I think netbooks get a weird exception clause for 2 years after the purchase of the netbook or something like that IIRC. Also thanks for catching my little mistake there.

January 31st, 2009, looks like. That'd be what, 8 months back? http://www.microsoft.com/windows/lifecycle/default.mspx

Plus, by making the Oracle licensing scheme slightly more favourable towards sparc than power or intel, they can mess with IBM/other competitors pretty well. Before anyone complains about the immorality of such moves, I would like to point out that this is Oracle we're talking about, and they already do this when they're mad at Sun/HP/IBM...

Sun and Oracle already work pretty closely with eachother, and I think, without Sun's inept executives (ie. Jonathan Schwartz) bogging them down, Oracle will be able to go far with Sun's excellent employees, who ARE used to that kind of responisbility.

Yay! Finally someone who doesn't just repeat the /. standard: "Sun sucks, use Linux on a giant pile of cheap boxen instead" line. I salute you, good sir.

Yeah, but you gotta understand. Without Sun there's just IBM. There's no other vendor in the mainframe business, which is still big business. You don't think the IRS has time or money to manage the size of cluster they would need to operate effectively? So they rely on big iron, which is reliable and redundant and engineered to be that way over 40-50 years of experience. Clusters are garbage compared to a real mainframe. Sure, you have distributed filesystems now, and you can sort of split CPU around, there's management systems, etc, but all of this are ideas that come straight from the mainframe os which does all this "by itself". Google managed to make a pretty cool mainframe from commodity hardware but whatever.

Now, if you're not going to go with IBM for your database, you're probably going to go Oracle. But if you need big iron to run this huge database, you're going to have to go with IBM with z/OS and linux virtual machines or something. Oracle now has viable, proven mainframe line and all they have to do is throw money at it. They'll just move to selling complete packages instead of just DB at the mainframe level. With all this "cloud" bullshit (eg "Mainframe on the internet"), big businesses are interested in managed services and Mainframes have always been vendor managed.

Even IBM minis like AS/400 boxes come with full support from IBM. They monitor the box 24/7. I used to operate them long ago, and I remember that a disk went bad in one of our storage boxes (they had these giant enclosures with over 100 disks in them). Literally the message flashed on my console "SYS01281: DISK ERROR" blah blah blah and I turned around to get the binder to figure out what I had to do. By the time I turned back to my desk my phone was ringing and it was IBM support letting me know a tech would be there within 4 hours to replace the drive. Awesome.

So like, Sun/Oracle can do the same thing, and they can compete if they play their cards right. Oracle has poached a lot of high-end people from IBM in the past so this was only a matter of time.

Regarding MySql: MySql is a toy. Go to where the money is and you will find mainframes still. No one in their right mind would put anything important on MySql. Yeah yeah, facebook pft. If Facebook was making more than a few mil they would switch. Internet hits != money. (I'm talking Fortune 25 money, government money, world organization money, casino money, bank money). So I, for one, welcome Oracle and Sun back to this venue.

I used to be a KDE user back in the day, but I just can't get into the 4.x thing and have moved to Gnome since.. Still, I miss the good 'ol days of KDE... :(

i did the same with compiz on my ~3Ghz P4 toshiba laptop with 512 megs of ram and it runs fine... though i hardly use that machine anymore since i bought a new macbook :) Depending on ram and video chipset, you could probably have a compiz on too is all i'm saying (especially in a more moderate form), it's not that much of a performance hog.

That's a pretty common government thing to do... When I used to work for Environment Canada, we used to spend like insanity when it came up to budget time, just so we wouldn't lose that budget room should we need it in a future year. It (and a few other things that I won't discuss now) actually sickened me to the point where I had to leave government employment and join the corporate world oncemore, which while not perfect is a little bit more sane, where success and competence are somewhat more linked.

Myself I just have my linux (slackware) vm for my *nix tinkery stuff.. it takes up 10 gigs on my hard disk, and it lets my do my *nix tinkering in an environment where I can be reasonably sure not to pwn everything in my OSX, which contains all my school assignmnents, etc... It's the same reason I have an XP vm (under XP) on my windoze box. It's nice to have an isolated environment sometimes.

hey, it glowed, ok?

Again, I wasn't like "OMG I hate this movie because it turned me gay" or anything... I was just commenting on how I was suprised by the repeated wang occurrences at seemingly random times.

Haha, my statement was purely for purposes of hyperbole... Really, there was just *slightly* too much glowing blue wang in my opinion. By the end of the movie I was like "Yeah, I get it, he's so removed from humanity that he doesn't feel the need to wear pants".

Parent of my post is totally not off topic, I don't know who modded that. There was more blue wang in that movie than in "Backdoor Smurfs 9".

There was definitely too much of that, and they like tricked you into looking at it a few times with their cinematography.. I really liked the movie, aside from the gratuitous glowing blue wang (at least he wore pants when he was giant in vietnam) and a few other little things, like their being superer in the movie than the comic.