Preach on!

Hell, I'd be happy if they'd just teach people the basics of using source control.

It is so much more pleasant working with even a total noob dev who can incrementally make progress by properly checking out, branching, and submitting code, than working with a moderately talented programmer who just submits blobs of stuff all over the place that we have to run around and try to keep coordinated.

Some of the public school systems right nearby Bill G. already have something of an alternative to private charter schools.
http://www.lwsd.org/schools/Ch...

So not sure why they have to push so hard to get private charter schools stood up.

Admission is by lottery, which is just as self-selecting for motivated parents as charter schools... that is to say, you will probably get into one of them if you bother to apply. Once in, you're expected to put in so many hours of community service (both students and parents), as well as make a "voluntary" donation of $200 per year (as a public school, they can't really mandate collection).

The schools themselves tend to be small and very tightly-knit. They're usually run entirely by a handful of "star" teachers with free reign over the curriculum and virtually no administration... they usually share a principal from the nearest conventional school. The real "scam" is some legal loophole that allows these schools to be built with none of the extra facilities - usually when school campuses are constructed, they need a certain minimum allotment of athletic fields, gyms, cafeterias, multipurpose rooms, etc. While some of these choice schools have such things, the majority of them are just a handful of classrooms - so funds are purely focused on academics (kids can still participate in sports and activities at their local conventional school). The other scam is no school busses; parents have to drive the kids there themselves, though a lot of them carpool and the kids also get public bus passes.

So it's actually not all that much different than what you describe. Most of them have themes (art/theater , environmentalism, politics, foreign language / history, STEM, etc.). The big complaint is that there aren't more of them, which is funny because they appear to be much cheaper to run than most typical school campuses and draw on a lot of parent involvement.

Yeah, they basically had some ulterior motive, or internal struggle not that related to your performance. Most likely they hired you for a new project before it got its funding secured or something like that. It's their fault, not yours. Even if it /was/ something related to your skill level, then they totally failed to assess your skill in the interview process.

Too bad for all the extra paperwork they cost everyone, though.

They mentioned family photos. There are two services that are virtually free at the moment, which makes it hard to beat with a private cloud.

Yes, Google+ photos have a 15GB cap on full-resolution photos in the free tier, but no cap on "web-resolution" photos. It's simple to upload from Picasa from Win/Mac/Linux, and of course happens automatically on most Android devices. Yeah, it won't be archival quality, but good enough to record and share the "so this happened" moments.

For all of the huge archives of digital negatives and source video content, it's nice to be able to have an offsite backup. If you don't have terabytes of storage on a friend's system, Amazon Glacier is probably the most cost-effective way to insure you have at least one place to turn to to retrieve your files. The cost structure is complex, but basically boils down to 1 cent / GB / month, and maybe a retrieval fee between 0 to 5 cents per GB depending upon how quickly you try to retrieve it all. Not bad for an insurance policy for a couple dozen GB of photos, though for 100s of GBs of videos you may want to think twice.

It took me a while to find a good straightforward Amazon Glacier upload utility, but the Java-based SAGU ( http://simpleglacieruploader.b... ) does the trick nicely. I sort my photos by month, so every year I make a big tgz and upload that big file (optionally encrypt with gnupg or something if you want, though I personally am more paranoid about not being able to get to my data than the Feds or someone doing something with my kids' baby pics). Glacier is based on a robotic tape library, so it is cheap to upload, but expensive to pull data, even the list of what you have stored. So save all of the index data for every file you upload to one or more other cloud or email systems (just not on the computer you're backing up from), so you can retrieve those archives in the future as your last resort.

I'm a little confused about why http://altslashdot.org/ appears to be a wiki as opposed to something running on http://slashcode.com/

But I suppose that may be because they don't want to be /too/ much like slashdot classic.

Anyway, I don't see the problem with having a discussion board that links to other discussion boards to discuss the discussions, I mean, that's essentially what all these sites are ( fark , reddit , 4chan , slashdot , etc.). So maybe the real surprise is that there isn't some sort of comment sync engine yet that somehow joins disparate commenting systems.

Not to mention the user comments summary appears to be gone.

http://slashdot.org/~rwa2/comm... is one of the bookmarks that I (somewhat narcissistically) monitor to see who has replied to my comments, so I can reply back to them even if it's a day or three later. Much like I'm doing now with you. Also, I noticed that I put in a plug to Nixie Pixel on the article about female role models and she actually responded to it a few days later. Whee!

The beta user profile even more narcissistically only shows my comments, like I don't know what I already said, and makes no mention of what other people are replying to me. So much for conversation and debate and stuff.

I was hoping to find an actual positive discussion in here, but oh well.

For my part, I assume the site "redesign" is just a migration off of Slashcode onto the same web publishing engine that the rest of DICE's properties use, so they can get the same analytics engine to market you to their advertisers. That's all the PHBs want ,what they really really want.

In fact, this big anti-Beta campaign is probably driving their analytics up Up UP! "Look at all the traffic our enthusiastic users are generating to the new Beta site!"

http://arstechnica.com/ and http://theregister.co.uk/ for nerd news and British snark

http://m.fark.com/ for generally wasting time chatting about current events.

The slashdot mobile beta site just doesn't work for me. On both mobile and desktop I always scroll through the stories and open interesting links in new tabs that load in the background, and then I can go back and flip through them at will. But long-presses (at least on Android browsers) are blocked and turned into normal clicks instead. Being forced to load each story and then go back all while waiting for the network simply doesn't work for me, even if I'm on a fast wifi link.

The only mobile slashdot experience that was any good was the AvantSlash utility someone made for offline comments browsing in AvantGo or better yet JPlucker for Palm. Suck down a day's worth of stories and comments with your filter settings, and flip back and forth at lightning speed for hours on the subway with no cell connectivity. Unfortunately, they (and therefore we) had to update their parser every time slashdot made a code change. Such were the sacrifices we made in the name of News for Nerds.

All good points.

But from the standpoint of "providing strong role models of women using open source to have fun and make money" I can't really think of anyone who does it better, including any male tech "vloggers" I've seen awkwardly hemming and hawing their way through a device teardown or interface demonstration.

And yes, I'd also hope that my daughter would aspire to eventually be more, but at this point, just seeing someone on "TV" who talks enthusiastically about computers in general and Linux in particular who is also a girl would do wonders for the image of "what type of person plays with computers" that otherwise gets jammed into your head by the nerdy stereotypes that constantly show up in media.

Yeah, DoofusOfDeath is the reason we can't have nice things! (erm, I mean, nice human beings with feelings)

It's Nixie Pixel:
http://www.nixiepixel.com/

She's very articulate, and the technical depth is there, if you can keep yourself from getting distracted.

*patents submarine drone beer delivery system*

They're not going to actually get rid of /. classic once the new site goes out of beta, are they?