Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check

Re:Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check by reitanqild on Friday July 14, 2017 @03:52AM (#14768264)

Even just trying to install Oracle 11g correctly was hard.

I think it expected to be installed in /usr/local and company procedures demanded that it was installed in /opt (or the other way around).

For this it would consequently misplace some permissions on some of the files causing a later stage in the installer to fail and bork the installation.

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Re:Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check by staofbur on Friday July 14, 2017 @04:31AM (#14768400)

Back in about 1999, I was working for a big corporate and one of our Oracle admins lost her shit and had a meltdown, think it was around 8i era. She just got up and walked out shouting "fuck this fucking shit, I quit". This was on a freshly delivered HP N-Class HPUX box and they just couldn't get it to run after a month of going back and forth between HP and Oracle.

I bumped into her last year at Ansible Fest London and she was still angry about it 17 years later!

And that's what Oracle does to your soul :)

Edit: that N class and Oracle NEVER got deployed in the end. It just sat there unused, licenses weren't renewed, it got sheepishly powered down after a few months to save electricity and it got chucked in a skip after 5 years. About £200k of expenditure down the pan.

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Re:Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check by reitanqild on Friday July 14, 2017 @05:22AM (#14768580)

licenses weren't renewed, it got sheepishly powered down after a few months to save electricity [...] About £200k of expenditure down the pan.

I guess you could easily lost even more money. Good thing they stopped it at £200k.

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Re:Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check by staofbur on Friday July 14, 2017 @06:12AM (#14768721)

Yeah a big chunk of that was consultancy, support, Oracle licenses. TCO was going to be around £500k for 5 years.

The whole platform got replaced with SQL Server on a clone PC server in the end which cost less than £10k. No fan of Microsoft but there was no competition. And the tooling was far better!

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Re:Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check by odammit on Friday July 14, 2017 @11:43AM (#14770657)

When I get issues were vendors point fingers at each other I three way call them, tell them what's up, hit mute, go get a coffee, and let them figure it out.

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Re:Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check by staofbur on Friday July 14, 2017 @02:57PM (#14772294)

We did that. They were still finger pointing two hours later.

Legal guys said it wasn't worth suing them because we'd have to pay up then or lose the support contract.

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Re:Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check by odammit on Saturday July 15, 2017 @12:46PM (#14777552)

Oof. You should bill them for your time. I sent HP or Dell (can't recall) an invoice for $800 in my early 20s for my time wasted on a support call where a "support tech" had asked me to reinstall Windows as a way to fix a disk that failed in a RAID array. OS was AIX.

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Re:Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check by gaius on Friday July 14, 2017 @06:42AM (#14768807)

Hilariously Oracle database can't run on Oracle Linux OOTB...

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Re:Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check by dsr_ on Friday July 14, 2017 @07:15AM (#14768929)

While I'm not a fan of Oracle, I have to correct you: Oracle DB runs just fine on Oracle Linux. It installs exactly the same way that it does on RHEL, same checklist.

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Re:Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check by gaius on Friday July 14, 2017 @08:13AM (#14769158)

That's kinda my point - why do they ship a Linux distribution without the prerequisites for their flagship product preinstalled?

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Re:Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check by hildaman on Friday July 14, 2017 @09:23PM (#14774524)

Probably because they don't want to deal with the overhead of maintaining patches to RHEL source.

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Re:Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check by gaius on Saturday July 15, 2017 @01:52AM (#14775205)

Then they fully deserve the ridicule. It's like Ford selling you a car but you have to bring your own tyres if you want to drive it away

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Re:Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check by reitanqild on Friday July 14, 2017 @07:34AM (#14768998)

Just as long as you follow the defaults without changing anything I guess :-)

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Re:Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check by nthcolumn on Friday July 14, 2017 @06:55AM (#14768851)

See it wasn't that hard. Stupid company procedures made it hard-er and even then iff you know what you are doing it is still trivially easy. It is so easy even sysadmins can do it. Next next finish have a cookie back in your gimp cave now easy.

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