How are you not providing a service to those who attend your party, even if you don't charge?
Or, if you'd like to contrast based on taking money, how is your party different than the hypothetical one I throw in my store, which is free to attend?
Finally, if I sign an NDA with you, stating that I won't talk about whatever it is we're doing together (subject to established law), and then I go and blog about it, am I in the wrong? (I'm not saying the dental school had this sort of agreement in place; I'm trying to establish a baseline for discussion.)
I agree with you. People (or at least, "the people", whatever that means) should be more proactive. The sad truth is that the Establishment clause has been widely held to be very, very loosely binding on the government. And the "states rights", as a political (if not legal) meme, has been hijacked by a group of like-minded people with particular goals, so it has become hard to get others excited about the concept, due to association.
Sorry, I don't agree. What if the institution decides to discriminate access according to whatever whimsical attribute it deems appropriate (sex, politics, race, belief, whatever...)? You let them go happily along?
My house is private property, not a privately held institution; what if a shopkeeper or a cinema put a sign reading: "no Jews, Black, Homo allowed"? One can be a racist prick on his own property, but not when it's open for the public consumption.
There are statutes precluding such a situation. As for going "happily along", no, I wouldn't, but I do believe that people should be free to be bigots, just as I'm free to vehemently disagree with them.
Why do you think there should be a difference between your house and your store?
Thanks for marking me a "foe" - I've wanted one for a long time.
If you want to argue this angle, you need to point to a _state_ law proclaiming that private institutions cannot take action based on someone's speech. The Federal amendment you are thinking of says "Congress shall make no law..." A private institution can do what it likes about the speech of its members (absent a contractual obligation to do otherwise).
If you disagree, think for a minute about someone coming to a party you throw and cursing at everyone and being generally rude for the duration. Do you have the right to kick them out of your house? If so, please explain the difference.
[...] The case remains active as to defendants AmeriP.O.S., Inc., Damon DeCrescenzo, and James
McCalla. The court cannot yet determine whether any of the other named defendants have been
served with process. The plaintiff and all defendants served with process shall file joint or separate
status reports on or before January 3, 2005, so a further scheduling order can promptly be entered.
IT IS SO ORDERED.
Dated this 17th day of December, 2004
I learned it from years as a sysadmin, and having an interest in law, and a devious mind. As a sysadmin, you know how to preserve evidence (or a crash on a production system that you wnat to figure out). If you read law, you learn rule of evidence, evolving case law, and get a feel for what future cases require. Thinking about what people might do helps you find, well, what people might have done.
As said, I'm not a pro - I do something else for a living. I have done forensics professionally, and we won (as plaintiffs). The most important thing I learned was to charge more. I'm not hiring myself out as an expert witness, nor advertising this, but client who need it already trust me, and if you pay attention and know what you're doing, it is more process than 1337 sk111z.
Note that knowing what you're doing involves legal knowledge, not just being a great sysadmin (not that I am one). As I said previously, unless you think like a laywer, don't think that you understand how the legal system will work. (I don't, in either case, but have had instruction, and pay attention. And I discount that 'pay attention' part for anything other than discussion.)
Exactly. There is no single answer without looking at the specifics and performing an investigation.
Some data points:
Properly configured, Windows >= NT will store file access times. Note that "access" will include things other than "opening a word document".
Law in this area is still evolving. The fact that the machine wasn't taken off line and left unused until an investigator dd'ed the disk and started poking doesn't necessarily mean "reasonable doubt", or if this is civil, "preponderance". OTOH, if someone wanted to dummy up evidence, technically it is entirely possible to have done so. I'm just pointing out that law doesn't work the way you think, unless you're trained to think like a lawyer, and also that IT law/"computer crime"/white collar crime are areas of substantial activity and change at the moment, particularly with regard to rules of evidence.
I have no idea if Roxio stores a log of activity. It wouldn't surprise me.
Never underestimate the power of correlation. For instance, does Roxio phone home to check for updates? The firewall log can establish a time of contact. If the machine contacts an ntp server, that's golden. Now, posit a time of an email being sent, or some meat-space contact that can be verified (or at least testified about). See how this works?
Don't underestimate a determined researcher, unless you feel very lucky.
Who cares if other businesses aren't permitted to offer alternative services?
Who can't? I don't see Big Steve's goons running around saying, "nice music store you got there. It would suck if something happened to it."
Oh, you mean you dislike Apple not letting people piggyback on Apple's engineering and marketing investment. I understand. I'm pissed that Bank of America won't let me offer loans in their branch offices, too.
This isn't so much game theory as profit maximization in a monopoly situation. They supply of product is unlimited (modulo bandwidth), unlike your oranges. Therefor, the only reason to restrict availability (raise prices) is to find the minimax of customers/cost that provides the highest returns. The problem with realtime market pricing for an unlimited commodity is that you'll tend to seek local optima. Manipulating pricing as a signalling mechanism (e.g., starting song X out at an artificially high price) is going to be more profitable, at least for some acts (imagine what the starting price for "Thriller" would have been, at the time).
Of course, if you don't have a monopoly or your supply is limited, either the consumer or the producers are forced to compete, so this only works in music, movies, software, and patents. (and, to some extent, taxation.)
No, it seems to me that this is what people in the financial community were saying it was -- an eBay killer in its first stages.
Honestly, eBay may be in the targets, but I think it will attack Monster and CareerBuilder first. Think about the local search angle, and how you'd attack the (somewhat entrenched) recruiting market right now.
I think it is. Intent always matters. Even if it is completely misguided, it is worth looking at what was intended. The old homily about (and I don't remember who came up with this) a fence in a road goes, don't rip down the fence just because you can't see why it is there. The fact that the fence is there indicates that someone else thought it worth building. Understand something, before you destroy it.
and all we have gotten is bullshit, and people calling them "intellectual property" while society gets riped to pieces with litigation.
I might have been overly subtle. I don't disagree. My primary point is that you can't disagree convincingly until you understand the original intent.
Even if they were an incentive, did it ever occur to you that you have no moral right to restrict how other people use discoveries and inventions?
You may disagree with IP laws, and you'll find me agreeing much of the time.
Perhaps that moral foundation doesn't matter to you, but that is precicely why patents have caused all the problems they have today.
But you're casting what I say in a way to be precisely opposite to what I mean. I'm on your side, just not for the same reasons. I would suggest that you learn that intellectual purity is not always needed. Lots of us heathens are not so bad.
Me, I'm just going to ignore you as another... commenter who completely missed the point. Come around, play again, and here's a sticker to show you were here.
Patents are supposed to be incentives. The idea is that if one discovers Really Neat Discovery X, they should profit from it for a while, and that by setting up this system, we're creating a feedback loop that makes lots of people want to discover Really Neat Things.
Now, of course, the setup has been turned in to a weapon in corporate battles, and almost none of this has anything to do with people doing Really Neat Things in their basements.
So, the question that people should be asking is, what do we want? Do we want to protect profits? Do we want to encourage innovation (whatever that means, but that's not on point)? Do we want a utilitarian maximalization of human happiness?
Honestly, to my mind, only the louder OS advocates can frame a reasonable discussion here, and it is framed on a utilitarian view. I'd love to hear an IP maximalist make a coherent argument other than, "that would cost shareholder's their money". That isn't to say that Lessig, etc. don't have logical flaws - I'm just asserting that they make more sense than anyone else.
Here is the problem. When you break up a company, you immediately get a lot of market turmoil and the customer loses. Many people complained abour rising phone bills after the AT&T divestiture, for example even though in the long run prices have come down.
This is way off topic.
That isn't how I remember the AT&T breakup. And I don't think that should be a goal - this is about the market. The market will be fine. People will want stuff. Someone will provide it. Why do we need to still support turn of the century companies?
Here's the thing - would you compete on an equal footing? No consideration of the copper in the ground that you've already payed for, no agreements that should have expired.
What the bloody fuck has AT&T done in the last 10 years, except spin off Lucent?
This is only an ideal, and depends on the client. Heavily. Expect to be managed heavily at first, unless you're leveraging off some known quantity that you have a working relationship with, who already treats you like this. I'm now a small firm, and we still have people who want to micromanage my employees, rather a lot.
flexibility
Yes, perfect flexibility. Remember that the other word for that is 'risk'. I'm not trying to scare you, I'm just saying that the uncertainty that allows flexibility implies the risk of making the wrong choice, and not having a gig.
and higher pay
I don't know what the average is. My desire not to leak finance information makes me not want to guess. But I took a massive hit from my corporate drone job to fully independent, and another big hit when dealing with incorporation. I don't feel bad about the choice now, but there were moments when I thought I has miscalculated, and was going to get kicked out of my apartment. (Actually, more precisely, I should have planned more carefully in those cases. It worked out, but never count of that.) For the record, I've got a much nicer place to work, 'cause I own it, and all; I still make less than my last drone job. 1099 sucks hard, and becoming a C- or S- corp doesn't make it easier, although it can release a little more money back to you. Don't think it is all wine and roses.
that are the perks of being a contractor, while at the same time looking nervously at the uncertainty and irregular income.
It can work. You're going to work you're ass off. Don't think it is easier - you're so doomed, unless you're really special.
Typically, the only people that build businesses around me are people like me - we can't hold normal jobs, and have to build something to have a future. Go figure.
Re:PostgreSQL vs MSSQL vs Oracle
on
Sun Eyes PostgreSQL
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Oracle is certainly one step above PGSQL in power--but of course that comes with a very hefty price tag. That price isn't just in licensing either--Oracle takes more time to administer and you also pay by losing flexibility, since enterprise systems based on Oracle better do things the "Oracle way" or you are inviting trouble (just like with Microsoft products, Oracle really pushes its single-vendor solutions).
This can't be emphasized this enough.
We develop for/administer both, and it costs Oracle clients probably an order of magnitude more to run Oracle than PG. The environments and apps are different, so it really is hard to compare, but on average, admin and goofy workarounds for Oracle involve adding a zero to the consultant budget, in my experience. As the consultant in question, I must admit that it makes up for the hassle, but...
If you need Oracle, well, you need Oracle. But Postgres is more than enough for 90% of the cases where folks deploy Oracle, in my experience. And it is so much nicer to work with... psql vs. sqlplus, anyone?
Sure, Toad is great, but for $1K/desktop. And it seems like once you give someone Toad, they become incapable of solving problems in sqlplus, which, face it, you're going to have to do. I know this was happening to me for a while, until I noticed it - seems like it leeches one's memory of the contorted v$ and dba_blah joins one needs on occasion, and then you're stuck.
Snapshots are easy to get without filesystem support (LVM).
Not atomic snapshots. Not that everyone needs this, but if you do, it does require FS support. Netapp's file system, for instance, supports atomic snapshots. Very nice for hot backups of DB data files, for example.
A more important question is whether or not they may begin additional investigation of people based upon what they accidentally pick up during an erroneous tap. That would be a real problem.
They "may" not do so legally, due to the exclusionary rule and various other bits of case law.
However, even though this isn't "supposed" to happen, if a cop who accidentally gains information passes that along to someone else informally, especially someone in a different LEA branch, who then acts on a hunch and starts watching the target, well, there are very few avenues for proving something improper happened.
Even if one is improperly targetted, actually getting anywhere is pretty rare. At best, you may have a tort claim, get some of your fellow tax-payer's cash for your hassle, the crooked cop gets a slap on the wrist, and they're going to have a grudge against you now, so it is time to move. And that's the best case.
The 4th amendment has been mostly made redundant, aside from cases where you don't need it, or some very narrow and (compared with the otherwise prevailing cases) strange decisions. It is of course much more complex than this, but a good rule of thumb: if you're in a car, the 4th doesn't apply. If you're not, but in a public space and not obviously doing something illegal, the rules are more complicated, and vary by locale. General lessons are stay calmer than a catatonic potato, realize that innocent actions like reaching for your wallet can be construed as threatening, don't talk to them other than to ask if you're being detained or arrested, and get out of the area as soon as possible. Your home is very different, but that gets even more complicated, and I'm going to stop babbling now.
None of this is legal advice, I am not a lawyer, and giving any of this more credence then you do your spam is stupid. Get your own advice.
Choose your alliances carefully. In a place large enough to support rich company infighting and politicing, you'll have to make some. Think of this as one part parlimentary coalition building, two parts personality cult. You need an effective coalition to show results, and you need to make sure you're teamed with the winning side of any given fight.
Get a handle on the culture quickly. Some places you'll get fired as an amoral asshole for doing things that are expected parts of proving your value other places.
Keep your department loyal to you. This should be fundamental, but if you can't keep your people productive, you'll be out on your ear eventually.
Make yourself as vital to other managers and execs as possible. By whatever means you can. Well placed kindness and help, genuinely forming friendships (to a point), making them dependent on you, etc. If you're in a weak position, offering loyalty to an exec can work, but make sure they're a winner. Frequently, this ends up with you following them to other firms when they aren't, and nobody bats 1000. Make sure you can handle that if you go this route.
Make sure the COO and CFO trust you. If they don't, you're doomed sooner or later. 'nuff said.
Perhaps most importantly, make sure you have the stomach for this sort of thing. If you don't, you will screw up, and then you will have failed at something you didn't enjoy, making for a total waste of time and a career dead end. Politics in some firms gets awfully close to knife fighting at times. Careers are damaged, people's quality of life is hurt, and everyone is under a ton of stress. Instinct, practice, and a little bit of bloodlust are required personality traits at the harder-edged firms.
The only real drawbacks to it are that (a), it is a little confusing to set up, because it exposes layers of software that in Windows-land are papered over, (b), well, it is ODBC, which isn't my favorite way to talk to databases (lowest common denominator implementations, the weird {? = exec} crap, etc.) (to be fair, not like JDBC is any better, as you'd expect from the name.), and (c) some drivers are not F/free.
For the record, though, the FreeTDS driver (only one I've used UnixODBC) is very solid - once I wrapped my head around the configuration, everything went swimmingly. I really didn't expect talking to SQL Server to work very well, but it does.
I just finished a project that accesses SQL Server from a Linux/Apache/mod_perl app using ODBC via the FreeTDS drivers. (Don't ask, client requirement.)
Granted, not all of the unixodbc drivers are free. But then, they aren't in MS land either, although you might not notice because you're paying for them via a bundle.
Slashdot Mirror
Or, if you'd like to contrast based on taking money, how is your party different than the hypothetical one I throw in my store, which is free to attend?
Finally, if I sign an NDA with you, stating that I won't talk about whatever it is we're doing together (subject to established law), and then I go and blog about it, am I in the wrong? (I'm not saying the dental school had this sort of agreement in place; I'm trying to establish a baseline for discussion.)
I agree with you. People (or at least, "the people", whatever that means) should be more proactive. The sad truth is that the Establishment clause has been widely held to be very, very loosely binding on the government. And the "states rights", as a political (if not legal) meme, has been hijacked by a group of like-minded people with particular goals, so it has become hard to get others excited about the concept, due to association.
Sorry, I don't agree. What if the institution decides to discriminate access according to whatever whimsical attribute it deems appropriate (sex, politics, race, belief, whatever...)? You let them go happily along? My house is private property, not a privately held institution; what if a shopkeeper or a cinema put a sign reading: "no Jews, Black, Homo allowed"? One can be a racist prick on his own property, but not when it's open for the public consumption.
There are statutes precluding such a situation. As for going "happily along", no, I wouldn't, but I do believe that people should be free to be bigots, just as I'm free to vehemently disagree with them.
Why do you think there should be a difference between your house and your store?
Thanks for marking me a "foe" - I've wanted one for a long time.
If you disagree, think for a minute about someone coming to a party you throw and cursing at everyone and being generally rude for the duration. Do you have the right to kick them out of your house? If so, please explain the difference.
[...] The case remains active as to defendants AmeriP.O.S., Inc., Damon DeCrescenzo, and James McCalla. The court cannot yet determine whether any of the other named defendants have been served with process. The plaintiff and all defendants served with process shall file joint or separate status reports on or before January 3, 2005, so a further scheduling order can promptly be entered.
IT IS SO ORDERED.
Dated this 17th day of December, 2004
I haven't found the right one yet.
...Global Warming Skeptic Bingo!
As said, I'm not a pro - I do something else for a living. I have done forensics professionally, and we won (as plaintiffs). The most important thing I learned was to charge more. I'm not hiring myself out as an expert witness, nor advertising this, but client who need it already trust me, and if you pay attention and know what you're doing, it is more process than 1337 sk111z.
Note that knowing what you're doing involves legal knowledge, not just being a great sysadmin (not that I am one). As I said previously, unless you think like a laywer, don't think that you understand how the legal system will work. (I don't, in either case, but have had instruction, and pay attention. And I discount that 'pay attention' part for anything other than discussion.)
Some data points:
- Properly configured, Windows >= NT will store file access times. Note that "access" will include things other than "opening a word document".
- Law in this area is still evolving. The fact that the machine wasn't taken off line and left unused until an investigator dd'ed the disk and started poking doesn't necessarily mean "reasonable doubt", or if this is civil, "preponderance". OTOH, if someone wanted to dummy up evidence, technically it is entirely possible to have done so. I'm just pointing out that law doesn't work the way you think, unless you're trained to think like a lawyer, and also that IT law/"computer crime"/white collar crime are areas of substantial activity and change at the moment, particularly with regard to rules of evidence.
- I have no idea if Roxio stores a log of activity. It wouldn't surprise me.
- Never underestimate the power of correlation. For instance, does Roxio phone home to check for updates? The firewall log can establish a time of contact. If the machine contacts an ntp server, that's golden. Now, posit a time of an email being sent, or some meat-space contact that can be verified (or at least testified about). See how this works?
Don't underestimate a determined researcher, unless you feel very lucky.Who can't? I don't see Big Steve's goons running around saying, "nice music store you got there. It would suck if something happened to it."
Oh, you mean you dislike Apple not letting people piggyback on Apple's engineering and marketing investment. I understand. I'm pissed that Bank of America won't let me offer loans in their branch offices, too.
Anyone depending on this for any real "security" is an idiot.
Of course, if you don't have a monopoly or your supply is limited, either the consumer or the producers are forced to compete, so this only works in music, movies, software, and patents. (and, to some extent, taxation.)
Honestly, eBay may be in the targets, but I think it will attack Monster and CareerBuilder first. Think about the local search angle, and how you'd attack the (somewhat entrenched) recruiting market right now.
I think it is. Intent always matters. Even if it is completely misguided, it is worth looking at what was intended. The old homily about (and I don't remember who came up with this) a fence in a road goes, don't rip down the fence just because you can't see why it is there. The fact that the fence is there indicates that someone else thought it worth building. Understand something, before you destroy it.
and all we have gotten is bullshit, and people calling them "intellectual property" while society gets riped to pieces with litigation.
I might have been overly subtle. I don't disagree. My primary point is that you can't disagree convincingly until you understand the original intent.
Even if they were an incentive, did it ever occur to you that you have no moral right to restrict how other people use discoveries and inventions?
You may disagree with IP laws, and you'll find me agreeing much of the time.
Perhaps that moral foundation doesn't matter to you, but that is precicely why patents have caused all the problems they have today.
But you're casting what I say in a way to be precisely opposite to what I mean. I'm on your side, just not for the same reasons. I would suggest that you learn that intellectual purity is not always needed. Lots of us heathens are not so bad.
Me, I'm just going to ignore you as another ... commenter who completely missed the point. Come around, play again, and here's a sticker to show you were here.
Now, of course, the setup has been turned in to a weapon in corporate battles, and almost none of this has anything to do with people doing Really Neat Things in their basements.
So, the question that people should be asking is, what do we want? Do we want to protect profits? Do we want to encourage innovation (whatever that means, but that's not on point)? Do we want a utilitarian maximalization of human happiness?
Honestly, to my mind, only the louder OS advocates can frame a reasonable discussion here, and it is framed on a utilitarian view. I'd love to hear an IP maximalist make a coherent argument other than, "that would cost shareholder's their money". That isn't to say that Lessig, etc. don't have logical flaws - I'm just asserting that they make more sense than anyone else.
Rate me down, motherfuckers. That keeps me in contracts. I think it is funny.
This is way off topic.
That isn't how I remember the AT&T breakup. And I don't think that should be a goal - this is about the market. The market will be fine. People will want stuff. Someone will provide it. Why do we need to still support turn of the century companies?
Here's the thing - would you compete on an equal footing? No consideration of the copper in the ground that you've already payed for, no agreements that should have expired. What the bloody fuck has AT&T done in the last 10 years, except spin off Lucent?
It is also easy to have a 'fairly reasonable take' on copyright when it is your 'creations or works' to which you're applying it.
Many people do. I do. Many makers of music do, as do many writers, makers of video, etc.
Are you asserting that you don't have a fairly reasonable take on copyright, because of something in particular?
Just asking.
Except the Kennedy's what? The Kennedy's dog?
He meant George W. LaRouche.
have been tempted
Certainly.
by the self-management,
This is only an ideal, and depends on the client. Heavily. Expect to be managed heavily at first, unless you're leveraging off some known quantity that you have a working relationship with, who already treats you like this. I'm now a small firm, and we still have people who want to micromanage my employees, rather a lot.
flexibility
Yes, perfect flexibility. Remember that the other word for that is 'risk'. I'm not trying to scare you, I'm just saying that the uncertainty that allows flexibility implies the risk of making the wrong choice, and not having a gig.
and higher pay
I don't know what the average is. My desire not to leak finance information makes me not want to guess. But I took a massive hit from my corporate drone job to fully independent, and another big hit when dealing with incorporation. I don't feel bad about the choice now, but there were moments when I thought I has miscalculated, and was going to get kicked out of my apartment. (Actually, more precisely, I should have planned more carefully in those cases. It worked out, but never count of that.) For the record, I've got a much nicer place to work, 'cause I own it, and all; I still make less than my last drone job. 1099 sucks hard, and becoming a C- or S- corp doesn't make it easier, although it can release a little more money back to you. Don't think it is all wine and roses. that are the perks of being a contractor, while at the same time looking nervously at the uncertainty and irregular income.
It can work. You're going to work you're ass off. Don't think it is easier - you're so doomed, unless you're really special.
Typically, the only people that build businesses around me are people like me - we can't hold normal jobs, and have to build something to have a future. Go figure.
This can't be emphasized this enough.
We develop for/administer both, and it costs Oracle clients probably an order of magnitude more to run Oracle than PG. The environments and apps are different, so it really is hard to compare, but on average, admin and goofy workarounds for Oracle involve adding a zero to the consultant budget, in my experience. As the consultant in question, I must admit that it makes up for the hassle, but...
If you need Oracle, well, you need Oracle. But Postgres is more than enough for 90% of the cases where folks deploy Oracle, in my experience. And it is so much nicer to work with... psql vs. sqlplus, anyone?
Sure, Toad is great, but for $1K/desktop. And it seems like once you give someone Toad, they become incapable of solving problems in sqlplus, which, face it, you're going to have to do. I know this was happening to me for a while, until I noticed it - seems like it leeches one's memory of the contorted v$ and dba_blah joins one needs on occasion, and then you're stuck.
Not atomic snapshots. Not that everyone needs this, but if you do, it does require FS support. Netapp's file system, for instance, supports atomic snapshots. Very nice for hot backups of DB data files, for example.
They "may" not do so legally, due to the exclusionary rule and various other bits of case law.
However, even though this isn't "supposed" to happen, if a cop who accidentally gains information passes that along to someone else informally, especially someone in a different LEA branch, who then acts on a hunch and starts watching the target, well, there are very few avenues for proving something improper happened.
Even if one is improperly targetted, actually getting anywhere is pretty rare. At best, you may have a tort claim, get some of your fellow tax-payer's cash for your hassle, the crooked cop gets a slap on the wrist, and they're going to have a grudge against you now, so it is time to move. And that's the best case.
The 4th amendment has been mostly made redundant, aside from cases where you don't need it, or some very narrow and (compared with the otherwise prevailing cases) strange decisions. It is of course much more complex than this, but a good rule of thumb: if you're in a car, the 4th doesn't apply. If you're not, but in a public space and not obviously doing something illegal, the rules are more complicated, and vary by locale. General lessons are stay calmer than a catatonic potato, realize that innocent actions like reaching for your wallet can be construed as threatening, don't talk to them other than to ask if you're being detained or arrested, and get out of the area as soon as possible. Your home is very different, but that gets even more complicated, and I'm going to stop babbling now.
None of this is legal advice, I am not a lawyer, and giving any of this more credence then you do your spam is stupid. Get your own advice.
In a place large enough to support rich company infighting and politicing, you'll have to make some. Think of this as one part parlimentary coalition building, two parts personality cult. You need an effective coalition to show results, and you need to make sure you're teamed with the winning side of any given fight.
Some places you'll get fired as an amoral asshole for doing things that are expected parts of proving your value other places.
This should be fundamental, but if you can't keep your people productive, you'll be out on your ear eventually.
By whatever means you can. Well placed kindness and help, genuinely forming friendships (to a point), making them dependent on you, etc. If you're in a weak position, offering loyalty to an exec can work, but make sure they're a winner. Frequently, this ends up with you following them to other firms when they aren't, and nobody bats 1000. Make sure you can handle that if you go this route.
If they don't, you're doomed sooner or later. 'nuff said.
The only real drawbacks to it are that (a), it is a little confusing to set up, because it exposes layers of software that in Windows-land are papered over, (b), well, it is ODBC, which isn't my favorite way to talk to databases (lowest common denominator implementations, the weird {? = exec} crap, etc.) (to be fair, not like JDBC is any better, as you'd expect from the name.), and (c) some drivers are not F/free.
For the record, though, the FreeTDS driver (only one I've used UnixODBC) is very solid - once I wrapped my head around the configuration, everything went swimmingly. I really didn't expect talking to SQL Server to work very well, but it does.
There isn't?
I just finished a project that accesses SQL Server from a Linux/Apache/mod_perl app using ODBC via the FreeTDS drivers. (Don't ask, client requirement.)
Granted, not all of the unixodbc drivers are free. But then, they aren't in MS land either, although you might not notice because you're paying for them via a bundle.