I don't know... I keep waiting for someone to come up with a GPU-based OS based on Ampere or something like that. It can't be more than a couple years out.

Since the 1980s the US public school systems have been in decline.

More like since the 1950s. By 1960 logic and critical thinking had been removed from curriculums, and then the gradual decline in literacy and mathematics. Much of what U.S. high school students are doing is what 5th and 6th grade students are doing in most countries. If anyone excels in the U.S. public schools they are either very self-motivated or have strong interest and encourgement at home, where they are learning most of what they know.

And here I thought God engineered clouds!

Perhaps a USB/RJ45 adapter?

Use a hash? A small Copy app to put files on the SSD and save a hash there. Instead of completely reading through the file with an integrity check, do a hash and then check against the saved one on the SSD.

The word 'dupe' will be next.

Stick a box fan under it meanwhile. Where I worked for a while a couple decades ago, we always built our own computers for client jobs, and it was normal for us to always have computers sitting around that consisted of everything screwed to a piece of plywood or foam core board or stiff cardboard or whatever was around for testing before we committed to the components we were going to put together in the boxes, in addition to having some that we already assembled to test them already built. Not quite pizza boxes, though. That's a good one! Personally, though, I just use some old towers that I keep around and just put together new stuff in them.

Nah, I think I will retire before then. Pretty much been doing C# for the last ten years except for a brief stint of C++ for a year. I'm 64 and have a couple of years of work in front of me that I have to get done, and then I think I will fade away to the beach somewhere. :laugh:

C# !C# :)

I played Asteroids and Tank a little bit in the 70s in college. Not much since then. I use computers as a tool rather than for entertainment, although I acknowledge that entertainment is one of the biggest industries in the world and a main driver of computer tech. when I was in college someone I knew did a Master's thesis about how entertainment would be the biggest driver of computer tech going forward. Although IMO it might be second to defense. Hard to judge, and I am not interested enough in the statistics to check it out. For entertainment I take nature walks and study botany. It is a balance against the tech world I work in.

I am in the process of setting up redundant backups, using the cloud and 2 local SSDs as well as regularly making a VM from my machine. I recently had a computer failure where my computer died, and somehow it managed to kill my backup flash drive which was attached at the time. All lost in a microsecond. Fortunately, the folks in my IT dept were able to retrieve the data off my computer. Lesson learned. An important thing going forward will be to always be redundant and keep updated with current tech. Remember all those floppy backups?

Let's eat Grandma

I use Keepass, but have been wondering if it is a good idea. It is open-source, so couldn't someone motivated just gt the code to decrypt it and bust any keepass database?

Lots of good advice given already. After 12 years at the same company, which went out of business, I worked for another company as a programmer/tester, and there was a downturn, they laid off everyone who was over 50. It was not age discrimination, of course. Due to the widespread economic downturn, it took me 2.5 years to find a job, even with 18 years of programming experience. Companies preferred young folks right out of college rather than 50-somethings. They even paid the younguns more that older applicants. I developed some websites and did other stuff to pay bills. I eventually found a job at a place where they value life experience and more than half of the employees were over 50, some in their 70s. I am in a small (2 people) division of a company that does mostly industrial controls, and our programming division does Winforms desktop supervisory systems mostly, aside from some mobile phone dev. I personally like C#, and taught myself C# after 15 years doing C programming, mostly knowing Assembly, C, C++, and Basic and having an engineering degree with a concentration in control systems. As for Practical stuff, I would say C#. Easy to learn, and you can do desktop programming, ASP web programming, and also mobile dev using Xamarin. Some people put down Xamarin, but I really like it. I like the Murach books because I like the approach and style and example practice programs. I enjoyed Murach's C# 2015. It has been updated by newer versions, but the 2015 is cheaper and it does cover all the basics well, and, although C# has added a lot of functionality and .NET has expanded, the basics to start learning have not changed. For web dev I enjoyed Murach's ASP.NET 4.6 with C# 2015. Again, an older book, but nicely organized and practical and worthwhile for learning the basics of ASP and web dev. CSS is good to learn, and javascript. Javascript syntax is close enough to C to be able to learn easily. Develop some fun, practical applications to get the hang of the programming. After this, if you like C# like I do, get some good books on Xamarin.Forms to start in the cross-platform development if you want to get into mobile dev. I have 7 of them. Most of them show pretty much all of their UI using XAML, but I do almost everything with code since my app UIs are all adaptable per individual user. Even if you do not end up in mobile dev, it is good exposure. Xamarin.Forms Projects by Karlsson and Hindrikes is pretty good, with its UI based in XAML. Cross-Platform UI Development with Xa

does this help? C++ reading and writing BMP images | Solarian Programmer[^]

I think there are some legitimate uses for var. I use it in generic methods that have incoming objects and I have to iterate through using reflection.

A boss of mine actually said that to me once.

Yeah, always use OPM. :-D

The cost is insignificant compared to the cost of a couple hundred engineering hours to develop your own program to do these kind of things. Where I work we have no problem spending a few hundred bucks on a third-party hardware or software that could take 100, 200, 500 hours to do in-house. If you figure 100 bucks an hour personnel cost, spending 100 hours on something costs 10,000 dollars. Purchasing frees us up to do things that we need to do. Anyway, engineering hours for a project are budgeted separately from purchases. The shell game.

I just do not see it as an either/or situation, whether for an app or for data storage, desktop app or cross-platform app. I offer clients options of cloud providers or on-site servers. 99% of the code is the same, with modules to connect to various cloud services or to an on-site server. The read/write module for data I/O is selected by a state variable for the particular project. I can set up the local server or configure for cloud service. In any case I encrypt the data and back it up elsewhere. You end up with situations like China does not allow anything from Google, so it is Microsoft cloud services or local server. Some clients like Google platform. I can advise but do not make the final decision. At the end of the day it is a customer preference.