"It's not so much which is better and more reliable these days (it's certainly centralized control and storage, aka 'The Cloud'), but who controls that central point" - Which introduces a third point of failure. How do I know, with any degree of certainty, that the person administering the server(s) is competent? Or that their management is giving them the right tools and the right priorities to protect my data? The short answer is that I don't.

I'm not suggesting that you are not competent to do it or that all sys admins are not competent. That would be silly. What I am suggesting is that it is a leap of faith.

Good question. I'm talking about the cloud. All communication between your PC and the cloud based application occurs over TCP/IP/routers etc. which are not secure. They can be made secure if you are willing to go to a lot of effort and are willing to give up come conveniences.

Can a PC be compromised? Sure. The usual attack vectors are the internet and physical access to the keyboard.

My point is that you can more easily control the data on an PC. You can even, if you choose, disconnect it from the internet and shut down that avenue of attack entirely. I do this on an old virtual machine that I run sometimes. It runs on Windows 2000 server, which Microsoft no longer patches. I have it completely sandboxed. If you open a browser it will only connect to LocalHost, which is all I need.

Single point of failure and security. Some applications might lend themselves to running exclusively in a browser and some will not.

the vulnerabilities are most likely in the operating systems/database/web servers etc. SAP, of course, runs on top of all that. The SAP software itself is not insecure but there are a lot of moving parts :-)

" I was a Division 1 college athlete. (wrestling if you care)" - Then I think you will agree that wrestling is not exactly a big money sport at the college level. Your experience was quite probably different that it was for many football and basketball players. And this is my point. Once you introduce money into the equation everything changes. Much like life in general. By the way, I think it's a shame that money gets siphoned away from your sport towards the "big" sports, but that's another topic for another day.

"Yes there are some schools that in football and basketball seriously bend or just plain ignore the rules in the pursuit of wins" - Certainly. And we only know about the ones that get caught.

"While the NCAA is a hugely hypocritical organization, most college athletes are legitimately there to try to get a degree" - The NCAA is one of the most corrupt organizations in America. Yes, most college athletes are there to get a degree but I'm talking about the elite athletes. The ones that make the money for the schools. That is where the cheating occurs.

What I really meant to say was a large minority. In other words, very few people. Thanks for bringing that to my attention.

Bingo. If i had a dollar for every time I heard some windbag manager say that I would be retired right now. It's never one more push. Once you agree to the first one it becomes standard operating procedure. Project timelines will continue to get squeezed as long as they can get away with it.

For me the answer was to become a contractor. If you want me to work 80 hours a week you pay me for 80 hours. And if I decide I don't want to work 80 hours I find another contract. It's surprising how a crisis becomes a non-crisis once management discovers that they have to actually pay you for every hour you work.

"The overall college graduation rate of about 80% among retired NFL players is much higher than the general population rate of 30%" - Oh please. Let's not try to compare the "diplomas" that football players get with real diplomas that are, you know, actually earned. Yes there are some notable exceptions. Steve Young and Andrew Luck come to mind as football players that also excelled academically. I'm sure there are others but they are in the vast minority.

College football is a big money business. Players bring in big money for their schools. The players have to keep up a minimum GPA or they are not allowed to play. If they don't play the school doesn't do as well and loses money. So the schools "help" the players by making sure they keep up their GPA. Help meaning they steer them towards fluff courses. At the end of it they give them a diploma, basically as payback for all the money they helped the school earn.

Claiming that they have earned the diploma in any real academic sense is laughable.

I'll never forget seeing that press conference with Dexter Manley, the former Washington Redskins player. That poor guy could barely read or write and yet somehow he had "earned" a college diploma. I blame the NCAA and the schools for allowing this to happen. It was really sad to see him struggling to read a few simple sentences. He didn't fail college. College failed him.

"It's not even close a better fit, especially for consumers" - Consumers is a different angle. I was looking at it from a company standpoint. Your point on licencing costs is well taken.

I haven't used SAP software personally but it has a reputation for being extremely complex and difficult to customize. SAP R/4 (I believe that is the newest version) has had a very slow adoption rate. Partly because customers spent so much money (in some cases 10's of millions of dollars) getting R/3 to work and are terrified to touch anything.

R/4 uses a proprietary database (HANA) rather than Oracle or DB/2 or one of the open source databases.

It might sound like I'm knocking SAP but I'm not. They face the same challenges that Oracle does. Big, cumbersome, complex. Lengthy and expensive upgrades. High maintenance fees.

Personally I'm not really sold on cloud computing. It doesn't have the flexibility that some companies need. Workday, for example, simply cannot be customized in any way. You can configure it in many different ways but you cannot add your own code to make it do something unique. In my experience, everyone customizes their software. Some studies have shown that the cloud model can actually cost more money in the long run.

But Oracle and SAP see a need to have cloud offerings for their customers that want it. Salesforce is going to be a very attractive prize for someone.

Oracle has been trying to get its foot in the cloud, so to speak, for a while now. Their success has been mixed, to be charitable. Oracle doesn't need the CRM software that Salesforce has since they already have Siebel and PeopleSoft and JD Edwards CRM offerings. What they do need is a proven cloud platform and that's where Salesforce comes in.

Salesforce already struck a deal to use the Oracle database as its back end. Salesforce also comes with a development platform (they call it Force) that allows you to extend and enhance what they deliver. You can even create your own bolt on applications. This fits in perfectly with their on premise offerings (PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, etc.) that allow you to do exactly the same thing.

Oracle could build out HR and Financials components, leveraging the Salesforce cloud platform, giving them a true Enterprise level offering that nobody else has on a cloud platform.

But what I really think the driving factor here is the destruction of Workday. Workday was founded by Dave Duffield, the former CEO of PeopleSoft. Duffield founded the company and lost out in a bitter hostile takeover by Oracle. Workday, although still very small and not yet profitable, has been nibbling at Oracles heels. Ellison sees the writing on the wall. If he waits much longer Salesforce will be too big for them to buy. This gives him the opportunity to buy one rival and crush another all in one fell swoop. Classic Ellison move.

" The US system (school funding from local property tax) then adds a second advantage to those same children, rather than even attempting to redress the balance for the disadvantaged kids."

Sadly you are correct. It does give children of affluent families a (theoretical at least) advantage.

The problem is what to do about it. Putting aside for a moment the very rich, what do you say to those people that have worked hard to buy a home in a neighborhood with good schools? If school funding is somehow leveled out what happens to the value of those homes, now that it is no longer seen as being in a "good" school district relative to other neighborhoods?

Rich people can always send their kids to private schools and hire tutors and give their kids advantages that the rest of us don't have. Nothing we can do about that.

What about the upper middle class family making, say, $200K a year? They worked hard and made sacrifices to buy a 500K home in a good neighborhood so that their kids can go to one of the best schools. Is it fair to punish them by raising their taxes or reducing the funding to their schools?

These sorts of things always start out as "punish the rich" and end up being "punish the middle class" because the rich can always find a way around these things.

At the risk of sounding harsh, perhaps *some* disadvantaged people should be taking a look in the mirror. Maybe, just maybe, they play a part in their current circumstances. Of course there are some people that find themselves in a tough spot through no fault of their own. Society should, and must, take care of those people.

But there are some - maybe many - that are there because they made bad choices. Some of them are the kids at the back of the class in high school - goofing off and not doing their homework and generally not giving a shit. Didn't go to college. No skills. Drunk. High.

Sorry but I don't feel much an obligation to support these types of people. If people are lazy then no amount of handouts is going to help in the long term.

is that programming is just like any other skill. You can learn it if you work at it. Sure, some people are born with a natural aptitude for it. I'm pretty sure that the first time Linus Torvalds tried computer programming he could probably tell that he was going to be really good at it. I'm sure that after Michael Jordan's first game of pickup basketball he probably knew that he was a lot better than the other kids he played against.

Those are the rock stars and every profession has them. But that doesn't mean that you can't be a good programmer by simply working at it and learning your craft. Some people are late bloomers. Effort and dedication can take you a long way. It's a mistake to discourage people simply because they are not rock stars.

I think I'm a pretty good programmer but I'm not in the top 1%. I'm OK with that. I enjoy it and I make a good living at it. I'll never be as good as Linus but I'm happy to be doing it for a living.

Well, that's a noble thought. It would be nice if everyone had a fair chance right from the start. It would be nice if we could "fix" schools simply by throwing more money at the problem. But the issue is much more complex than that. Certainly money helps but at a certain point it doesn't.

The USA spends more money per student than any other country in the world and yet overall we are far behind many other countries in academic achievement. The problem, as I see it, is the gap between the best schools and the worst schools. The best schools are world class and the worst ones are horrible.

Is it just a coincidence that the best schools tend to be in affluent areas? Probably not but I think it's more than money that contributes to it. The best teachers tend to want to teach at the best schools. Successful parents tend to be better role models. The kids of those parents learn from a very young age the importance of school.

I think what we really need to do is take a closer look at where the money goes rather than how much we spend. Teachers get a bad rap but a lot of the money gets sucked up by highly paid administrators and other "middle management". We spend way too much money on sports. We don't invest enough in trade schools. Far too many jobs require a bachelors degree when it is completely unnecessary in many cases.

Hahaha...every episode :-D