Oracle the company has not been about Oracle the DB server for 20+ years.
Oracle the company specializes in acquiring software, integrating it in their ecosystem, selling the installations, and living off the recurring licensing fees (NetSuite is one example).
The focus not being the DB for 20 years is mostly true, with the exception that all of their applications are well-served by having a very scalable and very bulletproof database in-house.
They might drop it for end consumers but I doubt it.
It's such a small niche right now they do not even care if they're in their cloud. Enterprise users are the absolute majority of their user base revenue-wise.
However dropping the requirement might force them to change some things. Like in Azure-related stuff such as OneDrive where you have to design/build/test it behave differently if the user is not constantly logged into the Azure account. This means that they might decide to continue to force the Azure account and if they lose more of the end consumers so be it.
Unless they decide to separate Home and higher versions of Windows even more and drop the requirement for the home version users. But it might be more trouble than it's worth.
I very much would like to know how much of this presumably ordered (and backordered) hardware (RAM/SSD/.../wafers) is going to end up being released back to the market when the dust settles. I haven't seen any estimations but in order to put all this hardware to work the hyperscalers need to be building data centers at ludicrous speed. That should be appearing in construction data, jobs data, and many other places. Are we actually seeing any of that? Or is it all just based on the back-of-the-napkin math by Mr Altman and Co and they put all the money they got towards the future projects?
As much as 23.1GW of capacity is under construction globally, split across 831 sites. The Americas region hosts 17GW of this capacity, across 311 locations. Europe, Middle East and Africa or EMEA as well as the Asia Pacific (APAC) region trail significantly. APAC has marginally more ongoing construction, with 3.2GW across 283 sites versus EMEA’s 2.9GW across 258. The US alone hosts 15.9GW of ongoing construction.
I actually printed this one out to give it a thorough read, something I haven't done in a while :) I'll probably comment on the author's blog later.
My first reaction is that it's a bit of oversimplification, LLMs have been on the scene for what like 4 years now? I doubt the effects will be visible when you look at the data.
But on the topic of inequality as a result of changes how value add is distributed between business owners and the labor - there's a very relevant book by Thomas Pickety called "Capital in the 21st century" (I believe he used the title of a similar work by another economist in 18th century on the same topic). He collected as much data as he could on income and wealth of individuals and groups for Western nations (some going back to like 17th century) and did some analysis.
In a nutshell, the share of profits going towards the business owners (simplifying, inherited capital) in the West had been increasing in the 18th and the 19th century, likely due to Industrial Revolution. Which in the US culminated in extreme inequality personified in Robber Barons (Carnegie, Rockefeller and Co). It was followed by economic and financial collapse, mass unemployment, and arguably, 2 world wars. It also resulted in creating various mechanisms designed to prevent these things in the future, such as anti-trust regulations.
After WWII (especially in the US) the distribution of value add between the ownership/capital and the labor changed so that the labor started getting larger and larger share, to the point that the economists declared that the capitalism solved the issue of inequality. That trend reversed around 1970s/1980s, which coincided with the invention of complex electronic computing and communication devices (and therefore inventions of the new business models). From that point on the share of profits going towards the business owners started increasing again, and that speed has been actually accelerating since the 2000s.
imho at this point US is basically where we were in the end of 19th/early 20th century. The individuals' names are different, the issues (extreme monopolization/concentration of capital) are the same. LLMs and other GenAI stuff are simply part of that trend.
Hopefully people at the power learned something from what happened 100+ years ago. But I kinda sorta doubt it.
Some people strongly prefer to have an external battery that can be swapped (as in pull a tab, remove the battery, and plug in another, which is fully charged). Older Thinkpads (T480 and earlier) had a second, smaller, battery inside that would keep the laptop running while the main (external) battery is being replaced.
I've been using various Thinkpads for 10+ years and have yet to use this feature. But hey, to each his own :)
Yes, I also prefer the 2nd external battery on my T470.
But in today's market it's still one of the most simple to change batteries. And you know you can still purchase a genuine one, 4 years later for a reasonable price
T480 has 2 RAM slots and can support 64Gb (32+32). The reason it's "unofficial" is that when they designed it (and wrote PSREF) the 32Gb RAM wasn't a thing.
I think it is less of a concern to the businesses buying these things brand new and more of a concern to the tinkerers who buy/repair/resell/use older models. There's a lot of people who still use ThinkPads made in early 2010s (and earlier). I had RAM module fail on an x270 and replacing it only required opening the laptop (RAM sticks just snap into place). If soldered-on RAM fails, it's game over, or at least full board swap.
Plus, no way to put more RAM/replace RAM with larger module if it's soldered on.
I dived into a niche world of small phones recently while looking for replacement to malfunctioning Pixel 4a (which is apparently now considered compact phone). There's a few small manufacturers in China making some, with 4 inch or 5 inch screen, like Aiphor or Unihertz. And by "small" I mean "they use kickstarter to fund their R&D" small.
Other than that... Nobody's really bothering with compact phones anymore, in the US or in the rest of the world. Bummer.
> Nobody's really bothering with compact phones anymore, in the US or in the rest of the world. Bummer.
And the worst thing is that app developers do not bother with testing their apps on small phones. So even if someone would produce small phone, many apps would be broken on that UI. So there's no way back.
PS 4 inch is not a small phone. iPhone 4S had 3.5" display and it wasn't small, it was normal. Small is something like 2" screen I suppose. All modern phones including these "iPhone Minis" are egregiously huge.
I would not go as far as calling the iPhone Minis "egregiously huge", keep in mind that screen size is not a great measure for phone sizes across different generations. You could easily fit a 4+ inch display into the form factor of the 4S with modern technology, the bezels on those phones were huge. Unless my math is off, the housing of the 4S has a diagonal of just over 5 inches.
Yep. Aiphor's BlueFox NX1 with 4 inch screen is roughly the same size as original iPhone, but has a larger screen (iPhone had bigger bezels and the home button underneath). To me it feels a bit too small for things like typing/texting for example.
Unihertz Jelly Star has 3 inch screen, that's way too small for me.
We do, and it is a pain. It is incredibly easy to defeat any kind of design or in fact HID guidelines by cranking text size to the max on these smaller devices.
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