religion and faith are not the same thing. If you accept any premise such as axioms in math or scientific data, you have to believe that it has some truth to it. As you said, you don't just believe that Napoleon is that guy on the street
No, thats wrong. "If you accept any premise such as axioms in math or scientific data...", you THINK there is some truth to it. You weight the source, its validity, and accept or deny it as possibly true considering the circonstances. Sometimes you'll accept it, sometimes you'll deny it, depending on various factor. That is "thinking". I "think" creationism is bull. I "think" that roughly -273.15 C on the Celsius scale is absolute zero, even though I never tested myself.
Beleiving, faith, is a much different process. It is taking something at face value because it is part of a big idea that you attached yourself to.
Now, these are not dictionary definitions, but being born in a christian family and having been a hardcore beleiver for quite a few years, until I went "w...wait a minute...", I can honestly say the way someone puts faith in an idea, and someone -think- that idea to be true, is totally different.
The problem with that is the mixed signal people are getting, especialy those not closely tied to the OSS movement. On one side you're told Free Software is the future, everyone should use it, its the best thing since sliced bread, yada yada yada. On the other side, you're told the developers don't owe you anything and you shouldn't expect anything beyond whats given to you. The later is simply not enough for a user, especialy if that user is trying to get serious work done (in other words: business).
of course, its not black and white. Certain open source projects (linux itself, Firefox, etc) can be depended on. Others....not quite. But this is part of why users tend to "expect" things. When you're being told by all the zealots that you "must" use open source, then you don't get what you want when you do so, you get confused first time around...
I don't remember the original playstation being all so hot (even in japan) when FFVII came out. Square Enix will jump ship as soon as they get a better offer on a system they think could work with their support. With FF13 so far away, it still just reminds me of the N64 days. There was a Final Fantasy scheduled for it, promised as exclusive blah blah blah. I still even have the screenshots of the demo (a bit like how we have the FF13 trailer now), and it looked damn good.
Then we turned around and surprise surprise, FF7 was on a console very few people had ever heard of, that was owned by a company which was less pushy/pissy (in those days, Nintendo was the one making all the demands from the developers, a bit like Sony did during the PS2 age).
Now i'll admit its a bit more confusing, since MS is an american company, as opposed to sony. So would SE go there? Don't know. Maybe the Wii (which would be possible: FF7 looked like garbage compared to the previews of the N64 FF, so its not beyond them to switch to a console thats less graphicaly powerful). Maybe they'll just develop FFs on all consoles (most likely scenario in my opinion, since it already started).
Lots of maybes, since its all so far away... but don't be surprised if FF13 -never- comes out on the PS3, announced or not.
I remember reading in a very non-scientific report (which probably didn't mean much, but this is slashdot, who cares) something as high as 25%. Though it almost make enough sense for me to beleive it.
In any case, I doubt game developers will cry over it. They gave Nintendo the finger a decade ago because Nintendo was trying to control them. Sony during the PS2 days did the same, so they're probably all -praying- for Sony to fail so they can jump ship for the next console maker who'll give them everything they want...
Think of what a successful MS lawsuit would have done to Linux market penetration, too
Actualy, that is the reason why Microsoft is NOT going to sue. They probably can sue, and win. But at what cost? They are a convicted monopoly. From a legal point of view, that is horrible for them. The best choice, economicaly speaking for them, is to keep Linux around, the same way they helped keep Macs around back then. What I'm getting at is, let say they sue for Linux, and let say they win. Big freagin woohoo. 2 days layer they get owned by the EU. Thats why they rather use FUD. It IS most likely true they can sue and would win. They want people to be afraid of it. They just won't tell anyone what they know damn well would happen after they win:)
What im saying is that when you buy books (which do not have different licenses for "production" or for "educational purpose", you get f**** uped the ass. Any students can tell you that. (I didn't go to school in the US, so -I- didn't get screwed, but my girlfriend does, and she spends several hundred/thousand dollars per year on college books).
Most softwares used in schools have rediculously low pricing. Some are even given for free if the school have certain agreements. You can literally buy (using example of everyone's "favorite" proprietary software company) Visual Studio Pro, Windows, MS Office, etc, all for less than the price of an average math book.
If someone can just turn around, buy that software, and use it as they see fit (aka: for commercial purpose), companies will have to even things out: take out the educational licenses, and kind of average the commercial and educational prices into one flat price no matter the use. Considering any Microsoft partner get most of the development softwares for free (again, which wouldn't happen anymore), now students would have to pay up the ass, etc, that wouldn't be fun.
For Microsoft softwares, there are decent alternatives to most (not all) of them. Not so with all of the softwares one could use educationaly.
In other words, what I'm saying, is that all of the license agreements that allow you to get certain commercial softwares for free, or for pennies, under certain circonstances, could not exist anymore. I'm sure a lot of students would prefer paying 10$ per book with a "this book can only be used for educational purpose" restriction than what they have to deal with right now. Get what i mean?
EULAs need to be -restricted-, but not made null and void. That would do more harms than good.
Well, that does depend on which country you're in, laws and all, but software is a lot more complicated than a book (all books have the same purpose, give or take a few. Display "data".. some with limited "input" (exercise books), some pictures...but all around its all the same), as they have a lot of purposes. Putting them all in the same category would be quite troublesome.
The alternative is quite awkward (and CAN be seen with books): if you BUY the software, then all the companies that do educational license, or cheaper licenses for certain types of organisations, personal projects, etc, have to go down the drain, because then someone can just buy one of these and resell it commercialy, if the EULAs aren't valid. Thats just one of the few "good things" these "license agreements" do, and IMO outweight the alternatives.
Of course, for people who think all softwares should be Free, that doesn't sound like much. For the rest, its something to think about.
Thats one store, but for real, the ratio was much higher than that. Sony shipped less than expected at like 200-250k units I beleive, the Wii shipped something like 1.8 millions? Even if Sony shipped what they had said they would, we're looking at 4:1. And a lot of stores are getting more Wiis as soon as next week. And europe is getting it before christmas, and so on and so on... Sony is getting outsupplied in extreme ratios from all sides, so we can expect nintendo to snatch all of the people who are on the fence "I'll take anything i can get" type. And there's quite a few of those.
Probably because the game industry is incredibly cuttroath, and time to market is an issue to the point that every day count. If programmers find themselves even -slightly- more comfortable with Direct X, or that it is even -slightly- easier/faster to pull something off in DX, they'll do it. Simple as that.
I'm no graphic programmer myself, but at first glance, it does seem like DX would be easier to use, so if real game programmers feel that way too, that would explain it right there.
Considering how many patents and whatsnot microsoft has, its almost impossible to write ANYTHING without hitting something thats "theirs", so to speak. Same can be said of IBM, I'm sure Oracle has a few patents that open source databases hit every so often, and so on. (at least in north america). The same can be said of just about any software of large scale. Its nothing WE should be worried about, but big companies do.
Now, mind you, i'm sure 2/3rd of these patents can get overturned, but its still probably what Not-Bill-Gates, err, I mean Ballmer, was trying to blow out of proportion.
"Linux ingringes our IP!". No freagin way! So does like, -everything- else! No news here.
From the sound of the article/question, with their setup, it really doesn't seem like it is that big a deal to support multiple platforms. Plus, the knowledge is there, and they seem to enjoy it, its simple tools, etc. Why the hell not.
Other environments (usualy very customer centric ones, let say consulting firms, with strict deadlines, marketing getting in the way, etc) and more complex applications with very specific needs, it becomes trickier. These are the environments where your job is hard even if you're only supporting one platform, and even using every single last specialised API the platform offers still let you wish for more. In those cases it becomes a bit more annoying to have to go with the lowest common denominator.
Then add to that that users of different platforms -expect- different things. It isn't the end of the world to make something that works on both OSX and Windows, for example. But users of both platforms expect certain different things. I don't know the status right now,but I remember even in Java a few years back, one had to add some specific arguments when running java apps so that the menu bar would be at the right place in OSX, otherwise it would end up more like KDE/WIndows/Gnome/etc, with everything inside the window by default.
And last, but the most important one, testing, QA, etc. Doing cross platform, no matter what you do (unless you only do HTML and target Firefox only or something) means testing on those platforms, if only to look. That means moving the files, booting up the virtual machine, or something, to check it out. If the app is remotly complex, that IS time consuming like hell.
So in the end, it really depends. If you release your app to the general public, then the advantages of cross platform often outweight the "cost", and its only a matter of time before we are -expected- to do it. When your audience is more limited though, you often benifit more from targeting one particular platform and optimising your workflow like crazy for it, the time saving is significant.
Irrelevent, since the OP was looking in the EULA for something, so we quoted the EULA. If the person was in such a country, looking in the eula was pointless in the first place. Besides, in the majority (not all) of countries where customer protection prevents something like that from being true for a sold product, it is rarely so for services (There aren't many countries where an hotel doesn't have the right to kick you out...)
I haven't played all of the mainstream MMOs, only about 3, but in every single one of them, the company that runned them abused their customers in ways that make this story look irrelevent. So in other words, people stay with WoW because its a lesser evil.
Yup. Its funny how a lot of people in just about every MMOs forget that one. I remember back when I was playing FFXI, and Square-Enix was banning people (rarely, but sometimes), a bunch would freak out going "They can't, by law, ban me if they have no proof!".
"not just music". I don;t think you need to point that. What happened with Music is exactly it. In Star Trek, the invention of replicators set the world in a kind of golden age, where people work only for self fulfilment ('m not the ultimate trekkie, but i'm pretty sure its how they put it).
In the real world, everytime something gets copied easily, all hell breaks loose. Music, games, videos, books... Someday, it will be real objects, and if the world doesn't change (hahaha, world, change? ROFL), there will be equivalents of DMCA and entities like the RIAA to bitch and complain, instead of embracing this as a way to throw society in a world where money doesn't matter anymore... It is kind of sad, and i'm glad i'll be dead before it happens.
And I'm not putting any kids in that world, either.
Makes sense. I personally like the entire thing to look at least semi-decent. I didn't use to. Over the years I changed my mind about it, because it was seriously getting boring and feel too much like "work" (to me, even work shouldn't feel like "work"). But hey, different people, different tastes.
When I have this monitor in front of my face as much as 80 hours a week, I really DO care what my desktop looks like. While I'll change stuff like themes, etc, fonts and icons tend to me part of the "I have better things to do with my time" department, so if it doesn't look nice out of the box, and its not packaged with my theme somehow, it has to look semi-decent.
Do I misunderstand the business model? I was under the impression the idea behind pre-orders was to lock in buyers before a product is even out, AND profit from the interests on their money...
Now, the second point comes moot when you have problems like the above, and only a retard wouldn't have expected it. And the first point falls totally flat, since they'll sell out -no matter what-.
So who had the bright idea of allowing preorders for these consoles again?
Ahh, sorry, not a clue. My apologies for assuming the Jet comparison... Its just, Firebird IS a DBMS, so asking for a comparison with a database engine frontend is fairly weird:) I'm unfortunately not familiar enough with the tool support for it:(
At first glance though, reports-integrated-with-the-DBMS is a MS thing mostly. Only other one I can think of is SQL Server Reporting Services...
Hahaha, you're right, it is far more than an Access replacements. However, RDBMS are a dime a douzan. Full featured desktop databases are rarer, thus the "hype" about the whole MS Access replacement thing =)
Especialy if you are using.NET (which is possible since you're in a Microsoft environment), know that the ADO.NET driver for Firebird is feature complete. I never used it myself, but having seen several comparison between Vista DB, Access, SQLite and Firebird, which I -beleive- to be the dominant embeddable database engines in the WIndows world, Firebird seems to come at the top in every way, and that was before 2.0 came out.
This works, to some extent. When you start doing anything relatively serious, you have to get out of the standard API. SQL is unfortunately not supported in a standard way, because the actual SQL standard is limited. So all serious RDBMS have to add custom features. Want to page your data server side? You either do 3 nested query using ANSI SQL, or you use one of the "proprietary" features and have it run in about 1/100th the time (number not out of my ass, it comes from benchmarks). Standard APIs are only valid for CRUD operation, and light business intelligence. For anything serious, like hardcore data mining, and you start having to go in the procedural sql code (T-SQL, PL/SQL, and so on) to work and manipulate sets of data, and thats about as standard across databases as CSS is in Internet Explorer.
The only reason people go ga-ga over MySQL is name recognition. Since the last version, I understand that it doesn't suck anymore, so thats great. But it sure as hell used to. PostgreSQL is great, but some of the legacy code in it probably can make Windows' code base look clean (they had to get someone from Summer of Code to try to clean up the DISTINCT code because it was beyond horrible, for one). Firebird's supposed to be pretty darn good, I need to try it (Frans Bouma, a fairly well known Microsoft MVP recommended it fairly frequently, so it caught my attention recently)
While I have never used it myself, I have heard nothing but praises from it, including from the Microsoft programmer community side. It is supposed to be full featured, quite fast, and can be used as an embedded database by just shipping a single DLL (on Windows, dunno how it goes on Unix side of things) with your app, thus allowing for a lot of flexibility. It has a lot more feature than even most commercial embedded database, and is supposed to be very easy on the developer, and its drivers are quite complete for java,.net, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
Beleiving, faith, is a much different process. It is taking something at face value because it is part of a big idea that you attached yourself to.
Now, these are not dictionary definitions, but being born in a christian family and having been a hardcore beleiver for quite a few years, until I went "w...wait a minute...", I can honestly say the way someone puts faith in an idea, and someone -think- that idea to be true, is totally different.
The problem with that is the mixed signal people are getting, especialy those not closely tied to the OSS movement. On one side you're told Free Software is the future, everyone should use it, its the best thing since sliced bread, yada yada yada. On the other side, you're told the developers don't owe you anything and you shouldn't expect anything beyond whats given to you. The later is simply not enough for a user, especialy if that user is trying to get serious work done (in other words: business).
of course, its not black and white. Certain open source projects (linux itself, Firefox, etc) can be depended on. Others....not quite. But this is part of why users tend to "expect" things. When you're being told by all the zealots that you "must" use open source, then you don't get what you want when you do so, you get confused first time around...
I don't remember the original playstation being all so hot (even in japan) when FFVII came out. Square Enix will jump ship as soon as they get a better offer on a system they think could work with their support. With FF13 so far away, it still just reminds me of the N64 days. There was a Final Fantasy scheduled for it, promised as exclusive blah blah blah. I still even have the screenshots of the demo (a bit like how we have the FF13 trailer now), and it looked damn good.
Then we turned around and surprise surprise, FF7 was on a console very few people had ever heard of, that was owned by a company which was less pushy/pissy (in those days, Nintendo was the one making all the demands from the developers, a bit like Sony did during the PS2 age).
Now i'll admit its a bit more confusing, since MS is an american company, as opposed to sony. So would SE go there? Don't know. Maybe the Wii (which would be possible: FF7 looked like garbage compared to the previews of the N64 FF, so its not beyond them to switch to a console thats less graphicaly powerful). Maybe they'll just develop FFs on all consoles (most likely scenario in my opinion, since it already started).
Lots of maybes, since its all so far away... but don't be surprised if FF13 -never- comes out on the PS3, announced or not.
I remember reading in a very non-scientific report (which probably didn't mean much, but this is slashdot, who cares) something as high as 25%. Though it almost make enough sense for me to beleive it.
In any case, I doubt game developers will cry over it. They gave Nintendo the finger a decade ago because Nintendo was trying to control them. Sony during the PS2 days did the same, so they're probably all -praying- for Sony to fail so they can jump ship for the next console maker who'll give them everything they want...
You totally missed the point (no offense).
What im saying is that when you buy books (which do not have different licenses for "production" or for "educational purpose", you get f**** uped the ass. Any students can tell you that. (I didn't go to school in the US, so -I- didn't get screwed, but my girlfriend does, and she spends several hundred/thousand dollars per year on college books).
Most softwares used in schools have rediculously low pricing. Some are even given for free if the school have certain agreements. You can literally buy (using example of everyone's "favorite" proprietary software company) Visual Studio Pro, Windows, MS Office, etc, all for less than the price of an average math book.
If someone can just turn around, buy that software, and use it as they see fit (aka: for commercial purpose), companies will have to even things out: take out the educational licenses, and kind of average the commercial and educational prices into one flat price no matter the use. Considering any Microsoft partner get most of the development softwares for free (again, which wouldn't happen anymore), now students would have to pay up the ass, etc, that wouldn't be fun.
For Microsoft softwares, there are decent alternatives to most (not all) of them. Not so with all of the softwares one could use educationaly.
In other words, what I'm saying, is that all of the license agreements that allow you to get certain commercial softwares for free, or for pennies, under certain circonstances, could not exist anymore. I'm sure a lot of students would prefer paying 10$ per book with a "this book can only be used for educational purpose" restriction than what they have to deal with right now. Get what i mean?
EULAs need to be -restricted-, but not made null and void. That would do more harms than good.
Well, that does depend on which country you're in, laws and all, but software is a lot more complicated than a book (all books have the same purpose, give or take a few. Display "data".. some with limited "input" (exercise books), some pictures...but all around its all the same), as they have a lot of purposes. Putting them all in the same category would be quite troublesome.
The alternative is quite awkward (and CAN be seen with books): if you BUY the software, then all the companies that do educational license, or cheaper licenses for certain types of organisations, personal projects, etc, have to go down the drain, because then someone can just buy one of these and resell it commercialy, if the EULAs aren't valid. Thats just one of the few "good things" these "license agreements" do, and IMO outweight the alternatives.
Of course, for people who think all softwares should be Free, that doesn't sound like much. For the rest, its something to think about.
Thats one store, but for real, the ratio was much higher than that. Sony shipped less than expected at like 200-250k units I beleive, the Wii shipped something like 1.8 millions? Even if Sony shipped what they had said they would, we're looking at 4:1. And a lot of stores are getting more Wiis as soon as next week. And europe is getting it before christmas, and so on and so on... Sony is getting outsupplied in extreme ratios from all sides, so we can expect nintendo to snatch all of the people who are on the fence "I'll take anything i can get" type. And there's quite a few of those.
Probably because the game industry is incredibly cuttroath, and time to market is an issue to the point that every day count. If programmers find themselves even -slightly- more comfortable with Direct X, or that it is even -slightly- easier/faster to pull something off in DX, they'll do it. Simple as that.
I'm no graphic programmer myself, but at first glance, it does seem like DX would be easier to use, so if real game programmers feel that way too, that would explain it right there.
Considering how many patents and whatsnot microsoft has, its almost impossible to write ANYTHING without hitting something thats "theirs", so to speak. Same can be said of IBM, I'm sure Oracle has a few patents that open source databases hit every so often, and so on. (at least in north america). The same can be said of just about any software of large scale. Its nothing WE should be worried about, but big companies do.
Now, mind you, i'm sure 2/3rd of these patents can get overturned, but its still probably what Not-Bill-Gates, err, I mean Ballmer, was trying to blow out of proportion.
"Linux ingringes our IP!". No freagin way! So does like, -everything- else! No news here.
From the sound of the article/question, with their setup, it really doesn't seem like it is that big a deal to support multiple platforms. Plus, the knowledge is there, and they seem to enjoy it, its simple tools, etc. Why the hell not.
,but I remember even in Java a few years back, one had to add some specific arguments when running java apps so that the menu bar would be at the right place in OSX, otherwise it would end up more like KDE/WIndows/Gnome/etc, with everything inside the window by default.
Other environments (usualy very customer centric ones, let say consulting firms, with strict deadlines, marketing getting in the way, etc) and more complex applications with very specific needs, it becomes trickier. These are the environments where your job is hard even if you're only supporting one platform, and even using every single last specialised API the platform offers still let you wish for more. In those cases it becomes a bit more annoying to have to go with the lowest common denominator.
Then add to that that users of different platforms -expect- different things. It isn't the end of the world to make something that works on both OSX and Windows, for example. But users of both platforms expect certain different things. I don't know the status right now
And last, but the most important one, testing, QA, etc. Doing cross platform, no matter what you do (unless you only do HTML and target Firefox only or something) means testing on those platforms, if only to look. That means moving the files, booting up the virtual machine, or something, to check it out. If the app is remotly complex, that IS time consuming like hell.
So in the end, it really depends. If you release your app to the general public, then the advantages of cross platform often outweight the "cost", and its only a matter of time before we are -expected- to do it. When your audience is more limited though, you often benifit more from targeting one particular platform and optimising your workflow like crazy for it, the time saving is significant.
Irrelevent, since the OP was looking in the EULA for something, so we quoted the EULA. If the person was in such a country, looking in the eula was pointless in the first place. Besides, in the majority (not all) of countries where customer protection prevents something like that from being true for a sold product, it is rarely so for services (There aren't many countries where an hotel doesn't have the right to kick you out...)
I haven't played all of the mainstream MMOs, only about 3, but in every single one of them, the company that runned them abused their customers in ways that make this story look irrelevent. So in other words, people stay with WoW because its a lesser evil.
Yup. Its funny how a lot of people in just about every MMOs forget that one. I remember back when I was playing FFXI, and Square-Enix was banning people (rarely, but sometimes), a bunch would freak out going "They can't, by law, ban me if they have no proof!".
Its never stops being funny, I swear.
"not just music". I don;t think you need to point that. What happened with Music is exactly it. In Star Trek, the invention of replicators set the world in a kind of golden age, where people work only for self fulfilment ('m not the ultimate trekkie, but i'm pretty sure its how they put it).
In the real world, everytime something gets copied easily, all hell breaks loose. Music, games, videos, books... Someday, it will be real objects, and if the world doesn't change (hahaha, world, change? ROFL), there will be equivalents of DMCA and entities like the RIAA to bitch and complain, instead of embracing this as a way to throw society in a world where money doesn't matter anymore... It is kind of sad, and i'm glad i'll be dead before it happens.
And I'm not putting any kids in that world, either.
Makes sense. I personally like the entire thing to look at least semi-decent. I didn't use to. Over the years I changed my mind about it, because it was seriously getting boring and feel too much like "work" (to me, even work shouldn't feel like "work"). But hey, different people, different tastes.
When I have this monitor in front of my face as much as 80 hours a week, I really DO care what my desktop looks like. While I'll change stuff like themes, etc, fonts and icons tend to me part of the "I have better things to do with my time" department, so if it doesn't look nice out of the box, and its not packaged with my theme somehow, it has to look semi-decent.
Do I misunderstand the business model? I was under the impression the idea behind pre-orders was to lock in buyers before a product is even out, AND profit from the interests on their money...
Now, the second point comes moot when you have problems like the above, and only a retard wouldn't have expected it. And the first point falls totally flat, since they'll sell out -no matter what-.
So who had the bright idea of allowing preorders for these consoles again?
Ahh, sorry, not a clue. My apologies for assuming the Jet comparison... Its just, Firebird IS a DBMS, so asking for a comparison with a database engine frontend is fairly weird :) I'm unfortunately not familiar enough with the tool support for it :(
At first glance though, reports-integrated-with-the-DBMS is a MS thing mostly. Only other one I can think of is SQL Server Reporting Services...
Hahaha, you're right, it is far more than an Access replacements. However, RDBMS are a dime a douzan. Full featured desktop databases are rarer, thus the "hype" about the whole MS Access replacement thing =)
They are biaised, of course, but...look at this:r d-and-microsoft-jet-feature.html
.NET (which is possible since you're in a Microsoft environment), know that the ADO.NET driver for Firebird is feature complete. I never used it myself, but having seen several comparison between Vista DB, Access, SQLite and Firebird, which I -beleive- to be the dominant embeddable database engines in the WIndows world, Firebird seems to come at the top in every way, and that was before 2.0 came out.
http://www.dotnetfirebird.org/blog/2005/01/firebi
Especialy if you are using
This works, to some extent. When you start doing anything relatively serious, you have to get out of the standard API. SQL is unfortunately not supported in a standard way, because the actual SQL standard is limited. So all serious RDBMS have to add custom features. Want to page your data server side? You either do 3 nested query using ANSI SQL, or you use one of the "proprietary" features and have it run in about 1/100th the time (number not out of my ass, it comes from benchmarks). Standard APIs are only valid for CRUD operation, and light business intelligence. For anything serious, like hardcore data mining, and you start having to go in the procedural sql code (T-SQL, PL/SQL, and so on) to work and manipulate sets of data, and thats about as standard across databases as CSS is in Internet Explorer.
The only reason people go ga-ga over MySQL is name recognition. Since the last version, I understand that it doesn't suck anymore, so thats great. But it sure as hell used to. PostgreSQL is great, but some of the legacy code in it probably can make Windows' code base look clean (they had to get someone from Summer of Code to try to clean up the DISTINCT code because it was beyond horrible, for one). Firebird's supposed to be pretty darn good, I need to try it (Frans Bouma, a fairly well known Microsoft MVP recommended it fairly frequently, so it caught my attention recently)
Well, one thing: Firebird can be used in embedded scenarios
While I have never used it myself, I have heard nothing but praises from it, including from the Microsoft programmer community side. It is supposed to be full featured, quite fast, and can be used as an embedded database by just shipping a single DLL (on Windows, dunno how it goes on Unix side of things) with your app, thus allowing for a lot of flexibility. It has a lot more feature than even most commercial embedded database, and is supposed to be very easy on the developer, and its drivers are quite complete for java, .net, etc.