So true. Sun Hardware is nice. Very nice. But not nice enough to offset the fact that I can often get two or three of the "lower-end" stuff (which is often still quite reliable itself) and maybe even run Solaris on it (though Oracle, predictably, has begun charging quite a bit for Solaris support on non-Oracle hardware).

As a customer, I felt they pretty much were saying that they'd abandoned this middle-tier space to Linux...

Usually takes 6 weeks or so. You can follow the CentOS twitter feed here to keep up.

In addition, sounds like there may be new ways shortly for tracking CentOS development.

If ISP's care about how their bandwidth is being used up, they should/would definitely disconnect users for even unintentional abusive behavior for this.

Used to work at a WISP, and malware infected customers were a huge source of network problems. Anyone suspected of being infected was contacted immediately, and potentially disconnected from the network if they were unreachable and/or immediate attempts to resolve their spyware problems weren't successful.

Perhaps wired ISP's aren't so concerned about this...

Definitely. Best place to follow a lot of the debate is LWN. See this article for starters on some of the numbers that prompt the criticism. Canonical also has developed a reputation for maintaining large patches or groups of patches for applications rather than pushing the stuff upstream. Or they fork and create a new upstream.

These are just some of the arguments I can recall popping up on LWN the last few months -- I'm sure you can find more.

Of course, the usual suspects are at work here too... jealousy for sure as the technical heavy lifting of Canonical is done by Debian, Red Hat and others who employ the kernel hackers and such. Without these folks, Ubuntu wouldn't even exist...

Anyways, not to say Ubuntu doesn't give back in their own way, but these are the meat of the technical criticisms.

Linux *always* had a niche to fill. I can't see how the same is true of OpenSolaris.

ZFS.

And don't say BSD... the BSD port of ZFS is way behind OpenSolaris' feature and performance-wise.

We should reject ALL energy subsidies. If solar truly is the more economical solution, it will win out in the market place.

I can see what you're saying as well. ZFS does a _lot_ of the things WAFL has done for years. I don't really think those approaches should necessarily be able to be patented though, but as it is now, you can see how something like ZFS -- very similar to WAFL in a lot of ways would raise some red flags and at least warrant some investigation (whether or not we agree with the principles there).

NetApp should focus on their business model though instead. WAFL is still significantly more mature than ZFS and has a superior deduplication implementation IMO. Their stuff "just works". They've got plenty of ammo to continue competing... I suppose they realize this and are just doing their corporate "due diligence" in aggressively trying to protect their IP.

Oracle should offer to provide indemnification to vendors. They've got a large patent portfolio of their own and obviously large assets to make them a much more formidable foe to NetApp.

Any plans to add in write cache support? I'm thinking along the lines of putting ZFS's ZIL on SSD's. Really makes NFS in sync mode much quicker.

Agree that ZFS is "way ahead" of btrfs (and most any other filesystem out there other than WAFL really) due to the fact that it's available "now". btrfs will most likely address the issues you bring up by the time they are stable, but still will need a year or two of burn-in time. ZFS needed the same...

I have no doubt that btrfs or something else will eventually fill the void in the Linux world. I think Sun/Oracle does themselves a disservice by licensing things such that ZFS cannot be included in the Linux kernel... all they're doing is ensuring that the Linux community will come up with something compareable down the road when instead they could just let everyone use ZFS and become the de facto standard.

Ah well.

First Paul Krugman, now this. How irrelevant is the Nobel Prize these days?

Just a bunch of elitists scratching their own backs.

Years of diplomacy (UN inspections and such) were tried with Iraq after the first gulf war.

Yeah, I think it was an internal thing, and no packages were ever distributed. The steps they took were all precautionary (with as internal as it was they probably could have said nothing and no one would have been the wiser).

But hey, fun to stir up FUD...

Because Debian has a LOT more manpower than Slackware does?

This has everything to do with Arlen's political survival (aka pulling a Lieberman) as he was about to be voted out of office in the Republican primary there.

And I'm not sure that it's a clear cut win for Democrats... Arlen will be an uncertain ally at best, and negates the Democrats ability to run someone really far to the left against Toomey in PA which I'm sure they would have loved to do. So, a mixed bag. Arlen's effectively been a democrat (or at least not a republican) for many years now anyways, so while this is a PR blow to be sure it won't change much as far as senate politics are concerned.

As far as Arlen trying to say the GOP has moved right since Reagan's days? Hogwash, they've moved left and become indistinguishable from Democrats which is why they're being punished by the voters. Arlen's own appeal to Reaganism is offset by a quote from the man himself: