http://www.marketwatch.com/sto... "I suppose that as the case of the programmer, Rajendrasinh B. Makwana, is brought out into the open we'll discover whether he's just a disgruntled programmer irked at being let go by Fannie Mae in October, or someone with more sinister intentions. It was only a fluke, according to all the reports Friday, that a malicious piece of code was found on the Fannie Mae FNM, -6.82% servers. It was designed to go off Saturday and erase all the data and screw up the company. It was placed there by Makwana, an Indian national and former Fannie Mae contractor, according to a federal indictment. If it was part of some greater scheme, then we can assume that on Jan. 31, the date his program was supposed to kick in, a slew of computer networks will go down. Generally speaking, this sort of thing is more of an inconvenience than a catastrophe."

If Microsoft software drives obsolescence to promote sales, Linux presents a sound alternative. It is competitive, supported software with a full range of free applications.

In this day and age, it is hard to justify any price for Oracle. It still has a 30-character limit for object names, which leads to all sorts of cryptic naming conventions. Plus, is seems to take five times the amount of staff to administer, compared to SQL-Server.