This Really Useful, Right?
CBS has a Snowden Deflect today: Tech tycoon Larry Ellison on NSA surveillance.
Charlie Rose interviewing Oracle CEO Larry Ellison:
ROSE: Let me just hear you clearly. You were saying whatever the NSA’s doing is okay with me?
ELLISON: It’s great. I wish, you know, it’s great. It’s essential. By the way, President Obama thinks it’s essential.
It’s essential if we want to minimize the kind of strikes that we just had in Boston. It’s absolutely essential.
First off, I don’t see where it was mentioned how much money Oracle makes from the military/industrial complex in software, training, and consulting [millions of dollars] and secondly, the system, as intrusive as it is, didn’t find the Tsarnaev brothers despite multiple red flags, including one from Russia’s FSB. I realize that someone who sells Oracle database software will have a hard time accepting this concept, but – it can’t be essential if it doesn’t work!
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I realize that someone who sells Oracle database software will have a hard time accepting this concept, but – it can’t be essential if it doesn’t work!
PMSL That’s the nail, right there! LMAO
I’ll be laughing all night… thanks for that m8! Seriously! 😀
(I’m fighting a double-damned DNS problem with my VPS, so wasn’t in a happy mood, until now.) 😉 😀
To be serious for a moment… Anything Larry is for, like his hated rival, Bill… is something everyone should automatically be against! Since Larry, like Bill, are only interested in things that are good for themselves. They care not one iota for anyone else. Since I have had to study them both (quite seriously and with great depth) and have talked with them both, I feel somewhat qualified to make that statement. Bill & Larry make the Bush family look like downright human benefactors by comparison.
(And you knew I couldn’t resist commenting when you mentioned larry!) 😎
I have a relative who has spent her professional life as an Oracle guru – she has never been unemployed. She is very good, but it does get to her that she has to fix things every time there is a new release. In one release for no known reason Oracle reversed the priority order for selection. That meant that all of the carefully optimized commands in the system to speed things up had to be rewritten to get it back up to the speed it had before the change. You talk about bitching – the Oracle users were livid.
You essentially have to attend Oracle’s seminars to get the real documentation for the system as it was shipped.
I crossed paths with the software several times, but it was just too frustrating for me to want to spend any time with it, even though becoming an Oracle guru is one of the few lifetime jobs left.
Larry is, was, and always will be an asshole, and you must have had a keeper to have talked to him for more than a couple of minutes without breaking him into small pieces. If he were 1% as good as he thinks he is, there would never be another software update because all software would be perfect.
The last straw for me was late 90’s for a major half billion $ project for a major corp when I was with HP. I was Assistant Proj Mgr (2IC), we had a half doz qualified PM’s for the project. It was large and complex.
HP was adamant that we would use Oracle as the core of the project and everything would revolve around that. I had misgivings from day one, and let them be known because I had fought with Oracle middle-ware garbage products on earlier projects and lost. Thankfully, HP relented somewhat and allowed us to choose other products that worked with the Oracle DBMS as the core. We partnered with PeopleSoft for the HRMS, ERP & CRM components. We discovered some issues, and the early fixes from PS were fast and good, we even had 2 PS engineers assigned to our project. (We never had anyone from Oracle, only an in-house (HP) Oracle *Guru* which shows how much they care)! In ’99 Craig Conway became CEO of PS and things got even better! We had been asking for Internet & Web support in PS products and gotten nowhere, and suddenly after Conway became CEO, there they were! 😀
By 2001, the support from PS began to get worse, updates were slower… And we discovered that Oracle were in the process of trying to take over PS, and every time PS would update something to match an Oracle update, Oracle would quickly release a *minor* patch that just happened to cause a problem for a PS product! Oracle always had a *legitimate* reason for the patch of course. by 2004, Craig Conway had enough and resigned from PS, and Dave Duffield returned and sold PS to Oracle. And my project was cancelled by the client even though it was almost 90% complete. *shrug* Don’t blame them. We spent most of the project fighting with Oracle, with the only saving grace being PeopleSoft. Since Oracle now owned PS… well, it was a no-brainer really. Cut your losses and quit.
HP have always had a history of picking bad partnerships.
One day, I might see if I can make a list of projects that Oracle have (at least helped) kill, or at the very least go way over-budget! I suspect many people may well be surprised! I could do the same for M$! LOL 😈
Anyone who believes anything Ellison (or Gates) has to say (unless it is self-serving) is a moron.
Oracle has become like a ‘too big to fail bank’ or IBM in the main frame era – a safe choice for a manager. The essential weakness in IT for decades was that the people making the decisions didn’t have any idea what things did, or how anything worked, because they were in finance, not IT.
HP made good hardware, but their software choices were often extremely strange.
M$ & Oracle have been responsible for a lot of lifetime jobs, so there is that 😉 What’s a few billions dollars down the tubes by comparison 😈 When Ellison bought that ‘boat’ it confirmed every bad thought I ever had about him. Buying a boat is as dumb as ‘buying’ a condominium, because they are both money pits, so the bigger and more expensive they are, the greater the level of stupid in the purchase.
Yep.
Towards the end of the project, my boss (Snr. PM) resigned and I became pro-tem Snr. PM. It was only supposed to be temporary, a month at most, until they got another HP PM up to speed. But no PM in Aus., Asia or the USA would touch it! Most even threatened to resign (which should have told HP a ton). They finally found a PM in HP Canada that took it on. And after a couple weeks, I resigned (and then most of my team resigned also). The guy was strictly a HW specialist! I’d warned the client and told them I was going to resign and why, They fought with HP to have me installed as the Snr. PM, but HP refused. HP was like the old DEC & IBM. Very much *seniority* based, and as far as they were concerned, I didn’t make the cut (after all, I’d only worked for HP for 5 years, I was still a *junior* in their eye’s. Plus a lot of the people I would have been promoted over would probably have resigned anyway). Way it is with these Corp’s. *shrug*
On top of everything else, Carly Fiorina became CEO of HP in ’99, and she put a hold on just about everything until she could change everything to suit herself. It was a disaster. Many HP projects, such as mine, failed. One of the reasons was that nobody was at all sure what their jobs actually were or would be next week! So nobody did anything. And that was a big part of my reasoning to resign, and I told the Client they should think hard about their future with HP. And they did, and decided to go back to IBM. Better the devil you know… 😉 IBM even offered me a job as a consequence! 😆 No way in hell! We (well, the client) had to buy IBM PC’s because we couldn’t get any from HP (and not just a few, over 600, with a lot more to follow)! We even had to go to Tektronix to get several $15k color lazer printers! It was an insane time!
So, I became involved full-time in the Security biz I was a ‘part-time’ Director of since 2000 (really more of a consultant then, though I did have to attend the Monthly GM’s & the AGM of course). In hindsight… I probably should have swallowed my pride taken the job with IBM. At least I would have gotten paid, and paid well. *sigh* After that disaster, I went back to Apple. Which was yet another disastrous decision! Three in a row… I’d truly just about decided that I had no idea what the hell I was doing or thinking any longer! And it’s no wonder I had a major break-down that took me several years to recover from. Well, kinda recover. *shrug*
The decisions we make… Sometimes we definitely make the wrong decisions but for (what we believe are) the right reasons. And sometimes, we are just plain stupid! 😈
I was definitely better as a Soldier/spook. It truly was all so much simpler! I have to laugh though when I hear people who have never worked in the Military or Intel Svc’s who imagine they are all so difficult and complicated! Nope! Because in the field, complexity is a really bad thing! And the Commanders know it. So, they keep it as simple as possible, and we are trained to do the job well. Of course things don’t go according to plan, but even that is actually *planned* for! We know what to do when things go seriously ass-up! I didn’t spend over 2 years in training to learn how to march and shoot! A lot of that training was the reason why I was a good PM! I was trained as a tactician and strategist, amongst other things. And I was trained not to panic (even without a towel!) 😉 When things went bad on a project, I was generally the one with the clear head who found a solution. *shrug*
My problem now is that I’m really best at creating and managing great teams. My team in the Military got unit citations and commendations. In the civilian World, my engineering team won several Aus & Queens awards, and other Int’l awards. And now, it’s just me. I guess I’m not used to that, and it’s very difficult. Not least because no single person can do everything. 🙂 But I’m doing my best with what I have. *shrug* What choice do I have? 🙂
Ahh well… back to my own problem! 😆
Oh! One thing that really does piss me off is how the Business World rewards abject failure!!
After Carly almost destroyed HP and was kicked out (forced to resign), she was immediately offered Board Memberships with several organizations! She was on the Boards of Revolution Health Group (and people wonder why Health insurance and the health system is so screwed!) Cybertrust (Yeah, right! I’d never trust them a micron!) and TSMC (Why??! I thought the Chinese were smarter than that! I mean jeez… Fiorina got HP out of the chip-making business by culling PA-RISC and making sure the Alphacide continued, then sent all high-end chip designs off to Intel for manufacturing! And wasn’t Intel so very happy to oblige??! And people wonder how Intel beat AMD! Well… They had help! Yeah, perfect credentials for TSMC!) And not least, a member of the Board of Trustees for MIT (Seriously… WTF????!) What else… Oh, WEF (World Economic Forum) No wonder the World Economy is in the tank! And Fellow at the London Business School!
I don’t get it! Maybe all that espionage and blackmail she did netted her info on the head’s of these Org’s? *shrug* One thing, she’s totally Paranoid!
There’s my problem right there! I have a long list of successes! I should become an abject failure, and then I’d be worth millions!! 😈 Hmmmm…
😆
In the CEO game, Carly didn’t fail – she got paid her entire contract even though the company tanked, so that is considered a success for an MBA. All those people think about is themselves, they don’t care about the companies they run. The 1% don’t care about ‘losers’, people who don’t have 1% money. That’s why things like Bain Capital stay in business – they occasionally have a long shot success that generates a huge payoff, so the losses are just bad luck. These people are gambling, they aren’t operating businesses. If the insiders made a lot of money, who cares what happens to the plebes?
Carly isn’t paranoid, she just knows the people she’s dealing with at the top and what they are capable of if you are between them and something they want -IOW they are just like her, you know: sociopaths.