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Swarm of Cheap Open Source Robots Set to Take Over the World
Why Did Apple Drop ZFS From Snow Leopard?
Nvidia Badaboom and ATI Avivo GPU Video Transcoders Battle to the Death
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Asus Supposedly Infringes Linux License Terms
Archos Releases 604, 604 Wi-Fi Firmware Into to Open Source
Cisco Responds to iPhone GPL Clusterlovemaking - Open Source Wi-Fi Phone Coming?
iPhone: Ironic Cisco Fiasco

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Curves
11/16/09

In reply to Swarm of Cheap Open Source Robots Set to Take Over the World
I could not sleep knowing these things were in my house....plotting against me in evil league with the monsters that already live under my bed. Thanks, No. #opensourceswarmrobots
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Jrsy Devil's Advocate®
11/16/09

In reply to Swarm of Cheap Open Source Robots Set to Take Over the World
Now there's a set of micromachines I wouldn't mind collecting.. #opensourceswarmrobots
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Hello Mister Walrus
11/16/09

In reply to Swarm of Cheap Open Source Robots Set to Take Over the World
Meh, it'll be fine unless they're the kind of robots that make more robots that make more robots that make more robots... #opensourceswarmrobots
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GitEmSteveDave_DefinesTurgid
11/16/09

In reply to Swarm of Cheap Open Source Robots Set to Take Over the World
Well they could probably cut the cost down if they didn't use coins for wheels. #opensourceswarmrobots
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Kaiser-Machead
11/16/09

@GitEmSteveDave_Isn'tFreshPerked: But they're foreign coins. Surely they're worth nothing at all! #opensourceswarmrobots
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j05hu4
11/16/09

@Kaiser-Machead: €1 is currently worth $1.5 dollar, that is 50% more than when the euro was introduced 10 years ago.

Spend less on war I say... or get cheap open source robo's to waterboard all of them. #opensourceswarmrobots
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Kaiser-Machead promoted this comment j05hu4 was starred j05hu4 was unstarred

Kaiser-Machead
11/16/09

@j05hu4: You will not break through my barrier of stereotypical American ignorance. Pshaw #opensourceswarmrobots
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Kaiser-Machead
11/16/09

In reply to Swarm of Cheap Open Source Robots Set to Take Over the World
I would've guessed Bender's hors d'oeuvres

I wouldn't mind having an ever expanding army of nanite drones.
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Edited by Kaiser-Machead at 11/16/09 4:10 PM Kaiser-Machead was starred Kaiser-Machead was unstarred

jinushaun
09/01/09

In reply to Why Did Apple Drop ZFS From Snow Leopard?
Snow Leopard is starting to sound more and more like Vista everyday! Are we ever going to get WinFS?
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t3knomanser
09/01/09

@jinushaun: The key difference being that ZFS was never a flagship item. The only people who care are people who run data centers- ZFS is waaaaaay too much file-system for your average user.
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oldtaku
08/31/09

In reply to Why Did Apple Drop ZFS From Snow Leopard?
As an engineer I'm going to guess that

1) They underestimated the work getting it fully integrated; not just 'there if you know how to get to it', but fully productized and easy enough for their audience to use. And taking into account all the new failure and configuration paths.

2) It's not really something blingy that they can explain to most of their customer base. How many people are using their MacBook or iMac and going 'dang, this file system is really just adequate' and tossing the OS in disgust?

3) So they just never had enough manpower to dedicate to it full time when they could have those people working on something else like MMS in the iPhone or the iTablet or a thousand other things. The best people for this job would have been the ones who were desperately trying to get 10.6 out and had their hands full of other stuff like the Finder rewrite.
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Rosa Golijan promoted this comment oldtaku was starred oldtaku was unstarred

brobot - Beboptimus Prime
08/31/09

@oldtaku: you make some really good points. the only thing that I thought I'd add is that the target customer base for Mac OS X Server is going to typically be a much more 'technologically literate' group of people than the average Mac customer... meaning that ZFS isn't necessarily something that Apple would really need to advertise as a 'blingy' feature. Then again... it IS Apple after all...
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Rosa Golijan promoted this comment

ludwigk
09/01/09

@oldtaku: I don't buy argument #2, considering that it was announced as part of Snow Leopard Server. The Server product is not about "blingy" features, and NONE of it is described to most of their customer base. People using MacBooks and iMacs typically wouldn't be using X Server anyway.

Argument #3 doesn't quite make sense, since Apple keeps their project teams so discrete.
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Sir Gibler
08/31/09

In reply to Why Did Apple Drop ZFS From Snow Leopard?
has anyone else notice that the interface was updated in iTunes when you run snow leopard. the scroll bar when view apps is well different. at least from my knowledge. EDIT: sorry if that was out of the blue, i just saw the comment below and i was thinking about the UI
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Edited by Sir Gibler at 08/31/09 10:49 PM Sir Gibler was starred Sir Gibler was unstarred

Bodie1550
08/31/09

In reply to Why Did Apple Drop ZFS From Snow Leopard?
Wasn't there also something called a "Marble Interface"? Perhaps in the Blizzard edition. Still -- looking forward to Snow Leopard which I should receive from Amazon by Friday of this week. Rumors be damned. This is the real thing. Thanks Apple!
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Sir Gibler promoted this comment Bodie1550 was starred Bodie1550 was unstarred

Sir Gibler
08/31/09

@Bodie1550: marble only appears in quicktime x and was more of a philosophy than an interface. (everything disappears unless you need it)
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zacbowling
08/31/09

In reply to Why Did Apple Drop ZFS From Snow Leopard?
DTrace isn't an issue with CDDL because its a userspace application and not linked to the kernel.

Apple wouldn't have to worry so much about GPL since still owns the Darwin kernel and can license it under whatever it wants.

Also it can just write the file system support as a kmod and not link it in directly (just means you can't boot from ZFS file system).
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Rosa Golijan promoted this comment Edited by zacbowling at 08/31/09 10:43 PM zacbowling was starred zacbowling was unstarred

ploopsy
08/31/09

In reply to Why Did Apple Drop ZFS From Snow Leopard?
Most computers that apple sells can only hold 1 hard drive. ZFS seems more use full in a multi disk file server or data center.
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Rosa Golijan promoted this comment ploopsy was starred ploopsy was unstarred

theRealMikeyG
08/31/09

@ploopsy: apparently you missed the first sentance....

-------------------------------------------------
In 2008, Apple announced that we would see ZFS as part of Snow Leopard Server, but a year later our copies are shipping with ZFS nowhere to be found.
-------------------------------------------------

see that part about Snow Leopard SERVER........
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Edited by Rosa Golijan at 08/31/09 10:39 PM Rosa Golijan approved this comment theRealMikeyG was starred theRealMikeyG was unstarred

dallasmay
08/31/09

@ploopsy: Hey, in 30 years when we have exabyte hard drives you're going to regret that statement.
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32ndnote promoted this comment dallasmay was starred dallasmay was unstarred

ploopsy
08/31/09

@theRealMikeyG: OOPS! my bad! The orange writing cause "Disharmony" and I was unable to read it properly lol.

Actually It slipped my mind by the time I got to the end of it.
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ploopsy
08/31/09

@dallasmay: In 30 years a 4exabyte thumb drive will cost 8$.
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ndonahue
08/31/09

In reply to Why Did Apple Drop ZFS From Snow Leopard?
I think Apple just didn't want to go above the $29 price point. Imagine how many people wouldn't upgrade if the price was $29.95.
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Rosa Golijan promoted this comment ndonahue was starred ndonahue was unstarred

zacbowling
08/31/09

In reply to Why Did Apple Drop ZFS From Snow Leopard?
did you nod off durning writing this?

"ZFS" became "ZDF" half way through.
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Rosa Golijan promoted this comment zacbowling was starred zacbowling was unstarred

Rosa Golijan
08/31/09

@zacbowling: It's quite possible that I was sleep-writing while dreaming about Zacbowling da Fantastic.

Thanks for the catch, fixed.
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Edited by Rosa Golijan at 08/31/09 10:37 PM Rosa Golijan was starred Rosa Golijan was unstarred

zacbowling
08/31/09

@Rosa Golijan: hehe :-) my heart is warmed at the thought.
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Andyr2120
08/31/09

In reply to Why Did Apple Drop ZFS From Snow Leopard?
Oracle looks like they are going to try to monetize every last possible dollar out of the various apps that Sun owned. It won't end well.
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ifstone
12/06/08

In reply to Nvidia Badaboom and ATI Avivo GPU Video Transcoders Battle to the Death
I think you're confusing transcoding with recompression. Sounds like these products recompress video, i.e., decompress the source and then compress it in another format. Transcoding is different: it means parsing the source bitstream and intelligently converting it to another format, or even the same format at a different bitrate, without all the work involved in encoding.

Something like Nero Recode does transcoding, and it can process an entire two-hour movie in software (on the CPU) in a half-hour or so -- far less time than it would take to recompress -- because it's simply changing quantization and going MPEG-2 to MPEG-2. It doesn't need to do motion estimation, which is the most time-consuming part of encoding. There are transcoders to convert between different M-JPEG formats too (of which there are many) that simply repackage the JPEG data in whatever quirky format is required without recompressing, i.e., running DCT on all the image data.
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