You're going to spend way too much time trying to get Samba to do all the funny stuff that an ancient farm of XPs has set up to share. You're going to have to do this in stages, which means replicating the exact sharing structure of the old machines. The users won't be able to do this themselves. ("After editing /etc/samba/smb.conf, restart Samba for the changes to take effect." - Ubuntu documentation)

Then you have to get everybody converted from Microsoft Office to OpenOffice/LibreOffice. They're not that compatible. Some documents and spreadsheets will be broken. Templates won't transfer very well. Everyone's workflow will be disrupted. The overhead of doing this for a small shop will be higher than the savings.

The small office environment is where the Microsoft environment does best. Upgrade to Windows 7, one machine at a time. Windows 7 is a good OS. (The solid Microsoft OSs were NT 3.51, Windows 2000, and Windows 7.)

Without making any kind of statement about which "side" might be right or wrong this is exactly how the homosexual community will react the moment that someone, somewhere figures out what exactly makes a person homosexual vs. heterosexual and then announces that they can change them from one to the other. The first gay person, for whatever reason who gets "treated" will be attacked mercilessly for It by people who feel that he's betrayed their culture. Now whether that's ever possible I don't know and really don't care. Gay people surround me at work and at home and it doesn't affect me in the least bit. The only thing I want them to be able to do is be happy and enjoy their lives. I don't think it's a sin or a problem at all but someone will and if they find a gene that can be changed or a spot in someone's brain that can be modified in some way to "fix" them they will and then all hell will break loose. I think it's just human nature.

This is a technololgy that's almost there. Like laser weapons. Big chemical lasers that could shoot down shells or small missiles were built two decades ago, but they were building-sized installations, used huge amounts of hazardous chemicals, and took a long time to cool between shots. A decade ago, the THEL laser system had that down to three semi-trailers, but it still used big tanks of hazardous chemicals. Recently, big arrays of solid-state lasers have been used to shoot down shells and small missiles, and that system fits on a medium sized truck. The current version is only 10KW, and the consensus is that about 50KW to 100KW is needed to be really effective.

What's "mobile" about it? Runs on batteries? Plays crappy cellphone games? No. It's cordless.

That's good, but it has nothing to do with mobile phones. Even GameFace uses the term "cordless", not "mobile".

The site is kind of vague on what processing takes place in the headgear, and what takes place on the external WiFi connected device where, presumably, the game is playing. This thing is only worth the trouble if the game behind it is rendering very fast and has very high resolution content, and the latency to the game is very low.

Here's the argument for non-obviousness from the patent:

Apple was trying to come up with a way to prevent butt-dialing and other unwanted device actions. The point of using a sliding motion is that it's unlikely to happen via random touches, but is reasonably intutive.

Microsoft's video doesn't really show a slider. It shows touch buttons that look visually like sliders. But you can trip them just by touching in the active area for the desired state. This is shown in the video where the demonstrator runs their finger down a column of switches and they all switch. Apple requires an explicit "click and drag" operation to unlock.

It may seem trivial, but if nobody did it before the patent, and everybody wanted to do it after the patent, it's a valid invention. "Obvious" does not mean "obvious in hindsight".

Batteries for grid storage have different properties than batteries for cars.

• Weight doesn't matter for grid storage.
• Recharge time need not be faster than discharge rate.
• Grid storage batteries should last a decade or two. Car storage batteries only need a working life of a few thousand hours.
• Efficiency over a charge/discharge cycle matters more for grid storage.

So grid storage tends to use different battery technologies than vehicles.

This is Yet Another Crap Extruder based printer. That whole class of machines sort of works on good days. None of them Just Work.

The fundamental problem is that they're welding a hot thing to a cold thing. That sucks for metal welding, it sucks for soldering, and it sucks for plastic welding. It's how you get bad welds, cold solder joints, and fractures in 3D printing. The heated build plate systems usually start a build OK, but a few cm from the build plate, that heat source isn't close enough to help much. So many taller builds fail around 2-5 cm.

For this process to work, it needs better temperature control. A heated build chamber (that's patented). A hot air jet or small laser aimed at the target just before the weld (larger plastic welders do this). But nobody seems to be doing that. They just keep coming up with variations in the 3-axis motion mechanism (not hard to get right) and the software (not really the problem). Or they add DRM and overcharge for "print cartridges".

Here's the programming manual for FIRST robotics competitions. This is not dumbed down.

We all did. Each and every one of us. It's impossible to resist and at the same time it doesn't work nearly as well if you don't do it.

Did this guy just reinvent a book cypher?

It's just 70 gallons of crude oil left in an unused pipeline. No fire. No explosion. Just a mess.

It's not like a few years ago, when a high pressure gas pipeline exploded in Daly City and took out a small subdivision. Now that was a serious problem and an indication of a worse one. The column of smoke was visible 20 miles away. The state of California made PG&E do hydrostatic testing on all their major gas pipelines, over PG&E's claims that it was unnecessary. During hydrostatic testing with water, there were two pipeline bursts. One caused a landslide that blocked parts of I-280 at Woodside CA. No fire, of course; just water and mud, since this happened during testing.

OK, first bypass the click troll and get to the actual paper.

The general idea seems to be to transmit a large amount of noisy data per plaintext bit. Historically, crypto schemes which make the input much bigger are disfavored, but communications bandwidth is cheaper now and that might be OK.

The author of the paper seems to have fallen into the old trap of thinking that that analog signals have infinite amounts of data in them. He writes things like ''The encrypting key space is unbounded." and "The choice of the form of coupling functions comes from a set of functions that is not bounded." ("High-end" audio people also fall for this.) In reality, at some point you hit a noise threshold, and, anyway, down at the bottom, electrons and photons are discrite. Also, to be usable, whatever is used for the key has to be of finite size, and preferably not too big.

"No new cypher is worth looking at unless it comes from someone who has already broken a very hard one. - Friedman.

Read the analysis of the code. It's not. It is, however, decompiled assembly code; the people doing the analysis don't have access to the source.

Irrelevant. This code is vulnerable on any OS that lets it get UDP packets.

Read the actual vulnerability report. There's enough context there.

You have to assume today that if it has an Internet-accessable interface, an attacker will find a way to get to it from the public Internet. Because, in practice, attackers do.

Google already has several TV interface devices on the market. There's Google Chromecast, of course. Google also sells a set top-box used with Google Fiber That also comes with the Google Storage Box, which is a 2TB file server for storing downloaded content. There's the old Google TV, which is mostly Android software inside.

So Google has this covered already. They have a device for viewing TV over the Internet, and they have a cable box for their cable system. They're probably going to tweak the UI on one of those and promote that as a new product.

Neither Google nor Facebook has ever successfully built a product users will actually pay for. (Google's Nexus phones are rebranded LG, Samsung, and Asus products). For both, all significant revenue is from ads. Yet both have now acquired hardware companies. Now they have to make a business out of them. They may not succeed.

Google acquired Motorola and had no idea what to do with it. Now they're selling it. Google has an automatic driving R&D project, but they acquired DARPA Grand Challenge technology and seem no closer to deployment than a few years ago. Google acquired a half dozen advanced robotics R&D firms, but none of those have commercial products or profits yet. Google now has to build an entire industrial business in robotics, which is slow, hard, and will take years to pay off. Google hasn't shown the corporate patience for that. Google products that didn't take off quickly are usually killed. I'm worried that Google will end up trashing the US robotics industry once they realize it's not a Make Money Fast business.

Facebook hasn't really tried yet in hardware. But they have no expertise at it. The Oculus Rift is still a prototype/low volume device. Facebook has never run a factory. They'll have to outsource manufacturing, which means everybody else will be making goggles if it turns out to be profitable to do so.