Hell... I wouldn't let him in to see ME, even if I knew who he was!
Now, don't get me wrong, I'm all for the "relaxed" dress code and all, but if I'm meeting a new client, I'll sure as hell put on the monkey suit and try and look respectable.
NEVER MIND if I were to try and see a world leader, without an appointment.
Did he seriously expect to actually meet the guy?
For real?
I think someone's losing touch with reality a bit...
I'm no lawyer by any means, but I can tell that the judge had FUN belittling the guy. And, he actually had sentences using phrases with "fisted by a gorilla" and "jerkoff".
More importantly, this was a pretty serious precedent that was set, in that the operator of the board was not held to be responsible for the comments made by the members.
It's definitely worth a read if you have 10 or 15 minutes.
I'd be interested to know how big your company is, how many people are under you in the Org chart, what your yearly spending budget is, etc.
I, too, am the "CTO" of my company, but that is only to increase the chances that my quotes/sound-bytes will be used in marketing crap from Oracle, or anyone else who needs at least a "C" level officer listed in order to seem credible. In reality, I'm the Technical Architect, President, etc., of a 10-man shop.
That being said, I have a ton of large clients where CTO means that (s)he's more management than tech, and this name would cause unnecessary road-blocks and pre-conceived notions right from the start.
Doesn't mean that it's not good software.
And all it takes is one monster company to adopt the software, and it might result in a crap-load of big-company sponsored development back into it.
Sure, you can name the software whatever the hell you want, but be aware that there are some potential real-world consequences with naming it something funny or wierd. It's no different than having a whack of tatoos, etc. Sure, you can have them, but odds are they WILL affect your chances to get a typical "corporate" job.
What "should be" has nothing to do with "what is".
Yeah, don't get me wrong, Oracle is a pig of a database when it comes to installation, etc. They've even adopted a common installation registry for their software, among other stupid things.
The problem is that unless you're dealing with a rather simple environment, where you're not thinking too far out of the box, an RPM installer is problematic.
By NOT using an RPM installer, Oracle actually gives me (or, more properly, someone running a more complex, non-typical installation) more choice by allowing me to perform a complicated installation or update.
I also recommend you try using Oracle in a more complex environment (something where you have more than one instance running more than one version), and understand that your whole concept of top-level "opt" directory/versions just doesn't work. There are too many shared services and directory locations for this to work.
But why waste time with distros that don't have official support services for business? After all, this represents their demographic. I've personally NEVER seen an Oracle install on Linux (that was paid for) that didn't have a full-on OS and hardware support contract in place. I've also never seen any real desire or need to run a different distro in those environments.
Are you a potential, paying client of theirs? Have you told them of your desire to run a different distro? What are your reasons for wanting to run a different distro than what they support? If they're compelling, and you tell them about it, and they get enough interest being shown, they will eventually include it.
They're not stupid.. if they see that they are losing potential revenue that could be gained with sufficient profit margin, they'll go for it.
There were a bunch of us who were all over them for not supporting OSX with their tools, DB, etc., and they came around. We provided them with the information they needed to justify the expense, and they did it.
Sure, it wasn't over night, but it's there now.
At the end of the day, for me (and my clients), it's about running their software, not the distro that it runs on. Distro's aren't different enough for me to give a shit, other than personal preference. I'm just glad that it runs on ANY form of Linux... I'm not going to bitch about which distros are officially supported.
Yeah... it's pretty trivial to "fake out" the installer, if you want. So sure, you can try to install it on any OS you want... they're not stopping you. (just be sure that the distro you set it to in order to fake out the installer matches the dependency/library set and/or install rules for the distro you're actually using). But installing it and getting it to run well/stable on an unsupported distro are two different things.
Just as it's your choice of what OS you want to run it on, it's their choice as to which OS they want to officially support. I think it'd be nuts for them to try and support all Linux distros. Too many OS dependencies that vary from distro to distro (GCC version, libraries, etc).
I currently run my DEV Oracle installations on CentOS (for the most part)... but in Test and Prod it's only the OS's that are supported by them. (RH, Suse, Solaris, etc).
Because this doesn't deal with the issue of migrations, etc., or any other scenario where you take into account a "non-standard" file system layout, etc.
Also, how do you deal with multiple oracle homes with an RPM?
Hell, I can't get my Apache install to upgrade properly with RPM's without fscking things up, so there's no way I'm going to trust Oracle updates, etc, to an RPM. (yeah, could be operator error, but it's frustrating and very "non-point-and-click" none the less).
Needless to say, you can very easily install Oracle without X or Java, and you don't need a GUI... you can do a silent install that is scripted.
You can even record your answers in a DEV environment and use that as the source for your scripted installation.
Besides, who in their right mind installs anything in a Production environment, never mind a DMZ, using a manual, GUI-based installer?
Oracle gains nothing now by buying into Linux but growing pains and the probable destruction of whatever Linux group they suck up
Not at all. They push Oracle on Linux in a big way.
They would do well to have a distro that they controlled so that they could tightly integrate the OS dev with their product development. Hell, it'd be nice to find a Linux distro that would run Oracle out of the box without having to do any tunings or tweakings. It would also be nice if there were a Linux distro that had Oracle securely integrated with it out of the box... proper security / chrooted environments, etc.
I think it would also improve their support offerings (Oracle would probably be certified on their distro only).
There are also some interesting things that they could do with an "Oracle" distro... things that they've tried with Windows but ended up sucking big time (because of the stupidity of Windows).
They could take their AFS (Automatic File System) to the next level, giving Veritas a true run for their money... they could better integrate Oracle failover / RAC with the OS... etc.
There've been rumours of Oracle buying Suse for years, so I'll believe it when I see it.
Personally, as an Oracle DBA and owner of an Oracle shop, I'd be quite happy to have them take over some distro of Linux.
With the scope and breadth of the Oracle product offering, one of the biggest things that we (as an Oracle shop) deal with is the installation and configuration of the entire product line. Sure, it's more of a Government and huge-business scenario, and doesn't fit your typical slashdot user scenario, but I think it'd do them well.
Hell, between 5 of my clients, Oracle rakes in Millions of dollars a year in licensing... that could go a long way to making a better base OS for Oracle deployment.
I asked my cousin about this... he does Mergers and Acquisitions for a top 3 bank.
That's EXACTLY what they do... they go and check back as far as they are legally responsible for. If it's seven years of tax returns, then they check back 7 years. That's why some of the due dillegence bills alone can be in the millions of dollars, even if the deal never goes through.
From what I understand, Oracle is back using Solaris as its main development target.
Also, the new Sun CoolThreads servers (T1000, T2000) are making HUGE inroads with Oracle customers, both new and existing.
I've been doing Oracle for 15+ years now, and have gone from SGI, Sun, to Linux, as my preference for platform. I'm now back to recommending Sun as the best platform for running Oracle in Production. Best performance for cost/space, IMO.
They know that it's their responsibility to be productive, but they can choose to use whatever IDE they want, with the caveat that they have to support their choice of OS and toolset.
Sure, it's a small company, but we all work at home (VERY small overhead), and live in the command line (ANT) and SVN world.
At the end of the day, as long as you can interact with our SVN repository, and run the build via ant, and get your work done, I could care less what you use.
So far, we have a mix of Linux, Winodws, OS X, and Solaris boxes being used by various people, and it's working out quite well.
Sure, I don't have the control of their end-user stations, but I don't care.
The only thing written in stone is the target platform for the client... as long as it works in that, and you're productive, I could care less if you use VI on your palm pilot.
Yeah... and it makes me laugh even more when you meet these types in the real world.
I kid you not, in a new client meeting yesterday, one of the vendors shows up with a big pad of paper and a pen, and the first words out of the client's mouth are "as you all know, we'd like to do an international e-commerce site".
The guy writes this down.
The client actually stopped, looked at him, and asked, "Did you actually just write that down?"
"uhmmm... yes, I did".
"why? are you afraid you're going to forget that when you leave?"
"uhmmm... no..."
"well, how about you stop trying to look all excited and concerned and on top of things, and just pay attention to what I have to say?"
How so? I'd always thought that defragging allowed file segments to be (re)assigned to linearly sequential drive blocks so that they could be read much faster, as the heads have much less travelling/seeking to do.
With this, there is no physical motion, so no apparent gains.
Do journalled file systems have need for some sort of sequential read/write in memory addressing or physical blocks?
It sounds more like a VC "talent search", where the $50k MIGHT be enough cash to pay one person a mac-and-cheese salary and get a business plan and some collateral marketing done to get properly financed.
Or, it could be a "anything you submit will become our property" type "scam", where some grad student has a unique approach that this group then becomes the owner of for a mere $50k. They can then take the idea and run with it, and reap the benefits.
All in all, sounds like something I'd not be lining up for.
Yeah.. I did something similar... ended up having the longest shower of my life, and REALLY REALLY appreciated the hot-water-on-demand system my Dad had installed the year earlier.
Slashdot Mirror
Hell... I wouldn't let him in to see ME, even if I knew who he was!
Now, don't get me wrong, I'm all for the "relaxed" dress code and all, but if I'm meeting a new client, I'll sure as hell put on the monkey suit and try and look respectable.
NEVER MIND if I were to try and see a world leader, without an appointment.
Did he seriously expect to actually meet the guy?
For real?
I think someone's losing touch with reality a bit...
This is pretty funny, but I've recently seen an even funnier judge's decision from a Federal court.
t =9316&page=1&pp=10
I hang out on another web site a bit (Tucker Max) and he was sued by a guy that was being made fun of in a few of the threads.
The guy's lawyer was BEYOND a hack, and the judge's verdict from the site made me laugh out loud.
Thread is here: http://messageboard.tuckermax.com/showthread.php?
I'm no lawyer by any means, but I can tell that the judge had FUN belittling the guy. And, he actually had sentences using phrases with "fisted by a gorilla" and "jerkoff".
More importantly, this was a pretty serious precedent that was set, in that the operator of the board was not held to be responsible for the comments made by the members.
It's definitely worth a read if you have 10 or 15 minutes.
Yeah, and why is this listed under Linux?
Pretty fucked up, if you ask me.
I'd be interested to know how big your company is, how many people are under you in the Org chart, what your yearly spending budget is, etc.
I, too, am the "CTO" of my company, but that is only to increase the chances that my quotes/sound-bytes will be used in marketing crap from Oracle, or anyone else who needs at least a "C" level officer listed in order to seem credible. In reality, I'm the Technical Architect, President, etc., of a 10-man shop.
That being said, I have a ton of large clients where CTO means that (s)he's more management than tech, and this name would cause unnecessary road-blocks and pre-conceived notions right from the start.
Doesn't mean that it's not good software.
And all it takes is one monster company to adopt the software, and it might result in a crap-load of big-company sponsored development back into it.
Sure, you can name the software whatever the hell you want, but be aware that there are some potential real-world consequences with naming it something funny or wierd. It's no different than having a whack of tatoos, etc. Sure, you can have them, but odds are they WILL affect your chances to get a typical "corporate" job.
What "should be" has nothing to do with "what is".
Cool...
Yeah, don't get me wrong, Oracle is a pig of a database when it comes to installation, etc. They've even adopted a common installation registry for their software, among other stupid things.
The problem is that unless you're dealing with a rather simple environment, where you're not thinking too far out of the box, an RPM installer is problematic.
By NOT using an RPM installer, Oracle actually gives me (or, more properly, someone running a more complex, non-typical installation) more choice by allowing me to perform a complicated installation or update.
I have.
I also recommend you try using Oracle in a more complex environment (something where you have more than one instance running more than one version), and understand that your whole concept of top-level "opt" directory/versions just doesn't work. There are too many shared services and directory locations for this to work.
But why waste time with distros that don't have official support services for business? After all, this represents their demographic. I've personally NEVER seen an Oracle install on Linux (that was paid for) that didn't have a full-on OS and hardware support contract in place. I've also never seen any real desire or need to run a different distro in those environments.
Are you a potential, paying client of theirs? Have you told them of your desire to run a different distro? What are your reasons for wanting to run a different distro than what they support? If they're compelling, and you tell them about it, and they get enough interest being shown, they will eventually include it.
They're not stupid.. if they see that they are losing potential revenue that could be gained with sufficient profit margin, they'll go for it.
There were a bunch of us who were all over them for not supporting OSX with their tools, DB, etc., and they came around. We provided them with the information they needed to justify the expense, and they did it.
Sure, it wasn't over night, but it's there now.
At the end of the day, for me (and my clients), it's about running their software, not the distro that it runs on. Distro's aren't different enough for me to give a shit, other than personal preference. I'm just glad that it runs on ANY form of Linux... I'm not going to bitch about which distros are officially supported.
Marki Post was all goodness back in the day... her friends called her "Mark" for short.
Yeah... it's pretty trivial to "fake out" the installer, if you want. So sure, you can try to install it on any OS you want... they're not stopping you. (just be sure that the distro you set it to in order to fake out the installer matches the dependency/library set and/or install rules for the distro you're actually using). But installing it and getting it to run well/stable on an unsupported distro are two different things.
Just as it's your choice of what OS you want to run it on, it's their choice as to which OS they want to officially support. I think it'd be nuts for them to try and support all Linux distros. Too many OS dependencies that vary from distro to distro (GCC version, libraries, etc).
I currently run my DEV Oracle installations on CentOS (for the most part)... but in Test and Prod it's only the OS's that are supported by them. (RH, Suse, Solaris, etc).
Personally, I can't fault them for that.
Oh... and then I gave him the benefit of the doubt.
This was my initial thought as well.
Except then I remembered that Oracle isn't just databases.
They're also web/application servers, ldap servers, portal servers, email servers, etc.
And they all use the same installer technology.
Because this doesn't deal with the issue of migrations, etc., or any other scenario where you take into account a "non-standard" file system layout, etc.
Also, how do you deal with multiple oracle homes with an RPM?
Hell, I can't get my Apache install to upgrade properly with RPM's without fscking things up, so there's no way I'm going to trust Oracle updates, etc, to an RPM. (yeah, could be operator error, but it's frustrating and very "non-point-and-click" none the less).
Needless to say, you can very easily install Oracle without X or Java, and you don't need a GUI... you can do a silent install that is scripted.
You can even record your answers in a DEV environment and use that as the source for your scripted installation.
Besides, who in their right mind installs anything in a Production environment, never mind a DMZ, using a manual, GUI-based installer?
Oracle gains nothing now by buying into Linux but growing pains and the probable destruction of whatever Linux group they suck up
Not at all. They push Oracle on Linux in a big way.
They would do well to have a distro that they controlled so that they could tightly integrate the OS dev with their product development. Hell, it'd be nice to find a Linux distro that would run Oracle out of the box without having to do any tunings or tweakings. It would also be nice if there were a Linux distro that had Oracle securely integrated with it out of the box... proper security / chrooted environments, etc.
I think it would also improve their support offerings (Oracle would probably be certified on their distro only).
There are also some interesting things that they could do with an "Oracle" distro... things that they've tried with Windows but ended up sucking big time (because of the stupidity of Windows).
They could take their AFS (Automatic File System) to the next level, giving Veritas a true run for their money... they could better integrate Oracle failover / RAC with the OS... etc.
There've been rumours of Oracle buying Suse for years, so I'll believe it when I see it.
Personally, as an Oracle DBA and owner of an Oracle shop, I'd be quite happy to have them take over some distro of Linux.
With the scope and breadth of the Oracle product offering, one of the biggest things that we (as an Oracle shop) deal with is the installation and configuration of the entire product line. Sure, it's more of a Government and huge-business scenario, and doesn't fit your typical slashdot user scenario, but I think it'd do them well.
Hell, between 5 of my clients, Oracle rakes in Millions of dollars a year in licensing... that could go a long way to making a better base OS for Oracle deployment.
I asked my cousin about this... he does Mergers and Acquisitions for a top 3 bank.
That's EXACTLY what they do... they go and check back as far as they are legally responsible for. If it's seven years of tax returns, then they check back 7 years. That's why some of the due dillegence bills alone can be in the millions of dollars, even if the deal never goes through.
Cool... thanks... good to know.
From what I understand, Oracle is back using Solaris as its main development target.
Also, the new Sun CoolThreads servers (T1000, T2000) are making HUGE inroads with Oracle customers, both new and existing.
I've been doing Oracle for 15+ years now, and have gone from SGI, Sun, to Linux, as my preference for platform. I'm now back to recommending Sun as the best platform for running Oracle in Production. Best performance for cost/space, IMO.
That, and Solaris 10 on Sparc rocks.
I let my employees do exactly that.
They know that it's their responsibility to be productive, but they can choose to use whatever IDE they want, with the caveat that they have to support their choice of OS and toolset.
Sure, it's a small company, but we all work at home (VERY small overhead), and live in the command line (ANT) and SVN world.
At the end of the day, as long as you can interact with our SVN repository, and run the build via ant, and get your work done, I could care less what you use.
So far, we have a mix of Linux, Winodws, OS X, and Solaris boxes being used by various people, and it's working out quite well.
Sure, I don't have the control of their end-user stations, but I don't care.
The only thing written in stone is the target platform for the client... as long as it works in that, and you're productive, I could care less if you use VI on your palm pilot.
Yeah... I guess that U2 iPod was a figment of my imagination.
Yeah... and it makes me laugh even more when you meet these types in the real world.
I kid you not, in a new client meeting yesterday, one of the vendors shows up with a big pad of paper and a pen, and the first words out of the client's mouth are "as you all know, we'd like to do an international e-commerce site".
The guy writes this down.
The client actually stopped, looked at him, and asked, "Did you actually just write that down?"
"uhmmm... yes, I did".
"why? are you afraid you're going to forget that when you leave?"
"uhmmm... no..."
"well, how about you stop trying to look all excited and concerned and on top of things, and just pay attention to what I have to say?"
I laughed out loud.
Man, I like this guy already.
How so? I'd always thought that defragging allowed file segments to be (re)assigned to linearly sequential drive blocks so that they could be read much faster, as the heads have much less travelling/seeking to do.
With this, there is no physical motion, so no apparent gains.
Do journalled file systems have need for some sort of sequential read/write in memory addressing or physical blocks?
This is lame.
It sounds more like a VC "talent search", where the $50k MIGHT be enough cash to pay one person a mac-and-cheese salary and get a business plan and some collateral marketing done to get properly financed.
Or, it could be a "anything you submit will become our property" type "scam", where some grad student has a unique approach that this group then becomes the owner of for a mere $50k. They can then take the idea and run with it, and reap the benefits.
All in all, sounds like something I'd not be lining up for.
Yeah.. I did something similar... ended up having the longest shower of my life, and REALLY REALLY appreciated the hot-water-on-demand system my Dad had installed the year earlier.
Where the hell is CleverNickName when you really need him!
Yeah, but Google is public, and as such, have to report such things in their filings.
Yeah... Google is the new SkunkWorks.