Posts by alien anthropologist

Oracle woos open sourcers with free Java web framework

Re: Oracle Universal Installer...

If you want to look at an enterprise ADF application, look at https://support.oracle.com - Oracle's customer support site (valid CSI needed to logon).

This used to be Flash based. The ADF version is a lot slicker.

As for blaming SQL-Developer as a "bloated slowcoach" - how about backing that up with evidence? Am a CLI fan myself and prefer SQL-Plus. Have used SQL-Developer (and have it installed), and find it no different that other SQL GUI tools (like TOAD, Tora, etc).

Governments block YouTube over that video

Re: disease

AC said:

" Well, no, I was actually meaning the poster who pretty much suggested that the only way forward is to nuke everyone who doesn't share his convictions. Interesting responses though, when you consider I was suggesting that a middle ground would be best for everyone."

It was a a tongue-in-cheek verbatim quote from the movie Aliens - where this was a suggestion on how to deal with the problem they faced.

If you take the rod out of your backside, you may realise that the meaning behind this quote is that there are no real solutions to religious fanatics and fundamentalism. From the bible belt in southern US, to the Middle East.

There is no "middle ground". And that is not my opinion. That is what these fanatics are saying and are demonstrating - by killing innocents bystanders (like the 8 South Africans in Kabul).

disease

Religion is a disease that infects the mind. It has, unfortunately, a very poor cure rate.

Solution? Take off. Nuke the planet from orbit.

Only way to be sure...

From the Department of WTF: New USB tampon flash drive

Re: general what?

> PS. Imagine seeing 2nd-hand ones for sale on e-bay - any takers?

That depends on where the USB ..er "device", was inserted to?

I can already see a vending machine opportunity for used USB devices in Japan...

IBM's DB2 database update does time travel, gets graphic

Re: Nice Marketing Blurb

Downvoted for posting a *fact*!?

Hell, you must really hate those spells of reality (dealing with facts and stuff), in-between being a giant bearded muscled warrior, with a hot elf as wife, in WoW...

Re: Nice Marketing Blurb

> Oracle's the same (ish). Big download just to get a driver. Bah!

Untrue. Oracle InstantClient download is small and does not even need to be installed using a traditional installer. See <http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/topics/linuxsoft-082809.html> for the x86_64 Linux driver download.

Simply download. Unzip. Set your environment variables (PATH or LD_LIBRARY_PATH depending on o/s, and optionally point TNS_ADMIN to you Oracle network/tns config file). Use.

Virident flasher claims Oracle database streak record

@kevinclosson.wordpress.com

See www.oracle.com/us/products/database/exadata/database-machine-x2-2/overview/index.html for the statement quoted.

But the actual core number comparison aside. How do you scale I/O on a 80 CPU SMP server with processes on each of the 80 cores hitting the I/O subsystem?

The I/O layer needs to scale with the number of cores and increase I/O demands. And that is what Exadata does by distributing the I/O across multiple storage servers and using QDR Infiniband as fabric layer.

This is not about Exadata specifically. This about scalability. SMP does not scale as well as MPP in cases like this. With a MPP architecture the I/O fabric layer can be scaled from QDR to higher speeds. The storage servers PCI flash caches can be increased. More storage servers can be used for striping data. Etc.

With a single SMP h/w box - how do you scale? How do you for example add additional PCI busses or increase PCI bus speed? It becomes a large and expensive doorstop that cost even more to replace...

Marketing Speak

"For Exadata products, the 1 million IOPS is typically achieved using multiple 'storage server' units. Our performance was achieved using single server with multiple FlashMAX cards."

So they ran a single Oracle instance on a 80 core server? And then that is compared to an Exadata Database Machine? How?

The path between CPUs and local I/O bus is a lot shorter than Exadata's path from CPU over Infiniband to a storage server and via a s/w layer through PCI flash to spinning rust. Yet, Exadata is faster!

80 cores is a lot more than the typical Exadata Database Machine. A full X2-2 rack comes with eight 2-socket database servers. Significantly less cores.

This is a traditional SMP versus MPP comparisons - that is almost always skewed as the architectures are drastically different. Of course, that does not stop sales from their marketing speak and bullshit.

The bottom line that a single 80 core NEC server provides LESS I/O scalability and performance than a much smaller (core wise) Exadata DB Machine. WTF are they going to do if the Oracle database processing scales across all 80 cores and do some serious I/O? Which is WHY you want distributed storage servers in order to provide the scalability for the I/O fabric layer.

NEC is seriously missing the point on how to use Oracle and how to make a database scale. SMP is not it. Been there. Done that. MPP is. Been there and still am using it.

Jackpot: astronomers tag Goldilocks planet

Mankind to the stars

"Red dwarfs? That's the shitty part of the local neighbourhood.Your probes are likely to be jacked and stripped for parts by local alien minorities."

And that is what mankind will take to the stars. Prejudice. Racism. Hatred. And wait till a local earth boy falls in love with an alien chick and starts banging her... KKK? Evangelical Christians? Fundamentalists? Taliban?

You ain't seen nothing of how truly fucked up mankind is...

Here's hoping that your species never set foot outside your solar system.

Iran spy drone GPS hijack boasts: Rubbish, say experts

So the question has been answered...

as to what happens when a drone gets a BSoD over enemy airspace...

Her Majesty's £444m court IT system can't even add up fines

Lemme guess...

Libra is written in Java by a bunch of Javaheads, followers of The Faith of Java.. that (as usual) have not a fricken clue about relational databases and data modeling - and did not design the system to add up metrics across entities...?

I've lost count how many Java fails like this I've seen. But then reasoning and logic are lost causes when dealing with Javaheads - as one would expect dealing with religious zealots.

BUSTED! Secret app on millions of phones logs key taps

Galaxy S2

Had a look (using a terminal app) on my S2 (running a factory Gingerbread) and not iq libs of any sort in /system/lib.

Phew?

Ex-NASA space shuttle to touch down on aircraft carrier

@The title missed all 4 arrestor cables.

Doubt that it could be done - the glide slope is a lot steeper than a normal approach with a longer round out that eats more runway space.

But armchair pilots can have a bash at simulating this using x-plane.com - as it at least got a half-decent flight model for the Orbiter (unlike the older Microsoft title).

But then it would be more fun to rather shoot touch and go's on Paris...

Pure Storage attacks EMC heartland

Wait...

... Fibre?

Screw fibre. Make it work via SRP over 40Gb Infiniband and I'll buy.

Blue Screen of Death gets makeover for Windows 8

Huh?

> "Last time I checked it ends up in Event Viewer, are they really power users? Don't they know that event viewer actually gives more information?"

Really?

Does this include an error in the file system driver that prevents anything to be written to disk (including updating event log)?

Does this include h/w errors that prevents the file system buffer cache from being flushed, resulting in no data being written to disk (including flushing the I/O buffer for the event log)?

You are making one too many assumption about the usability of the event log to diagnose a h/w crash afterwards.

WikiLeaks releases full searchable US secret cable files

@pctechxp

In that case, before condemning Assange, look at your politicians and government and their reasons for putting their young men (and women) in harms way.

Their reasons are even more questionable than those you accuse Assange of.

Assange (wikileaks) is a symptom. Not the problem.

Huh?

So JA is the sole guilty party in all this? Not Manning? Not US military security (or lack thereof) that allowed a private to access and download classified stuff? Not the newspapers that too gladly are publishing the material? Not Joe Public that want to read all about it?

Or on a deeper philosophical level, not the society you have that consists of borders and distrust and dirty secrets between (so-called) sentient beings that share the same damn friggen dna and pale blue dot in this universe?

And then you, using the handle zen, which implies a deeper and balanced and spiritual understanding, blame the bullet for the killing. That is quite pathetic. But not surprising as far as your species go...

Oracle's Africa dealings under FBI, SEC, DoJ investigation

WTF?

> And all the information about this is contained in Oracle RDBMS to which you need to run a SQL report created by an Oracle process to get at it

Huh? What an ignorant statement to make.

The client supplies the SQL source code. Be that BO, Cognos or whatever BI or reporting client system used. An Oracle server processes "compiles" the SQL code into a cursor and executes it. The output which is then consumed by the client process.

Standard client-server. Standard architecture used in RDBMS systems.

Or did you simply want to raise the bar of the definition of an El Reg commentard?

Google Apache mod speeds into outside world

@AC

But you fail to understand that Google does not evil. So SPDY is good.

And oh look... the oompa loompas are going to dance for you now to take your mind of such evil thoughts..

Mozilla to auto-block unwanted Firefox add-ons

@Peter2: denying write permissions to the folder

> Is this too difficult?

Yes. What do you (aka the kernel or file system driver) use as ACL to determine that process foo may have write access to a specific folder? How does it determine that process foo is foo and not its notorious cousin, fubar? Keep in mind that creating a signature for process foo will fail when foo itself is updated. What about advance user Johnie that wants to use process screwup to access the folder and make some manual mods and changes?

Security is complex. Period.

Wikipedia: It's not for girls

Correction

> In general on the internet it's safe to assume that a fair number of people claiming to be female are actually men or teenage boys

..and the remainder are undercover cops and law enforcement agents.

No. There are no women on the Internet. Except on female safe web yards like Twitter and Facebook...

Oracle buys Ksplice

@Stewart McKenna

Stewart McKenna said:

> Our Oracle RAC cluster is harder to maintain than 10 stand alone servers...

I manage 4 RACs. One is a 12 node RAC.

Cannot recall the last time I had to do sysadmin (Linux) or sysdba (Oracle) maintenance on the 12 node one as it simply works.

If it is hard to maintain then the house was build on sand. RAC is only as robust as the underlying hardware enables it to be.

My pet peeve is looking at others building RACs and using 100Mb Ethernet for the Interconnect. Or shared 1Gb Ethernet for both the public network and Interconnect. Or using shared switches for the Interconnect. Etc.

Performance and robustness of such RACs are essentially non existent. RAC is not designed to be run on a "garbage" h/w layer.

@AC 11:5

AC said:

> What's the point in buying a company for a technology which anyone

> else can fork and use themselves for free?

What does the clever man do? Buy the recipe how to make good beer? Or employe the talent behind that beer recipe?

Source code is.. well, source code. The savy that went into making that source code is worth a lot more than the source code itself.

Database high priest mud-wrestles Facebook

@Destroy All Monsters

> SQL is just the crappy insanely dumb query language on top of whatever your database is

What an utterly idiotic and ignorant statement to make.... SQL is not crap. SQL is not dumb. SQL is the fastest method to crunch data on SQL-based databases. And it can scales very well.

Of course - this also depends how SQL is used. A simple thing like using bind variables is often ignored. SQL used as a mere I/O layer like one would treat kernel device read() and write() calls.

That type of ignorant use of SQL... no wonder your application and database performance sucks.

On my databases - runninng a 1000+ SQLs per second is the norm. Not the exception. And there's no way in hell that you could ever get that performance by pulling db data into a client process, crunching it there and ship it (across process and memory and even h/w boundaries) back to the database.

The biggest monster of all?

Ignorance.

Moderatrix kisses the Reg goodbye

Cheers...

..and good luck lass.

Oracle cranks Sun Fire servers with Xeon E7s

@AC Add it!

> Looks like it has plenty of expansion capability. Drop a Mellanox Connect X2 in there and have fun. Solaris & Linux both already support IB.

In the corporate environment you do not want to build your own storage servers with support for Infiniband as fabric layer.

Yes, we have done it (lab setup, srp targets). But the amount of politics, the type of support/maintenance expected, management 's "aversion" to (utter ignorance of) Open Source, corporate conservatism and so on, are all factors that say , bad fscking idea.

It is many times easier to simply buy a "certified" storage server that has IB (SRP) support.

However.. looking at the market. This is pretty scarce indeed. And then only for highly specialised market segments like video editing. Or horrible expensive products like Exadata for the the Oracle db market.

Which begs the question. Why is Exadata's approach to the storage fabric layer, which is hugely successful, not being used in other (Oracle/Sun) products? Or by other vendors?

And....

..where's the Infiniband and SRP support for storage?

Or is taking (some) of what makes Exadata storage perform so well, not acceptable to Larry as he needs the extra(data) bucks to pay for mistress/golfing buddy salary/avgas for bizzjet/new bizzjet/buying the next America's cup or wtf rich people do with too much money?

Red Hat's Oracle shot: The Unbreakable Database?

@doperative

> That would be news to me and I've been following the technology sector for too long to remember

Well, it did made a difference. The Oracle db market is significant. And when it supported RHEL, corporate doors opened for RedHat.

Have first hand experience at that - getting Linux/RHEL into a major corporate. Today Linux (and not HP-UX or Solaris or Windows) are the preferred o/s for database platforms.

Granted, you can argue about the extend this impacted RedHat's market share and turnover. But it would be foolish to argue that it did not.

@Conner

> once Oracle admit that Exadata is not the answer to Big Data

Admit that is is the storage component of the fastest and most scalable database cluster platform in the world, supporting both OLAP and OLTP?

Admit that it is based on Infiniband that is far superior than using Gig Ether?

And they have already admitted that Exadata and Oracle DB Machines were the fastest and widest product uptakes they ever had in the market. It is. That. Damn. Good.

It will be very tough for anyone to enter this niche market that Oracle has grabbed.

Virgin IT dept shocked by donkey-shagging Taliban

@AC 10:11

> I thought camels were more their style ...

Not really. Young boys apparently are in Afghan culture (and they in turn become abusers when adult). And Afghan men do what Afghan men do when far from home, when sharing blankets.

Anyway, this was how they rolled there according to Doug Beattie in his book... a good read about the fighting there from a grunt perspective.

Infantry. The Queens of The Battlefield. They get it from both sides.

Nothing new....

Back in the 90's when corporates, this part of the planet, first got web access it was still pretty much unfiltered.

Worked at a major corporate who had an admin looking at web logs to manage and control Internet access. So porn sites were not blocked - but access seen via the logs and then reported to management by this admin as part of his job description.

The very same admin that told me of what the best of the best bestiality sites were that he found on the net... <shudder>

Who watch the watchers?

Admin: Gmail phishers stalked victims for months

活泉

Like in 喷泉很臭狗屎 ?

Mine's the one with the Babel Fish in the pocket...

German salesmen rewarded with meticulously organised orgy

@AC. I'm all for having a good time

Wet your willy in the same pot?

I believe the correct English expression is 'porridge' - as in 'I prefer not to stir the porridge'. A sentiment I heartily echo.

(yes, you can learn a lot about English expressions listening to a NY Rock Station, streaming via the net, that has a regular Englishman in the studio)

Linux kernel runs inside web browser

It can run DOS games...

.. but does it run 'em slow enough?

Now where did I put my copy of Ancient Art of War...

Oracle: Quit messin' and marry Hadoop!

@Steve Loughran

Oh yeah... I forgot that in today's all powerful and important blogosphere, claims like that in https://blogs.apache.org/foundation/entry/statement_by_the_asf_board1, can be taken as what the legal judgement would be of a court of law, made by one or more (highly qualified) judges.

Sheez... but there's a lot of smoke in here...

@Steve Loughran

Your point 13.

If Oracle is indeed not (quote) "meet(ing) its legal requirements" (unquote) ito of providing ASF with a TCK license, then ASF has a legal recourse and should be talking via lawyers in court to the Oracle suits?

As this is not the case (did I miss something in the press about ASF suing Oracle over TCK licensing?), you are in fact blowing smoke up orifices... just as the Oracle suits are...

I have already predicted that..

...Oracle v12 will be called 12c. :-)

8i and 9i = internet

10g and 11g = grid

12c .. = cloud computing

The Oracle database product is just more than a RDBMS. It is a full blown and very able and scalable data processing platform. Have been for many years now - due to assimilating technologies traditionally the domain of the application layer.

Today you can put the entire app layer into Oracle - and it will often perform better and scale faster than using a separate J2EE or .Net app layer... and cheaper. With reduced moving parts that makes everything simpler.

But 11g lacks ito true cloud and distributed computing. Supporting Hadoop and similar technologies... That would be of a major benefit to most/all Oracle customers.

Sure, you may not like Larry and his suits and their approach to Open Source, pricing, marketing and what not.

But that aside, technically Oracle is a damn fine and sexy data processing platform and superior to a lot of other products. It makes evolutionary sense for it to consume something like Hadoop.

Plague of US preachers falsely claim to be Navy SEALs

Reminds me..

..of being back in town on a long weekend pass a very long time ago. Was a CO (candidate officer) about to become a 2nd Lt.

Ran into a girl I knew from our high school matric class. We started chatting about our old school friends. She mentioned one that is now an officer... the very same guy was doing a NCO course at the same base that I was.

And before I could tell her that he lied, she told me that this guy told her that I was in the special forces.

Hehe.. kind of funny that he tried to cover himself that way.

I told her it was bullshit. Got too much respect for the guys in special forces to claim to be one of them. Served with them (even had one as a company commander). Have family that were in special forces. Takes something special to wear that title and badge - something that most of us do not have.

Acer boss quits after board disses his future strategy

The title is required, and must contain letters and/or digits.

Have 2 Acers myself. A notebook and a netbook (both running Linux btw).

Happy with both pieces of kit - does the job that it was bought to do.

Would I recommend buying Acer?

No.

I would however recommend not placing your head into your, or a 3rd party, ass. Do not base your purchase decisions on the (often irrelevant) opinions of others.

Instead evaluate what is available, at what cost, and what suits *your* specific needs and expectations the best.

Microsoft says exec took secret 'trove' to Salesforce

Or..

> Or maybe he took the documents, then quit?

In such a case the guys wearing suits are unleashed. And not only on ex-employee, but also on company that employed him.

The title is required, and must contain letters and/or digits.

Fail Microsoft.

SOP for employees at that level is 2 to 3 months notice period. When termination of employment is received, that employee's access to the office building is immediately revoked (I have seen them being escorted out of the building within minutes of HR receiving the termination letter). All network accounts of the employee are locked. Allowed into the building once only with a security or IT staff member to clear their desk of personal belongings.

The remainder of the notice period is paid leave - taking the employee out of the loop. And as part of the terms of employment, the employee is not allowed so much as saying "hello" to any of the corporate clients.

Damage that can be caused by that employee going to work for a competitor can be very effectively contained.

Facebook system messages subverted by French pranksters

Sorry...

..but someone has to say it:

My Hovercraft is Full of Eels.

NYT casts Assange as 'arrogant' (with a little 'Peter Pan')

The title is required, and must contain letters and/or digits.

Seems like some did not like my comment that the 1st Amendment is not the one of the best traditions of the US of A... Undoubtedly,. it once was. As the US once was "a symbol of freedom" and the "home to the oppressed and persecuted". Before it started illegal wars over oil. Before it had detention without trail. Before it had extraordinary redition. Etc and etc and etc...

The US of A and many of its citizens have become exactly that which their forefathers feared and fled.

The title is required, and must contain letters and/or digits.

".. run up against the First Amendment and the best traditions of this country.”

Jeez... I just threw up a bit in my mouth. The First Amendment as one of the best traditions of the US of A? As likely as 419 e-mail turning out to be the real thing and making you a millionaire...

Egypt slams lid on protests, Twitter

phobioc commentard

"In Egypt's case it is the Muslim's who are demonstrating."

As much as I dislike all forms of formal religion (the bureaucracy between us and god), your statement is utter and pure bullshit.

No it not "Muslims" that are demonstrating.

It is men. It is women. It is students. It is professors. It is middle class Egypt. And on the religion side, it is Muslims and Christians.

But no, you want to taint the protests with a Muslim brush. WTF for?

COBOL drinks from cloudy fountain of youth

Huh?

"Visual COBOL R3 converts COBOL's English-like statements – the essence that has made the language so accessible for programmers during the last 50-odd years – into files that the machine understands."

Accessible!? WTF!!

This "essence" is EXACTLY what makes COBOL such a shitty language. There is not a single fricken reason to "talk English" to a computer to instruct it. English did not evolve from man-machine interaction. It is a clunky language at best to use to instruct computers. Which is why COBOL is, was and forever will be, a MASSIVE FAIL. Perform varying my ass...

And yes, I have written enough COBOL in the 80's, even re-entrant COBOL (courtesy of transaction monitors), to back this statement up with real experience.

First DOS-based malware celebrates silver jubilee

Early DOS attack..

I once accidentally nuked the company LAN. By having a look at what this Doom v1 Shareware thing was* during lunchtime - discovering the multiplayer option and starting a multiplayer game on a colleague's desktop and mine.

I shut it down after a few minutes - and did not do the same on the colleague's desktop. Did not know that the early multiplayer version of Doom used IPX broadcasting. And this desktop was hammering the network hard with broadcasts. Hard enough for our Windows-NT 3 servers (also running IPX stacks - Novel ruled the LAN back then) to choke and die.

* Did a lot of network R&D and development back then, so I had a "technical interest" too in looking at the s/w - and not just being dumbstruck by the awesome graphics of the first real FPS. ;-)

Shocked mum muzzles foul-mouthed toy mutt

Fuck should only be used..

.. to describe said woman.

So here goes. She is a fucking idiot.

Too bad she has contributed to mankind's gene pool. We need less fuckwits in the human race - and that will be a Good Thing (tm) all round. From politics to religion and everything in between.

Enraged wives hand Pakistani polygamist vicious shoeing

IT angle?

You must be a blind idiot not to see the direct correlation to designing an application that combines hardware and software by utilising resources correctly - and that grabbing too much resources is inherantly dangerous.

It is a perfect analogy for those dumbtards that run multiple Oracle database instances on a single server, imagining that this is somehow better and more scalable.

4chan hit by DDoS assault

There are no patriot hackers....

.. but there is a government "computer warfare" department that's getting a lot of black funds via the US defense budget - and they have been waiting for just such an opportunity to flex their muscle and test drive their capabilities...