Not so long as there were lawyers who needed to make their billables and politicians in their pockets :P

Not in time for peoples' lives to not be ruined. Those of us who grew up during the 'drug war' still have memories of that, and I'm sure there are people still incarcerated under the Rockefeller Laws

That wasn't really my intent -- what I'm saying is that always having the cops on cam will take away their 'human' side and they'll just be encouraged more towards robot enforcers. I don't think it'll help much with planted evidence and framing -- those types of things will be done with some sort of coincidental leaving the camera in the car or disabling it or even having someone else commit the plant. There's an economy for those sorts of activities, and there will always be a price that someone is willing to pay.

The problem with this is that if all cops feel like they're being audited all of the time, they're less likely to let you off the hook for a minor violation. Then since they have to charge you with something, and there's supporting evidence, you're not going to get a plea or reduction from a mandatory sentence in court.

I know that doesn't sound like a big deal but cops let thousands of people off per day on minor things where people just need a warning.

RTFC. You still seem to have a problem that I mention it's only 10% of the cases where Oracle/IBM add value.

There was no criticism. That's what you (and he) fail to understand. What I'm saying is there's a niche market for these guys and they shouldn't be written off as all bad. Because I pointed out a use case for the hardware for ~10-20% of the cases out there.

For a slashdot car analogy, I'm saying "Stop trying to make multiple runs to home depot packing 30 yards of mulch in the trunk of your Honda Fit when you can just rent a dump truck and save on gas and effort." You don't go to home depot every week, you go three times a year. The Honda Fit is fine for the groceries. Stop a) putting words in my mouth and b) assuming that I'm saying everyone needs a dump truck.

Regarding the RAID6 thing -- I have seen plenty of shops that try to run databases on RAID5/6 and yes it isn't pretty, but that's how they do.

1: "The vendor says we needed a DB2 box. Their requirements mandate a certain level of IO performance that doesn't fit within our clustering/standardization scheme. IBM has an off-the-shelf solution for $25k plus 5k/year support, or we can get Jeff to slap something together for $15k."
2: "What's our business case?"
1: "A $300,000 piece of software that runs our ERP system."
2: "What if it goes down?"
1: "If it goes down, we lose $1m a day in revenue."
2: "The IBM thing sounds good to me. I'll have the approvals to you tomorrow."

I think you're either a) mistaking me for someone who is invested in seeing these companies succeed, or b) trying to pick a fight. So I will answer this without addressing the manner in which you made your comments and just cut right to your message.

Unfortunately it does in a lot of places, and here's why:

When your $1800 box goes down, and you've long left the company, where do I go to get enterprise support for it? How do I google for "How to fix Jeff's SmartOS whitebox"? When the CEO is coming at me like a steam roller because our online order entry system is down, where do I point the finger? THAT'S what your $1800 box doesn't provide.

The other scenario is what happens when I want something that has a supported (as in see paragraph above) set of hardware that needs to push tens of millions of iops over infiniband to a dedicated storage array for that box? If I'm spending 50k for a storage array and 20k for switching hardware, you'd better believe I'm going to throw an extra 2k at a server that Oracle or IBM says is certified to work with that equipment and they release-test the drivers. Not everyone is cool with a few commodity hard drives in a RAID 6 because it won't keep up with the database volumes. Yes, for 90% of the worlds buzzfeeds out there serving up dumb top10 lists or sites that survive on crosslinking other things that's fine, but there will always be specialty needs and high volume customers, and that's where these places will find their niche.

I'm not saying that dirt cheap intel boxes aren't the way to go for most cases [and that's exactly why IBM and Oracle struggle to stay competitive], but CEOs think their business is the most important thing in the world. Jeff in IT isn't nearly as good at convincing them that he's got their back as the smooth talking guy with the Oracle polo that rolls up in the Mercedes to golf with him.

Why wouldn't they just support Linux on the new hardware? It makes no sense to try to keep AIX alive outside of a VM for some legacy apps (unless they're going to do a native AIX/DB2 optimized solution similar to Oracle's Linux/DB optimized hardware).

My bet is that they market it as a Linux box with more cores and a better storage subsystem than you can get out of commodity hardware -- there are a fair number of places that would pay for that assuming that they didn't have a predatory licensing model (like the one they use for Websphere and DB2).

I would hire devs to interface with the ERP. Because when you go to upgrade to the next version [of the ERP], you have a modular thing that you can change pieces of rather than having to pay someone to rewrite the entire thing. If you continue to customize the ERP you're using, you'll be locked in to that specific version and all of its security/stability/functionality problems.

+1 I lol'ed.

Except that then they'd get you for Insurance Fraud or whatever.

Oh yeah, he's Canadian as fuck.

I bought one of these for my office:
http://www.amazon.com/Seiki-SE...

The pixel density is perfect for the opposite side of my desk, and since it's the office, being restricted to 30Hz doesn't hurt anything. At $400 it's a great place to get started with 4k computing. I agree that programming in 4k changes your entire way of working.

For those of us who still have the binaries around, the D2X-XL project (http://www.descent2.de/d2x.html) has ported the game engine to OpenGL and has added a number of great things to the project. It supports more players, TCP/IP, and tons of additional features. As with any community project (or commercial project recently) there are bugs, but some of the builds have been quite good. I encourage fans to check out and contribute to the project :)

I would absolutely play it more if there were a community of descent players ready to go online against (a matchmaking system, for example).