There is essentially no virtue in a compressed filesystem because there is essentially no compressible data on a modern file system. The bulk of user data these days (by volume) is already compressed, as JPEG images or MPEG sound files, or similar. A very few people or situations will have a fair chunk of information in the form of documents and guess what: the modern forms of those are already compressed too (zipped XML is the new doc.)

The pieces of data that people will complain about, executables and libraries, aren't particularly compressible either, and are not useful in compressed form because the modern operating systems that execute them operate by demand paging. Everything else (directory structure, control files) is in the noise, and arguably much better off uncompressed for efficiency of access.

I'd say that it's mostly disillusionment. You're right: it's not that hard in essence, but in the modern age of spam the effort required to stay clean is (IMO) non-trivial, and things can get very ugly very quickly. (Ugly in terms of bounce loops and bounce spam and various spools filling up.)

I gave up, but haven't switched to gmail (yet). I just turned off my external SMTP service, and now configure all of my MUAs to SMTP directly to the upstream server of the account I'm responding as. Most can handle that, and it still lets me run a unified IMAP server, which I love, but avoids all of the pain of black-lists and most of the pain of spam. Still run a local spool, because my ISP's mail is only POP, so I fetchmail from there.

So: the OP can probably get most of what he wants with an IMAP server (dovecot) and a web-mail front-end (maybe roundcube? I just read about it here.) Let the big ISP's mail spool handle MX and most of the spam filtering...

Why not? Works for Ubuntu. You want Amazon or WalMart or the guy down the road managing your software updates?

The old Slashdot used to format the centre column nicely across the width of the iPhone screen. The new one does that by making the font size unreadable, keeping the same number of lines per paragraph. Please support "vertical" reading on handheld devices again, by allowing the paragraphs to re-format, as HTML intended.

Mostly for the network stack that addressed processes, rather than hardware nodes.

"creating and composing anonymous lambda functions on the fly" is usually referred to as closing over lexically-scoped variables. It is certainly something that happens as a common idiom in functional languages, but it is *not* self-modifying code. It's more like creating an ad-hoc object that holds some data, and has an over-ridden "operator-()" (to use a C++ idiom).
Yes, many lisps can and do generate code at run-time. So do several object-oriented languages, like Smalltalk. There are many dialects of lisp (including common lisp and scheme) that compile to pure executable code, either directly or through C, and have no compiler in the result. No compiler or self-modifcation, but they still operate with closures.

You mean like gnash? Clearly it's not quite as simple as that, because gnash's primary function appears to be to crash, taking the browser with it...

I have a circa-2000 Pentium-III 500MHz that is running the crossovers for my lounge room hi-fi, which I'm listening to at the moment: so it's in use. It's plugged into a very nice multi-channel AD/DA box with a PCI interface: not sure how hard it is to find those (PCI interfaces) any more.
The box has alway run FreeBSD, and I'm happy to report it's as happy as it's ever been under 8-STABLE. Props to 4front-tech for the oss drivers.

The Australian is the local NEWS Corp. paper. Rupert essentially on record as saying that the internet is a bad idea...

> So there's nothing fundamentally wrong with filtering it.

Totally wrong: there is *no* other "media" that is actively filtered, based either on content or source. That is what is different about this proposal. All other media comply with the legislation (mostly) because they'll get into trouble with the law if they don't. That is *good enough*.

> I mean hell, it's already illegal to *host* this sort of content in Australia.

Exactly. It's illegal essentially everywhere. Let the police get on with their job. Encourage them. Fund them with the proceeds of this policy, if you like. The police don't care what protocols you're using to break the law, and are therefore future-proof and much harder to circumvent.

Java the language may or may not be cool, but Java the platform has exactly the problem Jobs is talking about: a closed API set that doesn't offer *any* access to the underlying Cocoa framework, because to do so would prevent "compiling once and running anywhere". This inability to use platform-native APIs is why Java is the programming ghetto that it is, and why Android's use of Java is not allowed to call itself Java: they like the language, but want to offer platform-appropriate (their own) APIs, rather than J2ME or whatever.

Since when does DTD or CSS file creation involve "a map of metacodes found in the document" such that "the map indicates the location and addresses of metacodes in the document". I doubt that is what Microsoft have done, because, well, who would? It means that this map needs to be regenerated after every edit of the document, which means that this isn't terribly useful or document-independent meta-information...

That summary makes it sound as though the company invented DTDs, after seeing HTML (which had them, sort-of), and in ignorance of all of the processing that was already being done in SGML in the years before. This is clearly rubbish. The pre-existence of document formatting with SGML must make the patent's claims very narrow. (not that I've read them.)