Simply scary. Hurrah for offsite backups.

The king of Linux vents on how rubbish Github is (for writing OS kernels, presumably). Fascinating to see it play out.

His role includes managing the roll-out of similar installations at other sites around the country. Like many young IT professionals, Munguya is laid-back, likeable and helpful to a fault. He's just bought his first car and he plans to get married early this year.</p><p>
Nothing unusual so far, you might think. Except that Elton works for LinkNet Zambia. His 'patch' is a small rural village called Macha in the south of the country. The nearest tarmacked road is more than 15km away, and it's a 45-minute drive to get to the closest town, Choma.

Inspiring.

"I'm starting to see a pattern. For any intellectual property issues facing Linux (or at least the most popular Linux derivative, Android), Linus Torvalds has a standard answer at hand: after admitting that he doesn't know the facts, he claims that "this [whatever it may be] seems completely bogus." Or, interchangeably, "totally bogus".

"If he did this only in private conversations, there would be nothing wrong with it. Everyone may opine on anything, with or without conducting in-depth analysis. But an authority like Linus Torvalds doesn't act responsibly by repeatedly giving interviews that are as ignorant as they are assertive."

"Sources tell us that Nokia is developing a Linux-based replacement for its S40 phones, called Meltemi. The news was leaked, accurately, by the Wall Street Journal last week. Now we can confirm it.

"The codename turned up in an internal communication we saw in April, referring to opportunities for redundant Meego staff “in the Meltemi organisation”. We inferred that was a Windows project. It isn’t.

"The thinking is that a Linux-based replacement for S40 will allow developers to tap into proven development tools – and Qt."

Targeting the installed base, apparently, rather than its future. Meanwhile, smartphones make more than 25% of sales worldwide and the figure is rising every quarter.

Linus Torvalds - remember him? - on userspace filesystems: "Umm. 'userspace filesystem'?<br />
"The problem is right there. Always has been. People who think that userspace filesystems are realistic for anything but toys are just misguided."

After the theft of 25,000 Bitcoins (possibly by Lulzsec, though unproven - both the theft and the thief), how to make sure it never happens again. Only involves Linux LiveCDs, encryption, fireproof safes and regular rebooting into that LiveCD.<br />
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Yup, Bitcoin is untraceable electronic money for the elite, all right.

The former chief operating officer of Canonical (Ubuntu) argues that netbooks are sooo over. The commenters disagree: some of them know someone who bought a netbook, ooh, a while back, and their tablet doesn't have a proper file system browser, so QED.

Eben Upton: "I used to teach at the University of Cambridge and was part of the process of interviewing sixth formers for Computer Science, and that's where I noticed the need to do something.<br />
"When I was there as a student in the mid-1990s, the typical skillset that undergraduates came through the door with would be assembly language, maybe a bit of C, BASIC and a certain amount of hardware hacking.<br />
"By the time I was actually interviewing, ten years later, that had changed to mostly HTML from people who had done a web page and the really good ones would maybe have done PHP – you'd get the occasional exception, but the skills have declined.<br />
"It was as if there was a pipeline of hobbyists and then one day we stopped topping the pipeline up with ten year olds and gradually this wave has passed through the pipeline, first through the universities and then the workplace."

"Google has lost a high-stakes lawsuit in Texas that is raising sharp concern that the Internet giant could face more such claims.<br />
"A federal jury last week awarded Linux patent-holder Bedrock Computer Technologies $5 million in the closely watched patent infringement case. It may be the first such award over the Linux kernel that is at the core of the open-source operating system."<br />
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A cloud on the horizon the size of a man's hand.