Correction: I'm mailing a check. Pain in the ass but at least I'm reducing the number of untrusted hands involved in my transaction.

I went to donate and saw that. I'm actually very unhappy about it but I won't be able to donate because they only accept payment via systems I don't trust. If there a direct payment option, I'd have opened my wallet immediately but I refuse to do business with PayPal and just don't trust Amazon. Call me paranoid but it is what it is.

Many things on /. are worthy of debate and lead to much trolling. This isn't. This is a Good Thing. I'm throwing in a couple bucks and anyone old enough to remember what a phone call and how pagers work should too.

It's not new. I have an email address that people assume doesn't exist and rt they sign up for things all the time. About two years ago, I received a password reset mail from Skype. When I went to reset it (as I do with every random account people sign up for with my email), they gave me the option to reset about a half dozen accounts. I now maintain a list of burner Skype accounts that had previously used my address.

Fun fact: you are limited to 4 successful resets, per email address, per day.

I work for a company that has a love affair with social media and a bit of a love affair with SalesForce... kinda. I've seen their software and we've tried hard to even use some. When Chatter was brought to our company, it was well received. Once people started trying to use it, it became extremely obvious that it's a solution for a problem that doesn't exist. The only problem that it could possibly solve is "How to we get our employees to act more like they're using Facebook?" Sorry guys, we're not (all) children and we want Big Boy Tools to get our jobs done.

Do you really want your employees to feel comfortable posting their photos and comments from drunken nights of debauchery on company systems? Seems like a bad line to start trying to make fuzzy.

Broken? I was going to say that even a batshit crazy clock can be right every couple decade.

It's likely that the problem isn't with the UI but with the people who use it. The majority of people who have a personal/professional investment in the UI of a particular OS are not your average user. We're power users or developers or whatever you call people who make their Apples make noises and call it music. We tend to know how our computers work and can make them do things that outsiders look at as magical amazing feats. The designers of these new UIs had us as customers due to the tech under the UI and, in many cases, in spite of it.

With this new march of "progress," the target appears to be only the technically inexperienced. The UI is becoming the way you interact with your computer and not just something that makes the masses capable of doing their job while those of us who know how to use computers can work around them. When the UI becomes the only way to do things, then it's time for us to move on.

Win2k had my favorite Windows UI and I've made all future iterations work the same way.
I never liked Apple.
Xfce has all the interface I need to hold up a web browser, a chat client and a bunch of terminals.

I don't color. I don't take pictures. I don't play games. I write code. I read the interwebs. I conduct business. I am the 1%.

I can't find any evidence to support that statement. Shuttleworth didn't write it, he just blows a lot of smoke about it. I would love to hear a primary dev on the Unity project talk about it and then do a Q&A. Unfortunately, Shuttleworth being the mouthpiece is received as well as Lars Ulrich being the voice of the RIAA.

Wait a week and their mantra of "move fast and break things" will take them down again anyway. The piss poor engineering practices in that company are a liability to themselves and anyone who monetizes off of them. The reason Facebook has such a large infrastructure? They ignore resource utilization in their infrastructure and compensate with vast amounts of hardware. If they wait for Facebook to take down their app servers and then focus on the border network, they could likely keep them down for a while. Facebook pukes out multiple releases a day and many of them are bad. Anon will have ample opportunity.

I'll sit back, with some popcorn, and root for the %s guys... I can't figure out who are the bad guys and who are the good guys in this case. Regardless, I'm rooting for Anon on this one.

As someone who knew this pompous windbag personally, I'm in no way surprised that he promotes "do[ing] dumb things." Most of the crap that came out of his mouth was dumb. He was a power hungry egomaniac who got by on his edginess and good looks. Few, if any, smart ideas came from him. The smart ideas that flourished within his organizations were almost always started as somewhat subversive projects for fear that morons that be would step in a dumb them up. When Google finally came to realize his uselessness, he was "promoted" to the East Africa office or some place thereabouts. We celebrated his "promotion" and his departure even more.

As has been mentioned many times, you're trying to find a solution for a problem you can't identify. What you need to do is think about you would feel is missing and how much you will miss it in the future.

My professional experiences have all been with companies where the end goal would require massive growth at some point. A twelve person company doesn't need a whole lot. The people working together are usually pretty intimately familiar with each other and data organization isn't very critical. If the long term plan isn't to stay small, but to eventually grow to hundreds or thousands or employees, keep that in mind when examining your needs. When everyone isn't on a first name basis and/or working in the same office, sharing data becomes a chore is not properly done. A wiki (or CMS) is a good thing for a dozen people but of absolute importance to a larger organization. Why not start one now?

Sticking with my theme of eventually having a large organization, the ability to find people is an often overlooked need until it's too late. Consider having a user directory with pictures, contact information and work group data. When doing this, make sure it allows for editing by the user as people are likely to link out to their projects and documents when given the chance. Also, having a single point of management for vital information (like when phone numbers change) means it can be an administrative nightmare.

Forums and blogs! Email is great but it's not always the best way to propose ideas and have random discussions. Forums allow for much better data persistence (usually only an admin can remove a thread) and give people a place to have more "off topic" banter. While I don't personally have much of a use for a blog, many people find them to be useful scratch pads. At the last place I worked, I occasionally updated a blog with tips and tricks, software patches for third party tools and random tech bugs I'd dealt with.

Whatever you do, make sure you have a central point of access. A unified search component (like a search appliance) is key to making sure that, when you have the date, you can find it. People are good at remembering a single point of entry but less so at remembering an ever growing list. All of these resources are useful but, unless you have a simple way to get to them/find data, they won't get nearly the utilization they could.

Lastly, if you do this all on a single host, you're destined for pain. I don't know anything about the Drobo (and I don't feel like looking it up), so I have no idea if it's running in a redundant state. Regardless, the fact that you have a single machine attached means that, if that box has a problem, all of this is for nothing. At the very least, you should get a second machine with a mirror of any resources/sites you create, so you're not left dead in the water if it fails. I'd actually recommend three, so you can have two in a production swappable state and one where you can test new software and upgrades before making them live.

Good luck.

Wow... just wow... Who will comprise their community development teams if not the power users? I had a hard time swallowing the fact that a distro founder would actually say they'd like to push parts of their user base away so I looked it up. Holy crap:

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/open-source/shuttleworth-on-ubuntu-1104-linux-unity/8780

"""
Is Unity too simple for power users? Yes, it is. But, as Shuttleworth tells us that’s by design. If you don’t like simple, consumer-oriented desktops, you’ll want to look at another Linux distribution because that’s exactly where Ubuntu is now and will continue to go.
"""

I didn't intend to post that anonymously. Feel free to attack me directly.

children? are you serious? ninja networks has been a part of defcon since inception. we've been attending, participating and throwing parties (yay, minibosses!) for years. the FB sponsorship just allows us to one up ourselves from last year. sit on it.

Had Wired paid more attention they would have made it clear that the crew is Ninja Networks and the individuals are Ninjas.