Accurately, it forbids reprocessing by anyone but DoD. Which is the same as I originally stated as civil power plants are NOT under control of the DoD.
As for the citation needed part, shove it your ass you lazy, incompetent, moron. Learn how to use a fucking search engine. What a complete waste of skin. Yes, its a major pet peeve of mine.
You always know when you've met a complete fucking idiot when they say, "citation needed". This is not a research paper! Nothing proves to the world that you're both a fucking idiot and lazy more than saying that. Holy shit. So tired of idiots like you. In a day and age when information is literally at your finger tips, people who walk around saying, "citation needed", prove to be absolutely worthless, lazy, and completely incompetent. And no citation needed here.
Geothermal has quakes associated with power generation.
wind
Wind is a very good source but no one is willing to invest in the infrustructure to deliver the power from large wind farms to the power grid. This is why Picken stopped building has massive wind farm in Texas.
Does anyone take into account the speed at which science accelerates? Isn't it likely that in 20-50 years we'll have tech that can just deal with the waste?
We already have the tech to deal with this issue. It can be handled in two ways. One is to reprocess it into new fuel rods which can then be used in the reactor from which it came. Two, it can be used as is in fast breeder-type reactor where it becomes enriched and then consumed as fuel. The combination means, rather than attempting to dispose of rods which contain 90%-97% usable fuel (aka, huge waste), something like 3% winds up needing disposal and much of that has a very short half life compared to what would have otherwise been thrown out.
Sadly, US law forbids reprocessing of fuel on US soil. So option one is out. Option two is not possible as I'm not aware of any certified fast breeder reactors. Certification alone, thanks to the massive red tape forced on us all by loony environmentalist, costs billions of dollars. As a result, perfectly safe designs are simply not certifiable because no one has the years to spend billions of dollars with yet another decade of more red tape and construction before they can even hope to reclaim their investment.
Its a really great example of why laws need to be changed and environmentalist need to be shot. Buses and cliffs are also an acceptable substitute; though it may be difficult to find room because of the large number of lawyers already in line.
True, but the average consumer is also pretty happy at DSL level speeds (Or at least won't justify spending more for the 100mbps service).
The average consumer was pretty happy at dial up speeds until they got a taste of something faster. Every day this becomes more and more true as more and more media rich services and web interfaces present themselves. Downloading music and watching video on line is now common for broadband users. Accordingly, users will continue to notice speed improvements up until they hit the endpoint service provider throttles or become saturated.
Costs can be substantially cheaper when you have a massive third world labor force begging to work. Additionally, Russian reactors are well known for having fall fewer safety controls built into their designs. So the combination of extremely cheap labor plus what is likely a far less safe design will certainly make for a far cheaper build.
What was your point as I don't see these are the least bit comparable, from a cost perspective.
That's actually easy to do and the expected result for a stationary object resting near or on the bottom. Things that don't don't move and don't make noise are really hard to find. This is especially true where multiple thermoclines exist. Of course, that's also why its not the least bit embarrassing for the US Navy because for it to have any real meaning, the Chinese would have to know where the US Navy would be before hand, during a state of war.
The picture is even more bleak for trying to locate modern diesel subs when operating in their own backyard. These days diesel subs are extremely quiet. And this is exactly why the Navy has been working hard to increase its sonar capabilities. Congress has been pushing back on funding and environmental concerns but as I originally said, I'm sure the Navy will use this to help bolster their position.
Except that article is all fluff and lacking any type of intelligence.
Those were regularly scheduled exercises which take place annually in the exact same spot every year. The FACT is, no one in the military was embarrassed. Period. Only the idiot reporters, who improperly frame it as an embarrassment, have been embarrassed.
This is reality. The Chinese, wishing to cause a publicity stunt, hoping that idiots, which are frequently referred to as reporters, will pick up on a stunt are report on it because one, they are idiots, and two, won't actually check fact their story. And so, the Chinese decide to quietly sit in the middle of nowhere waiting for the US military to come along; as they've done every year preceding for who knows how many years. Sure enough, just like every year before, the US Navy comes cruising along in the exact same area. The Chinese pop up and start cruising toward the highest value target available; a US aircraft carrier. Next, idiot reporter states the military is embarrassed because he's too stupid to realize they are not.
The simple truth is, unless they are able to break US military cryptography, which I very seriously doubt, or if they are planning on a preemptive strike whereby China disappears from the face of the Earth, this is in no way, shape, or form, representative of any type of military action possible by the Chinese.
The Chinese do not pose any credible threat to the US Navy in open waters. None. Not one bit. They do, however, pose a threat in regional, shallow waters, which is why the Navy is pushing so hard to improve their sonar capabilities in that environment.
To summarize, the only people embarrassed by the Chinese are idiot reporters and ignorant masses who believe it speaks to China's Naval capabilities. In reality, it was a completely non-news event and reports and people who ignorantly repeat such stories are nothing but sock puppets for the Chinese propaganda machine; which the US Military is now trying to play to obtain yet additional funding.
Wish I understood why people think its okay to throw "soft" objects are moving vehicles. I've had my front windshield shattered from a water balloon and almost wrecked on rain soaked roads. Snowballs can be an even worse projectile.
If more people would understand some very basic math, thew would never do such things. Any object with mass hitting a vehicle at speed creates the potential for serious damage or injury.
Snowballs can and do damage vehicles. The proper mindset is, if these kids have time and the desire to throw snowballs at moving vehicles, their community is lacking for activities to keep them out of trouble.
The police did the right thing. Now the snow angels, that's a different issue....
The absolute worst thing you can do in an object oriented language,
Perhaps you misunderstand the subject. Caching, memoizing, and/or object pools are all extremely common optimizations. On Android, its the ONLY way you're going to see a video game sustain reasonable FPS. End of discussion.
Its easy to re-initialize an object's state to allow for re-use after it has been instantiated. When the object's life is done, rather than free it, you simply return it to a pool. When a new object of that type is required, you re-initiate an existing instance, remove it from the pool, and return it. This way the object never needs to go through the garbage collector.
Even in languages without a garbage collector (C++), these optimizations are still fairly common and their use almost always increases performance. Additionally, their use in of themselves are never a bad idea unless the system you're on is extremely constrained by memory which prevents the creation of pools and/or caches.
Exactly. Another clueless and unfit judge who is completely out of touch with the Constitution and the US' history. The entire nation is built around the majority, not the minority. His type of persecution is exactly the reason so many puritans came here in the first place.
Lots of hostility over working more inefficiently. Be my guest. I don't think anyone is forcing you to work more efficiently. Don't like it, don't use it.
more concrete method
That's suggests you don't believe the truth. Its not that hard to even ponder for a second. Every time you change windows, unless you're an alt-tab guy, you must move the mouse and click. With focus-follow-mouse, you just move the mouse and field focus is restored to whatever field last had focus unless you deem otherwise. Now if you wanted to change window and field focus you still need to either click on the new field or tab to it. In that case, its a break even, but you've still lost nothing.
For example, as I type, my mouse is over the subject field but input is still going into the comment field.
Does this imply that on more or less identical hardware (latest ARM + similar battery), the iPhone will always run apps faster and will always have better battery life than an Android phone?
From a performance perspective, no. Android can run native code should a developer decide he wishes to do so.
As for battery life, maybe. As newer devices come out their efficiency is likely to continue to improve but Android devices always have more work to do because they are more capable devices. This extra capability comes from their native ability to multitask. Included in their ability to multitask is the ability to run applications in the background. This has the effect of a perceived reduction in battery life, when compared to something like an iPhone.
The good news for Android devices is that all that I'm aware of allow for interchangeable batteries which means you can always swap out batteries to stay on the run. Furthermore, many phones have alternate battery models with increased capacity. For example, the G1 has batteries with double their stock capacity.
I was appalled by the focus-follows-mouse misfeature.
Oddly, what you're calling a misfeature is what many would call click-to-focus. Click to focus needless requires extra clicking. Now do keep in mind there is a difference between raise on focus and focus follows mouse. I hate raise on focus but focus follows mouse is extremely superior to click-to-focus. Why? Because click-to-focus needlessly forces you to waste screen real estate when referencing one screen and inputting on another. This is even more so as you continue to add more and more references screens.
Like many technology related issues, many times is a case of what's different is bad or ugly. You were likely taught to use a computer with click-to-focus and therefore anything which is not that is bad. But once you get used to it, the click-to-focus style of using interfaces, assuming the interface is designed to work with it (*cough* no windows *cough*), anything else sucks and sucks badly.
So if you enjoy needlessly clicking for the sake of needlessly clicking, then by all means continue to use click-to-focus. But for those of us that enjoy fewer clicks and higher efficiency of interface, you'll not want to go back to the insanity which is click-to-focus.
I guess if you're one of those users who maximizes every window and never multi-tasks, then there is nothing wrong with click-to-focus. But if not, you need to give it a try for a week or two and you'll be wondering what the heck you were thinking. Of course, this assumes you're not using Windows, which is specifically designed to break focus follows mouse behavior. There, its usable but IMO, a wash because of Windows' UI behaviors.
Sounds like a subset of functionality is coming in PostgreSQL 9.0, which supports streaming replication in addition to transactional and log shipping.
High-performance compression that in many cases is faster than non-compression. You can encrypt it, too.
Here you can see Greenplum's commercial PostgreSQL offering which is 10x-20x faster than stock PostgreSQL. A large portion of its performance boost comes from its support of high performance and effective compression as well as parallelism. I strongly suspect its faster than Oracle in many use cases.
It's great you have B-tree indexes - Oracle also offers bitmap and there are cases where they are really useful. It's nice that you offer hash partitioning (if you do), but Oracle can partition on a half-dozen different things. Etc.
PostgreSQL has had bitmap indexes for a while now. Not to mention you can actually create your own index types too. PostgreSQL is very extensible. That's one of the reasons why PostGIS is so capable. And please note they just announced a major new release.
Let's also not forget PostgreSQL, like Oracle, supports function indexes, which are in of themselves extremely powerful.
Online redefinition (change your tables, views, etc. and have Oracle store everything up until you snap everything over at once - great for reducing downtimes).
PostgreSQL can do this too for most everything. There are some exceptions but by in large, PostgreSQL has this covered.
PostgreSQL is one of the few databases which supports transactional DDL and has done so for a very long time. So for example, you can create types populate and even create indexes within a single transactional boundary. Which means you can actually do all this within the confines of a TPC transaction, which can wait a long time (logging implications and caveats here). Then when ready you can commit the TPC transaction and *BLAM*, you new table, fully populated, with deferred index creation, is now online. That's just one example of what can be done with PostgreSQL.
Query analysis is enormously better than open software (explain plans, etc.)
PostgreSQL has very good query analysis features. Its query plans are also excellent and typically does so without the many hints Oracle often requires. Having said that, IMO, PostgreSQL query plans are only exceeded by that of Oracle's and even then PostgeSQL genetic planner offers capabilities to niche projects unavailable in even Oracle.
Virtual Private Databases
Hotly debated on PostgreSQL mailing lists. PostgreSQL offers this capability today via its schema and security models. They just don't call it VPDs.
PL/SQL, Java, etc. native to the DB
PostgreSQL blows Oracle and every other database out of the water when it comes to native PL language support. What's you're flavor? PL/pgSQL? Perl? Python? Tcl? Java? C? Lua? And I think I many be forgetting a couple.
No bones about it, Oracle is more feature rich. It is true Oracle still addresses many high end solutions where stock PostgreSQL does not yet compete. Just the same, many commercial PostgreSQL offerings are starting to compete in arenas which were previously Oracle only domains. Furthermore, stock PostgreSQL continues to egress further and further into extremely large databases and warehousing solutions. Additionally, once you step outside of high end databases, for the vast majority of people, PostgreSQL is a very competitive solution to Oracle and in many cases, unofficially faster.
It sounds like you need to take a hard second look at PostgreSQL because based on my of your comments, it sounds like you're somewhat out of touch with the current capabilities and features provided by PostgreSQL.
Bullshit there are plenty of independent musicians and small businesses getting along just fine without resorting to vigilante tactics.
Its bullshit because your proposed world, to which I responded, does not exist. That's the point of my comment. Should things take the direction you desire, everything changes from a crap-fest (currest state of things) to a royal shit hole (your imaginary yet desired world).
In short, your argument is that you just invalidated your original argument and validated my post.
Chris DiBona and other people have stated that it's a fork.
Its a fork only to the degree that anyone who developers a device driver is forking the kernel - which is to say its not. Its a "fork" in the most general of layman's expressions. Technically its not a fork at all. A fork is a divergent source tree. This is not a divergent source tree. This is the official source tree plus a driver. That's a huge difference.
If you want to call it a "fork", fine, but technically that's not accurate. With this definition of fork, every distribution and every device which runs Linux, has a "fork".
Well, it's not technically Linux these phones use, as it's now an incompatible Linux fork. So, I guess like the authors of this article, the company told Linus to go fork himself.
Well, what you're saying is not technically true either.
These phones absolutely do run the Linux kernel and anyone who says otherwise is misleading at best and trolling at worst. Period. Just because a single device driver was recently removed from the official source tree does not suddenly make the kernel any less Linux. To suggest that's the case is ignorance or stupidity.
The reality is, Android uses their own driver for power management. Their design stinks. They've refused to maintain it in the official source tree. The stinking, unmaintained driver was removed. Despite no longer being maintained in the official source tree, Google continues to maintain it in their own kernel tree - which is freely accessible to all. This was all previously covered here on/. Having said all that, it is extremely common for external drivers to be maintained outside of the official source tree for a variety of reasons. This is one of the primary reasons the dkms project exists.
Furthermore, since the source portion of Android's framework which accesses the power management driver is freely available, if someone wanted to, they could easily change the internal implementation to use Linux's official power management interface rather than Google's driver. Battery life is likely to only slightly suffer. And with small improvements to Linux's existing power management infrastructure, to bring it more in line with Google's implementation goals, battery life parity can be achieved while maintaining full Android compatibility.
At the end of the day, removal of the driver from the official source tree changes nothing for anyone.
Slashdot Mirror
{{citation-needed}}
Accurately, it forbids reprocessing by anyone but DoD. Which is the same as I originally stated as civil power plants are NOT under control of the DoD.
As for the citation needed part, shove it your ass you lazy, incompetent, moron. Learn how to use a fucking search engine. What a complete waste of skin. Yes, its a major pet peeve of mine.
You always know when you've met a complete fucking idiot when they say, "citation needed". This is not a research paper! Nothing proves to the world that you're both a fucking idiot and lazy more than saying that. Holy shit. So tired of idiots like you. In a day and age when information is literally at your finger tips, people who walk around saying, "citation needed", prove to be absolutely worthless, lazy, and completely incompetent. And no citation needed here.
Holy shit. Morons everywhere.
Fact: Whenever anyone mentions "facts", you know he tries to shove his dogmas down your throat.
There, fixed that for you.
geothermal
Geothermal has quakes associated with power generation.
wind
Wind is a very good source but no one is willing to invest in the infrustructure to deliver the power from large wind farms to the power grid. This is why Picken stopped building has massive wind farm in Texas.
Does anyone take into account the speed at which science accelerates? Isn't it likely that in 20-50 years we'll have tech that can just deal with the waste?
We already have the tech to deal with this issue. It can be handled in two ways. One is to reprocess it into new fuel rods which can then be used in the reactor from which it came. Two, it can be used as is in fast breeder-type reactor where it becomes enriched and then consumed as fuel. The combination means, rather than attempting to dispose of rods which contain 90%-97% usable fuel (aka, huge waste), something like 3% winds up needing disposal and much of that has a very short half life compared to what would have otherwise been thrown out.
Sadly, US law forbids reprocessing of fuel on US soil. So option one is out. Option two is not possible as I'm not aware of any certified fast breeder reactors. Certification alone, thanks to the massive red tape forced on us all by loony environmentalist, costs billions of dollars. As a result, perfectly safe designs are simply not certifiable because no one has the years to spend billions of dollars with yet another decade of more red tape and construction before they can even hope to reclaim their investment.
Its a really great example of why laws need to be changed and environmentalist need to be shot. Buses and cliffs are also an acceptable substitute; though it may be difficult to find room because of the large number of lawyers already in line.
True, but the average consumer is also pretty happy at DSL level speeds (Or at least won't justify spending more for the 100mbps service).
The average consumer was pretty happy at dial up speeds until they got a taste of something faster. Every day this becomes more and more true as more and more media rich services and web interfaces present themselves. Downloading music and watching video on line is now common for broadband users. Accordingly, users will continue to notice speed improvements up until they hit the endpoint service provider throttles or become saturated.
Shameful cost, though. $14 billion ...two Russia...
Costs can be substantially cheaper when you have a massive third world labor force begging to work. Additionally, Russian reactors are well known for having fall fewer safety controls built into their designs. So the combination of extremely cheap labor plus what is likely a far less safe design will certainly make for a far cheaper build.
What was your point as I don't see these are the least bit comparable, from a cost perspective.
Obviously throwing snowballs at each other is not entertainment enough if they need to throw them at cars. You're message is nasty and uninformed.
sub managed to bypass their sensors.
That's actually easy to do and the expected result for a stationary object resting near or on the bottom. Things that don't don't move and don't make noise are really hard to find. This is especially true where multiple thermoclines exist. Of course, that's also why its not the least bit embarrassing for the US Navy because for it to have any real meaning, the Chinese would have to know where the US Navy would be before hand, during a state of war.
The picture is even more bleak for trying to locate modern diesel subs when operating in their own backyard. These days diesel subs are extremely quiet. And this is exactly why the Navy has been working hard to increase its sonar capabilities. Congress has been pushing back on funding and environmental concerns but as I originally said, I'm sure the Navy will use this to help bolster their position.
Except that article is all fluff and lacking any type of intelligence.
Those were regularly scheduled exercises which take place annually in the exact same spot every year. The FACT is, no one in the military was embarrassed. Period. Only the idiot reporters, who improperly frame it as an embarrassment, have been embarrassed.
This is reality. The Chinese, wishing to cause a publicity stunt, hoping that idiots, which are frequently referred to as reporters, will pick up on a stunt are report on it because one, they are idiots, and two, won't actually check fact their story. And so, the Chinese decide to quietly sit in the middle of nowhere waiting for the US military to come along; as they've done every year preceding for who knows how many years. Sure enough, just like every year before, the US Navy comes cruising along in the exact same area. The Chinese pop up and start cruising toward the highest value target available; a US aircraft carrier. Next, idiot reporter states the military is embarrassed because he's too stupid to realize they are not.
The simple truth is, unless they are able to break US military cryptography, which I very seriously doubt, or if they are planning on a preemptive strike whereby China disappears from the face of the Earth, this is in no way, shape, or form, representative of any type of military action possible by the Chinese.
The Chinese do not pose any credible threat to the US Navy in open waters. None. Not one bit. They do, however, pose a threat in regional, shallow waters, which is why the Navy is pushing so hard to improve their sonar capabilities in that environment.
To summarize, the only people embarrassed by the Chinese are idiot reporters and ignorant masses who believe it speaks to China's Naval capabilities. In reality, it was a completely non-news event and reports and people who ignorantly repeat such stories are nothing but sock puppets for the Chinese propaganda machine; which the US Military is now trying to play to obtain yet additional funding.
Wish I understood why people think its okay to throw "soft" objects are moving vehicles. I've had my front windshield shattered from a water balloon and almost wrecked on rain soaked roads. Snowballs can be an even worse projectile.
If more people would understand some very basic math, thew would never do such things. Any object with mass hitting a vehicle at speed creates the potential for serious damage or injury.
Snowballs can and do damage vehicles. The proper mindset is, if these kids have time and the desire to throw snowballs at moving vehicles, their community is lacking for activities to keep them out of trouble.
The police did the right thing. Now the snow angels, that's a different issue....
Does my house get a vote?
The absolute worst thing you can do in an object oriented language,
Perhaps you misunderstand the subject. Caching, memoizing, and/or object pools are all extremely common optimizations. On Android, its the ONLY way you're going to see a video game sustain reasonable FPS. End of discussion.
Its easy to re-initialize an object's state to allow for re-use after it has been instantiated. When the object's life is done, rather than free it, you simply return it to a pool. When a new object of that type is required, you re-initiate an existing instance, remove it from the pool, and return it. This way the object never needs to go through the garbage collector.
Even in languages without a garbage collector (C++), these optimizations are still fairly common and their use almost always increases performance. Additionally, their use in of themselves are never a bad idea unless the system you're on is extremely constrained by memory which prevents the creation of pools and/or caches.
Exactly! And that's why focus follows mouse is more efficient both physically and from a screen real estate perspective.
Exactly. Another clueless and unfit judge who is completely out of touch with the Constitution and the US' history. The entire nation is built around the majority, not the minority. His type of persecution is exactly the reason so many puritans came here in the first place.
Long live the King!
I don't give a shit about "saving clicks."
Lots of hostility over working more inefficiently. Be my guest. I don't think anyone is forcing you to work more efficiently. Don't like it, don't use it.
more concrete method
That's suggests you don't believe the truth. Its not that hard to even ponder for a second. Every time you change windows, unless you're an alt-tab guy, you must move the mouse and click. With focus-follow-mouse, you just move the mouse and field focus is restored to whatever field last had focus unless you deem otherwise. Now if you wanted to change window and field focus you still need to either click on the new field or tab to it. In that case, its a break even, but you've still lost nothing.
For example, as I type, my mouse is over the subject field but input is still going into the comment field.
You frequently keep your mouse on your keyboard?
Exactly.
Does this imply that on more or less identical hardware (latest ARM + similar battery), the iPhone will always run apps faster and will always have better battery life than an Android phone?
From a performance perspective, no. Android can run native code should a developer decide he wishes to do so.
As for battery life, maybe. As newer devices come out their efficiency is likely to continue to improve but Android devices always have more work to do because they are more capable devices. This extra capability comes from their native ability to multitask. Included in their ability to multitask is the ability to run applications in the background. This has the effect of a perceived reduction in battery life, when compared to something like an iPhone.
The good news for Android devices is that all that I'm aware of allow for interchangeable batteries which means you can always swap out batteries to stay on the run. Furthermore, many phones have alternate battery models with increased capacity. For example, the G1 has batteries with double their stock capacity.
It gives focus to the window whereby the window then controls focus per normal rules.
You may type into the wrong window but its unlikely you'll type into the wrong field unless you application uses a truly crappy widget set.
For KDE and Gnome, and many others, it saves you clicks.
Eeek! My references to, "screens", should be, "windows".
I was appalled by the focus-follows-mouse misfeature.
Oddly, what you're calling a misfeature is what many would call click-to-focus. Click to focus needless requires extra clicking. Now do keep in mind there is a difference between raise on focus and focus follows mouse. I hate raise on focus but focus follows mouse is extremely superior to click-to-focus. Why? Because click-to-focus needlessly forces you to waste screen real estate when referencing one screen and inputting on another. This is even more so as you continue to add more and more references screens.
Like many technology related issues, many times is a case of what's different is bad or ugly. You were likely taught to use a computer with click-to-focus and therefore anything which is not that is bad. But once you get used to it, the click-to-focus style of using interfaces, assuming the interface is designed to work with it (*cough* no windows *cough*), anything else sucks and sucks badly.
So if you enjoy needlessly clicking for the sake of needlessly clicking, then by all means continue to use click-to-focus. But for those of us that enjoy fewer clicks and higher efficiency of interface, you'll not want to go back to the insanity which is click-to-focus.
I guess if you're one of those users who maximizes every window and never multi-tasks, then there is nothing wrong with click-to-focus. But if not, you need to give it a try for a week or two and you'll be wondering what the heck you were thinking. Of course, this assumes you're not using Windows, which is specifically designed to break focus follows mouse behavior. There, its usable but IMO, a wash because of Windows' UI behaviors.
LOL! I think you need to learn to read and comprehend what it is you've read.
Sorry but your going to lose this one.
Hate to tell you this, but you already lost. You're rebuttal literally affirmed that.
Oracle streams - a form of SQL-level replication.
Sounds like a subset of functionality is coming in PostgreSQL 9.0, which supports streaming replication in addition to transactional and log shipping.
High-performance compression that in many cases is faster than non-compression. You can encrypt it, too.
Here you can see Greenplum's commercial PostgreSQL offering which is 10x-20x faster than stock PostgreSQL. A large portion of its performance boost comes from its support of high performance and effective compression as well as parallelism. I strongly suspect its faster than Oracle in many use cases.
It's great you have B-tree indexes - Oracle also offers bitmap and there are cases where they are really useful. It's nice that you offer hash partitioning (if you do), but Oracle can partition on a half-dozen different things. Etc.
PostgreSQL has had bitmap indexes for a while now. Not to mention you can actually create your own index types too. PostgreSQL is very extensible. That's one of the reasons why PostGIS is so capable. And please note they just announced a major new release.
Let's also not forget PostgreSQL, like Oracle, supports function indexes, which are in of themselves extremely powerful.
Online redefinition (change your tables, views, etc. and have Oracle store everything up until you snap everything over at once - great for reducing downtimes).
PostgreSQL can do this too for most everything. There are some exceptions but by in large, PostgreSQL has this covered.
PostgreSQL is one of the few databases which supports transactional DDL and has done so for a very long time. So for example, you can create types populate and even create indexes within a single transactional boundary. Which means you can actually do all this within the confines of a TPC transaction, which can wait a long time (logging implications and caveats here). Then when ready you can commit the TPC transaction and *BLAM*, you new table, fully populated, with deferred index creation, is now online. That's just one example of what can be done with PostgreSQL.
Query analysis is enormously better than open software (explain plans, etc.)
PostgreSQL has very good query analysis features. Its query plans are also excellent and typically does so without the many hints Oracle often requires. Having said that, IMO, PostgreSQL query plans are only exceeded by that of Oracle's and even then PostgeSQL genetic planner offers capabilities to niche projects unavailable in even Oracle.
Virtual Private Databases
Hotly debated on PostgreSQL mailing lists. PostgreSQL offers this capability today via its schema and security models. They just don't call it VPDs.
PL/SQL, Java, etc. native to the DB
PostgreSQL blows Oracle and every other database out of the water when it comes to native PL language support. What's you're flavor? PL/pgSQL? Perl? Python? Tcl? Java? C? Lua? And I think I many be forgetting a couple.
No bones about it, Oracle is more feature rich. It is true Oracle still addresses many high end solutions where stock PostgreSQL does not yet compete. Just the same, many commercial PostgreSQL offerings are starting to compete in arenas which were previously Oracle only domains. Furthermore, stock PostgreSQL continues to egress further and further into extremely large databases and warehousing solutions. Additionally, once you step outside of high end databases, for the vast majority of people, PostgreSQL is a very competitive solution to Oracle and in many cases, unofficially faster.
It sounds like you need to take a hard second look at PostgreSQL because based on my of your comments, it sounds like you're somewhat out of touch with the current capabilities and features provided by PostgreSQL.
Bullshit there are plenty of independent musicians and small businesses getting along just fine without resorting to vigilante tactics.
Its bullshit because your proposed world, to which I responded, does not exist. That's the point of my comment. Should things take the direction you desire, everything changes from a crap-fest (currest state of things) to a royal shit hole (your imaginary yet desired world).
In short, your argument is that you just invalidated your original argument and validated my post.
Chris DiBona and other people have stated that it's a fork.
Its a fork only to the degree that anyone who developers a device driver is forking the kernel - which is to say its not. Its a "fork" in the most general of layman's expressions. Technically its not a fork at all. A fork is a divergent source tree. This is not a divergent source tree. This is the official source tree plus a driver. That's a huge difference.
If you want to call it a "fork", fine, but technically that's not accurate. With this definition of fork, every distribution and every device which runs Linux, has a "fork".
Well, it's not technically Linux these phones use, as it's now an incompatible Linux fork. So, I guess like the authors of this article, the company told Linus to go fork himself.
Well, what you're saying is not technically true either.
These phones absolutely do run the Linux kernel and anyone who says otherwise is misleading at best and trolling at worst. Period. Just because a single device driver was recently removed from the official source tree does not suddenly make the kernel any less Linux. To suggest that's the case is ignorance or stupidity.
The reality is, Android uses their own driver for power management. Their design stinks. They've refused to maintain it in the official source tree. The stinking, unmaintained driver was removed. Despite no longer being maintained in the official source tree, Google continues to maintain it in their own kernel tree - which is freely accessible to all. This was all previously covered here on /. Having said all that, it is extremely common for external drivers to be maintained outside of the official source tree for a variety of reasons. This is one of the primary reasons the dkms project exists.
Furthermore, since the source portion of Android's framework which accesses the power management driver is freely available, if someone wanted to, they could easily change the internal implementation to use Linux's official power management interface rather than Google's driver. Battery life is likely to only slightly suffer. And with small improvements to Linux's existing power management infrastructure, to bring it more in line with Google's implementation goals, battery life parity can be achieved while maintaining full Android compatibility.
At the end of the day, removal of the driver from the official source tree changes nothing for anyone.