Joshua? Is that you?

...or warrantless wiretapping :P

Funny you should mention that. Window functions in the SQL:2003 standard address that need, and there was an article on Slashdot earlier today about PostgreSQL 8.4 being released with support for them. Oracle has for a while now.

Transportation in City of Heroes is so much faster than other MMO's I've played. Train stations or boats allow you to quickly move from one to zone to almost others in the same level range. There's a multitude of shortcuts (Pocket D teleporter, day job teleporters). There are Supergorup base teleporters that take you to almost every zone. Once you get to level 25, you can get the Ouroboros portal, which you can summon wherever you want and allows you to instantly teleport to the key high-level zones that you visit a lot.

That's just between zones. In the world itself, or even in instanced missions, you can move extremely fast if you pick up a travel power (first available at level 14). Flight is the slowest, but most versatile. "Slowest" is relative, it's still faster than epic flying mounts in WoW. There's also Super Jumping, Super Speed, and Teleportation, in increasing order of speed and difficulty to use.

After hitting boost range and teleporting across a huge zone in a half dozen hops, when I go play WoW with friends it just takes so damn long to get anywhere. :( Especially in the old world where the ground mounts feel so slooooow.

...and not just the titles. The HP one is talking about HP pushing for people to migrate off mainframes. Onto HP servers. Running Windows Server 2003.

vi and sqlplus

Same way you do when you disable enterprise manager because java is a memory hog.

...gets shot by those who don't!

Um, I want it to create the table with a NOT NULL constraint and no default value. That's perfectly legitimate SQL.

No, a proper db will create the table as instructed. There's nothing silly about creating a table that you don't want NULL values in, and saying that there's no sane default, so the user must specify a value on INSERT.

The former (reject INSERTS that don't specify a value for that column), which is what any decent database like Oracle, DB2, and hell probably even Microsoft SQL Server will do.

Basically, built-in multimaster replication (if you pay for the license, of course), and load-balanced clustering. If you don't need either of those, there's really no reason to pick Oracle over PG other than political.

PG is an awesome DB, and it just keeps getting better.

When was that? PostgreSQL has been using MVCC for as long as I can remember (as least since 6.0+, probably earlier), which is the same type of concurrency control used by Oracle. The implementation is a little different, but the effect is the same. Much more efficient than the locking method used by MySQL and MSSQL until fairly recently (SQL Server 2005 and InnoDB use MVCC).

The ext2 driver in FreeBSD isn't very actively maintained, tends to lag behind the rest of the kernel, and has been the cause of various problems like panics and VFS lockups in the past. It's not recommended for serious read-write use.

Really the only platform to have good ext2 support is Linux. Honestly a least-common-denominator UFS variant would probably be usable by more systems due to Mac OS X.