No explanation in the summary, so a quick copy/paste from the official site: "MediaGoblin is a free software media publishing platform that anyone can run. You can think of it as a decentralized alternative to Flickr, YouTube, SoundCloud, etc. "

Basically it's a "private cloud" (I hate myself for writing that) with which you can upload your photos, videos, songs, etc - so they live on /your/ server.

It is actually pretty neat. It has the usual marks of an open source product - a very, uh, functional interface that doesn't really grab you immediately. It's a little fiddly to install, but not too bad.

But it all works pretty well - I set up a test server reasonably quickly, and it performs as advertised. Getting photos and videos online is nice and easy, although there's no obvious way to upload albums - it's all one photo at a time (looks like it's at least on their TODO.

I think for it to get some solid mainstream acceptance they'll need to work on the design side - make it look beautiful and Apple-ish out of the box so that civilians are immediately awestruck with how pretty it is - otherwise they might struggle to find adoption outside of the hardcore OSS crowd.

But it's a cool idea, and it's good to see it got funding - the federation stuff will be interesting and if done correctly could really make it a good tool for media sharing.

This.

We used to have a more DevOps approach when we were a startup (1999-2005ish?). After a while as our contracts got bigger and our client projects got more visibility, they wanted to move into a more change-request-managed style of development (this is despite the fact that we'd never (in my recollection) had any incidents as a result of our management process).

We created a strict separation of roles between Dev and Ops. Devs just wrote code, Ops pushed code to servers.

To this day, many years later, our Dev team still has poor visibility into our operational environment. Getting easy access to log files, looking at temporary files - really /basic/ operational stuff that Devs had done for years was denied to them and a "process" built around getting that stuff from Ops.

This process is slow and awkward. Arguably we could have done it better using tools but we'd bought into the process too much, it existed, so why bother changing it?

Similarly, from an Operations side, their workflow suffered because the devs would be off in a silo, then one day someone would pop up and say "OK I need a full staging and production environment for this project by tomorrow".

Again, not great project management on our part, but what was originally a natural flow of information between two teams who a) historically worked very closely and b) NEED to work very closely slowed to a trickle as the "DevOps" interface was basically shut down.

I have been pushing for a DevOps role for a few years, without success. For me DevOps is about lightening the burden of Dev and Ops teams by increasing the ability for information to flow between them quickly and easily.

In our company it's almost the opposite - we have only three operations staff but 12 developers. Just by virtue of the fact we have more developers they have a wide range of experience doing some operational tasks, just for their own projects.

I'll make sure to let the 7,518,856 other people I play Dota 2 with every month know (that number from just loading the game and looking at the unique monthly players figure).

That is, if I can get their attention while they're all trying to be the next team to win $1m in cash.

(Related aside: check out Valve's Free to Play documentary; it's a great watch for some insight into the lives of professional gamers.)

I'm currently in Columbus, OH - currently undergoing a mumps problem, with almost 200 cases reported. The number is still growing. This is a dumb problem to have to worry about. Get your vaccinations.

I always find it funny how often this is a (modded-up) defence to claims of corruption in Western society (generally the USA on Slashdot, but you'll see it almost everywhere else).

It doesn't mean that that you should stop striving to eliminate what corruption you do have. Or highlighting it at every opportunity and saying "that's wrong".

From the perspective of an outsider (Australian), the US increasingly looks like it's becoming an oligarchy where money is the only thing that matters. If this story were true it is a sad state of affairs.

So... Who cares if you have an accident that kills or maims someone else because you ignored the manufacturers instructions to modify something.... As long as someone else is around to pick up the bill?

Are you American or something?

It's a social construct that has been turned into legislation, which then defines the rights. Some people have the right to get married, and some don't.

When your organisation is built on the concept of "openness and inclusiveness" then it seems strange to me for them to allow someone - their leader - to hold an opinion which is arguably not about those things.

Is the only thing worth being intolerant about, intolerance itself?

Anyway. This is a complicated issue; I still am not sure how I feel about it. I feel sorry for Brendan because of the situation he was put in - but I am probably more sorry for an entire class of people who are denied rights to engage in a social construct of their own free will for some arbitrary reason like the gender of the person they want to be with. I don't know how to do this kind of moral calculus.

I do not understand what you're asking or where that quote is from. Wondering if you replied to me by mistake?

I was wondering this too, but unfortunately his blog post on the subject - which I would say is the only really authoritative source of information - is basically just gutless corporate-speak (e.g., "Mozilla will remain egalitarian blah blah blah").

It does nothing to explain his personal opinion or his history on the topic, so the only thing I can get out of it is that I'll have to remain largely in the dark about what his personal opinions are and hope it doesn't influence any decisions he makes for Mozilla.

I would like to see an honest, up front post on his blog where he lays out his opinion. Even if I disagree with it (as I suspect I would), at least then I'd respect him for being up-front about it.

Your two posts were fascinating, thanks. It has never crossed my mind to think about rats that much, but the sentence about humans effectively keeping them safe from other predators is one of those obvious-in-hindsight things that I probably never would have realised.

As an Australian that has recently relocated to the US, you have also inculcated a new fear of raccoons, which I will now go at lengths to avoid!

Out of interest, have any of Facebook's other acquisitions been used to force users onto the FB platform? In other words, do they have a strong precedent of doing this?

In the case of Oculus spending $2b and then immediately trying to alienate its core user base by somehow pushing FB on the tiny percentage of users that don't already have it seems like it would be a weird thing to do.