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.

You are not an RTS fan. You are a linux guy. Can you be both? I don't think you can, not in today's game market. Perhaps you were an rts fan years ago and still have nostalgia for the genre, but you have chosen to remove yourself from the evolution of the genre and the pc game playing playerbase in general.
You can look down on us from your high, and game free ideological throne. But the pragmatic, actual game fans, have long since switched back to windows. Or at least dual boot. Or a hackintosh if you are willing to wait for your games and still want to make an OS statement.

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.

Your analogy is backwards.

The slot machine that the publishers keep pumping money into is the PC game industry. Developers want to release PC games, but doing so is just not profitable and piracy takes sales away from the SKUs that are actually profitable (consoles). If DRM fails they will just stop making PC versions.

This is a last ditch effort to save pc gaming. But pc gamers keep piling on the hate, trying to make this fail.

I think you are just waving farewell to pc gaming. Good going.