I agree about their sales teams - they can be real vultures. That being said, as someone who's worked with Oracle for decades now, I can tell you these two things:
1) They've never won a sale because their customer's love of the sales teams
2) If the sales folks are that universally reviled and they are ~still~ pushing 40% market share, that should tell you something about the capabilities and robustness of the product.
Oracle clearly isn't a solution for every problem, and they seem to have totally missed the boat in terms of rapid horizontal scaling capabilities. But for what it does focus on, it has few peers. They've been polishing the code since 1979 after all, which is several eternities in I.T.
In my world, "merit" includes "being able to work with others without being a dick."
Apparently, on The Internet Tubes in general these days, that's not a requirement. That message also seems to have not sunk in very far at all with people interested in that project, given the toxic and increasingly clueless comments on the original article at their site. But it certainly is a good definition of "merit" everywhere else. Heck, the first question I ask my team after we interview someone is "Do we LIKE this person?" If they're an unpleasant individual to work with, I don't really care how good they are - they're not getting on my team. I've hired brilliant-but-difficult types decades in the past...never again. They rapidly destroy the team's productivity and cohesiveness.
Pity this is coming as Microsoft is in the process of killing Windows Media Center once and for all. For all its faults and backwards feature creep (removing sports, Netflix, etc), it is still the only (or one of the very few?) non-embedded systems that can record and playback copy-protected video, which is kind of a big deal if you want to DVR those HBO series. I'd ditch it in a heartbeat if I could find another non-embedded, non-WMC alternative that could do this.
Polyester-based film stock specifically, with an optical soundtrack printed right on it. Dead simple to view or engineer a playback device for, from scratch if necessary. I believe it is what the Library of Congress is using these days.
...and got a gigantically unhelpful email from someone who obviously didn't bother to pay attention to my support ticket. It helpfully informed me that 1) the code was already redeemed, 2) they couldn't tell me who did that due to privacy, and 3) told me to have a nice day.
I miss the days when Steve would come in and yell at people, relentlessly, for not doing their [ redacted ]-ing jobs, at all.
I may seem like a fuddy-duddy to some other parents with the ~somewhat~ early (or at least not late) bedtimes we have established for our grade school aged kids during the week, but the further I go, the more I believe we're doing the right thing. I may not be able to control whether they get sick or not, or if they always eat all their veggies, but the one thing I CAN make sure of is that they always get a good night's sleep. And the older they get, the more important the benefits of being well rested are, considering the increasing academic rigor that comes with the higher grades. Considering how sleep deprived most kids are, they'll be Well Rested Supermen by the time they arrive at high school.
And I've already tried to instill in them that all-nighters to cram for an exam are, without a doubt, absolutely counter-productive. Been there, done that - fell asleep during a Physics final. Staying up all night to try and learn a semester's worth of material simply doesn't work. If you haven't done the work all along and don't know the material before the final arrives, adding a serious level of fatigue won't help.
Really? If their Web habits are ~that~ sketchy then you don't even want them using your Internet connection. Seriously! They could be downloading copyrighted material or even worse things that you don't want anywhere near your ISPs records.
Tell them no, and make them bring their own damn 3G/4G device hooked to an account that they own if they simply must access the net while they're hanging out.
It's called the Maginot Line http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maginot_line folks! That was brilliantly engineered (unlike this) yet incomplete (LIKE this), and it still didn't work. Another few hundred million of our hard-earned tax $ that could have gone towards schools, roads or a really good party pissed away.
Is it 2009 yet?
The best preservation for digital media is to not count on the media being reliable in the very-long-term. Instead, you should invest the time and effort into making scheduled, verified copies of the media well before the predicted life of the media.
Of course, you need to not clean your CDs/DVDs with a Brillo pad in between times, and generally take care of them. But for real permanent retention, nothing's better than a fresh copy.
BTW, this copy doesn't even have to be on the same media standard -- sometimes its a good thing to revv that up as well. Remember that British Laserdisc archive they had all that trouble getting the data off of a while back when the players became obsolete?
Perhaps I'm missing something, but in the CNet article, it specifically says this:
The amended complaint includes an
IBM copyright on the RCU technology that names the an engineer as the author, with work "based on a Dynix/ptx implementation by Paul Mckenney (sic)." Dynix/ptx was Sequent's version of Unix for servers with multiple Intel processors.
If IBM is the copyright holder of this piece of code, based on their aquisition of Sequent, how can they be sued releasing it into the Linux/GPLed world? It belongs to them, not SCO...
Actually, you do have the right to speak freely in the US, just as I suspect you do in Canada. After all, you & your loved ones are not dead/imprisoned/being tortured for what you said.
However...
You did just shoot your mouth off about your employer in a negative way! Not too wise to do that anywhere public, and pretty much just plain dumb to do it VERY publicly in print.
And, lo and behold, they didn't agree with what you had to say (shock, amazement) and they pulled funding.
I hate that you lost your grant money (especially since I like your project and the work you do), but you have no one to blame but yourself.
So no whining.
Refer to the subject of this message if you have any further questions.
I agree and well said, darn it! (Beat me to the punch.)
Personally, I prefer Dark City over The Matrix. DCs visuals are a bit less in-your-face (but no less sweeping in their scope), as was its treatment of the concept of what defines your reality - your memories & perceptions or the actual truth - and which is ultimately more important.
Absolutely must be watched at night, just like The Crow.
Then again, on the completly other end of the movie genre universe there's Real Genius. A sometimes overlooked comic masterpiece.
And if that wasn't overlooked enough, and in keeping with our mention of The Matrix, there's always The Night Before, a real gem that hasn't made it onto DVD yet, darn it.
Another one that hasn't made it onto DVD but typifies life in corporate America in the 1980s is Head Office.
As someone who finally bailed out of an extremely poorly run company (WebMD) burdened with dumb management, it's easy to see the echoes.
The list on the last page of the article is nearly perfect, with one small addition:
6) Listen to your employees!! You hired them because you thought they were good at what they do. Why would you ignore their input into the process now?
Nothing in this article is the "fault" of the technology (Oracle, Java, IBM, Linux, or anything) itself any more than it's the fault of a head of cabbage.
In spite of the doom-and-gloom in the press, there are still good I.T. jobs out there that don't involve working for total morons like that guy sounds like.
From your high userid, I can tell you haven't been online for a while, or at least not here very long. Probably an AOLer, eh? You've *obviously* never heard of courtesy. Anyone who has ever posted a message online knows that it is better to be correct and polite than wrong and rude. I don't know if you were dropped on your head as a child, but your lack of verbal skills makes me wonder if you face-type all your messages as you obviously did the one for me.
(for bonus points), I might add that I've been participating in computer-based messaging for going on 16 years now (yes, since Reagan was President), so I'm especially well-versed in the subject.
Not to seem like a pushover, but I have to agree with you as well! (~sigh~) The overall level of the conversations here seem to be at about medium-flame constantly.
Oh well...
PS: I just realized...I really have been doing this since 1985! Scary. Time has really flown.
Very well put Yoshi! TCO is something that's often overlooked by non-financial types, but it ends up right on the bottom line, IMHO.
Now, what they need to do to be successful in a subscription model is:
1. Make it less expensive than a full-refresh purchase over the same time period (12-18 months nowadays?). Would you rather pay $350 every year or two so for Application_Suite_XX, or pay $10 a month, and always be current?
2. INCLUDE SUPPORT!! By Odin, if you're paying a monthly subscription fee, you should be able to either call a human for help, or at the very least use a very responsive Web-based help desk for product questions...NOT just access to a knowledgebase (which itself is an oxymoron.)
3. Make the auto-upgrade process reliable, and recoverable. There's nothing worse than installing an update and getting a BSOD or equivalent. You should be able to roll-back upgrades that are of...sub-optimal quality.
4. Have a clear, well written and highly public privacy policy on any and all data you collect from users. Something to the effect of "No one outside our company will know anything about you unless they pry the data from our cold dead fingers, and we won't use it to sell anything to you, ever!"
5. Offer users a quarterly CD mailer with all the updates, at no additional cost. If they can put AOL CDs in cereal boxes for free, then a subscribed user surely deserves a CD every now and then.
6. Make it relatively easy to transfer licenses between computers. Once that old P3 reaches the end of its life in 4-5 years, you should be able to submit a web form, register the other computer as "killed", and set up the new one for no additional cost.
7. Offer a discout to multiple-PC users. To Big_Software_Company, there's very little incremental work required to issue a license for someone with two or three PCs as oppposed to one. So there should be a price break there. Say, $10 a month, plus $1.50 for each additional licensed to the same user.
In summary: If you make the process affordable, reliable, confidental and reasonable, there's nothing wrong with software subscriptions.
Or, put another way, if you don't make friends of your uses, they will make you.
Are you listening, Microsoft? IBM? Oracle? CA? Siebel? Sun? HP? Compaq?
This one really takes the cake in terms of ignoring prior art.
Let's see, two examples that leap to mind:
-Lotus has been providing "Incremental Installers" for Lotus Notes since the mid-90s, well before this was even filed. These, I believe, make byte-by-byte updates of installed files, as well as adding/removing files.
-There was a product called RTP (?) that I think goes back to the **80's** that would validate and patch individual files. We're talking MS-DOS era here, folks.
Do the boneheads at the Patent Office even check these things, or just look at the references listed on the application and assume there is nothing else?
If I paid this level of attention to detail in my college work, I never would have graduated. And I wouldn't have made it a month at my job like this.
I'm an Oracle DBA for a living, and to me it smells like a *major* hardware fault (i.e. a pipe fell on the EMC array), or some idiot SysAdmin (or DBA with too much access) did something amazingly bad, like rm -R * from/, and the machine let them.
I've had Oracle instances on Solaris running in Production, handling millions of transactions a day, with uptimes in the 6-month to one-year range (depending on what the maint. schedule is. Generally, Oracle/Sun is a good combination.
There is another possibility, though...
I've found Oracle (and Sun for that matter) to be extremely reliable -- as long as you are about one version behind the "latest and greatest", when all the (usually minor) bugs are resolved. If they tried to run 8i in production, for instance, Lord help them. Again, that would be an Admin fault...
Amazon uses Oracle...they don't go down. What's the problem at Ebay? Hmmm....
Slashdot Mirror
I'm just impressed that there's anyone still left around here with a lower user# than mine! Congratulations on your innovation and publication!!
I agree about their sales teams - they can be real vultures. That being said, as someone who's worked with Oracle for decades now, I can tell you these two things: 1) They've never won a sale because their customer's love of the sales teams 2) If the sales folks are that universally reviled and they are ~still~ pushing 40% market share, that should tell you something about the capabilities and robustness of the product. Oracle clearly isn't a solution for every problem, and they seem to have totally missed the boat in terms of rapid horizontal scaling capabilities. But for what it does focus on, it has few peers. They've been polishing the code since 1979 after all, which is several eternities in I.T.
In my world, "merit" includes "being able to work with others without being a dick."
Apparently, on The Internet Tubes in general these days, that's not a requirement. That message also seems to have not sunk in very far at all with people interested in that project, given the toxic and increasingly clueless comments on the original article at their site. But it certainly is a good definition of "merit" everywhere else. Heck, the first question I ask my team after we interview someone is "Do we LIKE this person?" If they're an unpleasant individual to work with, I don't really care how good they are - they're not getting on my team. I've hired brilliant-but-difficult types decades in the past...never again. They rapidly destroy the team's productivity and cohesiveness.
Damn...I thought I was doing good being a 4-digit guy. Nice to see someone older than me around here.
For something that *costs* about $8, even $100 is not "super cheap"... http://www.mercurynews.com/201...
Pity this is coming as Microsoft is in the process of killing Windows Media Center once and for all. For all its faults and backwards feature creep (removing sports, Netflix, etc), it is still the only (or one of the very few?) non-embedded systems that can record and playback copy-protected video, which is kind of a big deal if you want to DVR those HBO series. I'd ditch it in a heartbeat if I could find another non-embedded, non-WMC alternative that could do this.
Polyester-based film stock specifically, with an optical soundtrack printed right on it. Dead simple to view or engineer a playback device for, from scratch if necessary. I believe it is what the Library of Congress is using these days.
http://www.loc.gov/loc/lcib/07078/preserve.html
...and got a gigantically unhelpful email from someone who obviously didn't bother to pay attention to my support ticket. It helpfully informed me that 1) the code was already redeemed, 2) they couldn't tell me who did that due to privacy, and 3) told me to have a nice day.
I miss the days when Steve would come in and yell at people, relentlessly, for not doing their [ redacted ]-ing jobs, at all.
...except that my "redemption code" which pops me over to the App Store says "This code has already been redeemed". Did we break their site already?
I may seem like a fuddy-duddy to some other parents with the ~somewhat~ early (or at least not late) bedtimes we have established for our grade school aged kids during the week, but the further I go, the more I believe we're doing the right thing. I may not be able to control whether they get sick or not, or if they always eat all their veggies, but the one thing I CAN make sure of is that they always get a good night's sleep. And the older they get, the more important the benefits of being well rested are, considering the increasing academic rigor that comes with the higher grades. Considering how sleep deprived most kids are, they'll be Well Rested Supermen by the time they arrive at high school.
And I've already tried to instill in them that all-nighters to cram for an exam are, without a doubt, absolutely counter-productive. Been there, done that - fell asleep during a Physics final. Staying up all night to try and learn a semester's worth of material simply doesn't work. If you haven't done the work all along and don't know the material before the final arrives, adding a serious level of fatigue won't help.
Really? If their Web habits are ~that~ sketchy then you don't even want them using your Internet connection. Seriously! They could be downloading copyrighted material or even worse things that you don't want anywhere near your ISPs records.
Tell them no, and make them bring their own damn 3G/4G device hooked to an account that they own if they simply must access the net while they're hanging out.
It's called the Maginot Line http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maginot_line folks! That was brilliantly engineered (unlike this) yet incomplete (LIKE this), and it still didn't work. Another few hundred million of our hard-earned tax $ that could have gone towards schools, roads or a really good party pissed away. Is it 2009 yet?
OK, that may be true but it is a bit unsightly. For something more attractive (and above ground), check out:
: www.avantgarde-usa.com/basshorns.html+&hl=en
The Avantgarde Basshorn -
http://www.avantgarde-usa.com/basshorns.html
The Google cache of above -
http://64.233.167.104/search?q=cache:4iR7Uup3O1UJ
Love the main speakers too. Very spendy, however...........
The best preservation for digital media is to not count on the media being reliable in the very-long-term. Instead, you should invest the time and effort into making scheduled, verified copies of the media well before the predicted life of the media.
Of course, you need to not clean your CDs/DVDs with a Brillo pad in between times, and generally take care of them. But for real permanent retention, nothing's better than a fresh copy.
BTW, this copy doesn't even have to be on the same media standard -- sometimes its a good thing to revv that up as well. Remember that British Laserdisc archive they had all that trouble getting the data off of a while back when the players became obsolete?
If IBM is the copyright holder of this piece of code, based on their aquisition of Sequent, how can they be sued releasing it into the Linux/GPLed world? It belongs to them, not SCO...
I 88% agree with you, believe it or not...we have swung to far to the authoritarian side.
My hope, however, is that the cycle may yet come back around. It did in the 50s with the whole Red Scare thing...we shall see, eh?
Actually, you do have the right to speak freely in the US, just as I suspect you do in Canada. After all, you & your loved ones are not dead/imprisoned/being tortured for what you said.
However...
You did just shoot your mouth off about your employer in a negative way! Not too wise to do that anywhere public, and pretty much just plain dumb to do it VERY publicly in print.
And, lo and behold, they didn't agree with what you had to say (shock, amazement) and they pulled funding.
I hate that you lost your grant money (especially since I like your project and the work you do), but you have no one to blame but yourself.
So no whining.
Refer to the subject of this message if you have any further questions.
Personally, I prefer Dark City over The Matrix. DCs visuals are a bit less in-your-face (but no less sweeping in their scope), as was its treatment of the concept of what defines your reality - your memories & perceptions or the actual truth - and which is ultimately more important.
Absolutely must be watched at night, just like The Crow.
Then again, on the completly other end of the movie genre universe there's Real Genius. A sometimes overlooked comic masterpiece.
And if that wasn't overlooked enough, and in keeping with our mention of The Matrix, there's always The Night Before, a real gem that hasn't made it onto DVD yet, darn it.
Another one that hasn't made it onto DVD but typifies life in corporate America in the 1980s is Head Office.
You have to love a movie with lines in it like:
As someone who finally bailed out of an extremely poorly run company (WebMD) burdened with dumb management, it's easy to see the echoes.
The list on the last page of the article is nearly perfect, with one small addition:
6) Listen to your employees!! You hired them because you thought they were good at what they do. Why would you ignore their input into the process now?
Nothing in this article is the "fault" of the technology (Oracle, Java, IBM, Linux, or anything) itself any more than it's the fault of a head of cabbage.
It's just poor management.
In spite of the doom-and-gloom in the press, there are still good I.T. jobs out there that don't involve working for total morons like that guy sounds like.
Time to update the 'ole resume...
Hmmmm...let me see if I can do this right:
From your high userid, I can tell you haven't been online for a while, or at least not here very long. Probably an AOLer, eh? You've *obviously* never heard of courtesy. Anyone who has ever posted a message online knows that it is better to be correct and polite than wrong and rude. I don't know if you were dropped on your head as a child, but your lack of verbal skills makes me wonder if you face-type all your messages as you obviously did the one for me.
(for bonus points), I might add that I've been participating in computer-based messaging for going on 16 years now (yes, since Reagan was President), so I'm especially well-versed in the subject.
-----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK-----
Version: 3.1
GCS d s+:+ a- C++++ U+++ P+>+++ L+>++ E- W++>+++>$ N+ o? K? W++++$ O--- M-- V PS-- PE+(++) Y+(++) PGP(+++) t+ 5 X-- R++(+++) !tv b++ DI++++ D---- G++>+++ e++ h r z+
-----END GEEK CODE BLOCK-----
Was that better?
Not to seem like a pushover, but I have to agree with you as well! (~sigh~) The overall level of the conversations here seem to be at about medium-flame constantly.
Oh well...
PS: I just realized...I really have been doing this since 1985! Scary. Time has really flown.
Very well put Yoshi! TCO is something that's often overlooked by non-financial types, but it ends up right on the bottom line, IMHO.
Now, what they need to do to be successful in a subscription model is:
1. Make it less expensive than a full-refresh purchase over the same time period (12-18 months nowadays?). Would you rather pay $350 every year or two so for Application_Suite_XX, or pay $10 a month, and always be current?
2. INCLUDE SUPPORT!! By Odin, if you're paying a monthly subscription fee, you should be able to either call a human for help, or at the very least use a very responsive Web-based help desk for product questions...NOT just access to a knowledgebase (which itself is an oxymoron.)
3. Make the auto-upgrade process reliable, and recoverable. There's nothing worse than installing an update and getting a BSOD or equivalent. You should be able to roll-back upgrades that are of...sub-optimal quality.
4. Have a clear, well written and highly public privacy policy on any and all data you collect from users. Something to the effect of "No one outside our company will know anything about you unless they pry the data from our cold dead fingers, and we won't use it to sell anything to you, ever!"
5. Offer users a quarterly CD mailer with all the updates, at no additional cost. If they can put AOL CDs in cereal boxes for free, then a subscribed user surely deserves a CD every now and then.
6. Make it relatively easy to transfer licenses between computers. Once that old P3 reaches the end of its life in 4-5 years, you should be able to submit a web form, register the other computer as "killed", and set up the new one for no additional cost.
7. Offer a discout to multiple-PC users. To Big_Software_Company, there's very little incremental work required to issue a license for someone with two or three PCs as oppposed to one. So there should be a price break there. Say, $10 a month, plus $1.50 for each additional licensed to the same user.
In summary: If you make the process affordable, reliable, confidental and reasonable, there's nothing wrong with software subscriptions.
Or, put another way, if you don't make friends of your uses, they will make you.
Are you listening, Microsoft? IBM? Oracle? CA? Siebel? Sun? HP? Compaq?
This one really takes the cake in terms of ignoring prior art.
Let's see, two examples that leap to mind:
-Lotus has been providing "Incremental Installers" for Lotus Notes since the mid-90s, well before this was even filed. These, I believe, make byte-by-byte updates of installed files, as well as adding/removing files.
-There was a product called RTP (?) that I think goes back to the **80's** that would validate and patch individual files. We're talking MS-DOS era here, folks.
Do the boneheads at the Patent Office even check these things, or just look at the references listed on the application and assume there is nothing else?
If I paid this level of attention to detail in my college work, I never would have graduated. And I wouldn't have made it a month at my job like this.
Profoundly bad.
I'm an Oracle DBA for a living, and to me it smells like a *major* hardware fault (i.e. a pipe fell on the EMC array), or some idiot SysAdmin (or DBA with too much access) did something amazingly bad, like rm -R * from /, and the machine let them.
I've had Oracle instances on Solaris running in Production, handling millions of transactions a day, with uptimes in the 6-month to one-year range (depending on what the maint. schedule is. Generally, Oracle/Sun is a good combination.
There is another possibility, though...
I've found Oracle (and Sun for that matter) to be extremely reliable -- as long as you are about one version behind the "latest and greatest", when all the (usually minor) bugs are resolved. If they tried to run 8i in production, for instance, Lord help them. Again, that would be an Admin fault...
Amazon uses Oracle...they don't go down. What's the problem at Ebay? Hmmm....
I believe that Oracle's already closed down the $1 million dollar offer after about a 3-4 month time with no takers at all!
Still, I'd like to see the results. I don't think M$ has a chance, so this should be amusing...