I agree that free software is a good thing, and so does Oracle, as they give away their RedHat clone for free.

Oracle gives away PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQLLite, and several other databases in their clone, and will support them if that is important to you.

Some applications require scalability, availability, or other features that are beyond the realm of the free databases. In those cases, Oracle database XE is free, standard edition is under $10k, and enterprise is available where performance outweighs cost.

I wholeheartedly concur that it will be a good day when a free database gets on the TPC-C top ten list.

It's up to the vendor to assemble and benchmark a database platform for TPC.

Software licensing for most database servers explicitly prohibit benchmarking, meaning all scores must be released by the vendor. IBM likely has seen fit not to, for reasons of their own.

Ksplice and it's derivatives won't help you if you need to purge bad glibc code from memory, as we did for the recent "ghost" vulnerability.

Still, it could potentially be nasty if exploited so we strongly recommend immediate patching and rebooting. Without a reboot, services using the old library will not be restarted,” Moore concluded.

The Dell server is actually running a Sybase product, which is 98% slower than the SPARC benchmark. It is the newest entry on the list.

If you want an inexpensive database, you might look at Oracle XE, which is free. However, it has some rather tight constraints and limitations, and it only runs on x86.

If you examine the top two best performing database platforms (as benchmarked by TPC-C score) you will discover that they are both sold by Oracle, and that the SPARC version has both higher performance and a lower cost per transaction than the x86-64 version.

You might find this quote to be particularly interesting:

"I am going to make a promise to you," [Larry] Ellison said. "By this time next year, that Sparc microprocessor will run the Oracle database faster than anything on the planet."

...that, while this part of the conversation might not have been the strongest part of the interview, systemd has won an amazing number of technical battles.

FWIW IMHO, absolutely no, a unified development approach is not the main benefit of systemd. The new functionality is absolutely worth the transition pain. Not only can you control (kill) whole classes of processes more simply than ever, but you also get lightweight containers as a door prize.

OpenBSD is trying to move from rc.conf.local and inittab into per-daemon startup/shutdown init.d scripts.

It's a shame that someone didn't swoop in with bare-bones unit file functionality (no cgroups, obviously). At least, with a unit file, PID 1 can launch a non-root process, which is hard with SysVinit (I do wonder if I've written my shim correctly).

There will be one final CM11 milestone release before they switch to CM12. How do we confirm the final will have this patch?

This was known, and should have been exploited:

Although subjecting the cells to high heat could return memory, the process was problematic; the entire memory chip would need heating for hours at around 250 C.

The rover is equipped with heaters. There is some possibility that simply placing the flash closer could have extended the life of the memory.

The article you link to is dated 2012 - the MER rovers launched in 2003. You do the math.

No, the article says that you either need low-intensity, long duration heat (which has apparently long been known), or high-intensity, short-duration:

Although subjecting the cells to high heat could return memory, the process was problematic; the entire memory chip would need heating for hours at around 250 C.

We are still buying flash that we can't fix because of the packaging. We're still shipping this unfixable flash in mission-critical applications. When does it get fixed?

If it was long-known that long-duration, low-intensity heat would revive failed flash, why did these rovers leave without the ability to do so?

And why am I not able now to buy flash memory that will heat itself to 800 degrees and heal itself?

And why isn't flash memory sold in ceramic housings that can stand me baking them in an oven for a few days to fix failed flash manually?

I'd like to buy hardware that works, or that can be repaired. That's not flash.