this is silly. the linux desktop is far from dead and is only going to improve when A) people become disenfranchised with the direction Windows 8 is going, and B) people can buy and play all their games (and one day, other commercial applications) through Steam. I think Valve is providing the engine that will drive Linux desktop adoption.

this has a lot of potential... it gives the "laptop" experience the same flexibility that the "desktop" experience has in terms of reusing the keyboard/mouse/monitor. You buy the clamcase dock once, and may be able to use it for several phones as long as they all use a similar connector to dock with it, and you'd only need to replace that portion of it when it breaks, rather than pretty much every time you upgrade as you would on a laptop.

This sounds like the Superintendent in Halo ODST.

KATE: RISC architecture is gonna change everything.

DADE: Yeah. RISC is good.

the concern I have is that CyanogenMod is so good because it lacks the crap that handset manufacturers force onto users. I doubt that a phone running a Samsung branded CyanogenMod will be able to escape having (for example) unremoveable Verizon junk forced into it.

why are people modding this up? i bet this guy had the same short-sighted view about the mobile market before Android came out and now is the market leader. as more and more applications are moving away from desktop apps to online based applications, it's certainly plausible that at some point in the future people will start asking why they are still paying for the privilege of an OS like Windows when everything they need to do on their computer takes place in their browser. and as the differences between "computers" and "phones" is continually blurred, how can you be so sure that at some point in the near future ChromeOS/Android won't become a dominant player on the "desktop"? that too is certainly plausible.

i think PSLUG needs to come back. i remember the old install-fests and linux demo day where they had all these (now bankrupt) Linux companies come demo their products.

now where is network support, ssh, nmap and other tools that could make this actually useful to the roaming sysadmin?

on the login screen you type in your username then at the bottom select "Ubuntu Classic" from the list of options. It's not "hidden deep in the operating system", in fact it's the first screen you see.

I kinda like this sorta post. I used to feel a closer connection with the /. mods back in the day than recently. It didn't always feel like one Apple/Google press release after another like it does nowadays. It seemed like there was more editorial content. (Not that I'm asking for JonKatz to return...)

this all comes down to time. i can reapply the data to a fresh VM image in a matter of hours and have it back up and running, pretty much without variation. hunting down a deep, dark problem can take 30 minutes or it might take days, and depending on the problem, that may simply be unacceptable.

the real skill is knowing when to pull the trigger on a rebuild vs knowing when it's something you can find and fix. hunting down problems and fixing them is something many sysadmins crave. at least VM's give us the ability to investigate the broken machine at our leisure, while a working VM can jump into production.

unless management wants to rely solely on rebuilds and the time investment it takes to do them every time, there will always be a need for sysadmins to analyze problems and figure out the "whys" and "hows" that caused them.

Google bought Dodgeball (which did this sort of location tracking via sms) in 2005. Dodgeball's founder (Dennis Crowley) then created Foursquare. If anybody should be patenting this it should be Crowley or Google.

imagine a beowulf cluster of these! ;)

i kinda wish rorr.im worked for slashdot. :-\ i mean, we INVENTED slashdotting.

i have been using foursquare for a long time and i absolutely love it. playing the meta-game of acquiring badges has motivated me to travel to all new places and discover things I may never have come across on my own. it's fun, and my buddies and i have gone on some road trips to see places we've found through foursquare to great success. if you have an actual social life, it can be great fun to find which bar or club your friends are at on any given night without having to contact everybody directly. it's nice the way it is. i wouldn't want facebook getting their grubby hands on it.