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Oracle is the Borg: Enterprise Software Development Will Be Assimilated

By gherlein, on November 6th, 2010 - No comments

Oracle made some moves this week that look like the opening pawn moves in a master chess game. The end game will have Oracle having a controlling position in every aspect of Enterprise software development.

First of all, Oracle has removed InnoDB from the MySQL Classic Edition. Now, you can still get the GPL community edition that has InnoDB in it. But if you want support, you’ll have to buy their version. Oh, and they just raised the price on that. I’m not sure if they require it or not, but if you use Linux Oracle prefers that you run their software on THEIR version of Linux – a customized Red Hat. This week they also released plans for the JVM that will include a free version and a premium paid version. Oh, and if you want some new hardware that will really make it all work well together, they can sell you that too (they bought Sun, remember?).

So it’s pretty clear to me that Oracle is playing for keeps, and playing to own the Enterprise space. Want to use a database? Buy Oracle, or use MySQL… but if you want support, you pay them. Then you pay them for Linux. Then license the JVM. Then license the app server (they bought BEA last year, so WebLogic is all theirs now too). Want to code in Java? Well, they own that too. Business folks call this “owning the vertical.”

Watch for them to take even more steps to make sure that they have control points around as many places they can. Nearly all software that gets written is business application software. Clearly Oracle has been embedded firmly there for a long time – but these moves are enveloping and will sink hooks into so many more places. I predict that when Google and Oracle settle – and they will eventually, since the cost to litigate a huge patent battle does no good for either party – that Oracle will get some hooks into mobile as well. Maybe some email integration, or provisioning, or something deep and fundamental.

So watch out, stay alert, and think about your tools. Or you too will be assimilated.
> 1% of Microsoft shares changes hands each day

yes, but these are transactions that follow the pattern of the market. Usually they even out, with a few days having more sellers and on other days more buyers.

When you have a share repurchase program, you are basically giving a support for the market. It is hard for the stock to go much lower, because the company is always buying.

Bill and Ballmer, on the other hand, are selling shares. This is not good for the stock, even if spread over a long time.
I'm not sure he realizes what money is. Listia credits are money. It is actually the same system we use today. Dollars have no inherent use, but people value them because you can trade them for physical items that do have use. This is exactly what the Listia credits are. The only difference is that there has been no exchange rate set up between that and other forms of money, but I am willing to bet that this will come to.

Money is a mode of trade. When you sell somebody a computer, and use that money to buy a hamburger (a really expensive gourmet one) you are in essence trading that computer for a hamburger. (Ok, it is a little more complicated, but not much.)

Money is a good thing. To quote a certain author (who I won't name because it will cause more debate than it really deserves.) "Money is the material shape of the principle that men who wish to deal with one another must deal by trade and give value for value."

This so called "Age of abundance" is a dream that can not exist. And even if it could, I am not sure I would want to live in it. To live in a world in which everything is provided for me, with no work and no effort, is to live in a world with no purpose. It sounds more like hell to me.

There were other issues, but I don't have time right now to deal with them.
I think the idea is that more informed individuals (executives) are selling and less informed individuals (retail investors) are buying.
So far we have 3 of the 4 people post here. Can the last one own up? Or did someone underestimate how many people don't have a facebook account...
Ask HN: Etiquette at conferences?
I'm curious if there are any good books or online resources or even coaches/tutors for etiquette and manners, particularly as it applies to academic and tech conferences...

I don't mean like where you put your fork and knife but more:

- how to get in and out of a conversation circle

- event invitations: when is it ok to go and not go

- what's the appropriate amount to talk about yourself and your idea

- how to identify this conversation is going nowhere

- how to approach FAMOUS GUY

- how to appropriately ask your friend to introduce you to his friend, FAMOUS GUY

- etc
I doubt apple would approve malware in the app store.
Your hunch that you're overthinking: probably right.

Advice: build experience by actually doing stuff.

ps: if you're not going to build your profitable niche ideas, mind sharing them?
"The military abandoned it because it could not produce results."

According to the movie, the military originally abandoned the research because of internal conflicts, and they have in fact since resumed research again. Not sure what the veracity of this is, but they stated it as being a true fact at the end of the film.

"What do you propose to be the propagator of information?"

Terence McKenna once said, "Not only is reality stranger than we suppose, it's stranger than we can suppose." Betting on current scientific paradigms as accurately portraying reality is a suckers bet every time. I have no idea where the information would come from, though presumably it would come from the same place that consciousness comes from.

The reason HN is mostly logical positivists is because it's dominated by engineers and people with engineer-like personalities, and that's what most engineers think science advocates. (Even though most scientists themselves don't believe this, and post modern philosophy makes pretty short work of it.)
Don't get a co-founder because they are "really good with coming up with ideas", that is not a good idea. (pun intended)
It is a lot simpler and cheaper to buy or coerce some poor bastard to smuggle for you.
Dodgy title but good advice: How to win friends and influence people. http://amzn.to/aEYc04

For conferences: try to contact people that are going beforehand and talk about stuff over email. It's easier to follow up in person than to start from scratch in person.
Thanks for the reply.
I'm working on the co-founder thing, it's part of the reason for going to college.
And yeah I hear that a lot, which is what makes me think I'm just too critical of my own ideas. I really couldn't be that bad.
Not wanting to be pedantic but the main logo, "Videolla" and the title "Make money on videos" appear a little jagged around the edges. I tested this in IE, Firefox and Chrome on Windows-7. To me, this gives a rather amateurish feel to the website. I am no web expert but is it not possible to make the fonts look smoother ?
I deleted my facebook account a long time ago.
The very best programmers I've known personally have, mostly, had no college degrees, or, a degree in something other than CS or EE. But EE does seem to attract a higher average intellectual caliber than CS programs do, so that may explain what you've experienced. I know a lot of kids enter CS undergrad programs with the hope of making "easy money" as a Blub Developer later on, with many of them finding they hate it and dropping out before the end. You don't see that anywhere as much with EE.

Also, I think there's this weird effect with degrees where if you're bad or mediocre but you have say a CS degree, you're more likely to stay working in the field than if you had no CS degree or no degree at all. Because if you suck, and you have no degree, there will be so little demand for you you'll have trouble staying continually employed. But by having a degree, especially in CS, you gain an edge and can get past more hiring and big corp HR-ocratic hurdles than you otherwise could.

This last bit is just a theory, I could be wrong about it as a contributing force. But I'm confident in the first part of what I said, where I've seen a disproportionate of the best without CS degrees, or without any at all.

Lastly, I know many guys who started programming as a kid and a common issue for them is you'd get to 18 and have to pick a undergraduate program, but much of CS, especially early stuff looked lame and child's play, whereas many other fields were equally or more interesting and the chance of getting to play with those other toys, and interact with those other professors, was way more attractive.
The point is that lots of other people are selling shares too - by the numbers, several times more than Bill and Ballmer. Yet nobody cares much if say, Fidelity or Vanguard or Goldman Sachs is selling.

In a liquid market, somebody is always selling. And somebody else is buying. In order to have a transaction, you have to have both a buyer and a seller. As long as those balance out, the price remains stable. You only see wild swings in price when there are suddenly many more sellers than buyers, or several more buyers than sellers. That doesn't happen with these planned insider transactions, because as soon as a sale is announced, a dozen computerized arbitragers swoop in to buy up the shares they've just sold (as long as the market doesn't consider the insider sales to be a vote of no confidence in the stock).
Some conference tips from Colette Ballou (from BALLOU PR http://BallouPr.com ): http://search.twitter.com/search?q=&ands=Conference+tips...
How does your argument look if you replace cocaine with caffeine?

Hey now. A crime fighting dog told me that cocaine is bad. What more evidence do we need?
Top 30 Free Encoding, Conversion
The records show that this was transferred to the CIA in 1995 and discontinued. If they secretly continued it, they sure did a great job in the run-up to 9/11.

If these guys are open with their data, it will be rather straightforward to identify the error that they committed that led to these results. If not, a few other people will try to replicate their results and fail. At least some things in their field of study are always consistent.

Also, I'm a scientist, not an engineer.

Oh, also, let's be clear here. If what these fellows propose is true, then they will have simultaneously discovered both of the following:

1) Reverse causality
2) Evidence for biological receptors for the mediator of reverse causality

It's basically hilarious, except for the fact that the money that funds this could be spent more productively on literally anything else. In general, parapsychology consists of the practice of accidentally or willfully misunderstanding the scientific method.
I got -3 point's because I said sweet? wow......
The 4G lie
Our app (http://gri.pe) feels a lot snappier after this latest bit of datastore maintenance. We've been using as much memcache as possible to avoid datastore access because prior to this maintenance, datastore access was spiky and even the simplest of queries had a small chance of timing out.

I can say for sure that some of our datastore-heavy cron jobs were taking > 200ms, but are around 70ms now.

It's a shame that the stats for > 12hrs ago seem to have been wiped. I bet we'd be seeing a marked improvement on our ms/request stat.
You're damn right.
Thanks, that makes a lot more sense. My projects so far have included well under 1000 LOC of my code per page. If and when this changes, I will watch out for this issue and consider Closure Compiler as a possible solution.

I also wonder if (runtime-checked) pre/post-conditions could bring much of the benefits you speak of, with the option to use them sparingly and avoid the "drag" part. In other words, make the type annotations optional and only put them where it looks like the extra safety is important enough to be worth it.

In any case, I'll cross that bridge when I get to it. Thanks for the heads up.
If I have the choice between reading TAOCP cover-to-cover or building a software-based startup which I can later sell for millions of dollars, I know which I'd choose. And have chosen. And I'm confident you can do the latter without doing the former.
I wouldn't say this problem is common, but it's not rare among developers or entrepreneurs either. I would say a couple things:

1) don't rush anything. At some point you'll create some beautiful ideas in your head which you just can't contain - you'll feel the urge to rush at your computer and stay up coding all night long. THIS is normal. I'm pretty sure this has happened to most every developer early on in their career (I still get this and I've been coding for well over 3ish years now)

2) if you really can't sit idly by while you finalize your ideas, try programming familiar applications which you enjoy. Friends of mine have cloned scripts similar to Digg, Twitter, Wordpress... it's fun and you build a lot of project experience.
You are 17, have 3 months of work experience as a web developer, have more balls than brains, and you want to hit a home run right of the gate.

Take one of your niche ideas, build it, launch it, earn. Then once you finish that try to swing for the fences.

How long do you think it's going to take? The answer is always longer than you think, so get that lesson out of the way.
Encryption didn't make it into the MVP? :-)
An easy one to talk yourself out of, though: "Oh, something must have happened to my upgrade since I printed my boarding pass last night."

The 1950s-era reservation system isn't going to refute your story.
It is (potentially) mind-blowing. Our models, understandings, and predictive capability w.r.t. time, space, matter, energy, and causality would need revising. Jobs and reputations would be lost; new theories, paradigms, technologies, and industries would be born. That's all happened before, and one can look forward to it happening again. ;)
I went to Cornell and I'm one of the many students that participated in this guy's experiments (although not this particular one with the erotic pictures. I got regular pictures.)

I can tell you that every semester that I was there he was running a version of the "Are you psychic?" experiment. I'm sure he's been doing it every semester for a very long time. Undoubtedly there have been loads of experiments where it didn't pan out. (If you're curious about my results, I got 54% and a cheerful grad student greeted me after the fact by saying "congrats! you're psychic!")

The fact is, if you run an experiment like this enough times you are going to get a significant result eventually. That's why you have alpha values. If it's at .05, that means that 5% of the time you're going to get a false positive. I think that's what this is.
A Web Designers Story - Getting Off The Ferris Wheel
Just a little story to offer some motivation for any of you who are dreaming of launching a product of your own.
The Polluted Eastern Marshes would be New Jersey. More specifically, Murray Hill, New Jersey, home of Bell Labs, and Unix.
Google is effectively using the same method the GPL uses to "force" people to play nice and share. It's entirely reasonable that if someone isn't going to share with you, you don't have to share with them. Of course this takes away some freedoms, most likely the freedom of the freeloader to abuse the person sharing, but often times that's the only way to get people to understand and make things a better place for everyone.
- how to get in and out of a conversation circle

What I usually do is approaching a 3-people circle. They usually welcome you. If it's a 2-people "circle" then it might be a somewhat private conversation. And if there are 4 people or more then it's starting to be crowded.
It's ridiculous that such an article could get published in the first place, though it seems the magazine is "new-age". They admit that all the evidence doesn't support the point they are arguing for:

"But the long history of parapsychology lab research, going back far before Bem to Rhine’s ESP work in the 1930s, shows that when you bring psi into the lab, it tends to become more of a systematic statistical biasing factor than a source of individual mind-blowing “miracle events.”" - in other words "Evidence of PSI is indistinguishable from stochastic noise".

"The chief bugaboo of scientific psi research has been replicability. It has proved frustratingly difficult to precisely replicate the results of many psi experiments." - In other words, the studies rely on chance events to get results in the first place.

"Perhaps the experiments ... will finally resolve this problem and provide robustly replicable experiments demonstrating psi phenomena. I certainly hope so." - And the author is biased. How is this worth discussing?
"The orange asterisk is of the same color as the headline box"

This annoys me at times, too. Maybe grey would be better.

"and refresh itself once in a while"

Only if it did it without meta-refresh. Meta-refresh would be evil.

"I find the background having a very close color to the text and it makes reading a bit problematic"

Only for the OP's post, for me. The rest is fine. I think the OP's post is a little harder to read, but I don't mind much, as it is like that to distinguish it from the comments. The OP's post is typically not as interesting to most as the comments, which is why it is grey.

"The down-voted comments literally cannot be distinguished from the background."

If you want to read it, highlight it. I don't mind this one.

Basically, I like it the way it is for the most part. I really dislike what others have tried to do with it, which I think is a good sign.
I love examples where people use the actual scientific method to test conventional wisdom. This is a good experiment. I would love to see it replicated by other groups (.e.g Mythbusters) to confirm or deny the results.

There is also a similar myth for McDonald's french fries. It would be nice to see those tested as well.
I love how HN feels, for the most part. The only issues I have are that the nav is a little opaque (I only recently discovered that "threads" is my recent conversations) and the edit profile is hard to understand in places (what is "showdead"?). I like that the UI doesn't get in the way of the actual meat-and-potatoes, though.
Not to mention his reverse engineering of the animal style In-N-Out burger. The Burger Lab has changed my entire perspective on the perfect burger.

http://aht.seriouseats.com/archives/2010/07/the-burger-lab-h...
Thanks for the reply.
Don't really wish to immediately post the ideas, however I may post some of them in a new thread soon to get feedback as I don't believe in hiding them worrying if they'll be stolen. Stay tuned.
I'm sorry, two "scientific" studies in 17 years don't make prior expectation.
Quick question about Learn You A * books -- has anyone here ever started from 0, read one, and then started writing useful software?
I find Kik could easily be the Blackberry killer app we've all been hoping for. The only real reason most Blackberry users don't switch to iOS or Android is Blackberry messenger. I hope they can get their security up to par.
At least one other is also replicating it; she seems to be doing a more thorough job as well, as she's explicitly varying the amount of moisture between her samples..

http://sparkasynapse.blogspot.com
More like two positive studies out of thousands that were probably conducted but not reported. The file drawer problem runs deep in these crowds.
Most of the datastore maintenance windows are about an hour long. Previous ones have even gone two hours.
Ditto the above comment. If users don't want to be asked if they want to download/open a file they can use the "Automatically do this from now on" option that Firefox gives them, or the equivalent in their preferred browser. Then users get their preferences, and the not servers forced on them.
54% correct out of how many, if you remember? Figuring out the degree to which this deviates from a null expectation should be pretty straightforward.
999 business ideas:

http://www.sixmonthmba.com/2009/02/999ideas.html
Looking at the error rates, I wonder what happened at around 12pm?
(Screenshots: http://grab.by/7gJ4 http://grab.by/7gJ5 http://grab.by/7gJh)
Thanks for the reply.
In response to point 2, that's actually exactly what I've been doing (making a Flickr clone), and have found it to be a great idea.
But 90% of developers produce negative work with these tools. It's not very useful to see what tools people use to produce crap. It's interesting to see what tools people choose to optimize their own creative productivity.

I use vi on a daily basis but just for very small text files, you can be so much more productive with more modern tools these days.

Well, yes; vim.
In either case - from the HN guidelines: "Resist complaining about being downmodded. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading."
Based off of your comments throughout this thread, it seemed/seems quite clear, to me at least, that you were and are trolling. But that's my opinion - guess we are all entitled to having one - so I will entitle you to yours - as fucked up and delusional I might think it is.
I think you are worrying about it too much. Just be yourself.

If you are doing interesting things, then other people will want to talk with you. If you aren't, they won't. You can be personable and likable, and they might talk with you, and maybe you'll get an in somewhere, but if you aren't aiming for anything in particular, what difference will it make?
Can someone explain to what's so awesome about this app? When that other link hit the front page - I couldn't even tell what the hell the app was for. I guessed from the image that it was some kind of messaging app - but couldn't for the life of me find any information on that site that could tell me why I care.

And yet - a million people seem to have done better than I. Dubious...
I'm sure he gives the size in the paper somewhere. I expect it was probably similar to what I did. It was 5 years ago and the pictures weren't numbered so I really have no idea.
This reads like something written word for word by IBM PR. It is also woefully misinformed. For instance:

The goal . . . was to build a profitable business with a lot of recurring revenue, based on service contracts and software licenses. . . . Over the last 10 years, Apple has embraced much of the same strategy — in broad strokes.

Even in broad strokes Apple's strategy is completely different. Apple makes money in selling vertically integrated products directly to consumers. The vast majority of Apple's income comes from when someone pays for the gadget (hardware) at purchase time. IBM relies heavily on support contracts and consulting work continued income, or as this journalist puts it, "recurring revenue."

At I.B.M., the inspiration engine is more subtle and conceptual. In late 2008, Mr. Palmisano and his team settled on a theme: the deployment of scientific research and technology to tackle big challenges for business and society . . . . And the company has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on its “Smarter Planet” advertising campaign.

A marketing campaign is a sign of IBMs "subtle and conceptual" inspiration engine? To me IBM's campaign represents the worst of contentless corporate advertising. No actual products named, no concrete facts, just feel-good "we're smart and serious" messaging. A lot like those wonderful full page ads in magazines by Shell or BP saying "don't worry, we really love renewable energy." Apple's advertising campaigns always center around actual products, what they do, what they stand for, why you want them. Once again, a far cry from "a series of conversations for a smarter planet."
Not only is it exceptionally well written, it's also holds true to a certain point to this day.
The most fascinating things about their business to me are the robots that move the product shelves TO the human pickers & the algorithmic approach that allows them to eke out extra margins