The internet of things sounds so stupid. In the spirit of stupid marketing phrases that mean nothing like "the cloud" wouldn't it be cooler to call it "the swarm"?

The issue seems to be that they're doing a rewrite of busybox because the legal foundation responsible for policing the busybox license forces them into compliance for all GPL'ed works for all the products they release before they will grant the company access to use the software again under the terms of the GPL. Many of these companies are not complying with the GPL for this other software because the copyright holders are not actively pursuing infringers of the license like busybox is.

Diaspora is not peer to peer. It's a federated service like smtp or xmpp/jabber. The identity model is also that of the web which may not be rich enough to do a fine grained web-of-trust or get around despotic governments in its current form.

Given that the interserver federation in xmpp doesn't scale well ( see http://about.psyc.eu/Jabber#Scalability ), I'm guessing the thought of federation is too scary an option for facebook. 60% of the packets in an xmpp network are presence packets and xmpp uses an extremely naive way of distributing these (i.e. it sends an xmpp presence message for each user in the buddy list, even if many of the users are on the same xmpp server and the presence packet could be only sent once for all of them and exploded by the server at the other end). This probably wouldn't be too much of an issue if not many people have buddies on other xmpp servers, but could be disastrous if it becomes popular. I'm guessing they'd also be reticent to do this because it would decrease their lockin of users, if you don't need a facebook account to talk to facebook users why would you bother using facebook.

How is port knocking security through obscurity? It's putting a password on being able to connect to the ssh daemon. Admittedly upstream routers could easily grab the "password" if they know what it's for but they've just peeled back one layer of the onion.

Maybe Comcast should setup an exchange server on their ad servers so that the the exchange clients don't time out connecting to mail.company.inside. As an added bonus if the password scheme for MAPI isn't a challenge response based one they could also collect the passwords for anyone using a split VPN on their network.

I've given up on adobe acrobat reader. I'm using mozplugger and xpdf/kpdf/insert favourite pdf viewer here.

It's one of my favourite movies.

I thought Ubuntu's goals were even more modest than that. A debian repository with 6 month release cycles. This was sorely needed at the time as woody had been the stable release of debian since 2002. The perception was that debian was horribly antiquated, which it was, and unusable. A lot of work has since been done and the speed of releases, although not as frequent as once every 6 months is pretty reasonable.

Yeah, everyone knows the superior cosmetic enhancement techniques all involve acid.

This is truly the year of linux on the desktop. Even Microsoft is embracing it now.

This thread is just an achievement point circle jerk.

Virtualization doesn't help your performance if you're already using all of a particular resource. It has overheads that mean you're getting less out of your hardware in terms of raw performance. The fact that you can put 5 boxes that would otherwise be sitting idle on the same hardware is what makes virtualization attractive.

Exactly. Treat people like criminals and they will act like criminals.