Developers at Gnome have reduced the entire UI to a single button and they're even trying to get rid of that.

Yes, they are. But since they haven't achieved that yet, they took an interim step: to eliminate all confusion about where to press the button, all buttons are now full screen.

Yes, there were a lot of "rogue" DHCP servers at LCA, although a better term might be miss-configured because I am almost certain it wasn't deliberate. But the story neglects to mention the reason. Attendees were invited to set up wireless access points because the accommodation didn't provide wireless. There were I guess 20 or 30 units, and I be surprised if every one of those units didn't have at least 1 AP set up by a community minded resident. It is inevitable that some of those will have forgotten to turn DHCP off, or perhaps plugged the internet connection into the switch rather than the upstream port on the router.

This is avoidable. LCA owns some 50 or so access points, which have been deployed in the past to supply wireless to the accommodation. Doing so means the attendees don't bother unpacking their access points, and the rogue DHCP problem goes away. However, deploying those access points takes a substantial amount of time and organisation. LCA is run by volunteers. So they have a tradeoff - they can put in a substantial amount of work and the problem largely goes away, or deal with the problem during the conference as it arises. As LCA attendees are a pretty sophisticated bunch networking wise, either way works well enough.

The one thing that doesn't make any sense is blaming the attendees, which is the way this story tries to slant it. That is like leaving the nappy off the baby and then blaming it for the piss on the carpet. The consequences of not supplying wireless are entirely predictable. Reasonable adults either supply wireless, or accept the consequences and don't whinge about it.

A more interesting topic of discussion is the collapse of the network in the accommodation on Friday night. In hindsight the cause is obvious. For the second LCA in a row they got all most of the conference video's up before the conference closed. Come Friday night many attendees decided to download huge quantities of them, the usual reason given being "so I have something to watch on the way home". It was a really good idea actually - LCA this year had 4 streams, and inevitably people ended up missing what in hindsight were "must see" talks. The problem was the link between the residences and LCA simply could not cope with the traffic.

Again, that could have been solved. Indeed it was solved at LCA 2011 using DNS tricks. In that year a copy of the videos was put on a server in the residences, and FQDN for the video server resolved to that server for the residences only. Or perhaps enabling torrents for the videos would have worked well enough. As it was, internet connectivity was almost non-existent Friday night, and that caused howls of anguish - far more anguish than the rogue DHCP servers.

I'll see that graph with wriggly lines and raise you an animated graph with wriggly lines:

http://blogs.crikey.com.au/purepoison/2011/11/16/it-hasnt-warmed-since%E2%80%A6/

You know where else Government got involved in the 1960s. . Health care via medicare.

Yes, well there is one little problem with this "governments are the problem". And that is just about other place on the planet gets better bang for the buck in their heath care than the US, and they do it by using more government regulation, not less.

You are right though. The government is the problem. But it is not everybodies government. It's yours. Most governments on the planet seem to be able to design systems that aren't rorted by corporates. The US - you lot seem to specialise in corporate welfare. And its not small business corporate welfare either. It's always the big end of town. Your banks fuck up and send the economy to hell and what do you do - bail out the bloody banks. You establish a student loan system and rather than forcing them to provide more education for the extra dollars, what do you do - allow them to rake off the extra money by charging more. You design new public health insurance system and who do you let write the rules - the bloody health insurance industry. I wonder who they will favour? The way your industrial complex sucks off the teat of the government paid for military is so bad your politicians invented a new word for it.

Then the cretins among you then say "our government is too big, too strong, running too much of the country, we must chop it down to size." Well it may be too big. But it's not because it's too strong. It's because it's too weak, and continually allows itself to be bought with corporate money. It's called capitalistic cronyism - the person with the most money gets to buy the most government influence. If you want to see it in action now, just look at how the legal fraternity is manipulating patent law. When that happens what you end up with is what we see in the US today - the people with the most money ensuring the bulk of the taxes end up in their pockets. When there aren't enough taxes to satisfy your corporate overloads, what do they manipulate your government into doing - borrowing more. To bail them out of all things. It's beyond belief.

It's time you guys woke up to yourselves and go got yourselves a real democracy. You know, one where votes aren't bought by the person who can spend the most on advertising. They have to be earned, by putting money in the pockets of the voter.

What you are possibly missing is that Linux doesn't use much hardware in todays terms. OpenWrt will happily run Linux plus a user space in 16M. That 16M gives you real time multitasking, IPv4, IPv6 and CIFS network stack, firewall, QOS, flash, HDD and fat, file systems, ACL's, 80211 stack, bluetooth stack, USB drivers, memory management, a mature development environment with every language known to man.

On today's hardware 16M is nothing, even Nokia's current S40 phones have 16M. In fact they (eg a Nokia C3) have 128M. Of that, Linux + the basic user space stuff uses less than 10%. In view of all that, the question isn't why do the use Linux for new development, the question is how on earth could you justify not using it?

Yes, the current term is ridiculous, but so is 10 years!

The economic argument behind copyright is we get more software, books, movies or whatever because of it. The balance becomes one of making copyright long enough to the producers of works so they an economic incentive return to produce more works, but no so long that they earn money from old works and have no produce not ones. We are after all a society built upon continual incremental improvement of things we have built before. Interfering with someone's ability to build on what others have done has to be done with a very light hand, otherwise it will reduce the rate on innovation and improvement rather than increase it.

A good for guess at how long we should afford a work protection is its economic lifetime - ie the time it takes them to haul in the bulk of its income. For movies and books that is under 2 years. How long do you think Microsoft should have to get to each back its development effort into XP? 10 years sounds reasonable to me. Ditto for those CAD packages. It we had 10 year copyright terms, it's probably that (a) the people who developed the original ones would have earned a substantial return and (b) many more people would have access to them now. That is the balance you want to strike. Bear in mind you need very little economic incentive to drive the production of software - open source shows us that.

The problem is that I don't believe in universal morals.

I suspect we have a budding new Utilitarian here, only he doesn't know it yet. Welcome to the club.

If it did, the N9 would be running MeeGo

The N9 was "running" MeeGo when it was due to be released in September 2010. Running is in quotes because it started swapping before it got to run a line of Qt code.

The introduction of MeeGo had no impact.

The MeeGo base it was standing on had to be thrown away. These one step forward two steps back manoeuvres take time to execute.

Key takeaway is that hiring open source evangelists to design a mobile OS(i.e Meego) failed and they wouldn't have had enough devices running it.

That is clearly bullshit. They didn't fail, as they have now delivered the N9.

They were late. They weren't late because of open source, they were late because the changed higher ups changed direction one too many times with the dropping of Maemo for MeeGo. But nonetheless they delivered. And they delivered long before Microsoft. They had a working Maemo based phone ready for the market place before Mango was Released To Manufacturing. If they wanted to ship a fleet of new phones ASAP, they should have done it using their home grown Maemo platform.

People from Microsoft understand the meaning of the term late better than most because they are familiar with Vista. It is a setback, not a disaster. What changed it from a setback to a disaster wasn't open source or engineering decisions, it was the board loosing their faith in the own company's engineering culture - something that Microsoft would never do. They hired a CEO that reflected that opinion and promptly declared declared all their products to be shit. Guess what? Their customers believed them.

It will be a great a lesson for business schools: it is indeed possible to destroy one of the worlds largest tech companies in 24 months or so. All it takes is a board consisting entirely of spineless, risk adverse morons who are willing to abandoning everything their company is built on and flee to the first exit offered as soon as the going gets tough.