Couldn't Sun just write their JVM in Java, so that it could run on any platform without porting?

You either die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain.

The SQL standard itself doesn't allow for unsigned integers, that's why.

Hrm, any radio astronomers out there? How hard would it be to rig up a poor man's directional radio antenna powerful enough to send a clear signal to that planet?

Well, that's exactly what I use: T-Mobile pay by the minute, with an old G1 Android phone (the first android phone that came out, I think). The phone was about $100 used on ebay, and I pay about $5-10/month for 50-150 minutes of usage per month (the going rate for a 1000 minute, 1-year card is $90 on eBay). It sure is cheap, but dunno about "wonderful" - no 3G data, for one thing. And the phone is somehow designed to *require* a 3G-capable SIM card when you activate it with your Google account, otherwise it pretends it can't login to your google account via WiFi. So you really need to have a buddy with a T-Mobile SIM card and a 3G plan for this to work. I chose T-Mobile because the per-minute rate was the cheapest I could find that would give me a reasonable phone choice and coverage.

In summary: cheap: yes. good: yes. wonderful: not quite

For six months, I couldn't sleep. With insomnia, nothing's real. Everything's far away. Everything's a copy of a copy of a copy. When you have insomnia, you're never really asleep, and you're never really awake.

Uh-huh. And established in the US Constitution. Great example for the GP's claim that we're not any more socialistic now than 10 years ago.

GP probably just does what I do when I'm on a WoW marathon: pee into an empty 3-Liter of Mountain Dew next to the gaming chair. Don't want to take any risks, right?

(Only problem is sometimes when I get my Dew bottles mixed up.. Yecch!)

It sounds like you want to use PostgreSQL as something like a (non-durable) cache layer. I'm not sure anyone has tried removing WAL entirely from the system, but people have definitely played around with the idea. See e.g. here. With a little tweaking, you should be able to get a large speedup by sacrificing durability/crash recovery.

Well, the GP was probably asking more about materialized views integrated into the Postgres core itself (I think Oracle has these). So that you could materialize an existing view just by saying "CREATE MATERIALIZED VIEW ... ", instead of cooking up the triggers yourself.

Now, The page you linked to actually says:

because of their inherent complexity and customizable nature. There actually has been some work recently attempting to do just this: see e.g. http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-hackers/2010-04/msg00479.php.

As for the GP's gripe about "those two ridiculously huge undo-type files", I have no idea what he's smoking. Postgres's "undo-type" files are its WAL logs, and you can configure how many it keeps around. They are 16 MB each by default. I've had no problem running Postgres on tiny hardware (cheap VPSes), and it comes configured out of the box to do just fine on minimal hardware.

Uh-huh. That's because if Youtube loses a video of a cat with 3 views, who gives a flying fuck? Ask your bank or your credit card company what database they use to store their financial transactions. Probably won't be PostgreSQL, but it sure as hell won't be MySQL. And they're only using Oracle because $10M to them is chump change.

Indeed. About 0.0005 seconds of Googling brought me this as the first link:

http://www.postgresonline.com/journal/archives/24-Using-MS-Access-with-PostgreSQL.html

Though I think there are probably a grand total of 3 people on Earth who have used MS Access in any serious capacity and don't loathe it.

Eh? Not sure exactly what you mean, but the postgres documentation is built from SGML into several formats, such as a giant PDF or the web documentation. It's pretty darn good, and if you have quibbles with any of it, post to pgsql-docs and you'll have someone on the case pretty quickly.

Replying to myself, I just remembered another interesting option that came up recently: you could also use the $40/month Virgin Mobile hotspot, along with an Android phone + sipdroid + google voice, and have unlimited 3G data and voice everywhere plus your own hotspot. How cool is that?

Mod parent up. The Wal-Mart deal isn't actually that good, considering the offerings from Virgin Mobile, and Cricket. Not to mention Boost Mobile ($50 for unlimited everything, last I checked) and Metro PCS (similar unlimited pricing).

Personally, I keep my cell phone bill down around $10/month using prepaid minutes from T-Mobile. I've got an Android phone (G1, only $100 on eBay) and I can use sipdroid on it, combined with Google Voice and a free POTS->SIP accounts, for free minutes when I'm on wifi, which is most of the time.

Just stay the fuck away from AT&T and the other gorillas trying to lock you into overpriced 2-year plans and you'll do fine. Cell prices are finally coming down.