have worked pretty well for me in the past. you can build a list of fuckoff sites and limit the amount of time you can spend on them per day. they don't actually stop you from wasting time on internet sites if you really want to, what they actually do is slow you down and give yourself a chance to ask yourself "wait, wtf am i doing? i already spent xx minutes doing this crap." it's not perfect, but it works pretty well.

the bobs hive is not exactly the first place i tend to think of when i want to know about information security trends... maybe they should stick to their core competencies. like really busy powerpoint templates that the government likes and "anybody whoever built an empire..."

and you know when too much lithium from the battery has leeched out when you're overtaken by tremors, seizures, coma and cardiovascular collapse.

...or why it would probably really suck to work there. Here's the official statement from the horse's mouth:

http://blogs.adobe.com/conversations/2013/01/update-on-cs2-and-acrobat-7-activation-servers.html

"Effective December 13, Adobe disabled the activation server for CS2 products and Acrobat 7 because of a technical glitch. These products were released over 7 years ago and do not run on many modern operating systems. But to ensure that any customers activating those old versions can continue to use their software, we issued a serial number directly to those customers. While this might be interpreted as Adobe giving away software for free, we did it to help our customers."

It's rather fascinating and somewhat indicative of a completely dysfunctional company. It reads almost like the head of support wrote an apologetic explanation that tried to downplay the issue a bit to the rest of the execs who then didn't quite understand the issue itself or the gravity of it. The solution, obviously, was to then just forward it directly to PR who then faithfully published it letter for letter. Wow.

Putting all concerns about having a cluttered, but complete, inbox that can be searched for answers versus tighter distribution groups and more delays in having to query actual people for answers aside, if you ask me, paying someone a six figure salary to write memos about the proper use of the "Reply All" button and paying IT staff to monkey with email software to remove it is pretty much the definition of bureaucracy and inefficiency gone wild.

The problem isn't theoretical speed, it's congestion control for shared radio bandwidth when tens or hundreds of consumer owned unlicensed wireless devices stomp all over each other. In recent years, I've noticed that existing 802.11 devices in any reasonably densely populated area completely fall apart due to interference from neighbors.

You think you can decimate our industry?! You think you can reduce us from journalists to mere "content creators"?! You think you can take our work and stick it in your little glowing devices?! WE'LL SHOW YOU! WE'LL TAKE YOUR LITTLE GLOWY SMARTPHONE AND GLUE IT RIGHT INSIDE OUR MAGAZINE.

What do Windows people do when they need to rsync stuff? How do they version control their configuration? How do you "grep" with no external utilities installed? What's the equivalent of lsof? How do Windows machines handle the split between 32bit and 64bit code? What's the equivalent of LD_LIBRARY_PATH? Do you really have to point and click for everything? Is there a command line equivalent of "su"? You'll be able to tell if the answers are smart. Literally, treat interviews as "tell me how people actually run Windows on a real scale because I'm green with it and if I tried to do it I'd go mental... I'm honestly interested" and you'll quickly figure out who knows what the hell they're talking about and perhaps learn something along the way.

At least that part was interesting. I'm sure there's loads of radio driven digital equipment out there that has been designed under the assumption that the radio is proprietary and therefore the other side is almost certainly going to behave properly.

The world will not end.

"We're sorry, due to a pricing error, we are unable to honor the price you were quoted on xx/xx/xx for xxxx priced at $xx.xx. Your payment has been refunded and the transaction has been reversed. Again, we apologize for the issue and any inconvenience it may have caused.

Sincerely,

Some Random Amazon Marketplace Seller"

don't you know that apple holds worldwide process patents on pushing out software updates that cripple shipped software and devices?

Making a car that can accelerate faster, we're going to deploy a massive network of autonomous motorcycles. When you step on the accelerator, the closest motorcycle will be dispatched with mind bending speed, your seat will be flung aboard in a feat of mechanical engineering never seen before, the motorcycle will accelerate to full speed faster and when the car catches up you'll be flung back. ...and I gotta be honest, the only real reason why Adobe would be interested in moving towards some kind of SaaS model would be because they basically get unbreakable DRM for free.

Lets not have government agencies get in the habit of piping music into public spaces! Can we? Really? I don't care what the reason is, it's just way too creepy eastern-blocish for me...

Ten years ago by a company called Liberate Technologies. (The company that Larry Ellison's NC morphed into) Their application area was set-top boxes and they built a number of embedded software stacks that were Netscape (licensed) and Mozilla (OSS) based (Browser sitting on Linux or vxWorks) that booted straight into the browser where everything lived in the browser. (the whole UI was HTML/Javascript/Flash, and all interaction with the underlying hardware was done through a Javascript API). There was no native code, everything was the browser.

But then nobody really cared about iTV, the company folded and I think the remaining shell company got into the trucking business (no joke).

You're looking at this the wrong way... You have obviously done the right thing by taking the initiative in the first place, but now, I hate to say, your attitude is all wrong.

Here's how it works:

1) You get some job
2) You "beast" it. That is... you do what you're asked very well and you take the initiative to use the extra skills you have to wow everyone by changing everything
3) You ensure that it is known that you are responsible for your work
4a) They offer you a payrise or more responsibility and pay
4b) They don't, you stick it on your resume and you get a better job somewhere else with a beamingly positive reference

Do the right thing, make sure there are no problems of attribution and it will pay off in the end. Do not crap up your reputation by trying to strongarm more money out of them upfront. Keep a good attitude and it will pay off in the end. If I had tried to extract extra pay for going above and beyond every time I did so in my career, I can all but guarantee I would not have done as well as I have.

Do interesting stuff, be unbelievably useful. The money will follow, it always does.