Last time I checked life on earth and thus us is possible because it *isn't* space. ... They needed a science crew for that?

Captain Obvious strikes again.

Just get a cheap netbook with a browser and use audiotool. ... No matter the OS, as long as it has Flash (Chrome has Flash built in).
Honestly, I'm only joking a little here. The stuff these people did with audiotool is amazing right up to flat out insane. You really should check it out. I wouldn't be suprised if it fits *all* your needs.

That aside, you get tons of tools in the closed and FOSS space. I'd go with what fits best. It may be that the available midi/audio to usb interfaces are most sophisticated for the mac vs. windows or x86 Linux.

You also want to consider the hardware. The new Mac Pro (the round pipe-thing) has gotten raving reviews from audio professionals for its silent operation (1 fan only) in relation to its power and speed. Some even use it directly in the studio. If your on a budget, a linux laptop with supported audio hardware (supported seperate USB audio interface strongly recommended!!) will do just fine. Supercollider is one of the many FOSS audiotools (it's a synth) that are really great. There are ready-made Linux music+audio distros out there, even a specialized ubuntu variante, IIRC.

Then again, do check out audiotool. Some musicians use it exclusively. A webapp. No shit. A friggin webapp. ... As I said: Quite amazing.

My 2 cents.

Nice one. Neatly shaped, sits snug and improved sensation. ... Yet sometimes I don't want to much sensation, so I can stay in the game longer.
I often also use two. Had 2 breakages and one loss in the past. Nasty and scary that is. (queue condom usage stories below please :-) )

Conclusion: Improvements in Condoms is not the worst thing for the super-rich to invest in.

My 2 cents.

That's an easy question to answer.
Top of the list and second to none:
Seneca - Letters from a Stoic

Then the works of Epicurus, Diogenes, Socrates & Aristoteles, in that order. Confuzius is a nice addition to that aswell.

Everything in our society and/or entire world that involves correct usage of basic brain functions goes back to what these people have written down.

Fallbacks to that:
Simple modern Zen Literature, perhaps condensed by Alan Watts or some other western advocate of Zen philosophy. ... But then agian, stoicisim is nothing but the wester variant of that, and one that's partially more fitting to western mindsets or perhaps even more refined than some eastern variants. .... Although eastern variants can be more poetic, if that's your thing.

Sidenote: People are recommending the Bible as a top-list must-read here. I really don't know why - probably some USA thing (watch me getting modded into oblivion for that half-sentence) ... anyway, stoicisim/zen will make you happy for the rest of your life, no matter what and will most probably also make you a better person for it. If you feel better when including the bible, add Jesus of Nazareth teachings (and *only* those!) later, they are *much* easyer to understand and apply when you have become a stoic!

BTW: Most of those books are public domain / copyright free and downloadable as PDF for free.

Good luck and have fun.

Ruby has, since it has become popular, mostly been used for webdev tooling and frameworks. In that department it combines the crappyness of PHP with a communities arrogance of C and the toolkit variety of Perl. So it could be that traction won't hold as long and good as some would like it to. PHP is deeply entrenched in serverside web development and the new kid on the block definitely is JavaScript with Node.js offering Serverside development in the turing complete language that also drives todays web frontend logic.

New serverside web projects I'd personally do in PHP or - if time and resources allow for experimenting - I'd use Node.js. For the simple reason that it offers the same PL on the serverside that we use for Ajax.

Bottom line:
With Node.js on the rise and JS offering basically the same features that people rave about in Ruby I would be suprised if Ruby loses traction again.

My 2 cents.

Amazon must realize it cannot export its anti-union labor model to European shores. ... ... powered by lobbying machine KPMG Consulting, their shill Gerhard 'Let's wrap him in barbed wire and shoot him into the sun' Schröder, Hartz 4 cheap-flexible-workforce-supply powered by German taxpayer and so forth. ... There, fixed that for you.

As much as I love shopping for stuff at amazon, I'm totally with these strikers. Kick them where it hurts is my vote on this! Go, workers rights, go! Voll in die Eier! ... I hope this spills over into the US, a notable signal no-holds barred neo-con corporate-socialism disguised as free market capitalism desperately needs. Here and across the pond.

My 2 cents.

MS Stack software developer

says it all. I almost stopped reading at that. MS stack is going bye-bye. And if there's one thing that is *not* lacking in *Seatle* it's MS 'talent'.
Try this: Advertise yourself as a Linux stack guy of same skill level, and look how many interviews you get with that. I'd bet measurably more.

Good luck.

I'm sure its nothing that a can of spray-paint and some bubble-gum can't deal with.

Don't get to cocky about your options in an orwellian/cyberpunk future.

The corps in turn are sure your spray-paint and bubble-gum tactic is nothing 99.999% reliability facial-recognition + cell-phone tracking + behavioural-and-movement-pattern-recognition + god-knows-what can't deal with by tracking you down, sueing you into next wednesday, locking your creditcards/bankaccounts for that specific mall (all all others connected to the same megacorp and data-exchange conglumerate), putting you on a special surveillance & potential terrorist threat list, ban you from accessing gated communities of type X,Y and Z until further notice and upping your rent for being a threat to society all for spraying and gumming up their new survelliance & minion control bot toy.

Just saying.

I see a lot of comments here pointing out that uncertainty is the most demanding parameter when doing a postdoc. Well, I'm not in a position to comment on that, because despite being a few decades old, I haven't really started my acamedic career yet - allthough I'm inching my way into it, should nothing notably better come up. Mind you, this is Germany, where there's no tuition to pay and they accept you at university if you've got the grades and the track record to prove you really mean it.

However, there is one thing that I've been noticing ever since the last decade started with the first internet bubble:

Today uncertainty is everywhere, no matter what you do.

It's a simple fact, and I'm sure most of you would agree, that we are moving head on into a cyberpunk world the likes described in William Gibson and Neal Stephenson novels. Move to post-scarcity economy, peak capitalism, permantent environmental damage, constant economic and currency votality, work & travel throughout your career, constant precarious personal life, etc. It's happening all around. Regular lives of people falling apart left, right and center and those stuggling to maintain a modestly secure life feeling more and more miserable by the day in doing so, because they have to cut so many throats and compromise in to many places to even be able to. I've had 3 jobs this year, the current one with a web programming hovel with no versioning or deployment, a passive-agressive boss, 5 different main admins in 5 years and a higher turnover rate of programmers than McD's has with burger-flippers, accompanied by the according codebase. The last gig was 60+ hrs of unpaid overtime in 7 weeks, working on a project that consilidates Germanys online travel booking market by orders of magnitude and will put quite a few people out of work when the rush is over.

I'm certain we're moving into a world where acamedic rank will count less and less and even universities will be consolidated, because their cruel selection mechanisms don't guarantee a solid career anymore. And do we need them? I can get more education off Khan Academy today than I could of half of the universities in Germany 3 decades ago. For free, without moving anywhere. Those are the upsides of a cyberpunk society.

My 2 cents.

Imagine if Microsoft had released an MS-branded laptop which only allowed you to use HTML+Javascript and Silverlight apps, and then released a development environment which ran under Silverlight.
That'd be as retarded as this is.

No it wouldn't.

If they gave away all of the software for free, integrated online services for free, if the software were based on an FOSS core, new very essential core components itself were released as FOSS (V8 anyone?) which all would basically prevent long-term lock-in powers for good and gain aknowledgement from the opinion leaders (i.e. us), the hard- and software were well integrated and the hardware itself were usable, sturdy, cheap, lightweight and pleasing in a visual and aesthetical way ... etc.

If all that would happen, then it would definitely not be retarded.
It would actually be quite smart and entrench a solid global market dominance even further. ...

Which is why Google is kicking MSes ass in that dept. btw. ... 1 billion activated android devices and counting. One-stop, cheap, total zero fuss, buy-unpack-turnon-use pissing-into-serious-apple-massuser-territory Chrome OS (mini) laptops that start to look as flashy as iStuff moving into the market, etc. .. You get the picture.

Bottom line:
I'd be carefull to call anything Google is doing right now retarded.

What's all the excitement? The General Interface Builder is basically full-blown bsd licensed browser-based offline IDE of Eclipse proportions. It's quite amazing, certainly speeds up development of non-trivial GeneralInterface Ajax Applications quite a bit and is very well matured.

I'm not holding my breath for Google to catch up on GI anytime soon.

My 2 cents.

Easy solution: Ban the use of antibiotics in the meat industry.

Of course then people wouldn't get their insanely cheap meat anymore.

Boohoo - what a disaster.

Very rarely have I agreed with Bill Gates to such an extent.

My 2 cents.

It's called marketing. RubyOnRails wasn't the first web framework and it certainly wasn't the best. In fact, it was pretty shitty. But it was the first that had a professionally designed website that advertised its benefits and a screencast that explained and demonstraded them. The pratically invented screencasts. Weeks later slashdot was filled with Rails fanatics.

The first version of the Zope Webapp Server came out roughly a decade before rails and still was notabliy superiour to any other WebFW, Rails included, in all aspects. Yet nobody cared. Why? That's why. Bland website? Nothing flashy? Can't find what I'm looking for? Backend UI without good looking buttons? Won't adhere to the loudmouths and hippsters and won't get attention, won't get critical mass, will lose eventually. It's that simple, even in the FOSS world nowadays (Rails actually sought to that, btw.)

If you really want to bring ICEwm (back) into the limelight, join the team, update their 12 year old website, bundle a new version with good looking modern themes and your tweaked setup, give it a new version number and do a little rattling on related online forums. Once everything is in place, tested, up and running that is. If you've done your job well, userbase will rise again and IceWM 2.0 will the the Hip WM of 2014. Fluxbox, a Blackbox fork, gained hippness status some years back the exact same way. Neat website, one or two nice little extras, screenshots, a well kempt miniblog and everybody went "Oh, look, new and shiny."

That's just about all there is to it. But don't you dare think good marketing isn't work and isn't worth giving as much thought as your projects software architecture. It's more work and - most of the time - even more important than that for the success of a project. Even in FOSS.

Good luck.