I disagree as far as downloading is concerned, comcast at 8mbps is pretty fast, I can download a linux distro in ~ an hour, which is much better than it was 5-6 years ago.
Now, where this service fails is on the upload side. Everyone throttles upload to bizarre levels, 378kbps is good, some dsl will let you get 768... but either way, if you're going to be uploading 50GB, that is WEEKS of having your upstream bandwidth completely tapped.
I signed up for mozy (online backup) and discontinued after 1 month... I was trying to back up ~40GB, and it took nearly 3 weeks... and then failed, and I had to start over again. During this time because the upload is totally maxed out, the download suffers, latency goes through the roof, even just little web browsing is painful (like dial up speeds)... so this is why this is more than useless for a home user. For businesses that might have multi-meg uploads, it might be a little useful... but I'd rather just buy a linux box with a bunch of drives and get more storage for less locally.
how this doesn't disprove at least *part* of global warming is beyond me... Uh the NASA scientists either willfully lied about their data, or made an honest mistake which caused their data to be off by an order of magnitude.
Either way, the US is not nearly as warm today as we thought it was:) that is hilarious to say, but its true. NASA was saying that the last 10 years were the warmest on record for any decade ever... well, now they are backpedaling, the warmest decade is still the 1930's, so obviously all the CO2 we've put in the atmosphere since then hasn't caused the expected warming, this puts a huge hole in CO2 caused warming.
It is getting thicker on the continent, the shelves have thinned and are melting due to warmer water, however the air is not warmer, and in the interior of the continent, it is getting thicker.
Wrong... You can get unlimited backup for $70/yr, go check out mozy.com
$500 for 250GB? That is bizarre, you can go buy a 500GB HD for a lot less than that, just spend that money buying hard drives every year, and you'll have 5 terabytes soon enough.
wow, that has to be the most moronic statement I've ever seen.
They aren't measuring the temperature of the ICE! They are measuring the temperature of the AIR!!! And, the ICE in antarctica is getting thicker on the continent.
If what you were saying made any sense at all, then there wouldn't be warming in the artic either, until ALL the ICE was gone... Or in Greenland... well the AIR temperatures in those places have increased (well, assuming the same code that said the US was warming wasn't used to say the artic and greenland were)
So... the contiguous 48 isn't part of the world now? What you're basically saying is "the data doesn't fit my conclusion, ignore the data". If the US hasn't seen warming as was previously reported, well, sure that doesn't mean the whole world hasn't seen it, but on a global scale it certainly decreases the average warming!
I love you global warming crazies! "Oh no! Data that might contradict what were saying... Uh, the US doesn't count towards global warming anymore!"
Just like you ignore the fact that antarctica has not seen warming.
Now, sure, its a scientific fact that a gas with a higher concentration of CO2 has a higher capacity to hold heat. And, given that the sun is adding heat continually, higher CO2 will cause an increase in temperature. My point is, and this is a question no one can answer, but my point is "How much?". And when you have faulty algorithms generating faulty data which say "the temp has gone up 2 degrees in 10 years" when really its only up.2 degrees.. or whatever, well then you have a serious problem. You global warming nazis are asking the world to make absolutely massive investments to "stop" the warming, and your "validation" for asking for these massive investments is that the temperature will increase X degrees and flood the planet.. or destroy crops, or habitat, or whatever...
Now if you are off by a factor of 10... do your doomsday scenarios still happen? Probably not. Therefore, it is completely valid to question all of your methodologies in coming up with the amount of warming we'll see, and it is completely invalid and stupid of you to just "disregard" the US because its not "the world". Are the European scientists that are doing the same thing as NASA completely infallible? Is it possible that they may have made a similar mistake? Is it possible that in Europe (where the political climate is much more pro-global warming than in the US) that the scientists are even more bent than these NASA guys apparently are? Sure it is! So why should I trust them?! I shouldn't! No one should!
an error this large should have been obvious. When I write code, and run data through it, I can normally spot things like graphs with complete disconnects, jumps, or dislocations, and when I see those things I always go run a check and look at the raw data to ensure it is a valid result. These scientists I believe willfully ignored what should have been an obvious error to get headlines and funding. They have the raw data, they have their processed data, and the huge jump on these graphs at 2000 should have sent them looking at their code first, not to CNN.
I just went to their site, and a Niagra 1 T1 with 6 cores x 4 threads is 3900, not 10k. That is not expensive, a 2x4core intel server with decent RAM, HD, and network interfaces is at least 3k, and I'm pretty sure that niagra is going to blow away the intel solution.
He actually gets paid for that tripe right? Crap I wish I had such an easy job.
"The economy fluctuates" give me a million dollars!
Seriously though, he doesn't mention one concrete thing that is "going" to spell disaster. Further, with the way web 2.0 companies have capitalized themselves, there really isn't much to "pop". Yeah some angel investors might be out their 50-100k, but its not going to be anything like webvan blowing 2 billion in 2 years.
Sure the job market might get tighter again if all these web 2.0 companies go belly up, again though, most of these companies have 10-20 employees, they aren't big huge concerns, its not like the companies in 98-00 that were raising hundreds of millions, hiring thousands, and then going bankrupt 2 weeks later.
Sure, we'll have a downturn in tech spending, in development, in advertising on the internet, that's going to happen, "predicting" that we'll have another downturn in technology "sometime" is like "predicting" that the sun will rise sometime in the future. The economy has fluctuated in a cycle for ever, and it always will.
He is disgruntled and rightly so. He had good ideas, he implemented them, Linus and all the maintainers spurned him, said "no this code is crap". Then they turned around, duplicated his work, took his ideas, and put them in the mainline.
I see this whole thing as a huge ego trip by Ingo and Linus. If they were halfway decent people, they would be able to admit "Hey this new guy had a good idea, and lots of people are using it, and it works, lets bring him in". Instead Ingo was hung up on "My way is the best way", Linus bought off on that, and then after the fact, Ingo screwed this guy over. I would be pissed too if I spent 4 years of my life trying to get something into the kernel, just to have someone who is more "politically" connected steal my ideas and get the credit for my improvements.
Since samba is going GPLv3, and the whole "point" of the MS/Novell deal was interoperability, and Samba is pretty much THE windows/linux integration point...
Obviously Novell doesn't have to remove samba, but I would imagine that the "vouchers" that MS has are for standard Suse distros which include samba. So, does Novell now have to create a "special" distro just for MS so they don't distribute GPLv3 software?
The article summary was certainly an eye grabber... but, the truth is, I've deployed quite a few linux HA and load balancing clusters. I have also installed a couple openMosix clusters. While it may be sad that openMosix is closing, the vast majority of clustering cannot be handled by openMosix. It is designed as a parallel processing cluster. I would say 99% of clusters are of the HA/load balancing variety. IE, I've got 3 web servers and I want to distribute the load between them. openMosix cannot do this, it isn't designed for it. Or I have 5 DB servers and I want to distribute load/perform replication. again openMosix does not do this. It is a "processing" cluster. IE I have this huge data set, and an application which will split up that data set and do some processing on it. Think SETI@home except, you don't want to send it to people's homes, you just want to run a single process which will send jobs off to other nodes for computing. The only thing I ever successfully used openMosix for was a compile cluster, and for that it was nice, but even for regularly compiling KDE, it wasn't much worth the effort to get the cluster running for the time it saved in compiling.
At the time I used it it couldn't migrate web server processes or db server processes, so it was useless for what I do most of the time.
MS regularly end of lifes things. Just recently the EOL'd foxpro. Sure its a crap language and a crap environment, but I know 5 people personally who are frantically trying to teach themselves.NET and get experience with that environment, as now that MS has declared foxpro dead, they aren't ever expecting to get another foxpro job. The only alternative left to companies with "legacy" foxpro code is to completely re-write any application in that language in a different one (not a small task).
You can still get the openMosix code, if you had openMosix experts you could still fix things and move forward. If you have an existing system on openMosix you can look for a different solution and move to it or keep your system on the existing code. I really don't see how this is any different than MS calling for an EOL of Windows NT. When they do that you are forced to invest tons of hours and money buying new systems, developing a migration plan, deploying the new system, training users on it... It is no different in Open source or closed source, when vendors decide they aren't supporting you anymore, it costs you money.
Vendors regularly leave users out in the cold, both closed source and open. Only difference is, if a company wanted to pick up openMosix they certainly could. They could provide support, ongoing development, whatever. When MS EOLs something, your only choice is to take whatever MS gives you.
Well, you're a college, of course MS gives you concessions, if MS lost the education market it would be a huge blow to them. They'd probably give you free licenses to everything just to keep your students coming out "pre-trained" and indoctrinated in MS technology.
hmm, I haven't heard of MS giving "home" copies since office 97/windows 95.
In fact, I worked at a company that still thought they had home copies (big 5000 person company, big volume license deal), and they had to pay almost 10 million in fines to the SBA for their "home" copies.
I'm not trying to say anything about the value of software assurance, I haven't looked at it, I have no clue if its a good deal, what it costs, anything.
I just thought it was funny that in MS's rebuttal of the survey, they completely confirmed it.
In the article MS says "this isn't what we are hearing from our customers, we don't think 26% are leaving us, this report isn't representative of our customers", then 4 paragraphs later they say "25% are leaving." I just thought it was hilarious that they so fully contradicted themselves.
If you read the article, in the last paragraph it quotes the MS representative thus: "Microsoft's Sloane countered Forrester's findings by pointing out that about 75 percent of the company's Enterprise Agreement customers are renewing those pacts." Well, if only 75% are renewing, doesn't that mean 25% aren't??
And the forrester report said 26%. I bet that's inside the margin for error of the survey.
You notice slightly which db you're working with in python, in that you have to load a driver, and if you're writing actual queries you have to write them following the syntax of the DB you're using. However, for most uses, most of the time, it doesn't matter which DB you're using. This guy just doesn't understand database abstraction but python certainly provides it.
I use psycopg2 as my python DB module... I don't know if it is "the best" but I've had no problems with it. It is the recommended module to use with Django (which is what I use it for mostly).
As for SQL Fairy, never used it... Obviously, once you are committed to a platform (any platform) the conversion costs increase. I don't think anyone is "recommending" drop everything and move to PostgreSQL. My point is simply if I'm starting a new project, that is the first DB I look at, and if it satisfies the requirements (99% of the time for me, one customer HAD to have the system on windows, like 5 years ago... so we used SQL Server), that is what I'll use, I haven't had any usability, lack of features, lack of support, or lack of performance problems with PostgreSQL, which seem to me to be the "problems" that most people spout off about when saying PostgreSQL isn't good.
The great (sarcasm) thing to me is they have added all these features (views, stored procs, triggers) in the last year or so, unfortunately if you want to use any of those features there are huge caveats when using their main selling point of "easy" clustering. Triggers, Views and Stored Procs all break replication under pretty normal use cases. So, if you want to use them you can't use the built in clustering.
I don't know if the same holds true for PostgreSQL, but I would be extremely surprised since Postgre has had all of those features for years and anyone designing a replication scheme would take them into account. MySQL in contrast had replication first, and now the designers of the additional features have to take the replication scheme into account (which is much harder I'd imagine, as views, triggers and stored procs all have some semblance of a standard, and at the very least have a well defined feature set, and sometimes you can't bend a feature set to fit into an already existing replication scheme)
Also, even if you own the server, converting an existing MyISAM DB to InnoDB can be a huge chore. I've done this for at least 3 customers, and every time it is a much more painful process than you'd think. Mostly because existing data in MyISAM almost always has referential problems after any real world usage (like its been live for more than a month). Someone has deleted a customer, and now you have orders that are orphaned, someone ran a bad update that set the FK wrong in the orders table, and MySQL happily obliged, and now you've got orphaned data... I mean to me the most BASIC functionality of an Rdbms is that it enforces the relationships you give it. I don't even count MySQL w/MyISAM as a database. Might as well just use a bunch of flat comma separated files for tables.
1) Ease of use: Adding users in postgresql is in my opinion much easier than mysql, createuser or if you've got the GUI, right click, add user... (you can't even add users in the MySQL GUI). Changing passwords, never really done it in either DB, but I can't emagine that is a "chore" in either. Backing up? as if pg_dump was any different the mysqldump (and no, just copying the mysql directory is not a safe backup). Seriously all of the things you mention are not harder in postgresql, maybe a little different, but not harder. As for your "syntactic sugar", and "lazier" programming scare me! I like ANSI standard SQL. I don't like 10 different ways to do a simple thing according to "developer taste". That is a recipe for disaster. Every time you hire a new dev, they complain about "Well, this is a silly way to do xyz, lets rewrite it so its 'right'". Also, its a nightmare for maintainability. If a new dev hasn't seen xyz done a certain way, they won't know what it is, or what the query is doing necessarily, not without doing research at least.
2) Dev community: I've never had a question on postgresql that I couldn't find an answer to, in fact, I've never posted to any message boards because either a) someone already had asked the question and had it answered, or b) it is in the documentation. Can't say that about MySQL. I've posted numerous times about things that PostgreSQL can do, and after searching for hours, I couldn't figure out how to do in MySQL. Invariably the answer to the question when I've posted is either a) a huge nasty cludge of a workaround or b) MySQL version x.y.z doesn't support that, build from source our latest dev snapshot and deploy that on your production server if you need that feature. c) That is in the roadmap, we'll support that feature someday. I program in python primarily too. the psycopg2 module has everything we need... What features does the MySQL "integration" have that psycopg2 doesn't? Both the drivers comply with the Python DB module spec... so basically they afford the same features (except psycopg2 always has transactions)
All in all, I really don't know why these myths about postgresql being hard to administer persist, I use postgresql with PHP, Ruby on Rails, and Django all the time, I've never run into a problem where I went "Oh if only I were using MySQL, I'd have xyz feature or I'd be able to use xyz module"
As for your final comment, I find the exact opposite to be true. When forced (by client requirements) to use MySQL I am constantly working around limitations in the DB, enabling InnoDB (because the 15 year old who installed their web server just used MyIsam) and they are wondering why they keep loosing information, or having orphaned children. I have quite a few more times than one hit unworkable problems in MySQL that PostgreSQL handles flawlessly out of the box.
I'm not saying the FCC is right, or that the whole telco/cable duopoly isn't complete horse crap. It is. I'm just saying under the current laws and regulations, its perfectly legit.
Slashdot Mirror
or just buy a 500GB external HD copy all your stuff over in about 20 minutes, and be done with it...
I disagree as far as downloading is concerned, comcast at 8mbps is pretty fast, I can download a linux distro in ~ an hour, which is much better than it was 5-6 years ago.
Now, where this service fails is on the upload side. Everyone throttles upload to bizarre levels, 378kbps is good, some dsl will let you get 768... but either way, if you're going to be uploading 50GB, that is WEEKS of having your upstream bandwidth completely tapped.
I signed up for mozy (online backup) and discontinued after 1 month... I was trying to back up ~40GB, and it took nearly 3 weeks... and then failed, and I had to start over again. During this time because the upload is totally maxed out, the download suffers, latency goes through the roof, even just little web browsing is painful (like dial up speeds)... so this is why this is more than useless for a home user. For businesses that might have multi-meg uploads, it might be a little useful... but I'd rather just buy a linux box with a bunch of drives and get more storage for less locally.
how this doesn't disprove at least *part* of global warming is beyond me...
:) that is hilarious to say, but its true. NASA was saying that the last 10 years were the warmest on record for any decade ever... well, now they are backpedaling, the warmest decade is still the 1930's, so obviously all the CO2 we've put in the atmosphere since then hasn't caused the expected warming, this puts a huge hole in CO2 caused warming.
Uh the NASA scientists either willfully lied about their data, or made an honest mistake which caused their data to be off by an order of magnitude.
Either way, the US is not nearly as warm today as we thought it was
as for CO2 contributions, ban the ocean, forest fires, and volcanoes too!
It is getting thicker on the continent, the shelves have thinned and are melting due to warmer water, however the air is not warmer, and in the interior of the continent, it is getting thicker.
Wrong...
You can get unlimited backup for $70/yr, go check out mozy.com
$500 for 250GB? That is bizarre, you can go buy a 500GB HD for a lot less than that, just spend that money buying hard drives every year, and you'll have 5 terabytes soon enough.
wow, that has to be the most moronic statement I've ever seen.
They aren't measuring the temperature of the ICE! They are measuring the temperature of the AIR!!! And, the ICE in antarctica is getting thicker on the continent.
If what you were saying made any sense at all, then there wouldn't be warming in the artic either, until ALL the ICE was gone... Or in Greenland... well the AIR temperatures in those places have increased (well, assuming the same code that said the US was warming wasn't used to say the artic and greenland were)
So... the contiguous 48 isn't part of the world now? What you're basically saying is "the data doesn't fit my conclusion, ignore the data". If the US hasn't seen warming as was previously reported, well, sure that doesn't mean the whole world hasn't seen it, but on a global scale it certainly decreases the average warming!
.2 degrees.. or whatever, well then you have a serious problem. You global warming nazis are asking the world to make absolutely massive investments to "stop" the warming, and your "validation" for asking for these massive investments is that the temperature will increase X degrees and flood the planet.. or destroy crops, or habitat, or whatever...
I love you global warming crazies! "Oh no! Data that might contradict what were saying... Uh, the US doesn't count towards global warming anymore!"
Just like you ignore the fact that antarctica has not seen warming.
Now, sure, its a scientific fact that a gas with a higher concentration of CO2 has a higher capacity to hold heat. And, given that the sun is adding heat continually, higher CO2 will cause an increase in temperature. My point is, and this is a question no one can answer, but my point is "How much?". And when you have faulty algorithms generating faulty data which say "the temp has gone up 2 degrees in 10 years" when really its only up
Now if you are off by a factor of 10... do your doomsday scenarios still happen? Probably not. Therefore, it is completely valid to question all of your methodologies in coming up with the amount of warming we'll see, and it is completely invalid and stupid of you to just "disregard" the US because its not "the world". Are the European scientists that are doing the same thing as NASA completely infallible? Is it possible that they may have made a similar mistake? Is it possible that in Europe (where the political climate is much more pro-global warming than in the US) that the scientists are even more bent than these NASA guys apparently are? Sure it is! So why should I trust them?! I shouldn't! No one should!
an error this large should have been obvious. When I write code, and run data through it, I can normally spot things like graphs with complete disconnects, jumps, or dislocations, and when I see those things I always go run a check and look at the raw data to ensure it is a valid result. These scientists I believe willfully ignored what should have been an obvious error to get headlines and funding. They have the raw data, they have their processed data, and the huge jump on these graphs at 2000 should have sent them looking at their code first, not to CNN.
I just went to their site, and a Niagra 1 T1 with 6 cores x 4 threads is 3900, not 10k. That is not expensive, a 2x4core intel server with decent RAM, HD, and network interfaces is at least 3k, and I'm pretty sure that niagra is going to blow away the intel solution.
He actually gets paid for that tripe right? Crap I wish I had such an easy job.
"The economy fluctuates" give me a million dollars!
Seriously though, he doesn't mention one concrete thing that is "going" to spell disaster. Further, with the way web 2.0 companies have capitalized themselves, there really isn't much to "pop". Yeah some angel investors might be out their 50-100k, but its not going to be anything like webvan blowing 2 billion in 2 years.
Sure the job market might get tighter again if all these web 2.0 companies go belly up, again though, most of these companies have 10-20 employees, they aren't big huge concerns, its not like the companies in 98-00 that were raising hundreds of millions, hiring thousands, and then going bankrupt 2 weeks later.
Sure, we'll have a downturn in tech spending, in development, in advertising on the internet, that's going to happen, "predicting" that we'll have another downturn in technology "sometime" is like "predicting" that the sun will rise sometime in the future. The economy has fluctuated in a cycle for ever, and it always will.
He is disgruntled and rightly so. He had good ideas, he implemented them, Linus and all the maintainers spurned him, said "no this code is crap". Then they turned around, duplicated his work, took his ideas, and put them in the mainline.
I see this whole thing as a huge ego trip by Ingo and Linus. If they were halfway decent people, they would be able to admit "Hey this new guy had a good idea, and lots of people are using it, and it works, lets bring him in". Instead Ingo was hung up on "My way is the best way", Linus bought off on that, and then after the fact, Ingo screwed this guy over. I would be pissed too if I spent 4 years of my life trying to get something into the kernel, just to have someone who is more "politically" connected steal my ideas and get the credit for my improvements.
Since samba is going GPLv3, and the whole "point" of the MS/Novell deal was interoperability, and Samba is pretty much THE windows/linux integration point...
Obviously Novell doesn't have to remove samba, but I would imagine that the "vouchers" that MS has are for standard Suse distros which include samba. So, does Novell now have to create a "special" distro just for MS so they don't distribute GPLv3 software?
The article summary was certainly an eye grabber... but, the truth is, I've deployed quite a few linux HA and load balancing clusters. I have also installed a couple openMosix clusters. While it may be sad that openMosix is closing, the vast majority of clustering cannot be handled by openMosix. It is designed as a parallel processing cluster. I would say 99% of clusters are of the HA/load balancing variety. IE, I've got 3 web servers and I want to distribute the load between them. openMosix cannot do this, it isn't designed for it. Or I have 5 DB servers and I want to distribute load/perform replication. again openMosix does not do this. It is a "processing" cluster. IE I have this huge data set, and an application which will split up that data set and do some processing on it. Think SETI@home except, you don't want to send it to people's homes, you just want to run a single process which will send jobs off to other nodes for computing. The only thing I ever successfully used openMosix for was a compile cluster, and for that it was nice, but even for regularly compiling KDE, it wasn't much worth the effort to get the cluster running for the time it saved in compiling.
At the time I used it it couldn't migrate web server processes or db server processes, so it was useless for what I do most of the time.
Wrong.
.NET and get experience with that environment, as now that MS has declared foxpro dead, they aren't ever expecting to get another foxpro job. The only alternative left to companies with "legacy" foxpro code is to completely re-write any application in that language in a different one (not a small task).
MS regularly end of lifes things. Just recently the EOL'd foxpro. Sure its a crap language and a crap environment, but I know 5 people personally who are frantically trying to teach themselves
You can still get the openMosix code, if you had openMosix experts you could still fix things and move forward. If you have an existing system on openMosix you can look for a different solution and move to it or keep your system on the existing code. I really don't see how this is any different than MS calling for an EOL of Windows NT. When they do that you are forced to invest tons of hours and money buying new systems, developing a migration plan, deploying the new system, training users on it... It is no different in Open source or closed source, when vendors decide they aren't supporting you anymore, it costs you money.
Vendors regularly leave users out in the cold, both closed source and open. Only difference is, if a company wanted to pick up openMosix they certainly could. They could provide support, ongoing development, whatever. When MS EOLs something, your only choice is to take whatever MS gives you.
Well, you're a college, of course MS gives you concessions, if MS lost the education market it would be a huge blow to them. They'd probably give you free licenses to everything just to keep your students coming out "pre-trained" and indoctrinated in MS technology.
hmm, I haven't heard of MS giving "home" copies since office 97/windows 95.
In fact, I worked at a company that still thought they had home copies (big 5000 person company, big volume license deal), and they had to pay almost 10 million in fines to the SBA for their "home" copies.
I'm not trying to say anything about the value of software assurance, I haven't looked at it, I have no clue if its a good deal, what it costs, anything.
I just thought it was funny that in MS's rebuttal of the survey, they completely confirmed it.
In the article MS says "this isn't what we are hearing from our customers, we don't think 26% are leaving us, this report isn't representative of our customers", then 4 paragraphs later they say "25% are leaving." I just thought it was hilarious that they so fully contradicted themselves.
If you read the article, in the last paragraph it quotes the MS representative thus: "Microsoft's Sloane countered Forrester's findings by pointing out that about 75 percent of the company's Enterprise Agreement customers are renewing those pacts." Well, if only 75% are renewing, doesn't that mean 25% aren't??
And the forrester report said 26%. I bet that's inside the margin for error of the survey.
Or maybe "I can move houses and trees for you"
You notice slightly which db you're working with in python, in that you have to load a driver, and if you're writing actual queries you have to write them following the syntax of the DB you're using. However, for most uses, most of the time, it doesn't matter which DB you're using. This guy just doesn't understand database abstraction but python certainly provides it.
I use psycopg2 as my python DB module... I don't know if it is "the best" but I've had no problems with it. It is the recommended module to use with Django (which is what I use it for mostly).
As for SQL Fairy, never used it... Obviously, once you are committed to a platform (any platform) the conversion costs increase. I don't think anyone is "recommending" drop everything and move to PostgreSQL. My point is simply if I'm starting a new project, that is the first DB I look at, and if it satisfies the requirements (99% of the time for me, one customer HAD to have the system on windows, like 5 years ago... so we used SQL Server), that is what I'll use, I haven't had any usability, lack of features, lack of support, or lack of performance problems with PostgreSQL, which seem to me to be the "problems" that most people spout off about when saying PostgreSQL isn't good.
The great (sarcasm) thing to me is they have added all these features (views, stored procs, triggers) in the last year or so, unfortunately if you want to use any of those features there are huge caveats when using their main selling point of "easy" clustering. Triggers, Views and Stored Procs all break replication under pretty normal use cases. So, if you want to use them you can't use the built in clustering.
I don't know if the same holds true for PostgreSQL, but I would be extremely surprised since Postgre has had all of those features for years and anyone designing a replication scheme would take them into account. MySQL in contrast had replication first, and now the designers of the additional features have to take the replication scheme into account (which is much harder I'd imagine, as views, triggers and stored procs all have some semblance of a standard, and at the very least have a well defined feature set, and sometimes you can't bend a feature set to fit into an already existing replication scheme)
Also, even if you own the server, converting an existing MyISAM DB to InnoDB can be a huge chore. I've done this for at least 3 customers, and every time it is a much more painful process than you'd think. Mostly because existing data in MyISAM almost always has referential problems after any real world usage (like its been live for more than a month). Someone has deleted a customer, and now you have orders that are orphaned, someone ran a bad update that set the FK wrong in the orders table, and MySQL happily obliged, and now you've got orphaned data... I mean to me the most BASIC functionality of an Rdbms is that it enforces the relationships you give it. I don't even count MySQL w/MyISAM as a database. Might as well just use a bunch of flat comma separated files for tables.
1) Ease of use: Adding users in postgresql is in my opinion much easier than mysql, createuser or if you've got the GUI, right click, add user... (you can't even add users in the MySQL GUI). Changing passwords, never really done it in either DB, but I can't emagine that is a "chore" in either. Backing up? as if pg_dump was any different the mysqldump (and no, just copying the mysql directory is not a safe backup). Seriously all of the things you mention are not harder in postgresql, maybe a little different, but not harder. As for your "syntactic sugar", and "lazier" programming scare me! I like ANSI standard SQL. I don't like 10 different ways to do a simple thing according to "developer taste". That is a recipe for disaster. Every time you hire a new dev, they complain about "Well, this is a silly way to do xyz, lets rewrite it so its 'right'". Also, its a nightmare for maintainability. If a new dev hasn't seen xyz done a certain way, they won't know what it is, or what the query is doing necessarily, not without doing research at least.
2) Dev community: I've never had a question on postgresql that I couldn't find an answer to, in fact, I've never posted to any message boards because either a) someone already had asked the question and had it answered, or b) it is in the documentation. Can't say that about MySQL. I've posted numerous times about things that PostgreSQL can do, and after searching for hours, I couldn't figure out how to do in MySQL. Invariably the answer to the question when I've posted is either a) a huge nasty cludge of a workaround or b) MySQL version x.y.z doesn't support that, build from source our latest dev snapshot and deploy that on your production server if you need that feature. c) That is in the roadmap, we'll support that feature someday. I program in python primarily too. the psycopg2 module has everything we need... What features does the MySQL "integration" have that psycopg2 doesn't? Both the drivers comply with the Python DB module spec... so basically they afford the same features (except psycopg2 always has transactions)
All in all, I really don't know why these myths about postgresql being hard to administer persist, I use postgresql with PHP, Ruby on Rails, and Django all the time, I've never run into a problem where I went "Oh if only I were using MySQL, I'd have xyz feature or I'd be able to use xyz module"
As for your final comment, I find the exact opposite to be true. When forced (by client requirements) to use MySQL I am constantly working around limitations in the DB, enabling InnoDB (because the 15 year old who installed their web server just used MyIsam) and they are wondering why they keep loosing information, or having orphaned children. I have quite a few more times than one hit unworkable problems in MySQL that PostgreSQL handles flawlessly out of the box.
I'm not saying the FCC is right, or that the whole telco/cable duopoly isn't complete horse crap. It is. I'm just saying under the current laws and regulations, its perfectly legit.
Ok, well you've got me there... I've never run a DB server on windows, Oracle on Solaris, PostgreSQL and MySQL on linux...