•           Top honour for The Pipe and Glass Inn | The Chef’s Directory   

  East Yorkshire’s The Pipe and Glass Inn has been named Pub of the Year in the 2012 edition of the Michelin Eating Out in Pubs Guide. The pub, which currently holds a Michelin star, is situated in South Dalton, East Yorkshire, very close to Grimbsby and the East Coast. It was taken over by James and Kate Mackenzie in 2006.

                           
   

•           The Old Bore at Rishworth ‘Award Winning Dining Pub’ 01422 822 291   

                               
 

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

   

•           Best Practice Guidelines: who has signed up?   

  Last year a number of independent specialist wine retailers complained about what they felt was unfair treatment at the hands of suppliers – when wines they believed were destined exclusively for the independent sector ended up on sale, at lower prices, elsewhere.

        tags:              wine

                           
   

•           MegaRetrieval   

  The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), supported by Carpathia Hosting, today announced its plans to assess the scope of the issue facing Megaupload users who are at risk of losing their data. Carpathia has created this website, http://www.MegaRetrieval.com to assist users in contacting EFF. EFF will review the factual situations shared by users and, if possible, try to resolve their issues

                           
   

•           Ben Jos Walbeehm’s Download Page DeflOpt   

  DeflOpt tries to reduce the size of GZIP (extensions .gz and .tgz), PNG, and ZIP files. Regardless of which programs/settings were used to create them, DeflOpt will be able to reduce these files by at least a few bytes more than 95% of the time.

        tags:              png        image        compression

                           
   

•           Water Galaxy | Indievania   

  Water Galaxy is a 2D gravity based puzzle game. The Saphira people are in need of water, and all galaxies are running out. It is your task to use gravity fields to guide water from other planets to the Mothership., which transports the water back to the Saphira. Throughout the galaxies you encounter wormholes, poisonous gas clouds, mysterious force fields and many more challenges. Because of the innovative use of gravity effects, the gameplay is very interesting.

        tags:              game        windows

                           
   

•           Udacity - Educating the 21st Century   

  We believe university-level education can be both high quality and low cost. Using the economics of the Internet, we’ve connected some of the greatest teachers to hundreds of thousands of students all over the world.

        tags:              education        online

             
               
   

•           PostgreSQL: EnterpriseDB Announces Availability of Postgres Plus Cloud Database   

  Postgres Plus Cloud Database combines the advantages of cloud computing with the features expected in an enterprise-class database, including: Fully ACID compliant relational database service Point-and-click simple setup & management with web-based interface Automatic scaling, load balancing and failover Automated online backup and point-in-time recovery Database Cloning Oracle database compatibility Postgres Plus Cloud Database is available now with two versions of its cloud database: PostgreSQL 9.1, and Postgres Plus Advanced Server 9.0. Pricing for Postgres Plus Cloud Database on Amazon Web Services is the same as Amazon RDS (MySQL), whether you choose the PostgreSQL or Postgres Plus Advanced Server database engine.

        tags:              postgresql        cloud        database

                           
   

•           Chaos the battle of wizards   

  Chaos - the Battle of Wizards. A Flash 2004 MX simulation of the original Spectrum 48k game by Julian Gollop. Chaos the battle of wizards was, and still remains, one of the best games ever made for the electronic medium. Originally programmed by Jullian Gollop (author of Lords of chaos, Xcom, lasersqaud, rebel star and many other classic titles) this game was released by games workshop before it was fully completed. Consequently, the troll spell was not included, and the turmoil spell gets into a permanent loop if there are too many sprites on the board.

        tags:              retro        game        flash        spectrum

                           
   

•           Aging Ad Execs Seeking Jobs Are Struggling to Stay Relevant | News - Advertising Age   

  Most shops won’t admit it readily, but gray-hair phobia is a reality in the digital era. With agencies continually restructuring and changing models to keep pace with the public’s media consumption habits, adland is right to be digitally obsessed. But most in the industry wrongly assume that the only people who grasp digital are fresh out of college. That presumption has spawned an undercurrent of resentment as agencies refit themselves for the digital world—a process that often entails stripping out layers of longtime employees in favor of a newer breed of creatives and strategists believed to better grasp the increasingly complex media environment.

                           
   

•           PostgreSQL cloud database announced - The H Open Source: News and Features   

  PostgreSQL specialist EnterpriseDB has announced the availability of Postgres Plus Cloud Database on Amazon Web Services (AWS). Users can run either PostgreSQL or the PostgreSQL-based Postgres Plus Advanced Server with the database-as-a-service (DBaaS) cloud service without needing to undertake major installation or configuration work.

        tags:              postgresql        cloud        database

                           
   

•           PNGGauntlet - PNG Compression Software | BenHollis.net   

  Combines PNGOUT, OptiPNG, and DeflOpt to create the smallest PNGs No image quality is lost - only file size Converts JPG, GIF, TIFF, and BMP files to PNG Ultra-configurable

        tags:              png        optimization        image        software

                           
   

•           Beautiful web type — the best typefaces from the Google web fonts directory   

        tags:              fonts        web        typography

                           
   

•           LeTemps.ch | Ces entrepreneurs qui veulent vendre du vin via la Toile   

                               
   

•           Why I chose to decline an invitation to review by Elsevier | Reciprocal Space   

        tags:              science        open        access

                           
 

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

   

•           Symptoms of Inner Peace   

                               
   

•           stevenberlinjohnson.com: Anatomy Of An Idea   

  I find it interesting that there are certain kinds of questions that I now send out by default to Twitter, not Google. The more subtle and complex the question, the more likely it’ll go to Twitter. But if it’s simply trying to find a citation or source, I’ll use Google. So trying to figure out who wrote Seeing Like A State was a Google query, but wondering about the origins of the Internet made more sense on Twitter. (I should add that the responses I’m looking for on Twitter are links to longer discussions, not 140 character micro-essays.)

        tags:              research        writing        social        Serendipity        ideas

                           
   

•           Future of Voice Expert-led Workshops - Future of Communications blog - Peak Telecoms   

  1. Move the needle with voice and messaging innovation: How to get past the “telecoms menopause” and rejuvenate growth for these core products through new business models? 2. Manage mobile data growth: How to keep cost, revenue and customer experience in balance—and avoid creating overcapacity and needless capex to meet growing demand—by creative business models? 3. Social customers and creating wealth from customer data and analytics: How to extract more value from the customer’s “data footprint”, and what are the emerging loyalty/retention models?

        tags:              telecoms        future

                           
   

•           Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist | Orion Magazine   

  I don’t have any answers, if by answers we mean political systems, better machines, means of engineering some grand shift in consciousness. All I have is a personal conviction built on those feelings, those responses, that goes back to the moors of northern England and the rivers of southern Borneo—that something big is being missed. That we are both hollow men and stuffed men, and that we will keep stuffing ourselves until the food runs out, and if outside the dining room door we have made a wasteland and called it necessity, then at least we will know we were not to blame, because we are never to blame, because we are the humans. What am I to do with feelings like these? Useless feelings in a world in which everything must be made useful. Sensibilities in a world of utility. Feelings like this provide no “solutions.” They build no new eco-homes, remove no carbon from the atmosphere. This is head-in-the-clouds stuff, as relevant to our busy, modern lives as the new moon or the date of the harvest. Easy to ignore, easy to dismiss, like the places that inspire the feelings, like the world outside the bubble, like the people who have seen it, if only in brief flashes beyond the ridge of some dark line of hills.

        tags:              environmentalism

           
  • It took me a while to realize where this kind of talk took me back to: the maze and the moonlit hilltop. This desperate scrabble for “sustainable development” was in reality the same old same old. People I had thought were on my side were arguing aggressively for the industrializing of wild places in the name of human desire. This was the same rootless, distant destruction that had led me to the top of Twyford Down. Only now there seemed to be some kind of crude equation at work that allowed them to believe this was something entirely different. Motorway through downland: bad. Wind power station on downland: good. Container port wiping out estuary mudflats: bad. Renewable hydropower barrage wiping out estuary mudflats: good. Destruction minus carbon equals sustainability.
                       
           
  • Now it seemed that environmentalism was not about wildness or ecocentrism or the other-than-human world and our relationship to it. Instead it was about (human) social justice and (human) equality and (human) progress and ensuring that all these things could be realized without degrading the (human) resource base that we used to call nature back when we were being naïve and problematic.
                       
           
  • Many who call themselves green have little time for the mainstream line I am attacking here. But it is the mainstream line. It is how most people see environmentalism today, even if it is not how all environmentalists intend it to be seen. These are the arguments and the positions that popular environmentalism—now a global force—offers up in its quest for redemption. There are reasons; there are always reasons. But whatever they are, they have led the greens down a dark, litter-strewn, dead-end street where the rubbish bins overflow, the light bulbs have blown, and the stray dogs are very hungry indeed.
                       
           

  • I don’t have any answers, if by answers we mean political systems, better machines, means of engineering some grand shift in consciousness. All I have is a personal conviction built on those feelings, those responses, that goes back to the moors of northern England and the rivers of southern Borneo—that something big is being missed. That we are both hollow men and stuffed men, and that we will keep stuffing ourselves until the food runs out, and if outside the dining room door we have made a wasteland and called it necessity, then at least we will know we were not to blame, because we are never to blame, because we are the humans.

    What am I to do with feelings like these? Useless feelings in a world in which everything must be made useful. Sensibilities in a world of utility. Feelings like this provide no “solutions.” They build no new eco-homes, remove no carbon from the atmosphere. This is head-in-the-clouds stuff, as relevant to our busy, modern lives as the new moon or the date of the harvest. Easy to ignore, easy to dismiss, like the places that inspire the feelings, like the world outside the bubble, like the people who have seen it, if only in brief flashes beyond the ridge of some dark line of hills.

                       
       
         
   

•           Is the fabric of industrialized society starting to unravel? Highly complex civilizations are more vulnerable to collapse   

  The point is that a highly complex society has many points of failure that individually impact the entire web of complexity. Lose rubber and you’ve lost your entire transportation sector. Lose oil and much the same happens. Lose your source of microchips and you have to revert back to pre-1980’s technology. Lose your manufacturing base—which has already happened in America—and you have no capability to start building the stuff you need in your own country anymore.

        tags:              society        collapse

                           
   

•           The Substitution Principle - Less Wrong   

  The important point is to learn to recognize the situations where you’re confronting a difficult problem, and your mind gives you an answer right away. If you don’t have extensive expertise with the problem – or even if you do – it’s likely that the answer you got wasn’t actually the answer to the question you asked. So before you act, stop to consider what heuristic question your brain might actually have used, and whether it makes sense given the situation that you’re thinking about.This involves three skills: first recognizing a problem as a difficult one, then figuring out what heuristic you might have used, and finally coming up with a better solution

        tags:              thinking

           
  • If a satisfactory answer to a hard question is not found quickly, System 1 will find a related question that is easier and will answer it. (Kahneman, p. 97)
                       
           
  • Let me reword that previous generalization: As soon as I set a goal, my brain asked itself how that goal might be achieved, realized that this was a difficult question, and substituted it with an easier one. So ”how could I advance X” became ”what are the kinds of behaviors that are commonly associated with advancing X”. That my brain happened to pick the most prestigious ways of advancing X might be simply because prestige is often correlated with achieving a lot.
                       
           
  • The Planning Fallacy: ”How much time will this take” becomes something like ”How much time did it take for me to get this far, and many times should that be multiplied to get to completion.” (Doesn’t take into account unexpected delays and interruptions, waning interest, etc.)
                       
           
  • Over-estimating your own share of household chores: ”What fraction of chores have I done” becomes ”how many chores do I remember doing, as compared to the amount of chores I remember my partner doing.” (You will naturally remember more of the things that you’ve done than that somebody else has done, possibly when you weren’t even around.)
                       
           

  • The important point is to learn to recognize the situations where you’re confronting a difficult problem, and your mind gives you an answer right away. If you don’t have extensive expertise with the problem – or even if you do – it’s likely that the answer you got wasn’t actually the answer to the question you asked. So before you act, stop to consider what heuristic question your brain might actually have used, and whether it makes sense given the situation that you’re thinking about.

    This involves three skills: first recognizing a problem as a difficult one, then figuring out what heuristic you might have used, and finally coming up with a better solution

                       
       
         
   

•           Umberto Eco: ‘It’s culture, not war, that cements European identity’ | World news | The Guardian   

  And that would have been to speak of the constitution of all our roots – the Greek-Roman, the Judaic and the Christian. In our past, we have both Venus and the crucifix, the Bible and Nordic mythology, which we remember with Christmas trees, or with the many festivals of St Lucy, St Nicolas and Santa Claus. Europe is a continent that was able to fuse many identities, and yet not confuse them.

        tags:              culture        european        identity        eco

           
  • “The university exchange programme Erasmus is barely mentioned in the business sections of newspapers, yet Erasmus has created the first generation of young Europeans. I call it a sexual revolution: a young Catalan man meets a Flemish girl – they fall in love, they get married and they become European, as do their children. The Erasmus idea should be compulsory – not just for students, but also for taxi drivers, plumbers and other workers. By this, I mean they need to spend time in other countries within the European Union; they should integrate.”
                       
           
  • Their Europe reacted to war and they shared resources to build peace. Now we must work towards building a more profound identity.
                       
           
  • And that would have been to speak of the constitution of all our roots – the Greek-Roman, the Judaic and the Christian. In our past, we have both Venus and the crucifix, the Bible and Nordic mythology, which we remember with Christmas trees, or with the many festivals of St Lucy, St Nicolas and Santa Claus. Europe is a continent that was able to fuse many identities, and yet not confuse them.
                       
       
         
   

•           The Intercession of a Thousand Small Sanities « how to save the world   

  “Gopnik is saying, in effect, that complex ‘problems’ like crime, poverty, climate change, peak oil, corruption, pandemics, and unsustainable growth economies, are not ‘problems’ that can be ‘solved’ at all, but rather, as philosopher Abraham Kaplan explained, predicaments that must be “chipped away at” and adapted to. Our species tends to loathe complexity, and prefers to oversimplify everything, and the politicians, lawyers, corporations and media play on that loathing by always proposing analytic (“A or B”) dichotomies and simplistic “answers” — which cannot possibly work. “Three-strikes” laws, “trickle-down” economics, emissions trading schemes, subsidies, religious taboos and inquisitions, austerity programs, prohibitions, bailouts, military invasions and “quantitative easing” — these are all massively expensive complicated “solutions” to complex “problems”, and they have all failed spectacularly.“The intercession of a thousand small sanities”, as Gopnik so elegantly puts it, will never be a popular approach to coping with complex predicaments, especially as they grow, through the indifference and incompetence of leaders and vested interests and the sheer size and scale of the systems creating them, into crises and then into chaos and collapse. Yet it is the only approach which has a chance of making things better.”

        tags:              question        politics        thinking

                           
 

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

   

•           OpenSpaceWorld: WorkingInOpenSpace   

  “While the reality of this responsibility sinks in, the Four Principles are explained. What seemed strange when you read the posters earlier, now seems to make a lot of sense. “Whoever comes is the right people” acknowledges that the only people really qualified or able to do great work on any issue are those who really care, and freely choose to be involved. “Whenever it starts is the right time” recognizes that spirit and creativity don’t run on the clock, so while we’re here, we’ll all keep a vigilant watch for great ideas and new insights, which can happen at anytime. “Whatever happens is the only thing that could have” allows everyone to let go of the could haves, would haves and should haves, so that we can give our full attention to the reality of what is happening, is working, and is possible right now. And finally, “When it’s over, it’s over” acknowledges that you never know just how long it’ll take to deal with a given issue, and reminds us that getting the work done is more important than sticking to an arbitrary schedule. Taken together, these principles say “work hard, pay attention, but be prepared to be surprised!” The one law is The Law of Two Feet, or in some cases, The Law of Personal Mobility. It says simply that you, and only you, know where you can learn and contribute the most to the work that must take place today. It demands that you use your two feet to go where you need to go and do what you need to do. If at any time today, you find that you are not learning or contributing, you have the right and the responsibility to move… find another breakout session, visit the food table, take a walk in the sunshine, make a phone call—but DO NOT waste time.”

        tags:              innovation        collaboration

                           
   

•           An Antidote to Urgency: How to Respond to the Oil Disaster in the Gulf of Mexico   

  These are very valid human responses-I’d worry if we weren’t feeling them. However, rage and despair fuel another strong emotion, especially for us activists: urgency. We must do something now! We must fix this now! This must never happen again! There’s a big problem with urgency-it’s always toxic. Like the black plumes of oil moving underwater through the Gulf, urgency blinds us. It pollutes our thinking, making it impossible to see clearly or to choose wise actions.

        tags:              thinking        policy

           
  • These are very valid human responses—I’d worry if we weren’t feeling them. However, rage and despair fuel another strong emotion, especially for us activists: urgency. We must do something now! We must fix this now! This must never happen again!
                       
       
         
   

•           More Than a Mantra: “We’re All in This Together” by Margaret Wheatley - YES! Magazine   

        tags:              change        thinking        world        emergence        system

           
  • Everything I’ve learned about the power of community comes from working through the Berkana Institute in the Global South. Communities in many different cultures have taught us that, in spite of the worst external circumstances—war, famine, abuse, societal collapse, ecological devastation—human beings can get through anything as long as we’re together. People with little or no material resources get through desperate and difficult circumstances by uncovering the resources they really need—each other’s companionship, each other’s knowledge and wisdom. 
                       
           
  • Sometimes people in these communities forget their collective strength, sometimes they get seduced by the lures of modern materialism. But time after time, when they reconnect with each other they find again their capacity to persevere.
                       
       
         
   

•           Margaret J. Wheatley: How Large-Scale Change Really Happens: Working with Emergence   

  A System of Influence determines accepted practices and patterns of behavior; it sets the criteria for what’s important and what’s not.  Over time, those who fail to conform to these requirements get labeled as deviant and pushed to the fringes.  A System of Influence, like a culture, sets the values, norms, expectations, beliefs and assumptions.  It determines where resources go, what practices to use, which behaviors to reward.  To understand how these powerful, determining systems of influence arise, we have to look into the dynamics of emergence.  Once we understand these dynamics, we can work with emergence to create a new system of influence that better serves our intentions.

        tags:              change        thinking        emergence

                           
 

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

   

•           Free research paper management software - Qiqqa   

  Research and academic work today means finding, downloading, and reading a never-ending stream of PDFs and webpages. Effectively managing and getting what you need from those documents can be a real pain, and wastes precious writing-up time. Qiqqa puts you back in control, with all the tools you need to manage your documents and notes effectively, visualize your ideas, and find insights you would have missed otherwise. Engineered by academics, its mission is to make your research life easier. Start using the award-winning software that lets you get your academic work done better, quicker.

                           
 

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

   

•           Future of Wireframing - HotGloo   

  HotGloo combines all the functionality from a classical desktop software with the comfort and benefits of a web app. From low- to high-fidelity, from wireframes to prototypes - with HotGloo you can finally achieve great concepts in a fast, simple and beautiful way. Mock up an idea, gather feedback, review and improve over time. With just one click you can receive feedback on a particular element or interaction, helping you to adjust accordingly

                           
   

•           Home - Pencil Project   

  The Pencil Project’s unique mission is to build a free and opensource tool for making diagrams and GUI prototyping that everyone can use. Top features: Built-in stencils for diagraming and prototyping Multi-page document with background page Inter-page linkings! On-screen text editing with rich-text supports Exporting to HTML, PNG, Openoffice.org document, Word document and PDF. Undo/redo supports Installing user-defined stencils and templates Standard drawing operations: aligning, z-ordering, scaling, rotating… Cross-platforms Adding external objects Personal Collection Clipart Browser And much more…

        tags:              Prototyping        design        gui        software

                           
 

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

   

•           darktable | the photo workflow software   

  darktable is an open source photography workflow application and RAW developer. A virtual lighttable and darkroom for photographers. It manages your digital negatives in a database, lets you view them through a zoomable lighttable and enables you to develop raw images and enhance them.

        tags:              raw        linux        photography

                           
   

•           A Beginner’s Introduction to POE - Perl.com   

        tags:              perl        poe

                           
   

•           AnyEvent::Intro   

                               
   

•           AnyEvent - search.cpan.org   

        tags:              perl        event

                           
   

•           Moose - A postmodern object system for Perl 5 - metacpan.org   

        tags:              perl        moose        object

                           
   

•           AnyEvent   

  This module offers a simple API for I/O, timer, signal, child process and completion events, independent of a specific event loop.

        tags:              perl

                           
   

•           Making TeX Work   

        tags:              Latex        book        reference        typesetting

                           
   

•           Overview   

  Salt is a powerful remote execution manager that can be used to administer servers in a fast and efficient way. Salt allows commands to be executed across large groups of servers. This means systems can be easily managed, but data can also be easily gathered. Quick introspection into running systems becomes a reality. Remote execution is usually used to set up a certain state on a remote system. Salt addresses this problem as well, the salt state system uses salt state files to define the state a server needs to be in. Between the remote execution system, and state management Salt addresses the backbone of cloud and data center management.

                           
   

•           Bootstrap, from Twitter   

  Bootstrap is a toolkit from Twitter designed to kickstart development of webapps and sites. It includes base CSS and HTML for typography, forms, buttons, tables, grids, navigation, and more.

        tags:              css        framework        html

             
               
   

•           The Importance Of Anonymity On The Web   

  But when you talk with friends or family about this, the oft quoted response is “I’ve got nothing to hide” or “I’m not special.” Of course, you may not be special now, but who knows what might be considered “special” in the future? It doesn’t take much to accidentally stumble across something you shouldn’t on the web, as Appelbaum says “it’s very easy to know someone who knows someone who’s on some government’s list.” Around the web, log files are stored with ISPs and cloud services that don’t have an expiry date. It’s easy for governments to cherry pick information that’s been collated through no fault of your own, and construct a story that fits their interest.

        tags:              anonymity        web

           
  • Appelbaum warns, “every log file stored around the world will tell a story about you. It may not be the truth, but it will be made up of facts.”
                       
           
  • an astonishing 250,000 requests for metadata on individuals were filed by the Australian government last year
                       
           
  • Appelbaum displayed slides of torproject.org blocked in countries such as Syria, Libya, Egypt, and China. That’s to be expected – the western world is acutely aware that the aforementioned nations have aggressive internet censorship in place. What might surprise you is that Appelbaum then showed slides of that same URL blocked on cellphone carriers O2 and Vodafone in the UK, and T-Mobile in the USA. Carriers that you use every day in democratic countries. Or so you thought.
                       
           
  • When people know they’re being watched, their behaviour changes – and interestingly, the populace begins to censor themselves. For fear of being caught, users avoid controversial websites, avoid speaking out or joining groups to exercise their democratic right (such as Occupy or Anonymous), and stay away from anonymity networks like the Tor Project.
                       
       
         
 

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

   

•           Business Success Your Way | Delightful Work   

  I believe that your core business calling can be found only at the intersection of these four paths. 1). the product or service that you are most eager to create. 2). the work activity that gives your deepest gladness. 3). who and what you care about the most right now. 4). what value point others most need from you offered how they want it. Let’s look at eagerness in this article.

        tags:              success

                           
   

•           What We Like vs What We Want « how to save the world   

  Where does ‘liking’ versus ‘wanting’ fit into this model of who we are? Things we like (such as being in love, being in nature, listening to music, play, learning and helping others), according to the Less Wrong article, are different from things we want (such as sex, addictive foods and other substances, attention, appreciation, and acquisition of shiny objects — all things that in our modern culture are usually scarce). When we do or get things we like, we are happy. When we do or get things we want, we are often not happy — just (for a time) satisfied.

           
  • In times of stress or scarcity, however, wild creatures snap into “Clock Time” (the instantaneous time-sensitive state that most humans spend their entire lives in), and hormones are produced to equip the body for fight-or-flight. They are driven then to satisfy immediate needs and wants (safety, food, victory over a predator or enemy etc.), and their body chemistry in this state is driven by dopamine — which immediately flushes the body when a craving for one of these needs or wants is satisfied. Not the same thing as happiness at all. When the crisis has passed, the creature returns quickly to Now Time, and the endomorphins and enkephalins again take charge of the body, seeking happiness.
                       
           
  • we humans spend all our lives charged up and seeking the satisfaction of our endless needs and wants, the dopamine “rush”. And our industrial civilization culture, which now depends on a constant growth of consumption, encourages this by creating additional “needs” and anxiety about scarcity and inadequacy. We’re never really happy, only temporarily satisfied.
                       
       
         
   

•           The Archdruid Report: Waking Up, Walking Away   

  It’s in this light that last year’s spasmodic outbursts of protest from within the middle classes need to be understood. Since the peak of conventional petroleum production in 2005, economies around the world—above all the economies of the US and its inner circle of allies, which use more petroleum per capita than anybody else—have been stuck in a worsening spiral of dysfunction, and the middle classes have abruptly found themselves struggling to maintain their lifestyles. Their annoyance at that fact is easy to understand. From their point of view, after all, they’ve kept up their side of the bargain; they’ve bought what they were supposed to buy, borrowed when they were supposed to borrow, lined up obediently behind one or another of the approved political parties, and steered clear of all the hard questions. Now the payoff that was supposed to be their reward for all this, the payoff their parents and grandparents always got on time and that they themselves could rely on until now, is nowhere to be seen.

           
  • Among its other benefits, that’s a good way to see the limits on the alleged freedom of choice that the consumer economy provides its inmates.  In today’s America, you can live without a car, but most other choices you make are going to be sharply curtailed by that decision.
                       
           
  • by the standards of most of humanity, I lead an extremely comfortable life, but most of the people I know are horrified by the thought that if it’s raining and I have errands to run, I put on a coat and open up an umbrella and go for a walk in the rain. They’d be more horrified still to learn that I deal with summer’s heat and humidity without an air conditioner, and respond to cold nights in winter by putting on a sweater rather than turning up the heat, but I don’t go out of my way to bring those details to their attention; my car-free life is enough of a shock for most of them.
                       
           
  • The more of the payoff you refuse, the sharper the restrictions you have to live with.  Now of course the less privileged classes in the industrial world, and the vast majority of people elsewhere, live with those restrictions every day of their lives, but suggest to those who don’t that they might find it useful to accept those restrictions, and I’m sure you can imagine the response you’re likely to get.
                       
           
  • The entire operation of the modern magician state, after all, depends utterly on uninterrupted access to gargantuan supplies of cheap, highly concentrated energy.
                       
           
  • The point that needs making is that a great many people in between those two extremes also benefit handsomely from the system.  When those people criticize the system, their criticisms by and large focus on the barriers that keep them from having as large a share as the rich
                       
           
  • Attempts to launch American antiwar movements since that time have foundered on the unmentionable but real fact that middle class Americans by and large have no trouble at all reconciling themselves to war, as long as someone else’s kids are doing the fighting.
                       
           
  • From their point of view, after all, they’ve kept up their side of the bargain; they’ve bought what they were supposed to buy, borrowed when they were supposed to borrow, lined up obediently behind one or another of the approved political parties, and steered clear of all the hard questions.  Now the payoff that was supposed to be their reward for all this, the payoff their parents and grandparents always got on time and that they themselves could rely on until now, is nowhere to be seen.
                       
           
  • Blumberg showed that while a rising tide lifts all boats, a falling tide behaves in a much more selective fashion, as those groups with more political influence and economic clout are able to hang onto a disproportionate share of a shrinking pie at the expense of those with less.
                       
           
  • Having nodded and smiled while those further down the pyramid got shafted, the middle classes are in no position to mount an effective resistance now that they’re the ones being made redundant.
                       
           
  • The alternative is to let go of the perks and privileges before they drag you down. That may be the least popular advice I could offer, but it’s also among the most necessary. Over the years to come, as the real economy of goods and services contracts in lockstep with the depletion of fossil fuels, the fight over what’s left of the benefits of a failing industrial system is likely to become far more brutal than it is today. In the long run, that’s a fight with no winners.
                       
       
         
   

•           Java UI Component Library for Google Web Toolkit | Ext GWT | Products | Sencha   

  If you’re a Java developer who builds enterprise applications for the web, you may know about Google Web Toolkit (GWT). GWT allows you to write in Java, and then compile your code into highly-optimized cross-browser JavaScript. Sencha Ext GWT takes GWT to the next level, giving you high-performance widgets, feature-rich templates and layouts, advanced charting, data loaders and stores, and accessibility, and much more. Quite simply, Ext GWT is the fastest, most powerful way to create rich web-based applications using Java.

                           
   

•           Configuration Management for Agile System Administrators - CFEngine - Distributed Configuration Management   

  Configuration Management for Agile System Administrators CFEngine automates IT infrastructure to ensure the Availability, Security and Compliance of mission-critical applications and services

        tags:              infrastructure

                           
   

•           qooxdoo » Home   

  qooxdoo is a universal JavaScript framework that enables you to create applications for a wide range of platforms. With its object-oriented programming model you build rich, interactive applications (RIAs),  native-like apps for mobile devices, light-weight traditional web applications or even applications to run outside the browser. You leverage its integrated tool chain to develop and deploy applications of any scale, while taking advantage of modern web technologies like HTML5 and CSS3, its comprehensive feature set and a state-of-the-art GUI toolkit. qooxdoo is open source under liberal licenses, led by the world’s largest web host 1&1,

        tags:              javascript        framework

             
               
   

•           Railo   

  CFML engine

        tags:              coldfusion        opensource

                           
 

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.