2006-10-26

mdlbear: blue fractal bear with text "since 2002" (Default)

Sorry about the late notice -- things got busy. Anyway, this is the usual Halloween potluck Saturday party at Grand Central Starport in San Jose ([map] [directions] [google]). Kids, friends, and musical instruments welcome as usual.

mdlbear: blue fractal bear with text "since 2002" (Default)

Wired magazine ran a collection of science fiction stories in six words. I got the link from BoingBoing, but I see that [livejournal.com profile] filkerdave spotted it, too. (and, naturally, has one of his own, as do the comments).

So, just following along, here's a two-volume remake of an old classic:

"Does God exist?" Computer: I am.
Lightning strikes, welds power switch ON.

And here's one about one possible fate of the universe:
.backwards runs time ;expanding stops Universe

Meme too seductive. Must... try... to...

(update: I will not edit whole... post into six word phrases. No!)

mdlbear: blue fractal bear with text "since 2002" (Default)

(Six-word meme eats brain -- No!)

Looks like there's debris on 280 at El Monte, which is on my commute route. So I'll just sit here and try to catch up...

The sprain in my left foot, and its various followup aches and pains, seems to be nearly gone now; I can wear regular shoes two or three days in a row again. Glad to have the boots, though; they're comfy. I've managed to get in at least half an hour of walking every day this week. My back is back to giving me a little trouble, though.

Reading peoples' OVFF reports (with considerable envy) I realized that there are going to be at least two flute players at GAFilk: [livejournal.com profile] cflute and [livejournal.com profile] ohiblather. (Waves.) "World Inside the Crystal" sounds really good with two flute parts, and I'll bet that "Ship of Stone" would, too. Just saying...

Just a reminder: Party at the Starport on Saturday.

mdlbear: (kill bill)

In a word, "no". At least, not to anyone except the obvious competitor. But I'll get to that later.

Much ink and many pixels have been spilled recently over Oracle's announcement that it will be providing "their own" Linux distribution. In particular, what they'll be doing is exactly what CentOS and White Box do: download a stack of sources from Red Hat, rebuild them without the branding package, and call it "Oracle Linux".

Here are a few articles from InfoWorld that I came across this morning: "Oracle to push Red Hat from support chair" (yes, Oracle will be providing their own, paid support), "Oracle-Ubuntu rumor fizzles" (a lot of observers expected Oracle to simply certify the Ubuntu distribution), "Oracle move a worry for Red Hat" (um... yes; maybe), "With friends like these....(Oracle goes after Red Hat)", and finally this one pointing off to this entry in Dave Dargo's blog at Ingres. Dave "was a longtime Oracle employee and started and ran Oracle's open source program office", and now works for one of Oracle's open-source competitors.

Dave Dargo is understandably skeptical of Oracle's ability to compete with RedHat on the basis of support: "There's a survey from CIOInsight [PDF] that shows Red Hat is the number one vendor for value as rated by CIOs in 2004 and 2005. Where does Oracle fit on that chart? Glad you asked, they ranked 39 out of 41." But nobody seems to be asking themselves who Oracle's real target is.

I'll give you a hint: it isn't RedHat. RedHat has a solid number-one position in enterprise Linux, a solid number-one reputation for support (even if it's a little slow sometimes), and it's really not very likely that any of their customers are going to switch, unless they already want to run an Oracle database server. If they do, they'll be happy to get their OS and their database from the same vendor, and pay the additional 5% for the convenience of getting all their support from the same place. What they get with that support is a guaranteed lack of fingerpointing. As somebody who once bought a RedHat-based server from Dell, I can assure you that that's well worth the price.

So who else makes a big marketing noise about being a one-stop shop for your enterprise database server? Microsoft, of course. That's Oracle's real target. Microsoft, who can tweak their database server and their OS kernel to work perfectly together -- or at least get in their competitors' way when it comes down to running benchmarks. Now Oracle can play that game. Until now, Oracle couldn't offer an "all your software from one vendor, guaranteed no fingerpointing, just runs out of the box" solution. Now they can. It's that simple.

I expect that the impact on RedHat's non-Oracle customers will be minimal. They'll be hit a little more than other distros, because almost all of Oracle's customers were already running RHEL. Maybe they'll be hit a lot more; it's not clear how many of their enterprise customers weren't running Oracle. But RedHat isn't number one anymore, and having multiple vendors in the enterprise (high rent) market can only benefit the Linux market as a whole. Who knows? Maybe it'll convince RH that they should go back to selling $99 boxed sets like they used to do. Because if they don't, Oracle will get all that lovely shelf space in Fry's.

But the hackers will stick to Debian, Ubuntu, Gentoo, Fedora, and Slackware, and probably won't even notice. The IT guys who just want a box at home with the same style of config files as their big servers at work might download Oracle instead of CentOS or White Box. Or might not. Not a problem. RedHat will lose some customers, but if they go back to selling boxed sets at retail they won't lose much, if any, off their bottom line. The big loser, at least if everything goes according to Oracle's plan, will be Microsoft.

And that's as it should be.

mdlbear: blue fractal bear with text "since 2002" (Default)

This song by the lovely, talented, and demented [livejournal.com profile] cadhla puts a whole new spin on the old words, "See you in Hell!"

Go read it.

mdlbear: (audacity)

Bugs was easy. Could still use a little work to even out the amplitude on the guitar track. Results here. That's [livejournal.com profile] chaoswolf on the last line, BTW.

mdlbear: (audacity)

Paper Pings (A Note on the Implementation of RFC1149) was pretty easy, too. That leaves three more apparently easy ones, three or four in need of re-recording a track or two, and seven in need of additional tracks (mostly percussion). No ogg this time -- have to save something for the album...

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