According to The Economist, IKEA will release a new version of its classic BILLY bookshelf next month, one that's focused less on storing books than storing, well, anything and everything else. The company is finding that customers use their shelves increasingly for “ornaments, tchotchkes and the odd coffee-table tome,” and less so for reading material.

Developed by BAE Systems, the Adaptiv technology allows vehicles to mimic the temperature of their surroundings.
It can also make a tank look like other objects, such as a cow or car, when seen through heat-sensitive 'scopes.

This article should give you at least a partial picture of the "Internet of Things" march from its first glimpses into today's trending topic.

Wie können wir uns damit abfinden, dass unsere Schulen zu Produzenten von potemkinschen Informationsdörfern verkommen sind, die in der Folge in der Sonne des Lebens schmelzen; und bestenfalls bleibt das eine oder andere Bruchstück an brauchbarem Wissen und Können zurück? Wie können wir ein so teures, ineffektives System finanzieren?

Und wie können wir es mit unserem Gewissen vereinbaren, dass unsere Kinder in jüngeren Jahren oft Märchen von Autonomie, Demokratie und Selbstbestimmung aufgetischt bekommen, während sie im Heranwachsen dann in ein autoritäres System hineingeschleudert werden, dass sie gnadenlos und unbarmherzig zu belehren trachtet?

I'm going to turn the TV off on September 11th. And close all the web browser tabs I have open on news sites.

This isn't to belittle the events of ten years ago, or to show disrespect for the victims and their bereaved: rather, it's to avoid the narcissistic and indecent media feeding frenzy that battens onto popular sentiment and attempts to jerk every tear from the emotional aftermath of tragedy, the better to milk the advertising revenue stream.

If the media really wanted to mark the occasion respectfully, they'd do so by holding a minutes' silence at 8:46am EST this Sunday.

That's the story of my professional career. Trying to learn things fast enough to create programs to solve problems that go away by themselves or weren't worth spending time on in the first place. Sisyphus had more job satisfaction.

Terence Parr discusses using automation tools including DSLs to automate the software creation process as much as possible in order to increase output, effectiveness, correctness and velocity.

The keyboard is still our main interface to the computer and for many reasons we accept the challenge completely unprepared because we just don't bother to learn the mechanical skill of touch typing. Just think how much more productive you could be if you could simply think your thoughts or your code onto the keyboard as fast as you could think them.

Touch typing is clearly a skill to be valued.

Or is it?

There is a change in the way we interact with computers and it is mostly due to the use of touch screens. You simply cannot touch type on a mobile phone's virtual keyboard. When presented with such a thing your only option is to use one or at most two fingers. Given the way that the unit is held you also can't use the full keyboard style for a two finger peck. It seems that the best you can do is use two thumbs. This is perhaps the biggest change to typing since the introduction of touch typing.

But he has, he admits, always wanted to play a spy – "any actor worth their salt would jump at the chance", he says, "because it's all about mask shifting". His opportunity finally came thanks to Tomas Alfredson, who cast him in his adaptation of John Le Carré's celebrated MI6 thriller – a film that is already being talked about in the industry in hushed, Oscar-worthy tones.

The iconic Cold War spymaster George Smiley is played by Gary Oldman – trading in his usual fire-eating performance for a cloak of impassivity – and Cumberbatch is Peter Guillam, his sidekick in all but name, who puts his own integrity on the line to help him uncover a Russian mole at the heart of the secret service. As eyecatching as the film's 70s aesthetic – gunmetal London skies, stolen documents in buff folders – are the names populating MI6's HQ: Colin Firth, Toby Jones, Mark Strong, Ciaran Hinds, John Hurt and Tom Hardy. "That's a call sheet I'm going to frame and keep for ever," says Cumberbatch.

Über Eck erfahre ich gerade von ein paar Holländern, dass deren Zertifikate auch zur Absicherung der "Lawful Interception"-Schnittstellen benutzt wurden, also zum Beschnüffeln der Bürger. Ich denke mal, dass das den Ausschlag gegeben haben wird. Das ist ja seit vielen Jahren eine Warnung aus dem CCC bezüglich Lawful Intercept Schnittstellen, dass man da nicht ausschließen kann, dass sich jemand unbefugtes Zugang verschafft.

Jedenfalls ist es beeindruckend, dass die da nicht "too big to fail" gesagt und sich rauszuwieseln versucht haben. Innerhalb von 5 Tagen nach Herauskommen des Problems ist die CA futsch. Keine schlechte Zeit!

Wenn man schon weltweit "Terroristen" entführt und mit Charterflugzeugen heimlich zu Folterknästen fliegt, dann zahlt man doch wenigstens fristgemäß und vollständig an die Charterfirma. Sonst kommen da doch die ganzen Details raus, wenn die sich ihr Geld einklagen will!

Gutenberg to Zuckerberg fills an important gap in the published literature of the Internet: a fast, thoughtful, thought-provoking read for intelligent people who don't quite get the Internet. We all know these sorts of people -- often powerful and accomplished, but at a disadvantage in that they got their start before the net came along. These people struggle to put the Internet in perspective, buffeted on the one side by colleagues who reassure them by telling them that the transformative nature of the net is overstated; on the other by juniors, analysts and press who tell them that they're doomed unless they rebuild their lives around the net.

A new company, Booktrack, is devising book-length soundtracks for novels and non-fiction. Is it a good idea? Or do we risk losing the serendipitous soundtracks that already accompany our reading?

Da kommt die jährliche Extremdosis an inspirierenden Eigenartigkeiten der Ars Electronica gerade recht. Das Linzer Festival für Computer, Kunst und Gesellschaft hat sich dem verschrieben, wofür die Engländer ein wunderbares Wort haben, das sich lose (und jugendfreundlich entschärft) mit Gehirngeschlechtsverkehr übersetzen lässt.

Rhythmisches Auflockern der Hirnwindungen ist Aufgabe und Anliegen der verspielten Vordenker des Digitalen, die in Linz ihre künstlerischen Arbeiten präsentieren. Denn positive Veränderungen brauchen die Chance, zu entstehen. Und wie man dies fördern kann, will das Festival heuer erforschen. Ein willkommener Gegenentwurf zum inneren und äußeren Reformstau.

Twitter is really my only experience of social media, so far. I sometimes wonder what my life would have been like if I'd had access to some sort of agreeable social media in my early teens. I think I would really have liked it, so then I feel a little sorry for my younger self. Then I remember that all of that stuff might still be around, and I feel a huge relief that it isn't.


Age bias is "something that no [employer] talks about. But it's a reality in tech that if you're 45 years of age and still writing C code or Cobol code and making $150,000 a year, the likelihood is that you won't be employed very long.
...
"If you're an unencumbered worker" -- that is, single with lots of time to work extra hours and attend training to update your skills -- "then you're 'young,'" she says.
...
The difficulty for programmers is twofold: For one thing, the desired skills keep changing and changing again, requiring them to refresh their talents on a nearly continuous basis. And, unlike managers, programmers often don't have a clear career path within an organization.
...
He was hired by the city of Alexandria 11 years ago to service a Cobol-based payroll system, with the understanding that the system was scheduled to be phased out within a year and a half (but that has yet to happen, O'Connor points out with some amusement).

Something very important and very weird is happening to the book right now: It’s shedding its papery corpus and transmigrating into a bodiless digital form, right before our eyes. We’re witnessing the bibliographical equivalent of the rapture. If anything we may be lowballing the weirdness of it all.

The last time a change of this magnitude occurred was circa 1450, when Johannes Gutenberg invented movable type. But if you go back further there’s a more helpful precedent for what’s going on. Starting in the first century A.D., Western readers discarded the scroll in favor of the codex — the bound book as we know it today.

Collide@CERN is an international competition that will run for a period of three years. Each year, artists working in different art forms will have the opportunity to take up a funded residency of up to three months.

Und jetzt die Masterfrage: Wozu brauchen wir – ‘im Internet’ oder sonstwo – eine Sammlung von persönlichen Daten aller Menschen, die sich in der Bundesrepublik aufhalten, ohne dass sie irgend einer Straftat verdächtig sind? Weil jeder von uns einen Kinderpornoring gründen könnte? Weil wir alle Sprengstoff herstellen wollen könnten? Weil wir organisierte Spontanhandlungen verhindern wollen? Oder geht es am Ende doch um illegale Datentransfers, Urheberrechtsverletzungen, für deren Nachweis kein Richter eine Spitzelgenehmigung erteilt, weil das eben keine schwere Straftat ist?

Also noch mal zum Mitschreiben: Verdachtsunabhängige Ermittlung ist das Kennzeichen des Überwachungsstaats. Es spielt keine Rolle, ob sie ‘im Internet’ oder sonstwo zur Anwendung kommt. Sie gehört verboten.

This article will first introduce you to some of the different styles used for personal names, and then some of the possible implications for handling those on the Web.