It really is sad you stupid, ignorant dumbass fucking yanks are even allowed out of your own coutry. It's a miracle that you can even find your way to a shit house overseas considering how you can't even read articles in English, you dumb cunt.
For a nice inflammatory post, that would be a good start. It certainly is how I feel at the moment. I certainly will never again visit the USA. It's really a pity. There's a lot of good in your country, but it is drowning beneath a wave of religiously paranoid, fearful and backward shit.
I'm all for it, but I want Americans to be required to offer proof of fluency in the language of the country they are visiting before we let them into the EU.
I had the same idea as you, that Apple ported Safari in order to help kill Silverlight before it got any traction, but I don't think that's really the case. I think it's because Safari web apps will also run on the iphone and Safari will serve as a good testbed for that.
Everytime Photoshop is mentioned here (or Indesign or Illusrtator for that matter), sooner or later someone will jump up and claim that the GIMP can do aynthing that Photoshop can and will then go on to make increasingly bizarre claims about how GIMP is going to support CMYK anyday now and (in the last Photoshop claim in the/. article by the guy who was looking for cheap alternatives to the Adobe suite), by some people even claiming that you don't need CMYK for print as sRGB is somehow better than the various ISO CMYK profiles worked out by industry professionals. I wonder if these people have ever heard of spot colours and how trying to emulate those in RGB for print is not going to work out too well. But to get back on topic...
Graphic professionals usually quote the quality CMYK workflows as the reason why PS is better than the GIMP, but in reality the reason is quality alone.
The Adobe applications have, IMHO, amongst the highest quality of any apps I've ever seen out there. The apps consistenly produce the same quality results throughout the suite. The interfaces are very well thought out (the big changes in CS3 are the biggest in 7 years) and Adobe reserves a lot of time for quality control which ensures that when I use one of their apps in my job (I use almost all of them, PS, AI, ID, Acrobat), I can be fairly certain that they won't crash and that the results will be acceptable for print and the web. Added to that Adobe really pays a great amount of attention to detail, such as the quality of scaled images, which while many others support bicubic scaling these days, almost none do it with the same quality as PS does. And the list goes on.
There's nothing wrong with the GIMP and it is a bloody amazing tool all things considered. But someone would have to pay the GIMP contributors to spend more time taking care of details in the app to bring it up to PS' quality.
Having only read a tiny amount on the origions of modern monotheism in Sumerian, Assyrian and Babylonian myth, it still becomes pretty obvious that most of what many millions of people have foughten and died for was another man's entertainment.
Frankly, this is so ridiculous, it's almost funny. Here we have a Russian politician threatening firstly the USA, then Western Europe with nuclear weapons if they install what is almost certainly going to be a big fat white elephant that would not stop an Iranian nuclear weapon in any case (because the Iranians would certainly not be dumb enough to actually launch one, thy would pass it on to Hezbollah or some other radical grouping who would use it in a suicide nuclear bombing).
Basically, I'm pissed off with almost all the "players" at the moment: a)The Americans. The current US government, not content with fighting two insurgencies concurrently, one of which is almost certainly already lost and the other one looks ominously like it's going that way as well, is blindly carrying on with this utterly useless missile defence scheme in Poland and the Czech republic which the majority of the populations do not want, but whose governments have been bought by big promises from the same group of corrupt (Wolfowitz, Gonzales, Feith, Cheney, Bremer et al) incompetents who bled Iraq dry while promising the sun and the moon.
b)The Russians. While I can certainly understand Russians in general wanting a strong government after the chaos and national humiliation of the fall of the Soviet Union and the subsequent robbery by Oil thieves and chaos of drunk and corrupt politicians, Putin is still in his heart a KGB man who wants a return of Russian might and power and who is just too dumb too see that the only place threatening the Europeans will lead to will be a gradual and then rapid rearmament of Western Europe, with the majority of nations bending over even further for the protection of American weapons than was thought possible. The American, Russian and European Arms lobbies must be rubbing their hands in glee at the prospect of new satanically expensive weapons systems of questionable value for their respective clients. The slashdot weapon groupies will be loudly masturbating over these same toys as they dream of killing millions in their science fiction dreams of sexual impotence.
c)The Eastern Europeans. Just how far did these nations expect to be able to provoke the Russians before the Russians went ahead and drew a line in the sand? Do the Czechs and the Poles, both of whom are so fond of criticing Western Europe (but happily take its cash and forgetting that England and France went to war for Poland in 1939 and that the Americans did sweet fuck all in 1968 when the Russians reinvaded Czechoslovakia) for not being totally willing to support their Russian baiting think that the USA would risk nuclear war for them so that they could threaten the Russians? I mean, I know the Nazis and the Soviets killed off a lot of intelligent people there, but really, just how dumb are they? The EU will unhappily be pulled into this mess by these three fuckups playing very dangerous games.
The only people who really profit in this is the arms manufacturers. Think about that and look at the situation again.
At my place of work, when I was helping out doing sysadmin last year, I discovered that the current sysadmin is a Gentoo fan, which is ok, except that all the Gentoo boxes were plagued, really plagued with update problems, sometimes showstoppers, but often bugs that required half a day to track down. We could not replicate one setup from one machine to another. It simply did not work. Sometimes I had to fix really bad update problems where something critical, like Apache, MySQL or some obscure PHP package got updated quietly, bringing the service to a screeching halt. Portage is enormously flexible, but it is buggy and some things are simply so painful to do (like the Java JDK setups for Tomcat etc), that it sometimes just doesn't seem worth it (having to write my own entropy generator so that mod_perl would work was mind blowing).
No, in retrospect, I think Gentoo belongs firmly in the realm of the very advanced admin user who only runs one or two services per box. For the rest it is a cool experimental and very educational toy, but I would in future only use Debian (or perhaps the Ubuntu server versions now), or one of the commercial distros (But not SuSE. It's better than RedHat but Novell is going to implode)
Microsoft product managers remind me of the Soviet factory managers in that they both had fixed, set quotas to meet, which were set by leaders/upper management who were/are totally divorced from the reality of just how unpopular Microsoft as a brand is, and the reasons behind that unpopularity are because it's been a long time since Microsoft offered products that didn't have some kind of Designed-By-Marketing trick to lock you into their products.
It shows just how little trust Microsoft actually has in its own products.
I own a Mac and run both Windows and OSX on it. Macs are, in fact, PCs these days, with x86 CPUs and the ability to run whatever OS runs on other PCs, including Microsoft's enormously overpriced Vista (and you accuse Apple of being pricey?????)
Here in Europe, where I live, in Africa, where my mother lives, in Australia, where my sister lives, the climate has obviously been changing over the last one and a half decades.
When I got to Europe in 1986, there was snow in winter on the local hills near to Zurich here in Switzerland so that kids could go skiing almost all winter, and people said they were used to that. Since then, the winters have gotten progressively warmer until there is often no snow on those local hills anymore long enough for more than one or two days of skiing, the whole winter. The summers have been starting earlier and earlier, so that this last April, the warmest EVER in HUMAN MEMORY, I was in a short sleeves in very warm sunny weather. In 2003, Europe had the hottest summer EVER. Last october, was the second hottest EVER recorded. The mountains in the Alps are losing their glaciers VISIBLY, not just in some geeky scientific measurements. The permafrost holding many of the highest together, is melting, causing massive landslides.
South Africa, where I come from, has gotten progessively warmer and drier in the same time. The high plateau inland down there, which at no point is below 1000 metres above sea level (about 3300 feet for the metrically challenged), didn't used to get much warmer than around 30 degrees Centigrade (86 Fahrenheit) in summer due to the altitude. In the summers now, the temperatures have regularly started to reach 36 degrees centigrade.
Australia, where my sister lives, is having one of the worst if not the worst drought the country has ever experienced, so much so, that scientists are beginning to think it might actually be a climate shift, i.e. it might be semi permanent.
What fucking blows me away, when climate change is pretty obvious to the naked, dumbass eye, without needing to see scientific measurements, is that some people are still fucking disputing this. I'm not talking about Greenland or Antarctica or northern Canada, since I don't live there. I'm talking about stuff that I can see. It blows my mind that so many here dispute it. Is there no such obvious change in America? Or is it that Americans spend so much of their lives in air conditioned houses that they don't notice?
So what is the difference between their stereotype and your stereotype? Did it ever occur to you that a large portion of this world, most of whom are white American liberals, cannot stand your president either?
I had to laugh long and loud at this one. Is Microsoft going to make it brown? Will phone calls ony be made if you pay to enable the DRM? Will Microsoft sell Office 2009 Mobile edition with a huge ribbon interface?
I am not using Windows, and I have a question as to US law when it comes to the requirement to actively protect ones patents.
If Microsoft threatens to sue based on its software patents (or claims to want to do cross license deals where the patents would have to be shown), is there not some law in the US that takes away their right to sue for those patents if they do not then go ahead with the legal action?
In Europe MIcrosoft's threats to sue while not really doing so would be classed as slander at best, I think, or extortion at worst.
I think Microsoft is in for a possible world of pain here in Europe if they carry on the way they currently are.
The OP IS American, as far as I can tell. But you have, with your inability to either THINK or allow for the fact that possibly, just fractionally possibly, Americans (or anyone else for that matter), might be capable of viewing their own country critically.
Seriously, write to Fortune magazine and complain about the bias you feel they entertain, by not giving anyone else the chance to offer some refutation to yet another *yawn* Microsoft FUD attack, just like back in 2001 when MS' Craig Mundie was frothing at the mouth and calling Linux a Cancer.
Better yet, write to every major newspaper and offer your view before they, in their usual utter clueless manner, copy the story verbatim. The BBC, for instance, since they tend to be especially dumb when it comes to parroting the Microsoft party line.
I don't think this is real because IBM has a lot at stake in Linux and MS almost certainly infringes on many of those. I'm pretty sure that MS also infringes on numerous Apple copyrights and Aplle could do something good for once and shake their own stick at MS.
Lastly, Microsoft, you should be ashamed at your behaviour. You know why so many countries and institutions are ditching your products for Linux and others? It's because of the way you behave. SCO almost certainly got the idea to sue IBM from you, Microsoft, and if that ever comes out in court, Fatman Ballmer is going to be doing some dancing in court, because IBM also knows this and they won't take it kindly.
In the true spirit of the RIAA, MPAA and other *AAs, where the notable inability of overpaid executives to tell between a good story and a one that simply makes lots of money (Hi Hollywood, you listening?) resulting in thousands of superficial shows with the same mindless plots and heavy application of special CGI effects, all based on a blockbuster two decades ago (actually three, but still).
When audiences get tired of spending their dollars on this, the *AAs then get on their high horse and accuse almost everyone from consumers to vague thirld world nations of piracy and "stealing their profits".
If Battlestar Galactica, which was, up until now, a fantastic show, but which was really starting to show warning signs of producer self overestimation and ego growth in the last series with the drop off over the edge into the supernatural, I sadly suspect that the next series will only get worse if the producers are not under pressure to produce a good finale to the show.
In English there is a saying: "too much of a good thing."
While Microsoft has been on this particular little bandwagon for a while now, with big plans for a "Vista Home Server" or something to that effect, and while HP et al may be clamouring for something where the margins and above all, sales will be thicker than the razor edges they now are (MS's margins on Win2K3 Server are enormous compared to WinXP/Vista), I'm pretty sure they'll mess it up and completely miss the boat just like they did with Windows Media Center, which, together with the poor Media Center PCs/Devices have only driven more people to Apple, where OSX along with a Mac Mini makes a really wonderful little home server for movies and sound, very easy to set up, and easy to maintain. This is what I have at home.
I had a Windows machine, but really, using Windows for basic media storage and media serving is, while easy for people who have a fair knowledge of Windows, not easy for average home users. Add to that the fact that WMC relied to a certain extent on small OEMs providing media in the way of TV and radio, and this failed across the board.
The Home Server market (for more than basic media and file serving) will be fun to watch. Who on earth is going to serve their apps (calendar,mail,media) across the net to themselves with their home broadband connection. How many ISPs will let that go before they upping the price to compensate for overloaded networks or blocking such services totally as many already do? How many pwned home servers will ther be if users today can't even stop their home machines from being used as bot nets?
And last but not least by a long way: When will Microsoft design server apps that are easy enough for home users to set up? I'm pretty sure Microsoft is doing this because Apple's OSX 10.5 Leopard will include calendar and media serving and will be, typically forApple, easy to use and problem free. It's just like the Zune, MSsmartphones and the XBox, Microsoft entering any and every market they possibly can because they are so incredibly terrified that they may wake up and find that no one wants their stuff anymore.
The only losers will be Gates (who has already thrown in the towel), Balmer (who has already thrown in the chair), and the rest of the original dreamers with their juvenile fantasies about attaining world dominance.
That's like: 7 reasons a mouse likes a cat 7 reasons why oil likes water 7 reasons why intelligent design likes pasta or 7 reasons why office users like clippy
I ran into exactly the same problems as you did when trying to write SPs that would do maintenance on other tables. It simply was not worth the hassle. The fact that I had to resort to temporary tables because there are no associative arrays (Postgres, thank god, does have associative arrays), was the biggest problem.
Mysql is getting better, but I still think there's only Postgres as a real alternative to things like Oracle, mainly because the feature sets between the two are so similar.
Slashdot Mirror
It really is sad you stupid, ignorant dumbass fucking yanks are even allowed out of your own coutry. It's a miracle that you can even find your way to a shit house overseas considering how you can't even read articles in English, you dumb cunt.
For a nice inflammatory post, that would be a good start. It certainly is how I feel at the moment. I certainly will never again visit the USA. It's really a pity. There's a lot of good in your country, but it is drowning beneath a wave of religiously paranoid, fearful and backward shit.
I'm all for it, but I want Americans to be required to offer proof of fluency in the language of the country they are visiting before we let them into the EU.
I had the same idea as you, that Apple ported Safari in order to help kill Silverlight before it got any traction, but I don't think that's really the case. I think it's because Safari web apps will also run on the iphone and Safari will serve as a good testbed for that.
Everytime Photoshop is mentioned here (or Indesign or Illusrtator for that matter), sooner or later someone will jump up and claim that the GIMP can do aynthing that Photoshop can and will then go on to make increasingly bizarre claims about how GIMP is going to support CMYK anyday now and (in the last Photoshop claim in the /. article by the guy who was looking for cheap alternatives to the Adobe suite), by some people even claiming that you don't need CMYK for print as sRGB is somehow better than the various ISO CMYK profiles worked out by industry professionals. I wonder if these people have ever heard of spot colours and how trying to emulate those in RGB for print is not going to work out too well. But to get back on topic...
Graphic professionals usually quote the quality CMYK workflows as the reason why PS is better than the GIMP, but in reality the reason is quality alone.
The Adobe applications have, IMHO, amongst the highest quality of any apps I've ever seen out there. The apps consistenly produce the same quality results throughout the suite. The interfaces are very well thought out (the big changes in CS3 are the biggest in 7 years) and Adobe reserves a lot of time for quality control which ensures that when I use one of their apps in my job (I use almost all of them, PS, AI, ID, Acrobat), I can be fairly certain that they won't crash and that the results will be acceptable for print and the web. Added to that Adobe really pays a great amount of attention to detail, such as the quality of scaled images, which while many others support bicubic scaling these days, almost none do it with the same quality as PS does. And the list goes on.
There's nothing wrong with the GIMP and it is a bloody amazing tool all things considered. But someone would have to pay the GIMP contributors to spend more time taking care of details in the app to bring it up to PS' quality.
Having only read a tiny amount on the origions of modern monotheism in Sumerian, Assyrian and Babylonian myth, it still becomes pretty obvious that most of what many millions of people have foughten and died for was another man's entertainment.
Are you trolling? You know that the cambrain explosion occurred some 500 million years ago?
Frankly, this is so ridiculous, it's almost funny. Here we have a Russian politician threatening firstly the USA, then Western Europe with nuclear weapons if they install what is almost certainly going to be a big fat white elephant that would not stop an Iranian nuclear weapon in any case (because the Iranians would certainly not be dumb enough to actually launch one, thy would pass it on to Hezbollah or some other radical grouping who would use it in a suicide nuclear bombing).
Basically, I'm pissed off with almost all the "players" at the moment:
a)The Americans. The current US government, not content with fighting two insurgencies concurrently, one of which is almost certainly already lost and the other one looks ominously like it's going that way as well, is blindly carrying on with this utterly useless missile defence scheme in Poland and the Czech republic which the majority of the populations do not want, but whose governments have been bought by big promises from the same group of corrupt (Wolfowitz, Gonzales, Feith, Cheney, Bremer et al) incompetents who bled Iraq dry while promising the sun and the moon.
b)The Russians. While I can certainly understand Russians in general wanting a strong government after the chaos and national humiliation of the fall of the Soviet Union and the subsequent robbery by Oil thieves and chaos of drunk and corrupt politicians, Putin is still in his heart a KGB man who wants a return of Russian might and power and who is just too dumb too see that the only place threatening the Europeans will lead to will be a gradual and then rapid rearmament of Western Europe, with the majority of nations bending over even further for the protection of American weapons than was thought possible. The American, Russian and European Arms lobbies must be rubbing their hands in glee at the prospect of new satanically expensive weapons systems of questionable value for their respective clients. The slashdot weapon groupies will be loudly masturbating over these same toys as they dream of killing millions in their science fiction dreams of sexual impotence.
c)The Eastern Europeans. Just how far did these nations expect to be able to provoke the Russians before the Russians went ahead and drew a line in the sand? Do the Czechs and the Poles, both of whom are so fond of criticing Western Europe (but happily take its cash and forgetting that England and France went to war for Poland in 1939 and that the Americans did sweet fuck all in 1968 when the Russians reinvaded Czechoslovakia) for not being totally willing to support their Russian baiting think that the USA would risk nuclear war for them so that they could threaten the Russians? I mean, I know the Nazis and the Soviets killed off a lot of intelligent people there, but really, just how dumb are they? The EU will unhappily be pulled into this mess by these three fuckups playing very dangerous games.
The only people who really profit in this is the arms manufacturers. Think about that and look at the situation again.
At my place of work, when I was helping out doing sysadmin last year, I discovered that the current sysadmin is a Gentoo fan, which is ok, except that all the Gentoo boxes were plagued, really plagued with update problems, sometimes showstoppers, but often bugs that required half a day to track down. We could not replicate one setup from one machine to another. It simply did not work. Sometimes I had to fix really bad update problems where something critical, like Apache, MySQL or some obscure PHP package got updated quietly, bringing the service to a screeching halt. Portage is enormously flexible, but it is buggy and some things are simply so painful to do (like the Java JDK setups for Tomcat etc), that it sometimes just doesn't seem worth it (having to write my own entropy generator so that mod_perl would work was mind blowing).
No, in retrospect, I think Gentoo belongs firmly in the realm of the very advanced admin user who only runs one or two services per box. For the rest it is a cool experimental and very educational toy, but I would in future only use Debian (or perhaps the Ubuntu server versions now), or one of the commercial distros (But not SuSE. It's better than RedHat but Novell is going to implode)
Microsoft product managers remind me of the Soviet factory managers in that they both had fixed, set quotas to meet, which were set by leaders/upper management who were/are totally divorced from the reality of just how unpopular Microsoft as a brand is, and the reasons behind that unpopularity are because it's been a long time since Microsoft offered products that didn't have some kind of Designed-By-Marketing trick to lock you into their products.
It shows just how little trust Microsoft actually has in its own products.
I own a Mac and run both Windows and OSX on it. Macs are, in fact, PCs these days, with x86 CPUs and the ability to run whatever OS runs on other PCs, including Microsoft's enormously overpriced Vista (and you accuse Apple of being pricey?????)
Hmmm, so where does that leave you?
Here in Europe, where I live, in Africa, where my mother lives, in Australia, where my sister lives, the climate has obviously been changing over the last one and a half decades.
When I got to Europe in 1986, there was snow in winter on the local hills near to Zurich here in Switzerland so that kids could go skiing almost all winter, and people said they were used to that. Since then, the winters have gotten progressively warmer until there is often no snow on those local hills anymore long enough for more than one or two days of skiing, the whole winter. The summers have been starting earlier and earlier, so that this last April, the warmest EVER in HUMAN MEMORY, I was in a short sleeves in very warm sunny weather. In 2003, Europe had the hottest summer EVER. Last october, was the second hottest EVER recorded. The mountains in the Alps are losing their glaciers VISIBLY, not just in some geeky scientific measurements. The permafrost holding many of the highest together, is melting, causing massive landslides.
South Africa, where I come from, has gotten progessively warmer and drier in the same time. The high plateau inland down there, which at no point is below 1000 metres above sea level (about 3300 feet for the metrically challenged), didn't used to get much warmer than around 30 degrees Centigrade (86 Fahrenheit) in summer due to the altitude. In the summers now, the temperatures have regularly started to reach 36 degrees centigrade.
Australia, where my sister lives, is having one of the worst if not the worst drought the country has ever experienced, so much so, that scientists are beginning to think it might actually be a climate shift, i.e. it might be semi permanent.
What fucking blows me away, when climate change is pretty obvious to the naked, dumbass eye, without needing to see scientific measurements, is that some people are still fucking disputing this. I'm not talking about Greenland or Antarctica or northern Canada, since I don't live there. I'm talking about stuff that I can see. It blows my mind that so many here dispute it. Is there no such obvious change in America? Or is it that Americans spend so much of their lives in air conditioned houses that they don't notice?
So what is the difference between their stereotype and your stereotype? Did it ever occur to you that a large portion of this world, most of whom are white American liberals, cannot stand your president either?
I had to laugh long and loud at this one. Is Microsoft going to make it brown? Will phone calls ony be made if you pay to enable the DRM? Will Microsoft sell Office 2009 Mobile edition with a huge ribbon interface?
God, what a bunch of fucking morons.
I am not using Windows, and I have a question as to US law when it comes to the requirement to actively protect ones patents.
If Microsoft threatens to sue based on its software patents (or claims to want to do cross license deals where the patents would have to be shown), is there not some law in the US that takes away their right to sue for those patents if they do not then go ahead with the legal action?
In Europe MIcrosoft's threats to sue while not really doing so would be classed as slander at best, I think, or extortion at worst.
I think Microsoft is in for a possible world of pain here in Europe if they carry on the way they currently are.
The OP IS American, as far as I can tell. But you have, with your inability to either THINK or allow for the fact that possibly, just fractionally possibly, Americans (or anyone else for that matter), might be capable of viewing their own country critically.
Seriously, write to Fortune magazine and complain about the bias you feel they entertain, by not giving anyone else the chance to offer some refutation to yet another *yawn* Microsoft FUD attack, just like back in 2001 when MS' Craig Mundie was frothing at the mouth and calling Linux a Cancer.
Better yet, write to every major newspaper and offer your view before they, in their usual utter clueless manner, copy the story verbatim. The BBC, for instance, since they tend to be especially dumb when it comes to parroting the Microsoft party line.
I don't think this is real because IBM has a lot at stake in Linux and MS almost certainly infringes on many of those. I'm pretty sure that MS also infringes on numerous Apple copyrights and Aplle could do something good for once and shake their own stick at MS.
Lastly, Microsoft, you should be ashamed at your behaviour. You know why so many countries and institutions are ditching your products for Linux and others? It's because of the way you behave. SCO almost certainly got the idea to sue IBM from you, Microsoft, and if that ever comes out in court, Fatman Ballmer is going to be doing some dancing in court, because IBM also knows this and they won't take it kindly.
Hope your tube of KY is ready Steve.
Fuck off chicken shit
In the true spirit of the RIAA, MPAA and other *AAs, where the notable inability of overpaid executives to tell between a good story and a one that simply makes lots of money (Hi Hollywood, you listening?) resulting in thousands of superficial shows with the same mindless plots and heavy application of special CGI effects, all based on a blockbuster two decades ago (actually three, but still).
When audiences get tired of spending their dollars on this, the *AAs then get on their high horse and accuse almost everyone from consumers to vague thirld world nations of piracy and "stealing their profits".
If Battlestar Galactica, which was, up until now, a fantastic show, but which was really starting to show warning signs of producer self overestimation and ego growth in the last series with the drop off over the edge into the supernatural, I sadly suspect that the next series will only get worse if the producers are not under pressure to produce a good finale to the show.
In English there is a saying: "too much of a good thing."
Do you REALLY think that the US is a "totalitarian" state?
It may not be, but it certainly is not the sharpest knife in the drawer.
American right is fairly unique in the world.
Stupidity knows no borders.
While Microsoft has been on this particular little bandwagon for a while now, with big plans for a "Vista Home Server" or something to that effect, and while HP et al may be clamouring for something where the margins and above all, sales will be thicker than the razor edges they now are (MS's margins on Win2K3 Server are enormous compared to WinXP/Vista), I'm pretty sure they'll mess it up and completely miss the boat just like they did with Windows Media Center, which, together with the poor Media Center PCs/Devices have only driven more people to Apple, where OSX along with a Mac Mini makes a really wonderful little home server for movies and sound, very easy to set up, and easy to maintain. This is what I have at home.
I had a Windows machine, but really, using Windows for basic media storage and media serving is, while easy for people who have a fair knowledge of Windows, not easy for average home users. Add to that the fact that WMC relied to a certain extent on small OEMs providing media in the way of TV and radio, and this failed across the board.
The Home Server market (for more than basic media and file serving) will be fun to watch. Who on earth is going to serve their apps (calendar,mail,media) across the net to themselves with their home broadband connection. How many ISPs will let that go before they upping the price to compensate for overloaded networks or blocking such services totally as many already do? How many pwned home servers will ther be if users today can't even stop their home machines from being used as bot nets?
And last but not least by a long way: When will Microsoft design server apps that are easy enough for home users to set up? I'm pretty sure Microsoft is doing this because Apple's OSX 10.5 Leopard will include calendar and media serving and will be, typically forApple, easy to use and problem free. It's just like the Zune, MSsmartphones and the XBox, Microsoft entering any and every market they possibly can because they are so incredibly terrified that they may wake up and find that no one wants their stuff anymore.
The only losers will be Gates (who has already thrown in the towel), Balmer (who has already thrown in the chair), and the rest of the original dreamers with their juvenile fantasies about attaining world dominance.
Fixed(TM)
That's like:
7 reasons a mouse likes a cat
7 reasons why oil likes water
7 reasons why intelligent design likes pasta
or
7 reasons why office users like clippy
I ran into exactly the same problems as you did when trying to write SPs that would do maintenance on other tables. It simply was not worth the hassle. The fact that I had to resort to temporary tables because there are no associative arrays (Postgres, thank god, does have associative arrays), was the biggest problem.
Mysql is getting better, but I still think there's only Postgres as a real alternative to things like Oracle, mainly because the feature sets between the two are so similar.