no harder than trying to port something heavily linux centric to a *BSD, I would imagine.

Perhaps every Ubuntu release story should have a link to a site titled "The Unusability of Ubuntu." Seems fair, doesn't it? The article would necessarily have to be negative... title non-withstanding. Slashdot has turned seriously hostile to non-Linux open source operating systems. I'm not sure why. I've even heard people here use the classic, "nobody uses it, so it must be bad" argument - the same one Windows users make about Linux.

you're doing it wrong.

If I'm not mistaken, the alcohol tax is relatively new in Mass. (2009.) I do remember Mass. posting state troopers at New Hampshire fireworks stores. They would write down plate numbers and contact troopers on the Mass. side of the border who would pull them over once they got into Mass. It was kind of obnoxious how NH fireworks stores would advertise in Mass. I vaguely remember a large fireworks sign off of I495 a few years ago.

I think raising the sales tax was definitely a boon to NH retail, though. I know Mass. has a use tax, but I've only known Mass. to enforce it against corporations who buy online and out of state and don't pay the use tax.

It's amazing how frequently coal and other fuel sources like to travel. They must have an excellent benefits package.

And back in the older shows, the sonic screwdriver wasn't so capable. I remember it being more of a tool, and less of the greatest deus ex machina ever invented.

I guess I've never liked the look of the "new" Tardis. It's interesting that the the old Tardis (i.e., image) was so sterile - It seems to me that the earlier doctors spent more time in the Tardis that the recent doctors.

It's particularly interesting that they decided to remake the Tardis starting with Christopher Eccleston, as the earlier doctors never seemed to fix or change anything on the Tardis.

as most people might assume. I went to a conservatory for composition, and I have to say that any half decent composer should be able to imitate a non-living composer... particularly one in the past.

I took quite a few classes on counterpoint, and was able to write fugues that sounded very much like Bach... and it didn't take too much skill. Other composers had a similar experience.

The reason why, I suspect, is that it's easier to analyze an existing body of work and imitate that, than it is to create entirely new, original music. The same goes for art, literature, etc.

I guess it's easier to drive down a road after someone else has paved it.

It's true, but the OpenBSD FAQ only lists RAIDFRAME and not softraid. I suspect that will change in a release or two.

They didn't have a full install iso until somewhat recently, as they felt that it would hurt their CD sales. I suppose they will do a bit torrent sometime, but probably not for a release or two.

OpenBSD has had the RAIDframe driver for a long time. This releases is adding some sort of RAID 4 and 5 implementation.

RaidZ3 is nearly upon us...
Most slashdot folks will prefer btrfs just because it's GPL and native to Linux... whether or not it's better.

If you ever see ZFS snapshots in action, you'd want ZFS on your desktop, too. It's trivial to create a snapshot. No need to pre-allocate space like on LVM.
Snapshots don't seem to impact performance, either.

Phoronix loves doing this. Last time, they compared a beta version of FreeBSD to a release of Ubuntu. The debugging definitely hurts performance.
I complained about this once, but a bunch of teenage kids started saying, "Ubuntu R0X0RS!"
I'm not sure where people got the idea that benchmarks are the one and only metric for comparing OSes. When Ubuntu doesn't win a benchmark in one of their OS shootouts, they'll have some explanation why that doesn't mean a lot.
I think they're still reeling from that time around 1999 or 2000 when NT4 trounced a redhat tuned linux in web server performance. It seems to me that OS X is the real desktop competition for Linux, and that OS X is winning "the hearts and minds" of the users. I'm sure Ubuntu can beat OS X (wasn't there a phoronix shootout about this?) in most benchmarks, but that doesn't matter if desktop users generally prefer OS X.
I suspect it would be useful to have more articles about what is needed to improve in Linux on the desktop... but to be fair, phoronix is just a benchmark, so that would be out of their scope.

and not something you'd want to store valuable data on. First off, it does not have redundant power. You could probably add redundant power for another $1,000 or so.

Second of all, if you did set up something like RAID 5 or RAID 6 (or RAIDZ/RAIDZ2), the rebuild time on a drive would probably be well over 12 hours with 1.5TB SATA drives.

I'm sure many people would be tempted to put all 45 drives in a large RAID 5 volume, which would be even scarier.
A more practical version would be to go with 41x 500GB SATA, 3x 60GB SSD, dual redundant power supplies, 32GB RAM, and Solaris or OpenSolaris.

You would probably break it down something like this: 2 disks - RAID 1 mirror for the system 2 30GB SSD drives for the slog (definitely helps improve performance) 3 hot spare and then 6 sets of 6 drives in RAIDZ-2 in a single pool This leaves out a couple of drives. You could put in a couple of 1.5TB (or even 2TB) in a Raid 1 mirror for some supplementary storage or just leave them out. You're not going to have as much storage, but, your data will be safer. Plus, dropping down to 500GB from 1.5TB drives is a large difference in price (as much as $50-$60 per drive,) and the price differentials mean that the added expenses (such as power and the SSD drvies.)