I would mod you up as "mucho interesting" if I had the points...

I also appreciate how open Facebook is on their techniques to solve problems, open sourcing things like Cassandra, etc.

MongoDB starts as a service on my MacBook and on my local network I always keep services for Sesame (RDF data store, SPARQL endpoint), MongoDB, and CouchDB running.

It is easier to use NoSQL datastores (when they are appropriate) if you always have them running, have client libraries in place, etc.

If you want to use a relational database, you don't have to stop to install it, get client libraires, etc. I think the same 'ready at hand-ness' shoud apply to whatever NoSQL datastores that meet your needs.

Great point! I would mod you up if I had any points.

"Look up how much campaign money they gave to Hillary and Obama."

Wow, are you a shill, or what.

How about the truth? Try it sometime.

The truth is: both the democrats and republicans take obscene amounts of money from the health industry.

Our corporate overlords (those who own Congress) won't allow it.

Call me cynical, but I think that our overlords (one of my friends calls these people "the owners", and she has that right) let the House pass this bill to keep people's hopes alive and distracted.

I am basically against large government expenditures, but the cost of our military industrial complex is so much more that what a reasonable medical bill would cost, that I have softened my position and now I do support health care reform.

BTW, we could save a lot of money by trimming our ""defense"" costs but that is not going to happen because a relatively few people make so much profit that any reform there is not going to happen.

Many years ago, I did to J2ME projects for customers. I have played with the iPhone dev tools, but don't really like the platform or the constraints of the AppStore.

The Android plugins for Eclipse really make this a nice "coders platform." I expect to see more web portals to provide customized rich clients (perhaps for free) to make for easier mobile access. ANyway, getting more into the Android platform has been on my short list for a while.

BTW, a little off topic, but the rumors are that Google is going to open an app store for Google Wave plugins. Nice addition to an app store for Android aps.

I wouldn't be surprised if PostgreSQL support will be forthcoming.

BTW, I spent 2 hours experimenting with RDS - I'll probably start using it when it is out of beta.

Copying from my blog (http://markwatson.com/blog/2009/10/i-just-tried-amzons-new-relational.html):

Amazon just released a beta of their Relational Database Service (RDS). You pay by the EC2 instance hour, about the same cost as a plain EC2, but about $0.01/hour more for a small instance, plus some storage costs, and bandwidth costs if you access the database outside of an Amazon availability zone.

RDS MyQL compatible (version 5.1) and is automatically monitored, restarted, and backed up.

Currently, there is no master slave replication, but this is being worked on (RDS beta just started today).

Here are my notes on my first use of RDS:

        * Install the RDS command line tools
        * rds-create-db-instance --db-instance-identifier marktesting123 --allocated-storage 5 --db-instance-class db.m1.small --engine MySQL5.1 --master-username marktesting123 --master-user-password markpasstesting123
        * Wait a few minutes and see if the RDS instance is ready: rds-describe-db-instances
        * Open up ports for external access, if required (note, here I am opening up for world wide access just for this test): rds-authorize-db-security-group-ingress default --cidr-ip 0.0.0.0/0
        * Use a mysql client to connect: mysql -h marktesting123.cyvbi77nio5f.us-east-1.rds.amazonaws.com -u marktesting123 -p
        * create database recipes;
        * in another bash shell: cat recipes.sql | mysql -h marktesting123.cyvbi77nio5f.us-east-1.rds.amazonaws.com recipes -u marktesting123 -p
        * In the mysql client: use the remote RDS hosted database and be happy :-)
        * delete RDS instance (to stop paying for it): rds-delete-db-instance marktestng123 --skip-final-snapshot

Any mysql client libraries should work fine.

When I only had a sandbox account this summer, all I did with Wave was experiment with writing robots.

Now that Wave is out in beta form and I have been able to invite family members, friends, and some of my customers, I am starting to appreciate Wave as an email substitute.

I am also getting some customer feedback that they might want to build systems layered on top of Wave.

I've had a developer's account for a while, and I think that wave is fun. Most fun is writing robots that receive events (which events is a configuration option) when people add text to a wave, join a wave, etc. A robot can then itself modify or add to a wave.

If I had mods points, I would mod you up.

Great point! Also, we had our largest peacetime naval exercises off of Venezuela after they started talking about getting off of the dollar standard.

It pisses me off when I feel that my country takes such a bad approach to promoting our best interests.

China has used long term treaties and financial arrangements to nail down long term access to oil. We, on the other hand, persue a military strategy that simply does not make sense financially. (I am assuming that we are much safer now than during the cold war, so our "defense" is not much an issue.)

Once again, our controllers (i.e., financial elite, corporations) choose strategies that enrich them and hurt people like me, my family, and friends who just want to work, be productive, and not harm other people.

If I had mod points, I would mod you up.

G. W. Bush's actions with "axis of evil" rhetoric and threats forced the moderates in Iran to keep their heads down and empowered the radicals. I now suspect that this may have been done purposely.

Sanctions really are a soft act of war and should be viewed thus. Does Congress have to approve sanctions? If not, they should have this power, not the president.

I voted for both G.W. Bush and Obama, and I am very disappointed by both of them. They both seem to beholden to the defense industry and the all too powerful Israeli lobby, instead of doing what is best for *our* country.

Seriously, what about people (like me!) who work on laptops - who wants to give up that much screen real estate?

Yuck.

I wrote several books using OpenOffice.org, and I still very much appreciate having it (for free!), but I really prefer the use of Latex - you get to spend almost all of your time thinking about what you want to write, then doing the writing - and not waste time formatting with Word, OpenOffice.org, Pages, etc.

Anyway, the ribbon looks sort-of OK (perhaps) if you work on a huge display, but for hyper-modern nomadic knowledge workers (*) who use laptops, it seems like a really lame idea.

(*) In many years of posting to Slashdot, I don't think I have ever had a comment modded funny - this may be my big chance :-)

Amazon published a white paper about using their AWS platform with HIPAA compient applications: basic idea is to keep data encrypted until it is in memory, and encrypt it again before writing to persistent storage.

For Google Apps, how about using rich clients that decrypt data for viewing/editing, and encrypt it again before storing back on big table, etc.

Perhaps Google themselves would implement this as browser plugins?