Rookie dad totally forgets that five year old life is highly focused on things interesting to a five year old and not at all focused on boring things like long speeches and naked people. Five year old is understandably interested at father figure whose freakout knob is set to 11. Later, five year old sees dad preening for the camera and thinks it looks like a good time, joins in.

This kid would have totally forgotten it if not for his dad's reaction. I weep for the culture which has to deal with this guy's kids 15 years from now.

Fewer managers. You say that like it's a bad thing.

As some have already commented, the scope of this project is a bit much. To automatically strip the specific things you want out of the stream even at the LAN level would involve a lot of processing. To do it for the phones would take Steve Jobs levels of political clout.

An easy thing you could do is to set up a proxy on the network (such as Squid) and use DHCP to force all of the computers on the LAN to use it. It won't be foolproof unless you block any outbound web traffic that isn't coming from the proxy and that will maybe break things, but this is someone's house and not an IT shop so that's not a big deal.

After that, set up all the phones to use wifi and take the hit in battery performance, or else get everyone ipod touches instead of phones with a data plan. You can't get around the fact that he is paying for another data connection per handset from the phone company.

The *best* thing you could do is sit your friend down and advise him that the world is scary and that you can't shield your kids from everything, but you can certainly build a good rapport with them and answer questions about life when they come up.

Out of all of the stuff I've tried for team password management, my favorite is Password Safe. I haven't tried the Linux port but apparently there are a couple: http://passwordsafe.sourceforge.net/relatedprojects.shtml The ONLY reason it beats a GPG encrypted password file is ease of use. Ideally you are hiring people who can deal with GPG but my experience is that it can be a decent learning curve just to get people to not use notepad.

I would submit that the ratio hasn't changed much. There are plenty of people who are willing to follow some online instructions (they have it so easy, these days) to fix issues and plenty of others who love the idea of rooting and putting different OS images onto their devices. Anecdotal evidence suggests that many of these people couldn't puzzle through IRQ conflicts or work a soldering iron if they had to, but something step by step demystifies it to a considerable degree.

The Wintel stuff suffered from the same Apple dominance but eventually came around when some clear front runners emerged, either in the form of strong word of mouth and catalog advertising (Gateway 2k) or in the form of big box electronics retailers pushing a few brands (Best Buy et al). I'd say that there is one other thing that Wintel had going for it which may be a factor going forward: The lack of Steve Jobs at the helm of Apple.

The next few years should be very interesting in the world of tablets.

It isn't necessary for you to learn multiplication tables.

For a certain subset of students, it is better to teach them how to figure it out on the fly. But the problem here is that now you are running afoul of the history and civics classes you took which state that everybody is made equal - which, at least when it comes to math, is not the case. Some people are like you, others work best by memorizing formulae and running numbers through them without any further analysis.

Whatever you do, print out some copies of "Snake Wrangling for Kids" to hand out while you're there. It was written for kids who are eight years or older, but chances are there are at least a couple of kids in there who would get it if they looked it over. I gave a copy to my daughter when she was seven and she thought it was pretty fun. Even if nobody has access to some kind of Python install, it may plant seeds for later.

http://www.briggs.net.nz/log/writing/snake-wrangling-for-kids/

Just because you *can* leave your system up for five years straight doesn't mean it's a good idea.

Really. I consider it a sign of inexperience and an indicator that the admin has never had to clean up after someone else screwed something up as root. That may be the case if you are super meticulous and you've been the only admin everywhere you've been, but no serious environment only has one root level admin and I have yet to meet anyone who was really good and super meticulous all the time.

I'm doing sysadmin, maybe one out of 20 commands I type *have* to be run with root access. If I am doing them all as root then there is a much greater chance of making a mistake and committing that system destroying action or, even worse, doing something subtly bad that nobody knows about until later when it's too late. It also makes me think twice (instead of just once) before executing that command as sudo.

Sudo logs commands that were run, by whom, and when. Even if I didn't care about whether I was root all the time or not, having a log of what was done with that access can be an indispensable tool when doing system troubleshooting. It's also a handy way of telling if someone screwed something up or if j00 wuz pwndz.

To me, running around as root and not using sudo is like using vi to look at a config file you have no intention of editing or similar. It's too easy to slip up and do something wrong once you get "in the groove". Add a page at 4am to that or a situation where you're at the tail end of a 30 hour emergency maint and it's beyond easy to screw things up.

This guy lost me with the first thing on the list. Going directly to root is great - if you're a noob in mom's basement. Nobody who has ever run systems in a serious environment mucks around as root as an alternative to something like sudo.

I love Radiohead considerably more than Bon Jovi, but the difference between one song and a whole concert isn't enough to make what they did some kind of revolutionary move. The "free" thing might have been, but when you consider that in those days almost everybody who could afford MTV had a VCR (just like everyone these days who can afford the Internet has a disk drive), and the video was shown ad nauseum when it was released and continued to be played until the mid '90s happened (just like Radiohead's video will be available for download until someone decides that it shouldn't be), it is essentially the same deal.

A group of fans went to one of the band's shows ... each shooting the show from a different angle.

...editing it all together and adding audio from the original masters provided by the band

So this is exactly like the making of Bon Jovi's video for _Bad Medicine_, then?

...I heard you like the GPL.

Maybe not NetApp so much as Oracle.

Badass is in the eye - or maturity level - of the beholder.