This promotes cheap medicines. http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9B0DE0D7113AF932A0575BC0A961948260 No patent term extension can extend the term of a patent for a pharmaceutical beyond 14 years from the receipt of Food and Drug Administration approval to commence marketing. ... The bottom line is that the period of marketing exclusivity provided by a patent for a pharmaceutical can never exceed 17 years

Although if you don't have a collection, then you have a null collection ... back to square one.

I bought a sinilar IBN Nodel N where the N key (N for Nother) is completely screwed, so I have been forced to substitute that character, luckily the control keys are okay, so I can cut and paste when I need to ... ctrl-v ... mmmwahaha

I remember having the ability to switch between different LPAR's on an IBM mainframe running MVS. I didn't execute the switch before 1985, but I'm sure the capability would have existed before them.

I haven't had much joy from sun hardware. We had a project that needed to process large amounts of data.

A fairly expensive sun server with CoolThreads technology was procured. The application was deployed and the processing time was so bad that we started blaming it on the "CrawlThreads".

We redeployed the app onto a commodity HP server with CEntOS installed and the processing time dropped from 8 hours to 2 hours.

I dont actually think that CoolThreads was a bad technology, unfortunately the application was very limited to what it could do in terms of parallel processing. Most of the processing was linear, so the majority of the massive number of threads that were available from CoolThreads were sitting idle, and the trade-off for the great number of threads available was less processing power for each individual thread.

I think the market pricing is more concerned with operating costs and customerbase rather than knowledgebase.

Nah - they would have to be ctrl, alt, Delete

You are missing the point of a sunk cost. If someone has a need and has to spend funds to meet the requirement by a certain date due to regulatory or other reasons, they will pay the costs or face the consequences. Once paid this is a sunk cost, already spent and not assumed to be recoverable. If later on someone else is able to benefit from the product of the sunk cost, that is a different argument, and possibly negotiations will proceed. Negotiations wont necessarily result in recovering any of the initial sunk cost, there are many possible results, some of which may be collaborative development or shared future maintenance burdens.

Yeah, but to be even cooler, you have to spell it lite, although the new lite's are zero or free...

I like the story about NASA spending millions of dollars designing a ballpoint pen that can work in zero gravity, whereas the russians opted to use a pencil.

Thrashing is a violent action such as causing a hard disk to spin fast and long. The effects are generally benign, i.e. there is no damage done when the thRashing stops.

Trashing causes long term damage, such as installing windows or .net

But apart from the semantic differences, I would say you're right on the money.

This comes down to choosing the right tool for the job. Perhaps their application is written using frameworks which enable/enforce this kind of normal transactional processing of requests.

Now if the existing application is the only way that they know how to get to the data, then it may easily become the golden-hammer / silver bullet that gets used for performing an upgrade, rather than writing an external sql script which they might not be familiar with. Add to this the common convention of "nothing touches my database except my application", which has proven to be useful by preventing rogue updates which cause application 'bugs', and the golden-hammer / silver bullet becomes even more appealing.

SQL script wouldn't be the only non-application choice, there are quite a few good ETL solutions available, however these tend to cost quite a bit and perhaps the vendor does not want to impose another licence fee onto the client. This brings up a point more relevent to the main article thread, when deciding whether to throw people or hardware ata particular problem, you always have to be aware of the hidden costs i.e. licences for all software used including pre-requisites, network capacity, server-room capacity power & cooling etc. Naturally wide-spread use of open source software makes the initial calculation of software licencing cost a lot easier, although I'm sure that there are those who could argue that the savings on open-source software licences are eroded by necessary additional staff costs.

I thought that it was named after the HMS Beagle upon which Darwin made his first observations that led to his theory of natural selection / evolution.