I would be very, very surprised if they would port Windows to ARM and *not* include something like Apple's Rosetta. Sure, you take a performance hit when running legacy, crusty apps, but considering that those were probably designed for much slower computers originally it hardly matters if you're running them with a hefty performance penalty now. I know I was quite pleased with the PPC -> Intel transition process on my Macbook Pro.

Snapshotting is probably the most compelling feature of either FS for workstation use. Both BTRFS and ZFS are copy-on-write, and they both feature very low overhead, very straightforward snapshotting. That's a feature that almost anybody can utilize.

Aside from that, ZFS features a lot of datacenter-centric goodies that might have some utility on a workstation as well. Realtime (low overhead) compression, realtime (high overhead) deduplication, realtime encryption, easy and fast creation/destruction of filesystems and virtual block devices, and a ton of other odds and ends.

The long take is an old technique with countless excellent examples, but I really love Kubrick's use of them in The Shining. Particularly in two instances: Danny's traversal of the halls on his trike, and meandering through the garden maze towards the end of the film.

These scenes to me are especially captivating because of the motion of the camera through these corridors. It's one thing to have a fixed point camera for a long scene, but it's quite another to have a moving camera for such a long time; the potential missteps are countless. The maze scene in the Shining is notorious for how long it took to complete. The sense of motion and space that this sort of cinematography can provide is really quite spectacular though, and I think it often justifies the effort.

You're right, and the Linux community as a whole has certainly embraced btrfs. If Oracle were to just pull the plug on it, the project would continue in some form (which is more than one could say for opensolaris and ZFS).

The problem as I see it is that Oracle has already shown a willingness to submarine competitors with patents they hold on GPL'd projects. A worst case scenario isn't that btrfs dies; a worst case scenario is that it gets used by Oracle's competitors, and then Oracle decides to go and sue them for patent infringement.

Oracle: Hey, Red Hat... nice filesystem you got there. Shame if something were to... happen to it...

Of course, Oracle controls btrfs as well, and its future doesn't exactly look so great at this point, either

Why exactly does Oracle need btrfs now, anyway? ZFS is more mature, and the CDDL is more restrictive than the GPL, so it seems like that would be Oracle's product of choice. I guess Oracle can still sue btrfs users for patent infringement, even though the code itself is under the GPL, but why bother at all? Making Linux a more attractive competitor to their own Solaris doesn't seem like it makes much sense.

Indeed. This program is solely responsible for me ever using ebay. They say it's discontinued due to poor adoption, or some such thing; I think adoption was quite rapid amongst people looking to save money and get the absolute best prices possible. The problem is, as an advertiser, those are the people you're least interested in.

One?

MythTV has its weaknesses (mostly UI related), but I'm not sure what you mean by this:

The answer: it depends. MythTV will do the following: if possible, it will record each show in its entirety, with the padding requested by the user (this is configurable on a global and per-recording level). Say you have show A and show B, where show A ends at the same time that show B begins: MythTV it will do its best to preserve both shows, but it's limited by how many tuners you have. With two tuners of equal priority, MythTV will record show A on tuner 1 (including any pre/post padding) and show B on tuner 2 (also including any pre/post padding).

If you only have one tuner, then MythTV obviously can't do that (indeed, no DVR really could). What happens in this case is that MythTV "throws away" the padding in its calculations; so it records show A (but no post-padding) and immediately switches to show B (with no pre-padding). In an ideal world with good schedule data from the TV stations, that would be good enough, but shows often run over/under (which is why you have the "padding" option), so in this case you might lose a few seconds of each show (assuming A runs long and B starts early). MythTV figures that the padding is "nice to have" but, if it can't guarantee that padding, it also figures you'd rather have the show as scheduled than no show at all.

By the way, if you dig deep, most of these things can be modified. MythTV's defaults in this case do what I believe most people would want to do, but they can be extensively modified to taste.

I don't think it has this as of .22 - it would be handy.

. This is distribution specific, and it's not a MythTV problem. In the United States it's illegal to play DVDs in Linux without paying for a decoder license. Many distributions give you easy ways to bypass this restriction at your own peril, and in gentoo with the appropriate use flags everything does indeed work "out of the box."

Mythweb allows direct download of files.

I do agree with that sentiment. It does/can do most of what you desire, but it's not obvious due to a murky UI and rather cumbersome setup process. If you aren't interested in tinkering, it's a poor choice.

NC's government is so corrupt, we're currently giving up schools and paved roads even *with* the sales tax.

I fail to see much appeal to these devices as regular sources of electricity; you still need hydrocarbon delivery (natural gas), you still give off CO2. It would make much more sense to do all the nasty hydrocarbon-to-electricty bits at a central location and use the grid to get the power to people. The grid is an abstraction layer; you don't have to care how the power is generated, you just end up with the results. The power plants themselves gain on economies of scale and can swap out their infrastructure gradually for future better technologies without the end user having to care. If these fuel cells are so great, they could be crammed into plants and put on the grid.

I do, however, see one very attractive use case: emergency power generation. Assuming your natural gas lines aren't interrupted (or you store your own NG supply on site), if you have one of these things around, you have backup power when the grid "goes away." This only makes sense if the price point gets low enough, of course.

You're right, of course. Google will continue to support Flash in some fashion for quite a while; they can't really afford not to. If Youtube blocks flash, some other site that provides a flash option will pick up the slack, and youtube perishes in the flames of user outrage.

There's nothing particularly unique about Youtube, except that it was the first and currently largest site to "just work" with video clips. Let's not forget that Flash, for all its sins, is what even made this possible to begin with.

I personally suspect that the benefits of HTML5 will be very clear to many users, especially on mobile devices where Flash simply is not viable. It should be a case of superior technology ultimately winning out, just as long as the word is actually spread (and it's in google's interest to spread it).

Youtube currently gives you the option to "opt in" to HTML5, and that's excellent. In the future, they may give you an option to "opt in" to Flash, and they'll tell you that performance may suffer for it. They don't really need to kill Flash entirely, because Flash is good enough at killing itself.

This is a valid point. The "MS Phone" at this time isn't even a product - it's just a demo. By the time something actually gets to market (later this year, maybe?) Android, WebOS, iPhone OS, Maemo, etc will have had a good bit of time to "catch up" with any missing functionality.

MS is, essentially, the last to the table of those I mentioned, and that's a dangerous place to be, even with a superior product. All of the others (well, possibly excepting Maemo) already have mind share and already have, more importantly, applications. The Windows 7 phone will mystifyingly not support any legacy winmo apps, so it's starting off at a massive disadvantage.

Despite these disadvantages, I think it's too soon to say whether MS is going to be able to catch up eventually. The Zune keeps getting better and keeps carving out its own little niche market; maybe Windows Phone 7 will do the same.

The pay wall will slash their number of readers to a small fraction of what they have now, but I assume that readership numbers are not their sole criterion for success. The NYT has a reputation for quality irrespective of mass market consumption, and there will be many people who value this quality enough to pay a premium.

While "the news" in a general sense may already be hopelessly commoditized, the NYT offers a degree of quality that you simply will not find from AP reprints. This is a prestige brand, and it doesn't need the mass market to succeed.

There's dust on the sensor - you can see it in shots of the sky. It gives you an idea of how large each individual image is, as the sensor dust spots are visible at regular intervals.

Indeed, it buys them time. How much time, I'm not sure about.

Clearly, Yahoo! has decided that they simply can't compete on search. Why not let MS chase google, they figure, and take a cut for simply lending them the Yahoo! name. In the meantime, that removes a lot of search related R&D and infrastructure headcount, and they can free up those resources to chase the next big thing (well, or lay them off).

This is a desperate move, though. It only works out if people continue to use Yahoo! branded Bing search, and it's unclear to me why anybody would do so. Yahoo! needs to find some kind of value add that lures people to use their Bing frontend, otherwise this deal buys them months, not years. Indeed, this is why it's such a good move from MS - it gradually migrates people to Bing and kills off the Yahoo! brand, without them having to buy Yahoo! and shut them down directly. There's always the *chance* that Yahoo! will recover, but I'm sure MS is assuming that they won't.