Blogs

My weekend was a nice balance of relaxation and thinking--provided by a good book (The Unincorporated Man), a trip to the beach, and a very thought-provoking question from a Linux.com reader.

See? I do read your e-mails.

The question came from one Oscar Slone, who wrote:

If you run your data center on Linux you have likely heard of BTRfs, the next generation file system that was recently merged into the kernel. If you haven’t heard of it, you should, as it stands to make your life, and all those who handle large amounts of data on Linux, much easier, more reliable and more scalable.

Why did perennial litigant Rambus, Inc. settle with the European Commission?

 

Today Opera announced something amazing. Unite. The basis is a webserver in a browser. It allows you to share your music, images, files, and host chatrooms with anyone you choose, whether or not they use Opera. Futhermore, the APIs for writing your own services are available now. And the press has jumped onto this. Even Slashdot incorrectly reported it as the 10.0 release. However, will this actually get them users?

One of the coolest things I get to do in this job is talk to the developers and business executives who are every day advancing the Linux operating system. Our Open Voices Podcast Series showcases some of the most influential people in the Linux and open source software community, including Linus Torvalds, Mark Shuttleworth, Mitchell Baker, and many more.

Sharp-eyed observers may have noticed a slightly unusual patch which was merged into the mainline kernel on March 17. It’s a new mascot for the kernel; among other things, this image is shown at boot time for a number of configurations. For many a year, the mascot has been Tux the penguin. For 2.6.29, though, Tux will be taking a break while “Tuz” steps in.

According to the German Heise magazine, Parrot 1.0 finally got released today. I think this is very exciting news. In general this means that the virtual machine of Rakudo is finally stable, which is great news all by itself. It also means that maybe we will even see a working version of Pynie in the near future, now that its basis has stabilised.

After reading the comments on my earlier post, Delayed allocation and the zero-length file problem as well as some of the comments on the Slashdot story as well as the Ubuntu bug, it’s bec