blumentopf's comments

I've had an Intel S3500 brick within 4 weeks and a SanDisk Extreme Pro start to show occasional I/O errors after a few months. The latter doesn't just lead to bit rot, but unreadable files. With ZFS I was able to identify those with a quick zpool scrub. Which shows how valuable checksumming is even in the absence of ECC memory. At least according to my anecdotal experience, flash is much more flakey than conventional hard disks, so the assumption that stuff just doesn't happen seems ludicrous.

So they still have a team working on ZFS? Could the anonymous "ilovezfs" involved with OpenZFSonOSX and coming from a California IP address be part of this team?

https://mobile.twitter.com/ uses a much saner and faster UI.

I assume the videos available on iTunes are encoded in an H.264 profile that can be decoded entirely on the GPU, so the CPU would indeed be mostly idling during playback.

There's some progress on the keyboard and trackpad, but it's still a WIP:

http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.linux.acpi.devel/82025

At least a patch to recognize the WildcatPoint PCH is in 4.6:

https://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux....

I'm awed by your work but this is really an abomination:

"Unfortunately, company policy prohibits me from sharing the actual code." (http://marc.info/?l=linux-ext4&m=145007745502639&w=2)

- Implementation-diverse nameservers

Use multiple implementations, e.g. NSD/BIND for authoritative servers and Unbound/BIND for resolvers, to mitigate against implementation-specific bugs and vulnerabilities.

> Hopefully the kernel driver rewrite pays off

It's not a rewrite, amdgpu is a fork of radeon with support added for newer GPUs plus some cleanups and older code stripped off. Which means if you're submitting fixes, you need to submit it to both drivers (at the moment the two patches you'd submit will usually be identical.)

Oracle's ZFS encryption is susceptible to watermarking attacks: http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-hackers/2013-Sept...

The "more advanced" claim is certainly disputable but OpenZFS has a larger and rapidly growing user base. The ZFSonLinux and OpenZFSonOSX ports in particular are bringing loads of new users to the table, and that means more testing, more contributors, and in the long run more features. (I've also become an occasional ZoL contributor that way.)

Mercedes-Benz was in a similar position in 1997 when the newly introduced A-Class flunked the moose test. After a short period of denial they hired a specialist (Armin Töpfer), halted production for several months and retooled all cars with a different suspension and ESP. The ESP wasn't even necessary but put competitors under pressure to include it in their compact class cars as well. The crisis was eventually overcome and the car sold very well in Europe (1.1 million produced in 7 years). There's a fascinating book (sadly in German only) on this called "Die A-Klasse: Elchtest, Krisenmanagement, Kommunikationsstrategie." (http://www.amazon.com/dp/3472037997)

Based on my experience (from working there), car manufacturers often do not implement stuff themselves, they outsource. E.g. the HTML5-based infotainmemt system in the Porsche 918 was not created by Porsche (though they market it as if it was), but by S1nn.

From a software engineer perspective, if you work at a car manufacturer, you usually do not write software yourself, you're hired to write specs for external companies and verify that the results are conformant. Which honestly is boring.

The car manufacturers should react to the influx of new competitors (like Apple, Google) by becoming software companies themselves, but management is too stupid to see that. S1nn is a perfect example: Apple or Google would have bought the company right away, so should have Porsche. Guess who bought them instead? Harman.

Subscribe to LKML or one of the subsystem mailing lists (e.g. dri-devel). Pretty much the majority of Linux kernel developers seem to be using Mutt. (Disclosure: Me too, since 1997 in fact when I needed to replace ELM.)

I think parent referred more to contentious issues (e.g. sexism, systemd hate) rather than uncontrollable growth of a project. That said, excellent post, thank you!

The opposite of course are projects with too few contributors that accept any patch out of desperation, be it reasonable or not. (ZFS on Linux comes to mind, it's a super nice community and Brian Behlendorf does a great job as project lead but sometimes features and patches creep in of which I'm wondering why nobody dared saying "no".)

The Linux kernel community solved growth by delegating responsibility to subsystem maintainers. Such a hierarchical model is not supported by GitHub. Also, the kernel community's process of submitting and discussing patches on mailing lists, while somewhat arcane, raises the barrier of entry and keeps at least a portion of the Twitter mob out.

Because this is Europe's Lehman weekend. Those who think that contagion is not an issue anymore may be in for a surprise. In combination with this week's record plunge at Shanghai Stock Exchange and a general slowdown of the world economy this could spiral out of control fairly quickly.

Incidentally I checked your hiring page a few days ago and found only non-engineering jobs listed. Will definitely send you an e-mail though.

I hope you don't mind me saying, the hiring page required me to turn on cookies. For a privacy-focused company I think it would look best to not set cookies at all. (Or use cookies only for personal settings like language selection, like DuckDuckGo does.)

Edit: Can't find a public key for Frank nor Travis on pgp.mit.edu, will e-mail JshWright, okay?

The Hurr Durr Archives

https://www.kernel.org/

Retrieving wifi passwords from NVRAM:

    /usr/libexec/airportd readNVRAM

Alternatively:

    nvram 36C28AB5-6566-4C50-9EBD-CBB920F83843:current-network
    nvram 36C28AB5-6566-4C50-9EBD-CBB920F83843:preferred-networks
    nvram 36C28AB5-6566-4C50-9EBD-CBB920F83843:preferred-count

Can't speak for other OSes but OS X constantly phones home to Cupertino, sometimes not even using encryption, thus leaking data when you're booked into a public Wifi.

I literally spent weeks last year grepping the entire Mavericks base installation for hardcoded URLs, domain names and IP addresses and setting up entries in /etc/hosts and NAT rules to hardwire that stuff to 127.0.0.1. I also had to disable lots of LaunchServices/Agents to get the OS to shut up. Can put this up on Github if there is interest. It's only for Mavericks though, couldn't be bothered to upgrade to Yosemite as long as there are security updates for Mavericks.

Oh and another thing a lot of people don't know: The OS stores Wifi passwords in EFI boot variables. This is used for Internet Recovery. So if your device is stolen or just lent to someone else, consider your Wifi passwords compromised, regardless if the disk was encrypted.

It wasn't free for universities, but in the first half of the 90s, SGI offered so-called "Varsity" contracts, which was basically a campus license for OS updates and unbundled products like compilers, NFS/YP and the "Documenter's Workbench" (a fancy name for troff/nroff).

Of course it does, Safari uses the resolver provided by OS X, which is mDNSResponder. (It superseded the stub resolver in libSystem.dylib starting with 10.6.)