Larry Ellison's son had to scale down his media and TV empire ambitions when Oracle stock crashed. That's one thing to celebrate, because we don't want CNN to be controlled by the Ellisons.
"Do not fall into the trap of anthropomorphizing Larry Ellison.
You need to think of Larry Ellison the way you think of a lawnmower. You don’t anthropomorphize your lawnmower, the lawnmower just mows the lawn - you stick your hand in there and it’ll chop it off, the end. You don’t think "oh, the lawnmower hates me" – lawnmower doesn’t give a shit about you, lawnmower can’t hate you. Don’t anthropomorphize the lawnmower. Don’t fall into that trap about Oracle."
The gimmicky episodes were highly entertaining to my decidedly non-Trekkie wife. She loved the Star Trek Muppet episode ("Star Trek in Spaaaaaace") and the soap-opera episode.
As for taking the show seriously, I don't take any of it seriously. It's a telenovela, or maybe we should say Stellanovela. Most episodes build a fairly cohesive story, then break loose, and those old scientists have fun with the Star Trek universe. It's not like they're acting in a Chekhov play.
re: taking it seriously, I meant more in terms of whether it is "good art" vs disposable entertainment. On the whole, I felt that TNG and DS9 both eventually found the right balance of drama and humor, often with an intelligent underlying message about aspects of our society and culture. The modern Star Trek shows are sorely lacking in that area!
Eh, I mean TNG, which is probably the best-regarded series, had its fair share of duds, and not just in the not-very-good first season. In particular, I am thinking of the episode where Data's cat turned into a lizard.
> A transporter malfunction turns most of the crew into puppets while Spock fights to reclaim the ship.
The difference is the sheer number of gimmick episodes: so far half the episodes this season fall into that category. Did you actually watch that puppet episode you're quoting? Gimmick aside, it had one of the dumbest endings of any Star Trek episode I can think of.
Nope; haven’t seen any of this series. The streaming situation for it, at least in this country, is a bit of a mess. But it sounds from the description like a do-over of the cat lizard episode, more or less.
Ehh, maybe that notion times ten. These recent episodes are far goofier and more nonsensical than that TNG episode. (and again, my view on them is far less harsh than many of the reviews I've seen online...)
At least the TNG duds attempted some kind of sci fi technobabble explanation for whatever hijinks were occurring. With this season of SNW, we're getting plot devices like "missing resistance leader just happened to look identical to Enterprise's first officer by complete coincidence!" and "spooky derelict ship is haunted, no explanation even attempted!" ... there are worse ones I could reference but they're spoilers. I'm genuinely starting to wonder if an LLM is writing these scripts.
To be honest, I'm not sure to what degree my reaction to increasingly random dips into recent Trek has been around them just not being that good as a whole vs. just being tired of the franchise after many decades at this point.
TOS was what it was. Some episodes were better (and aged better) than others. After a pretty week start, TNG was pretty solid. DS9 was good too far more often than not. While other series had their strong points, I'm not going to go to the mat to defend any of them.
Maybe some in this thread won’t celebrate CNN staying out of the clutches of the Ellisons.
But think of it this way. If Ellison’s acquisition of Warner Bros falls through Ellison must pay Warner Bros a $7 Billion breakup fee. That’s on top of the $2.8 Billion they paid Netflix to abandon its pursuit of Warner Bros.
So Ellison would have wasted $9.8 Billion and years of his life for absolutely nothing. And I think we can all agree that the world would be better off.
It's definitely not 10%, more like 3%. His net worth is currently listed as $248B. If he has to pay out the penalty on both acquisitions, his net worth will still be about $240B. There's nothing articulable about the difference in his life as a result.
I will give you the time though, or the motivations (however appalling they are) for his exertion of energy on these.
It’s been more than a decade when CNN was a respected institution. I agree it’s too late for the news media in general. Their incentives are unfortunately all lined up just like social media: pure ragebait is the fully optimized product. The only thing changing from now on is fine tweaks to get it slightly more… ragey.
I'd roughly agree they are, but they have clearly positioned themselves in the opposite way as the mainstream media - the rest compete for ad-supported clicks and views; those two are fully paywalled and at a price that deliberately drives away anyone below say, the 90th percentile by income or wealth.
That resembles, to me, how newspapers used to be - except instead of a small fraction of people being willing to pay for quality news, roughly two thirds were (62 million subscribers out of 92 million American households in 1989 [1]). Like Bloomberg today, their incentives were to provide information for serious people and to cultivate a trustworthy reputation, rather than to enrage people into commenting and sharing articles.
The decline of newspapers is of course too much of a tangent, but I think it's interesting how the math kind of illustrates why most 'news' has to be trash now.
From what I can see, online media has finally taken over. The horrendous coverage from the 2024 election may have finally been the last straw for many people.
People seem to be focusing more on individual reporters, subscribing directly to good journalists who have gone out on their own. We are also seeing a thing that pleases me ver much: Reporters focusing on the subjects they are experts in and not doing a jack of all trades master of none. Its made me accept that I wont get top tier news in every subject so I have to pick what really matters to me(Tech, Food, entertainment, geopolitics of specific regions of the world etc.).
On the low end though its more bleak. TikTok slop, Youtuber "commentators" etc.
I lol'ed in the theater when I watched Top Gun Maverick as a double-feature with the original and the first thing you see is PRODUCED BY DAVID ELLISON — very “ecrof ria eht nioj”
> it would utterly destroy the American movie industry
I don't understand, if Oracle etc. has financial problems, why would movie-making bits be destroyed as opposed to sold to new owners?
If the American movie industry got "destroyed", what would that look like, and how would it lead to long-term malaise? Offhand, I can't imagine the same kind of supply-chain/infrastructure rot-problem as, say, the "destruction" of the automotive industry.
Consolidation into one company with a huge amount of market power ruins the market, destroys innovation, and destroys infrastructure and capacity within the vertical.
Oh, I see, I thought you were saying that Oracle's financial woes would have a ripple-effect that's negative for everyone else, as opposed to the mergers being a bad thing regardless of Oracle's financial situation.
Yeah, America is way overdue for some trust-busting.
Because David Ellison’s explicit plan is to run Warner Bros. Discovery (owners of CNN) and Paramount (owners of CBS) as two divisions within Skydance Media. He committed to keeping a 20-odd film slate at WBD as part of antitrust negotiations with the U.S. and other countries. So he has to keep the studio running while figuring out how to pay off the investors with depreciating Oracle assets.
I strongly suspect that broad enthusiasm for copy-on-write filesystems is largely past. Btrfs is out there and is the default for some Fedora editions. While I have no direct connections to that storage world any longer, I'm not convinced that relicensing ZFS would affect the landscape in a major way among the more significant distributions.
As someone who's used btrfs and zfs, btrfs today is still a pale imitation of what zfs was at launch. btrfs feels like people wanted to make a filesystem which had all the 'pretty neat' features of ZFS but without the tightly coupled management and benefits of ZFS (like volume management + RAID + encryption + compression all being managed through one tool).
btrfs ended up being basically a consumer version of a few of ZFS's most visible features - transparent compression, subvolumes, and copy-on-write - which then farms out the other most useful features - RAID + volume management + encryption - to the existing tooling. Makes sense for a smaller-scale project, no shade, but it definitely misses the mark if you've spent time on ZFS systems taking advantage of what ZFS has to offer (like recursive snapshots or vdevs).
I don't know the whole history of btrfs (although its primary maintainer was I think at Oracle at one point) but ZFS was definitely built from a hierarchical storage enterprise mindset.
Given different historical circumstances, it could probably have picked up more traction. But not sure what would change today even with an Oracle licensing change.
It seems that btrfs is being phased out of fedora. It looks like Fedora will be moving to stratis storage over the next year or two. Btrfs is nice but it's raid5/6 support still seems shaky and there's odd corner cases that apply to all btrfs setups (getting stuck when free space is low is mostly resolved but can still occur).
I no longer have the direct relationships with storage folks at Red Hat that I once did and that stuff may all be over on the IBM side anyway. Stratis (which I wasn't familiar with) does seem to be designed with the intention of bringing a lot of pooling etc. on top of a conventional file system but haven't really looked at or talked to anyone in the storage groups recently. Conventional LVM was pretty old and really designed for a different time.
I'm not super-plugged into Fedora these days. Red Hat has long been pretty comfortable with a more conventional file system (think it's still XFS out of SGI by default) plus volume management for RHEL. ZFS was a non-starter for licensing reasons and Oracle; btrfs just wasn't there. I suspect things could have played out differently had Oracle relicensed ZFS once upon a time but that ship has likely sailed in a variety of ways.
XFS is a default filesystem in a production system? Really?
XFS was dead to me 20 years ago. The only time I ever actually verifiably lost data to a system crash was on XFS. I had actual zero length files with XFS after a crash. Lost actual data. But the file system was in totally happy consistent metadata state. Never ever would I ever consider that filesystem ever again.
The ominous "reisserfs" everyone complained about? Never lost a single byte of data to it even when I pulled the plug in the middle of a write operation to test it. No issues with ext4, no experience with btrfs.
I vaguely know some of the backstory of moving off ext4 (as default). As I understood it at the time, it was less focused on some of the larger systems Red Hat was interested in.
That's why I called it "reisserFS" and not reiserfs. I am well aware of the controversies because of what he did on the non-technical side. I am also of course for a very long time by now not using it any longer.
I was merely talking about the experience with XFS "back in the day" and yes I was on reiserfs and then XFS "came up" and I changed my home partition to that, coz I was looking to move off of reisserfs. Power outage. Boom, lost half my home dir. Suddenly lots of totally fine metadata wise files had null length. I did go back to reiserfs until ext4 was stable enough after that. I will never try XFS ever again, sorry. Loosing data is the thing that a file system can't do to me if they want to "retain my business" so to speak.
And yes, reiserfs I actually tested and had survive some power outages totally fine too. I believed the XFS hype too much without proper testing. My bad I guess in that sense. We were all young once. But also: Never again XFS ;)
Is it? I thought the contrary, the immutable distros are possible specifically because of them?.
Relicensing it would probably make it into kernel within months and I am absolutely sure adoption would happen quickly. Mind you, ZFS is more important to servers than desktop.
zfs is more mature and has a better feature set. It's also about the best file system for a NAS, since you can detect and repair single bad blocks if you run zfs's version of RAID5/6.
btrfs is lighter on memory use and a bit easier to administer (until it eats your data). But if zfs licensing becomes cleared up and it becomes a normal part of the linux kernel that would be a lot more attractive than btrfs to me
They are still making billions from highly sticky enterprise customers, which is more than enough to survive. Otherwise, Microsoft would have gone out of business years ago.
Sure, but then they're out of the "growth" stock category they so badly wanted to be in, with its higher valuation multipliers, then in the stodgy "keep the lights on" niche. If a company makes $10B this year, and you had a way of knowing it was going to make $10B every year from now on, there's not much incentive to invest in it.
Note that this doesn't make for a bad company! You can run a $0-profit company indefinitely and give employees nice jobs for providing nice services to your customers. There's nothing wrong with that. It's great! But you don't get the same multiples for that arrangment as you do for a company that's growing quickly. Lower multiples = stock drops = One Medium Wealthy Asshole Called Larry Ellison, and that's something I simply do not think he could tolerate.
Putting a big X on the Ellison photo in the rogue's gallery of tech elites will be satisfying. In an industry chock full of despicable men, Ellison is a real standout.
IBM has always been better than Oracle. It makes giant expensive software and hardware that require arcane knowledge to keep them running. But they also run reliably once you insert enough money.
Oracle's stuff JustDoesn'tWork(tm) once you move past its core database offering. And even that (see: RAC) is sometimes problematic.
