Actually it means the customers were complaining that they was too slow when they brought them back. It's definitely underpowered, it's just that Linux doesn't care (;-))
The clerk did say that a lot of people did take the Linux model in it's place, an I suggested they copy Linux onto some of the XP returns.
Once you've left, they no longer need your SSN.
Therefor retaining it is no longer part of a lawful business
process, and the prohibition can apply.
After all, the only business reason to retain your SSN is to
start a sideline in identity theft, and that's not a
lawful business.
Hmmn: ask your lawyer if retaining your SSN over your objections might
not be prima facie
proof that they're actually engaging in identity theft.
--dave
In the store where I bought a Aspire, the clerk offered a "refurbished" model with XP for a lower price. I asked him if
they were being returned because they were too slow, and he shamefacedly admitted that was the case.
The practice of creating polyopolies (local monopolies) started in the UK
about the time people figured out how
to build power looms.
There should be a similarly rich history of how the English dealt with the problem.
--dave (he who knows not history
is doomed to repeat it) c-b
Re:Why would you buy into a walled gardin in a clo
on
Lost In the Cloud
·
· Score: 1
I entirely agree: what's being offered seems aimed at the level of someone who isn't even a consumer, more of a learned-by-rote kind of user.
That's survivable by consumers, although it may be frustrating.
That's less than useful to a company that wants to use the cloud for something profitable: they're limited to a very restricted set of things they can do. I've worked with one of the big packaged-services providers, and the service they offer limited, hard to adapt to your business and breaks in
mysterious ways, such as telling me "you don't have permission to read this page" when I'm following an emailed link that says I must respond to the page.
And I assume commercial users a pretty smart, albeit more about money than about bits and byte (I'm a capacity planner, so I talk a lot to financial managers).
--dave
Why would you buy into a walled gardin in a cloud?
on
Lost In the Cloud
·
· Score: 1
First of all, clouds aren't a good foundation to build stone walls on (;-))
Secondly, and more seriously, a smart user will buy a service that gives them a virtual machine or a JVM to run an application on, and control the app and it's storage themselves.
At the expense of sounding grumpy, a lot of the cloud stuff reminds of software written for script kiddies
The library community faced this years ago, and the results are embedded in library software to this day.
Records are kept of who has a book until such time as they have returned it undamaged, after which that item is destroyed. Records of how many fines a customer paid are kept for longer, and records of how many books circulated are kept for substantially longer.
In effect, it's horses for courses. Privacy-sensitive information has a short life, billing longer, but not forever, and totals, which are needed for the grants process and planning, are kept for long times.
Because this is clearly sane, as well as an honest effort to meet legal requirements re privacy, most jurisdictions in the world accept it. They could object, but then they'd have to pay for a "belgium only" system to provide to their libraries.
Many many small processors without a fast interconnect will give good database performance if and only if all the operations are wonderfully parallelizable, and don't require coordination.
This is somewhat hard to arrange(;))
A bank, for example, always debits one account when it credits another, so in
the general case ties up two machines for every operation. If there is another transaction outstanding against either of these accounts, you've tied up three.
Think about how well this scales in a busy bank branch and you can guess that the dominating cost is the coordination.
This is true for most thing you *use*
transactions for, pretty much by definition.
That works best on a machine with a
really fast locking regieme, which in turn you need a backplane like a Cray.
That's what you get when you by a Sun or IBM machine: hardware to make database transactions go fast.
I know they did the port, and it clearly works, but I'd suggest it is the kind
of low-priority thing one does to make sure they have a presence in the machine room, and predominantly on the Sun x86 machines they mentioned in the cited page.
It would be somewhat weird to bet the success of Ubuntu, the user-friendly desktop and laptop Linux, on the success of a port to rack-mount machine-room SPARC server hardware.
There's a good proof of concept Linux
that's run on a T2000, but how many years, how many staff and how many debates on LKML would it take to get from a POC
to something you could bet your company on?
Honorable bird in hand beats however many in the South Atlantic (;-))
I think he's deeply involved in a worldview where pretty much everyone looks evil. This means he'll be tempted to treat opposing council, grumpy judges and uppity clients like they're evil. That's a bad thing.
The test for crazy as a fox vs just crazy is to see if he's still got a sense of humor. If he's willing to make fun of himself, assume fox. If not, crazy.
I'd suggest that they are likely to grow to being an important part of computing, but no bigger than, for example, the large-server-and-Oracle part. (full disclosure: I'm a capacity planner, so most of my income comes from just that part).
The disadvantage is that my cost per transaction is greater than if I had a steady load and ran my own machine room.
The fees I and the other customers pay a cloud service have to cover their whole machine room, whether it's it's busy or not, plus their profit.
So I see a natural evolution for a growing business. While they're small, they'll build a LAMP or Java stack on a small machine in the back room. If they grow slowly and steadily, they'll buy more, larger machines for the back room. If they grow without bound, they'll jump to LAMP-on-cloud or Java-on-a-cloud, with a few code changes as possible.
Once they have mastered that, they'll move back and forth, depending on the business growth rate. If they grow too fast, they'll do a lot in the cloud. If they grow slowly, they'll have a cloud presence, but try to process as much in their own machine room as they can, to improve the profit margins, using the cloud for overflow and to run during my machine-room upgrade.
Conclusion? common software between the cloud and the machine-room is important. Look for any standards developing in the LAMP/SAMP space, like the DMTF incubator at http://www.dmtf.org/about/cloud-incubator
Look for Java offerings for business, like http://blogs.sun.com/cloud/entry/communityone_cloud_recap
When you're there, specifically look for
virtual machines that will run in the cloud. Finally, look for load-balancing mechanisms that will send your work to two different places, under your control, sometimes called "application distributors".
Don't assume open source is at a disadvantage: if you can run your stack on a free VM on a standard-conforming cloud, however commercial it might be,
then your computing can remain free of the control of others.
He's the Government pit-bull, and will defend anything his political masters wish, even if they are currently illegal. After all, he can just pass a law, can't he?
There's also the question of the seller making a retroactive change in the contract with the buyer, rendering the device no longer functional, and therefor no longer "suitable for the purpose sold".
Back in my ill-spent youth as a reserve instructor, I had to teach a course on how dishonest retailers tried to scam soldiers, and that was one of the tactics
they tried. Illegal under the statute of frauds, you understand!
A lot of the elision allowed was for human beings writing html code by hand. Interpreting it in a DFA without the extra closing tags takes no more cycles at run-time, but more work writing the interpreter.
Logically, the only thing you're gaining by leaving out tags is the time to read , so this part of the optimization isn't going to give you a lot of performance.
Canadian providers ask, but can't require it. And having someone else's SIN (SSN equivalent) without them being an employee is prima facia evidence of identity theft.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually it means the customers were complaining that they was too slow when they brought them back. It's definitely underpowered, it's just that Linux doesn't care (;-))
The clerk did say that a lot of people did take the Linux model in it's place, an I suggested they copy Linux onto some of the XP returns.
--dave
Ironically, you can't change your SSN, even if you're the victim of identity theft. You need to enroll in witness protection for that (;-))
--dave
Once you've left, they no longer need your SSN. Therefor retaining it is no longer part of a lawful business process, and the prohibition can apply.
After all, the only business reason to retain your SSN is to start a sideline in identity theft, and that's not a lawful business.
Hmmn: ask your lawyer if retaining your SSN over your objections might not be prima facie proof that they're actually engaging in identity theft. --dave
--dave
Everything used to be assigned or registered by IANA, which was a few chaps in their copious spare time (;-))
Mind you, if you didn't require renewal and charge money, you could do it with a very small company under contract.
--dave
Hey, they got an offer, Oracle is legally precluded from telling them if they have a job, and they chose which risk to take.
I probably would do something different, but that doesn't mean they didn't make a reasoned move.
--dave
The practice of creating polyopolies (local monopolies) started in the UK about the time people figured out how to build power looms.
There should be a similarly rich history of how the English dealt with the problem.
--dave (he who knows not history is doomed to repeat it) c-b
I entirely agree: what's being offered seems aimed at the level of someone who isn't even a consumer, more of a learned-by-rote kind of user. That's survivable by consumers, although it may be frustrating.
That's less than useful to a company that wants to use the cloud for something profitable: they're limited to a very restricted set of things they can do. I've worked with one of the big packaged-services providers, and the service they offer limited, hard to adapt to your business and breaks in mysterious ways, such as telling me "you don't have permission to read this page" when I'm following an emailed link that says I must respond to the page.
And I assume commercial users a pretty smart, albeit more about money than about bits and byte (I'm a capacity planner, so I talk a lot to financial managers).
--dave
First of all, clouds aren't a good foundation to build stone walls on (;-))
Secondly, and more seriously, a smart user will buy a service that gives them a virtual machine or a JVM to run an application on, and control the app and it's storage themselves.
At the expense of sounding grumpy, a lot of the cloud stuff reminds of software written for script kiddies
--dave
The library community faced this years ago, and the results are embedded in library software to this day.
Records are kept of who has a book until such time as they have returned it undamaged, after which that item is destroyed. Records of how many fines a customer paid are kept for longer, and records of how many books circulated are kept for substantially longer.
In effect, it's horses for courses. Privacy-sensitive information has a short life, billing longer, but not forever, and totals, which are needed for the grants process and planning, are kept for long times.
Because this is clearly sane, as well as an honest effort to meet legal requirements re privacy, most jurisdictions in the world accept it. They could object, but then they'd have to pay for a "belgium only" system to provide to their libraries.
--dave
Many many small processors without a fast interconnect will give good database performance if and only if all the operations are wonderfully parallelizable, and don't require coordination.
This is somewhat hard to arrange(;)) A bank, for example, always debits one account when it credits another, so in the general case ties up two machines for every operation. If there is another transaction outstanding against either of these accounts, you've tied up three. Think about how well this scales in a busy bank branch and you can guess that the dominating cost is the coordination. This is true for most thing you *use* transactions for, pretty much by definition.
That works best on a machine with a really fast locking regieme, which in turn you need a backplane like a Cray. That's what you get when you by a Sun or IBM machine: hardware to make database transactions go fast.
--dave
I consider them pretty close to synonymous, and wouldn't recommend Oracle or Canonical bet the company on it (;-))
--dave
--dave
The chips are open-source. Oracle doesn't need to do anything.
--dave
Seriously, though, I think the article is mostly FUD, and that Oracle won't risk their company on throwing away a working OS.
In fact, if they want to save money, they would encourage more Open Solaris efforts (;-))
--dave
I know they did the port, and it clearly works, but I'd suggest it is the kind of low-priority thing one does to make sure they have a presence in the machine room, and predominantly on the Sun x86 machines they mentioned in the cited page.
It would be somewhat weird to bet the success of Ubuntu, the user-friendly desktop and laptop Linux, on the success of a port to rack-mount machine-room SPARC server hardware.
--dave
There's a good proof of concept Linux that's run on a T2000, but how many years, how many staff and how many debates on LKML would it take to get from a POC to something you could bet your company on?
Honorable bird in hand beats however many in the South Atlantic (;-))
--dave
If I wanted to capture business from Sun, I'd start a rumor that Oracle was going to get rid of big parts of Sun.
And, just to add insult to injury, the rumor would have them laying off the people Oracle most wants to retain!
--dave
I think he's deeply involved in a worldview where pretty much everyone looks evil. This means he'll be tempted to treat opposing council, grumpy judges and uppity clients like they're evil. That's a bad thing.
The test for crazy as a fox vs just crazy is to see if he's still got a sense of humor. If he's willing to make fun of himself, assume fox. If not, crazy.
--dave
I'd suggest that they are likely to grow to being an important part of computing, but no bigger than, for example, the large-server-and-Oracle part. (full disclosure: I'm a capacity planner, so most of my income comes from just that part).
The disadvantage is that my cost per transaction is greater than if I had a steady load and ran my own machine room. The fees I and the other customers pay a cloud service have to cover their whole machine room, whether it's it's busy or not, plus their profit.
So I see a natural evolution for a growing business. While they're small, they'll build a LAMP or Java stack on a small machine in the back room. If they grow slowly and steadily, they'll buy more, larger machines for the back room. If they grow without bound, they'll jump to LAMP-on-cloud or Java-on-a-cloud, with a few code changes as possible.
Once they have mastered that, they'll move back and forth, depending on the business growth rate. If they grow too fast, they'll do a lot in the cloud. If they grow slowly, they'll have a cloud presence, but try to process as much in their own machine room as they can, to improve the profit margins, using the cloud for overflow and to run during my machine-room upgrade.
Conclusion? common software between the cloud and the machine-room is important. Look for any standards developing in the LAMP/SAMP space, like the DMTF incubator at http://www.dmtf.org/about/cloud-incubator Look for Java offerings for business, like http://blogs.sun.com/cloud/entry/communityone_cloud_recap When you're there, specifically look for virtual machines that will run in the cloud. Finally, look for load-balancing mechanisms that will send your work to two different places, under your control, sometimes called "application distributors".
Don't assume open source is at a disadvantage: if you can run your stack on a free VM on a standard-conforming cloud, however commercial it might be, then your computing can remain free of the control of others.
--dave
He's the Government pit-bull, and will defend anything his political masters wish, even if they are currently illegal. After all, he can just pass a law, can't he?
--dave
There's also the question of the seller making a retroactive change in the contract with the buyer, rendering the device no longer functional, and therefor no longer "suitable for the purpose sold".
Back in my ill-spent youth as a reserve instructor, I had to teach a course on how dishonest retailers tried to scam soldiers, and that was one of the tactics they tried. Illegal under the statute of frauds, you understand!
--dave
A lot of the elision allowed was for human beings writing html code by hand. Interpreting it in a DFA without the extra closing tags takes no more cycles at run-time, but more work writing the interpreter.
Logically, the only thing you're gaining by leaving out tags is the time to read , so this part of the optimization isn't going to give you a lot of performance.
--dave
Canadian providers ask, but can't require it. And having someone else's SIN (SSN equivalent) without them being an employee is prima facia evidence of identity theft.
--dave
They bought the relational engine that MySQL uses over a year ago, and then instead of shutting it down, invested money in improving its performance.
Larry reputedly says he wants more people to learn SQL, because in the long run it will bring Oracle customers.
It looks like the cases may be different.
--dave