World of Warcraft or similar could be a good alternative. At least that is how I remember the experience of leveling a couple characters together with good real-life friends (though not my significant other), before I eventually grew bored of the world of Azeroth and the repetitive nature of quests and game mechanics. WoW strikes a reasonably good balance between playing a game together with a shared purpose and creating collaborative experience, while at the same time having plenty of 'downtime' (traveling and quests that don't require much thinking) for chatting and being social.

For lots of the various gadgets I own, whenever I visit related forums, there are posts about how these gadgets "always break". Which I find interesting, because I almost never break anything I own, including those products. Yes, stuff may break, even under normal use. But when it happens too often, there is some other factor involved. Normally this would be due to careless use, so a user problem. If you feel that cannot be it, because you are not somehow physically abusing your gear ... then something else is going on, e.g. room conditions, power input, someone is messing with your stuff, violent sleepwalking.

Let's say there is a 1% chance you get a faulty piece of equipment which breaks within a year. The chance that happens e.g. 4 times in a row is pretty slim, i.e. 0.01^4. So either you have simply lost the lottery, or you are looking for the wrong type of solution.

Having connectivity to such gadgets would be nice, both for monitoring and controlling. What I do not want is to either get trapped in some vendor's ecosystem in order to get any level of integration, or to have to deal with tons of apps, one for each gadget. Similar to devices on the PC, there should be an abstraction level between the device's controlling interface, and the programs for accessing the devices. I think any vendor who did a "first mover" step into that space, offering control over their devices at an API level, would have a nice advantage, in terms of going towards where the market will likely eventually end up.

That, plus it needs to have integrated WLAN (don't want the hassle of setting up additional networking technologies in the home), plus of course some reasonable authentication mechanism.

As long as the company (management) is pushing strongly for pushing new releases fast, then there is no solution to your problem. You can ask for a "day of zen" where all the programmers go off-site and discuss "what is good code" until everyone is fired up, only to return to work and get back into the old mode. The todo list and release dates hasn't changed.

In terms of "good code" there is of course never any excuse not to have properly written, formatted, and commented code etc. I am assuming the main problem with your code is it is somehow poorly architected and quality checked; bad or inconsistent design, commit stuff as soon as things seem to work, avoid spending time on writing tests - that sort of thing. New stuff gets layered on top or some quick band aid is applied, and it eventually turns into a big mess.

For that kind of code problem, "fixing the problem" is a big thing. It is in itself an investment - the poor development processes has incurred a development "debt", which requires man-hours to fix. Lots of stuff may have to be rewritten. And in return for all this time, product managers are getting no new features to show the customers - "only" a more stable product. Secondly, new stuff will (in the short term) take a little longer to implement, because doing it right takes a little longer, plus various problems with the old code will surface that need to get fixed. Thirdly, the team's mentality towards what it means to write a good product needs to be changed - and some of the team members may not be able to change their attitude, or may not have the skills to write and architect proper code.

In the end, this is a problem that needs to be discussed with the powers in charge, as a big and serious issue. While it may be comforting for management to let things just run as they are, this is the type of approach that leads to complex and unmaintainable products. Which at some point, so much debt has been incurred that product is completely unstable, everyone is caught up in "fixing" bugs and crashes, and new features take forever to fix even when trying to take the quick route.

Unfortunately, with the typical near-sighted "next quarter" focus, it is an uphill battle you may well end up losing.

No, I never bothered to learn the details about the bitcoin scheme, and my argument does not require such knowledge. From the various articles I have read on Slashdot and other sites about bitcoins over the years, I see big flashing yellow lights and have long since decided to stay far away.

Here is a mental experiment for you - assume the 1 euro coin was made from common rock. Someone comes up with a more economic scheme for producing such coins from widely available materials, which can be performed by normal households. Everybody on the planet decides to join in on the fun, and spends half their time on rock coin production. In the end, what is the output? A f...ton of rock coins of virtually no value (go search for "inflation" and "printing money" on Google), a lot of wasted man-hours, and a lot of CO2-generating energy going into rock production.

Your argument is like saying smoking is ok because it keeps mosquitoes away and helps poor tobacco farmers in developing countries stay in business. There is actually a bigger picture here.

From a society-level point of view I see a business model which consumes resources for hardware, energy for operating the hardware, and man-hours spent planning and operating the mining setup. And what is created? Nothing at all. Just some half-random redistribution of wealth based on a dubious scheme. Participating in this type of setup seems about as good an idea as being in the bottom 1-2 layers of a pyramid. May I suggest visiting a casino instead; probably a lot more fun, and consumes less of the planet's resources.

Great for businesses to squeeze the lemon to the last drop from every employee and to have everyone always-on; not so great for the employees. Why bother even having a family or a home if all time is spent at work, thinking about work, or dreaming about work. And yes, I have "been there, done that".

An article in The Guardian listed the top five regrets of dying people:

1. I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.
2. I wish I hadn't worked so hard.
3. I wish I'd had the courage to express my feelings.
4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.
5. I wish that I had let myself be happier.

Lots of people probably feel trapped in the current workplace due to debt, running expenses, or an expensive-to-maintain self-image, which requires maintaining the current position or even advancing the career. My advice is to think outside the bubble, e.g. move to a cheaper location or cut back on luxuries. If not possible today, actively pursue opportunities to make future changes.

I love how you used "generic bible" as an example here - ROTFL, well played. In the old lady's defense, perhaps the cheap one she used previously didn't include all the commandments.

These laptops should serve primarily as a vehicle for providing cheap and convenient access to learning material, plus a means to become part of the online world. If it can render PDF files and various other formats, then anyone with an OLPC laptop can potentially have access to a vast archive of various subjects. Who cares about whether or not these devices are used "creatively".

It makes sense to put Linux on the laptop, because it does the job just fine without having to pay any 3rd parties for the privilege of distributing laptops to children in need. Plus it gives those kids an open platform for hacking away as much as they want.

Obviously, the device is of little use without content. I have never looked into the OLPC ecosystem so have no real idea what exists there, but I would imagine it would make sense to divert some of the funds that go into making the device, into making electronic books for various topics (basic math, world history, etc) and translate into some of the major languages.

Thinking about it, with a planet of 7 billion people and looking at all the money that go into various wasteful or pointless activities, it is quite sad that there does not seem to exist some universally available fits-on-a-USB-stick "learning package" for the first ~12 years of education.

I organize all my data into three categories, (a) stuff I need backup including old versions, (b) stuff I want backup of latest version, and (c) stuff I don't mind losing.

Two external backup drives, one is kept in another location, the other at home. Every once in a while I switch the two, so there is always an offsite copy that is at most a few months old.

Simple and stupid setup for making copies; each external drive is formatted with an encrypted filesystem. Made some scripts for copying with "rsync" for files which go into categories (a) and (b). Using some additional scripts for recursive "copying" of old versions with hard linking (on an ext filesystem) to preserve history for files in category (a).

Keeping an off-site backup is important to protect against some risks such as fire, and it also helps prevent losing data in case some malicious software or accidental "rm -rf" or the like would wipe your backup. Keeping old versions of category (a) data helps protect against a scenario where master data is lost, and an rsync operation removes the data on the backup.

If you want to be really paranoid, you could make the backup from a remote computer so that if the master you are backing up is compromised, it would not be able to wipe the backup (at least not "type a" data). Personally I found it was not worth the hassle, given the redundancy added by the offsite backup.

If this is data which is important to you, keep in mind a RAID really gives you very little protection. It only offers some protection against hardware failure, but any virus or accidental wiping will kill your data just as well as it had been a single disk. If the data is important, you need at least one external backup.

The inflation in people's work hours and willingness to work overtime is just a natural consequence of market forces at work in an unregulated market. There are too many people for too few jobs, and corporations take advantage of this situation by squeezing their employees harder.

Now, for the society as a whole, this does not seem to make very much sense, because the result is a scenario where nobody is happy. The people who have work are unhappy because they get very little time to enjoy life and have fun, and the people who do not have work are unhappy because their basic needs are not met.

Just by using simple game theory, the question of "how much should I work" is clearly a game where everyone loses - everyone is compelled to work a little bit more than the next guy, and because everyone comes to the same conclusion, everyone ends up working more - without gaining any competitive advantage. And this is _exactly_ because of the "everyone should be allowed to decide for themselves" type of situation which so many people are advocating, which basically rigs the game so everyone loses.

In order to shape society such that people don't have to work their &# off just to basically survive, then regulation is needed - there's no way around it.

Makes me think about this Stephen Hawking quote from wikiquote.org, "I don't think the human race will survive the next thousand years, unless we spread into space. There are too many accidents that can befall life on a single planet. But I'm an optimist. We will reach out to the stars."

I do not bother spending too much time pondering the various things that could happen; each of them seems rather unlikely and if the risk is very low or there is nothing one can do to reduce the risk anyways, might as well just get on with life and leave it to fate. So I am not too much into the doomsday mentality.

The problem is mathematically there is nothing average about the effect of a planetary catastrophy. If there is just a small chance that some single lunatic is in the position to do something crazy which has the potential to wipe out the world's population, then over the course of a very long timespan the probability that it happens becomes very high. And there is no recovery from such an event .So even though I would guess we are good to go for the next few decades, technology is only going to advance including our ability to cause destruction at even larger scales than currently.

As a bit of a technology nerd I think it would be quite fun to see how we could start by conquering our own solar system. It would be nice knowing we have improved our chances to survive as a species. Plus a global space colonization initiative would probably generate a bunch of jobs, not necessarily bad for the current economy.

Ah well who am I kidding, not going to happen in near future - but one can always dream :-)

Well, I can see for an individual who wants an income in the IT sector it may be the right question for performing sub-optimization for that individual.

But looking at it from a macro-perspective, it is interesting to observe how the skewed distribution of wealth makes "workers" so eager to work and find new ways to spend all our waking moments generating even more wealth for the super-rich. It is a perfectly self-enforcing system where as soon as a "worker" has nothing to do (s)he focuses all energy of finding new ways to please the overlords. Because if we are not working, there is no income. And somehow nothing less than working 100% seems to cut it in order to live the lives we have come to expect. So we willingly spend most of our lives working until we are old and die, and most of the output of that work trickles up the pyramid to that "1%" group.

So instead of celebrating efficiency ("hooray, now we can all spend a little less time working without sacrificing our lifestyle"), we start worrying about this type of progress. Just shows that humanity has still not figured out the right way to organize as a society. Democracy and capitalism seems to be the best answer we have come up with so far, but these days with the Internet etc. it is becoming all the more visible how plagued our Western systems are by corruption and self-serving people in positions of power.

A well-known employee of a technology giant that is frequently threatened with antitrust accusations, is asked about whether the break-up of a monopoly is a good thing, and the answer is "no". Hardly any surprise there.