Just about everything that is bad for you today is being negated a few years later. Can't find the link today, but at one point "research" showed that jeans were responsible for higher risk of cancer. So I will just continue to live my life and enjoy it to the fullest. If something kills me, at least I had a good time.

acid isn't so important when the unit is a patient's records. there is also no need for a rigid data model.

I can't help but get the feeling that within a few months they'll be running back to Oracle or some other real database system.

At this point, anyone who works with databases in industry knows that "NoSQL" has come to mean inconsistent data, corrupted data, and silently lost data.

One just can't throw away atomicity, consistency, isolation and durability without running into some serious problems.

And that's totally ignoring how it becomes damn near impossible effectively query NoSQL databases. Sorry, writing complex queries in some imperative subset of JavaScript is totally the wrong way of doing things. Intentionally not learning SQL takes more effort than learning how to use it!

Whilst I'm all for open source in government, I can;t help thinking every time they come out with press releases saying "we used " describes a process where being different with the technology stack is an end in itself.
You could write an open source application in C++ rather than the much less mainstream R language and you'd have lots of people ready skilled to maintain it. Using R just seems like it was the choice of the devs who persuaded the agency to adopt their tools rather than an agency who thought about what they needed up front.

I wonder in 5 years if we see headlines "Immigration Agency dumps open source for Oracle. A spokeperson said,'we used a bunch of obscure languages and tools for the old system that served us well we had difficult finding people skilled in them, so we successfully outsourced the system to our new partners who will deliver increased performance and efficiency savings over.blah blah blah". If they'd done it "maturely" in the first place, this kind of nightmare scenario wouldn't happen.

(and I speak of experience - currently discussing details with a company that has a system "built with a mix of Erlang, Scala and Ruby on Rails". You know its been cobbled together by a bunch of hacks more interested in whatever language seemed coolest at the time.

Here's another one. Wonder what they have in common?

http://www.itnews.com.au/News/...

A gigantic set of the population is no longer even used to the concept of wearing a watch, because they have their phone. This device doesn't replace their phone. What exactly is the reason to have this as well, as opposed to pulling your phone out of your pocket?

Unless some company comes up with a functionally independent wearable device that replaces the need for keeping your phone with you I do not see the appeal. I don't understand what the pitch is supposed to even be. Literally every functionality can be responded to with "but i have my phone right here, it also does that and better"

Someone posts a scientific article about dieting and everyone posts their wild unproven theories about dieting.

If I wanted to read wild speculation by uninformed nobodies I can find that elsewhere.

Does anyone know if its possible to eat a low carb diet as a vegetarian?

You do realize you just made all that up... right?

I repeat my standing point that prior to modern times people were not fat and often ate lots of carbs. In fact, carbs are the staple calories of the entire modern world and have been for thousands of years.

Wheat, Rice, Potatoes, Maize... notice a pattern here?

That is what the modern world has been eating since the dawn of recorded time. Carbs. Where they fat? Nope.

What changes? The food? Nope. The activity? Yep. So... logically what caused this issue?

The activity.

End of discussion.

Uh, what? Only processed foods, and then frankly, almost none of them. The lack of unnecessary ingredients is part of the draw to most Organic brands. Only the fake-ass organics like "O" (Safeway's brand) are full of bullshit like that.

Such as? Any problems we've found can simply be fixed in the kickstart file we use.. It's a pretty small file :)

Agile developers expect agile everything. Ubuntu happens to just be a happy compromise between agile and waterfall.

If you look at RHEL, it's 5-10 year old packages, kept alive by an enormous engineering team that backports fixes to old, dead software, which creates a huge pile of technical debt for any developer trying to use "modern", highly modular frameworks.

As far as developers go, In the Ruby, Python, and Node ecosystems, anything that's not the latest doesn't exist. They don't use the system package management, they use gem, pip, and npm. They really don't care about the underlying OS, until it gets in the way, and getting in the way is exactly what a decade-old OS does.

Just to throw out an example. Take some modern ruby on rails application, say Discourse. (discourse.org). Go download a tarball from github. Now try to make it work with nothing but software from the official RHEL repository. Let me know how that works out for you. After you tear out all your hair and skin trying to do that, try to get the pieces from 3rd party repos that will make that work. See how much you have to bring in as far as new libraries and new packages just to make it work. It's still a nightmare even with the 3rd party repos, and that RHEL support contract doesn't cover them - every single piece that's likely to break your application, is now outside of your support agreement, so your company is now wasting at least $799/year for support.

From working in Linux-based IT for nearly a decade now, IT departments get very frustrated by Red Hat's package management and the concept of needing both an Entitlement and various Channels to get updates; on the flip side of this summary is Ubuntu, which IT departments can't stand due to it's constant change and instable nature. Every IT department I've worked in and with seems to prefer administering and deploying Debian and battles with devs on Ubuntu and management on Red Hat.