lwat

If a product is still profitable, why discontinue it?

Most websites will just ignore it from day 1 anyway.

I'm willing to pay the Gold Price but I don't want to wait several months until they decide to air it in my local country.

Offers are ALWAYS subject to due diligence checks.

Human drivers are terrible. Is it so hard to imagine computers doing significantly better? Why do computers need to be 100% safe when the humans they are replacing are nowhere near that?

Seven years ago I bought a Dell 30" with 2560x1600 resolution for about $1500. Today the biggest monitor I can find is still the same 30" at $1500. What the hell?

Nothing? For something as common as you say I'd have thought there would be many examples out there. I don't get how this can be touted so often when there's no concrete use cases for this 'feature'.

I recently asked if anyone could point me to an (open source) app on github or wherever that has a 'fluid schema' on a NoSQL system and nobody was able to show me one. Do you have a concrete example I can look at please?

If you're good at adapting to your environment you don't need to waste so much time trying to adapt your environment to you. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M-9w3dlcmyk

Yes but can you request 'all internal emails for the last 3 months' or something as broad as that?

I'm not convinced you can get a TB of internal emails via a simple FOIA request.

It's one of the biggest players in their market!

So who cares, shady operators will just move?

Not too many 'casual' pirates download from usenet. They just go to The Pirate Bay and the comments will always tell you a file is fake before you hit the download link. These fake torrents do exist in large numbers but they're trivial to avoid.

What if they're not in the USA?

Nope, our system is a write-heavy transactional one, and SQL Server can show you which query started your lock chains too so it's easy to resolve lock contention issues.

This doesn't work on sites like The Pirate Bay where trusted uploaders make it easy to find what you're looking for. If my torrent was uploaded by eztv then I know what I'm getting.

I've been using SQL Server 5 hours a day for almost 15 years now and yes, I've taken databases to the limits of the hardware many times. We've upgraded our SQL Servers' hardware many times due to increasing load. We've never had a scaling problem that we could not immediately and easily resolve.

If your server falls apart it's usually because of a single bad query and with SQL Server it's super easy to determine which query is at fault and kill it, at which point everything is immediately back to normal with NO LOST DATA. You can even set limits to how much resources a query can consume if you want.

As for the 'no warning' thing, all you need to do is monitor your server. It should not run at 99% CPU or IO capacity at peak times! If you know the limits of your hardware it's really not difficult to monitor the actual usage and plan your upgrades accordingly.

It doesn't matter how bad things get you can rest assured that you'll end up with a consistent database once the dust settles. You can even do database restores up to an arbitrary point in time if you need to! We've fucked up in every way imaginable but we've never lost any data let alone an entire database. I have nothing but praise for SQL Server.

This doesn't really answer any of the questions I asked you but from what you wrote here you have to agree that going with a tried-and-true RDBMS that's been around for decades is a much better prospect than choosing one of the new, unproven NoSQL products.

So if these incredibly mature and robust systems are an 'operational nightmare' I'd like to hear what software systems ARE up to your operational standards?

How often did you manage to spectacularly fail PostgreSQL to qualify it an 'operational nightmare'?

FYI PostgreSQL is free.

You don't seem to have any experience with solid, mature RDBMSs like PostgreSQL or Oracle or SQL Server. MySQL sucks in so many ways and all the other names you mentioned are not RDBMSs. People running large numbers of (for example) MS SQL Servers will tell you that they are ridiculously robust and mature and do NOT randomly crash in the middle of the night. And even when your hardware lets you down your hot failover machine is ready to take over without skipping a beat.

Magic bullet? These systems are the closest you can find in the world of software.

Do you mean the physical server crashing? You should have a hot spare replicated machine for that. If you mean the RDBMS failing randomly at night, that really doesn't happen on mature systems like PostgreSQL or MS SQL Server. I mean it could happen but it's as rare as hen's teeth.

So brave

If you push ANYTHING to the limits it will cause issues. I don't see how that's an argument against properly utilizing an RDBMS.

I don't know how accurate those stats are though.

I disagree with everything you say here. I seriously doubt you've been using databases for 20 years. Which databases have you used? How many hours experience do you have with each of them? Just because some people do it wrong doesn't mean you should throw out the baby with the bath water! In every stack I've used the database has been the most robust and amazing piece of technology and it's been an absolute dream come true for every project I've been involved in. (SQL Server / PostgreSQL - 10,000 hours experience)

Mutually Assured Destruction is alive and well and many countries still maintain a good stock of nuclear weapons for this purpose.

No this device has a faster CPU, more RAM etc. It's not an exact duplicate of the Pi.

Make no mistake, clones are on the way. For example this device: http://rhombus-tech.net/allwinner_a10/ is supposedly both cheaper and more powerful than the Pi.