Linux desktop users are generally not "potential customers" of Microsoft, and are an extremely tiny market compared with Windows and Apple desktop users. This thing is actually available to about 97% of web surfers.

1996 called. They want their anti-Microsoft rant back. This hasn't been true since NT 3.5.1 was released. The NT series of the Windows operating system has always supported multiple users very well (I would say better than *nix-like systems because of the more robust ACL model). End-user applications, on the other hand, have in the past not supported multiple users well (e.g. sticking configuration in %WINDIR% or HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE instead of per-user locations) .

No, it won't. Google has kilometers of 10 Gb/s fiber spanning the globe, and far better connectivity inside each of their datacenters. It's your ISP's network (via private peering), or that of any public peering points that will "fall over".

Modern workstation and server worloads are dominated by random access IO, where SSDs excel. Even a 10-drive 15K RAID array can only do about 1800 random IOPS, while a single Intel X-25M can do 30,000+ random reads and 3000+ random writes for $400. There really is no difference if you've used a good SSD on a day-to-day basis - I will never go back.

Transfer rate, which sites like TR and Anand always highlight, is a mostly useless metric for a disk subsystem. Transfer rate is essentially meaninful for one common operation: backup. Which is a stupid thing to optimize, since it happens in the middle of the night.

There used to be a gay bar in Chicago's "boys Town" neighborhood called "The Manhole". Never went in myself, mind you. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

Greenpeace et. all. only begrudgingly accepted DDT as a anti-malaria measure since the mid-2000s, despite 30+ years of a massive resurgence in malaria deaths.

For 30 years they did everything they could to ban the use, manufacture, and even donation of DDT to third-world countries, despite staggering increases in malarial deaths. There was no practical substitute for DDT, yet they spent their money on a campaign for its eradication instead of research into safer alternatives. Evil.

Even if what you assert were factual, so what? Millions of (mostly poor and brown) human children died from malaria, which was a non-problem until DDT was banned. Fuck the birds, and fuck all the racist sociopatic Eco-terrorists who trade human lives for their camping trips.

Yes, Greenpeace is a sociopath.

I'd prefer the RIAA have their money and power, personally. But that's not my original point. They are all allowed to operate in a free society, like it or not.

Greenpeace is directly responsible for the deaths of millions of children from malaria, as they led the campaign for the ban of DDT without any scientific basis. They're far more evil than any for-profit entity.

"Improving society" is a very subjective thing.

Yes they are, in the way Greenpeace, the American Red Cross, or the FSF are "people". Corporations are simply groups of people acting together. Why should one group of people be allowed to pool their resources and influence, but not others?

No, you can't.. Do make sane snapshots, you need application-layer support, especially for databases. Otherwise your snapshots are not clean, they are in a crash-recovery state as far as the application is concerned. This is particularly important for databases, distributed file-systems, and queue-based software (including mail stores).

The beauty of the Microsoft Volume ShadowCopy Service is that it is a stable API through wich applications, backup software, and storage systems can all communicate. Backup software says "I want a snapshot". All the applications who have registrerd themselves with VSS get their writes flushed into a consistent state, and say "I am ready for snapshot". Then the storage device (either a software filesystem like NTFS or a SAN/NAS) says "I am doing the snapshot". This level of coordination is simply not possible on Linux.

While I like the idea on a visceral level, the "only veterans can judge" thing could never work in practice. There would be far too much room for abuse and collusion, just like the "blue line of silence" shown by police officials towards internal corruption. This is the real world, and not Starship Troopers. A jury of randomly selected ordinary citizens is shown the evidence, and determine if a supposed crime was an accident, negligence, or willful action. That's the system, and it needs to be applied here.

"Anycast TCP" means advertising a connection-oriented TCP service via anycast routing. I did not make up the term, Google for "anycast TCP".

And as far as Gomez is concerned, I am not a customer nor an advocate, but they are probably the best-known distributed monitoring service out there. My point was that you need lots of long-term measurements from many vantage points to see if using anycast with TCP services is really as trouble-free as CacheFly et. all contend.