31–40 of 115 posts
The Raiders were 11-5 the next year (2002) and went to the Super Bowl.
Darryl K. Taft is a horrible writer.
For real, "That bent Gosling’s resolve like a wishbone in the hands of two eager siblings in mid-pull after Thanksgiving dinner, but even that didn’t break it."
"But unlike Oracle, Davis and the Raiders have not had a winning season for awhile – not since my Baltimore Ravens flattened their hopes and the shoulder of quarterback Rich Gannon after a vicious pancake tackle by Tony Siragusa on the way to a Ravens’ Super Bowl winning season in 2001."
Some quotes: > Oracle did not have a notion of a senior engineer or at least one equivalent to Gosling’s grade at Sun, where he was a fellow. “In my job offer, they had me at a fairly significant grade level down,” he said. Says something about how they value technical people. > The word came down that Oracle does not do employee appreciation events. So she forced the thing to be cancelled. But they didn’t save any m…
I was under the impression that Ellison pays for the sponsorship out of his pockets but puts the Oracle logo on the sailboat. Also, it is the BMW Oracle team and the total amount spent was "reported" to be around $200 million.
Larry also owns a beach house in the mansions area of Newport, Rhode Island, aka sailing capital of the world (the main street connecting to the dwarfs is called America's Cup Avenue).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was under the impression that Ellison pays for the sponsorship out of his pockets but puts the Oracle logo on the sailboat. Also, it is the BMW Oracle team and the total amount spent was "reported" to be around $200 million.
Correct. Larry also owns a beach house in the mansions area of Newport, Rhode Island, aka sailing capital of the world (the main street connecting to the dwarfs is called America's Cup Avenue).
Oracle has brilliant opportunities at the moment: they own a great processor (Sparc) that they could closely integrate with their database, application software and even Java... and (finally!) give IBM a run for their money. They have the cool and fast technology of both Sun's JVM and BEA's JVM (JRockit). They have acquired other brilliant technologies, and have in practice endless resources to acquire more: http://e…
" they own a great processor (Sparc)" I'm not so sure about that. For years x86 has been chewing up the market for Sparc processors, and one of the reasons that Sun had such poor finances is that it was selling x86-based servers more than Sparc based servers (they cost considerably less, and perform better). Fujutsu's Sparc implementation significantly outperforms Sun's. Contemporary Xeons outperform both these days.…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
One of the reasons I left GE was because there was no notion of a senior engineer in the software field (there are senior science positions in the research divisions). To go beyond "Software Engineer" you had to step into a managerial role and away from doing any software engineering. This burned out several people (including myself). You can only wait for the implementation of "Technical Career Path" for so long.
I can kind of see this for GE, because it isn't a software company. But Oracle does nothing but make software -- programmers are the absolute most important people on their projects. Oh yeah, I forgot. Oracle is a marketing company. If you want a nice database, use Postgres. If you want a database that sponsors a sailboat, buy Oracle.
Every large company is a software company, whether they know it or not. Failure to provide a career path for software engineering professionals on the technical side of the fence is a poor strategy, period.
"But unlike Oracle, Davis and the Raiders have not had a winning season for awhile – not since my Baltimore Ravens flattened their hopes and the shoulder of quarterback Rich Gannon after a vicious pancake tackle by Tony Siragusa on the way to a Ravens’ Super Bowl winning season in 2001." The Raiders were 11-5 the next year (2002) and went to the Super Bowl.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Correct. Larry also owns a beach house in the mansions area of Newport, Rhode Island, aka sailing capital of the world (the main street connecting to the dwarfs is called America's Cup Avenue).
Very interesting. I am in the area soon and will set up a side trip to come and visit the road that leads to the dwarfs.
For good food at reasonable prices, try The Barking Crab.