I'd buy it. The idea of my mobile phone being merely one more extension hanging off the Asterisk system I have installed at home is VERY appealing. Yes, I know, there are all sorts of edge cases (home phone is down, there's an emergency, blah blah blah) and Slashbots love to be stupidly pedantic about edge cases, but by and large this is the kind of thing a lot of people want -- an "extremely cordless phone" that is part of the voice plan (and phone number) they already have. Bring it on.

So the malware guys found a bunch of unpatched DSL modems with a vulnerability that allowed the resolver to be reconfigured remotely, and pointed it towards the "bad" DNS servers.

So why not just go to the "bad" DNS servers, which they now control, find out the IP addresses of the compromised modems, and use the same vulnerability to reconfigure the resolver to point back to "good" DNS servers?

Facebook is a mile wide but an inch deep. It's basically a whiny high school full of drama queens that happens to have half a billion people enrolled. As others have posted here already, Google+ actually delivers some substance. It's where smart people go.

The way I like to say it is: Google+ is where Facebook users go when they grow up.

No schizophrenia needed. That bit of information came directly from a Compaq rep.

"I see you're trying to do several things at once. Which jobs may I screw up for you?"

Exactly. Climate "science" (or what we hear about it in the news, anyway) isn't science at all; it's politics masquerading as science. And I have to say it's really a turn off when Slashdot suspends its "news for nerds" theme to take a hard line on a political issue.

Your argument is compelling and backed up by such detailed reasoning!

This could be a big win for open source. Are you concerned about your privacy? Then you'd better not be running proprietary mail or web software because the government backdoors are pre-installed (actually, they're probably there already today, but now you'll know for sure). Only if you're running open source will you be able to inspect the code yourself, verify that there are no government backdoors, or remove them if they are present. I'm sure the clever among us will even go as far as to send the FBI to a honeypot while directing private communications to the real servers.

Here is the thing.... in the next 18 months you won't see DVD players on most laptops.

Correction:

In the next 18 months Microsoft will strongarm OEM's into omitting the DVD drives on most laptops.

It'll be just like in the mid 1990's when Compaq switched the CD drives in their servers from SCSI models to IDE models because Microsoft told them to. And it'll be just like in the late 2000's when Microsoft started forcing netbook manufacturers to lard up the specs on the previously cheap devices because they needed just enough horsepower to run Windows XP.

Microsoft still has feet over the necks of all major OEM's. Until this problem is corrected, they will still call the shots.

Is everything Microsoft does wrong by definition?

Yes.

Microsoft's business practices over the years have earned them truckloads of bad karma. They've singlehandedly set the entire industry back by a decade or more. So yes, it will take more than getting something right once in a while for them to establish a reputation as a good citizen.

Oracle have shot themselves in the foot, and this is a good example of why. Even if the R-Pi runs Java, no one is going to trust Oracle not to sue them out of existence after the way they've abused Google over its use of Java on the Android platform.

That "extra cruft in rack design" is where your cables go. I have an 18,000 sqft data center over here and I can tell you from experience that what you call "cruft" isn't nearly enough space for all of the cables once things start getting dense. We are actually considering 23" (telecom standard) racks with 19" rails in them for cabinets that aggregate the networking gear, just for this reason.

But oh no, far be it from Facebook to actually work with the industry. They screwed up the Internet and now they're going to screw up your data center.

This may not matter. If the litigious bastards at Oracle have their way, future Android builds will migrate to "all native code" just like on the iPhone and other non-vm based devices. They'll just sadly set aside Dalvik and declare ARM to be the official ISA of Android phones, or do some crazy thing where applications are compiled (perhaps in the cloud?) before installation to a device. I don't see C#/CLR/Mono becoming part of the Android stack, not now, not ever. Google wouldn't abandon one third-party managed code environment only to embrace another. Perhaps what Google should do is settle the case: "We will pay you a royalty for every Android if you make Microsoft go away."

Simple solution: get a modest size rack and snuggle it *sideways* to the wall. It's not quite as obtrusive that way because it doesn't go as far into the room, and then you get access to both the front and the back. In my basement I have a rack sideways on the wall and a desk in the corner behind it. That corner also happens to be where cables from the rest of the house come in, and the service cables arrive there as well (fiber to the home ftw!). Instant geek cave.

Well yes, VMware is still the market leader, but what would anyone do with this source code anyway? It's not as if VMware has anything left to teach the rest of the world about virtualization. The rest of the world has pretty much caught up and virtualization is a commodity now.