To be fair, most animals don't allow multiple males to lead the herd/pack/whatever, so it's harder for them to form an attack troupe like humans or chimps do. Yes, there are exceptions, but when those packs encounter another pack it's just as vicious a battle. And they will gang up on a lone intruder as well.

I don't think humans or chimps are as "special" as a lot of people would like to believe them to be. We're just tool-using animals at the root of it all.

Properly tuned DB/2 UDB outperforms Oracle so badly it's not even funny. Sorry, dude, but popularity != quality.

At one point I had 5 machines all networked together, but nowadays you can get enough memory and CPU to install six different database servers on a laptop, so I'm down to one machine. I did have two, but my Linux box recently decided to go tits up so I've shifted everything to my WIndblows 7 laptop instead. Someday I'll buy another box for Linux, but it'll be a long time before I can save enough to buy a new machine -- I have other things that need buying first, and I'm on a disability budget nowadays.

Ah, how I miss the glory days of big-dollar contracting and being able to buy a machine with a bi-weekly paycheque without flinching. :)

Most animals fight for mates. The only reason they don't kill each other is it's tougher for them to be lethal about it. But if a moose could head-butt another moose into oblivion to win a mate, I've no doubt it would do it.

That theory assumes that growth can be virtually unlimited, when it's not. At this point in time, the only energy source we have that can deal with providing the transportation, food growing, and energy needs of the population is fossil fuels. If we continue using fossil fuels at an ever increasing rate, global warming is going to decimate food production. And millions upon billions are going to starve to death, if we aren't killed off by some plague or a nuclear war first.

Still, it does bother me that the biggest population growth centers are those least capable of supporting an increasing population. That makes the likelihood of wars that much greater.

It only concerns me in that a separation of Scotland would likely give the Quebec Separatists a second wind and we'd have to put up with their fantasies of keeping Quebec as it is now, keeping the Canadian dollar, and not taking on their share of the national debt. The Quebec separatists have always been in la-la land compared to the rational approach Scotland is following.

Canada has put up with enough nonsense from the separatists in Quebec. Personally I think if they try it again we should just fence off the original Quebec borders and kick the ungrateful fuckers out of the country.

That's almost as big as when Bill Gates stepped down from Microsoft -- it's the end of an era.

It'll be interesting to see what direction Oracle heads without him at the helm.

Okay. So. Do it. I'm not stopping anyone.

Yeah, it's not like Americans spent some $15,000,000,000.00 during Bush's second term to help fight AIDs in Africa, dropping the death rate by some ten percent and saving millions of lives or anything with the President's Emergency Plan For AIDS Relief (although, it seems like the funding may have been cut by the following presidency).

Or... any of the countless foundations that spend billions of dollars conducting charitable work in Africa, such as some of those sponsored by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Burundi, Lesotho, and Malawi, Togo
The Spanish Sahara is gone,
Niger, Nigeria, Chad, and Liberia
Egypt, Benin, and Gabon.
Tanzania, Somalia, Kenya, and Mali
Sierra Leone, and Algiers,
Dahomey, Namibia, Senegal, Libya
Cameroon, Congo, Zaire.
Ethiopia, Guinea-Bissau, Madagascar
Rwanda, Mahore, and Cayman,
Hong Kong, Abu Dhabi, Qatar, Yugoslavia...
Crete, Mauritania
Then Transylvania,
Monaco, Liechtenstein
Malta, and Palestine,
Fiji, Australia, Sudan

Perfect! Then we can wait 5 years for the first draft, 10 years for the final spec, and end up with requirements that are so complex and redundant that it'll take 3 times the memory available on most "smart" devices to implement. *LOL*

I used to be a big Logitech fan. Not any more.

I had one of their trackballs for close to 10 years. I was happy with it and loved it, so I bought a new one when it failed. The new one died in 9 months.

So I bought one of their mice, 'cause I've always had good luck with them. It died in 6 months.

Logitech makes absolute CRAP nowadays. There is no way in hell I'd trust them to keep my house working

I've seen plenty of "fear driven development" over the years, but the "fear" was usually on the part of incompetent employees who were afraid they'd be caught out as idiots and fired. They'd churn paperwork and documentation rather than touching a line of code, because if they broke something, their incompetence would become apparent.

Fear is the mind killer.

But if you're afraid to do your job, it's because you have a problem with confidence in your own skills. Blaming management for such fears just takes the incompetence you exhibit to a whole new level of blame-gaming.

Hey, can we maybe put some effort into cracking down on government spending, too? I mean, it has only been like 240 years. Maybe it's about time we finally do some snipping?

I can't figure out if I'm just too old and grumpy or if operating systems are just desperately uninspired. I remember how exciting a new OS used to be. Couldn't wait to learn about it. To get your hands on it. To install it. To customize it. To get things just right. It has been a good decade since an OS -- OSX, Windows, Linux, etc -- made me do much more than groan and think "maybe I can skip this one and the next one will be interesting". The most thought I find myself giving any of them, now, is to wonder just how much stuff they're going to fuck up that I'm going to have to learn to deal with.

I think the last thing I ever got excited about, OS-wise, was when I gave up on everything and said "I'm sticking with XFCE as much as possible" -- and that was less glee than exasperation.