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nosteon Everything Should Have An API

On the existing standard front, there is Universal Plug and Play (http://www.upnp.org/) that aims to "to enable simple and robust connectivity among consumer electronics, intelligent appliances and mobile devices from many different vendors." I haven't played with this stuff at all, but there appears to be fair amount activity in this space: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UPnP_AV_MediaServers

I don't know how much of the example scenario you could implement within the confines of UPnP, but perhaps it could be part of the solution.

nosteon Innovating Cron: Announcing Norc

Comparing Norc to batch is similar to comparing it to cron. Many of the limitations of batch processing come with retrying or auditing complex trees of dependencies (bigger than a handful of tasks).

Condor has DAGMan (http://www.cs.wisc.edu/condor/dagman/) for managing DAGs of jobs, and I suspect that it can scale higher than just a handful of tasks.

I believe resource management is limited to overall system load. Batch isn't designed for things like managing available licenses.

Condor acts as match maker for jobs and cluster nodes using "classified advertisements" (http://www.cs.wisc.edu/condor/classad/). Classads allow you to describe the jobs and the cluster nodes, and to express arbitrary requirements and preferences for both. This allows jobs to say "I need a node with X", but it also allows nodes to express requirements (e.g. "I won't any run jobs coming from the psych department"). I don't see why you couldn't use this system for expressing requirements regarding licenses.

However, Condor appears to be very complex. The PDF version of the Condor 7.3 manual has 991 pages in it. OTOH, Red Hat MRG Grid is based on Condor (http://www.redhat.com/mrg/grid/), so commercial support should be available.

nosteon Nokia sues Apple for infringement of multiple patents

"Apple Inc. v. Atico International USA Inc. et al" looks like it would fit the bill (see http://news.justia.com/cases/featured/delaware/dedce/1:2008c... )

nosteon How We Made GitHub Fast: A detailed look at GitHub's new architecture

Hmm, I think this part is still about authentication as sshd cannot authenticate the user without the keys. According to the article, GitHub does the authorization in their Gerve script.

nosteon How We Made GitHub Fast: A detailed look at GitHub's new architecture

I don't think you can use PAM for authentication if you want to use public key authentication (see auth2-pubkey.c in Portable OpenSSH).

nosteon IPREDator: a service that makes people online more anonymous using a VPN

IPRED stands for "Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement Directive". See http://wiki.openrightsgroup.org/wiki/IPRED for example.