Oh, so THAT is why our GIS analysts are wanting a new 100TB Backblaze storage pod and dedicated servers. Thanks for the info!

Why even slide your card? With the security of Google Wallet, you'll be buying yours, and the rest of the people in the store(world?) groceries and other items.

At my place of employment we use PostgreSQL and PostGIS extensively for the exact or similar problems as you describe. We recently contributed back to a portion of the PostGIS project by extending the TSP solver for a different ending than the beginning. I'm not the one who is generally writing stuff like this, but I maintain the servers and I know how much performance can be gained. Plus, the PgSQL and PostGIS guys are very close with lots of code and advancements being contributed directly into PgSQL from the PostGIS team. We have also looked at the MS solutions and found them to be ridiculously expensive to host and scale services targeted at business with real-life budgets and not huge corporations. We have tools used in nearly all of the counties in Wisconsin processing many requests per day and second(not allowed to give numbers) with only a few servers. Personally, stay open source and stick with PostgreSQL. They have a track record for extremely stable systems that can be upgraded as advancements are made with very little downtime. You can tune the internal performance metrics to tweak everything you need with online research or many books and even consultants such as EnterpriseDB. Good Luck with your developers, go with PostgreSQL and you won't look back.

My goodness I wish I could mod you up right now! I have had mod points the last few days and they would have finally been useful!

Interesting and thanks for the info. I am currently looking at going this exact route with the Asus Transformer Prime TF201 though with SSH and my desktop to back me up at home. I will be mostly browsing and writing emails though I will be writing a fair amount of code in vim and compiling anything of huge processing on my desktop. I will be working primarily in Java, Node and Javascript. Possibly some PHP. After glancing at your blog it looks like I should consider the same route you did with dual-booting Ubuntu. We'll see how it goes and I'll have to let you know what I decide on. My largest motivation for the switch is due to the pitiful battery on my laptop and the processing in Tegra 3 beats out my laptop's Core 2 in LINPACK. However it goes, I'm looking forward to the challenge.

If the redesign and re-release this in a Tegra 3 platform like the ASUS Transformer Prime, I'm in. Otherwise I'm following the Prime until it's released. I'm a developer and also need heavy processing for compiling code at times, for that I simply have SSH capability to my home desktop and can remote in on the command line or use X over SSH.

This might be helpful... http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:PDbfWzLJrQUJ:jtnimoy.net/workviewer.php%3Fq%3D178+http://jtnimoy.net/workviewer.php%3Fq%3D178+cache&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&source=www.google.com

In my high school we had two different programs after 2000. That's when the classes were first being created and a mathematics teacher wanted to have a computer programming course. They initially were teaching C++ without OOP principals before a teacher that actually had programmed came into the school and rewrote the curriculum. That was in 2004. I first took a programming course in 2004, as a freshman, with that teacher and helped show him what was missing. I had taught myself C++ from different books and guides online. From that point on the school has always had two programs under different departments. Business Apps is under Business(History Department) and Computer Programming 1, 2 and IB(International Baccalaureate):Computer Science is under the Math department as it should be. Coming from my learning and as I've gone into college and the workforce, my HS was lucky in that we actually DID have some people that knew what programming was, and was not. The only class that has gone back an forth between the two is HTML Internet Programming(a joke class, really). All that teaches(kinda) is HTML, some CSS, very very little JavaScript and Flash. That has been sent back over to the Business folks because the school wanted higher rates of students in it, and they always had more. Though, from other students I've talked to. As the OP writes, it is far too often that schools actually call stuff like this posted Comp. Sci. It's a joke to the students, parents and themselves.

Have you ever happened to look at what a normal smart phone costs these days when unsubsidized? I do realize that the price is still high but I have a feeling that's more so due to the low sales and manufacture numbers compared to other phones.

http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/widgetbrowser/ Second link I saw when I scanned the page. Looks like you need to use their "Widget browser" to be able to download and use it.

It absolutely would be. This is exactly what the system is designed for in both senses. So, Wonko, how do we go about doing this? Any threads on the forums at http://www.bitcoin.org/smf/

Yea, I completely agree. I'm a software and web dev and I need multiple environments to test stuff out. I run Win XP, Win 7, Leopard(10.5) and Snow Leopard(10.6) running in VirtualBox very well. All on Fedora 13 and an encrypted hard drive. No issues at all. Why build a dedicated rig and even dual-boot when VB works so much better?