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Maybe I tricked you by only giving a summery of the Ox experiment because originally Galton wanted to say that the Median was the proper way to Judge the crowd which would put the crowds response way off from the mean. Galton wanted crowds to be stupid so much that he wanted the Median to be the measurement because the Mean would prove otherwise. The concept of the Wisdom of a Crowd isn't that the crowd is some God infallible and immutable. The concept is that the crowd is only better then the individual.

The answer is that consumers don't know about UMA, and most mobile operators are still very cellular focused, and UMA is only one approach (though for my money it works a lot better than some of the alternatives).

Mobile operators are seeing something of a bandwidth crunch, giving rise to the idea of 'data offload': put as much traffic as possible on WiFi, home broadband, etc - UMA is effectively 'voice offload' which is complementary, and is great for people with poor indoor coverage. Since the more advanced the cellular technology (HSPA, LTE, etc) the smaller the cells become, there will be more and more need for voice and data offload, including UMA.

http://www.umatoday.blogspot.com/ has some stories on UMA, from the consortium promoting it. Andy Abramson, something of a VoIP guru, also likes it: http://andyabramson.blogs.com/voipwatch/2009/11/my-t-mobile-uma-experience-and-my-cdma-data-experience.html - sounds like the UMA support in phones is maturing, perhaps due to RIM/Blackberry pushing this.

UMA is also a great way of roaming internationally with your cellular number, as long as you have WiFi coverage.

From a developer's perspective, iOS is the platform to beat.

Median iOS developer income per app: $682 per year.

osborne also said that he did not have to increase vat to balance the budget.
http://conservativehome.blogs.com/thetorydiary/2010/04/george-osborne-aims-to-strangle-labours-vat-attack-at-birth.html

well osborne suggested during the election that the tories would not increase VAT.

http://conservativehome.blogs.com/thetorydiary/2010/04/george-osborne-aims-to-strangle-labours-vat-attack-at-birth.html

Yup, I used pg_migrator for the last RubyForge upgrade, very handy!

No, TFA isn't overly precise, but it's also not that confusing. It is worth noting that they never once use the word "software". The entire article is about WB using MPV's "technology", and the linked Hollywood Reporter article discusses the whole thing as a lawsuit over an "antipiracy technology patent".

Also, if you read the complaint, it seems that the patent doesn't cover the software, it covers the actual watermark that is created on the film. The "invention" exists outside of any software, as it "is automatically transferred to any copy made from the marked print (regardless what media are used, e.g. camcorder tape, DVD or internet file)".

I haven't read the actual patent, and IANAPL, but it sounds like this might, maybe, be a legitimate patentable invention. Obviously the patent office thinks so, but that doesn't necessarily mean anything. :P

Excel: Pivot Tables.

Aren't the equivalent of those called Data Pilots in OOo? Or are they a weak alternative?

(I don't really know, I rarely touch Office suites - generally I don't care about manual formatting so I use Lyx).

Actually Netflix does get special versions of many (most in my experience) DVDs. The DVDs are not the same disc cover image as retail versions -- they're usually just a simple gray background with the movie title/etc, many of them even specifically have "Rental" included directly on the disc image. Like this: http://mike.blogs.com/photos/uncategorized/everythingisilluminated.jpg

Catholics abstained from eating meat on Fridays in order to fast (or at least they used to, that might have changed). Jew don't eat pork, and while not Christian, they do share a common bond in the Old testement and Christians are always touting the ten commandments, which is an old testament story. Mormons abstain from alcohol, caffeine and refined sugar for religions reasons.

Since only 50% of this country is anti-abortion, and approximately 80% call themselves Christian .. at least some Christians seem to believe that abortion is not murder. A quick Google search turned up this minister and the The Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice. They seem to feel that abortion isn't murder, and they claim to be Christian. Or is there some committee that has to approve Christian values???

Funny, I was just reading this blog post last night.

Danese Cooper is a long time open source advocate who formerly worked at Sun, among others, and is recently the new CTO at the Wikimedia Foundation after the recent departure of Brion Vibber for a micro-blogging upstart.

New DivaBlog: Assimilation begins...Oracle Censors Blogs.Sun.Com

Remaining Snoracle employees have until May to migrate their personal blogs to a non-Oracle-owned hosting service...but if even after such migration, anyone who mentions work on a personal blog forfeits their editorial self-determination, as Oracle believes the blog then becomes Oracle property subject to their draconian rules.

That sounds a mite drama-queeny until you factor in that she helped to create Blogs.Sun.Com and probably cared a lot about the culture of her former employer.

What you don't see in the picture behind the Borg ship is that giant cone thing that eats solar systems, and on the underside of the Borg ship, Ellison's personal executive-escape-yacht launch portal.

On an engineering note, pretty obvious that the Borg ship was designed by a DBA for optimum table access efficiency. This of course limits the scalability. On a a planetary scale, starships come in any shape you like, so long as the shape is an oblate sphere. Of the two, I'd say Darth had more vision.

I can see why IE adopted Chakra. Here's Neal Stephenson on overcoming disability: NSFW

So you didn't look past just "change"?

Obama was definitely vague on some points of his platform, but he was just as specific on the others. IP was one of those. After he was elected, it became even more clear on short notice - change.gov has been around for a while, and has some rather explicit statements on the subject.

If Professor Takahashi uses the Takahashi Method to present his results, it will be the longest presentation ever -- 2.5 trillion slides!

As one of the writers of Haven & Hearth, I have to disagree. The reason me and my friend wanted to write the game is that we wanted a world where the actions that players can perform actually have an impact on the world itself, rather than just another theme park where you can just enjoy yourself withing the very strict frame set by the authors of the game; and those of our current players that seem to enjoy the game the most seem to agree with that. It leads naturally to a game world where the emergent phenomena become the most defining feature of the world, rather than the mechanics that we, as the game authors, build into it. The coolest thing about the world, if I may say so myself, is that there isn't a single structure in the world that hasn't been built by the players themselves.

I applaud and even agree with your effort, but you walk a dangerous road. Read the following about a similar effort and what happened if you haven't already. Maybe you can avoid the mistakes they made.

War of the Jessie Wall

Don't go by Nokia's lack of popularity in the US, and the hyperbole of largely American tech news websites, who have never seen a smartphone before 2007.
Nokia still has 39% of the smartphone market worldwide

There must surely be some techniques you can use, even with a completely non-stealthy fighter, that can increase your chances of dropping off your $100 million dollar payload without being pwned by the air force?

Please.. don't use the word(?) "pwned" when discussing something other than gaming. It makes it difficult to take a person seriously.

I'm also fairly certain that there are some ex-Soviet pilots now down on their luck who would know any tricks that could help.

Oh, you mean like all those ex-Soviet pilots who bagged all those F-15s, F-16s, and F-18s in actual combat? *guffaw*

The only air forces on the planet I'd be seriously worried about are the UK (as with most things, a very high standard of training) and Israel (when *aren't* they in combat?)

The Canadians will crow about William Tell, but their record doing the deed in combat is a joke compared to ours, and India will snipe about that so-called war game when their fighters outnumbered ours 2-1 and 4-1 without AWACS support and they managed some AA-10 Alamo kills against the F-15C. Keep in mind that the F-15C is a 1979 vintage aircraft, though undoubtedly has been upgraded since running up against the latest toys India has. You'll note an imbecile in the comments section talking trash that India has the "most intense training in the world".. which is hilarious. Nobody really knows who wins the "intensity" award..heheh.

Neither (pyrrhic victories of Canada and India) mean shit in the real world. It's like a 3rd degree black belt in Tae Kwon Do (or any other Korean "art") playing tip-tap in the Dojang, then running up against a Hells Angel who after he was a Golden Gloves boxer did a stint in Folsom. The real world result ain't pretty, and generally results in splattered kimchi.

XAML started out as WVG (Windows Vector Graphics), they took all svg elements and Capitalized them, the rest is extensions.

you can google it

And so I did
http://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2003/07/war_of_the_jess.html

The first culture to display their nascent fascism were the liberal peacniks, who objected to ardent patriotism of a number of players during the Iraq war. They tried to bottle up and hem in the pro-US players, who reacted violently (within the rules of the Jesse zone, where killing was possible).

I seriously doubt it was unprovoked and from what I've read, the picture isn't painted quite the same way in the article. Excerpt from: "WAR OF THE JESSIE WALL" ( the link above )

Nothing doing: WWIIOLers swooped down on the Outlands, loaded for bear, and used its longtime residents for live target practice, killing them again and again, and maybe yet again. Because most Residents, unsurprisingly, set their home point on their home property, many folks living in the Outlands were stuck in an infinite cycle of violence, to be shot on their land then resurrected and shot again, in perpetuity, until they logged off the game entirely, or their antagonist finally got bored. All of which was perfectly permissible by Linden Lab since, after all, this is precisely what the Outlands were designed for.

Permitted or not, griefing sucks and corpse camping is the pinnacle of griefing in any MMO.

"Their originally-stated goal was laudable: a lassaiz-faire (sp?) world with basic physics, to see how people would operate"

I think they came to the end of that experiment and concluded that some people are assholes.

I looked up the War of Jessie Wall and found that you mis-characterized it to justify your rant against liberals. Jessie was the zone where a bunch of players from WWII Online decided to set up shop, many of the players with a conservative bent. They weren't really interested in finding a spot and fitting in rather than carving out a section for themselves. You portray it more as "poor conservatives with pro-war views being harassed by the evil liberals". In the pieces I read, it seemed there were dicks on both sides of the fence who kept on ratcheting up the rhetoric. Jessie wasn't locked down because of views, it was locked down because LL didn't want player killing to spread beyond that zone.

Here, have a read. Not as one sided as you portrayed it.

After reading your post I did some searching and found this: War of the Jesse Wall. Rather long, but an interesting read.

If you really want to talk hypocrisy, note how PETA president Ingrid Newkirk has no problems about using medical techniques developed from animal testing to help herself, or how PETA vice president Mary Beth Sweetland keeps herself alive with animal tested and derived insulin.

The judges will respond to motions from the defendants to transfer, but in this district Judges Everingham and Ward default to favoring the plaintiff's choice and have consistenly applied a stringent test to those requests. Only if the defendants can show by predefined factors that their proposed venue is "clearly more convenient" than the venue chosen by the plaintiff will they allow a transfer (here's a blog that tracks the court's activity). The judges don't seem to mind the extra load. In fact they pride themselves how their "streamlining" of the process for trying patent cases has drawn in so much activity. They've fondly nicknamed their court "the rocket docket".

Whether or not physicists will come to valid scientific or academic conclusions on soft arts (sociology, psychology), or whether the conclusions of this study are valid, at least one of the authors is recognizable as someone with quite a bit of credibility in a nascent field. He is a contributing author at http://terranova.blogs.com/ where many Virtual academics reside (e.g., Edward Castranova and Richard Bartle, who are contributing to legal and sociological aspects of Virtual Worlds) and he created and maintained a (now hibernating) website, The Daedalus Project ( http://www.nickyee.com/daedalus/ ) , which explored the sociology of MMORPGs.

Check his bio at http://www.nickyee.com/ I'd say he's worth listening to, at least WRT virtual groups. And maybe so are some of the other contributors.

Ugh, someone get the Troll repellent. They're apparently out in droves today.

Your solution of investing in the infrastructure is completely correct, but is a completely alien concept in modern business practices. Investment is a cost, and so by not investing you're cutting cost and maintaining profit.

AT&T's behavior is endemic in American business today, and has been for god, 20 - 30 years? The US frequently comes in near the bottom, and all too often, dead last when its infrastructure is compared to the other industrialized nations. If you just compare the modernized coast of China, it's infrastructure is better than the United States. Our broadband is horribly slow. Our cell phone system is antiquated and undeveloped. Our electrical system is overstretched and prone to brownouts. Since everyone else can't be "ahead of the curve," we're left with the unescapable conclusion, that we're behind it. We're way behind it when emerging economies are on par with us.

It's not just infrastructure. The auto makers are in collapse (with the notable exception of Ford) not only due to crushing healthcare costs due to retirees, but also because the lack of will to adapt to new trends and technologies. It's embarrassing that after getting their lunch ate by the Japanese back in the 70s when Detroit was turning out crap (in all fairness, American cars today very well made, and can compete in quality with anyone), that they let it happen again by placing all their eggs in the SUV basket while not just ignoring, but actively fighting fuel efficiency standards and slow walking the development of hybrids and all-electrics. Guess who owns that market now?

With electricity, we're told that our infrastructure doesn't suck, but yet a fucking squirrel can cut off 50 million people. Meanwhile we're told to deregulate to decrease costs, but instead we get market manipulation that actually increases costs. (It seems like we always forget why the regulation was put in place the first time, and then we have to repeated learn that companies will screw over the most people in worst possible way, thus harming all of us, all to increase profits.) Then when we do say that we're going to invest in a new electrical infrastructure, and do develop new technologies, we don't. The US is already lagging the world in green technology development.

We make nothing here, except except "exotic financial instruments," and we know how well those work. Yet, people wonder why this is is the second jobless "recovery" in a row. Real unemployment is at 17%, but hey, the Dow Jones Industrials have been on a steady rise since March, so everything is cool. Wages are down, unless you're to top 1%. The Chicago Fed reported that the US has the most unequal wealth distribution of any OCED country. We have government that won't pass reform that 65% of the public wants, because it would hurt the megacorp that bought politician.

We've been asleep at the switch for too damn long, and now we're over the cliff.

When Obama came in and was talking about reform, and infrastructure investment, and new technology investment, I thinking that it was about damn time. Yet, we're not getting it. Instead we get "too big to fail." None of these promises are playing out like he said, because the entrenched interests, and yet you can't vote for the Republicans, because they simply deny there's a problem.

Goddamn we suck.

I thought computers were generally better at optimizing than humans these days. Certainly are at least faster :P http://wesnerm.blogs.com/net_undocumented/2005/06/human_vs_comput.html I realize it's contested, anyone have any more recent actual research or papers?

what was wrong with coin operated meters? Why do they need computers?

Crimanal gangs target coin operated metres. For instance, "Cashless parking was trialled in Westminster [London] in October 2006 and in early 2007 the decision was taken to extend cashless parking city [of Westminster] wide. One of the primary drivers was the estimated £120,000 per week being lost to organised crime. Organised crime which led to murder on the streets of Westminster." (The murder was after one gang started taking the money from meters in another gang's "territory").

A metal detector under the parking space and a camera nearby, and the computer could automatically issue a ticket (or automatically bill for the correct duration). And tell drivers how many spaces are available.

Something I just randomly found, but this is the average now days http://nwn.blogs.com/photos/uncategorized/2008/01/15/wlheader.jpg

...have used it on several projects and always gotten good results. Setting it up is easy and the Ruby API is solid, although I needed a tiny bit of additional code for special character escaping. Highly recommended!

When on earth have the Tories had any concern for civil liberties?

Since David Cameron came along....?

http://conservativehome.blogs.com/thetorydiary/2009/06/david-cameron-to-underline-the-conservative-commitment-to-civil-liberties.html
And much as I hate to link to the News of the Screws (UK's most popular sunday paper) http://www.newsoftheworld.co.uk/news/88338/DAVID-CAMERON-WRITES-FOR-NEWS-OF-THE-WORLD-An-assault-on-all-our-rights.html

Maggie was a facist nutter and brought in a lot of nasty legislation, but as the OP said... the Nu-Tories (tm) do seam more chilled with regards to civil liberties and (along with the liberal democrats) will most likely do well in the next election.

> Upgrade in place is done via pg_migrator

Outstanding. That was kind of painful when I upgraded RubyForge to PostgreSQL 8.3; looking forward to a much smaller downtime window for the upgrade to 8.4.

Too bad replication didn't make it in there... maybe in 8.5.

....that is, those autogenerated blogs on free sites that just contain a mishmash of keywords - or a bunch of stolen content. Those lie fallow because there's no real blogger behind them.

I used to blog technical stuff once or twice a week... now I twitter the little stuff and save blog entries for something more involved, like using setrlimit on Mac OS X. Hard to boil that down to 140 characters... unless it's "setrlimit apparently not working, but the server's running Linux, so, meh".

Deep down, I agree with the guy up-thread who said that it wasn't evidence of racism, just that she plays identity politics.

It was neither. If you read the speech in question, she's talking about how very intelligent, respected, white justices made horrible decisions on discrimination in the past. Her point was that a "wise Latina woman" would probably have a better perspective than those intelligent, respected justices who nonetheless made horrible decisions. It's just as reasonable a statement as say, Laurence Lessig, stating that someone with experience in copyright issues could come to a better decision than a judge who didn't have that experience.

Further putting the lie to this lame Republican talking point (I apologize for the redundancy of that statement), look at her dissent in Pappas v. Giuliani, where she ruled in favor of a white bigot:

One of her more controversial cases was Pappas v. Giuliani, 290 F.3d 143 (2d Cir. 2002), involving an employee of the New York City Police Department who was terminated from his desk job because, when he received mailings requesting that he make charitable contributions, he responded by mailing back racist and bigoted materials. On appeal, the panel majority held that the NYPD could terminate Pappas for his behavior without violating his First Amendment right to free speech. Sotomayor dissented from the majority's decision to award summary judgment to the police department. She acknowledged that the speech was "patently offensive, hateful, and insulting," but cautioned the majority against "gloss[ing] over three decades of jurisprudence and the centrality of First Amendment freedoms in our lives just because it is confronted with speech it does not like.

Maybe the EU should bother to look in the widespread FRAUD within it's own institution which means the EU's own auditors have not signed-off the EU's accounts for the past 14 years in a row.

The politicians only want laws to have the hoi-polloi under their thumbs and make sure they stay there, while the politicians continue to rape the population via taxes, and use technology to hide their frauds. How often you hear of "computer errors" for "overpayments" and other such BS.

Chris Heaton-Harris MEP on the 2009 budget frauds.

I use a nasty application at work in Java. Some versions only work with JRE 1.4 and some only work with JRE 1.5. They even have a message if the wrong version is installed. Actually .Net is just as shitty. Lookout, an excellent Outlook email indexer only works with .Net 1.1. If you have 2.0 installed it will crash

There are various hackarounds for this, like using a manifest to force Outlook to load .Net 1.1 or even hacking the binary of Lookout, but on my work machine I just uninstalled .Net 2.0 because I don't use anything that needs it.

Of course the best option would have been for the Lookout people to release an updated binary of Lookout to fix the bug that makes it require an old version of .Net. But there's no chance of that because Microsoft bought the company and took down the website. Lookout is now Microsoft Desktop Search, which I probably should be using instead.

Dr. Bronner makes sites as well as soap?

As a Brit, this appointment won't affect me directly. But indirectly US Government policy has an important global effect. I'll be watching closely to see whether ODF becomes widely used as a document format by the US Federal Government.

The ODF Alliance have welcomed the appointment, as have Tim O'Reilly and a host of other people so I'm hopeful that it will turn out to be a good thing

...since that's that database on which Greenplum is based. PostgreSQL 8.4 is coming out soon and looks like it's got a lot of improvements. Too bad replication didn't make it in... hopefully in 8.5.

One of the improvements that looks good is the parallelized restore; RubyForge's upgrade from PostgreSQL 8.2 to 8.3 took 30 minutes to restore the db and it seems like this feature will speed that up considerably.

It makes no sense to spin off OpenOffice before knowing what Oracle does to it. What I think most of us really care about is some reinvigoration in the OpenOffice project, which this change may help bring about.

It may reinvigorate OO, who knows, but I did like Solveig Haugland's open letter to Larry Elison explaining what he'd like to see happen. (Hat tip to http://www.groklaw.net)

I like listening to Led Zeppelin songs, but they actually took a lot of their material from other artists (without giving proper credit) -

http://therecord.blogs.com/blogovich/2007/09/led-zeppelin-as.html

LL should put up a splash screen saying "This is not the U.S. Its laws do not apply here, motherfucker". Then again, most Americans wouldn't understand it, and everyone else already knows.

Linden Labs is in the US. Its servers are in the US. I think most Americans would agree that that puts them under American law, even if you don't understand that. The rest of us realize that virtual worlds aren't real.

Virtual worlds aren't outside reality; they are contained within it. The content of the Second Life grid is digital like everything else on the internet...are you claiming the internet isn't "real"?

Possibly the important question here is...is a SL Taser a protected form of expression; is it "fair use"? If I write a story in which a Taser is a prop, must I call it something else? I don't think so. But a number of people have been shut-down in world for using characters and other elements from copyrighted works.

By the way, I've heard rumors that LL wants to locate a datacenter in the UK. There's currently a huge kerfluffle in-world about a recent move by LL to add an additional rating "adults-only" to the existing "PG" "Mature" scheme. (Under 18 users are already segregared to a completely separate virtual world.

Some folks believe (me included) that the recent "extreme pornography" provisions of the UK Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008 is one reason for the tighter content controls. Certainly fear of procecution under the UK's draconian pedophilia laws was related to the similar kerfluffle a year ago about age play in-world.

> Why not translate? COBOL to C++ translators [google.com]

There's also a COBOL grammar for JavaCC that could be used for that very purpose...

There's a reason violence is still so commonly used after so many thousands of years of human existence; it works every single time if used in sufficient quantity.

For a certain version of "works". You cannot murder people into loving you, for example. You can bomb people into true submission, but that requires blazing a path of epic destruction through their homes like Hitler through Poland, only more thorough. To consider yourself one of "the good guys" when you're openly advocating that sort of thing requires the sort of masturbatory self-delusion endemic to cokeheads and Americans.

Like Hilzoy said, "Violence is not a way of getting where you want to go, only more quickly. Its existence changes your destination. If you use it, you had better be prepared to find yourself in the kind of place it takes you to."

I did read "Blink" and found that while he provided lots of anecdotes to support his premise, there was no mechanism, no measurement, and no way to verify it. In fact, he provided a number of other anecdotes that showed just the opposite.

What he did in that book, I think, was to state a premise that we'd like to believe, that our gut instincts are right, and tell stories to reinforce that, but never go so far as to make a claim that could be verified. I'm not alone in this view.

Based on what I've read so far, "Outliers" seems like more of the same.

You might be interested in Antonio Damasio's book "Descarte's Error" in which Damasio scientifically presents evidence that the majority of our reasoning is in fact mediated by emotion and "gut feeling" linked to situational stimulus. Damage to the pre-frontal cortex of the brain (see: Phineas Gage) impairs this "secondary" emotional system and causes quantifiable decision-making deficits. Gladwell is referring to just this system in Blink, and although he does occaisionally lapse into pop-sci there is a significant body of work that supports his main conclusions.

As another interesting aside, this is why teenagers have such a poor time making good long-term decisions. The pre-frontal cortex is one the last places in the brain to fully mylleinate (develop), and so their emotion-based reasoning system does not fully come on line until they are 18-22. As the insurance commercial goes: Why do teenagers driver like they're missing a part of their brain? Because they are.

I've decided that Malcolm Gladwell is a storyteller. As such, he learns what stories resonate with people, and because he's a good storyteller, he's become very successful at spinning his tales.

While I haven't read Outliers, I did read "Blink" and found that while he provided lots of anecdotes to support his premise, there was no mechanism, no measurement, and no way to verify it. In fact, he provided a number of other anecdotes that showed just the opposite.

What he did in that book, I think, was to state a premise that we'd like to believe, that our gut instincts are right, and tell stories to reinforce that, but never go so far as to make a claim that could be verified. I'm not alone in this view.

Based on what I've read so far, "Outliers" seems like more of the same.

Sounds like possibly the formating you have set up in advance of data entry is being overwritten by the "AutoInput" reformating capability, or something like that.

Play around with your settings under Tools/Cell_Contents and Tools/Auto_Correct. Also, look over the options in Tools/Options.

Also, get familiar with your resources. The OOo Help system is generally more useable than MS Help ever was (it is not yet complete and some of the entries need more clarification... but the volunteers are continously improving it). There are very good support forums at OOo Support. Also, there is Solveig's blog that addresses a problem very similar to yours, as well as a lot of other things pertaining to transitioning.

Main thing: recognize that the OOo defaults are set up to assist total n00bes (like grade school students) in making their first spreadsheets work. You are no longer in that category: you know too much. You can use the extensive OOo online community to figure out how to best control the power of OOo for your own use, but if you continue to ride that motorcycle with the training wheels still attached, yeah, you are not going to be happy.

...I've been using Sphinx a lot recently and have been really pleased with it. The indexer is fast, there's good Ruby on Rails integration, and I don't worry about scalability since if it's good enough for craigslist it's good enough for me. Definitely worth a look for your next project that needs to do full text search.

For a quick demo of it, do some searches here.

> I recommend mod_security

One thing to watch for with mod_security is that it will block certain requests even when it's in 'logging only' mode. Still a useful tool, but keep a close eye on it.

> Yeah, I use Postgresql a lot these days, but I also still use MySQL.

I'm a big fan of PostgreSQL; I recently upgraded RubyForge to PostgreSQL 8.3 and have been quite happy with the performance.

That said, I kind of feel like MySQL still has an edge on PostgreSQL in terms of replication - I know Slony is out there, but my perception of it is that it doesn't handle schema changes easily, and MySQL replication via binary log shipping is pretty straightforward. I hear the PostgreSQL guys are working on something for out of the box replication though, so we'll see....