I have the opposite problem: Due to excessive caffeine intake and zero exercise, my resting pulse is normally around 95. Add in a bit of white coat hypertension, and it easily goes over 100.

I've tried to donate blood twice, and in both cases a nurse has measured my pulse and then told me that they don't want my blood -- apparently (in Canada, at least) a pulse over 100 translates to "we can't take your blood because it might make you faint".

Good point... come to think of it, I'm not sure how it's possible to do that even with a source upgrade, since trying to run an 8.0 world on a 7.x kernel would break too.

Thanks for the kind words -- I certainly should be able to write coherent instructions for doing a binary upgrade, though, given that I wrote FreeBSD Update. :-)

Are you running into the "need to create wlan0 instead of using the wifi device directly in 8.0" change? This has tripped up a lot of people.

We all know that slashdotters don't rtfa, but he'll probably get some traffic from people who aren't regular slashdot readers and don't know how things work around here.

I should also add that one link the submitter didn't include was instructions for upgrading to FreeBSD 8.0-RELEASE from a previous release: http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2009-07-11-freebsd-update-to-8.0-beta1.html (obviously, apply s/8.0-BETA1/8.0-RELEASE/ to the instructions).

Before anyone asks, yes, that link is on my personal website -- but no, I'm not just posting it here to drive traffic in my direction. That link is going to be in the official release announcement too.

Technically, 8.0-RELEASE has not yet been announced. Judging by the links in the submission, it looks like the "anonymous reader" is whoever owns cyberciti.biz, and he decided to submit the story early in order to drive traffic to his site.

Tarsnap is really designed as a backup service rather than a synchronization service: While it is very good at recognizing duplicate data and only uploading new blocks when you create an archive, it has no such mechanism for making archive extraction more efficient -- I wrote it with the presumption that people would only be extracting archives after losing data. That said, I think I can see a way to implement "tarsnap -x --sync" efficiently.

But for right now, as much as I'd love to get more customers, I don't think Tarsnap really matches the submitter's requirements.

in CTR mode you can easily flip bits of the cyphertext then make a new MAC.

No. MAC != hash. You cannot compute a new MAC unless you have the MAC key.

I mean what else is "2^119" hard to solve?

Finding a file which has an MD5 hash of either 000000000000000000000000000000XX or 000000000000000000000000000001XX for some pair of hexadecimal digits XX.

Computing the 2^100th bit of Pi (approximately -- the BBP algorithm has some factors of log thrown in, so I've dropped a factor of 2^19 to account for those).

Sorting a list of 31 elements using bogo-sort.

If I had a nickel for every time I heard someone say "if I had a nickel", I'd have a lot of nickels.

The RELENG_7 branch moves directly from -PRERELEASE to -STABLE. The -RELEASE is cut from the RELENG_7_2 branch.

FreeBSD 7.2 is coming out on Monday, too. (The release source code has been tagged; now it's just a matter of waiting for ISOs to build and bits to propagate to the mirrors.)

Also, one set of backups isn't enough. What if things broke before the last backup, and you need to go back further?

The phrase "set of backups" is rather ambiguous here -- but if you're using an intelligent backup system (like tarsnap) you'll have multiple snapshots stored.