>Oracle issued a statement saying the suit "is a desperate attempt to deflect blame from Cover Oregon and the governor for their failures to manage a complex IT project.

When a client pays you sums of money that reach this proportion, you would think that they have 0 interaction to do, and would have 100% support of any type of situation possible.

I developed softwares from a-z from start to finish including dev, deploy and support, and I can rest assured that a health care system should not cost this much, let alone give the client such limited service as to say they would still need to be interactive in the configuration, maintenance or deployment of the product.

Oracle to me is the worst overpriced and underworking company out there, they beat IBM , Microsoft and any others for the amount of services provided for the amount they charge. Everyone knows (as a running joke) if you want to make money, get certified as Oracle pro, and you can charge limitless amounts of money...even though technically a MSSQL certified pro could easily surpass in knowledge or service what is offered by way of Oracle.

I worked with Oracle recently and found a glitch in their new 12.0 version of a specific dll responsible for communicating in background...and saw a performance hit based on which version of the client connecting to the new 12.0 db. SO an older client 10.0 dll would not get same sql query execution time then a new client 12.0 dll. In the end, it was because they added new way of pooling queries being searched, and the indexing of the queries was taking longer with older dlls.

I would think this one of those corrupted moves that force all companies to upgrade ALL Oracle components (instead of just a backend)..and get even more money.

I really didnt like their product when compared to the ease of use and speed of dev. of MSSQL. All earlier features that Oracle was known for are now also available with MSSQL, so no more reasons to select Oracle at all..... they even just got around now (15 years after MS) of adding proper increment seeds to their tables....

Overall again, dont like the product as it is way overpriced as all are finding out the hard way now...

I have been saying this on /. for 10 years atleast! Now finally someone gets it, yes there are 3 orbits to the earth, the daily, and the yearly and the ??? which comes from the orbit we are in from the solar system spinning inside the galaxy, which "IT" could affect the gravity/orbit of the other 2.

If you take a coin and put it on a table top to spin it and use your finger to spin it, you will see that eventually gravity will affect the orbit as it slows down, but if it did not slow down it would still be affected in terms of the direction the coin would be spinning in. I have seen this and consider this to be more the reason why we haveglobal events then say global warming being the cause. The climate changes and locations on the planet are getting strange weather but only strange to that location, but say you shifted the worlds axis by 1.5 degrees, then you would see a change everywhere, and the weather would be normal for that location based on the new degrees, although my example could be off degree wise, you get the picture.

I am no scientist yet can figure this out, so how much more should the real scientist know , or maybe they knew all along but didnt want the world to freak over this??

You seem very well educated on the subject, what do you think of this idea...

I think any country (like Argentina or Iceland or Greece), that declares bankruptcy becomes eligible to be "bought" to become part of another countries affiliations.
Seeing as the former government there made such a mess of things, that their people are now considered broke, that country should not be allowed to continue ruling itself, without the guide of an existing country that is successful. Countries take away peoples freedoms without choice. When yo are born into a country, you can not say you do not belong there, or will not follow their rules, and there is no "international neutral zone" which allows people to live without rules, except the ones they "want" to adopt for themselves.

Now it sounds extreme when you consider we have great laws against killing others, but say in a country like colombia or cuba, where the dictators stop you from leaving at all costs, forcing you to live in conditions that you find unacceptable, then this is not free will, as you were born into this, with no choice to another option.

Now keeping this part in mind, when a country whose has responsibility to be the best they can, becomes a danger to all its people because of the corruption or incompetence or whatever the case might be for that country's mismanegement, that country now becomes eligible for a buy out. All resources become another countries with the exception that you also have to accept citizenship for all its people. The uS accepts Argentina to be a 55th or 56th state, all the Argentinians become US citizens, as their resources could not be had without this, a fail safe if you will.

This I would hope to become a movement that spreads across the globe. Imagine if we had no borders because the world was 1 country!

How much would we save on border patrol globally
How much would we save on legal tender management.
How much would we save on transport fees if we have no customs to worry about.
How much would we etc, etc, etc ( fill in limitless vision here )

What I see happening with the reverse if we have splinters of countries everywhere, is that to get your goods by land from spain to ukraine, you might have 150 countries to get through, you would have 150 more chances of catching smugglers, but also 150 more chances of corruption and something happening to your goods in transfer.

We see in so many movies that have underwater cities etc... they all have bio domes and seem to have their infrastructure and atmosphere all encapsulated, but I guess this could have happened over time instead of all at once, as this could be a sign of changes to come, if the sea keeps rising, then we could just need to start building a dome like encasement, allowing us to keep the buildings where they are without too much worry about moving or losing the investment of that chosen physical location.

This post is a bit off topic but uses this article to bring into light certain phenomenons that appear when fractured countries fall and crumble...bringing into question would they have done better keeping themselves as part of the whole (other country they left prior).

If the US currently said to any world government, join us as another one of our states, and allow us to manage you, although you keep certain laws and policies in place, thereby strengthening the fabric of government that might be fragile, they could then also help continue to mine that counrtie's (or new state's) resources whatever they might be. They would both profit as the new state would have less hardships with such polices that could just be adopting, and the US would become even stronger, but we are fracturing smaller and smaller, but to what end?

This fracturing to say you are "this label" or "that label" just to say you want to keep your culture alive is pure crap. I live in Quebec and deal with stupidity all the time concerning such issues and find any government that forces their people to the brink of bankruptcy just to say they are keeping their culture alive is wrong. The culture will remain alive no matter what country you live in as the Jews have clearly demonstrated up to today. Unfortunately they have bought into the fractured point of view by now bying their land back so to speak....

In the end, remove all borders and barriers, we are left with a language we speak and a heritage we choose to either accept and maintain or do away with. Neither is right or wrong, but atleast it is the people deciding for themselves, instead of the government deciding for them at the cost of tax payer dollars.

In this case we could see a reintegration into academic excellence and have a level of standards adopted from the US.

By the way, by no means do I think the US is the only country that could do this, as any country with a level of excellence could be considered as a viable source to "GROW" the united one world nation!.

Say we replace bus drivers who are obnoxious and think they own the road and can cut you off at a whim without any consideration, we could use such technology to introduce better driven cars/buses which would not cost a salary, therefor would not be under any pressure to actually keep a schedule other then just drive to the next stop. This lack of pressure does not allow tempers to enter the factors that might affect road conditions for a bus operator.

We see also that taxis that keep crying they need to make more money and keep inflating pricing, would then be able to lower the costs way down, and bring about less pollution as less people would use their cars if they knnew the alternative to downtown travel could be a cheap cab ride (think about it, if cab fares were 1/5 the cost, would you worry about finding parking, or wasting time and gas, when you could for the same cost just grab a cab?)

This is turn would have an effect of lowering the amount of cars in the downtown area, and also lower pollution from carbon exhaust and traffic. All in all, I think all taxi drivers and bus drivers should be replaced with a safer or cheaper alternative. This is public transport though, so when we think about what that person now would need to learn to have a job, they could be a car washer or gas pump jockey, etc... I know other jobs can be had to replace the ones they would lose.

I am not worried, only excited.

>The hoax caused U.S. stock markets to briefly lose $200 billion in value
You know when I found out they could hack the power grid, I thought, wow what damage could that cause!
Then I heard they could hack into missal silos and probably decrypt the launch codes given enough time to brute force the sequence, I knew for sure how much damage that could cause....
Now i see that they can hack media outlets where people get their information from and post hoax stories on almost any news paper or channel, getting access to internal account info on any of those accounts, I really think we are screwed.

If the source of info we have to make daily decisions is compromised, this is worse then limiting our supply of power (we know how to set up solar panels to get some electricity and could somehow still survive the attack), or even damaging our population through nuclear attack (there are a limited of nuclear arms available and the distances of effect of nuclear fall out would not cover all of the US, therefor we could still survive). The source of information telling us the white house has passed a new law stating it is ok for people to go out and hoard water and food because there is a missal on its way from China...even being a hoax, would take a long time to recover from, and eventually no one would ever pay attention to media outlets, and be ignorant to many things happening every where.

We communicate our daily lives through these mediums, and if these mediums are compromised, then we have no communication. News outlets has been around before electricity, and is one of the measurements of how civilized a country has become!

Hugh Pickens writes...blah blah blah...

Who is Hugh Pickens? I ask only because for someone to suggest that this is what MS needs to do, would need a precedent for this to be suggested, where this person would have been apart of and seen the end result directly. This person would have had to have been in a previous situation with a similar company with similar situations and have seen the progress in order to turn around and suggest that fracturing a company into smaller parts is for the better. If you have proof that this works, then please put on the table. I have yet to hear of companies that got better when they fractured off into smaller pieces, if anything, it has been the reverse, merger after merger solidifies the companies overall hold on the market and offers stability towards unifying that all sub sections follow the same protocols and can lose the dead weight of needless duplication of processes.

Sorry, here is a redo using ~ instead of open close tags

Stan and Kyle > ~playing gutiar hero~
Stan's Dad >Hey, boys, heres something really cool....watch .... ~playing real guitar~
Stan and Kyle > Thats lame Dad!
Stan's Dad > But I am playing for real !?!
Stan and Kyle > Mom....can you get Dad out of here!

The only one I can think of actually would require a joystick throw back to the 80s.
The rest of the post would require lots of censorship and therefor will be left up to your imagination.
Why do something with a GF on a video game, when you can do it for real!

Stan and Kyle >
Stan's Dad >Hey, boys, heres something really cool....watch ....
Stan and Kyle > Thats lame Dad!
Stan's Dad > But I am playing for real !?!
Stan and Kyle > Mom....can you get Dad out of here!

Yes, you can NOW be burned for trying to skim, dust under the rug, threaten, or even deny accusations that your business, product, or services, is under par.

Thank god we finally have the internet, although businesses still are lagging in accepting this is here to stay, and you should do your best to take care of the client.

If you are a hotel, and have bed bugs, this is a crime... if you are a mehcanic shop and have bed bugs, who the f*ck cares!

Lets keep it real, a hotel with bed bugs is like a mechanic shop with no wrenches! You will not get the job done properly.

Don't cry if you are caught with your pants down.... and I am sure this is the only guy that thought to complain online, but I can bet this is not the only guy to get bitten by bed bugs in that hotel.

Now as a hotel, will you look at this and see the importance of hygiene? I hope so...

I stayed in a hotel in Sault StMarie, where they had replaced the covers as they were before the previous person was there, i opened up the covers and found pieces of cheese, pubic hairs, and some stains on the sheets, all the while having a bed with a middle that sagged 5 inches deep! This was in 1995, and you can bet if I came across this now, I would and WILL do the same as this guy did.

Hotels need to be held accountable, just like any other business taking your money for a service provided.

I actually condone proper use of those, as in mexico, europe, and the US, it is accepted as being normal to sometimes need them....
Here in Canada, you just mention the word, and everyone thinks you are criminal...

Imagine all the people, living in a world where you just go to the pharmacy and get what you need....

Joe and the volcano seemed like a good idea, what is stopping them from trying this...run up the side of the volcano, dump the stuff in, and run back down for the next load, & repeat!, Eventually, you will be able to close off the volcano completely, no?

I know this very exact situation is in a canadian government office, and with major content management, you would think this to be the most critical thing to get away from, yet they stick with Access and the 1 guy who knows it all....god save us if he dies tomorrow

>The infrastructure in Haiti under normal conditions was perfectly capable or providing drinking water

Have you been to Haiti to be able to confirm this?
Are you a water treatment plant manager to be able to expertly describe what is considered "perfectly capable"?
When you consider a country to be an island, and that their drinking water is coming from only 1 supply, would you say that it is perfectly acceptable?

I think it would be wise for anyone going into a building that houses flammable materials, to know all fire exits just in case, dont you?.