I've recently discovered the Fall From Heaven 2 mod for Civ4. It's the most sophisticated and complete mod for Civ4 out there. It's a fantasy mod set in a deep and well fleshed out universe
It brings much more new concepts and content than both commercial extensions, Warlords and Beyond the Sword (although it requires these to work).

I expect it to keep me busy enough well past Civ V enters the discount bins. Having the mod ported to Civ V, however, will make me switch in an instant. Hint hint, Firaxis.

This year's FOSDEM in Bruxelles had over 2400 unique MAC addresses and 3600 visitors a day(source). We enjoyed a 1Gbps pipe, and far from saturated it.

It was overall of excellent quality, though there was a glitch in at least one of the hacker rooms where the operators had to upgrade the AP firmware. The geographic setup was more broken out: FOSDEM happens at the Universite Libre de Belgique (how appropriate), with talks in lots of classrooms spread across a few buildings.

It would be useful for everyone if they could post a writeup of their infrastructure.

TFA already included that very XKCD. Its cultural embrace extends...

Drive letters. Enough said.
Backslashes as directory separators
(...)
Non-POSIX filesystem semantics

So what you're complaining about is that Symbian is not Unix?

Very strange application deployment consisting of several disparate directories with magical names

As opposed to Unix?

"[This point was really hammered down for me when "Supreme Commander", highly hailed as innovative, came out and it turns out it's an almost 1-to-1 copy of the old "Total Annihilation" from 10 years ago only with better graphics]"

And that's exactly as I and thousands of other fans wanted it. Most remakes are crap. SupCom isn't.

(actually, a 1:1 copy of the old with better graphics would better describe TA: Spring)

It did add a vital gameplay mechanic in the zoomable tactical display*. Starcraft II is going to hurt so much when I won't be able to do that.

*I'm sure other games did it before... Rome: Total War?

PulseAudio was adopted to solve the problem of broken audio for some users, but PulseAudio broke stuff for some users for whom things worked before.

There is more loud complaining about newly-broken systems than there is praise for newly-working systems (humans are a fussy lot), and the complaining is drowning the praise.

Lesson: when you change something, make sure it works well and more importantly doesn't break anything for existing users, or the backlash will be terrible. Apple knows this, Ubuntu is learning this.

It's been close to 5 months now, and he still hasn't achieved his goal of publishing his apps on the store. He has had to put up with nonsensical paperwork and claims. He is at the mercy of a bureaucracy he doesn't control. He still doesn't know what to do to get through this mess. I dunno, it kinda reminds me of Kafka's The Trial.

Maybe your "Don't abuse Kafka" rant has merit for other situations. This one? Not so much.

Oh that stupid argument again. Let's cut the bull: There are about 30 000 employees on the Redmond campus, (and that was in 2005, before they started expansion to hold 12 000 more). That many employees, and that much infrastructure, does NOT move overnight, or even over a few years.

Just like most other companies contributing drivers to the kernel through Greg K-H's Linux Driver Project, as Greg points out himself

It's still better than some other industry-standard languages such as, I dunno, C and C++. Show me their standardized network, threading, GUI libraries please? When did an open-source Java become useable: before or after Microsoft came with open-source C#?

Now I hate Microsoft as much as the next slashdotter, but let's be pragmatic please. Microsoft isn't Bill Gates, it's a thousand-headed hydra. Some heads may still be stuck in the old ways, but things are slowly improving.

In the old days, C# would never have been standardized, it would've been bundled with all their applications, and dev kits would cost thousands. They would've counter-sued to oblivion anybody complaining about their linux drivers. Yeah, OOXML is one of their myriad fuckups, but please don't single out the driver issue or C#, which are actually signs that things are improving at Microsoft, even if they're not perfect yet.

In an ideal world, you just recompile your C code.

In the real world, your code (indirectly) uses low-level libraries and system calls that only work on a given chip because they make use of specific hardware, either through assembly or through hardware-mapped structures.

More rarely, some basic C operations don't work as expected. A common gotcha on previous ARM architectures were that all memory accesses had to be 32-bit aligned (it saved transistors and power). That meant that you couldn't use a char[] array, you necessarily had to use an int32_t[] from which you'd then extract each byte.

Woops, looks like /. is hammering the server. Here's a copy of the text (as of now):

I've been taking a closer look at the WebOS side of my Palm Pre tonight, and I noticed that it periodically uploads information to Palm, Inc.

The first thing sent is intended to be my GPS location. It's the same location I get if I open the map app on the Pre. Not very accurate in this case, but I've seen it be accurate enough to find my house before.

{ "errorCode": 0, "timestamp": 1249855555954.000000, "latitude": 36.594108, "longitude": -82.183260, "horizAccuracy": 2523, "heading": 0, "velocity": 0, "altitude": 0, "vertAccuracy": 0 }

Here they can tell every WebOS app I use, and for how long.

{ "appid": "com.palm.app.phone", "event": "close", "timestamp": 1250006362 }
{ "appid": "com.palm.app.messaging", "event": "launch", "timestamp": 1250006422 }
{ "appid": "com.palm.app.messaging", "event": "close", "timestamp": 1250006446 }

It sends the above info on a daily basis.

2009-08-10t09:15:10z upload /var/context/pending/1249895710-contextfile.gz.contextlog ok rdx-30681971
2009-08-11t09:15:10z upload /var/context/pending/1249982110-contextfile.gz.contextlog ok rdx-31306808

There is also some info that is recorded when a WebOS app crashes. Now, I've seen WebOS crash hard a time or two, but it turns out apps are crashing fairly frequently behind the scenes, and each such crash is logged and a system state snapshot taken. At least some of these are uploaded, though if things are crashing a whole lot it will be throttled.

2009-08-09T17:01:22Z upload /var/log/rdxd/pending/rdxd_log_59.tgz OK RDX-30246857
2009-08-09T17:05:36Z upload /var/log/rdxd/pending/rdxd_log_26.tgz OK RDX-30249465
2009-08-09T17:09:11Z upload /var/log/rdxd/pending/rdxd_log_56.tgz OK RDX-30252374
2009-08-09T17:11:46Z upload /var/log/rdxd/pending/rdxd_log_70.tgz OK RDX-30253958
2009-08-09T17:16:29Z upload /var/log/rdxd/pending/rdxd_log_67.tgz ERR_UPLOAD_THROTTLED_DAILY
2009-08-09T17:17:28Z upload /var/log/rdxd/pending/rdxd_log_51.tgz ERR_UPLOAD_THROTTLED_DAILY
2009-08-09T17:20:40Z upload /var/log/rdxd/pending/rdxd_log_21.tgz ERR_UPLOAD_THROTTLED_DAILY

Each tarball contains a kernel dmesg, syslog, a manifest.txt listing all installed ipkg packages (including third-party apps), a backtrace of the crash, a df (from which they can tell I'm using Debian on the phone), and ps -f output listing all processes owned by root (but not by joey).

The uploading is handled by uploadd, which reads /etc/uploadd.conf:

[SERVER=rdx]
RepositoryURL=https:///palmcsext/prefRequest?prefkey=APPLICATIONS,RDX_SRV
UploadURL=https:///palmcsext/RDFileReceiver

[SERVER=context]
RepositoryURL=https:///palmcsext/prefRequest?prefkey=APPLICATIONS,RDX_SRV
UploadURL=https:////palmcsext/RDFileReceiver

The "HOST" this is sent to via https is ps.palmws.com.

My approach to disable this, which may not stick across WebOS upgrades, was to comment out the 'exec' line in /etc/event.d/uploadd and reboot. However, then I noticed a contextupload process running. This is started by dbus, so the best way to disable it seems to be: rm /usr/bin/contextupload

BTW, since Palm has lawyers, they have a privacy policy, which covers their ass fairly well regarding all this, without going into details or making clear that the above data is being uploaded.