Josh Wieder

Microsoft has started giving away 90 day free trials of Azure - SQL reporting and media services are included. Its worth giving it a try since the price is right, if for no other reason than to become a bit more familiar with the platform. Whether or not Microsoft comes out a winner in the Cloud Revenue Wars has yet to be seen, but my suspicion is the platform will be here to stay for some time.* * This website is not involved with any affiliate advertising. I do not receive any commissions for click throughs or signups and I was not paid for this post.. 

I got a kick out of this. Check out more coder/admin comics here .

I am a huge fan and regular reader of the blog "The Ancient Gaming Noob" . I've been a gamer since I could use a keyboard, alternating between the qBasic games on my Xerox laptop with double 5 1/2 floppies  (remember Gorillas? I rewrote the script and made the Gorillas different colors! ) to the Apple II's at school (Oregon Trail and Prince of Persia ftw!) Different Colors Recently, The Ancient Gaming Noob has been discussing Richard Garriot's Kickstarter campaign . The discussion is really getting interesting. You have Garriot, a man who lives in a castle and has been to outer space, using a fund raising tool ostensibly designed for those that, well, need money. Garriot's campaign, which as of this writing has nearly completed his goal of raising US$1 million to help fund a new game, may be more of a self-financing marketing tactic than anything. This begs a few questions - does this sort of tactic devalue Kickstarter? What is the ultimate use of Kickst

Mehdi Sadaghdar has some very funny (and very smart) videos on his Youtube channel where he performs and explains a variety of electrical tests and principles. Check it out!

Samba 4 is nothing short of amazing. Until recently I was familiar with earlier versions and had done nothing more than mounted cross-OS volumes (to create simple white-label NFS storage devices, for example). Version 4 has hacked some major portions of the Windows kernel functionality and re-worked them in Python.  For example, did you know that a Linux server can be an Active Directory Domain Controller? Install samba-tool and run the following command (assuming your domain already exists):  # samba-tool join MY.DOMAIN DC -Uadministrator@my.domain --realm=MY.DOMAIN Use the 'samdump' operator for Kerberos data to standard output:  # samba-tool samdump In no way would I recommend this for outside of a testing / development environment - there are some key differences between samba 4 AD and real AD (one issue documented so far is that samba 4 uses some NT 4 notions that Windows simply emulates in recent versions, for example  primary and secondary domain controller r

Fast Company - The Vatican has selected EMC to source roughly 2.8 Petabytes of storage for a project to digitize the Vatican library, home to over 1 million books. Business Week - Skype service in China is actively monitored for certain key phrases that are offensive to the state. When a user inputs these phrases, the conversation is forwarded to Chinese intelligence. Skype is currently owned by Microsoft, and in China is partnered with TOM Online to provide service in the region (like India, China requires foreign entities to be minority stake holders with a domestic corporation in order to do business). Microsoft has not responded to requests to clarify the surveillance features in Skype beyond saying that they adhere to Chinese law when operating there. No word yet on whether American users are monitored as well (at this point, I would be more shocked if they were not) - the Chinese program bears striking similarity to the NSA program that became public shortly after 9/11, at l