xradionut

Is help documentation almost 3000 pages or is the source almost 3000 pages? :D

I've yet to get bumblebee working on my laptop. Same system works fine under Windows. :(

If Nvida could fix Optimus for other OSes, there might be more Linux users/gamers.

"Nvidia's already working to ensure their proprietary drivers work as well on Linux as Windows and probably considers maintaining one codebase to be far less of a headache."

LOL!

Try getting Optimus working on laptop under Linux. I have a Nvidia video card in my Dell that's basically a paperweight, unless I run Windows.

A good history of the start of FoxPro: http://www.hentzenwerke.com/catalog/ftale.htm

I still end up using VFP occasionally to port our older clients to our newer software.

Python/SQLite is almost as productive, you can do some sweet stuff with a few lines of code. Not as REPL, though. Throw in some pandas, IPython and some SQLAlchemy and your are rocking.

The later versions of Excel dropped support for the .dbf format.

Considering the state of the US government, it's either incompetence or fraud. I wouldn't be surprised if Goldman Sachs had warehouses full of dewars of helium...

If you aren't in the "In" peer group your work is irrelevant.

Overpriced, this board is.

"Right now Microsoft is the only option for affordable really high-end desktop/laptop computers."

I have a high end laptop that doesn't run Windows as the primary OS. (I occasionally run Windows in VMs to verify that cross platform OSS software runs on it and on Patch Tuesday to fix the latest exploits...) Other than that, Linux is my primary personal machine at home for development, research, office work, music and movies, etc... I'm also shopping for a new desktop and home media server that will probably not be Windows.

Windows currently has a chokehold on the desktop market with it's huge ecosystem of applications and entertainment, that's what's preventing many folks from moving. Games and accounting applications are the only reasons that my spouse still runs Windows at home.

They are NSA standards compliant.

Since it was one of the very few semi-modern systems programming languages other than C used to build an OS, I would love to see some form of Oberon gain more nerd traction.

Correction: Oberon-07, which has so few users, I doubt it qualifies as valid option.

I just assume everyone in life has bias and that the links he provides my not make him much money or cover his costs of hosting.

I think that anyone going down the route of building a PC is going to do additional research and would be happy just to use posting as this as guidelines or starting points.

Does Microsoft think this is a selling point to any entity other than US government institutions? Do they not see the irony?

:)

As date guy that uses both, there is a higher level of expertise required to properly maintain PostgreSQL. SQLite is something that I can call instantly from Python without much forethought.

This is true of many metro areas. The overall decline in Dallas (Texas) schools began with the boom economy in the 70's and 80's and the flight of the middle class to suburbia, the Park cities and exurbia. It was sped up due to school integration and ever ongoing mass migration of poor and wealthy from out of state/county.

I've a more detailed comment below, but the issue isn't new databases per se, but the huge number of legacy systems out in the world. I have no control of those, I end up building software that has to work with them and help the users and their clients.

You deal with questionable quality data that comes from hundreds of different systems running software that may be decades old with demographics from around the world that may have no common conventions. And you fight for the extra disc space and processors to handle an extra hundred characters per record, because with a huge number of records, even that may cause issue with storage, backups and time to process.

And yes, I have to write code to deal with all of the "Little Bobby Tables", too.

Don't be absurd.

Software can be made to be very accommodating. Most systems I work on allocate a 50 character nvarchar for a full name, various fields for prefix, first, last, multiple middles, suffix, maiden, titles, informal salutation, aliases, nick names, gender change issues, etc. And various flags and other fields/tables for exceptions, notes and warnings, etc...

But you wouldn't believe the bad data and crap people put in name fields unless you've worked with a huge number of sources over the years. I've seen every bad variation possible. And that's not including address fields. Or combined name/address fields with multiple names and multiple addresses in the same record with a complexity that would vex a dyslexic Talmudic scholar.

I've work with names and other demographic data darn near my entire career. I've also had name issues due to the length of one of my names.

Things are better and more accommodating than twenty years ago when every byte was precious. But some cultures and individuals get ridiculous. I'm not allocating 400 characters of space in a standard name field just because you want to include your family tree, PGP key, DNA sequence and homeland geology in your name. (I will put this in another table, and link it relationally so the software and the people can access your true name.)

It's good to be a king:

http://www.publicintegrity.org/2013/09/10/13326/ex-wall-stre...

I live in tornado alley in a area with extremely summer temps and the occasional wild fire. These are the domes we recommend:

http://www.monolithic.com/

I think you handicap yourself by not having "decent" equipment. I don't run expensive gear, it's at the right price/performance point to do the job. I guarantee you that I spend less than most folk realize.

As for spinning up Amazon clusters, that's fine when you don't have to care about company/clients data security. We live in the post NSA revelation world and if you connect from overseas, your security is null and void.

I disagree.

You can use the extra computation power, DRAM and drive space when you do complex data analysis or run virtualization. I can either run huge data sets or have multiple VMs running to simulate various server configurations and test cases without having additional physical gear. And this is on a beefy commodity laptop that costs less than most Apple gear.

You would think that there would be more activity in the OpenCores and other processors on a FPGA systems, but there's not as much I expected when I researched it. Maybe the renewed revelations about the NSA will increase the participation and lower the costs.

"That's great as long as it's only your stuff you're sacrificing."

My parents moved again and again then divorced and moved again and again. I attended four different high schools and have no life-long childhood friends nor a "hometown" nor many great memories of family. My siblings and I were the casualties of their lifestyle and half of us are dead before 30. Our education and many other advantages of a more stable life suffered.

"I think things will become much much worse for Microsoft before they get better. I'm afraid they will lose small and medium size enterprises and ISVs because their licensing structure has become so complex, overpriced and antiquated that a new generation of customers will refuse to deal with them."

They have cranked prices up, killed TechNet and other stupid things to try push the medium sized clients to Azure. Licenses cost are killing some of our smaller clients to the point they are asking us to find alternatives to Microsoft even if it is a SaaS that isn't Azure. When clients start talking about OSS alternatives instead of Microsoft, you can be damn sure Redmond has "jumped the shark" in their eyes. And even with BizSpark, you are fucked if you are an independent developer.

"Today, in 2013, a trivial software bug is all it takes to allow the author of a web page to upload and run code in your browser process. That is a consequence of the architecture we run on."

Technically I hate the glued together, shit-stack that is the organically evolved web. One part of me thinks we have devolved from the Big Iron/VMS days.

"Are we at any point in the near future going to have fully transparent hardware? No we are not."

Open hardware isn't cost effective, and economically and politically probably is repressed. There's darn few viable projects that I can find on the internet and a few underground systems that are borderline crackpot. There might be a better market for these systems today than there was a year ago. There seems to be a growing mistrust in commercial software, but there is no substitute for commercial hardware.

"We're going to have to get over the NSA stuff, at least for the most part."

I have to go to the office tomorrow and pretend that I work on secure systems for sensitive data. :)

The summary paragraph sums up the only thing I was thinking of while reading this:

"Finally, we should discuss the important issue of whether this whole SGX, while providing many great benefits for system architects, should really be blindly trusted? What are the chances of Intel building in backdoors there and exposing those to the NSA? Is there any difference in trusting Intel processors today vs. trusting the SGX as a basis of security model of all software in the future?"

There is no full trust of any modern hardware or commercial software or even complex OSS software anymore. None. I made poked fun at some of my paranoid technical buddies in the '90s, but so far have apologized recently. Their customized systems don't seem so silly anymore.

The review is like a thesaurus full of pretense took acid, gorged at a buffet and then purged on a Scrabble board. Hopefully the book is better.

One of the companies I work with uses various data brokers. They have more than you realize. Especially if you have a vehicle and a house.