Comment by legitster
5 days ago
If you are already a customer of Oracle, I can't imagine this matters to you. You did not choose Oracle because it was a good product and they are a good company. You are a customer of Oracle because there was a backroom executive deal with the Devil. No one is surprised or outraged or even has any choices.
As my buddy from Oracle likes to say, "No one cares what we do as long as the flow of streak, coke, and strippers doesn't stop."
He's a big Zed Shaw fan.
Anytime Oracle is brought up is a great time to repost the famous Lawnmower quote:
> "As you know people, as you learn about things, you realize that these generalizations we have are, virtually to a generalization, false. Well, except for this one, as it turns out. What you think of Oracle, is even truer than you think it is. There has been no entity in human history with less complexity or nuance to it than Oracle. And I gotta say, as someone who has seen that complexity for my entire life, it's very hard to get used to that idea. It's like, 'surely this is more complicated!' but it's like: Wow, this is really simple! This company is very straightforward, in its defense. This company is about one man, his alter-ego, and what he wants to inflict upon humanity -- that's it! ...Ship mediocrity, inflict misery, lie our asses off, screw our customers, and make a whole shitload of money. Yeah... you talk to Oracle, it's like, 'no, we don't fucking make dreams happen -- we make money!' ...You need to think of Larry Ellison the way you think of a lawnmower. You don't anthropomorphize your lawnmower, the lawnmower just mows the lawn, you stick your hand in there and it'll chop it off, the end. You don't think 'oh, the lawnmower hates me' -- lawnmower doesn't give a shit about you, lawnmower can't hate you. Don't anthropomorphize the lawnmower. Don't fall into that trap about Oracle." - Bryan Cantril
You elided the most famous quote from that diatribe. The lawnmower comparison is the expansion on:
"Do not fall into the trap of anthropomorphizing Larry Ellison"
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To be fair to Oracle: the lawnmower doesn't hate people... yet. This millennium is still young. And we keep adding connectivity and llms into everything.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&t=33m
"Everyone Else Must Fail" is a good read.
what's "streak"? do you mean steak?
I thought it was some kind of trendy alcohol that I hadn't heard of, that probably comes in a brown bottle
You can search for that word definition.
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The problem is the people who have to use Oracle aren't the ones getting the steak or strippers.
Isn’t that a feature?
"Oracle, where the Sun don't shine no more."
I’m sorry but I don’t get this Zed Shaw reference, what did I miss?
He's a popular blogger: https://zedshaw.com/
Weapons grade infinte snark, probably.
He seems to have stopped blogging a few years back. I kinda miss his epic rants and Learning $whatever The Hard Way stuff. Part of me hopes them and whoever used to run n-gate moved to Portland and are now running a bespoke hand made piano business together or something.
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I use Oracle Cloud for my personal projects because of their generous free tier[1] which includes 4x Ampere A1 cores, 24 GB of RAM, and 10 TB of outbound data transfer per month.
I was ready to jump ship if they changed the terms, but I was not expecting a security incident.
[1]: https://www.oracle.com/cloud/free/
I was talking to a customer in a construction company that had its entire internal project management platform sold to Oracle. < This was why they couldnt manage their end of a large project.
Oracle futzed it, and after a complete roll of the construction firms board of directors, they were in negotiations to buy their own program back for twice the price.
I've started seeing ads for Oracle OCI in some podcasts I listen to so I think they are starting to see if they can attract customers outside of their "enterprise sales process".
I'm not sure who those ads are supposed to appeal to besides the podcasts hosts raking in the ad dollars.
I haven’t seen the ads, but Oracle Cloud is definitely the public cloud provider with the most generous free tier. That’s not to say you should use and trust them, but I can see why many would.
You pay in other ways.
I understand if you have absolutely no money, but even then repeatedly trying to provision a server and getting a error- something like no capacity available - isn't a fun time.
Whatever, I'll pay 7$ a month to not deal with that.
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My personal multicloud strategy for many years was to make full use of the free tier on as many providers as necessary.
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>”enterprise sales process”
I’m sorry, is Oracle known to be some super sleazy sales org that plys enterprise decision makers with strippers and cocktails, and drugs?
I have absolutely no idea if you are being facetious or naive there.
Yes. Oracle is absolutely the tech vendor that's going to be dropped on the engineering team with zero input and no consideration for whether it fits the problems they have, after your CTO spends a a few days on the golf course and high end steak restaurants and, depending on how much money their enterprise sales team thinks they have, either high class escorts or sleazy strip joints. Given how common that story (or one very like it) is, I'm close to 100% certain those trips also include discreet photographers and hotel rooms wired with 4k video recording.
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I imagine Larry Ellison gave this exact speech right after this incident became public.
If the tables were turned, Oracle would be taking advantage of the situation.
Take note.