Oracle provides user profiles to control virtually everything the user can do within the database, including CPU time and connect time. With it, you should be able to closely control what these ad-hoc queries can do, and avoid problems.
The toilet analogy is a pretty good one, but it fails in one respect that is very important - few companies choose to design their own toilet. They assume that existing, simple, common toilets will work just fine for them and they assume that even if they chose to design their own toilet it would give them no competitive advantage.
Now, examine software for a moment. How many companies would be willing to change all of their procedures and operations in order to adopt a standard off-the-shelf solution purchased as a commodity on the open market? How many would abandon their carefully crafted strategies and competitive practices in order to avoid special purpose software? To put it another way, how many would be willing to run their businesses exactly (and I mean EXACTLY) like the competitor across the street so that the two of them could use the same software "plumbing"? In my experience, the answer is NONE. And that's why we have CIOs and Technology Officers and the like slowly forcing their ways into the boardroom. Without them, the custom-made "plumbing" isn't worth the millions spent on it, and the company can't compete.
Perhaps when buying a product for your home, it might be true that complexity seems attractive. But when you are developing a device or software interface for use in industry or the workplace, I have found time and time again that "choice is a bad thing". The fabled device with just one button ("start") that is talked about in the articles is EXACTLY what you strive for when developing an industrial interface for use in the workplace. Technicians and laborers and general folks working day in and day out don't want to be bothered with making a dozen choices each time they perform a basic work function. They want to punch a button, have it do what they expect, and have it work flawlessly every time. I can't tell you how many times I have REMOVED choices from a menu at the demands of my users because they "don't need all these choices".
Well, actually, yes I have heard of the Pony Express. It may be a bad example for this situation, however. That service only ran for about 18 months just before the U.S. Civil War, and it was something like the "X prize" contest... the speculators that started it were hoping to gain a million dollar U.S. government contract, and ran the service for those 18 months more as a demo than anything else. The Civil War interrupted the service, and after the war, the railroads made it impractical. In the end, the sponsors lost a couple hundred thousand dollars.
This may be a case that proves my point - a risky, financially unstable endevor that might have been better handled by the government...
Once an operation becomes routine, I think it should be privatized. In this case, NASA does a better job at developing the new (and highly risky) missions (like the one to Mars), and less well at doing routine things like lifting payloads into orbit. I'd put this akin to commercial freight hauling and less in the vein of the Apollo missions. Given this, getting someone in the commericial market to do the hauling should be cheaper, quicker, and probably safer than having the government do it. Sort of like the difference between the USPS and UPS... perhaps 100 years ago when delivering packages was a very risky endevor with zero profit margins having the government deliver them was logical, but it's hard to see the reason now. Perhaps we're turning that corner in the orbital lift business this decade.
I believe the money to pay for the payloads to the ISS will still come out of the NASA budget (for instance, the article mentions a $500 million price tag just to fund this privatization effort). NASA just hopes that the price tag will be less once competition takes over. And, I suspect they're correct, given the remarkably low cost of the recent X-prize contestants.
From the 1995 PDF article: "Eolas stands to become a big company quickly by deriving a licensing fee from any outfit that supplies or uses applets". Really. Check out what they say about themselves on their own web site: http://www.eolas.com/.
Nothing here indicating a huge, rapidly growing, influential company. It appears they hold a handful of patents and a clever logo, but not much more. If they haven't been able to markedly influence browsers in a 10 year time span, why should this decision mark some significant change in the landscape? What, really has changed here other than Microsoft essentially avoiding another lawsuit by doing something they probably should have done anyway (in order to avoid the security flaws pointed out by other posters).
Several commenters have indicated that both High School and College were worthless because they were forced to endure non-technical classes that were outside their major fieldof study. Too freakin' bad! College (at least, a good college) is not supposed to be a trade school that teaches you how to be a Linux system admin - it's supposed to teach you a broad knowledge base that will help you to write, to read, to learn and to live. If you wanted to get a certificate as a sysadmin, there's non-college options for that.
That being said, I'm just as annoyed by Gate's statement that everyone should be going to college after high school. Get real! Not everyone needs to, wants to, or has the ability to make it through a 4 year college. What the US needs it not necessarily more college graduates, but rather a better (and more widely accepted) technical school alternative. Then maybe the folks that are posting about hating college wouldn't have felt compelled to go there in the first place.
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Oracle provides user profiles to control virtually everything the user can do within the database, including CPU time and connect time. With it, you should be able to closely control what these ad-hoc queries can do, and avoid problems.
The toilet analogy is a pretty good one, but it fails in one respect that is very important - few companies choose to design their own toilet. They assume that existing, simple, common toilets will work just fine for them and they assume that even if they chose to design their own toilet it would give them no competitive advantage. Now, examine software for a moment. How many companies would be willing to change all of their procedures and operations in order to adopt a standard off-the-shelf solution purchased as a commodity on the open market? How many would abandon their carefully crafted strategies and competitive practices in order to avoid special purpose software? To put it another way, how many would be willing to run their businesses exactly (and I mean EXACTLY) like the competitor across the street so that the two of them could use the same software "plumbing"? In my experience, the answer is NONE. And that's why we have CIOs and Technology Officers and the like slowly forcing their ways into the boardroom. Without them, the custom-made "plumbing" isn't worth the millions spent on it, and the company can't compete.
Perhaps when buying a product for your home, it might be true that complexity seems attractive. But when you are developing a device or software interface for use in industry or the workplace, I have found time and time again that "choice is a bad thing". The fabled device with just one button ("start") that is talked about in the articles is EXACTLY what you strive for when developing an industrial interface for use in the workplace. Technicians and laborers and general folks working day in and day out don't want to be bothered with making a dozen choices each time they perform a basic work function. They want to punch a button, have it do what they expect, and have it work flawlessly every time. I can't tell you how many times I have REMOVED choices from a menu at the demands of my users because they "don't need all these choices".
Well, actually, yes I have heard of the Pony Express. It may be a bad example for this situation, however. That service only ran for about 18 months just before the U.S. Civil War, and it was something like the "X prize" contest... the speculators that started it were hoping to gain a million dollar U.S. government contract, and ran the service for those 18 months more as a demo than anything else. The Civil War interrupted the service, and after the war, the railroads made it impractical. In the end, the sponsors lost a couple hundred thousand dollars. This may be a case that proves my point - a risky, financially unstable endevor that might have been better handled by the government...
Once an operation becomes routine, I think it should be privatized. In this case, NASA does a better job at developing the new (and highly risky) missions (like the one to Mars), and less well at doing routine things like lifting payloads into orbit. I'd put this akin to commercial freight hauling and less in the vein of the Apollo missions. Given this, getting someone in the commericial market to do the hauling should be cheaper, quicker, and probably safer than having the government do it. Sort of like the difference between the USPS and UPS... perhaps 100 years ago when delivering packages was a very risky endevor with zero profit margins having the government deliver them was logical, but it's hard to see the reason now. Perhaps we're turning that corner in the orbital lift business this decade.
I believe the money to pay for the payloads to the ISS will still come out of the NASA budget (for instance, the article mentions a $500 million price tag just to fund this privatization effort). NASA just hopes that the price tag will be less once competition takes over. And, I suspect they're correct, given the remarkably low cost of the recent X-prize contestants.
From the 1995 PDF article: "Eolas stands to become a big company quickly by deriving a licensing fee from any outfit that supplies or uses applets". Really. Check out what they say about themselves on their own web site: http://www.eolas.com/. Nothing here indicating a huge, rapidly growing, influential company. It appears they hold a handful of patents and a clever logo, but not much more. If they haven't been able to markedly influence browsers in a 10 year time span, why should this decision mark some significant change in the landscape? What, really has changed here other than Microsoft essentially avoiding another lawsuit by doing something they probably should have done anyway (in order to avoid the security flaws pointed out by other posters).
Several commenters have indicated that both High School and College were worthless because they were forced to endure non-technical classes that were outside their major fieldof study. Too freakin' bad! College (at least, a good college) is not supposed to be a trade school that teaches you how to be a Linux system admin - it's supposed to teach you a broad knowledge base that will help you to write, to read, to learn and to live. If you wanted to get a certificate as a sysadmin, there's non-college options for that. That being said, I'm just as annoyed by Gate's statement that everyone should be going to college after high school. Get real! Not everyone needs to, wants to, or has the ability to make it through a 4 year college. What the US needs it not necessarily more college graduates, but rather a better (and more widely accepted) technical school alternative. Then maybe the folks that are posting about hating college wouldn't have felt compelled to go there in the first place.