It occurs to me this is Apple's way of spreading out the "early-adopter tax" over their product life cycle. Their new graphics hardware isn't available yet, but will be soon. In three to five years, a new Mac Pro will be at least a generation behind, graphics-wise. The generic hardware that follows will benefit from manufacturing and integration efficiencies, as well as driver support. Apple customers will have underwritten all that.

Bravo. Very well said. I wonder why using specific software is so often compared to a religious choice-- after conversion to PHP, Oracle, jquery, .NET, whatever, then no other software can be used or contemplated. Bah. Every paged email client, like Yahoo, gmail, or even Outlook's web client, is a dog for managing any more than a screenful of emails at a time.

To get to the other side?

Just like in the US, the healthcare system guarantees that no valuable money is wasted on actually delivering healthcare to actual people.

I have been doing this for the last 18 months, since our sys admin was terminated. Write stuff down. Find a secure place (or two) on the network to store an Excel spreadsheet with IP addresses, dns names, and credentials for servers, databases, routers, printers. Encryption keys, vendor support websites. Save root, administrator, and sys passswords, and any other admiinistrivia, in some sort of order you can decipher in 3 months at midnight. I use worksheets to identify categories of information.. It's probably more secure to not keep this stuff all in one spreadsheet, but the fact is the document becomes a corporate asset. You can be the keeper of it, and the central answer person--lots of parties need that kind of information. Back it up, encrypt it, whatever. Where I work, only the CIO, two database admins, and the network admin have read permissions on it. Do not print it out, or carry it on a usb stick that can be misplaced. It's an admirable gesture, but probably masochistic to try and store this information in a secure database, because that may run on the server that goes down at midnight when you most need that list. Plus it's freeform-- we keep different columns of data for OS's, servers, cert keys, routers, databases, etc.. It's also nice to have it handy and organized, so you can paste it into vendor inquiries. Saves money and consternation next time you don't have to look up the info ad hoc. It's easy enough to find out the MySql version, but when there are 10+ servers, you will be glad you've got it in one spreadsheet.

Save model numbers, sales staff information, customer contacts, warranty information, service contracts. Also record server software versions. It's easy to remember if you just bought it, but in two years, you will be glad you know It's Oracle 10.1.0.5 and not just 10g. All the big IT suppliers-- Oracle, Microsoft, HP, Dell, NetApp, SAP-- have their own twisted bureaucracies, ticket tracking systems, incident reporting and escalation, and lines of communication. Put as much of that info in the spreadsheet as you can. You can even embed links to support sites in Excel.

Try and figure out which servers talk to each other, which have dependencies and would be affected by an issue with another server. It's good to learn the network topology-- which equipment and services are in which segment and why. Where does the internet come in? Try not to work too late. Don't carry a gun to work. Be nice to the users. That's about all I've got.

I understood the headline the first time I read it, but I am familiar with the company, the product, and the market, so maybe it was more obvious to me. I assumed the dangling "in an illegal fashion" was attached to the provision of Solaris Support, but you're right. It's ambiguous.

As far as I know, Oracle treats their 3rd party support companies as badly as they treat their customers. They charge full price for all their products, even if it's used in education or software development. The software is readily available online (once you sign up), but be prepared to pay up if the Oracle police visit. Every Oracle support company I've worked with do their own audits. If they work with a customer who is infringing, Oracle partly blames them, their 3rd party consultants. Larry wants every part of his company to gobble at money like piranhas. The tech glow of SUN and Oracle (still an excellent database) is completely eclipsed by the ravenous capitalism his company practices. There's no pleasure left working with them, and I'll never recommend that company again.

Oracle is like herpes: You never get rid of it completely, it pops up in the worst situations, and it is never a pleasure to work with. As if they're continually trying to gyp you out of something, waiting for a mistake, or letting your guard down, or having a failed backup, then WHAM! You gotta pay to get out of trouble. Fie on them all!.Sail on, Larry!

No, the fees are high because it costs a lot to keep Larry Ellison in jets and new Pacific islands. Oracle is a rapacious, money-gobbling machine of a company. Every upgrade, bug fix, OS update, dev or test server costs large money. If you run the database on a VM (besides the one Oracle owns), you have to license for every processor on the VM server, even if your DB only uses one core. They send actual auditors to your site to check your license compliance. They like to "partner" with their customers, such that the more money you make, the more you pay Oracle corporation-- like privatizing taxes.

Their sales force speaks a strange language. I dare you to find out what a copy of Weblogic (oh wait, I mean Fusion Middleware), BI (oh, no that's Discoverer), and a database (errr... 11g? 12c?) will cost, or to come up with how many cores/ processors/ CPU's there are in your server, and which have to be licensed. It's basically gangster language. And once you acquire some Oracle products, you're locked in. Update a server? ka-ching! Operating system update? ka-ching. Upgrading Weblogic forced you into upgrading app server? ka-ching. Adding a service pack to your windows server? ka-ching. Windows update broke the 64 bit keys that your old copy of Enterprise Manager tries to load in the browser? ka-ching.

I like their stuff, but I very much hate their business model.

Watch out if you're running Oracle on VMware. Everything works fine except the Oracle licensing. Got a VMware server with 32 processors? If you run Oracle on a VM hosted by that server, then you have to license all 32 cores (we're in the six figures here), even if the specific VM is only using 2 cores!. And they audit your usage. The work around is you can license the Oracle VM software to avoid that problem.

The biggest innovations Oracle has made in the last 10-15 years is how many ways they can slide their tentacles into your wallet. They don't want customers, they want "partners." Their pricing model is "How much money do you expect to make/save by using our product? That's the price." One huge, but difficult-to-quantify, feature of PostgreSQL is the fact of not having to be "partnered" again and again by Larry Ellison.

Waiting months between bootups means Adobe always has to update some software. And all the browsers need to be updated. Even Ubuntu 12.04LTS wants to do kernel updates. I allow automatic Win7 updates, and recently MS has been booting after installing updates, rather than tossing up a restart confirmation dialog box. This is rare, but annoying.

It's easy enough to agree with your sentiment, but I don't believe the US today resembles the USSR (before it was no longer). The problems with the US today are a direct result of the explosive growth of unfettered greed capitalism. Pervasive electronic eavesdropping isn't used to enhance "security" but to protect capital and IP, and more generally the economic interests of the elites. Security is just another industry for them, witness StRATFOR Security (or whatever their name is) who were so severely pwned by kid-hackers. They're not there to provide security (they clearly don't know anything about it), they're there because that's where the big checks come from.

The Soviet Union used horrible excesses in their attempt rectify centuries of gross economic inequality by trying to move economic power from the top to the bottom, and it was an utter, tragic failure. The private power structure of the US today is engaged in moving capital the other way-- to soak the lower and middle classes (until they're paupers) and move their assets back up to the top 400 families. What those venomous leaches want is for everyone to work at below minimum-wage jobs for their entire lives, always beholden to their employers (for both their paycheck and their health insurance), and for their communities to crumble to nothing-- cut off infrastructure, education, and relief and services for the poor. Detroit is, for the US elite, a success story. And they now own all three branches of the government, and even more importantly, they own the press.

It's fine to believe the excesses of the USSR are being repeated in the US, but it's misleading, and probably not useful to equate them. It just makes it harder to discern who the true enemy is.

I would wager Salesforce negotiated a better price on their annual Oracle license renewals in exchange for plugging the product with Larry. Kaching!

I want to live in the simple world you inhabit.

Oh wait, no I don't.

Let me guess. You don't have a job, do you. Thought not.

Thank you for saying this. You're absolutely right.