A lot of my development work is done in Drupal/PHP. For several years, the definitive source of books about Drupal has been Packt Publishing. I have a shelf full of their books. And I was a beta tester of their PacktLib, and still have a subscription. PacktLib lets you read any Packt book on-line. I find it most useful for deciding if I'm going to buy a book.
My wife is not a power user. For years she could check email (using the icon with the label "Email"). If she wanted to create a document in Word, the kids would help.
But she's getting better. She can create her own Word documents, print them, even find things via Google.
Since she's not much of a power user, her last upgrade was to a single core Pentium desktop with 1GB RAM and a CRT monitor, running Windows XP. It was never a fast computer, but it kept up with her needs.
When I was in college, back in the middle ages, party invitations frequently came with the notation BYOB, "bring your own booze."
Now, more and more job offers come with the notation BYOD, "bring your own device."
Another FLA (four letter acronym) being used to describe this change is CoIT, or the Consumerism of IT. One variant I like is Cooperative IT.
This was one of the recurring themes at this last year's Defrag conference.
I've been building Drupal websites for 5 years, full time for the past two. Most of that has been at the site architecture and module levels but occasionally I have been "forced" to do some theming.
Every year I have the privilege of attending Defrag, http://www.defragcon.com, a conference unlike any other I attend during the year. Where other technology conferences are about what's new, what's hot, but some specific topic, Defrag often appears as a random walk through technologies that will be. But every year I come away with one or two insights that prove to be predictors of future trends. It is an amazing, confusing experience.
One of the interesting things about the Defrag conference (http://www.defragcon.com) is it helps me bring ideas together. I have been fascinated by virtual teams since getting my MBA in 2000 from the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, without setting foot on campus. After a semester or two you learned which students you hoped would be assigned to your virtual team--they had developed a reputation.
The end of 2010 hackers broke into the Gawker user database and downloaded its contents, including all the usernames and passwords. Gawker operates a larger number of on-line news services, including several I read regularly. I figured no big deal, the hackers know how to leave comments on those sites.
At that time I pretty much had a single password for anything I deemed "low security," which was pretty much anything that wasn't banking oriented. My banking passwords were much stronger and each one was unique. But for email, Facebook, Twitter, etc. I used that single password.
QR-Codes. You've probably seen them and not paid a lot of attention. They are the square black and white "matrices" you see on outdoor advertising or in magazines. They are becoming more and more common, yet a lot of people don't know what they can do for their businesses.
With 18GB of RAM memory and a quad core CPU, I rarely need to worry about what programs are running in the background of my desktop computer. My thin and light laptop is a bit more limited (4 GB RAM, dual core CPU). But my netbook only has 1GB RAM and the modest Atom processor. Having a bunch of relatively useless stuff running in the background can make a real difference in how it performs (actually how all my computers perform).
I broke down and bought an iPad 2 last month.
Generally I don't buy Apple products on the principal they are "closed" systems. Usually there aren't a lot of options to expand them without using Apple's unique connectors, etc. And they generally are more expensive for a given functionality.
I was really pulling for the Android tablets introduced at last year's Consumer Electronics Show. But unfortunately when they finally started shipping they ended up being as expensive, or more so, than the iPad.
