Where the Playstation and XBox have had long, fruitful lives right up until they were killed off by their next generation siblings (PS2 games still being released TODAY!) the Gamecube has pretty much not had a good game in 2 years, game store simply do not pay attention to it because of that
It lost third part exclusives, which is a big hit. But I bought Lego Star Wars 2 for it very recently, and Fire Emblem and Mario Party 7 (both first party) were released late 2005 (and Zelda TP is comming out any day now, if you don't have a Wii). I can't think of many must have games I got recently for the PS2 either, God of War (PS2); Ratchet Reloaded (PS2); Need for Speed (GC) and Lego Star Wars 2 (GC) are what I played before I got a Wii.
I think because a lot of people had something else as well as a GC, many stores found it more cost efficient to severly limit the GC stock (as people would just buy the Xbox/PS2 versions instead). For instance it took a couple of stores before I found one that had Lego Star Wars 2 for the GC.
Why doesn't Google just put out a Google site validator tool that lists everything that might cause Google's automated stuff to delist a site?
Well, I don't speak for Google but, I assume it's because it's not in their best interests to do that. Google want all of the possible problems removed, they know about some of them... so telling people about the ones they know about is counter productive. Plus they are actively fighting people who are trying to game their system.
A story I heard a long time ago fits here. A not very experienced cryptographer writes a new cyptographic protocol and thinks it's the best thing yet, so he takes it to a more experienced cryptographer and says "this is the best protocol ever, can you find any problems with it?".
The more experienced cryptographer looks at it for a while and says "here's a problem, this makes it completely broken". The less experienced cryptographer is impressed, goes away and then comes back a week later and says "Ok, I've fixed that now. Now it's the best protocol ever, can you find any problems with it?". The more experienced programer looks at it for a bit longer, turns around and writes something on three pieces of paper, folds them all, turns back to the less experienced cryptographer and says "I've written down three problems with your protocol, pick one and don't come back until you've found the other two".
This gen I have basically turned into a nintendo fanboy. Pre launch and post launch I am always trying to hype the console.
Like a lot of people I've basically turned into a Nintendo FanBoi this gen. too. Damn I want decent games not pretty graphics. I just hope Nintendo don't screw it up.
But when I tell people now that they wont see any classic nintendo games till some unannounced time in 2007 it just doesnt drum up much interest.
That's a little unfair you've got, Soloman's Key; Zelda 1; Sonic and Bomberman '93 (5 player). All of which are classics, IMNSHO. I would have prefered they release them all at once (damit, I want ToeJam and Earl)... but I'm pretty sure they are going to make more money overall with this strategy, so I can't really blame them.
They may have to undertake an arduous process of vetting pages, essentially having to second-guess the mind of the cracker in trying to locate a problem that Google knows the exact location of.
Bzzt. The website admin needs to locate one or more problems (== however many the cracker planted), and Google knows the exact location of at least one. "one or more" >= "at least one". If google tells people where their problems are, google will be playing whack a mole for eternity. There are contractors/services that should be able to help them/anyone, google is not one of them.
saying that software is 100% bug free, or not exploitable is a complete fallacy.
all software has bugs in it, there is no such thing as a completely secure application.
Yes, and no. You can't make "bug free" software, because one persons feature (or lack of) is another's bug. However, I believe, you can make secure (read: no remote exploits) software. That's a much smaller scope you have to defend against, and it's mostly testable. Also multiple people have done it, or claim to have done it... including myself.
It would be, for example, surprising to see a new cell phone which is released which has really good function as a phone, huge battery life, and hasn't tried to converge in 10 other devices. It would be surprising purely in the sense that nobody else seems to be doing it.
Well that's not surprising either, there are a few of these. In fact this phone from Motorola was designed that way.
So this generation, I think all consoles win. They each are attempting to break into a different part of the market, and they all have succeeded tremendously.
I doubt that, the PS3 and Xbox 360 look like they are going after basically the same market to me... and most everyone else I've read. Also, much like previous generations, the market just isn't going to support all three well (network effect). So the average person needs to know which is better... because the other two are worth much less, in the long run.
Saying that, Nintendo again have a minor second chance... due to their making money and being a great first party publisher (but it'll be pretty bad for them long term if they fail to be a major player again this generation, IMO).
One obvious fact from this list is that it bears zero correlation to anything useful. Also, I thought the main complaint with the PS3 is that almost all the games are available elsewhere (resistance being the exception)... not that they are bad.
And Soul Caliber beating Zelda TP, is probably mainly due to gamespot not wanting "another" Zelda... and it's upto 96.4 anyway (higher than the above article).
If anyone wants the sure fire way to know which of the current "next-gen" consoles is going to win... wait 12 months, maybe 18-24 to be sure.
I got my Wii home, and wireless bought stuff fine at 11am-noon Sunday. When I tried to go back online at around 3pm it was totally dead (I had to pull the plug from the Wii). Tried it again today (more games are supposed to appear every Monday) and it was fine. I'm not worried, I just wouldn't recommend using it on Dec. 25th (note to any parents, if you want your child to experience Mario/Zelda-1/Soloman's Key... buy/download it before you wrap the Wii). After Dec. this year, I expect it'll fine all the time.
Also, I wasn't expecting much from Wii sports... but it's very enjoyable, even to people who normally don't like sports in any form.
One bad point about the release is the lack of accessories. Esp. the Nunchuck, it looked like they needed roughly 1 per. remote but had nowhere near the supply (almost every game uses the thing -- which is also "nice" in that your controller is like $60). Oi, Nintendo make some more Nunchucks... like NOW!
Rayman was nice, and my Wife liked it a lot, but I kept feeling that it would be much better for Rayman 2 after the developers have worked out how to program the controller well. I'm not sure anyone could do much about that kind of problem though.
Of course you are, you might think it's an OK job... but it's not like you can leave.
If they got the hypothetical 2500$ each for 2 systems, that's 5000$
You're right, I used 2,500 by accident and it looked about right from other calculations I'd done (but this is a significantly more profitable scenario, unrealistically so IMO). But, even if all the numbers above were a given, I still think your time has to be pretty cheap to wait in line 24hrs a day for 4 days... just for a one off 17.36/hr job. And I think most people are getting much closer to $10/hr... although "only" waiting for 48 hrs or so.
now, THAT would have made for a decent profit for a week's worth of waiting in line... imagine if the first 3 people lived together and sold off 2 of them. goddamn. think of what they'd fetch for the autographed system.
Say you get $2,500 each for the comped. normal PS3's. 3 x 4 x 24 = 288 hours. That's $8.68 dollars an hour. In NY city.
I'm not sure how much the autograph would go for, my guess is not much though. Certainly noone buying PS3's on eBay right now is buying it for the autographed version. So I don't see you making money over just working at McDonalds.
I would NOT want to be a Target employee this week. At any level.
Well, personally, I think it's a great thing. My local target had about 10-20 people outside it on Wed. night and it was obvious it just wasn't designed to have a small tent city (my local store told them they would be removed if they put tents up though). This screws the store over in a number of ways, from fire code, general liability and people not going to the store due to the eye sore.
Also, from interviews, most of the people in line seem to be doing this so they can eBay the box immediately for a $1,000 ish profit. Which makes me doubt their intelligence, in theory if they were only waiting all day Wed. and Thur. they're getting $21 per. hour... but that also assumes they were alone (most weren't), they don't get sick, food doesn't cost significantly more etc.
It's seems very likely that if the minimum wage "speculators" had no insentive, it would be better for everyone.
Did Microsoft promote vendor-lockin? I can say surely they did. So what? I can't think of any company that doesn't offer discounts for promoting that company's product over others -- everyone does it, and it is usually better for the customer in terms of price. You don't have to buy from vendors that are "locked in." Jiffy Lube gets a discount for promoting one oil over another, but there are many oil change places that provide many products.
This is not rocket science, and has been explained several times on this site. One has to wonder if you're just trolling or a paid MS shill. Please pay attention this time.
Product bundling is not illegal in itself, it is illegal in certain situations though. For instance if Jiffy Lube was the only place to get oil changes, it would be illegal for them to tie that product (oil change) with a different product (Jiffy Lube Oil). While you could argue that it might be cheaper for the customer in the short term, the problem is that over time there would be much less competition in the second product category which hurts the customer. In the same way microsoft are being punished for illegal product tying, due to them owning the desktop OS that 90% of people use and are forced to continue to use.
The two other "big" cases where that has been stopped, Standard Oil and AT & T, it was obvious after the fact that it was not better for the customer. In a similar way, I find it very hard to believe that MS pricing is realistic of a competitive market.
In the Virginia Senate race incumbent Republican George Allen held a comfortable lead [...] until [...] footage of Allen making a racial slur during a campaign stop.
Err, sorry to break it to you US MSM but informing people that someone is a racists POS, when that is the case and you have evidence to prove it, is not mudslinging. Also note, for future reference, presenting both to stories about "my sky budy says evolution isn't true"... not objective reporting.
They can certainly try, but CentOS has been around for a while and Red Hat are still in business. If you wish to argue that Oracle are going to give better service than Red Hat, on products that only Red Hat control... then please pass the crack pipe around so everyone can have a toke.
It's also confusing to me, that Oracle's main market will be asked if they want to save $500 on the OS when they buy a multi $10,000+ Oracle install. But hey, maybe you're already technically retarded if you are deploying Oracle instead of PostgreSQL so why not one more thing?
The reason for opposing it is because the contents of the estate are assets that have been accrued AFTER taxes have already been taken. ...
the assets [are] double-dipped when the death bell tolls.
They aren't "double-dipped" they are taxed as they move from one person to another, like everything else (although Estate Tax is much less). If I earn $X, on which I paid Tax, if I buy something I pay Sales tax on it and if I pay someone to renovate my house I also pay taxes on that, and they pay income tax... and no one is shouting "OMG tripple-dipping".
The same is true in the other direction, if you take your pay and buy dividend paying stocks you pay taxes on those (although Bush has brought out the "double-dipping" talking point here too, to lower that). If you buy something with your post-taxed income, and sell it later for more you again pay taxes.
From the Tax system's point of view, your death is just a large one off piece of income for someone else (although, again, often Taxed much less than regular income).
One of the ideas behind the Tax system, is that you convince people to do certain things with their money. So you do want certain "loop holes" in income tax, so that people use their income to invest in things to get more income... like buy a house. This creates a stable economy. So although I agree in general that the wealthiest aren't paying as much as they should, removing all the loopholes so people's income couldn't grow easily would be a terrible idea (and if it can grow, then you need some way to make it go down again or the wealthiest get all the money).
If I die and leave a taxable estate, you can bet that the government wants their hands deep in my pockets to extract their pound of flesh, even if there is no actual money changing hands.
Just ask any farmer with land holdings.
There are significant limits that need to be reached before this happens. Even before Bush's proposed removal of the Estate Tax (this is in the millions). Can you provide any actual evidence that farmer's are losing their land as it moves to the next generation (Bush talking points are not data).
The Estate Tax is one of the best progressive Taxes currently, removing it in favour of other taxes would be an insane gift to the very wealthy (no surprise Bush wants it).
Re:Definitely has uses but..
on
Oracle Linux?
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· Score: 1
You are running backup software,
Which is part of Oracle.
You mean taking the snapshots? Sure. But what about streaming it over the network to the backup server... or are you seriously telling me you connect tape drives to your DB server?
remote login (with some form of directory services etc.)
Directory services? Only the DBA should be able to log in to your database server. You might be using SSH, you might be using some external network console.
While it's probably that only DBAs are logging into the production DB server, it's very likely the development server (which is supposed to be configured very closely) can be accessed by the entire development team. Also, you don't just have one DBA. And the DBA's do come and go... and the security people really want the authentication tied to the corp. directory server.
and you are certainly running some monitoring agent sofware.
Which is part of Oracle...
Which is presumably why pretty much every comercial network management app. comes with agents for Oracle? People like to reuse what they know, if you are using Tivoli to monitor every other machine on your network, what's the likelyhood you aren't going to want it on your Oracle server. Not very big, IMO.
You also need storage drivers, possibly a real FS and maybe even something like GFS.
You've got to be joking. Oracle doesn't use an OS-provided filesystem if it can possibly get away with it. It requests access to the raw block device and uses Oracle's own filesystem which is heavily optimised for DB access.
Not at all, if you want a supported OS cluster solution GFS is the way to go. Oracle have it as an approved configuration for a reason.
Yes, again, you can go with an Oracle only OCFS based solution... but then your Oracle cluster is entire different to your mail/dns/web/whatever clustering.
You still didn't talk about the SAN drivers, which are needed even if Oracle goes straight to the block device. And I've also seen a lot of deployments going to a normal FS (even Veritas)... because large companies don't like change, and every other server is configured that way. Again, if companies wanted heavy DB to HW integration at all costs they'd all be buying DB2 on s390s (and some do, for that reason, but not all).
Re:Definitely has uses but..
on
Oracle Linux?
·
· Score: 1
In that case, why go with Linux?
Because even if you are just running Oracle on that machine, you aren't just running Oracle. You are running backup software, remote login (with some form of directory services etc.), likely running maintenance software (in perl/python/ruby/etc.) and you are certainly running some monitoring agent sofware. You also need storage drivers, possibly a real FS and maybe even something like GFS.
Also DB2 has been coming with a custom OS and hardware for years, if people wanted that they'd buy that... Oracle Linux is just crack.
$9,000 a quarter = $36,000 a year. Bond's are giving me about 0.25% a month, my really nice dividend stocks/mutual-funds are giving me about 1% a quarter (but the stocks esp. have growth as well, although some of that is compounding too -- which you'd lose out on). Let's just double those numbers. You'd need $450,000 invested into stocks, or $1,800,000 into bounds.
Note that bonds are high atm., the above doesn't account for inflation and assumes the dividend income is risk free (more true for bonds). If you save your entire working life, you could get there... but it is very non-trivial.
Ok, so what is my solution? Not giving a rats rectum about Windows or Mac limit my rant to Linux (and a bit of BSD). Start with OpenBSD as they are the closest to getting it right. Sure there isn't much in BSD, but what IS there is as reliable as an organization their size can make it. Features be damned, make it work!
I mainly agree with your point, certain aspects of software suck because they aren't prioritized. However your solution is a non-solution, OpenBSD aren't prioritizing good code... just look at openssh, years later and the latest release still uses the C string API (sorry adding strlcpy isn't even close to good enough) and fixes a bunch of DOS attacks.
Hoping that auditting crap will help us produce good code is pure insanity. We need to prioritize decent designs and decent implementations, complete with unit tests and then have them auditted. As I understand it, that's how JPL etc. work (although, I'm not convinced you need their entire process)... and they are basically the only success stories.
So, personally, I'm using Linux. Yeh, it's still crap... but it's open crap used by a lot of people and has a lot of developers. And there are some lights in the darkness, like vsftpd; and-httpd; postfix... that actually seem to be surviving without a patch of the week needed (obvious note, all of which don't use the C string library).
Ubisoft is essentially a Microsoft-only shop these days, it seems. They've pretty much bet the farm on the Xbox, and have so far been the only game shop to make anything really decent for it.
See Amazon 's games list for the Wii, Red Steel is one of the "ones to watch" as well. Of course Ubisoft and ps3 produces nothing, so it's possible MS is trying an "anything but PS3 play" to hurt Sony but that seems too tin foil hat like.
Slashdot Mirror
It lost third part exclusives, which is a big hit. But I bought Lego Star Wars 2 for it very recently, and Fire Emblem and Mario Party 7 (both first party) were released late 2005 (and Zelda TP is comming out any day now, if you don't have a Wii). I can't think of many must have games I got recently for the PS2 either, God of War (PS2); Ratchet Reloaded (PS2); Need for Speed (GC) and Lego Star Wars 2 (GC) are what I played before I got a Wii.
I think because a lot of people had something else as well as a GC, many stores found it more cost efficient to severly limit the GC stock (as people would just buy the Xbox/PS2 versions instead). For instance it took a couple of stores before I found one that had Lego Star Wars 2 for the GC.
Well, I don't speak for Google but, I assume it's because it's not in their best interests to do that. Google want all of the possible problems removed, they know about some of them ... so telling people about the ones they know about is counter productive. Plus they are actively fighting people who are trying to game their system.
A story I heard a long time ago fits here. A not very experienced cryptographer writes a new cyptographic protocol and thinks it's the best thing yet, so he takes it to a more experienced cryptographer and says "this is the best protocol ever, can you find any problems with it?".
The more experienced cryptographer looks at it for a while and says "here's a problem, this makes it completely broken". The less experienced cryptographer is impressed, goes away and then comes back a week later and says "Ok, I've fixed that now. Now it's the best protocol ever, can you find any problems with it?". The more experienced programer looks at it for a bit longer, turns around and writes something on three pieces of paper, folds them all, turns back to the less experienced cryptographer and says "I've written down three problems with your protocol, pick one and don't come back until you've found the other two".
Like a lot of people I've basically turned into a Nintendo FanBoi this gen. too. Damn I want decent games not pretty graphics. I just hope Nintendo don't screw it up.
That's a little unfair you've got, Soloman's Key; Zelda 1; Sonic and Bomberman '93 (5 player). All of which are classics, IMNSHO. I would have prefered they release them all at once (damit, I want ToeJam and Earl) ... but I'm pretty sure they are going to make more money overall with this strategy, so I can't really blame them.
Bzzt. The website admin needs to locate one or more problems (== however many the cracker planted), and Google knows the exact location of at least one. "one or more" >= "at least one". If google tells people where their problems are, google will be playing whack a mole for eternity. There are contractors/services that should be able to help them/anyone, google is not one of them.
Yes, and no. You can't make "bug free" software, because one persons feature (or lack of) is another's bug. However, I believe, you can make secure (read: no remote exploits) software. That's a much smaller scope you have to defend against, and it's mostly testable. Also multiple people have done it, or claim to have done it ... including myself.
Well that's not surprising either, there are a few of these. In fact this phone from Motorola was designed that way.
I doubt that, the PS3 and Xbox 360 look like they are going after basically the same market to me ... and most everyone else I've read. Also, much like previous generations, the market just isn't going to support all three well (network effect). So the average person needs to know which is better ... because the other two are worth much less, in the long run.
Saying that, Nintendo again have a minor second chance ... due to their making money and being a great first party publisher (but it'll be pretty bad for them long term if they fail to be a major player again this generation, IMO).
One obvious fact from this list is that it bears zero correlation to anything useful. Also, I thought the main complaint with the PS3 is that almost all the games are available elsewhere (resistance being the exception) ... not that they are bad.
And Soul Caliber beating Zelda TP, is probably mainly due to gamespot not wanting "another" Zelda ... and it's upto 96.4 anyway (higher than the above article).
If anyone wants the sure fire way to know which of the current "next-gen" consoles is going to win ... wait 12 months, maybe 18-24 to be sure.
Because swapping out a multi hundred dollar purchase for a free download doesn't take much to justify.
I could believe it'll be Feb. before all the pre-orders are filled. But then I got a Wii on launch day, so I don't care :).
I got my Wii home, and wireless bought stuff fine at 11am-noon Sunday. When I tried to go back online at around 3pm it was totally dead (I had to pull the plug from the Wii). Tried it again today (more games are supposed to appear every Monday) and it was fine. I'm not worried, I just wouldn't recommend using it on Dec. 25th (note to any parents, if you want your child to experience Mario/Zelda-1/Soloman's Key ... buy/download it before you wrap the Wii). After Dec. this year, I expect it'll fine all the time.
Also, I wasn't expecting much from Wii sports ... but it's very enjoyable, even to people who normally don't like sports in any form.
One bad point about the release is the lack of accessories. Esp. the Nunchuck, it looked like they needed roughly 1 per. remote but had nowhere near the supply (almost every game uses the thing -- which is also "nice" in that your controller is like $60). Oi, Nintendo make some more Nunchucks ... like NOW!
Rayman was nice, and my Wife liked it a lot, but I kept feeling that it would be much better for Rayman 2 after the developers have worked out how to program the controller well. I'm not sure anyone could do much about that kind of problem though.
Of course you are, you might think it's an OK job ... but it's not like you can leave.
You're right, I used 2,500 by accident and it looked about right from other calculations I'd done (but this is a significantly more profitable scenario, unrealistically so IMO). But, even if all the numbers above were a given, I still think your time has to be pretty cheap to wait in line 24hrs a day for 4 days ... just for a one off 17.36/hr job. And I think most people are getting much closer to $10/hr ... although "only" waiting for 48 hrs or so.
Say you get $2,500 each for the comped. normal PS3's. 3 x 4 x 24 = 288 hours. That's $8.68 dollars an hour. In NY city.
I'm not sure how much the autograph would go for, my guess is not much though. Certainly noone buying PS3's on eBay right now is buying it for the autographed version. So I don't see you making money over just working at McDonalds.
Well, personally, I think it's a great thing. My local target had about 10-20 people outside it on Wed. night and it was obvious it just wasn't designed to have a small tent city (my local store told them they would be removed if they put tents up though). This screws the store over in a number of ways, from fire code, general liability and people not going to the store due to the eye sore.
Also, from interviews, most of the people in line seem to be doing this so they can eBay the box immediately for a $1,000 ish profit. Which makes me doubt their intelligence, in theory if they were only waiting all day Wed. and Thur. they're getting $21 per. hour ... but that also assumes they were alone (most weren't), they don't get sick, food doesn't cost significantly more etc.
It's seems very likely that if the minimum wage "speculators" had no insentive, it would be better for everyone.
This is not rocket science, and has been explained several times on this site. One has to wonder if you're just trolling or a paid MS shill. Please pay attention this time.
Product bundling is not illegal in itself, it is illegal in certain situations though. For instance if Jiffy Lube was the only place to get oil changes, it would be illegal for them to tie that product (oil change) with a different product (Jiffy Lube Oil). While you could argue that it might be cheaper for the customer in the short term, the problem is that over time there would be much less competition in the second product category which hurts the customer. In the same way microsoft are being punished for illegal product tying, due to them owning the desktop OS that 90% of people use and are forced to continue to use.
The two other "big" cases where that has been stopped, Standard Oil and AT & T, it was obvious after the fact that it was not better for the customer. In a similar way, I find it very hard to believe that MS pricing is realistic of a competitive market.
Err, sorry to break it to you US MSM but informing people that someone is a racists POS, when that is the case and you have evidence to prove it, is not mudslinging. Also note, for future reference, presenting both to stories about "my sky budy says evolution isn't true" ... not objective reporting.
Not true, chunked encoding is fine. You just can't use connection close as end of entity marker ... but that's bad anyway.
They can certainly try, but CentOS has been around for a while and Red Hat are still in business. If you wish to argue that Oracle are going to give better service than Red Hat, on products that only Red Hat control ... then please pass the crack pipe around so everyone can have a toke.
It's also confusing to me, that Oracle's main market will be asked if they want to save $500 on the OS when they buy a multi $10,000+ Oracle install. But hey, maybe you're already technically retarded if you are deploying Oracle instead of PostgreSQL so why not one more thing?
They aren't "double-dipped" they are taxed as they move from one person to another, like everything else (although Estate Tax is much less). If I earn $X, on which I paid Tax, if I buy something I pay Sales tax on it and if I pay someone to renovate my house I also pay taxes on that, and they pay income tax ... and no one is shouting "OMG tripple-dipping".
The same is true in the other direction, if you take your pay and buy dividend paying stocks you pay taxes on those (although Bush has brought out the "double-dipping" talking point here too, to lower that). If you buy something with your post-taxed income, and sell it later for more you again pay taxes.
From the Tax system's point of view, your death is just a large one off piece of income for someone else (although, again, often Taxed much less than regular income).
One of the ideas behind the Tax system, is that you convince people to do certain things with their money. So you do want certain "loop holes" in income tax, so that people use their income to invest in things to get more income ... like buy a house. This creates a stable economy. So although I agree in general that the wealthiest aren't paying as much as they should, removing all the loopholes so people's income couldn't grow easily would be a terrible idea (and if it can grow, then you need some way to make it go down again or the wealthiest get all the money).
There are significant limits that need to be reached before this happens. Even before Bush's proposed removal of the Estate Tax (this is in the millions ). Can you provide any actual evidence that farmer's are losing their land as it moves to the next generation (Bush talking points are not data).
The Estate Tax is one of the best progressive Taxes currently, removing it in favour of other taxes would be an insane gift to the very wealthy (no surprise Bush wants it).
You mean taking the snapshots? Sure. But what about streaming it over the network to the backup server ... or are you seriously telling me you connect tape drives to your DB server?
Directory services? Only the DBA should be able to log in to your database server. You might be using SSH, you might be using some external network console.While it's probably that only DBAs are logging into the production DB server, it's very likely the development server (which is supposed to be configured very closely) can be accessed by the entire development team. Also, you don't just have one DBA. And the DBA's do come and go ... and the security people really want the authentication tied to the corp. directory server.
Which is presumably why pretty much every comercial network management app. comes with agents for Oracle? People like to reuse what they know, if you are using Tivoli to monitor every other machine on your network, what's the likelyhood you aren't going to want it on your Oracle server. Not very big, IMO.
Not at all, if you want a supported OS cluster solution GFS is the way to go. Oracle have it as an approved configuration for a reason.
Yes, again, you can go with an Oracle only OCFS based solution ... but then your Oracle cluster is entire different to your mail/dns/web/whatever clustering.
You still didn't talk about the SAN drivers, which are needed even if Oracle goes straight to the block device. And I've also seen a lot of deployments going to a normal FS (even Veritas) ... because large companies don't like change, and every other server is configured that way. Again, if companies wanted heavy DB to HW integration at all costs they'd all be buying DB2 on s390s (and some do, for that reason, but not all).
Because even if you are just running Oracle on that machine, you aren't just running Oracle. You are running backup software, remote login (with some form of directory services etc.), likely running maintenance software (in perl/python/ruby/etc.) and you are certainly running some monitoring agent sofware. You also need storage drivers, possibly a real FS and maybe even something like GFS.
Also DB2 has been coming with a custom OS and hardware for years, if people wanted that they'd buy that ... Oracle Linux is just crack.
$9,000 a quarter = $36,000 a year. Bond's are giving me about 0.25% a month, my really nice dividend stocks/mutual-funds are giving me about 1% a quarter (but the stocks esp. have growth as well, although some of that is compounding too -- which you'd lose out on). Let's just double those numbers. You'd need $450,000 invested into stocks, or $1,800,000 into bounds.
Note that bonds are high atm., the above doesn't account for inflation and assumes the dividend income is risk free (more true for bonds). If you save your entire working life, you could get there ... but it is very non-trivial.
I mainly agree with your point, certain aspects of software suck because they aren't prioritized. However your solution is a non-solution, OpenBSD aren't prioritizing good code ... just look at openssh, years later and the latest release still uses the C string API (sorry adding strlcpy isn't even close to good enough) and fixes a bunch of DOS attacks.
Hoping that auditting crap will help us produce good code is pure insanity. We need to prioritize decent designs and decent implementations, complete with unit tests and then have them auditted. As I understand it, that's how JPL etc. work (although, I'm not convinced you need their entire process) ... and they are basically the only success stories.
So, personally, I'm using Linux. Yeh, it's still crap ... but it's open crap used by a lot of people and has a lot of developers. And there are some lights in the darkness, like vsftpd; and-httpd; postfix ... that actually seem to be surviving without a patch of the week needed (obvious note, all of which don't use the C string library).
See Amazon 's games list for the Wii, Red Steel is one of the "ones to watch" as well. Of course Ubisoft and ps3 produces nothing, so it's possible MS is trying an "anything but PS3 play" to hurt Sony but that seems too tin foil hat like.