Wake me up when it can do power over wireless ethernet.

Yeah, every web developer runs Ubuntu up until that moment when they realise they have to make sure the site works with Internet Explorer. So the first thing you'll have to do with this is install Virtual Box and do a Windows Install. You do have a Windows license, right?

Make friends with someone in your Cultural/Media Studies faculty. Preferably someone doing research into social media, emerging cultural phenomena, self-organising cliques, something like that. Then get them to repeatedly hassle IT to give them access to blocked sites, claiming its for their research. I reckon after the fifth time IT will give up and just open up the whole network (their router access control lists will get unmanageable for their competence level).

Who exposes their Oracle DB server to the outside world anyway? Surely its just accessible from the servers that need it. Anyone know any public Oracle DB servers? Lemme just scan the interwebs...

Of course if your front-end gets pwned then you don't want your DB server getting rooted, but hey, they got your front end server... Hopefully that will only have restricted access to the databases it needs, so an Oracle remote exploit here could let an attacker get to anything on the server...

Either way up, not a good thing... Has Larry sold his MiG yet?

Do you know what ITIL is? Find out. Then get yourself a CMDB. There's open source ones so you're not going to break the budget.

http://www.cmdbuild.org/en/index_html?set_language=en&cl=en

  Then get yourself a document management system. Alfresco? It's a monster.

If you can tame those systems, then you can look for a massively well-paid job with a bigger company that wants to leverage enhanced ITIL capabilities in an enterprise solution situation scenario. F**k yeah.

Anyone want to tell those guys that SketchUp isn't open source? This is slashdot after all, and we care about these things don't we?

Getting '503 Service Unavailable' when I try and wget the relevant URL. The slashdot effect for good!

How does groupon work?

Company A has a product that normally sells for X. They get a deal with groupon to sell it for Y, such that Y < X.

Groupon take some cut, so the retailer is getting A, such that A<Y<X.

So I call the retailer and go 'hey, let me buy your thing at price B', such that: A<B<Y<X.

The retailer gets more than they would from groupon. I pay less than I would if I'd gone through groupon. Groupon get zilch. I win, the retailer wins. My only issue is how I pitch the price B. But for me, anything below Y is a win for both of us, I just don't know what A is (if I go below that, the retailer is better off with groupon).

Or I've missed something, apart from the fact that if groupon didnt exist I wouldn't have heard about the retailer in the first place...

So can anyone tell me what the circled numbers 1 to 5 are:

here

40ft across, irregularly spaced, close to something the size of a soccer/football field.

Actually its the complete opposite. The telephone companies are desperate to fibre-up the working class estates in order to cut into Sky's satellite TV revenues. In my town I hear you can get fast fibre internet north of the river, but not on the more middle-class south side. There's no money to be made in infrastructure unless you can sell 260 channels of endless crap to unemployed chavs sitting on their butts all day. Slight caricature.

Described as "Mystical Barmpottery" (a lovely english expression we should all use more):

http://www.dcscience.net/?p=3528

and some wonderful racism in there too:

http://www.dcscience.net/?p=3853

  The only Waldorf I'd want my kids taught by is the one who sits next to Statdler on The Muppet Show.

I thought you meant you wanted 2500 users on the Linux system itself. That's a fairly big /etc/passwd file, and if they all log in at once then I suspect even a high-end system will crawl a bit.

What you really want is a system that can run a forum that can support 2500 users, but you don't say how many simultaneously, or anything else useful. For 2500 simultaneous users, all posting and reading, you might need more than one box...

So, proper requirements spec plzkthx.

..these game-changing big forces that will alter our lives forever? ISPs will start only taking bitcoins for payment. Heck, this is another bitcoin slashvertisement isnt it?

I laughed at the "download" icon. All the greatest tech minds and what do they use for the download icon? A floppy disk.

"Can things like 5 months of "no backups" happen with an rsync-based backup to external hard drives? (see my comment above regarding same). I'm honestly asking."

Of course. Suppose the server gets rebooted, but there's an issue with the backup drive, and the server spits a warning and carries on without mounting it. Now the clients are dumping to server:/backups as usual, but oh dear, that's on the little 10G root file system and not the 6TB backup. Which soon fills up. And there's insufficient monitoring and logging for anyone to notice. I mean, why bother checking the disk space, we're never going to fill 6TB, right?

Just one scenario out of plenty. New or expired ssh keys? Someone changed the network card? Lots of things can trip up a system, the epic fail is not having a human check it (which would take two minutes) frequently.