It is productive human effort that CREATES wealth. I agree that there are an awful lot of people who simply don't know what to do, don't want to learn how to do something new, feel entitled, or need someone to tell them exactly what to do. To all those excuses, I say "tough poop." DO SOMETHING!
And Amazon isn't going to be flying packages to a world of people who were unemployed by robots. Nor is the drone farmer going to sell much food to unemployed field workers. All those people WILL find something to do after a brief period of adjustment because that has happened since the beginning of civilization.
Think about this seriously for a minute and I really want you to answer. You've got some 50 year old guy who along with 20 other people at the same company have been replaced by drones or some other form of automation. It is very easy to say: "DO SOMETHING!", much harder to actually accomplish. Since his company is not the only company replacing workers like him, the chances of getting another job with his current skills is virtually none.
What are he and others like him really going to do? Go back to school, and incur more debt at a time in their lives when they should stuffing as much money into their retirement accounts as they can? At 50 they only have 15 to 20 years left of contributions before they need to start drawing it out. That assumes they remain healthy. Let's say he goes back to school and learns to code (no small feat for a 50 year old blue collar worker). How easy is it going to be for a now 52 to 54 year old guy with no experience to get hired as a programmer?
The reality is that there are fewer and fewer jobs that pay a living wage available for people without specific skills. Those skills take time and money to acquire. The industrial revolution replaced agricultural jobs with manufacturing jobs that didn't require a lot of training. Mostly the manufacturers provided it but worker abuse, long, hours, low pay, and dangerous conditions where common. It wasn't until unions and government regulation came along that your everyday worker started to really benefit from the technology behind the industrial revolution.
Over time companies got around this by both increasing automation and moving production to places with cheaper labor and weaker labor laws. That trend continues and not surprisingly, the middle class in this country is shrinking at an alarming rate.
If you define success as who has the richest people, then GDP per capita is one measure.
This sentence is self-contradicting...
If it matters to you that financial success and economic security be reasonably well distributed among the population
It does matter to me, incidentally, but that can not be the goal in itself. This "reasonably even distribution" comes as a consequence of good governance.
If you pursue it as a goal, you'll make everyone equally poor — take from someone, who grew up in the USSR.
Some quotes from a CNN article on happiness
Happiness is not quantifiable and can not be discussed in this context.
The desirability among would-be immigrants, however, can be. Yet, you chose to ignore that measure even though I proposed it right along the per capita GDP. Could it be because the US is winning on it, huh? Maybe, it is time for you to leave the country, to which your ancestors fled from wherever that was — and vacate the space for new freedom-seekers?
How is a survey asking people how happy they are any less quantifiable than a survey asking them which country they'd like to live in? In my mind, the former is more telling because it asks people to evaluate what their lives are actually like rather than what they imagine they'd be like living somewhere else. But if you don't like comparing by "happiness", then comparing by standard of living puts a lot of the same counties in the top. In neither of these lists does the US do badly, but there are countries with larger, more left leaning governments that do better (and worse).
As far ignoring desirability among potential immigrants goes, I ignored it because it's a measurement of perception rather than reality. I honestly didn't know where the US ranked but assumed that it ranked highly or you wouldn't have selected it as a measure. It is interesting to note who wants to come here and where they tend to be from: http://www.gallup.com/poll/153...
It's not from countries that do better on happiness or standard of living scale. I do agree that if getting rich is your goal and that if opportunities are limited where you currently live, the US is a great choice that's relatively easy to get into. And it's a better place on almost any measure than where lots of these would-be migrants currently live. However that doesn't mean a smaller government = a better place to live.
If you define success as who has the richest people, then GDP per capita is one measure. If it matters to you that financial success and economic security be reasonably well distributed among the population, or that the general population is "happy", then it doesn't tell you much on its own.
Some of the "happiest" countries are Denmark, Switzerland, Iceland, Norway, and Finland. The United States does make it into the top 15 and GDP per capita is one factor. Other countries that finished ahead of the United States are: Canada (6), the Netherlands (7), New Zealand (8), Australia (9), Sweden (10), Israel (11) and Austria (12).
Some quotes from a CNN article on happiness (http://www.cnn.com/2016/03/16/travel/worlds-happiest-countries-united-nations/):
"People who live in the happiest countries have longer life expectancies, have more social support, have more freedom to make life choices, have lower perceptions of corruption, experience more generosity, experience less inequality of happiness and have a higher gross domestic product per capita, the report shows."
"Happiness is a better measure of human welfare than measuring education, health, poverty, income and good government separately, the report's editors argue."
Personally, I'd argue that there is no single best size or form of government that will work well across the globe. Many countries lack natural resources and/or have challenging climates and geography. Some are very isolated while others have indefensible borders and complex histories.
1. Prejudice based on skin color and clothing is a real thing. Pretending it's not doesn't make the problem go away.
2.There is a significant wage gap between white and black people. A larger percentage of black people live in poverty. That is not something in dispute. African-American culture is a subset or even a distinct American culture on its own. What may very well prove successful with one group of low income people may not work as well with another. Trying to help one group of people doesn't stop anyone from helping another group.
3. Teaching valuable skills is a good thing whether it's in a vocational or college setting.
I find the prospect of a Trump presidency to be kind of scary. At the same time he's obviously tapped into some genuine concerns of a substantial portion of the public. Attempting to silence him just marginalizes his supporters even more and further justifies the extreme positions he advocates. Rather than suppressing or ignoring him, we should be trying to understand his appeal and attempting to address some of the underlying issues that fuel his popularity. My guess is that there's a link between Trump supporters and Sanders supporters. The middle class is hurting and has been for decades.
> I can't wait for the DevOps movement to die a quiet death,
If I were you, I'd wait to see what replaces DevOps You may well end up looking back on the good old days of DevOps.
Being long since retired, I have no experience with the DevOps concept. It sounds pretty bizzare. I suspect that any organization that found it appealing will buy into most any magic based development scheme.
If you have no experience with the DevOps concept and it's something that sounds bizarre to you, you probably just never worked in a small organization. If the organization is small enough, the sysadmin and the developer are the same person. As an organization grows and additional staff are hired, you will see more specialization but it's still not unusual for a dev to retain the ability to deploy to production in smaller shops. Even if that's not the case, in a smaller shop the devs and the operations people are seen as part of the same team rather than separate entities and are accustomed to working closely together.
In large organizations you have more specialization and often times more bureaucracy and less efficient communications. Software is more complex and so is the release process. What I see devOps as doing is using tools to add automation to the process so that fewer steps that require human intervention are required. What remains are the cultural barriers that say "this thing must be performed by this group, fill out this form and we'll schedule it" when in reality if all groups worked together, a simplified process could work much more efficiently and reliably.
I don't think that's quite it. I think it has more to do with the fact that pushing for change involves taking certain risks. And you're right, this is easier when you only have yourself and your own limited possessions to worry about. That doesn't mean their ideals are or were misplaced. It means that over time there's a tendency to get more entwined in the system as it exists. Thirst for change dwindles to the point where some actually fear it, - even if they would ultimately benefit from it.
I can guarantee that today's millennials will develop customs and behaviors that are unhealthy and destructive. Their grandkids will learn from science the truth about these behaviors and many of today's millennials will kick, scream, and claim conspiracy rather than change.
Doesn't that depend on what you consider severe? I would consider permanent flooding of some coastal areas and more frequent flooding of others coastal areas to be severe. I'm not inclined to believe that humans are going to be wiped out by AGW but that doesn't mean lesser consequences aren't extremely serious.
It's fine and good to question, but the best information we have says that there's a problem that needs attention. CO2 levels in the atmosphere were 280 ppm in the mid-18th century and now they're 402 ppm. We can hope that continuing increases won't have any severe consequences but it would be wise to consider the real possibility that they will.
What crime will a pervert be committing assuming he's just looking at little boys putting on their bathing suits? Or is that OK because he's got a penis too?
If someone is gawking at kids or other adults in a bathroom, then there's a problem. What sex they are is irrelevant.
On the other hand if some transgendered person goes into a stall in the women's bathroom and minds their own business like we'd expect anybody using a public bathroom to do then honestly I don't understand the problem.
Well, there is the possibility that you're exceptional and that there are lots people who benefited greatly by being taught by others in a college setting.
Over the years, I've probably learned a lot more on my own than I have in any classroom, but that doesn't mean that formal study and training weren't extremely valuable to me. I learned things that I would have never taken the time to investigate on my own, only to find that that knowledge was very useful down the road.
With all the emphasis on huge phones the last few years, I think it's good to have a powerful phone available in a more compact form factor. It also makes sense to have the pro version of the iPad available in a more traditional tablet size.
There's nothing revolutionary about either. I'm content with my 5s. I'd enjoy an iPad pro but there's other things I'd rather spend my money on.
It may or may not be cheaper to build your own power plant, depending on where you live, what your needs are, skills and materials at your disposal, etc. For some factories, it is cheaper to build their own power plants. For most residential homeowners, it isn't.
Likewise, for some companies having their own network and computer infrastructure makes sense. For others, not. For lots of companies, it makes sense to host their own services in some instances and use cloud services in others.
Electricity costs in Colorado are still quite a bit lower than the national average. To put things in perspective, the average household in Colorado probably pays less for electricity per month than they do for cable/Internet and probably less than 1/2 of what they pay to use their cell phones.
If electricity prices were at all a burden to most Americans, they'd be doing far more to cut back on its use than they do. That's not to say that there aren't people for whom paying for electricity isn't a real problem. I used to talk to a number of them on a regular basis as a side effect of my job. However, the issue for them is a lack of any real income and not the price of electricity.
The real cost of burning coal to produce electricity goes far beyond what you pay on your electric bill. Google "externalities" if you're curious.
I'll put it in a different way. Postgres doesn't have stored procedures in the same way that the C language doesn't have procedures. However in both cases you can have functions that return "void" and use them in the same way that you would use a procedure in another language.
There are a few features that are lacking in postgres functions that you can find in other database servers' procedures and functions. Likewise, there are features that you'll find in postgres functions that are missing from functions and procedures in other database servers.
I'm not saying that stored procedures don't have value, The complaint was that postgres doesn't have "real" stored procedures and I was asking what it was you can do with an MS SQL stored procedure that you can't do with a postgresql function.
I've worked with several types of relational databases including Oracle. I have not done a lot with SQL server but I've written plenty of stored procedures in other database servers. In postgres the same functionality is available through functions. In fact, most people in the postgres world refer to them as stored procedures even though they are actually functions (they optionally return a value) rather than procedures (which never return a value). SQL Server also has functions and I think that's where people get confused. In SQL Server, functions have limits placed on them (can't do inserts or updates for example) that postgres does not place on its functions.
You can make the pedantic argument that functions shouldn't have side affects but it seams like a trivial reason to prefer one database server over another. In postgres you might write a pure function that runs some query, does a few calculations and returns a value. Or you might create a set of functions that handles all CRUD operations that for all intents and purposes are procedures.
...and existing code base. we have thousands of lines of T-SQL code. I have never heard of a business using PostgreSQL. Might be some but I don't know who they are and we deal with tons of customers and vendors with SQL Server and Oracle. Oracle shops use Linux so might be a way to eat into Oracle's market. Still trying to figure out why to put on Linux though. Works fine on Windows and OS license cost is not a big deal compared to SQL CALs.
I just don't see a use case unless Microsoft wants to get out of the server business. Sounds crazy but they might be looking to migrate server and developer products away from windows. They made windows 2012 look like a consumer OS which was strange.
Think about who your customers and vendors are and what percentage of all businesses that really amounts to. I'm guessing not all that much. You don't know of businesses that use postgres because you're working in a different world from where postgres thrives.
Ever browse IMDB?
Use Skype (prior to microsoft's takeover)?
What about instagram?
Used a Mac?
Then you've used postgres.
Skype was in fact a major contributor to postgres development. That's what's nice about an open source product. If you've got talented people working for you, you can decided what features are important and not rely on the vendor to provide them for you.
No, I'm not under than impression that businesses only care about a free price tag but not having deal with licensing issues is really, really nice. Besides few organizations really need a postgres DBA (or an SQL Server DBA).
If you're concerned about installation and support, you can get it through Enterprise DB and other sources. The postgres community is also an excellent source of support. I've been using postgres for close to 15 years and I've never ran into a problem that made me wish I had some sort of phone support, but that's available for people that want it. There are also several cloud based postgres solutions where there is little to no configuration for you to worry about.
Integration is another story. If you're already heavily invested in MS development tools, then yeah SQL server is an easy fit. If you're not, then it doesn't seem to offer much on its own to warrant going that route.
I don't see how SqlServer can compete against Postgresql. The only thing SqlServer had going for it was integration with.Net framework.
.. and real stored procedures.
What features do stored procedures provide that can't be handled with postgresql functions?
Outside of starting and ending transactions within the function I can't think of anything. Parameters can be input or output and you can modify tables. These are normally things that people with an SQL Server background believe can't be done within functions but in postgres they can.
Postgres isn't a perfect database but it's extremely powerful with new features being added all the time. It has a lot to offer for free.
Just because it's both technically possible and common practice doesn't mean it's actually done by every employer. Besides, as much as we tell people their Internet usage is being monitored, there are still folks who get busted doing stuff they shouldn't.
But it's the free market right? If all these insurance are over charging wouldn't other companies swoop in with lower premiums and steel all the business? Why don't they? Because they're genuinely afraid of they big payouts they'll increasingly have to make.
Yeah, there's a strong desire to live near water and people will pay huge a lot of money in order to do so, even if they know the area is prone to flooding. My family is a perfect example. I grew up in a home where sandbagging once every decade was just part of the deal. Many Springs my mother would fret over every rain storm. It cost my parents relatively little to build there in the late 50's when the water level was much lower, but over time the property taxes and insurance costs have skyrocketed.
The floods come more often now, the last one being a couple of years ago. At one point there were 1/2 dozen pumps running 24 hours a day to keep the water (mostly) on the other side of the sand bag walls. My brother has lived there for the past 7 years even though he can't afford it. Not even close. Far more aggravation than I'd be willing to put up with but it's a beautiful place four out of every five years.
A lot of other people that have homes in those areas are just plain wealthy and will just collect the insurance, declare their losses and move on if they need to.
Slashdot Mirror
It is productive human effort that CREATES wealth. I agree that there are an awful lot of people who simply don't know what to do, don't want to learn how to do something new, feel entitled, or need someone to tell them exactly what to do. To all those excuses, I say "tough poop." DO SOMETHING!
And Amazon isn't going to be flying packages to a world of people who were unemployed by robots. Nor is the drone farmer going to sell much food to unemployed field workers. All those people WILL find something to do after a brief period of adjustment because that has happened since the beginning of civilization.
Think about this seriously for a minute and I really want you to answer. You've got some 50 year old guy who along with 20 other people at the same company have been replaced by drones or some other form of automation. It is very easy to say: "DO SOMETHING!", much harder to actually accomplish. Since his company is not the only company replacing workers like him, the chances of getting another job with his current skills is virtually none.
What are he and others like him really going to do? Go back to school, and incur more debt at a time in their lives when they should stuffing as much money into their retirement accounts as they can? At 50 they only have 15 to 20 years left of contributions before they need to start drawing it out. That assumes they remain healthy. Let's say he goes back to school and learns to code (no small feat for a 50 year old blue collar worker). How easy is it going to be for a now 52 to 54 year old guy with no experience to get hired as a programmer?
The reality is that there are fewer and fewer jobs that pay a living wage available for people without specific skills. Those skills take time and money to acquire. The industrial revolution replaced agricultural jobs with manufacturing jobs that didn't require a lot of training. Mostly the manufacturers provided it but worker abuse, long, hours, low pay, and dangerous conditions where common. It wasn't until unions and government regulation came along that your everyday worker started to really benefit from the technology behind the industrial revolution.
Over time companies got around this by both increasing automation and moving production to places with cheaper labor and weaker labor laws. That trend continues and not surprisingly, the middle class in this country is shrinking at an alarming rate.
This sentence is self-contradicting...
It does matter to me, incidentally, but that can not be the goal in itself. This "reasonably even distribution" comes as a consequence of good governance.
If you pursue it as a goal, you'll make everyone equally poor — take from someone, who grew up in the USSR.
Happiness is not quantifiable and can not be discussed in this context.
The desirability among would-be immigrants, however, can be. Yet, you chose to ignore that measure even though I proposed it right along the per capita GDP. Could it be because the US is winning on it, huh? Maybe, it is time for you to leave the country, to which your ancestors fled from wherever that was — and vacate the space for new freedom-seekers?
How is a survey asking people how happy they are any less quantifiable than a survey asking them which country they'd like to live in? In my mind, the former is more telling because it asks people to evaluate what their lives are actually like rather than what they imagine they'd be like living somewhere else. But if you don't like comparing by "happiness", then comparing by standard of living puts a lot of the same counties in the top. In neither of these lists does the US do badly, but there are countries with larger, more left leaning governments that do better (and worse).
As far ignoring desirability among potential immigrants goes, I ignored it because it's a measurement of perception rather than reality. I honestly didn't know where the US ranked but assumed that it ranked highly or you wouldn't have selected it as a measure. It is interesting to note who wants to come here and where they tend to be from: http://www.gallup.com/poll/153...
It's not from countries that do better on happiness or standard of living scale. I do agree that if getting rich is your goal and that if opportunities are limited where you currently live, the US is a great choice that's relatively easy to get into. And it's a better place on almost any measure than where lots of these would-be migrants currently live. However that doesn't mean a smaller government = a better place to live.
If you define success as who has the richest people, then GDP per capita is one measure. If it matters to you that financial success and economic security be reasonably well distributed among the population, or that the general population is "happy", then it doesn't tell you much on its own.
Some of the "happiest" countries are Denmark, Switzerland, Iceland, Norway, and Finland. The United States does make it into the top 15 and GDP per capita is one factor. Other countries that finished ahead of the United States are: Canada (6), the Netherlands (7), New Zealand (8), Australia (9), Sweden (10), Israel (11) and Austria (12).
Some quotes from a CNN article on happiness (http://www.cnn.com/2016/03/16/travel/worlds-happiest-countries-united-nations/):
"People who live in the happiest countries have longer life expectancies, have more social support, have more freedom to make life choices, have lower perceptions of corruption, experience more generosity, experience less inequality of happiness and have a higher gross domestic product per capita, the report shows."
"Happiness is a better measure of human welfare than measuring education, health, poverty, income and good government separately, the report's editors argue."
Personally, I'd argue that there is no single best size or form of government that will work well across the globe. Many countries lack natural resources and/or have challenging climates and geography. Some are very isolated while others have indefensible borders and complex histories.
1. Prejudice based on skin color and clothing is a real thing. Pretending it's not doesn't make the problem go away.
2.There is a significant wage gap between white and black people. A larger percentage of black people live in poverty. That is not something in dispute. African-American culture is a subset or even a distinct American culture on its own. What may very well prove successful with one group of low income people may not work as well with another. Trying to help one group of people doesn't stop anyone from helping another group.
3. Teaching valuable skills is a good thing whether it's in a vocational or college setting.
I find the prospect of a Trump presidency to be kind of scary. At the same time he's obviously tapped into some genuine concerns of a substantial portion of the public. Attempting to silence him just marginalizes his supporters even more and further justifies the extreme positions he advocates. Rather than suppressing or ignoring him, we should be trying to understand his appeal and attempting to address some of the underlying issues that fuel his popularity. My guess is that there's a link between Trump supporters and Sanders supporters. The middle class is hurting and has been for decades.
> I can't wait for the DevOps movement to die a quiet death,
If I were you, I'd wait to see what replaces DevOps You may well end up looking back on the good old days of DevOps.
Being long since retired, I have no experience with the DevOps concept. It sounds pretty bizzare. I suspect that any organization that found it appealing will buy into most any magic based development scheme.
If you have no experience with the DevOps concept and it's something that sounds bizarre to you, you probably just never worked in a small organization. If the organization is small enough, the sysadmin and the developer are the same person. As an organization grows and additional staff are hired, you will see more specialization but it's still not unusual for a dev to retain the ability to deploy to production in smaller shops. Even if that's not the case, in a smaller shop the devs and the operations people are seen as part of the same team rather than separate entities and are accustomed to working closely together.
In large organizations you have more specialization and often times more bureaucracy and less efficient communications. Software is more complex and so is the release process. What I see devOps as doing is using tools to add automation to the process so that fewer steps that require human intervention are required. What remains are the cultural barriers that say "this thing must be performed by this group, fill out this form and we'll schedule it" when in reality if all groups worked together, a simplified process could work much more efficiently and reliably.
I don't think that's quite it. I think it has more to do with the fact that pushing for change involves taking certain risks. And you're right, this is easier when you only have yourself and your own limited possessions to worry about. That doesn't mean their ideals are or were misplaced. It means that over time there's a tendency to get more entwined in the system as it exists. Thirst for change dwindles to the point where some actually fear it, - even if they would ultimately benefit from it.
I can guarantee that today's millennials will develop customs and behaviors that are unhealthy and destructive. Their grandkids will learn from science the truth about these behaviors and many of today's millennials will kick, scream, and claim conspiracy rather than change.
Doesn't that depend on what you consider severe? I would consider permanent flooding of some coastal areas and more frequent flooding of others coastal areas to be severe. I'm not inclined to believe that humans are going to be wiped out by AGW but that doesn't mean lesser consequences aren't extremely serious.
It's fine and good to question, but the best information we have says that there's a problem that needs attention. CO2 levels in the atmosphere were 280 ppm in the mid-18th century and now they're 402 ppm. We can hope that continuing increases won't have any severe consequences but it would be wise to consider the real possibility that they will.
What crime will a pervert be committing assuming he's just looking at little boys putting on their bathing suits? Or is that OK because he's got a penis too?
If someone is gawking at kids or other adults in a bathroom, then there's a problem. What sex they are is irrelevant.
On the other hand if some transgendered person goes into a stall in the women's bathroom and minds their own business like we'd expect anybody using a public bathroom to do then honestly I don't understand the problem.
Well, there is the possibility that you're exceptional and that there are lots people who benefited greatly by being taught by others in a college setting.
Over the years, I've probably learned a lot more on my own than I have in any classroom, but that doesn't mean that formal study and training weren't extremely valuable to me. I learned things that I would have never taken the time to investigate on my own, only to find that that knowledge was very useful down the road.
These people were killed by bombs. I don't think a personal firearm would have helped them if that's what you were implying.
With all the emphasis on huge phones the last few years, I think it's good to have a powerful phone available in a more compact form factor. It also makes sense to have the pro version of the iPad available in a more traditional tablet size.
There's nothing revolutionary about either. I'm content with my 5s. I'd enjoy an iPad pro but there's other things I'd rather spend my money on.
It may or may not be cheaper to build your own power plant, depending on where you live, what your needs are, skills and materials at your disposal, etc. For some factories, it is cheaper to build their own power plants. For most residential homeowners, it isn't.
Likewise, for some companies having their own network and computer infrastructure makes sense. For others, not. For lots of companies, it makes sense to host their own services in some instances and use cloud services in others.
Electricity costs in Colorado are still quite a bit lower than the national average. To put things in perspective, the average household in Colorado probably pays less for electricity per month than they do for cable/Internet and probably less than 1/2 of what they pay to use their cell phones.
If electricity prices were at all a burden to most Americans, they'd be doing far more to cut back on its use than they do. That's not to say that there aren't people for whom paying for electricity isn't a real problem. I used to talk to a number of them on a regular basis as a side effect of my job. However, the issue for them is a lack of any real income and not the price of electricity.
The real cost of burning coal to produce electricity goes far beyond what you pay on your electric bill. Google "externalities" if you're curious.
I'll put it in a different way. Postgres doesn't have stored procedures in the same way that the C language doesn't have procedures. However in both cases you can have functions that return "void" and use them in the same way that you would use a procedure in another language.
There are a few features that are lacking in postgres functions that you can find in other database servers' procedures and functions. Likewise, there are features that you'll find in postgres functions that are missing from functions and procedures in other database servers.
I'm not saying that stored procedures don't have value, The complaint was that postgres doesn't have "real" stored procedures and I was asking what it was you can do with an MS SQL stored procedure that you can't do with a postgresql function.
I've worked with several types of relational databases including Oracle. I have not done a lot with SQL server but I've written plenty of stored procedures in other database servers. In postgres the same functionality is available through functions. In fact, most people in the postgres world refer to them as stored procedures even though they are actually functions (they optionally return a value) rather than procedures (which never return a value). SQL Server also has functions and I think that's where people get confused. In SQL Server, functions have limits placed on them (can't do inserts or updates for example) that postgres does not place on its functions.
You can make the pedantic argument that functions shouldn't have side affects but it seams like a trivial reason to prefer one database server over another. In postgres you might write a pure function that runs some query, does a few calculations and returns a value. Or you might create a set of functions that handles all CRUD operations that for all intents and purposes are procedures.
...and existing code base. we have thousands of lines of T-SQL code. I have never heard of a business using PostgreSQL. Might be some but I don't know who they are and we deal with tons of customers and vendors with SQL Server and Oracle. Oracle shops use Linux so might be a way to eat into Oracle's market. Still trying to figure out why to put on Linux though. Works fine on Windows and OS license cost is not a big deal compared to SQL CALs.
I just don't see a use case unless Microsoft wants to get out of the server business. Sounds crazy but they might be looking to migrate server and developer products away from windows. They made windows 2012 look like a consumer OS which was strange.
Think about who your customers and vendors are and what percentage of all businesses that really amounts to. I'm guessing not all that much. You don't know of businesses that use postgres because you're working in a different world from where postgres thrives.
Ever browse IMDB?
Use Skype (prior to microsoft's takeover)?
What about instagram?
Used a Mac?
Then you've used postgres.
Skype was in fact a major contributor to postgres development. That's what's nice about an open source product. If you've got talented people working for you, you can decided what features are important and not rely on the vendor to provide them for you.
No, I'm not under than impression that businesses only care about a free price tag but not having deal with licensing issues is really, really nice. Besides few organizations really need a postgres DBA (or an SQL Server DBA).
If you're concerned about installation and support, you can get it through Enterprise DB and other sources. The postgres community is also an excellent source of support. I've been using postgres for close to 15 years and I've never ran into a problem that made me wish I had some sort of phone support, but that's available for people that want it. There are also several cloud based postgres solutions where there is little to no configuration for you to worry about.
Integration is another story. If you're already heavily invested in MS development tools, then yeah SQL server is an easy fit. If you're not, then it doesn't seem to offer much on its own to warrant going that route.
I don't see how SqlServer can compete against Postgresql. The only thing SqlServer had going for it was integration with .Net framework.
.. and real stored procedures.
What features do stored procedures provide that can't be handled with postgresql functions?
Outside of starting and ending transactions within the function I can't think of anything. Parameters can be input or output and you can modify tables. These are normally things that people with an SQL Server background believe can't be done within functions but in postgres they can.
Postgres isn't a perfect database but it's extremely powerful with new features being added all the time. It has a lot to offer for free.
Just because it's both technically possible and common practice doesn't mean it's actually done by every employer. Besides, as much as we tell people their Internet usage is being monitored, there are still folks who get busted doing stuff they shouldn't.
If you have a genuine intellectual curiosity about the subject, information is pretty easy to find. Here's one link: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/...
If you've already made up your mind, then it doesn't really matter what sort of evidence I provide.
Higher water levels and warmer temps mean that flood damage due to storms is increasingly likely.
But it's the free market right? If all these insurance are over charging wouldn't other companies swoop in with lower premiums and steel all the business? Why don't they? Because they're genuinely afraid of they big payouts they'll increasingly have to make.
Yeah, there's a strong desire to live near water and people will pay huge a lot of money in order to do so, even if they know the area is prone to flooding. My family is a perfect example. I grew up in a home where sandbagging once every decade was just part of the deal. Many Springs my mother would fret over every rain storm. It cost my parents relatively little to build there in the late 50's when the water level was much lower, but over time the property taxes and insurance costs have skyrocketed.
The floods come more often now, the last one being a couple of years ago. At one point there were 1/2 dozen pumps running 24 hours a day to keep the water (mostly) on the other side of the sand bag walls. My brother has lived there for the past 7 years even though he can't afford it. Not even close. Far more aggravation than I'd be willing to put up with but it's a beautiful place four out of every five years.
A lot of other people that have homes in those areas are just plain wealthy and will just collect the insurance, declare their losses and move on if they need to.