Crunchbang was removed from the rankings (including historically) when it was marked as 'discontinued'. Here's what it looked like in January: http://web.archive.org/web/20150107170132/http://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=popularity

While it's been gradually declining in popularity it's still ranked 20th over the last 12 months, appearing higher than distros like Xubuntu, Slackware, Gentoo, and a stack of others. I'd guess the decline is due to the 18-month gap since the most recent release.

The message to take from this is: Crunchbang was a fairly popular niche distro, and Distrowatch cannot be relied on for accurate historical rankings.

Because it's faster, cheaper, and generally more effortless than any of the other options. Chip+pin is secure but takes longer, cash involves a lot more overhead.

Retailers like it because:

• It saves money. With self-checkouts everywhere, the biggest maintenance you have to do on those machines is restocking change. On a standard checkout, using a card is about as fast as using cash in most instances.
• Effortless payment. You don't have to count out and hand over cash, you don't even have to verify the number and type in a pin (for purchase under $100 here). You just wave your card over the receiver, grab your stuff, and go. Retailers like you to be less conscious of how much you're spending.

People are fine with it for similar reasons. Cash requires planning and overhead (I recently dumped a 30kg bucket of coins at the bank). Card+pin can be fiddly or annoying if you're just buying a sandwich. Contactless options are fast and convenient for small everyday purchases.
They also pass a test that eftpos/chip+pin dont: You can quickly pay for a few drinks at a busy pub. It's hard to explain how big a deal that is, but it's something credit cards never conquered. Most pubs here include an ATM so you can turn your inconvenient card into convenient cash before you order anything.

I personally make a rule of using cash when reasonable possible. I'm uncomfortable with having one piece of plastic linked to all my purchases in easily-searchable databases...but I understand the appeal completely. Eventually I'll probably have to go over to it, I just hope there'll be an easy option that still includes some anonymity.

As someone who put cyanogenmod on an original galaxy, I highly recommend it. There's occasional lag and the boot time is terrible, but it's pretty darn usable for day-to-day tasks.

You might need to add a couple more words, at the moment I don't get it.

Sysadmins take note: the OSX Server caching service does not cache the iOS 8 update, despite that kind of being it's purpose. The update is a hair under a gigabyte

If you have a bunch of iOS users and were relying on this (I know I was), you might want to block the update for now.

Last time the deal was negotiated (or details were made public), Google was ramping up their payments to firefox to remain the default browser due to increased competition from Yahoo and Microsoft.

Let's say firefox dropped to under 10% market share as a result of this, a substantial drop: Do you think that microsoft or yahoo wouldn't pay a lot of money to be the default search? And do you think google would happily hand over even a small percentage of their search revenue to their competitors? That's the lifeblood of the company, and they take it very seriously.

I wouldn't be surprised if mozilla's revenue dropped next time they renegotiate contracts, but that's okay. They're pulling in over $300m/year revenue and using that to cover a wide range of non-core and unprofitable projects. If worst came to worst, they could spin off all their other efforts and survive on a small fraction of that.

(disclaimer: I don't agree with a lot of their decisions, but I think they'll be fine financially for a long time yet)

Meta articles are also a quick measure on the size and involvement of the community. Seeing weeks of articles with only a few comments each makes you wonder if anybody is reading them at all. But Pipedot is a topic we all have a stake in, so you get a better indication of how many people are happy to comment.

After the 1.0 release I bought one of these: http://wiki.openwrt.org/toh/tp-link/tl-wr703n, as it looked like the cheapest way to get a working piratebox - under $30 delivered, plus a 32gb thumbdrive I had lying around to use as storage. I've had it running for probably about a month.

So a few observations:

• Setup instructions are very simple and had me up and running in about 20 minutes.
• Zero maintenance required. Once it's set up, it'll chug along until it runs out of storage space.
• The one I chose runs off 5v microusb, so you can hook it up to any 5v source (including those external mobile phone battery packs)
• The web interface is a bit clunky at times, most obviously when it comes to uploading and organising files. Apparently you can get webDAV working on them, but I haven't tried yet.

It's pretty good fun for the price, and since it's all open source you can mod it till your heart's content.

Pipedot just went from 'a place I read interesting comments' to 'a place I find out about security issues that affect me.'

I'm sure I'll hear a lot about this come Monday, but right now this is the only site in my RSS feed that's mentioned it. It feels like a threshold has just been crossed.

I just spun up a quick debian wheezy VM to test it out. One or two tweaks to get it up and running, but a surprisingly smooth install overall.

Of course now I have my own pipedot it's only a matter of time until I burn my bridges, betray you all, and make off to my secret lair.

Very High. Here's the most recent stats I could find from soylentnews.

It looks like the raw daily page views are in the 6-figure range, while daily comments are in the 3-figure range. That's (very) roughly around 10000 page views per comment.

I'd love to compare between sites. My guess is pipedot would be about the same or slightly higher, while slashdot would be orders of magnitude worse.

I also really like how pipedot is coming together. Pipedot is being properly designed from the ground up, whereas soylentnews was being built off the old code to get to a fully-functional site faster, and will then be refactored and redesigned a bit.

Both are legitimate approaches, and everybody is working towards the same goal. With any luck there'll be some exchange of ideas and techniques, if not actual code.

When google reader went down, the community fractured off and created dozens of new RSS readers. Not all survived, but quite a few are thriving. Slashdot doesn't need to be replaced with one monolithic site, we can easily have half a dozen to fill that space.