been living through an unusually stable period. Sometime on a timescale of decades rather than centuries a Tunguska-type body is going to hit a city. That will give the budget for a space colony a serious boost, methinks.
Re:Spaceflight as a religious endeavour
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The Sun will destroy life on Earth well before 5 billion years. The Sun has been getting gradually hotter through its lifetime and this heating will result in a range of effects that mean that in around a billion years our planet will be dry and uninhabitable.
The film includes a brief alien abduction, which should mean its even more suited to the good old USA that it was when first released. Religion and Aliens - should appeal to virtually everyone there.
As for custom configs, that was because Linux was not that great a while ago. Now systems like Mandrake and Fedora are usually trivially easy to install.
Serious businesses don't want to buy from 'clone shops'.
Slashdot Mirror
But companies are waking up. In another couple of years, most databases are going to be distributed databases running on networks of PCs, just like web servers and middle ware already are. Sun's server business is going to implode.
There is no evidence for this. True distributed database are very hard to implement and very expensive to buy. Most web servers are the exact opposite of distributed - they run on virtual hosts on a single machine.
Where clustering is implemented, its usually between a few machines, not a huge network of small servers.
The big new thing in the enterprise industry is partitioning - providing very vast and dynamic virtual machines on massively multiprocessing Unix mainframes.
Anyway, got a feeling that Oracle is keeping the tuning stuff so hard because if they made it simple, they would pull the rug away from thousaqnds of poor contractors who specialise in tuning oracle dbs. ;-)
Things changed for the better with Oracle 9i and later. You get a huge speed improvement over previous versions without any tuning. Its both fast and simple.
Note that 'planned' != 'available'.
When MySQL has full referential integrity, really good safe transactions and the ability to do 'select thing from table1 where otherthing in (select yetanotherthing from table2)', I'll take a look.
If you read the website, you will see that the product advertised is not the MySQL database. Its a SAP product distributed by the MySQL organisation.
I totally agree. The Java/.Net 'war' reminds me of the so-called battle between Windows NT and UNIX in the early 90s. Huge sales of NT were leading some to suggest that UNIX would die. But, of course, they weren't competing. NT was replacing Windows for Workgroups, Netware and Vines.
True, it is a pittance, but it means Java development at Sun is self-funding. This is a huge difference from Java being a liability for Sun, which is what some suggest.
They aren't planning to stop selling high margin servers. They believe that increased visibility of Sun and Java on the client side will boost server sales.
.NET is still struggling to gain market share on java, thats part of the reason microsoft did this deal, so they can hedge their bets. If .NET fails then they can fall back onto java and vice-versa.
.Net is being mostly used as an upgrade for client-side development, with C# replacing VB and C++. It has made little impact on the server side. Java is being mostly used for portable server applications, and for rewriting legacy mainframe/enterprise code. It has made little impact on the client side.
The so-called Java/.NET war is much misunderstood. In most cases they aren't in competition at all.
All versions of Oracle took days to install, and I found tuning information to be very difficult to find and comprehend via free or paid-for resources
Eh? I have just installed Oracle 10g on a Linux box. Took 3 hours from start to finish. Detailed documentation about how to do this was available on-line at Oracle.
9i and 10g were able to complete the tests, but at half the speed of MS or PG. Perhaps if we'd hired a consultant they'd have been able to get better numbers, but no one was willing to pay to find out when we had two perfectly good platforms which cost much less.
Bizarre. After the 3-hour install, Oracle was up and running and giving at least a five-fold performance boost over Postgresql, with no fiddling or tuning.
I'm afraid that you seem to be the clueless one. Sun makes money out of J2EE. Implementors of J2EE who want to provide app servers which are compliant have to pay for testing and certification and licences. That includes IBM and BEA for example.
Sun also makes money by selling and supporting products such as Sun Studio that use Java.
Java1 or whatever Sun planed with Iplanet and J2EE is too little and too late. They lost.
Nonsense. Most new IT jobs are Java. Most Java jobs are J2EE. Most server systems are not Microsoft. Virtually no high-end (enterprise level) servers are Microsoft. This is where J2EE is king.
The biggest new market for software is mobile devices. The most important software development platform for these devices is mobile Java (increasingly on embedded Linux).
Sun may have financial problems in the server sales market, but they have wisely expanded their range from Solaris/Sparc to include J2EE and mobile Java licencing. Their long-term prospects are very good indeed.
In terms of installations the vast majority of Java is not server side, but in mobile devices, specifically mobile phones. The Java Games market for mobile phones is huge and is likely to expand exponentially over the next few years.
The "meant to be" statement is nonsense, however..
"Giant meteorites burning through our atmosphere & hitting the ground with such force that it blasts rocks containing live bacteria at escape velocity out past Mars & the asteroids, narrowly avoiding Jupiter's gravity well & gently touching down in a hospitable place on Io - and you call that probable? Like it happens on a daily basis."
Not daily, but every million years or so, yes, actually, this is very likely indeed.
Asteroid collisions and solar wind have been splattering bits of our planet and atmosphere all over the system on a regular basis for billions of years. Bits of other planets rain down on us all the time, in the form of meteor fragments. It is well-established that both living bacteria and spores survive could easily survive such interplanetary trips. If there is life on Mars, Io, Europa or wherever, you can be sure its all the from the same source, and cross-contamination would be a regular occurrence.
Apple had about a full percent of the market more than Linux, I haven't seen any numbers for 2003.
I said that Apple and Linux had at least 3-4% each of desktop sales. Well, 2.8 is around 3%, and a full percent more than that is around 4%.
What is broken about that?
The original post was implying that the Linux desktop market is as small compared to the Mac desktop market as the Mac is to Windows. This is clearly nonsense.
The threat to Microsoft is not the fine. Its restrictions on bundling and opening up APIs, and its likely that these are going to imposed pretty much immediately. The reason these are significant is because of Microsoft's business model. They rely on sales, not services. This means that they need users to buy software and upgrades and they need to constantly expand to new markets. At the moment, these strategies aren't working very well. There are major complaints about support and licencing of existing installations and the attempts to expand look successful at first but are loss-makers: Last year MS server sales made a loss, and X-Box has always been hugely subsidised. Even worse for Microsoft, they are being threatened in their core market, as Linux on the desktop is starting to be taken seriously - especially in the corporate market. Microsoft is desperate to expand into the multimedia market: they want you to use Microsoft TVs, home media centres and portable media players. To do this they have to be able to sell XP embedded and bundle media player. These are key parts of the on-going EU investigation.
Microsoft is a lot less strong than it looks - its all based on share value. If in a few years time desktop share starts to fall due to corporate Linux use, users are even more reluctant to upgrade yet again or purchase 6GHz machines with 4GB memory to run Longhorn, and they have no escape route into other markets because of EU action, they won't be a happy company.
Apple sales figures came from: http://www.macminute.com/2003/03/12/desktopsales. (3.8%)5 .html (suggests 2.8% in 2003).
Linux desktop sales:
http://www.newsfactor.com/perl/story/2267
The Mac desktop market dwarfs Linux the same way that the Windows market dwarfs it.
Actually, No. In terms of sales, both Mac and Linux desktops are each 3-4% of the desktop market. Sales is not a good measure of Linux though, as its freely distributable. Also, a considerable number of desktop systems are purchased as Windows and then have Linux installed, so the Linux could well be at least a few percent higher. Incidentally, this implies that MS Windows sales don't correspond to use.
But it does have a lot to do with Java. There is Java pre-installed, a reasonable number of Java applications and tools, and StarOffice which has Java as the main way to interface with databases and write extensions.
The problem for policy makers is, among other things, how do you spend money on grand space visions when social security is running out of money, public services have little money and millions of Americans are without primary healthcare?
Space travel - even manned space travel - is not expensive. The Apollo missions cost a mere fraction of a percent of gross national product of the USA. Even a manned Mars mission would be inexpensive compared with defence spending. Its just a matter of priorities. If defence spending were cut, even by a little, there would be plenty of money for both public services and space.
It would. A common mistake in Java is to try and compare Strings using == e.g.
if (a == "value")
instead of
if (a.equals("value"))
in the long term (not that long - think in terms of centuries) manned space travel will be kind of vital, unless someone comes up with effective defences against asteroid impacts, vulcanism, tsunamis and climate change. We have been living through an unusually stable period. Sometime on a timescale of decades rather than centuries a Tunguska-type body is going to hit a city. That will give the budget for a space colony a serious boost, methinks.
The Sun will destroy life on Earth well before 5 billion years. The Sun has been getting gradually hotter through its lifetime and this heating will result in a range of effects that mean that in around a billion years our planet will be dry and uninhabitable.
The film includes a brief alien abduction, which should mean its even more suited to the good old USA that it was when first released. Religion and Aliens - should appeal to virtually everyone there.
That was years ago. Things have changed.
As for custom configs, that was because Linux was not that great a while ago. Now systems like Mandrake and Fedora are usually trivially easy to install.
Serious businesses don't want to buy from 'clone shops'.