Oh, yay, unions had a place and that place was in the past. Your real point is what, exactly?

Today I don't have to join a union and I get treated fairly by the company I work for, and I can even engage in negotiations with that company without being fired. And I'm not forced to pay a union to treat me as a member of a herd rather than the individual I am.

So again, your point is what, exactly?

That's funny, I use copy-only backups all the time on SQL Server Express.

Stop talking out of your arse.

I am not in a union, there isn't a union involved at all within the company I work for, and they have north of 350 employees.

We all negotiate our own pay scales, for which mine is above average because I am a valued worker and can negiotiate for myself, and we receive very good benefits (private health care, sports tickets, days away etc) for free.

Why do I need a union? I'm not impoverished, despite you saying I should be without a union...

But then again I'm in the UK.

What sucks in the US is the concept of "union shops" where you *have* to join the union, or at least pay union dues, regardless. You can't work there without paying the union their cut of your pay packet. That's bullshit right there. A union should not be able to stop either an employer or a employee from having a relationship which fully excludes the union. Being part of a union should be 100% voluntary.

Unions are the equivalent of dragging everyone down to the same common denominator - if you are a decent employee working for a decent employer, you lose more than you gain through being part of the union and unable to negotiate for yourself.

Except there is "malice aforethought" here...

Wow you have an attitude, and a bad one at that.

If you couldn't run Windows 8 without it crashing, then thats your problem - get better hardware. I have Windows 8/8.1 on several computers, none have crashed once in over a year. The OS is rock solid, even works perfectly with sleep and hibernation modes.

Who gives a shit about the colour scheme - for 99.9% of the time I'm staring at the same application screens I would be in any other versions of Windows, colour schemes don't come into it. Neither does aero, haven't missed it once.

Start screen? I actually like it - I won't say its for everyone, and perhaps it is an acquired taste, but I like it.

UAC? I dont see it until I need to - it doesn't pop up during normal operation, it pops up when it should.

Sounds like you are afraid of change, and are willing to lash out at everyone else because of it.

Branson is exceptional at PR, but thats about it - he rarely actually achieves something revolutionary from scratch as musk is doing, he will rather buy up existing outfits that is on the verge of success or has just achieved success. Formula E is easy to compete in because the cars are stock and supplied by a single third party, while their space effort only came about after Scaled Composites achieved their fame. Virgin Atlantic et al are nothing to call home about.

Branson is all about making money, he rarely takes actual risks.

Copy-only is fine for online databases, you will never have an issue with locks etc as its specifically designed to cope with them.

Also the action of copy-only is done by the database engine, so it knows what it has to deal with.

Incase you are misunderstanding, copy-only is an option you provide to SQL Server when copying the database via SQL commands and the database engine, it has nothing to do with dealing with the actual data files the live database is using.

I would never advocate backing up the actual mdf and ldf files, always use the systems the database engine provides because that knows better than you how to handle various situations and will flush stuff to disk as needed.

Most people dont want shitty static pages, they want the application experience. Which is why we have the heavy browsers we have today.

Yes, PowerShell scripts to trigger a copy-only backup - no issues with locking etc, no need to take the db off line or anything of that ilk.

And yet I can run it on a Windows client, so its not included in the server license...

Sure, talk SQL. Now, what format are the data sets being returned in, and can you get access to the execution plans etc for audit purposes? How easy is it to integrate with an ORM. How easy is it to roll back a transaction. Does it choke when pulling a million rows?

There is no point in having a rock solid database if the results being returned to your code are untrustworthy due to poor quality client libraries.

In other words, you don't have any idea about the intricacies involved.

And yet you ignore the fact that most uses of databases are for "small potato" uses, in fact I wouldn't hesitate to suggest that the vast majority of databases are idle 99% of the time, and barely stressed for the remaining 1% of the time that they are actually doing something.

Hence doing ETL tasks on SQL Server Express with 100 million data rows is something I do - and I don't pay money to do it. And the free version of SQL Server is perfectly adequate for the job.

Don't worry, that issue is still out there - have it myself at least once a month.

Do you get the issue where the screen registers a continuous finger press on it? The only way to clear that one is to reboot the device too :/

If your business grows, its trivial to migrate from Express to Standard - and I do mean trivial. In most circumstances you can just detach the DB files and reattach them to the Standard instance.

And MS has yet to reduce the Express limits, infact they tend to expand them with each new version.

A major issue with picking databases is whether they come with decent client libraries, so my decision making process rarely puts a significant amount of weight on whether something has no licensing cost or not. A much larger factor is how hard is it to use in code.

You can use that translation if you ignore my entire last paragraph...

For fetching content for a CMS for a My Little Brony blog, its perfectly fine. Even in production.

Hell, I do complex ETL on hundred million row datasets using SQL Server Express...