The Real Truth About Oracle's 'New' Kernel 177
An anonymous reader writes "Yesterday at OpenWorld, Oracle announced a 'new' Enterprise kernel for its so-called Unbreakable Linux. What's the real truth? The company is simply sticking a 2.6.32-based kernel on top of its re-branded Red Hat Enterprise Linux clone and trying to spin it as a new and innovative development."
But... (Score:5, Funny)
OSR (Obligitory Simpson's Reference) (Score:2)
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Really?
I knew something looked different about Barb, but my first guess was she had her natural breasts replaced with manmade ones. A new hat would be cheaper.
If Linux Had Modern Corporate Marketing (Score:2)
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Take another look at those plastic doll commercials. The hook is "your mom and dad will stop ignoring you if you have this doll."
Cut 1: Lonely child, Mom and Dad in background ignoring him/her.
Cut 2: Child excitedly opening package.
Cut 3: Mom and Dad laughing and playing with no-longer-lonely child.
I can just picture the child psychologist at the ad agency getting a woody imagining all the miserable children that will obsess over the latest ad.
But... (Score:2)
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What the hell does Bruce Willis have to do with Oracle?
Re:But... (Score:4, Funny)
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Do you really get a pinquin with an armour for free with that 1400 dollar [oracle.com] a year support?
Re:Nope. (Score:4, Funny)
We bought the support from them. No penguin.
I see why you had to post that anonymously.
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And it's the real truth!
Not a false truth, or an imaginary truth. This truth is much truthier.
I'd even dare to say it's the truthiest!
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So it uses the NT kernel rather that the open sores Linsux kernel?
He said unbreakable, not unbearable.
Uhh, isn't this what Oracle customers pay for? (Score:5, Insightful)
This could be glossing over quite a bit of useful work for Oracles customers. "Fine tuning" could be anything from tweaking some compiler settings to actually patching things in the kernel. Its hardly a trivial task given the size and complexity that most Oracle customers bring.
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oh please, oracle customer complexities are a result from the oracle usage and not the motivation for it.
oracle is one of those business providing useless solution so they can charge you twice for the consultancy.
Re:Uhh, isn't this what Oracle customers pay for? (Score:4, Insightful)
The Spurious Placebo Solutions Company. For the CIO who needs to do something but not sure what!
We guarantee that by purchasing from us, a CIO will have continued employment with plenty of bonuses and appear to be innovative!
Proprietary and F/OSS vsersions available.
Ask about our buzzword du jour package! Free with this code: IMA PHB RETARD
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But thinking I was made me feel better.
engineering != rhetorical bile (Score:3, Insightful)
oh please, oracle customer complexities are a result from the oracle usage and not the motivation for it.
Oh wow, what a revelation. Using a complex software causes usage complexity. Here, have a banana as a price.
Yeah, usage of Oracle causes usage complexity. Does that mean that fine tuning a Linux distro to ease the pain of configuring a box suitable for Oracle products is something trivial, or non important, or what? What was exactly the point?
It doesn't even have to be for running Oracle database-related problems. When you run a EE container, be it JBoss or WebLogic (now a Oracle product) on a HP-UX, Li
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There are sometimes unavoidable complexities, however I know first-hand companies providing 'product' and 'services' rapidly prioritize services. At first, the services may be a 'necessary evil' to enable the complex software, but the revenue quickly becomes intoxicating and soon any effort toward ease-of-use and out-of-the-box usability becomes a threat to services revenue.
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There are sometimes unavoidable complexities, however I know first-hand companies providing 'product' and 'services' rapidly prioritize services. At first, the services may be a 'necessary evil' to enable the complex software, but the revenue quickly becomes intoxicating and soon any effort toward ease-of-use and out-of-the-box usability becomes a threat to services revenue.
This is absolutely true, but at least my experience with Oracle (for supporting Oracle databases), former BEA for their EE containers, and Sun and HP (for supporting their hardware) has not been like that. Rarely in the companies I've worked with I've seen the constant remora-like latching of consultancy as described here. In 10 years working in Solaris/HP-UX/Linux environments, I can count with less than half of my fingers a need of bringing expensive vendor consultancy. In fact, I can only remember three
the koolaid is strong among /.ers (Score:2, Flamebait)
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I have to laugh a little too.
I'm not Oracle certified....I did, take some cert. classes back for 8i and 9i, but never got around to taking the
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Furthermore, it's not like these things come out of nowhere. I'm sure there's a huge body of internal research from customer surveys and the like that point to a demand for such a product.
Now, one can say that their customers are stupid, and Oracle is milking them by offering a product of little or no additional value. Or one can say that Oracle is trying to milk the Linux cash cow by attaching their name to what's effectively a rebranded existing Linux distro. One can also say that their execution is incom
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Or one could say that Oracle Enterprise Linux fulfills its role: an Oracle-controlled software platform that allows the Oracl
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Unlike the Gordian-knot, not every complex problem has a simple solution. Especially in business where you can't just throw the shit out and call a Mulligan.
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> oracle is one of those business providing useless solution so they can charge you twice for the consultancy.
I thought that was IBM.
Oracle passes off Red Hat's work as their own. (Score:3, Informative)
This could be glossing over quite a bit of useful work for Oracles customers.
You are glossing over the point of the article.
1. Redhat writes lots of great Linux stuff that make the kernel better (11.6% of the kernel).
2. Oracle passes it off as their own. (They only contribute 1.3%, less that 1/10 that of Red Hat).
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This could be glossing over quite a bit of useful work for Oracles customers.
You are glossing over the point of the article.
1. Redhat writes lots of great Linux stuff that make the kernel better (11.6% of the kernel).
2. Oracle passes it off as their own. (They only contribute 1.3%, less that 1/10 that of Red Hat).
Cry me a river. That's what happens when you base your company on OSS. This isn't a surprise. At all. People warned of this at least a decade ago.
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They patched quite a few things, but at the same time thought it important to be as close to mainline as possible. Here's the lowdown from Chris Mason [lwn.net] over at LWN:
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Ohhh the truth!!! (Score:4, Interesting)
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But then, they already have Solaris which is much more suited for the markets they are aiming at (high-end enterprise servers), so why waste the time ?
Drivers.
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Re:Ohhh the truth!!! (Score:5, Interesting)
Oracle has all the agreements with Intel, LSI and whoever helps them build servers to have drivers developed
I have a server with a year-old Intel gigabit chipset where only one LAN port works under Solaris, both work under Linux. Last month the Solaris bug was sitting at "3 - Yes, that's a problem". I think the bug was reported about 10 months ago.
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Sadly as it is, that's how they are running the business now. They want mid-range and high-end servers and support contracts for everything.
They dumped OpenSolaris and have repeatedly said they have no interest in the entry-level server market. I also have many bugs opened (for whitebox hardware) that have had to attention from Oracle after the acquisition.
Personally I think they
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They want mid-range and high-end servers and support contracts for everything.
Well that's very nice, but aren't they interested in the business of those of us who don't? Large companies are strange beasts. They always seem to forget how they got to be large companies.
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You know the official Oracle answer for that: get a support contract on a supported hardware and they'll fix it for you.
Will they really or will they just offer that to close the sale? I can see where it would be worth it for certain classes of users to buy a support contract to have known-good hardware selections.
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I have a server with a year-old Intel gigabit chipset where only one LAN port works under Solaris, both work under Linux. Last month the Solaris bug was sitting at "3 - Yes, that's a problem". I think the bug was reported about 10 months ago.
What's the server vendor and model ?
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"But I'm sure we'll see they pushing Solaris a lot more now."
I am not sure what fantasy world you live in but every large enterprise I have experience with are getting rid of Solaris as fast as they possibly can.
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Same here, in both smaller enterprises and my current rather large storage vendor; we are adding SPARC H/W just as fast as the x86 architectures, along with some Cisco UCS. There are tons of Solaris installations out there in the big data centers, kids. Not that Oracle is my friend, they are just another method for me to get paid at the moment, until they botch Solaris and I bail on it. I'm already moving into big VMware and more admin tool designing. Solaris can't last under the insane care of Larry.
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> But then, they already have Solaris which is much more suited for the markets they are aiming at (high-end enterprise servers), so why waste the time ?
No. It makes far more sense to ask them why they bothered with Sun in the first place.
Oracle's reference platform has been Linux for a long time now.
The idea that you need Solaris to run an Oracle database is an argument that is very much out of date.
In truth, they probably care more about Java than Solaris.
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Agreed, and they probably will.
If Oracle wants to continue to sell Xen-based virtualization products, they're looking at much deeper changes to their distro than this. A secondary goal of this could be to get Oracle ramped up to diverge further from Red Hat's enterprise offering, since the writing is on the wall for Xen support in RHEL.
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[...] but the hacker-wannabes that seem to pollute the /. forums with their ramblings[...]
Any idea how such language makes you look?
So what? (Score:2, Insightful)
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Not a troll, but a pointing out the obvious. The "major" announcement was nothing more than 2.6.18+patches -> 2.6.32.
What doesn't get mentioned is that the oracle kernel would invalidate any ISV certifications that oracle's linux might have "inherited" from RHEL...
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No, it's a troll. Otherwise they'd point out that other obvious fact -- that RHEL's kernel is [**gasp**] "just" a custom configured 2.6.18 Linux kernel. No distro is coding their own kernel from scratch.
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And $deity knows what 2.6.18+patches (what Redhat uses) actually means, and if the differences are all that big from the recent 2.6.3x kernels. They have been backporting stuff on top of 2.6.18 for years and years now; I think RHEL5.4 is on the 160th revision on top of 2.6.18 or something.
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What doesn't get mentioned is that the oracle kernel would invalidate any ISV certifications that oracle's linux might have "inherited" from RHEL...
All the major storage vendors are already lined up for this, it's in Oracle's press release.
How else could this matter to anyone using the new kernel to improve Oracle DB performance on an Oracle Machine?
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But how is this not fraud? (Score:3, Interesting)
They made direct comparisons to RedHat kernels claiming performance, security and stability enhancements? If it is the same, then those claims cannot possibly be true. This is confusing... and troubling.
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This is wildly misleading. Almost everything Red Hat ships in Enterprise Linux is not from Red Hat. Projects like GCC, RPM package manager, Gnome, Glibc, KDE are all too big for Red Hat to develop on its own. The only things I can think of that are completely from Red Hat are layered products like Directory Server or projects where Red Hat has maintain
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RHEL 6 upgrades are free for those paying support, so that's not it.
By replacing the kernel it is no longer (even close to) RHEL 5 so ISV certifications are shot. Making oracle's linux unsupported by any 3rd party software other than what oracle itself has certified.
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Good for databases (Score:5, Interesting)
Just one example of why this is good - iotop.
I've been watching the RHEL bug for adding iotop since at least RHEL 5.3. It keeps getting bumped, now RHEL 5.7 IIRC.
It would require a bunch of backporting work from the kernel beyond 2.6.18. But once sysadmins get used to knowing which disks are busy they really get used to that. And doubly so for optimizing database servers.
Redhat's strategy gains them certainty and loses them opportunity. That's certainly a niche that's done well for them, but there are also users with other needs. Oracle's strategy will be very popular with some of them. When Redhat brings RHEL6 to market there will be lots of required subsystem changes to get the new kernel. Some people will just want the new kernel and not want to change all their underlying dependencies, and Oracle is meeting that need. Eventually Fedora will adopt a rolling-release model and RHEL will track that (probably with more QA) but it's a hard problem and not well-solved yet.
It's great that we have such a vibrant market that there's room for so many approaches.
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Apparently not watching it very closly, or you would know dstat will do what you want. Since 5.4 too.
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dstat provides _per process_ per disk io usage data in relatively fine grained sampling windows?
That's what iotop provides, mind you.
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In KDE, if you press ctrl+esc it pops up my "System Activity" app which has a lot of the features of iotop, and many more.
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I've been waiting on iotop for a while too... see this comment I made: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=239654#c2 [redhat.com] back in September of last year.
Argh.
Innovation != Novelty (Score:3, Insightful)
To innovate means to make something new happen. It doesn't have to be radically new, just something that wasn't available before. In the real world, most innovations are pretty humble, but humble doesn't imply not useful.
Do you ever look at Crapware 7.0 and think they just added some 3D arrows for absolutely no reason? Now look at TFA and the reactions here, this is *precisely* why the marketers demand idiotic features.
If you've actually set up Oracle on a system, you quickly realize that a. it's hugely complicated but b. it's a solved problem so c. why am I going through all this pain when Oracle has done this already? Of course, they have, calling it OEL just makes it easy to explain to the boss.
And for anyone trying to maintain an Oracle system, this is a big deal. It is not an understatement that for the typical business, their Oracle database more or less *is* the business. You want something that's going to work, with no nonsense, and you want to keep it up to date.
What Oracle meant to say.... (Score:3, Funny)
Oracle Linux is Unbreakable and better than Linux.
BUT Linux is bad mojo.... if you want a real OS and not a toy, use Oracle's Solaris.
Somehow they failed to add that last bit. Mixed messages from a VERY mixed up company.
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God, I wish. Someone should push Ellison down some stairs and find out.
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Modifications against mainline (Score:5, Informative)
People may want to check the LWN discussion on the topic, which includes comments from Chris Mason and others concerning their improvements over vanilla 2.6.32:
http://lwn.net/Articles/406242/
Unbreakable Linux? (Score:5, Insightful)
Whenever a company starts calling their product unbreakable or indestructible or unhackable or whatever, I start thinking Titanic.
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Infinite recursion: whenever I'm seeing posts as the parent, I start thinking Pavlov.
Introducing break condition: start thinking "iceberg"... comes with a chance of breaking in the IT security business and, when it happens, thinking of Titanic will stop being wasted CPU cycles.
Oracle's using a new Linux kernel? (Score:2)
And here I thought they'd only just adopted Hurd.
this slashdot article is a lie (Score:3, Insightful)
this kernel is not the same as RedHat's, there are improvements geared toward Oracle's DBMS
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eh? look about six threads up, the one about differences from mainstream....follow the link and see list, or check out the code from repository.
Troll Harder (Score:5, Interesting)
So, let me get this straight. Oracle is "bad" because they announced that their distribution had a "modern" kernel, but it's "only" 2.6.32 with custom patches, not 2.6.35 which is totally almost 2 months old now so there's no excuse for it not to be in there!!!! And, Oracle is a jerk who just takes and takes without contributing back, because they are "only barely" in the top 20 contributors to the kernel (and the kernel is only one small part of Linux so basically they don't contribute at all). What a troll! At least the article is up-front about being written by a Novell employee. (Wait no it's not, it sort of slips that into the middle).
And Mr. Sour Grapes Novell employee is just pleased as punch over pointing out the "dirty secret" Oracle tried to hide, by publicly announcing that Oracle Linux would be running the 2.6.32 kernel, with custom patches to improve performance on certain hardware, and for Oracle software. How sneaky of them, you could never tell by reading that, that it's actually the 2.6.32 kernel (WHICH IS SO OLD HOW DARE THEY CALL IT MODERN).
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They are "bad" because they are claiming they have some magic to be faster than Red Hat, when the fact is that Red Hat supplies modern kernels for people who wants to run them.
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you make a very good point... but be aware the guy mentions he is a FORMER employee of novell... it may sound like a tiny difference but it is significant... that means he moved on and he is not paid anymore by novell. generally when people quit it is because they are not satisfied with their former employee..
Meh. (Score:2)
It is about the Oracle stack... (Score:2)
Sure, you can use OEL for anything you might want - but, the folks using this are probably folks using Oracle for the OS, applications, and possibly even hardware. What this means the Oracle *applications* are going to have better support and tuning.
The big news from Oracle is that it's offering a "modern" Linux kernel that's supposed to offer better performance and support for newer hardware (like solid state disks), and is optimized for Oracle hardware and software.
In practice, it works out something li
"Unbreakable" - right (Score:3, Interesting)
There are things Oracle could use if they really wanted "unbreakable". There are some very tough microkernels available. LynxOS is certified to DO-178B leval A for safety-critical software, yet it can run Linux ABI binaries.
LynxOS drives quite a number of systems with serious firepower. The Navy Shipboard Self-Defense System, the "Multiple Missile Kill Vehicle", stuff like that. On the civilian side, LinxOS powers the Airbus navigation system.
There's a performance penalty over Linux, and LynxOS is not free. But if it really has to work, there are options.
New Sun Hardware Requires New Kernel Version (Score:2)
The article is missing the point. The key pitch here is that you need to be running Oracle Enterprise Linux 5 Update 6 or newer to work on the latest generation of Sun x86 hardware. It's a big deal inside of Oracle because Oracle wants to be running on Oracle hardware, but is about 80% Dell stuff on the x86 side right now in the Oracle data centers that weren't Sun acquisitions. There's a substantial hardware refresh effort inside the company right now, temporarily making Oracle one of Oracle's biggest h
We already have a distro that does that... (Score:2)
It IS new and interesting (Score:2)
That is new and interesting for an "Enterprise Linux".
RedHat and CentOS still use 2.6.18. That's 4 years old - ancient, relatively speaking. We're talking CFQ with ext3 filesystems, which is a complete nightmare in terms of performance.
There have been quite a few improvements since. So yes, using a modern kernel on RedHat derived stuff is indeed "revolutionary".
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>>>the SNES CD addon that became the PS1?
The PS1 was more than just a CD addon. After Nintendo screwed Sony, the company decided to avoid that massive loss by adding a 32-bit CPU and GPU. Thus it became more than just a CD player.
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Yeah, imagine that. Nintendo didn't want to give Sony complete control over something that Nintendo had essentially created. Those bastards.
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>>>Nintendo didn't want to give Sony complete control over something that Nintendo had essentially created.
False. Sony and Nintendo had created a partnership for the CD addon and of course would share both expenses and profits. The arrangement was similar to the Sony/Phillips arrangement (they both bore the cost of developing the Audio CD). Then Nintendo decided they didn't want a CD addon after all because it would be too easy to pirate the games, so they jumped ship, leaving Sony with all the
Re:Rebranding something is surprising? (Score:5, Interesting)
So YES Nintendo screwed Sony, just the same as if we agreed to buy a car together but then I suddenly backed-out, leaving you with the $20,000 bill.
Nintendo didn't just screw Sony. They made the Philips announcement without telling Sony that the deal was off first. According to interviews Sony was demonstrating the SNES-CD when this happened and were utterly humiliated. Up to then the company at large was reluctant to enter the gaming marked, they only entered because but some engineers at Sony had managed to get some contracts with Nintendo (for instance they designed the SNES sound chip), but when Nintendo made a fool out of them the big boss took it personally.
Sony wasn't the first big-corp that tried to take a chunk of the gaming marked. NEC, for instance, was bigger and went in sooner. But Sony didn't just release great hardware, they went the extra mile by getting the needed games and marketing campaign to make it all matter. It's possible that Sony's rage is the reason for that.
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"The Rage Of Sony" sounds like it should be a Playstation game...
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But they didn't. Nintendo left Sony and went over to Philips to create their CD addon instead.
Of course, Nintendo screwed over Philips, too, but Philips used specific terms of their contract to create several games from Nintendo franchises for the CDi... specifically Hotel Mario, Link: Faces of Evil, Zelda: Wand of Gamelon, and Zelda's Ad
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False. Sony had a deal that in essence gave them control and Nintendo naturally didn't want that and can
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>>>It's not like it's poor old Sony here, they're bastards
Nintendo is (or was) a bigger bastard than Sony ever was. Nintendo used lock-out chips to prevent third parties on their NES. That by itself is not so bad, but Nintendo next forced companies to sign exclusive NES deals and punished companies that dared develop for the Atari ProSystem/7800 or Sega Master System. Nintendo also found itself sued by Atari for their refusal to let Atari (a) develop games for the NES or (b) port games over to
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>>>Do you have any reason to believe Nintendo intuited the ease and minimal expense of copying CDs in 1993-94
Of course. We had CD-stlye MODs as early as 1985. CD-rs arrived in 1988. It's why they redirected N64 development away from CDs and towards Carts, because Nintendo knew carts were extremely difficult to clone.
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OTOH, it is moist and delicious.
I postulate that, in spite of the published corporate history [wikia.com], Aperture Science must have started life as Oracle.
Re:1, 2, 3, Profit! (Score:5, Insightful)
3. ???
3. Support.
Oracle support sucks (Score:3, Informative)
Anecdotal evidence, but where I work there were some people using pro*fortran to access Oracle databases from Fortran. pro*fortran was dropped between Oracle 8 and 8.1
It took six months of digging for the Oracle support people to finally tell us they had dropped pro*fortran from their product. Everyone kept saying "sure, we support Fortran, but that's not my specialty, let me get an expert for you"
When the technical support people don't know their own product, what worth is it paying for that it?
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Support? "Complete failure of Oracle security response and utter neglect of their responsibility to their customers":
http://seclists.org/bugtraq/2005/Oct/56 [seclists.org] (the infamous Litchfield letter)
You mean,
3. Charge for Support
Big difference. :)
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3. Charge for Support
Fair enough. In theory this keeps Step 4 from growing too large.
Re:Consistent (Score:5, Funny)
Not their flagship database offering. But, you're right, since they acquired Sun, we now have Oracle OpenOffice.org, Oracle VirtualBox, Oracle MySQL, etc., much like before when they acquired SleepyCat so we have Oracle Berkeley DB.
Maybe Oracle should acquire Embarcadero, so we could have Oracle Delphi! *drum fill*
Thank you, thank you. I'm here all week!
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Funny since Borland named came up with the name Delphi as a reference to its ability to connect to the Oracle database.
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