Amazingly, even very rich companies like Apple do some research before they spend money opening a new store. They'll have an idea what sort of revenue a given store is expected to produce. As such, they have all the information they need to figure out what local products they'd need to make 30% of the new revenue total be locally produced. Alternatively, Apple could make a few products in India, and thus 100% of their revenue would be 'local' and so would offset a lot of the revenue from imports, again though, projections would give you an idea if that's likely to work.
I'm guessing there's an annual 'tax return' sort of bureaucracy that Apple would have to fill out to say "we made X from imports and Y from local", to show they were keeping up with the 30% minimum. I'd need someone more familiar with the rules to know what happens if Apple actually made less from local than they projected.
In the UK, around a million people marched through London in opposition of the (then proposed) UK involvement in the Iraq war (part 2). It was probably the biggest single peaceful march in the UK in decades, and was accompanied by thorough analysis and critique by various media outlets. Indeed, many millions more marched in other countries as well. I think we can say that 'the people' were pretty well convinced.
We still ended up in a war, which to this day many (qualified) people consider to gave been illegal (We're still waiting for the official report on our leadership's behaviour).
So... peaceful protest - not so successful after all.
These "exclusive deals" are disgusting... Imagine that we had the same thing in stores: You would have to go to one store to buy Coca-Cola and a different store to buy Pepsi, or to one store to buy yogurt and a different store to buy cheese, and so on.
Apart from your coke/pepsi thing, the fact you can buy (coke|pepsi) and cheese in the same store is because coke and pepsi both realised they needed to be in as many outlets as they could to get market share. They figured this out maybe 100 years ago or whatever. The movie industry... not so much.
You know... it's really easy - JUST DON'T WATCH TV. I mean, you don't have to go cold-turkey, but you know what, you'll still go to sleep and wake up in the morning if you don't watch $show or $film. Maybe phone someone for a chat instead? Read a book? Do some sort of hobby? Watch something else? If these companies don't want to sell to you, you don't have to buy - simple as that.
Okay, that's lousy behavior on the part of apparently corrupt officials. How exactly is anonymous vandalism any better? If his political views are so sophisticated, why isn't he engaging the political process and using valid means to promote said views? Like organizing nonviolent protests, engaging with the electorate, using the democratic process to bring about systemic change?
Hmm... let me see now... because none of those methods work, perhaps?
Vandalism only discredits his cause.
Only if you think that way. If you're expecting a nice non-violent protest where everyone picks up their own litter and goes home at the time the police say they should, then of course you're going to think anything other than that is 'discrediting'.
I'm not going to say 'hactivism' is the Right Thing, but as we saw with the recent Panama leaks, it sure can make changes in the world. In that sense, I'd place it above non-violent protest, which recent history shows does pretty much nothing.
Paywalls are a great bullshit filter. If this article turns out to be useful and interesting, then other outlets will run it. If it's the usual sensationalist bullshit, then they won't. Thus, you and I needn't concern ourselves with it for now. If it's important, we'll hear about it somewhere else;-)
As a sysadmin (devops?), I don't have anything against the language per-se, but so far, I haven't been impressed with the packaging and deployment options. Maybe I'm not doing it right (quite possibly), but so far I'm not especially impressed with npm and pm2. I find they're both a bit opaque and don't feel very natural to me - I don't feel like I have proper control over them - it feels like they're doing 'clever' things on my behalf which I'd rather do myself.
None of that is a reason to avoid node.js, but it's not a glowing endorsement for it either. Ultimately this shit has to run in production, and that means people like me have to deploy it. That means we want 'clean' and reliable, repeatable (etc) ways to get things onto boxes. It feels like the node.js world is about as ready for production as Ruby, Python etc. All possible, but none very friendly.
Java, for all its faults is actually pretty easy - you can have multiple versions of the language, libraries and application quite easily. Perl's weirdly pretty easy too (although in truth, multiple language versions would be fairly painful). PHP is really easy, so long as you want it in Apache web server (but again, multiple versions is hard).
It'll work well until Autumn - leaf fall might just have something to say about this idea (although the cars will actually look pretty cool entirely encrusted in leaves).
If I grok the summary correctly, they're going to use any cameras without a password to augment their existing capability. That means persons-unknown-to-them can control the output of those cameras, and thus alter the reality (as they see it) of whatever the camera is pointing at.
As an example, let's say there's a passwordless camera pointed at a pawn shop. I decide I want to rob said pawn shop, so I convince the camera owner to delay the feed by 15 minutes (which they do, perhaps by inserting an extra frame every so often for a couple of weeks so no one notices). I then rob the pawn shop, and get 15 minutes head start on the lazy cops sat in the office eating snack and talking about sports and their cheating spouses. The police-owned cameras (and in fact all the others) just see my van drive down the road and turning onto some dirt track where there are no cameras at all. GENIUS!
To MalQuote: "advice from and old tracker: if you want to find someone, use your eyes".
I find this interesting. There's talk of banning things, heavily licensing them, etc etc - all on the basis that someone *might* misuse them. In the case of drones, getting one to carry anywhere near enough paint (or petrol) to cause anything more than a nuisance on the freeway requires some very, very deliberate acts. You've got to seriously consider how that extra weight affects handling, flying time, etc. You've also got to figure out how to tip the paint out at the right time, and presumably only tip a bit of it at a time, or else you only get one shot at it before the cops get to hear about it and start looking for you. That all sounds pretty hard to me.
Contrast this with how little effort it takes to shoot someone (by accident or otherwise) when guns are freely available.
Seems to me if you want to liven up a dull afternoon, screw with an airliner, or generally cause trouble there are far easier ways to do so.
In many cases, option (2) works well for a lot of people. I know all the reasons not to go that way, but most companies are more interested in having a solid contract and a working solution than they are worrying about things that may never happen (and supposedly if they do, then the contract is there to help).
1) Leave any decision (including this one) until the last possible moment 2) Often make a bad decision rather then the one the voters or common sense would suggest 3) ??? 4) Profit!
In American politics, that means:
1) You'll only find out hours or minutes before the deadline for such things 2) You'll be left wondering why the person that dropped out really did 3) ??? 4) Both candidates ultimately don't get elected, drop out of future races and decide to concentrate on being senior VPs and advisors at numerous big companies instead
I've used Docker a bit, and I get it. I'd like to build a container of my client's Rails app + gems + ruby and just run it wherever without having to 'dirty' my system with all that stuff. I get it.
What I don't get is why I'd want Docker for MySql or Postgres? I install that on a dedicated box, so whatever crap it wants to pull in and spew all over the place is fine with me. When its time to upgrade, I'm yet to see if Docker can help me, I can't see how (at the very least, not much).
So... what I'm saying is... I can see Docker making a lot of inroads in a lot of places, I'm just not sure its the special sauce for every situation, which is what the hype seems to suggest.
No remote working? Quite the irony for a cloud company most of its customers couldn't even locate on a map, that peddles a distributed, decentralised source code control product.
as for their growth... I understand their need to make money and assure their market position. Couldn't they just do that by being good at git and not worrying about all the other fluff?
If I were in the business of intrusive ways to protect my imaginary property, I could think of a bunch of far better options that would actually do them some good rather than this incredibly obvious fail. For example:
1) If evil bit is set, then don't allow fast forward (and return to normal playing if fast forwarding). Set evil bit during ad breaks, product placements etc. 2) If evil bit is set, then do not allow viewing on anything other than the device that recorded the content (so no network or copy-to-usb or download for later viewing) 3) If evil bit is set, then only allow copying to authorised devices, but watch freely on device that did the recording...I could go on.
If anyone fancies using any of these ideas, then you'll need to obtain a license from me to do so;-)
I suspect Japan will be the test bed for these idiotic ideas. If whatever comes out of that wash has this sort of bollocks in it by the time it gets to me, then I guess I won't worry about getting 4K/8K capable devices until the whole thing has been hacked and reverse engineered to shreds like every previous attempt to do this sort of thing has eventually become.
...they also won't have to worry about learning what the hell Open Source is, how it benefits humankind (and indeed the big corps too), how they can contribute and be useful, and how it has it's own legal framework that's remarkably easy to stay comfortably inside if you have half a brain. They'll be far too busy trying to learn about imaginary property, non-transferable licenses, annual subscriptions and contract lengths.
I complained to my MP (in the UK, where our PM has publicly stated he'd like back doors all over the place) and got a response which essentially said "we invest in strong encryption, we don't advocate weakening encryption at all. However, we do want tech companies to give us access to data when we ask for it".
In other words - it's all about double-speak. To turn this into slashdot friendly words: "we come in peace. shoot to kill".
Strong statements are all well and good, but until they also legislate to say (to tech companies) "it's okay to store data in encrypted form that you don't have the keys for", they're not really any different from the other countries of the western world that are keen to snoop on our every move. They're less in-bed with the Americans than we Brits are, so hopefully not quite as pervasive as we are, but apart from scale and efficiency, not that far different.
When we've grown a few humans with similar growing differences as we've done to this salmon, I'll start thinking the salmon is okay. Until then, forget it.
I know that humankind knows less than there is to learn. We have no idea if this salmon is safe or not - we don't know what makes a wild salmon safe (or not). All we can do is check for things we know are bad, and we really don't know very many bad things compared to how many there are (we can't even count them, to be honest). The fact you and I disagree on this general point suggests also that we can't agree what's 'bad' and what's not. In other words, we've got a long way to go in this area before we're "pretty knowledgeable".
Until the salmon can tell us it feels okay, it's physically okay and that it's pretty happy with its lot in life, we honestly have no way to know if it's the same as a non-GM salmon. At least a human can tell us what it's thinking and feeling, and can be compared to other humans. Thus, we stand a chance of finding out if the GM-human really is the same as a non-GM human. Even this doesn't tell you everything, but I'm pretty sure nature has a way of adapting or rejecting things that are too par "out of spec", and so asking how things are seems like a reasonable first step in lieu of a more "star trek tricorder scan" sort of solution.
I just asked mine to tell me what use weakened encryption would be since France has already outlawed it and still missed these guys (as indeed did GCHQ and the Five Eyes nations). I went on to ask him to publish the same information the Bill calls for, but for his home, office and Parliament use of the Internet (I even said I'd install suitable equipment to collect the information if he didn't have it already). Anything less is hipocrisy;-)
I know doing this does about jackshit most of the time. However, if we all do it then they at least have to reply to all our letters, which might slow them down a bit. Gotta give writetothem.com a +1 though, it really is a great resource.
I plan to start out by saying (as someone above said) that you can't pass a law to make maths easier. Then I'll go on to explain the One Time Pad, and after s/he is bamboozled with all that, suggest that they should indeed pass a law to make maths easier because it'll make our kids achieve far greater things than the rest of the world and make the scrambling of conversations easier to unscramble. There's no need to make this a "snoopers charter" - just make it an Education Bill instead;-)
I agree, but RAC is like crack, and Oracle know it. FWIW, RAC is actually pretty good - esoteric, yes, but actually capable of an awful lot.
The thing about Oracle is that if you run single server, then you could conceivably migrate to Postres. You've got a world of dev work to do, but you could do it. Once single server starts puffing a bit and the sharp suited Oracle guys tell you RAC is your best option, the PHBs get involved. In fairness to them, they're faced with a big license fee to pay each year, or to pay more in dollars and lost dev time to convert to Postgres. Spending (say) 3-6 months engineering out of Oracle and onto Postgres is pretty career limiting if not done exactly right - not only have you got to convince the CxOs that it's the right way to go (which is hard), but you've got to hit your deadlines and Postgres *has* to give you headroom beyond the next 2-3 years at least (and you've got to push back on your feature delivery a bit). That's a hell of a personal risk to take as a PHB, and so it becomes much easier to spend a lot of someone else's money and buy RAC instead. The implementation costs are tiny in comparison, and you guarantee headroom for several more years at least.
Whilst I can understand all of this, what I can't understand is how anyone thinks Oracle isn't just going to turn up the thumb screws in years 2-3. I mean, once you've used RAC enough that you couldn't "just drop in postgres", then they know you've got months of dev work just to shard up your data, never mind actually use a different RDMS. As much as I think Oracle are arseholes, cranking up the license to a captive customer is pretty understandable. How on earth the CxOs can't see this up-front is beyond me - what the hell do they teach on MBA courses?
What I can't abide is the slight-of-hand stuff Oracle also does. The subtle changes to contract wording that mean you sign your contract renewal and are instantly in violation of your contract (which they only tell you about a few months later). That to me seems more like a protection racket, and surely must be illegal in a lot of jurisdictions. I wonder if customers can ask for assurances that they're license-compliant on day one of contract renewals? That wouldn't stop you having to pay, but at least you'd get some transparency while dealing with the contract, and would mean you could at least stay compliant until the next renewal.
So anyway, if you're about half-using an Oracle single server, then start looking at Postgres. That way you're always small to Oracle and not worth hassling too much, and you won't ever get into all this horrible stuff.
The sketchy side of the internet (in part) supplies them with the tools of their trade. Given all the other sh*t these agencies have been up to, I wouldn't be surprised to find out they were in charge of some ransomware so that they could fund other extra-curricular activities (via suitable layers of third parties, of course).
exactly as this thread shows, though, they have a perception problem. They may have arrived at having a cloud offering in the same was as Microsoft (ie. buy it in), but unlike Microsoft, to paraphrase a common expression, you can get fired for buying Wallmart.
That said, if Wallmart could offer Amazon's list of services at the sort of lower price most people perceive Wallmart as offering, then it could get some traction (at least from the smaller companies).
Slashdot Mirror
Amazingly, even very rich companies like Apple do some research before they spend money opening a new store. They'll have an idea what sort of revenue a given store is expected to produce. As such, they have all the information they need to figure out what local products they'd need to make 30% of the new revenue total be locally produced. Alternatively, Apple could make a few products in India, and thus 100% of their revenue would be 'local' and so would offset a lot of the revenue from imports, again though, projections would give you an idea if that's likely to work.
I'm guessing there's an annual 'tax return' sort of bureaucracy that Apple would have to fill out to say "we made X from imports and Y from local", to show they were keeping up with the 30% minimum. I'd need someone more familiar with the rules to know what happens if Apple actually made less from local than they projected.
In the UK, around a million people marched through London in opposition of the (then proposed) UK involvement in the Iraq war (part 2). It was probably the biggest single peaceful march in the UK in decades, and was accompanied by thorough analysis and critique by various media outlets. Indeed, many millions more marched in other countries as well. I think we can say that 'the people' were pretty well convinced.
We still ended up in a war, which to this day many (qualified) people consider to gave been illegal (We're still waiting for the official report on our leadership's behaviour).
So... peaceful protest - not so successful after all.
These "exclusive deals" are disgusting... Imagine that we had the same thing in stores: You would have to go to one store to buy Coca-Cola and a different store to buy Pepsi, or to one store to buy yogurt and a different store to buy cheese, and so on.
Apart from your coke/pepsi thing, the fact you can buy (coke|pepsi) and cheese in the same store is because coke and pepsi both realised they needed to be in as many outlets as they could to get market share. They figured this out maybe 100 years ago or whatever. The movie industry... not so much.
You know... it's really easy - JUST DON'T WATCH TV. I mean, you don't have to go cold-turkey, but you know what, you'll still go to sleep and wake up in the morning if you don't watch $show or $film. Maybe phone someone for a chat instead? Read a book? Do some sort of hobby? Watch something else? If these companies don't want to sell to you, you don't have to buy - simple as that.
Okay, that's lousy behavior on the part of apparently corrupt officials. How exactly is anonymous vandalism any better? If his political views are so sophisticated, why isn't he engaging the political process and using valid means to promote said views? Like organizing nonviolent protests, engaging with the electorate, using the democratic process to bring about systemic change?
Hmm... let me see now... because none of those methods work, perhaps?
Vandalism only discredits his cause.
Only if you think that way. If you're expecting a nice non-violent protest where everyone picks up their own litter and goes home at the time the police say they should, then of course you're going to think anything other than that is 'discrediting'.
I'm not going to say 'hactivism' is the Right Thing, but as we saw with the recent Panama leaks, it sure can make changes in the world. In that sense, I'd place it above non-violent protest, which recent history shows does pretty much nothing.
I'd say it works just fine.
Paywalls are a great bullshit filter. If this article turns out to be useful and interesting, then other outlets will run it. If it's the usual sensationalist bullshit, then they won't. Thus, you and I needn't concern ourselves with it for now. If it's important, we'll hear about it somewhere else ;-)
As a sysadmin (devops?), I don't have anything against the language per-se, but so far, I haven't been impressed with the packaging and deployment options. Maybe I'm not doing it right (quite possibly), but so far I'm not especially impressed with npm and pm2. I find they're both a bit opaque and don't feel very natural to me - I don't feel like I have proper control over them - it feels like they're doing 'clever' things on my behalf which I'd rather do myself.
None of that is a reason to avoid node.js, but it's not a glowing endorsement for it either. Ultimately this shit has to run in production, and that means people like me have to deploy it. That means we want 'clean' and reliable, repeatable (etc) ways to get things onto boxes. It feels like the node.js world is about as ready for production as Ruby, Python etc. All possible, but none very friendly.
Java, for all its faults is actually pretty easy - you can have multiple versions of the language, libraries and application quite easily. Perl's weirdly pretty easy too (although in truth, multiple language versions would be fairly painful). PHP is really easy, so long as you want it in Apache web server (but again, multiple versions is hard).
It'll work well until Autumn - leaf fall might just have something to say about this idea (although the cars will actually look pretty cool entirely encrusted in leaves).
If I grok the summary correctly, they're going to use any cameras without a password to augment their existing capability. That means persons-unknown-to-them can control the output of those cameras, and thus alter the reality (as they see it) of whatever the camera is pointing at.
As an example, let's say there's a passwordless camera pointed at a pawn shop. I decide I want to rob said pawn shop, so I convince the camera owner to delay the feed by 15 minutes (which they do, perhaps by inserting an extra frame every so often for a couple of weeks so no one notices). I then rob the pawn shop, and get 15 minutes head start on the lazy cops sat in the office eating snack and talking about sports and their cheating spouses. The police-owned cameras (and in fact all the others) just see my van drive down the road and turning onto some dirt track where there are no cameras at all. GENIUS!
To MalQuote: "advice from and old tracker: if you want to find someone, use your eyes".
I find this interesting. There's talk of banning things, heavily licensing them, etc etc - all on the basis that someone *might* misuse them. In the case of drones, getting one to carry anywhere near enough paint (or petrol) to cause anything more than a nuisance on the freeway requires some very, very deliberate acts. You've got to seriously consider how that extra weight affects handling, flying time, etc. You've also got to figure out how to tip the paint out at the right time, and presumably only tip a bit of it at a time, or else you only get one shot at it before the cops get to hear about it and start looking for you. That all sounds pretty hard to me.
Contrast this with how little effort it takes to shoot someone (by accident or otherwise) when guns are freely available.
Seems to me if you want to liven up a dull afternoon, screw with an airliner, or generally cause trouble there are far easier ways to do so.
Interesting...
...then your choices appear to be:
1) Mac
2) "Cloud" apps, online, in a browser
In many cases, option (2) works well for a lot of people. I know all the reasons not to go that way, but most companies are more interested in having a solid contract and a working solution than they are worrying about things that may never happen (and supposedly if they do, then the contract is there to help).
The usual, tired and trusted solution is:
1) Leave any decision (including this one) until the last possible moment
2) Often make a bad decision rather then the one the voters or common sense would suggest
3) ???
4) Profit!
In American politics, that means:
1) You'll only find out hours or minutes before the deadline for such things
2) You'll be left wondering why the person that dropped out really did
3) ???
4) Both candidates ultimately don't get elected, drop out of future races and decide to concentrate on being senior VPs and advisors at numerous big companies instead
No need - just tow a trailer and put them on there ;-)
I've used Docker a bit, and I get it. I'd like to build a container of my client's Rails app + gems + ruby and just run it wherever without having to 'dirty' my system with all that stuff. I get it.
What I don't get is why I'd want Docker for MySql or Postgres? I install that on a dedicated box, so whatever crap it wants to pull in and spew all over the place is fine with me. When its time to upgrade, I'm yet to see if Docker can help me, I can't see how (at the very least, not much).
So... what I'm saying is... I can see Docker making a lot of inroads in a lot of places, I'm just not sure its the special sauce for every situation, which is what the hype seems to suggest.
No remote working? Quite the irony for a cloud company most of its customers couldn't even locate on a map, that peddles a distributed, decentralised source code control product.
as for their growth... I understand their need to make money and assure their market position. Couldn't they just do that by being good at git and not worrying about all the other fluff?
If I were in the business of intrusive ways to protect my imaginary property, I could think of a bunch of far better options that would actually do them some good rather than this incredibly obvious fail. For example:
1) If evil bit is set, then don't allow fast forward (and return to normal playing if fast forwarding). Set evil bit during ad breaks, product placements etc. ...I could go on.
2) If evil bit is set, then do not allow viewing on anything other than the device that recorded the content (so no network or copy-to-usb or download for later viewing)
3) If evil bit is set, then only allow copying to authorised devices, but watch freely on device that did the recording
If anyone fancies using any of these ideas, then you'll need to obtain a license from me to do so ;-)
I suspect Japan will be the test bed for these idiotic ideas. If whatever comes out of that wash has this sort of bollocks in it by the time it gets to me, then I guess I won't worry about getting 4K/8K capable devices until the whole thing has been hacked and reverse engineered to shreds like every previous attempt to do this sort of thing has eventually become.
...they also won't have to worry about learning what the hell Open Source is, how it benefits humankind (and indeed the big corps too), how they can contribute and be useful, and how it has it's own legal framework that's remarkably easy to stay comfortably inside if you have half a brain. They'll be far too busy trying to learn about imaginary property, non-transferable licenses, annual subscriptions and contract lengths.
All sounds great to me ;-)
I complained to my MP (in the UK, where our PM has publicly stated he'd like back doors all over the place) and got a response which essentially said "we invest in strong encryption, we don't advocate weakening encryption at all. However, we do want tech companies to give us access to data when we ask for it".
In other words - it's all about double-speak. To turn this into slashdot friendly words: "we come in peace. shoot to kill".
Strong statements are all well and good, but until they also legislate to say (to tech companies) "it's okay to store data in encrypted form that you don't have the keys for", they're not really any different from the other countries of the western world that are keen to snoop on our every move. They're less in-bed with the Americans than we Brits are, so hopefully not quite as pervasive as we are, but apart from scale and efficiency, not that far different.
You forgot the part where they managed to miniturise the reactor to fit into a man's arm (1973): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
All on Blu Ray ;-)
When we've grown a few humans with similar growing differences as we've done to this salmon, I'll start thinking the salmon is okay. Until then, forget it.
I know that humankind knows less than there is to learn. We have no idea if this salmon is safe or not - we don't know what makes a wild salmon safe (or not). All we can do is check for things we know are bad, and we really don't know very many bad things compared to how many there are (we can't even count them, to be honest). The fact you and I disagree on this general point suggests also that we can't agree what's 'bad' and what's not. In other words, we've got a long way to go in this area before we're "pretty knowledgeable".
Until the salmon can tell us it feels okay, it's physically okay and that it's pretty happy with its lot in life, we honestly have no way to know if it's the same as a non-GM salmon. At least a human can tell us what it's thinking and feeling, and can be compared to other humans. Thus, we stand a chance of finding out if the GM-human really is the same as a non-GM human. Even this doesn't tell you everything, but I'm pretty sure nature has a way of adapting or rejecting things that are too par "out of spec", and so asking how things are seems like a reasonable first step in lieu of a more "star trek tricorder scan" sort of solution.
I just asked mine to tell me what use weakened encryption would be since France has already outlawed it and still missed these guys (as indeed did GCHQ and the Five Eyes nations). I went on to ask him to publish the same information the Bill calls for, but for his home, office and Parliament use of the Internet (I even said I'd install suitable equipment to collect the information if he didn't have it already). Anything less is hipocrisy ;-)
I know doing this does about jackshit most of the time. However, if we all do it then they at least have to reply to all our letters, which might slow them down a bit. Gotta give writetothem.com a +1 though, it really is a great resource.
I plan to start out by saying (as someone above said) that you can't pass a law to make maths easier. Then I'll go on to explain the One Time Pad, and after s/he is bamboozled with all that, suggest that they should indeed pass a law to make maths easier because it'll make our kids achieve far greater things than the rest of the world and make the scrambling of conversations easier to unscramble. There's no need to make this a "snoopers charter" - just make it an Education Bill instead ;-)
I agree, but RAC is like crack, and Oracle know it. FWIW, RAC is actually pretty good - esoteric, yes, but actually capable of an awful lot.
The thing about Oracle is that if you run single server, then you could conceivably migrate to Postres. You've got a world of dev work to do, but you could do it. Once single server starts puffing a bit and the sharp suited Oracle guys tell you RAC is your best option, the PHBs get involved. In fairness to them, they're faced with a big license fee to pay each year, or to pay more in dollars and lost dev time to convert to Postgres. Spending (say) 3-6 months engineering out of Oracle and onto Postgres is pretty career limiting if not done exactly right - not only have you got to convince the CxOs that it's the right way to go (which is hard), but you've got to hit your deadlines and Postgres *has* to give you headroom beyond the next 2-3 years at least (and you've got to push back on your feature delivery a bit). That's a hell of a personal risk to take as a PHB, and so it becomes much easier to spend a lot of someone else's money and buy RAC instead. The implementation costs are tiny in comparison, and you guarantee headroom for several more years at least.
Whilst I can understand all of this, what I can't understand is how anyone thinks Oracle isn't just going to turn up the thumb screws in years 2-3. I mean, once you've used RAC enough that you couldn't "just drop in postgres", then they know you've got months of dev work just to shard up your data, never mind actually use a different RDMS. As much as I think Oracle are arseholes, cranking up the license to a captive customer is pretty understandable. How on earth the CxOs can't see this up-front is beyond me - what the hell do they teach on MBA courses?
What I can't abide is the slight-of-hand stuff Oracle also does. The subtle changes to contract wording that mean you sign your contract renewal and are instantly in violation of your contract (which they only tell you about a few months later). That to me seems more like a protection racket, and surely must be illegal in a lot of jurisdictions. I wonder if customers can ask for assurances that they're license-compliant on day one of contract renewals? That wouldn't stop you having to pay, but at least you'd get some transparency while dealing with the contract, and would mean you could at least stay compliant until the next renewal.
So anyway, if you're about half-using an Oracle single server, then start looking at Postgres. That way you're always small to Oracle and not worth hassling too much, and you won't ever get into all this horrible stuff.
The sketchy side of the internet (in part) supplies them with the tools of their trade. Given all the other sh*t these agencies have been up to, I wouldn't be surprised to find out they were in charge of some ransomware so that they could fund other extra-curricular activities (via suitable layers of third parties, of course).
exactly as this thread shows, though, they have a perception problem. They may have arrived at having a cloud offering in the same was as Microsoft (ie. buy it in), but unlike Microsoft, to paraphrase a common expression, you can get fired for buying Wallmart.
That said, if Wallmart could offer Amazon's list of services at the sort of lower price most people perceive Wallmart as offering, then it could get some traction (at least from the smaller companies).