A blog post from developer turned writer Marty Jacobs caught my attention earlier this morning. In the post, Jacobs has listed some of the programming books he says he had discovered and read much sooner. He writes, "There are so many programming books out there, sometimes it's hard to know what books are best. Programming itself is so broad and there are so many concepts to learn." You can check out his list here. I was curious what books would you include if you were to make a similar list?

dryriver writes: For many older people, you use Windows, macOS, or Linux on the desktop, and Android or iOS on mobile devices. Nobody is screaming for an Android desktop PC or an iOS 17.3-inch laptop computer. But what about younger generations growing up, from a very young age, glued to devices with these two mobile operating systems running on it? Will they want to use Windows, macOS, or Linux just like us old farts when they grow older, or will they want their favorite mobile operating systems running -- in a beefed up and more robust form -- on desktop and laptop computers which they use for school, college, and/or work as well? Since we are on this topic -- could Android or iOS one day become reasonably usable desktop operating systems from an architectural standpoint? And could Google and Apple already be planning for an "Android and iOS on the desktop" computing future, without telling anyone about it publicly?

dryriver writes: A lot of people seem to think it's O.K. to buy electronics made in China. We get to buy products considerably cheaper than we otherwise would, and China by all accounts is growing, developing, and modernizing as a nation due to all the cool stuff they now make for the world. There is only one problem with that reasoning. 21st Century China has an atrocious human rights record, and almost all human rights watchdogs report that China is becoming more and more repressive each year. Freedom House put it this way in 2018: "It's worth noting that, in its attitude toward political dissent, the Chinese Communist Party has proven much harsher than the old Soviet regime of the Brezhnev era. Modern Chinese sentences are longer, the prospects for early release are far worse, and the Chinese authorities are generally unmoved by pleas for leniency from foreign diplomats." Basically, consumer dollars from around the world are not gradually creating a gentler, freer, more prosperous and more modern China at all. They are making the Chinese Communist Party richer, stronger, bolder and more aggressive and repressive in every respect. To the question: knowing what the human rights situation is in China, and that consumer dollars and euros flowing into the country from abroad is making things worse, not better, is it at all ethical to buy electronics or IT products manufactured in China?

Thelasko writes: Reading Kashmir Hill's series Goodby Big Five on Gizmodo made me consider switching to a custom Android ROM like LineageOS again. The Gizmodo articles make it seem that most phones are so locked down it is almost impossible to do. My last experience with custom ROMs confirmed that to be true for me. Is anyone having success? Why is LineageOS making builds for 185 devices if no one can use them?

dryriver writes: If you look at the last 15 years in tech, just about everything that could go wrong seemingly has gone wrong. Everything you buy and bring into your home tracks you in some way or the other. Some software can only be rented now -- no permanent licenses available to buy. PC games are tethered into cloud crap like Steam, Origin and UPlay. China is messing with unborn baby genes. Drones have managed to mess up entire airports. The Scandinavians have developed a serious hatred of cash money and are instead getting themselves chipped. CPUs have horrible security. Every day some huge customer database somewhere gets pwned by hackers. Cybercrime has gone through the roof. You cannot trust the BIOS on your PC anymore. Windows 10 just will not stop updating itself. And AI is soon going to kill us all, if a self-driving car by Uber doesn't do it first. So: What has -- so far -- not gone wrong in tech that still could go wrong, and perhaps in a surprising way?

"How does the actual, purchaseable consumer technology available in 2019 compare to what you -- back in the 1960s, '70s, '80s or '90s -- thought consumer technology might look like around the year 2020?" asks Slashdot reader dryriver. Is today's consumer technology as advanced, inventive, groundbreaking and empowering as you imagined it would be 30, 40, 50 years ago? Or is the "technological future that has now actually arrived" different, in various ways, from how you'd hoped/imagined it might be a few decades back?

If so, what was different in your "future technologies imagination" than what is available to buy today?
Each generation received different dreams from the pop culture of their time. Back in 1969 an 18-year-old Kurt Russell starred in a Disney movie with a malfunctioning mainframe. By 1984 one TV series showed David Hasselhoff with his own talking self-driving car. But how close did your own personal predictions come, asks the original submission.

"Do today's technological gadgets manage to live up to how you imagined tech around the year 2020 would be, or do they fall short of what you hoped/imagined might exist by today?

vikingpower writes: Until now, yours truly has been running a one-man freelancer show. However, since January 1st the first employee is here, and of course I'm mighty proud of a stellarly clever young person working for me. She works remotely (I'm in one European capital; she is in another) and I need to buy her a laptop. Since she's straight out of college and a non-techie, she basically only knows one OS: Windows, although she could get comfortable with macOS. However, as a long-time (server-side) programmer, I feel Apple hardware is seriously overpriced. Also, my brilliant first employee will mostly do research and hardly needs anything more than a browser, Office or Office-like software (yes, I'm looking at you, Libre Office, and I love you!), and bibliography software. Should I get her a Chromebook or a mid-level laptop running Windows? Any thoughts?

LinkedIn had 590 million members -- though back in 2016 Microsoft conceded that less than 25% of the service's members were active. Yet CNBC recently shared estimates that 95% of recruiters are using LinkedIn to find candidates, and touted a new tool called "LinkedIn Hashtags" which lets companies highlight policies like "#dogfriendly" or "#freelunch".

But is LinkedIn really helpful for job-seekers? An anonymous Slashdot reader writes: I'm on unemployment and am looking for a new job, and I've been told "Oh, you need to be on LinkedIn if you want to be taken seriously!" So I go there, and it looks like Facebook or something, wants to scrape my email contacts, upload pictures, and so on.

Is LinkedIn really necessary, or is it just a ruse to get me to give them all sorts of personal information like all other social media sites?
"I'm also unemployed and looking for a job," adds another anonymous Slashdot reader, "and have all my crap on Linkedin and Indeed, and have been using them to apply left and right. If they aren't useful anymore I'm essentially sitting on my hands doing nothing." But Slashdot reader tomhath insists that LinkedIn "was never relevant. Their motto was that you didn't exist if you're not there -- but that was only their marketing hype, not reality."

Leave your own thoughts in the comments. Is LinkedIn still relevant?

dryriver writes: A relative of mine has been left with extremely low speech volume -- about 25% of a normal speaker -- and lack of high pitch capability after a major throat surgery. He cannot speak on the phone at all now -- you cannot hear him properly on the other end of the line, even though you can understand his speech OK when you are standing in the room next to him. Is there an assistive Android app that can:
1. Significantly boost the output volume (e.g. X 4) of the Android phone microphone he speaks into.
2. Add voice box, equalizer, autotune or audio filtering/bass boosting type audio effects in realtime to the microphone input to fix the speaker's pitch.
3. Can filter out background noise to some extent (so it doesn't get boosted as well).
4. Allows these effects to be used easily during phonecalls?
All the Android microphone/equalizer/megaphone type apps I've tried so far have huge problems -- some are novelty voice-changer apps for teens, some demand ridiculously broad permissions to everything on the phone including realtime location data of the user, some demand that an external mic is attached to the phone, some are too simple technically to do anything useful and some are advertising-fests that are plain unusable. Is there a good Android -- or iOS -- app for the speech impaired that would give this person a chance to make audio phonecalls on a smartphone again? Thanks for any advice!

Several remarkable movies and shows hit the theaters and TV this year. We had "First Man", "Black Panther", new "Incredibles", "Avengers: Infinity War", more "Star Wars" and "Mission: Impossible" hit the cinemas. On TV, we saw the conclusion of "The Americans", continuation of "Westworld" on HBO, and "Homecoming" arrive on Amazon Prime Video. "Money Heist" on Netflix, "Barry" on HBO, and "Detectorists" on AcornTV garnered good reviews from critics, too. What did you like this year?

Also in this year-ender series: Slashdot Asks: What Are Some Good Books You Read This Year?

As we inch closer to the end of the year, we will be running a couple of year-ender posts in the next few days. We're starting with books. What were some books you read this year that you would recommend to others? (It could be from any genre.) Second, what were some books from this year that you read that you would recommend to others? And third, what are you reading now, or planning to read soon?

dryriver asks: Is there an open source video analysis tool available that can take a folder full of video captures (e.g. news, sports, movies, music videos, TV shows), analyze the video frames in those captures, and put a hard number on how optically sharp, on average, the digital video provided by any given digital TV or streaming service is?

If such a tool exists, it could be of great use in shaming paid video content delivery services that promise proper "1080 HD" or "4K UHD" quality content, but deliver video that is actually Youtube quality or worse. With such a tool, people could channel-hop across their digital TV service's various offerings for an hour or so, capture the video stream to harddisk, and then have an "average optical sharpness score" for that service calculated that can be shared with others and published online, possibly shaming the content provider -- satellite TV providers in particular -- into upping their bitrate if the score turns out to be atrociously low for that service....

People in many countries -- particularly developing countries -- cough up hard cash to sign up for various satellite TV, digital TV, streaming video and similar services, only to then find that the bitrate, compression quality and optical sharpness of the video content delivered isn't too great at all. At a time when 4K UHD content is available in some countries, many satellite TV and streaming video services in many different countries do not even deliver properly sharp and well-defined 1080 HD video to their customers, even though the content quality advertised before signing up is very much "crystal clear 1080 HD High-Definition".
What's the solution? Leave your thoughts and suggestions in the comments.

And is there an open source tool measuring the sharpness of streaming video?

dryriver writes: As anyone who buys professional computer monitors knows, the dynamic range of the display device you are looking at can be expressed quite usefully in terms of percentage sRGB coverage and percentage AdobeRGB coverage. The higher the percentage for each, the better and wider the dynamic range of the screen panel you are getting. People who work with professional video and photographs typically aim for a display that has 100 percent sRGB coverage and at least 70 to 80 percent AdobeRGB coverage. Laptop review site Notebookcheck for example uses professional optical testing equipment to check whether the advertised sRGB and AdobeRGB percentages and brightness in nits for any laptop display panel hold up in real life.

This being the case, why do quote-unquote "High Dynamic Range" capable TVs -- which seem to be mostly 10 bits per channel to begin with -- not have an sRGB or AdobeRGB rating quoted anywhere in their technical specs? Why don't professional TV reviewers use optical testing equipment that's readily available to measure the real world dynamic range of HDR or non-HDR TVs objectively, in hard numbers? Why do they simply say "the blacks on this TV were deep and pleasing, and the lighter tones were..." when this can be expressed better and more objectively in measured numbers or percentages? Do they think consumers are too unsophisticated to understand a simple number like "this OLED TV achieves a fairly average 66 percent AdobeRGB coverage?"

"Half of tech employees think their work culture is toxic," reports one Texas news site, citing a new survey by Blind: Blind, an anonymous work talk app, asked more than 12,000 tech staffers to respond to the statement: "I consider my current workplace a healthy working environment." Slightly more than half, 52 percent, said the survey statement was "false," versus nearly 48 percent who responded with "true."

Intel was named the tech company with the least healthy work environment, by 48.5 percent of its employees, followed by Amazon at 46.5 percent, and eBay at 44.5 percent. Employees who consider their workplaces healthier work at LinkedIn, where 17.3 percent responded true, followed by Google, at 23.7 percent, and Uber, at 29.7 percent.
It depends on how you define "unhealthy," of course -- but it'd be interesting to hear how Slashdot's readers respond to the same question. So leave your own thoughts and reactions in the comments.

Is your work environment unhealthy?

Slashdot reader Thelasko says his wife manages a small eight-person business -- but remains unhappy with the company's IT consultant: She's had endless problems with Windows 10 Pro's update system causing downtime. Anytime she calls the IT consultant, they don't resolve issues to her satisfaction, and the company gets stuck with a large bill. She's resorted to researching and providing support for the company network herself.

The contract is up at the end of the year, and she wants to find a new consultant. The company owner however, doesn't want to switch because all of the work the consultant provided is covered under a "warranty" for 3 years (the company typically gets charged). I don't work in IT myself, and am unable to provide advice. What should they do? How would Slashdot find a reputable consultant?
Leave your best answers in the comments. How can you find a good IT consultant?

An anonymous reader writes: Hello all. I am looking to buy a good mechanical keyboard for my everyday usage — programming and writing. I see some good offers on certain keyboards -- thanks to Black Friday deals. Just this week, Razer launched what looks like a good mechanical keyboard for people who are looking for a budget gear. One of the issues I have come across looking for a good keyboard is how most of them are designed for Windows OS by default. (I know you can customize keys, but.)

Slashdot has run keyboard discussion posts in the past -- the best laptop with best keyboard, greatest keyboard ever made, and quest to find a good keyboard , but I don't see any recent story on this. I was curious to know what kind of keyboard you use and why did you choose the one you have?

An anonymous reader writes: As a student, what's the best way to bring change to an outdated college tech curriculum?

The background on this is that I have 15 years of experience in the field and a very healthy amount of industry-recognized training and certifications. I'm merely finishing up my degree to flesh out my resume -- I haven't learned much from the program that I don't already know. However, the program would have benefited me greatly 15 years ago. It's a great program, except for a biometrics class that is absolutely behind the curve. The newest publication on the syllabus is from 2009. This is simply teaching the students outdated and often wrong information.

Additionally, a lot of the material seems like it was stretched to make a full semester class in biometrics in the first place -- most of the material, honestly, could be compressed to about two hours of lecture and still be delivered at a reasonable rate.

What's the best way for a student in my situation to get this fixed so the school stops wasting student's time with outdated and wrong information?

Longtime Slashdot reader King_TJ writes: I've worked in I.T. for almost 30 years now in various capacities, from bench PC technician to web page designer, support specialist, network manager, and was self-employed for a while doing on-site service and consulting too. In all that time, I've always felt like I had a good handle on troubleshooting and problem-solving while providing good, friendly customer service at the same time. But recently, I've started feeling like there's just a little too much knowledge to keep straight in my brain. If I'm able to work on a project on my own terms, without interruptions or distractions? Sure, I can get almost anything figured out. But it's the stress of users needing immediate assistance with random problems, thrown out willy-nilly in the constant barrage of trouble tickets, that I'm starting to struggle with.

For example, just this morning, a user had a question about whether or not she should open an email about quarantined junk mail to actually look through it. I briefly noted a screenshot she attached that showed a typical MS Office quarantined email message and replied that she could absolutely view them at her discretion. (I also noted that I tend to ignore and delete those myself, unless I'm actually expecting a specific piece of email that I didn't receive -- in case it was actually in the junk mail filter.) Well, that was the wrong answer, because that message was a nicely done phishing attempt; not a legit message -- and she tried to sign in through it. Then, I had to do a mad scramble to change her password and help her get the new one working on her phone and computer. With more time to think about what happened, I'm realizing now that I should have known the email was fake because we recently made some changes to our Office 365 environment so junk mail is going directly into Junk folders in Outlook -- and those types of messages aren't really coming in to people anymore. On top of that? We're trying to migrate people to using two-factor authentication so I was instructed to get this user on it while I'm changing her account info. Makes sense, but I had to dig all over to find our document with instructions on how to do that too. I just couldn't remember where they told me they saved the thing, several weeks ago, when they talked about creating the new document in one of our weekly meetings. Am I just getting old and starting to lose it? Is everybody feeling this way about I.T. support these days? Are things just changing at too quick a pace for anyone to stay on top of it all?

I mean, in just the last few weeks, we've dealt with users failing to get their single sign-on passwords to work because something broke that only an upgrade to the latest build of Windows 10 corrected. We've had an office network go berserk and randomly drop people's Internet access, ability to print, etc. -- because one of the switches started intermittently failing under load. We've had online training to set up a new MDM solution, company-wide. And I had to single-handedly set up a new server running the latest version of vCenter for our ESXi servers. And all of that is while trying to get in some studying on the side to get my Security Plus cert., getting Macs with broken screens mailed out for service, a couple of new computers deployed, and accounts properly shut down for an employee who left, plus the usual grind of "mindless" tickets like requests to create new shared DropBox team folders for groups. It's a LOT to juggle, but I was pretty happy with my ability to keep all of it moving right along for years. Now -- I'm starting to have doubts.

OpenSourceAllTheWay writes: Back when PCs were more boxy looking than today and people used floppy disks to store stuff, there were a bunch of prank apps around that one could put on a DOS or Windows computer to annoy the hell out of siblings, classmates, coworkers and others. (Here is a listing of some older prank apps and some more recent Android prank apps.) Some prank apps would flip the Windows desktop upside down. Some would make the mouse pointer move in strange ways or make it give you the middle finger. Some would cause you to hit the right keyboard key and still mistype a word. Some would play an audio file in the background every now and then that gave the impression of your computer making strange noises for unknown reasons, even turning the OS volume up before the sound, and then down again, making it impossible to make the sounds stop. There are many more computer users today than there were back then, yet there doesn't seem to be much new in the way of prank apps -- at least for Windows. Why is that? Did Windows 8 cause PC users to lose their humor?

Readers share a column: Apple is no longer the king of the smartphone camera, but that's just a small component of a company in (highly profitable) stagnation. It wasn't that long ago that anyone who cared about taking great photos on their phone was destined to buy an iPhone (whether they wanted it or not) just by sheer brilliance of its miniaturized camera tech. But something happened over the last 18 months that's changed the dynamic for consumers in the market: Samsung and especially Google have started producing handsets that equal or surpass Apple's devices with their picture-taking quality.

[...] But Google is not Facebook, and while I give up some of my data to the company, what I get in return has sizable value -- apps I use for hours every day, predictive services that actually work, photo processing that means I'm less likely to miss an important moment. To be clear: the stuff Google and Amazon are doing right now isn't just cool and doesn't solely serve their corporate interests -- it matters in very real ways to consumers, with touchpoints they encounter every day where Apple can't even get a word in edgewise.

[...] Coming in second in the camera space alone might not be that big of an issue, but Apple has also had significant problems with its hardware recently -- not just with quality control, but in pure design terms as well (who could have predicted that in 2018 people would be touting Microsoft as the industry leader in design?). Siri continues to be a running joke among most people I know -- tech enthusiasts and average users alike. Apple's iCloud efforts have amounted to little more than a "hard disk in the sky" (a famous Jobsian turn of phrase). And is it the best experience for consumers to be forced into Apple Mail, Apple Maps, iTunes, Apple Music, and Apple Photos at every turn? Can you honestly say they're the best at what they do?