I've long marvelled that as I'm speeding down the freeway, a black car followed by a white car in the oncoming lane looks like a police car: a black car with a white door.

Most OS's and programming languages will let you map your memory data structure to a contiguous disk file so your disk IO is performed at paging speeds. The file system is only touched when the file is mapped (opened). Your system can then be configured to chose to what degree your data is in memory vs. disk.

It's not the CI tool that assures that mainline is stable; it's the quality of the regressions.

Shouldn't your continuous integration's regression suite assure that mainline is virtually stable? Why isn't the call for better regression tests?

I thought Linus was referring to SCM religions, Git v. BitKeeper

Instead of sorting datasets, use a testlist database (flat files). The test contains/links/points to its dataset. The test lists are selected at test run time. Each entry in a test list tells how to generate the specific test environment for the test. A test list entry contains the test, the RCS tag/version of the test to be "gotten", the test seed, and array of exit codes that should be retired, how many retries, whether the test is gating, and an array of tests dependencies. A test run can be considered to pass even though an individual, non-gating test fails. One test entry may extract and prepare the test data and other dependent entries can then run against that test dataset.

Android 2.0 (eclair) lets you store apps on the SD card. The Droid is not limited to 256MB app storage.

Running multiple services on one OS requires that when you must reboot a server because of an OS bug or mis-configuration all of the services are brought down... Same if it crashes or hangs. As compelling as that is I've never used a hypervisor in 30 years on 10's of thousands of servers.

I do routinely use chroot jails on thousands of servers to isolate the application from the host OS. This way I do not need to re-qualify any tools when we implement an OS patch.

Check it out: http://sourceforge.net/projects/vesta/ :-)

In 1998 my friend Bernie and I took a cruise on Holland America's MS Statendam to view the solar eclipse off the coast of Curacao. We planned to broadcast a live webcam over the internet. The ship radio charges would have been charged by the time that we kept the radio busy, not bandwidth or "connect" time. The Statendam radio man agreed to let us use the radio for free because it would have been very expensive. Twice we spent hours rehearsing, trying to call my dialup Netcom account, but I failed. We had radio problems, modem problems and ISP problems.

I understand that ham radio operators can probably lend you a lot of help. I guess you should get a license and get up to speed.

Be wary of your location when making a ship-to-shore internet connection. Some countries consider it a serious crime.

We are GSM. All your base are belong to us.

I agree with the point on touching up portraits, but I think whether or not the first, female 5 star general wears makeup is news. If I saw a photo of an office wall where her portrait was hung, I'd expect retouching *and* makeup.