Anybody who has run software on a non-trivial scale knows how important changelogs are.

They give you some idea of what to expect, but more importantly let you know whether a problem you're having now has been fixed in the upgrade. Although developers would like everyone to run the newest version of software, in practice you don't touch production systems without good reason. Fixed pain points, and maybe security (depending on isolation) are valid reasons. "Because it's there" is not.

Elimination is a stupid move. It's a triumph of marketing at the cost of we who must run this shit.

If you're willing to look beyond AWS, there's something called Manta out there (http://www.joyent.com/products/manta). The data rests on some servers, and you submit UNIX map/reduce jobs. The jobs are run on the nodes where the data is resting, you get a full UNIX environment, and you only get charged as you'd expect (compute time, combined with the cheaper at-rest time). It might be a better fit for what you're doing than your proposal, plus it'll likely be faster too due to reduced data movement.

That's mighty odd. The place I work has hundreds of OSOL servers. I've seen ZFS only flake out once.

Use illumos or one of its derivatives instead.

Odd. The company I work for uses ZFS on many thousands of disks, we don't pay Oracle a dime, and we shovel code back to illumos.

Most of the top Solaris talent jumped the Oracle ship long ago. A lot of them are committing code to illumos as part of the jobs.

I'll take a look when I have a moment. Thanks. :)

Backups are necessary. But, you know, it's nice to avoid restoring a backup if you don't need to.

Furthermore, backups don't help with data that flips bits on disk without being noticed, then consumed by the system in some calculation. A lot of filesystems do not notice non-metadata bits flipping, so you could end up end up with false suddenly becoming true in your database, affecting future calculations.

Once you add RAID, failure conditions become yet more complicated, although some of them become less likely. I don't even know where to begin on that one, except that it isn't a panacea.

It's easy to go "F***" if you're clueless.

Except that Ext and ZFS are in different classes. Ext provides few of the protections that ZFS does.

I'm only aware of two filesystems in the same class: ZFS and Btrfs. I'm looking forward to the day I can use Btrfs on production, but until then there's just ZFS. Ext is a non-contender here.

Most of OpenSolaris was under the CDDL, which provides protection from patent claims from Sun (now Oracle). So if you used OpenSolaris, they wouldn't have a case through copyright infringement -- it's an approved open-source license -- or through patents they hold. Reality is complicated, so it's always a good idea to read the license code is released under: http://www.opensource.org/licenses/cddl1.php

In other words: your concern about OpenSolaris specifically is unfounded. DalvikVM wasn't make by Sun and released under the CDDL, so there was no patent protection. This will still have a chilling effect on the Java ecosystem, of course.

In practice I would use Solaris for databases and storing other critical data. Linux has a long way to go before it has something as mature as ZFS, and I wouldn't trust important data on anything less. DTrace adds introspection that is wonderful on a live database as well. Operating systems are tools, so use them for what they're good at.

OECD data that shows countries with universal healthcare spend less and have better outcomes in quite a few important metrics.

Here's a summary for the US: http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/46/2/38980580.pdf

Not to put too fine a point on it, but libertarians live in a fantasy land. They talk theory, when hard data has been available for years. Empiricism > Wankery.

It's called "forum shopping", and all litigants with a clue take advantage of it.

Whether your case is morally right or wrong, attempting to stack the case in your own favour is a rational action; nobody attempts to lose a lawsuit.

I, on the other hand, would like a stylus. I'd like to draw sketches during note taking. More importantly, I like drawing.

Stating that styluses suck only means you're not in the arts. This is pretty obvious, yo.

IIRC, Opera was actually the first browser to release a (alpha?) version of their browser that supported <video>.

For whatever reason they haven't released one since.

That was Beethoven, and for only part of his life.

Could you at least check facts you're not sure of?

Ah, the classic "I'm special, why are you so blind?" retort. Keep patting yourself on the back.