Connie Willis wrote an interesting story called Remake.

All dead actors rights were under license and it was more cost effective to use dead actors then unknown live actors.

http://www.amazon.com/Remake-Connie-Willis/dp/0553374370

I've been using a web browser since 1993, both at home and at work.

I have always had lots of bookmarks and usually want the same set at home and at work. It's always been a pain to combine them without duplicating or losing bookmarks. I used to use my bookmarks.html as my home page.

I've gone from Mosaic to Netscape to Mozilla to Firefox. I tried external sites like delicious but didn't like how it got brought back to my browser. I tried scripts that would merge 2 copies into a master copy.

Foxmarks was the 1st system that did what I wanted. It even helped when I tried Chrome. I love saving a bookmark at work and finding it at home.

I don't want to have to sync anything else. I use different extensions, cookies, logins, etc at home/work. Work has a censoring proxy that blocks some sites. I don't use facebook, youtube, etc at work because they monitor for "excessive usage". I can wait until I get home in any event. I certainly don't want any tabes brought back to work.

The next thing I want to find is a bookmark cleaner to clean out dead links. Some of my book marks might be for a device I power on in summer and off in winter every year and I want to keep those even if they go off the network.

The textbook looks like a good introduction to concepts using computers, but as an IT Systems Administrator, I wouldn't call it IT. Some of the suggestions here are programming, not IT. IT uses programming, but lots of it is user stuff.

For IT concepts:

Something on security, using passwords. Maybe explain it in terms of a diary that you don't want a sibling to read & how to ensure that. The issues of sharing too much online.

How email works. Storing & forwarding. How email addresses are organized.

How an algorithm works. Math, if-then-else, functions. This plus this. Use a spreadsheet. Use a programming language. Use Openoffice macros. Use javascript. Teach concepts.

Teach file organization. Grouping files. Sorting, date formats. Moving files, copying files, backups. Age of data.

Teach about tags, metadata (data about data). File sizes.

Tables, statistics, graphing. How to use it to measure something over time. Outliers. Measuring something scientifically like time/distance, temperature, etc.

In the southern US, some weeds have already developed a resistance to weeds.

The techniques those farmers currently use for large scale farming need to be changed.

Speed is the NASCAR channel. I try to watch MotoGP on it. There was a 3 way battle for 2nd place going on last week and they cut away from it, just as an attack was going on to show 1st place, 4-5 seconds ahead, cruising across the finish. *sigh*

There's lots of cutting away from a race to show a NASCAR repeat. ESPN used to do it with Supercross & cut off the end to show the football draft rerun. At least Speed treats supercross better then ESPN.

FWIW, I heard about an F1 race with 2-3 lead changes in a race. The next week I saw a MotoGP with 4 lead changes in *1* corner.

And I say "the day the gov't/power company put something in to remotely turn off my toilet"

I'm all for having something where I can see how much power I'm using minute to minute. The power, gas, phone and water utilities should already be able to do this. I'd love to be able to get the same data on my system in a reasonable timeframe. I'd probably be willing to pay.

But no way am I going to give permission to any of them to turn it off w/o my active involvement. I have my owe computer monitoring my freezer temp, burgler alarms. My garden gets watered during the day, etc.

Indeed. I've heard of Solaris 2.4 apps (1996ish) running on Solaris 10.

Or an NFS v1 client on DOS running against an NFS v4 server on Solaris 10.

Corn costs almost twice as much to grow then what the farmer gets paid. So the US gov't subsidies it. 51% + 50% = 101% so the corn farmer gets a profit.

And beef is fed corn because that's the cheapest stuff you can feed them. Cows evolved to eat mainly grass so eventually an all corn diet will cause disease. So you feed them antibiotics. Which has other risks to the population.

And what to do with the manure? You used to spread it on the fields to fertilize the corn. But now the feedlot is > 30 miles from the nearest corn farm so it's too costly to truck to a nearby farm. I bet some of your taxes help pay to dispose of that manure too.

If all you can afford is cheap food, eat it. Long term, you can't survive on raman noodles and other cheap food. FWIW, the cheapest source of organic food is a backyard garden. Even a little bit helps.

We're spending a smaller percentage of income on food then any time in history. And a larger percentage on health care.

FWIW *all* farming was organic before chemical fertilizers and pesticides were developed after WWII.

ZFS dedupe in OpenSolaris is also Open Source.

I've gotten 11% dedup savings on 1.04 TB of a 1.82 TB volume.
Add compresson savings and ECC (so bad bits don't happen silently).

I'm hoping it will be in btrfs so Linux will have it.

I have red-green color-blindness, like 20%(?) of the male population. 99% of the time I can work around it. Traffic lights have 2 keys, position and color. The colors they use look different to me.

I have a hard time with dual color red/green LEDs. Most are light colored and I can't tell the difference. I have issues with some charts that choose light colors as well.

I can read resistor charts, tell between wire colors and can generally do things w/o the red/green.

But as a sysadmin/network admin, I'd *really* like the ability to tell the difference between red/green LEDs instead of having logging in to check.

I wonder how often they crash a veggie grower's seedlings.

I have a few racks of lights and over 50 tomato seedlings growing on a heating mat.

A DSi: Graphical device with touch screen, WiFi, Web Browser, 2 Cameras, SD card, Custom Cartridge. Does it have IR? Some kind of external port?

There was a embroidery sewing machine that used a GameBoy Color + custom cartridge as its computer. Many sewers back then (1999?) didn't have computers and adding a $200 GameBoy to a $2000 sewing machine was cheaper then a $1000 PC.

Palm PDAs with the infrared port have been used to simulate the spread of a disease through a population. Give all the students the PDAs running the App. One is infected. Everyone starts syncing IR. Now the class tries to find out who had the original infection.

A Palm with a serial port interface to sensors that collect information (button press as a ball rolls across it, sound waves, anything that can be timed).

Distributed quiz answering pads. Send class notes to everyone's DS to read at home. Quizes to research.

There has to be lots of things that can be done beyond "Educational" software.

My 1st admin was Xenix on a 386 with a 40MB MFM drive. I worked as a computer operator before that at a place that had Altos Xenix, SunOS i386, Sequent and DTSS.

Anyways...

You have up to 10MB of data. It can use a serial port. Without hardware handshaking, 9600 baud is the fastest you can expect.

10485760 bytes @ 2400 bytes/sec ~= 73 minutes. Geez, why not just use the serial port?

Plug a PC with a 3 wire serial port cable & a terminal program that can log to file. Even Hyperterm can capure text.

If it's just text, cat it on the Xenix just after you start the capture txt on your terminal.

If it's binary, you have 2 choices.

1) Get something like xmodem, zmodem or kermit running on both ends.
2) uuencode the data to convert it to 7 bit ascii and cat it as above.

compress should be on Xenix to reduce the file size before you transfer. uuencode will convert 3 bytes to 4 bytes. gzip can uncompress.

I had xmodem and zmodem for Xenix back in the day. Since I didn't have a compiler, I had to get a binary from CompuServ's Unix SIG. If I had known about uuencode, I would have used that.

The only problem with uuencode it error checking. You might want to do some kind of checksum on your data.
I don't remember the tools. Zmodem and kermit both do error checking. If you have a short cable ( 9600 baud without hardware handshaking, you will get errors. I used to use a 50' 5 wire hardware handshaking cable for zmodem transfers at 115k all the time.

The thing that gets me is Microsoft designed the file formats we use in Office every day. Yet they are so full of binary that's not portable and subject to endianess issues. The tech to slice & dice the data to make it available on portable media such as the web or non intel cpus has to be all reverse engineered. Even Microsoft has issues with backward compatibility. It's amazing this rickety technology has lasted so long.

TBL didn't use a binary format for a reason. I have LaTeX documents created on a VAX in 1987 that have been used on DOS, DTSS, MacOS, OS/2, Windows 95, Linux, SunOS, Solaris. The could still be used today. A Word document created in 1987 or even 1995, not so much. There would be issues going from Windows 95 to MacOS as well.