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No surprise: OpenDarwin has shut down.

On august 16th 1993 at 13:05:37 (GMT) Ian Murdock announced the first Debian release:

Fellow Linuxers,

This is just to announce the imminent completion of a brand-new Linux release, which I’m calling the Debian Linux Release. This is a release that I have put together basically from scratch; in other words, I didn’t simply make some changes to SLS and call it a new release. I was inspired to put together this release after running SLS and generally being dissatisfied with much of it, and after much altering of SLS I decided that it would be easier to start from scratch. The base system is now virtually complete (though I’m still looking around to make sure that I grabbed the most recent sources for everything), and I’d like to get some feedback before I add the “fancy” stuff.

The problem is there: how to connect several social networks and managing all contacts as a user?
The solution too: OpenID.

Unfortunately, it’s not likely to coming soon.

It’s sad but true. For most users, passwords are just another bureaucratic annoyance.

No, it’s a really bad idea to use unencrypted wireless communication. Especially if it’s in a public place.

And no, sensitive information should not be accessed from public networks even if it’s “encrypted”.

Linux gets the Completely Fair Scheduler of Ingo Molnár merged into its 2.6 branch before the release of 2.6.23.

Meanwhile Jeff Robertson is working on the SCHED_ULE to replace SCHED_4BSD as the standard scheduler of FreeBSD. His thoughts on the CFS can be found here.

More and more spam is getting through the spam-filters because the text is rendered in an image or PDF. Despite of the reversed Captcha problem, there is a fix. Use your anti-virus detection tools to get this kind of spam: Filtering PDF-/XLS-/Image-Spam With ClamAV (And ISPConfig) On Debian/Ubuntu.

There is a nice example of a well forged jargon word that turned out to mean the exact opposite of its English origin: ‘synchronous’ — it means ‘locking’ in programming, which is ‘asynchronous’ (i.e. executed on different points in time) in spoken English.

But in contrast to the author, I accept that jargon and the spoken language it’s based on can differ to a great extent. They evolve differently and finally can become languages by themselves. The best example I think is Latin and medicine. While the language itself is dead, the jargon lives on.

Perhaps this will also be the fate of IT jargon.

In the earlier days, the internet was easy to compare to a real world object: take an onion and at the core are the main tier-1 service providers exchanging data. On the outer layers lie the smaller providers and on the outside the users.

But this has been always an inadequate metaphor. An orange with its segments would probably be better. But the actual data draws a completely different picture.
The core of the internet is made of about 100 autonomous systems (e.g. Google, AT&T Worldnet) directly connected to each other that hold together the fabric. The next layer contains around 15,000 peer-connected systems (Those can pass data with-and-forth without having to go through the core.). An additional of 5,000 autonomous systems have only a single connection to the fabric and could therefore be cut off too easily.

So what do you now say if asked by your non-tech savvy friends or relatives? — Try the DIMES Visualizer

This is definitely what we all have waited for: wireless electricity transmission!

The full title of the paper presented is Wireless Power Transfer via Strongly Coupled Magnetic Resonances which reads a little less spectacular, but gives a hint about the method used.

Now it is only a small step to Power over Ethernet on the WLAN!