"That does not follow. Microsoft can sue Redhat users anyway, regardless of any deal they have with Novell."
That's true. Before this deal Novell had made a promise to the open source community that if anybody filed a patent suit for anything in linux they would assert their patents against the aggressor. Novell has now reneged on that promise but only for MS. MS can sue redhad without any fear that novell would come to the aid of red hat.
"Novell's actions do not in any way affect Microsoft's relationship to other distros or their users."
Except as I said before this deal they could come to aid of anybody who was sued. Now they won't if MS is the aggresor.
"The defeat of Microsoft is the primary goal, so Novell's sin is that they are no longer threatening Microsoft."
No. I find it odd that you are a freebsd users, they tend to be smarter then that. You got it all backwards. Novell wasn't threatening to sue anybody, red hat wasn't either. It's MS who is threating to sue. It's MS who wants to destroy linux and open source. Novell had promised to help if anybody got sued by MS. They have now agreed never to defend anybody who is sued by MS for the next five years. Got it? Your summary was 180 degrees backwards.
So when MS sues a company who is using linux (let's say they sue ernie ball) novell will sit idly by and do nothing. Before they had promised to help ernie ball by countersuing with their patent portfolio. Novell will not lift a finger and it will be up to others to help ernie ball against one of the richest corporations in the world. Maybe that will be red hat, maybe it will be IBM, maybe it will just be the community. Ernie ball will not have to face the fight alone but novell has agreed to sit on the sidelines and not intefere with MS' efforts to destroy linux for the next five years.
There are no winners in the american justice system. Once the cops put the handcuffs on you the best possible outcome is that you will be found not guilty after a trial. At the end of that process you will have lost all your money, your house, your job, your friends, and (not in this case of course) most likely your wife and family.
That's the best possible outcome.
The worst possible outcome is that you will be found guilty and gang raped repeatedly in prison. In america any jail sentence carries with it an adjunct punishment of rape.
"and it's easy enough to put a hosted solution on the domain."
Whoa!. What makes you sure the hosting company is secure and respects your privacy? Any idiot can form a hosting company and there are billions out there that charge five bucks a month. What makes you think that any of those companies are more "respectable" then google? You claim that you can not trust gmail.com what makes you think you can trust some_cheap_hosting.com?
"It's simply a matter of professionalism. "
You keep using that word but I don't think you know what it means. Professionalism isn't about making buying decisions based on an email address. Sorry to break it to you.
What's amazing to me is that your "diligence" goes no further then checking the domain of the email address. You are perfectly willing to cut a deal with a company using some fly by night hosting service or even hosting the mail server at the sales persons home DSL line but refuse to do business with a company hosting their emails at world class infrastructure like google, microsoft and yahoo have.
Your inability to properly evaluate the risks you may encounter when dealing with a company tells volumes about what kind of a person you are and what kind of a company you run. Risk management is an important (if not the most important) skill of a manager at any level. A manager who is unable to assess risks properly and makes judgments based on completely stupid and baseless risk factors while ignoring other obvious risks is an incompetent manager and their business should fire them right away.
If you worked for me and you said you chose company A over company B to provide service X because the company B sales person gave you a gmail.com email address you would be fired on the spot. If I did a little digging and found out that company A was hosting their mail servers at some_cheap_hosting.com then I might even sue you for negligence.
"My understanding is that this is an indemnity deal. Microsoft says it won't sue Novell over patents."
No the agreement doesn't say that at all. It says MS will not sue Novell CUSTOMERS. It can still sue novell anytime it wants. The agreement is only good for five years. After the five years are up MS can (and probably will) sue novell customers.
MS claims that it has patents on unspecified technologies that in linux (that's probably true because they have patents of lots of silly stuff). Before this deal if MS sued somebody novell had promised to come to their aid by countersuing with their patent portfolio. MS has now taken that threat away. MS is now free to sue anybody that USES linux and novell will not come to their aid.
Of course IBM, Redhat, HP etc may still come countersue and the community at large would in all likelyhood find prior art and invalidate the patent anyway but that's not the point. The point is that Novell has now been taken away as a threat to MS for the next five years.
What happens after the five years are over? Well then Novell customers are now prime targets!. There is a high probability that MS will hand over specs and code to novell in the name of interop that will certainly violate MS IP. MS will pick what they view as their most solid patents and make sure that novell incorporates these into the GPLed projects. In other words "they will have set us up the bomb".
Any code coming from novell from this point on should be treated as a loaded weapon.
"Accountability, reliability, data security and privacy come to mind."
In that case you should investigate who is hosting the email server of all your vendors. Only when you have determined that the email servers are being hosted by a reputable company should you do business with someone. For example if company A makes a proposal to sell you a product which would save you some money but they are not hosting their own mail servers and instead are relying on a hosted exchange server providor you have never heard of then you should not buy their product.
No it doesn't. It says you are small minded bigot who makes major decisions based on irrelevant criteria.
Not everybody want to host their own mail servers you know. What about people who use google for hosting their domain MX records. You know google offers that too right? So the mail you sent to joeblowinc.com may actually be hosted on the google mail servers (GASP!!!). Do you check the MX records to see if that's the case too?
What if they are using a hosted exchange server is that acceptable to you or do you only buy goods and services from people who host their own exchange server?
What else do you check about their email servers? Do you check to see if they are running sendmail or postfix and only give your business to people who run postfix? What if they are running qmail do you kick them out of the office and tell them to never come back?
Are you only bigoted about gmail addresses or do you also discriminate against people who have.mac email addresses too?
In my mind any corporation that uses exchange is being run by idiots but hey I don't base my decisions solely what they use to host their emails.
Maybe they just wanted a more flexible way to sort their emails. Outlook filters suck and exchange doesn't support tags.
Aside from that. What does it say about you and your company if your decisions of what products and services to buy are based on peoples email addresses?
To be fair you use the library as much if not more then you use the language. If I can't interact with databases, if I can't download a library that scrapes web sites, connect to SOAP services easily, authenticate against a LDAP server then no matter how beautiful the language is I can't use it.
One lesson ruby learned early was that you don't get anywhere till you build your own version of CPAN (still the king!). Build your library, build a way to install, uninstall and upgrade your libraries smoothly and your language will take off.
"Thinking about the traditional and dirty way to do the same thing: write scripts to 'post' webpages and extract the return pages."
That's so cute, "the traditional way". Soap is just another in the long line of technologies that attempt at RPC. SOAP is actually a way to make CORBA more palletable. CORBA was universally despised for it's complexity so SOAP was supposed to simplify it. The only way to make RPC simple is to neuter it so that's what they did. Alas there was a reason for all that complexity and as SOAP becomes more and more complex it starts to look like CORBA more and more except of course that every implementation is incompatible with every other one.
Today I was trying to use a SSH java applet to connect to a server in IE7. IE7 refused to run the applet because it did not recognize the signature. I added the site to my trusted sites list but it still refused to load it. I went into advanced setting and told it to install unsigned activex controls but it still do it. After struggling for a little while longer I installed firefox (this was not my computer) and ran the applet I needed to run. Installing firefox and then installing java took less time then my struggles trying to get IE7 to load an open sourced applet.
All this "protection" in IE7 is there to try and limit which software you run. MS has decided that before they can beat open source they need to winnow the list of companies that deal with it and this is a good first step to do that with. If this same applet was signed by novell I am sure it would run in IE.
I don't think anybody disputes any of that. When a scientists says "it's X number of light years away" he means "it's X number of light years away given all we know about measuring distances that far out". It's not meant to be accurate withing a few feet.
It's a very long series of conjectures basically. You measure the redshifts from known close star and "fixed" stars (star that don't appear to move). You come up with a series of ratios, you interpolate the distance based on redshift.
I am simplifying vastly here but you get the gist. It's about measuring close things and then using what you know about them to measure far things.
Recently apple opened up their iTunes store in NZ. On that very day the NZ govt passed a law making it legal for people to copy their music from one format to another. Before that it was illegal in NZ to rip your CDs to MP3 or any other format.
Here is the odd thing. If it's now your right to be able to format shift the music you bought wouldn't any technology that prevents you from doing that be illegal?
Personally I think putting business logic in the database is wrong. It's harder to debug, harder to version control, harder to write.
Putting some code to handle data integrity is OK but not business logic. Performance isn't everything. I would rather have an application that runs slower and is easier to maintain then the other way around.
"unless the application is written in C. Databases are generally written in C/C++. Applications are generally written in Java,Perl,Python,Ruby. None of these can compete with C."
This is nonsensical. If I write in python the python VM compiles and then runs my code. The VM is written in C. If I write in PL/PSQL then the postgres interprets my PL/PSQL line by line (it never gets compiled). Running your business logic in java should be significantly faster then writing it in PL/PSQL except when the application needs to transfer an ungodly amount of data over the network.
You build a web site which lets people enter some data (let's say it's employees for now). Your web site also lets them search the web site so they can find a particular employee. You have used an ORM in developing your web site because you know it's wrong to sprinkle your code with SQL statements. You have chosen to use postgres because it's "robust".
Your customer does a search for "McFadden" but is unable to find the employee because she typed in "Mcfadden" when she entered the data. Your ORM does not support weird postgres syntax like ILIKE or *~. Oh I know all I have to do is to change to collation on that column to case insensitive english. Nope postgres does not support per column collations and it does not have any case insensitive collations.
Ah well forget it. Your ORM lets you change databases and every other database in the world supports case insensitive where clauses so you switch.
That's reality for you. Also in real life people need easy to set up, async, multi master, replication and failover.
"If these features are important to you (and the legions of others you refer to), then you and they can implement the features yourselves."
Adding asynchronous multi master replication is not a trivial task. I could understand your point if it a minor feature though. Even then it's easier to use something else then to hack postgres code. People who want those feature end up taking the path of least resistance which is to use mysql or firebird or oracle or whatever.
"Pray tell what DB am I supposed to be developing on?"
There are dozens. Lots of them are open source. What makes you think mssql is the only database on the market?
"I suppose you also know exactly what non-MS language I should be using, too."
There are dozens. Most of them are open source.
"The right tools are the ones that work well for you. It sounds like you have not gotten SQL server to work for you and that's a shame because lots of other organizations figured it out and spend a lot less $ for it than, say, an Oracle shop."
Feature for reature oracle costs the same as SQL server. The very top end product of oracle costs more then the very top end version of sql server but it does lots more.
Whats more oracle works on lots of operating systems including free ones like linux and solaris. SQL server only runs on windows and some version require SQL server enterprise edition which is not cheap so you have to add the cost of windows to the cost of SQL server before you make a comparison.
I have worked with SQL server for the past eight years in two different jobs. It's how I make my living. I hate it with a passion. I can't believe that businesses actually rely on it to make money. In my experience the only people who like it are the people who never used anything else and people who are afraid of unix or the command line.
SQL server has crappy error messages. It's really hard to debug when something goes wrong. If I get another "multiple step process has caused an error" message I am going to scream.
Aside from that SQL server promotes vendor lock (so does.NET). MS wants you to use the full MS stack..NET, windows, SQL server, and VB or C#. If you veer outside of their stack with any of their elements you suffer serious pain.
If you don't mind getting your chain yanked by your vendor once in a while by all means use it.
"Attaching a stigma to certain platforms or technologies for certain jobs is just stupid and childish."
And yet it still happens. The windows geek attack a stigma to linux users are being unwashed communist hippies and the linux users attach a stigma to windows geeks are brainless button pushers and screen painters.
That's reality and I certainly don't see it going away any time soon.
Like it or not there is a certain amount of l33tness in having a job where you can use a mac and cool platforms like ROR. It goes double or triple if you are using emacs and lisp/smalltalk/haskell/erlang.
President Bush said he looked into Putin's soul and sees a good man there. He calls putin "putty put" or "puddin put" or something like that. He has a very funny nickname for putin.
I think you may be surprised at how widespread the desire for freedom is. The problem is that people don't think they have a choice. For example if you were able to make a device which let you fast forward through the stupid ads and messages on a DVD and told people about it they would choose the product that gave them the freedom not to be forced to view stuff they don't want to see.
The FSF is going on the right path here. Point out how vista takes away your freedoms, point out that there are alternatives. It used to be that only programmers were worried about software freedom but now that the software companies are going after the consumers with DRM they too will realize how important the freedom to use the products you bought is.
"No, I simply pointed out that there is nothing modern about it. "
Well other then the fact virtually every program written today is written using objects there is nothing modern about it all. What a stupid thing to say. You really thought you were trying to say something profound with that?
"I personally don't use ORMs because if I wanted to work in an OO style I would use an object database instead of a relational database."
Ah you are one of those people too.
"Just because you invent excuses not to use postgres, that doesn't mean all the people choosing mysql are doing it for your invented reason."
No they are using for their own reasons. There are features they want the mysql has and postgres doesn't It's not just one feature, I pointed out several that postgres doesn't have, there are dozens more. There are lots of features people want and postgres doesn't offer them so they choose a different database. That's why postgres has such a tiny percentage of the database market. It lacks a lot of really important features people want.
"And just because someone disagrees with your opinion, doesn't make them dickwads or "fanbois"."
No it doesn't. It's how they disagree that makes them dickwads and fanbois. Remember when postgres didn't have alter table? Go back and read the posts about how dickwads (like you!) gave workarounds and pretended that the only people who wanted alter table were stupid and how they were a small minority etc. Those dickwads were making the exact same arguments you are. Those dickwads were wrong. Eventually even the stubborn postgres developers implemented alter table thereby making the dickwads the joke of history. Postgres will one day clean up their collation mess. They will one day implement a case insensitive collation thereby joining every other database in the world. That day you too will be a joke of history and this thread will one day be resurrected by some people looking for an example of how close minded dickwad-ish postgres users are.
"Most mysql users don't even know that postgresql doesn't have this, I doubt its affected the choice for even.1% of mysql users."
Oh I keep forgetting. Mysql users are stupid, they are unable to compare features of databases. Postgres users are smart that's why they don't think outer joins are such a great idea.
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"That does not follow. Microsoft can sue Redhat users anyway, regardless of any deal they have with Novell."
That's true. Before this deal Novell had made a promise to the open source community that if anybody filed a patent suit for anything in linux they would assert their patents against the aggressor. Novell has now reneged on that promise but only for MS. MS can sue redhad without any fear that novell would come to the aid of red hat.
"Novell's actions do not in any way affect Microsoft's relationship to other distros or their users."
Except as I said before this deal they could come to aid of anybody who was sued. Now they won't if MS is the aggresor.
"The defeat of Microsoft is the primary goal, so Novell's sin is that they are no longer threatening Microsoft."
No. I find it odd that you are a freebsd users, they tend to be smarter then that. You got it all backwards. Novell wasn't threatening to sue anybody, red hat wasn't either. It's MS who is threating to sue. It's MS who wants to destroy linux and open source. Novell had promised to help if anybody got sued by MS. They have now agreed never to defend anybody who is sued by MS for the next five years. Got it? Your summary was 180 degrees backwards.
So when MS sues a company who is using linux (let's say they sue ernie ball) novell will sit idly by and do nothing. Before they had promised to help ernie ball by countersuing with their patent portfolio. Novell will not lift a finger and it will be up to others to help ernie ball against one of the richest corporations in the world. Maybe that will be red hat, maybe it will be IBM, maybe it will just be the community. Ernie ball will not have to face the fight alone but novell has agreed to sit on the sidelines and not intefere with MS' efforts to destroy linux for the next five years.
There are no winners in the american justice system. Once the cops put the handcuffs on you the best possible outcome is that you will be found not guilty after a trial. At the end of that process you will have lost all your money, your house, your job, your friends, and (not in this case of course) most likely your wife and family.
That's the best possible outcome.
The worst possible outcome is that you will be found guilty and gang raped repeatedly in prison. In america any jail sentence carries with it an adjunct punishment of rape.
"and it's easy enough to put a hosted solution on the domain."
Whoa!. What makes you sure the hosting company is secure and respects your privacy? Any idiot can form a hosting company and there are billions out there that charge five bucks a month. What makes you think that any of those companies are more "respectable" then google? You claim that you can not trust gmail.com what makes you think you can trust some_cheap_hosting.com?
"It's simply a matter of professionalism. "
You keep using that word but I don't think you know what it means. Professionalism isn't about making buying decisions based on an email address. Sorry to break it to you.
What's amazing to me is that your "diligence" goes no further then checking the domain of the email address. You are perfectly willing to cut a deal with a company using some fly by night hosting service or even hosting the mail server at the sales persons home DSL line but refuse to do business with a company hosting their emails at world class infrastructure like google, microsoft and yahoo have.
Your inability to properly evaluate the risks you may encounter when dealing with a company tells volumes about what kind of a person you are and what kind of a company you run. Risk management is an important (if not the most important) skill of a manager at any level. A manager who is unable to assess risks properly and makes judgments based on completely stupid and baseless risk factors while ignoring other obvious risks is an incompetent manager and their business should fire them right away.
If you worked for me and you said you chose company A over company B to provide service X because the company B sales person gave you a gmail.com email address you would be fired on the spot. If I did a little digging and found out that company A was hosting their mail servers at some_cheap_hosting.com then I might even sue you for negligence.
"My understanding is that this is an indemnity deal. Microsoft says it won't sue Novell over patents."
No the agreement doesn't say that at all. It says MS will not sue Novell CUSTOMERS. It can still sue novell anytime it wants. The agreement is only good for five years. After the five years are up MS can (and probably will) sue novell customers.
MS claims that it has patents on unspecified technologies that in linux (that's probably true because they have patents of lots of silly stuff). Before this deal if MS sued somebody novell had promised to come to their aid by countersuing with their patent portfolio. MS has now taken that threat away. MS is now free to sue anybody that USES linux and novell will not come to their aid.
Of course IBM, Redhat, HP etc may still come countersue and the community at large would in all likelyhood find prior art and invalidate the patent anyway but that's not the point. The point is that Novell has now been taken away as a threat to MS for the next five years.
What happens after the five years are over? Well then Novell customers are now prime targets!. There is a high probability that MS will hand over specs and code to novell in the name of interop that will certainly violate MS IP. MS will pick what they view as their most solid patents and make sure that novell incorporates these into the GPLed projects. In other words "they will have set us up the bomb".
Any code coming from novell from this point on should be treated as a loaded weapon.
"Accountability, reliability, data security and privacy come to mind."
In that case you should investigate who is hosting the email server of all your vendors. Only when you have determined that the email servers are being hosted by a reputable company should you do business with someone. For example if company A makes a proposal to sell you a product which would save you some money but they are not hosting their own mail servers and instead are relying on a hosted exchange server providor you have never heard of then you should not buy their product.
No it doesn't. It says you are small minded bigot who makes major decisions based on irrelevant criteria.
.mac email addresses too?
Not everybody want to host their own mail servers you know. What about people who use google for hosting their domain MX records. You know google offers that too right? So the mail you sent to joeblowinc.com may actually be hosted on the google mail servers (GASP!!!). Do you check the MX records to see if that's the case too?
What if they are using a hosted exchange server is that acceptable to you or do you only buy goods and services from people who host their own exchange server?
What else do you check about their email servers? Do you check to see if they are running sendmail or postfix and only give your business to people who run postfix? What if they are running qmail do you kick them out of the office and tell them to never come back?
Are you only bigoted about gmail addresses or do you also discriminate against people who have
In my mind any corporation that uses exchange is being run by idiots but hey I don't base my decisions solely what they use to host their emails.
So you are completely against using hosted exchange servers then?
Maybe they just wanted a more flexible way to sort their emails. Outlook filters suck and exchange doesn't support tags.
Aside from that. What does it say about you and your company if your decisions of what products and services to buy are based on peoples email addresses?
To be fair you use the library as much if not more then you use the language. If I can't interact with databases, if I can't download a library that scrapes web sites, connect to SOAP services easily, authenticate against a LDAP server then no matter how beautiful the language is I can't use it.
One lesson ruby learned early was that you don't get anywhere till you build your own version of CPAN (still the king!). Build your library, build a way to install, uninstall and upgrade your libraries smoothly and your language will take off.
In conclusion. It's the library stupid.
"Thinking about the traditional and dirty way to do the same thing: write scripts to 'post' webpages and extract the return pages."
That's so cute, "the traditional way". Soap is just another in the long line of technologies that attempt at RPC. SOAP is actually a way to make CORBA more palletable. CORBA was universally despised for it's complexity so SOAP was supposed to simplify it. The only way to make RPC simple is to neuter it so that's what they did. Alas there was a reason for all that complexity and as SOAP becomes more and more complex it starts to look like CORBA more and more except of course that every implementation is incompatible with every other one.
Today I was trying to use a SSH java applet to connect to a server in IE7. IE7 refused to run the applet because it did not recognize the signature. I added the site to my trusted sites list but it still refused to load it. I went into advanced setting and told it to install unsigned activex controls but it still do it. After struggling for a little while longer I installed firefox (this was not my computer) and ran the applet I needed to run. Installing firefox and then installing java took less time then my struggles trying to get IE7 to load an open sourced applet.
All this "protection" in IE7 is there to try and limit which software you run. MS has decided that before they can beat open source they need to winnow the list of companies that deal with it and this is a good first step to do that with. If this same applet was signed by novell I am sure it would run in IE.
I don't think anybody disputes any of that. When a scientists says "it's X number of light years away" he means "it's X number of light years away given all we know about measuring distances that far out". It's not meant to be accurate withing a few feet.
It's a very long series of conjectures basically. You measure the redshifts from known close star and "fixed" stars (star that don't appear to move). You come up with a series of ratios, you interpolate the distance based on redshift.
I am simplifying vastly here but you get the gist. It's about measuring close things and then using what you know about them to measure far things.
Recently apple opened up their iTunes store in NZ. On that very day the NZ govt passed a law making it legal for people to copy their music from one format to another. Before that it was illegal in NZ to rip your CDs to MP3 or any other format.
Here is the odd thing. If it's now your right to be able to format shift the music you bought wouldn't any technology that prevents you from doing that be illegal?
Personally I think putting business logic in the database is wrong. It's harder to debug, harder to version control, harder to write.
Putting some code to handle data integrity is OK but not business logic. Performance isn't everything. I would rather have an application that runs slower and is easier to maintain then the other way around.
"unless the application is written in C. Databases are generally written in C/C++. Applications are generally written in Java,Perl,Python,Ruby. None of these can compete with C."
This is nonsensical. If I write in python the python VM compiles and then runs my code. The VM is written in C. If I write in PL/PSQL then the postgres interprets my PL/PSQL line by line (it never gets compiled). Running your business logic in java should be significantly faster then writing it in PL/PSQL except when the application needs to transfer an ungodly amount of data over the network.
Here is reality.
You build a web site which lets people enter some data (let's say it's employees for now). Your web site also lets them search the web site so they can find a particular employee. You have used an ORM in developing your web site because you know it's wrong to sprinkle your code with SQL statements. You have chosen to use postgres because it's "robust".
Your customer does a search for "McFadden" but is unable to find the employee because she typed in "Mcfadden" when she entered the data. Your ORM does not support weird postgres syntax like ILIKE or *~. Oh I know all I have to do is to change to collation on that column to case insensitive english. Nope postgres does not support per column collations and it does not have any case insensitive collations.
Ah well forget it. Your ORM lets you change databases and every other database in the world supports case insensitive where clauses so you switch.
That's reality for you. Also in real life people need easy to set up, async, multi master, replication and failover.
"If these features are important to you (and the legions of others you refer to), then you and they can implement the features yourselves."
Adding asynchronous multi master replication is not a trivial task. I could understand your point if it a minor feature though. Even then it's easier to use something else then to hack postgres code. People who want those feature end up taking the path of least resistance which is to use mysql or firebird or oracle or whatever.
"Pray tell what DB am I supposed to be developing on?"
There are dozens. Lots of them are open source. What makes you think mssql is the only database on the market?
"I suppose you also know exactly what non-MS language I should be using, too."
There are dozens. Most of them are open source.
"The right tools are the ones that work well for you. It sounds like you have not gotten SQL server to work for you and that's a shame because lots of other organizations figured it out and spend a lot less $ for it than, say, an Oracle shop."
Feature for reature oracle costs the same as SQL server. The very top end product of oracle costs more then the very top end version of sql server but it does lots more.
Whats more oracle works on lots of operating systems including free ones like linux and solaris. SQL server only runs on windows and some version require SQL server enterprise edition which is not cheap so you have to add the cost of windows to the cost of SQL server before you make a comparison.
I have worked with SQL server for the past eight years in two different jobs. It's how I make my living. I hate it with a passion. I can't believe that businesses actually rely on it to make money. In my experience the only people who like it are the people who never used anything else and people who are afraid of unix or the command line.
SQL server has crappy error messages. It's really hard to debug when something goes wrong. If I get another "multiple step process has caused an error" message I am going to scream.
.NET). MS wants you to use the full MS stack. .NET, windows, SQL server, and VB or C#. If you veer outside of their stack with any of their elements you suffer serious pain.
Aside from that SQL server promotes vendor lock (so does
If you don't mind getting your chain yanked by your vendor once in a while by all means use it.
"Attaching a stigma to certain platforms or technologies for certain jobs is just stupid and childish."
And yet it still happens. The windows geek attack a stigma to linux users are being unwashed communist hippies and the linux users attach a stigma to windows geeks are brainless button pushers and screen painters.
That's reality and I certainly don't see it going away any time soon.
Like it or not there is a certain amount of l33tness in having a job where you can use a mac and cool platforms like ROR. It goes double or triple if you are using emacs and lisp/smalltalk/haskell/erlang.
That's just the way things are.
President Bush said he looked into Putin's soul and sees a good man there. He calls putin "putty put" or "puddin put" or something like that. He has a very funny nickname for putin.
I think you may be surprised at how widespread the desire for freedom is. The problem is that people don't think they have a choice. For example if you were able to make a device which let you fast forward through the stupid ads and messages on a DVD and told people about it they would choose the product that gave them the freedom not to be forced to view stuff they don't want to see.
The FSF is going on the right path here. Point out how vista takes away your freedoms, point out that there are alternatives. It used to be that only programmers were worried about software freedom but now that the software companies are going after the consumers with DRM they too will realize how important the freedom to use the products you bought is.
The only difference between the distros you sited are the programs running on them and where the repositories point to.
Why. Ballmer is promising to sue people. He is not promising to build better products.
This is all about lawsuits. When the CEO of MS is threating lawsuits we all better stand up and take notice.
"No, I simply pointed out that there is nothing modern about it. "
.1% of mysql users."
Well other then the fact virtually every program written today is written using objects there is nothing modern about it all. What a stupid thing to say. You really thought you were trying to say something profound with that?
"I personally don't use ORMs because if I wanted to work in an OO style I would use an object database instead of a relational database."
Ah you are one of those people too.
"Just because you invent excuses not to use postgres, that doesn't mean all the people choosing mysql are doing it for your invented reason."
No they are using for their own reasons. There are features they want the mysql has and postgres doesn't It's not just one feature, I pointed out several that postgres doesn't have, there are dozens more. There are lots of features people want and postgres doesn't offer them so they choose a different database. That's why postgres has such a tiny percentage of the database market. It lacks a lot of really important features people want.
"And just because someone disagrees with your opinion, doesn't make them dickwads or "fanbois"."
No it doesn't. It's how they disagree that makes them dickwads and fanbois. Remember when postgres didn't have alter table? Go back and read the posts about how dickwads (like you!) gave workarounds and pretended that the only people who wanted alter table were stupid and how they were a small minority etc. Those dickwads were making the exact same arguments you are. Those dickwads were wrong. Eventually even the stubborn postgres developers implemented alter table thereby making the dickwads the joke of history. Postgres will one day clean up their collation mess. They will one day implement a case insensitive collation thereby joining every other database in the world. That day you too will be a joke of history and this thread will one day be resurrected by some people looking for an example of how close minded dickwad-ish postgres users are.
"Most mysql users don't even know that postgresql doesn't have this, I doubt its affected the choice for even
Oh I keep forgetting. Mysql users are stupid, they are unable to compare features of databases. Postgres users are smart that's why they don't think outer joins are such a great idea.