Fresh with a CS degree, I had been programming for the best part of the past 10 years (call me a nerd) and had a clear advantage over the other students. Hell, I even taught classes.
Anyway, I was more focused on C++ rather than Java. I much prefer OOP anyway so even though C is a language I quite like, I discarded it. I spent the past 3 years coding only in C++. Every assignment I had, I did in C++, and then I did it in the requested language (or the other way around). No matter if it was a web app or whatever, I always made sure I managed to write the equivalent in C++. This allowed me to learn the advantages but also the shortcomings of the language. Yes, no matter what people say, every language also has shortcomings.
This was in Southern France. I moved to London in August, and started working on getting a job. Long story short, in the end there were two opportunities, I had both job offers on my desk, and I could choose whichever I wanted. One needed me to move to Peterborough, but gave me a nice relocation package (quite amazing for a first job), the second one was in Central London. The main difference between the two jobs was I what was going to be doing. The one in Peterborough was as junior C++ developer. I'd be porting apps to Linux/Mac. The one in London was as a Technical Consultant, for a company that deals with credential management, PKI, all that stuff. I'd be writing docs, giving advice, deploying products, no programming, or very little, and most of that very little would be Java.
I chose the Technical Consultant position, and I don't regret it one bit. The thing is that if, as I, you *enjoy* programming, I suggest you don't become a professional programmer. Keep it your hobby. Sure, if your job requires you to do a little bit of it (I've spent about 3 weeks coding for the company since October), well your knowledge won't be lost.
If you want to take a coding position, then I would suggest Java. We deal with a lot of banks, and I do see a whole lot of Java going round. More than C++. Why? I don't really know.
I think you could also simply call and ask. Just go hunt for names on LinkedIn and ring them up. Find companies that you like, or that do stuff that you feel could motivate you sufficiently and ask them. Plus, if later you're prospecting for a job, you can always cite the name, you never know.
But I think you're simply off topic. I'm a drummer myself, and I was also the sound engineer of the band, and the only times we would do single-track recording over multi-track is when we would just record ourselves so we could improve ourselves by listening to our messing about during rehearsals. Call it an audio logbook.
Yet, there is no way in hell that I would discard multi-track recording when actually recording something that has any other purpose than what I explained above. For all the very good reasons that you've explained, being able to lower the drums, or accent the bass during a solo (at some point I had extra hardware and multi-tracked my drumkit just for fun, only used it for a while and then switched back to mixing my drumkit live), but the thing is we never used a metronome for any of that.
As we did it, we would just play, everyone together and record the whole thing for the first time. Once that was done, we would listen to each track individually, and could see which parts needed improving. Everyone would then take turns and improve each section of the song --while listening to the other instruments while they re-recorded their part-- until we were happy with it. The only time I use a metronome is when I'm drumming on my own, to improve my own performance, but I could never play a whole song with the invariable click in my ears (actually that's not true, there is one song where I used a metronome, but only because I had a continuous snare drum pattern and was (am?) just not good enough to keep the rythm).
My point being that multi-track is completely different than playing with a metronome. You don't need one to do the other, even though I am confident both greatly improve the overall quality when applied to the correct scenario.
I have to agree I don't feel comfortable with RFID as a technology feat in identity cards or passports... Though, I wouldn't scrap electronic devices as a whole just yet.
A smartcard (the good ol' chip) is quite secure, and I yet have to find someone who can crack through the Master Keys to replace the applets on the chip (and even that wouldn't do him any good). A certificate generated on the card will never get out, if it is not marked exportable; actually, I would guess that if the solution required key escrow, you would probably generate it in an HSM and then put it on the card, but still. Most PKI certificates (more and more cards support 2048bit keys without a problem) are extremely robust.
I really love the idea of the Belgian government: give everyone a card, give everyone a certificate that is trusted by the government, so that they can sign stuff or encrypt stuff. And with PKI being what it is, other uses have been implemented leveraging the fact everyone has PKI credentials. Imagine the post guy coming round to deliver something, no signature, just put your card in, and type your PIN. Legal signature, done.
Quite honestly, when you look at what a SoC can achieve these days, I wonder why you would even look at an "embedded computer". See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FuVwh_VrIxk for example.
I think we are getting to a point where we should starting to draw a line between PC and Embedded Device. Yes, both run Linux, and the support for say, ARM architectures is extremely good (go to http://packages.debian.org/stable/allpackages and pick one package at random, and fine one that's not available on ARM or ARMel). An embedded device is as powerful as a PC was a few years ago, and I don't really see that trend changing. I don't think anyone expects an embedded device to run as fast as a desktop computer, so the real quality is going to come from the applications that people are going to develop for them; regarless of the form factor. One example is the NIT http://linuxdevices.com/news/NS3555890464.html
If you look at embedded devices or set-top boxes, you realise you don't really want Intel or AMD made CPUs. Look at most mobile devices, they all run OMAP-based devices (ARM), because of their energy efficiency and price. It also makes a helluva lot more sense to go with a SoC (System on Chip), as soon as power and size are even remotely factors in the decision making.
It's not because AMD drops out of the low-power energy manufacturing that the world is going to end, it just means they're focusing on things they're good at. I don't really ever remember AMDs being particularly energy-efficient, not nearly as what some VIA CPUs manage. I'm not talking about the Atom either, which is a whole different area.
Maybe I'm going completely bonkers, but if I were to build a low-power system, Intel and AMD would be last on my list, by quite a margin.
You think it'll last forever. People and cars and concrete. But it won't. And one day it's all gone. Even the sky.
My planet's gone. It's dead. It burned like the Earth. It's just rocks and dust. Before its time.
You lot, you spend all your time thinking about dying, like you're gonna get killed by eggs, or beef, or global warming, or asteroids. But you never take time to imagine the impossible. Like maybe you survive. This is the year 5.5/apple/26, five billion years in your future, and this is the day... Hold on... This is the day the sun expands. Welcome to the end of the world.
You can stare at it all day and it won't go "WHAAT???".
It has an "Off" switch.
It will go to sleep if you don't use it for 30 minutes, WITHOUT moaning.
Doesn't mind you staring at another one, hell, doesn't mind you having two or three of them sitting on your desk, ready and waiting, just for you. Doesn't mind the big one in the living room either.
They both age at approximately the same speed? One gets yellow and its colours fade until the light dies. The screen just stops working.
Fair point, I understand a lot of people wouldn't want to compile on the device, and that's really the problem. It's a mobile device, so why not? Why do you think at some point, so many people started developping in Python; even though the performance was attrocious (Helloooo 15+ second start time). Some people are actually geeky enough that they want to develop something while they're commuting or traveling, and quite frankly, who could blame them? It's when I'm out of the office, or out of my home office that I have had some of my craziest ideas, so why not? That being said, liqbase was up 'till recently being developped on the device (on device compilation, even though the code was being written on an external computer). Not sure how he does it now, exactly.
We also know that KDrive is going to go, and that instead, a fork of Xorg is going to be used. You'll have to hunt the web for more details though. But the problem remains the same: Nokia didn't get the drivers (and.. err, rights) for the PowerVR chip. Not sure why Nokia never got the rights, even though they acquired Symbian who has the rights to ship the PowerVR drivers. Nevertheless, if Nokia doesn't get the rights to release a driver for the new Internet Tablet, be it Qt, GTK or CP/M, it's not going to evolve a whole lot, graphically wise. If they had been able to release the drivers for each single platform, we could've had a few high quality games by now. The PowerVR chip really is quite powerful.
Though, I don't really know if a Maemo-based phone would be a good thing for the Internet Tablet. Sure, having data abilities wouldn't be a bad thing (even though the prices are still high, it's starting to come down), but "phoning" it would probably be a mistake. The problem is that when people buy a phone, they expect everything to be shiny, blinky, and worky. And well, we all know the n8x0 platform is far from polished for the consumer market. I would definitely recommend an Internet Tablet to my nerd friends, never to a dumb blonde who just wants to browse the Facespace. In that regard, I am hoping the next evolution of the Internet Tablet remains just that, and Internet Tablet, with added connectivity, for sure, but just limited so that the niche remains quite hacker-focused.
Hildon is GTK for Mobile Devices. It was developped by Nokia. One distribution that uses this the most is Maemo. Considering Maemo is a Nokia-motivated (read coded/funded) project, and that Nokia bought Trolltech and told them to GPL Qt, they now have an extra incentive to boost Qt adoption. One of the tactics used to boost Qt adoption is that from their next version of Maemo (code named Fremantle), the UI is going to be moving from Hildon to Qt. Fremantle will still be using the Hildon libraries, but the version after Fremantle (Harmattan?) will include the Qt libraries by default, and will be officially supported.
Considering that Hildon is very closely entied to Maemo, if Maemo drops its use (read: if Nokia drops it), keeping it up to date is going to be a hard task, which is probably why UbuntuM is switching to Qt as well, as they don't want to have to maintain the UI library on their own; quite the smart move.
We've seen full Linux distributions running on ARM platforms for quite a while. Yes, Debian works, Maemo does as well, and some people might even be intersted in projects such as Mer (Mer is project that forked from Maemo and that is basically the Maemo community yelling at Nokia that they'd better not drop support for the n800/n810 in Fremantle, as they're proving they could very well take care of themselves --software wise-- and that they won't buy new devices just because Nokia wants them to). We've even seen fully fledged KDE desktops run on the n8x0, or Android for that matter.
The main problem on these devices is the lack of support for languages like C++. Yes, we have libhildonmm (C++ bindings for Hildon), but this is all pretty limited. They don't add the flexibility and power that Qt has; and they most probably won't ever do so. At this point, the devices are too slow to even think about compiling C++ on it, so most people default to shit languages like Python.
But I digress, let me summarise:
- Nokia created Hildon, and Maemo.
- Maemo uses Hildon.
- Ubuntu Mobile came along, liked Hildon and said "Hey, let's use that!".
- Nokia bought Trolltech, that develop Qt.
- Nokia is switching Maemo to use Qt instead of Hildon.
- Ubuntu Mobile doesn't want to hold on to the losing end, and switches to Qt before Hildon dies.
Remind me again, do any common Linux distros have used the same front-end to support browsing both local filesystems and the web?
I'm hoping this is a joke; how could anyone attack the Linux community and its distributions for not sharing the same code-base? Surely no-one is that ignorant.
How many distributions use Gnome or KDE as default? A nice chunk. And how many allow you to switch (easily?) to another Desktop Environment (for the sake of example)? All of them.
I'll humour you and answer your initial question by giving two browser names: Konqueror, Galeon.
A few months ago I was in Peterborough for an interview. I had three senior programmers in front of me interviewing me, asking me various questions. They were shooting the questions in rapid-fire. The one on the left asked me "Are you familiar with Revision Control Tools? If so, which one do you use?", I had barely finished answering a question coming from the right and dodged one coming from the centre, I quickly looked left and plainly said "Git."
For a moment they all went silent, and looking at my interviewer on the left, he was looking at me a bit white-faced, and then asked, with half a smile, half a what-the-hell-did-this-little-fucker-just-say-look on his face, "I'm sorry, what?". One of his colleagues then jumped in, and said "Oh right, I know what you're talking about, it's the one written by the Linux guy right?"
How would you feel if every Twitter you sent, every video uploaded, was to be stored and held against you in perpetuity?
How stupid do you have to be to say "oh noes, the government wants to store information I willingly send to the whole wide world"
Could we please go back to a day and age where people will actually stop moaning about governments storing data, considering you're giving everything up to huge corporations anyway? How many spams do you get? How many snail-mail spams do you get? You are in the corporate directories, what's the difference with it being a government or a corporation?
Quote Steve Rambam: "Privacy is dead, get over it"
Slashdot Mirror
Anyone writing "M$" rather than MS automagically loses all credibility.
It's the key located left to D.
Tell that to the Conficker guys.
Here's some research I did quite recently (less than a month ago). Prices should still be about the same.
Bare minimum:
Dell PowerEdge T100 â" GBP 279
Quad Core Intel Xeon X3220 2.40Ghz
http://configure.euro.dell.com/dellstore/config.aspx?c=uk&cs=ukbsdt1&kc=305&l=en&oc=PE1T1001&s=bsd&sbc=%20server-poweredge-t100
4x 2GB DDR2 RAM â" GBP 82.76
http://www.crucial.com/uk/store/partspecs.aspx?IMODULE=CT25664AA667
2x 1TB 32MB Cache 7200RPM HD â" GBP 163.30
http://www.novatech.co.uk/novatech/specpage.html?WD-10EADS
Total: GBP 525.06
Medium setup:
Dell PowerEdge T300 - GBP 569
Quad Core Intel® Xeon® X3363, 2.83GHz
http://configure.euro.dell.com/dellstore/config.aspx?b=&c=uk&cs=ukbsdt1&kc=N4XT3001&l=en&oc=SV1T300&rbc=SV1T300&s=bsd
6x 2GB DDR2 RAM - GBP 124.14
http://www.crucial.com/uk/store/partspecs.aspx?IMODULE=CT25664AA667
4x 1TB 32MB Cache 7200RPM HD â" GBP 326.6
http://www.novatech.co.uk/novatech/specpage.html?WD-10EADS
Total: GBP 1019.74
Over the top:
Dell PowerEdge 1900 â" GBP 1359
2x Quad Core Intel® Xeon® E5345, 2x4MB Cache, 2.33GHz
http://configure.euro.dell.com/dellstore/config.aspx?b=&c=uk&cs=ukbsdt1&kc=N4XM2301&l=en&oc=SV11901&rbc=SV11901&s=bsd
8x 2GB DDR2 RAM â" GBP 165.52
http://www.crucial.com/uk/store/partspecs.aspx?IMODULE=CT25664AA667
6x 1TB 32MB Cache 7200RPM HD â" GBP 589.9
http://www.novatech.co.uk/novatech/specpage.html?WD-10EADS
Total: GBP 2114.42
I was in your shoes not so long ago (8 months).
Fresh with a CS degree, I had been programming for the best part of the past 10 years (call me a nerd) and had a clear advantage over the other students. Hell, I even taught classes.
Anyway, I was more focused on C++ rather than Java. I much prefer OOP anyway so even though C is a language I quite like, I discarded it. I spent the past 3 years coding only in C++. Every assignment I had, I did in C++, and then I did it in the requested language (or the other way around). No matter if it was a web app or whatever, I always made sure I managed to write the equivalent in C++. This allowed me to learn the advantages but also the shortcomings of the language. Yes, no matter what people say, every language also has shortcomings.
This was in Southern France. I moved to London in August, and started working on getting a job. Long story short, in the end there were two opportunities, I had both job offers on my desk, and I could choose whichever I wanted. One needed me to move to Peterborough, but gave me a nice relocation package (quite amazing for a first job), the second one was in Central London. The main difference between the two jobs was I what was going to be doing. The one in Peterborough was as junior C++ developer. I'd be porting apps to Linux/Mac. The one in London was as a Technical Consultant, for a company that deals with credential management, PKI, all that stuff. I'd be writing docs, giving advice, deploying products, no programming, or very little, and most of that very little would be Java.
I chose the Technical Consultant position, and I don't regret it one bit. The thing is that if, as I, you *enjoy* programming, I suggest you don't become a professional programmer. Keep it your hobby. Sure, if your job requires you to do a little bit of it (I've spent about 3 weeks coding for the company since October), well your knowledge won't be lost.
If you want to take a coding position, then I would suggest Java. We deal with a lot of banks, and I do see a whole lot of Java going round. More than C++. Why? I don't really know.
I think you could also simply call and ask. Just go hunt for names on LinkedIn and ring them up. Find companies that you like, or that do stuff that you feel could motivate you sufficiently and ask them. Plus, if later you're prospecting for a job, you can always cite the name, you never know.
Double edge razor. The real deal.
Will Credit Crunch 2009 be the Linux year?
We're lucky the scientists were creative with the ACGT thingy.
I would've hated listening to ABBA for 23.5 years.
Been there, done that as well.
But I think you're simply off topic. I'm a drummer myself, and I was also the sound engineer of the band, and the only times we would do single-track recording over multi-track is when we would just record ourselves so we could improve ourselves by listening to our messing about during rehearsals. Call it an audio logbook.
Yet, there is no way in hell that I would discard multi-track recording when actually recording something that has any other purpose than what I explained above. For all the very good reasons that you've explained, being able to lower the drums, or accent the bass during a solo (at some point I had extra hardware and multi-tracked my drumkit just for fun, only used it for a while and then switched back to mixing my drumkit live), but the thing is we never used a metronome for any of that.
As we did it, we would just play, everyone together and record the whole thing for the first time. Once that was done, we would listen to each track individually, and could see which parts needed improving. Everyone would then take turns and improve each section of the song --while listening to the other instruments while they re-recorded their part-- until we were happy with it. The only time I use a metronome is when I'm drumming on my own, to improve my own performance, but I could never play a whole song with the invariable click in my ears (actually that's not true, there is one song where I used a metronome, but only because I had a continuous snare drum pattern and was (am?) just not good enough to keep the rythm).
My point being that multi-track is completely different than playing with a metronome. You don't need one to do the other, even though I am confident both greatly improve the overall quality when applied to the correct scenario.
I have to agree I don't feel comfortable with RFID as a technology feat in identity cards or passports... Though, I wouldn't scrap electronic devices as a whole just yet.
A smartcard (the good ol' chip) is quite secure, and I yet have to find someone who can crack through the Master Keys to replace the applets on the chip (and even that wouldn't do him any good). A certificate generated on the card will never get out, if it is not marked exportable; actually, I would guess that if the solution required key escrow, you would probably generate it in an HSM and then put it on the card, but still. Most PKI certificates (more and more cards support 2048bit keys without a problem) are extremely robust.
I really love the idea of the Belgian government: give everyone a card, give everyone a certificate that is trusted by the government, so that they can sign stuff or encrypt stuff. And with PKI being what it is, other uses have been implemented leveraging the fact everyone has PKI credentials. Imagine the post guy coming round to deliver something, no signature, just put your card in, and type your PIN. Legal signature, done.
Anyone else struck with the thought they've finally gotten the memo from Torvalds?
Release early, release often.
Quite honestly, when you look at what a SoC can achieve these days, I wonder why you would even look at an "embedded computer". See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FuVwh_VrIxk for example.
I think we are getting to a point where we should starting to draw a line between PC and Embedded Device. Yes, both run Linux, and the support for say, ARM architectures is extremely good (go to http://packages.debian.org/stable/allpackages and pick one package at random, and fine one that's not available on ARM or ARMel). An embedded device is as powerful as a PC was a few years ago, and I don't really see that trend changing. I don't think anyone expects an embedded device to run as fast as a desktop computer, so the real quality is going to come from the applications that people are going to develop for them; regarless of the form factor. One example is the NIT http://linuxdevices.com/news/NS3555890464.html
If you look at embedded devices or set-top boxes, you realise you don't really want Intel or AMD made CPUs. Look at most mobile devices, they all run OMAP-based devices (ARM), because of their energy efficiency and price. It also makes a helluva lot more sense to go with a SoC (System on Chip), as soon as power and size are even remotely factors in the decision making.
It's not because AMD drops out of the low-power energy manufacturing that the world is going to end, it just means they're focusing on things they're good at. I don't really ever remember AMDs being particularly energy-efficient, not nearly as what some VIA CPUs manage. I'm not talking about the Atom either, which is a whole different area.
Maybe I'm going completely bonkers, but if I were to build a low-power system, Intel and AMD would be last on my list, by quite a margin.
You think it'll last forever. People and cars and concrete. But it won't. And one day it's all gone. Even the sky.
My planet's gone. It's dead. It burned like the Earth. It's just rocks and dust. Before its time.
You lot, you spend all your time thinking about dying, like you're gonna get killed by eggs, or beef, or global warming, or asteroids. But you never take time to imagine the impossible. Like maybe you survive. This is the year 5.5/apple/26, five billion years in your future, and this is the day... Hold on... This is the day the sun expands. Welcome to the end of the world.
You can stare at it all day and it won't go "WHAAT???".
It has an "Off" switch.
It will go to sleep if you don't use it for 30 minutes, WITHOUT moaning.
Doesn't mind you staring at another one, hell, doesn't mind you having two or three of them sitting on your desk, ready and waiting, just for you. Doesn't mind the big one in the living room either.
They both age at approximately the same speed? One gets yellow and its colours fade until the light dies. The screen just stops working.
This joke has probably outlived itself.
Fair point, I understand a lot of people wouldn't want to compile on the device, and that's really the problem. It's a mobile device, so why not? Why do you think at some point, so many people started developping in Python; even though the performance was attrocious (Helloooo 15+ second start time). Some people are actually geeky enough that they want to develop something while they're commuting or traveling, and quite frankly, who could blame them? It's when I'm out of the office, or out of my home office that I have had some of my craziest ideas, so why not? That being said, liqbase was up 'till recently being developped on the device (on device compilation, even though the code was being written on an external computer). Not sure how he does it now, exactly.
We also know that KDrive is going to go, and that instead, a fork of Xorg is going to be used. You'll have to hunt the web for more details though. But the problem remains the same: Nokia didn't get the drivers (and.. err, rights) for the PowerVR chip. Not sure why Nokia never got the rights, even though they acquired Symbian who has the rights to ship the PowerVR drivers. Nevertheless, if Nokia doesn't get the rights to release a driver for the new Internet Tablet, be it Qt, GTK or CP/M, it's not going to evolve a whole lot, graphically wise. If they had been able to release the drivers for each single platform, we could've had a few high quality games by now. The PowerVR chip really is quite powerful.
3G HSPA has already been announced for the next Maemo-based device. See http://sites.hardwarezone.com/sg/nokiazone/content/sersitiv/files/2008/09/maemo-5.jpg (This was during the Maemo Summit in Berlin, September 2008).
Though, I don't really know if a Maemo-based phone would be a good thing for the Internet Tablet. Sure, having data abilities wouldn't be a bad thing (even though the prices are still high, it's starting to come down), but "phoning" it would probably be a mistake. The problem is that when people buy a phone, they expect everything to be shiny, blinky, and worky. And well, we all know the n8x0 platform is far from polished for the consumer market. I would definitely recommend an Internet Tablet to my nerd friends, never to a dumb blonde who just wants to browse the Facespace. In that regard, I am hoping the next evolution of the Internet Tablet remains just that, and Internet Tablet, with added connectivity, for sure, but just limited so that the niche remains quite hacker-focused.
Oh, and: http://www.flickr.com/photos/timsamoff/2885618332/in/pool-maemo
The summary is a bit stupid.
Hildon is GTK for Mobile Devices. It was developped by Nokia. One distribution that uses this the most is Maemo. Considering Maemo is a Nokia-motivated (read coded/funded) project, and that Nokia bought Trolltech and told them to GPL Qt, they now have an extra incentive to boost Qt adoption. One of the tactics used to boost Qt adoption is that from their next version of Maemo (code named Fremantle), the UI is going to be moving from Hildon to Qt. Fremantle will still be using the Hildon libraries, but the version after Fremantle (Harmattan?) will include the Qt libraries by default, and will be officially supported.
Considering that Hildon is very closely entied to Maemo, if Maemo drops its use (read: if Nokia drops it), keeping it up to date is going to be a hard task, which is probably why UbuntuM is switching to Qt as well, as they don't want to have to maintain the UI library on their own; quite the smart move.
We've seen full Linux distributions running on ARM platforms for quite a while. Yes, Debian works, Maemo does as well, and some people might even be intersted in projects such as Mer (Mer is project that forked from Maemo and that is basically the Maemo community yelling at Nokia that they'd better not drop support for the n800/n810 in Fremantle, as they're proving they could very well take care of themselves --software wise-- and that they won't buy new devices just because Nokia wants them to). We've even seen fully fledged KDE desktops run on the n8x0, or Android for that matter.
The main problem on these devices is the lack of support for languages like C++. Yes, we have libhildonmm (C++ bindings for Hildon), but this is all pretty limited. They don't add the flexibility and power that Qt has; and they most probably won't ever do so. At this point, the devices are too slow to even think about compiling C++ on it, so most people default to shit languages like Python.
But I digress, let me summarise:
- Nokia created Hildon, and Maemo.
- Maemo uses Hildon.
- Ubuntu Mobile came along, liked Hildon and said "Hey, let's use that!".
- Nokia bought Trolltech, that develop Qt.
- Nokia is switching Maemo to use Qt instead of Hildon.
- Ubuntu Mobile doesn't want to hold on to the losing end, and switches to Qt before Hildon dies.
Dutch Study Says Filesharing Has Positive Economic Effects
From the same researchers who said weed has no effect on intellectual capacities.
eDirectory is well worth it and is definitely an option to consider if you want to have some serious directory services. Please mod parent up.
And yes, it's been a long time since they've abandonned the horror of ConsoleOne, and quite honestly, iManager is pretty nice and intuitive.
Remind me again, do any common Linux distros have used the same front-end to support browsing both local filesystems and the web?
I'm hoping this is a joke; how could anyone attack the Linux community and its distributions for not sharing the same code-base? Surely no-one is that ignorant.
How many distributions use Gnome or KDE as default? A nice chunk. And how many allow you to switch (easily?) to another Desktop Environment (for the sake of example)? All of them.
I'll humour you and answer your initial question by giving two browser names: Konqueror, Galeon.
Most people can take your picture in a public area, and hundreds of waiters or anyone around your table in a pub can take your fingerprints.
This is different how from reading it from a chip?
If they are close enough to read the chip, they're probably already in range not to need it.
A few months ago I was in Peterborough for an interview. I had three senior programmers in front of me interviewing me, asking me various questions. They were shooting the questions in rapid-fire. The one on the left asked me "Are you familiar with Revision Control Tools? If so, which one do you use?", I had barely finished answering a question coming from the right and dodged one coming from the centre, I quickly looked left and plainly said "Git."
For a moment they all went silent, and looking at my interviewer on the left, he was looking at me a bit white-faced, and then asked, with half a smile, half a what-the-hell-did-this-little-fucker-just-say-look on his face, "I'm sorry, what?". One of his colleagues then jumped in, and said "Oh right, I know what you're talking about, it's the one written by the Linux guy right?"
I was offered the job but turned it down.
I'm guessing by the way you phrased that you're not really interested in doing some consulting on the side then?
dammit
How would you feel if every Twitter you sent, every video uploaded, was to be stored and held against you in perpetuity?
How stupid do you have to be to say "oh noes, the government wants to store information I willingly send to the whole wide world"
Could we please go back to a day and age where people will actually stop moaning about governments storing data, considering you're giving everything up to huge corporations anyway? How many spams do you get? How many snail-mail spams do you get? You are in the corporate directories, what's the difference with it being a government or a corporation?
Quote Steve Rambam: "Privacy is dead, get over it"
I love the smell of petrol in the morning