But Oracle would not need to buy out companies, just key people.
Oracle could just offer that one NTT employee, say, a "consulting" position at Oracle, for, oh, 50x his current salary. There would be some tiny little clause in his contract stating something along the lines of "you shall remain 50 yards from any computer that contains the source code for the postgresql database"
I'm not suggesting that Oracle can or should do this (see my other comment) but that the comparison between NTT and Oracle is not meaningful.
Heads need not roll. Anyone with a large exposure to mysql should be at least getting a sense of how painful it would be to migrate to postgresql, and ideally have been doing some of this research for at least the past year when it was clear mysql was headed for trouble.
But even in the worst case, mysql would turn into a type of legacy application, with support and bug fixes provided by 3rd parties. This would be not nearly as bad as the suffering of companies back in the day dealing with legacy systems where they can't even figure out who might even know where the original source is, let alone someone to fix or enhance something for you.
While he is technically correct that Oracle could just bribe the key developers to abandon pgsql, this would likely backfire.
First, it assumes that the pgsql developers of importance can be bought. Our world is decadent, but not everyone has a price tag
Second, seems Monty has been dealing with mysql code for too long. The pgsql code base (at least the parts I've seen) is significantly more pleasant to work with than MySQL's, and the sheer number of projects building off of it, commercial or OSS (due to BSD licence) are a testament to how accessible it is. Even if all of the current developers were to be bribed and stopped working on postgresql, there would be a significant incentive for other parties to step in and pick up the slack, given that postgresql has a sizable user base, and especially since it is now widely seen as the heir-apparent to mysql as the open-source rdbms of choice for your run-of-the-mill applications.
Add on top of that the bad press from a failed attempt to use such questionable tactics, and I think not even Oracle is greedy or dumb enough to try anything.
This is a largely American phenomenon, and certainly not universal as your post seems to suggest.
For example, in countries like Germany and Russia, engineers are highly respected members of the educated classes, and any average blue collar worker would be extremely proud to see his child become an engineer (or a doctor or lawyer for that matter)
American intellectuals lament the poor decisions that the uneducated masses make and the people that they vote for. Perhaps the 'intellectuals' should focus more on being a role model for the uneducated, something to aspire to, as with the engineer example above, rather than something to resent as a symbol of a class-based society where birth means a great deal. Perhaps comparing the MBA-to-Engineer and MBA salary / Engineer salary ratios of the US and Germany might be a good start
I read through the new yorker article, and while it is clear that Perelman is eccentric, I don't think aspergers/autistic fits here. From the article
Now, when I become a very conspicuous person, I cannot stay a pet and say nothing. That is why I had to quit.” We asked Perelman whether, by refusing the Fields and withdrawing from his profession, he was eliminating any possibility of influencing the discipline. “I am not a politician!” he replied, angrily.
It is clear that he is hurt by the backstabbing politics and lack of ethics (as he perceives it) that have corrupted mathematics. He seems more like an artist entirely dedicated to his craft; the Greta Garbo comparison somewhere above fits well.
That is precisely the problem -- we've never really had a viable option to test that. If we did, i think the overwhelming answer would be to ditch the annoying ads. Of course an entire industry of ad 'professionals' doesn't want that to happen.
What we really need are micropayments that are low enough to reflect how much the sites actually make from all the ads.
To simplify things a bit: a top-tier site, for quality content, ideally, can command an equivalent of something like $20-30 CPM for a well-placed banner ad (i.e. $20 cost/revenue per thousand views.)
For a user-generated content site, that figure goes way down, $1 per thousand or less, down to pennies for something like facebook.
So let's assume, generously, Slashdot's effective CPM is $1 for American viewers.
This means if I open on average 5 pages per day, over the course of a month, they might make all of $0.15 off of me.
If Slashdot gave me the option of paying them fifty cents a month for unlimited views, i would not only gladly do it, they would make a ton more , and a whole lot of the online ad industry would disappear, sending the money where it belongs -- to the people generating the content and maintaining the sites we all love.
You seem to have a lot of other people's money to blow away, "son".
I know it must give you a satisfying feeling in your nether regions to see such "enterprise" hardware, but people working for forward-looking enterprises have long-ago figured out that distributed clusters of commodity hardware give a substantially better processing power per unit cost and energy. You just need to turn your brains "on" and turn the Oracle sales calls "off"
Maybe you've heard of some of these "in-the-basement" enterprises... Google? Amazon?
Oracle certainly has developed a lot of very sophisticated functionality over the years as the functionality of a single standalone RDBMS has become commoditized.
The problem is that a great number of customers that Oracle strongarms into buying their product really don't need what they are being sold, but the thought of using a "toy" database to accomplish your business needs is a hard thing for many CIOs to stomach, especially if it requires you to actually think hard about what you need and what you don't need, and what you can design around.
Take your average medium-sized company looking to build a data warehouse. A pgsql solution using some decent hardware and an entry-level storage array may be enough. For bigger volumes, you can move to a hadoop/hive approach or use something like GridSQL.
For the CIO, unfortunately, there is the axiom "no one gets fired for buying Oracle", and yet-another company is relieved of a good portion of their IT budget.
Every implementation involves pain. It's all a matter of how much it will cost you in dollars or sweat to ease that pain, and Oracle makes you pay dearly.
Statements like "Oracle is at least twenty years ahead of all of their competitors in database technology", "toy database" are meaningless and unquantifiable. You may be able to scare the CIO types with that kind of language, but/. is not a fan of FUD tactics
Mod grandparent up. Parent is pretty much a perfect example of the propaganda that Oracle and its (pre)sales minions have attacked insecure and clueless C[IT]Os with for a generation.
This Oracle Tax, much like the Microsoft Tax, hurts the average consumer who has to pay inflated rates for financial services, insurance, etc. when these companies pass on the exorbitant costs of Oracle implementation and maintenance.
Having maintained large infrastructures of MySQL servers for real companies that make real dollars, I'm amazed that there are still CTOs who are insecure about telling the Oracle leeches on sales calls that they have opted to not pay the Oracle tax, and retain some of that money to invest in their business.
It's perfectly sensible. There are 130m Japanese crowded onto an island the size of California, highly-dependent on raw materials and food from outside which must be protected by an outside force (the US) they resent but can do nothing about.
The reduction of the population will increase the living standard of the remaining Japanese, and the investment into robotics and automation will make the transition to a smaller population easier while keeping the country on the cutting edge of technology.
You're absolutely right. Apple did a very smart thing and recognised that computers were being commoditized and ubiquitous and that this naturally creates a market for people who are willing to spend a premium on a fashion statement. Those people also tend not to care if they're being absolutely gouged, so profits are handsome for Apple -- why bother even going after the riff raff?
cause the last I checked, my money deposited in "risk-free" accounts is getting somewhere between 0.5 and 1.5% interest in these days of rampant money printing. A 5%, tax-free return on a solar installation is looking like a mighty fine return right about now.
As I understand it (I am American and in Texas, far from Canada) Canada has some really bad setup of restrictions on media already since most of it is imported from the US
This is "bad" depending on your perspective. Bad for American media companies that want free access to the Canadian market, good for nationalist Canadians that fear cultural assimilation from the behemoth to the south. One could argue that we would not have such a vibrant music scene producing bands like Arcade Fire (ironically the lead singer is an American from Texas!) if not for these protectionist measures.
While our current conservative government in many ways is just an offshoot of the republican party, even they will not dare be perceived by the public as a government that is selling the country out to the US and will back off any legislation that stirs up such sentiment. Democracy is not dead in Canada just yet!
An amazing concentration of hatred towards multiple targets the propagandists have been able to induce in you. All in two short and simple sentences, you've got hatred, mocking or xenophobia towards: immigrants, Canada, Mexico and France!
And I said brain drain, the cherry picking of highly educated or talented people. Today, no average, sane Canadian would pack up and move to US illegally as an economic migrant. An out-of-work auto worker in Michigan is a hell of a lot worse off than his counterpart across the border in Ontario. Who should be afraid of the refugee problem? And meanwhile, "patrols" are being stepped up on the Great Lakes! Pretty hilarious.
.. from which to look down my frost-bitten nose at the suckers having their rights taken away down south. Now i'm putting up with bad weather for no good reason!
Doesn't our government understand a fundamental principle of governing a country with a predominantly harsh climate like Canada: we must do everything significantly better than our neighbours to the south to prevent brain drain.
Oh, by the way: Portland (and Oregon at-large) pretty much pioneered the urban planning and growth boundary system that you are cheerleading with your car-hate and enviro-spew in the 1970s.
Sigh. Typical US-centric thinking, even by supposedly enlightened west-coasters.
The idea of a green belt dates to biblical times, and the modern idea of a legislated development-free belt around a rapidly expanding city dates to 1930s London (England)
But since the London greenbelt happened after the Great Disappearance of the Rest of the World in 1776, you can be forgiven for not knowing about it.
Huh? Relocate what people? The article mentions that much of this property is already empty/abandoned.
Yes, the areas are abandoned but that does not mean that large numbers of "off balance sheet" people do not squat, camp or otherwise use many of these properties, of course at an opportunity cost to the local government because they are not paying any property taxes or upkeep. At the moment, rust-belt areas of the US have relatively low populations compared to the number of buildings available to squat, a legacy of past wealth, in comparison to cities like Mumbai, where the local government wages a constant battle to destroy "illegal" slums and shantytowns, only to have them rebuilt.
However, when you raze these areas, you're still going to have that same pesky problem as before, which is that there are large numbers of people who have been abandoned by society, and taking away their "residences" will simply shift them around. The end result will probably be the popping up of shanty towns or other third-world-esque eyesores in areas of the US. Indeed, areas of the US are devolving to third-world status before our very eyes.
I can only hope that we're just seeing the beginning of this.
With the financial crisis, not only do the big players have a lot less credibility in strong-arming governments into using locked-in solutions, budgets are also tightening everywhere and open-source is a perfect way to save money. FUD tactics focusing on obscure risks from moving to OSS are far less effective on a government that has a population watching its expenditures like a hawk. Voters will be tolerant of blips in government services if they believe they are part of an undertaking to help avoid tax increases.
In such an environment, adoption of OSS to save money and invest in the local economy is truly a no-brainer.
Normally I would share your cynical perspective, but things are quite different now. The US federal deficit is going into the stratosphere, and for Obama it would be an easy Win(tm) to bash the corporate greed of Microsoft, Oracle, IBM and go for a large scale push towards OSS software in government. Microsoft certainly has a lot of influence, but not more than the defense contractors that will be fighting to maintain their share of a rapidly shrinking budget pie.
Indeed, a silver lining of the economic crisis may be a huge amount of cost-cutting by large institutions and governments in the western world that leads to greater adoption of OSS.
Notice that the possible locations for the new Toyota plant didn't even include any of the traditional industrial states, it was a choice between the American South and Canada (which, in this case, Canada won due to lower cost and higher quality workforce)
Yahoo has thrown the white flag to Google, and will now effectively become a media company using Google's advertising platform. Not a good time to be an engineer at Yahoo.
While now #2 in the US market, Yahoo still sees 84% of the eyeballs on the US internet in a given month. If Google's advertising technology can leverage that tremendous reach better than Yahoo's can, then they are doing their shareholders a huge favour in doing this.
It's not unlike the problems at IBM in the early 90's, where a broken corporate culture was re-invented, the company rebranded as services company utilizing the assets it had. If the execs at Yahoo can swallow their pride, they may be able to make the company a financial success once again. It just won't be the Yahoo we all know right now.
While memory sizes may be increasing such that available memory is not too much smaller than a typical OLTP database, there is always a computational Jevon's paradox at work. Most applications these days could run just fine if I revoked the delete privilege.
eg. the transactions involving relatively large (> $10, let's say) sums of money in systems of 10 years ago have given way to databases that keep track of granular clicks and impressions. $10 "worth" of data might be a record of over 10,000 pageviews.
In 5-10 years, as computational and storage capabilities increase, we may be tracking even more granular things, like, say, specific, movements through much more interactive applications generating massive volumes of data by today's standards. By the time that happens, we may think of magnetic disks much as we look at tape drives these days and the database and application landscape will look much different.
Slashdot Mirror
But Oracle would not need to buy out companies, just key people.
Oracle could just offer that one NTT employee, say, a "consulting" position at Oracle, for, oh, 50x his current salary. There would be some tiny little clause in his contract stating something along the lines of "you shall remain 50 yards from any computer that contains the source code for the postgresql database"
I'm not suggesting that Oracle can or should do this (see my other comment) but that the comparison between NTT and Oracle is not meaningful.
Heads need not roll. Anyone with a large exposure to mysql should be at least getting a sense of how painful it would be to migrate to postgresql, and ideally have been doing some of this research for at least the past year when it was clear mysql was headed for trouble.
But even in the worst case, mysql would turn into a type of legacy application, with support and bug fixes provided by 3rd parties. This would be not nearly as bad as the suffering of companies back in the day dealing with legacy systems where they can't even figure out who might even know where the original source is, let alone someone to fix or enhance something for you.
While he is technically correct that Oracle could just bribe the key developers to abandon pgsql, this would likely backfire.
First, it assumes that the pgsql developers of importance can be bought. Our world is decadent, but not everyone has a price tag
Second, seems Monty has been dealing with mysql code for too long. The pgsql code base (at least the parts I've seen) is significantly more pleasant to work with than MySQL's, and the sheer number of projects building off of it, commercial or OSS (due to BSD licence) are a testament to how accessible it is. Even if all of the current developers were to be bribed and stopped working on postgresql, there would be a significant incentive for other parties to step in and pick up the slack, given that postgresql has a sizable user base, and especially since it is now widely seen as the heir-apparent to mysql as the open-source rdbms of choice for your run-of-the-mill applications.
Add on top of that the bad press from a failed attempt to use such questionable tactics, and I think not even Oracle is greedy or dumb enough to try anything.
For example, in countries like Germany and Russia, engineers are highly respected members of the educated classes, and any average blue collar worker would be extremely proud to see his child become an engineer (or a doctor or lawyer for that matter)
American intellectuals lament the poor decisions that the uneducated masses make and the people that they vote for. Perhaps the 'intellectuals' should focus more on being a role model for the uneducated, something to aspire to, as with the engineer example above, rather than something to resent as a symbol of a class-based society where birth means a great deal. Perhaps comparing the MBA-to-Engineer and MBA salary / Engineer salary ratios of the US and Germany might be a good start
If you believe in such a merit-based system, why should your children get anything, especially if they're dolts?
Now, when I become a very conspicuous person, I cannot stay a pet and say nothing. That is why I had to quit.” We asked Perelman whether, by refusing the Fields and withdrawing from his profession, he was eliminating any possibility of influencing the discipline. “I am not a politician!” he replied, angrily.
It is clear that he is hurt by the backstabbing politics and lack of ethics (as he perceives it) that have corrupted mathematics. He seems more like an artist entirely dedicated to his craft; the Greta Garbo comparison somewhere above fits well.
What we really need are micropayments that are low enough to reflect how much the sites actually make from all the ads.
To simplify things a bit: a top-tier site, for quality content, ideally, can command an equivalent of something like $20-30 CPM for a well-placed banner ad (i.e. $20 cost/revenue per thousand views.)
For a user-generated content site, that figure goes way down, $1 per thousand or less, down to pennies for something like facebook.
So let's assume, generously, Slashdot's effective CPM is $1 for American viewers.
This means if I open on average 5 pages per day, over the course of a month, they might make all of $0.15 off of me.
If Slashdot gave me the option of paying them fifty cents a month for unlimited views, i would not only gladly do it, they would make a ton more , and a whole lot of the online ad industry would disappear, sending the money where it belongs -- to the people generating the content and maintaining the sites we all love.
You seem to have a lot of other people's money to blow away, "son".
I know it must give you a satisfying feeling in your nether regions to see such "enterprise" hardware, but people working for forward-looking enterprises have long-ago figured out that distributed clusters of commodity hardware give a substantially better processing power per unit cost and energy. You just need to turn your brains "on" and turn the Oracle sales calls "off"
Maybe you've heard of some of these "in-the-basement" enterprises... Google? Amazon?
Oracle certainly has developed a lot of very sophisticated functionality over the years as the functionality of a single standalone RDBMS has become commoditized.
The problem is that a great number of customers that Oracle strongarms into buying their product really don't need what they are being sold, but the thought of using a "toy" database to accomplish your business needs is a hard thing for many CIOs to stomach, especially if it requires you to actually think hard about what you need and what you don't need, and what you can design around.
Take your average medium-sized company looking to build a data warehouse. A pgsql solution using some decent hardware and an entry-level storage array may be enough. For bigger volumes, you can move to a hadoop/hive approach or use something like GridSQL.
For the CIO, unfortunately, there is the axiom "no one gets fired for buying Oracle", and yet-another company is relieved of a good portion of their IT budget.
Every implementation involves pain. It's all a matter of how much it will cost you in dollars or sweat to ease that pain, and Oracle makes you pay dearly.
Statements like "Oracle is at least twenty years ahead of all of their competitors in database technology", "toy database" are meaningless and unquantifiable. You may be able to scare the CIO types with that kind of language, but /. is not a fan of FUD tactics
Mod grandparent up. Parent is pretty much a perfect example of the propaganda that Oracle and its (pre)sales minions have attacked insecure and clueless C[IT]Os with for a generation.
This Oracle Tax, much like the Microsoft Tax, hurts the average consumer who has to pay inflated rates for financial services, insurance, etc. when these companies pass on the exorbitant costs of Oracle implementation and maintenance.
Having maintained large infrastructures of MySQL servers for real companies that make real dollars, I'm amazed that there are still CTOs who are insecure about telling the Oracle leeches on sales calls that they have opted to not pay the Oracle tax, and retain some of that money to invest in their business.
It's perfectly sensible. There are 130m Japanese crowded onto an island the size of California, highly-dependent on raw materials and food from outside which must be protected by an outside force (the US) they resent but can do nothing about.
The reduction of the population will increase the living standard of the remaining Japanese, and the investment into robotics and automation will make the transition to a smaller population easier while keeping the country on the cutting edge of technology.
You're absolutely right. Apple did a very smart thing and recognised that computers were being commoditized and ubiquitous and that this naturally creates a market for people who are willing to spend a premium on a fashion statement. Those people also tend not to care if they're being absolutely gouged, so profits are handsome for Apple -- why bother even going after the riff raff?
cause the last I checked, my money deposited in "risk-free" accounts is getting somewhere between 0.5 and 1.5% interest in these days of rampant money printing. A 5%, tax-free return on a solar installation is looking like a mighty fine return right about now.
As I understand it (I am American and in Texas, far from Canada) Canada has some really bad setup of restrictions on media already since most of it is imported from the US
This is "bad" depending on your perspective. Bad for American media companies that want free access to the Canadian market, good for nationalist Canadians that fear cultural assimilation from the behemoth to the south. One could argue that we would not have such a vibrant music scene producing bands like Arcade Fire (ironically the lead singer is an American from Texas!) if not for these protectionist measures.
While our current conservative government in many ways is just an offshoot of the republican party, even they will not dare be perceived by the public as a government that is selling the country out to the US and will back off any legislation that stirs up such sentiment. Democracy is not dead in Canada just yet!
An amazing concentration of hatred towards multiple targets the propagandists have been able to induce in you. All in two short and simple sentences, you've got hatred, mocking or xenophobia towards: immigrants, Canada, Mexico and France!
And I said brain drain, the cherry picking of highly educated or talented people. Today, no average, sane Canadian would pack up and move to US illegally as an economic migrant. An out-of-work auto worker in Michigan is a hell of a lot worse off than his counterpart across the border in Ontario. Who should be afraid of the refugee problem? And meanwhile, "patrols" are being stepped up on the Great Lakes! Pretty hilarious.
.. from which to look down my frost-bitten nose at the suckers having their rights taken away down south. Now i'm putting up with bad weather for no good reason!
Doesn't our government understand a fundamental principle of governing a country with a predominantly harsh climate like Canada: we must do everything significantly better than our neighbours to the south to prevent brain drain.
Oh, by the way: Portland (and Oregon at-large) pretty much pioneered the urban planning and growth boundary system that you are cheerleading with your car-hate and enviro-spew in the 1970s.
Sigh. Typical US-centric thinking, even by supposedly enlightened west-coasters.
The idea of a green belt dates to biblical times, and the modern idea of a legislated development-free belt around a rapidly expanding city dates to 1930s London (England)
But since the London greenbelt happened after the Great Disappearance of the Rest of the World in 1776, you can be forgiven for not knowing about it.
Huh? Relocate what people? The article mentions that much of this property is already empty/abandoned.
Yes, the areas are abandoned but that does not mean that large numbers of "off balance sheet" people do not squat, camp or otherwise use many of these properties, of course at an opportunity cost to the local government because they are not paying any property taxes or upkeep. At the moment, rust-belt areas of the US have relatively low populations compared to the number of buildings available to squat, a legacy of past wealth, in comparison to cities like Mumbai, where the local government wages a constant battle to destroy "illegal" slums and shantytowns, only to have them rebuilt.
However, when you raze these areas, you're still going to have that same pesky problem as before, which is that there are large numbers of people who have been abandoned by society, and taking away their "residences" will simply shift them around. The end result will probably be the popping up of shanty towns or other third-world-esque eyesores in areas of the US. Indeed, areas of the US are devolving to third-world status before our very eyes.
That was a low blow indeed. Watch out for flying rocks next time you visit the zoo...
I can only hope that we're just seeing the beginning of this.
With the financial crisis, not only do the big players have a lot less credibility in strong-arming governments into using locked-in solutions, budgets are also tightening everywhere and open-source is a perfect way to save money. FUD tactics focusing on obscure risks from moving to OSS are far less effective on a government that has a population watching its expenditures like a hawk. Voters will be tolerant of blips in government services if they believe they are part of an undertaking to help avoid tax increases.
In such an environment, adoption of OSS to save money and invest in the local economy is truly a no-brainer.
Normally I would share your cynical perspective, but things are quite different now. The US federal deficit is going into the stratosphere, and for Obama it would be an easy Win(tm) to bash the corporate greed of Microsoft, Oracle, IBM and go for a large scale push towards OSS software in government. Microsoft certainly has a lot of influence, but not more than the defense contractors that will be fighting to maintain their share of a rapidly shrinking budget pie.
Indeed, a silver lining of the economic crisis may be a huge amount of cost-cutting by large institutions and governments in the western world that leads to greater adoption of OSS.
This is a good example of the process of re-industrialization of North America.
Notice that the possible locations for the new Toyota plant didn't even include any of the traditional industrial states, it was a choice between the American South and Canada (which, in this case, Canada won due to lower cost and higher quality workforce)
While now #2 in the US market, Yahoo still sees 84% of the eyeballs on the US internet in a given month. If Google's advertising technology can leverage that tremendous reach better than Yahoo's can, then they are doing their shareholders a huge favour in doing this.
It's not unlike the problems at IBM in the early 90's, where a broken corporate culture was re-invented, the company rebranded as services company utilizing the assets it had. If the execs at Yahoo can swallow their pride, they may be able to make the company a financial success once again. It just won't be the Yahoo we all know right now.
eg. the transactions involving relatively large (> $10, let's say) sums of money in systems of 10 years ago have given way to databases that keep track of granular clicks and impressions. $10 "worth" of data might be a record of over 10,000 pageviews.
In 5-10 years, as computational and storage capabilities increase, we may be tracking even more granular things, like, say, specific, movements through much more interactive applications generating massive volumes of data by today's standards. By the time that happens, we may think of magnetic disks much as we look at tape drives these days and the database and application landscape will look much different.