I'd also like to know the network topology of the facility in question, its connectivity to the internet and their protocols for isolating their systems from threats
I was just imagining some puritanical speech about rejecting your animal nature and elevating people above base instinct
funny how that never works out, how hiding our human nature to enjoy intoxicants, sex, and all the other naughty things that people are prone to do just results in layers of lies and social artifice
the remedies that the puritans insist on are are inconvenient at best, in the case of blue laws, and deadly at at worse in the case of stonings
how long is it going to take the us to get over trying to enforce puritanical beliefs about intoxicants and find a better way to work with basic human/animal nature
I still don't see why you would have to 'suspend skepticism' to attend a church.
About 15 years ago I went hunting for a church that I would be comfortable taking my kids to.
I would say that that is why you don't see it. You already appear to have done it. Why were you "hunting for a church" to begin with?
A few reasons; I wanted to introduce my children to a moral framework that did not require that they look to me for all information, I wanted to be around other people who had a common belief system to myself , and I wanted to meet single women after my divorce
Found a nice one, plenty of decent people, a belief system that did not require that I turn my brain off and a real commitment to work towards making the world a better place for other people to get along in
Really? So you found a church which did not make any supernatural claims? I'm curious, which church? Even the Unitarians around here accept a lot of supernatural weirdness, though I know of non-believers who attend for various reasons.
It depends on what you call a supernatural claim, and whether that requires that I 'turn by brain off'. The church is the SRF, which lists its mission as, 'teach people the direct experience of God through meditation'. I know that people can be lead to have this same sensation via certain drugs and high intensity magnetic waves, but being able to sit down for an hour and perform a series of breathing and metal exercises to gain a sense of calm purpose seems, well, easier than the other two options.
my son invited a couple of his little friends, who's parents had let him attend their church as well. Funny thing, these two little kids ran home and told their parents (whom btw, regularly spoke in tongues and flopped around on the ground in their own church) that our church was 'weird', resulting in them not ever being allowed to play with my son again.
Yes, it is always sad to see social bonds broken over something as stupid as religion.
yep, it also lead him to have a negative view of meditation for a few years
I suppose that there is an inclination to stick with the religion that you are born into, but honestly people, there are a lot of choices and it is pretty easy to find a religion that does not demand that you totally turn your brain off
It's also pretty easy to live without those religions.
I would agree that it is pretty easy to live without such influences. I tend to follow the middle path and find myself weaving between periods of rationalism and sentimentality. However, the experience of spirituality seems to be pretty deeply wired into our brains, and this spirituality gives me the strength to get through difficulties, so I am willing to let myself experience it from time to time.
I still don't see why you would have to 'suspend skepticism' to attend a church.
About 15 years ago I went hunting for a church that I would be comfortable taking my kids to. Found a nice one, plenty of decent people, a belief system that did not require that I turn my brain off and a real commitment to work towards making the world a better place for other people to get along in
my son invited a couple of his little friends, who's parents had let him attend their church as well. Funny thing, these two little kids ran home and told their parents (whom btw, regularly spoke in tongues and flopped around on the ground in their own church) that our church was 'weird', resulting in them not ever being allowed to play with my son again.
I suppose that there is an inclination to stick with the religion that you are born into, but honestly people, there are a lot of choices and it is pretty easy to find a religion that does not demand that you totally turn your brain off
honestly, when I read 'anaerobic' I am thinking less about modern anaerobic life forms that are involved in fermentation (some of which can even survive in an oxygen environment) and more about chemosynthetic organisms that live around volcanic vents and base their entire metabolism on hydrogen sulfide.
these are the anaerobes of the Archean era, the ones that were killed off by the onrush of oxygen that the photosynthetic life forms brought with them and forced down into the oxygen-less cracks of the Earth
If you can draw a direct line between chemosynthesis of hydrogen sulfide and the oxygen-based metabolism that keeps me upright, then I am all ears
whoa buddy, it is a long way from recognizing that there are some significant developments in the chemistry of life (over the course of hundreds of millions of years) and jumping to the conclusion that there must have been some 'engineered' step that created an extremely complex reaction all at once.
do you like science fiction? I do most of the time, however the stories that really piss me off and make me want to rip up a few books, are they ones with 'shaggy dog' endings.
you know, where everything is tossed in the air and the author pulls together some simple solution that solves everybody's problems, answers all questions and gives the author an easy way out of whatever mess the story line had become.
to me it seemed like the author was being lazy and just bailed out on finishing the story that I had been stupid enough to read. all this talk of life from space and engineering just stinks to me of another shaggy dog ending put together by people that are just too damn lazy to really figure something out and who just want to stick their mark on it before they go to fuck up some other complex field of study
you say you're a programmer... how do you feel when you are using some software that is unstable, and the vendor just tells you to allocate more memory and reboot the machine on a regular basis? do you feel like they are really doing their job, or just glossing over the hard stuff with a simple solution? well, that's how I feel about intelligent design, life from space etc... pure mental laziness
yeah, my parents always went for the whole, 'So, how do you know that a billion years isn't a "day" for God?' thing and sent me on my way. they were teachers (remain involved with religion) and never faced any of the conflict that the fundamentalists being to the table
so, what drives the desire to hold a belief in front of so much evidence to the contrary?
really, creationism is the 'elephant in the room' whenever you start talking about the fossil record
what I find interesting about the article is the layering effect of life. how the anerobic life got pushed out by the oxygen breathers and relegated to living in the cracks. good for us, but an extinction event for them. there have been many big extinctions, and each allowed some hardier form of live to make it to the next expansion. we are in a current extinction event (holocene), and have started to worry about an asteroid or some such wiping us out.
even that worry over our own 'extinction' bumps up against any number of religious beliefs, even if they seem to have an unrealistic timescale of tens of years, when any historical events have been separated by millions of years
so, gimmee something here, how do you discuss geologic events when people seem so driven to think in terms of their own lifespans?
>>So NPR/CBS interview the pro-big-government Harry Reid ~1000 times over the last half decade,
OK, so by your standards there was a Harry Reid interview on NPR and/or CBS every ONE AND A HALF DAYS!
Prove it! Don't change the subject or try and fall back on some other 'factoid' just fucking prove the first statement on the post that the gp called you out on.
If not, then everything you say can be passed off as BS.
Chuck beat the devil and his minions, but decided that life would be too easy for mere humans, so he freed the devil, and insisted that Id release the easier version of Doom
"Removable HDs are essential as many unconnected computers can be used for multiple programs where the data can not be placed on the same HD this would go away under your shortsighted plan, "
Sorry, but my shortsighted plan would be using hardware encryption on the hard drives, removable or not.
All that I have to protect are a few million people's test results and I have enough sense to isolate data, require conformation for access, record everybody who is granted access to encrypted systems and keep my patches up to data to avoid attempts to compromise our systems
How the hell can anybody have confidence in a system that seems to have been compromised by an INDIVIDUAL!!!
Hell, no control over access, no countersigning for access, no encryption of sensitive data and 'apparently' no physical searches at point of entry/exit... next thing you're gonna tell me is that it's 'ok' to run this type of data over 'commercially available' operating systems, because everybody in the government should work on a computer in a locked room, with no network connection or direct physical contact, because that way it is safe:(
FTA "promising increased internal auditing and banning the ability of systems containing classified information to connect to thumb drives or other removable media"
Are the people running this network lost in the eighties, um, I mean sometime before Multix (say the early sixties)?
Wouldn't you think that internal auditing and limiting the ability to copy classified files to removable media should have been addressed decades before this leak occured?
I work at an FDA regulated company and we use a hard copy document approach that was put together in the '90's, lots of paper, lots of signatures...
A few years ago we had an RFP for a requirements management system and ended up reviewing Requisite Pro (part of Rational suite) and Doors (now owned by IBM, maker of Rational, go figure}. I liked the Rational product because it allowed you to link the database to existing word docs and enter and update info either through the database app or original doc. As things go, we got Doors and were unable to successfully integrate it with our systems
In the mean time we have settled on MS team foundation server for a code repository and HP quick test pro and load runner for testing.
The newest version of HP quality center now has a requirement management piece and does good traceability to the tests, and we are looking at using it, which might have a chance since we are already using other HP tools.
fwiw, I enjoy working in a well regulated environment since it provides a lot of coverage to avoid crap code in production and makes maintenance a hell of a lot easier
Read their justification here: http://www.nlpc.org/stories/2010/11/10/congress-must-investigate-google-obama-ties...urging a thorough investigation of both Google Street View and the FTC’s recent conduct during its investigation of the program. Click here for a 6-page pdf of the letter that includes additional background on Google’s extensive and close lobbying connections with the Obama Administration.
Who is the National Legal and Policy Center? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Legal_and_Policy_Center The National Legal and Policy Center (NLPC) is a right-leaning 501(c)(3) non-profit group that monitors and reports on the ethics of public officials, supporters of liberal causes, and labor unions in the United States.
Just wait until Rush and Faux start spinning this, this will take on a life of its own
Why not? If it is public data and it might offer some additional correlation for geographic/text search engine cross-over then I for one would be interested in using that information.
A better question is, why the hell do people feel comfortable putting PRIVATE data on an UNPROTECTED network?
Oh, and just to keep it fun, the GOP is turning this into a smear campaign against President Obama by saying that there was collusion between the Whitehouse, Google and the FCC to turn this into a cover=up. Just wait until the lying heads at Faux News start spouting their twisted stories
Sure, let's say that there is some customization that I developed and it starts throwing ORA-6000 errors after an upgrade or patch, some optimized query starts runnin reeeeeeaaaaaaallllllyyyyy slow, or some basic functionality, well ceases to function.
First thing, I hit the alert log, or at least write down the full text of the original error message
I can do a few things at this point... search google, talk to my co-workers, maybe just get a cup of coffee and dig around in guts for a while.
What I have learned in past decade and a half, is to go to Metalink, do a quick search on the exact text of the error message and open a support ticket if I fail to get a hit on it.
Basic breakdown, at least half of my searches on error messages get a hit on a known bug, the appropriate patch and a fairly detailed breakdown of what all the patch touches and what else it may break.
Of the half that end up getting a support ticket; I manage to figure out a fair number by searching or figuring out on my own, some get caught by the first line of support (although some reps try and blame it on the end user, more on that later) and every now and then some get all the way back to development and we are given some sort of work around until there is a patch created.
Rarely, only two or three times for myself, an actual, never-before-seen, bug is found and we get to kid each other for a few days about killing the gary-bug or some such thing.
So, yeah I would say that half of the problems that I have to go to metalink for get resolved fairly quickly via a patch of a known bug. Call it ten minutes if you want, it is usually a hell of a lot faster than searching google and any number of developer blogs to find anything even remotely as suitable as a one-off patch that corrects the situation.
That said, metalink is not without problems. We had to learn not to open support tickets during a certain portion of the day because the tech who picked them up would invariably attempt to put the blame on us and claim that Oracle support could not help us. That would lead to angry call to the duty manager, and finally waiting until Australia was picking up our calls to get a tech who would really figure out the problem.
Then there is the prioritization that Oracle sets on each call. Basically, you had better have a downed production server to get level one support (24x7 with your issue being pushed from tech to tech as timezones shift around the globe) where things usually get resolved in short order. If that isn't fast enough for you, there is also an escalated level 1, do not plan on sleeping while it is open, they expect you to answer your phone at any time of day, and will even lower the assigned level if you are not willing to work it along with them.
So... what's the down side?
Cash, simple as that... it costs a lot of money to get that sort of support, and as a 24x7 company that provides an essential product that is literally a 'life or death' issue for hundreds of thousands of Americans a year, we are willing to make that sort of investment. Honestly, if you step into the Oracle arena and do NOT think that you are going to spend a few hundred thousand bucks a year on support and upgrades, then you are just a fucking fool
As far as being a dinosaur goes, I got my dba and developer training and certs in 1997, kept them current when appropriate, or learned new tech as needed. At this point half the customizations we do are pretty much vanilla pl/sql concurrent programs or (old style) reports. There has been a fair amount of workflow (pl/sql behind a gui) and XML work to support the new web interface, and some extension of the Oracle APIs via pl/sql packages to.NET via EDO (or whatever flavor MS is pushing today). I have to admit that I am not one tenth as good in C# or Java as I am in pl/sql, but at least I can represent for Oracle while my other team members rip up the roads with C# and Java. It is entirely possible that I can wade through the rest of my career doing Oracle work (20 odd years to go), or a just rest in the shallows of management wasting the youngster's time with my back-in-the-day stories...
Slashdot Mirror
Sure, a diagram would be nice.
I'd also like to know the network topology of the facility in question, its connectivity to the internet and their protocols for isolating their systems from threats
Thanks for asking
I was just imagining some puritanical speech about rejecting your animal nature and elevating people above base instinct
funny how that never works out, how hiding our human nature to enjoy intoxicants, sex, and all the other naughty things that people are prone to do just results in layers of lies and social artifice
the remedies that the puritans insist on are are inconvenient at best, in the case of blue laws, and deadly at at worse in the case of stonings
how long is it going to take the us to get over trying to enforce puritanical beliefs about intoxicants and find a better way to work with basic human/animal nature
I still don't see why you would have to 'suspend skepticism' to attend a church.
About 15 years ago I went hunting for a church that I would be comfortable taking my kids to.
I would say that that is why you don't see it. You already appear to have done it. Why were you "hunting for a church" to begin with?
A few reasons; I wanted to introduce my children to a moral framework that did not require that they look to me for all information, I wanted to be around other people who had a common belief system to myself , and I wanted to meet single women after my divorce
Found a nice one, plenty of decent people, a belief system that did not require that I turn my brain off and a real commitment to work towards making the world a better place for other people to get along in
Really? So you found a church which did not make any supernatural claims? I'm curious, which church? Even the Unitarians around here accept a lot of supernatural weirdness, though I know of non-believers who attend for various reasons.
It depends on what you call a supernatural claim, and whether that requires that I 'turn by brain off'. The church is the SRF, which lists its mission as, 'teach people the direct experience of God through meditation'. I know that people can be lead to have this same sensation via certain drugs and high intensity magnetic waves, but being able to sit down for an hour and perform a series of breathing and metal exercises to gain a sense of calm purpose seems, well, easier than the other two options.
my son invited a couple of his little friends, who's parents had let him attend their church as well. Funny thing, these two little kids ran home and told their parents (whom btw, regularly spoke in tongues and flopped around on the ground in their own church) that our church was 'weird', resulting in them not ever being allowed to play with my son again.
Yes, it is always sad to see social bonds broken over something as stupid as religion.
yep, it also lead him to have a negative view of meditation for a few years
I suppose that there is an inclination to stick with the religion that you are born into, but honestly people, there are a lot of choices and it is pretty easy to find a religion that does not demand that you totally turn your brain off
It's also pretty easy to live without those religions.
I would agree that it is pretty easy to live without such influences. I tend to follow the middle path and find myself weaving between periods of rationalism and sentimentality. However, the experience of spirituality seems to be pretty deeply wired into our brains, and this spirituality gives me the strength to get through difficulties, so I am willing to let myself experience it from time to time.
ok, extinction events are essentially game changers.
perhaps I should have said, 'hardier in the context of the changed environment'
I still don't see why you would have to 'suspend skepticism' to attend a church.
About 15 years ago I went hunting for a church that I would be comfortable taking my kids to. Found a nice one, plenty of decent people, a belief system that did not require that I turn my brain off and a real commitment to work towards making the world a better place for other people to get along in
my son invited a couple of his little friends, who's parents had let him attend their church as well. Funny thing, these two little kids ran home and told their parents (whom btw, regularly spoke in tongues and flopped around on the ground in their own church) that our church was 'weird', resulting in them not ever being allowed to play with my son again.
I suppose that there is an inclination to stick with the religion that you are born into, but honestly people, there are a lot of choices and it is pretty easy to find a religion that does not demand that you totally turn your brain off
honestly, when I read 'anaerobic' I am thinking less about modern anaerobic life forms that are involved in fermentation (some of which can even survive in an oxygen environment) and more about chemosynthetic organisms that live around volcanic vents and base their entire metabolism on hydrogen sulfide.
these are the anaerobes of the Archean era, the ones that were killed off by the onrush of oxygen that the photosynthetic life forms brought with them and forced down into the oxygen-less cracks of the Earth
If you can draw a direct line between chemosynthesis of hydrogen sulfide and the oxygen-based metabolism that keeps me upright, then I am all ears
Engineered???
whoa buddy, it is a long way from recognizing that there are some significant developments in the chemistry of life (over the course of hundreds of millions of years) and jumping to the conclusion that there must have been some 'engineered' step that created an extremely complex reaction all at once.
do you like science fiction? I do most of the time, however the stories that really piss me off and make me want to rip up a few books, are they ones with 'shaggy dog' endings.
you know, where everything is tossed in the air and the author pulls together some simple solution that solves everybody's problems, answers all questions and gives the author an easy way out of whatever mess the story line had become.
to me it seemed like the author was being lazy and just bailed out on finishing the story that I had been stupid enough to read. all this talk of life from space and engineering just stinks to me of another shaggy dog ending put together by people that are just too damn lazy to really figure something out and who just want to stick their mark on it before they go to fuck up some other complex field of study
you say you're a programmer... how do you feel when you are using some software that is unstable, and the vendor just tells you to allocate more memory and reboot the machine on a regular basis? do you feel like they are really doing their job, or just glossing over the hard stuff with a simple solution? well, that's how I feel about intelligent design, life from space etc... pure mental laziness
with their cyanobacteria cronies!
yeah, my parents always went for the whole, 'So, how do you know that a billion years isn't a "day" for God?' thing and sent me on my way. they were teachers (remain involved with religion) and never faced any of the conflict that the fundamentalists being to the table
so, what drives the desire to hold a belief in front of so much evidence to the contrary?
really, creationism is the 'elephant in the room' whenever you start talking about the fossil record
what I find interesting about the article is the layering effect of life. how the anerobic life got pushed out by the oxygen breathers and relegated to living in the cracks. good for us, but an extinction event for them. there have been many big extinctions, and each allowed some hardier form of live to make it to the next expansion. we are in a current extinction event (holocene), and have started to worry about an asteroid or some such wiping us out.
even that worry over our own 'extinction' bumps up against any number of religious beliefs, even if they seem to have an unrealistic timescale of tens of years, when any historical events have been separated by millions of years
so, gimmee something here, how do you discuss geologic events when people seem so driven to think in terms of their own lifespans?
If your average is 8/10... then change those all to 5/10
That should create more headroom in the upper range and provide for more clarity in the reviews.
Or just rate everything at 8/10 so the authors can be happy that they are 'above average'
Author: William Pierce (as Andrew Macdonald), leader of the neo-Nazi National Alliance
Published: 1978
http://www.adl.org/learn/ext_us/Turner_Diaries.asp?xpicked=5&item=22
you can find it posted in stormfront too, total drek
How about you try and defend your first claim:
>>So NPR/CBS interview the pro-big-government Harry Reid ~1000 times over the last half decade,
OK, so by your standards there was a Harry Reid interview on NPR and/or CBS every ONE AND A HALF DAYS!
Prove it! Don't change the subject or try and fall back on some other 'factoid' just fucking prove the first statement on the post that the gp called you out on.
If not, then everything you say can be passed off as BS.
the original Doom opened a gateway to hell
Chuck beat the devil and his minions, but decided that life would be too easy for mere humans, so he freed the devil, and insisted that Id release the easier version of Doom
http://inphobe.blogspot.com/2009/07/mining-saturns-rings.html
Great source of natural resources, all ground up and separated by density, but we have to stake our claim before some aliens use it all up
if you let me touch the case, I can install a usb card and get around your epoxy
but seriously, are you saying that there is no way to disable all usb devices in the 'commercially available operating system' du jour?
"Removable HDs are essential as many unconnected computers can be used for multiple programs where the data can not be placed on the same HD this would go away under your shortsighted plan, "
Sorry, but my shortsighted plan would be using hardware encryption on the hard drives, removable or not.
All that I have to protect are a few million people's test results and I have enough sense to isolate data, require conformation for access, record everybody who is granted access to encrypted systems and keep my patches up to data to avoid attempts to compromise our systems
How the hell can anybody have confidence in a system that seems to have been compromised by an INDIVIDUAL!!!
Hell, no control over access, no countersigning for access, no encryption of sensitive data and 'apparently' no physical searches at point of entry/exit... next thing you're gonna tell me is that it's 'ok' to run this type of data over 'commercially available' operating systems, because everybody in the government should work on a computer in a locked room, with no network connection or direct physical contact, because that way it is safe :(
FTA "promising increased internal auditing and banning the ability of systems containing classified information to connect to thumb drives or other removable media"
Are the people running this network lost in the eighties, um, I mean sometime before Multix (say the early sixties)?
Wouldn't you think that internal auditing and limiting the ability to copy classified files to removable media should have been addressed decades before this leak occured?
Oddly enough, quality is something that people will pay for, if they are aware of how much it affects their enjoyment of the product
It becomes more apparent when a failure in your product has the ability to kill a lot of people
It is also apparent (maybe to a lesser degree) if the low quality product cannot interface with other systems or fails in a short amount of time
How much loss of revenue due to turning out poor products does it take before the bean counters understand the value of change management?
I work at an FDA regulated company and we use a hard copy document approach that was put together in the '90's, lots of paper, lots of signatures...
A few years ago we had an RFP for a requirements management system and ended up reviewing Requisite Pro (part of Rational suite) and Doors (now owned by IBM, maker of Rational, go figure}.
I liked the Rational product because it allowed you to link the database to existing word docs and enter and update info either through the database app or original doc.
As things go, we got Doors and were unable to successfully integrate it with our systems
In the mean time we have settled on MS team foundation server for a code repository and HP quick test pro and load runner for testing.
The newest version of HP quality center now has a requirement management piece and does good traceability to the tests, and we are looking at using it, which might have a chance since we are already using other HP tools.
fwiw, I enjoy working in a well regulated environment since it provides a lot of coverage to avoid crap code in production and makes maintenance a hell of a lot easier
Read their justification here: ...urging a thorough investigation of both Google Street View and the FTC’s recent conduct during its investigation of the program. Click here for a 6-page pdf of the letter that includes additional background on Google’s extensive and close lobbying connections with the Obama Administration.
http://www.nlpc.org/stories/2010/11/10/congress-must-investigate-google-obama-ties
Who is the National Legal and Policy Center?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Legal_and_Policy_Center
The National Legal and Policy Center (NLPC) is a right-leaning 501(c)(3) non-profit group that monitors and reports on the ethics of public officials, supporters of liberal causes, and labor unions in the United States.
Just wait until Rush and Faux start spinning this, this will take on a life of its own
Hmmm, illegal acts like enabling people to find an available wireless connection without paying ATT or Verizon for it?
Yeah, shame on them how dare they enable people to connect to the internet without paying out the ass for it, just plain un-American!
Why climb Everest? Because it's there!
Why not? If it is public data and it might offer some additional correlation for geographic/text search engine cross-over then I for one would be interested in using that information.
A better question is, why the hell do people feel comfortable putting PRIVATE data on an UNPROTECTED network?
Oh, and just to keep it fun, the GOP is turning this into a smear campaign against President Obama by saying that there was collusion between the Whitehouse, Google and the FCC to turn this into a cover=up. Just wait until the lying heads at Faux News start spouting their twisted stories
Sure, let's say that there is some customization that I developed and it starts throwing ORA-6000 errors after an upgrade or patch, some optimized query starts runnin reeeeeeaaaaaaallllllyyyyy slow, or some basic functionality, well ceases to function.
First thing, I hit the alert log, or at least write down the full text of the original error message
I can do a few things at this point... search google, talk to my co-workers, maybe just get a cup of coffee and dig around in guts for a while.
What I have learned in past decade and a half, is to go to Metalink, do a quick search on the exact text of the error message and open a support ticket if I fail to get a hit on it.
Basic breakdown, at least half of my searches on error messages get a hit on a known bug, the appropriate patch and a fairly detailed breakdown of what all the patch touches and what else it may break.
Of the half that end up getting a support ticket; I manage to figure out a fair number by searching or figuring out on my own, some get caught by the first line of support (although some reps try and blame it on the end user, more on that later) and every now and then some get all the way back to development and we are given some sort of work around until there is a patch created.
Rarely, only two or three times for myself, an actual, never-before-seen, bug is found and we get to kid each other for a few days about killing the gary-bug or some such thing.
So, yeah I would say that half of the problems that I have to go to metalink for get resolved fairly quickly via a patch of a known bug. Call it ten minutes if you want, it is usually a hell of a lot faster than searching google and any number of developer blogs to find anything even remotely as suitable as a one-off patch that corrects the situation.
That said, metalink is not without problems. We had to learn not to open support tickets during a certain portion of the day because the tech who picked them up would invariably attempt to put the blame on us and claim that Oracle support could not help us. That would lead to angry call to the duty manager, and finally waiting until Australia was picking up our calls to get a tech who would really figure out the problem.
Then there is the prioritization that Oracle sets on each call. Basically, you had better have a downed production server to get level one support (24x7 with your issue being pushed from tech to tech as timezones shift around the globe) where things usually get resolved in short order. If that isn't fast enough for you, there is also an escalated level 1, do not plan on sleeping while it is open, they expect you to answer your phone at any time of day, and will even lower the assigned level if you are not willing to work it along with them.
So... what's the down side?
Cash, simple as that... it costs a lot of money to get that sort of support, and as a 24x7 company that provides an essential product that is literally a 'life or death' issue for hundreds of thousands of Americans a year, we are willing to make that sort of investment. Honestly, if you step into the Oracle arena and do NOT think that you are going to spend a few hundred thousand bucks a year on support and upgrades, then you are just a fucking fool
As far as being a dinosaur goes, I got my dba and developer training and certs in 1997, kept them current when appropriate, or learned new tech as needed. At this point half the customizations we do are pretty much vanilla pl/sql concurrent programs or (old style) reports. There has been a fair amount of workflow (pl/sql behind a gui) and XML work to support the new web interface, and some extension of the Oracle APIs via pl/sql packages to .NET via EDO (or whatever flavor MS is pushing today). I have to admit that I am not one tenth as good in C# or Java as I am in pl/sql, but at least I can represent for Oracle while my other team members rip up the roads with C# and Java. It is entirely possible that I can wade through the rest of my career doing Oracle work (20 odd years to go), or a just rest in the shallows of management wasting the youngster's time with my back-in-the-day stories...
zzzz! Hey, you damn kids get offa my lawn!
Yeah, because software that is designed by an unfocused group people with no direction is sooooooo useful.