EnterpriseDB is an important part of PostgreSQL development with several contributors, but they still work within the larger development community of contributors. There are other companies with just as many contributors, with one example being how 2ndQuadrant is adding logical replication features.

One way you can tell if an open source project has a real community is whether the project would go on even if the largest company contributing code disappeared. Linux would survive RedHat disappearing, and PostgreSQL would certainly survive EDB going out of business. That's not even a theoretical question, because the PostgreSQL community is informed by having seen it happen once already. A company named Great Bridge hired a good percentage of the PostgreSQL community once, and then failed after running out of VC cash.

Yes, you did miss the expose, there have been hundreds of lawsuits. They went to the supreme court. Farmers who don't use Monsanto's seeds can go out of business from the legal risk they take on. It's a classic protection money racket. You pays your tribute to buy our seeds, or something unfortunate might happen to your crop one day, when our lawyers come to break your kneecaps.

I'm so skeptical I'll even debunk your joke. The mainstream statistic you'll see quoted everywhere is that true celiac disease hits 1 in 133 people. The number of gluten free food shoppers is a multiple of that, because that doesn't count people with milder gluten intolerance; households where everyone eats GF because of one member; and the recent GF fad shoppers. The household ripple alone is so huge, even Betty Crocker runs around selling to this market because they believe "28 percent of consumers seek out gluten-free foods". And all that was going on before GF became mainstream as a dieting fad.

Meanwhile, diabetes hits 8.3% of the population and there isn't nearly as much of a ripple to household members.

I agree with your skepticism that celery derived bacon will have more nitrates. The nitrate amount in the final product is determined by the quantity of curing product used, and presuming that all celery based methods will result in more is impossible. You could surely game that by using more curing product than is strictly necessary on one side of the comparison.

But the reason you are not finding the hard numbers you want is that a simple celery based method doesn't have them, and never will. The amount of nitrate in a celery stalk varies based on how it was grown. You might be able to sample a given batch for its chemical properties, but you cannot predict them. To quote from an intro to meat curing: "There are absolutely no regulations or standards as to the amount of nitrate [celery] contains. Even if you use the same amount in every salami you make, you could quite easily be adding too much or too little nitrate to your cured meats."

Until Whole Foods publishes exactly what their manufacturing QA process is, we can't know how it compares to the well documented "pink salt" formula. I can offer a logical argument that there are probably more nitrates in the end result though. The downsides to using too much curing product are excessive nitrates in the result and too much "salt" flavor. The downside to using too little could be botulism, and inspection may reject it. If you're manufacturing food and the incoming strength of the nitrate is unpredictable, the case with celery, the obvious way to navigate that risk/reward tradeoff is to err toward using more than you strictly need. Then even if that celery batch absorbed a bit less nitrogen than average, you'll still be safe. But the average nitrate of that approach will be higher than a more predictable process.

No, the GF "twits" are the ones who have no allergy issues at all; that's why they're twits for eating this way. If someone is avoiding gluten based on the perception of a food intolerance or allergy--but without test results to back it up--that's not well accepted by mainstream medicine. But no one is suggesting they belong in the group that's being openly mocked here.

The GF section of your average Whole Foods hasn't grown that much since the products became a mainstream fad, you probably just weren't paying attention to it until recently. They've always had a large section for them, and they pushed into that market hard with their own "GlutenFree Bakehouse®" products ten years ago. That was based on the observation that almost 1% of people in the US has celiac disease, and those people heavily sway food purchases for their entire house/family.

There's a similar loop around government regulation, what's called the "revolving door". Hire people who used to be government regulators with a fat paycheck; tell existing regulators they'll earn more that way than their government job pays; use profits from unregulated activities to hire more regulators. This is how financial companies in the US cracked regulation by the SEC, food manufacturers avoid the FDA, etc.

It's hilarious how an AC thought your history lesson here was a plan for the future.

No it isn't.

No, because modding down the bullshit is an essential part of what the user community being ignored by beta does. If you want there to be some impact from a boycott, let Dice see what happens when the moderators go away.

The Beta design team doesn't need a UX lead. It needs some cranky, low UID asshole who has complete and utter veto power over everyone else. My suggested test for whether someone is qualified is to look at their moderation history and note how much of it is bashing down the goddamn trolls. No UI redesign is going to matter one bit if you drive that crowd off.

Wanting to get paid for consuming news release propaganda and sometimes crapping out some truth is what ruined blogging.

His point was that any number of language+library stacks give such similar abstractions for everything from HTTP to database persistence, it doesn't even matter which one you pick.

Reallocated sectors indicate things are starting to go wrong with the drive, and those skyrocket starting at only 100TB of writes.. Admittedly they're busy servers, but I do have systems on SSD I've measured hitting 75TB of writes in only a year of heavy use. And while extremely heavy on writes, this test rig is pretty simple compared to the mess real world drives go through. As my parent post pointed out, there's more to TLC wear than just writes, and it's not hard at all to imagine workloads that will start hitting reallocations in a small number of years. Any amount of reallocation is scary when one potential outcome from wear is forgetting your data.

Recent reliability testing has been downright horrifying for the TLC based drives. I predict a whole lot of people buying Samsung 840 drives because they're cheap are going to regret that.

One of the patterns I've noticed with Seagate is that drive failures seem to spike when manufacturing moves. The reliable Barracuda IV models made in Singapore were replaced by shoddy ones made by newer facilities in Thailand. Then around 2009-2010 they shifted a lot more manufacturing into China, and from that period the Thailand drives were now the more reliable ones from the mature facility. A lot of the troubled 1.5TB 7200.11 models came out of that, and perhaps some of your 500GB enterprise drives too.

If you think about this in terms of individual plants being less reliable when new, that would explain why manufacturers go through cycles of good and bad. I think buying based on what's been good the previous few years is troublesome for a lot of reasons. From the perspective of the manufacturer, if a plant is above target in terms of reliability, it would be tempting to cut costs there. Similarly, it's the shoddy plants that are likely to be improved because returns are costing from there are costing too much. There's a few forces here that could revert reliability toward the mean, and if that happens buying the company that's been the best recently will give you the worst results.

At this point I try to judge each drive model individually, rather than to assume any sort of brand reliability.