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Sorry about posting AC.

This problem is huge. I know that we as the tech nerd type tend to view designers as sort of lesser non technical children.

However, it might be a good idea for us to maybe consider what they do. After all code disasters don't make all of us question the need for coders.

Instead, we might take the path that we could learn something out of the deal. There are a bunch of people who offer training to non design people on how to make their design better. most of this stuff is actually really easy to do and it pays off hugely later.

As an example Dan Rubin's Lecture Slides.

Furthermore, many people dislike Office 2007/2010 still so you are being very presumptuous in your argument. Here.

Many people in very specific places, like Slashdot, that usually isn't typical Office users or even care much about Office outside dissing on the ribbon dislike Office 2007/2010, while a ton of user research and sales show that users are happy with it. FTFY Seems nerds like on Slashdot is resisting change more than most others. Slashdot is still one of the few places I see a lot of people arguing against the concept of a phone being more than just to make phone calls, "social networking is stupid because if I want to talk to my friends I'll call or meet them", etc.

I have managed mail-systems for several ISPs. Each with 7 digit numbers of users. Exchange isn't even on their radar, while Postfix/Exim with Horde/Dovecot most definetly is. Please don't delude yourself in thinking that an Exchange server will scale even remotely as well.
As for Zimbra, we currently serve several thousand concurrent users using a virtualized server. A similar Exchange installation in our experience consumes far more resources. Other independent actors also seems to think that Zimbra is a better choice.

"In my mind, the last real Microsoft innovations that happened were in the year period between late 1995 and early 1996."

They may not make a lot of huge market changing products that take off like the iPhone, but MS does dump A LOT of money into R&D and works with many other companies like AMD/Intel and helps them with chip design. They work with prototype CPUs/Memory that are completely different in design from today's hardware, and they give useful feedback to the hardware people on how an OS/software would interface to that hardware.

MS is top 10 for R&D world wide for the past decade and made 2nd place in '09. No one in the computer industry is near them, including Intel and IBM.

IBM 5.8bil, Intel 5.6bil, MS 9.0bil
http://www.slideshare.net/consultancynl/booz-co-the-2010-global-innovation-1000

MS helps a lot of things outside of their own products.

http://people.mozilla.com/~dmandelin/KnowYourEngines_Velocity2011.pdf (or http://www.slideshare.net/newmovie/know-yourengines-velocity2011 if you prefer them on slideshare) is a good set of slides to read about things you want to avoid to make your JS fast.

There's a lot of value in going to the library, finding the books you need, and using them to take the notes you need for the research you're doing. On it's own there's a lot of value in the simple process of taking notes down on paper itself:

http://www.slideshare.net/luscher/optimising-the-use-of-notetaking-as-an-external-cognitive-aid-for-increasing-learning

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1636926/

A physicist doesn't need to know calculus? How does that physicist make it through basic college physics classes without understanding some of the math behind their chosen field? And CAD is still drawing out a blueprint, it's just a different medium. I guarantee you though, if you talked to any architect these days they'd tell you that their ideas all begin as rough sketches on paper. There are still architectural schools that require taking classes with a drafting board and a parallel rule.

These people that use Wolfram Alpha, or CAD for everything are your low level monkeys in their field. They're no different from a help desk tech that uses google to solve every problem.

It is harping on details but science is about details.

The commercial production of atlases is business, not science. That someone made a mistake putting an atlas together has nothing to do with the scientific consensus on climate change. The denier argument amounts to: "look, there is uncertainty here, because there's this mistake over here". At this rate, you might think that there were no forest because there is some space between the trees.

But whatever. You know best, right?.

How does one establish whether methods/vars are public/private/protected? Or inheritance? To me, the weird misappropriation of the function keyword to build objects, the verbosity of the code to express objects, and the lack of inheritance, etc. are primitive compared to Actionscript 3, to Java, to PHP5, to C++, and a variety of other languages I've dealt with.

You really need to read Crockford's "Javascript: the good parts". You absolutely do make private methods and vars (ever noticed that you can't directly call jQuery's internal methods? Or TinyMCE's? Or any other major library/framework?)

He also makes the case that actually JS has more patterns to allow code re-use. That's why things like Mootools can even fake things that look like classical class inheritance patterns for you, if you really want to do that.

Check out http://www.crockford.com/javascript/inheritance.html and http://javascript.crockford.com/prototypal.html and http://www.slideshare.net/douglascrockford/javascript-the-good-parts-3292746

Yes, this is correct. Wait a month and you'll see that we turned the corner about a week ago.

You made that statement on the 31st March 2011, which means you claim all these things were done by 24th March 2011. It's not my fault that you made a lazy and vague point to make your grandiose statement. Your bullshit is on the record as is you inability to define what you mean by your statement and your subsequent attempts to backpedal and massage some meaning into your statement as new information becomes available and then claim that you were right all along to satisfy your sense of self importance and attempt to recover some dignity. You took a gamble that I didn't have any facts to present and that I would back down like everyone else you have bludgeoned with your arrogance, that is so sickening to watch, and you turned out looking like a fool.

Why don't you shut up and do step one. Show that my statement was false? I can wait.

First, I've already done that here.

Second, looking back to June a sharp rise in radiation meant they couldn't even get near the plant. So almost three months after your claim it still hadn't "turned a corner"

Third, Spontaneous criticality is still occurring at the sites, disturbingly, it is suspected that this is also happening in the spent fuel cooling pools. That's not even under control. The evidence; the site is still outputting radiocesium. Source Tepco report (June 20 – June 28: approx. 1 billion Bq/hr (1.0 x 109)) Jul/Aug/Sep data not available

Fourth, Tepco's Official Plan for dealing with the accident has, ironically, has not achieved Step One "Maintain Stable Cooling" (So *you* can shut up now) Source; Japan Prime Ministers Office.

Fifth, Overall, the situation at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant remains very serious. Source IAEA

Sixth; Plant has not yet acheived a cold shut down - Source Japan Prime Minister report on Fukushima.

Bloomberg, Reuters, Summary of Reactor Status (2 June 2011) - Presentation Transcript etc etc

There is so much more that tells us the corner hasn't been turned yet, not even a cold shutdown has been achieved yet. The workers can't even get into the plant to assess the damage yet but you will likely come up with some word twist to justify your position. The worst thing about your position is you show no respect for the workers there who continue to risk their lives to bring the situation under control.

You are lost.

http://www.slideshare.net/bsideslondon/breaking-out-of-restricted-rdp

Fluidinfo in a nutshell: http://www.slideshare.net/fluidinfo/fluidinfo-in-a-nutshell Happy to answer any questions (n.b. yeah, I work for Fluidinfo and I authored the presentation that I'm linking to).

Hi. Love the memoization comment :-) I don't know how technical you want it, but there are some slide decks on http://www.slideshare.net/fluidinfo/presentations and some more technical ones in http://www.slideshare.net/terrycojones/presentations (back when we were still calling it FluidDB). If you have specific questions I'll try to answer them. Fluidinfo doesn't provide the actual storage layer (we build on a variety of things), it's more that it's an alternate interface to information - a bit like Wikipedia was an alternative way for people to store information: one in which you didn't have to ask permission to contribute, your additions didn't have to be anticipated, and where there was a single logical place for any thing (i.e., a URL in the case of Wikipedia). Fluidinfo does the same, but for apps. Plus you get a perms system on tags, typed data (of any type), and a query language. The main change is to objects without owners, which allows related information to collect in the same logical place (Fluidinfo has a unique 'about' tag, which is like Wikipedia's URLs) because information in context is more valuable than identical information that's isolated elsewhere. It can be searched across, for example. Does that help?

Hi. Love the memoization comment :-) I don't know how technical you want it, but there are some slide decks on http://www.slideshare.net/fluidinfo/presentations and some more technical ones in http://www.slideshare.net/terrycojones/presentations (back when we were still calling it FluidDB). If you have specific questions I'll try to answer them. Fluidinfo doesn't provide the actual storage layer (we build on a variety of things), it's more that it's an alternate interface to information - a bit like Wikipedia was an alternative way for people to store information: one in which you didn't have to ask permission to contribute, your additions didn't have to be anticipated, and where there was a single logical place for any thing (i.e., a URL in the case of Wikipedia). Fluidinfo does the same, but for apps. Plus you get a perms system on tags, typed data (of any type), and a query language. The main change is to objects without owners, which allows related information to collect in the same logical place (Fluidinfo has a unique 'about' tag, which is like Wikipedia's URLs) because information in context is more valuable than identical information that's isolated elsewhere. It can be searched across, for example. Does that help?

It's an occupational hazard of indoor manager/coder types.
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/about-vitamin-d/how-to-get-your-vitamin-d/vitamin-d-supplementation/

Vegetable deficiency disease (in part from stress) is a killer too.
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/foodpyramid.aspx
http://drfuhrman.com/library/article16.aspx
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/PCI_angioplasty_article.aspx

Fixing both of those issues in my own life has led to more energy and mental clarity for learning new things.

Otherwise, code monkeys are at big risk of more than bad management from eating chips, drinking soda, and working indoors, which curtails the time for learning on this plane of existence:
    "Code Monkey"
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4Wy7gRGgeA

Exercise, good sleep, and other lifestyle issues can also contribute to having more energy and more mental capacity.
http://www.bluezones.com/

Also, there is a lot to be done for improving software projects beside code, so you might be able to push your project management skills in new directions, like discussed by David Eaves here for FOSS projects:
http://www.slideshare.net/david_a_eaves/community-management-presentation/

It's a joke with lot of truth to it. My undergrad adviser said he used this model sometimes (he's 90 or so now, so probably OK to mention this). He said he would essentially get a grant for work he had already (mostly) done, and then use much of the money to do the next thing. So, you are right, it's an interesting and sometimes successful model.

A much deeper problem is that the people good at looking good may not be the same people good at doing stuff. As someone suggested recently (forget where, maybe on slashdot) that is why so many mediocre films are produced. The best directors and writers may not be the best at convincing others to give them money to make films. This is in part a function of how many lesser skilled wannabees are around and how desirable the area is. The more mature a field is, perhaps the bigger the problem?

I think that was implied in another recent slashdot article that at first glance seemed to be about how the popularity of computer programming was insuring the unemployment of true geeks. Will a true geek, even one with decent social skills, get hired when hiring managers can find a lot of very appealing people who look even more on paper like true geeks than the true geeks, and they can't tell the difference, or at least, can't tell from the information they have to work with? This is also a problem in the "Seven Samurai", how does a farmer know what makes a good Samurai? And there are so many aspects to what makes people effective, even a focus on skills and experiences can be misleading.

A completely different issue is you may be hiring the wrong type of person, or the wrong person may be doing the hiring. For example, this presentation by David Eaves suggests that big open source projects need good facilitators at the core more than they need good coders:
http://www.slideshare.net/david_a_eaves/community-management-presentation/

Still, coding skills in the case of open source may be important for a certain level of respect by the community. In general, we need better software tools for collaboration, as that presentation talks about (and thus the need for a social semantic desktop and good tools on it, including for stuff like Structured Dialogic Design and a variety of other methods for collective sensemaking and analysis and collaboration).
http://www.globalagoras.org/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensemaking
http://collaboration.wikia.com/wiki/Stigmergic_collaboration

The best "manager" I ever had in a commercial setting did not know how to code that well (although he could code enough to understand the problem area and contribute to it), but he was great at managing a team well.

Another option for running a program like this is to not have applications. Just find people doing the work you like and give them money.

Still, ultimately, the best security is going to emerge from a society with things like a "basic income" to live off of so the people who like resolving these issues have the time to do so, without imposing this problematical filtering process on it. That is what is depicted in James P. Hogan's "Voyage From Yesteryear" sci-fi novel. And it is backed up by research, like discussed here:
"RSA Animate - Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us "
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc

The best motivated work comes from taking money off the table, and people having a sense of purpose, developing a sense of mastery, and having a sense of ownership/influence over what is happening.

This is all why it is so how hard to give money away well, as discussed near the end to the Seven Laws of Money

FYI from last time something similar happened:
http://it.slashdot.org/story/10/10/24/1651220/iPhone-Jailbreak-Modified-Into-CC-Sniffing-Malware
Slides:
http://www.slideshare.net/esmonti/toorcon-2010-iphone-rootkits-theres-an-app-for-that

Actually the design is pretty different. Take a look at these slides: http://www.slideshare.net/xen_com_mgr/why-xen-slides . That should explain the differences. Xen is also multi-OS, ie. you can use also BSD/Solaris in addition to Linux as a Xen host, while KVM is Linux-only as host.

Here's the radiation information from the NNSA and Department of Energy which have cooperated with Japanese authorities on overflights and ground measurements. Slide 6 shows the Cesium levels which are probably the most relevant mid-term. Expect them to adjust the exclusion zone to cover anything green and up (and Iitate is right in the middle), although this being Japan they might just exchange the top soil of the outlying islands. I do wonder what they're gonna do in the 300,000-600,000 Bq/m^3 areas.

1. Blog your progress. Whatever you did today, blog it. Let people know what you did that worked, or what was faster (Nginx vs. Apache), or what wasn't (ColdFusion?). Don't reinvent the wheel, use WordPress, regardless of whether you like PHP/MySQL or not.

2. Use a subscription/payment management company. You're just a small group of nerds, not accounts receivable clerks. Fastspring, Plimus are free; Chargify, Subsify, Cheddar Getter, BrainTree, Spreedly charge; and Zuora is expensive.

3. Use Google Docs and Slideshare to share documents.

4. Chat. Don't just rely on email. Emails can often read like "this way or the highway". Be collaborative. You can often accomplish more with 15-30min collaboratively as opposed to composing and responding to long emails. Skype, Jabber, SIP

5. Take notes on what you did. Made a server configuration or a setting change in your CMS, your compiler, or whatever? Copy and paste from xterm so you don't have to guess about those commandline switches next time. Take screenshots and make them available to others. Zim, Projly, DokuWiki.

6. Have a phone numbers. If not bog-standard landline phones, take advantage of Google Voice and SkypeOut and SkypeIn (people can call your Skype line on a normal phone number). I realize Google Voice might not be available in South Africa yet.

7. Someone mentioned version control. Use git if you're a cool kid. Or svn if you're old and busted. Read the RedBean book. I've had success in having non-tech colleagues using graphical clients like TortoiseSVN (integrates into Windows Explorer).

8. Write tests. Any member of your team, sitting anyplace, should be able to push a button and run all your tests. Tests document how you're supposed to use a given method, class, etc., especially valuable when you're so far flung. Use JUnit, PHPUnit, FooUnit for your language. Write the tests before you develop, and you're doing Test Driven Development.

9. If you're writing tests, that implies loose coupling, which might require dependency injection. Can be difficult to climb that mountain, but it's worth it when you can just run a test and be sure your project works.

10. Development processes: Scrum, Extreme Programming. UML lets you communicate graphically about objects.

Concur.

It unfortunately becomes an addiction. I ended up having to upgrade all my machines to SSD after using it on one. Couldn't take what then seemed like intolerable sluggishness after upgrading the first machine. Would never go back to HD for OS drives.

Additionally, if you do database work, SSD is like crack cocaine. Instead of drives being the performance limiter, you'll actually start to saturate your CPU and WAN connections (particularly for slave operations.)

Check out this presentation with regards to mySQL: http://www.slideshare.net/matsunobu/ssd-deployment-strategies-for-mysql#

I probably should've posted this straight away, but I would recommend two pieces of reading:
- http://lwn.net/Articles/250967/ (all parts) gives a good idea of all the sorts of effects that memory layout can have on your program's performance, and what you can do about it (to the degree that you can).
- http://www.slideshare.net/naughty_dog/multiprocessor-game-loops-lessons-from-uncharted-2-among-thieves specifically speaks about how to improve parallel processing efficiency by (amongst other things) doing what I wrote about above.

Linking > repeating :D

Um, yes actually, the USA developed Darpanet (the first internet) in response to the USSR in order to build a robust communications network.

Oh, and there's this new-fangled thing called "Google" you can use to look up the origins like this: http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_is_some_information_about_the_invention_of_the_internet

and this: http://www.velocityguide.com/internet-history/origin-of-the-internet.html

or perhaps a little slideshow might be simpler for you:
http://www.slideshare.net/macloo/invention-of-the-internet

Oh yes, and TCP/IP? See this guy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vint_Cerf
and this guy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Kahn.
FYI, neither is Swiss.

You think yourself "harsh" but what you come across as is adolescent and what rural Americans would term "pig-ignorant."

It's precisely the 2D canvas that makes HTML5 game graphics practical.

Wrong, canvas isn't suited for games in current browsers. Moving around divs is much faster and much easier (no need to do image loading manually, no need to handle redraws, etc). The only issue is alpha-aware hit testing, that's actually impossible with divs.

See this presentation by Paul Backaus (the guy behind jQuery UI and a javascript game engine that was bought by Zynga) starting on slide 31.

WebGL will change a lot there, when it's finally working in all major browsers (except IE of course).

Roughly, this is how the labs are laid out:

Week 1: I have the students install Ubuntu via wubi. Wubi isn't without its problems but it's a good compromise to our Windows-only systems. Having the students do the installation is a learning process in itself. Explore the Ubuntu interface, list out applications, compare to Windows, etc. Install software via Synaptic.

Week 2: Command-line exercises. I set up an Ubuntu machine where they can log in. I give them stuff to do with files and directories and such. I have them create HTML pages, compile C and Java programs. I have them use "The Linux Command Line" as reference.

Week 3: More command-line exercises. Stuff with sort, grep, find, cut, etc. I have them do stuff that's difficult to perform with GUI but easy to do with CLI.

Week 4: Students install VirtualBox and a command-line only virtual machine. This gives them an idea what it's like to install Ubuntu on a full system. Optional: install Ubuntu on USB flash drive.

Week 5-Week 6: Students install the LAMP stack and some popular CMSes like WordPress, Joomla, Drupal. Again, I force them to use only the command line.

Week 7: Students install and work with Tomcat. Just some basic programming and deployment with Netbeans. This provides some perspective beyond PHP.

Week 8-Week 9: Programming languages: assembly, C, Java, Python, Perl, command-line PHP, Ruby. Not too in-depth, just enough to give them a taste of each. I use combinations of ps, time, and strace to explain processes and system calls.

Week 10: Wine, with some Windows games, and Dosbox, with some DOS games. Used to explain system calls, APIs, and emulation.

Week 11: Explanation of the Linux boot process and Windows boot process. See my presentation (needs some updates.)

Week 12-13: Compiling the Linux kernel.

Week 14-15: Linux networking. DHCP, DNS, routing, mail services, etc.

Week 16: Webmin

Week 17-18: Their choice of operating system to work on.

Every sem I tweak my labs further, but more or less, it's laid out as above. So far, the response has been good. Enrollment varies, but at one time I was getting 100 or so students to use Ubuntu. As an added activity, we run an open source mini-conference in school for other students and Software Freedom Day. Some of my students eventually get jobs involving open source.

Drop me an email if you want to trade notes. I'd be happy to share some of my lab exercises with you. I also teach an information security class (using mostly Ubuntu, too) and an open source class. Our class blog gives some idea of what the students are working on.

The have a slideshow here: http://www.slideshare.net/andrewmurraympc/elce-the , it's interesting starting at slide 19. Especially the executable reordering to defer loading of UI event handling code is impressive.

Lol, that's a nice fairy tale.

I didn't say it was moral, good for you, or the route to improved community(s) relationships. It is what Oracle does: make money.

No, you're not listening, er reading. You don't make money by paying billions of dollars buying a company then dumping that company's products. Nor do you as a software business make money by treating developers of your platform like shit. Oracle is foolhardy doing so. Sure right now they're the 800 pound gorilla but there are other enterprise scale databases on the market. Microsoft will even help customers transition from Oracle to SQL Server. IBM has it's own offering, DB2 as does HP. Of course there are also open source based DBMSs such as ones based on PostgreSQL, Computer Associates spin-off Ingres, and Firebird.

Falcon

"Cyber" has had an interesting history - from military research in 1948 (Norbert Weiner coined "cybernetics" while working on anti-aircraft guns), to 1980s science fiction, to 1990s business buzzword, to military strategy in 2010. Which raises the question, can military planners only understand their own technology through the lens of science fiction?

DISCLAIMER: I am writing this from a student's point of view. So this might be completely unhelpful. Or even more helpful than the viewpoint of a teacher. Either way, just take this with a grain of salt.

What's important is not necessarily the technology, but methods of teaching. Regardless of available tech, if you can get students interested in a subject, they will succeed. However, if you just give students a laptop, or a graphing calculator, they're going to be interested in the piece of equipment as opposed to the lesson. In fact, it will easily make your lesson less interesting. Therefore, the point is to use your resources to add to the lesson, not detract from it. Technology, and even computing equipment, can be used, but the way it is used is more important.

For example, if you're teaching about graphs of trig functions for the first time, it doesn't hurt to have students do something as simple as graphing the six functions on Wolfram|Alpha usin a smartboard and figuring out, "hey, the graphs of the cofunctions are just translations and/or reflections of the original trig function." In that case, their attention would be drawn towards the front, and they would actually be paying attention. Also, it would help them figure out things like that on their own.

However, if you tell them to graph it on their personal little TI-84's, it's almost as if you have given them an excuse to go off in their own world and start playing BlockDude on their calculators; their attention is immediately yanked away from you, the teacher, and toward some tiny little device in their hands, that will be a crutch, a distraction, and therefore a complete detriment to learning. Also, TI-84's just suck, because the time it takes to learn all the different functions, as well the time taken to input functions and such, is ridiculous for the small gains. Tech shouldn't be that (relatively) difficult to use and that easily distracting at the same time. And the very fact that you can put games on there makes is unsuitable for the classroom setting.

Hehe. I guess in certain cases, the tech used does make a difference. If you use tech that is easily used for distracting purposes (that iPhone that she's texting with? or that Mac that he's checking his FaceBook wall on?) it renders all you efforts to hold your students' attention useless. (Even if the class is so intricate that not paying attention for a second will cost them significant knowledge of the subject) It seems like common sense, doesn't it? Apparently most of my teachers didn't seem to get that.

Of course, in any discussion regarding technology and learning, the issue of PowerPoints comes up. As far as I'm concerned, teachers need a lesson on using powerpoint properly. Or maybe 30 lessons. Teachers more often than not make the fatal error of putting up every bullet that they're talking about in the powerpoint. This, again, detracts attention from you. Seriously, you could just put the powerpoint online and let us students take notes on it on our own time. There's a great powerpoint (haha) about this very issue at http://www.slideshare.net/GlobalGossip/steal-this-presentation-5038209

Quite simply, I agree with "pedantic bore". Tech for its own sake is useless for real learning. It's the method of getting students' attention toward a subject that really makes a positive difference.

What exactly would constitute a good educational discount from Apple? 25%? 50%? Even half the $500 cost of their low-end model is $250, which is still greater than the retail price of most eBook readers (Kindle 3G now $189)...and I didn't even need an iPad to figure that out.

The average lifespan of a textbook in California is 6 years. How does the iPad stack up? There's no way to tell since it's been out for less than a year! Plus, textbooks can be kicked around, stepped on, dropped etc. This is a clear case of using unproven technology in a capacity for which it was not designed.

After some Googling, I found an interesting proposal for an eBook reader specifically designed to be used in the classroom. A well-thought and researched idea like this deserves serious consideration, however, we are not dealing with a genuine movement toward improving education, but rather the "I want cool gadgets and I want them now!" mentality.

"if those android game devs were deveoping on apple's platform they'd be SOL."

Um, Gameloft does make iPHone games, a lot of iPhone games, making $25 million from iPhone apps in 2009.

"I've certainly heard enough horror stories about the review process to turn me off from ever trying to sell anything on the iphone."

Sure there's a review process, but judging from how many apps make it obviously it's not bad, and with 200,000+ apps I'd be shocked if there wasn't somebody complaining about the process.

I'm sure you won't be missed, plenty of developers are becoming millionaires off iPhone apps, you don't have to be one of them. How many Android millionaires are there? After 2 years not one Android developer has made a million dollars from apps. In fact Android developers celebrate making "up to" 100k a year

Besides Android has it's own major problems, like a 24 hour return on apps: according to one Android developer, you can return any Android app for a full refund within 24 hours. Talk about fail, no wonder Android developers are broke when users can instantly download apps, use them, and then return it for a full refund and repeat the process anytime they want.

Sorry but Android is a joke, Google does not make money from Android while the iPhone is Apple's cash cow. If the iPhone vanished tomorrow Apple would be in serious pain, but if Android vanished tomorrow Google wouldn't even notice, so Apple will fight tooth-and-nail to make sure the iPhone maintains it's Jesusphone status while Google will continue to ignore Android.

Leadership training has always been a lie. All the theories upon which training was based have been refuted or considered non-trainable. I believe that we will be able to settle for the right leadership training, but how can we do it if we don't even have a consensus on which Group Development theory is right? After all, the role of the leader is that of realizing which stage of group development an organization is and, then, take appropriate measures to burst productivity, either by utilizing a privileged development stage, or directing the group towards another development stage.

I like the Integrated Development Model that is used here in the University of Coimbra in many things ( http://bit.ly/90XCCA for instance). This is a modified version of Wheelan’s Integrated Model of Group Development, it's Miguez and Lourenço's Integrated Model of Group Development.

Other examples where this theory is exposed: http://bit.ly/9CmeNA and https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http://www.psicologia.com.pt/artigos/textos/A0338.pdf (mentions it) and http://www.slideshare.net/daniellopes314/gesto-de-equipas and http://bit.ly/aU9Rvy

They may all be in Portuguese, but they show a real (and IMO, the best) approach to Leadership and the likes.

I'm glad you were good enough to mention the artists, since it seems they never get the recognition they deserve. Some of the artwork they produced for Atari is exceptional. Unfortunately, much of this work has disappeared, either thrown away or stolen by people at Atari. Among the creators of the "Atari look":

Cliff Spohn is a talented and sought after portraitist of real people, sports figures in particular.
http://www.artworkoriginals.com/JAAAAAOU.htm

Steve Hendricks also usually focused on portraiture and has created some of the most evocative and distinctive work to come out of Atari.
http://www.sundancecreative.com/

Rick Guidice often worked with NASA doing space illustration.
http://www.nasaimages.org/luna/servlet/view/search?q=Guidice&search=Search
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Rick_Guidice
http://er.jsc.nasa.gov/seh/advart.html

James Kelly is not just an artist, he was one of Atari's art directors for many years.
http://www.orangecountyfineart.com/kelly.htm
http://www.slideshare.net/aditaciobanu/james-kelly-painting-nx-power-lite-presentation

Bob Flemate is someone I unfortunately haven't found much information on. He worked on Atari arcade cabinets and created the marvelous Atari 400/800 Space Invaders cover art.
http://thenewgamer.com/content/archives/gamephemera_space_invaders_atari_400_800

George Opperman was one of Atari's first artists and art director, and is notable for designing the original, iconic, and difficult to reproduce Atari "fuji" logo. The logo is meant to resemble the letter "A" and represents two players facing each other with the Pong "net" between them.
http://www.arcade-history.com/index.php?page=person&name=George+Opperman
http://www.cooganphoto.com/gravitar/cabinets.html

Hiro Kimura has had the honor of creating three US postage stamps.
https://shop.usps.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/ProductDisplay?catalogId=10001&storeId=10052&productId=10001795&langId=-1&parent_category_rn=&parent_category_rn=10000003&categoryId=10000028&top_category=10000003
http://www.virtualstampclub.com/images/flagcity.jpg
http://www.virtualstampclub.com/images/99chalk.jpg

Warren Chang was a staff artist at Atari for two years, starting in 1981. His beautiful work can be described as classical realism and has garnered several awards.
http://warrenchang.com/

How do you measure RAM usage? not with top, I hope... Because most of the plasma memory is in fact the pixmaps which are counted thrice (once for the app, once for the xserver, and an extra time in the videocard for the double-buffering)

See, plasma runs on phones, so clearly it is not that heavy (not that phones are not pretty powerful these days, but still)...

Ruby's performance is no good - it's worse than PHP.

No, it's not. Rails may be worse than vanilla PHP, but Ruby is not worse than PHP, and Rails is significantly better than CakePHP.

Here's the original presentation of the gnome census. Most of the numbers discussed here come from slide 16 and 18.
http://www.slideshare.net/nearyd/gnome-census

I also don't agree with the claim that only 23.45% of contributions come from volunteers. There is also the 16.94% "unknown". Now, if you're working on Gnome for a company, you usually would want to list your affiliation. If you don't, maybe you're contributing to Gnome on company time without your bosses knowing, but such a situation should (arguably) be counted as "volunteer" work. But I speculate most of these unknowns are simply actual volunteers, who just skipped the question "which company do you work for", and didn't notice there was an option "none" (people usually are in a hurry when they fill in surveys). That would set an upper limit of 23.45%+16.94%=40.39% on the fraction of volunteers, and I feel the actual number is likely to be closer to this upper limit than to the lower limit (23.45%).

Greater men than me have failed to answer that question but I'm arrogant enough to give it a try anyway.

In ancient Rome slaves provided for Roman citizens such that there was a large group of people who didn't have to work at all. Everything they wanted was given to them. They spent their time at theaters, bath houses, and feeding each other. Some turned to philosophy, some to learning, many to simply wasting their lives away in whatever they liked to do.

In today's UK there are many people living on the public welfare system. Their standard of living is significantly lower than that of Rome but their pursuits are about the same. It's not fair to say they aren't as intellectual: you would be comparing the average of today's time wasters with the progress of a thousand years of Roman philosophers.

In America there are many people in the inner cities existing with a very low standard of living (by today's ideas of a proper standard of living), most of that wealth given to them by the government. They have very poor lives and a high crime rate. It has been alleged that government handouts are causing this low standard living but another way to look at is that insufficient knowledge, improper allocation of handouts, and not enough handouts are causing the problems. If enough time and energy could be spent on those neighborhoods (especially in solving the social problems) they WOULD improve.

So what I'm saying is that given high enough productivity per person you would have the same social structures that have been seen where wealth is concentrated: look at Dubai's hotels and massive public works projects, the activities of today's ultra rich (often composed of wealth wasting contests like seeing who can get the most and best horses and proving who had enough time to spend learning just the right set of mannerisms) and the activities of the Roman wasters.

It may also by beneficial to compare lifestyles across times when wealth was plentiful and not so plentiful.It is not whether someone is working or not that determines their standard of living but only how much wealth they have. Below a certain point you have ghettos and severe social malignancy; above that level you have the desire to be warm, comfortable, well fed, and able to move about; and above that there is an increasing amount of conspicuous consumption where anything goes as long as it obviously cost enough.

Even though this is not the first time that ATM vendors prevented a security researcher to publicly disclose findings about flaws in their devices at a conference, this instance is really surprising, since Chiesa held this same presentation at a couple of security conferences already, and the slides he employed are also available online.

The thing is these slides are sanitized, the details of the ATM attack were removed.

Does anybody know where to find a non-sanitized version?

Here are the slides.

http://www.slideshare.net/null0x00/raoul-nullcon2010-day1

He gave this presenation at nullcon already. Nothing too creepy there...

M

See also:
http://www.currentcost.com/
http://www.slideshare.net/andysc/the-house-that-twitters

the mention slides to be found here:
http://www.slideshare.net/xzilla/intro-to-postgres-9-tutorial
It took me a while to realize it was not either of 2 mentioned presentations...

While the changelog is cool and all, if you just want to see the slides go to http://www.slideshare.net/xzilla/intro-to-postgres-9-tutorial

I'm a developer for The Guardian ( http://www.guardian.co.uk/ ) - a UK newspaper not owned by Murdoch, which doesn't have any intention of becoming invisible any time soon - rather than erecting a paywall, we've spent the last year putting together a content API that allows anyone to explore our content using search terms, faceting, etc - and then build your own application upon it. Check it out here:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/open-platform/getting-started

The implementation, written in Scala and based on Apache Solr/Lucene stack was pretty good fun (we plan to opensource it within a few months) - slides with some of the implementation details are here :

http://www.slideshare.net/openplatform/the-guardian-open-platform-content-api-implementation

Alan Rusbridger, the editor of the Guardian, recently gave a pretty deep lecture on the 'open vs closed' & 'authority vs involvement' questions raised by the spectre of paywalls:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/jan/25/cudlipp-lecture-alan-rusbridger

cheers,
Roberto

(views my own, not necessarily those of my employer, yack yack yack)

Seriously, did the article writer not read ANY of the readily available information about the purchase?

Possibly he was too busy wanking off onto his Android, as he is apparently a MASSIVE Droid Fanboi.

However, had he actually read up on it he would have noted that HP is MASSIVELY interested in WebOS. Particularly in bringing WebOS into the TABLET market to compete directly with the iPad. Hell, the HP execs practically reached through the internet and slapped us all silly with their enthusiasm for WebOS on a tablet!

Of course, there is also the fact that while HP had a very strong showing in the early days of smart phones, their recent offerings have been very lackluster. With HP acting as partner and "sugardaddy" to Palm, Palm can begin to put out some really impressive smartphone offerings, along with HP offering the fantastic WebOS on an HP tablet. It's a great combination, and the WebOS platform has a great future ahead of it.

By the way, I really do use Linux on the PS3. I have been on the mailing list for cbe-oss-dev for over a year. I was falsely assured that it would continue to be supported: http://lists.ozlabs.org/pipermail/cbe-oss-dev/2010-February/007189.html I lead the BoF for PS3 Linux at SCALE 6x. I just uploaded my slides to slideshare.net: http://www.slideshare.net/wrightrocket/ps3-linux

Suse will also support KVM in SLES11 SP1 and expects that long term it will "become equivalent to Xen". Ubuntu and Fedora also support KVM. Xen doesn't care about what distros do (they don't care about getting all their code merged in mainline either), they seem to think that they can ignore what mainstream OSes do, just like VMWare. I suppose they will die some day, I'm not using third party software if I can get the same funcionality with the OS.

Actually I found his slides: http://www.slideshare.net/gvwilson The slides themselves don't touch unit testing, and should be combined with his talk. I never meant to refute unit testing in the first place though, I just wanted to ensure before I spent the time and money going through the above book that it provided empirical evidence that his methods were better.

Maybe. Dynamically moving systems to faster CPUs will raise the ceiling a little. The game is growing; the big alliances have 4000+ players. Eventually they'll break the fastest CPUs CCP can get their hands on.

The servers use "cooperative multithreading" (their term, not mine) which means it can't be distributed across cores because the system isn't thread safe. Read about it here.

EVE just doesn't scale. Microthreads, green threads, whatever you want to call them, are elegant and efficient while your problem fits inside one core. When it doesn't you get this fail.

Here's one of their 2008 presentations on the topic - apc @ facebook.

No, not those, but benchmarks which measure actual web performance, not merely fibonacci.

Try these. Note that when we actually compare a full framework (Cake vs Rails), Rails is faster, and Merb is much faster. When we try to compare closer to the bare metal (raw PHP), we find that the Merb controller is almost as fast, and the Merb router is much faster.

Also, the page you linked to links to this, which is actually less about PHP and more about your app in general. Ruby may be the bottleneck more often than PHP, but still far less than database design, front-end (HTML/etc) design, and your own stupid mistakes.