bzuro - Slashdot User

Submission + - OpenSolaris or FreeBSD?

Submitted by Norsefire on Friday November 27, 2009 @10:25AM

Norsefire writes: I am in quite a predicament. I decided a while back to branch out and use a new operating system (currently running Debian), after a bit of searching (trying Gentoo, Gobo and Arch along the way) I decided to use something that isn't Linux. Long story, short: I narrowed the choice down to OpenSolaris and FreeBSD but now I'm stuck. OpenSolaris is commercially backed by Sun, has nice enterprisey tools in the default install and best of all, a mature implementation of ZFS. FreeBSD is backed by a foundation, has a minimal default install and a rather new (but recently improved in the 8.0 release) implementation of ZFS, however it offers the Ports Collection (I quite like the performance boost from compiling from source, no matter how small it might be) and a bigger community than OpenSolaris. That is just a very minimal mention of the differences, I would be interested to see what the Slashdot community thinks of these two operating systems.

Comment stonewalling their own ignorance (Score 1) 323

by bzuro on Wednesday October 28, 2009 @09:59PM (#29905493) Attached to: Amazon Patents Changing Authors' Words

why is it, that these companies do the exact opposite of the reasonable thing? and its getting worse every time. someone (we) should really do something about these things called 'patents'.

Submission + - Penny-Sized Nuclear Batteries Developed 1

Submitted by pickens on Friday October 09, 2009 @12:19AM

pickens writes: Pickens writes:

Nuclear batteries that produce energy from the decay of radioisotopes are an attractive proposition for many applications because the isotopes that power them can provide a useful amount of current for hundreds of years at power densities a million times as high as standard batteries. Although nuclear batteries have been used for military and aerospace applications for years their large size has limited their general usage but now a research team at the University of Missouri team has developed a nuclear battery the size of a penny that could be used to power micro- and nano-electromechanical systems. The researchers' innovation is not only in the battery's size, but also that the batteries use a liquid semiconductor rather than a solid semiconductor. "The critical part of using a radioactive battery is that when you harvest the energy, part of the radiation energy can damage the lattice structure of the solid semiconductor," says Jae Wan Kwon. "By using a liquid semiconductor, we believe we can minimize that problem." The batteries are safe under normal operating conditions. "People hear the word 'nuclear' and think of something very dangerous," says Kwon. "However, nuclear power sources have already been safely powering a variety of devices, such as pacemakers, space satellites and underwater systems."

Comment this poll (Score 1) 549

by bzuro on Monday March 02, 2009 @07:51AM (#27038631) Attached to: I would install the following technology in my current/future children:

should have checkboxes, instead of radio buttons.

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