There is no reason to use credit card numbers to authenticate transactions.
As it is, right now vendors need to keep credit card numbers on file as part of their reciept of a credit card transaction. Forcing vendors to keep this information until the transaction completes (which would normally be a complete payment cycle) is an invitation for disaster.
Ideally, credit card numbers would accept a hash of the credit card number, the vendor number, a transaction identifier, and maybe evewn the amount and date. It would be virtually impossible for anyone to pull anything useful out of this hash, but this hash could be used by the consumer, vendor, and credit card company to authorize and authenticate transactions.
Taken to the next logical step, web browsers could be configured to generate these e-commerce hashes, in which case web consumers could be guaranteed that a vendor didn't know their credit card number at all.
Credit card companies could even supply two cards, one with a number printed on the front and one without. For the majority of in-person credit card transactions nowadays, there is no need to publish your credit card number on the card when most restraunts and stores use a bar code or magnetic strip reader built into their registers. There is much less chance of some teenager at the pizza joint making a carbon copy of your CCN if it is only on a magnetic strip. Sure it is not totally fraud proof, but it raises the expense and complexity of stealing your credit card, saving the credit card companies tens or hundreds of millions of dollars in fraudulent charges.
California's power problems are not a problem with production, but with finances. It is true that California hasn't built in state power plants in over ten years, but that is not the problem... California utilities (including LA's DWP which is *thriving* in this crisis by selling its surplus) have owned out of state power generation capacity since before deregulation.
The problem is that the two big utilities companies orchestrated a stupid STUPID deregulation plan, and it has now come back and bitten them in the ass and they can't pay for power they've already used much less power they will need.
They agreed to sell off their power production facilities, buy power from the people they sold their facilities to through a poorly organized exchange. Believing that capitalism was some magic wand, they believed that prices would magically drop, so they agreed to consumer price caps.
Now that the power producers are selling them power from the facilities they built at 10 to 100 (yes one hundred!) times the prices two years ago, they are starting to realize that the whole deregulation and divestment and price caps and 'let the market set the rates' plan was stupid and they are asking the taxpayers of California (not the big-business power consumers) to pay the bills.
Again. There is no power shortage. Few states produce all the power they need. Most buy production from other states. There was a botched deregulation, and poor finaancial planning by two utilities companies who are more willing to default and declare bankrupcy than pass the expense of their decisions on to their parent companies.
California's problems lie with stupid CFOs and corrupt politicians.
All the FUD that was spewed against Linux five years ago applies now to OSX. It is too new to tell anything about it. People have expertise on Linux, which makes it far easier to deploy and support over a largely unused and untested OS like OS X.
There is no power shortage. California doesn't have power shortages in winter. Most homes are heated by natural gas. We have power shortages in summer when the air conditioners run all day long.
The problem is that the power companies are trying to increase rates and the government doesn't want them to. A number of plants "mysteriously" shut down over the last few weeks and are still down.
Electronic Voting Won't Help: Why Nader Won
on
eLection '04
·
· Score: 2
There will always be a margin of error. While electronic voting may be able to reduce the margin of error, we will still make a likely margin of error at least one tenth of one percent. In this vote in Florida, the decisive margin is about half of one hundredth of a percent of the vote. Even with an electronic system, we would still have a statistical tie in Florida.
The problem is that in a two party system, you have one winner and one loser, and a bunch of people who don't matter. In a winner take all system where the candidates of the two major parties are not substantially different, a tie is inevitable. Nader (and other small party candidates) have been arguing that the political system needs to empower third parties somehow. I think that this whole situation clearly demonstrates their point.
Other countries don't have this problem because smaller parties can throw their support behind major parties to form coalition governments. Not only does this eliminate the possibility of a tie -- or worse yet a statistical tie that leaves one person a "winner" but without any clear mandate -- it also injects new ideas into the political process.
I'm not necessarily advocating the elimination of the existing political system, but it would be nice if Nader could trade his votes in Florida with Gore or Bush in exchange for a promise or two that his agenda will move forward. Not only does that make all of the votes for Nader count in a really substantial way, it also gives Bush or Gore a margin of victory well beyond the statistical margin of error.
While I agree that electronic voting is a good idea, we can't expect technology to wipe clean the systemic flaws of the polical process. We need to recognize there are serious problems and start proposing real changes.
I think that Mr. Robins' questions do strike at the heart of the issue here. Kerberos is copyright by MIT. Microsoft can no more claim copyright on their Kerberos extensions than I can claim copyright on the obscene comments I put in a book that belongs to the public library. The fact that Microsoft posted their "specification" on Internet further weakens their claim to copyright. Let's remember here, that Microsoft is claiming copyright on the specification, not the implementation.
Furthermore, I suspect that Microsoft has broken the MIT Kerberos copyright:
WITHIN THAT CONSTRAINT, permission to use, copy, modify, and distribute this software and its documentation for any purpose and without fee is hereby granted, provided that the above copyright notice appear in all copies and that both that copyright notice and this permission notice appear in supporting documentation, and that the name of M.I.T. not be used in advertising or publicity pertaining to distribution of the software without specific, written prior permission. Furthermore if you modify this software you must label your software as modified software and not distribute it in such a fashion that it might be confused with the original MIT software. M.I.T. makes no representations about the suitability of this software for any purpose. It is provided "as is" without express or implied warranty.
Counting OS shipments (as opposed to shipments of pre-installed oSes only) would include OEM shipments... which accounts for the pre-installed machines, as well as the OS licenses that are bought but never installed.
Personally, I trust IDC more. IDC looks like they looked at OS software sales, and DataQuest looks like they are measuring preinstalled OS machine shipments.
Considering I've bought or received many "NT preinstalled" machines and then happily installed Linux over them, looking at shipments of machines with a preinstalled OS is not fair.
For one, it is bound to ignore the 'clone makers' who together amount to nearly 40% of server shipments. It favors the big PC makers who are probably locked into contracts with Microsoft requiring X number of servers to ship with NT pre-installed.
It also does not consider installs of Linux over NT on new machines or old machines given new life by installing Linux. A lot of Linux's growth is on machines made obsolete by Microsoft's bloat.
IDC also went out of their way to point out that there is a large element of the Linux market that CAN'T be measured. Linux can be installed over Internet for free. Also, unlike NT or a commercial Unix, when you buy one copy of RedHat, you can install that CD to more than one server machine.
IDC has many sources of revenue, making them not-so-dependant on income from these reports, so they can afford to be objective. DataQuest/Gartner is certainly no Mindcraft, but they may not have seen as much of an incentive to count "free" shipments of Linux.
IDC said that the Linux server market was 17.2% in 1998 and predicted an annual growth rate of 25% until 2003. That means that by 2002, Linux would be more than 40% of the server market.
Given that Linux makes A LOT more sense than NT or commercial Unixes for 'server appliances' (no per-seat license fees, no duplication license fees, and open source adaptability), I think Linux will be a considerably larger part of the market than 23% by 2003.
These guys are claiming that they don't have to turn over the documents on the grounds of attorney-client privledge. Attorney-Client privledge protects attorneys from being compelled to incriminate their clients by protecting all communications between attorneys and clients.
The fact is that NSA has probably already violated attorney-client privledge by eavesdropping.
I don't understand how they can claim attorney client privledge. As far as I can see, the only attorneys and clients involved are the ones whose rights have been violated by the NSA!
I heartily agree with others that no user level process should ever, ever, ever be able to crash a server operating system, regardless of how small the scope of the problem.
I don't think the issue is that big, though. OS X is Apple's first real server OS, and there are bound to be bugs in any first release products.
Linux recently had a IP bug, bwhich could easily be used for a DoS attack, but the Linux community proved the worthiness of Linux by coming out with a patch the same day. [Thanks Alan!]
The real challenge for Apple is in how they respond. Do they issue a fix quickly, or do they whine and deny?
From the Apache homepage, we find that "Apache exists to provide a robust and commercial-grade reference implementation of the HTTP protocol."
To my experience, Apache is the most stable of all web servers, and the only one that comes close to implementing the whole HTTP protocol.
Speed is not the Apache group's primary concern, and folks whose main concern is speed might consider looking elsewhere. Despite that, Apache is more than powerful enough to saturate a T1 with a relatively low end machine (we have saturated a T1 with a Pentium 90/96M RAM running Linux), and a fine tuned Apache can easily outperform just about any other web server (when we load mod_mmap we get performance tens or even hundreds of times what IIS can do on a good day).
In the early days of Linux, there was iBCS to get SCO, Solaris and other Intel Unix binaries to run on Linux. I know iBCS hasn't disappeared, but I'm finding it increasing less important). Now SCO and Sun are scrambling to run Linux binaries.
Today, Linux tools like WINE provide Win32 compatability. One day, Bill Gates and Co. will be scrambling to run Linux binaries.
These guys are blowing smoke up your Congressional representative's you-know-what.
All of the remedies that the DoJ are investigating that involve breaking up Microsoft involve keeping operating systems intact. The argument is that while a monopoly in the OS market may be a beneficial standard, Microsoft is using that monopoly to stifle competition in other areas; namely in Internet applications, office productivity, etc. In other words, these folks are throwing us a red herring.
In any case, even if the DoJ was examining the possibility of breaking up Microsoft along lines that would split the OS market, there is a good argument that this would benefit customers. Not too long ago, people were raising fears that breaking up Ma Bell's monopoly would end up costing consumers trillions more in long distance services. Instead, long distance carriers are now fighting to offer long distance at 5 to 10 cents a minute, which (when adjusted for inflation) is much lower than what we were paying in the 70s.
I'm pretty happy with MediaOne's service here in LA. I have both cable TV and internet access at home through them, and aside from a few minor quirks, the serive has been fairly good.
The tech people aren't always on the ball, but I hardly ever interact with them.
Now if Microsoft bought MediaOne, I'd be really upset. If AOL bought it, I wouldn't be happy, but I could live with it. I don't like the idea of AT&T taking over the world's telecommunications, but at least I would have a decent alternative to PacBell's phone service.
True. In some cases the difference will be a few percent, in other cases, it will be several magnitudes.
The real issue is that Java is much easier to program, much more portable, and arguably easier to maintain. While it may be worth programming some things in order to squeeze out some more performance, there are cases where Java will be far more cost effective.
You can get garbage collectors for many languages, including C and C++.
While I would agree that Java programs can be faster than C++ programs, anything written in Java can always be rewritten and made faster in C++ if you are willing to commit the time and knowledge to get it done.
He basically claims that OMG is giving up language neutrality. Here is a quote from the OMG press release that he is supposedly commenting on:
While the CORBA solution has embraced Java, it has not done so at the expense of other languages. In fact, Java is the only language for which CORBA supports binary portability. For other all other languages, CORBA is portable only at the source code level.
The press release is simply a joint announcement from Sun and OMG announcing that there will be a close collaboration between EJB and CORBA. Importantly, EJB will be supporting the core of CORBA's network communication model: IIOP, which pretty much guarantees that you can write your objects in any language and on any platform, as long as you can make TCP sockets.
I must say that this guy's experience is really, really, far from my own and that ceretainly shapes his very, very different interpretation of this press release. He says that he sees half of all programmers who are working with object integration programming with VB. I certainly don't.
I think people should read the OMG release themselves and draw their own conclusions, but I read it as a commitment from Sun to cooperate with OMG to come up with a vendor neutral object specification... something to address the fundamental questions of vendor and platform dependence raised by Microsoft's DOM.
If it wasn't for SCO sucking so bad, Linus probably would have never bothered.
Seriously, who does this guy think he's fooling? At this point, by criticizing RedHat all he does is drive his own disatisfied customers RedHat's way.
We re-evaluated UnixWare as an Oracle server a couple of years ago and were so impressed with the performance that we came close to buying the UnixWare license, but then running Oracle in Linux using iBCS. (Basically, we just wanted the shared libraries and the commercial support that came with an official Oracle platform.) Fortunately, the database vendors have come to their senses and are now all supporting Linux.
RedHat is a great company because they actually add value to an already great Linux. I am still convinced that SCO is the core of a Microsoft conspiracy to make UNIX a bad word.
say that MS only need to increase the cost of their system by a factor of 50 to match the Oracle performance.
Oracle's whole argument is that Microsoft simply cannot scale... not with any amount of money... Oracle has conceeded that Microsft may be able to provide a cheaper solution, but they argue that for a high-end solution, you simply can't use Microsoft's products.
While for folks like me (a sysadmin for a web shop) this type of big muscle flexing seems pointless, there are folks out there who are getting terabyte-sized databases, and need a real system to manage it.
Microsoft wants us to believe that NT and MS SQL can scale... and Oracle wants to prove that they can't.
As for mySQL... I don't think that it even comes close to supporting terabyte sized databases, so a comparison is kind of pointless. mySQL is fast with smaller databases (a gig or less), and that is where it is best used and considered.
Microsoft didn't do anything illegal by requesting a poll and specifying the results. They were just stupid to call a witness who based his testimony on the results of the poll.
Slashdot Mirror
There is no reason to use credit card numbers to authenticate transactions.
As it is, right now vendors need to keep credit card numbers on file as part of their reciept of a credit card transaction. Forcing vendors to keep this information until the transaction completes (which would normally be a complete payment cycle) is an invitation for disaster.
Ideally, credit card numbers would accept a hash of the credit card number, the vendor number, a transaction identifier, and maybe evewn the amount and date. It would be virtually impossible for anyone to pull anything useful out of this hash, but this hash could be used by the consumer, vendor, and credit card company to authorize and authenticate transactions.
Taken to the next logical step, web browsers could be configured to generate these e-commerce hashes, in which case web consumers could be guaranteed that a vendor didn't know their credit card number at all.
Credit card companies could even supply two cards, one with a number printed on the front and one without. For the majority of in-person credit card transactions nowadays, there is no need to publish your credit card number on the card when most restraunts and stores use a bar code or magnetic strip reader built into their registers. There is much less chance of some teenager at the pizza joint making a carbon copy of your CCN if it is only on a magnetic strip. Sure it is not totally fraud proof, but it raises the expense and complexity of stealing your credit card, saving the credit card companies tens or hundreds of millions of dollars in fraudulent charges.
This is stupid.
... California utilities (including LA's DWP which is *thriving* in this crisis by selling its surplus) have owned out of state power generation capacity since before deregulation.
California's power problems are not a problem with production, but with finances. It is true that California hasn't built in state power plants in over ten years, but that is not the problem
The problem is that the two big utilities companies orchestrated a stupid STUPID deregulation plan, and it has now come back and bitten them in the ass and they can't pay for power they've already used much less power they will need.
They agreed to sell off their power production facilities, buy power from the people they sold their facilities to through a poorly organized exchange. Believing that capitalism was some magic wand, they believed that prices would magically drop, so they agreed to consumer price caps.
Now that the power producers are selling them power from the facilities they built at 10 to 100 (yes one hundred!) times the prices two years ago, they are starting to realize that the whole deregulation and divestment and price caps and 'let the market set the rates' plan was stupid and they are asking the taxpayers of California (not the big-business power consumers) to pay the bills.
Again. There is no power shortage. Few states produce all the power they need. Most buy production from other states. There was a botched deregulation, and poor finaancial planning by two utilities companies who are more willing to default and declare bankrupcy than pass the expense of their decisions on to their parent companies.
California's problems lie with stupid CFOs and corrupt politicians.
FUD = Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt.
In the case of OS X I happen to believe that the fears, uncertainty, and dount are well founded for the reasons you state and others.
All the FUD that was spewed against Linux five years ago applies now to OSX. It is too new to tell anything about it. People have expertise on Linux, which makes it far easier to deploy and support over a largely unused and untested OS like OS X.
There is no power shortage. California doesn't have power shortages in winter. Most homes are heated by natural gas. We have power shortages in summer when the air conditioners run all day long.
The problem is that the power companies are trying to increase rates and the government doesn't want them to. A number of plants "mysteriously" shut down over the last few weeks and are still down.
There will always be a margin of error. While electronic voting may be able to reduce the margin of error, we will still make a likely margin of error at least one tenth of one percent. In this vote in Florida, the decisive margin is about half of one hundredth of a percent of the vote. Even with an electronic system, we would still have a statistical tie in Florida.
The problem is that in a two party system, you have one winner and one loser, and a bunch of people who don't matter. In a winner take all system where the candidates of the two major parties are not substantially different, a tie is inevitable. Nader (and other small party candidates) have been arguing that the political system needs to empower third parties somehow. I think that this whole situation clearly demonstrates their point.
Other countries don't have this problem because smaller parties can throw their support behind major parties to form coalition governments. Not only does this eliminate the possibility of a tie -- or worse yet a statistical tie that leaves one person a "winner" but without any clear mandate -- it also injects new ideas into the political process.
I'm not necessarily advocating the elimination of the existing political system, but it would be nice if Nader could trade his votes in Florida with Gore or Bush in exchange for a promise or two that his agenda will move forward. Not only does that make all of the votes for Nader count in a really substantial way, it also gives Bush or Gore a margin of victory well beyond the statistical margin of error.
While I agree that electronic voting is a good idea, we can't expect technology to wipe clean the systemic flaws of the polical process. We need to recognize there are serious problems and start proposing real changes.
I think that Mr. Robins' questions do strike at the heart of the issue here. Kerberos is copyright by MIT. Microsoft can no more claim copyright on their Kerberos extensions than I can claim copyright on the obscene comments I put in a book that belongs to the public library. The fact that Microsoft posted their "specification" on Internet further weakens their claim to copyright. Let's remember here, that Microsoft is claiming copyright on the specification, not the implementation.
Furthermore, I suspect that Microsoft has broken the MIT Kerberos copyright:
WITHIN THAT CONSTRAINT, permission to use, copy, modify, and distribute this software and its documentation for any purpose and without fee is hereby granted, provided that the above copyright notice appear in all copies and that both that copyright notice and this permission notice appear in supporting documentation, and that the name of M.I.T. not be used in advertising or publicity pertaining to distribution of the software without specific, written prior permission. Furthermore if you modify this software you must label your software as modified software and not distribute it in such a fashion that it might be confused with the original MIT software. M.I.T. makes no representations about the suitability of this software for any purpose. It is provided "as is" without express or implied warranty.
Counting OS shipments (as opposed to shipments of pre-installed oSes only) would include OEM shipments ... which accounts for the pre-installed machines, as well as the OS licenses that are bought but never installed.
Personally, I trust IDC more. IDC looks like they looked at OS software sales, and DataQuest looks like they are measuring preinstalled OS machine shipments.
Considering I've bought or received many "NT preinstalled" machines and then happily installed Linux over them, looking at shipments of machines with a preinstalled OS is not fair.
For one, it is bound to ignore the 'clone makers' who together amount to nearly 40% of server shipments. It favors the big PC makers who are probably locked into contracts with Microsoft requiring X number of servers to ship with NT pre-installed.
It also does not consider installs of Linux over NT on new machines or old machines given new life by installing Linux. A lot of Linux's growth is on machines made obsolete by Microsoft's bloat.
IDC also went out of their way to point out that there is a large element of the Linux market that CAN'T be measured. Linux can be installed over Internet for free. Also, unlike NT or a commercial Unix, when you buy one copy of RedHat, you can install that CD to more than one server machine.
IDC has many sources of revenue, making them not-so-dependant on income from these reports, so they can afford to be objective. DataQuest/Gartner is certainly no Mindcraft, but they may not have seen as much of an incentive to count "free" shipments of Linux.
http://www.sunworld.com/swol-04-1999/swol-04-idcli nux.html
IDC said that the Linux server market was 17.2% in 1998 and predicted an annual growth rate of 25% until 2003. That means that by 2002, Linux would be more than 40% of the server market.
Given that Linux makes A LOT more sense than NT or commercial Unixes for 'server appliances' (no per-seat license fees, no duplication license fees, and open source adaptability), I think Linux will be a considerably larger part of the market than 23% by 2003.
Heh?
These guys are claiming that they don't have to turn over the documents on the grounds of attorney-client privledge. Attorney-Client privledge protects attorneys from being compelled to incriminate their clients by protecting all communications between attorneys and clients.
The fact is that NSA has probably already violated attorney-client privledge by eavesdropping.
I don't understand how they can claim attorney client privledge. As far as I can see, the only attorneys and clients involved are the ones whose rights have been violated by the NSA!
I heartily agree with others that no user level process should ever, ever, ever be able to crash a server operating system, regardless of how small the scope of the problem.
I don't think the issue is that big, though. OS X is Apple's first real server OS, and there are bound to be bugs in any first release products.
Linux recently had a IP bug, bwhich could easily be used for a DoS attack, but the Linux community proved the worthiness of Linux by coming out with a patch the same day. [Thanks Alan!]
The real challenge for Apple is in how they respond. Do they issue a fix quickly, or do they whine and deny?
From the Apache homepage, we find that "Apache exists to provide a robust and commercial-grade reference implementation of the HTTP protocol."
To my experience, Apache is the most stable of all web servers, and the only one that comes close to implementing the whole HTTP protocol.
Speed is not the Apache group's primary concern, and folks whose main concern is speed might consider looking elsewhere. Despite that, Apache is more than powerful enough to saturate a T1 with a relatively low end machine (we have saturated a T1 with a Pentium 90/96M RAM running Linux), and a fine tuned Apache can easily outperform just about any other web server (when we load mod_mmap we get performance tens or even hundreds of times what IIS can do on a good day).
In the early days of Linux, there was iBCS to get SCO, Solaris and other Intel Unix binaries to run on Linux. I know iBCS hasn't disappeared, but I'm finding it increasing less important). Now SCO and Sun are scrambling to run Linux binaries.
Today, Linux tools like WINE provide Win32 compatability. One day, Bill Gates and Co. will be scrambling to run Linux binaries.
These guys are blowing smoke up your Congressional representative's you-know-what.
All of the remedies that the DoJ are investigating that involve breaking up Microsoft involve keeping operating systems intact. The argument is that while a monopoly in the OS market may be a beneficial standard, Microsoft is using that monopoly to stifle competition in other areas; namely in Internet applications, office productivity, etc. In other words, these folks are throwing us a red herring.
In any case, even if the DoJ was examining the possibility of breaking up Microsoft along lines that would split the OS market, there is a good argument that this would benefit customers. Not too long ago, people were raising fears that breaking up Ma Bell's monopoly would end up costing consumers trillions more in long distance services. Instead, long distance carriers are now fighting to offer long distance at 5 to 10 cents a minute, which (when adjusted for inflation) is much lower than what we were paying in the 70s.
I'm pretty happy with MediaOne's service here in LA. I have both cable TV and internet access at home through them, and aside from a few minor quirks, the serive has been fairly good.
The tech people aren't always on the ball, but I hardly ever interact with them.
Now if Microsoft bought MediaOne, I'd be really upset. If AOL bought it, I wouldn't be happy, but I could live with it. I don't like the idea of AT&T taking over the world's telecommunications, but at least I would have a decent alternative to PacBell's phone service.
True. In some cases the difference will be a few percent, in other cases, it will be several magnitudes.
The real issue is that Java is much easier to program, much more portable, and arguably easier to maintain. While it may be worth programming some things in order to squeeze out some more performance, there are cases where Java will be far more cost effective.
Right tool for the right job.
You can get garbage collectors for many languages, including C and C++.
While I would agree that Java programs can be faster than C++ programs, anything written in Java can always be rewritten and made faster in C++ if you are willing to commit the time and knowledge to get it done.
He basically claims that OMG is giving up language neutrality. Here is a quote from the OMG press release that he is supposedly commenting on:
The press release is simply a joint announcement from Sun and OMG announcing that there will be a close collaboration between EJB and CORBA. Importantly, EJB will be supporting the core of CORBA's network communication model: IIOP, which pretty much guarantees that you can write your objects in any language and on any platform, as long as you can make TCP sockets.
I must say that this guy's experience is really, really, far from my own and that ceretainly shapes his very, very different interpretation of this press release. He says that he sees half of all programmers who are working with object integration programming with VB. I certainly don't.
I think people should read the OMG release themselves and draw their own conclusions, but I read it as a commitment from Sun to cooperate with OMG to come up with a vendor neutral object specification ... something to address the fundamental questions of vendor and platform dependence raised by Microsoft's DOM.
If it wasn't for SCO sucking so bad, Linus probably would have never bothered.
Seriously, who does this guy think he's fooling? At this point, by criticizing RedHat all he does is drive his own disatisfied customers RedHat's way.
We re-evaluated UnixWare as an Oracle server a couple of years ago and were so impressed with the performance that we came close to buying the UnixWare license, but then running Oracle in Linux using iBCS. (Basically, we just wanted the shared libraries and the commercial support that came with an official Oracle platform.) Fortunately, the database vendors have come to their senses and are now all supporting Linux.
RedHat is a great company because they actually add value to an already great Linux. I am still convinced that SCO is the core of a Microsoft conspiracy to make UNIX a bad word.
Oracle's whole argument is that Microsoft simply cannot scale ... not with any amount of money ... Oracle has conceeded that Microsft may be able to provide a cheaper solution, but they argue that for a high-end solution, you simply can't use Microsoft's products.
While for folks like me (a sysadmin for a web shop) this type of big muscle flexing seems pointless, there are folks out there who are getting terabyte-sized databases, and need a real system to manage it.
... and Oracle wants to prove that they can't.
... I don't think that it even comes close to supporting terabyte sized databases, so a comparison is kind of pointless. mySQL is fast with smaller databases (a gig or less), and that is where it is best used and considered.
Microsoft wants us to believe that NT and MS SQL can scale
As for mySQL
Microsoft didn't do anything illegal by requesting a poll and specifying the results. They were just stupid to call a witness who based his testimony on the results of the poll.