I usually boot into Linux when I'm at work. Occasionally, I'll need to boot into Windows for a webinar that uses Silverlight. So that's "2" to start.

But don't forget mobile devices. I have an iPad at home, which lets me browse news over breakfast. But my smartphone is an Android device. That's 2 more.

And when I'm doing development work, I'm usually running an instance of FreeDOS in DOSEmu.

What about my programmer's editor of choice: does GNU Emacs count as an operating system? :-)

Turns out, there is actually some scholarly findings about how older and younger audiences understand and use icons. I just finished up a grad course on information design, and it included research on this topic.

For example, Charalambos Koutsourelakis & Konstantinos Chorianopoulos wrote in the Information Design Journal in 2010 [IDJ 18(1), 22–35] about "Icons in mobile phones: Comprehensibility differences between older and younger users." They selected icons from mobile phones, and tested older v younger audiences to determine how well they understood the intended meaning of each icon.

In short: Koutsourelakis and Chorianopoulos found that comprehension of icons differs based on the age of the audience. Icons with a high-level of abstraction that do not have immediate real-life metaphors were often difficult for audiences to grasp.

Koutsourelakis and Chorianopoulos did not comment on the qualities of successful icons common across age groups. However, their samples of successful icons suggest icons that provide a metaphor to real-life activities, and those with which users may have some prior experience, are most likely to be understood by both age groups. Successful icons across both age groups used a tools metaphor to represent “Settings”, and a depiction of an address book for “Phonebook” or a calendar for “Organizer”. Audiences in both age groups found these icons easy to understand

If you're curious about their results:

Top 5 best icons for younger users:

1. wrench for Settings (C4)
2. screwdriver + wrench for Settings
3. mobile phone + screwdriver for Settings
4. wrench for Settings
5. spiral notebook with classic phone icon for Phonebook (B3)

Top 5 best icons for older users:

1. book + phone for Phonebook
2. book with tabs for Phonebook
3. spiral notebook with classic phone icon for Phonebook (B3)
4. wrench for Settings (C4)
5. picture of calendar for Organizer

The 5 worst icons for younger users:

1. picture of a PDA + stylus for Organizer (B4)
2. mobile phone + circle "i" icon for Calls (A3)
3. collection of folders with left/right arrows for Calls (E3)
4. notepad with clock and phone for Calls
5. collection of blocks for Applications (C3)

The 5 worst icons for older users:

1. collection of blocks for Applications (C3)
2. picture of a PDA + stylus for Organizer (B4)
3. mobile phone + circle "i" icon for Calls (A3)
4. collection of folders with left/right arrows for Calls (E3)
5. manila folder for Files

So while I agree icons are conventions, and sometimes you just learn what an icon "means", people really do associate certain real-life metaphors with actions that are represented by icons.

I agree we don't really need to legislate this one. If we do any legislation at all, I'd prefer there be something out there that mandates when a user deletes something from the service, it should get deleted. Not "marked as though it were deleted" or "hidden" - but actually deleted.

I don't put embarrassing stuff on Facebook or Twitter, but I have lots of friends that do. And I'm sure one day they'll get surprised by something asinine they put on Facebook or Twitter - and later "deleted" - but years later it pops up again & gets taken out of context.

I think Taco exited at the right time. Also, I think I might be spending less time here, if Slashdot has started focusing on keywords like BI, and away from the core idea of "News for Nerds, Stuff That Matters", which is why we joined the site in the first place & kept coming back.

From the article: According to Fred Birang, a senior product marketing engineer at Intel, the NUC is primarily targeted at digital signage and kiosks — but I’m sure we can all agree that it would make an awesome set-top home theater PC (HTPC), or an introductory system for kids. ... Where does this leave Raspberry Pi? At 8.5×5.5cm, the Raspberry Pi is still a fair bit smaller than Intel’s NUC (and at 2cm deep, it’s probably thinner as well). ... Price-wise,... It almost certainly won’t be as cheap as the $25 Raspberry Pi, but a price point around $100 would be realistic.

When Raspberry Pi was first getting started, I did wonder why some someone didn't develop a similar Intel-based cheap micro SBC. It seemed to me a simple board based on the Atom, with cheap onboard graphics & audio, HDMI or VGA + audio (whichever is less expensive), a little RAM, 2 USB, and wired Ethernet would be fairly inexpensive to build. Assume boot from USB-connected storage, such as a fob drive. But probably no one other than the folks at RasPi thought there was a market for a cheap micro SBC. And RasPi was targeted at a fairly narrow market anyway (education).

Now that Raspberry Pi has really taken off, with extraordinary sales numbers up front, we're starting to hear about the new, emerging market of the cheap micro SBC. But I think Intel's NUC kind of misses the mark. What a complicated, overbuilt system!

My theory: someone at Intel figured they'd hit the leading edge of the cheap micro SBC market. But before this great idea could take off, someone else asked "Can it run Windows?" And thus, this over-complicated SBC was born. It resembles a "laptop in a can" more than it does a RasPi. Too bad.

I'd be happy if shooters stopped with the cliche of "The rest of the heavily-armed squad will stay here to guard this safe area, while you go ahead and clear out the millions of bad guys on your own." Seriously?

It's like if they made the original DOOM today, no one would play it. It would be kind of lame.

The article also mentioned "Conveniently Indestructable Objects", and I'm with them on that. If you don't want the glass to shatter, give me a good reason: bulletproof glass, force field, ... something. I think Killzone on the PS2 had unbreakable windows in some areas, but they were clearly security-type windows. Force Unleashed dealt with the player breaking exterior windows on a Star Destroyer by immediately shutting an exterior port. That was fine.

But like the article points out, you have some games where you encounter some glass partition, you can't shoot it out. But trigger a cutscene, and some NPC will take out the window no problem. Even worse are the cutscenes where you shoot out the window - the same window you weren't able to shoot out just a few moments before.

At our house, it's a math problem. When we had cable TV service, our costs were about $80/month just for TV service. We don't actually watch that much TV, so we did the math. Much of the current stuff we want to watch is on HuluPlus (Daily Show, Colbert, Castle, Modern Family, etc) and the rest is available from Amazon Instant Video at $2/episode. We also have Netflix to watch movies, and maybe discover some shows we missed via "TV on DVD".

Hulu + Amazon + Netflix is still less than the cost of cableTV. And that includes us buying a $99 Roku box so we could stream everything through that, directly to our TV.

As long as that math problem works out, we won't go back to cableTV. It's just not worth it.

GNU Robots uses Guile, but I don't see it on the list. GNU Robots lets you construct a program for a robot, then you set it loose in a virtual environment. It can use sensors to detect objects, blast baddies, pick up rewards, and move around. You write the program in Scheme, which is loaded by GNU Robots via Guile.

I had no idea what you meant in your "Arkell v Pressdram" comment, so I had to google it. Perhaps this is well-known in the UK, but I didn't know it. For the benefit it others, it's a reference to a British satirical and current affairs magazine called "Private Eye". From wikipedia:

An unlikely piece of British legal history occurred in what is now referred to as the "case" of Arkell v. Pressdram (1971). The plaintiff was the subject of an article relating to illicit payments, and the magazine had ample evidence to back up the article. Arkell's lawyers wrote a letter which concluded: "His attitude to damages will be governed by the nature of your reply." The magazine's response was, in full: "We acknowledge your letter of 29th April referring to Mr J. Arkell. We note that Mr Arkell's attitude to damages will be governed by the nature of our reply and would therefore be grateful if you would inform us what his attitude to damages would be, were he to learn that the nature of our reply is as follows: fuck off." In the years following, the magazine would refer to this exchange as a euphemism for a blunt and coarse dismissal: for example, "We refer you to the reply given in the case of Arkell v. Pressdram".

I'm not sure where the article gets their numbers, so I can't comment on that.

However, I will say that Google missed their real window in launching Google+. It seems Google just doesn't have the "knack" of advertising and seizing on opportunity, despite being an advertising company. Don't get me wrong, I like Google and all that. I just think they need to hire some PR folks, rather than letting the engineers run things.

IIRC, about a week after Google+ started in "invite-only beta", there was yet another security fiasco with Facebook. But this one was big, really huge. It was all over the news, it was all I heard about, and it seemed like everyone I knew was threatening to jump off Facebook because of it. I thought, "Someone at Google is watching this, and is going to open up the beta to everyone." But no one ever did.

That would have been the perfect time to really open up Google+, when everyone wanted an alternative to their ongoing security woes at Facebook. Never happened. Google continued their sloooooooooow rollout of the "invite-only" beta. Finally, months later, Google finally opened Google+ to everyone who wanted to join.

But it was too late. Google+ was a ghost town. Only a few people I knew were on Google+. The rest of my friends eventually "got over" whatever the Facebook security problem-of-the-day was, and stayed on Facebook. Since my friends are on Facebook, I stayed on Facebook.

For all that, Google+ does have a killer feature: Hangouts. I wish they'd made a big deal out of this when Google+ launched - like, showed it in action or something, ads on TV, whatever. It's like Skype or any other video chat, except you can have up to 10 people on at the same time (you + 9 others.) We have a hosted domain for work, and we use Hangouts all the time to talk to people at different locations within the organization. It's really freed us from having to share a single video conference room at our location.

I started my career as a systems administrator / systems programmer on Unix systems. Over the last 20 years, I went from a "hands on" role to a leadership role. I'm now the "CIO" of a small university (we don't have the title "CIO" at this campus, but that's basically my job.) Some of those transitions to a larger role were easy, others were more difficult.

I strongly recommend you read the essay "Taking on a new role" (PDF) from MOR Associates. In short, the essay gives this advice:

1. Share broad themes early: what general areas do you plan to address, what are your goals for the team, where are you headed?

2. Read the landscape: what does the culture of the organization look like, not just in the team you work with, but at the leadership level.

3. Build relationships: people who can help you in your new role, mentors, coaches.

4. Create a "SWOT" profile with your team, to understand the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats.

5. Assess the talent needed to get the job done: do you have the right people, and are the right people doing the right things?

6. Understand your financial situation: this is often the most-overlooked by new leaders.

7. Sketch out your priorities for the first 3-12 months: in particular, keep track of what you need to get done in your first 100 days.

I like do to the SWOT profile (see #4) without actually using the terms "Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats." I find it's easier to start with a "plus/delta" profile. If you haven't done that before: Draw a vertical line on the whiteboard. On the left, label it "plus"; on the right, "delta". Draw a horizontal line across this, making 4 quadrants. Above the horizontal line, label it "now"; below the line, "future".

Now you're ready for your team to identify what's working well (plus) right now, and what's going to be a benefit to them after another 6-12 months. They can also help you identify what needs to be addressed/fixed/changed/improved (delta) right now, and what can wait for another 6-12 months. Congratulations, you've built a SWOT profile:

• S = plus, now
• W = delta, now
• O = plus, future
• T = delta, future

I find the SWOT helps me to identify the key issues to focus on. What you must do is identify a plan to address the right-hand column (deltas) that leverages what you have on the left (plusses). Your team is critical to help fill out the SWOT, and the great thing about this exercise is that it helps the team to identify with you on your new level. But while your team helps you with the SWOT, you must build your own strategy to respond to it; that's your job as a new leader.

If you're having trouble picking out your top priorities (see #7) you may also consider doing an "affinity" exercise with your team. You can do this in different ways, but here's what I find works best for my team:

1. Give each team member a stack of Post-It notes, maybe 5 or 6 each. Have them write down what they think are the top priorities - but only one item per Post-It note. Not everyone can fill out 5 or 6 Post-It notes, and that's ok.
2. When everyone has their notes, talk about them in front of the group. See if any overlap (or are the same) as someone else's note. Combine any that seem to match up.
3. Then, pass them around the table. Each person at the table gives an independent score (0-10) for how important they think that item is to the team or organization. You aren't ranking them in a list, you're just giving them an independent score. Everyone gives their own score, and passes the note to the next person around the table.
4. When every Post-It has been scored by everyone at the table (i.e. when a person gets their own Post-Its back) add up the scores for a total for each note.

You can now identify (by score) what are your top priorities. Maybe you have 5 or 6 "top" priorities. Or maybe you only have 4 top priorities, and there's a big gap (in score) between #4 and #5.

In general, this is true of anything you post on the Internet. I look at it this way: try to avoid posting things on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Slashdot, Flickr, or any other site, that you might be embarrassed for a family member to see, or a future potential employer. If it's on the Internet, assume anyone can see it.

My immediate personal response to this Facebook flaw: ohmigosh! Then I remembered that my photos are pretty much my cats, work we've done on the house, flowers, speakers at events, and similar stuff. I may have them marked "private" but not that big a deal if this flaw exposed them.

I recognize that I am a minority of Facebook users, however.

Tehnically, that's actually covered by a student fee, usually a "technology fee" in most universities. So yes, this cost should already be built into the cost of attending university. Whether that fee is enough to cover everything, including email, I'll leave to Berkeley.

As another poster has mentioned, MD will eventually result in total loss of vision. So do encourage him to explore audio books.

But I think I know where your girlfriend's grandfather's is coming from on the audio book topic. Not every book is released in audio format, so you're kind of tied to only those titles that have an audio version. The latest cool book may take months to get an audio version, if at all. Also note that magazines, product instructions, medicine labels, etc. do not have audio versions. So having an assistive reading device is part of maintaining his independence.

I hope I do prove you wrong. Look at my other posts on Slashdot, or Google some of the other things I've been up to, and you'll see I've been doing quite a lot to fight against software patents. I fought especially hard against AIA, although that got passed anyway.

I've been working with Sen Franken's office throughout, he's been very responsive generally, moreso than other Senators. Right now, I'm working with Franken's office to send a message to USPTO, urging them to update their policies regarding software patents, to make it harder to award a patent for software, and raise the obviousness test in general.