No, the fees are high because it costs a lot to keep Larry Ellison in jets and new Pacific islands. Oracle is a rapacious, money-gobbling machine of a company. Every upgrade, bug fix, OS update, dev or test server costs large money. If you run the database on a VM (besides the one Oracle owns), you have to license for every processor on the VM server, even if your DB only uses one core. They send actual auditors to your site to check your license compliance. They like to "partner" with their customers, such that the more money you make, the more you pay Oracle corporation-- like privatizing taxes.
Their sales force speaks a strange language. I dare you to find out what a copy of Weblogic (oh wait, I mean Fusion Middleware), BI (oh, no that's Discoverer), and a database (errr... 11g? 12c?) will cost, or to come up with how many cores/ processors/ CPU's there are in your server, and which have to be licensed. It's basically gangster language. And once you acquire some Oracle products, you're locked in. Update a server? ka-ching! Operating system update? ka-ching. Upgrading Weblogic forced you into upgrading app server? ka-ching. Adding a service pack to your windows server? ka-ching. Windows update broke the 64 bit keys that your old copy of Enterprise Manager tries to load in the browser? ka-ching.
I like their stuff, but I very much hate their business model.
Watch out if you're running Oracle on VMware. Everything works fine except the Oracle licensing. Got a VMware server with 32 processors? If you run Oracle on a VM hosted by that server, then you have to license all 32 cores (we're in the six figures here), even if the specific VM is only using 2 cores!. And they audit your usage. The work around is you can license the Oracle VM software to avoid that problem.
The biggest innovations Oracle has made in the last 10-15 years is how many ways they can slide their tentacles into your wallet. They don't want customers, they want "partners." Their pricing model is "How much money do you expect to make/save by using our product? That's the price." One huge, but difficult-to-quantify, feature of PostgreSQL is the fact of not having to be "partnered" again and again by Larry Ellison.
It's easy enough to agree with your sentiment, but I don't believe the US today resembles the USSR (before it was no longer). The problems with the US today are a direct result of the explosive growth of unfettered greed capitalism. Pervasive electronic eavesdropping isn't used to enhance "security" but to protect capital and IP, and more generally the economic interests of the elites. Security is just another industry for them, witness StRATFOR Security (or whatever their name is) who were so severely pwned by kid-hackers. They're not there to provide security (they clearly don't know anything about it), they're there because that's where the big checks come from.
The Soviet Union used horrible excesses in their attempt rectify centuries of gross economic inequality by trying to move economic power from the top to the bottom, and it was an utter, tragic failure. The private power structure of the US today is engaged in moving capital the other way-- to soak the lower and middle classes (until they're paupers) and move their assets back up to the top 400 families. What those venomous leaches want is for everyone to work at below minimum-wage jobs for their entire lives, always beholden to their employers (for both their paycheck and their health insurance), and for their communities to crumble to nothing-- cut off infrastructure, education, and relief and services for the poor. Detroit is, for the US elite, a success story. And they now own all three branches of the government, and even more importantly, they own the press.
It's fine to believe the excesses of the USSR are being repeated in the US, but it's misleading, and probably not useful to equate them. It just makes it harder to discern who the true enemy is.
The only tricky part is finding a job you will like.
I believe there's a rule in the US, wherein if someone likes their job that indicates a management mistake. Whenever my job starts to not suck, management messes with it so it sucks again.
Ah, but the database is the soil. And it's Net Scale. And with Oracle, the price of your license depends on how much you intend to earn from said license. And they will audit you. And you will be forever version bound and platform bound and tied to one processor size, because to change any of those you need more licenses. Please read the license carefully, then Click here to install. And be sure to check out our special deal on the Ask search bar for your browser. Oh wait, we must update your java client. Click here to accept agreement, then click install. You may be required to restart your computer after installation. Java runs on 4 billion devices. Larry Ellison must pwns all!
I don't know if Oracle is a state of mind or a social disease.
Ellison didn't invent the Oracle database, he bought the efforts of those who did. Larry Ellison is the same as every Afghan warlord, Saudi princeling, or Russian oligarch-- a twisted parasite on the planet. His efforts did not create productivity, they stole productivity.
More and more legislation is being written to guarantee profit for business ventures. Look at the Monsanto Protection legislation that was recently tacked onto the budget. When profits are guaranteed by legislation, competition no longer functions as a control to efficiency.
Privately financed infrastructure projects! Ahh, in the 18th century, that was called royalty. The lord of the manor controlled everything, paid tribute to more powerful entities, and exercised his droite de seigneur over the realm. This is all lovely until the lord succumbs to the moral cancer that invariably comes with that level of power, or until their finances fall apart and another mobster (err, I mean titled landowner) takes over. At that point Lanai will become a miniature, tropical Detroit.
This is disgusting, and it's probably worthwhile to point out that Oracle is among the largest and most successful gangster-based business enterprises on the planet. Go ahead and buy an Oracle product-- it will never go away. Get used to the license audit shake-downs, the version lock-in, the upgrades that cost more than the now-obsolete earlier version. Oracle embodies everything that's wrong with late-empire monopoly capitalism, and Larry Ellison is the grinning goof-ball poster boy.
And for the record, Oracle makes a fine piece of database software-- software so good, it finances Larry's wildest dreams.
This is not unlike 3D video, a sort-of-possibly-good feature that requires upgrades to a large subset of your electronics. I have some old but serviceable stereo components, and my TV is 5 years old, which is old in the TV industry as it is-- heck, the remote control on the TV doesn't even work, so changing inputs is tricky. Most of my stuff will not work with this rig. Airport is similar. It kind of works, with lots of gotchas (no oggs in your library, right? And that iPod Touch is too old to stay connected after it goes to sleep, and then requires a power-off reset, right?).
This new feature is an invitation to upgrade a bunch of tech. Of course, logically all that tech needs to be refreshed every 5 years or so anyway. I don't think the motion input is a compelling feature, and hence not worth the investment. I don't use Siri on my phone either. Maybe I'm just too old to learn a new input method.
Notice they've got Oracle in that list. This vendor list is a nasty bunch of international billionaires-- individuals and corporations. These are the kind of companies who want to "partner" with you if you use their products-- one doesn't "buy" Oracle (or IBM or BT) products, one carries them like an STD. Note the three local contractors and sub-contractors who sell to the government, and then sub out to a bunch of bloated global corporations who have no (non-monetary) interest whatsoever in the project working, and probably won't repatriate the profits. This does keep the salaries in the field high. And the government has no choice but to bid out another contract for a plum software project right soon. There's a lot more partnering to do.
You're missing the fact the government and the corporations are practically the same entity now. There's an open door between mid-level government bureaucrats, mostly regulators, who go to work for private firms, and their co-workers who.go back into government. Many people in oil, pharma, and finance, especially banking, spend time as regulators, and then go to work for the companies they previously regulated. Private individuals can't really fight corporations (viz. the oil spill in Arkansas). Only government is powerful enough to control the corporations, and smaller government will make it weaker in that regard.
This is a fine nugget of philosophical truthiness, originally coined by the carnival huckster P.T. Barnum. I have some gnawing reservations regarding the advisability of adopting it as the philosophical underpinning for my vision of the future. YMMV
what's different between an ug concert and some guys playing cello at your daughters graduation party?
The difference is measurable as decibels measured at some distance from the event. Most people are consistently against being woken by loud amplified music, no matter what the genre. The cellos playing at the lawn party down the street could not wake me up, unless they were amped and cranked, in which case I'd be disturbed. This kind of argument has fueled a generational divide for more than half a century, with the old people saying "turn it down," and the youngsters taking that as a sleight to their favorite band, musical genre, or lifestyle. My (now grown) children went through this, I did it when I was a younger, and my father did too. Before that, I guess there wasn't a lot of amplification, so I assume they had different issues.
This comment should be modded up. Impromptu concerts / house parties are very disruptive in residential areas, and the disruption is caused not just by the music, it's caused by the people and cars and the drugs. It's easy to forget, there are first responders sleeping, and people who have invested time and money to keep their neighborhood tidy and safe, who are very averse to getting woken up, having their lawns dug up by bad drivers, and having deal with the litter and general mayhem that accompanies any large crowd. If concerts are actually being closed down, that means the undercover work is at least partially successful, the egregious examples cited in the TFA notwithstanding. No matter how one feels about freedom and the police state, the fact is the police's job is to address this kind of disruption. This method seems low cost, and not too invasive. And much more cost effective than a massive turnout of force (in all their new TSA regalia) to shut down an event in progress.
Tell that to Aaron Swartz. Even if the protection mechanism doesn't work, or isn't implemented, it's still hacking in the eyes of law enforcement. And also note, even if you win you'll spend every cent you have on lawyers.
Oh, the SDS guy. OK then. And no one has explained how Mr. Ayers was not interested in the violent overthrow of the government, he was interested in resistance to specific injustices, specifically the draft and the Viet Nam war in general. Then as now the arms were nearly always in the hands of the police. He was never charged or convicted of any crime-- his only crime was thinking (and writing and speaking) against the status quo. He's now dragged out as a symbol of violent insurrection by the right because the media knows almost no one will bother to look him up to find out the real story anyway. Besides, no one is interested in Ayers-- he's been a college professor for 30 years-- only in his relationship to Obama, which was slight, and the opportunity to use an unfair and incorrect innuendo to besmirch the President.
Sorry to nit-pick, but it's important to be informed.
Are you referring to the right Rev. Jeremiah Wright? Because Rev. Wright is an honorable, articulate, educated, honest, and forthright man, who is at least second generation military, served as a Marine and a Navy corpsman, has more academic degrees than most Tea-Baggers have fingers on their right hand, is a college professor and runs a church. The fact that the fucktard-right-- errr, I mean mainstream media-- in this country can't tell the difference between an intelligent man's hyperbole (used to illustrate a point about the history of racial oppression) and violent insurrection-- does not condemn the man.
And if not Rev. Wright, then who are you talking about?
Ms. Rand would have had a better time of it in the USA if she hadn't insisted on writing children's books. Eventually her audience grew up. Oh wait, a few stayed back.
Thank you for proving definitively that my experience has been wrong for all these years. I never got to enjoy that online world of the past, blessed with all that lovely non-shitty and bloat-free "user created content," when browsers could cope with whatever was posted, and search engines only returned relevant results. For so long, my experience was just the opposite. It's a relief to finally realize I was living in an alternate universe.
I was entertained that Larry Ellison attached crapware to their security updates, which have to be specifically turned off in the installation, and their stupid toolbar turns off popup windows, but that disables Oracle's Discoverer product, and it works differently than the IE popup blocker, by not looking for user configurable exceptions. So for pennies per user, Oracle collects from the toolbar makers for every installation. And they're alienating IT departments. I hate working with them-- they're more mafia-like every year. End of complaint.
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No, the fees are high because it costs a lot to keep Larry Ellison in jets and new Pacific islands. Oracle is a rapacious, money-gobbling machine of a company. Every upgrade, bug fix, OS update, dev or test server costs large money. If you run the database on a VM (besides the one Oracle owns), you have to license for every processor on the VM server, even if your DB only uses one core. They send actual auditors to your site to check your license compliance. They like to "partner" with their customers, such that the more money you make, the more you pay Oracle corporation-- like privatizing taxes.
Their sales force speaks a strange language. I dare you to find out what a copy of Weblogic (oh wait, I mean Fusion Middleware), BI (oh, no that's Discoverer), and a database (errr... 11g? 12c?) will cost, or to come up with how many cores/ processors/ CPU's there are in your server, and which have to be licensed. It's basically gangster language. And once you acquire some Oracle products, you're locked in. Update a server? ka-ching! Operating system update? ka-ching. Upgrading Weblogic forced you into upgrading app server? ka-ching. Adding a service pack to your windows server? ka-ching. Windows update broke the 64 bit keys that your old copy of Enterprise Manager tries to load in the browser? ka-ching.
I like their stuff, but I very much hate their business model.
Watch out if you're running Oracle on VMware. Everything works fine except the Oracle licensing. Got a VMware server with 32 processors? If you run Oracle on a VM hosted by that server, then you have to license all 32 cores (we're in the six figures here), even if the specific VM is only using 2 cores!. And they audit your usage. The work around is you can license the Oracle VM software to avoid that problem.
The biggest innovations Oracle has made in the last 10-15 years is how many ways they can slide their tentacles into your wallet. They don't want customers, they want "partners." Their pricing model is "How much money do you expect to make/save by using our product? That's the price." One huge, but difficult-to-quantify, feature of PostgreSQL is the fact of not having to be "partnered" again and again by Larry Ellison.
It's easy enough to agree with your sentiment, but I don't believe the US today resembles the USSR (before it was no longer). The problems with the US today are a direct result of the explosive growth of unfettered greed capitalism. Pervasive electronic eavesdropping isn't used to enhance "security" but to protect capital and IP, and more generally the economic interests of the elites. Security is just another industry for them, witness StRATFOR Security (or whatever their name is) who were so severely pwned by kid-hackers. They're not there to provide security (they clearly don't know anything about it), they're there because that's where the big checks come from.
The Soviet Union used horrible excesses in their attempt rectify centuries of gross economic inequality by trying to move economic power from the top to the bottom, and it was an utter, tragic failure. The private power structure of the US today is engaged in moving capital the other way-- to soak the lower and middle classes (until they're paupers) and move their assets back up to the top 400 families. What those venomous leaches want is for everyone to work at below minimum-wage jobs for their entire lives, always beholden to their employers (for both their paycheck and their health insurance), and for their communities to crumble to nothing-- cut off infrastructure, education, and relief and services for the poor. Detroit is, for the US elite, a success story. And they now own all three branches of the government, and even more importantly, they own the press.
It's fine to believe the excesses of the USSR are being repeated in the US, but it's misleading, and probably not useful to equate them. It just makes it harder to discern who the true enemy is.
I would wager Salesforce negotiated a better price on their annual Oracle license renewals in exchange for plugging the product with Larry. Kaching!
The only tricky part is finding a job you will like.
I believe there's a rule in the US, wherein if someone likes their job that indicates a management mistake. Whenever my job starts to not suck, management messes with it so it sucks again.
Ah, but the database is the soil. And it's Net Scale. And with Oracle, the price of your license depends on how much you intend to earn from said license. And they will audit you. And you will be forever version bound and platform bound and tied to one processor size, because to change any of those you need more licenses. Please read the license carefully, then Click here to install. And be sure to check out our special deal on the Ask search bar for your browser. Oh wait, we must update your java client. Click here to accept agreement, then click install. You may be required to restart your computer after installation. Java runs on 4 billion devices. Larry Ellison must pwns all!
I don't know if Oracle is a state of mind or a social disease.
Ellison didn't invent the Oracle database, he bought the efforts of those who did. Larry Ellison is the same as every Afghan warlord, Saudi princeling, or Russian oligarch-- a twisted parasite on the planet. His efforts did not create productivity, they stole productivity.
More and more legislation is being written to guarantee profit for business ventures. Look at the Monsanto Protection legislation that was recently tacked onto the budget. When profits are guaranteed by legislation, competition no longer functions as a control to efficiency.
Privately financed infrastructure projects! Ahh, in the 18th century, that was called royalty. The lord of the manor controlled everything, paid tribute to more powerful entities, and exercised his droite de seigneur over the realm. This is all lovely until the lord succumbs to the moral cancer that invariably comes with that level of power, or until their finances fall apart and another mobster (err, I mean titled landowner) takes over. At that point Lanai will become a miniature, tropical Detroit.
This is disgusting, and it's probably worthwhile to point out that Oracle is among the largest and most successful gangster-based business enterprises on the planet. Go ahead and buy an Oracle product-- it will never go away. Get used to the license audit shake-downs, the version lock-in, the upgrades that cost more than the now-obsolete earlier version. Oracle embodies everything that's wrong with late-empire monopoly capitalism, and Larry Ellison is the grinning goof-ball poster boy.
And for the record, Oracle makes a fine piece of database software-- software so good, it finances Larry's wildest dreams.
This is not unlike 3D video, a sort-of-possibly-good feature that requires upgrades to a large subset of your electronics. I have some old but serviceable stereo components, and my TV is 5 years old, which is old in the TV industry as it is-- heck, the remote control on the TV doesn't even work, so changing inputs is tricky. Most of my stuff will not work with this rig. Airport is similar. It kind of works, with lots of gotchas (no oggs in your library, right? And that iPod Touch is too old to stay connected after it goes to sleep, and then requires a power-off reset, right?).
This new feature is an invitation to upgrade a bunch of tech. Of course, logically all that tech needs to be refreshed every 5 years or so anyway. I don't think the motion input is a compelling feature, and hence not worth the investment. I don't use Siri on my phone either. Maybe I'm just too old to learn a new input method.
Notice they've got Oracle in that list. This vendor list is a nasty bunch of international billionaires-- individuals and corporations. These are the kind of companies who want to "partner" with you if you use their products-- one doesn't "buy" Oracle (or IBM or BT) products, one carries them like an STD. Note the three local contractors and sub-contractors who sell to the government, and then sub out to a bunch of bloated global corporations who have no (non-monetary) interest whatsoever in the project working, and probably won't repatriate the profits. This does keep the salaries in the field high. And the government has no choice but to bid out another contract for a plum software project right soon. There's a lot more partnering to do.
The most important thing is to keep the investigators busy and let them have plenty of investigating to do.
You're missing the fact the government and the corporations are practically the same entity now. There's an open door between mid-level government bureaucrats, mostly regulators, who go to work for private firms, and their co-workers who.go back into government. Many people in oil, pharma, and finance, especially banking, spend time as regulators, and then go to work for the companies they previously regulated. Private individuals can't really fight corporations (viz. the oil spill in Arkansas). Only government is powerful enough to control the corporations, and smaller government will make it weaker in that regard.
This is a fine nugget of philosophical truthiness, originally coined by the carnival huckster P.T. Barnum. I have some gnawing reservations regarding the advisability of adopting it as the philosophical underpinning for my vision of the future. YMMV
Vista was not as bad as Millenium Edition.
And both of those were better than Bob.
what's different between an ug concert and some guys playing cello at your daughters graduation party?
The difference is measurable as decibels measured at some distance from the event. Most people are consistently against being woken by loud amplified music, no matter what the genre. The cellos playing at the lawn party down the street could not wake me up, unless they were amped and cranked, in which case I'd be disturbed. This kind of argument has fueled a generational divide for more than half a century, with the old people saying "turn it down," and the youngsters taking that as a sleight to their favorite band, musical genre, or lifestyle. My (now grown) children went through this, I did it when I was a younger, and my father did too. Before that, I guess there wasn't a lot of amplification, so I assume they had different issues.
This comment should be modded up. Impromptu concerts / house parties are very disruptive in residential areas, and the disruption is caused not just by the music, it's caused by the people and cars and the drugs. It's easy to forget, there are first responders sleeping, and people who have invested time and money to keep their neighborhood tidy and safe, who are very averse to getting woken up, having their lawns dug up by bad drivers, and having deal with the litter and general mayhem that accompanies any large crowd. If concerts are actually being closed down, that means the undercover work is at least partially successful, the egregious examples cited in the TFA notwithstanding. No matter how one feels about freedom and the police state, the fact is the police's job is to address this kind of disruption. This method seems low cost, and not too invasive. And much more cost effective than a massive turnout of force (in all their new TSA regalia) to shut down an event in progress.
Tell that to Aaron Swartz. Even if the protection mechanism doesn't work, or isn't implemented, it's still hacking in the eyes of law enforcement. And also note, even if you win you'll spend every cent you have on lawyers.
You are right. The man also speaks with caring, integrity, truth, and righteous outrage. Thanks for pointing that out.
Oh, the SDS guy. OK then. And no one has explained how Mr. Ayers was not interested in the violent overthrow of the government, he was interested in resistance to specific injustices, specifically the draft and the Viet Nam war in general. Then as now the arms were nearly always in the hands of the police. He was never charged or convicted of any crime-- his only crime was thinking (and writing and speaking) against the status quo. He's now dragged out as a symbol of violent insurrection by the right because the media knows almost no one will bother to look him up to find out the real story anyway. Besides, no one is interested in Ayers-- he's been a college professor for 30 years-- only in his relationship to Obama, which was slight, and the opportunity to use an unfair and incorrect innuendo to besmirch the President.
Sorry to nit-pick, but it's important to be informed.
Are you referring to the right Rev. Jeremiah Wright? Because Rev. Wright is an honorable, articulate, educated, honest, and forthright man, who is at least second generation military, served as a Marine and a Navy corpsman, has more academic degrees than most Tea-Baggers have fingers on their right hand, is a college professor and runs a church. The fact that the fucktard-right-- errr, I mean mainstream media-- in this country can't tell the difference between an intelligent man's hyperbole (used to illustrate a point about the history of racial oppression) and violent insurrection-- does not condemn the man.
And if not Rev. Wright, then who are you talking about?
Ms. Rand would have had a better time of it in the USA if she hadn't insisted on writing children's books. Eventually her audience grew up. Oh wait, a few stayed back.
Thank you for proving definitively that my experience has been wrong for all these years. I never got to enjoy that online world of the past, blessed with all that lovely non-shitty and bloat-free "user created content," when browsers could cope with whatever was posted, and search engines only returned relevant results. For so long, my experience was just the opposite. It's a relief to finally realize I was living in an alternate universe.
I was entertained that Larry Ellison attached crapware to their security updates, which have to be specifically turned off in the installation, and their stupid toolbar turns off popup windows, but that disables Oracle's Discoverer product, and it works differently than the IE popup blocker, by not looking for user configurable exceptions. So for pennies per user, Oracle collects from the toolbar makers for every installation. And they're alienating IT departments. I hate working with them-- they're more mafia-like every year. End of complaint.
The closet was not locked. Hence, no break-in.