If you need an interesting project to motivate you, you could try to build something with Arduino. It requires purchasing some hardware, of course, but it's cheap enough to play around with.
> Comcast Is Threatening To Cut Off Customers Who Use Tor, The Web Browser For Criminals
Uh, it's not "The Web Browser For Criminals". It's for people who want anonymity. And being slightly pedantic, Tor is also not a web browser. Tor Browser is.
It does start to beg the question of whether or not we can trust TOR. Personally, I'm far more interested in meshnets, and other encrypted networks now.
Is that screenshot the site itself? At first I thought I was seeing some chat app, so Staply must be some sort of browser plugin to connect it all together.
Basically, it looks like Staply is kind of a chat room app with file sharing as part of it. Or not? I was kind of confused.
Basically we are building a very open platform where you can invite anyone, for example one of use cases would be if you are organizing an event with lots of speakers and you need to collect their presentations and answer all their question regarding the timetable etc. Kind of like a shared folder+small Q&A, where all data is seemlessly organized so that you would know for sure which version of the presentation is the latest one for example.
I suggest actually timing some of this stuff before writing off the idea. If an image can be processed in 1 second, and you can parallelize it to 4 cores, some quick and dirty (and probably useless) math says 2 million images could be done in just under 6 days. I don't think that's too shabby for 2 million images.
I'd assume that the bottle neck would be I/O if these images are ~30mb as the OP stated in the thread. I don't think you'd see 4x speedups from parallelizing.
I'm not sure what resolution these images are, but if it's very high-res, it may make sense to make intermediate-sized versions first. I expect that would make recreating thumbnails (i.e. in a different size - or multiple sizes) much quicker.
Also, converting the (hi-res) images to JPEG before further processing may make the data somewhat easier to deal with. 25-30MB per image * 2 million would be 50-60 terabytes of data? Plus, how often would someone really benefit from having access to a 25-30MB TIFF vs a much smaller JPEG version in the same resolution? That alone could be reason to start with JPEG compression first.
I know many fine sysadmins and network engineers that couldn't code anything to save their lives. Coding is one of many ways to contribute in IT, and a lack of coding knowledge doesn't preclude one from understanding how technology works. Conversely, I have met several programmers that have a surprising lack of understanding of anything that goes on outside their code. Teaching everyone to code will not magically prepare them for the future, nor will a lack of coding knowledge prevent them from functioning in a high tech society.
Now, making technology a bigger part of the curriculum? I think that is a good idea.
I'm sure you're right but I also think there are many kids who have probably never even thought about the mechanics of what goes on behind the web sites they visit, the games they play (and everything else vaguely tech related they come into contact with on a daily basis). So maybe it will, at the very least, introduce more kids to the fun that can be had, and ultimately, to careers in the sector.
> the primary negative reaction is the voyeuristic-rejection of having a camera always pointed at you (that may or may not be recording). To which the analogy vs. headphones is not relevant.
That isn't the theme of the article, though. The author was just addressing whether Google Glass would stop looking dorky, not whether we'd be comfortable with the voyeurism. So I think the analogy is valid, and I suspect will be proven true.
