I'm thinking in upgrading.. Should I wait for the top end (bulldozer) of AMD in 2011? is it worth it?
Independent advise: gather rumors about next socket from AMD and availability of next DDR standard (DDR4/DDR5).
Judging from past AMD practices, they would be making AM3 compatible CPUs for quite some time after introduction of AM4.
IMO it is safe to build AM3 system now, as down the road definitely there would be upgrade options. Considering that CPU design now heavily influenced by power consumption, new socket might be needed only to accommodate new DDR. (Power consumption was (is?) major driver behind new socket types as most CPU pins now are used to deliver current. More power needs CPU -> more pins has to be allocated for power -> new socket type needed.)
IIRC, Intel used AMD's documentation to create ET64. AMD in their wisdom decided against patenting AMD64 (like Intel likes to do with new instruction sets) to spur its adoption.
Do you mean PAE? Then it's totally different story and btw it is still supported and used when 32 OS has to access more than 4GB RAM (in a limited way).
... poor feedback from server venders that disliked x86 in the enterprise...
Interesting. To what then you would attribute Linux uprising then? It was precisely because enterprises got tired of *nix vendor lock-in into expensive hardware - which already in 90s was underperforming compared to x86. Linux allowed to move many legacy *nix applications to cheap OTS hardware and that actually how it (Linux) made the first inroads in enterprise.
I wouldn't give AMD much engineering credit, but rather blame the piss poor management at Intel.
If anything, credit should go to AMD for (1st) creating AMD64 and (2nd) properly communicating with vendors and users what/how they going to do in the new architecture.
Without AMD taking the initiative back then, many who need more than 4GB RAM would have to buy the $8K+ Itanic boxes now.
By pure lack of funds I was pushed in past to buy Athlon 64 X2. Before I was exclusively with Intel.
By seeing how my 5yo 4200+ (2x2200GHz) CPU works now, I really see no point buying e.g. i7 9xx - which I can easily afford now.
I have looked at past benchmarks to try to find how outdated my CPU really is. Difference is at ~50-60% I'd say. But it works fine for most of the workloads I use it for: development/compilation, video and games.
Keeping that in mind, I find it outrageous now to even think of spending $200+$150 on Intel's CPU and MB. With AMD's AM3 one can get a very good deal for under $200 (~$100 for CPU and ~$80 for MB). Better spend rest of money on a better video card: e.g. Radeon 5770 at $170 is simply unbelievable deal right now.
I get good frame rate on 16x10 (>40fps) and decent frame rate on 19x12 (~30fps) with 5 year old Athlon 64 X2 4200+ (2x2.2GHz) and Radeon 4850. Recent games I have played were Dragon Age and Torchlight - and all settings were at least on medium, most on high.
IMO, level of details in most games already exceeds by a huge margin whatever normal human being can perceive. Pushing for more details is pointless.
... you'll almost exclusively be testing usermode code unrelated to the OS.
Nobody cares about what OS itself does.
All people want from an OS is that their application run and run best.
... but you'll mostly be testing 3rd party code and the quality of your compiler's optimizations, not the OS kernel.
The statement is valid for e.g. MS-DOS. But it never was valid for OSs supporting virtual memory and I/O abstraction: the way kernel does things impact application performance quite noticeably. I/O optimization (read-ahead, delayed write back) and virtual memory management (application memory allocation, stack, context switching) all have direct influence on user space performance. And that is what important and is subject of the Phoronix tests.
P.S. My personal gripe with the tests is that they do not attempt to measure latencies. For some I/O-bound applications and also video playback latencies are more important compared to throughput or CPU usage.
The problem was that Intel treated different OEMs differently. There were many other vendors who were capable of selling in volumes, yet Intel dealt only with selected OEMs.
And that is discriminatory, unfair and often illegal.
As proud ex-owner of TNT2 and gf7800 I can personally attest: yes, the drivers exists.
But all those problems pretty much everybody experienced complained and reported to nVidia in the drivers never got fixed for the older cards. (*) And those were normal stability, screen corruption and game performance problems.
I'm sorry but I have to conclude that they do in fact abandon support. OK, that's my personal experience. But with two f***ing cards in different times I got pretty much the same experience with nVidia.
(*) As I haven't owned new cards I can't confirm whether the problems were actually fixed for newer cards. The list of changes supplied with drivers even stop mentioning the older cards: IIRC one of the problems I had with 7800 was fixed in a driver update, yet it was billed as a gf8000-specific fix.
Well... Intel's past anti-competitive practices were never really a secret. Dell in past was constantly bragging about the deals they were getting by remaining loyal to Intel.
Also AMD/ATI at the moment do better GPUs - as consumers are concerned. Buying now gt200 card is pointless as it is a well known fact that nVidia literally abandons support of previous GPU generation when they release new one. Waiting for GF100 based cards just to find that one has to sell an arm and a leg to afford one (especially in this economy)... Better get one/two of 5870/5850 and enjoy the ride now.
Saxony, state of Germany, only gave them place pretty much for free to build their fabs. They are literally located in Dresden, but actually not inside the city line. (Google Maps is still not up-to-date: AMD isn't on the satellite shot.)
And incredible tax breaks.
Yet, Saxony as much as it might want simply doesn't have the capacity to help AMD (or anybody for that sake) build a new fab. Modern fabs are way too expensive - >$2Bln - for a state to afford.
[ Disclaimer: I lived in Dresden for two years and once/twice a week was driving past the AMD fab. ]
And worst part of the fab business is that now they become obsolete also very fast: just in past ten years we went from 150nm to 32/40nm process. And changing process costs only a bit less than building a new fab.
AMD really had to spin off their fabs because they couldn't attract enough other manufacturers to participate. Most manufacturers were simply unwilling to trust their chip production to a company taking on Intel. The spun off Foundries is independent entity and thanks to that rather quickly attracted much more participant than it ever could while under the AMD roof.
Does anybody watch a movie by staring dead-straight at the centre of the screen?
Majority does.
And that's what Hollywood execs care about.
I have similar problems though not to such extent: during Avatar I had to take off glasses not once but otherwise I was OK.
In fact it is not so much of an off-topic. HD has similar problem - supplying too much redundant information which human perception simply can't swallow. Most people ignore it. Though some like me (or you) who like to look not only at what film/game makers expects us to look at get the headaches.
Most of the time - yes. Many movies gain little to nothing from HD.
Or am I just restating the '640k' thing?
Yes and no.
My point is that many movies/games jumped on HD (and next - 3D) without actually trying to add anything new to it. My friend after seeing a new movie in HD once commented that only difference to experience was that in the boring moments of the movie he could entertain himself by reading the signs and numbers on the license plates.
Where HD could make huge difference in games IMO are the action scenes. Pixel count really helps to understand what's going on the screen. Though to date I have seen very few (if any) games which were able to do it properly: huge mess of flashy special effects spilling from the screen is really a huge unparsable mess. Only truly properly applied HD in games remain the cut scenes. And even those out of the long standing PC gaming habit I normally skip....
Though game-wise HD at the moment is largely misplaced, Wii needs to support HD simply because in few years one wouldn't be able to buy a non-HD TV. And Wii on HD screen looks really bad: jagged edges and overall over-smoothness of graphics really hurts my eyes. Upgrade of Wii to simply properly render in/scale to at least 720p would help.
Users want to have *less* functionality and most are simply freaked out by the amount of crap and bloat software companies put into their products now to justify the higher prices. One thing is when the bloat can be skipped, but now they push it into the front often crippling the features users actually bought the software for.
The problem is that he isn't contacting the vendors in this case.
We have all seen the (horrible) statistics about how long it takes a vendor to patch a hole though "responsible disclosure" process.
The guys try to gather new statistics about how long would it take for a company to fix a problem which was disclosed to the general public.
If he had, we would have happily fixed the issue within a day or two. Instead our users are being put on the line as dumb script kiddies try out their new exploit while we finish up the bug fix.
Well, methods of script kiddies are well known and protecting against them doesn't take a rocket scientist.
Plus disclosure of a problem doesn't equal to publishing an exploit. Most script kiddies are incapable of developing their own exploits. If you really need the "day or two" to fix the issue, then there would be literally no impact on your users.
It is statistically highly improbable (impossible) to release any relatively complex application without bugs.
QA is not a feature. QA is a process. Any software except helloworld.c has bugs. The question is how company deals with the problems after deployment.
Modus operandi of many business is to go into "Sold!" state after deal is sealed: customer paid money already, so we don't care anymore.
Once you release the software the use cases and use environments multiply like rabbits with Viagra.
Not really.
I have seen statistics about testing which was showing that software without any testing (or only developer unit test only) had magnitudes more bugs compared to software which had undergone a test with very low coverage (10-25%).
What it says, is whether company pays attention to quality or not. Many do not. Then bugs do the "multiply" thing.
P.S. Also I have seen pathological cases where companies intentionally test cases which are rare/nonexistent in real world - because they refused to support as official features what customers usually do with the product. On a book it looks cool: software is tested/etc. But in the end customers are still treated like alpha testers.
I work for one of the affected projects and can tell you that we did not get contacted by them via any of our normal, well publicized methods (email, phone calls, etc...).
I once tried to contact a vendor about trivial bug. I have spent in total about a day on a phone (e-mails went unanswered for weeks) being switched between different people who had no clue what to do with me. In the end the task went to the secretary who was supposed to pass them my technical e-mail about the problem. Never heard back on the matter from any of them.
The point I'm trying to make, it is extremely hard and often is impossible for a techie from one company to reach a techie of another company. (Unless of course the two know each other in some other way.)
That is one of the advantages of open source projects that they use open forums and often have open bug tracking systems. Communicating a problem to most OSS project in my experience is magnitudes easier.
P.S. I hear that sometimes contacting marketing directly can be more fruitful. But there are the pathological cases of marketdroids not accepting existence of problems in their products. Or more commonly marketing outsourced to a 3rd party in which case it is just as good as contacting company directly.
... and an extra 9-cell secondary "slab" type battery.
You should have guessed yourself: when it comes to laptops data sheet never was an indication of high-endness.
High end doesn't have the price tag it used to.
Yes, but decent portable workstation - without slab battery - still would easily get into +$2K region.
The point though is that most applications now do not need any sort of high-end system. Higher end software simply can't use up all available h/w resources. My friend is happily working with large projects in AutoCAD on a modest HP laptop for ~$1.2K: requirements for it haven't changed for past 5+ years while hardware was steadily advancing.
Because it allows people behind pg to -on one side- give you for free a half-baked RDBMS but -on another side- ask money for the tools/etc to make it usable.
That what BSD license allows. And in past it was practiced by PostgreSQL core team most of whom were employed by the company which was offering all the extras to PosgreSQL.
But that is not per se BSD license weakness - it was pg business model in the past. It kind of feels f***ed up when somebody offers a patch but it gets rejected by pg core because it competes with their commercial offering.
That is btw explanation why pg has much lower visibility compared to MySQL. MySQL was much more open and Monty/etc were investing their time to reimplement -instead of rejecting- into their proprietary fork what OSS community was contributing to GPL'ed MySQL.
Of course Monty doesn't have the money to buy MySQL. It doesn't change the fact that he stayed completely silent on this until he got his millions. Maybe he only understood the problems of Oracle ownership then?
He understood the problem long before. And he made an agreement with first investors (long before Sun deal) that MySQL, if sold, would be sold to a company which has more reasons to continue MySQL development than reasons to kill it. That's why Sun deal hadn't provoked his attention (and at the time he was only a member of MySQL board, not employed by MysQL AB anymore).
After ownership of MySQL went to Sun, obviously the investors changed too. Initial investors understood the value of MySQL and to whom it can/not be sold. Now to Sun investors it's peanuts and they do not care. So they sold Sun to Oracle.
And Monty, as responsible parent, had to speak up...
With all the over-religious F/LOSS rhetoric, people forget that everybody needs a job. And, sorry, having Oracle as your main competitor, isn't very inspiring - good luck explaining to investors how you are NOT going to be squashed by Oracle aggressive sales department. I think many people do underestimate what Monty/etc did with MySQL and how much they have created - all that thanks to the proprietary fork of MySQL - while at the same time maintaining GPL fork too - to the extent now that MySQL blocks Sun-Oracle deal.
Websites that were built on (non-gpl) mysql could be in trouble if Oracle wants to fuck them. That was the risk those websites took when they decided to go with a proprietary vendor. That would suck for them, but that's how proprietary software works.
Not at all. Companies which supply 3rd party modules to MySQL are fucked - users are not affected by a slightest. (Commercial users can upgrade to GPL version anytime.)
Oracle can't kill users - Oracle can kill all MySQL ISVs. Thanks to the fact that MySQL client libraries are covered by GPL (what apparently was a part of how Monty attracted first investors).
Did I forget anything?
Yes, you forgot to RTFA and also Monty blog. Knowing why other side does and says what it does and says is important. Unless of course you simply want to troll.
We tend to side with Israelis because culturally we are close. But our knowledge of what's going on other side of fence is very limited. And Israeli's rhetoric isn't that much better compared to say populists like Ahmadinejad.
People want a large resource pool, people want a stable business, support they can rely on and an infrastructure than can grow with their business.
You apparently never ran an IT department but read too much MSFT's PR.
Microsoft's support is well known to be one of the clumsiest (unless you are an extremely important customer to them).
Their licensing model also often limits the growth of the business.
Believe it or not, the world wants accountability and you don't get that with open source since the accountability falls squarely on your own resources in most cases.
That's silly. Accountability doesn't depend on software type. It does depend who's you have hired as a your integrator. There are plenty of integrators who would install and help you operate whatever software you wish to have - either closed source or open source.
Otherwise, good luck trying to keep MSFT accountable....
Slashdot Mirror
I'm thinking in upgrading.. Should I wait for the top end (bulldozer) of AMD in 2011? is it worth it?
Independent advise: gather rumors about next socket from AMD and availability of next DDR standard (DDR4/DDR5).
Judging from past AMD practices, they would be making AM3 compatible CPUs for quite some time after introduction of AM4.
IMO it is safe to build AM3 system now, as down the road definitely there would be upgrade options. Considering that CPU design now heavily influenced by power consumption, new socket might be needed only to accommodate new DDR. (Power consumption was (is?) major driver behind new socket types as most CPU pins now are used to deliver current. More power needs CPU -> more pins has to be allocated for power -> new socket type needed.)
IIRC, Intel used AMD's documentation to create ET64. AMD in their wisdom decided against patenting AMD64 (like Intel likes to do with new instruction sets) to spur its adoption.
but AMD64 is a very minor extension to x86 and leverages SSE.
Load of.
Intel had a 64-bit extension in the 90s ...
Do you mean PAE? Then it's totally different story and btw it is still supported and used when 32 OS has to access more than 4GB RAM (in a limited way).
Interesting. To what then you would attribute Linux uprising then? It was precisely because enterprises got tired of *nix vendor lock-in into expensive hardware - which already in 90s was underperforming compared to x86. Linux allowed to move many legacy *nix applications to cheap OTS hardware and that actually how it (Linux) made the first inroads in enterprise.
I wouldn't give AMD much engineering credit, but rather blame the piss poor management at Intel.
If anything, credit should go to AMD for (1st) creating AMD64 and (2nd) properly communicating with vendors and users what/how they going to do in the new architecture.
Without AMD taking the initiative back then, many who need more than 4GB RAM would have to buy the $8K+ Itanic boxes now.
By pure lack of funds I was pushed in past to buy Athlon 64 X2. Before I was exclusively with Intel.
By seeing how my 5yo 4200+ (2x2200GHz) CPU works now, I really see no point buying e.g. i7 9xx - which I can easily afford now.
I have looked at past benchmarks to try to find how outdated my CPU really is. Difference is at ~50-60% I'd say. But it works fine for most of the workloads I use it for: development/compilation, video and games.
Keeping that in mind, I find it outrageous now to even think of spending $200+$150 on Intel's CPU and MB. With AMD's AM3 one can get a very good deal for under $200 (~$100 for CPU and ~$80 for MB). Better spend rest of money on a better video card: e.g. Radeon 5770 at $170 is simply unbelievable deal right now.
I get good frame rate on 16x10 (>40fps) and decent frame rate on 19x12 (~30fps) with 5 year old Athlon 64 X2 4200+ (2x2.2GHz) and Radeon 4850. Recent games I have played were Dragon Age and Torchlight - and all settings were at least on medium, most on high.
IMO, level of details in most games already exceeds by a huge margin whatever normal human being can perceive. Pushing for more details is pointless.
Nobody cares about what OS itself does.
All people want from an OS is that their application run and run best.
The statement is valid for e.g. MS-DOS. But it never was valid for OSs supporting virtual memory and I/O abstraction: the way kernel does things impact application performance quite noticeably. I/O optimization (read-ahead, delayed write back) and virtual memory management (application memory allocation, stack, context switching) all have direct influence on user space performance. And that is what important and is subject of the Phoronix tests.
P.S. My personal gripe with the tests is that they do not attempt to measure latencies. For some I/O-bound applications and also video playback latencies are more important compared to throughput or CPU usage.
THE HORROR!!! THE HORROR!!!!
The problem was that Intel treated different OEMs differently. There were many other vendors who were capable of selling in volumes, yet Intel dealt only with selected OEMs.
And that is discriminatory, unfair and often illegal.
P.S. IANAL
As proud ex-owner of TNT2 and gf7800 I can personally attest: yes, the drivers exists.
But all those problems pretty much everybody experienced complained and reported to nVidia in the drivers never got fixed for the older cards. (*) And those were normal stability, screen corruption and game performance problems.
I'm sorry but I have to conclude that they do in fact abandon support. OK, that's my personal experience. But with two f***ing cards in different times I got pretty much the same experience with nVidia.
(*) As I haven't owned new cards I can't confirm whether the problems were actually fixed for newer cards. The list of changes supplied with drivers even stop mentioning the older cards: IIRC one of the problems I had with 7800 was fixed in a driver update, yet it was billed as a gf8000-specific fix.
Well... Intel's past anti-competitive practices were never really a secret. Dell in past was constantly bragging about the deals they were getting by remaining loyal to Intel.
Also AMD/ATI at the moment do better GPUs - as consumers are concerned. Buying now gt200 card is pointless as it is a well known fact that nVidia literally abandons support of previous GPU generation when they release new one. Waiting for GF100 based cards just to find that one has to sell an arm and a leg to afford one (especially in this economy)... Better get one/two of 5870/5850 and enjoy the ride now.
I do not need convincing: 5870 (and likely rumored 5890) simply do not fit my PC case.
Though question left open is whether the GF100 based cards would. Or rather: Would GF100 with PSU it would likely require together fit my case.
Saxony, state of Germany, only gave them place pretty much for free to build their fabs. They are literally located in Dresden, but actually not inside the city line. (Google Maps is still not up-to-date: AMD isn't on the satellite shot.)
And incredible tax breaks.
Yet, Saxony as much as it might want simply doesn't have the capacity to help AMD (or anybody for that sake) build a new fab. Modern fabs are way too expensive - >$2Bln - for a state to afford.
[ Disclaimer: I lived in Dresden for two years and once/twice a week was driving past the AMD fab. ]
And worst part of the fab business is that now they become obsolete also very fast: just in past ten years we went from 150nm to 32/40nm process. And changing process costs only a bit less than building a new fab.
AMD really had to spin off their fabs because they couldn't attract enough other manufacturers to participate. Most manufacturers were simply unwilling to trust their chip production to a company taking on Intel. The spun off Foundries is independent entity and thanks to that rather quickly attracted much more participant than it ever could while under the AMD roof.
I was watching 3D Avatar with two my friends and not once they had to take off glasses. Nor they had any problems after the movie.
According to the recent article on the topic, 4-10% of people have the problem.
Does anybody watch a movie by staring dead-straight at the centre of the screen?
Majority does.
And that's what Hollywood execs care about.
I have similar problems though not to such extent: during Avatar I had to take off glasses not once but otherwise I was OK.
In fact it is not so much of an off-topic. HD has similar problem - supplying too much redundant information which human perception simply can't swallow. Most people ignore it. Though some like me (or you) who like to look not only at what film/game makers expects us to look at get the headaches.
DVD resolution is 'good enough' for video
Most of the time - yes. Many movies gain little to nothing from HD.
Or am I just restating the '640k' thing?
Yes and no.
My point is that many movies/games jumped on HD (and next - 3D) without actually trying to add anything new to it. My friend after seeing a new movie in HD once commented that only difference to experience was that in the boring moments of the movie he could entertain himself by reading the signs and numbers on the license plates.
Where HD could make huge difference in games IMO are the action scenes. Pixel count really helps to understand what's going on the screen. Though to date I have seen very few (if any) games which were able to do it properly: huge mess of flashy special effects spilling from the screen is really a huge unparsable mess. Only truly properly applied HD in games remain the cut scenes. And even those out of the long standing PC gaming habit I normally skip....
Though game-wise HD at the moment is largely misplaced, Wii needs to support HD simply because in few years one wouldn't be able to buy a non-HD TV. And Wii on HD screen looks really bad: jagged edges and overall over-smoothness of graphics really hurts my eyes. Upgrade of Wii to simply properly render in/scale to at least 720p would help.
ZOMFG.
Users want to have *less* functionality and most are simply freaked out by the amount of crap and bloat software companies put into their products now to justify the higher prices. One thing is when the bloat can be skipped, but now they push it into the front often crippling the features users actually bought the software for.
The problem is that he isn't contacting the vendors in this case.
We have all seen the (horrible) statistics about how long it takes a vendor to patch a hole though "responsible disclosure" process.
The guys try to gather new statistics about how long would it take for a company to fix a problem which was disclosed to the general public.
If he had, we would have happily fixed the issue within a day or two. Instead our users are being put on the line as dumb script kiddies try out their new exploit while we finish up the bug fix.
Well, methods of script kiddies are well known and protecting against them doesn't take a rocket scientist.
Plus disclosure of a problem doesn't equal to publishing an exploit. Most script kiddies are incapable of developing their own exploits. If you really need the "day or two" to fix the issue, then there would be literally no impact on your users.
It is statistically highly improbable (impossible) to release any relatively complex application without bugs.
QA is not a feature. QA is a process. Any software except helloworld.c has bugs. The question is how company deals with the problems after deployment.
Modus operandi of many business is to go into "Sold!" state after deal is sealed: customer paid money already, so we don't care anymore.
Once you release the software the use cases and use environments multiply like rabbits with Viagra.
Not really.
I have seen statistics about testing which was showing that software without any testing (or only developer unit test only) had magnitudes more bugs compared to software which had undergone a test with very low coverage (10-25%).
What it says, is whether company pays attention to quality or not. Many do not. Then bugs do the "multiply" thing.
P.S. Also I have seen pathological cases where companies intentionally test cases which are rare/nonexistent in real world - because they refused to support as official features what customers usually do with the product. On a book it looks cool: software is tested/etc. But in the end customers are still treated like alpha testers.
I work for one of the affected projects and can tell you that we did not get contacted by them via any of our normal, well publicized methods (email, phone calls, etc...).
I once tried to contact a vendor about trivial bug. I have spent in total about a day on a phone (e-mails went unanswered for weeks) being switched between different people who had no clue what to do with me. In the end the task went to the secretary who was supposed to pass them my technical e-mail about the problem. Never heard back on the matter from any of them.
The point I'm trying to make, it is extremely hard and often is impossible for a techie from one company to reach a techie of another company. (Unless of course the two know each other in some other way.)
That is one of the advantages of open source projects that they use open forums and often have open bug tracking systems. Communicating a problem to most OSS project in my experience is magnitudes easier.
P.S. I hear that sometimes contacting marketing directly can be more fruitful. But there are the pathological cases of marketdroids not accepting existence of problems in their products. Or more commonly marketing outsourced to a 3rd party in which case it is just as good as contacting company directly.
You should have guessed yourself: when it comes to laptops data sheet never was an indication of high-endness.
High end doesn't have the price tag it used to.
Yes, but decent portable workstation - without slab battery - still would easily get into +$2K region.
The point though is that most applications now do not need any sort of high-end system. Higher end software simply can't use up all available h/w resources. My friend is happily working with large projects in AutoCAD on a modest HP laptop for ~$1.2K: requirements for it haven't changed for past 5+ years while hardware was steadily advancing.
Because it allows people behind pg to -on one side- give you for free a half-baked RDBMS but -on another side- ask money for the tools/etc to make it usable.
That what BSD license allows. And in past it was practiced by PostgreSQL core team most of whom were employed by the company which was offering all the extras to PosgreSQL.
But that is not per se BSD license weakness - it was pg business model in the past. It kind of feels f***ed up when somebody offers a patch but it gets rejected by pg core because it competes with their commercial offering.
That is btw explanation why pg has much lower visibility compared to MySQL. MySQL was much more open and Monty/etc were investing their time to reimplement -instead of rejecting- into their proprietary fork what OSS community was contributing to GPL'ed MySQL.
Stop this non-sense. Monty wasn't owner of MySQL AB in times of Sun deal. He is only one of the founders and creators of MySQL.
Of course Monty doesn't have the money to buy MySQL. It doesn't change the fact that he stayed completely silent on this until he got his millions. Maybe he only understood the problems of Oracle ownership then?
He understood the problem long before. And he made an agreement with first investors (long before Sun deal) that MySQL, if sold, would be sold to a company which has more reasons to continue MySQL development than reasons to kill it. That's why Sun deal hadn't provoked his attention (and at the time he was only a member of MySQL board, not employed by MysQL AB anymore).
After ownership of MySQL went to Sun, obviously the investors changed too. Initial investors understood the value of MySQL and to whom it can/not be sold. Now to Sun investors it's peanuts and they do not care. So they sold Sun to Oracle.
And Monty, as responsible parent, had to speak up...
With all the over-religious F/LOSS rhetoric, people forget that everybody needs a job. And, sorry, having Oracle as your main competitor, isn't very inspiring - good luck explaining to investors how you are NOT going to be squashed by Oracle aggressive sales department. I think many people do underestimate what Monty/etc did with MySQL and how much they have created - all that thanks to the proprietary fork of MySQL - while at the same time maintaining GPL fork too - to the extent now that MySQL blocks Sun-Oracle deal.
Websites that were built on (non-gpl) mysql could be in trouble if Oracle wants to fuck them. That was the risk those websites took when they decided to go with a proprietary vendor. That would suck for them, but that's how proprietary software works.
Not at all. Companies which supply 3rd party modules to MySQL are fucked - users are not affected by a slightest. (Commercial users can upgrade to GPL version anytime.)
Oracle can't kill users - Oracle can kill all MySQL ISVs. Thanks to the fact that MySQL client libraries are covered by GPL (what apparently was a part of how Monty attracted first investors).
Did I forget anything?
Yes, you forgot to RTFA and also Monty blog. Knowing why other side does and says what it does and says is important. Unless of course you simply want to troll.
Things were never peaceful there.
Or rather: if it's not covered by western mass media, it doesn't mean it is peaceful.
If one forcefully sends hundred thousands people into essentially an exile, there would be never happy ending to the story.
It's not the Israelis.
We tend to side with Israelis because culturally we are close. But our knowledge of what's going on other side of fence is very limited. And Israeli's rhetoric isn't that much better compared to say populists like Ahmadinejad.
In the end, Israelis just as guilty.
Posting anonymously because it's bull. 200 years to peak oil there? Maybe if they don't sell any.
IIRC, there is an embargo on Iran selling oil. In other words: yes, they do not sell any.
People want a large resource pool, people want a stable business, support they can rely on and an infrastructure than can grow with their business.
You apparently never ran an IT department but read too much MSFT's PR.
Microsoft's support is well known to be one of the clumsiest (unless you are an extremely important customer to them).
Their licensing model also often limits the growth of the business.
Believe it or not, the world wants accountability and you don't get that with open source since the accountability falls squarely on your own resources in most cases.
That's silly. Accountability doesn't depend on software type. It does depend who's you have hired as a your integrator. There are plenty of integrators who would install and help you operate whatever software you wish to have - either closed source or open source.
Otherwise, good luck trying to keep MSFT accountable....