lmao. You pwnd him pretty hard. But you really have a point... email ISN'T ftp. I remember when I was writing an email client I did a lot of research into the history of email. Email was never originally meant to carry binary attachments. The whole idea of binary attachments were an afterthought and horrible hack. Ever look at a raw attachment? Looks like regular ol' ascii doesn't it? That's because to work around the RFC (which states that binary data is not allowed in an email), a plain text encoding was used to send binary data. Email was never meant to send mp3's and frankly does a horrible job at it!!!
That said, email is usually fine and dandy for the home user, but WAY overused and misunderstood in the business world. I remember a few weeks back someone trying to get together a meeting (seven people attending). The emails went on for over a week and totaled over 45 in my inbox. And the email I should have recieved (ahem, the one actually confirming the time and date), was only emailed to a few people and assumed it made it to everyone. I can't even tell you how many calls we get saying legit email was tagged and bounced by the anti-spam gateway. What's the point of email if you have to call? Then there's the forwarding. "I forwarded you this attachment". Needless to say the attachment wasn't included in the forward because many times they are stripped when you hit forward or reply. So again, I have to make a call to explain to them what happened.
Again, all that is fine and dandy for home users. But I just wish the business world would get its head out of its ass. These people are supposed to be "professionals". "Professional" just seems to be a way of saying "I'm too damn good to learn to use the right tools to make things work smoothly." Every organization of reasonable size should have a message board, project management tools, a documentation system (probably a wiki), and a file sharing server. If people actually used those, it would take 90% of the frustration out of my day.
I still can't believe this tool. He actually thinks the threat to the FBI is what prompted the CentOS developer (lead dev if I remember correctly). More likely the developer got tired of this fagtart harassing him. The city manager justified his actions by saying that anyone who is experienced on the internet knows better than to follow directions on a website. When the directions are to consult your site's administrator, I think those are pretty safe instructions.
And I can't believe this twiddle dick STILL hasn't apologized. He shoots back with "there should have been better directions". It is mind boggling that in 20 years of his supposed IT experience he's never run into a default webserver page. I really think this ass clown is deserving of any and all harassment he gets. In fact, he is deserving of a bill for CentOS's wasted time. If I had go-go gadget balls, I'd teabag that butthole surfer from 12 states away.
One is a father of the Open Source movement, the other is instrumental in disseminating anti-FUD regarding legal threats to OSS. I'm sort of wondering what it'd take to impress you.
lmao. ESR the father of the open source movement? You mean RMS? Maybe you get the two confused. ESR has written little software and his software to loudmouth ratio isn't near that of RMS. I've read a lot of RMS's work and it's nothing impressive. I remember a few months back Microsoft invited him in for an interview, and his response was that of a 12 year old. It was completely childish. This is who you want representing the movement?
As for PJ, she's done almost nothing. She has no technical standing to be an authority in any anti-fud matters. She's not a lawyer. She's basically a pundit. She's no better than the likes of Laura Diddo. Microsoft shouts, she shouts louder. I posed the question, what has she actually done for us. I haven't recieved one response other than she battles anti-fud. In reality her abrasive approach just makes open source users look like pony-tailed sandle wearers.
Open source doesn't need loud mouth clowns like these. In years of working in mixed environments I've found the best way to get open source used isn't by being a loud mouth. It's with level headedness. IBM and Redhat have been so successful with open source because they aren't shooting off their mouths every five minutes and seem like a mature responsible vendors that people feel comfortable using. I wish some other people would get the clue.
I'd sure as hell never heard of them. So I googled them. The first result? "PointCast: The Rise and Fall of an Internet Star". At one point the article says Microsoft was bundling their software with internet explorer. There will always be stubborn dumbasses. And watching them fall on their faces will never stop being funny.
I don't think this is a huge thing to get up-n-arms about either. PJ at Groklaw is very quick to react and shoot off her mouth. She seems to have Eric Raymond syndrome. She thinks she's much more important to open source than she actually is. I know this isn't a popular opinion on slashdot, but I've yet to see her do anything important. She seems more like a liability than anything. I would absolutly love someone to prove me wrong, but time after time she shoots off her mouth and makes outrageous accusations without any real understanding of the issue. It just makes open source users look like even bigger zealots.
It may take off, but I doubt it will be revolutionary. I think there's an Airport capable of this, and it really hasn't been that huge either. The article doesn't understand the media PC _at all_. They assume you're putting a full fledged ugly grey cased PC next to your TV. I don't know a single person who's actually ever done that. More likely you've got a Mini itx box with a big laptop hard drive and maybe a TV-in card (if you want a DVR). Have you seen the Mini itx cases out there? They look better than most of the components I have next to my stereo.
For about 350-400 bucks you can have a box that:
Can watch and burn dual layer DVD's
Can listen to and burn CD's and internet radio (and basically any other audio content)
Load full of emulators and Gametap and play games on
Browse the web
And a low power always on media file server that people coming over to your house can grab media from
Like I said, I'm sure there's a market for people who just want to play MP3's over their stereo. But there are already much better solutions that can do more that aren't tied so closely with DRM.
Ok, this is probably one of the biggest mess of haphazard comments I've ever seen on slashdot. I guess this is a good indication of how many people RTFA. This article has _nothing_ to do with the speed of Windows itself, but the time lapse of release cycles. Please mod accordingly!
here and here. It's comical really. The first story goes on and on and on how lean Microsoft has become with their new development process. Obviously little has changed. It's also comical that their solution to these sorts of things always seems to be a management shakedown. A shakedown doesn't really help anything if there is a deeper problem. In reality, it will probably just result in further delays.
Didn't this _exact_ same sort of thing happen like six months ago? I remember a delay being announced, a management shakedown, and a commitment that a new development process would acclerate Vista's arrival. I remember it even being discussed on slashdot. Oh my if I could only find the link...
I know this was meant as a joke, but was this ever common practice? I only say it because I remember working on an NCR system a few years ago, and instead of using ls, all their examples used echo *. ls existed on that machine, however. Was there a time in Unix when ls didn't exist? It'd be really cool to see in what versions today's common place Unix commands arrived.
Ehtereal is great and has saved me many hours diagnosing anything from network issues to application layer problems. Here are a few more I use constantly...
Netcat - In the original netcat readme he describes it as one of those tools that should have become a standard tool for Unix admins. Well, as of 2006, its basically achieved that status. It's one of the most useful network tools ever and nowadays most BSD and Linux distros come with it in a standard install.
Grep, cut, sed, awk, tar, gzip, sort, uniq, | (pipes), bash, [insert other small extremely useful command line tool] - These tools let me do things in 10 seconds it would take 10 minutes to do in a gui. I can't imagine these tools not being around in 10 years. They are the computer equivalent to a pencil and paper. So simple, yet so damn useful. It's nice to know that no matter how complex the world gets I can always go to a Unix box and get some real work done with these.
High level scripting languages (Perl, Python, Ruby, Tcl, Bash) - It's nice to be able to scale down. If something's too complex for pipes, I like being able to write a useful, scalable, pipe-able, command line program in 30 lines.
The future isn't Open Office
on
Office Delayed, Too
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Open Office really isn't that great. It's a good transition piece of software that will hopefully get people away from Office's closed formats, but I can't see it being used for the long term. However, right now, it's the closest thing to office as far as support for their file formats. So it's playing a very important role. Trying to be an open source version of Microsoft's garbage.
There is a much more fundamental problem that needs to be cured before we can evolve to the lightweight likes of abiword and kword. People using their office suite for things they shouldn't. It's that simple. It is almost like the whole business world learned one piece of software and decided they would do _everything_ with it. In college I had to take an Office class. The entire book was written in Word. It was possibly the most poorly published book I've ever seen. Square peg in a round hole. There are much better tools for that sort of thing. What about when people send you a single picture as a word file. Try to do their whole payroll on a spreadsheet. Create webpages in Word. Use their email as ftp. Don't even get me started on Powerpoint...
To get back to the point... If people actually used their Office productivity suite for what it was meant for, then they wouldn't be tied so tightly to Office. But they are dumb, and their entire way of using computers are based on a house of cards. And they will be stuck with Office. Hopefully they will find a way out with Open Office and evolve to Abiword and Kword.
If the "business" people I've dealt with are any indication, then that trend isn't going away. Their attitude is "but we've always done it this way". Just because you've always done it that way doesn't make it the right way...
I registered a domain with them a few years ago. It made me put in my business name so I made one up. For the next year I got sales calls asking if I'm the business owner of this fake business. I'm _very_ careful about those little privacy checkboxes too. I registered a domain a couple years later with my cell number as the contact. Sure enough, I got sales calls on my cell phone for the next six months (before that I never got one).
The only upside to the whole thing was office depot kept sending coupons to my fake business.
bottleneck order for you: network bandwidth, hard drive, ram, then _maybe_ cpu.
Basically, it isn't going to help you much. If you put a lot of ram into it that'd probably help (try to get as much into ram as possible). If you have a huge amount of pics (60 gigs) a 10,000 rpm Raptor sata would probably be a good investment.
All that doesn't mean much if the network pipe is too small to dish out that many pics.
These students sound like a bunch of whiney bitches and I completely agree with the teacher in this. Laptops do exactly what she said, put up a fence between the teacher and the students. I've discussed this with professors before and many of them feel the exact same way. Laptops create an atmosphere where the students are doing little more than transcribing. You read the book for that. You go to class for interactivity. These students are simply too young and too immature to understand that. What the students also fail to understand is it's the teachers discretion how they teach. I remember in school when teachers wouldn't allow calculators because they felt it was a shortcut and you didn't _really_ learn the math (you learned how to use the calculator). I hated it and bitched and moaned. Looking back I wish more teachers would have done that.
In all my years, I've noticed most technology based "teaching aids" just get in the way from _really_ understanding the information. Nothing can replace a teacher, a student, and the two interacting.
I can't find the link now, but I remember like 6 months ago there was this big story (on slashdot actually) how the development process of Vista is the best and fastest yet. It basically said "When we first started to create vista, things got so slow we scrapped it and started over with a fresh new process. Now we are actually ahead of schedule". I love to see them eat crow. Man I wish I could find that link!!!
Basically, it's really hard and arbitrary to do OS versioning. In software, there's guidelines in versioning. If the API changes and might break stuff, that's a new major number. Significant features might also get a new major version number. Its not so easy with an entire OS. Fedora doesn't really have an API that would change. A distribution doesn't generally make huge leaps and bounds between releases like a piece of software might either. Sure, the numbers will eventually get up there, but so what? Is "Fifty" that much harder to say than "five"?
Disclaimer: I've been using Linux and Unix in general for many many years.
That being out of the way...
I don't find Ubuntu all that revolutionary in user friendlyness. It's never detected a piece of hardware most others couldn't (for me). The installer isn't anything special (ncurses based). It doesn't play patent encombered media types. It uses a dickload of ram. On top of all that, they didn't even put any good eye candy.
I mean its not bad, just not revolutionary like everyone would have you believe. I find Fedora and Suse to really be of equal quality (I generally use Debian anyway).
I know I'll get flamed as a troll, but please enlighten me how Ubuntu is light years ahead of any other distro in user friendlyness. I'd like to believe it's some great leap forward (and I run it on a couple of machines myself), but I just don't see it.
Reason number 6 is the damnned Postgres zealots that feel the need to bash everyone else's database rather than promote their own. I use MySQL and Postgres on a regular basis. I'm proficient in both. And to the dismay of Postgres users everywhere, there are times which *gasp* MySQL is better suited. "Oh, you are probably a lame programmer and use it for trivial web stuff". Not true! I look at a project and each databases strenths. It has nothing to do with the seriousness of an application. When I was writing VoIP billing software, we'd sometimes see 4-5 million CDR's (call detail records) in a single day. Our first iteration actually used Postgres and choked on that many records. We had to make some compromises with MySQL. We had an additional field for Unix epoch time because of MySQL's lacking (at the time) date and time math. There was a tradeoff. It was deemed that having billing invoices generate in 5 seconds (as opposed to 5 minutes) was more important than programmer time. Welcome to the real world. Another project I had was for writing worker punchcard system. Six months of records only topped out at 50,000 records and we decided Postgres' procedural languages would be a great help to us. Lose the zealots and attitude and maybe you'll have a greater user base.
Oh geez, this clown. For those of you who don't know, Rob Enderle is the troll of trolls. He will go on various forums and make outrageous statements seemingly to do nothing more than pick fights. I can't tell you how many times I've seen him make personal attacks on people. Then, once he's done trolling, will write articles on how vapid the open source community is. The sad part is he's supposed to be a "professional" with a consulting company. I wouldn't believe a single word that comes out of that mans mouth, whether true or not. Get a different source for your facts...
The shareholders and stock analysts and 10x more fickle with google than any other stock. They have turned google's stock into a big circius. And none of it is google's fault!!!!!!! They've brought it upon themselves. Why? Because they don't understand google as a company. At every announcement google stock either goes up 10% or down 10%. Google's stock has become disconnected from their actual health as a company. When people get burned bad enough google's stock will go through an adjustment period (which we are somewhat seeing now). Eventually, when people get some damn common sense regarding google stock, it will see normal market prices. I laugh when I see "google honeymoon is over". You jackasses created this false honeymoon! The only ones you have to blame are yourselves.
The nokia 770 runs linux and is more practical. 3rd party bluetooth headset support is available and an officially supported VoIP phone is going to be out in the next couple of months. And if for nothing else, it's fun to hack;) 350 dollars retail.
Slashdot Mirror
I think I saw this same post and response for the last 137 windows virus related stories. Does this mean there's a glitch in the matrix?
lmao. You pwnd him pretty hard. But you really have a point... email ISN'T ftp. I remember when I was writing an email client I did a lot of research into the history of email. Email was never originally meant to carry binary attachments. The whole idea of binary attachments were an afterthought and horrible hack. Ever look at a raw attachment? Looks like regular ol' ascii doesn't it? That's because to work around the RFC (which states that binary data is not allowed in an email), a plain text encoding was used to send binary data. Email was never meant to send mp3's and frankly does a horrible job at it!!!
That said, email is usually fine and dandy for the home user, but WAY overused and misunderstood in the business world. I remember a few weeks back someone trying to get together a meeting (seven people attending). The emails went on for over a week and totaled over 45 in my inbox. And the email I should have recieved (ahem, the one actually confirming the time and date), was only emailed to a few people and assumed it made it to everyone. I can't even tell you how many calls we get saying legit email was tagged and bounced by the anti-spam gateway. What's the point of email if you have to call? Then there's the forwarding. "I forwarded you this attachment". Needless to say the attachment wasn't included in the forward because many times they are stripped when you hit forward or reply. So again, I have to make a call to explain to them what happened.
Again, all that is fine and dandy for home users. But I just wish the business world would get its head out of its ass. These people are supposed to be "professionals". "Professional" just seems to be a way of saying "I'm too damn good to learn to use the right tools to make things work smoothly." Every organization of reasonable size should have a message board, project management tools, a documentation system (probably a wiki), and a file sharing server. If people actually used those, it would take 90% of the frustration out of my day.
Beat you by 4 posts
My eyes! Zee goggles zey do nothing!
I still can't believe this tool. He actually thinks the threat to the FBI is what prompted the CentOS developer (lead dev if I remember correctly). More likely the developer got tired of this fagtart harassing him. The city manager justified his actions by saying that anyone who is experienced on the internet knows better than to follow directions on a website. When the directions are to consult your site's administrator, I think those are pretty safe instructions.
And I can't believe this twiddle dick STILL hasn't apologized. He shoots back with "there should have been better directions". It is mind boggling that in 20 years of his supposed IT experience he's never run into a default webserver page. I really think this ass clown is deserving of any and all harassment he gets. In fact, he is deserving of a bill for CentOS's wasted time. If I had go-go gadget balls, I'd teabag that butthole surfer from 12 states away.
One is a father of the Open Source movement, the other is instrumental in disseminating anti-FUD regarding legal threats to OSS. I'm sort of wondering what it'd take to impress you.
lmao. ESR the father of the open source movement? You mean RMS? Maybe you get the two confused. ESR has written little software and his software to loudmouth ratio isn't near that of RMS. I've read a lot of RMS's work and it's nothing impressive. I remember a few months back Microsoft invited him in for an interview, and his response was that of a 12 year old. It was completely childish. This is who you want representing the movement?
As for PJ, she's done almost nothing. She has no technical standing to be an authority in any anti-fud matters. She's not a lawyer. She's basically a pundit. She's no better than the likes of Laura Diddo. Microsoft shouts, she shouts louder. I posed the question, what has she actually done for us. I haven't recieved one response other than she battles anti-fud. In reality her abrasive approach just makes open source users look like pony-tailed sandle wearers.
Open source doesn't need loud mouth clowns like these. In years of working in mixed environments I've found the best way to get open source used isn't by being a loud mouth. It's with level headedness. IBM and Redhat have been so successful with open source because they aren't shooting off their mouths every five minutes and seem like a mature responsible vendors that people feel comfortable using. I wish some other people would get the clue.
I'd sure as hell never heard of them. So I googled them. The first result? "PointCast: The Rise and Fall of an Internet Star". At one point the article says Microsoft was bundling their software with internet explorer. There will always be stubborn dumbasses. And watching them fall on their faces will never stop being funny.
I don't think this is a huge thing to get up-n-arms about either. PJ at Groklaw is very quick to react and shoot off her mouth. She seems to have Eric Raymond syndrome. She thinks she's much more important to open source than she actually is. I know this isn't a popular opinion on slashdot, but I've yet to see her do anything important. She seems more like a liability than anything. I would absolutly love someone to prove me wrong, but time after time she shoots off her mouth and makes outrageous accusations without any real understanding of the issue. It just makes open source users look like even bigger zealots.
It may take off, but I doubt it will be revolutionary. I think there's an Airport capable of this, and it really hasn't been that huge either. The article doesn't understand the media PC _at all_. They assume you're putting a full fledged ugly grey cased PC next to your TV. I don't know a single person who's actually ever done that. More likely you've got a Mini itx box with a big laptop hard drive and maybe a TV-in card (if you want a DVR). Have you seen the Mini itx cases out there? They look better than most of the components I have next to my stereo.
For about 350-400 bucks you can have a box that:
Can watch and burn dual layer DVD's
Can listen to and burn CD's and internet radio (and basically any other audio content)
Load full of emulators and Gametap and play games on
Browse the web
And a low power always on media file server that people coming over to your house can grab media from
Like I said, I'm sure there's a market for people who just want to play MP3's over their stereo. But there are already much better solutions that can do more that aren't tied so closely with DRM.
Ok, this is probably one of the biggest mess of haphazard comments I've ever seen on slashdot. I guess this is a good indication of how many people RTFA. This article has _nothing_ to do with the speed of Windows itself, but the time lapse of release cycles. Please mod accordingly!
here and here. It's comical really. The first story goes on and on and on how lean Microsoft has become with their new development process. Obviously little has changed. It's also comical that their solution to these sorts of things always seems to be a management shakedown. A shakedown doesn't really help anything if there is a deeper problem. In reality, it will probably just result in further delays.
Didn't this _exact_ same sort of thing happen like six months ago? I remember a delay being announced, a management shakedown, and a commitment that a new development process would acclerate Vista's arrival. I remember it even being discussed on slashdot. Oh my if I could only find the link...
I know this was meant as a joke, but was this ever common practice? I only say it because I remember working on an NCR system a few years ago, and instead of using ls, all their examples used echo *. ls existed on that machine, however. Was there a time in Unix when ls didn't exist? It'd be really cool to see in what versions today's common place Unix commands arrived.
Ehtereal is great and has saved me many hours diagnosing anything from network issues to application layer problems. Here are a few more I use constantly...
Netcat - In the original netcat readme he describes it as one of those tools that should have become a standard tool for Unix admins. Well, as of 2006, its basically achieved that status. It's one of the most useful network tools ever and nowadays most BSD and Linux distros come with it in a standard install.
Grep, cut, sed, awk, tar, gzip, sort, uniq, | (pipes), bash, [insert other small extremely useful command line tool] - These tools let me do things in 10 seconds it would take 10 minutes to do in a gui. I can't imagine these tools not being around in 10 years. They are the computer equivalent to a pencil and paper. So simple, yet so damn useful. It's nice to know that no matter how complex the world gets I can always go to a Unix box and get some real work done with these.
High level scripting languages (Perl, Python, Ruby, Tcl, Bash) - It's nice to be able to scale down. If something's too complex for pipes, I like being able to write a useful, scalable, pipe-able, command line program in 30 lines.
Open Office really isn't that great. It's a good transition piece of software that will hopefully get people away from Office's closed formats, but I can't see it being used for the long term. However, right now, it's the closest thing to office as far as support for their file formats. So it's playing a very important role. Trying to be an open source version of Microsoft's garbage.
There is a much more fundamental problem that needs to be cured before we can evolve to the lightweight likes of abiword and kword. People using their office suite for things they shouldn't. It's that simple. It is almost like the whole business world learned one piece of software and decided they would do _everything_ with it. In college I had to take an Office class. The entire book was written in Word. It was possibly the most poorly published book I've ever seen. Square peg in a round hole. There are much better tools for that sort of thing. What about when people send you a single picture as a word file. Try to do their whole payroll on a spreadsheet. Create webpages in Word. Use their email as ftp. Don't even get me started on Powerpoint...
To get back to the point... If people actually used their Office productivity suite for what it was meant for, then they wouldn't be tied so tightly to Office. But they are dumb, and their entire way of using computers are based on a house of cards. And they will be stuck with Office. Hopefully they will find a way out with Open Office and evolve to Abiword and Kword.
If the "business" people I've dealt with are any indication, then that trend isn't going away. Their attitude is "but we've always done it this way". Just because you've always done it that way doesn't make it the right way...
I registered a domain with them a few years ago. It made me put in my business name so I made one up. For the next year I got sales calls asking if I'm the business owner of this fake business. I'm _very_ careful about those little privacy checkboxes too. I registered a domain a couple years later with my cell number as the contact. Sure enough, I got sales calls on my cell phone for the next six months (before that I never got one).
The only upside to the whole thing was office depot kept sending coupons to my fake business.
bottleneck order for you: network bandwidth, hard drive, ram, then _maybe_ cpu.
Basically, it isn't going to help you much. If you put a lot of ram into it that'd probably help (try to get as much into ram as possible). If you have a huge amount of pics (60 gigs) a 10,000 rpm Raptor sata would probably be a good investment.
All that doesn't mean much if the network pipe is too small to dish out that many pics.
These students sound like a bunch of whiney bitches and I completely agree with the teacher in this. Laptops do exactly what she said, put up a fence between the teacher and the students. I've discussed this with professors before and many of them feel the exact same way. Laptops create an atmosphere where the students are doing little more than transcribing. You read the book for that. You go to class for interactivity. These students are simply too young and too immature to understand that. What the students also fail to understand is it's the teachers discretion how they teach. I remember in school when teachers wouldn't allow calculators because they felt it was a shortcut and you didn't _really_ learn the math (you learned how to use the calculator). I hated it and bitched and moaned. Looking back I wish more teachers would have done that.
In all my years, I've noticed most technology based "teaching aids" just get in the way from _really_ understanding the information. Nothing can replace a teacher, a student, and the two interacting.
I can't find the link now, but I remember like 6 months ago there was this big story (on slashdot actually) how the development process of Vista is the best and fastest yet. It basically said "When we first started to create vista, things got so slow we scrapped it and started over with a fresh new process. Now we are actually ahead of schedule". I love to see them eat crow. Man I wish I could find that link!!!
Basically, it's really hard and arbitrary to do OS versioning. In software, there's guidelines in versioning. If the API changes and might break stuff, that's a new major number. Significant features might also get a new major version number. Its not so easy with an entire OS. Fedora doesn't really have an API that would change. A distribution doesn't generally make huge leaps and bounds between releases like a piece of software might either. Sure, the numbers will eventually get up there, but so what? Is "Fifty" that much harder to say than "five"?
Disclaimer: I've been using Linux and Unix in general for many many years.
That being out of the way...
I don't find Ubuntu all that revolutionary in user friendlyness. It's never detected a piece of hardware most others couldn't (for me). The installer isn't anything special (ncurses based). It doesn't play patent encombered media types. It uses a dickload of ram. On top of all that, they didn't even put any good eye candy.
I mean its not bad, just not revolutionary like everyone would have you believe. I find Fedora and Suse to really be of equal quality (I generally use Debian anyway).
I know I'll get flamed as a troll, but please enlighten me how Ubuntu is light years ahead of any other distro in user friendlyness. I'd like to believe it's some great leap forward (and I run it on a couple of machines myself), but I just don't see it.
Reason number 6 is the damnned Postgres zealots that feel the need to bash everyone else's database rather than promote their own. I use MySQL and Postgres on a regular basis. I'm proficient in both. And to the dismay of Postgres users everywhere, there are times which *gasp* MySQL is better suited. "Oh, you are probably a lame programmer and use it for trivial web stuff". Not true! I look at a project and each databases strenths. It has nothing to do with the seriousness of an application. When I was writing VoIP billing software, we'd sometimes see 4-5 million CDR's (call detail records) in a single day. Our first iteration actually used Postgres and choked on that many records. We had to make some compromises with MySQL. We had an additional field for Unix epoch time because of MySQL's lacking (at the time) date and time math. There was a tradeoff. It was deemed that having billing invoices generate in 5 seconds (as opposed to 5 minutes) was more important than programmer time. Welcome to the real world. Another project I had was for writing worker punchcard system. Six months of records only topped out at 50,000 records and we decided Postgres' procedural languages would be a great help to us. Lose the zealots and attitude and maybe you'll have a greater user base.
Oh geez, this clown. For those of you who don't know, Rob Enderle is the troll of trolls. He will go on various forums and make outrageous statements seemingly to do nothing more than pick fights. I can't tell you how many times I've seen him make personal attacks on people. Then, once he's done trolling, will write articles on how vapid the open source community is. The sad part is he's supposed to be a "professional" with a consulting company. I wouldn't believe a single word that comes out of that mans mouth, whether true or not. Get a different source for your facts...
The shareholders and stock analysts and 10x more fickle with google than any other stock. They have turned google's stock into a big circius. And none of it is google's fault!!!!!!! They've brought it upon themselves. Why? Because they don't understand google as a company. At every announcement google stock either goes up 10% or down 10%. Google's stock has become disconnected from their actual health as a company. When people get burned bad enough google's stock will go through an adjustment period (which we are somewhat seeing now). Eventually, when people get some damn common sense regarding google stock, it will see normal market prices. I laugh when I see "google honeymoon is over". You jackasses created this false honeymoon! The only ones you have to blame are yourselves.
The nokia 770 runs linux and is more practical. 3rd party bluetooth headset support is available and an officially supported VoIP phone is going to be out in the next couple of months. And if for nothing else, it's fun to hack ;) 350 dollars retail.