Wednesday, December 03, 2003

It's become cheaper to build Oracle than to buy it This is a posting on the pghackers newsgroup about a company interested in sponsoring the PostgresSQL development of a subset of enterprise Oracle database functionality that they require. It's amazing that even Oracle can now lose sales to 'No thanks, we'll roll our own.' Actually, considering the cost of an Oracle site-license (or RAC licenses) I'm surprised this took so long. 10:11:54 AM      comment []  trackback []

Phil Greenspun -- 'Why get educated if your own school won't hire you?' http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/2003/12/01 This one already appeared on slashdot, but check out the followup from Al Essa, Director of IT at MIT/Sloan: http://openacs.org/forums/message-view?message_id=149581 Phil is the master of the straw man argument -- throwing out an idea that has some nerd-appealling logic, but finely crafted to be pure provocation. This particular one was short on logic, but made up for it by pushing the offshore-outsourcing and Microsoft buttons at the same time. It fun to see folks take the flamebait on his blog, but most frequent readers just play along and figuratively nod their heads in appreciation. 9:57:46 AM      comment []  trackback []

Busted Talli accused my last post of being over the top nerdy. In my defense, I should probably add that the real reason I got a GPS was because my sense of direction is quite bad. I have had difficulty finding my way somewhere even with the help of Mapquest maps (because of construction, driving at night missing turns, etc.) I like the idea of always knowing where you are, it's just terrific. But speaking of over-the-top nerdy, Tom Lord (of distributed version control 'arch' fame) has now decided that the world needs another dialect of scheme to use as an arch scripting language. The man has absolutely no fear of reinventing the wheel ... first version control, now a lisp dialect. It will be interesting to see if he has as much success as he has had with arch (which sounds very much like a better wheel). 9:53:49 AM      comment []  trackback []