I don't see it ending any time soon. IBM currently holds the largest market share for UNIX servers and Oracle would rather see their DB on those rather than DB2. As long as there is still a good market share in the high end server market, then Oracle will continue to provide it just as they do for HP and did for Sun before buying them.

Why is it people assume you have to run Linux on Power hardware for Oracle? AIX fully supports Oracle RDBMS solutions, including combining them high availability products such as HACMP. You buy Power hardware for the reliability and performance in mid-large scale computing. Someone that can afford to put Oracle on that kind of hardware usually runs AIX vs Linux.

My solution to it given IT often has long and somtimes odd hours with various maintenance windows, events, late night coding sessions and what have you is to use my 24/7 gym at off hours. In general, I see 4-5 people acutally in my gym at night, not including myself and one other buddy I go with. So that leaves plenty of space, equipment and stuff for you to do at nights without the mass of folks using the gym like say at 6AM or 5PM time frames. With this huge 60'000 sq ft gym, 4 people is nothing at all and its very comfortable. After all, those that go at 2 or 3 AM in the mornings, tend to mind their own business.

Lowe's is NOT running CDE, GNOME or fvwm95 on their terminals and never has. Just curious - the post from "engineer who did the work" - hmmmm... I don't know about you... Unless you are my pitifully misinformed alter ego? -The engineer who ACTUALLY did the work.