Well is it really better? When my son goes to the doctor for his annual checkup ( a 9 year old ) the doctor spends most of the time logging into ( if it works ) some windows box, then getting to the screen to lookup my son's medical records, then typing in why he is there. That takes about 1/3 of the scheduled slot. Then the exam followed by more intermediate typing, followed by more questions from him, answers by my son, me and his mother ( if we can both be there ) followed by yet more typing.
All in all about 50% of the scheduled visit is just the doctor fucking around with the computer.
bad in the old ways the doctor made a few salient notes here and there and 90% of the time was used to address issues and or questions about my sons health instead of dicking around with a computer.
Sometimes automation is good other times it just gets in the way of what you are trying to do.
Being a civilian pilot myself and also a Navy vet oh boy do I feel your pain. lol!
Even with the larger predator type drones, even those who are good pilots flying them from the ground have (through no fault of their own ) poor situational awareness as far as the actual flying goes. When you sit in the glass bubble your peripheral vision is in full swing, you can scan the sky and the instruments. Flying a drone must be a lot like flying something like MS Flight Simulator, yes you can get different views from different "cameras" or in the case of a drone, actual cameras but those fall far behind the Mark 1 Mod 0 eyeball for getting the bigger picture.
The EVIL Novell has done it again! OpenSuse which by the way is free as in $0.00 USD. Patches and updates are free as $0.00 USD. If you want Novel's SLES product, guess what it is free as well AND includes 60 days worth of updates and if you want it out farther then it costs you around $30.00 USD a month The NERVE! Those fuckers from Novel hell gaul selling support AND pushing all their changes back to the Free Version they are such bastards!
You folks need to get that stick worked out of your collective asses. Novel's rock solid support of the Linux Community is on-par with Red Hat and all the rest of them and in many ways it is better.
How many distros come with an Oracle option ready to role? Yast may not handle all the various Apache configuration strangeness the way you might like it, but if you use it as designed it works damn fine. It could have a much better Firewall config utility but they are getting there. I have installed it on many many different versions of hardware and in 99% of the cases it has just found all the parts bits and pieces and handled them quite well. I even put it on a ancient IBM Thinkpad and the only glitch was a display setting and one quick google search solved that problem.
The SLED Distro is a great desktop OS and handles prety much anything you want to throw at it and then some and does it better then most any other Distro. So all you zealots can have a tall cool glass of Shut The Fuck up. And as for giving people a reason to migrate to MS, that's funny since I just moved an entire company ( 100 Desktops ) from Windows XP to OpenSuse.
then anything else. NO ONE forced them to sign that contract, NO ONE prevented them from finding a lawyer to go over the contract and AMEND it, NO ONE prevented them from taking the contract and going to the library and looking up every phrase in Blacks Law Dictionary.
They signed the contract because they wanted to get paid and because they had visions of being a rock star, country star, pop star, Folk Star, Rap Star, jsut a BIG Star.
Limo's, Hotel Suites instead of rooms, Lobster, blow and hookers every night! Can ANYONE possibly think this shit is free?
Oh here is your 1959 Les Paul play your hart out Johny! Could ANY person who has been playing guitar for more then a year NOT know that those things are basicaly priceless?
Flying 1st class -v- Flying Coach, Execu-bus -v- a Cargo Van?
I will give you that the Record Companies are blood suckers, but the "Artist" sign a contract allowing their blood to be sucked and most of the time, if not all the time, they signed it without even looking at it.
A Smart grid would be fabulous provided it worked and well they can barely make the one we have now work. As to having all thee things connected to the grid and then possibly giving back to the grid, well that is going to be problematic as converting AC to DC to charge them is fairly straight forward but going back the other way is going to take a one big fucking inverter! The losses of going from AC to DC and back to AC are going to be reasonably substantial I would think.
I agree with your post, the subsidies have to change, there can be no doubting that.
As to the storage part that is going to be a bit tricky. I personally know of no way to store Alternating Current with present technology. The only way that has ben accomplished thus far that I know of is by pushing water back up the hill to let it fall through the turbines again and pushing water takes a lot of energy so while it might work for peek periods I think it comes out to a zero sum gain.
Even if we went to lots and lots of very local small DC generating facilities and then developed storage ( caps, batteries whatever ) on a very LARGE scale then we are going to have people screaming about having say 5 or 10 gen plants in the city of San Francisco, but then again they scream about fucking everything.
Personally I think until we come up with a MASSIVE leap in efficiency of the way we move people and goods and lighting our houses or fusion generation becomes a reality about the only way we have to go is a combo of sources and I think fission has to be in the equation. Now before you go nuts about that, there is room for a tremendous amount of R&D in nuclear. There are dramatically less toxic fuels for reactors these days and those have been talked about on/. many many times. There are also ways to design reactors that fail safe even if you lose ALL the cooling water and the control rods are all the way up.
That was an informative post, but you sure came off sounding like a major league jerk.
I did some quick reading on (LiFePO4) batteries here and while they have great potential they seem to also have some high associated costs.
As to the "Long Tail Pipe Theory you might want to check here at various times of the day to see what our current electrical load is and theory aside contemplate shifting of the gasoline load to the electrical load.
Your correct but the environmentalist want every car on the road to be either electric or hybrid, preferably electric. Hmm about 25,000,000 cars registered in CA give or take, so at a 2kwh charging load thats 2,000 & 25,000,000 = 50,000,000,000 or 50 gigawatt hours and that is more then the entire supply that the state of California has available and thats a combination of all available fuels we have on line.
That is the myth if the electric car, if we shift to all electric we simply shift the fuel consumption to another type of engine. Now an electrical generating plant is more efficient then an internal combustion engine but you have to build out that capacity and keep a lot of it on hot stand-by because it takes a long time to spin up from cold to generating electricity. Additionally no one is really talking about the insanely toxic batteries that will have to be disposed of on a regular basis.
It will be interesting to see how things progress over the years, but there is no magic solution. Lots of incremental ones but no big one is coming anytime soon and more then likely I will be dead before it really comes to pass as I am 50 now and don't really see this happening before the next 40 or 50 years. Technology can move fast but we are pushing the limits of known technology as far as electrical storage is concerned. There is a lot of progress being made in Electric double-layer capacitor "EDLC's" but even those are still experimental and cannot provide the kind of power you would need to run say a Tesla car ( Who's IPO is going backwards).
Here I am with MP's yet I feel compelled to respond to you...
If you RTFA you would see that it explicitly sites making a personal copy for use on whatever player you desire. But if you give a copy to a friend with the DRM broken then you are still committing a crime and that is fair since it is NOT fair use.
Now having said that, I certainly expect a flood of torrents to start comming from Brazil if this gets enacted into law because people still think that if they buy a DVD and then rip it to make a copy to "should be able to rip it and use on a portable player, media server etc." they somehow have the right to give it away to their pals and put it on a web server for everyone to have a copy.
That is why this begins with, "I - reproduction by any means or process of any work legitimately acquired, if made in one copy and by the copyist, for his private use and not commercial;" [emphasis is mine] because in point of fact doing anything other then making a copy for personal, non commercial use is a copyright violation even under these terms and is in point of fact illegal and that is as it should be
A lot of responses are referencing some good books and you should give them due consideration.
One post spoke of set theory. Definitely look into that.
...
Now for the real world. DB Theory is great, it is a base of knowledge that needs to be obtained and digested. You should understand 1st norrnal form all the way to 6th normal form and that will take a bit to wrap your head around
Now that you have accomplished that, it is time to start breaking those rules and get some work done. Databases do one thing and ONE thing only, they store data for later retrieval and analysis, ie: reports. Now you can normalize your brains out and that will end you up with a database that it is close to impossible to write reports against without using the most insane joins that you have never even thought about..
Start with your most common report and start looking at how the data breaks out. Does it fit in an ultra normalized model or a hybrid model. Understand the differences between OLTP and OLAP ( if you don't know what those acronyms mean, loook them up it's important.
Database modeling is not an exact science and sadly much of it is inherent in a certain type of mind, some gots it, some don't. It is a lot like a puzzle, you look at it and then you have that "aha!" moment and start re-arranging tables and columns and suddently everything works correctly, which is to say you get your data out with a reasonable amount of effort instead of having to have roll-up tables and so forth and so on.
Lastly, you as a programmer should know better then anyone else that you can't proof your own work as effectively as someone else can so I suggest you hire in a database guy or gal to look over your shoulder now and then to give you a reality check.
Sorry but your argument just doesn't hold up. The "Movie Industry" would LOVE to build very big pipes and sell you a movie that you could play for forever plus 1 day IF they knew for sure and dead certain you would not immediately then burn it onto to 15 DVD's and give a copy to all your friends who didn't pay for it.
Why in the hell do you think they spent millions coming up with DRM, copy protection, etc,etc ad naseum? WHY because people think that if they buy ONE DVD or download one, for some reason they think they have the right to start reproducing it and giving to anyone they want or putting onto a torent site for millions of other people to NOT pay for it.!
I would bet a very large amount of money that if we got the CEO of Disney in a room and asked him, "He if you could be completely sure that each copy sold would stay one copy would you scarp all this DRM bullshit, he would say "In a heartbeat". Why because DRM is a pain in the ass for them just as much as it is a pain in the ass for everyone else.
The movie industry taken as a whole is not that insanely profitable. Yes Avatar is going to be looking at a 500% ROI but when you start diluting that with movies that break even, lose money or make very little in profit then things look a little different. Viacom the parent of Paramount has about an 11% profit margin. News Corporation has about 10% profit margin.
So yes they are making money but on the whole it is not that kinds of sums that so many people think. Yes James Cameron made a nice tidy sum on that but the vast majority of the money gets turned around and invested into new projects which in turn pays a LOT of people who do all the other jobs it requires to make movies.
No they are not overly burdensome. I was pissed at the hoops I had to jump through but as a holder PP-SEL certificate I can fly figure eights of the the city of San Francisco, or Dallas or wherever and can land at any airport I want, yes even Washington National.
The problem is that this is a slippery slope because the people buying these things are going to be CEO's and the like then big time lawyers who think that their time is worth more then anyone else's and I am guessing a bunch of them will be K Street types and pretty soon they are going to want to land these things anywhere they want. Then the money starts to flow and a Congressman or Senator or 20 will get leaned on who will then in turn lean on the FAA and so forth and so on.
It seems our FAA just made it a bit eaiser too as the raised the maximum weight for this thing to 1430 lbs see this CNN
article.
it costs $194,000.00 USD so you know who is going to be buying this thing. Yup the CEO that is on his third by-pass operation and no medical certificate required. It is only 170 lbs lighter then a Cessna 150 which you cannot fly after you have had a by-pass operation because you cannot pass a 3rd class medical examine without an exemption from the FAA, which in the case of of heart problems is very very rare.
I hold a private pilots certificate and I passed a kidney stone, ONCE and it took me 6 months to get my medical certificate back and that was only after about $5000.00 USD worth of tests and examinations, not to mention the gross amounts of paperwork I had to file with the FAA. Kidney Stones hurt like hell, but at least I am not dead of a heart attack in the left seat.
As a pilot, the part I am mostly opposed to is that you don't have to have a medical exam to fly this fucking contraption. If I can't pass my medical I cannot even fly a Cessna 150 which weighs in at about the same as this thing does. What scares me more then anything is the idea of a bunch of executives who are on their 3rd bypass operation having a fucking heart attack and then crashing into whatever happens to be below them, or worse having auto pilot that keeps the thing flying into down town San Francisco or Oakland or Atlanta, or whatever and killing a whole lot of people.
Stop supporting IE 6 period. MS does not even support it anymore.
Stop trying to print using HTML, it does not work. Use PDF there are plenty of libs out there for most all the scripting languages.
Make two links on your site to PDF readers if the user does not have one. The first to Foxit (tiny and fast ) and the second to Acrobat.
Support as narrow a range of browsers as you can get away with I would just stick with FF 3.5 and above and IE 7 or better.
Stay as far away from exotic CSS as you can, in other words do the least you have to to make the site look correct. I don't care what the zealots say, use tables to align things because DIVS will act different from Browser to Browser. Not the tables don't, they just do it much less.
How in the hell did he ever get promoted or appointed or how ever the hell it is you become one of the anointed few who decide what gets posted on/. and what the headline looks like? I mean really, is he related to someone? Is he the owners kid, nephew, love child?
Nice try at a refute but that don't work. They are spread across the globe because as long as you will stay on the phone they will keep transferring you to the next support center as the world continues to turn. I know because I have done it, had an Oracle server down hard and started the conversation with a center in Denver and as the clock kept going I got transfered to the next engineer after they were briefed by my current engineer.
That is my point, when you call Oracle support you do not get a "Menu based monkey reading from boiler plate", you get an oracle Engineer that knows your Oracle Software inside and out.
Oracle needs to drop the high prices, the competition in the market now doesnt allow them to have those prices.
An this is why...
It's called support. One of the major reasons I recommend Oracle to clients who need maximum uptime and downtime is just not an option is because of the world class support Oracle provides. If you are a licensed Oracle site you have support 24/7/365 no matter what time zone or country you happen to be in. If you pick up the phone and say those magic words, "I'm down" the calvary is not just coming over the hill they are at your door. Guess what that kind of support costs a lot of money to provide.
In our race to the bottom of the price bucket lots of things have to be cut and guess where they cut first, you guessed it, in support. With Oracle support you do not get script readers in India or the Philippines you get an Oracle engineer on the phone ready to tackle the problem with you until the problem is solved and they will bring in whatever other resources are required.
MySQL is a wonder database that does what it does very well, but would I put it up in a mission critical bit of infrastructure? Not on a bet. Those companies that have, eg: Sales Force and the like have had to hire LOTS of engineers/developers to handle MySQL in big installations and that costs even more.
Postgre has no such level of support either. So when you missions critical DB goes south either you better be able to fix it or you had better have a lot of friends you can wake up in the middle of the night.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry I was replying to the other post below.
Pls see the post above.
Well is it really better? When my son goes to the doctor for his annual checkup ( a 9 year old ) the doctor spends most of the time logging into ( if it works ) some windows box, then getting to the screen to lookup my son's medical records, then typing in why he is there. That takes about 1/3 of the scheduled slot. Then the exam followed by more intermediate typing, followed by more questions from him, answers by my son, me and his mother ( if we can both be there ) followed by yet more typing.
All in all about 50% of the scheduled visit is just the doctor fucking around with the computer.
bad in the old ways the doctor made a few salient notes here and there and 90% of the time was used to address issues and or questions about my sons health instead of dicking around with a computer.
Sometimes automation is good other times it just gets in the way of what you are trying to do.
Being a civilian pilot myself and also a Navy vet oh boy do I feel your pain. lol!
Even with the larger predator type drones, even those who are good pilots flying them from the ground have (through no fault of their own ) poor situational awareness as far as the actual flying goes. When you sit in the glass bubble your peripheral vision is in full swing, you can scan the sky and the instruments. Flying a drone must be a lot like flying something like MS Flight Simulator, yes you can get different views from different "cameras" or in the case of a drone, actual cameras but those fall far behind the Mark 1 Mod 0 eyeball for getting the bigger picture.
The EVIL Novell has done it again! OpenSuse which by the way is free as in $0.00 USD. Patches and updates are free as $0.00 USD. If you want Novel's SLES product, guess what it is free as well AND includes 60 days worth of updates and if you want it out farther then it costs you around $30.00 USD a month The NERVE! Those fuckers from Novel hell gaul selling support AND pushing all their changes back to the Free Version they are such bastards!
You folks need to get that stick worked out of your collective asses. Novel's rock solid support of the Linux Community is on-par with Red Hat and all the rest of them and in many ways it is better.
How many distros come with an Oracle option ready to role? Yast may not handle all the various Apache configuration strangeness the way you might like it, but if you use it as designed it works damn fine. It could have a much better Firewall config utility but they are getting there. I have installed it on many many different versions of hardware and in 99% of the cases it has just found all the parts bits and pieces and handled them quite well. I even put it on a ancient IBM Thinkpad and the only glitch was a display setting and one quick google search solved that problem.
The SLED Distro is a great desktop OS and handles prety much anything you want to throw at it and then some and does it better then most any other Distro. So all you zealots can have a tall cool glass of Shut The Fuck up. And as for giving people a reason to migrate to MS, that's funny since I just moved an entire company ( 100 Desktops ) from Windows XP to OpenSuse.
then anything else. NO ONE forced them to sign that contract, NO ONE prevented them from finding a lawyer to go over the contract and AMEND it, NO ONE prevented them from taking the contract and going to the library and looking up every phrase in Blacks Law Dictionary.
They signed the contract because they wanted to get paid and because they had visions of being a rock star, country star, pop star, Folk Star, Rap Star, jsut a BIG Star.
Limo's, Hotel Suites instead of rooms, Lobster, blow and hookers every night! Can ANYONE possibly think this shit is free?
Oh here is your 1959 Les Paul play your hart out Johny! Could ANY person who has been playing guitar for more then a year NOT know that those things are basicaly priceless?
Flying 1st class -v- Flying Coach, Execu-bus -v- a Cargo Van?
I will give you that the Record Companies are blood suckers, but the "Artist" sign a contract allowing their blood to be sucked and most of the time, if not all the time, they signed it without even looking at it.
And your point was? Oh wait there wasn't one, you were just trying to be clever.
A Smart grid would be fabulous provided it worked and well they can barely make the one we have now work. As to having all thee things connected to the grid and then possibly giving back to the grid, well that is going to be problematic as converting AC to DC to charge them is fairly straight forward but going back the other way is going to take a one big fucking inverter! The losses of going from AC to DC and back to AC are going to be reasonably substantial I would think.
I agree with your post, the subsidies have to change, there can be no doubting that.
As to the storage part that is going to be a bit tricky. I personally know of no way to store Alternating Current with present technology. The only way that has ben accomplished thus far that I know of is by pushing water back up the hill to let it fall through the turbines again and pushing water takes a lot of energy so while it might work for peek periods I think it comes out to a zero sum gain.
Even if we went to lots and lots of very local small DC generating facilities and then developed storage ( caps, batteries whatever ) on a very LARGE scale then we are going to have people screaming about having say 5 or 10 gen plants in the city of San Francisco, but then again they scream about fucking everything.
Personally I think until we come up with a MASSIVE leap in efficiency of the way we move people and goods and lighting our houses or fusion generation becomes a reality about the only way we have to go is a combo of sources and I think fission has to be in the equation. Now before you go nuts about that, there is room for a tremendous amount of R&D in nuclear. There are dramatically less toxic fuels for reactors these days and those have been talked about on /. many many times. There are also ways to design reactors that fail safe even if you lose ALL the cooling water and the control rods are all the way up.
That was an informative post, but you sure came off sounding like a major league jerk.
I did some quick reading on (LiFePO4) batteries here and while they have great potential they seem to also have some high associated costs.
As to the "Long Tail Pipe Theory you might want to check here at various times of the day to see what our current electrical load is and theory aside contemplate shifting of the gasoline load to the electrical load.
have a nice day.
Your correct but the environmentalist want every car on the road to be either electric or hybrid, preferably electric. Hmm about 25,000,000 cars registered in CA give or take, so at a 2kwh charging load thats 2,000 & 25,000,000 = 50,000,000,000 or 50 gigawatt hours and that is more then the entire supply that the state of California has available and thats a combination of all available fuels we have on line.
That is the myth if the electric car, if we shift to all electric we simply shift the fuel consumption to another type of engine. Now an electrical generating plant is more efficient then an internal combustion engine but you have to build out that capacity and keep a lot of it on hot stand-by because it takes a long time to spin up from cold to generating electricity. Additionally no one is really talking about the insanely toxic batteries that will have to be disposed of on a regular basis.
It will be interesting to see how things progress over the years, but there is no magic solution. Lots of incremental ones but no big one is coming anytime soon and more then likely I will be dead before it really comes to pass as I am 50 now and don't really see this happening before the next 40 or 50 years. Technology can move fast but we are pushing the limits of known technology as far as electrical storage is concerned. There is a lot of progress being made in Electric double-layer capacitor "EDLC's" but even those are still experimental and cannot provide the kind of power you would need to run say a Tesla car ( Who's IPO is going backwards).
Here I am with MP's yet I feel compelled to respond to you...
If you RTFA you would see that it explicitly sites making a personal copy for use on whatever player you desire. But if you give a copy to a friend with the DRM broken then you are still committing a crime and that is fair since it is NOT fair use.
Now having said that, I certainly expect a flood of torrents to start comming from Brazil if this gets enacted into law because people still think that if they buy a DVD and then rip it to make a copy to "should be able to rip it and use on a portable player, media server etc." they somehow have the right to give it away to their pals and put it on a web server for everyone to have a copy.
That is why this begins with, "I - reproduction by any means or process of any work legitimately acquired, if made in one copy and by the copyist, for his private use and not commercial;" [emphasis is mine] because in point of fact doing anything other then making a copy for personal, non commercial use is a copyright violation even under these terms and is in point of fact illegal and that is as it should be
A lot of responses are referencing some good books and you should give them due consideration.
One post spoke of set theory. Definitely look into that.
Now for the real world. DB Theory is great, it is a base of knowledge that needs to be obtained and digested. You should understand 1st norrnal form all the way to 6th normal form and that will take a bit to wrap your head around
Now that you have accomplished that, it is time to start breaking those rules and get some work done. Databases do one thing and ONE thing only, they store data for later retrieval and analysis, ie: reports. Now you can normalize your brains out and that will end you up with a database that it is close to impossible to write reports against without using the most insane joins that you have never even thought about..
Start with your most common report and start looking at how the data breaks out. Does it fit in an ultra normalized model or a hybrid model. Understand the differences between OLTP and OLAP ( if you don't know what those acronyms mean, loook them up it's important.
Database modeling is not an exact science and sadly much of it is inherent in a certain type of mind, some gots it, some don't. It is a lot like a puzzle, you look at it and then you have that "aha!" moment and start re-arranging tables and columns and suddently everything works correctly, which is to say you get your data out with a reasonable amount of effort instead of having to have roll-up tables and so forth and so on.
Lastly, you as a programmer should know better then anyone else that you can't proof your own work as effectively as someone else can so I suggest you hire in a database guy or gal to look over your shoulder now and then to give you a reality check.
Best of luck!
Sorry but your argument just doesn't hold up. The "Movie Industry" would LOVE to build very big pipes and sell you a movie that you could play for forever plus 1 day IF they knew for sure and dead certain you would not immediately then burn it onto to 15 DVD's and give a copy to all your friends who didn't pay for it.
Why in the hell do you think they spent millions coming up with DRM, copy protection, etc,etc ad naseum? WHY because people think that if they buy ONE DVD or download one, for some reason they think they have the right to start reproducing it and giving to anyone they want or putting onto a torent site for millions of other people to NOT pay for it.!
I would bet a very large amount of money that if we got the CEO of Disney in a room and asked him, "He if you could be completely sure that each copy sold would stay one copy would you scarp all this DRM bullshit, he would say "In a heartbeat". Why because DRM is a pain in the ass for them just as much as it is a pain in the ass for everyone else.
The movie industry taken as a whole is not that insanely profitable. Yes Avatar is going to be looking at a 500% ROI but when you start diluting that with movies that break even, lose money or make very little in profit then things look a little different. Viacom the parent of Paramount has about an 11% profit margin. News Corporation has about 10% profit margin.
So yes they are making money but on the whole it is not that kinds of sums that so many people think. Yes James Cameron made a nice tidy sum on that but the vast majority of the money gets turned around and invested into new projects which in turn pays a LOT of people who do all the other jobs it requires to make movies.
No they are not overly burdensome. I was pissed at the hoops I had to jump through but as a holder PP-SEL certificate I can fly figure eights of the the city of San Francisco, or Dallas or wherever and can land at any airport I want, yes even Washington National.
The problem is that this is a slippery slope because the people buying these things are going to be CEO's and the like then big time lawyers who think that their time is worth more then anyone else's and I am guessing a bunch of them will be K Street types and pretty soon they are going to want to land these things anywhere they want. Then the money starts to flow and a Congressman or Senator or 20 will get leaned on who will then in turn lean on the FAA and so forth and so on.
It seems our FAA just made it a bit eaiser too as the raised the maximum weight for this thing to 1430 lbs see this CNN article.
it costs $194,000.00 USD so you know who is going to be buying this thing. Yup the CEO that is on his third by-pass operation and no medical certificate required. It is only 170 lbs lighter then a Cessna 150 which you cannot fly after you have had a by-pass operation because you cannot pass a 3rd class medical examine without an exemption from the FAA, which in the case of of heart problems is very very rare.
I hold a private pilots certificate and I passed a kidney stone, ONCE and it took me 6 months to get my medical certificate back and that was only after about $5000.00 USD worth of tests and examinations, not to mention the gross amounts of paperwork I had to file with the FAA. Kidney Stones hurt like hell, but at least I am not dead of a heart attack in the left seat.
As a pilot, the part I am mostly opposed to is that you don't have to have a medical exam to fly this fucking contraption. If I can't pass my medical I cannot even fly a Cessna 150 which weighs in at about the same as this thing does. What scares me more then anything is the idea of a bunch of executives who are on their 3rd bypass operation having a fucking heart attack and then crashing into whatever happens to be below them, or worse having auto pilot that keeps the thing flying into down town San Francisco or Oakland or Atlanta, or whatever and killing a whole lot of people.
Ya think?!
god I wish he would stop approving shit.
Document this with the case number and the support notes or it didn't happen.
Pick your deriding descriptive term.
How in the hell did he ever get promoted or appointed or how ever the hell it is you become one of the anointed few who decide what gets posted on /. and what the headline looks like? I mean really, is he related to someone? Is he the owners kid, nephew, love child?
Nice try at a refute but that don't work. They are spread across the globe because as long as you will stay on the phone they will keep transferring you to the next support center as the world continues to turn. I know because I have done it, had an Oracle server down hard and started the conversation with a center in Denver and as the clock kept going I got transfered to the next engineer after they were briefed by my current engineer.
That is my point, when you call Oracle support you do not get a "Menu based monkey reading from boiler plate", you get an oracle Engineer that knows your Oracle Software inside and out.
You could not be more wrong about:
Oracle needs to drop the high prices, the competition in the market now doesnt allow them to have those prices.
An this is why...
It's called support. One of the major reasons I recommend Oracle to clients who need maximum uptime and downtime is just not an option is because of the world class support Oracle provides. If you are a licensed Oracle site you have support 24/7/365 no matter what time zone or country you happen to be in. If you pick up the phone and say those magic words, "I'm down" the calvary is not just coming over the hill they are at your door. Guess what that kind of support costs a lot of money to provide.
In our race to the bottom of the price bucket lots of things have to be cut and guess where they cut first, you guessed it, in support. With Oracle support you do not get script readers in India or the Philippines you get an Oracle engineer on the phone ready to tackle the problem with you until the problem is solved and they will bring in whatever other resources are required.
MySQL is a wonder database that does what it does very well, but would I put it up in a mission critical bit of infrastructure? Not on a bet. Those companies that have, eg: Sales Force and the like have had to hire LOTS of engineers/developers to handle MySQL in big installations and that costs even more.
Postgre has no such level of support either. So when you missions critical DB goes south either you better be able to fix it or you had better have a lot of friends you can wake up in the middle of the night.