Lack of knowledge is so sad. One has only to have a passing understanding of data models to read Reiser’s paper and realise he
does not understand the fundamental concepts of the field. Such a waste of time, money and talents.

Or, when will it run on GNU/Linux?

Yes, they do. The few of them, that is. SQL DBMSs do not, but they are not relational.

This makes little sense to me, because it describes not a key-value store — unless you consider the ‘value’to be all
non-primary key columns, which would stretch the definition of a key-value store —, but a relational database relation.

Not a Book, but an article. Granted, Codd published a book aftwards, but that was not original anymore.

Precisely.

Not sure about what do you mean with relationships here. Relationships are a concept of ERDs, not of the relational model.

They were never a price oriented company.

This is not true at all. Nearly all markets Microsoft entered they underpriced, usually a lot. Operating systems, server
software, office suites, you name it — MS products were always cheaper than the then incumbent. What MS always
did was to establish a proprietary lock-in by embracing, extending and extinguishing existing standards, so that they
could avoid lowering prices — software having fat margins, former incumbents would underprice MS once they lost in the
market, so avoiding a price war was of essence.

As far as I know this is the first time Microsoft enters a new market — actually, reenters a redefined market, as they failed to
develop the market for tablets with their MS Windows for Pen Computing OS version and are now playing in a renewed by Apple
and Google market — overpricing it. Netbook history, where Asus created the market with GNU/Linux and forced MS to lower the
price on MS Windows XP, seems to indicate where will MS Windows RT prices will go after a few months. Downhill.

I do see how F1 is a fuller featured DBMS than Spanner, but it seems less relational, if it does not require that tables have
keys.

Tables without keys are not relations, so one could argue that Spanner is more, not less, relational than F1 and other SQL
systems.

From the original paper linked at the summary post above:

OK, relational keys should not be ordered. But the fact that each table must have a key makes it a relation, at least in
principle, so Spanner at first looks like it is in fact more relational than SQL. Am I missing anything?

It seems at least one FAA certified product is a set including Flight Gear, so I would not use that to say X Plane is the only serious flight simulator to run on Apple Mac OS X & GNU/Linux.

What makes X Plane more serious than Flight Gear, let alone the only serious one?

Why? All the others were equally touted, the difference being the situation was never as dire as it is now for MS WinCE.

Yes — but ðat was while investment stagnated, commodities buoyed the economy and manufacturing stagnated, and education continues to widen the capability gap to oðer societies. Now public servants feel ðey deserve more, and society will not give ðem anything because it feels illserved; and, ðis being a government of syndicalists, it has to say no but does not know how to.

Mutatus mutandis, we are. Check my oðer post. To sum it up here, Southern Europe malinvested based on credit in Euros, in real state instead of manufacturing and services capabilities; we not even invested, but spent all we gained from commodities. And both of us are into a demographic transition changing ðe rules of ðe game, yet we are not capable even of acknowledging ðe fact.

Check my oðer post, elsewhere in ðis thread.

Yes, we are. We are spending like ðere was no tomorrow, and in current expenses, not investments; we are bending public accounting to allow ðe Central Bank to print more money; we are living on exporting commodities, pricing manufacturing out of ðe market (Dutch malady).

Granted.

Which church, and what does it have to do with the issue at hand?

I hope so. Actually, for the last decade or so the current government has been lowering the standards on the public sector accounting and manipulating the numbers both on public finance and on mixed capital companies, so we just do not trust the rosy picture the government paints. It is like we are living for the last decade on the trust built on the decade and a half before that.

Yes, that is true. But the common citizen, who earns a lot less than his First World counterpart, pays double: he pays taxes to keep roads, but has to change his mini SUV often because asphalt is so bad cars last less; he pays taxes to keep the police force, but has to pay for private security because of violence and criminality; he pays taxes to build schools and hire teachers, to the cost of up to US$5K per pupil (in the Federal District) and then pays another U$5K per children in a private school because public schools are garbage; and he has to live in a closed condominium because public streets are too noisy, since government is not competent enough to police noise levels and mediate between neighbours. Also, plan on the additional risk from a practically nonfuncional judicial system. Many people resort to bribery to get justice done or to navigate state bureaucracy.

Also, taxes on payroll, on manufacturing and imports are ridiculously high. Manufactured or imported goods usually cost triple as they would cost in the US, or double the European prices.

If you earn enough to pay double for all these services government is supposed to provide, and to pay around double for everything imported (which is nearly all electronics and automobiles plus quite some stuff), life is pretty good.

Actually, we are totally dependent on selling commodities, specially to China.

We are spending against the future, but not getting much out of it. Government spent a lot on salaries by hiring and raising public sector salaries but managed to invest only a little bit — in (specially Southern) Europe, they invested a lot but much of it was malinvestment, that is, investments in building for a market that would never realise, as demographics did not generate demand.

To expand a bit, government here leaves little room for private investment by a ridiculously high tax level. The resulting dearth of capital makes interest rates relatively high. People have little in return because government simply spends a lot but public services provided are of very low quality. Government development agencies and programs were build and are funded, but these agencies only paid salaries and never managed to build the infrastructure for development they should.

Another similarity to Europe is that we are under demographic transition. We are below population reposition natality levels, but we have no immigration policy to speak of, and compared to Europe we have much lower savings and education to see us through the transition to an hypothetical new economic model which would not rely on growth. And we haven’t even started to think about this supposed new economic model; we do not even know if it is possible to build such a thing.

Now, for where we are quite different from Europe: we are relatively comfortable because we have been exporting lots of commodities for high prices, because of the Chinese industrial growth and living standards improvement. Specially iron ore and soy. We have been lucky. For instance, now that Chinese growth is decelarating, crops have taken a hit in the United States and thus commodity prices are likely to stay high for a while longer, perhaps enough for China to recover and keep our balance of payments healthy. But we are not using the opportunity to build a manufacturing or a services factor: we have bad transportation insfrastructure for manufacturing (Chinese model), and a incredibly low quality education for services (Indian model).