This is completely wrong

No, it's completely right: the traditional way to use a database is to blob everything together in to one huge table, preferably with many NULLs, then limit your query to SELECT * FROM Table; and finally process the results directly in VB6, with bonus points for a buggy parser for unpicking comma separated fields.

Note: he said "traditional" not "sane relational".

Sarcasm aside, his reason for not using a relational database is that he'd need to use more than one table and then he'd have to perform joins on them, which sounds very much like saying the reason not to use SQL is because the problem fits exactly into what SQL is designed to do.

But hey, his new solution is in the cloud so it must be better.

people given US security clearances have a VERY intensive background check done on them,

Well, except members of congress who can get clearances of any level necessary for an investigation, regardless of their level of criminality and dodgy financials.

Actually, these days it's pretty unusual to have a congrescritter without dodgy financials.

Obviously, all this data is classified as secret or above, and is almost certainly not for release to foreign individuals.

The USA, UK, Canada and Australia all have the administrative structure in place to share classified data with each other. Naturally not all classified data is to be shared, but classified doesn't imply not for fireigners.

The funny thing is that the NOFORN stuff is an entirely different mechanism done as trade protection, and while you can share it with any 2 bit sleaze bag multiple felon with US citizenship, you can't share it with your trusted allies sharing a clearance level.

Brilliant!

That's okay; if the grammar and vocabularly of today's 20 and 30 year old Americans are any indication,

No, you've got the reason all wrong.

The reason for the one way communication is that the F22 pilots can't talk back due to having passed out from lack of oxygen.

What you have said is roughly:

By blind luck I had a choice

But my point is that the mentality of "you have no choice, big business owns you" is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

That's utter rubbish. If you didn't have your family then you would have had no choice.

The nice thing is that there is only one way to be good but so many ways to be evil.

Microsoft loath competition, but seem to be at worst ambivalent to their customers. I think they might even quite like them in that they recognise on some level that customers are somehow key to their success. I mean they created bob and clippy, but out of misguided good intentions, rather than evil in that case.

Sony seem to exist for the sole purpose of making their customers lives miserable. I have never encountered another company which seems to despise their customers and delight in creating new schemes to make them suffer.

But that's just two. There are so many more. Blackwater (like to kill people), the big government contractors (like to steal taxpayers money under the guise of contracts), patent trolls, copyright trolls, union carbide, etc...

See so many ways.

"This thing that a subsidiary caused happened 10 years ago! NEVER FORGIVE!!!"

So, it's a thing that happened on THEIR BRAND, and their reaction: "fuck you", and then more recently, they had the largest credit card breach in history. Their reaction? "fuck you again".

Sure that event hapened 10 years ago, but the sony brand, going back much more than those 10 years has shown itself to regard the customer with utter contempt.

That was one highlight, don't pretend they've changed just because it was a long time ago. But if you want to completely ignore their behaviour and go buy your new shiny, don't let me stop you.

What I hear from you is blah blah blah.

Don't you get it? This is IN THE CLOUD!

So it must be new.

Most PDF renderers are written in C.

On Linux, the Xpdf and the derived rendering library used by everything else (poppler) is written in C++. Xpdf is quite old so it probably doesn't make much use of modern (i.e. safer) C++, though it it likely significantly safer than C. The trouble is that PDF also understands all sorts of crazy image formats which are decoded by large, complex external C libraries with their own vulnerabilities.

I've been using Linux for over 15 years, don't remember when it was introduced but I've become so accustomed to it, I really can't do without it.

It was never introduced to linux, at least not in the way you're thinking. It's been a feature of X11 since very early on. Multiple clipboards (selections in X11 parlence) have always been a feature of X11 (i.e. since 1987--I don't know if earlier versions of X had such a feature). The convention of having one short lived and one longer lived clipboard (PRIMARY and CLIPBOARD) was codified in the ICCCM. Version 1.0 came out in 1988, and while I can't find this version, I believe that the copy/paste protocol was codified in that version.

Therefore Linux supported this as soon as X11 implemented as XFree86 (as it was then--or was it still X386 at that stage?) was ported to Linux.

TL;DR, it predates Linux by probably 4 years or so, but the relevant software was ported early on.

Well apparently I can't type.

Should read: not until we stop having really stupid patents.

And: I'm not a DFS guy, I'm a computer vision guy.

Can we please have an end to the stupid articles where someone intentionally mis-interprets the abstract or even just the title of a patent and pretends it's some simple thing that's been done for decades to try to drum up anti-patent sentiment? There seems to be one a week or so.

Not until we have really stupid patents. I'm not a DFS guy, bu I am a computer guy. In every patent article there's one of you pointing out some supposed novelty. In my field, I've been through one or two and posted blow-by-blow rebuttals to slashdot pointing out that every claim is trivial or preexisting. Honestly, this patent has the same kind smell to it.

Deleting files based on last modification is not new. I think we can all agree on that and the cluster I used to run on 10 years ago had a script which did that. It wasn't new then.

They've basically munged up a time to live, and last modified time.

And patented the idea that "on a DFS you can delete it using some heuristic based on TTL, last modified time and quota".

All the blah about pluralities of chunks and pluralities of filesystems is patentese for obfuscating the underlying trivial point. The fact that it's a DFS is also beside the point, since there's nothing specific about a DFS there except for that obfuscaion.

It's a 1 line perl script "yeah but on a steam engine^W^Wa computer^W^Wthe internet^W^Wa phone^W^Wthe cloud^W^Wa DFS".

As we see from the resounding success of social policy in Europe, where every country has coffers full of tax revenues and a vibrant, healthy workforce to support the millions upon millions of pensions.

Ah, you mean like Germany? Yes, you are right, they have implemented it very well.

Intel's latest generation of desktop i5/i7 CPUs appear to be buggy. People I know working in CFD are finding all sorts of quirks so have gone back to older and slower Xeons.

One difference is that the intel desktop CPUs generally don't have ECC whereas the Xeon ones do.

Do the new i7s produce consistent results each time? If so, then lack ECC isn't the problem.

There could also be some subtle difference in IEEE modes.

You could try dumping everything from every stage of the algorithm out and seeing when two runs start to differ.

For a prototype it's OK

Actually it's a great idea. If the car crashes, you can just blame the driver for holding the ipad wrong.

Actually, the reason they have an ipad in the dashboard is almost certainly because a student thought it would be way cooler to have an ipad with an app relaying data over some connection than plugging a small screen into an embedded PC.