SuperGenPass has a lot of limitations due to its design, but its simplicity makes up for that IMO. It is not a password manager, just a hasher, which hashes the domain name and the master password into a unique 10 char alphanumeric password. Only one site I've used has complained about this, and that was eBay, which required punctuation as well. It can't handle well if a password must be changed (you can add something like "2012", "2013" to the master pw though). It is great that the passwords are stored nowhere, so there is no need for synchronisation or backup.

Password managers and SuperGenPass are a good solution, but too complicated for most people to use. The system suggested in the article doesn't work either. When a password DB is compromised there will be no entry in the audit hook. The audit hook will only give an elert too late, when the hackers use the password.

There are much better options for improving authentication. It's not easy to do without relying on a third party though, while still allowing logins from various new computers with little effort.

I hadn't heard of it, but you can sort of work it out from the name. I assume it means to require vendors to label food that is genetically modified, or has some such ingredients. I'm also in an area where it's not debated, but there are strict rules for what things can for example be called cheese, so I think GMO labelling would a be logical extension of existing laws. I'm quite indifferent to gentic modification as a technology, and I certainly see the benefit of producing more food. I would avoid it just to protest the asshole business practices of the companies producing the modified organisms though.

The 1. missing idea from my previous post is the output format. There is no reason to have documents be a stack of pages when they are displayed on a screen. It is absolutely boneheaded. There are solutions for producing HTML from TeX source, this was the first search result: http://hutchinson.belmont.ma.us/tth/ . I don't know why academics keep ignoring this and keep making PDFs which are only good for printing and for displaying on large monitors. There are many small devices which are better suited for reading (e.g. on the train), and PDF papers look like crap on them ( http://ask.slashdot.org/story/12/12/01/214255/ask-slashdot-tablets-for-papers-are-we-there-yet ). The problem with HTML is that it can't be saved locally and passed around easily. Maybe EPUB can help. The page I linked has a section on how to make EPUBs. So my suggestion is to have a prominent option to output to EPUB. Strike the collaboration features, we can handle using git or SVN for a few more years.

The 1. missing feature in TeX land is collaboration features. It's not horrible -- you can split the doc into files for different sections (don't know if you can do this in LyX) and use source control or Dropbox -- but it's not particularly elegant. Just having seamless integration with source control would be great: some kind of interactive conflict handling and easy committing of all dependent resources. It could also be useful for single-user projects to have revision tracking. Perhaps the Lyx project could be a git repository by default, but I would of course prefer if it supported SVN and anything else that comes along too. Something like the SVN integration for Eclipse would be cool, but it wouldn't have to be that comprehensive. Lyx would of course still have to support stand-alone files without all the VCS mumbo jumbo.

Bah, who cares about a few gigabytes on real computers (including netbooks too). Maybe sysadmins with hundreds of diskless clients care, but with installing TeX on a shared mount, that's no problem. And who worries about updates anymore when there's apt, yum and hundreds of hacked together solutions on Windows. Maybe sysadmins who have hundreds of clients who needs updates, but don't ahve unlimited bandwidth ;) For that, there's local update repos

Remote compilation is interesting at first glance though because it can take ten or more seconds to compile a large Latex file on a slow computer, and compilation is single-threaded, so having a really fast server for this could be beneficial. Most other text processing jobs don't require much juice, with the unfortunate exception of *displaying* PDFs. After compilation, the resulting PDF file will have a size of order a few MB, so there will be practically no transmission delay on a LAN, and a few seconds over the internet. The problem is to upload the content to the server, including all graphical content. No problem on a LAN, but it would be a nightmare for home users, because the upload is typically 10 % of the download speed.

The CLSI does allow for caching, but it requires an URL for the cached content, so you'd need another server just to hold a second cached copy of the files. It would be an interesting challenge for developers to write code to manage the uploads -- with correct queueing and error handling. In the end I think that the time saved by having fast compilation is going to be negligible (except for on a LAN, but then the sysadmins would have to set up 1) an upload server and 2) a compilation server, and this is probably too much, except possibly at huge universities and NASA and CERN). It seems more interesting to have a purely remote system *including an editor* on the web (no, X11 forwarding with LyX doesn't cut it, too slow). That way one could work on documents from computers without having to install anything, for example when one has to borrow a computer. This wouldn't be a LyX project though.

Seems like performance is a big concern for the submitter, and then LXC is a great idea.

My primary disk is a 5-disk array (with 2 SSD cache devices!). About 4 TB free. I had a RAID10 setup with four disks before, but it was getting close to full. 8 TB is overkill, but it was just a matter of adding a single drive. My backup disk is only 1 TB, so much of what I have are files that can be re-generated, or which have copies in other places. Also TV recordings. My *secondary* active disk a 500 GB hybrid disk in a laptop, and it's above 80 %. Tertiary active disk is the app storage on the Android phone, I suppose, and that's almost full too.

It's not *just* out of generosity. It is in Google's interest to have users submit as much data as possible to them, and the users are more likely to do so if the government doesn't have easy access. It's a great thing nonetheless, but it just happens that there is a positive correlation between the interst of Google and that of the users.

Actually, I want to retract that. It is correct, but laptops are very constrained anyway. It would be difficult to have two editors next to each other on anything taller than 16:10. I think laptop monitors are just going to be a pain, no matter what.

I'd love 8 GB RAM and a faster CPU, but my desktop will always be faster, and I will always want better specs. So keep pushing the specs.

I have a really poor "garage" of portable devices. Just an old smartphone and a kind of heavy Thinkpad. I would like to have a convertible laptop/tablet that did well as both, for reading and writing/working.

In the end I don't really have one thing I would like to change about laptops, I'd tell them to just push the specs and push the form factors like they do currently. I'd agree with others about the aspect ratio though, going to 16:10 would be an epic win (you can of course find those now, my current one is 1440:900, but they are not typical)

It isn't that bad. Some of the limitation is in the physical size. You probably wouldn't use less than an 8pt font on a high resolution display anyway, and while 8pt fonts look like crap on 1366x768, they are usable. It's more a

This is why you need taller screens. Reading a document on 1280x800 is painful, but it's *not* because of the resolution, it's because of the physical size of the screen. 16:9 is fine on 27" monitors, because there's still plenty of vertical space, but on a laptop it makes reading worse than on a smaller tablet.

I've never had a data disaster, but I still have a somewhat complex setup:
1. Automatic filesystem (ZFS) snapshots every 15 min on my desktop (home, also used for work from home) and RAID to protect against HW failures.
2. Unison (http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/) sync between laptop and desktop keeps my home dir in two places (the important bits)
3. Work files are synced to the organisation's system, and that's probably enough
4. Rsync backup to external hard drive every ~3 days, drive is otherwise kept off line
5. Data integrity scan (ZFS scrub) ~every month
6. Rsync with checksums to backup drive to verify integrity, infrequently
7. Off site backup on another HDD, every ~6 months
The snapshots are perhaps the most useful, because they protect against user error. They do not protect against admin errors though, such as running "zfs" commands. I am lacking a bit on the off site backups, and would lose a lot of days of data if there was a fire or a burglary, but I don't produce that much personal data. There should also be an "8. Complete system restore on VM" to see that the backups are good, but as they are only standard Truecrypt volumes with an ext4 filesystem I can inspect them manually and be reasonably sure they are OK.

Ignoring the joke for a second, Restore Day is a great idea! The only thing worse than not having backups is to have faulty backups, believing they are OK.

Same idea here. For my personal mail I have a filter to move sent and received mail older than 30 days off to a local folder. I use my web host/DNS registrar's IMAP service, and I would probably keep them for longer if I ran my own. Most of my /home including the local folder is synced between my desktop and laptop, so I still have access from there, but only to the last 30 days from the web and my mobile. Thunderbird seems to use a reasonable format where I can actually read the messages directly from the file, so even if there are no programs to read it, I can scan the archive and get what I want