Oracle Finally Decides To Stop Prolonging the Inevitable, Begins Hardware Layoffs (theregister.co.uk) 177
Shaun Nichols, reporting for The Register: Oracle is starting layoffs that will hit its hardware division, The Register has learned. Current and some soon-to-be former staffers have whispered that the database giant is shipping out packages containing the paperwork for ending their employment. The workers have received alerts from FedEx that the packages, which will need to be signed for, are en route for a September 1 delivery. "One of my co-workers emailed that he received a notification from FedEx of a label created by Oracle America, Inc," writes one anonymous employee. "I just checked and a label has been created for my home address. This is in the US. Looks like Friday is it for Sparc MicroElectronics." The layoffs are hardly a surprise, given the performance of Oracle's hardware unit as of late. In the last financial year, Oracle reported hardware revenues of $4.15bn. By comparison, in 2016 the unit logged hardware revenues of $4.67bn. In 2015 it was $5.2bn, and 2014 saw $5.37bn.
Oracle? (Score:4, Funny)
Well, they should have seen it coming!
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They were too busy baking cookies.
Re: Oracle? (Score:1)
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I'm sure sparcs will fly over this.
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> I'm sure sparcs will fly over this.
Mind if I JOIN the pun cascade?
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> I'm sure sparcs will fly over this.
Mind if I JOIN the pun cascade?
Join eagles Tour venue with catering. output hotel california;
Re: Oracle? (Score:1)
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The sun is setting. Kind of sad in a way. SUN built my house. I used to make all kinds of money with Sun and Sun technology.
I'll start digging the grave in the computer cemetery for them. Think I'll put SUN next to Wang. Then we can have a sunny wang.
I know, don't quit my day job.
Re: Oracle? (Score:1)
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In some ways this is good. Better utilization. (Score:2, Interesting)
Of course, this is terrible news for the people losing their jobs. Nobody wants to have their livelihood taken away. But in other ways this is a good thing.
It shows the tremendous work these people did in creating extremely powerful hardware. But we're also seeing improvements on the software side, too. Virtual machines and cloud computing have vastly increased the utilization of the hardware we do have. It's no longer a case of a company having 20,000 servers, and collectively they're idle 85% of the time.
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We're now doing a lot more with a lot less.
"We", Kimosabe? The folks losing their jobs will be doing a lot less because they now have a lot less, unless and until they find other jobs with equivalent pay. Of course those at the top will be doing a lot more with a lot more, and the newly unemployed people can surely take comfort in that while they're struggling to make the next mortgage payment, right?
... a net win for society...
Still subscribing to that ol' trickle-down theory, are you? Heck, even the bastards at the IMF have finally realized that it's bullshit. [huffingtonpost.ca]
Re: In some ways this is good. Better utilization. (Score:3)
Sorry to break the news to you but most stuff running on VMs in the last few years is weitten JavaScript or Java. Not C++. Efficient binaries are decidedly not in favour
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People don't buy database hardware for smallish apps, they buy it for big-iron apps that have a lot of transactions and/or data. Small apps with low CPU utilization
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Except no one uses SPARC hardware to do any of that stuff. It's all common Intel x86 based systems, which Oracle did actually make. Unfortunately, everything Oracle makes (made) is somewhat over-engineered, and way overpriced. There are far cheaper x86 hardware vendors.
Oracle has always been mostly a software giant. I'm surprised the hardware side of Sun Microsystems has lasted as long as it has.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
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Just switch to FreeBSD already and quit complaining about ZFS not available on Linux.
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Or run an Illumos based distro, or any distro that ships ZFS on Linux which is the shared code FreeBSD, Illumos and Linux ZFS consumers are all basing and contributing to.
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And party like it's 1999?
BSD is missing too much to be considered an option today.
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On ZFS, while it may be hampered by license, there's sadly nothing that Oracle will gain by bothering to relicense it, unless it's part of a much friendlier open source stance to turn their image around, which seems to be something they aren't remotely interested in. I agree it's not worth the investment, just like everything else you listed, with respect to Oracle's culture.
Also, we have speculation here, is it just layoffs and keep working the product (the usual), abandoning all hardware, or just the SPA
Re:other inevitabilities they can consider. (Score:5, Interesting)
They weren't excited because it was a SPARC workstation. They were excited because it was a Solaris workstation. For much of the 1990s, and even into the early 2000s, Solaris provided perhaps the best workstation OS experience around. It had the best desktop environments, it had the best userland software, it had excellent development tools, it had a lot of advanced functionality, and compared to its contemporaries it was very pleasant to use. Although Solaris workstations weren't exactly cheap, they were relatively affordable to serious users.
Yes, part of Solaris' appeal was due to its tight integration with the hardware, but the hardware itself was largely irrelevant to most users. It was the Solaris experience that they wanted and desired.
NeXT systems running NeXTSTEP were a real competitor to Solaris and SPARC workstations, but NeXT systems were prohibitively expensive for even many deep-pocketed business users. It wasn't until Apple came out with Mac OS X that this technology started to become accessible to a winder audience.
Solaris also started facing more competition from Linux and the BSDs at the low end, which by the early 2000s had started to mature. Interestingly, we've actually seen a lot of regression lately within the Linux sphere of influence, such as systemd, GNOME 3, GTK+ 3, PulseAudio, and Wayland. FreeBSD has managed to avoid these shenanigans, while actually incorporating some of the best parts of Solaris, such as ZFS.
Solaris' success was typically far more about the software than the hardware it was running on.
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I'll give credit to their hardware too. A lot of users at the time were somewhat disappointed at their Ultra10s (which were SPARC, but with IDE drives and such).
The Ultra1, Ultra30 and Ultra60s were very highly regarded from a hardware standpoint, as well as the higher end server stuff.
SGI? XFS? (Score:2)
Irix was a much friendlier player with Motif and made it look good and work well. As I'm still using the Irix filesystem in CentOS - there was certainly better technology in Irix than Solaris.
And Sun really couldn't challenge anyone on the high end until Cray was forced to give them the e10k. And why was Cray forced into this? Because SGI bought them.
Sun got SGI's table scraps. I will grant you that NFS and a number of other important technologies came from Solaris, but Irix was nothing to sneeze at.
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They weren't excited because it was a SPARC workstation. They were excited because it was a Solaris workstation. For much of the 1990s, and even into the early 2000s, Solaris provided perhaps the best workstation OS experience around. It had the best desktop environments, it had the best userland software, it had excellent development tools, it had a lot of advanced functionality, and compared to its contemporaries it was very pleasant to use. Although Solaris workstations weren't exactly cheap, they were relatively affordable to serious users.
Yes, part of Solaris' appeal was due to its tight integration with the hardware, but the hardware itself was largely irrelevant to most users. It was the Solaris experience that they wanted and desired.
NeXT systems running NeXTSTEP were a real competitor to Solaris and SPARC workstations, but NeXT systems were prohibitively expensive for even many deep-pocketed business users
As I recall, Next machines were actually cheaper than contemporary Sparc Stations but Next was targeting users who were mostly unwilling to pay so much. With rare and mostly weird exceptions* Sparcstations were not used by nor priced for rank and file paper pushers. These were engineering workstations. They were use for tasks beyond the reach of contemporary PC's. In the beginning this was about raw computational power and 32-bit addressing when PC's were 16-bit. In the mid to late 90's, it was 64-b
Gain? Oracle Linux ZFS is what they will gain. (Score:2)
How long do you think it will take Red Hat to jack in ZFS once the license is compatible?
It would probably appear as a technology preview within a week.
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The challenge being there was that OpenOffice was already appropriately licensed to let the community take it, Oracle's IP strategy be damned.. Here the crux of the problem remains how it is licensed, and thus you need Oracle's participation to modify it, and Oracle is unlikely to play ball. It's just completely out of character for them, and it's hard to make a strong *business* case they can't deny (people saying 'it would help oracle linux', but it would help redhat linux just as much, so it'll be even
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Oracle dropping it seems more likely than changing licensing. Oracle will relicense any of it's IP over Ellison's dead body.
Either:
a) ZFS is a value add for Solaris and they enjoy that edge
b) They stop caring about Solaris, but they *still* don't feel like bothering to revisit the license, because they don't get anything out of it that they would see as valuable.
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Oracle Linux: you squandered solaris, one of the great operating systems of our time, and did everything you could to make it a complete pain in the ass to own.
Yeah, Solaris really was great. I spent years as a Solaris admin on my 2 jobs previous to this one and I do miss Solaris at times. I'm not knocking Linux at all, which we use at my current job, but I did like Solaris. Now if you want to talk about not very good OSes, I'd put AIX, DGUX and HPUX as some of the ones I worked with and didn't like much. Every now and then on my current job, and by the way as a company I think we don't officially support Solaris internally any more, I run into people who if t
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if it happens to be a software based product that can fork without a lawsuit following close behind, then it might just survive that bad experience. Unfortunately there is seldom any victory cele
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Solaris used to be great. Then they came up with Solaris 11. What a turd that is. Did you know they put a lot of /etc a database? Sure, the files are there, they often don't do anything. You have to use their bullshit commands to configure it instead of being able to hack the old files. Just like Windows and their pain in the ass registry. It's a really bad idea, don't do it.
By the way, nobody I know is transitioning to Windows. They were up until about 2 years ago, now they realize their stupidity when MS
Don't sign for the package? (Score:2)
I had a meeting with my manager and someone from HR the last time I was laid off.
You're telling me they announce lay offs by mail? What happens if I ignore the delivery?
Seems like a bad way to deliver bad news...
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I had a meeting with my manager and someone from HR the last time I was laid off.
You're telling me they announce lay offs by mail? What happens if I ignore the delivery?
Seems like a bad way to deliver bad news...
I had a meeting with my manager and someone from HR the last time I was laid off.
You're telling me they announce lay offs by mail? What happens if I ignore the delivery?
Seems like a bad way to deliver bad news...
Someone probably paraded some bullshit statistics in front of management that claimed the chances of an ex-employee going postal was minimized if you deliver a firing via postal worker.
How ironic.
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We find it's always better to fire people on a Friday. Studies have statistically shown that there's less chance of an incident if you do it at the end of the week.
"It's been good talking to you, Bob, and Bob."
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You're telling me they announce lay offs by mail? What happens if I ignore the delivery?
Doesn't everyone? Normally the formalities are done via internal mail.
I mean you can feel free to ignore it as much as you want, but you may find at some point you're no longer let into the building, no longer paid, and someone comes knocking at your door to return that company phone that you failed to give back.
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Just come into work anyhow. Maybe they'll forget they laid you off.
The Most Shocking Thing (Score:1)
The thing that shocks me most about this article and comments is how few people understand the difference between revenue and profit.
Revenue is not profit. It is not money that comes in that you get to keep. Profit is what you get to keep. Profit is revenue minus all of your costs.
One important metric withing a large company is called "return on capital." Capital is the amount of money you have invested in property, building, tools, and other things that keep the revenue coming in. The return on capital is
Re: The Most Shocking Thing (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, but if you get rid of the people, that capital equipment is worth a whole lot less because you got rid of the knowledge and skills to work with it, and likely sent a lot of that expertise to potential competitors.
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I do not think people are strictly part of the cash flow. A lot of investment went into those people creating institutional memory, and if you did it right, some sort of emotional investment of the people in the company. Treating people as strictly part of cash flow tells them they do not count, are more or less worthless, and the company has not allegiance to them. All of this represents selling off the people and getting squat for them.
Today I learned... (Score:2)
Today I learned that Oracle apparently has (had?) a hardware division. I'm amazed it's lasted this long, honestly. As crappy as their overpriced, proprietary software is, I can't imagine *also* trusting them with hardware. Sucks to be one of the workers, for sure, but you have to expect it when you choose to work for such a monolith. The faster we get to Oracle's demise, the better for everyone.
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Today I learned that Oracle apparently has (had?) a hardware division. I'm amazed it's lasted this long, honestly. As crappy as their overpriced, proprietary software is, I can't imagine *also* trusting them with hardware. Sucks to be one of the workers, for sure, but you have to expect it when you choose to work for such a monolith. The faster we get to Oracle's demise, the better for everyone.
They bought Sun Microsystems waaaaaaay back. That hardware was rock solid for the most part when it was Sun. I'm unclear as to it's actual reliability after the purchase.
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A lot of hardware is actually designed and built by Fujitsu. (I've wormed my way through Fujitsu's sites to get updates before, since the greedy bastards at Oracle require a support contract to even download drivers.)
The Sun buy is a failure (Score:4, Insightful)
No one is buying SPARC. Solaris is fading away. OpenOffice is forked and everyone runs the fork. About the only thing of value Oracle has after buying Sun is Java; $7.4 billion for a language they can't really monetize. ZFS I suppose... another thing 90% of its users don't pay for.
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About the only thing of value Oracle has after buying Sun is Java; $7.4 billion for a language they can't really monetize.
It seems Oracle is trying to hand off responsibility for Java as well https://developers.slashdot.or... [slashdot.org] , although maybe not, at least with respect to security... https://developers.slashdot.or... [slashdot.org]
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A better company might have been able to monetize that purchase more effectively, but don't think that Oracle didn't get what it was after.
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About the only thing of value Oracle has after buying Sun is Java; $7.4 billion for a language they can't really monetize.
But they tried! Twice so far. They were seeking $9B from Google in that lawsuit [wikipedia.org].
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You do realize I hope that SunOS / Solaris has run on x86 / x64 systems as well since the late 1980's?
Back in the day the x4100/x4200 Intel/AMD series of systems were among the best rackmount x64 servers one could source. People even bought them to run MS Windows on.
No internal mail? (Score:2)
Since when do people get fired via FedEx? I mean it's fitting for Oracle because it really seems like the single most expensive way of doing something.
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Since when do people get fired via FedEx? I mean it's fitting for Oracle because it really seems like the single most expensive way of doing something.
I've heard some places just text you to let you know.
Is this appropriate? (Score:1)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Ellison couldn't have done a worse job with Sun (Score:4, Insightful)
Ellison is a fool. I don't care if he's rich.
First, when buying Sun, a legend in the industry and the origin of countless software and hardware technologies everyone now takes for granted, he decides to exterminate anything with the Sun name on it.
SunSolve.Sun.com, an enormous wealth of technical and debugging information, gone in an instant.
Docs.Sun.com, an even bigger wealth of research and documentation (ever gone through their Blueprint docs? Phenomenal)... also gone. Yes, they pretended to copy everything over to Oracle, but they didn't. The vast majority was purged, what was left was filled with perpetually broken links, and they ignored any requests for docs that other (remaining) docs referenced. The wealth of info lost here is astonishing.
When a group published the Blueprints, Oracle went after 'em and shut 'em down.
Idiotic.
Next shot at his own foot was to pull out of OpenSolaris without so much as an announcement.
OpenSolaris.org? Shut down and purged from existence. (I managed to grab a tarball of their Solaris AD integration that predates the mismatched crap in Solaris 11 and got it working in Solaris 10, and in Solaris 11... works better than their official solution).
By this time they were well into the self-destruction phase where they were treating Sun engineers like absolute crap under their boots, so they drove the majority of them out. When internet legends are leaving your company en masse, you've done something really, really stupid.
Another shot to his foot was to eliminate the free license for education and personal use... every University still teaching Solaris immediately switched to Linux. Now those entering the market are trained in Linux (and have a poor opinion of Solaris, much of which is beyond what is deserved). WTF did he think would happen?!?
As if he has infinite feet, he takes another shot and removes all entry-level SPARC servers... you used to be able to get a T2000 for ~$2k. After this *($# move, their cheapest hardware was ~$40k! If I had his ear, I'd tell him "listen dipwad, it didn't work for IBM or HP, why the heck do you think it'll work for you?" (in reference to his "we only want the richest customers" approach). If you're thinking "but IBM & HP are doing well...", you're missing my point. I'm talking about their Unix systems. I haven't seen AIX in many years, and I haven't seen HP/UX in at least 2 decades.
Fast forward... they're still (up to recently) putting amazing R&D into Solaris & SPARC, but they fail miserably to properly market them. Solaris 11 is nothing short of astonishing. I love Linux, but it's barely approaching Solaris 10 tech at this point... and Solaris 10 is archaic compared to Solaris 11. The newest SPARCs are absolute monsters, and are actually starting to get slightly more affordable again (I saw a 64-core, 256-thread, 64GB RAM entry level machine for $9k early this year), but when you go to their sales pitches, they can't let go of their grudge against IBM! Every single benchmark and price comparison is against IBM's AIX hardware (which they apparently actually still make). I asked about x86 comparisons, as it was pretty obvious by some of the numbers that they could actually compete against Xeon offerings (which was actually mentioned by Ellison!) and they got pissed like I was heckling them!
Morons, the lot of them, but this all boils back to Ellison's ego. He's a moron, plain and simple.
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Every university I knew was already pushing Linux heavily well before Oracle took over. Oracle wants to be paid for everything, so sunsolve and docs had to go away.
IMO, Solaris 10 is where Solaris died. "smf" (*cough*systemd*cough*) absolutely fucking NO.
Normal yearly schedule (Score:1)
That's one way to get rid of SUN (Score:1)
We have some people that are making us use Sun/Solaris crap. Even though we showed them it worked better under Linux. If they have no choice, they'll finally have to do what we told them years ago and switch.
How not to look too smug when they admit they must ditch Solaris.
Re:but don't forget kids! (Score:5, Interesting)
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What is better? To have one person making $200K per year paying $48K in taxes to support four persons barely surviving on $12K per year or four persons making $50K per year?
Re:but don't forget kids! (Score:5, Informative)
Now that Obama is gone and his policies are going in the dust bin of history, we are seeing 3% growth rate in the economy.
We're getting 3% growth because of Obama's policies. Trump policies, if anything ever gets passed by the Republican congress, won't go into effect until next year.
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First off, the fascist alt-left with their sock puppet accounts are out in force today.
Regarding your statement, sorry, but that is a flat out lie. Obama's policies gave us 1% per year for 8 years. The growth rate right now is partially forward looking by businesses, who are expecting Obamacare to be repealed, taxes to be cut, regulations to be rolled back, and in part due to actual EOs that have been rescinded by Trump. Regulations can stifle business even worse than taxes, something Obama never underst
Re:but don't forget kids! (Score:4, Interesting)
Yet while Obama was around things were bad for 8 years. Real bad.
Thanks to the Republicans who spent eight years dragging their feet. They're still dragging their feet because it's easier to say "no" but saying "yes" requires compromises. Not with the Democrats, but with themselves.
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Yea, like the compromises with the AHA? Oh wait, there weren't any. Democrats did that all on their own. There wasn't anyone willing to compromise on either side for those eight years. I agree with the parent. The new administration signals a more promising environment for business, and it's showing in the stock market.
Re:but don't forget kids! (Score:4, Insightful)
Yea, like the compromises with the AHA? Oh wait, there weren't any. Democrats did that all on their own.
You mean the 200+ amendments that were sponsored or co-sponsored by Republicans that were included in the final bill? Since the Democrats had enough votes to pass the AHA, the Republicans voted "no" and ate their cake too.
The new administration signals a more promising environment for business, and it's showing in the stock market.
The eight-year-old bull market is starting to show its age. What's going to happen when the stock market corrects itself and the economy will goes into a long overdue recession in the next two years?
I'm building up a cash reserve in my brokerage account so I can buy stocks all the way down in the Pence recession.
Re:but don't forget kids! (Score:5, Insightful)
Forget the amendments. The entire design was a compromise to win Republican votes. The Democrats wanted to set up a single payer system, and the Republicans nearly ruptured an aneurysm, so they walked it back to a design that the Republicans said they would be willing to vote for, and then they still didn't.
The Republican party are amazingly skilled manipulators. The Democrats compromise, allowing the Republicans to trick them into adding flaws into bills, and then the Republicans turn around and use the flaws that they introduced to help them attack "the Democrats' bills" so that once they gain enough power, they can put in something entirely different without having to compromise. It's utterly disgusting.
To be fair, the Democrats attempt this sort of manipulation, too, but they're nowhere near as good at it.
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Coming from somebody who's got so much 24% APY credit card debt that he needs a consolidation loan to have a hope of paying it off, you're not going to do shit, tubby.
I'll be debt free in three years, if not sooner. Suck it.
You're going to keep on flailing until you run out of money again, and then you're going to declare bankruptcy, because you're a lazy, dishonest, fraudulent piece of shit.
Maybe you're right. I got a paid off credit card. I could buy a new car with it and head off to Mexico to find a chica to marry.
You'll be one of the first people laid off when the "Pence recession" hits, and when you end up filing for bankruptcy again, any assets you have will be liquidated to pay off pennies on the dollar of your debt.
If all my assets were liquidated, I would still have enough cash to buy a new car and head off to Mexico to find a chica to marry.
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The things I'm saying match what the news outlets were saying while the ACA was being designed [cbsnews.com]. Read that second paragraph again. The whole reason the ACA is a train wreck is because of concessions the Democrats made to the Republicans. This is all well-established fact. Anyone arguing against those facts need only spend two minutes doing a Google search of historical news articles to find out that their opinion is based on pure fantasy and lies.
One of us is spouting
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Sorry, that is revisionist BS. The changes made to the ACA were to get Democrats to vote for it who were not alt-left nut jobs (there were some at that time). Most of those who did vote for it have since lost their seats anyway because the public didn't want that monstrosity in the first place.
Trying to blame Republicans for a Democrat authored bill voted for exclusively by Democrats is a nice trick though.
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You need to look at the records, Republicans gained control of the House in 2011, they took the Senate in 2015. So Democrats had all three bodies from 2009 - 2011 and control of 2 from 2011-2015. Harry Reid refused to put any legislation through the Senate while he was in charge through 2015 so it wasn't the Republicans for the last 8 years dragging their feet, it was the Democrats and Harry Reid. Now for the last 8 months the Republicans haven't done jack, and I seriously doubt they will over the next 1
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The only reason that didn't happen was Obama shat all over the recovery with Obamacare and his pen and paper regulations.
The other problem was Obama being afraid to confront the anti-science wing of the party. That's why the stimulus was frittered away on 'shovel ready' (noncontroversial) construction projects rather than the kind of large-scale infrastructure that returns value for generations to come.
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The EE degree isn't the problem. It's taking out student loans to get a MBA and not being able to find a job to pay off the student loans. I have several friends who graduated with EE in the 1990's, decided to get their MBA after getting laid off during the Great Recession, and now do IT support because they can't find a higher paying job. It's a bit of shock to go from $200K per year to $50K per year.
No. It's going to schools in other cities without consideration of costs, which causes ppl to take loans more than necessary, for pursuing fields of study that cannot possibly provide the necessary ROI.
If someone is going to get $80K in students loans, it better be for pursuing post-grad education at, say, a prestigious medical school. It should not be for getting a BA degree in psychology from an unknown but expensive private school (the later happens a lot.)
Most people could do well to pursue the firs
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Well, it was their decision and now they have to live with the consequences.
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I guess they didn't have the foresight to look at job predictions. That can be found in the library. I was a EE in the 1980s and found in 1985 that there would be *NOTHING* for me when I graduated. Men with decades of experience were projected to be out of work so I switched.
Besides, I was a foreigner in my own school. Seemed to be nothing but Chinese students that had everything paid for them while they were here. Their best of the best. They were really bright.
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I guess they didn't have the foresight to look at job predictions.
I had a roommate who took automotive design on the west coast because he liked cars, leaving him with $25K in student loans and no job prospects. That was in the late 90's. Automotive design might make sense today with Tesla HQ down the street. Fortunately, his wife to be was a career counselor and turned his six years as a grocery clerk into a logistics and warehouse career.
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I don't know what I'd do today. Too many people going to college. Just to get into anything medical, nutrition, dentistry, etc, you're look at a 4.0+ GPA or forgetabout it. So some people look at the bullshit liberal arts type stuff, that doesn't pay squat.
Think if I were doing it today I might go into automotive, or a trade like electrician or plumbing. Elevator Mechanic is a bit easier in that it's indoors and they make a lot of money but you have to be very bright to pass the test. Hardly any black peopl
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retiring on a total savings of *maybe* half a million at best at age 30 or so (after taxes and at least some semblance of living expenses)? Yeah that isn't going to pan out...
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If they were making 200K a year, modestly saving should have had them retired in 5 years.
That only works if you retire to Mexico, build a mansion (by local standards), marry an underage sweet thing and bequeath all your possessions to the village.
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No wonder you're a virgin and have no hope of a female friend, probably ever.
What does my sexuality have to do with the topic being discussed? Or were you just making snide remark because you have nothing worthwhile to add to the discussion?
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Impartial observer here: you brought sexuality into this by discussing underage lovers.
You must be new around here. I don't have underage lovers. Everyone on Slashdot knows that I'm a 48-year-old virgin. Why they have a problem with that I have no clue. As for my comment, I've heard stories of engineers retiring at 50, moving to Mexico and marrying underage girls. Since I work with ex-military, the Philippines is a popular retirement spot for marrying underage girls as well. It's all about getting the most bang for your retirement dollars.
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You're so gone you can't comprehend how deviant this sounds.
I don't think you can comprehend how far up your ass you're riding your high horse.
This is not a rhetorical question I'd really like to know what sort of things you've seen where you think this is ok.
You're aware that are some states in the U.S. that allow underage marriage as young as 14 years old?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_marriage_in_the_United_States [wikipedia.org]
From all the stories that I've heard, the families and the village elders gave their permissions for the marriage. The end result is not some deviant American banging an underage bride but the village getting everything he owns when he dies.
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Odd we should be mentioning this, but underage brides in the USA was one of the main stories on the BBC news app yesterday or possibly the day before. The thrust of the story was that their was a huge increase in it in recent years so much so that a number of states have recently brought in minimum ages of 18 for marriage.
Then again I live in Scotland that only brought in any sort of minimum age in the 1920's and even then it's 16 with on requirement for parental consent. (rest of UK it's 16 but parents hav
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Some got pissed - which I couldn't understand why.
One friend is mad at me for making more money than him in IT support. Never mind that I never took out student loans for my education and I've been working in IT Support for many years longer than him. Having in an EE and MBA doesn't mean squat in IT support when you don't have a track record of getting the work done.
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Your friend must be extremely creepy or something because a highschool dropout that can code fizzbuzz and get around in linux can make $5?,000 in silicon valley.
Nah... Just a bitter EE who made $200K per year, got laid off, took out $100K in student loans to get an MBA, and now makes $50K. Retirement looks bleak with $100K in student loans that can't be discharged in bankruptcy.
I wonder if this is part of the same group of friends you talked about earlier who wants to "get the most bang for their retirement buck" by moving to the 3rd world and buying a child bride.
I don't have any friends like that. I just have friends who have friends who are like that.
student loans need chapter 11 and 7 (Score:2)
and then costs will come down / a lot of joke classes will be gone.
No more $150K+ masters in medieval studies people.
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The cult is not the university, it's the belief that you have to pay an outrageous amount of money for it. You do know that in many parts of the world you get higher education for free or for a very, very modest fee, right?
Re: but don't forget kids! (Score:2)
Free? There is no such thing as free. The US has a very cheap education system compared to Europe. In the US the costs are individual, in Europe they are socialized.
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Something smells about that number.
So all the analysts put Oracle in the 'others' category, not enough revenue to even break out.
However, Cisco is the last 'big enough' vendor, and they seemed to have turned in under 4 billion in revenue on the server business.
But in any event, companies like IBM, Cisco, and Oracle are too profit obsessed to really live in a hardware business filled with competitors living with sub 10% margins.
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I have heard of other companies doing this funny accounting and failing before. Typically they do not account for sales they wouldn't do otherwise had the hardware not been there. So they should, IMHO, account for the SPARC hardware sales and services, Solaris OS sales and services, and Solaris OS dependent applications (e.g. Solaris Oracle DB) sales and services which they are in the position of being able to account.
Otherwise they might be cutting something they think doesn't make them a profit, and end u
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10 people to design a CPU? That hasn't been true for decades, unless you want to design a tiny CPU with uncompetitive performance.
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There's cost and price.
To Intel, unit cost of a processor is exceedingly cheap. They however have massive operational expense to cover to get to that point. The price on top of that is still to a large extent the luxury of a vendor able to set their own margins, to some extent. Too high people won't upgrade, and if they get desperate enough go to AMD. On the desktop side, it no longer takes desperation to get people to not pay Intel because AMD is competitive in desktop. In the dual socket arena, Epyc
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It rather depends on what the associated costs are, which is the point the "simplistic reply" was correctly making.
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Had Sun open sourced Solaris sooner perhaps Linux would never have gotten a foothold in the market. Then again they would have also lost their competitive advantage. So being this late in the game, I think they would have been better off keeping the kernel on internal development, and switching all the tools to as many open source components as they could, much like Apple did.
As long as they designed the hardware to have higher RAS, or density, than what can be achieved with off the shelf x86 solutions, I t
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What I want to know is who is still buying new SPARC servers in 2017? Almost everyone moved off to either commodity Intel hardware or Amazon/Azure/Google/IBM cloud instances years ago.
People with more money than brains... (Score:2, Insightful)
And a nepotic or incestuously cozy relationship with the Oracle Salesguys.
I actually knew someone in the medical tech field whose company had a few dozen sparc servers left a few years ago. They even had a few later model sun/oracle fire servers as storage arrays.
However their last big licensing/sales renegotiation resulted in them getting Oracle x86_64 storage appliances instead and pulling out all of their sparc hardware, over concerns exactly like this.
Guess this is proof they made the prudent choice.
Hon
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The real argument is that they have been on a consistent decline, and are attempting to increase profitability by decreasing costs. In a downward spiral that's usually the harbinger of an eventual end since a decrease in personnel usually leads to a decrease in sales and profit, which begets a vicious cycle.
If they're lucky, they'll be able to trim some fat and stave off the shutdown, but given the declining revenue ... the writing is on the wall despite the stunning numbers involved (4 BILLION? Oracle can
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Of course, essentially supporting an entire processor architecture by yourself is very high operational expense nowadays. And I suspect they are including some sort of revenue that is not strictly hardware, because that number is higher than the analysts say most other vendors make, but do not consider Oracle as having enough server revenue to track).
So assuming you aren't too crazy on volume (and I'm pretty sure they don't have much volume), 4 billion should leave a healthy amount of operational expense t
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Jesus, even their layoff method is both bureaucratic, inefficient, and poorly handled...
Wait, don't tell me...let me guess.
Oracle HR runs on...Oracle?