A too-big-to-fail about to fail certain it'll be bailed out? Another comment* raised a question about investments in fuel cells that could have been just for show. Are they doing max damage to leech as much cash as possible before implosion or it's just... I mean, it's oracle it's a mystery to me how they make so much money with selling crapware, so it might just be business as usual?
Hard disagree. Oracle's database will always live in my mind as a complete waste of money. Some con-man, I'm sorry salesman, sold a previous (idiot) executive on it at a previous company I worked for. The exec was long gone and lots of time was wasted trying to adapt our application (that used MySQL) over to Oracle until we finally pulled the plug. But not after spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on time and equipment. We re-purposed the hardware into effectively a big NAS.
With software products you can pretty reliably tell they're dogshit when the sales team targets the C suite. The security industry is riddled with that. Deals done over steak dinners and yacht charters don't translate to working, reliable software.
Uh, it's only the "best" in the same sense that Windows Server is the best server infra on the planet. And arguably Windows has some network bandwagon effect behind its momentum: when your workstation supplier supplies machines with Windows pre-installed and you have built an IT Support Team with the expertise for Windows technologies, it only makes sense to also use Windows in your server.
AFAICT the only thing Oracle has over established FOSS DBs is vendor support and the only thing Oracle has over established FOSS vendors like Percona is a ginormous marketing budget. I'm always grimused when I see Oracle product placement in the MCU.
I've lost count how many "cloud-native application deployed on Azure" at my job have turned out to be this. Installed by random contractors who have since left of course.
It's easy to deploy grief and call it a day if you aren't the one cleaning up afterwards. On the other hand the blaming mentality never led anyone anywhere so I'm not really sure how one is to address this.
My guess would be the cause is unreasonable corporate pressure for productivity, so if this is the case the natural answer would be to give people more time to think about architecture, create incentives for group studies and laboratories and remove incentives that lead to the so called "résumé-driven development"
Just this month, I tried to hook it up to a modern .NET app with the latest Oracle client and discovered that if you cancel a transaction, the connection enters a broken state and is returned to the connection pool, "infecting it". After a half a dozen of those, the whole app server just dies with endless cancellation related exceptions. This isn't even the only such bug, apparently there's a whole family of pool-corruption bugs that have workaround config settings and everything!
This was with version 23.26.301 which suggests that they've had a lot of major releases, bug fixes, etc... but basic functionality like "connect successfully to the database server every time" is totally broken and has been for many years.
The issue tracker forums have tumbleweeds rolling through them and play the sound of wolves howling in the distance to provide just the right kind of "what are you still doing here?" ambiance.
> Here is how the life of an Oracle Database developer is:
> - Start working on a new bug.
> - Spend two weeks trying to understand the 20 different flags that interact in mysterious ways to cause this bag.
> - Add one more flag to handle the new special scenario. Add a few more lines of code that checks this flag and works around the problematic situation and avoids the bug.
> - Submit the changes to a test farm consisting of about 100 to 200 servers that would compile the code, build a new Oracle DB, and run the millions of tests in a distributed fashion.
> - Go home. Come the next day and work on something else. The tests can take 20 hours to 30 hours to complete.
> - Go home. Come the next day and check your farm test results. On a good day, there would be about 100 failing tests. On a bad day, there would be about 1000 failing tests. Pick some of these tests randomly and try to understand what went wrong with your assumptions. Maybe there are some 10 more flags to consider to truly understand the nature of the bug.
> - Add a few more flags in an attempt to fix the issue. Submit the changes again for testing. Wait another 20 to 30 hours.
> - Rinse and repeat for another two weeks until you get the mysterious incantation of the combination of flags right.
My favorite bug of the .Net connector is how the entire API supports async operations, but the underlying implementation can't tell two different executions of the same query apart, so it's random whether each call will get their own results or some other ones.
But polluting the poll with unusable connections is just Oracle copying the MS-SQL's thing. The C# recommended coding practices will automatically deal with this. (Not that you would want to follow them, but you may want to look and copy this part.)
That should just be illegal. The right to measure or to publish things is not about their software, it's a personal right, so Obstacle shouldn't be able to remove your right in their license agreement.
The copyright that Oracle has entitles it to offer a license with the conditions it wants. They've had that condition in their license for decades.
You are not forced to accept them.
Back in the late 90s, Oracle RDBMS was the "won't get fired for buying" RDBMS. It's been downhill ever since. Once Postgres got partitions, it was over.
Oracle still had a market for high availability clusters for a while, but the increasing performance of single servers and SANs and finally cloud services made that redundant.
So Oracle have spent the last 20 years being bastards about licensing, squeezing their existing customers while the customers do their best to migrate somewhere else.
What an honor for Professor De Witt (no relation to my handle).
My handle notwithstanding, I'm smart enough to not take legal advice from HN but nonetheless I cannot stop myself hence the rhetorical question: how is a EULA clause like that even enforceable? If this isn't going against freedom of speech then this surely it's against some consumer protection laws?
The cynical answer to that I guess is "a lot of money funding a legal team the size of a warlord's militia" and also "lobbying" but even then it doesn't track to me that this clause could have even that much of an effect as a scare tactic?
It's their copyright, they get to decide the conditions in the license if you want to use their software.
The EULA is enforceable because you have to agree to it to use the software, and Oracle has large and well financed legal team who will descend from a great height on you and anyone who publishes the results of you doing performance testing.
To be fair with Oracle, every software has it's idiosyncrasies and for many corporations the devil you know wins every time. The problem starts when new projects start adopting such a hopeless stack.
This is a platform and we are discussing this, which means such a platform isn't enough for what you need. Not judging, actually I've felt a degradation in engagement quality as of late, maybe it's personal bias, but the discussions seem more shallow or aggressive.
In any case, what would you expect from such a platform? That would help with recomendations.
I was in the same place you are now but looking for places to discuss philosophy and looking at the state of mainstream sites like Reddit I decided the open web isn't a place for such discussions because of the sheer volume of noise.
I think the best place to discuss most things nowadays is the real world, but it takes time to build connections in the real world. HN is still a place of real productive discussions but not without a lot of moderation and even so it's still barely functional.
People have different ideas of what's good UX, because everybody comes from their own tradition of using desktops. Some people don't see anything wrong worth evolving from with mouse, point, click. The kind of thinking from the article, from someone that only worked on big companies, is the thinking from someone looking for the next big product, which I look with suspicion. At some point this stops being about good UX and starts being about a good product that makes good profit.
True revolution in UX will come from making customisation accessible, so everyone can decide what's best for them without losing their minds in endless customisation rabbit holes or having to rely on big and clumsy organizations.
The difference between big-company and FLOSS UX design, including profit-motivated behaviors (a bit indirectly, but it's definitely there), is specifically addressed in the article, so I don't think that's a very fair characterization.
I actually agree about customization, but that's only part of it, and seems to be pretty orthogonal to what the article is talking about. You can only customize to features that are actually implemented by the system, and coming up with those seems like the harder problem.
I hope I'm mistaken with my unfair characterization, but until I'm proven wrong I'll take these addresses as suggestions rather than core principles.
> You can only customize to features that are actually implemented by the system
> (Customisation) is only part of it, and seems to be pretty orthogonal to what the article is talking about
It's not orthogonal because implementation without ergonomics is meaningless, which is what customization accessibility is all about. It needs to be a core design focus on the end user and not some obscure API only maybe Redhat will use to implement business support.
We have lots to work on already. Hyprland on archlinux is crazy customizable, but it's a far cry from what we should expect from a customizable and accessible system intended for a more mainstream audience.
True revolution in UX will come from making customisation accessible
...like it was back in the days when Windows actually had a very customisable UI[1], and then the "skinnable" UIs of the early 2000s (most of which were extremely gaudy, but then again, maybe that was what the majority of the population wanted.) Now it has devolved into little more than this: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/experience/perso...
Hot Dog Stand is really illustrative of the change in attitude. Previously: "It's your computer, of course you're allowed to make it look ugly." Now: "It's our computer, that's not on brand."
Art isn't supposed to be comfortable and it's uncomfortable for a good reason, what if this became a trend? Would it endanger the organic art scene? Can these coexist?
That we are discussing it shows that the mural, even though it's AI generated is performing as art should. Should we welcome all forms of art? If not, where do we draw the line? That's for me the most uncomfortable question.
I never made this assessment, that's not an interpretation you can derive from my comment in good faith. I just commented that art isn't supposed to be comfortable, nowhere I said that all art is uncomfortable. The mural is however performing just like art. What if this was an original confirmed banksy?
It's a good question. I just don't personally believe it's a challenging one. I'm comfortable drawing the line at simple AI art ("simple" as in nothing beyond some hours spent prompting - for somebody who finds a creative way to take it beyond that, I'd come back to the question).
We are not uncomfortable with what the art is saying but with what the meta-narrative around the art is saying, and I think that's an important distinction. Sometimes context is an important part of artistic interpretation and expression, but this time around I think the discomfort is that human intention is being replaced by a machine.
> If not, where do we draw the line?
I don't find this question uncomfortable at all: art is art if and only if it was made by humans, end to end. Human thought informing human action resulting in a human-created work. If you involved an AI, it is not art; it is a facsimile of art. If you agree that conveying emotion and meaning is an important part of art, and I think you do since you highlighted that art can and sometimes should be uncomfortable, then I posit that AI "art" cannot be art because there is no feeling, emotion, or creativity involved in its creation. An AI can only attempt to mimic human expression based on its training while the AI itself is incapable of these things.
> art is art if and only if it was made by humans, end to end
I disagree with your definition of art. One can use AI as a reference and the end result will still be art because it'll carry execution technique and the subjective perception of the artist. Saying otherwise would be like saying that electronic music isn't music because it's a computer producing the sound waves.
A better candidate would be "an object can be a work of art if and only if it wasn't made by machines end to end".
Ha, that is a fair critique. Now, I do consider electronic music to be art; in that case, I consider the computer or synthesizer to be an instrument, and thus the creative output of a DAW is still the artist's creative output. There is definitely some sloppiness in how I defined my terms; unfortunately, I'm just not going to commit my afternoon to an iron-clad definition of art for an internet comment.
I understand, and we need to have good faith to navigate wonky definitions, because impeccable definitions aren't a prerequisite for productive conversation.
I think it's a spectrum. DJing can go from hitting play with someone else's recorded live set to sampling live from vynil and midi controllers and mixing with voice, doing loops and the likes.
I think there is room for art in anything, including AI. Just like musicians like DJ Shadow managed to show it's perfectly possible to make great pieces using only sampling, I think we can go very far with AI generated art and still be able to call it art in good faith.
I like to think behind every Dev anxious to ship half baked software sits an omniscient middle manager with a vague idea of what the product was supposed to do, maybe
Guess you don’t remember the days of ssl on login pages, ssl strip, exfiltering data via JavaScript prototype pollution, and a million other things like that.
Only just when we started to have a resemblance of security we got agile and startups breaking things (making rubbish software to capture a few bucks faster) and now vibe coding and llm assisted hacking.
The point of my, arguably rant, is that there is nothing new under the sun.
It should. We went through couple of cycles of "things are bad, inmates are running the asylum" before, and nothing of consequence happened. The world still goes on.
It's not a guarantee this time will be the same - but it should temper the worry somewhat.
I thought security clearances are a dime a dozen, and "all FBI employees" list is full of administrative work and basically 80% mirrored on LinkedIn? (Yes, the remaining 20% - or however much - leaking is a problem.)
Nothing new under the sun, it's the banality of evil all over again my dude. We never left scary waters, but they do seem to be growing more agitated. Is this the storm before the storm?
No because it's a problem of human communication. Taking humans out of the loop creates other social problems that have been thoroughly documented in cyberpunk mythology, not actual a solution, just trading one big problem with multiple little ones.
Noted, but I think it's important to comment seriously because this is an important topic, sorry I didn't acknowledge the sarcasm, should have opened with something like "I for one welcome our AGI overlords"
PS. Likewise, apologies, perhaps I was at fault for style: There was an underlying more serious point ...
... that, it is indeed a serious problem, that folks shouldn't be having their souls (or anything else for that matter) crushed, and that it indeed would appear to be an issue of conflicting incentives vs. management.-
I think it's one of the first two special episodes right at the beginning of the series, and it's the sole reason why the fleet could sustain evading the cylons
*https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49842884
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