Plan 9's filesystem has an append permission mode bit.

It also achieves deduplication in a simple way using Venti. Clever stuff.

I completely agree.

However, that doesn't mean I think Quartz or whatever Windows uses is better. Some of the alternatives that are miles better, but unfortunately didn't catch on simply because they were a bit too late include Sun's NeWS and Plan 9's /dev/draw.

Hear hear.

I'm not familiar with what's going on in Yemen, but what you describe is something that many, many people in the west do, which results in many many fuck-ups.

Seconded.

I use FreeBSD instead of Solaris, but the idea is the same. SCM is an overkill for everyday files.

Use rsync if all you want is backups, or unison if you want to sync more than one machine. ZFS takes care of keeping the logs!

Although there's room for improvement in unison, it does the job pretty well for me.

Arabic books and their authors indeed played an amazing role in the history of science. It's disturbing seeing them arrive to what they are now...

Anyway, a few more Arabic classics off the top of my head:

- Pretty much anything written by Ibn Sina. (The Canon of Medicine is a pretty good one)
- Ibn AlNafis's Commentary on the Anatomy in Ibn Sina's Canon (where he described the circulatory system)
- As parent mentioned, the original book on algebra, by AlKhwarizmi. The word "algorithm" is named after him, while "algebra" was named after his book. "Jabr" in Arabic means completion.
- Omar Khayyam's many treatises on Maths and Astronomy.

There's much more on Astronomy, Physics, Chemistry, Philosophy of Science and the Experimental Method, etc.