Maybe I misunderstood...

But did you just refer to the contents of foxnews.com as knowledge?

I have heard this narrative many many times and I am not doubting it's accuracy. But what I don't understand about it is: If it's such a big problem, can't the entire Medical industry just keep using the old stuff? Especially now that it's gone generic? With so much on the line is the entire industry unable to make decisions based on the medical efficacy of a drug and not based on pure marketing? Let the pharmaceutical company go make their stupid one off variant that is still patentable while doctors just switch over to prescribing the generic form of the old drug. I have wondered about this for some time, why are doctors not able to subvert this shady tactic???

So, I am not a kernel developer but I am pretty sure that the transition to a full 64-bit, "Grand Central Dispatch" and OpenCL would involve some pretty serious work on the kernel. Does MS really make such huge under the hood changes in a service pack? If so that seems like a pretty bad idea. I can see that maybe in XP SP2 (and maybe 3) just because they were getting hammered so hard on security they had no choice not to make some pretty serious security upgrades. But for the most part they seem just like an accumulation of lots and lots of lots and lots of bug fixes. Just because it doesn't have that many checklistably obvious user facing features doesn't mean that they haven't made serious architectural changes that would distinguish it from what MS calls a service pack.

There are often large updates to the OS that apple also pushes out for free that contain tons of bug fixes. They also don't charge for those. The two companies obviously have different models for how they do updates, but I can't believe that this idea that every major OS X update is just a service pack keeps coming up again and again. I'm sure I am missing something but at this point it just seems willfully obtuse.

So which major versions would you consider service packs and which would you not? So far it seems people have said that about every single major version that has been released except for 10.0. By the logic of these people all of the work that Apple has done since 2001 is akin to what MS just gives away for free. All that they have done is just fix a ton of bugs and add very minor features. It is unbelievable to me that people continue to assert this.

It seems to me that the entire viewpoint of people who espouse and advocate these ideas seems to be fundamentally flawed. The way I see it every single major release has been worth way more than $129 to me and I would in fact pay far more for it if it came down to it. When you combine that with the number of people who actually paid money to "downgrade" their Vista licenses to XP it just becomes all the more laughable that people are trying to criticize Apple's update/pay structure not with any real argument about it's specific flaws but by saying "oh yeah, well Microsoft would give that away for free."

Seriously?

People don't even want the latest MS OS they have already been forced to pay for and yet you feel the need to make ridiculous semantic arguments about what constitutes a service pack in order to try to somehow say that what Apple spent two years making MS would just give away.

Am I alone here are do others also believe that this "it's just like an service pack" line of reasoning is just completely absurd?

Many of these comments seem to focus on using these non-relational databases because the developer is to lazy to use, or doesn't understand how a proper relational database functions. It is probably true that that happens but that discussion totally overlooks what these non-relational systems are actually for and why they are popping up all over the place.

If all you want is a key-value store then why not use an existing relational database? They are amazingly good at what they do and storing key-value pairs could be considered a small subset of what they do. But even that they do very well. They have very fast data storage formats, they are very good at not losing your data, they have all the networking figured out, authentication, etc, etc. It would seem silly to be create a brand new database that does only a strict subset of what existing dbs can do. There is no point unless they can do things that an RDBMS can not do, or unless they could do that small subset of things better than a traditional RDBMS.

The main reason that these dbs are popping up all over the place is that people want to scale, and scale quickly. Google doesn't use big table because their devs are lazy or un-knowledgeable. Google uses big table because they need to scale. Transactions, constraints, joins, ACID. Doing all of those things in the db makes it harder to scale the db. Implement those features in the app and now your db can scale more easily and the app servers can still scale, thus your app as a whole can scale. That is the idea that is being explored in many different directions by all of these different non-relational dbs.

Mabye some of these databases are just jumping on the bandwagon without even knowing what the point is. Maybe some of their users are just too lazy to learn SQL. But the real reason for these new db's existence is that scaling a relational database is very hard and people are trying to find easier ways to do it.

I'm still in wait and see mode but that doesn't mean that this new breed of databases doesn't have a place.