Here's a new scale: www.politicalcompass.org. In short, it separates the economic aspect from the social (or "how-much-control-has-the-government-over-society" ) aspect.
Yeah, I like that. But we're talking entirely about the economic system of a country. The other scale is orthogonal to what we're talking about.
The original poster seemed to suggest that there was some economic system what we had never considered. As evidence he used the myriad of economic systems that humanity has used. I was merely pointing out that all the economic systems in the past were really the same, just different points along the same line.
Well, the primary goal is ideally to benefit the long-term investment value of the corporation.
What I don't understand is that people keep investing when the execs are not interested in strengthening the value of the company. In fact, investors often provide the opposite incentives.
Investors are figuring it out the hard way, and it will take decades at least.
The employees aren't really a consideration in my post. I assume that an employee would look for work elsewhere if they aren't happy. And once the investors and banks are a little more sane, hopefully competition would flourish. (maybe 100 years is too soon...)
In summary, nothing is guaranteed. If the government provides universal solutions, it's likely that we will experience deterioration of quality and shortages (either of which would probably kill me very quickly). A better solution is means tests, which only help the people in need, and allow most people to pay the costs. That's much less likely to cause a shortage or a deterioration of quality.
Some people are scared because the government doesn't guarantee them medical care. I am scared that the government will guarantee it to me. And I have a very real reason to be scared, unlike most people who want universal health care.
Nothing is "guaranteed". That's an illusion. Right now I get good medical care, and I get what I pay for.
As soon as the government "guarantees" it to me, I'm at risk for quality deterioration or shortages of the supply of medical care.
A better solution is to use means tests. If you can pay, you get nothing, and if you can't, you get some help. The "universal" solutions to medical care or anything else are usually political games. The real beneficiaries of government programs are bureaucrats, politicians and people with vested interest in the programs (like the people getting the contracts for certain types of medical supplies). These people (not poor, and often very rich) hide behind the poor to get their interests passed through Congress.
Means tests get rid of a lot of those problems. And they also keep poor people alive, and with whatever "basic living standard" the voters think is appropriate. And most importantly, the vast majority of people will continue to pay the costs and get what they pay for (like me), and quality will not deteriorate, nor will shortages exist.
I never said pure capitalism is good. I was merely dispelling the myth that government is the only way a person might get the help they need. Government is not the answer to everything.
If someone faces expensive heart surgery, why do they seek help from the federal government that may be 1000 miles away first? Why not ask some friends, relatives, and members of a social group? Why not ask the doctor for credit? Or even the state?
Yes, the government is one answer, but not the only answer. Capitalists happen to believe that the government has a more narrowly defined role, which I don't necessarily agree with.
I think if you look harder at the facts you'll find many better reasons to dislike capitalism than the ones the parent made.
In many ways, the government of Canada is more sane than in the U.S. The problem is that in the U.S., the population is very large and power is shifting rapidly to the national level (rather than adhering to our forgotten 10th Amendment).
The federal government down here in the U.S. is simply out of our control. There are so many national laws dows here we can't even keep track of the ones we want to change, and that's how the politicians like it.
However, I will cling to the private health care providers as long as they're legal here in the U.S. My health depends upon it, and I'm scared of government health care (which is already happening).
Pure capitalism doesn't prohibit others from paying the cost (perhaps the doctor would work without pay, or many other possibilities that can and do happen today without government involvement).
Pure capitalism prohibits the government from forcibly seizing one persons property to transfer to another person.
It's my theory that capitalism is young in some ways. Maybe in another 100 years the forces in a market economy will be a little different, improving the actual outcome of capitalism.
Many of the problems with capitalism seem to be realted to individuals lacking information or acting in line with a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Take the example of those executives. Why do investors turn their money over to individuals who have nothing to lose by running the company into the ground? I certainly don't.
Why do companies structure themselves like a monarchy or oligarchy? It doesn't work for nations, yet big companies routinely take the revenue-generating power away from the individual workers or team managers, and make corporation-wide decrees (e.g. "the whole company will run windows"). If the execs would just cede a little of the decision making to the smaller units, the smaller units could pick up the small-scale revenue and efficiencies that can't be seen from the boardroom. I'm waiting for the day big business is run more like a bunch of small companies working together. That's a place I might invest.
It's only the last 100 years that banking and investing have been even close to the scale of today. We have another 100 years to go before people realize that it's a losing proposition to buy into litigious companies that are bound to fall apart ("I'll get out before it blows up...", sure, uh huh). People will stop playing the stock market as though they were just letting a bet ride in Las Vegas. People will start looking at the real incentives they create for the corporate execs (in the case of Darl McBride, the incentives are not apparently long-term).
Maybe in the longer term the banking system will facilitate larger investments more quickly, which will mitigate the monopolistic powers (the monopolists rely on have more money than any competitor can access). A monopolist couldn't employ "predatory pricing" unless the monopolist has way more money. A bank would be willing to loan the money in order to, in the long term, get it's foot into the lucrative (and previously monopolized) market. With a powerful enough banking system, competition would take hold and benefit the consumer.
At least I hope these things can start to happen in 100 years. I have my doubts that anyone is going to invent anything better than capitalism. After all, you speak of the different economic systems but they are really just different points along the spectrum of government control. Capitalism is close to 0 government control of the economy, and the other systems' governments control different aspects of the economy different amounts. Feudalism is really just about land ownership and tennants (in a time when you couldn't pick up and move quite so easily to find a better lord). So, are you planning to just pick different points on the scale until you find a "sweet spot"? Or are you hoping for new scale to appear?
Cmdline is great for nostalgia most of the time, and sometimes you can't do without it, but this is a failing of the GUI in most cases, IMO.
You can't have a fully functional GUI any more easily than you could have a graphical programming language.
The basic idea is that a CLI is almost entirely context-insensitive. It always behaves the same no matter what else is happening.
A graphical interface is all about context: is there a box there to click on? What's the value of that text entry field? What part is visible, and do we have to scroll?
Context-based interfaces are useful sometimes I'm sure, like when browsing the web, or browsing in general I guess. A GUI is good when you don't really know what you're looking for. Really it's only useful when communicating directly with the user, and only when the user is doing something within what the GUI defines as a "normal task" (i.e. moving files, opening files, etc).
Well, they aren't really "try[ing] to be objective" if they are completely ignorant. If I'm utterly ignorant of a particular topic, I don't write authoritatively about it. If only others could show the same restraint maybe misinformation wouldn't flow so quickly.
I haven't purchased any RIAA products or downloaded any music for a long time. I think I tried downloading some music a month ago and the tracks were screwed up (presumably RIAA trying to make it tougher).
Then I thought to myself: (1) The record companies should be trying to make downloading music difficult, as long as they obey the law. (2) I don't feel any right to hear their music if they don't allow me to (3) I really don't need the music. I listen to the radio and that's fine with me.
So, I just gave up. I like music, but I don't need it from the RIAA.
And I agree about the bullshit arguments. If you didn't create the music yourself you have no "right" to it. The artist could have made a CD and threw the original in the furnace and then NOBODY would have it. Instead, they found it in their financial interest to share it with the record companies, who pay the artists solely because they expect consumers to pay them.
And if you want to talk about freedom, consider what has been boycotted in the past. Very noble people would boycott the bus system and walk 10 or 20 miles instead of paying a faire, just to protest their mistreatment. That's sacrifice for the greater good. And nobody in the U.S. seems to be able to boycott some crappy music? If you hate the RIAA so much why keep buying?
Come on, the rest you can maybe consider a utility. But I'm not exactly worried about cable T.V.
If my cable T.V. went out I would probably forget about it completely in 3 days. If cable T.V. bugs me it's GONE. If other consumers feel they have the money to spend on that luxury, fine, but I think that's the furthest from any example of something requiring regulation.
I think that the real problem with the argument that proprietary software has a roadmap is that the proprietary vendors don't follow their roadmaps any more than OSS projects do.
If features X, Y, and Z sound good, but aren't thought through enough to implement, a proprietary vendor will list it on the "roadmap" until the techs point out that it makes no sense. An OSS developer will decide "Well, when I figure out what those features actually ARE, I'll do them, until that time I'll release a working product."
So I don't have any idea why a CIO would trust a proprietary vendor when all the vendor is doing is luring you into their product with the promise that a future piece of vaporware will be available at an even higher price.
If it doesn't meet your needs now, there's no reason to believe that it will in the future. And certainly there's no guarentee that the vendor won't jack up the price once he knows you're stuck on his platform and knows you need features X, Y, and Z.
With OSS you're quite a bit more likely to get an honest response because there's no ulterior motive. I see all the time a developer will give a response like "don't hold your breath..." or "our resources are better spent elsewhere". You may even learn that you don't need a feature, or that the feature that the vendor said would solve your problem really won't solve anything.
Any time I see a roadmap from a proprietary developer I get very cynical. Quite simply, they're trying to sell me something they don't have, and that bothers me.
Can some other company take a look at the Java standards and specifications and make their own implementation without conforming to Sun's rules? I suppose they wouldn't be able to call it java, but would that work?
For instance, debian ships gcj and that is supposedly java, and also supposedly free right?
So what exactly is the complaint about Sun? Do we want their standard libraries code, or their interpreter code, or their compiler code, or what? Or do we want the freedom to call something java that's not made by Sun?
If Sun presents an open standard for everything, and then just keeps control over their own implementation, I don't see a huge problem with that, if anyone can make a competing implementation.
If I'm not mistaken, Linus could prevent me from calling something linux, right? If I applied a lot of crappy patches he could invoke his trademark, right? Then I'd have to call it something else, of course.
So what exactly do the open source advocates want from Sun? And when you answer, could you please distinguish between the interpreter, compiler, standard libraries, and all the assocaited standards? I get really confused when people just say "you can't ship java" and then meanwhile I can do "apt-get install gcj". "Java" is much to vague a word for this discussion.
On the other hand, there are those that think that things produce and those that think people produce.
Obviously, it takes some combination of the two to produce. Socialists tend to emphasize the former, and capitalists the latter, because in general it strengthens their political stance.
In general in the U.S., people who work more have more. Perhaps this trend is not followed as closely as some people would like, but it does work to some degree. Also, in general in the U.S., people who work do not find themselves very poor, and by "very poor" I mean they aren't poor by the standards of most other places in the world.
Look at Firebird SQL. I haven't used it, but it runs on windows, and I also hear it's a good database even from the PostgreSQL list people (I don't have a quotation at the moment, but when it comes up the perception of Firebird is usually good).
As far as being used by someone with no programming skills, it would be more helpful to all parties concerned if you would itemize some things that should be improved in PostgreSQL or firebird.
Yes, abstraction has a cost. However in a practical sense there are platforms out there that already provide this level of abstraction and they support some incredibly busy sites.
I wasn't talking about performance cost. I would expect that a well-written abstraction layer would have negligible cost. I am talking about cost in terms of extra code and lesser maintainability of code.
If you add an extra layer of abstraction (above and beyond the already-existing SQL99 standard), then it requires more code changes when you change the interface between your app and your data. If you add a feature, and the feature requires a different result set to be returned in a different way, than you not only have to change your code, but now the data abstraction layer as well.
I wasn't even really disagreeing with you, but I'm just trying to warn that abstraction does have tradeoffs. It's more code, and more code is harder to maintain. In many situations it's a clear net win. However, it's frustrating when an abstraction layer exists, and then to make something work in a maintainable way you have to add another abstraction layer.
That's what MySQL is doing when they trample SQL99. They make it extra work for anyone to use any other database. Even Microsoft Access makes some attempt at following standards, if for no other reason than so MS can upsell someone SQL Server.
Think about the metric system. I'm a U.S. citizen, and I'm not the type to criticize our cultural ways all the time, but come on... time to use metric. We have measurement unit abstraction layers built into everything so that we can convert. However, look at how much that costs? What if the worlds #1 economy got on board with a standard that makes more sense? Wouldn't that be so much better? What if MySQL followed the standards?
You can make the same argument for anyone who doesn't follow standards that other people "just need an abstraction layer".
Postgresql is underdocumented, the MySQL online documentation simply excels.
Complete and utter bullshit. How is this for documentation? There are also excellent books about it.
I am a strong advocate of PostgreSQL. However, to say that Postgres' docs are perfect is false. This has been discussed on the advocacy mailing lists before. PostgreSQL has great docs for people who need a reference and pretty much know where to look, and what they're looking for.
In my opinion, PostgreSQL docs could be improved by: (1) Better search functionality (2) More tutorial-oriented material throughout the docs, like more examples at the end of sections, and more descriptions about why you'd find that particlar feature useful. (3) The website needs to be more portal-like, introducing you to all the postgresql resources available, and helping you get going.
MySQL has paid maintainers to take care of all of that. PostgreSQL doesn't. PostgreSQL only really has coders, and if I'm not mistaken, only one major advocacy coordinator, Josh Berkus, who I met at Linuxworld in SF, who does a great job, but is only one person.
It just takes some more people that know the database well and have some basic web experience to put together some great things.
PostgreSQL is, in my opinion, the best database for most RDBMS tasks. However, I know how I feel when I go to a software site and i just want to check something out. I don't know whether it's the best or not, so I want to try it. It can be imtimidating when nothing has context. Lots of context is what makes docs easy to understand for a beginner.
That takes people that PostgreSQL doesn't currently have yet. Public relations and marketing are expensive, but MySQL can pay those guys.
Of course PostgreSQL is doing just fine by attracting users away from Oracle and SQL Server, and the people that have serious enough database requirements to actually look. The code quality, and the quality of the coders and the steering, and the project management is amazing. And it attracts more coders because they retain copyright on their work, unlike MySQL coders.
Postgresql does not support shared scenarios as good as MySQL. That's sharing the same machine with a web server, and that's sharing multiple logical databases as in a hosting environment (including putting the actual data files into each customers chrooted environment). MySQL does this very well.
Sure you can. "CREATE DATABASE username LOCATION='/home/username/pgdata'". This has been around for a while (since 7.1 at least which was several years ago; we're now on 7.4).
Slashdot Mirror
Here's a new scale: www.politicalcompass.org. In short, it separates the economic aspect from the social (or "how-much-control-has-the-government-over-society" ) aspect.
Yeah, I like that. But we're talking entirely about the economic system of a country. The other scale is orthogonal to what we're talking about.
The original poster seemed to suggest that there was some economic system what we had never considered. As evidence he used the myriad of economic systems that humanity has used. I was merely pointing out that all the economic systems in the past were really the same, just different points along the same line.
Well, the primary goal is ideally to benefit the long-term investment value of the corporation.
What I don't understand is that people keep investing when the execs are not interested in strengthening the value of the company. In fact, investors often provide the opposite incentives.
Investors are figuring it out the hard way, and it will take decades at least.
The employees aren't really a consideration in my post. I assume that an employee would look for work elsewhere if they aren't happy. And once the investors and banks are a little more sane, hopefully competition would flourish. (maybe 100 years is too soon...)
I hope it got people to start just going to Vegas instead. It's fine if you like to gamble, but don't screw up the financial markets in the process :)
(this post is not meant to be serious)
See my previous post, it's reponsive to your comment as well.
In summary, nothing is guaranteed. If the government provides universal solutions, it's likely that we will experience deterioration of quality and shortages (either of which would probably kill me very quickly). A better solution is means tests, which only help the people in need, and allow most people to pay the costs. That's much less likely to cause a shortage or a deterioration of quality.
Some people are scared because the government doesn't guarantee them medical care. I am scared that the government will guarantee it to me. And I have a very real reason to be scared, unlike most people who want universal health care.
Nothing is "guaranteed". That's an illusion. Right now I get good medical care, and I get what I pay for.
As soon as the government "guarantees" it to me, I'm at risk for quality deterioration or shortages of the supply of medical care.
A better solution is to use means tests. If you can pay, you get nothing, and if you can't, you get some help. The "universal" solutions to medical care or anything else are usually political games. The real beneficiaries of government programs are bureaucrats, politicians and people with vested interest in the programs (like the people getting the contracts for certain types of medical supplies). These people (not poor, and often very rich) hide behind the poor to get their interests passed through Congress.
Means tests get rid of a lot of those problems. And they also keep poor people alive, and with whatever "basic living standard" the voters think is appropriate. And most importantly, the vast majority of people will continue to pay the costs and get what they pay for (like me), and quality will not deteriorate, nor will shortages exist.
Either way someone is taking pity on you, and paying your medical costs that you can't pay. I don't see how the government is special.
All I meant was that government is not the only thing between that hypothetical heart patient and the surgery he needs.
I'm not willing to start with the assumption that government is the only way to solve a problem. It may be the right way to solve a certain problem.
If someone is in need and can't help themselves it's a given that either:
(a) They will perish
(b) Someone will help them
Assuming (b) happens, that helper could be from the government or anywhere else.
I never said pure capitalism is good. I was merely dispelling the myth that government is the only way a person might get the help they need. Government is not the answer to everything.
If someone faces expensive heart surgery, why do they seek help from the federal government that may be 1000 miles away first? Why not ask some friends, relatives, and members of a social group? Why not ask the doctor for credit? Or even the state?
Yes, the government is one answer, but not the only answer. Capitalists happen to believe that the government has a more narrowly defined role, which I don't necessarily agree with.
I think if you look harder at the facts you'll find many better reasons to dislike capitalism than the ones the parent made.
For the same reason you don't pay an extortionist: 10 others will line up the next day for a payout.
In fact, isn't that what you're suggesting: paying an extortionist? Sounds like an easy way out, but IBM knows better.
"Ahh.. sounds like Canada, eh?"
In many ways, the government of Canada is more sane than in the U.S. The problem is that in the U.S., the population is very large and power is shifting rapidly to the national level (rather than adhering to our forgotten 10th Amendment).
The federal government down here in the U.S. is simply out of our control. There are so many national laws dows here we can't even keep track of the ones we want to change, and that's how the politicians like it.
However, I will cling to the private health care providers as long as they're legal here in the U.S. My health depends upon it, and I'm scared of government health care (which is already happening).
If you can't pay for that heart surgery, you die.
Pure capitalism doesn't prohibit others from paying the cost (perhaps the doctor would work without pay, or many other possibilities that can and do happen today without government involvement).
Pure capitalism prohibits the government from forcibly seizing one persons property to transfer to another person.
free education/health care
Education and health care aren't free, it's just a question of who pays the costs, and how.
You might find "FDR's Folly" an interesting read.
Basically, the book asserts that FDR didn't understand the economic system, and many of his policies deepened and lengthened the depression.
It's my theory that capitalism is young in some ways. Maybe in another 100 years the forces in a market economy will be a little different, improving the actual outcome of capitalism.
Many of the problems with capitalism seem to be realted to individuals lacking information or acting in line with a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Take the example of those executives. Why do investors turn their money over to individuals who have nothing to lose by running the company into the ground? I certainly don't.
Why do companies structure themselves like a monarchy or oligarchy? It doesn't work for nations, yet big companies routinely take the revenue-generating power away from the individual workers or team managers, and make corporation-wide decrees (e.g. "the whole company will run windows"). If the execs would just cede a little of the decision making to the smaller units, the smaller units could pick up the small-scale revenue and efficiencies that can't be seen from the boardroom. I'm waiting for the day big business is run more like a bunch of small companies working together. That's a place I might invest.
It's only the last 100 years that banking and investing have been even close to the scale of today. We have another 100 years to go before people realize that it's a losing proposition to buy into litigious companies that are bound to fall apart ("I'll get out before it blows up...", sure, uh huh). People will stop playing the stock market as though they were just letting a bet ride in Las Vegas. People will start looking at the real incentives they create for the corporate execs (in the case of Darl McBride, the incentives are not apparently long-term).
Maybe in the longer term the banking system will facilitate larger investments more quickly, which will mitigate the monopolistic powers (the monopolists rely on have more money than any competitor can access). A monopolist couldn't employ "predatory pricing" unless the monopolist has way more money. A bank would be willing to loan the money in order to, in the long term, get it's foot into the lucrative (and previously monopolized) market. With a powerful enough banking system, competition would take hold and benefit the consumer.
At least I hope these things can start to happen in 100 years. I have my doubts that anyone is going to invent anything better than capitalism. After all, you speak of the different economic systems but they are really just different points along the spectrum of government control. Capitalism is close to 0 government control of the economy, and the other systems' governments control different aspects of the economy different amounts. Feudalism is really just about land ownership and tennants (in a time when you couldn't pick up and move quite so easily to find a better lord). So, are you planning to just pick different points on the scale until you find a "sweet spot"? Or are you hoping for new scale to appear?
Cmdline is great for nostalgia most of the time, and sometimes you can't do without it, but this is a failing of the GUI in most cases, IMO.
You can't have a fully functional GUI any more easily than you could have a graphical programming language.
The basic idea is that a CLI is almost entirely context-insensitive. It always behaves the same no matter what else is happening.
A graphical interface is all about context: is there a box there to click on? What's the value of that text entry field? What part is visible, and do we have to scroll?
Context-based interfaces are useful sometimes I'm sure, like when browsing the web, or browsing in general I guess. A GUI is good when you don't really know what you're looking for. Really it's only useful when communicating directly with the user, and only when the user is doing something within what the GUI defines as a "normal task" (i.e. moving files, opening files, etc).
Well, they aren't really "try[ing] to be objective" if they are completely ignorant. If I'm utterly ignorant of a particular topic, I don't write authoritatively about it. If only others could show the same restraint maybe misinformation wouldn't flow so quickly.
I wish I could mod your posts up.
I haven't purchased any RIAA products or downloaded any music for a long time. I think I tried downloading some music a month ago and the tracks were screwed up (presumably RIAA trying to make it tougher).
Then I thought to myself:
(1) The record companies should be trying to make downloading music difficult, as long as they obey the law.
(2) I don't feel any right to hear their music if they don't allow me to
(3) I really don't need the music. I listen to the radio and that's fine with me.
So, I just gave up. I like music, but I don't need it from the RIAA.
And I agree about the bullshit arguments. If you didn't create the music yourself you have no "right" to it. The artist could have made a CD and threw the original in the furnace and then NOBODY would have it. Instead, they found it in their financial interest to share it with the record companies, who pay the artists solely because they expect consumers to pay them.
And if you want to talk about freedom, consider what has been boycotted in the past. Very noble people would boycott the bus system and walk 10 or 20 miles instead of paying a faire, just to protest their mistreatment. That's sacrifice for the greater good. And nobody in the U.S. seems to be able to boycott some crappy music? If you hate the RIAA so much why keep buying?
The cable company.
Come on, the rest you can maybe consider a utility. But I'm not exactly worried about cable T.V.
If my cable T.V. went out I would probably forget about it completely in 3 days. If cable T.V. bugs me it's GONE. If other consumers feel they have the money to spend on that luxury, fine, but I think that's the furthest from any example of something requiring regulation.
I think that the real problem with the argument that proprietary software has a roadmap is that the proprietary vendors don't follow their roadmaps any more than OSS projects do.
If features X, Y, and Z sound good, but aren't thought through enough to implement, a proprietary vendor will list it on the "roadmap" until the techs point out that it makes no sense. An OSS developer will decide "Well, when I figure out what those features actually ARE, I'll do them, until that time I'll release a working product."
So I don't have any idea why a CIO would trust a proprietary vendor when all the vendor is doing is luring you into their product with the promise that a future piece of vaporware will be available at an even higher price.
If it doesn't meet your needs now, there's no reason to believe that it will in the future. And certainly there's no guarentee that the vendor won't jack up the price once he knows you're stuck on his platform and knows you need features X, Y, and Z.
With OSS you're quite a bit more likely to get an honest response because there's no ulterior motive. I see all the time a developer will give a response like "don't hold your breath..." or "our resources are better spent elsewhere". You may even learn that you don't need a feature, or that the feature that the vendor said would solve your problem really won't solve anything.
Any time I see a roadmap from a proprietary developer I get very cynical. Quite simply, they're trying to sell me something they don't have, and that bothers me.
I am confused.
Can some other company take a look at the Java standards and specifications and make their own implementation without conforming to Sun's rules? I suppose they wouldn't be able to call it java, but would that work?
For instance, debian ships gcj and that is supposedly java, and also supposedly free right?
So what exactly is the complaint about Sun? Do we want their standard libraries code, or their interpreter code, or their compiler code, or what? Or do we want the freedom to call something java that's not made by Sun?
If Sun presents an open standard for everything, and then just keeps control over their own implementation, I don't see a huge problem with that, if anyone can make a competing implementation.
If I'm not mistaken, Linus could prevent me from calling something linux, right? If I applied a lot of crappy patches he could invoke his trademark, right? Then I'd have to call it something else, of course.
So what exactly do the open source advocates want from Sun? And when you answer, could you please distinguish between the interpreter, compiler, standard libraries, and all the assocaited standards? I get really confused when people just say "you can't ship java" and then meanwhile I can do "apt-get install gcj". "Java" is much to vague a word for this discussion.
Well, sounds like PostgreSQL needs a windows port to be as widely adopted as MySQL. I guess we'll just have to wait, they're working on it.
On the other hand, there are those that think that things produce and those that think people produce.
Obviously, it takes some combination of the two to produce. Socialists tend to emphasize the former, and capitalists the latter, because in general it strengthens their political stance.
In general in the U.S., people who work more have more. Perhaps this trend is not followed as closely as some people would like, but it does work to some degree. Also, in general in the U.S., people who work do not find themselves very poor, and by "very poor" I mean they aren't poor by the standards of most other places in the world.
But nope, it's not perfect.
Look at Firebird SQL. I haven't used it, but it runs on windows, and I also hear it's a good database even from the PostgreSQL list people (I don't have a quotation at the moment, but when it comes up the perception of Firebird is usually good).
As far as being used by someone with no programming skills, it would be more helpful to all parties concerned if you would itemize some things that should be improved in PostgreSQL or firebird.
Yes, abstraction has a cost. However in a practical sense there are platforms out there that already provide this level of abstraction and they support some incredibly busy sites.
I wasn't talking about performance cost. I would expect that a well-written abstraction layer would have negligible cost. I am talking about cost in terms of extra code and lesser maintainability of code.
If you add an extra layer of abstraction (above and beyond the already-existing SQL99 standard), then it requires more code changes when you change the interface between your app and your data. If you add a feature, and the feature requires a different result set to be returned in a different way, than you not only have to change your code, but now the data abstraction layer as well.
I wasn't even really disagreeing with you, but I'm just trying to warn that abstraction does have tradeoffs. It's more code, and more code is harder to maintain. In many situations it's a clear net win. However, it's frustrating when an abstraction layer exists, and then to make something work in a maintainable way you have to add another abstraction layer.
That's what MySQL is doing when they trample SQL99. They make it extra work for anyone to use any other database. Even Microsoft Access makes some attempt at following standards, if for no other reason than so MS can upsell someone SQL Server.
Think about the metric system. I'm a U.S. citizen, and I'm not the type to criticize our cultural ways all the time, but come on... time to use metric. We have measurement unit abstraction layers built into everything so that we can convert. However, look at how much that costs? What if the worlds #1 economy got on board with a standard that makes more sense? Wouldn't that be so much better? What if MySQL followed the standards?
You can make the same argument for anyone who doesn't follow standards that other people "just need an abstraction layer".
I am a strong advocate of PostgreSQL. However, to say that Postgres' docs are perfect is false. This has been discussed on the advocacy mailing lists before. PostgreSQL has great docs for people who need a reference and pretty much know where to look, and what they're looking for.
In my opinion, PostgreSQL docs could be improved by:
(1) Better search functionality
(2) More tutorial-oriented material throughout the docs, like more examples at the end of sections, and more descriptions about why you'd find that particlar feature useful.
(3) The website needs to be more portal-like, introducing you to all the postgresql resources available, and helping you get going.
MySQL has paid maintainers to take care of all of that. PostgreSQL doesn't. PostgreSQL only really has coders, and if I'm not mistaken, only one major advocacy coordinator, Josh Berkus, who I met at Linuxworld in SF, who does a great job, but is only one person.
It just takes some more people that know the database well and have some basic web experience to put together some great things.
PostgreSQL is, in my opinion, the best database for most RDBMS tasks. However, I know how I feel when I go to a software site and i just want to check something out. I don't know whether it's the best or not, so I want to try it. It can be imtimidating when nothing has context. Lots of context is what makes docs easy to understand for a beginner.
That takes people that PostgreSQL doesn't currently have yet. Public relations and marketing are expensive, but MySQL can pay those guys.
Of course PostgreSQL is doing just fine by attracting users away from Oracle and SQL Server, and the people that have serious enough database requirements to actually look. The code quality, and the quality of the coders and the steering, and the project management is amazing. And it attracts more coders because they retain copyright on their work, unlike MySQL coders.
Postgresql does not support shared scenarios as good as MySQL. That's sharing the same machine with a web server, and that's sharing multiple logical databases as in a hosting environment (including putting the actual data files into each customers chrooted environment). MySQL does this very well.
Sure you can. "CREATE DATABASE username LOCATION='/home/username/pgdata'". This has been around for a while (since 7.1 at least which was several years ago; we're now on 7.4).