Does anyone seriously think that mere millions is remotely impressive anymore?

Billions isn't even all that impressive. Some of us were dealing with databases like that 15 years ago.

That tragic "stuff that slows you down" is also the stuff that saves your ass when things inevitably go wrong. Ditch that stuff and you are just gambling with your future.

It gets better than that. There are behaviors for which there are no ANSI standards. So it doesn't matter how much you want to whine that your pet brand is 'more standard". There are enough low level holes in ANSI to ensure that even with the simplest use cases you are still working around vendor specific syntax.

That's just the way it is.

So whining that one engine is "less standard" than any of the other ones is ignorant blather.

Oracle doesn't "merely work" on Linux, it's been Oracle's flagship platform for a number of years now. It took that title away from the darling of the commercial Unix world (Solaris Sparc).

Oracle may have it's warts but at least it isn't pre-configured to eat itself. No wonder Windows admins are so used to rebooting machines so often.

You would think that Microsoft would at least use a sane, sensible, and industry standard default.

So? There's a free version of Oracle too, if you are willing to expose yourself like that.

"Getting something for nothing" usually isn't the point of using "serious commercial enterprise software".

Non-free Oracle can even be licensed in ways that make it as cheap as a more expensive consumer application.

> 3: Finding MS SQL expertise is easy.

No. Not really. Microsoft pushes the idea that you don't need to have any clue to use it's products. It helps enable this idea with better novice interfaces. This leads to the problem that you end up with barely trained monkeys having the appearance that they can us Microsoft products.

> 4: MS SQL does work and is decently secure. For 99.99% of tasks, it is just as good as Oracle.

I think Microsoft has the only RDBMS that ever had a genuine viral exploit in the wild. That's quite an accomplishment. SQL Server also has some "subtleties" that make it oddly more user hostile than even Oracle.

...or Iranian democracy could have turned out like Egyptian democracy and all without our help.

I think this service is entirely pointless. If you are worried about interception using a common carrier, then you need to stop using common carriers. Full stop.

You need to use a proper courier. You also need to work on making your gear more tamper resistant.

> Your pirate, sorry "media backup" collection

Someone needs to downmod this jackass into oblivion.

This sort of Apple-centric "if you strayed off the reservation, then you are a criminal" sort of nonsense really has no place here.

If you are really really really dead set on essentially leaving your media server OUTSIDE then the thing has to be beefed up to industrial or military grade specs.

A towed mega boat. Not the most efficient means of travel. Certainly not something you want to wait on when you are trying to get ahead of something quickly.

The only difference here really is completion time.

Unixen are born to do batch jobs. So this apparent aversion to starting something and just letting it run until it finishes seems oddly out of place.

Plus there's development and testing to consider. A private resource is usually more available. That's why PCs became popular to begin with.

Meanwhile, it's likely that the "real hardware" is NOT available on demand. This is likely something that hasn't changed since the original Big Iron machines used punchards.

Finally, laptops are only "dinky" if you have no other options but to use someone else's "dinky" configuration.

Thus the reason why you might want to be free to consider ALL of the available options.

Not enough of the right kinds of ports. No consideration for legacy support.

> Linux can have flakey support for some music files, music players, video, etc ....

Are you on crack? Did you just come in from a 90s wormhole? Linux doesn't have this kind of problem at all anymore. If anything it wipes the floor with the other options and provides the OTHER things with what they need to have decent media support.

If your usage of media is remotely interesting, it's the Mac that will give you problems.

Macs MIGHT have a "usability" advantage in certain very narrowly defined use cases. Beyond that you're on your own on a Mac worse than a 90s version of Slackware.

Of course if the's already bought into the Apple brand then her options are limited. It's that way by design.

That's just an excuse to overlook Apple's obvious limitations.

The point is that with a non-Apple laptop, you don't have to be so limited. HELL, you could even go for something even more exotic like a "lunchbox" style machine. Just about any option you can think of is available in the wider PC market.

There are two proper Linux system vendors you can get laptops from: System76 and ZaReason. See if one of their machines suit out. Both of them have slim and beefy options to choose from.