Oracle owns InnoDB and Sleepycat/BerkeleyDB, both of which are in active development. InnoDB is also MySQL's most popular storage engine. So I wouldn't fear for MySQL's future. It wasn't doing well in Sun anyways.

I'd start a bunch of buzzword-heavy .com's and cash out late 1999. Then I'd go into real estate and cash out in 2007. Then I'd retire.

Who do I need to listen to, and where do I need to be, to have this sort of story 30 years from now?

facebook is indulging the exact same hubris we engaged at yahoo in the late 90s. after an initial cadre of so-so developers rode the wave up, we decided to believe the hype that we were uber-brilliant and suddenly no one was smart enough to pass our interviews. we made sure of it. in the end we hired mediocore talent because we had pissed off anyone with a brain with our retarded brain teasers and "did you memorize page 478 of stroustrup" type questions.

my interview with them was pointlessly difficult, i pretty much hung up on them because it was obvious that the point of the interview was to provide amusement for the caller.

"Sooner or later, people will run out of fresh, attractive ideas that can be done easily, without becoming a decent programmer."

And some people, who never would have considered programming had it not been for iPhone, will turn out to be damn good programmers that continue learning and making good, useful software long after the iPhone glow has faded.

http://www.infoworld.com/d/developer-world/what-if-oracle-bo... is now particularly interesting (from 10 days ago).

It argues:

MySQL is a (low-end) complementary product to the (high-end) Oracle DB

Solaris fits into Oracle's strategy of controlling an OS (their RedHat derivative)

Sun's hardware business could continue given Oracle have just partnered with HP to ship hardware

Java is key to Oracle's application strategy

IMHO, this feels like a much less strained fit than with IBM.

The people are uneducated. In order to protect them from themselves, a strong government must control them. Since a strong government controls the people, there is no need to educate them. The people are uneducated...

I'm missing the part where an unpaid intern can support living in SF and working up to 7 days a week, esp in software where pretty much every internship in industry pays quite nicely

I think you're interpreting people's irrationality in the wrong way. People are often irrationally risk averse: most people would much rather pay $X with probability 1 than $2X with probability 1/2 and $0 elsewhere. The reason lottery tickets sell is because utility functions are nonlinear. After buying a $1 lotto ticket, they're still poor; they don't miss the dollar. But if they win, suddenly they are rich, which is qualitatively different from being poor. Thus, the calculation is a small but nonzero chance of being rich, vs. the certainty of being poor. Most people don't do the math to figure out just how small.

There's a reason why people indulge "If I won the lottery..." fantasies.

The clip art all over the site makes me feel like my email will get sold the second I register.

From five years ago:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A54964-2004Nov...

And even the best research is plagued by cold fusion's most nagging problem: a long history of failing to reproduce experimental results. McKubre is one of the more respected people in the field, and in more than 50,000 hours of experiments, he says, he has recorded 50 times when the setup "unmistakably" produced excess heat.

From tonight's 60 Minutes, an exciting new result!

McKubre says he has seen that energy more than 50 times in cold fusion experiments he's doing at SRI International, a respected California lab that does extensive work for the government.

Or, um, not. Sounds like he hasn't made much progress in the last five years. He's still stuck at "about 50" irreproducible results out of twenty years of experiments. Also, he still has no theory.

This guy's only reproducible result is his ability to convince credulous journalists to publish stuff about him every few years.

Wake me up when the Physical Review Letter is accepted for publication.

with exercise i've found benefit as a function of time to be crazy non-linear. there's a much bigger difference between 0 minutes and 20 minutes spent exercising than between 20 and 40 or 40 and 60. so when i'm busy, i do what i can, keep it short, but never cut it out. i try to do something every other day at least. it clears my head and resets my stress.

i like to run. simple. no gym membership. no complicated/expensive gear -- only necessary investment is a pair of running shoes (runs around $90). best of all, you can exhaust yourself quickly: if you don't have much time to spare, just run faster* for less time.

* i wouldn't recommend taking this to an extreme. i knew a guy in college who'd max out the treadmill for a few minutes, sweat like crazy and call it a day. odds are that's terrible for you. (he also had an anger management problem...related?)

What a bunch of sensationalistic crap. Tons of companies exist solely for organizational (as in, keeping things neat and orderly) purposes, and as pass-through entities into other companies. There's nothing shady or tax-evasive about this; it's just something you do.

If this were a statistic about the 1000 largest companies in America, it'd be alarming; when we are talking about all entities that are formed as corporations, it is completely meaningless. Interesting how a harmless GAO statistic can be spun in such a manner.

That was my intended use of it. My apologies for not writing more clearly.

It's a little early to refer to him in the past tense.