funny, I did the exact same thing. It's absolutely ridiculous they pay that much for bandwidth. If they put up instructions and why they are doing it, and how by seeding torrents you can contribute for free, it would be very sucessful.

1: Buy game.
2: Update game with patch.
3: Get no-DVD patch from gamecopyworld.com

I do this with every game I buy. It would be a little annoying if I was buying brand new games and had lots of patches coming out, but I buy older games that aren't as expensive. They are new to me :)

Wow. Learn what a theory is. Everything in science that you would consider "facts" are theories. A theory is an explanation to a set of facts that predicts other facts correctly. It does not imply that anything about it is "unproven" (that would be a hypothesis).

Actually, most, if not all, college athletic depts. lose money. See "Beer and Circus" or any of the other books on the subject. They use some real creative accounting to hide this.

at a newspaper. I loved it. Worked wed-sat and had sunday, monday and tuesday off. 10 hour shifts.

It was the only really good thing about that job. :)

and I forgot to say, I work on an app that is a front end (web) for a bunch of number cruncing and reporting servers, but the database is MSSQL, it has about 400 clients (with lots of users for each company), has about a terabyte of data spread across 5 MSSQL servers, and brings in about $70 mil a year in revenue, so I'd say someone uses it.

That being said, we have a newly rewritten app/architecture using Oracle (for various reasons).

Right. The biggest advantage Oracle still has is multi-platform. On a windows box, you want to patch it, you have to be an admin (root) of the box. Period.

As for the other features, yes, partitioning (that's been there forever, since at least 2000) ncluding advanced, rule based partitioning to spread a table among multiple partitions based on rules. The clustering, you have a ton of options.

The flashback stuff is there, but still isn't as easy/painless as I watched Oracle DBAs do it for me on Oracle. Raw devices? A database is still a file, but as Oracle and SQL server pretty much tie on performance (depending on who's benchmarks you believe) I guess it isn't that great an advantage.

High security? Well, it has ssl and native encryption built in to the database, but my hunch is Oracle still has more security features. (including a more locked down platform on a streamlined *nix system, obv.)

I like the tools I see in Oracle 11, but the web-based stuff doesn't beat the responsiveness of the "real" programs with MSSQL, imho.

Like I said, it's almost a wash. MSSQL is still slightly cheaper (but not much) for licensing (but of course, you have the windows licensing costs).

I've worked with both pretty extensively, and honestly, there are pluses and minuses to both.

It used to be that oracle was more powerful/scalable, but cost more, but the price gap is pretty much gone (MSSQL has gone up, oracle has come down).

It used to be that Oracle had more features, but that gap has narrowed. It used to have more scalability options, but that has narrowed as well. Oracle does have multi-OS options that MSSQL doesn't have obviously.

It also used to be that tools (particularly for what I call 'the reluctant or defacto dba' who doesn't do it full time) had a much shallower learning curve for MSSQL, but I think that's pretty much gone (as MSSQL has gotten more features, administering it is necesarily more complex, and Oracle has worked hard at their tools).

Anyway, that's my two cents.

as soon as we had a president "elected" who didn't actually win the popular vote.

Guess not.

Yes, it usually takes a second or two for someone to click in on that.