Heh, we have 2 kids. And the car doesn't even bother to have a keyhole on the passenger side. It does at least have autolocks the driver and passenger side door.
We cope. My wife has a keyfob, so we can lock and unlock the car from home if the older kid forgot something there and needs to run back and get it.
I might get a keyfob someday, but like I said, I enjoy just not having the thing in my pocket all the time... it doesn't really save me all that much time.
Never really got into lanyards. My work id clips on a retractable hook, which also helps me do my wind-up-doll routine.
Lanyards are either a safety hazard, or are the breakaway type which means you'll lose them.
Keep an extra set of keys with friends and family, rather than hiding them around the house or car. But it's probably better just to simply not have any valuables.
I think submitter needs to start carrying *MORE* keys. Then get rid of the ones he doesn't need. His pocket will feel *so* much lighter!
Get rid of anything large and bulky on the keychain. That means the swiss army knife. Replace it with a proper Leatherman or Gerber multiool with a leather case on a leather belt. Same goes for car keyfobs. Keyless entry is nice, but you still need the ignition key anyway, and the keyfob will just run out of batteries someday.
Talk work into getting badge access instead of having yet another set of keys. Badge readers are probably more secure for that kind of thing (two-factor authentication and they can disable lost badges right away). Then you can keep your badge in your backpack with your laptop, since you'll probably be pretty useless at work anyway without your laptop. I used to forget my badge in random pockets once in a while, but with a little discipline you learn to keep it with your laptop. And getting locked out of work once in a while isn't so bad, and you can always check out a temporary badge for the day.
Some day we'll have a smart programmable RFID chip in a badge or phone or wristband (like in spas and nudist colonies) that store all of our authentication tokens, that will work on vending machines and credit card machines and cars and home doors and act as a license and passport and student ID. Probably in Japan first. But for now, my wallet is thin enough and my keyring slim enough and my Leatherman useful enough not to spend much time worrying about it.
Hmm, I DNRTFA, but a an underpowered device like that should still be able to get a decent framerate using TigerVNC or similar to screenscrape off of a real gaming PC (at least at low resolutions).
Hmm, interesting, but I pretty much gave up on playing EVE with just the mouse, it always felt much faster and more natural to mash the F1-F8 keys and other hotkeys to activate weapons and devices. Plus many of those control elements are pretty small at any usable resolution. Though I think they did succeed at exposing interface elements to noobs by following that philosophy.
There is a class of games that I've grown accustomed to playing only on a PDA touchscreen and couldn't imagine going back to a mouse... e.g. just about anything from Popcap (Bejeweled, Insaniqarium, Bookworm, etc.). But even then it's with using a stylus... I couldn't imagine trying to play those games on a capacitive touchscreen where I have to obscure much of the screen with my finger pad.
I've had some of those expensive Axis/Canon PTZ webcams for work. Pretty sweet what you can zoom into.... we could read license plates off cars in the parking lot outside the office building windows.
I think your best bet would be to attach a $100 USB Logitech Orbit to a $200 nettop, perhaps running off an SD card. There are fairly good Linux drivers (including rudimentary PTZ) and fairly decent optical quality for the Logitech webcams (compared to those D-link webcam things, which I've also learned to loathe). So you could get 1280x960 stills at low frame rates (sounds good for what you're doing) and also 30fps 640x480 video, plus audio. If you stick it on a beefier machine, you could even do mpeg4 encoding and streaming using VLC or something.
Heh, all the way back since the late 90's I've been logging in to my VNC sessions via the built-in java client (just go to http://vnchost:5801/ instead of vnchost:1 ). I guess that means that HTML5 + JIT compiled Javascript is the new Java?
If you like Guacamole, you'll probably also like AJAXterm, which can give you a webpage-based shell. It works well with GNU screen. It's nice for workplaces that block SSH but have an HTTPS proxy. Can't find a definitive webpage for it, but it's not too hard to set up from the debian repository. But it does seem to work a bit better than Mindterm (the Java ssh client from the 90's).
For mobile phone use, I've been fairly content with the java MIDPSSH. Unless your smartphone has a native ssh client, of course.
I bought one of those $400 laptops for my wife last year... 2.2Ghz dual core Toshiba Satellite with a fairly recent Intel 4000 integrated graphics chip.
My upgraded 8-year old 2.2Ghz dual SMP Athlon XP-M with an AGP nVidia 6800GS still blows the doors off of it for gaming. Works great as long as the games don't require DX10 or 64-bit. And it actually didn't cost all that much since I waited to upgrade the CPUs, video, and RAM after they got cheap.
Though to be fair, if SMS/was/ really free, we would have developed some kind of really really slow HTTP-over-SMS gateway by now to get free news and traffic updates for free over the network to avoid paying for the WAP plan:-P
In the US, SMS/messaging has always been an extra luxury charge. On most contracts, it's cheaper to just call (given that the daytime voice minutes are already paid for, and nighttime and weekend voice minutes are free. But SMS messages cost upwards (!) of 5cents each for send or receive, and an extra $10 per month for unlimited (which is separate from a "real" data plan (!!)).
All this for 160 char messages that have just about negligible impact on the phone network and are easily delayed if there is network congestion. Everywhere else in the world SMS is the poor man's comm channel. But I guess we have the US marketing geniuses here to blame for making something that takes more personal time and work to save money for the network an extra-cost luxury feature.
The technical/thermodynamic explanation (which also works inside of PC cases) is that you generally want to concentrate on removing heat rather than adding cold.
Having cold spots can be just as bad or worse as having hot spots, due to condensation
Removing heat is easier, since hot air generally rises. With cold air you generally have to duct and force its way to the front of racks. And even then you need to have adjustable vent settings based on load. If you have any kind of variable load (say, switching between banks of servers during failover or for temporary processing) you will have to readjust your vent settings to keep the environment balanced. You could spend lots of money on an expensive "smart" cooling system to take care of this for you, or patrol the server room regularly and make adjustments every time something changes and sets off an environmental monitoring alarm. Or you can just simply contain and remove the hot exhaust.
Removing hot exhaust means that cool ambient air will be sucked in through any available orifice. Adding cold air means that hot air may still be able to loop back and recirculate to the front of the rack and sneak back in to the intake of individual servers.
You'll be working at greater thermodynamic efficiency if the return air to the HVAC is hot, rather than a warm mixture.
The larger mass of ambient cool air will act as a better buffer. Remember that A/C units work at on/off cycles and it's better for them to run with a larger hysteresis so they're not turning on and off all the time to stay within the thermal/humidity envelope.
Cold vents can be anywhere and preferably equally spaced and vented to maximize mixing with ambient air.
I could go on but let's take a break and look at the relative merits of Cold Aisle containment:
Sysadmins can work in a short shirtsleeves environment when they're in the server room (i.e. so they can better enjoy working in a place with lots of failures)
PHBs can feel like they're coddling their equipment by feeding them "special" air
To be fair, I suppose some containment is better than none. And even without any containment at all, you can do OK by at least giving a little thought to how the air should be circulating.
I approve. I've been testing a dual-core nVidia ION setup for use as a thin-client at work, and it's worlds apart from my eeepc 901 netbook at home. It's almost indistinguishable from a real desktop unless I run FPU-intensive apps on it.
The Atom 330 runs 64-bit code, the dual cores keep it from stuttering and pausing like my eeepc, and the nVidia GPU make it perform well on movies and light 3D, whereas the Intel GPU has lots of artifacts and is slow under Linux (and the newer pinetrail cores use the crappy PowerVR GMA500 chipsets that aren't supported under most Linux distros unless you manage to shoehorn in the one binary blob driver thy occasionally release for a particular version of ubuntu),
I'm waiting for ION2 nettops to come out, and then I'm planning on using one to replace my 24x7 home Linux server. I think this is the real market for these devices, small nettops and netbooks that you can just drop in anywhere for $200 - $400 to do one specific task and just forget about. There will always be a "real" computer somewhere in the house for gaming or heavy-duty web browsing or whatever, but most households will only buy 1 every few years. These cheap devices are at a price point where people say "yeah, I could throw one in the car to use as a large-screen GPS" or "I could put one behind the TV so it could play movies and show photo screensavers".
Once they reach the $50 - $100 range, they'll sell even more, since people could start buying them as presents, and you'd have a lot of useless stuff left around. I wish the older Palm Pilots were here already, it would be great to have little touchscreens lying around everywhere to use as remote controls or music players or something:-/
I'm a big Linux geek, but I'd have to agree with you when it comes to features like "Track Changes". On the other hand, none of the engineering companies I've worked for really had any clue how to effectively use those features.
In my experience, OpenOffice has been great for classwork and day-to-day stuff. I wouldn't get all fancy with graphing, however, since the formatting and scaling still kind of stinks and is crash prone (though it's improved greatly on recent releases, like 3.2+).
For anything more than casual use, I'd go straight to a combination of Lyx + gnuplot / octave .
Most of my casual spreadsheet use is actually done in gnumeric, which is very light, fast, and stable. Unfortunately I can't say the same about Abiword, so I tend to stick to OpenOffice for documents.
Finally, most of my presentations are exported to pdf and displayed using keyjnote / Impress!ve for its dead-simple but awesome usable GLX eye-candy.
If I really need MS Office compatibility to fill out someone's stupid form (which happens often for heavily formatted documents -- different versions of MS Office still can't even share these with each other even with all the compatibility packs), I boot up Windows in a VM (either the free VMware server 2.0 or VirtualBox, which actually tends to be easier to install and works better).
I wouldn't consider myself an awesome parent, but stuff like happy meals with toys helps me convince my children to be suspicious of things like that. I tell them that the restaurant food is so nasty that the toy is the only way for them to sell their crappy food at all. But we could get better food at a real food place (like home) and better toys at a real toy store and it would be cheaper (my son is very money conscious, probably because we so often tell him that we just don't have money to buy some random crap for him).
Same thing with the checkout aisle at the grocery store. They put all that candy in the "impulse buy" section because they charge more for it than they do in the candy aisle. But the kids are only allowed to pick one thing for themselves, and if they want another thing they have to put the first one back. They usually end up getting a donut, which they munch on while sitting in the cart as we stroll through the store. Shopper's is known as the "Donut Store" in our family:P
It's pretty hopeless, as far as I tell. The past 2 major aerospace/defense corporations I've worked for have invested heavily in rolling out all of their mandatory on-line training and timecard accounting using software that happens to only work in IE6. This mandatory training is required to meet all kinds of legal and policy requirements... ethics training, security training, etc. So it's not really the IT department per se that's holding everything back, other than not being more successful in standing by web standards back when they were deciding to deploy all that cruft.
On the bright side, Firefox has really taken off as a secondary day-to-day browser. Microsoft really shot themselves in the foot with their vendor lock-in this time, since no major corporate customer could successfully upgrade to IE7 or IE8 because it would break all of their meticulously tested training and timecard apps. But they can certainly install and develop new apps for alternative browsers.
This has also been a boon for virtualization... I've been running the corporate load of WinXP+IE6 under VMware, so I can actually have a 64-bit OS on the bare metal, yet comply with all the corporate application and security and encryption policies on my VM. As a nice side benefit, Outlook can't thrash more than 1 CPU or gobble up all my memory this way.
I think Microsoft might finally regain some ground with corporate deployments with Windows 7 only because it provides a WinXP mode that might let them run all their legacy cruft. But it will still take 6 months to a year after Windows 7 was released for the IT departments to finish testing and remastering for widespread deployment, so we won't know for sure for another while yet.
Hmm, pretty interesting. At the risk of trying to solve a problem with technology again, I'd submit that rather than handing out any personal information to anyone, just give them a link to your personal contact page, where they can grab just the information you authorize for them any time you like. And then you just need to update one place if you need to change your address or phone number or sex or whatever, or revoke access to certain query sources.
But then eventually I guess it starts looking like OpenID.
So better yet, have this contact page not even give them access to the real information, but act as a proxy that forwards whatever they need on to your real address (whether it's an email or physical or phone #, etc).
It's all I ever think about every time twitter is covered by the popular media or NPR or whatever. And it unnerves me tremendously that I can't twack the anchor with a wet trout wrapped in a printout of that comic.
Buzz sounds like the ultimate social media platform, with images and a fast url tracker and everything. But I can't get any of my friends and relatives to actually use it. I suppose it would help if it ever came out of beta.
It would be neat to have something a little more distributed, where you host most of your own data and have ganglia that connect to all kinds of other things. But it'd probably end up being like Pidgin.
I also set up a bunch of stuff that automatically crossposts between livejournal, facebook, and twitter, depending on whether I want content, exposure, or expediency. But most of my socialization still happens on our IRC channel (though even then mostly with bots:-P )
This doesn't sound all that different from saying you have to use ssh instead of telnet, or rsh. Yes, it's more trouble to juggle keys and stuff like that, and a lot of people will just keep on doing things the old way out of laziness. Unless it becomes, like, policy or something.
That's pretty much already corporate policy at the last two major places I've worked for a few years now. It would be nice if the government starts treating that data the same way.
In fact, it would also be nice to mandate encryption and signatures for email so there will be no more unsolicited spam. And finally it would be great if no one was allowed to open up a line of credit without my cryptographic signature so I wouldn't have to protect my SSN, birthdate, and mother's maiden name like it was some sort of safety deposit box combination.
If so, I'd say our best bet is to contact the Alien sympathizers (SPCH?) and see if they'd arm us for a revolution. They can't leave us trapped here wallowing in our own filth.:-P
Slashdot Mirror
Heh, we have 2 kids. And the car doesn't even bother to have a keyhole on the passenger side. It does at least have autolocks the driver and passenger side door.
We cope. My wife has a keyfob, so we can lock and unlock the car from home if the older kid forgot something there and needs to run back and get it.
I might get a keyfob someday, but like I said, I enjoy just not having the thing in my pocket all the time... it doesn't really save me all that much time.
Never really got into lanyards. My work id clips on a retractable hook, which also helps me do my wind-up-doll routine.
Lanyards are either a safety hazard, or are the breakaway type which means you'll lose them.
Keep an extra set of keys with friends and family, rather than hiding them around the house or car. But it's probably better just to simply not have any valuables.
I think submitter needs to start carrying *MORE* keys. Then get rid of the ones he doesn't need. His pocket will feel *so* much lighter!
Get rid of anything large and bulky on the keychain. That means the swiss army knife. Replace it with a proper Leatherman or Gerber multiool with a leather case on a leather belt. Same goes for car keyfobs. Keyless entry is nice, but you still need the ignition key anyway, and the keyfob will just run out of batteries someday.
Talk work into getting badge access instead of having yet another set of keys. Badge readers are probably more secure for that kind of thing (two-factor authentication and they can disable lost badges right away). Then you can keep your badge in your backpack with your laptop, since you'll probably be pretty useless at work anyway without your laptop. I used to forget my badge in random pockets once in a while, but with a little discipline you learn to keep it with your laptop. And getting locked out of work once in a while isn't so bad, and you can always check out a temporary badge for the day.
Some day we'll have a smart programmable RFID chip in a badge or phone or wristband (like in spas and nudist colonies) that store all of our authentication tokens, that will work on vending machines and credit card machines and cars and home doors and act as a license and passport and student ID. Probably in Japan first. But for now, my wallet is thin enough and my keyring slim enough and my Leatherman useful enough not to spend much time worrying about it.
Hmm, I DNRTFA, but a an underpowered device like that should still be able to get a decent framerate using TigerVNC or similar to screenscrape off of a real gaming PC (at least at low resolutions).
Hmm, interesting, but I pretty much gave up on playing EVE with just the mouse, it always felt much faster and more natural to mash the F1-F8 keys and other hotkeys to activate weapons and devices. Plus many of those control elements are pretty small at any usable resolution. Though I think they did succeed at exposing interface elements to noobs by following that philosophy.
There is a class of games that I've grown accustomed to playing only on a PDA touchscreen and couldn't imagine going back to a mouse ... e.g. just about anything from Popcap (Bejeweled, Insaniqarium, Bookworm, etc.). But even then it's with using a stylus... I couldn't imagine trying to play those games on a capacitive touchscreen where I have to obscure much of the screen with my finger pad.
I've had some of those expensive Axis/Canon PTZ webcams for work. Pretty sweet what you can zoom into.... we could read license plates off cars in the parking lot outside the office building windows.
I think your best bet would be to attach a $100 USB Logitech Orbit to a $200 nettop, perhaps running off an SD card. There are fairly good Linux drivers (including rudimentary PTZ) and fairly decent optical quality for the Logitech webcams (compared to those D-link webcam things, which I've also learned to loathe). So you could get 1280x960 stills at low frame rates (sounds good for what you're doing) and also 30fps 640x480 video, plus audio. If you stick it on a beefier machine, you could even do mpeg4 encoding and streaming using VLC or something.
Heh, all the way back since the late 90's I've been logging in to my VNC sessions via the built-in java client (just go to http://vnchost:5801/ instead of vnchost:1 ). I guess that means that HTML5 + JIT compiled Javascript is the new Java?
If you like Guacamole, you'll probably also like AJAXterm, which can give you a webpage-based shell. It works well with GNU screen. It's nice for workplaces that block SSH but have an HTTPS proxy. Can't find a definitive webpage for it, but it's not too hard to set up from the debian repository. But it does seem to work a bit better than Mindterm (the Java ssh client from the 90's).
For mobile phone use, I've been fairly content with the java MIDPSSH. Unless your smartphone has a native ssh client, of course.
I bought one of those $400 laptops for my wife last year... 2.2Ghz dual core Toshiba Satellite with a fairly recent Intel 4000 integrated graphics chip.
My upgraded 8-year old 2.2Ghz dual SMP Athlon XP-M with an AGP nVidia 6800GS still blows the doors off of it for gaming. Works great as long as the games don't require DX10 or 64-bit. And it actually didn't cost all that much since I waited to upgrade the CPUs, video, and RAM after they got cheap.
Get a goat.
Then after it craps in your bed and chews up your linens and brays all night, get rid of it.
Your computer will seem so much cooler and quieter after you get rid of the goat!
(my current PC from 2007 is soooo much quieter than the 2002-era PC it replaced)
Something like this would be more useful:
http://www.olsr.org/
I'd run it, but I'm waiting for someone else to package it for the Tomato firmware I run on my open WRT54g router :/
Three cheers for laziness!!! Yay...
<chirp chirp>
Though to be fair, if SMS /was/ really free, we would have developed some kind of really really slow HTTP-over-SMS gateway by now to get free news and traffic updates for free over the network to avoid paying for the WAP plan :-P
In the US, SMS/messaging has always been an extra luxury charge. On most contracts, it's cheaper to just call (given that the daytime voice minutes are already paid for, and nighttime and weekend voice minutes are free. But SMS messages cost upwards (!) of 5cents each for send or receive, and an extra $10 per month for unlimited (which is separate from a "real" data plan (!!)).
All this for 160 char messages that have just about negligible impact on the phone network and are easily delayed if there is network congestion. Everywhere else in the world SMS is the poor man's comm channel. But I guess we have the US marketing geniuses here to blame for making something that takes more personal time and work to save money for the network an extra-cost luxury feature.
Huh, thanks for the correction, I guess I had old misinformation...
http://www.linuxfordevices.com/c/a/News/Intel-D510MO-and-D410PT/
Sounds good. As an engineer, I'd design for hot aisle containment.
First off, APC (makers of expensive racks and equipment) has less to gain from doing things wrong than Emerson/Liebert (makers of expensive HVAC).
Now that the easy explanation is out of the way...
First start with the environmental requirement for server intake: http://tc99.ashraetcs.org/documents/ASHRAE_Extended_Environmental_Envelope_Final_Aug_1_2008.pdf
but avoid the PHB fallacy of thinking that's what's coming directly out of the HVAC system. The thermostat is not located in the AC vents.
The technical/thermodynamic explanation (which also works inside of PC cases) is that you generally want to concentrate on removing heat rather than adding cold.
I could go on but let's take a break and look at the relative merits of Cold Aisle containment:
To be fair, I suppose some containment is better than none. And even without any containment at all, you can do OK by at least giving a little thought to how the air should be circulating.
I approve. I've been testing a dual-core nVidia ION setup for use as a thin-client at work, and it's worlds apart from my eeepc 901 netbook at home. It's almost indistinguishable from a real desktop unless I run FPU-intensive apps on it.
The Atom 330 runs 64-bit code, the dual cores keep it from stuttering and pausing like my eeepc, and the nVidia GPU make it perform well on movies and light 3D, whereas the Intel GPU has lots of artifacts and is slow under Linux (and the newer pinetrail cores use the crappy PowerVR GMA500 chipsets that aren't supported under most Linux distros unless you manage to shoehorn in the one binary blob driver thy occasionally release for a particular version of ubuntu),
I'm waiting for ION2 nettops to come out, and then I'm planning on using one to replace my 24x7 home Linux server. I think this is the real market for these devices, small nettops and netbooks that you can just drop in anywhere for $200 - $400 to do one specific task and just forget about. There will always be a "real" computer somewhere in the house for gaming or heavy-duty web browsing or whatever, but most households will only buy 1 every few years. These cheap devices are at a price point where people say "yeah, I could throw one in the car to use as a large-screen GPS" or "I could put one behind the TV so it could play movies and show photo screensavers".
Once they reach the $50 - $100 range, they'll sell even more, since people could start buying them as presents, and you'd have a lot of useless stuff left around. I wish the older Palm Pilots were here already, it would be great to have little touchscreens lying around everywhere to use as remote controls or music players or something :-/
I'm a big Linux geek, but I'd have to agree with you when it comes to features like "Track Changes". On the other hand, none of the engineering companies I've worked for really had any clue how to effectively use those features.
In my experience, OpenOffice has been great for classwork and day-to-day stuff. I wouldn't get all fancy with graphing, however, since the formatting and scaling still kind of stinks and is crash prone (though it's improved greatly on recent releases, like 3.2+).
For anything more than casual use, I'd go straight to a combination of Lyx + gnuplot / octave .
Most of my casual spreadsheet use is actually done in gnumeric, which is very light, fast, and stable. Unfortunately I can't say the same about Abiword, so I tend to stick to OpenOffice for documents.
Finally, most of my presentations are exported to pdf and displayed using keyjnote / Impress!ve for its dead-simple but awesome usable GLX eye-candy.
If I really need MS Office compatibility to fill out someone's stupid form (which happens often for heavily formatted documents -- different versions of MS Office still can't even share these with each other even with all the compatibility packs), I boot up Windows in a VM (either the free VMware server 2.0 or VirtualBox, which actually tends to be easier to install and works better).
Hmm, interesting...
I wouldn't consider myself an awesome parent, but stuff like happy meals with toys helps me convince my children to be suspicious of things like that. I tell them that the restaurant food is so nasty that the toy is the only way for them to sell their crappy food at all. But we could get better food at a real food place (like home) and better toys at a real toy store and it would be cheaper (my son is very money conscious, probably because we so often tell him that we just don't have money to buy some random crap for him).
Same thing with the checkout aisle at the grocery store. They put all that candy in the "impulse buy" section because they charge more for it than they do in the candy aisle. But the kids are only allowed to pick one thing for themselves, and if they want another thing they have to put the first one back. They usually end up getting a donut, which they munch on while sitting in the cart as we stroll through the store. Shopper's is known as the "Donut Store" in our family :P
Honestly, what are they going to do next? Ban Cracker Jack boxes? The crap coming in those barely qualifies as a "toy" these days.
Kinder Eggs still come with decent toys:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinder_Surprise
You can't really get them in the US unless you go to an international food market, but they're cracking down on them too due to the choking hazard.
Just as well, my kids are learning to make their own damn toys, out of paper and sh^Htuff.
It's pretty hopeless, as far as I tell. The past 2 major aerospace/defense corporations I've worked for have invested heavily in rolling out all of their mandatory on-line training and timecard accounting using software that happens to only work in IE6. This mandatory training is required to meet all kinds of legal and policy requirements... ethics training, security training, etc. So it's not really the IT department per se that's holding everything back, other than not being more successful in standing by web standards back when they were deciding to deploy all that cruft.
On the bright side, Firefox has really taken off as a secondary day-to-day browser. Microsoft really shot themselves in the foot with their vendor lock-in this time, since no major corporate customer could successfully upgrade to IE7 or IE8 because it would break all of their meticulously tested training and timecard apps. But they can certainly install and develop new apps for alternative browsers.
This has also been a boon for virtualization... I've been running the corporate load of WinXP+IE6 under VMware, so I can actually have a 64-bit OS on the bare metal, yet comply with all the corporate application and security and encryption policies on my VM. As a nice side benefit, Outlook can't thrash more than 1 CPU or gobble up all my memory this way.
I think Microsoft might finally regain some ground with corporate deployments with Windows 7 only because it provides a WinXP mode that might let them run all their legacy cruft. But it will still take 6 months to a year after Windows 7 was released for the IT departments to finish testing and remastering for widespread deployment, so we won't know for sure for another while yet.
Hmm, pretty interesting. At the risk of trying to solve a problem with technology again, I'd submit that rather than handing out any personal information to anyone, just give them a link to your personal contact page, where they can grab just the information you authorize for them any time you like. And then you just need to update one place if you need to change your address or phone number or sex or whatever, or revoke access to certain query sources.
But then eventually I guess it starts looking like OpenID.
So better yet, have this contact page not even give them access to the real information, but act as a proxy that forwards whatever they need on to your real address (whether it's an email or physical or phone #, etc).
Ob PA: http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2008/4/23/
It's all I ever think about every time twitter is covered by the popular media or NPR or whatever. And it unnerves me tremendously that I can't twack the anchor with a wet trout wrapped in a printout of that comic.
Word.
Buzz sounds like the ultimate social media platform, with images and a fast url tracker and everything. But I can't get any of my friends and relatives to actually use it. I suppose it would help if it ever came out of beta.
It would be neat to have something a little more distributed, where you host most of your own data and have ganglia that connect to all kinds of other things. But it'd probably end up being like Pidgin.
I also set up a bunch of stuff that automatically crossposts between livejournal, facebook, and twitter, depending on whether I want content, exposure, or expediency. But most of my socialization still happens on our IRC channel (though even then mostly with bots :-P )
This doesn't sound all that different from saying you have to use ssh instead of telnet, or rsh. Yes, it's more trouble to juggle keys and stuff like that, and a lot of people will just keep on doing things the old way out of laziness. Unless it becomes, like, policy or something.
That's pretty much already corporate policy at the last two major places I've worked for a few years now. It would be nice if the government starts treating that data the same way.
In fact, it would also be nice to mandate encryption and signatures for email so there will be no more unsolicited spam. And finally it would be great if no one was allowed to open up a line of credit without my cryptographic signature so I wouldn't have to protect my SSN, birthdate, and mother's maiden name like it was some sort of safety deposit box combination.
Yeah, also possible that's already happened: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoo_hypothesis
If so, I'd say our best bet is to contact the Alien sympathizers (SPCH?) and see if they'd arm us for a revolution. They can't leave us trapped here wallowing in our own filth. :-P