I remember when the government mandated the switchover from TCP/IP to ISO protocols. The acronym for that was GOSIP. Computer industry vendors spent serious money preparing for the August 1990 adoption deadline. They had to implement the ISO protocols or risk not being able to sell their systems to the government (always a major customer).
The revised date for adoption is never.
The worst part about doing government contracts was dealing with all the folks that say: "We can't design this around TCP/IP, the government is mandating ISO."
An item can be legal, unless you use it to commit a burglary.
Many US states have laws such as these:
511.050 Possession of burglar's tools. (1) A person is guilty of possession of burglar's tools when he possesses any tool, instrument or other thing adapted, designed or commonly used for committing or facilitating the commission of an offense involving forcible entry into premises or theft by a physical taking under circumstances which leave no reasonable doubt as to his: (a) Intention to use the same in the commission of an offense of such character; or (b) Knowledge that some other person intends to use the same in the commission of an offense of such character. (2) Possession of burglar's tools is a Class A misdemeanor. Effective: January 1, 1975 History: Created 1974 Ky. Acts ch. 406, sec. 100, effective January 1, 1975.
This example is from Kentucky.
If you steal a key and use it to break in someplace, it too can be a "burglar's tool."
I have been using Java for several years now. But I haven't touched Sun hardware in a long, long time.
Even when I did, my employers did not like having to provide both a Sun workstation and a Windows box for every developer.
I remember when a spreadsheet first became available for a Sun Workstation. It was called Wingz. Since it was a "powerful unix machine capable of supporting multiple users" they decided to charge about $1000 for a spreadsheet program. So for a long time, Unix software vendors kept your average business from moving to a Unix desktop. About the same time, running Unix (SVR4) on PC hardware was also about $1000 for the OS.
My employer at the time also spent on the order of $100,000 for a CAD package that ran on Sun 3 (Motorola 68000 based) hardware. Shortly after that, Sun came out with SPARC. So no one wanted to use the old CAD software on slower hardware, and they were never able to recharge the cost of the CAD system back to projects.
At the time, there was still lots of software that could only run on VMS or Unix on mini-computers. Today, much much more can be done on either Linux or Windows running on commodity hardware. Companies only use commercial Unix hardware when the have to and when they don't have even bigger iron.
Java allows development teams to develop for Linux/Unix servers and give their developers one desktop running Windows. You can have a Linux desktop if you find a castoff PC within the company to sit next to your company-provided Windows desktop.
Lucky for me 1) I never bought Sun stock and 2) I learned Windows programming so I could stay employed.
To me, it looks like a big chunk of the job market for developers is divided between.NET and Java/J2EE.
I don't see how Sun is ever going to sell significantly more proprietary hardware than they do today.
People can buy Sun servers. But they don't have to. And with Java, they can port their server code to Linux on XYZ vendor hardware.
Senator Feinstein is one of my senators. I have sent her an email letting her know that I am concerned about the issue. I downloaded and printed out the bill and will probably send her another one once I figure out what it means.
One might argue that writing your congress people accomplishes nothing. But so does griping about it on/.
You can let them know how you feel about it. You can vote for or against them. You can make campaign donations for or against them.
One person might not make a difference, but more than one person is concerned about this type of law.
You know the congress hears what the lobbyists clients think. Have they heard what you think?
Nayar is also looking to solve a problem that looms large for Indian IT companies these days: Attrition. The best employees are increasingly the hardest to retain. Nayar wants anyone who leaves for a job elsewhere to end up frustrated.
Although India has a lot of people, I wouldn't be surprised if they still didn't have enough people who can do high-end technical work.
Elsewhere in the article, they said this company was implementing one of CISCO's products as part of a "shared risk" contract.
My degree is in Physics. In the process of getting my degree, I used tons and tons of algebra. Maybe other programmers think differently, but I find programming very mathmatical.
1) Factoring lines of code out of loops or into methods 2) Looking for invariants 3) Commutation (can you switch the order of operations and get the same result) 4) Being carefull about details 5) Finding the mistakes (where did I pick up that incorrect factor of 2?)
It is true that you might not use specific things you had in school (like F = mA). But I think doing a lot of math exercises the same parts of the brain as a lot of programming.
As far as using libraries for sorting or collections, it is helpful to know how a linked list or a hash table is in order to choose the right collection. Or for that matter, knowing something about the performance of sorting algorithms in ordere to choose the right one.
Hopefully, you found some of the topics covered in your degree as fun so it will not have been a complete waste if you don't ever use them at work. Imagine if you knew you would never do anything you didn't learn in school.
Thank god we're getting away from the "horse and buggy" days.
Personally, I like drawing with a pencil or painting with a brush because I have been working on computers 8 hours a day for 25 years. It is refreshing to get away from the computer for an hour or two.
Sure, no one should believe in a secure job for life.
But the banks sure believe in 30 year mortgages. And if you are out of work long enough, you will default and join the ranks of folks who have a tough time getting mortgages.
You pay a hefty transaction fee if you need to relocate to stay employed.
At one time, those in the know said: Don't worry about the US losing all those manufacturing jobs, the future is in technology.
So now we have lost a bunch of technology jobs. Some to slower domestic and world-wide demand, some to outsourcing.
I thought I was on the high end of skilled technology workers. Then a Fortune 25 company cut me loose.
Am I adapting? Sure. Do I like it? No.
I don't think many people expect a job for life. But it would be nice if you had some idea if you could continue to afford the house payment for the length of the loan. It must be worse for those who want to start a family. Sure you can afford it now. But what about after the next big management trend?
While it is true that Henry Ford took it upon himself to institute an 8 hour work day in 1914, it was not in a vacuum. Some unions were demanding first a 10 hour day, then later an 8 hour day throughout the 1800s.
The interesting thing is that after Ford started the 8 hour day, his competitors followed suit because Ford was achieving higher productivity as a result.
In 1924, a consitutional ammendment banning child labor failed to pass.
In 1938, the Wages and Hours (later Fair Labor Standards) Act was passed, banning child labor and setting the 40-hour work week. There was a court challenge and and the Supreme Court upheld the law in 1941.
In 1835, child workers in employed in the silk mills in Paterson, NJ went on strike for the 11 hour day/6 day week.
In the 1886, the Knights of Labour marched with 80,000 people marched in support of the 8 hour day and in subsequent days, 350,000 workers went on strike.
It is true that Henry Ford paid better and had a shorter work day than other captains of industry. He also hated unions and hoped treating workers better would help keep unions out of his factories.
But thousands and thousands of workers struck and marched before and after this. Both private police and workers were shot or beaten to death as part of the struggle. Many of the events had names like Bayview Massacre, and Thibodaux Massacre. Local police, National Guard and federal troops have been called in to end strikes. For their part, early unions hired people to beat up "scabs" and were not afraid of mob violence.
It seems so different than the world we live in today. I have ancestors who worked in the mills in Fall River, Massachusetts. They were recent immigrants from Ireland and French Canada. I went there once and visited a museum about the mills, there were pictures of children with missing fingers working in the mills.
For the most part, people had to fight for an 8 hour day, overtime pay, and to have a childhood.
Perhaps you're right. I heard this story a long time ago. The disadvantage of that scheme is they know where to find the bartender.
I did a google search and the closest thing I found to this was a guy who was accidently given the wrong card back. He went on to knowingly rack up charges on it. When they figured it out, he had already fled and has an outstanding warrant.
So maybe it is an urban legend. The other kinds of bar tab frauds I found were all targeted at foreign travellers. Look up "friendly greek bar scam."
Oh well, I don't spend as much time drinking as I did when I was 22.
Years ago, I heard about a bar-related scam. It worked this way:
1) You have a bar tab. They ask to hold your credit card while you and your friends get your fill of cocktails. This was (and maybe still is) normal practice.
2) When it is time to pay, instead of getting your card back, they give you another card. You go home drunk and sleep it off.
3) Meanwhile, they give your card to their criminal friends who go out and spend, spend, spend.
4) After the normal time it takes to detect the lost card, they re-cycle your card and give it to the next party animal after they pay for their bar tab.
I note in TFA that JBoss is unprofitable. So Marc might sell because he doesn't want to put anymore money into it. If it takes the 10 years you are talking about, where is he going to get the investors?
It reminds me of a joke about a Vermont farmer who wins $1 millon in the lottery. When asked what he will do, he says:
"Well I guess I'll keep farming until the money runs out."
If you are losing money, you can't keep paying the developers forever.
With J2EE, every year or two there is a new version of the standard, so JBoss would not keep its value without continued development.
It is not just congress but the American people that are, in agregate, short-sighted. If the American people were really concerned about the resources going into technical education and industrial research, but the congress wasn't, the situation would not last long.
You imply that money, not votes is what drives members of congress. That is only the case because most people don't pay much attention to politics and are largely influenced by campaign ads.
So members of congress go after the money to buy the ads. If having detailed, thought out positions and communicating them to the public was the way to get votes, they would do that instead.
I have some optimism due to something I heard recently: the combination of 9/11 and the actions of the Bush administration have increased the number of people who follow national politics.
Meanwhile, poverty has decreased in China due to their trade with the U.S.
Who do you have more in common with:
1) A non-skilled, low-income, high-school gradute in the U. S., or
2) A recent Chinese engineering-school graduate?
In the bay area, some places charge for you to park.
I work two days a week in the Bay Area. I take the Amtrak from the Sacramento to Richmond, then the BART from Richmond to Oakland.
At work the parking is $13/day if you get there early. At the hotel, parking is $16 for the night.
Granted, it takes 3 hours instead of 2 each way, but I can read a book, walk over to the cafe car to get some coffee in the morning. On the way back on the second day, I can have wine or beer.
I could neither read nor drink if I took my car.
But my commute is unusual. The time spent and economics depend on how far your place of work or home is from the subway and whether or not they charge for parking. Or how long it takes you to find a place to park.
It is definitely not worth taking a bus to avoid a 10 minute walk.
Install 1) was the worst. There were so many patches and bug fixes for it, it took several days. It was so difficult, we used rcp to copy the disk image onto later servers to install it. Then we run the instance creation scripts.
For some strange reason, install 2) is incredibly painless. I know from experience that Windows IPC calls are fairly different from Unix (System V) IPC calls. Since Oracle on windows does not require the cygwin libraries, I will assume Oracle has a lot of stuff like:
#ifdef __WINDOWS__/* do it one way */
#endif
#ifdef __UNIX_flavor_1/* do it another way */
#endif
Install 3) was at home, so I did not have several full days to devote to it. IIRC, the required shared memory area size was bigger than my total system memory. So shortly after that, I gave up.
We used a couple of DBA consultant to help us with the Tru64 Unix install to help us with the Oracle "hidden parameters." But my point is, if you run Oracle under Windows, you don't have to fool with any of that stuff.
The lesson I walk away from that project is this:
If you need to run Oracle on Unix or Linux, make sure you have a good Oracle DBA, preferably full time. If you can run Oracle on Windows, you don't need the DBA.
What I haven't tried yet is to run Multi-master replication on a pair of Windows servers.
I subsequent project I am working on uses PostgreSQL and it seems pretty painless to use. I have used that both on Windows and Linux and have not had any difficulties. The client for that job has a mixed Windows and Linux environment. I am not aware of them having a PostgreSQL DBA, either full time or part time.
One thing I wish I understood more is why the same desktop machine can run Oracle nicely under Windows, but you can't even install it under Linux.
The machine I have in mind has 512MB of memory, some Pentium 4 processor and the usual 40-80 Gb of disk.
At work, we use a plain old Windows desktop machine for the development Oracle server and don't have any problems. I tried to setup Oracle under Linux and it would require more memory and lots of unusual System V shared memory conifuration and Kernel settings etc. The Oracle install under Windows runs a GUI based installation. You click through a bunch of stuff and boom, you have your instance up and running.
Our production environment is a pair of Unix servers using Oracle multi-master replication. When we have to bring both servers down and run Oracle, JBoss, and our application server all on a windows Laptop. Does Unix/Linux make it harder than it needs to be?
You can browse a child porn link unintentionally. That involves writing it to your monitor, hard drive (via the browser cache) and your RAM. It might have been spam or a popup.
Having burned it to a cd or printed it out makes it hard to claim it was an accident.
On April 20, 2004, President Bush said, "Now, by the way, any time you hear the United States government talking about wiretap, it requires -- a wiretap requires a court order. Nothing has changed, by the way. When we're talking about chasing down terrorists, we're talking about getting a court order before we do so. It's important for our fellow citizens to understand, when you think Patriot Act, constitutional guarantees are in place when it comes to doing what is necessary to protect our homeland, because we value the Constitution."
Slashdot Mirror
I remember when the government mandated the switchover from TCP/IP to ISO protocols. The acronym for that was GOSIP.
Computer industry vendors spent serious money preparing for the August 1990 adoption deadline.
They had to implement the ISO protocols or risk not being able to sell their systems to the government (always a major customer).
The revised date for adoption is never.
The worst part about doing government contracts was dealing with all the folks that say:
"We can't design this around TCP/IP, the government is mandating ISO."
Indeed. When I clicked on the article, they had fixed it to read as the author intended.
An item can be legal, unless you use it to commit a burglary.
Many US states have laws such as these:
511.050 Possession of burglar's tools.
(1) A person is guilty of possession of burglar's tools when he possesses any tool,
instrument or other thing adapted, designed or commonly used for committing or
facilitating the commission of an offense involving forcible entry into premises or
theft by a physical taking under circumstances which leave no reasonable doubt as
to his:
(a) Intention to use the same in the commission of an offense of such character; or
(b) Knowledge that some other person intends to use the same in the commission
of an offense of such character.
(2) Possession of burglar's tools is a Class A misdemeanor.
Effective: January 1, 1975
History: Created 1974 Ky. Acts ch. 406, sec. 100, effective January 1, 1975.
This example is from Kentucky.
If you steal a key and use it to break in someplace, it too can be a "burglar's tool."
I have been using Java for several years now. But I haven't touched Sun hardware in a long, long time.
.NET and Java/J2EE.
Even when I did, my employers did not like having to provide both a Sun workstation and a Windows box for every developer.
I remember when a spreadsheet first became available for a Sun Workstation. It was called Wingz.
Since it was a "powerful unix machine capable of supporting multiple users" they decided to charge
about $1000 for a spreadsheet program.
So for a long time, Unix software vendors kept your average business from moving to a Unix desktop.
About the same time, running Unix (SVR4) on PC hardware was also about $1000 for the OS.
My employer at the time also spent on the order of $100,000 for a CAD package that ran on Sun 3 (Motorola 68000
based) hardware. Shortly after that, Sun came out with SPARC. So no one wanted to
use the old CAD software on slower hardware, and they were never able to recharge the cost
of the CAD system back to projects.
At the time, there was still lots of software that could only run on VMS or Unix on mini-computers.
Today, much much more can be done on either Linux or Windows running on commodity hardware.
Companies only use commercial Unix hardware when the have to and when they don't have even bigger iron.
Java allows development teams to develop for Linux/Unix servers and give their developers one desktop
running Windows. You can have a Linux desktop if you find a castoff PC within the company to sit
next to your company-provided Windows desktop.
Lucky for me 1) I never bought Sun stock and 2) I learned Windows programming so I could stay employed.
To me, it looks like a big chunk of the job market for developers is divided between
I don't see how Sun is ever going to sell significantly more proprietary hardware than they do today.
People can buy Sun servers. But they don't have to. And with Java, they can port their server code to Linux
on XYZ vendor hardware.
I didn't think of contacting Senator Boxer. That's a good idea.
This morning, I wrote a followup email to Senator Feinstein and re-worded it
to send to Senator Boxer.
I have voted for Feinstein before. I will have to re-consider it next time.
She also voted for the USA Patriot act.
Senator Feinstein is one of my senators. I have sent her an email
/.
letting her know that I am concerned about the issue. I downloaded
and printed out the bill and will probably send her another one
once I figure out what it means.
One might argue that writing your congress people accomplishes nothing.
But so does griping about it on
You can let them know how you feel about it.
You can vote for or against them.
You can make campaign donations for or against them.
One person might not make a difference, but more than one person is concerned about this type of law.
You know the congress hears what the lobbyists clients think.
Have they heard what you think?
From TFA:
Nayar is also looking to solve a problem that looms large for Indian IT companies these days: Attrition. The best employees are increasingly the hardest to retain. Nayar wants anyone who leaves for a job elsewhere to end up frustrated.
Although India has a lot of people, I wouldn't be surprised if they still didn't have enough people who can do high-end technical work.
Elsewhere in the article, they said this company was implementing one of CISCO's products as part of a
"shared risk" contract.
Since every ticket is visible to all, it would only take a matter of time
for people to figure out who the troublesome employees are.
If someone complains more than is warranted, it is useful for other managers to know
that so they would not accept a transfer.
After a year or two, you could do a report of the top complainers and fire the whole lot of them.
But for now, the TFA says they are concerned about retaining employees.
"What's missing is that employees are an organization's best assets."
For some reason, that reminded me of this:
http://www.satirewire.com/news/0105/loyal.shtml
My degree is in Physics. In the process of getting my degree, I used
tons and tons of algebra. Maybe other programmers think differently, but
I find programming very mathmatical.
1) Factoring lines of code out of loops or into methods
2) Looking for invariants
3) Commutation (can you switch the order of operations and get the same result)
4) Being carefull about details
5) Finding the mistakes (where did I pick up that incorrect factor of 2?)
It is true that you might not use specific things you had in school (like F = mA).
But I think doing a lot of math exercises the same parts of the brain as a lot of
programming.
As far as using libraries for sorting or collections, it is helpful to know how a linked list or a hash table is in order to choose the right collection.
Or for that matter, knowing something about the performance of sorting algorithms in ordere to choose the right one.
Hopefully, you found some of the topics covered in your degree as fun so it will not have been a complete waste if you don't ever use them at work.
Imagine if you knew you would never do anything you didn't learn in school.
Just think, the old fashioned way:
$1 - pencil
$5 - sketchbook
New, obviously better way:
$1000 - base computer
$100 - WACOM tablet
$600 - Adobe Photoshop
------
$1700
Thank god we're getting away from the "horse and buggy" days.
Personally, I like drawing with a pencil or painting with a brush
because I have been working on computers 8 hours a day for 25
years. It is refreshing to get away from the computer for an
hour or two.
Sure, no one should believe in a secure job for life.
But the banks sure believe in 30 year mortgages. And if you are out of work long enough,
you will default and join the ranks of folks who have a tough time getting mortgages.
You pay a hefty transaction fee if you need to relocate to stay employed.
At one time, those in the know said: Don't worry about the US losing all those manufacturing jobs, the future is in technology.
So now we have lost a bunch of technology jobs. Some to slower domestic and world-wide demand, some to outsourcing.
I thought I was on the high end of skilled technology workers. Then a Fortune 25 company
cut me loose.
Am I adapting? Sure. Do I like it? No.
I don't think many people expect a job for life. But it would be nice if
you had some idea if you could continue to afford the house payment
for the length of the loan. It must be worse for those who want to start a
family. Sure you can afford it now. But what about after the next big
management trend?
While it is true that Henry Ford took it upon himself to institute an 8 hour work day in 1914, it was not in a vacuum. Some unions were demanding first a 10 hour day, then later an 8 hour day throughout the 1800s.
The interesting thing is that after Ford started the 8 hour day, his competitors followed suit because Ford was achieving higher productivity as a result.
The Wikipedia article has more detail.
In 1924, a consitutional ammendment banning child labor failed to pass.
In 1938, the Wages and Hours (later Fair Labor Standards) Act was passed, banning child labor and setting the 40-hour work week.
There was a court challenge and and the Supreme Court upheld the law in 1941.
In 1835, child workers in employed in the silk mills in Paterson, NJ went on strike for the 11 hour day/6 day week.
In the 1886, the Knights of Labour marched with 80,000 people marched in support of the 8 hour day and in subsequent days, 350,000 workers went on strike.
It is true that Henry Ford paid better and had a shorter work day than other captains of industry.
He also hated unions and hoped treating workers better would help keep unions out of his factories.
But thousands and thousands of workers struck and marched before and after this. Both private police and workers were shot or beaten to death
as part of the struggle.
Many of the events had names like Bayview Massacre, and Thibodaux Massacre.
Local police, National Guard and federal troops have been called in to end strikes.
For their part, early unions hired people to beat up "scabs" and were not afraid of mob violence.
It seems so different than the world we live in today. I have ancestors who worked in the mills in Fall River, Massachusetts.
They were recent immigrants from Ireland and French Canada.
I went there once and visited a museum about the mills, there were pictures
of children with missing fingers working in the mills.
For the most part, people had to fight for an 8 hour day, overtime pay, and to have a childhood.
Perhaps you're right. I heard this story a long time ago.
The disadvantage of that scheme is they know where to find the
bartender.
I did a google search and the closest thing I found to this was a
guy who was accidently given the wrong card back.
He went on to knowingly rack up charges on it. When they figured
it out, he had already fled and has an outstanding warrant.
So maybe it is an urban legend. The other kinds of bar tab frauds
I found were all targeted at foreign travellers. Look up
"friendly greek bar scam."
Oh well, I don't spend as much time drinking as I did when I was 22.
Years ago, I heard about a bar-related scam. It worked this way:
1) You have a bar tab. They ask to hold your credit card while you
and your friends get your fill of cocktails.
This was (and maybe still is) normal practice.
2) When it is time to pay, instead of getting your card back,
they give you another card. You go home drunk and sleep it off.
3) Meanwhile, they give your card to their criminal friends who
go out and spend, spend, spend.
4) After the normal time it takes to detect the lost card, they
re-cycle your card and give it to the next party animal
after they pay for their bar tab.
This was back in the 1980's.
I am using Coppermine and I am pretty happy with it.
It is free and written in PHP. It runs well on my hosting services web site.
You're right. I got it wrong.
That's what I get for reading the artcile. The BussinessWeekOnline article stated that JBoss was unprofitable.
But searching for other sources backs up you're point that they have always been profitible.
"That's very different. Never mind."
E. Litella
I note in TFA that JBoss is unprofitable. So Marc might sell because he doesn't want to put anymore money into it.
If it takes the 10 years you are talking about, where is he going to get the investors?
It reminds me of a joke about a Vermont farmer who wins $1 millon in the lottery.
When asked what he will do, he says:
"Well I guess I'll keep farming until the money runs out."
If you are losing money, you can't keep paying the developers forever.
With J2EE, every year or two there is a new version of the standard, so JBoss
would not keep its value without continued development.
It is not just congress but the American people that are, in agregate, short-sighted.
If the American people were really concerned about the resources going into technical education and industrial research, but the congress wasn't, the situation would not last long.
You imply that money, not votes is what drives members of congress. That is
only the case because most people don't pay much attention to politics
and are largely influenced by campaign ads.
So members of congress go after the money to buy the ads. If having detailed,
thought out positions and communicating them to the public was the
way to get votes, they would do that instead.
I have some optimism due to something I heard recently: the combination of
9/11 and the actions of the Bush administration have increased
the number of people who follow national politics.
Meanwhile, poverty has decreased in China due to their trade with the U.S.
Who do you have more in common with:
1) A non-skilled, low-income, high-school gradute in the U. S., or
2) A recent Chinese engineering-school graduate?
In the bay area, some places charge for you to park.
I work two days a week in the Bay Area. I take the Amtrak from the Sacramento to Richmond, then the BART from Richmond to Oakland.
At work the parking is $13/day if you get there early. At the hotel, parking is $16 for the night.
Granted, it takes 3 hours instead of 2 each way, but I can read a book, walk over to the cafe car to get some coffee in the morning.
On the way back on the second day, I can have wine or beer.
I could neither read nor drink if I took my car.
But my commute is unusual. The time spent and economics depend on how
far your place of work or home is from the subway and whether or not they
charge for parking. Or how long it takes you to find a place to park.
It is definitely not worth taking a bus to avoid a 10 minute walk.
YMMV
My Oracle installation experiences have included:
/* do it one way */
/* do it another way */
1) Compaq Tru64 Unix
2) Windows
3) Linux
Install 1) was the worst. There were so many patches and bug fixes for it, it took several days.
It was so difficult, we used rcp to copy the disk image onto later servers to install it.
Then we run the instance creation scripts.
For some strange reason, install 2) is incredibly painless.
I know from experience that Windows IPC calls are fairly different from Unix (System V) IPC calls.
Since Oracle on windows does not require the cygwin libraries, I will assume Oracle has a lot of stuff like:
#ifdef __WINDOWS__
#endif
#ifdef __UNIX_flavor_1
#endif
Install 3) was at home, so I did not have several full days to devote to it. IIRC, the required shared memory area size was bigger than my total system memory. So shortly after
that, I gave up.
We used a couple of DBA consultant to help us with the Tru64 Unix install to help us with the Oracle "hidden parameters."
But my point is, if you run Oracle under Windows, you don't have to fool with any of that stuff.
The lesson I walk away from that project is this:
If you need to run Oracle on Unix or Linux, make sure you have a good Oracle DBA, preferably full time.
If you can run Oracle on Windows, you don't need the DBA.
What I haven't tried yet is to run Multi-master replication on a pair of Windows servers.
I subsequent project I am working on uses PostgreSQL and it seems pretty painless to use.
I have used that both on Windows and Linux and have not had any difficulties.
The client for that job has a mixed Windows and Linux environment.
I am not aware of them having a PostgreSQL DBA, either full time or part time.
One thing I wish I understood more is why the same desktop machine can run Oracle nicely under Windows, but you can't even install it under Linux.
The machine I have in mind has 512MB of memory, some Pentium 4 processor and the usual 40-80 Gb of disk.
At work, we use a plain old Windows desktop machine for the development Oracle server and don't have any problems.
I tried to setup Oracle under Linux and it would require more memory and lots of unusual System V shared memory conifuration and Kernel settings etc.
The Oracle install under Windows runs a GUI based installation. You click through
a bunch of stuff and boom, you have your instance up and running.
Our production environment is a pair of Unix servers using Oracle multi-master replication.
When we have to bring both servers down and run Oracle, JBoss, and our application server
all on a windows Laptop.
Does Unix/Linux make it harder than it needs to be?
I think the difference is intent.
You can browse a child porn link unintentionally. That involves writing it to
your monitor, hard drive (via the browser cache) and your RAM.
It might have been spam or a popup.
Having burned it to a cd or printed it out makes it hard to claim it was an accident.
On April 20, 2004, President Bush said, "Now, by the way, any time you hear the United States government talking about wiretap, it requires -- a wiretap requires a court order. Nothing has changed, by the way. When we're talking about chasing down terrorists, we're talking about getting a court order before we do so. It's important for our fellow citizens to understand, when you think Patriot Act, constitutional guarantees are in place when it comes to doing what is necessary to protect our homeland, because we value the Constitution."
When he was running for re-election, he said that his government did not
conduct wiretapping without a warrant.
Now he is saying he doesn't need a warrant.
The first statement, during the campaign, is the lie to which I am referring.