Older blog entries for badvogato (starting at number 442)

14 Mar 2012 (updated 18 Mar 2012 at 19:23 UTC) »
This brings back most of maths & Phys I've learned in school. holy cow. I am so rusty. need to visit gobase.org again. "Go forth and spread the good news about τ.

I believe the strongest argument in favor of τ is "The complex exponential of the circle constant is unity." If we surrender to this list of Five-O-Metrics: 0, 1, e, i, τ . The last one can also be remembered as 666 over 106. How awesome can any other order of numbers be?

Chinese linkies & Yixiao AT limao.net


Interesting Conversation:

http://gigaom.com/2012/03/10/oracle-has-a-cloud-computing-secret/

stupid dba:

Lots of really bad info in that article…

-$2.8M would be almost 120 intel cores of Oracle Enterprise Edition at list price. There are well known websites run on half of that.
-You couldn’t run a transactional DB on anything other than Oracle very successfully on 120 cores
-Unless your hosting provider is bleeding money, its going to cost you a *lot* more over 3-4 years than 2.8M to host that. The electricity alone to run that is far more than what you quoted.
-Could you come up with a segmented architecture to run in all on mySQL? Sure, you’d also probably spend an extra $20M in development costs to do it and manage it.
-As far as running a 2 node cluster on RAC – you’d only need standard edition and you’d closer to 30K in licensing then, not 900K.
-Oracle already announced its offering hosted “amazon” like public cloud databases for EE. You can let cat of the bag on your secret… cloud.oracle.com
-No serious company on the Web outsources its hosting. Its a great start up model, but the cost benefit is waaaaay past there when you’re at 2.8M in database licenses. This was Ellison’s knock on Force.com, you end up having to take a proprietary format that you *can’t* take off a public cloud (this is also a problem for Azure)

George Gilbert Sunday, March 11 2012

Mr. DBA (I can’t address you as stupid, since you’re comments are well informed):

“$2.8M would be almost 120 intel cores of Oracle Enterprise Edition at list price. There are well known websites run on half of that”

I think I know where your processor count comes from. $2,800,000 / $23,700 / core = apx 120 cores. Let me try to explain my math, since the pricing rules can be complicated.

Amazon’s largest EC2 database instance is “Quadruple Extra Large DB Instance” and it has 8 virtual cores at the equivalent of 1Ghz 2007 class Intel Xeons. So you take that EC2 database instance and then you convert the 8 virtual cores to 4 “Processor Core Equivalents” because of how Oracle accounts for 1Ghz 2007 class Xeon cores.

Enterprise Edition costs $47,500 per processor core and another $46,000 per processor core combined for the Real Application Clusters and Cache options – so that you can run in a configuration similar to a mirrored mySQL with Memcached. That totals apx $400,000 *per node*. So the two nodes in a cluster together total apx $800,000. That gets upsized by a factor of 2.5 to account for peak capacity. Even if the application runs at that peak 10% of the time, you have to pay Oracle *up front* apx $2,000,000 plus 22% for first year maintenance.

- Regarding the running cost of this configuration, the baseline configuration is a total of 16 virtual cores or 2 EC2 max database instances. Amazon’s fully loaded charge for running mySQL in that configuration is only $5.20 per hour. So unless Amazon is bleeding red ink, the electricity is included in that. Similarly, if you upsize that to peak capacity, it’s still only $12.00 per hour.

- Regarding the comment that Standard Edition would suffice, you couldn’t use the Cache option for memory-resident acceleration like Memcached, or any of the other Enterprise Edition functions for that matter.

- Regarding Force.com, apparently they are hard at work at moving off Oracle as the database for their PaaS offering as well as for the core Salesforce.com application itself. Once upon a time Scott McNealy used to boast that big applications needed big Sun boxes and he frequently pointed to Salesforce.com. Then they moved to commodity x86 boxes.

– Regarding building the site or application on a sharded mySQL architecture, you’re right. It is more difficult than using a proper RDBMS where you leave all physical management of the data to the DBMS. However, the default stack and application pattern for Web applications that emerged over the last 10 years was LAMP on sharded mySQL databases. Driven by Big Data requirements, It’s now evolving even further to include even more scalable databases labeled (or mislabeled) NoSQL or NewSQL.

- Regarding running on Oracle Public Cloud, see my response to Campbell Webb above. We still need to see pricing and how non-Oracle software can be accommodated.

7 Mar 2012 (updated 9 Mar 2012 at 15:25 UTC) »

The Praemium Erasmianum Foundation has awarded the Erasmus Prize 2012 to the American philosopher Daniel C. Dennett (1942). The theme of the Erasmus Prize this year is ‘the cultural meaning of the natural sciences’. Daniel Dennett is praised for his ability to translate the cultural significance of science and technology to a broad audience.

http://www.epo.org/law-practice.html
http://appft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-bool.html&r=1&f=G&l=50&co1=AND&d=PG01&s1=%2211%2F454,652%22&OS=%2211/454,652%22&RS=%2211/454,652%22

finished 'Fraternity' by Diane Brady. Reading 'Fatal Invention' by Dorothy Roberts. Interested in connecting with Prof. Yanzhong Huang

"IBM touts quantum computing breakthrough" ---
Mark Ketchen, the manager of physics of information at the IBM's TJ Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, NY.

" do you really want to challenge a Dutch person about the English translation of the word ‘Levenswensverklaring’? " It is NOT 'Life Passport' ....What is Dutch Euthanasia Blue that is different from Americans?

9 Feb 2012 (updated 9 Feb 2012 at 14:30 UTC) »

there is a prophet among us, by the name of sashako, who forsee the lack of credit in Greek, I could be wrong though. But only god knows why I was a helper in his project in the year of 2004. OPS. I couldn't be more than wrong. wishful thinking and seeing. IT'S GEEK NOT GREEK, PROOF: NOBODY IS AS BLIND AS I CAN BE, SOMETIMES.

8 Feb 2012 (updated 21 Feb 2012 at 20:02 UTC) »

it seems to me, there are no good man nor bad man by nature's lofty design but man and woman. More to it, in my copy of the bible, 'to sin' simply is 'to be born as a man alone'. Does that algorithm translates to the understanding that twins are always good from the very beginning? Where did I get the impression that 'Thomas' in Yiddish means twin.

'Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.' So Einstein once wrote to explain his personal creed:"A religious person is devout in the sense that he has no doubt of the significance of those super-personal objects and goals which neither require nor are capable of rational foundation.' His was not a life of prayer and worship. Yet he lived by a deep faith - a faith not capable of rational foundation - that there are laws of Nature to be discovered. His lifelong pursuit was to discover them. His realism and his optimism are illuminated by his remark: 'Subtle is the Lord, but malicious He is not.' ('Raffiniert ist der Herrgott aber boshaft ist er nicht.') When asked by a colleague what he meant by that, he replied: 'Nature hides her secret because of her loftiness, but not by means of ruse' (Die Natur verbirgt ihr Geheimnis durch die Erhabenheit ihres Wesens, aber nicht durch List.')

Here's a casethat US court stripped a Chinese national, Dow's research leader the title 'Scientist' and labeled him 'a trade-secret theft' instead.

"According to court documents, from January 2003 until February 2008, Huang was
employed as a research scientist at Dow, a leading international agricultural company based in Indianapolis that provides agrochemical and biotechnology products. In 2005, Huang became a research leader for Dow in strain development related to unique, proprietary organic insecticides marketed worldwide. As a Dow employee, Huang signed an agreement that outlined his obligations in handling confidential information, including trade secrets, and prohibited him from disclosing any confidential information without Dow’s consent. Dow employed several layers of security to preserve and maintain confidentiality and to prevent unauthorized use or disclosure of its trade
secrets.

Huang admitted that during his employment at Dow, he misappropriated several Dow trade secrets. According to plea documents, from 2007 to 2010, Huang transferred and delivered the stolen Dow trade secrets to individuals in Germany and the PRC. With the assistance of these individuals, Huang used the stolen materials to conduct unauthorized research with the intent to benefit foreign universities that were instrumentalities of the PRC government. Huang also admitted that he pursued steps to develop and produce the misappropriated Dow trade
secrets in the PRC, including identifying manufacturing facilities in the PRC that would allow him to compete directly with Dow in the established organic pesticide market.

According to court documents, after Huang left Dow, he was hired in March 2008 by Cargill, an international producer and marketer of food, agricultural, financial and industrial
products and services. Huang worked as a biotechnologist for Cargill until July 2009 and signed a confidentiality agreement promising never to disclose any trade secrets or other confidential information of Cargill. Huang admitted that during his employment with Cargill, he stole one of
the company’s trade secrets – a key component in the manufacture of a new food product, which he later disseminated to another person, specifically a student at Hunan Normal University in the PRC.

According to the plea agreement, the aggregated loss from Huang’s criminal conduct exceeds $7 million but is less than $20 million.

“Mr. Huang used his insider status at two of America’s largest agricultural companies to steal valuable trade secrets for use in his native China,” said Assistant Attorney General Breuer.

“We cannot allow U.S. citizens or foreign nationals to hand sensitive business information over to competitors in other countries, and we will continue our vigorous criminal enforcement of economic espionage and trade secret laws. These crimes present a danger to the U.S. economy
and jeopardize our nation’s leadership in innovation.”




"In the expectation or hope of grace, we do evil on an installment basis; we are always aware of the necessary compensatory forms of remorse and penance. If we believe in grace, we also believe in immortality; in short, we believe. we sin not from despair but in the expectation of a saving grace." How about that? I haven't thought of it, that way. Maybe, it's about time to sin a little again? I wonder...

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