I do actually watch TV. I guess I just don't watch the Network shows enough to notice. I watch a lot of the History Channel. I do DVR some of the older sit-coms that I like such as Mad About You. I found that I like some of the much older shows. I DVR the Waltons and watch that now and then. I didn't watch it when I was a kid but now I actually like of like it. The characters are actually people that I can like. Doctor Who on BBC America is also pretty good. So no I am not bragging about not watching TV at all. It is more a statment about how bad the Network show have gotten that I really don't miss them.
Maybe they are doing a poor job entertaining me. I can not think of one show on the networks that I really want to watch. I have about 8 episodes of Heros sitting on my DVR that I have yet to watch because they are just not that interesting to me. They are about the best show on TV right now. While I do think good writers are vastly under paid I have to say what they are turning out now is of such a low interest to me that I just didn't notice.
I tend to watch a lot more of the History Channel and the like than the big network shows.
If it makes you feel better I really didn't notice the Baseball strike, the Hockey Strike, or the Actor strike.
"People also don't like crappy UI's, programs with really absurd/dorky names that make no sense to anyone but nerds who get the inside joke (if there even is one), and O/S's that don't support their favorite software." First of all I have to say that I just installed the latest version of Ubuntu. The list of OS's I have used is. CP/M, TRS-DOS,MS-DOS, MVS , AmigaOS , Windows 2,Windows 3.11,OS/2,WindowsNT,Windows 95,98,Windows 2000,Windows XP,OS/X and a few versions of Linux. I would say I am pretty experienced with PCs Ubuntu,s standard install is far from a crappy UI. It is pretty nice and I can sit down with it and just use it. My wife which is pretty good with computers liked it so much that she had me put it on her PC. She just sat down and used it with no problem. The Gnome's UI isn't crappy and the install is close to painless. Absurd/dorky names? Well they have been with use since the beginning of computers. Pentium, Centrino, Core-Duo, Google, Vista, Yahoo, YouTube, and Flickr, yea no one will buy anything with a dorky name. Finding a name for a program is getting harder and harder. If you come up with a program name even close to what one of the big boys have you may expect a nastygram at best. Over all crabbing about the name is just shallow and frankly pretty dumb.
Yes the UI of Gnome isn't EXACTLY like Windows XP. But then the UI of Vista isn't exactly like XP. Heck I have a hard time finding stuff in Vista all the time. Over all I would say Gnome is about as good as XP or Vista as far as a UI goes.
You don't think that the Google cluster requires specialized talent? I do agree that Google is crazy smart. Odds are very good that they are reading this paper from top to bottom. If it makes sense they will probably buy a Blue Gene. Ebay is also probably look at the paper as well. Being smart means not falling in love with your solution. When a problem gets big enough then specialized solutions become cheaper then COTS solutions. If that wasn't true then you wouldn't have the specialized solutions to start with.
The difference between DVD and Blu-Ray is tiny compared to the difference between DVD and VHS. Even then it took a long tome for DVD to become dominate. Blu-ray now how has to face network distribution so no I think calling blu-ray the winner is way optimistic at this point. So the 360 has had one die shrink. Well the 360 is still having some heat issues and I am sure that Nintendo wouldn't object to even higher profits for the Wii.
Because Blue-Ray hasn't won the Format wars. DVD has. Still for the vast majority of people DVD is good enough. I think Sony would love to seem even more systems sold and that will take a price drop. What no-one is saying is... IBM also makes the PPC based CPUs for the 360 and Wii:) So they could also see a drop in power and price as well. I don't think IBM is that much in love with Sony that they will ignore Nintendo and Microsoft.
It could end up costing less. In power, space, and manpower. Thousands and thousands of PCs take a lot of power to run and cool. There is a reason that IBM built the BLue Gene instead of a cluster of X86.
So your against freedom of speech you don't agree with? Really if someone should have the right to say yes I am offended by x. You obviously feel that you have the right to say what offends you and how people express themselves so why shouldn't everyone else? "I think we really have to try our best to encourage people to keep their religious insanity to themselves and to their own little groups. The early Christians had the right idea, meeting in secret in caves. If only we could get the contemporary ones to follow their lead." "As always, the best tool is ridicule. Whether Tom Cruise or Mormons or Ted Haggard or "evangelicals" or fanatic muslims, ridicule is the key."
So how are any different that the Muslims trying to tell Wikipedia what to do? Oh it is because you are tying to control what they are can say and how they say it.
Really people have the right to voice when they are displeased. As long as they simply voice that opinion and try to convince others to agree by none violent means then I see no problem. That is called free speech. I would be disappointed in Wikipedia if they did remove the image but I don't see how them being asked is wrong or evil. It is just a different view.
I get offended by self righteous nut cases on Slashdot all the time.
But the latest stuff is not always the best stuff.
The idea behind RHEL and CentOS and frankly Debian is to provide the most stable platform. For production servers uptime is everything. The ideal situation would be if you never had to update your server at all. That of course just doesn't happen. There will always be security fixes and bug fixes but many new features are just not that important. To give you a real world example. At my office we use a Postgres Database server to run our call queue. We have a program that keeps track of all our incoming support calls and out going support calls. Right now it does what we need and is fast. Postgres just came out with a brand new version. It looks great and has some really nice features. The thing is I don't need those features until I write a new version of our phone software. Postgres keeps updating the older version of the postgres server software with bug and security fixes for just that reason. I don't need to jump to a new major release until I want to. This is typical of servers. Your example is kind of misleading. I think that Fedora 3 is no longer supported with updates, RHEL4 is. For a home system Fedora is great. For a small office? Why not if you want it. But CentOS has the same cost as Fedora and a much longer support life. Yea it may be "boring" but frankly boring is good for a server.
I did read the article. IBM is talking about running it on a Blue Gene type of machine. The Blue Gene is sort of a cluster in a box but it isn't what your talking about. Maybe they think a cluster of Blue Gene's might be what they are thinking of. I doubt that they are planing replacing the Internet with one machine but a Blue Gene might replace Google's cluster. It might even be cheaper, faster, user less power, and be easier to manage. IBM has decades of experience making systems that have up times of years so being a single point of failure is less of an issue than many people might think.
I have to find the idea of a Blue Gene running LAMP is very very odd but hey IBM did it. The headline is catchy but the real meat of the story is that IBM thinks that Blue Gene could replace a data center full of 1U servers. So no not the internet hosted on one machine but EBay, Goggle, or Yahoo hosted on one machine.
These days most sellers are using paypal so you don't have to "slow" buyers. A few years ago I bought a motherboard on EBay. I paid for insurance and waited. It never came we tried to contact the seller and nothing. We contacted paypal and they said that the seller claimed to have shipped it and we had waited too long. So I contacted my bank and they reversed the charge. All the time the seller protested that he had sent it. We mentioned that we did pay for it to be insured but that didn't seem to make any real difference. My wife wouldn't post negative feedback because when she check this guy had a bunch of new negative feedback about not shipping stuff. Every buyer that gave him negative feed back got negative feedback from him!
I know this is a bit of a radical statment but Linux is Linux. I don't find it all that hard to jump from Ubuntu, to OpenSuse, to CentOS. Okay yum is a little different than apt-get and both are a little different from Yast but they are just not that hard to move from. The difference between Fedora and CentOS are so small that I just don't see the problem but then I like learning new stuff and I am an old fart.
Not really. I paid only 16k for a nice new car. Yes I got a deal but not a super one. I use that care to go work, the store, and many other things I must do day in and day out. I paid 95 dollars for my phone. I really like my phone btw. It is a Sanyo KatanaII. Now lets me take a look at my phone vs the iPhone. My phone is smaller and fits well in my pocket. I can surf the net as well as I need to with my phone. I can read my email, use Google Maps, and watch video with it, and get weather reports and even radar. It has EVO so I have high speed data. I put a six gig memory card in it and it holds a lot of music and other data files. The batter lasts about three days depending but I usually charge it every night. The voice quality is just GREAT as is the speaker phone. It has Turn by turn GPS navigation which works really well. I paid what I did for a car I will probably drive for ten years if I am lucky. I needed a good reliable car that gets good milage and I like that it is fun to drive. I paid what I did for my phone because it does what I need it to do and then some. Just how much better is the iPhone? Frankly I would rather have an EEEPC and my phone than just an iPhone.
People will pay 20,000 for car because they must have a car so it is worth it to them. I will not pay $400 for a phone bacause it isn't worth it to me. The Iphone lacks 3G and GPS. Not only that I know that soon there will be a new iPhone that is better than the current one. It that one will probably offer 3G and GPS. I don't want to pay for the honor of being an Apple early adopter. That can be painful. By the way the difference between a crappy phone and a crappy car can be huge. A crappy car can get you killed. A crappy phone might if you need to call for help and it fails but frankly the free Cell phone you get will do that just as well as an iPhone will.
But what do you gain from using Fedora over CentOS? I am not saying that can not use Fedora and have a stable server but why choose it over CentOS? CentOS is just fine at running web servers, databases, and SVN. Most databases and Apache produce RPMs for Red Hat Enterpise very early in the update cycle so there is no need for you to not have the latest and greatest if you want. All the tools are pretty much the same for management so why Fedora over CentOS? I am long time Suse user but I have to admit that I have really become fond of CentOS for servers. That and I just installed the Latest stable Ubuntu on my desktop and my goodness am I impressed with it. The simplest install I have ever done. Now if they could just get GNASH to work as well as Flash I would be ready to jump to 64 bit on my desktop.
Why would you use Fedora for a production server? Fedora has too short of a supported life for a server. I would recomend CentOS if you want a Red Hat like server install.
Maybe except I don't think I am in that five percent. I download maybe one or two ISOs a month. I am not a big bit-torrent user I use bittorrect for a Linux ISO or OpenOffice now and then. And I have the HD package, DVR, NFL network and I think that is it. I pay them pretty good money each month. If they loose my internet business they will lose my cable. The key to the cable, cellphone, and ISP business is retention.
Not every office has someone that knows PHP. I do but not everyone does. Not every office has the time to hack a wiki to use Postgres. Not every office will want to have to re hack the wiki to use postgres when an update is made available. Very few people will want to hack Sugar CRM to work with Postgres..... Yes there isn't a single job that MySql does that Postgres can not. Too bad that it is treated like a second class citizen. Postgres is better, MySql is the path of least resistance right now.
No and no. I will probably get the Dish network and DSL. I don't mind paying but I don't like this crap. When I got my Cable Modem they advertised 10-Mbit which I have never gotten. They advertised unlimited as well. I don't like them filtering, setting caps, and other bs. Yes I do download ISOs. I just downloaded OpenSuse and Ubuntu ISOs
"IF your kid has a laptop (are you insane? no child needs a laptop) you cant stop them as they will use the neighbors or mcdonalds instead." I guess you don't like the OLPC project then? Well I have an old PIII doing nothing so I guess installing smoothwall on it would be a good plan when I have kids:) The problem is really one of parental involvement more than technology. But the other issue is that there are real problems with kids on the internet. On day I was in a chat room talking with some friends when a new person shows up. I greeted them and they asked me my stats. Well this chat room isn't a pick up or porn room so I gave my age, state, gender and mentioned that I was married just so I wouldn't have to deal with any pick up flirt stuff. The "person" claims to be a 12 year old girl and wants to know if I would be her boyfriend! Good grief but at that time what does a responsible adult do? I could kick her out of the channel but there are channels with predators. I told her no and how dangerous it was to do that and that she shouldn't do that. I asked if her parents knew what she was doing? I tried to be nice and ask her about school, what her favorite subjects where and other things like that. All the time thinking was this a cop try to find pedophiles or a real little girl that was heading for trouble?
The real advantage that MySQL has right now is the number of packages that are MySQL centric. You need a Wiki? Odd are that it supports MySQL and can be made to work with Postgres. Need a content management system? Odds are that it was written for MySQL and might work with Postgres. So you probably already have MySQL in house so people tend to go with MySQL even when Postgres is a better solution even if for no other reason than why maintain two databases. The only reason why we use Postgres for several of our in house programs is because I wrote those before we put up an in house Wiki or other web stuff. Postgres offered row locking back then when MySQL didn't. I loved transactions when I finally got to use them. The sad thing is that if I did it over today I would probably pick MySQL since it is so popular and now supports row locking and transactions. Postgres is the better system but it lacks the depth of support that MySQL does. Sort of like BSD vs Windows.
Databases can be a good tool for this because of ease of extracting the data with standard reporting tools. You are correct that many times databases are being used to replace flat files. While it is often not the optimum choice it often the right choice. Modern databases are fast enough and thanks to FOSS cheap enough that it is just easier to use a database you know then write your own file handling code. It also means that if you expand the application in the future that the data is already in a database.
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I do actually watch TV. I guess I just don't watch the Network shows enough to notice.
I watch a lot of the History Channel. I do DVR some of the older sit-coms that I like such as Mad About You. I found that I like some of the much older shows. I DVR the Waltons and watch that now and then. I didn't watch it when I was a kid but now I actually like of like it. The characters are actually people that I can like. Doctor Who on BBC America is also pretty good.
So no I am not bragging about not watching TV at all. It is more a statment about how bad the Network show have gotten that I really don't miss them.
Maybe they are doing a poor job entertaining me.
I can not think of one show on the networks that I really want to watch. I have about 8 episodes of Heros sitting on my DVR that I have yet to watch because they are just not that interesting to me. They are about the best show on TV right now.
While I do think good writers are vastly under paid I have to say what they are turning out now is of such a low interest to me that I just didn't notice.
I tend to watch a lot more of the History Channel and the like than the big network shows.
If it makes you feel better I really didn't notice the Baseball strike, the Hockey Strike, or the Actor strike.
I didn't even notice it to be honest.
"People also don't like crappy UI's, programs with really absurd/dorky names that make no sense to anyone but nerds who get the inside joke (if there even is one), and O/S's that don't support their favorite software." ,Windows 3.11 ,OS/2 ,WindowsNT ,Windows 95,98 ,Windows 2000 ,Windows XP ,OS/X
First of all I have to say that I just installed the latest version of Ubuntu. The list of OS's I have used is.
CP/M, TRS-DOS,MS-DOS, MVS , AmigaOS , Windows 2
and a few versions of Linux. I would say I am pretty experienced with PCs
Ubuntu,s standard install is far from a crappy UI. It is pretty nice and I can sit down with it and just use it. My wife which is pretty good with computers liked it so much that she had me put it on her PC. She just sat down and used it with no problem. The Gnome's UI isn't crappy and the install is close to painless.
Absurd/dorky names? Well they have been with use since the beginning of computers. Pentium, Centrino, Core-Duo, Google, Vista, Yahoo, YouTube, and Flickr, yea no one will buy anything with a dorky name. Finding a name for a program is getting harder and harder. If you come up with a program name even close to what one of the big boys have you may expect a nastygram at best. Over all crabbing about the name is just shallow and frankly pretty dumb.
Yes the UI of Gnome isn't EXACTLY like Windows XP. But then the UI of Vista isn't exactly like XP. Heck I have a hard time finding stuff in Vista all the time.
Over all I would say Gnome is about as good as XP or Vista as far as a UI goes.
You don't think that the Google cluster requires specialized talent?
I do agree that Google is crazy smart. Odds are very good that they are reading this paper from top to bottom. If it makes sense they will probably buy a Blue Gene. Ebay is also probably look at the paper as well.
Being smart means not falling in love with your solution. When a problem gets big enough then specialized solutions become cheaper then COTS solutions. If that wasn't true then you wouldn't have the specialized solutions to start with.
The difference between DVD and Blu-Ray is tiny compared to the difference between DVD and VHS. Even then it took a long tome for DVD to become dominate. Blu-ray now how has to face network distribution so no I think calling blu-ray the winner is way optimistic at this point.
So the 360 has had one die shrink. Well the 360 is still having some heat issues and I am sure that Nintendo wouldn't object to even higher profits for the Wii.
Because Blue-Ray hasn't won the Format wars. DVD has. Still for the vast majority of people DVD is good enough. I think Sony would love to seem even more systems sold and that will take a price drop. :)
What no-one is saying is...
IBM also makes the PPC based CPUs for the 360 and Wii
So they could also see a drop in power and price as well.
I don't think IBM is that much in love with Sony that they will ignore Nintendo and Microsoft.
It could end up costing less.
In power, space, and manpower. Thousands and thousands of PCs take a lot of power to run and cool.
There is a reason that IBM built the BLue Gene instead of a cluster of X86.
The paypal was tied to my credit card and not my back account. So they where pahhy to reverse it.
So your against freedom of speech you don't agree with?
Really if someone should have the right to say yes I am offended by x. You obviously feel that you have the right to say what offends you and how people express themselves so why shouldn't everyone else?
"I think we really have to try our best to encourage people to keep their religious insanity to themselves and to their own little groups. The early Christians had the right idea, meeting in secret in caves. If only we could get the contemporary ones to follow their lead."
"As always, the best tool is ridicule. Whether Tom Cruise or Mormons or Ted Haggard or "evangelicals" or fanatic muslims, ridicule is the key."
So how are any different that the Muslims trying to tell Wikipedia what to do?
Oh it is because you are tying to control what they are can say and how they say it.
Really people have the right to voice when they are displeased. As long as they simply voice that opinion and try to convince others to agree by none violent means then I see no problem. That is called free speech.
I would be disappointed in Wikipedia if they did remove the image but I don't see how them being asked is wrong or evil. It is just a different view.
I get offended by self righteous nut cases on Slashdot all the time.
But the latest stuff is not always the best stuff.
The idea behind RHEL and CentOS and frankly Debian is to provide the most stable platform. For production servers uptime is everything. The ideal situation would be if you never had to update your server at all. That of course just doesn't happen. There will always be security fixes and bug fixes but many new features are just not that important.
To give you a real world example. At my office we use a Postgres Database server to run our call queue. We have a program that keeps track of all our incoming support calls and out going support calls. Right now it does what we need and is fast.
Postgres just came out with a brand new version. It looks great and has some really nice features. The thing is I don't need those features until I write a new version of our phone software. Postgres keeps updating the older version of the postgres server software with bug and security fixes for just that reason. I don't need to jump to a new major release until I want to.
This is typical of servers. Your example is kind of misleading. I think that Fedora 3 is no longer supported with updates, RHEL4 is.
For a home system Fedora is great. For a small office? Why not if you want it. But CentOS has the same cost as Fedora and a much longer support life.
Yea it may be "boring" but frankly boring is good for a server.
I did read the article. IBM is talking about running it on a Blue Gene type of machine.
The Blue Gene is sort of a cluster in a box but it isn't what your talking about.
Maybe they think a cluster of Blue Gene's might be what they are thinking of.
I doubt that they are planing replacing the Internet with one machine but a Blue Gene might replace Google's cluster. It might even be cheaper, faster, user less power, and be easier to manage. IBM has decades of experience making systems that have up times of years so being a single point of failure is less of an issue than many people might think.
I have to find the idea of a Blue Gene running LAMP is very very odd but hey IBM did it.
The headline is catchy but the real meat of the story is that IBM thinks that Blue Gene could replace a data center full of 1U servers. So no not the internet hosted on one machine but EBay, Goggle, or Yahoo hosted on one machine.
These days most sellers are using paypal so you don't have to "slow" buyers.
A few years ago I bought a motherboard on EBay. I paid for insurance and waited. It never came we tried to contact the seller and nothing. We contacted paypal and they said that the seller claimed to have shipped it and we had waited too long. So I contacted my bank and they reversed the charge.
All the time the seller protested that he had sent it. We mentioned that we did pay for it to be insured but that didn't seem to make any real difference.
My wife wouldn't post negative feedback because when she check this guy had a bunch of new negative feedback about not shipping stuff.
Every buyer that gave him negative feed back got negative feedback from him!
I know this is a bit of a radical statment but Linux is Linux.
I don't find it all that hard to jump from Ubuntu, to OpenSuse, to CentOS.
Okay yum is a little different than apt-get and both are a little different from Yast but they are just not that hard to move from.
The difference between Fedora and CentOS are so small that I just don't see the problem but then I like learning new stuff and I am an old fart.
Not really.
I paid only 16k for a nice new car. Yes I got a deal but not a super one. I use that care to go work, the store, and many other things I must do day in and day out.
I paid 95 dollars for my phone.
I really like my phone btw. It is a Sanyo KatanaII. Now lets me take a look at my phone vs the iPhone.
My phone is smaller and fits well in my pocket.
I can surf the net as well as I need to with my phone. I can read my email, use Google Maps, and watch video with it, and get weather reports and even radar.
It has EVO so I have high speed data.
I put a six gig memory card in it and it holds a lot of music and other data files.
The batter lasts about three days depending but I usually charge it every night.
The voice quality is just GREAT as is the speaker phone.
It has Turn by turn GPS navigation which works really well.
I paid what I did for a car I will probably drive for ten years if I am lucky. I needed a good reliable car that gets good milage and I like that it is fun to drive.
I paid what I did for my phone because it does what I need it to do and then some. Just how much better is the iPhone?
Frankly I would rather have an EEEPC and my phone than just an iPhone.
People will pay 20,000 for car because they must have a car so it is worth it to them. I will not pay $400 for a phone bacause it isn't worth it to me.
The Iphone lacks 3G and GPS. Not only that I know that soon there will be a new iPhone that is better than the current one. It that one will probably offer 3G and GPS.
I don't want to pay for the honor of being an Apple early adopter. That can be painful.
By the way the difference between a crappy phone and a crappy car can be huge.
A crappy car can get you killed. A crappy phone might if you need to call for help and it fails but frankly the free Cell phone you get will do that just as well as an iPhone will.
But what do you gain from using Fedora over CentOS?
I am not saying that can not use Fedora and have a stable server but why choose it over CentOS?
CentOS is just fine at running web servers, databases, and SVN. Most databases and Apache produce RPMs for Red Hat Enterpise very early in the update cycle so there is no need for you to not have the latest and greatest if you want. All the tools are pretty much the same for management so why Fedora over CentOS?
I am long time Suse user but I have to admit that I have really become fond of CentOS for servers. That and I just installed the Latest stable Ubuntu on my desktop and my goodness am I impressed with it. The simplest install I have ever done.
Now if they could just get GNASH to work as well as Flash I would be ready to jump to 64 bit on my desktop.
Why would you use Fedora for a production server?
Fedora has too short of a supported life for a server. I would recomend CentOS if you want a Red Hat like server install.
Frankly I would be glad if it was that and not a little girl. I wonder what they thought of me trying to do the right thing?
Maybe except I don't think I am in that five percent.
I download maybe one or two ISOs a month. I am not a big bit-torrent user I use bittorrect for a Linux ISO or OpenOffice now and then. And I have the HD package, DVR, NFL network and I think that is it.
I pay them pretty good money each month.
If they loose my internet business they will lose my cable.
The key to the cable, cellphone, and ISP business is retention.
Not every office has someone that knows PHP. I do but not everyone does. ....
Not every office has the time to hack a wiki to use Postgres.
Not every office will want to have to re hack the wiki to use postgres when an update is made available.
Very few people will want to hack Sugar CRM to work with Postgres.
Yes there isn't a single job that MySql does that Postgres can not. Too bad that it is treated like a second class citizen.
Postgres is better, MySql is the path of least resistance right now.
No and no.
I will probably get the Dish network and DSL.
I don't mind paying but I don't like this crap. When I got my Cable Modem they advertised 10-Mbit which I have never gotten. They advertised unlimited as well.
I don't like them filtering, setting caps, and other bs.
Yes I do download ISOs. I just downloaded OpenSuse and Ubuntu ISOs
"IF your kid has a laptop (are you insane? no child needs a laptop) you cant stop them as they will use the neighbors or mcdonalds instead." :)
I guess you don't like the OLPC project then?
Well I have an old PIII doing nothing so I guess installing smoothwall on it would be a good plan when I have kids
The problem is really one of parental involvement more than technology.
But the other issue is that there are real problems with kids on the internet. On day I was in a chat room talking with some friends when a new person shows up. I greeted them and they asked me my stats. Well this chat room isn't a pick up or porn room so I gave my age, state, gender and mentioned that I was married just so I wouldn't have to deal with any pick up flirt stuff.
The "person" claims to be a 12 year old girl and wants to know if I would be her boyfriend!
Good grief but at that time what does a responsible adult do? I could kick her out of the channel but there are channels with predators. I told her no and how dangerous it was to do that and that she shouldn't do that.
I asked if her parents knew what she was doing? I tried to be nice and ask her about school, what her favorite subjects where and other things like that. All the time thinking was this a cop try to find pedophiles or a real little girl that was heading for trouble?
If you implement this I will drop you for Internet and cable TV in a heartbeat.
The real advantage that MySQL has right now is the number of packages that are MySQL centric.
You need a Wiki? Odd are that it supports MySQL and can be made to work with Postgres. Need a content management system? Odds are that it was written for MySQL and might work with Postgres. So you probably already have MySQL in house so people tend to go with MySQL even when Postgres is a better solution even if for no other reason than why maintain two databases.
The only reason why we use Postgres for several of our in house programs is because I wrote those before we put up an in house Wiki or other web stuff. Postgres offered row locking back then when MySQL didn't. I loved transactions when I finally got to use them.
The sad thing is that if I did it over today I would probably pick MySQL since it is so popular and now supports row locking and transactions.
Postgres is the better system but it lacks the depth of support that MySQL does. Sort of like BSD vs Windows.
Databases can be a good tool for this because of ease of extracting the data with standard reporting tools. You are correct that many times databases are being used to replace flat files. While it is often not the optimum choice it often the right choice. Modern databases are fast enough and thanks to FOSS cheap enough that it is just easier to use a database you know then write your own file handling code. It also means that if you expand the application in the future that the data is already in a database.