Jailed Time Machine service? I just made a share with the appropriate settings and that was it; no jail or service required.

As long as you just want basic ZFS without fancy stuff like deduplication you can use an HP Microserver. I've got an N54L with four gigs of RAM, which is currently running FreeNAS 9.2 with a mirrored two-disk setup (because my budget didn't allow more then two disks when I put it together). It works just fine and didn't put a huge dent into my finances. Also nice is that there is a modding community for those things so if you want to replace the DVD drive with more fixed storage you can easily find an article by someone who has tried just that.

Newegg quotes 229 USD for one with 4 GB, which leaves ca. 250 USD for HDDs once S&H is factored in. Get two nice HDDs or perhaps three slightly worse ones. You've got four caddies to work with so future expansion is not a problem. Or put in more RAM.

Oh, and don't forget the USB drive. For FreeNAS 9.3 you'll want one with at least 8 gigs.

The blog is useless. I read the Github discussion on the pull request and the revert. Here's what happened:

1. A pull request containing only two very minor changes to comments in the source code was made.
2. Mr. Noordhuis rejected the pull request with a terse "Sorry, not interested in trivial changes like that."
3. A flamewar erupts about the appropriateness and neccessity of the singular "they". Mr. Noordhuis is not participating in the flamewar.
4. The pull request is forced through while the flamewar rages on.
5. Mr. Noordhuis reverts the forced landing on the grounds that it violated project policy. The revert immediately begins to accumulate a fair number of hostile comments.
6. The flamewar intensifies. Allegations are made about Mr. Noordhuis's character.
7. A joyent employee, acting in an official role and using Joyent's official blog, decided to write and publish a text about how Mr. Noordhuis is sexist and would've gotten fired from Joyent on the spot, indirectly calling Mr. Noordhuis an asshole in the process. Joyent, by not taking the text down, implicitly endorses it.
8. Mr. Noordhuis posts into the discussion to point out that the rejection/revert had been made on purely procedural grounds. He simultaneously announces that he will leave the project, which I can fully understand.

After that the flame war goes on. Some people actually point out that Joyent's behavior is highly unprofessional, which the Joyent employee disregards because "'Fired' isn't a gendered word that has larger social ramifications that careless use of pronouns does." So yes; according to Joyent, publicly calling someone so sexist that they would've been fired on the spot is less bad than using "he" in a gender-neutral role. (Bonus points for one woman in the discussion calling the whole thing a "witch burning". For the record, she was also the one person to offer a solution instead of flaming about pronouns.)

If IBM and Oracle worked remotely like that they'd be up to their ears in wrongful termination suits. And libel suits. And, depending on whether insults are an actionable offense in the relevant jurisdiction, suits about that too.

The sad thing is that early on someone offered a perfectly reasonable way of resolving the situation: Mandating the singular "they" in the project's coding guidelines and then floating changes to existing code until they can be mixed in with other refactoring commits. Of course it was completely ignored.


(For the record, I am a proponent of singular-they and I still think that the term "social justice warriors" with all its negative connotations entirely applies here. Many of the people involved completely went off the rails as soon as the pull request was rejected and immediately assumed Mr. Noordhuis to be a moustache-twirling antifeminist villain.)

Not just startups run by kids. Be wary of companies run "like startups" who want to be all kinds of agile by exclusively hiring people who have started but not finished a CS degree because those people are supposedly both experienced (because all CS students are experts in all things computer) and extremely creative (because people over 25 can't keep up). Experience is considered problematic as apparently it translates into higher salaries but not higher skill.

I work in such a hellhole (well, until I'm done with my degree) and the sheer amount of stupid mistakes we're making because nobody has any kind of experience is mindboggling and is the reason why the company has been in damage control mode since 2010. The kicker? The owner of the company is in his 50s. He's still convinced that only CS students can ever be reasonable employees in the IT world.

Not just young bosses can be stupid about hiring.

What's keeping Kickstarter from recouping the lost money from the creator? I haven't read the fine print of the deal between Kickstarter and a creator but I'd be surprised if it didn't contain a clause that allowed them to do exactly that.

Crowdfunding is a bit of a gamble. I've backed a few projects that are massively overdue. On the other hand I also backed Shadowrun Returns and Wasteland 2, both of which are here and immensely enjoyable. And a high-efficiency LED bulb I'd buy again if I needed another one. Aside from Kickstarter I bought myself into the Path of Exile closed beta and PoE became a succesful and very fun game that I spent a lot of time with.

Of course there are some wasted Euros in there. I'm not going to deny that. And I'm still waiting for a few promising-looking games, although at least I get status reports every once in a while. One semi-example for a failed Kickstarter would be Preaching to the Perverted; while the Blu-Ray version works fine and looks great, the promised digital download first turned into an iOS app (I don't own a recent iDevice) and then had to be redone from scratch because Apple wouldn't allow it on their store. If I remember correctly it's still being worked on.

You have to accept that it's always going to be hit-and-miss with crowdfunding. Sometimes you get a polished, fun product that will leave you entirely content with how much money you spent to obtain it. Sometimes you get something disappointing or the project folds due to mismanagement. In my experience the former is more common (even if time overruns are the norm), especially if it's a high-profile project. But it's still a gamble and it's up to you to decide whether you're willing to take it.

The gist of it is that a terrible and untouchable community manager managed to get several backers to a point where they felt that the only effective way to protest a community management issue was to financially hurt the developers. You can find the details online; a search for "mighty number 9 chargebacks" should bring up relevant stories. There's a dash of Gamergate towards the end but it's only tangentially related to the core issue.

NeXT didn't close up shop, they were bought by Apple. Then they replaced several of Apple's top execs (including the CEO) with their own and used NeXTSTEP as the foundation for the new MacOS. In essence, NeXT bought Apple for minus 400 million Dollars.

You are painting with broad strokes. By the same measure one could argue that guns have pretty much one use: Accelerating bullets. The kinds of targets the bullets can be accelerated towards are varied, one of which is murder victims. There is considerable societal interest in regulating guns' use in bullet acceleration leading to the production of murder victims.

You conflated all chemical reactions with bomb making, which does not make much sense, just like my conflation of all gun use with murder doesn't.

Also, by your logic, hydrocarbon fuels should be severely restricted because they can be used to make ANFO. Also vegetable oil because you can use that for ANFO, too. Or you leave the ammonium nitrate away and just build a fuel-air bomb. Society has interest in regulating the production of those, too. And let's not forget that electricity can be used to electrolyze water into hydrogen and oxygen, which can also be used as an explosive. Access to electricity should be regulated as well.

Or we agree that just because something can potentially be used for actions that are against the interests of society we can't assume that this is a particularly common use.

No, only lawmakers. A chemist would just look at what you're trying to do, say "yup, he's probably not going to kill himself" and move on. Chemists can be unnervingly casual around fairly dangerous chemicals because they can gauge the actual danger involved.

Of course when the chemist does become nervous, so should you.

When mainboards came with AC’97 that was good enough to deliver high-qualify 5.1 sound people stopped buying sound cards because the onboard sound was on par with them and came free with the mainboard. Plius, we still had the option to go for a sound card if we disliked the onboard sound or if it broke.

When mainboards came with onboard Fast Ethernet people stopped buying discrete NICs because, again, the onboard sound was on par and free. Plus, we still had the optiom to get a discrete NIC or two.

When mainboards came with onboard modems Well, I have no idea; we only got internet in the ISDN age. But, again, discrete modems continued to be available.

But the same things don’t apply to RAM and mass storage. The new MBPs don’t ship with terabyte SSDs for free so for people who expect to store large amounts of data directly on their computer the default offering is not on par. One could choose the BTO option for more storage but Apple’s prices are way above market average and they don’t even offer the choice of an HDD in a new MBP. So people complain because now they get less capability than before with no reasonable upgrade strategy. There would be no complaining if the baseline MBP had a terabyte SSD onboard or if one could pop it open and mount an HDD in there.

Likewise with the soldered-on RAM. Previously one would buy the MBP with the smallest RAM package available and then upgrade with third-party modules because, again, Apple’s prices are ridiculous. Not only that; it was possible to buy the machine and then later upgrade the RAM. This was useful if one didn’t have the money to purchase the machine and the RAM at the same time. No longer possible; RAM is non-upgradable now and if it breaks you have no option besides sending the entire computer in for repairs.

I’m talking about MBPs because they saw a big change recently but the same applies to other Macs. While treating ones computer as a disposable tool might be fine for the average user it’s not acceptable for those of us who do know their stuff. Not quite coincidentally, those are often the people who need a workhorse computer instead of something that can browse the web and play back fullscreen video.

I used to consider MacBook Pros to be no-brainer purchases. They looked good, had user-serviceable innards (at least those parts you’d reasonably expect a notebook to have) and came with OS X, which I like. These days I still like OS X but I don’t like the machines it comes on.

My next Mac will probably be a Thinkpad. Those things tend to make good Hackintoshes and don’t suffer from an anorexic design department.

I'm not saying that Windows is going to drop off the market; I just think that it won't be the only choice anymore.

Now if you'll excuse me; Steam just finished downloading Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel on my Mac.

To be honest, Windows is no longer the big name in gaming platforms, Steam is. And Valve is pushing for game devs to move away from Windows-exclusive games so they can sell their Linux-based Steam Machines. While Linux support isn’t quite common yet it does pop up every now and then and OS X is actually seeing a fair number of high-profile releases.

Right now Windows might hold its dominance in the video game market but whether it’ll still be the obvious choice in a few years is not settled. (For instance, I have no idea what effect Microsoft’s rumored plans for a free baseline Windows with subscription addons would have - depending on how they'd play it it might make Windows more attractive to gamers or it might scare them off. We’ll see.)

The only issue I see with this being part of systemd is that this probably means you need to run systemd in order to get virtual terminals (because of internal dependencies). This might be bad for small embedded distros that don't want to run the whole systemd stack. Perhaps things like systemd-shim will work, in which case it might not be too painful, but otherwise the distro might have to lug around relatively heavy components in order to get virtual terminals.

As far as I can tell the systemd devs seem to want to optimize Linux for a number of use cases while declaring all use cases that stand to lose as irrelevant. A lot of people are unhappy about this, thus the hate. Well, and their attitude.