I used to run Windows on my home computer until I decided to switch to Linux full-time in 1998. Mostly RedHat and Fedora. I was fortunate that I could also run Linux on the desktop at my work, and I did so until 2009. That's when our new director put his foot down and pretty much pushed me to run Windows at work.

I have to say, Windows is a dumb desktop. Microsoft may have updated the bells and whistles, but it's still painful to use. Inconsistencies everywhere, making a very strange user interface. Applying updates is hard. Functionality I just expected to be there was missing, but you could "easily" get add-ons by buying expensive software or getting the "premium" edition of Windows.

I switched jobs two years ago, and glad to say I'm running Linux at work again, with the occasional (about monthly) boot into Windows to use a videoconference client that requires Silverlight.

So there's another side of the story for you.

I've said it before, but it bears repeating: The irony is that Adobe does not see that by dropping support for platforms, fewer developers will want to use Flash because it is no longer "cross-platform." And if fewer developers want to use Flash, then fewer people will consume Flash content ... and eventually Adobe will decide to drop support on yet another platform because fewer people are consuming Flash there. The cycle feeds itself. It's only a matter of time before Flash goes away entirely.

This is not a trend Adobe will want. Adobe seems to be focusing on "the PC", but the market is increasingly moving to "mobile" ... I think we can see where this is going.

> Apparently, the catchy new name they've settled on is 'Windows 8 style UI'

I'm no Microsoft fan, but TFS is wrong. Both linked articles aren't that long, so it's not hard to find what they've actually said. Microsoft has dropped "Metro" and is looking for a new name. Until they figure out a new name, they have asked developers to stop referring to the interface as "Metro" and use "Windows 8 style UI" instead. But the point is, Microsoft has not settled on this as a new name.

From the BBC article:

From the Verge article:

> When I had hulu+, it was only $4 a month not $8... And I just canceled it about a month or two ago... ?

Not sure what deal you were getting, but the Hulu Plus page shows the cost at $7.99/month. That's what I'm paying.

The author took 4 pages (you start on page "1" and click through 3 other pages ... ads at each step) and basically he says this:

Open a spreadsheet. Enter in all the shows that you like to watch on cable. For shows that are available on HuluPlus, assume you'll subscribe to HuluPlus ($8/mo). For a show that is available on Amazon, enter it's cost per episode (less than $2). Same if your show is only available on iTunes or some other media center. Add up the costs, calculate a "monthly" cost to stream your shows. Compare to your monthly cost for cable TV.

That's pretty much what the article is about. I've just saved you a bunch of clicks and ads.

It is what I have been saying about my own television watching. When my wife & I moved two years ago, we opted not to sign up for cable TV, choosing to stream everything instead. We have Netflix for movies and "TV on DVD", HuluPlus for most of our current shows, Amazon for a few others. We bought a Roku ($99) to stream everything to our television - and it effectively paid for itself over a couple of months. Our monthly cost for all that is way less than the monthly cost of cable TV. And as long as the math continues to be in our favor, we'll keep streaming.

I read about this on BBC News this morning, and two things struck me:

1. "In tests Mr Brocious conducted with Forbes news site, the system did not prove entirely successful - only one of the three doors, at three hotels in New York, opened." So it doesn't work everywhere, but it's a good proof of concept. From the above ExtremeTech article: "Brocious found that he could simply read this 32-bit key out of the lock’s memory. No authentication is required ... By playing this 32-bit code back to the lock ... it opens." While Brocious seems to have taken this only to the demonstration stage, I'm sure others (CIA? MI5?) have made this method more reliable. It just seemed to me that Brocious is assuming this method applies everywhere, and possibly oversold it.

2. He didn't share this with the hotel lock vendor, Onity. While he's certainly not required to share that info with Onity, it seems a bit shady to only release the information publicly at a blackhat conference, and force the vendor to respond to it after the hack is "in the wild." I wonder if he was worried that if he shared the vulnerability with Onity beforehand that it would take away some of the "thunder" from his presentation. Or maybe it's simply less cool to say to a blackhat convention "I shared this with the vendor, and they're working on it."

Here's what the State of Minnesota says about accessible voting:

If you need assistance due to the inability to read English or have a physical inability to mark a ballot you may obtain the assistance of any individual you choose with the exception of the following: your employer, agent of your employer, officer or agent of your union, or a candidate for election. Alternatively, you may obtain the aid of two election judges who are members of different political parties. See Minnesota Statutes, Section 204C.15 for more information.

If you can’t easily leave your car, you can ask for the ballot to be brought out to you in your car. Two election judges from different political parties will bring the voting materials out and assist you.

Also, Assistance with voting:

If a voter needs assistance because of a disability, inability to read or write, difficulty with English, or other reasons, the voter has several options. The voter may: ... 3. Use the AutoMARK: Each polling place must have at least one voting machine accessible to disabled individuals, called the AutoMARK. It allows blind voters and those who have trouble marking the ballot themselves to vote independently by allowing voters to indicate their choices using a touch screen or headphones in combination with a keypad marked in Braille. The voter enters their choices and the AutoMARK prints the ballot for them. It does not count the votes or retain their choices. The voter then deposits their ballot into the optical scan ballot counter along with everyone else's.

So we do accommodate the blind (my father-in-law is blind) in several ways. Also, if you have difficulty with English you are allowed to bring someone in to translate your options for you. If you prefer Klingon, for example, feel free to have Mark Okrand there in person with you.

Welcome to generational differences. I hope you enjoy your stay. And yes, this exists pretty much everywhere - although maybe not to the point you describe here. Depends on the people you hire, too. But speaking generally, it's a generational thing.

Every generation approaches their work in a different way. I spoke about this a few years ago at Penguicon in my Linux in the Enterprise (Powerpoint) talk. Although my slides don't have a lot of text on them, so you may not get much benefit by looking at the slides on their own. You can also find more on my blog.

In my Penguicon talk, it was about how to pitch Linux to the higher-ups. I mentioned 3 generations that might be your manager. In your case, you are likely experiencing only 2 of these groups:

1. My generation (the "Star Wars generation") in their 30's and 40's
2. The "boomer generation" in their 50's and 60's

Folks in their 30's and 40's tend to be very conservative. I don't mean to say politically conservative but conservative in their actions. Other slashdotters who are about my age likely saw one of their parents get laid off from their jobs while we were growing up. If your parents weren't laid off, I'm sure one or more of your friends' parents were. And while we may not recognize it, that caused many of my generation to think conservatively. We don't want to see that happen to us. So we tend to view things in terms of risk. Many in my generation are risk-averse, so you really need to be careful in how you introduce new technology and new concepts to them. Approach it as a way to reduce risk or to make things easier. Don't just jump in and expect them to follow, because they're waiting to see what you'll make of it before they touch it. Will this be something that "sticks" or will it be another flash-in-the-pan that goes away after a little while, so a waste of time to learn?

The boomer generation is different. That generation is often motivated by societal change. Witness the societal upheaval in the 1960s and 1970s. And they definitely didn't grow up with technology, they probably "fell into it" and got their start working on mainframes. If they are honest, they may tell you they're more interested in society and social networks (this the generation that Classmates.com was built for) and less motivated by technology. Since they didn't grow up with technology, the boomer generation may not always be comfortable with the rate of change in technology - even those who work in technology. In general, don't expect boomers to share your enthusiasm for new technology. You may need to walk these folks through it. Draw parallels for them, show how this new thing is basically like this other older thing, but with a few improvements.

If you look at your coworkers' behaviors as a symptom of generational differences, you'll be pretty far along.

Your generation, by the way, is often very self-motivated to go search stuff out on their own. (You mentioned this in your post.) Kids in your generation don't often stop to bring other people into what they are doing, they just do their own research. (Sound familiar?) And your generation typically is not interested in going through the same "levels" that previous generations were content to follow. So while you didn't mention this in your post, I'll give it as a caution: if you find that your boss's boss is an expert in some area that you're working on, you probably will just send an email to pick his/her brain on the topic. You wouldn't think anything of it; that's the expert, so you asked. Your boss's boss will probably answer you, too, because that person is probably a boomer - and remember, boomers tend to be motivated by social networking. So your boss's boss will find it hard to resist having that dialogue with you.

And in doing so, you will have pissed off your immediate boss (at a guess, probably 30s or 40s - that's my generation, remember) who views what you just did as jumping over their head to a higher level in the organization. Even though that was probably the right thing for you to do, your "Star Wars generation" secretly-conservative boss will feel somewhat exposed because he/she didn't have a role in that process.

We are doing all that already in Minnesota. I don't know how you'd request to get access to ballots to scan them independently (probably granted by the courts, for example: during a contested recount) but in theory if you could get them, you could easily scan the ballots using your own software for an independent check. This is also dead simple for election officials to recount manually, like in our contested Senate race in 2008 (if it's too close, state law forces a manual recount.)

You may want to look at a few example ballots from Minnesota. Here's the 2012 general election sample ballot: PDF. The green numbers are explanatory notes - ignore them if you just want to see the ballot. This ballot is missing the feeder marks on either side of the page, which helps the scanner. And (obviously) the names and other text are just placeholders.

You can see that our "bubble sheet" ballots are pretty straightforward. Voters just fill in the ovals next to their choices. You can even opt for write-in. I believe these ballots are 11x17, so a pretty standard size.

Maybe this is a naive question, but what's wrong with bubble sheet voting ballots? Like those "A-B-C-D-E" forms you filled out when you took the SAT in high school. That's basically what we use in Minnesota, but just a little different because voting isn't just "A-B-C-D-E".

Everyone knows how to fill out bubble sheets, so they're dead simple to use. When you've voted, you insert them into a scanner (it's also a locked box, old-fashioned key-and-lock, so no one except election officials can access they ballots once they're inserted). The scanner checks for simple stuff like "Did you vote for more than one presidential candidate?" and immediately spits your ballot out if it finds a problem. I made a mistake on my ballot once, and there's a simple, established procedure where they destroy your invalid ballot in front of you and issue you another ballot so you can vote again. It's easy.

And bubble sheets are anonymous. No worrying about "Can someone figure out how I voted?"

Above all, bubble sheets are auditable. While the scanners can easily keep track of how many votes for Obama v Romney, election officials can always go back to manually count the bubble sheets in the case of a recount. You may have heard about our 2008 recount - they manually recounted the bubble sheets.

Been there. In 1995 or 1996, I was working in my first job, as a systems administrator for a small geographics company. Our main business was in generating custom maps for large businesses that needed to visualize the geophysical data for a certain area. For example, one typical customer was a large local bank that needed us to generate custom maps to show all the residential addresses they loaned money to in the metro area over the previous year, so they could show there was no discrimination in who they loaned to.

Back to the point: we could make custom maps. One day, my supervisor and I were talking about "The Web" and all the cool things you could find there. We had the great idea to use "The Web" to advertise our business. So we pitched an idea to our vice president: Let's set up a server that lets people type in their address in a "Web Browser", then we can pass that to our mapping system and create a simple "line drawing" map of their immediate area. Just stuff our server could complete in about 5 seconds or so. We figured the "Web Page" could also tell the visitor about the other things we do. Basically, give away a few small maps in exchange for getting more customers for our big stuff.

The vice president considered, then rejected the idea, saying that free maps on the Internet wasn't our business.

Only a year later, companies like MapQuest arrived on the scene, offering free maps supported by advertising. It was the start of a new business model. I don't want to say that our little company could have become MapQuest ... but yeah, we really could have. I'll note that the first versions of these mapping "Web Sites" provided little more than a line-drawing of a location, and a route to get from point A to point B.

I believe that company went out of business a few years after I left. Surprisingly, they weren't able to adapt to this new model where people could get free maps on the Internet.

Adobe will not develop and test Flash player for Android 4.1 and will now focus on a PC browsing and apps. In a blog post, they wrote, 'Devices that don’t have the Flash Player provided by the manufacturer typically are uncertified, meaning the manufacturer has not completed the certification testing requirements. In many cases users of uncertified devices have been able to download the Flash Player from the Google Play Store, and in most cases it worked. However, with Android 4.1 this is no longer going to be the case, as we have not continued developing and testing Flash Player for this new version of Android and its available browser options

First, Adobe stopped developing Flash for Linux, now they are dropping Android. The irony is that Adobe does not see that by dropping support for platforms, fewer developers will want to use Flash, because it is no longer "cross-platform." And if fewer developers want to use Flash, then fewer people will consume Flash content ... and eventually Adobe will decide to drop support for another platform because fewer people are consuming Flash there. The cycle feeds itself. It's only a matter of time before Flash goes away entirely.

This is not a trend Adobe will want. Adobe is focusing on "the PC", but the market is increasingly moving to "mobile" ... I think we can see where this is going.

Does it? Didn't realize. I never really looked for it. As I said, we get most of our news from bbc.co.uk and other sources, even before we got our Roku. Unless you count The Daily Show, which we do watch on Hulu.