I have seldom seen common sense strategy. Most companies rely on luck and have close to no strategy, or they go for the lunatic strategy.

Looks like Oracle is feeling the pressure from the free DBs like Postgres and MySQL.

From the Oracle webpage: Oracle Database 10g Express Edition (Oracle Database XE) is an entry-level, small-footprint database based on the Oracle Database 10g Release 2 code base that’s free to develop, deploy, and distribute.

Link.

Looks like the maximum DB size is 4GB and it uses only one processor and at most one GB RAM.

Having a free Oracle DB is good for the projects where one is forced to use an Oracle DB.

Enjoy the humor :-)

 ---- Forwarded Usenet-message ----
 From: "Pascal Costanza" <pc@p-cos.net>
 Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
 Subject: Re: Lisp Logo Madness!
 Date: Sat, 29 Oct 2005 00:21:40 +0200
 URL: news://<3sfmjlFnv7dfU1@individual.net>

 drewc wrote:
 > Alan Crowe wrote:
 >
 >> drcode@gmail.com writes:
 >>
 >>> I have built a logo set that I hope can fill this void.
 >>> There's several logos in different shapes and styles all built around a
 >>> central design.
 >>>
 >>> http://www.lisperati.com/logo.html
 >>
 >> The creature is very cute, but I think he should have a
 >> fifth leg, to match having five eyes.
 >>
 >> Alan Crowe
 >> small rock
 >> 93 million miles out
 >  This is a popular newbie request. In Common Life is is trivial add such a
 leg, and if you look around it has been done before. While i might agree
 that it is a useful feature, it's not worth revising the standard simply
 because the legs and eyes don't match.

 It's actually an advantage that the numbers of eyes and legs don't match
 because this allows you to infer from just partial information what you
 are dealing with. So, say, you see the number 4 mentioned in your
 program source, you will immediately realize that this is about the
 legs. Vice versa, if you see the number 5, you know that this is about
 the eyes.

 Schemers think that it is an advantage that their language has exactly
 one leg and exactly one eye, and they claim that a hygienic organ system
 can help you disambiguate the possible confusions arising from this. So
 when you see a 1 mentioned, the organ system can infer from the lexical
 scope whether it is a leg or an eye. However, I think this just appeals
 to some weird mathematical aesthetics. The 4-legs-5-eyes system has been
 around for nearly half a decade now, and noone in the Lisp community
 really has ever had any problems with that.

 > You must be a troll.

 Don't be so harsh. There is a whole chapter in Peter Seibel's "Practical
 Common Life" in which the 4-legs-5-eyes system is explained, so it seems
 to be a real problem for newbies - at least for those coming from other
 languages.

  Pascal

 But now executives at Scientigo, a small software maker based in
 Charlotte, NC, say the company owns two U.S. patents (No. 5,842,213 and
 No. 6,393,426), that cover one of the fundamental concepts behind XML: the
 idea of packaging data in a self-defining format that allows it to be
 correctly displayed wherever it travels.

The newest on-line resource for serious Ruby information has gone live.

Ruby Code & Style, an on-line magazine from Artima, has just published issue #1.

Check out the names on the advisory board. It’s a Who’s Who of everybody who’s anybody in the Ruby world.

The premiere issue has three outstanding articles:

First up, Jack Herrington, author of Code Generation in Action (Manning, 2002) and Podcasting Hacks (O’Reilly, 2005), has written Modular Architectures with Ruby

Next, Austin Ziegler gives us Creating Printable Documents with Ruby

And there’s a reprint of Ara Howard’s article, Linux Clustering with Ruby Queue: Small is Beautiful, which first appeared in Linux Journal but deserves repeat attention

A big thanks to the advisory board, and especial to Bill Venners for starting this whole thing.

To cut a long story short, we think that most financial online tools are a joke. We want to offer leading edge statistical tools with unknown ease of use. Then we combine these hard facts with soft facts :-). Stay tuned ..

Sven C. Koehler is still working on our conference videos, but a copy of our slides is available. Futurometer is still in the early development stages, but it's big fun.

I especially like the "bird flu" plot showing how much media attention it gets.

It seems like every development project begins with the date, and we’re held responsible for "making the date". Making the date is not a development responsibility. Here’s why.

 >>  On Sun, Oct 16, 2005 at 11:48:34PM -0200, Luiz Esmiralha wrote:
 >>  >
 >>  > Maybe another question can help clarify the issue.
 >>  >
 >>  > Why pay 100 grand a year for a programmer just to make a guy in the US
 >>  > or Europe happy if I can get the same job paying 20 grand a year for a
 >>  > guy in India?
 >>
 >>  Well those aren't anything near the figures.  I know someone who is
 >>  the IT director for a UK company that uses outsourcing.  The financial
 >>  savings are around 15%.  If he sets up a UK shop in one of the more
 >>  deprived areas of the UK he will be able to get to somewhere near that
 >>  figure - lower salaries, govt grants etc.  As a result he is seriously
 >>  looking at doing just that.
 >>

 In a recent survey, average savings from offshoring are around a bit
 less than 10%. 5% of the companies polled acheved savings around 50%
 (cases where they replaced 400 bucks/hour resources for 50 bucks/hour
 resources).

 The realistic target saving when offshoring operations is estimated
 around 30% as companies become more mature in the way they conduct
 offshoring.

 20 grand a year for a programmer in Brazil is a very good figure. I
 don't know the current average salary of a programmer in the US or UK.
 The 100K figure was based on supposition rather than fact.

 >>  > Your analogy implies that Indian software lacks quality. Quality seems
 >>  > to be measured (or guessed?) in CMM levels by every company in the US
 >>  > and the rest of the world is following this trend. Given that fact, I
 >>  > would like to remind you of the many companies in India appraised at a
 >>  > CMM 5 maturity level.
 >>  > I don't believe in CMM, but the guys in India didn't make it up, they
 >>  > just happily jumped on the SEI bandwagon.
 >>
 >>  I don't believe in CMM either and I dont believe it necessarily produces
 >>  a high quality product.  It has been my experience (of three different
 >>  Indian outsourcing companies) that product quality is variable, and
 >>  a lot of the developers are what I would class as juniors even though they
 >>  are not sold as such.  Undoubtedly some of this can be tracked to
 >>  the fact that development of apps that distant from the users is not the
 >>  best way of doing things. Also there is a disinclination for the Indian
 >>  guys to question the spec if they think it is inconsistent or lacking in
 >>  detail and to raise questions with whoever is leading the project.
 >>
 >>  Some (maybe most) of these issues are often also present for the big US/UK
 >>  consulting firms.
 >>

 I worked with the 'Big Five"  in some projects and they present a
 uniform pattern in their staffing that I call "War Movie Team".

 These teams are usually composed by a seasoned sargent (consultant)
 which marvels the spectator (customer) with his ability and 10 rookies
 (juniors or trainees). The sargent is usually assigned to another post
 in the middle of the movie and must leave the rookies to their own
 luck.

 In unrealistic war movies, the rookies will use their talent combined
 with the experience they acquired with Sarge to overcome the enemy and
 come home as heroes. In real wars and real projects, they are
 slaughtered by snipe fire, hidden mines and disease and return to
 South Dakota in bodybags.

Wee is a framework for building highly dynamic web applications. It is inspred by Seaside.

www.euruko.com

• The framework: Ruby on Rails
• The favored webserver: lighttpd with FastCGI
• An embedded database: SQLite

Locomotive includes the Ruby MySQL and PostgreSQL bindings. If you have MySQL/PostgreSQL installed, or want to use them, Locomotive is ready.

Locomotive will be nice to your existing rails installation as Locomotive is entirely self-contained.

Propositions for enhancements are welcome…

gegroet, Erik V. - www.erikveen.dds.nl/