ZFS does work under Linux - my understanding is that the only reason you don't find it in the main repositories (Ubuntu has it in a PPA) is a licensing issue. Or is there some technical issue I'm missing?

I've read Carnegie's work, and disagreed fundamentally with it for a simple reason: priorities. Carnegie prioritises getting along with people above establishing the truth or the end result, and that's fair enough given his book was focused on befriending people. But Linus' top priority is the stability of the kernel; social niceties come after that.

While I personally wouldn't respond the way he did, I can certainly understand his perspective and I think that you absolutely need zero tolerance for those kinds of patches if you want to keep the kernel in good shape. Excessive bluntness is preferable to excessive subtlety in this case.

"News for nerds, stuff that matters."
I'd much rather hear about this than yet another episode in the life of John McAfee.

The Exynos 4 is actually pretty recent tech. Once again I am tempted to design my own phone from scratch....

Kontact. Admittedly, Kmail's interface is a bit lacking compared to Thunderbird, but Kontact's killer feature is that it has email, an address book, personal organizer, and RSS reader, all of which you can sync across multiple devices if you run Kolab on a server. If you want access to all that information across multiple devices, you either have to put your data in the cloud, use a commercial solution, or use a varied collection of different programs.

Thanks for that post. It's rare to see people bringing balance to the conversation by offering perspectives like that here. We need more of it.

That's not what open source means.

The Japanese have a word for this - karoshi.

Same goes for us down in Australia. I've had great experiences with Amazon and bought a bunch of books from them recently, but it's virtually impossible to find electronics that ship outside the US on there.

No, these were the projections accounting for the UI Formerly Known as Metro. They just underestimated how bad it would be.

Why, that sounds almost as if they would be held accountable for their actions, to the extent that it might actually be disadvantageous to break the law...

The very reason it's a clusterfuck is because of the fragmentation these guys are trying to address. Each device has a different kernel, even those that use the same SoC (because the GPIOs, etc. are hardcoded). That means that the developers efforts are fragmented - only a small number of people see the bugs and put in the effort to fix them, which undermines Linus' law. 3.7 will help, but there's still a lot to be done before ARM has the kind of compatibility that x86 does.

tldr: These guys are doing useful, important work that will vastly improve the state of Linux ARM.

Citation needed. According to wikipedia, Linaro was only founded 2 years ago.

This is also true in other Commonwealth countries, such as Australia, Canada, etc.

KDE is hardly an alternative desktop - it has more in common with Gnome (in terms of popularity) than XFCE.