I work for Novell, and this topic went around an internal mailing list recently, we came up with a couple of good screenshots. These are undoctored screenshots from actual customer servers:
This server was up for 457 days when the shot was taken.
This server was up for 2,174 days when the shot was taken! If your calculator isn't handy that's almost six years!
It's out. I bought it over a week ago, March 29th, at the Fry's Electronics on Hamilton Road in San Jose.
It's a great game! My only complaint is the speed of play, it can take hours to get a scenario done by the time you feed your people, take over other towns, build up those towns, etc... My favorite thing, though, is petting my monkey. 8-)
They get away with it because law enforcement and the credit card companies generally don't care. I know someone who was involved in investigating the egghead compromise last year. One credit card company had over one million credit card numbers stolen. They decided that it was cheaper to deal with fraud on those credit card numbers than to reissue and remail one million credit cards.
For the credit card companies, it's a business decision, in the USA you can only be held liable for $50 in fraud if you report it, so they likely feel it's the consumer's problem to report it.
For law enforcement, it's only a few thousand dollar scam at most, and they are probably more interested in going after murderers and higher profile criminals. If these scam artists don't get too greedy and don't make too much noise, I'm sure they can keep up scams like these for years.
For the internet computer store, it's a tough call, many customers really do buy laptops as gifts or want stuff sent to a different address, are you going to turn away that business?
Here's a personal example: Our company experienced its first encounter with credit card fraud last month. Someone stole a credit card account number, then used the stolen number to purchase a $500 product from our company. The crook knew the cardholder's correct address, provided our company with that information, but requested that the product be shipped to a different address.
Since it's not uncommon for our customers to request a "ship to" address which is different than the "bill to" address, at first, we didn't think much of it. Our policy is to send the invoice to the "bill to" address -- which we did. A few days later we got a call from the customer (whose card number was stolen) informing us that he never purchased anything from us.
This particular scamster used one of the free email services (Juno) to open an email account in the stolen cardholder's name -- which made the transaction appear more legitimate. We informed Juno's security department of the fraud taking place. (Juno said that they shut down the scamster's account.)
Although we got authorization and approval from our merchant account vendor, we bear all the loss.
We contacted the banks and the merchant providers involved, and even contacted the police. The banks, merchant providers and police were not able to help -- mainly because they were too busy or felt that the dollar amount involved ($500) was not significant enough to warrant further action.
While I think the stories are probably somewhat exaggerated, I think that there is more truth than many posters have been willing to admit.
Lawrence Lessig in his excellent book "Code and other laws of Cyberspace" says that, if we aren't careful, the internet will become a technology of control, not of freedom.
As anyone who runs a web server knows, it's easy enough to track and log everything. The always-on internet opens up the possiblity of things like CPRM; Microsoft's plans for required registration before Office XP will work, and other sorts of digital rights management. DivX may have failed, but it failed because it didn't have a good enough value proposition, and it was a little ahead of its time. Once more houses have broadband connections, what's the big deal to the average consumer if your DVD player needs to be hooked up to the internet to play DVD's?
The idea that there will always be open alternatives to closed software or hardware isn't guaranteed. Lessig really hit the nail on the head in his book and predated a lot of this controversy. Will there be enough advocates to fund and continue producing open chipsets? You can look at the history of DAT to see a way things might play out.
There is a interview with him here that goes into more detail. (the streaming links didn't work for me, but the mp3 download did.)
I wonder if all this posturing on the big corporation side will lead to more polarization and zealotry. You'll have the totally proprietary and controlling microsoft camp, and the totally free and open Open Source camp. It'll be interesting to see.
Check out DSLreports.com before you pick your next provider. They have community reviews of DSL and other broadband providers, including user-contributed bandwidth and packet loss reports. Very cool!
(And before someone accuses me like on my last post, no, I don't work for them... 8-) )
That's funny, I thought the topic talked specifically about cookies and spyware. Doesn't sound "utterly off-topic" to me.
So, for the record, my post generated:
- One useful suggestion for Netscape
- One useful suggestion for junkbuster
- One useful suggestion for Konqueror
- Two flames accusing me work working/pimping for Opera
- One joke
I was hoping for a bit more, maybe:
- One "all your base" joke
- A classing "hot grits" troll
- A script to block cookies better using PERL
- A flamewar over whether PERL or Python was the right tool for the job.
After playing all day yesterday with browsers, I've come up with a way to handle cookies that I'm happy with.
Opera 5.02 has a great feature called "throw away new cookies on exit". It will accept all cookies, but when you exit it tosses them. So, you set up cookies for all the sites you want them for (like slashdot), exit opera (it only saves cookies on exit), check them using Opera File Explorer (see below), then start it back up and check off the "throw away new cookies on exit" option under File|Preferences|Security.
Now, doubleclick and everyone else can throw all the cookies at you they want, and they will be erased when you exit Opera. But, you also still have your stored cookies for the sites you want. Works great! No other browser can do this as gracefully. Opera 5 seems very cool (although I've only played with it for a couple days...).
If you're ever at the corner of route 9 and bear creek road in Boulder Creek, California, you may be in range of my house right around the corner. We're kind of isolated up in the mountains, and it's about 45 minutes from san jose, but we're on the way to Santa Cruz, so you can stop mid trip.
It's 802.11 on an Orinoco Residential Gateway. No network name or encryption. All my MP3's are on the debian server under/usr/music.
Great points! I think this is basically the path that Sega is taking, realized that their immense 16-bit library has value on roughly compatible "new" platforms. And, since they have lost the console war, Sega porting their games to other consoles makes good business sense.
There was an interesting article in The Register about how Microsoft could lose $2 billion on a successful XBox launch. Hurt Microsoft, pre-order an XBox and buy no games for it.... 8-)
>I'd like to see you go up to some big motherfucker, call him a cunt, and then tell him it's not an insult because you don't know his name;)
I'd tell him it wasn't a personal insult since I didn't know his name, especially if he was wearing a t-shirt that said "I am an anonymous coward." 8-)
You're missing my point, but heck, I'll let it rest after this... my point is that I think Sony is making a proactive investment now in looking at emulating PSone's so that they can take advantage of upcoming technologies, like the XBox and new PDA's. Then, they will look at providing that backcatalog on new medium for the new devices. Someone already responded to my original post with a really good point about this.
I think we're closer to agreement than you think...
How can it be a personal insult when you're anonymous? 8-)
>no-one has yet managed to produce 700Mb ROM cartridges cost effectively.
I'm going to make a note of this and put it next to these quotes.
You're assuming:
- That every playstation CD uses all 700MB.
- That a game like Tony Hawk couldn't be cut down in any way to fit into another form factor.
- That memory technology is static.
Call me a technological optimist, but I believe this problem can be solved. For example, Sony already has MD Data 2 discs with 650MB capacity on the market.
Yes, your problem is that you're short-sighted. Visor's PDAs already have a gameboy style expansion slot, and the new iPaqs have more than enough horsepower to run an PSone style game. The problem now is screen size and control. I don't know if the Gameboy Advance has the right horsepower yet, but I could certainly see a GameBoy Advance 2 that had more than enough horsepower to run all PSone games.
Also see this interesting story on The Register about Sony portable PSone rumors.
Maybe sony has wised up to the value that emulation might bring to them. Look at Sega's decision to get out of the hardware market and focus on software. The money is not in the razors (the consoles) it is in the blades (the games). Although you could argue that Sony is now making boatloads of cash on the PSone (which probably by now costs them $20 to make), I think that's more by accident than by design. Yes, there is value in owning a console platform, but there is value in leveraging your software library too.
Working with Connectix so that they have the option of putting a virtual playstation on anything has a lot of value to Sony in the future. X-Box emulators, and emulators for other sorts of devices could be a huge source of revenue. Just the revenue from a single 10-in-one CD with a bunch of top playstation titles for the XBox (similar to the Sega Arcade CD for Dreamcast) could pay for this arrangement with Connectix.
I saw an interview with the Sega america's president (in ODCM print, couldn't find it online) where he said that PDA's are getting to the point where they can run Sega's immense 16-bit library in emulation. Could Sony be looking at the same thing for their PSone library?
Ummm, no, it's the engineers, the admins, the IT people, the CEO's, the janitors, the marketroids, the bagel boy, and everyone else who is getting fired. Don't you read f**kedcompany????
If you don't, here's a hint: the dot-com bubble has burst, and silicon valley start ups are dropping like flies. Most of them were started by really "smart" degreed engineers who didn't have a clue how to run a business or make a profit.
I've notice this too. I commute in from Boulder Creek (up highway 17 at Bear Creek road to 880 north to near the San Jose airport), and I've noticed that traffic has been getting a LOT better. Of course, with Intel "attritioning" thousands and Cisco doing the same, things can only get better!
Consumer portals are the ones with a troubled future, but I think there is a great future in intranet portals. Meaning, portals that let you organize your companies internal information. How many wasted minutes a year are spent by employees looking for the correct HR form, for example?
Most companies have done a great job of web-ifying everything in their company, unfortunately, there are now too many web resources in a company. Portals can help organize that and show an employee only what is important to them.
People who just want a very simple web-experience are going to get AOL, which in effect is a web-portal for internet newbies. I also think that soon people will be able to build their own portal with a much simpler drag and drop metaphor that will be local to their machine or web-hosted in a very simple way. I don't think there is much money in doing that, but I think it will happen.
Don't forget MAME and all the other emulation projects for Linux. The Xmame home page is a good starter site to find lotsa info, as is the main MAME page.
If you like LSL and want other "racy" games, you can find on many ROM sites some of those old Japanese "strip" and many other games (like the one that was a Qix clone except as you cleared areas it exposed a nude girl). If that's how you get your jollies, hey, have fun, at least you aren't out shooting people...
FYI, O'Reilly recently had a big P2P conference in San Francisco, you can find out lots more information on P2P, especially on who all the current playing in the market are and what they are making, here.
I think there is a theme building in this and several other Slashdot articles lately: you need to have common sense about your career choices.
Just like the guy last week who complained that his employer actually had the gall to try to enforce the intellectual property agreement that he signed, this guy didn't do his due diligence before hand.
It's a big nasty world out there. The last car dealer we went to in the bay area (Bob Lewis Volkswagon) tried to give us a starting price of $3,000.00 over MSRP. Abdominizers and other crappy products get sold to people like you and me, not just wrassin' watching folks in trailer parks. One of the good and bad things about the USA is that you can largely make your own mistakes.
I've made similar mistakes to this one. My 2nd job out of college was for a company that was taking over the regional office of another computer reseller. The deal got held up, and I spent two weeks in Cincinnati in a new apartment with no job. I take responsiblity for that mistake.
Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote an incredible essay on self-reliance. (I also mirrored the Project Gutenburg free text version on my site here.) I carry it on my Palm Pilot and refer to it often when I'm feeling ripped off, used, or abused. There are two attitudes you can take when something happens to you, either it happened to you and you were powerless to prevent it, or it happend to you because you created it. The latter position is a more powerful one, since it gives you control of the situation and the power to change it.
Here's the last paragraph of Emerson's essay, I think it's a good summary of what I'm trying to say.
"So use all that is called Fortune. Most men gamble with her, and gain all, and lose all, as her wheel rolls. But do thou leave as unlawful these winnings, and deal with Cause and Effect, the chancellors of God. In the Will work and acquire, and thou hast chained the wheel of Chance, and shalt sit hereafter out of fear from her rotations. A political victory, a rise of rents, the recovery of your sick or the return of your absent friend, or some other favorable event raises your spirits, and you think good days are preparing for you. Do not believe it. Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles."
>`These kids are splitting atoms and stuff, so a
>lock poses no barrier to them,'' marveled Barber.
A little overdramatic, I think, this sounds kinda like something out of the Matrix, I can see it now in Matrix 4:
MIT Undergrad: "You mean to say that I can dodge padlocks?"
Morpheus: "I mean to say that when time comes, when you have your PhD in nuclear engineering and you want to put a cow on the dome, you won't have to."
I have a friend who got from a friend an actual transcript of one of the intercepted conversations that has been transcribed to text. Apparently, they were able to actually intercept a terrorist threat from Osama Bin Laden. I hope this proves once and for all the great value of this technology.
Transcript follows:
Captain: What happen?
Mechanic: Someone set up us the bomb
Operator: We get signal
Captain: What!
Operator: Main screen turn on.
Captain: It's you!!
Osama Bin Laden: How are you gentlemen!!
Osama Bin Laden: All your base are belong to us
Osama Bin Laden: You are on the way to destruction
Captain: What you say?
Osama Bin Laden: You have no chance to survive make your time
Osama Bin Laden: Ha ha ha....
Operator: Captain!!
Captain: Take off every 'ZIG'!!
Captain: Move 'ZIG'.
Captain: For great justice.
If I can take a little different angle than the other posts here, there's more to this than "my product features can beat up your product features".
A large company picking a strategic database may be making a decision that needs to last 10 or even 20 years. Companies that standardized on DB2, dBase, FoxPro, or other older databases many years ago have had to live with that decision. In many cases, they may think they made the right decision and it worked out for them, in others, they may have regretted the decision later, but once you go down a deployment road with a database or any software product, to a certain extent you're locked in.
So, when big companies buy Oracle, DB/2, Microsoft SQL server, Sybase, or any of the big companies, they aren't just buying a technical product, they are buying a certain level of trust in the company that they won't screw them (at least technically, they probably will get screwed financially many times (grin)); that the company will be around in 10 years to migrate the database to a new system; that support will be there when they need it; and that they will have someone's balls to squeeze if the going gets tough.
Open source databases are very, very cool for small web shops and many other applications, but it's not a good fit for the realistic business needs of large corporations. While there is the advantage of having the source code, so you know you can always enhance or change the product yourself, it will be a long time before a typical corporate IT shop is willing to take on that task. They already have their hands full with maintaining less-ambitious in-house applications.
As the comp.risks guys can tell you, there's a lot more to it than just the software.
Slashdot Mirror
I work for Novell, and this topic went around an internal mailing list recently, we came up with a couple of good screenshots. These are undoctored screenshots from actual customer servers:
This server was up for 457 days when the shot was taken.
This server was up for 2,174 days when the shot was taken! If your calculator isn't handy that's almost six years!
- Twid
It's out. I bought it over a week ago, March 29th, at the Fry's Electronics on Hamilton Road in San Jose.
It's a great game! My only complaint is the speed of play, it can take hours to get a scenario done by the time you feed your people, take over other towns, build up those towns, etc... My favorite thing, though, is petting my monkey. 8-)
For the credit card companies, it's a business decision, in the USA you can only be held liable for $50 in fraud if you report it, so they likely feel it's the consumer's problem to report it.
For law enforcement, it's only a few thousand dollar scam at most, and they are probably more interested in going after murderers and higher profile criminals. If these scam artists don't get too greedy and don't make too much noise, I'm sure they can keep up scams like these for years.
For the internet computer store, it's a tough call, many customers really do buy laptops as gifts or want stuff sent to a different address, are you going to turn away that business?
Here's a typical story from here.
While I think the stories are probably somewhat exaggerated, I think that there is more truth than many posters have been willing to admit.
- Twid
Great point! You're right, using "digital rights management" is falling into the trap of the RIAA... "digital control" is a much more accurate term.
Doubleplusgood suggestion! 8-)
- Twid
Lawrence Lessig in his excellent book "Code and other laws of Cyberspace" says that, if we aren't careful, the internet will become a technology of control, not of freedom.
As anyone who runs a web server knows, it's easy enough to track and log everything. The always-on internet opens up the possiblity of things like CPRM; Microsoft's plans for required registration before Office XP will work, and other sorts of digital rights management. DivX may have failed, but it failed because it didn't have a good enough value proposition, and it was a little ahead of its time. Once more houses have broadband connections, what's the big deal to the average consumer if your DVD player needs to be hooked up to the internet to play DVD's?
The idea that there will always be open alternatives to closed software or hardware isn't guaranteed. Lessig really hit the nail on the head in his book and predated a lot of this controversy. Will there be enough advocates to fund and continue producing open chipsets? You can look at the history of DAT to see a way things might play out.
There is a interview with him here that goes into more detail. (the streaming links didn't work for me, but the mp3 download did.)
I wonder if all this posturing on the big corporation side will lead to more polarization and zealotry. You'll have the totally proprietary and controlling microsoft camp, and the totally free and open Open Source camp. It'll be interesting to see.
- Twid
Check out DSLreports.com before you pick your next provider. They have community reviews of DSL and other broadband providers, including user-contributed bandwidth and packet loss reports. Very cool!
(And before someone accuses me like on my last post, no, I don't work for them... 8-) )
- Todd
That's funny, I thought the topic talked specifically about cookies and spyware. Doesn't sound "utterly off-topic" to me.
So, for the record, my post generated:
- One useful suggestion for Netscape
- One useful suggestion for junkbuster
- One useful suggestion for Konqueror
- Two flames accusing me work working/pimping for Opera
- One joke
I was hoping for a bit more, maybe:
- One "all your base" joke
- A classing "hot grits" troll
- A script to block cookies better using PERL
- A flamewar over whether PERL or Python was the right tool for the job.
But I'll take it as is. Always fun!
- Twid
No, I don't work for opera. BTW, the new version is free sponsorware. Still commercial, but better than the expiring shareware that it was before.
After playing all day yesterday with browsers, I've come up with a way to handle cookies that I'm happy with.
Opera 5.02 has a great feature called "throw away new cookies on exit". It will accept all cookies, but when you exit it tosses them. So, you set up cookies for all the sites you want them for (like slashdot), exit opera (it only saves cookies on exit), check them using Opera File Explorer (see below), then start it back up and check off the "throw away new cookies on exit" option under File|Preferences|Security.
Now, doubleclick and everyone else can throw all the cookies at you they want, and they will be erased when you exit Opera. But, you also still have your stored cookies for the sites you want. Works great! No other browser can do this as gracefully. Opera 5 seems very cool (although I've only played with it for a couple days...).
Links:
Opera: http://www.opera.com
Opera File Explorer (you will need this to view your cookies and decide which to keep): http://www.westelcom.com/users/jsegur/
- Twid
If you're ever at the corner of route 9 and bear creek road in Boulder Creek, California, you may be in range of my house right around the corner. We're kind of isolated up in the mountains, and it's about 45 minutes from san jose, but we're on the way to Santa Cruz, so you can stop mid trip.
/usr/music.
It's 802.11 on an Orinoco Residential Gateway. No network name or encryption. All my MP3's are on the debian server under
Have fun! 8-)
Great points! I think this is basically the path that Sega is taking, realized that their immense 16-bit library has value on roughly compatible "new" platforms. And, since they have lost the console war, Sega porting their games to other consoles makes good business sense.
There was an interesting article in The Register about how Microsoft could lose $2 billion on a successful XBox launch. Hurt Microsoft, pre-order an XBox and buy no games for it.... 8-)
- Twid
>I'd like to see you go up to some big motherfucker, call him a cunt, and then tell him it's not an insult because you don't know his name ;)
I'd tell him it wasn't a personal insult since I didn't know his name, especially if he was wearing a t-shirt that said "I am an anonymous coward." 8-)
You're missing my point, but heck, I'll let it rest after this... my point is that I think Sony is making a proactive investment now in looking at emulating PSone's so that they can take advantage of upcoming technologies, like the XBox and new PDA's. Then, they will look at providing that backcatalog on new medium for the new devices. Someone already responded to my original post with a really good point about this.
I think we're closer to agreement than you think...
That's it for me on this thread!
How can it be a personal insult when you're anonymous? 8-)
>no-one has yet managed to produce 700Mb ROM cartridges cost effectively.
I'm going to make a note of this and put it next to these quotes.
You're assuming:
- That every playstation CD uses all 700MB.
- That a game like Tony Hawk couldn't be cut down in any way to fit into another form factor.
- That memory technology is static.
Call me a technological optimist, but I believe this problem can be solved. For example, Sony already has MD Data 2 discs with 650MB capacity on the market.
- Twid
Yes, your problem is that you're short-sighted. Visor's PDAs already have a gameboy style expansion slot, and the new iPaqs have more than enough horsepower to run an PSone style game. The problem now is screen size and control. I don't know if the Gameboy Advance has the right horsepower yet, but I could certainly see a GameBoy Advance 2 that had more than enough horsepower to run all PSone games.
Also see this interesting story on The Register about Sony portable PSone rumors.
- Twid
Maybe sony has wised up to the value that emulation might bring to them. Look at Sega's decision to get out of the hardware market and focus on software. The money is not in the razors (the consoles) it is in the blades (the games). Although you could argue that Sony is now making boatloads of cash on the PSone (which probably by now costs them $20 to make), I think that's more by accident than by design. Yes, there is value in owning a console platform, but there is value in leveraging your software library too.
Working with Connectix so that they have the option of putting a virtual playstation on anything has a lot of value to Sony in the future. X-Box emulators, and emulators for other sorts of devices could be a huge source of revenue. Just the revenue from a single 10-in-one CD with a bunch of top playstation titles for the XBox (similar to the Sega Arcade CD for Dreamcast) could pay for this arrangement with Connectix.
I saw an interview with the Sega america's president (in ODCM print, couldn't find it online) where he said that PDA's are getting to the point where they can run Sega's immense 16-bit library in emulation. Could Sony be looking at the same thing for their PSone library?
Tony Hawk on your iPaq, anyone?
- Twid
Ummm, no, it's the engineers, the admins, the IT people, the CEO's, the janitors, the marketroids, the bagel boy, and everyone else who is getting fired. Don't you read f**kedcompany????
If you don't, here's a hint: the dot-com bubble has burst, and silicon valley start ups are dropping like flies. Most of them were started by really "smart" degreed engineers who didn't have a clue how to run a business or make a profit.
- Twid
I've notice this too. I commute in from Boulder Creek (up highway 17 at Bear Creek road to 880 north to near the San Jose airport), and I've noticed that traffic has been getting a LOT better. Of course, with Intel "attritioning" thousands and Cisco doing the same, things can only get better!
- Twid
So let me see here:
The Napster lawsuit says that I have no right to share corporate data personally across the internet.
This group is saying that I have no right to stop corporations from sharing my personal data across the internet.
I'll make them a deal, drop the Napster lawsuit, repeal the DMCA, and they can do what they want. Fair?
- Twid
Consumer portals are the ones with a troubled future, but I think there is a great future in intranet portals. Meaning, portals that let you organize your companies internal information. How many wasted minutes a year are spent by employees looking for the correct HR form, for example?
Most companies have done a great job of web-ifying everything in their company, unfortunately, there are now too many web resources in a company. Portals can help organize that and show an employee only what is important to them.
So, I think products like JetSpeed and the product I'm working on, Novell Portal Services have a bright future.
People who just want a very simple web-experience are going to get AOL, which in effect is a web-portal for internet newbies. I also think that soon people will be able to build their own portal with a much simpler drag and drop metaphor that will be local to their machine or web-hosted in a very simple way. I don't think there is much money in doing that, but I think it will happen.
- Twid
Don't forget MAME and all the other emulation projects for Linux. The Xmame home page is a good starter site to find lotsa info, as is the main MAME page.
If you like LSL and want other "racy" games, you can find on many ROM sites some of those old Japanese "strip" and many other games (like the one that was a Qix clone except as you cleared areas it exposed a nude girl). If that's how you get your jollies, hey, have fun, at least you aren't out shooting people...
- Twid
FYI, O'Reilly recently had a big P2P conference in San Francisco, you can find out lots more information on P2P, especially on who all the current playing in the market are and what they are making, here.
I think there is a theme building in this and several other Slashdot articles lately: you need to have common sense about your career choices.
Just like the guy last week who complained that his employer actually had the gall to try to enforce the intellectual property agreement that he signed, this guy didn't do his due diligence before hand.
It's a big nasty world out there. The last car dealer we went to in the bay area (Bob Lewis Volkswagon) tried to give us a starting price of $3,000.00 over MSRP. Abdominizers and other crappy products get sold to people like you and me, not just wrassin' watching folks in trailer parks. One of the good and bad things about the USA is that you can largely make your own mistakes.
I've made similar mistakes to this one. My 2nd job out of college was for a company that was taking over the regional office of another computer reseller. The deal got held up, and I spent two weeks in Cincinnati in a new apartment with no job. I take responsiblity for that mistake.
Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote an incredible essay on self-reliance. (I also mirrored the Project Gutenburg free text version on my site here.) I carry it on my Palm Pilot and refer to it often when I'm feeling ripped off, used, or abused. There are two attitudes you can take when something happens to you, either it happened to you and you were powerless to prevent it, or it happend to you because you created it. The latter position is a more powerful one, since it gives you control of the situation and the power to change it.
Here's the last paragraph of Emerson's essay, I think it's a good summary of what I'm trying to say.
"So use all that is called Fortune. Most men gamble with her, and gain all, and lose all, as her wheel rolls. But do thou leave as unlawful these winnings, and deal with Cause and Effect, the chancellors of God. In the Will work and acquire, and thou hast chained the wheel of Chance, and shalt sit hereafter out of fear from her rotations. A political victory, a rise of rents, the recovery of your sick or the return of your absent friend, or some other favorable event raises your spirits, and you think good days are preparing for you. Do not believe it. Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles."
- Twid
>`These kids are splitting atoms and stuff, so a
>lock poses no barrier to them,'' marveled Barber.
A little overdramatic, I think, this sounds kinda like something out of the Matrix, I can see it now in Matrix 4:
MIT Undergrad: "You mean to say that I can dodge padlocks?"
Morpheus: "I mean to say that when time comes, when you have your PhD in nuclear engineering and you want to put a cow on the dome, you won't have to."
- Twid
I have a friend who got from a friend an actual transcript of one of the intercepted conversations that has been transcribed to text. Apparently, they were able to actually intercept a terrorist threat from Osama Bin Laden. I hope this proves once and for all the great value of this technology.
....
Transcript follows:
Captain: What happen?
Mechanic: Someone set up us the bomb
Operator: We get signal
Captain: What!
Operator: Main screen turn on.
Captain: It's you!!
Osama Bin Laden: How are you gentlemen!!
Osama Bin Laden: All your base are belong to us
Osama Bin Laden: You are on the way to destruction
Captain: What you say?
Osama Bin Laden: You have no chance to survive make your time
Osama Bin Laden: Ha ha ha
Operator: Captain!!
Captain: Take off every 'ZIG'!!
Captain: Move 'ZIG'.
Captain: For great justice.
- Twid
If I can take a little different angle than the other posts here, there's more to this than "my product features can beat up your product features".
A large company picking a strategic database may be making a decision that needs to last 10 or even 20 years. Companies that standardized on DB2, dBase, FoxPro, or other older databases many years ago have had to live with that decision. In many cases, they may think they made the right decision and it worked out for them, in others, they may have regretted the decision later, but once you go down a deployment road with a database or any software product, to a certain extent you're locked in.
So, when big companies buy Oracle, DB/2, Microsoft SQL server, Sybase, or any of the big companies, they aren't just buying a technical product, they are buying a certain level of trust in the company that they won't screw them (at least technically, they probably will get screwed financially many times (grin)); that the company will be around in 10 years to migrate the database to a new system; that support will be there when they need it; and that they will have someone's balls to squeeze if the going gets tough.
Open source databases are very, very cool for small web shops and many other applications, but it's not a good fit for the realistic business needs of large corporations. While there is the advantage of having the source code, so you know you can always enhance or change the product yourself, it will be a long time before a typical corporate IT shop is willing to take on that task. They already have their hands full with maintaining less-ambitious in-house applications.
As the comp.risks guys can tell you, there's a lot more to it than just the software.