As long as that FOSS database uses the same mental model and basic syntax as one of the commercial RDBMS products, the amount of tribal knowledge lost from your cheapness will be minimized.

The real problem is that you are far too cheap to pay more than one person to be the keeper of the keys and that person you are underpaying so eggregiously underpaid that they will likely leave at the first opportunity.

This isn't just about Oracle. Everyone decides to do things differently because they each evolve in a vaccum and then once standards do come along, those standards bodies don't have any balls.

If you can't point to a relevant standard that Oracle is ignoring then you have no leg to stand on. That doesn't just go for Oracle but it applies to any other vendor.

Oracle has some features from the mid 90s that competitors are just getting around to implementing now. Sometimes you just have to make something up because there isn't a standard there yet.

No. Performance is just the wrong thing to be fixating on. Data management systems are not about being fast. They are about being correct. They are also about being robust. What you are really saying is that you don't care about your data.

You're willing to lose everything just to save a buck.

That's the wrong attitude to have regardless of how you decide your data needs to be organized.

Of course he's conflated Greek and Roman. Romans were dedicated to the shameless copying of the Greeks.

So conflating the two pantheons should not raise objections from anyone that's not a current member of the cult of Zeus.

Even then, I suspect that such a person in the flesh would not object either.

It's far too easy to end up with a craptacular experience when you start trying to cut corners with computing devices. It's not necessarily so much about being terribly powerful but avoiding total suckage.

Penny wise and pound foolish.

Sure I get it. You think that your children deserve scraps.

Not everyone thinks like that.

Some kids are appreciative of decent kit and responsible enough to take care of it. If yours aren't, perhaps you should consider that a result of poor parenting.

Intentionally buying crap you know to be inferior ultimately just subverts capitalism.

> 2. Most states also draw income from urban poor in the form of taxes on alcohol, tobacco, and by state-run lotteries

Cry me a river.

You just jumped the shark with that one.

Sometimes, the only suitable response to a jackass is to be "anti-social".

I have saved a number of machines from the rubbish bin by adding new video cards to them. All of those cards were dirt cheap but still a massive improvement with whatever original came on those machines. The end users were happy as clams as the machines ran as if they were shiny and new again.

Repeat that a few thousand times and watch the global sales numbers implode.

> Yes, clearly entertainment on PC is dead. There's no such thing as Netflix or Steam, those are just myths.

Both of those are already more effectively delivered to the average consumer through some sort of speciality appliance. Game consoles have been the primary focus of the likes of EA for a long time now. Netflix is something that you can do with a $60 appliance.

Comparatively speaking, something like Netflix sucks on a PC. It's a poorly optimized resource hog demanding far better specs than the task really calls for.

One problem with PCs is that coders are used to being lazy.

> That's not the real issue. What do most people need computers to begin with?

They don't need the "power". They need the form factor. Tablets are basically a PC locked down to nothing but a one button mouse. For a lot of tasks, that just isn't good enough.

For a lot of trivial tasks, it's tolerable though.

The PC wasn't a new way of interacting with programs. It was just an older style machine that was under the full control of the end user. That level of control was what made the PC, not the keyboard or mouse or monitor.

Kids can most certainly appreciate a powerful machine if you bother to give one to them. They will happily lug it around too.

You can get 100MB/s transfer speed off of a wired home connection. That's what you can push around from room to room in your own house. Now that's faster than some of the slower hard drives and way faster than anything you are going to get from the cloud.

Replacing your local storage with remote storage only makes sense if have no clue whatsoever about technology and have never tried any of this stuff for yourself.

I have a 5 year old hard drive sitting in my main machine. I use it as a scratch drive not because it is old and unreliable but because it is old and small. It's been made obsolete by newer, cheaper, and LARGER drives.

Despite of all of the FUD and the occasional scandal from the likes of Seagate, spinning rust still is more likely to become obsolete than die.

> DRM is a non-issue for the vast majority of people who are streaming their stuff.

Says you. On the other hand, I have actually seen DRM validation glitches with iTunes content. Some network related nonsense was occurring with the AppleTV. Didn't know what the cause was, but the effect was that all iTunes content was unavailable. It was like someone took a backhoe to the coax running to the house.

Of course my DRM free files were fine.

DRM is just something else that can fail in mysterious ways and frustrate consumers. They might not know what it is when they see it but that doesn't mean they won't suffer.