rm-rf

I still see btrfs as years behind zfs as measured strictly by maturity (not features), and therefore consider it to be at least a few years away from being usable in situations where an advanced file system really matters (mission critical databases, 30+TB file systems, etc.)

ZFS has been around 4-5 years, yet in the last few months we hit a severe data loss bug (ZIL corruption) and a service affecting ZFS cache performance bug (ARC cache maintenance routine with math error).

I'd assume that btrfs will have similar teething pains.

The claim "The aircraft was designed to cruise at speeds of 1,989 mph at 59,055 ft, with an operational range of 6,837 miles at this speed." sounds suspect also. That'd be impressive, if true.

On (1): Is it possible that the code base is so poor that getting it 64-bit clean is big deal?

On (3): It's a nightmare now.

No word on whether or not they've used the 64-bit update as an opportunity to address the near continuous stream of exploits that they seem to have built into their products.

Assuming of course that all the data that you wish to protect is on your data partition, and that no protected data is, was, or ever will be on any other partition. Full disk encryption removes the possibility of exposure of protected data showing up on non-encrypted partitions.

With most operating systems, I don't think that there is a way to ensure that no protected data will ever end up on a non-protected partition. Presumably - if there is any writable directory on an unencrypted partition, there is a reasonable chance that protected data will end up on that partition.

From what I see, both offered phones are T-Mobile frequencies only?

The key here is the unavailability of non-carrier branded unrestricted Android phones in the US. If I get subsidized by the carrier when purchasing the phone, dealing with crapware and restriction is part of the cost of getting $400 or so off the price of the phone at purchase time.

Ideally I could make a choice to buy an Andriod phone from a manufacturer with no branding and no restrictions, pay full price for it, and accept that the additional cost is what I'm willing to pay for an unrestricted, unbranded phone. The inability to purchase a phone like that is the real problem, not the restrictions placed on carrier subsidized phones.

Two years ago I bought an unrestricted HTC Diamond with Winmo 6.1. I paid over $600 for the phone and the privilege of being able to do whatever I want with the phone. The $400 extra over a branded/restricted phone, spread out over 24 months, is $17/month for the privilege of being able to doink around with a phone.

Having done that once, I'm leaning toward putting up with the crapware and restrictions and saving the $400. I figure that in two years, I probably only really used a couple of third party apps. Most of the rest that I tried were annoying memory leaks and crashes waiting to happen - barely better than carrier provided crapware.

On the other hand, in enterprise-land, if a vendor doesn't show me their top secret, NDA-only roadmap, there is a pretty good chance that I'll be sufficiently impressed by their competitors top secret, NDA-only roadmap to consider a vendor switch.

For example - startup storage vendor shows me really cool stuff that will ship in less than a year. If really big incumbent storage vendor doesn't show me their roadmap, there is a fair chance that I'll be impressed enough with startup's gear to defer upgrade or replacement of incumbent's gear until startup's gear ships.

If incumbent is smart, they'll have something on the roadmap to share with me that keeps my seven figure annual business pointed their way.

The last quote is the interesting one. "...developers aren't listening."

That has been my experience - that a significant number of people who write code for a living are not aware of what's been happening on the Internet the last half dozen years.

"black lists, grey lists and spammers should just go to hell"

Spammers first though. Otherwise things will get worse before they get better.

No, we are not on the brink of sanitizing nuclear waste.

In addition to pjscott's comments, I'd add that I believe that the risk's associated with radiation and radioactive waste are relatively well understood compared to the risks associated with manufactured chemicals and pharmaceuticals (for example). In these area's, we have a tendency to perform a trivial study of the toxic effects of a compound, release it for general world wide consumption, then decades later figure out the biological and environmental consequences.

Another byproduct of western civilization are our various systems for governing nation states. Those systems, in the 20th century alone, caused somewhere between 100 million and 200 million deaths (largely from war, famine and 'democide' initiated by governments, politicians & dictators).

I fear chemical compounds whose names I can't pronounce and governments who murder their citizens far more than radiation.

As someone degreed in Physics, I have far less fear of the long term consequences of nuclear power and nuclear waste than many of the other byproducts of western civilization.

I had something like this happen - except for the 'fatally' part of course.

I was in a canoe race on a cold spring day in cold water. At the beginning of the race I ended up jumping into the river in waste deep water. My jeans stayed wet the whole race. My legs were cold wet and immobile for over an hour while my upper body was 'working out' paddling the canoe.

All was good until the race ended. I got out of the canoe to walk the 1/2 mile back home. As soon as I started walking I felt the cold blood from my legs rush up to my torso & started seriously shivering. Continuing to walk made it worse. Made it home anyway & collapsed under a hot shower. I felt at the time that if I'd have tried to walk much further I'd have had a real bad day.

Ford didn't do this to be nice. He did it because:

"we can get at least as great production in five days as we can in six"

Smart man. By working them shorter hours, he could work them harder.

Looks to me like this app is a relatively simple scheduling app that in no way comes even close to the features and functionality of a full LMS such as Blackboard or Desire2Learn (or the other dozens-odd major players)

Not even close.

It will not kill Blackboard.

Having to pass tests prior to getting a diploma is a recent thing, at least to old dudes like me.

I stopped teaching twenty years ago. There were standardized tests in high school, but they were not used to determine progress or as graduation requirement. Social promotion was common - students were not held back under any circumstances, as it was assumed that the social stigma would be worse than the failure to actually learn anything.

We tested the students at the time they applied to college. Because were were publicly funded, open entry, we accepted all high school graduates regardless of how they scored. If they scored low, we moved them into remedial programs/courses.

I used to be a teacher also, but in a college level trade school, in a state that consistently ranks near the top in high school scores, in a rural, white, midwestern middle class district that had sufficient funds to produce state champion football teams, where there were minimal poverty and social issues and minimal crime.

I still had a steady stream of high school graduates showing up in my college program that could not read a paragraph, could not write a sentence, who could not add, subtract, multiply or divide fractions or decimals, yet they were proud gradates of the local school district.

What's broke? No idea, but I do know that if that district had done even the most trivial of standardized testing, those students would have been flagged for remedial work long before they started college. Instead the college, with about 40 full time faculty, dedicated 3 of those faculty to 4th through 8th grade remedial math and reading.

Is wordpress.org a different code base?

It may not be a direct indicator of their vulnerability to SQL injection, but it is a pretty good indicator of their placement on the clulessness scale.

clueless<-------------------->cluefull

        ^
        |

Right about here I'd say.

Or - that confirms that it's 32 bit number that when represented as a dotted quad appears to be an IP address.

"unless somebody subpoenas my ISP or something"

And in addition to your secure wireless SSID, you have an open SSID at your house that you maintain just for that reason, right?

Mine's named Free_Porn.

Correct - Yahoo and others put the IP address of the client that sent the mail in the SMTP headers.

Example:

Received: from [x.x.x.x] by web113916.mail.gq1.yahoo.com via HTTP; Fri, 07 May 2010 18:59:00 PDT

In this test case, x.x.x.x is my current IP address, not Yahoo!'s. The HTTP indicates that I used a browser, not POP/IMAP.

They've been doing that for years. It's handy as heck when you need to track an e-mail - you don't have to bother Yahoo with a subpoena - you can go right to the client's ISP.

There is no reason Facebook shouldn't do the same thing.

Edit: Comcast does:

X-Originating-IP: [x.x.x.x]

Google is weird:

Received: by 10.216.27.139 with HTTP; Fri, 7 May 2010 19:34:21 -0700 (PDT)

I'm not on a 10.x address. Hmmm....

"Closing the ozone hole actually speeds up the melting of the polar ice caps, according to a 2009 study from Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research."

Unintended consequence?

Perhaps 'Own the mobile' in the 2010's will be the precursor to 'Own the experience' in the 2020's?

The 70's: Own the data center (IBM)

The 80's: Own the desktop (Microsoft)

The 90's: Own the network (AOL)

The 2000's: Own the browser (Microsoft, et. al.)

The 2010's: Own the 'Experience' (Apple)

If Apple can entice us all into their walled garden, they'll own our entire experience - not just our desktops or data centers. It'll be AOL, pre-Internet, except it'll be way, way nicer - nice enough that most of us will not complain.

Had a similar thing happen the first time I used a GUI to admin a Linux box. I had a fresh install and was doing my usual post-install hardening (removing unneeded packages & users).

The GUI had a checkbox for removing the users home directory. Things were going good until I removed the user 'mail' whose home directory was '/'.

Doh!

The article describes home computing of that era quite well.

64k of RAM.

Cassette vs floppy.

Dot matrix vs daisy wheel.

Makes me want to get the old DECmate II down from the attic & boot it up one more time.

"Open Source apps usually don't try to slip crap onto your PC"

Unless you blindly run CPAN.

Agreed,and many customers will switch without knowing it.

If Comcast swapped my cable modem for a V6 capable modem, and if as a part of routine upgrades, my Dlink-whatever got swapped with one that has native v6, I'd be on v6 without knowing it. My Vista, Win7, Mac and Solaris clients would 'just work'. I.e. - when I dropped a /64 onto my home lan - consisting of a handful of laptops and an OpenSolaris server - my Vista, Win 7 and Mac picked up the V6 network and started using v6 w/o even a re-boot.

The harder part is making a decision to shut off IPV4. It's at that point that you have to make a service availability decision.

As an ordinary user, I can abandon ipv4 as soon as the services that I use are on ipv6. I don't need to be able to connect to every one of the 500 million computers on the network via ipv6 - I only need to be able to connect to the servers and services that I actually use - Google, Amazon, YCombinator, etc.

Worst case, I'd need to connect to all the computers in my P2P network - a few million, or all the computers in my bot net - a few million more. And in both of those cases, the client software either is or will be smart enough to keep me connected via a proxy of some sort.

For example - To get to Google without ipv4, I don't need to connect to every one of their millions of servers via IPV6, I only need to get a quad A from my DNS and connect to their external facing load balancers via ipv6. As soon as I can do that, I don't need ipv4 to use Google. For all I care they could be running Arcnet on their back end servers.

Another consideration is the prevalence of NAT and proxies in the corporate world. Corp users are already NAT'd, Proxied, Content Filtered anyway, so upgrading the the corporate web proxy to do 4 to 6 translation puts the entire corp desktop on the 6 network in one shot, and isn't a major re-think of Corp networking.