However, simplicity/efficiency is often the enemy of fairness. It certainly was in this case.
I mean, I can drastically simplify the American legal system if we toss the laws and move to a system of laws only I know. We'll get rid of all the lawyering and costly trials, and I'll just let the secret police know who they should quietly execute.
It does, but then, private industry has issues in letting people die if it's cheaper than keeping them alive.
The reason health care is a complicated debate instead of something you can resolve into a talking point is because it IS necessary to control costs, and yet, any system of health care that puts controlling costs first is by definition a failure because saving money isn't the object of it.
I can visit any website on my iphone. whether they work or or not is dependent on whether they use flash. In which case, if they do, then I leave and don't go back.
Programming jobs that involve no human interaction or analysis (or gain no value from being at least decent at human interaction) are both getting rarer and the easiest kind of job by far to outsource to a foreign country.
A midsize team might well benefit from one or two of your prototypical "super introvert spend 100 hours a week devouring technology both in and out of work" geeks... assuming you have the kind of management that can wrangle their expertise into being useful rather than a roadblock. More often you're going to see value from a developer who has the basic social skills to make sure they're building what the business actually needs.
Pretty much everything you want a keyboard for automatically goes to the netbook. For some people a touchscreen is good enough for e-mail (for example), but for a lot of people it isn't.
Anything on a budget goes to the netbook, at least for the foreseeable future.
I don't see that there's any niche for a netbook.. unless you really really want a proper laptop and you can't afford one.. because netbooks are just cheap laptops.
Not quite. They're also often small/light laptops. Often their smaller screens and lower power also mean more battery life.
My laptop is a high performance machine as laptops go, because its primary use (or most important use, if not always the one that's most common depending on what's going on with work) was to be a portable development machine for use at clients who preferred I provide my own hardware. It's not cheap, it's not especially light, and it goes through battery faster than a stoned college student goes through Taco Bell. It's perfectly suited to its purpose, and yet, it's very much NOT what I would want a netbook to be.
Hey, at least it's marginally more scientifically accurate than The Core. I know a guy who goes off on a 3 hour rant about each of the science problems in that movie if you bring it up, and the movie itself is only 2 1/4 hours long.
Well, I suppose one could argue working with character encodings isn't universal, but I think it's pretty darn close. Any program that interacts with users outside the USA will have to deal with this at some point
Yeah, see... that's my 10 years of experience. Literally none of it had international implications.
For example, I spent about a year working on a project relating to selling a product that could only be sold in one of the 50 states, much less outside of the USA.
A different project would only ever have clients who were active duty US military.
Another would only have clients living in a particular metro area.
Another (ironically, most of the dev team were UK nationals) by the nature of the industry would only have American users.
And so on. You get the idea.
My experience isn't one year of experience repeated ten times. It was done in different states for many different clients in half a dozen very different industries. It used a variety of databases, frameworks, ORM tools, IDEs, etc. Most were web projects, but the other 40% or so are all over the map.
And yet for all of that I've never, professionally, needed to do something you think is ubiquitous.
Food for thought. I'm not trying to pick on you specifically, I've just seen this kind of thing a lot in tech interviews (more ones I've sat in on than ones I gave or had to pass) -- a guy who's spent all his time doing web apps asks what he thinks are ridiculously basic questions to a guy who's mostly done services and embedded work and console apps and ends up thinking he doesn't know anything, etc.
That's so true. I was offered an otherwise decent job a few months ago, except it paid ~20-25k/year less than the about equally decent job I'm working. Sorry, no.
One of my friends once said to an employer while negotiating salary something to the effect of, "Look, money isn't everything, but the difference between what you're willing to pay me and what they're willing to pay me is the price of my car."
I put it more delicately as I'm negotiating, but I take the basic concept to heart.
Lots of candidates put down that they have, for instance, ten years of experience of Java. And maybe they do! But depressingly often they can't do trivial tasks
Sometimes what seems trivial to you might not to someone else. For example, I legitimately have 10 years of professional Java experience, and character encoding has been relevant to my work precisely zero times in that 10 years.
(That's not to say I probably still couldn't answer a question about it, but I think as developers we tend to take for granted that the kinds of tasks we run up against are universal.)
Right! How dare they force someone who was stealing to resign?!
I mean, I think it's stupid as shit for a guy making what Hurd was making to essentially grab a little more income that didn't amount to 1% of his take home (or more likely, not want his wife to see it on his credit card bills) to buy stuff for his mistress, but you know? I can't blame a company for not wanting to tolerate embezzlement.
No, they don't apply at all. Any non-compete clauses in a contract are invalidated by California law.
That's true in the general case, but California law still allows a company to sue to prevent use of its trade secrets, which is the angle HP is taking here.
Isn't there possibly room for both models to succeed?
Wikipedia's good at covering a lot of topics broadly, but not great for drilling down into a specific topic in the kind of depth that someone studying it for post-graduate work would find useful or helpful. At some point, that kind of peer-reviewed material has to migrate more strongly away from being in dead-tree journals.
a well-maintained Oracle will beat the crap out of SQL Server
but I have never seen a real-world example in which this was even remotely true:
and require less human resources.
I've seen many small-midsize companies in which one DBA covered all of the company's MySQL or PostGre or SQL Server or even Sybase databases. I've never seen a company running Oracle out of dozens I've encountered in my career -- even very small companies -- on less than 3 Oracle DBAs, and usually a lot more. To what degree this is Oracle's fault and to what degree it's the culture of Oracle DBAs to insist on owning tasks that DBAs let developers or others cover in any other environment is a subject for discussion, but (to my mind) that you're going to end up with a lot more DBAs if you run Oracle is a settled issue.
This is because nobody trusts them, stability in the business world is very important. In today's world customer affecting is the buzz word, downtime, negative impact or data loss are all very bad publicity and this can damage a companies earnings quite significantly and many customers will vote with their feet in the higher tech areas.
Which is why roughly 100% of the Fortune 500 are running Windows and Office? Sorry, that argument doesn't hold water.
You and I have clearly seen very different BIG businesses, I would say out of 300+ databases my current company operate less than 5 are SQL Server databases.
Well, two things:
1) You also say that you're an Oracle DBA, so uh... yeah, not that surprising that you tend to be at businesses that are running Oracle.
2) What you said there has absolutely nothing to do with the point you're responding to, which was: these companies are mostly running Windows for everything but NOT running SQL Server.
Oracle comes packaged with many detailed diagnostic tools not everything has or requires fancy GUI's, the tools available are good, now without someone who knows how to use them (i.e. a good DBA) to avoid, identify or repair issues then for sure you are in trouble.
Basically I'm telling you that Oracle's tools (whether or not they're good enough for your purpose) are beyond crap compared to everyone else's tools. Free databases (much less SQL Server) shipped with better tools than Oracle's in the 1900s. The people who developed them should be ashamed and forced to wear dunce caps or scarlet letters or some other mark of shame in public. It is not an exaggeration to say they're ten years behind the state of the art. In technology, that's more than a lifetime.
While your right that the majority of applications won't use the majority of functionality Oracle is positioned as a core app and so as the company grows so too does the demand for more functionality.
And yet, most of the Fortune 500 companies I've worked for still don't have a genuine need for what Oracle brings to the table.
I think there are legitimate cases for Oracle, but people are sold it based on the theory that they will probably have one of those cases sooner or later, while my experience suggests they most likely won't. It's like living a few hundred miles from the coast and buying tsunami insurance.
Most people I've encountered aren't interested in throwing more hardware at a problem if they don't have to. The more servers you run the more you have to maintain.
Alternately, if you buy Oracle you tend to need more DBAs. It's a lot cheaper to hire an extra IT guy than it is to triple your number of DBAs. (I can't make you an argument for why an Oracle installation requires that many more DBAs, I'm just saying that if you compare two similar businesses and one is an Oracle shop, they will always, always, always have many more DBAs.)
Four straight years of zero downtime with Oracle and NetApp has recouped the costs involved at least where I work.
Would you like to buy this rock? It keeps tigers away.
What evidence do you have that a PostGre-based solution (for example) wouldn't have had similar uptime?
Yes, Oracle is robust, but it's a level of robustness 99% of business applications don't actually need. Basically, Oracle is perenially successful at the equivalent of selling soccer moms who want to take their kids to practice and haul groceries home formula one race cars (complete with pit crew) instead of used minivans.
Performance-wise, at some point and in most cases, you can close the gap by throwing more/faster hardware at the problem -- and usually this is still ridiculously cheaper than the Oracle solution.
Frankly, I'm kind of amazed that Microsoft hasn't been able to make stronger inroads with SQL Server in more of the Oracle shops.
Yeah, you can't run SQL Server on anything but Windows, but honestly, 90% of the big businesses I have personally seen using Oracle are running it on Windows anyway.
Microsoft should seem like a big, stable, sueable-in-case-of-catastrophe kind of company to all the same kinds of managers who would be scared to death of adopting an Open Source solution even in the cases in which they're clearly superior across the board. (Otherwise I'd also be wondering why PostGre isn't eating more of Oracle's lunch, too.)
SQL Server has ridiculously better tools included (it's telling that to work on an Oracle database you generally use someone else's tool and never the ones Oracle provides because they're expensive, terrible, or both -- in some cases you're even better off using an Open Source tool a decade old) and is a lot less expensive.
I don't get it. Oracle DBAs managing to advocate for their own job security?
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However, simplicity/efficiency is often the enemy of fairness. It certainly was in this case.
I mean, I can drastically simplify the American legal system if we toss the laws and move to a system of laws only I know. We'll get rid of all the lawyering and costly trials, and I'll just let the secret police know who they should quietly execute.
At least they are. We all know companies that'd rather die than admit they were wrong.
Such as? I suspect that if you name a company or companies, people can point out similar things they backpedaled on.
Uhh, yes it is.
No, no it's not. They're clearly two different concepts.
Not to be inflammatory, but did you actually manage to get so much of Steve Jobs in your mouth that it hit your brain?
You claimed that consumer electronics are designed so they would fail shortly after a new product is released.
No, he didn't. Rather, he said they're not designed so they won't. It's not the same thing.
Your version of the statement is that the manufacturer is malicious and wants the item to fail once a new item is available.
The version of the statement from the poster you were responding to is that the manufacturer just doesn't care if it fails after that.
Against your invincible iPhone, I'll put my two iPods that failed within a month of their warranty expiring.
the government has issues in controlling costs
It does, but then, private industry has issues in letting people die if it's cheaper than keeping them alive.
The reason health care is a complicated debate instead of something you can resolve into a talking point is because it IS necessary to control costs, and yet, any system of health care that puts controlling costs first is by definition a failure because saving money isn't the object of it.
I can visit any website on my iphone. whether they work or or not is dependent on whether they use flash. In which case, if they do, then I leave and don't go back.
It's your loss.
I don't think this is true.
Programming jobs that involve no human interaction or analysis (or gain no value from being at least decent at human interaction) are both getting rarer and the easiest kind of job by far to outsource to a foreign country.
A midsize team might well benefit from one or two of your prototypical "super introvert spend 100 hours a week devouring technology both in and out of work" geeks... assuming you have the kind of management that can wrangle their expertise into being useful rather than a roadblock. More often you're going to see value from a developer who has the basic social skills to make sure they're building what the business actually needs.
Pretty much everything you want a keyboard for automatically goes to the netbook. For some people a touchscreen is good enough for e-mail (for example), but for a lot of people it isn't.
Anything on a budget goes to the netbook, at least for the foreseeable future.
I don't see that there's any niche for a netbook.. unless you really really want a proper laptop and you can't afford one.. because netbooks are just cheap laptops.
Not quite. They're also often small/light laptops. Often their smaller screens and lower power also mean more battery life.
My laptop is a high performance machine as laptops go, because its primary use (or most important use, if not always the one that's most common depending on what's going on with work) was to be a portable development machine for use at clients who preferred I provide my own hardware. It's not cheap, it's not especially light, and it goes through battery faster than a stoned college student goes through Taco Bell. It's perfectly suited to its purpose, and yet, it's very much NOT what I would want a netbook to be.
African or European?
They occupy different niches (even though there's some overlap) and can coexist. Next question!
Hey, at least it's marginally more scientifically accurate than The Core. I know a guy who goes off on a 3 hour rant about each of the science problems in that movie if you bring it up, and the movie itself is only 2 1/4 hours long.
Well, I suppose one could argue working with character encodings isn't universal, but I think it's pretty darn close. Any program that interacts with users outside the USA will have to deal with this at some point
Yeah, see... that's my 10 years of experience. Literally none of it had international implications.
For example, I spent about a year working on a project relating to selling a product that could only be sold in one of the 50 states, much less outside of the USA.
A different project would only ever have clients who were active duty US military.
Another would only have clients living in a particular metro area.
Another (ironically, most of the dev team were UK nationals) by the nature of the industry would only have American users.
And so on. You get the idea.
My experience isn't one year of experience repeated ten times. It was done in different states for many different clients in half a dozen very different industries. It used a variety of databases, frameworks, ORM tools, IDEs, etc. Most were web projects, but the other 40% or so are all over the map.
And yet for all of that I've never, professionally, needed to do something you think is ubiquitous.
Food for thought. I'm not trying to pick on you specifically, I've just seen this kind of thing a lot in tech interviews (more ones I've sat in on than ones I gave or had to pass) -- a guy who's spent all his time doing web apps asks what he thinks are ridiculously basic questions to a guy who's mostly done services and embedded work and console apps and ends up thinking he doesn't know anything, etc.
That's so true. I was offered an otherwise decent job a few months ago, except it paid ~20-25k/year less than the about equally decent job I'm working. Sorry, no.
One of my friends once said to an employer while negotiating salary something to the effect of, "Look, money isn't everything, but the difference between what you're willing to pay me and what they're willing to pay me is the price of my car."
I put it more delicately as I'm negotiating, but I take the basic concept to heart.
Lots of candidates put down that they have, for instance, ten years of experience of Java. And maybe they do! But depressingly often they can't do trivial tasks
Sometimes what seems trivial to you might not to someone else. For example, I legitimately have 10 years of professional Java experience, and character encoding has been relevant to my work precisely zero times in that 10 years.
(That's not to say I probably still couldn't answer a question about it, but I think as developers we tend to take for granted that the kinds of tasks we run up against are universal.)
Right! How dare they force someone who was stealing to resign?!
I mean, I think it's stupid as shit for a guy making what Hurd was making to essentially grab a little more income that didn't amount to 1% of his take home (or more likely, not want his wife to see it on his credit card bills) to buy stuff for his mistress, but you know? I can't blame a company for not wanting to tolerate embezzlement.
No, they don't apply at all. Any non-compete clauses in a contract are invalidated by California law.
That's true in the general case, but California law still allows a company to sue to prevent use of its trade secrets, which is the angle HP is taking here.
There are exceptions, but in this case, Hurd was fired/released
In effect, yes, though technically (and presumably for legal purposes) he did resign.
California law invalidates most non-competes; in this case, HP is going after one of the things they don't invalidate.
Isn't there possibly room for both models to succeed?
Wikipedia's good at covering a lot of topics broadly, but not great for drilling down into a specific topic in the kind of depth that someone studying it for post-graduate work would find useful or helpful. At some point, that kind of peer-reviewed material has to migrate more strongly away from being in dead-tree journals.
I'll give you this without a fight:
a well-maintained Oracle will beat the crap out of SQL Server
but I have never seen a real-world example in which this was even remotely true:
and require less human resources.
I've seen many small-midsize companies in which one DBA covered all of the company's MySQL or PostGre or SQL Server or even Sybase databases. I've never seen a company running Oracle out of dozens I've encountered in my career -- even very small companies -- on less than 3 Oracle DBAs, and usually a lot more. To what degree this is Oracle's fault and to what degree it's the culture of Oracle DBAs to insist on owning tasks that DBAs let developers or others cover in any other environment is a subject for discussion, but (to my mind) that you're going to end up with a lot more DBAs if you run Oracle is a settled issue.
This is because nobody trusts them, stability in the business world is very important. In today's world customer affecting is the buzz word, downtime, negative impact or data loss are all very bad publicity and this can damage a companies earnings quite significantly and many customers will vote with their feet in the higher tech areas.
Which is why roughly 100% of the Fortune 500 are running Windows and Office? Sorry, that argument doesn't hold water.
You and I have clearly seen very different BIG businesses, I would say out of 300+ databases my current company operate less than 5 are SQL Server databases.
Well, two things:
1) You also say that you're an Oracle DBA, so uh... yeah, not that surprising that you tend to be at businesses that are running Oracle.
2) What you said there has absolutely nothing to do with the point you're responding to, which was: these companies are mostly running Windows for everything but NOT running SQL Server.
Oracle comes packaged with many detailed diagnostic tools not everything has or requires fancy GUI's, the tools available are good, now without someone who knows how to use them (i.e. a good DBA) to avoid, identify or repair issues then for sure you are in trouble.
Basically I'm telling you that Oracle's tools (whether or not they're good enough for your purpose) are beyond crap compared to everyone else's tools. Free databases (much less SQL Server) shipped with better tools than Oracle's in the 1900s. The people who developed them should be ashamed and forced to wear dunce caps or scarlet letters or some other mark of shame in public. It is not an exaggeration to say they're ten years behind the state of the art. In technology, that's more than a lifetime.
While your right that the majority of applications won't use the majority of functionality Oracle is positioned as a core app and so as the company grows so too does the demand for more functionality.
And yet, most of the Fortune 500 companies I've worked for still don't have a genuine need for what Oracle brings to the table.
I think there are legitimate cases for Oracle, but people are sold it based on the theory that they will probably have one of those cases sooner or later, while my experience suggests they most likely won't. It's like living a few hundred miles from the coast and buying tsunami insurance.
Most people I've encountered aren't interested in throwing more hardware at a problem if they don't have to. The more servers you run the more you have to maintain.
Alternately, if you buy Oracle you tend to need more DBAs. It's a lot cheaper to hire an extra IT guy than it is to triple your number of DBAs. (I can't make you an argument for why an Oracle installation requires that many more DBAs, I'm just saying that if you compare two similar businesses and one is an Oracle shop, they will always, always, always have many more DBAs.)
Four straight years of zero downtime with Oracle and NetApp has recouped the costs involved at least where I work.
Would you like to buy this rock? It keeps tigers away.
What evidence do you have that a PostGre-based solution (for example) wouldn't have had similar uptime?
I'd argue two things:
Yes, Oracle is robust, but it's a level of robustness 99% of business applications don't actually need. Basically, Oracle is perenially successful at the equivalent of selling soccer moms who want to take their kids to practice and haul groceries home formula one race cars (complete with pit crew) instead of used minivans.
Performance-wise, at some point and in most cases, you can close the gap by throwing more/faster hardware at the problem -- and usually this is still ridiculously cheaper than the Oracle solution.
Governments exist to protect people from force and fraud, when they step beyond that, they turn into tyrants.
Hasn't the UAE's government always been tyrannical? Depending on who you ask, possibly benevolent tyranny, but still.
Frankly, I'm kind of amazed that Microsoft hasn't been able to make stronger inroads with SQL Server in more of the Oracle shops.
Yeah, you can't run SQL Server on anything but Windows, but honestly, 90% of the big businesses I have personally seen using Oracle are running it on Windows anyway.
Microsoft should seem like a big, stable, sueable-in-case-of-catastrophe kind of company to all the same kinds of managers who would be scared to death of adopting an Open Source solution even in the cases in which they're clearly superior across the board. (Otherwise I'd also be wondering why PostGre isn't eating more of Oracle's lunch, too.)
SQL Server has ridiculously better tools included (it's telling that to work on an Oracle database you generally use someone else's tool and never the ones Oracle provides because they're expensive, terrible, or both -- in some cases you're even better off using an Open Source tool a decade old) and is a lot less expensive.
I don't get it. Oracle DBAs managing to advocate for their own job security?