I think that's the key, really. Quite a few companies I know are switching from RHEL or CentOS to Ubuntu LTS releases purely because of familiarity. If that changes, Ubuntu will lose the corporate customers that actually matter.

Redhat got it right. I'm not sure why Ubuntu is having such a hard time figuring this out.

Hah. Actually, this time it was relevant. I was about to use a joke, "I don't think you have the authority to do that, son." But then I looked at his account number... I mean, really looked, and couldn't believe it. Has Slashdot really been around that long?

Fuck, I'm old.

God. It's days like this when I actually look at UIDs and instantly shit myself. I didn't even get into Slashdot that early, but all these folks with accounts in the millions make it look like I did.

> All those things are true, but his point is exactly what you said yourself, PostgreSQL is finally adding "Enterprise features."

I said that sarcastically. Note the snide quotes around "enterprise." :)

PostgreSQL is gaining popularity partially because Oracle purchased MySQL's parent company, and because of the newer features. But really, it's been "enterprise ready" since the 8.0 branch was released. Maybe I'm biased, being a PostgreSQL DBA, but a lot of the contractors I keep company with that work with Oracle anecdotally suggest there's been a massive effort by several companies to replace Oracle with PostgreSQL in the last year or two.

And like a previous commenter said, DBMSs come in various shapes and sizes, and have been since the 70's. But like all technology, things mature, and Oracle is no different in this regard. PostgreSQL came from Ingres, a research project for a guy working on his PHD in the late 80's. And that version didn't even use SQL. It's not like someone sat down one day and said, "Gee, how do I clone Oracle?" You can have notable and disruptive technology in existing categories.

And as much as I roll my eyes at the mention of NoSQL as some kind of ground-breaking concept, it's a fairly innovative application of a key-store caching model that has varying levels of compromises depending on the implementation you pick. They're not all just clones of memcached. Anyone who argues Cassandra, MongoDB, CouchDB, or Redis are all technologically equivalent needs a boot to the head. They're all innovative in their own way and have different areas where they're more scalable based on usage patterns.

My point was that his fundamental assumption (at least as I read his comment) is wrong. This stuff has been slowly taking over and replacing commercial software for years, and the pace is just accelerating. It's gotten to the point that major multi-million dollar firms are reaching for open-source first, not because it's equivalent to some other product, but because it's better.

OP basically wrote off half the examples as pointless. I was just saying it's not quite that simple.

As a side note, I'll have to look into Informix. I've never heard of anyone comparing it to PostgreSQL and getting the results you claim, but it's worth investigation.

Yes. Because you, a random user on the internet, has such compelling arguments, that I can't help myself but read through your specific comments.

But I rolled my eyes and did it anyway, because hey, with that kind of challenge, there must have been some notable comment there I didn't see. So after reading through your comments, I can only admit I have no clue how any of your dismissive arrogance can be construed as any kind of logical and reasoned response to the rebuttals of my, or anyone else's comments.

I won't reduce your reply to a humorous ad-lib as I normally would, because you're clearly missing the whole point, or inadequately supporting your position. Telling me to put forth effort you're clearly unwilling to expend yourself, suggests a level of hypocrisy I refuse to perpetuate. Have fun explaining why everything FOSS ultimately sucks and accomplishes nothing, because hey, defeatist attitudes get a lot done at the end of the day.

PostgreSQL: Just a relational database, and usually behind the heavy-hitters in terms of features. Mainly notable for at least being competitive with the big, commercial databases.

You may say this, but that's because you're not a DBA. PostgreSQL drives Skype, Pandora, Reddit, and IMDB for example. Working in the financial industry, we use it, and a few other companies I know of are converting away from SQL Server to PostgreSQL. Financial companies are especially prudent considering the liability concerns, and we do a metric assload of testing; we don't just convert for shits and giggles.

The PostgreSQL developer community is probably one of the best organized and responsive I've ever seen outside the Linux kernel. They have a major release almost yearly, and the 9.x branch is especially notable, since they're starting to include "enterprise" features. It's one of the few DBs that can regularly post equal or greater performance than Oracle, and it just keeps getting better. There are a number of reasons for this, but it all involves all the storage and memory architecture improvements they've been incorporating in the last few years.

Its popularity was never as high as MySQL because, as you said, MySQL isn't a real DB. It's easy to set up, and gets the job done without being quite as stripped-down as something like SQLite. For just whipping up a DB-driven website, it was dead simple, and with the popularity of PHP, so too did MySQL gain momentum.

And there's another very active project: PHP. Argue all you want about their design philosophy, but that language took the web by storm. Python and Ruby are similar in the regard to being highly active and groundbreaking open-source projects. Rails and Django are both huge sources of newer websites these days, and for good reason. Hell, even Drupal is being used by The Onion, and that's another huge Python community.

You could just as easily say Apache is "just a web server". Especially considering Lighttpd and NginX have both been outperforming it for years now. They may not count because they're not huge community projects, but they're more than viable and used by major sites. My company's site, for example, serves 120MB sustained traffic all day long serving a financial trading application, and we run both NginX and Apache on top of PostgreSQL. The DB alone serves 10,000 transactions per second (and can scale to about twice that on our hardware) just nicely at peak times.

What, exactly, does it take for a release to be considered "worthwhile"? Abandoning major commercial vendors? They're doing that. Scaling to huge usage? Reddit uses an entirely open-source stack including PostgreSQL, RabbitMQ, and Cassandra, and just broke 1.2B page views per month. Not just any page views, but fully threaded forums with a moderation system. I already mentioned Skype and Pandora. Sit up and take notice? They already started doing that.

The term "clone" is also pretty subjective. Lots of projects are spawned simultaneously, and the commercial product inevitably reaches the market first because of the paid developers that just work on it all day long. But when a FOSS project gets some momentum behind it, it really catches up in a big way.

FOSS projects individually have their warts. But the market is also littered with commercial software that is a clone of a clone of a clone, and is either out of business, or a product nobody wants. The aspect of being FOSS is not a differentiating factor in that regard. But the good software, both in the commercial and open-source world, lives on, and the really good examples are adopted with greater velocity as they mature. Criticize open-source all you want, but discounting the it as an also-ran is a giant mistake.

Haha. Good luck with that. The RAZR and its ilk were some of the smallest phones ever made. I doubt we'll see anything like them ever again.

I'm starting to wonder if consoles are a dying breed. They used to come out every 3-5 years like clockwork, with major advances every time. Now every maker seems to be phoning it in. And if Microsoft, king of the 66% hardware failure rate is the only one that takes the next round seriously, I fear for the future.

I salivated over the release of the PS2. I have tons of games for it, and most of those are JRPGs and DDR. That console just wouldn't die, and it seemed like everyone wanted to release onto it. My Wii library is decidedly smaller, and I totally skipped out on the RROD-box and kept waiting for the PS3 to come down in price. Looking through the game libraries of each, there's only two or three games I'd even want to buy anyway, which clearly isn't worth it.

So far, both Nintendo and Sony have said "meh" to the next console round. So I have to wonder why.

Yeah. I've been getting irritated about this myself. All of the new phones are dinner plates. And it's actually getting worse. It seems like 4.0" is the new minimum screen size, barring the iPhone.

Apparently "the public" wants bigger screens, and market pressures being what they are, that means smaller phones get the shaft. I'd be fine with a 3.7"... but everything good is 4.3" or larger these days. The 3.2" of the Eris feels a little cramped, to me, but these new phones are just taking things way too far.

The worst part is, all the good phones are the biggest ones, or can't be modded. The Eris modding community has basically moved to the Thunderbolt, save a few diehards. The Incredible II is boot-locked. I wouldn't touch LG with a ten-foot pole, based on my experience with the ENV 3 and ENV Touch. The Galaxy S line never came to Verizon, and the Galaxy S II (Function) is... 4.3", the new standard.

I'm actually off-contract now, but I keep waiting on phone announcements for something that either doesn't suck, or isn't a dinner-plate. I may have to just grit my teeth and go for the Galaxy S II, which has gotten universally glowing reviews from basically the entire internet.

My bad. For some reason, I associated the Nexus S with previous versions. I didn't realize they changed manufacturers.

It's interesting that exploits are openly available on the Android market. Clearly Google isn't as strict as Apple in that regard.

Either way, that does make more sense. I wonder if they got the whole bootloader idea from Motorola. Those bastards.

Great news indeed! Except for all those poor bastards who just bought one of the many HTC devices making the rounds, such as the Thunderbolt or the Incredible II.

Samsung, as much as they do wrong, got an early start. The Galaxy S and Galaxy S II are both unlocked, and they also make the Nexus line of Google's official phones.

What's odd is that HTC's early phones are all unlocked. The G1 and Eris are both easily hacked, with one-click root apps being openly available on the Android market, and ROM flashing as simple as a reboot. I find it mind-numbingly hilarious that my discontinued HTC Droid Eris is running the latest Gingerbread (Android 2.3.4) release, while brand new phones from HTC, Motorola, and LG, are all saddled with 2.1, or 2.2 if they're lucky.

I know one of the features is "me not using it anymore." 10.10 is probably the last version I'll ever use, and I've been looking at Mint or just going straight Debian.

I love apt, otherwise I'd consider an RPM based distro.

About ten years ago on Slashdot when the anti-MS sentiment was probably at its pinnacle, quite a few articles were posted that prompted this quote:

"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win."

It almost always followed some ridiculous reaction or FUD from Microsoft. Now with Android (Linux) bum-rushing the cellphone market and MS seemingly haven given up on fighting Open Source, it's almost as if there's a light at the end of the tunnel.

And his sentiment reflects my own recently. I used to be one of those guys who hated the word Microsoft. Now I just think they're a bad joke. They're not even worth making fun of anymore. I keep looking back and wondering just when that happened, and I can't. It was a gradual thing.

So there ya go, guys. We won. :)

I hear you on "can't be disabled", but "resource hogging"? Come on. In these days of TBs of HD space and GBs of RAM, do you honestly think that the improved location bar is gonna have any noticeable effect on your browsing? Please.

Owners of netbooks will say "yes." I stopped using Firefox three years ago because the XUL rendering causes all the menus to be hilariously slow. I can wave my mouse up and down my bookmarks in Firefox and drive my CPU up to 100%. Opera and Chrome absolutely obliterate Firefox on slow hardware.

Considering the Phoenix project was started back in the stone age to remove all the Mozilla bloat and make a speedy browser, I think they failed miserably. Every time a major new version comes out, I try it again, and end up going back to Opera and Chrome. I really want to love Firefox. It represents one of the most major successes in open source. But I chose to use minimal portable hardware and not have a huge desktop or giant laptop anymore, and that means I have to make sacrifices.

But just throwing memory or CPU at something is pure laziness. I shouldn't need a quad-core Intel i7 and the latest Nvidia card to browse the web. My puny netbook can handle Compiz just fine, but Firefox beats it with a crowbar. Go figure.

Masterful trolling. I really must congratulate you. This, folks, is what a 9/10 on the Troll Scale actually looks like. It's not obvious, but clearly an opinion not even a sanctimonious blow-hard could possibly justify with a straight face.

Note how he carefully shrugs off people who are tagged by friends and family, and forgets that Facebook will make an account for you, even if you never sign up. Then consider that he doesn't consider the rich prospects of lurking. Then of course, the hypocrisy of posting on a public forum, his personal distaste of... public forums.

This is one of those rare trolls that actually deserves a +5 funny. The only reason I docked a point from a perfect 10/10 score, is that you'll never get me to believe anyone with an account number that high is such a self-important rube. Nice try, though!