With so many major sites from Yahoo to Google to Microsoft (Passport) to Facebook, no one is perceived as a leader of SSO. Besides, Google now wants to know your real name, and Facebook Well, it’s Facebook for fuck sakes
On the other hand, Google has the concept of multiple sign-on, which I've started using. So I have a "spam" email account that I use for websites and mailing lists and crap, and a "realname" account that I only really use to talk to actual people. This works pretty well, esp. since I've pretty much disabled notification on the "spam" account on my Android phone/tablet.
I could probably create more accounts... maybe a few more spammy accounts for pr0n, and other less spammy accounts for financial stuff, but I'm fairly happy juggling just two personas. Most (but not all) of the Google / Android apps support this pretty decently.
Sure, law enforcement could probably ask Google to identify who's behind my spam account. But I don't worry too much about that.
OK, so it's a set of picturebooks without any real story. But I'd like to find something modern and similar for my kids.
Also finding myself showing them old reruns of ST (TOS and TNG), since there are no other Sci Fi worlds I've seen that have a somewhat positive view of the future.
Seconding the EeePC option. I'd opt for a netbook based on the Nvidia ION chipset... it's much more responsive with 2 cores and a decent GPU. Don't bother with the newer ION2 chipset, Intel constrained the graphics bus.
Fuduntu is probably my favorite netbook-optimized Linux OS at the moment... pretty low hassle and all of the special devices and power savings are supported.
I tested one of the FitPC thingies, which is probably more along the lines of what the submitter wanted. Sure it's a bit smaller than a netbook. But the Intel PowerVR GPU chip needs binary blob drivers that they only provided with certain builds of Ubuntu, the SATA support was also crappy, and it was just generally painful. I wish NVidia would get someone to build the ION reference platfrom on a micro-ITX form factor, which was just slightly bigger. There are plenty of people that make nice integrated miniITX "piggyback" systems, but those already exceed the size of netbooks, and lack keyboard / display / battery power / etc.
Heh, don't feel so bad working for the military, a lot of the R&D stuff they do makes sense. Training sims keep their people coordinated without burning resources in live-fire exercises. A lot of their command and control mentality is actually flipping the old hierarchy upside down and pushing the "power to the edge" where the people on the front lines are getting more information and making decisions themselves. Yeah, part of the military exists to employ people to push around our neighbors as part of some political circus, but that's not the part you'll be dealing with or even supporting in any conceivable way.
That said, after saving up a chunk of money I moved out of the military-industrial hotbed and took a job in the gaming industry on an edutainment sim. Yes, the volatility sucks, but I'm having a lot of fun and get to work on more interesting projects which I have much greater personal control over.
Inevitably, I expect the gaming industry to use me up and spit me out, so I kinda expect to start freelancing in green technology development in the future. I'm not exactly sure in the specifics, but I am certain that there's a ton of inefficiency in the way people live and work, and a maybe a decent pile of ethical money to be made optimizing the human environmental condition once people realize it won't be so cheap / easy to simply expand and sprawl to get it "for free"
Word... Spend half as much and upgrade in half the time. The only reason to spend more than $700 on a laptop is to get a decent video card, which submitty specifically excluded. Unfortunately, the only way to "narrow the field" is to look for a decent video card... that laptop market is still woefully small.
OTOH, the only reason to get a desktop is also to get a decent video card. Besides, it's easier to repurpose an old laptop as a bathroom netflix / social media feed / etc. Even low-end budget computers are fast enough these days. The only activities that take a "long time" such as video transcoding will continue to take a "long time" whether it takes an hour or 15 minutes.
Toshiba seems to have a good reputation for reliability, but don't shy away from a Dell / HP if you have a workplace / source to get replacement parts easily.
I'm not sure which category it falls under, probably a bit of both... but reportedly the original purpose of Java was simply to interface with the (relatively dumb) smartchip in ID badges in a platform-agnostic way. Somehow it grew way, way out of its original scope:P
I don't think having some self-directed time to do your regular job is really what the article was talking about. That's more "I'm the one in the middle of it and see what needs fixing better than you do"
Hey, even that I'd really appreciate. I'm always being pulled over by some management or other saying "hey, we've got deliverables you need to be working on" while I'm working on some process automation that would knock off huge chunks of time-intensive error-prone manual labor from our workflow.
But I guess whatever helps them complain about being understaffed helps them grow their org:-P
A dry run! Any kind of backup or redundancy can prove to be pretty much useless if you never test it.
The main thing I worry about is being out exploring somewhere and my phone dies leaving me without GPS. Sure, I could wait until nightfall and navigate by the stars, but what if it's raining?
After a few dry runs of worst case scenarios like that, it should be pretty obvious what kind of information you want to replicate elsewhere (on a laptop, on a phone, in a cloud service, printed out / tattooed on your person). Just go through each set of gear (and then the whole briefcase) and work out what you'd do if it suddenly fell into a swift river.
Let's start a concerted effort to replace them all with emoticons and lolspeak! It's the only language the younger generation understands nowadays, and it will surely withstand the test of time, at least until everyone (or at least the majority of the world's population) speaks Chinese.
Heh, the best thing that I could come up with in a Wintel-centric environment was an encrypted zip file containing an excel spreadsheet. The master password would be periodically rotated and sent to people in an encrypted email.
We had access to Keepass or something similar, but our management couldn't be bothered to install it from the depot:P
They're a big proponent of alternative commutes, so there's lots of incentive to bike to work, carpool, etc. http://www.gortrip.com/ . Everyone gets a free bus pass. (yeah, I know everyone can write off ~$120 a month in taxes for using public transit, but not every company bothers with it).
They also run a pretty generous on-demand shuttle service around their campus and surrounding facilities. (I know Google does the same, but we never hear about the M$ one.) They also have a special bus that ferrys like 12 bikes at a time across the 520 bridge, since the city busses can only 3 at a time.
Also, most of their cafeteria stuff is compostable, which leads to some hilarity because all their compostable plastic utensils melt in hot food / drinks. But it's great fun using that to demonstrate to visitors how strong the coffee is.
Technically every platform has a free IDE - Visual Studio Express for Windows
I might be confused with another product, but I think Visual Studio Express expires after a month demo period.
I had just installed it for a short project as part of a job interview a few months ago, and then couldn't use it a while later. Also it doesn't have complete unicode support, I had to research and install WinDDK to hack a silly TCHAR type into compiling, which took half the weekend to figure out.
Hmm, well, he's doing it wrong, I guess:-D What is this TV thing anyway? Can't you just stream video from a samba share created and maintained by a central PVR somewhere?
Actually, our internet went out last week and we had nothing left but basic cable for a brief while. *shudder*
Ooh, cool, 1GB of RAM (vs. 512MB in the G-Tablet) for an extra $20 sounds good... I bet it has a better screen as well. I'll try it out the next time I need a tablet device... someday...
If you're a cheapskate like me, I'd recommend the ~$300 ViewSonic G-Tablet running VeganTab (based on Android 2.3 Gingerbread). Overclocks to 1.4Ghz, and breezes through Netflix, YouTube, even random websites with Adobe Flash videos. I like WinAmp for streaming radio. It has built-in stereo speakers, but for the kitchen you'll probably want to plug it in to bigger speakers. It also has a USB jack so you can plug in a real keyboard for whatever reason.
Plus, these tablet things probably wipe down cleaner than whatever All-in-one PC you might find.
There's also a pretty good Android 4 ICS port done by TeamDRH which is in beta right now, but VegaTab still works better/faster/more stable at the moment. Multitasking is a bit nicer, but the memory footprint is too high for the G-Tablet to multitask well.
And yeah, I second someone else's suggestion of TinTin, since it's nearly universal, and the hero is mostly an ordinary young guy with no real special powers, which I young impressionable mind could strive to become.
I'm always telling people about how we could just mount turbines on the roofs of cars and power the engine; they're inevitably enthusiastic about this idea./sarcasm
Short answer, no. I think for evolution to occur, it's more important to eliminate the "weak" genes than merely select for the "attractive" genes. With medical technology today, many "weak" genes are allowed to propagate. Not that that's a bad thing. But I would argue that the opposite of evolution is occurring, where what once was separate populations adapted for their local environments are now rejoining and remixing all kinds of genes and we're kinda ending up closer to the genetic makeup of the first human beings again, which might fall somewhere around Northern Africa / the middle East between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.
To contribute my own anecdotal evidence, I'm basically half "white" and half Asian, but my appearance can pretty much have people mistake me for just about anything in between Europe and Southeast Asia, including middle eastern, hispanic, indian, etc.
And just to Godwin the thread for good measure, I bet they could probably find some evidence of evolution occurring with Jews during the holocaust, where there were some intense evolutionary pressures to purge the lower-class Jews out of the slums, and many of the ones with a good half a brain were able to arrange to GTFO (as they've had to do at various points throughout history). But it would just be awesomely ironic if Hitler's efforts to become the "master race" by eliminating the ghettos backfired from a strictly Darwinian evolutionary standpoint.
Slashdot Mirror
Lassie, Flipper, and Mr. Ed join forces to save the boy / bay / bray
With so many major sites from Yahoo to Google to Microsoft (Passport) to Facebook, no one is perceived as a leader of SSO. Besides, Google now wants to know your real name, and Facebook Well, it’s Facebook for fuck sakes
On the other hand, Google has the concept of multiple sign-on, which I've started using. So I have a "spam" email account that I use for websites and mailing lists and crap, and a "realname" account that I only really use to talk to actual people. This works pretty well, esp. since I've pretty much disabled notification on the "spam" account on my Android phone/tablet.
I could probably create more accounts... maybe a few more spammy accounts for pr0n, and other less spammy accounts for financial stuff, but I'm fairly happy juggling just two personas. Most (but not all) of the Google / Android apps support this pretty decently.
Sure, law enforcement could probably ask Google to identify who's behind my spam account. But I don't worry too much about that.
Mod up...
We were on Trac for a while, but Redmine pretty much seems to be the heir apparent for a reasonably simple troubleticketing system.
Thanks for that sentiment, now I have a hankering to go find the most danciest musical sci-fi Bollywood produced.
These were my favourites when I was that age:
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=Neil+Ardley+World+of+Tomorrow
OK, so it's a set of picturebooks without any real story. But I'd like to find something modern and similar for my kids.
Also finding myself showing them old reruns of ST (TOS and TNG), since there are no other Sci Fi worlds I've seen that have a somewhat positive view of the future.
Seconding the EeePC option. I'd opt for a netbook based on the Nvidia ION chipset... it's much more responsive with 2 cores and a decent GPU. Don't bother with the newer ION2 chipset, Intel constrained the graphics bus.
Fuduntu is probably my favorite netbook-optimized Linux OS at the moment... pretty low hassle and all of the special devices and power savings are supported.
I tested one of the FitPC thingies, which is probably more along the lines of what the submitter wanted. Sure it's a bit smaller than a netbook. But the Intel PowerVR GPU chip needs binary blob drivers that they only provided with certain builds of Ubuntu, the SATA support was also crappy, and it was just generally painful. I wish NVidia would get someone to build the ION reference platfrom on a micro-ITX form factor, which was just slightly bigger. There are plenty of people that make nice integrated miniITX "piggyback" systems, but those already exceed the size of netbooks, and lack keyboard / display / battery power / etc.
Heh, don't feel so bad working for the military, a lot of the R&D stuff they do makes sense. Training sims keep their people coordinated without burning resources in live-fire exercises. A lot of their command and control mentality is actually flipping the old hierarchy upside down and pushing the "power to the edge" where the people on the front lines are getting more information and making decisions themselves. Yeah, part of the military exists to employ people to push around our neighbors as part of some political circus, but that's not the part you'll be dealing with or even supporting in any conceivable way.
That said, after saving up a chunk of money I moved out of the military-industrial hotbed and took a job in the gaming industry on an edutainment sim. Yes, the volatility sucks, but I'm having a lot of fun and get to work on more interesting projects which I have much greater personal control over.
Inevitably, I expect the gaming industry to use me up and spit me out, so I kinda expect to start freelancing in green technology development in the future. I'm not exactly sure in the specifics, but I am certain that there's a ton of inefficiency in the way people live and work, and a maybe a decent pile of ethical money to be made optimizing the human environmental condition once people realize it won't be so cheap / easy to simply expand and sprawl to get it "for free"
Word... Spend half as much and upgrade in half the time. The only reason to spend more than $700 on a laptop is to get a decent video card, which submitty specifically excluded. Unfortunately, the only way to "narrow the field" is to look for a decent video card... that laptop market is still woefully small.
OTOH, the only reason to get a desktop is also to get a decent video card. Besides, it's easier to repurpose an old laptop as a bathroom netflix / social media feed / etc. Even low-end budget computers are fast enough these days. The only activities that take a "long time" such as video transcoding will continue to take a "long time" whether it takes an hour or 15 minutes.
Toshiba seems to have a good reputation for reliability, but don't shy away from a Dell / HP if you have a workplace / source to get replacement parts easily.
No, I just paid the $5 subscription fee 10 year ago, but never turned off ads, so it never expired, and I get the 5-minute premonition perk.
I'm not sure which category it falls under, probably a bit of both... but reportedly the original purpose of Java was simply to interface with the (relatively dumb) smartchip in ID badges in a platform-agnostic way. Somehow it grew way, way out of its original scope :P
I don't think having some self-directed time to do your regular job is really what the article was talking about. That's more "I'm the one in the middle of it and see what needs fixing better than you do"
Hey, even that I'd really appreciate. I'm always being pulled over by some management or other saying "hey, we've got deliverables you need to be working on" while I'm working on some process automation that would knock off huge chunks of time-intensive error-prone manual labor from our workflow.
But I guess whatever helps them complain about being understaffed helps them grow their org :-P
Am I missing anything?
A dry run! Any kind of backup or redundancy can prove to be pretty much useless if you never test it.
The main thing I worry about is being out exploring somewhere and my phone dies leaving me without GPS. Sure, I could wait until nightfall and navigate by the stars, but what if it's raining?
After a few dry runs of worst case scenarios like that, it should be pretty obvious what kind of information you want to replicate elsewhere (on a laptop, on a phone, in a cloud service, printed out / tattooed on your person). Just go through each set of gear (and then the whole briefcase) and work out what you'd do if it suddenly fell into a swift river.
Let's start a concerted effort to replace them all with emoticons and lolspeak! It's the only language the younger generation understands nowadays, and it will surely withstand the test of time, at least until everyone (or at least the majority of the world's population) speaks Chinese.
file save: => 101010 .cpp
radio buttons -> mutually exclusive buttons: oooOoo
clipboards -> tablets: [_]
bookmarks -> googling: [I'm feeling lucky]
Address books -> meatspace latitude: #
Calendars -> evites: [why are you late!]
Voicemail -> audiospam: (_o.O_)
Manila folder -> tag: [_^gt;
Handset phone -> smartphone: [_]-
Magnifying glass -> antburner: --O
Binoculars -> autofilter: >-
Envelopes -> GPG header: -- GPG Block --
Wrenches -> Text XML settings: <?xml?>
Gears -> Binary XML settings: 0_o
Microphones -> smartphones: [_]-
Photography -> smarthpones: [_]-
Televisions -> tablets: [_]
Carbon Copies -> DRM: Unskippable [FBI WARNING:]
Blueprints -gt; code:
OK, that was easy, next!
Oh yeah, but it sucked because opening an excel spreadsheet in a zip file would cause it to be extracted to the temp dir first :P
Heh, the best thing that I could come up with in a Wintel-centric environment was an encrypted zip file containing an excel spreadsheet. The master password would be periodically rotated and sent to people in an encrypted email.
We had access to Keepass or something similar, but our management couldn't be bothered to install it from the depot :P
So I just started working for M$ this year.
They're a big proponent of alternative commutes, so there's lots of incentive to bike to work, carpool, etc. http://www.gortrip.com/ . Everyone gets a free bus pass. (yeah, I know everyone can write off ~$120 a month in taxes for using public transit, but not every company bothers with it).
They also run a pretty generous on-demand shuttle service around their campus and surrounding facilities. (I know Google does the same, but we never hear about the M$ one.) They also have a special bus that ferrys like 12 bikes at a time across the 520 bridge, since the city busses can only 3 at a time.
Also, most of their cafeteria stuff is compostable, which leads to some hilarity because all their compostable plastic utensils melt in hot food / drinks. But it's great fun using that to demonstrate to visitors how strong the coffee is.
Technically every platform has a free IDE - Visual Studio Express for Windows
I might be confused with another product, but I think Visual Studio Express expires after a month demo period.
I had just installed it for a short project as part of a job interview a few months ago, and then couldn't use it a while later. Also it doesn't have complete unicode support, I had to research and install WinDDK to hack a silly TCHAR type into compiling, which took half the weekend to figure out.
(I did get the job, though)
That's very true, if you've never used any other IDE before... ever.
Heh, funny, I feel the same way about one of the Python IDEs.
http://eric-ide.python-projects.org/
Very slick, has all the high end debugging and "code awareness" features.
Hmm, well, he's doing it wrong, I guess :-D What is this TV thing anyway? Can't you just stream video from a samba share created and maintained by a central PVR somewhere?
Actually, our internet went out last week and we had nothing left but basic cable for a brief while. *shudder*
Ooh, cool, 1GB of RAM (vs. 512MB in the G-Tablet) for an extra $20 sounds good... I bet it has a better screen as well. I'll try it out the next time I need a tablet device... someday...
If you're a cheapskate like me, I'd recommend the ~$300 ViewSonic G-Tablet running VeganTab (based on Android 2.3 Gingerbread).
Overclocks to 1.4Ghz, and breezes through Netflix, YouTube, even random websites with Adobe Flash videos. I like WinAmp for streaming radio. It has built-in stereo speakers, but for the kitchen you'll probably want to plug it in to bigger speakers. It also has a USB jack so you can plug in a real keyboard for whatever reason.
Plus, these tablet things probably wipe down cleaner than whatever All-in-one PC you might find.
There's also a pretty good Android 4 ICS port done by TeamDRH which is in beta right now, but VegaTab still works better/faster/more stable at the moment. Multitasking is a bit nicer, but the memory footprint is too high for the G-Tablet to multitask well.
OK, your kid(s) might still be a bit too young, but in not too many years they should be ready for the Cartoon Guide to (the History of the Universe | Genetics | Chemistry | etc. etc.)
http://www.amazon.com/Cartoon-History-Universe-Vol-Pt-1/dp/0385265204
Hell, I learned more history from that trilogy than I did most of High School. Probably because they skip through most of the sexy parts.
My other favorite as a kid were The Way Things Work by David Macaulay.
http://www.amazon.com/The-New-Way-Things-Work/dp/0395938473
And yeah, I second someone else's suggestion of TinTin, since it's nearly universal, and the hero is mostly an ordinary young guy with no real special powers, which I young impressionable mind could strive to become.
I'm always telling people about how we could just mount turbines on the roofs of cars and power the engine; they're inevitably enthusiastic about this idea. /sarcasm
Actually, no sarcasm necessary, that actually works quite well:
http://www.smartplanet.com/blog/thinking-tech/wind-powered-car-travels-more-than-twice-as-fast-as-the-wind/4322
As an added bonus, the faster you drive into the wind, the more power you get!
(wouldn't really work for airplanes, though)
Short answer, no. I think for evolution to occur, it's more important to eliminate the "weak" genes than merely select for the "attractive" genes. With medical technology today, many "weak" genes are allowed to propagate. Not that that's a bad thing. But I would argue that the opposite of evolution is occurring, where what once was separate populations adapted for their local environments are now rejoining and remixing all kinds of genes and we're kinda ending up closer to the genetic makeup of the first human beings again, which might fall somewhere around Northern Africa / the middle East between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.
To contribute my own anecdotal evidence, I'm basically half "white" and half Asian, but my appearance can pretty much have people mistake me for just about anything in between Europe and Southeast Asia, including middle eastern, hispanic, indian, etc.
And just to Godwin the thread for good measure, I bet they could probably find some evidence of evolution occurring with Jews during the holocaust, where there were some intense evolutionary pressures to purge the lower-class Jews out of the slums, and many of the ones with a good half a brain were able to arrange to GTFO (as they've had to do at various points throughout history). But it would just be awesomely ironic if Hitler's efforts to become the "master race" by eliminating the ghettos backfired from a strictly Darwinian evolutionary standpoint.
They're taking some serious steps to keep going, though...
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/116811-NASA-Announces-Bake-Sale-Fundraiser