Heh... put some passion into it, why don't you?

I get the sense that this personal annoyance is one huge reason lots of companies are migrating to Postgres. it seems every time I consult on one of these, sooner or later someone will say the name "Oracle" with a sigh and an eye roll, communicating that the sooner they no longer have to deal with that company, the better. I get the sense that some would gladly move to PostgreSQL even if it were nowhere near as good as it is.

PostgreSQL has had full multiversion concurrency (MVCC) for over a decade or so (at least since version 7). It simply doesn't have this sort of locking issue.

Yeah, that's right. Postgres is only good enough for ma and pa's corner bar and grill. I can't imagine what the last few fortune 500 corporations I have consulted for were thinking.

Folks we have a class A hurtbutt here. Sorry the Postgres guys outbid you on that last project...

Yes PostgreSQL (community/open edition) may not have [xyz checkbox item] but it handles plenty of large databases just fine. The fact is, big companies, government/military contractors included, are seriously beginning to migrate many sections of their database infrastructure to Postgres. It's all I work on these days. Agreed that a company with a 60 terabyte OLTP database in Oracle should think twice about moving to Postgres (although Yahoo managed a 200+TB one years ago). But even for large corporations, most databases are still under the handful-of-terabytes size and are perfect candidates for PostgreSQL.

And yes, EnterpriseDB offers add-ons. How is that a bait-and-switch? It's simple honest business, and even with all the bells and whistles (some very nice ones) it still ends up costing a fraction of what Oracle costs.

None of that is "flaky"... these are all features of the languages that if you bothered to learn you'd see that it makes JS one of the most flexible languages out there.

Some devs can't deal with the freedom to think for themselves and need rigid rules to function. Not the languages's problem.

Might as well set this one up:

Why not use regular expressions?

It's kind of interesting to me how what we've seen with the rise of the app store model has largely mirrored what we've seen in the "real world" post-9/11. It hasn't quite been simultaneous, but pretty close.

What I mean is that a lot of people love the app store model and always say how it's "safer". Especially when talking about Apple, you have a gatekeeper checking on the safety of apps, to at least some degree. They ensure what gets through won't hurt you (in theory... but, to be fair, they do pretty well in practice too).

However, there's a cost: at least some decrease in "freedom". Not just anyone can throw an app out to the world of iOS users. If Apple doesn't like your app for any reason, you don't get to distribute to (most) iOS users. Sure, there's jailbreaking and Cydia and all of that, but let's be honest: that's a pretty small percentage of more technically-oriented users. For *most* iOS users, your app doesn't exist if Apple doesn't want it to.

The Android model is the opposite or course: there is virtually no barrier to entry. It's very easy to get into the Play store whether your app is "safe" or not. Oh, they're doing some checks now, but at the end of the day I think even us Android fans acknowledge that it's still more or less a wild west environment. And that says nothing of side-loading either: if you don't get in the store, or don't want to, no big deal, you can still distribute directly to users. Flipping a setting in options isn't the same as jailbreaking so you aren't limited to just "technical" users.

Post-9/11, people seem to be willing to give up some degree of freedom for safety (whether that safety is just perceived or not is a whole other discussion). No, not everyone of course, and yes, there's limits to what people will accept. But, aren't we seeing those bounds pushed more and more every day? Hasn't Snowden showed us that a large chunk of the American population is more than happy to give up privacy to at least *feel* safer?

It's no different in the app world. Lots of people swear by the closed, "walled garden" approach of Apple. They claim it's safer and the quality is better. Well, the former is fairly easy to show, the later is highly subjective, but what's obvious in either case is that there's a decrease in freedom. You may see the tradeoff as worth it. That's your call. People love Apple whether I do or not and I'm not going to try and convince them they're wrong. There's pluses and minuses to both approaches. But at the end of the day, Apple is, at least in part, deciding what you can and can't install on you device.

It's just interesting to me how people in both situations seem so willing to say "eh, make me safer, or at least make me THINK I'm safer, and you can have some measure of control over what I do". How that's acceptable to ANY American in either case is beyond me frankly and I think it shows that our societal values have eroded tremendously. Sure, yes, Apple controlling what apps I can install on my phone is VASTLY different from the TSA patting me down to ensure I don't bring a bomb on a plane. I dare say nobody's life is at stake because Apple decides I used the word cock one too many times in my app. But the fundamental concept is the same: safety in exchange for freedom.

But, underneath both is the same warped thinking: someone else is better suited to keeping you safe than YOU are. It's someone else' responsibility to keep you safe. Someone else can make decisions for you because you are unable or unwilling to do so. Yes, I'm saying you're opinion on the walled garden app store model vs. the Android "wild west" approach informs your take on society at large and what you are willing to let any government do to you. If you're in the Apple camp then you're probably perfectly willing to let the government trample your liberties in exchange for possibly less chance of being killed. The mentality of both is the same. If, on the other hand, you're willing to be responsible for yourself and control your own destiny, the Android approach is probably better-suited to you.

(of course, we'll have a similar discussion about how Google is a data whore above all others and what THAT means, but that's for another day)

Seriously. Write some code, publish it on Github. Spin up a single serving web page, does one interesting thing as soon as you arrive. Remember, everyone else with resumes could be pretending, you're actually doing stuff.

For work experience, sign up on freelancing sites like odesk. Take jobs just to do them. Nobody knows how old you are, there. Even if all you can do is sysadmin -- well, admin some cloud services!

Because you're a cunt.

The missing item no. 10 from TFA.

Hold down Ctrl and press the + key, and watch as the small print gets magically bigger.

Same here, The Old Reader (we're going to have to come up with a different acronym than TOR) is the closest to what I used to use Google reader for. I switched over last week, and apart from my muscle memory typing the wrong address, it's going fine. I do notice the formatting of posts is more basic, but at least that's always readable.

You might want to pull that fishhook out of your mouth.

Thank God for the UN's beneficence and adherence-to-principle.

Good thing none of those votes were bought through corruption... or through funds skimmed from the Oil-for-Food program.

Depends on your business needs. I use it to run small linux VMs for testing on a Windows host and it's been fine, completely rock solid.

"Yank" is British shorthand for any US citizen. The fact that it rhymes with 'wank' just makes it more amusing.

What a load of crap. Most teachers salaries are paid for with local and state funds, not federal income tax. And if you don't have a home, it is highly unlikely you have any deductions that can be itemized. This likely means you are part of the 45% or so that don't even pay any effective income tax, so you would hardly be starving the federal govt. Hate to rant, but this is just trolling and I don't have mod points.