Posts by fg_swe

Oracle's Java pricing brews bitter taste, subscribers spill over to OpenJDK

Java Business

1.) I guess that at least 50% of large businesses (more than 1 billion revenue) run some type of Java Software. From Eclipse to SAP to Oracle apps.

2.) SUN could easily have transformed herself into a Software Business IF they had demanded, from 2003 onwards, moderate license fees for the Java Compiler, the VM, the JRE and so on. Think of 30 Euros per core per year.

3.) SUN would be a sustainable business and ideally a good steward of Java.

It's a shame they went under after making such a nice contribution to applied computer science.

Cuba

A very poor/starving country because she is run by corrupt ideologoues. They cannot even be as pragmatic as the Chicoms and let SOME entrepreneurship happen.

Cuba was once a major exporter of coffee, now they are an IMPORTER. Same thing with sugar.

Now the Commie-Mafia tells Cubans to eat the banana PEEL, too, as it apparently contains some more calories.

Cuba can easily ship everywhere outside the US and do very nice business. No, they are ruled by a tiny elite of euro-style salloon communists, who all think they should live like a CORRUPT king: no work and live in luxury.

They dumped Batista and instead got Andropov. With Andropov came the inflexible ideology, laziness and inefficiency.

SUN

They designed, developed and maintained an efficient and memory-safe language and never found a way to monetize it.

They bought OpenOffice and gave it away for free, even for commercial use.

They bough MySQL and also gave it away for free.

Eventually they were a software company with a dying hardware business providing the declining revenue and soon negative profits.

Lunacy.

Re: Nobody Got Properly Nurtured

Oracle is under the full control of the U.S. and other governments. Unlike the Mafia they do not take law into their own hands. They do not threaten your or your family's life.

If you do not like to do business with Oracle, just remove all of their products from your computers and they won't bother you.

Then go to IBM for DB/2 and you will prolly have an unpleasant surprise. Harder to install (you need an IBM engineer for that) and most likely not cheaper.

If you do not like the Linux/Java combo, give AS/400+RPG a try. Definitely more expensive and surely locked in as much as locking can go.

Re: Nobody Got Properly Nurtured

Oracle is a well functioning economic (sub-)system. SUN, Cuba and Venezuela are very bad, socialist failures.

Exactly

This massive corporation now had a run of more than 40 years, which went very well. From 2 guys to 170 000 well-paid employees. Their products are used in lots of large corporations. Some of these installations can be replaced by Postgresql and Python. By a massive Rust rewrite.

But guess what ? Larry and his lieutenants will decrease prices IF+WHEN customers really start dropping Oracle. So far it seems customers are overall happy with the arrangement. The rantings of engineers and technicians on the internet matter very little. What matters is that Oracle wins in the comparison ORA|DB2|MSSQL|PSQL or JAVA|RUST|VWST|DELPHI|C#, done by engineering and business managers. So far they seem to do quite well.

Re: About Larry Ellison..........................

Ok, so Birmingham has two issues:

-knife slashing

-a failed Oracle sort-of-ERP introduction

Oh Man

You can always quit Oracle and go to IBM and deal with their sharks. I predict it will not be cheaper or easier.

Or go with Microsoft and discover their pecularities.

If your application is not too big, use PostgreSQL.

Nobody forces you into a relationship with Oracle, but many corporations have one, because they need a high performance database engine with commercial support.

Be a real man and rewrite all Java apps in Rust. Don't complain when they do not have the same support quality.

Not Really

Each and every investment of a company is intended to support her on the long run. It would have been only fair and square to demand a "reasonable" license fee for commercial Java use. Then SUN could have transformed herself from a hardware into a software company.

You are saying the hardware business was no longer good enough to subsidize a complex software system. Subsidies are in the most cases a bad thing, which will distort markets and businesses.

Re: FALSE

Even RHAT/IBM now have to tighten the screws to make sufficient revenue on "support". They will supply patches only to paying, licensed customer

Et Voila

https://www.oracle.com/java/technologies/javase/jdk11-archive-downloads.html

Re: But you're forwarding the principle of capitalism

Sun prolly spend several billion dollars on Java over the years. What they got in "return" was much less than that. They got "goodwill", but their employees needed hard dollars to pay the rent, the health insurance, the food, the car, the family, the vacation.

In the end it is a simple cashflow issue. If you have a massive staff of expensive engineers, you also need a source of revenue to pay for your staff.

Sure

This only "works" because SUN has given away the source code for the Java systems for free. They played the Jesus of the software world and died for IT cheapskates.

Oh Yeah

All these poor corporations such as Daimler, Shell, BP, Exxon, BASF, they have to give their last shirt to Oracle. NOT.

Guess What ?

Oracle is financially strong and stable, BECAUSE they ensure payment on their products.

SUN meanwhile went bankrupt on socialist ideology of "give away complex products for free, because this is the latest fancy ideology".

Nobody Got Properly Nurtured

...by Socialism. See Cuba and Venezuela.

Oracle meanwhile provides 170 000 well-paid, solid jobs for their employees. These people can afford good apartments, good and plenty of food, health insurance and at least one yearly vaction.

It is always amazing how supposedly well-educated engineers and technicians can be stubborn 1di0ts.

FALSE

SUN gave away Java, after having sunk serious money into its development. While sinking even more money into the continued maintenance and improvement of Java. They destroyed the Delphi business in that process, because many developers got accustomed to this socialist model of technology development.

Then SUN had to be rescued from bankruptcy by Oracle.

Oracle is a well-functioning business, which in turn provides 170 000 employees solid and well-paid jobs.

You can argue all day about the specifics of payment for software products, but "totally free" is not an economic model, it is Marxist Stupor. See Cuba, Venezuela where they suffer hunger now.

How did a CrowdStrike file crash millions of Windows computers? We take a closer look at the code

Insane Architecture

We only need this cr4ap because Windows does not have a modern sandboxing concept.

A single exploit in Outlook or a Word macro can hose the entire user's fileset plus all of the user's ODBC connections.

Little wonder we see encryption attacks left and right.

"config files"

It transpires these are in fact similar to Java bytecode or UCSD p code. This bytecode is then interpreted inside kernel mode. Evading MSFT quality control processes.

The interpreter will crash on bad bytecode, as we have witnessed.

What a polish turd.

FALSE

CS is used in thousands of enterprises. One of them will be penetrated by criminals or other enemy actors.

Bingo

Cybernetic attackers will analyze patches in order to attack not yet updated systems.

Patches should be thoroughly tested by the authoring company.

Also, they should be ditributed/staged encrypted on all affected computers and only after that the key should be broadcast and patch actually applied.

LSM Linux Security Modules

LSM also uses kernel level code to control and intercept potentially ALL userspace-to-kernel calls.

Yes, some security things must be done in kernel mode. But with that comes extreme duty of diligence by the "plugin" author. A config file error must never generate a bad pointer, but simply ignoring said config file.

CrowdStrike has a very bad quality assurance in place. The government should fine them for neglicence.

How to maintain code for a century: Just add Rust

Re: Myopic UNIX View

My opinion is that C should be taken down a notch or two. Some commenters depicted it as a forever-standard.

That was the objective of my post.

Algol Use

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1463321/was-algol-ever-used-for-mainstream-programming

Myopic UNIX View

A thorough study of computer history will reveal that C, Unix and Windows are by no means the only "basis" of systems programming.

Rather, C and Unix (and Windows) can be seen as the Hamburger of computing. Quick and dirty, unhealthy creators of the Cyber War Domain.

Algol was already a memory safe alternative to C and Unix in the 1970s. It contained a lot of solid European technology. The beef steak with hand made noodles and a proper salad, in the meals analogy.

Unlike C and Unix, Algol mainframes were not given away "for free" though.

Indonesian government didn't have backups of ransomwared data, because DR was only an option

Re: Double edged sword of Damocles

I am sure the big boys on this planet will want you to collect all your eggs into one basket. Then it is superconvenient for these foxes to clean out your nest thoroughly. Or rather, they have to bring the X Ray machine into only one place.

Could be Worse

Now they know their network is completely insecure. Encryption is not the worst thing to happen. Imagine what more cunning attackers could have done. You know, folks like "equation group"...

Re: "Authorities are instead attempting to decrypt the data"

Of course not. They will call Canberra and London for help. Then they will find out that there is something called "strong cipher".

AI query optimization in IBM's Db2 shows you can teach a tech dinosaur new tricks

Re: Any True DB/2 Experts Around ?

Again, I strongly assume IBM only allows the ANN AI to perform "safe" transformations of the original Query Plan. Worst outcome is bad runtime, but still correct results.

I am also quite sure all the transformations done by "conventional heuristics" are proven to be safe.

After all DB/2 and Oracle run billions of bank accounts !

Re: Optimistic AI

Then you will have slow runtime. Still correct results.

Application ?

Elaborate.

Other Approaches

Safely Transform Query Plan by

+Monte Carlo

+Genetic Mutation

+Simulated Annealing

Re: AI optimizing SQL err well

You can still run EXPLAIN to see the generated plan, I guess.

The AI will not be fully freewheeling...

Re: DB2 has included "DB2" since 1983!

1.) If the AI is only allowed to perform "safe" transformations of the query plan, there is limited worry regarding AI "correctness". No sane software engineer would grant an AI "full authority query plan transformation". AIs are "mostly correct", not "perfect".

2.) ANNs might indeed be a new type of heuristic for query plan optimization. Much more "rule of thumb based" than "statistically, logically based". It will prolly work nicely on standard scenarios and will prolly fail badly on special, extreme cases.

Elaborate

According to your terminology, an optimizing compiler also includes "AI" ?

1.) My understanding is that the query plan mangling will never change end result, but only runtime/resource consumption. AI can only be used for heuristics, similar to existing heuristics in traditional optimizers.

2.) I have seen large enterprises where they run convoluted queries and still wait for hours in queue to get results. The business questions are similar to "how many millions did we lose in winter, in the US, because a component was not that great ?". There exist corporations who really need large scale relational databases to better understand their core business. Much more than just a funny CMS.

Re: Query Plan Optimization Details

Now, if these flimsy web 2.0/key-value/graph "databases" contain 1/1000th of DB/2 query optimizer technology I would be surprised.

Again, relational databases are modern day wonders. They continue to be improved by scientists and engineers, as they are still far from perfect. Most users, including software engineers, never really cared about this technology. They just assume "it works" and only complain when the optimizer fails on an especially convoluted SQL query.

SQL database are on par with the latest jet engines, 3nm semiconductors, metal 3D printing, gas chromatography !

"Obvious"

To your wet computer of 100E9 Neurons and 100E13 Synapses there exists an "obvious" query plan. But for the dumb CPU there might be Billions of alternatives and each of them must be "rated"/"estimated" and then the best one chosen. In reality, the dumb CPU will use some sort of heuristic to boil the billions down to 10000 different plans. Works often, but not always, well.

The premise is that the AI is essentially a novel heuristic for find a good query plan. Any experience from the real world ?

Query Plan Optimization Details

https://www.tridex.org/wp-content/uploads/Db2-Query-Optimization-101.pdf

Well

SQL Database Servers are "as old" as Unix kernels such as Linux, MacOS X and later, iOS.

I am quite sure there are serious teams at IBM, Oracle, MSFT developing incremental improvements of their SQL engines. I would not be surprised to learn that serious percentages of code are not older than five years.

Regarding "Dinosaur"

I fully disagree with this notion. Advanced SQL Database are some of the most advanced systems in existence. As complex as a modern operating system. Critical for almost ANY business operation from accounting to inventory to sales statistics to analytical processing etc.

Relational databases continue to lead the field of databases due to solid theory, good performance, good query plan optimizers and so on.

The "new" key-value databases are merely useful for building massive collections of cat picture sharing systems for teenagers.

Any True DB/2 Experts Around ?

So far I can only read generic nonsense in this forum.

What I can say:

1.) Query Plan Optimization is a Hard Problem. MySQL fails badly in this aspect for complex queries.

2.) For many queries it would be too runtime-expensive to evaluate all possible solutions; heuristics are used.

3.) Maybe AI can add "novel heuristics".

4.) Any query plan, runtime-efficient or not, will produce the same result. AI is not messing with results.

5.) Adding further indices to a DB schema will quickly be a double-edged thing, as index maintenance will also consume serious runtime.

Microsoft answered Congress' questions on security. Now the White House needs to act

Repost

"The most expensive thing that can happen to a government agency is to lose sensitive data to a competing government.

For details, you can ask Karl Dönitz and Isoroku Yamamoto.

Windows must be banned from processing any secret government information, as they are at least 20 years behind the state of the art."

Corruption

Open Source does not have the bribery infrastructure in place. Unlike the $corporation.

Also, good people avoid the government, as it cannot pay competitive wages. Instead they hire armies of losers.

When push comes to shove, a college-dropout oligarch will be the Effective Surgeon General, as we have seen with COVID.

A dark world full of corruption.

Or Is It ?

Maybe they know all the backdoors and how to effectively plug them ?

Outside the Pentagon+NSA, everybody else is a victim to be pwned.

Or(more likely) they are simply corrupt and MSFT pays best.

Microsoft bigwig says the Feds catching Chinese spies in Exchange Online is the cloud working as intended

Oligarchy Disinformation Operations And Malgovernance

Oligarch bribing newspapers: https://www.berliner-zeitung.de/news/gates-stiftung-unterstuetzt-den-spiegel-mit-weiteren-29-millionen-dollar-li.194183

Oligarch buying goverment:

https://www.infosperber.ch/wirtschaft/konzerne/who-geraet-immer-mehr-in-abhaengigkeit-von-bill-gates-co/

https://www.welt.de/politik/deutschland/plus209247817/Umstrittene-Finanzierung-Das-Gates-Dilemma-der-WHO.html

Of course this is absolutely, never, ever related to his Pharma Investments !

Secure Government Email

Postfix

GNUpg

DeltaChat (also uses GNUog)

But alas, no kickbacks possible !

CISA - Censorship America

CISA coordinated with Facebook, Google, youtube, Apple and others in order to squelch any anti-Covid messages of ordinary NATO citizens.

https://judiciary.house.gov/media/press-releases/new-report-reveals-cisa-tried-cover-censorship-practices

https://eu.usatoday.com/story/money/2023/10/03/fifth-circuit-cisa-ruling-biden-first-amendment/71051110007/

https://www.theregister.com/2023/10/04/cisa_barred_from_coordinating_with/

It was essentially a CIA-NSA-ARMY operation designed to facilitate illegal censorship. They seconded their operatives into CISA, so they could avoid legal trouble.

This backfired big time, as people simply used TELEGRAM, provided by Mr Durov "out of Dubai" (believe this at your own cost).

Yes, that's true. Free speech provided by Russia because CIA censors the h3ll out of American services.