Right on. Schools do a horrible job of teaching how to code. Too much theory; not enough memory alignment or thinking about cache boundaries. Not enough about error checking or the graceful handling of errors. But hey! They teach Chomsky Normal form!

It comes down to whether the user likes to browse source. There's clearly things that make open source software good: a large community of experts (or `nerds', but I prefer the term `expert') ironing out the bugs and adding useful features. If Linux closed their source, would it still have the same expert community working on it? Maybe yes, maybe no. If you do a code freeze of your open source software now, yes, it's good, but will it be good in the future? Maybe yes, maybe no. Who knows. Certainly the user will NOT know if it's good because the source is closed. There is PLENTY of good closed source software. However, the openness of Linux/BSD/etc is one of my favorite features of those operating systems. Would I stop using them? No. I'm a software developer so ultimately I need to use a computer.

I take that back, there is a con: there's a 1 in ~300 million chance the lottery picks George Bush.

Only Pros. I've always felt it's a damn shame that our leaders have to be politicians.

ext4 may show better performance, obviously depending on the many factors listed above, but an ill-timed crash in extreme cases can cause massive data loss due to data not hitting the disk until long after metadata has been written to the journal in ext4. You can use the nodelalloc mount option for ext4 to get around the data loss problem, but then you lose some of the potential performance gain by using ext4. I am not as familiar with ufs or zfs, so I can't help you there. If it were me, i'd go ext3.

10 bucks says they have a line of code that checks to see if that unsigned int is less than 0.