> I don't see that Oracle has anything to lose here by staying open with that component, filesystems benefit a lot from widespread use and lots of testing, but, well, it is Oracle.

I believe netapp still believes, somehow, that zfs is wafl, and that they should be paid damages for distribution of their IP.

I know that Daniel Philips has claimed at conferences way back when that he has seen prior art on WAFLs patents, but he still stopped working on Tux2 instead of fighting it. I don't know if Larry and the big O have a patent portfolio that can shut up netapp.

ZFS has been riddled with bugs in practice. Production crashes, re-silvering that fails constantly, magic voodoo incantations to get all pools up and running (I don't mean commands, I mean "well, sometimes the third time we reboot it works"). Uggh. Now that bugs aren't being fixed in opensolaris, I don't know how paying customers can convince solaris support to patch bugs. I used to point out that we wouldn't be paying for a patch that someone had integrated into opensolaris a year prior. I am so happy I don't touch this any more.

They're OK... until you try to manage different (commercial) applications on them. When app 1 requires a kernel patch, well there's no real virtualization there - the zones still run the same kernel, so when app 2 requires a different, incompatible patch, you get the throw up your hands and become the IT that says "no".

These are old issues, but trying to sell zones as the end-all be-all, or as even much more interesting than a BSD jail, is bogus.

Let's get to real issues that this doesn't change: patch management is a nightmare on solaris. 11 hasn't changed this. The OS is waaaay overpriced vs. the competition, and very unsophisticated processes monitoring via smf (I honestly think they should have cut their losses and just used runit - most of the benefits, none of the academically-inspired and simply stupid limitations in compiling the graph at boot time vs run time vs build time.... ugh).

It may be rare, but when you're in a conf. call with Juniper and Cisco and F5 because you're finding that multicast is dropping packets, you can be pretty sure that the one that fixes it is the one who has a proposal to replace all of the others' equipment with their own.

A big part of Feynman's genius was his ability to explain. There are few people who could explain concepts like him, and so it's hard to get the education he gave in his books.

That is the hardest part to figure out. Current-generation LEDs have a tendency to flake out because of heat is my understanding.

This is a soft-sell way to get nosql databases into traditional IT situations, where familiarity with SQL will let current support and DBAs say "oh, it's like SQL, but it doesn't have joins. I can do that".

I always did like the sqlite docs, specifically the diagrams of the state machine for each statement.

Making the signal public after a week or so lost (to give the owner/shipper a chance to pick it up), and adding in the fact that there are rights to salvage in the open sea, and you'd probably have a great business opportunity.

Firefox has always had the most frustrating UI for their info pages. They'll send you to pages and pages of info, but there's never a standard sidebar to actually download the available versions. The page this article links to has a link to the mobile beta of 4, which is exactly not the platform I'm browsing from. Fail.

I've used these for a number of years now, and they're more durable that e.g. the M$ keyboards (more than one accidental water spill on my goldtouches, and they work fine after drying out. The M$ ergo keyboards die. I'd rather not admit that this has happened so often, but sometimes it does).

My only complaint is that the hinge/ball-joint mechanism on the goldtouch seems to have gotten less sturdy in the last 3-4 years, and I've had 2 break on me. My older model, at home, has never broken.

They also have a smaller keyboard that may be the next one I buy, hoping that the ball-joint is better.

Here's the manufacturer's site for their keyboards: http://www.goldtouch.com/c-2-adjustable-keyboards-numeric-keypads.aspx

From what I remember, the eye-fi doesn't delete content locally, it just uploads. so you'd have to play around with some way of having the modified firmware delete the oldest N photos or something.

Ahh... it seems that the newest cards will auto-delete: http://www.dpreview.com/news/1001/10010501eyefiprox2.asp

-Peter

This is interesting stuff, but if the goal is to not have to change source, isn't this sub-par? Hasn't the Boehm collector been tested as faster than using malloc/free forever? See http://www.drdobbs.com/cpp/184401632;jsessionid=IRGXEUGCDWGBJQE1GHOSKH4ATMY32JVN for a trivial example (a paper at ftp.cs.boulder.edu is offline, I guess with the server for now).

-Peter

I'm from new york city. Anyone who hasn't heard of my home town hasn't heard of the industrial revolution. They may exist, but I'm not finding them in my 2 weeks off.

-Peter