Because Windows 8 cripples it as a gaming machine, Ubuntu is a step up. My younger brother just bought a new machine with Windows 8 on it and spent a weekend trying to get several games to preform, some from steam some he has physical media for. It didn't work so he formatted it and against my advice put a pirated version of windows 7 on. It seems to be work fine now, but if he has any further issues he won't be able to return it with a pirated windows 7 OS.Ubuntu is a great alternative to windows 8. I have it running on my machine and have great success getting all my the Linux games running and almost all of my non-linux games run under wine. Besides more and more gaming companies and publishers are writing games for Linux.
Also we're not personal tech support for Microsoft. I use to do the tech support thing for friends and family, but it's a lose lose for me. You fix their machine and the next time something breaks, because of their bad habits or a windows update, it's your fault and you end up having to do more support. Since Win8 I refuse to help, If anyone want's me to do tech support for them they get a Linux distro, and since installing it for my in-laws, 2 out of 4 siblings and my wife I haven't been asked to fix anything. At first I was nervous that it'd be too much of a change for them, but I see my in-laws at least once a month, both love Ubuntu and have no problems with it.
I think it really depends on what your definition of inbreeding is. If your talking second cousins getting married, than 120M doesn't force inbreeding. If you're talking 10+ generations it's possible to do without even knowing. How many generations removed do you have to be before it's not inbreeding any more. I'm sure at one point the population of what is Japan today was in the Thousands, maybe even in the hundreds when humans first migrated there, so if you go back far enough then at one point people were probably mating with relatively "close" relatives (pardon the pun).
My grandfather had a family tree book for just his side of his family that was several thousand pages think. I remember flipping through it and finding all kinds of people I went to school with that were only six to seven generations removed from myself. A number of them ended up marrying and never knew the difference. At one point I moved from Nova Scotia, Canada to Laurinburg, North Carolina and there was one family living there that was related to me through my grandfathers side. It's a pretty small world.
Edward Snowden took a job with an NSA contractor with the intent of stealing and leaking classified NSA documents.
Do you have proof to back up that claim or just conjecture?
The fact is an "intelligence" organization collected data and "allowed" someone like Edward Snowden to obtain the data. You can debated "allowed" by accident or on purpose with yourself I really don't care and feel it's irreverent. The information wasn't leaked secretly to another organization or government, Snowden made it public. So my point "The U.S. got caught because they were greedy for data and careless with it" still stands.
I think that's kind of part of the problem here. The U.S. is far more, and far too, aggressive in collecting data. The E.U., being a collection of countries that have historically spied on each other to very large extents and are now friendly, frowns on that sort of thing. So although I'm sure the E.U. is still doing spying on each other and just putting up this front to cover their tracks. The U.S. got caught because they were greedy for data and careless with it, now they have to pay the piper.
Never heard of Crossover, I'll have to check it out. I have Steam running on a couple of VMs and steam for Linux with no issues. Don't take the boxed wine in the cab with you either;)
I just finished it, I think I'll play through again. A lot of it was very similar to the original, which I played I think nearly 20 years ago when I was about nine. My dad had the whole series at one point, I wasn't suppose to play them, but figured out DOS at a pretty young ange. He was pretty excited when I told him they were doing a kickstarter. I haven't seen him since the games release, but he was a kickstarter contributor so he might be playing through it now. He's always been a sierra/Lucas arts fan.
Yeah, I downloaded the Linux tar as well just in case the steam key didn't work. I was really happy they carried through with releasing a Linux version. I normally only contribute to kickstarters that say they'll support Linux, but you can never be sure until the final product and I'm aware that just because I contribute doesn't mean I'll get anything at all, let alone a Linux release of a game.
Eastlink, Right now we have the Talk, surf and watch bundle for $145/mo + tax, (15%) in Nova Scotia. If I just get the internet it'd be about $50/mo + tax
Alient's prices are much better.
I think Mint was a fork of Ubuntu 10 when because they were adding Unity to Ubuntu 11. I could be wrong, I switched to Mint 12 when Ubuntu 11 came out. But it would mean Mint is technically based off Ubuntu, but not the version of Ubuntu that's getting Mir.
Thanks, it's all coming back to me now I remember the application network layers. I'll have to look into this uTP protocol, first time I've heard of it. Back when I was in networking we were told UDP and TCP. UDP if order doesn't matter and you can add any TCP requirements yourself if they're necessary, I'm guessing that's pretty much what uTP is.
I certainly need to go back to high school it should have been:
$300/year for two PVRs on top of the $1,800/year for basic cable and internet is stupid.
Math fail.
I just looked into it and it would cost me $720/year for just internet to download what I want to watch and watch it when I want. Opposed to $2,100/year for crap TV channels I don't care about and internet so I can download what I want to watch and watch it when I want.
Now that I've put it in perspective for myself, screw my wife, cables gone when I get home.
Although I agree with a lot of what you said, especially with the growth of the mobile market. I think they will back down it'll just be backing down a little at a time to make it look like they're pushing forward, they're already starting to. They put the start "button" back in and claimed it was a step forward. I'm betting if adoption of Win 8.1 is as bad as Win 8 they will try adding the start menu back. The problem is Windows 8 is useless for large business applications, which is MS bread and butter. If they don't back down organizations will start looking to Apple or Linux for solutions to get work done. MS held onto the business world this long because they were really the first to figure out how to get vendor lock in, but if the whole systems changing anyway and you're going to have to retrain your staff to use something completely different it might as well be cheap like Linux or have good supported software like Apple
People still have a need for desktops/laptops for work and personal purposes, but it's getting to a point where if you have a need for number crunching and don't need to use applications like Photoshop you could have a Linux box. Most of the tools I use in MS office are available in Libre Office, I've rarely met anyone that requires the really advance MS office functions. As a developer (some web, some application) I can use GIMP for most of what I do, that's not to say GIMP will work for everyone, but for anyone not doing exclusive professional video, graphic design or photo manipulation there are open source applications will work. Most of the people I know that are professional video, graphics and photo people use Macs anyway and have well supported software for their trade.
I think either way, MS hit it's prime and has already fallen off the cliff, the question is how long the dead tree they're clinging to will hold out. There's a chance they could climb back up, but I have my doubts.
I watched continuum for a while. It was a pretty good show, but to SciFi for my wife and it wasn't on until almost 11:00PM for us here on the East coast so it was kind of late. I should add it to sickbeard for downloading now that I have that setup.
If I can't find something on Netflix TPB or ExtraTorrent is my next stop. I like Netflix because I like watching movies I haven't seen in a long time and they have a pretty good anime selection, way better than my local video store (now closed) ever had and I don't have to spend days snooping the interwebs to find episodes. Also there's good content there for my two year old to watch. For eight bucks a month it's worth the effort it'd take me to find and download stuff for her and saves physical space in my house for crap movies/shows she'd only watch once and never look at again.
If they had newer movies and shows there, I'd be willing to pay more. Espically if I could get rid of my cable. If I could get rid of the cable I'd save nearly $100/month, but my wife is addicted to having crap playing in the background even when she's reading a book and not watching it. I just got Sickbeard setup a couple of weeks ago to auto download shows we watch and I'm starting to wean my wife off of channel surfing, but she still insists we can't get rid of the cable.
Part of the reason for getting Sickbeard is we live on the East coast (Atlantic time) and a lot of shows we want to watch don't end until almost midnight for us, we have a two year old and are up early every day so staying up late is less and less of an option. The cable company wants to charge us ANOTHER $15/month for one PVR or $25/month for two so we could have one for the bedroom and another for the living room, all on top of the $150/month for internet and cable we already pay. With Sickbeard I have it downloading to a 3TB ($250) external drive on a laptop in our bedroom closet that's hocked to our bedroom TV (HDMI cable through the wall). Then I use Plex to stream content to our downstairs Smart TV, it's a pretty awesome setup and I'm considering ripping, or just downloading, all the movies we own and sticking the DVD's in a box in the attic to save space in our living room. But it's a shame I have to expend all the energy to setup that system when I'd be perfectly willing to pay a reasonable price for a similar service.
I don't like cable, I don't like sitting through 20 minutes of useless commercials for every hour of TV I watch and have movies and shows interrupted, I don't like having to pay for tons of crap I don't want and pay extra to get the two or three channels I do want, then be nickled and dimed for equipment that's inconvenient to use and I have to give back if I cancel my service anyway, $300/year for two PVRs on top of the $1,650/year for basic cable and internet is stupid.
I'd be interested in hearing what other protocols would work?
The only ones I know of for network traffic are TCP and UDP. TCP guarantees in-order delivery of packets which think would be important for things like video, but I suppose that would cause lag if there were a lot of dropped packets.
Disclaimer, I do very little network stuff and only had exposure to Networking 1 and 2 during University ten years ago and setting up the occasional WiFi. So I'm probably out of date and this is a serious question not a troll.
Yes, as I'm an application developer that is why it came to mind. My reason for pointing it out is because the DBA would be responsible for cleaning up the mess of some bad application developer if that situation was to arise. I'm not the only application dev in my group and am far more knowledgeable than some of my coworkers, and far less knowledgeable than others.
That being said, my understanding is if a DBA does a good job setting up permissions and uses DBA terms, such as materialized view, they can reduce the chance of an application dev messing things up in the first place.
You raise some good points about how people use their desktops and metro makes sense in that context, but people don't choose to create a wall of icons, it happens by accident out of convenience for a quick spot to put an launcher. Of the people I've seen do this when I ask them they say it just happened, install a onetime application here, quickly bookmark a web page there and months later the desktop is cluttered an ugly and they can't find anything. The start menu is invaluable when you're trying to find an application you seldom use, don't necessarily know the name of, or if you're not one of those wall of icons people and prefer to keep your desktop clean. I have have quick launch folders on the taskbar for most of the stuff I commonly access, but I still use the start menu to find stuff I don't use daily.
As Alioth points out Windows breaks a lot of human computer interaction and design rules. I'm also finding that Metro tiles are too flashy, it's like surfing the web back in the early 90's where most sites could induce seizures because of all the flashing, blinking and dancing babies. I'm also seeing tiles being used for advertising, which is the last thing I want to see when I'm trying to find an application to get something done. Windows 8 is a failure.
I'm betting by the end of next year MS will be announcing Windows 9, which will be the regular desktop with a start menu for desktops/laptops and a separate Metro interface for mobile devices, which is how it should have been in the first place.
There are a lot of reason they tried to cram metro down our throats, all business strategy and profit related. Better for the customer isn't one of them. It's just the excuse. They're trying to get in on the ground level of the mobile market and create the iCulture desktop-mobile integration so they can lock users into windows devices for everything they do. Instead the opposite is happening, Windows 8 is so poorly designed for desktop that MS is starting to losing that market instead of picking up the mobile market. Now they're trying to save face by saying, "look we put the start button back in, that's what you wanted right?... right?" Sorry, too little too late.
Windows 9 will probably be what windows 8 should have been. I'm sure MS has enough money to tide them over till then, but if I was on their board of directors, I'd be calling for Ballmer's head.
My keyboard is old and has had a lot of coffee spilled on it. Lately the keys stick a bit. Had I spelled it tarriebytes I might be able to see your concern, but one extra 'r' doesn't really count as a serious typo.
I'm not a DBA and I never made that claim, I'm a developer. Some of the applications I write are front ends for researchers to access data stored in Oracle databases. Some applications are for modeling data and comparing models against hindcasts. There is a lot of data.
Oracle uses a tiered system for licensing and the prices are usually depended on what features you need for your business. I've installed and use Oracle DB for personal use. It was mostly a training excise, but I use it to keep track of my beer brewing recipes, cost of supplies, quality checks, temperature, specific gravity, alcohol by volume, taste, etc... I could have used MySQL, but I wanted to learn and practice with Oracle because that's the industry standard for large database applications.
I'm not a shill promoting Oracle, MySQL and SQLServer are all great products. I haven't used MariaDB yet, but I like to play around with the technologies. Oracle is a great product if you have a need for large database applications. It's management are still a bunch of asshats; it sucks that business people get in the way of and ruin great technologies.
No, it's $200/year for a personal licence if you're going to use it commercially. If you're just creating a DB to categorize the porn on your PC and don't ever plan on making money or exposing it in a commercial sense it's free to use.
This is all very true. For a small website MySQL or MariaDB are fine. I work in government and we collect, process and create terrabytes of ocean data a month for weather, sea ice, waves, salinity, temperature, oxygen, species migration, satellite imagery, and tons of other things. I hate Oracle because of their business practices and general asshatery as much as the next techie, but for large databases that require the kind of collection, processing and modeling we do, Oracle is all there is.
You're especially right that there's no "easy mode". I think it'd be silly to include such a thing and dumb down such a hugely complex product to a level that you might as well be using MySQL or MariaDB. And for the amount of data we deal with and the number of database instances we have, yes it's a full time DB admin job. God forbid the someone was to pull a Bobby tables because we didn't have someone qualified creating and maintaining the databases at all times.
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Because Windows 8 cripples it as a gaming machine, Ubuntu is a step up. My younger brother just bought a new machine with Windows 8 on it and spent a weekend trying to get several games to preform, some from steam some he has physical media for. It didn't work so he formatted it and against my advice put a pirated version of windows 7 on. It seems to be work fine now, but if he has any further issues he won't be able to return it with a pirated windows 7 OS.Ubuntu is a great alternative to windows 8. I have it running on my machine and have great success getting all my the Linux games running and almost all of my non-linux games run under wine. Besides more and more gaming companies and publishers are writing games for Linux.
Also we're not personal tech support for Microsoft. I use to do the tech support thing for friends and family, but it's a lose lose for me. You fix their machine and the next time something breaks, because of their bad habits or a windows update, it's your fault and you end up having to do more support. Since Win8 I refuse to help, If anyone want's me to do tech support for them they get a Linux distro, and since installing it for my in-laws, 2 out of 4 siblings and my wife I haven't been asked to fix anything. At first I was nervous that it'd be too much of a change for them, but I see my in-laws at least once a month, both love Ubuntu and have no problems with it.
*Realization Smash Mouth was actually a band of prophets*
Mind == blown.
I think it really depends on what your definition of inbreeding is. If your talking second cousins getting married, than 120M doesn't force inbreeding. If you're talking 10+ generations it's possible to do without even knowing. How many generations removed do you have to be before it's not inbreeding any more. I'm sure at one point the population of what is Japan today was in the Thousands, maybe even in the hundreds when humans first migrated there, so if you go back far enough then at one point people were probably mating with relatively "close" relatives (pardon the pun).
My grandfather had a family tree book for just his side of his family that was several thousand pages think. I remember flipping through it and finding all kinds of people I went to school with that were only six to seven generations removed from myself. A number of them ended up marrying and never knew the difference. At one point I moved from Nova Scotia, Canada to Laurinburg, North Carolina and there was one family living there that was related to me through my grandfathers side. It's a pretty small world.
That was a very interesting read, thanks for posting it.
Edward Snowden took a job with an NSA contractor with the intent of stealing and leaking classified NSA documents.
Do you have proof to back up that claim or just conjecture?
The fact is an "intelligence" organization collected data and "allowed" someone like Edward Snowden to obtain the data. You can debated "allowed" by accident or on purpose with yourself I really don't care and feel it's irreverent. The information wasn't leaked secretly to another organization or government, Snowden made it public. So my point "The U.S. got caught because they were greedy for data and careless with it" still stands.
I think that's kind of part of the problem here. The U.S. is far more, and far too, aggressive in collecting data. The E.U., being a collection of countries that have historically spied on each other to very large extents and are now friendly, frowns on that sort of thing. So although I'm sure the E.U. is still doing spying on each other and just putting up this front to cover their tracks. The U.S. got caught because they were greedy for data and careless with it, now they have to pay the piper.
That'll be 50 cents please.
Never heard of Crossover, I'll have to check it out. I have Steam running on a couple of VMs and steam for Linux with no issues. Don't take the boxed wine in the cab with you either ;)
I just finished it, I think I'll play through again. A lot of it was very similar to the original, which I played I think nearly 20 years ago when I was about nine. My dad had the whole series at one point, I wasn't suppose to play them, but figured out DOS at a pretty young ange. He was pretty excited when I told him they were doing a kickstarter. I haven't seen him since the games release, but he was a kickstarter contributor so he might be playing through it now. He's always been a sierra/Lucas arts fan.
That was suppose to be "Alient's prices aren't much better."
Yeah, I downloaded the Linux tar as well just in case the steam key didn't work. I was really happy they carried through with releasing a Linux version. I normally only contribute to kickstarters that say they'll support Linux, but you can never be sure until the final product and I'm aware that just because I contribute doesn't mean I'll get anything at all, let alone a Linux release of a game.
Got my Linux version on Steam. It's not advertised there for Linux but I plugged in the steam key given to kickstart backers and it worked anyway.
Eastlink, Right now we have the Talk, surf and watch bundle for $145/mo + tax, (15%) in Nova Scotia. If I just get the internet it'd be about $50/mo + tax Alient's prices are much better.
I think Mint was a fork of Ubuntu 10 when because they were adding Unity to Ubuntu 11. I could be wrong, I switched to Mint 12 when Ubuntu 11 came out. But it would mean Mint is technically based off Ubuntu, but not the version of Ubuntu that's getting Mir.
Thanks, it's all coming back to me now I remember the application network layers. I'll have to look into this uTP protocol, first time I've heard of it. Back when I was in networking we were told UDP and TCP. UDP if order doesn't matter and you can add any TCP requirements yourself if they're necessary, I'm guessing that's pretty much what uTP is.
$300/year for two PVRs on top of the $1,800/year for basic cable and internet is stupid.
Math fail.
I just looked into it and it would cost me $720/year for just internet to download what I want to watch and watch it when I want. Opposed to $2,100/year for crap TV channels I don't care about and internet so I can download what I want to watch and watch it when I want.
Now that I've put it in perspective for myself, screw my wife, cables gone when I get home.
Although I agree with a lot of what you said, especially with the growth of the mobile market. I think they will back down it'll just be backing down a little at a time to make it look like they're pushing forward, they're already starting to. They put the start "button" back in and claimed it was a step forward. I'm betting if adoption of Win 8.1 is as bad as Win 8 they will try adding the start menu back. The problem is Windows 8 is useless for large business applications, which is MS bread and butter. If they don't back down organizations will start looking to Apple or Linux for solutions to get work done. MS held onto the business world this long because they were really the first to figure out how to get vendor lock in, but if the whole systems changing anyway and you're going to have to retrain your staff to use something completely different it might as well be cheap like Linux or have good supported software like Apple
People still have a need for desktops/laptops for work and personal purposes, but it's getting to a point where if you have a need for number crunching and don't need to use applications like Photoshop you could have a Linux box. Most of the tools I use in MS office are available in Libre Office, I've rarely met anyone that requires the really advance MS office functions. As a developer (some web, some application) I can use GIMP for most of what I do, that's not to say GIMP will work for everyone, but for anyone not doing exclusive professional video, graphic design or photo manipulation there are open source applications will work. Most of the people I know that are professional video, graphics and photo people use Macs anyway and have well supported software for their trade.
I think either way, MS hit it's prime and has already fallen off the cliff, the question is how long the dead tree they're clinging to will hold out. There's a chance they could climb back up, but I have my doubts.
I watched continuum for a while. It was a pretty good show, but to SciFi for my wife and it wasn't on until almost 11:00PM for us here on the East coast so it was kind of late. I should add it to sickbeard for downloading now that I have that setup.
I agree with you for the most part.
If I can't find something on Netflix TPB or ExtraTorrent is my next stop. I like Netflix because I like watching movies I haven't seen in a long time and they have a pretty good anime selection, way better than my local video store (now closed) ever had and I don't have to spend days snooping the interwebs to find episodes. Also there's good content there for my two year old to watch. For eight bucks a month it's worth the effort it'd take me to find and download stuff for her and saves physical space in my house for crap movies/shows she'd only watch once and never look at again.
If they had newer movies and shows there, I'd be willing to pay more. Espically if I could get rid of my cable. If I could get rid of the cable I'd save nearly $100/month, but my wife is addicted to having crap playing in the background even when she's reading a book and not watching it. I just got Sickbeard setup a couple of weeks ago to auto download shows we watch and I'm starting to wean my wife off of channel surfing, but she still insists we can't get rid of the cable.
Part of the reason for getting Sickbeard is we live on the East coast (Atlantic time) and a lot of shows we want to watch don't end until almost midnight for us, we have a two year old and are up early every day so staying up late is less and less of an option. The cable company wants to charge us ANOTHER $15/month for one PVR or $25/month for two so we could have one for the bedroom and another for the living room, all on top of the $150/month for internet and cable we already pay. With Sickbeard I have it downloading to a 3TB ($250) external drive on a laptop in our bedroom closet that's hocked to our bedroom TV (HDMI cable through the wall). Then I use Plex to stream content to our downstairs Smart TV, it's a pretty awesome setup and I'm considering ripping, or just downloading, all the movies we own and sticking the DVD's in a box in the attic to save space in our living room. But it's a shame I have to expend all the energy to setup that system when I'd be perfectly willing to pay a reasonable price for a similar service.
I don't like cable, I don't like sitting through 20 minutes of useless commercials for every hour of TV I watch and have movies and shows interrupted, I don't like having to pay for tons of crap I don't want and pay extra to get the two or three channels I do want, then be nickled and dimed for equipment that's inconvenient to use and I have to give back if I cancel my service anyway, $300/year for two PVRs on top of the $1,650/year for basic cable and internet is stupid.
I'd be interested in hearing what other protocols would work?
The only ones I know of for network traffic are TCP and UDP. TCP guarantees in-order delivery of packets which think would be important for things like video, but I suppose that would cause lag if there were a lot of dropped packets.
Disclaimer, I do very little network stuff and only had exposure to Networking 1 and 2 during University ten years ago and setting up the occasional WiFi. So I'm probably out of date and this is a serious question not a troll.
Canada's the same way. I use a proxy server setting on my smart TV to get the American netflix. Otherwise I wouldn't bother with it.
Yes, as I'm an application developer that is why it came to mind. My reason for pointing it out is because the DBA would be responsible for cleaning up the mess of some bad application developer if that situation was to arise. I'm not the only application dev in my group and am far more knowledgeable than some of my coworkers, and far less knowledgeable than others.
That being said, my understanding is if a DBA does a good job setting up permissions and uses DBA terms, such as materialized view, they can reduce the chance of an application dev messing things up in the first place.
You raise some good points about how people use their desktops and metro makes sense in that context, but people don't choose to create a wall of icons, it happens by accident out of convenience for a quick spot to put an launcher. Of the people I've seen do this when I ask them they say it just happened, install a onetime application here, quickly bookmark a web page there and months later the desktop is cluttered an ugly and they can't find anything. The start menu is invaluable when you're trying to find an application you seldom use, don't necessarily know the name of, or if you're not one of those wall of icons people and prefer to keep your desktop clean. I have have quick launch folders on the taskbar for most of the stuff I commonly access, but I still use the start menu to find stuff I don't use daily.
... right?" Sorry, too little too late.
As Alioth points out Windows breaks a lot of human computer interaction and design rules. I'm also finding that Metro tiles are too flashy, it's like surfing the web back in the early 90's where most sites could induce seizures because of all the flashing, blinking and dancing babies. I'm also seeing tiles being used for advertising, which is the last thing I want to see when I'm trying to find an application to get something done. Windows 8 is a failure.
I'm betting by the end of next year MS will be announcing Windows 9, which will be the regular desktop with a start menu for desktops/laptops and a separate Metro interface for mobile devices, which is how it should have been in the first place.
There are a lot of reason they tried to cram metro down our throats, all business strategy and profit related. Better for the customer isn't one of them. It's just the excuse. They're trying to get in on the ground level of the mobile market and create the iCulture desktop-mobile integration so they can lock users into windows devices for everything they do. Instead the opposite is happening, Windows 8 is so poorly designed for desktop that MS is starting to losing that market instead of picking up the mobile market. Now they're trying to save face by saying, "look we put the start button back in, that's what you wanted right?
Windows 9 will probably be what windows 8 should have been. I'm sure MS has enough money to tide them over till then, but if I was on their board of directors, I'd be calling for Ballmer's head.
My keyboard is old and has had a lot of coffee spilled on it. Lately the keys stick a bit. Had I spelled it tarriebytes I might be able to see your concern, but one extra 'r' doesn't really count as a serious typo.
I'm not a DBA and I never made that claim, I'm a developer. Some of the applications I write are front ends for researchers to access data stored in Oracle databases. Some applications are for modeling data and comparing models against hindcasts. There is a lot of data.
Oracle uses a tiered system for licensing and the prices are usually depended on what features you need for your business. I've installed and use Oracle DB for personal use. It was mostly a training excise, but I use it to keep track of my beer brewing recipes, cost of supplies, quality checks, temperature, specific gravity, alcohol by volume, taste, etc... I could have used MySQL, but I wanted to learn and practice with Oracle because that's the industry standard for large database applications.
I'm not a shill promoting Oracle, MySQL and SQLServer are all great products. I haven't used MariaDB yet, but I like to play around with the technologies. Oracle is a great product if you have a need for large database applications. It's management are still a bunch of asshats; it sucks that business people get in the way of and ruin great technologies.
No, it's $200/year for a personal licence if you're going to use it commercially. If you're just creating a DB to categorize the porn on your PC and don't ever plan on making money or exposing it in a commercial sense it's free to use.
This is all very true. For a small website MySQL or MariaDB are fine. I work in government and we collect, process and create terrabytes of ocean data a month for weather, sea ice, waves, salinity, temperature, oxygen, species migration, satellite imagery, and tons of other things. I hate Oracle because of their business practices and general asshatery as much as the next techie, but for large databases that require the kind of collection, processing and modeling we do, Oracle is all there is.
You're especially right that there's no "easy mode". I think it'd be silly to include such a thing and dumb down such a hugely complex product to a level that you might as well be using MySQL or MariaDB. And for the amount of data we deal with and the number of database instances we have, yes it's a full time DB admin job. God forbid the someone was to pull a Bobby tables because we didn't have someone qualified creating and maintaining the databases at all times.