Yup. I have one at work, and have been using it for 3 years with no discernable wear. The quality of the plastic castings isn't as good as a classic Model M, but it's built like a brick shithouse, and it's got USB, unlike the original Modle Ms which can have problems from time to time with some of the crappy PS/2 port implementations out there...

The higher tiers on Internet service have an appalling cost. You can get lots of bandwidth on FIOS or on Comcast here in Richmond, but you're looking at hundreds of dollars a month. Never mind that the FIOS infrastructure, at least, can handle hundreds of megabits per customer, they're going to continue to charge for bandwidth like it's going out of style.

Plus, even with the decent connection at work, I've run into lots of network congestion issues that keep you from using that bandwidth - literally the only times I've ever been able to saturate our downstream Internet connection is using Bittorrent to pull down Linux ISOs. Everything else is choked off, and we've only got a 20/7 connection.

Now, one of the things about the Google Fiber services is that it's all DHCP right now. There's restrictions on running servers in the service agreement, so there's perilously little you could do to saturate that link (short of Bittorrent to other people on your network), but what it does do is remove a major chokepoint for neighborhood-level networking.

However, there are good things. Offsite backups become retarded-simple, since you are now limited by the streaming capacity of your hard drives. Since you're guaranteed to have a top-notch connection to Youtube, HD videos should play much more reliably. Video conferencing. High speed VPNs to the Amazon VPC infrastructure. The list goes on.

Most activist communities have a higher than normal incidence of mental health issues. Personality disorders, paranoia, anger management issues, I've seen a lot of them in various political activist groups.

I've done one recently - it also tests memory and grace under pressure. Some people just can't perform well under the gun, and in a high-pressure workplace where you may be dealing with outages that are hitting the tech press within minutes, and the global press within an hour, being ale to not fold under pressure is a critical job skill.

Plus, as my old business computing teacher in high school said, "You will be doing tasks that make no sense on obsolete technology for inscrutable reasons. If you have a problem with any of this, you should probably drop out of this class, since you do not have what it takes to be a programmer in the business world." Dealing with arbitrary requirements is part of working for any large company, and seeing if an applicant will go through with it, or if their ego is going to get in the way, is a useful test.

I just rebuilt our monitoring system on Munin 2.0, which can deal with IPv6. Made life a lot easier, since punching holes in NAT routers and screwball port mappings went away.

Google and Facebook are both running ipv6, and both our office and a chunk of our datacenter are on ipv6 through a he.net tunnel. Wish native ipv6 was available, but Amazon hasn't enabled it for AWS, and the Comcast ipv6 rollout is to consumers, not to business clients.

Gloriously NSFW. Hilarious.

I work in the entertainment industry, and we have to rip about 100 albums a month at work for online promotions of various sorts. The HP DVD drives work pretty well.

Um, it's not just that. Me and my friends use FB for organizing social events - parties, performances, etc. The fire performance troupe I'm involved with does most of our organizing on Facebook too - we have jobs, and kids, and school, and live all over the area, so having quick discussions there makes life much easier.

Look, I go to Burning Man. I've seen more people naked than anyone short of a doctor or a nudist tour guide, and I have to say the ban on nudity on Facebook is a good thing. There are creepers out there who post pictures of people having a nude stroll. Without the subject's consent.

Being able to complain about it means that they get taken down.

Facebook is for real life, and some people (myself included) like having an area where there isn't soft-core porn all over the place. See, if I had to deal with that, I'd return fire with some of the better pictures from /r/gaybears - not everyone is into the same thing, and you get rather tired of being shown something you're NOT IN TO.

Interesting - looks like they're doing a major recruiting push, since I'm in the interview process myself. I'd wanted to move to San Francisco, and saying that to the recruiter kind of surprised them. I don't live in a high-tech city, so the recruiters aren't anywhere near as vigorous, but I'm having the feeling that Google has just about tapped out the talent pool that's available in their local areas, and has sent recruiters after the less well traveled paths.

I wasn't even in the market, but when a company like Google calls, you tend to respond...

Everything from an old system running SCO OpenServer 5 to CentOS 5 and 6, Debian 4 in other legacy systems, Windows XP, Vista, and 7, iOS, Android from 2.2 to 4.0, OSX 10.6 and 10.7.

I do web development, though, as well as embedded systems, so my day job involves a lot of different machines and virtual systems.

Yep. I consciously use this in the videos I shoot. I've found that shooting people dancing with silk streamers or flowing costumes look a lot "cooler" if I crank down the shutter to 1/500 or 1/250 - it gives a hyper-real effect that makes the movement of the cloth really pop, because they're moving so fast that with a standard 1/30 or 1/24 shutter speed, it would be a blur.

People also associate that fast shutter with action sequences, and by switching to that faster shutter, you can enhance the 'dynamism' of a scene with very little additional work. It works horribly for general filming, but as an effect, used sparingly, it's definitely a good technique.

The Clans in Battletech sent their old warriors out as foot soldiers (cannon fodder, essentially).

Actually, without hacking Phonegap, at least on iOS, the first time you access geolocaiton, it pops up the standard 'APP_X would like to use your location' message - we had to rework our Phonegap app to do that properly, instead of having a trainwreck of a URL in that notification.

Android had a better model for security, frankly, in how you build an app - as part of the configuration, you can indicate with a fair degree of granularity what rights you want your app to have, and our upcoming app will only have GPS and network access. We don't care about your contacts, or pictures of cats, or what porn you watch on your phone. Too busy to dig through that crap, and it's not worth anything to us anyway. A similar capabilities-based model for iOS would be great - and I'm not spending the time learning enough Objective-C to do that natively. I have 10 other projects we had to put aside to do this mobile crap, that still need to get done.

The fact is, for web shops tasked with doing a "mobile app" because it's the next f**king Web 2.0 buzzword-compliant "we're serious - we have an app and everything", being able to do a shovelware mobile app without having to learn 2 new languages is great. Our customers go away happy, we don't have to spend the time becoming experts in yet more arcane single-use dev frameworks, and we can go on to the next project.

You want it safe? Go after the OS vendors, and let those of us who write apps define the capabilities we should need, and sandbox the rest. And make it easier in the IDE to select capabilities you need, and default them to 'off', That way, the "I was a designer, but now I do teh mobile apps!" people won't inadvertently bunch a big hole in your phone's security.

I work as a programmer in the retail industry, and in previous employment have dealt with ERP integration and extending legacy systems. I can tell you with absolute confidence that certain industries do need completely custom software to work properly - grocery stores, bookstores, and clothing stores all have different needs, different workflows, and different requirements. A cash register is a cash register, yes, but everything from dealing with expiration tracking and sales by weight to street dates to clothing sizes to custom orders to EDI interfaces are handled by custom software.

We primarily work with the music industry, and I have to deal with EDI from 4 different POS / Inventory / bordering on full ERP application vendors (some of which have been heavily customized for specific clients) and 2 different distributors, and will be spinning up 3 more distributors in the next year. Our e-commerce system is off-the-shelf for our industry (we can spin up a new customer who has no need for custom EDI integration in less than a day), and we have rescued a number of smaller operations who tried to develop their own system, or adapt various open-source shopping cart applications.

Our software would be of no use whatsoever to the manufacturers and medical, real estate, and legal offices I have dealt with in previous jobs. A completely different regulatory environment, different expectations, and different reporting requirements make any one-size-fits-all useless. That's a perilously bad attitude to take - some things, like payroll and HR, are relatively common across industries, but not understanding how business workflows differ from company to company shows a lack of professionalism. You think UPS uses an off-the-shelf software package? Or Greyhound? I can speak to both of them - they both developed in-house, because there was no software that covered their needs.

My business programming teacher back in high school put it this way: You will be working with obsolete technology, writing boring code to make distinctions between states that you really don't care about or even understand all that well, and will be ignored unless you make a mistake. Your job is to disappear into the background and make the business run smoothly. If your ego can't deal with that, leave this class now, because you will not make it in programming.

Look - there were no deaths in Vietnam War protests before Kent State. There is always a first episode of massive violence, and nobody knows when that will come.

We are only in the very beginning of these protests - as the economy gets worse, more people will join them. As police forces make more blunders, they will react with more force. We are on a path that very soon now will be irreversible - of peaceful revolution or bloody ruin. The status quo will not hold - Communism is more popular than Congress these days.