I read the blog and replies. Have to agree with you. That guy's radio is stuck on transmit mode. Resistance is futile.

I don't like the new "Flashy" Metalink. I also don't like their effort to create a "community" in Metalink for those who have a CSI# - I believe Oracle should get rid of that community thing in Metalink and focus on OTN and OTN only. Metalink was good (and could be improved) for downloading patchsets, accessing documents, creating SR's, etc. It did not need another "community" for the privileged - I specifically asked who the Forms moderators are and if Jan Carlin and others involved in this Metalink community thing and their answer was no - WT. ? if Jan Carlin is not part of that Forms community thing on Metalink - what is the point ? Check how efficient AskTom is (based on APEX) - why not improving the efficiency of the older Metalink instead of using Adobe Flash ? don't like the new one at all.

I can add a practical objection: downloading big patchsets (like the 10.1.2.3 OAS upgrade for 10.1.2.0.2 - 1.8 GIGABYTES). I am not about to d/l that size of file to my PC, and then upload (esp when I am working from home with typical ISP upload link speed limits) when I can use a staging linux server inside our corporate network with a place to store the patchsets for distribution to various servers needing them.

The problem is that our RHEL servers are always "behind the times", and Flash support is non-existent or way out of date. I thought our new shiny staging server (VMware "slice" actually) was nice upgrade from RHEL 3.x to 4.x with 64-bit support, more RAM, etc, but then I find out that the only 64-bit Flash package for the bundled Firefox is a beta, and it requires a newer version of glibc than is installed, which I am not authorized to update, and so it goes.

Also, I get huge utility out of opening multiple tabs in Firefox to various ML pages for crosschecking things, like sorting out all those useless/bogus search results to find a nugget of something useful, or chase all the referenced notes without losing track of every note along the way. The new ML3 site's Flash paradigm does not not play weill with that approach, and seriously hinders my productitvity - oh, wait, maybe that's the idea: we use the service too much.

I have responded to the survey several times, but not much response aside from "why can't you use Flash?" - I like that analogy above about the blogger: radio stuck on transmit.

Almost as much fun as keeping us in the dark about security vulnerabilities, unlike most vendors (including Sun - hope they don't get retrograded like that) - don't let me get started...

RO

Edited by: ROC on Apr 27, 2009 4:52 PM

The XML parsing problem may be due to some lines in the SR like this:

􀃠 Identifies all resource pool assignments where actual hours are greater than zero and sets the actual hours value to zero.

That funky character at the beginning seems to be meant to appear as some kind of square bullet point for a list of such items (as viewed in Classic ML) - and that was entered by someone from Oracle support! If the system is that fragile, it most certainly is not ready for prime time.

RO

Unfortunately, it seems the staging server cannot get an ftp connection through the corporate firewall (even though our PC's can - think it might be a proxy authentication issue) to access update.oracle.com. The staging server otherwise is meant to gather stuff like patches from vendors over the internet to then distribute internally - lots of NAS storage for that purpose.

I do download stuff like the readme's, but not the GigaByte patchsets.

RO

I like what I relieved today in the Oracle freelist email....

Subject: Re: Flash-only Metalink

That leads nearly directly to a probably strategy:
MetaLink was introduced to reduce the cost for customer support by bringing the customers from phone calls (whit expensive human beings) to online self-service.

So if all who disagrees with Flash for some reasons open their SRs by phone from now on (or from the day, when classic ML will be closed down), all these mid-level managers will have a poor day telling Larry why the numbers of SR reduced, but the cost for employees increased (or the response-statiscics exploded).

Money is the thing which runs oracle inc., not satisfaction or quality. So make it to expensive.

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I tried to open a SR using the new Metalink. I could not. After adding a feedback in the flash-only Metalink, I was informed it was due to not having a valid license. I did have a valid license.
I cut and pasted the info from ORacle into the feedback. Later when I tried to open documents, I could not. I was informed after adding a feedback, it was because I did not have a valid license. I was informed the new Metalink checks the license before displaying the content of a document. I did have a valid license.... (didn't we go thru this before?)

If you chose to not open your future SR's by phone , I would recommend seeing if you can open a document before the old Metalink is gone.