Nice. My bad for not reading the article thoroughly enough, thanks for pointing it out.

That doesn't mean Yahoo! gets a 'pass' though. For a company with as much talent/infrastructure/experience as they should have, this kind of thing is definitely a warning sign.

Enjoying my !yahoo mail right now :D

Just dumped all my yahoo accounts (had two spam accounts and one personal account).

I've had them since the late 1990s, and while I hate to kick someone while they're down, the service has only gotten worse lately--spam, unwanted yahoo! instant messenger robot requests, "Temporary Problems Accessing Your Account" messages--the whole deal.

This kills it for me. I interviewed with Yahoo! about six years ago (didn't make it past the second cut, so yeah, I'm a moron) and being VERY impressed with how smart their teams were. Wonder if all the good ones left or got fired somewhere. Too bad, really.

Sorry guys, but thanks for the great 15 years!

Exactly.

bittorrent != 'piracy' [sic] ...but that's difficult to explain to some people.

Agreed. What's worse is that your skillset gradually atrophies away until you're barely able to do anything of value, other than manage "Sales Force" passwords, or write throwaway scripts to use against someone's proprietary API.

The hard stuff? Well, that's why we have consultants!

I'm somewhat of a X desktop transient, switching between KDE, Gnome, and Xfce (variety is the spice of life, and all that rot).

I spend most of my days in Emacs or a term window, and I frankly don't use 90% of the features these desktop managers provide. After a few months with one of the "big three," I always come back to GNUstep. It's totally minimal, and you can do EVERYTHING without touching a mouse. It's as unobtrusive as possible.

Check the wikipedia here, or dig the GNUstep website.

Another option in the "totally minimal" world is xmonad, there's a lot to like here as well. Wikipedia: xmonad,

Or, try the Xmonad website

Nice post. Too bad I used my last mod points yesterday.

The most ridiculously strong password is 100% worthless if your online data (via the server itself) is compromised, which happens way more than we'll ever know about.

Even more creepy are the perfectly legal and "legit" uses of your data (make sure you read everything in the EULA I guess) that are knowingly and willingly handed off to various third parties.

The Oracle Social Network piece seems pretty solid, but some people think the configuration might be a little difficult (until they pass their Oracle cert tests).

Here's the sample SCLINIT.ORA (it should be "social-init.ora" but damn that 8+3 filename convention):

FRIEND_LIST_LISTENER =
  (FRIEND_LIST =
        (FRIEND_DESC =
            (GLOBAL_FRIENDNAME = GENGHIS.KHAN)
            (FRIEND_HOME = /mongolia/otrar/)
            (FRIEND_NAME = my-doppelganger)
        )
    )
    (FRIEND_LIST =
        (FRIEND_DESC =
            (GLOBAL_FRIENDNAME = COMMANDER.TACO)
            (FRIEND_HOME = /no_california/silicon_valley/)
            (FRIEND_NAME = cmdrtaco)
        )
    )
    (FRIEND_LIST =
        (FRIEND_DESC =
            (GLOBAL_FRIENDNAME = MARC.BENIOFF)
            (FRIEND_HOME = /no_california/marin_county/)
            (FRIEND_NAME = markee-mark)
        )
    )
)

...with this

http://aide.sourceforge.net/

It's not a bad little alternative to "Tripwire" or some of those other things, either.

As someone who has downloaded this some time back and messed with it a bit, I do have to say it's kind of slick.

http://opalang.org/

I had a few complaints about it early on, but it's evolving, though. Might be worth revisiting.

Join the ACM.

This still comes on paper every month (plus a digital edition):

http://cacm.acm.org/

The articles cover a wide range of topics, including:

- Computing and society
- Legal issues
- New trends in computing
- Programming language geekery

Some of it may be too "niche" or "hardcore" (depending on your interests) but there's usually something for everybody in every issue. No, it won't be quite as task-specific as some of the mags out there (i.e., Not many articles with titles like "Turn up the Volume with LVM: twenty ways to crank up your hard drive!!") but excellent, nonetheless.

YMMV of course.

Yeah!

Glad to see someone else likes (tolerates?) this book. I remember reading it a looong time ago (~1980) and although it introduces a lot of stuff that wasn't present in the original movies, it seemed to hang together pretty well.

I'm sure some kind of "leap of faith" is required for any of these books.