Softwar by Matthew Symonds

Author:Matthew Symonds
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2015-07-22T16:00:00+00:00

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1. LE writes: Simply stated, shared-nothing clusters get less reliable as you add computers to the cluster. An eight-machine shared-nothing cluster is one fourth as reliable as a two-machine shared-nothing cluster. Hard to believe, but true.

2. LE writes: Right. We should have held the pricing change until the following week. It was really dumb to mix it with the RAC announcement.

3. LE writes: San Jose Airport had a bizarre noise abatement program based on the weight of an airplane rather than the noise it made. My quiet plane was banned from landing after 11 P.M. because it was too “heavy.” Noisier planes were allowed to land anytime because they were “lighter” than my airplane. Call me crazy, but I thought that noise ordinances had to do with restricting noisy airplanes, not heavy airplanes. The judge agreed. But in the meantime the press wrote lots of nasty articles about my not obeying the rules. It was quite the little local controversy.

4. LE writes: The Linux operating system running on Intel servers is rapidly on its way to becoming the most popular hardware/software combination in large data centers. This presents a great opportunity for Oracle because our unique clustering technology lets us deliver our high-performance, fault-tolerant database on low-cost Intel servers running Linux. We can’t continue to let Microsoft be the only software company to exploit low-cost Intel hardware.

5. LE writes: Every survey that asked customers what database they were using or planning on using showed Oracle gaining share against IBM. A Morgan Stanley survey had Oracle six times more popular than IBM’s DB2 under enterprise applications like SAP and Siebel.

6. LE writes: The most respected analyst in our industry is Chuck Phillips. When Chuck publishes his survey results, he includes all of his supporting data and his methodology. Anyone can independently verify the data and double-check his calculations and conclusions. Chuck is completely devoted to the scientific method, invented by Sir Francis Bacon more than four hundred years ago. Betsy Burton uses a more modern approach: she publishes her results without any supporting data or details about her methodology. You can’t check a damn thing. You just have to take her word for it.

7. LE writes: If you speak out in support of small, unimportant innovations that fly in the face of widely held beliefs—I do it all the time—you are likely to be dismissed as stupid or arrogant, and that’s pretty much the end of it. However, if you defend a really big idea that challenges widely held beliefs, you’re likely to generate a mass of hatred, and you just might pay for it with your life. When Galileo defended Copernicus, he was ridiculed, imprisoned, and then threatened with death unless he recanted. Charles Darwin cautiously postponed publishing On the Origin of Species and The Descent of Man for more than twenty years, but that judicious delay did not save him from vicious personal attacks coming from all ranks of contemporary society, from the dons at Oxford to the man in the street.

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