Thread

Oracle on the hook to pay data centre investors even if site has no electricity

158 points · 154 comments · Betelbuddy

gchamonlive · 1790335420 · focus · HN ↗
A too-big-to-fail about to fail certain it'll be bailed out? Another comment* raised a question about investments in fuel cells that could have been just for show. Are they doing max damage to leech as much cash as possible before implosion or it's just... I mean, it's oracle it's a mystery to me how they make so much money with selling crapware, so it might just be business as usual?
*<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49842884">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49842884
1. philipallstar · 1790336197 · focus · HN ↗
  I don't love Oracle, but they made so much money selling the best relational database on the planet for 40 years.
  1. jiggawatts · 1790337165 · focus · HN ↗
    "The best", but you'll be sued if you publish benchmarks: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_DeWitt#DeWitt_Clause" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_DeWitt#DeWitt_Clause
    Every time I use Oracle, I regret it.
    Just this month, I tried to hook it up to a modern .NET app with the latest Oracle client and discovered that if you cancel a transaction, the connection enters a broken state and is returned to the connection pool, "infecting it". After a half a dozen of those, the whole app server just dies with endless cancellation related exceptions. This isn't even the only such bug, apparently there's a whole family of pool-corruption bugs that have workaround config settings and everything!
    This was with version 23.26.301 which suggests that they've had a lot of major releases, bug fixes, etc... but basic functionality like "connect successfully to the database server every time" is totally broken and has been for many years.
    The issue tracker forums have tumbleweeds rolling through them and play the sound of wolves howling in the distance to provide just the right kind of "what are you still doing here?" ambiance.
    JsonDemWitOster · 1790341729 · focus · HN ↗
    What an honor for Professor De Witt (no relation to my handle).
    My handle notwithstanding, I'm smart enough to not take legal advice from HN but nonetheless I cannot stop myself hence the rhetorical question: how is a EULA clause like that even enforceable? If this isn't going against freedom of speech then this surely it's against some consumer protection laws?
    The cynical answer to that I guess is "a lot of money funding a legal team the size of a warlord's militia" and also "lobbying" but even then it doesn't track to me that this clause could have even that much of an effect as a scare tactic?
    gchamonlive · 1790348776 · focus · HN ↗
    Similar discussion I had a couple of weeks ago in the post about LG spying on consumers: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49603808">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49603808
    Basically ToS can't overrule the law, but the law doesn't seem to limit much what can be put in ToS, so abuse will always end up in court.
    The problem is that the consequence of this is this filters significantly in favor of the company which complaints are worth taking to court, given that these companies have legions of lawyers on payroll.

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