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Fish are capable of all sorts of feelings for humans.

You know, iPhones are known for exploding, flying away and stuff, so a mere battery dying out is nothing!

It's been done. Court ruled in favour of an argument that a PS3 should be expected to last at least 5 years. Granted, they didn't specify what they thought was reasonable.

Python is quite a good language, but the implementations suck. This is holding back widespread use of Python. It's too slow, typically 10x to 30x slower than C. That's far worse than Java.

There have been several attempts at other implementations. But because Guido Rossum fights formal standardization of the language, treating his CPython implementation as a de-facto standard, everyone else has a moving target to hit.

Google (who hired Guido) likes Python, but they don't like the low performance. CPython is a "naive interpreter" (very little optimization). Worse, with the rather lame implementation the Global Interpreter Lock, not only can't it use a multi-core CPU effectively, multi-thread programs run slower on multi-core CPUs. (The threads fight over the lock in an embarrassingly inefficient way.)

Google is doing "Unladen Swallow", which is an attempt to bolt CPython to a just-in-time compiler to a virtual machine. It's not clear how well that will work out, but the end result will have more layers than seems to be indicated. The goal is 5x faster than CPython, which won't beat Java, let alone C/C++.

It's cute that Python to JavaScript translation is possible, but it's not going to help much on the performance front.

For a few years, the great hope of the Python community was PyPy, but that had too many goals, was being developed in "sprints", and after five years, the European Union pulled the plug on funding after it was slower than CPython.

Shed Skin, which is a Python to C++ hard-code compiler, is currently the lead in Python performance, but it doesn't yet implement the whole language. Still, with about two people working on it, Shed Skin is doing better than most of the bigger projects. Shed Skin does automatic type inference. Python doesn't have declarations, but with enough analysis, the compiler can figure out what types each variable can hold and generate hard types, which makes for much faster code.

Let me enlighten you then, just so we're all on the same page:

http://www.bornalivetruth.org/timeline.php

http://gatewaypundit.blogspot.com/2009/09/obama-voted-for-infanticide-4-times-his.html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tNbp2-Tm9z4

This is nothing new to us on the north side of Chicago where our local alderman and her TIF recipients have subpoenaed bloggers for complaining about misuse of out tax dollars. You can find more on the subpoena here. And the EFF has even stepped in the help the lawyers supporting the bloggers.

Microsoft surely knows how to crush competition. http://next-world-war.blogspot.com/

Pushing the P2P users to the wall by banning such companies is noly going to result in negative and more such sites would pop up. http://next-world-war.blogspot.com/

These big corporations save themselves through chapter 11 while small investors go down the drain. http://next-world-war.blogspot.com/

You are largely correct. Almost every case under these conditions would not be fair use. Here's one I think that qualifies however.

You should be careful about making blanket statements like "There is no fair use involved in making unauthorized copies of a work" and then following with all sorts of conditions. You contradict yourself in your own post that way. It might be more consistent to say "there is no fair use involved in distributing unauthorized copies of a work".

LOL - I try not to shamelessly promoto myself

http://pizzaboxart.blogspot.com/

It now requires uber gear to do ANYTHING fun in the game

A guild recently cleared Ulduar in blues, just to disprove that way of thinking: http://greedygoblin.blogspot.com/2009/08/ungeared.html

Rocket propulsion technology belongs in the Smithsonian right next to the buggy whip and the slide rule. It hurts just to think about it. What is needed is a clean technology that taps into the universal sea of energy in which we move for extremely fast transportation. Earth to Mars in hours instead of years, that sort of thing.

Essentially, physicists are wrong in thinking that motion does not require a cause. Acausal motion is crackpottery, on a par with the flat earth hypothesis. An analysis of the causality of motion leads to the inevitable conclusion that we are moving in an immense sea of energetic particles organized as a lattice.

The Problem With Motion

Like fish in the water, we are swimming in an immense sea of energetic particles but we can't see it. An analysis of the causality of motion leads to the inevitable conclusion that we are moving in an immense sea of energetic particles. Soon we will understand how to tap into the sea for energy production and extremely fast transportation. It will be an age where vehicles have no need of wheels, move silently at enormous speeds with no visible means of propulsion and negotiate right-angle turns without slowing down. Get ready for interesting times ahead because Aristotle was right about motion requiring a cause.

The Problem with Motion

Simple. Joe Biden signed up for an account at Mint.Com. Our financial problems are over!

(Serious aside: The Fed could/should employ a team of designers and information experts (a la Edward Tufte or this guy) to help improve the transparency and operational efficiency of the government. Mint.com has some great examples of boring/old data presented in a fresh, informative, and visually-attractive manner. There's plenty of scientific evidence showing that aesthetics can improve cognition. The Obama administration have done an admirable job on this front compared to their predecessors, but there's still more to be done, particularly at the congressional level)

(Second aside: Mint.com were purchased by Intuit yesterday. Ew.)

In the US (well, the parts I've paid attention to) "real property" is the land and anything attached to it. If you can lift it and carry it out (with or without help) with nothing more than disconnecting it from utilities (or something like a dryer vent) then it not part of the real property. ....

I looked up chattel and real estate in Ontario, where I'm from. It's pretty much as you've found - if it's a "built in", it's real estate, but if it's stand-alone, it's chattels and you can take it.

A chattel is a moveable object that has not been "annexed" to the property in a legal sense. A stand-up dishwasher is a chattel. A built-in dishwasher is not. Built-in appliances are part of the real estate. Independent stand-alone appliances are chattels. Electric lights fixtures are part of the real estate, but the light bulbs are not.

From a real estate agent's blog, not a legal document. http://ontariorealestatesource.blogspot.com/2008/04/what-are-chattels.html

Hahaha Urinal. Nice to see that apk's security guides like this one have put a dent into your malware and botnet business with the infamous RBN, Ukie boy:

http://www.tcmagazine.com/forums/index.php?s=59a1733cda9711d7bb0c2f0b1da8e2ab&showtopic=2662

You're only showing your hand on this one. I use his guides and hosts files and I never get taken advantage of by the likes of your kind anymore because of him. It is very obvious you have taken a beating from apk before either in technical debate or because of your botnets being disabled and crippled one by one as more people do as I have done and applied apk's security guide points and hosts file versus scum like you. Trash like you deserve every second of it and the same thing is being done by online scum like you have done here to apk http://twitter.com/klastalov/status/200124793 where you said quite classlessly he could suck your sweaty cock. Small cock should have been added. Improve your English you foreign reject and improve your way of making money because you ukes have done the same to Dancho Danchev of ZDNET with his Ukranian fanclub he notes here http://ddanchev.blogspot.com/2009/09/ukrainian-fan-club-features.html and that is about all scum like you have is your online putdowns after people like Mr. Danchev and apk get through with you by blowing away your botnets and informing others online about them and how to stop them. Too bad you are too stupid and illiterate to make a living honestly and instead have to prey on grandma types online as online trash like you do. The part that makes you completely stupid is that you are obviously modding yourself up also which fools no one, you foreign moron. Go home to the Ukraine scumbag. You're not wanted here.

Tenure will give him some protection. But his university has a history of retaliating against whistleblowers. Considering that he has been using the public-records laws to ask hard questions about administrators, I'd say yeah, he's putting himself on the line to do this.

Compared to other developed countries, it is.

This is precisely this type of condescending, we-are-am-smater-than-you attitude that turns people off on science and scientists. Maybe physicists should concentrate on the foundational issues (e.g., the true nature of motion) first before they go chasing after gravity waves. You folks are not as smart as you think you are.

Did you know that over 90% of physicists believe that matter can move in spacetime even though it is known that spacetime is frozen from the infinite past to the infinite future? Did you know that physicists have no clue as to what keeps a moving particle in motion? Did you know that most physicists believe that moving bodies remain in motion for no reason at all, as if by magic?

My own research, based on the application of the principle of causality to motion, has led me to conclude that we are swimming in a enormous sea of energetic particles. Having a correct causal model of motion will unleash an age of free energy and extremely fast transportation.

The Problem With Motion

DX10 was never ported to XP in any significant manner. It was from this project: which hasn't been updated since January, 2008 as it is now defunct. If you want to try to make something of the work that they started (meaning actually getting it to easily allow you to use DX10 in a meaningful manner on non-Vista/7 platforms) they did release their work under the LGPL. But honestly, this isn't going anywhere because Microsoft was just simply not talking out of it's ass when it said porting DX10 to XP is not so trivial as some make it seem.

Maybe you should look into things before you start throwing around statements you can't support.

it's the same feigned argument as when they refused to port DX10 to XP to boost Vista sales - uh - I mean it was because it's technically impossible... it's just that hackers ported it to XP later....

Except those hackers consider the endeavor a failure, more than a year ago.

From Here

It is with great sadness that I announce the closing of Falling Leaf Systems, LLC. We set out over a year ago to provide users of both "old and unsupported" as well as "alternative" Operating Systems the ability to run the latest games for the PC. Unfortunately, Falling Leaf Systems was unable to achieve that goal.

So, what, is it that we've redefined success to include failure, which means that the failed attempt to port DX10 to XP, now counts as a success and proves Microsoft wrong?

>>cost so much is FDA regulations and the higher standards to which they are held

So is that why my wife's first insulin pump failed, was replaced, failed, was replaced over and over? From failed motors, the crappy plastic they used that broke, to the fact she spent over $5000 on a water proof device (to something like 6 feet) to "oops, we were wrong, sorry"? Where is the FDA here?

She switched to another vendor and it was the same story. The again, the pump motor would fail after several months, the plastic break, replacement after replacement. Then the Pod device. The consumables are much more expensive on this. The pods are cheaply produced, so sometimes they don't insert correctly. Sometimes one has to try 3 pods to get one which will work.

Somehow I don't think that FDA regulations are really worth a crap when it comes to consumer medical devices. The FDA even has rules against patching medical devices running Windows; http://lawfirmit.blogspot.com/2009/05/fda-rule-on-appying-windows-patches.html You have to get approval to patch, which takes around 90 days.

Limux wants to disagree: http://limuxwatch.blogspot.com/

Spatial cognition has been shown to be culturally variable

I love the example given in Language and Cognition: Investigating the Sapir-Wharf hypothesis:

'Follow me to Pormpuraaw, a small Aboriginal community on the western edge of Cape York, in northern Australia. I came here because of the way the locals, the Kuuk Thaayorre, talk about space. Instead of words like "right," "left," "forward," and "back," which, as commonly used in English, define space relative to an observer, the Kuuk Thaayorre, like many other Aboriginal groups, use cardinal-direction terms â" north, south, east, and west â" to define space.1 This is done at all scales, which means you have to say things like "There's an ant on your southeast leg" or "Move the cup to the north northwest a little bit." One obvious consequence of speaking such a language is that you have to stay oriented at all times, or else you cannot speak properly. The normal greeting in Kuuk Thaayorre is "Where are you going?" and the answer should be something like " Southsoutheast, in the middle distance." If you don't know which way you're facing, you can't even get past "Hello."'

All your mashups are belong to us!

Seriously, trace all you like on google maps (in your geography lessons, at work, in your council meetings) because we're going to take all your data and put adverts on it.

regards, Ed.

I realize that there are those of the math persuasion who choose to disagree but I donâ(TM)t care.

Math will not lie to you. There are continuous as well as discrete values observable in nature. Much like you can only perceive somewhere in the neighborhood of 30-90 frames of video per second, just because you're incapable of observing the continuity doesn't mean it's not there.

If *YOU* "could float a goat five feet above the White House lawn, then you" would have.

Your "site"'s arguments completely ignore time as a concept, not merely as a dimensionality. ("Alex, what is Impulse?") I feel that time is a separate system from physical dimensionality, but you go to the point of saying that it doesn't exist.

Therefore, you are an idiot. Q.E.D.

I realize that there are those of the math persuasion who choose to disagree but I donâ(TM)t care.

Math will not lie to you. There are continuous as well as discrete values observable in nature. Much like you can only perceive somewhere in the neighborhood of 30-90 frames of video per second, just because you're incapable of observing the continuity doesn't mean it's not there.

If *YOU* "could float a goat five feet above the White House lawn, then you" would have.

Your "site"'s arguments completely ignore time as a concept, not merely as a dimensionality. ("Alex, what is Impulse?") I feel that time is a separate system from physical dimensionality, but you go to the point of saying that it doesn't exist.

Therefore, you are an idiot. Q.E.D.

You want science to be popular? Just stop the elitist condescension and admit that you don't know it all and that you (especially, the more famous scientists) may be wrong about many things. The public has the right to mistrust scientists just as much as the religious leaders. We don't like to be preached to from on high. We want respect.

As an example, if you ask a physicist to explain why two particles in relative motion remain in motion, you come face to face with bullshit and ignorance. One may tell you that nothing is needed (the magical unseen cosmic hand) while the other may insist that physics is not about the why but the how of things. To a thinking layperson, both answers are pathetically wrong. Learn about why an analysis of the causality of motion leads to the conclusion that we are swimming in an immense sea of energetic particles.

Physics: The Problem With Motion

Is it default allow or default deny? Because if it is default allow it is worthless, as by the time the page is rendered it is already too late security wise. Does it have an easy way to import blocklists like ABP? Because I really would hate to have to program site by site by site, especially if it is default allow, which would mean i'd have to go in and set preferences before I clicked on any links for every site I wished to visit.

Sounds like way too much work to me, kinda like how I have read about Opera users expecting someone to run privoxy just to get add blocking. Like I really want another program sucking up resources 24/7 just to block ads, and as I have seen with trying HOSTS files for ad blocking never seems to work as good as ABP and is a royal PITA to add new ad servers to. So while I appreciate that you like Opera, and am quite happy we all have plenty of choices when it comes to browsers now, after trying to use my oldest's Opera (he loves Opera and refuses to have FF installed) even with a fully loaded HOSTS file I found all the ads that got through quite irritating, so if I wanted a lighter browser I would probably just use Kmeleon CCF ME which has ABP built in.

I have often wondered why they haven't followed the money trail to find the people behind the "Antivirus 20xx" nonsense. I know I would certainly like to read a news story about the untimely death of the people involved.

They (FBI, and their equivalents in the dozen other countries widely affected) know exactly where it's coming from, it's just not in their jurisdiction.

Code from within the 2009 version:
"00420214 - Don`t install on Rus:; 00420234 - Russian or Ukrainian Windows detected. Exiting ..." - http://sunbeltblog.blogspot.com/2009/01/russian-don-infect-themselves.html

"In the early and mid-1990s, criminal groups provided protection to businesses and enforced contracts when the state was too weak and corrupt to do so. In the process, they actually helped sustain private enterprise, albeit at a high cost to business. The emergence of an economic market for private protectionâ"in which criminal groups compete among themselves as well as with other newly formed private security agentsâ"has stabilized the business-criminal relationship. Recently, criminal networks have taken a more businesslike approach to maximizing profit" - http://www.worldpolicy.org/journal/articles/wpj04-1/sokolov.htm

The following article is the best writeup I've seen thus far on this threat, and provides some insight on the financials:

"If these stats are to be believed, one affiliate was able to install 154,825 copies of AV XP 08 in ten days' time, and 2,772 of those copies were actually purchased by the victims. This only represents a one to two percent conversion rate, but with the generous commission structure, was enough to earn the affiliate $146,525.25 for that time period. At that rate, the affiliate could be expected to earn over 5 million U.S. dollars a year, simply by maintaining a large botnet and forcing AV XP 08 installs on 10,000 to 20,000 computers a day." - http://www.secureworks.com/research/threats/rogue-antivirus-part-2/

Kinda makes a guy reconsider his chosen career... Until you consider the mortality rate of Mafiya members, and the hordes of angry noobs wherever you go ;)

Is it impossible that WebGL could ever be done that way?

I'm starting to think that the best way to deal with IE is to create a Webkit/V8 plugin.

Dibs on that idea!

And V8 may not always be the best engine for that. And since the browser already does Javascript, I'd say leave it to the browser. If it's really a problem for people, the solution is to upgrade the browser, not to install a bigger plugin.

No, what I like about O3D -- and you'll have to correct me if I'm wrong -- is that WebGL is a very low-level wrapper around OpenGL, whereas O3D is high-level-ish, right? Or, put another way: Would it be possible for O3D to wrap either Direct3D or OpenGL, depending on the platform? That would be a definite win.

Other than that, from reading that discussion, the biggest thing I like about WebGL is that, like most of the other web standards I know and love, and like the Unix philosophy, it tries to do one thing and well.

For example, rather than having its own format for loading assets, it's counting on the browser to provide a more generic one -- maybe the ability to have URLs that refer to some location inside a zipfile (or something else reasonably standard). It occurs to me that data URLs could go a long way here as a hack, too.

WebGL's biggest advantage (IMHO) is its ease of implementation -- by the browser, natively. Webkit's on board, along with Mozilla and Opera. Ever since Flash, it seems like people have learned their lesson regarding plugins. Don't get me wrong, I think that Gears is very useful, but how often is it updated?

Getting users to install a plugin on any platform is becoming difficult, it takes the browser vendors themselves to push features. If every browser apart from IE implements canvas3D, then I think you're going to see gradual adoption by the same developers that build on canvas and/or SVG despite IE's lack of (native) support.

There already is a Fallout MMO game. It's still in beta, but it's fun to see how far fans can go when they really want something that the creators of a game won't give them.

FOnline - Come join the grief fest.

In terms of storing things in cookies instead of the backend, I can understand their reply. Why did GMail have an outage a few weeks ago? Because the load balancing layer, which from what I can tell is required to steer you to the server your session is on, wasn't scaled properly to accommodate new code, some of which was designed to help improve service availability.

Unless you design things very carefully (and the larger the site the more carefully this stuff has to be designed), creating server sessions can mean exposing your users to single points of failure. It can also mean subjecting users to bad user experiences when their session times out.

Storing sessions in memory cached in a single server, with a router to get you to the right server, backed by a clustered database seems like a good solution, but is complex and can have performance problems. Which seems to be what happened to Google. Also remember that cache layers are great for reading, but problematic in a situation with lots of writing (for example, Ebay).

Cute is in the eye of the beholder. Behold, and judge for yourself. You should be warned, he's been hitting on her too. Getting between them could be hazardous to your health.

1. Creating and destroying thread pools has negligible overhead, so Windows isn't losing much
2. Having lots of threads running isn't a performance problem because any operating system will run out of memory before it can create enough threads to bog it down

My response:

1. Can you find a thread pooling article that doesn't include something like "there is a lot of overhead associated with creating and destroying a thread that has nothing to do with the work that the thread was created to perform in the first place"? http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc164139.aspx
2. It looks like .Net/Windows performance peeks at ~20 concurrent threads per CPU. By 50 concurrent threads you've taken a 30% hit in execution time. http://aviadezra.blogspot.com/2009/04/task-parallel-library-parallel.html and http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/dd252943.aspx
   • Pools trying to tighten their number of threads on an unloaded system will take an even bigger hit; the difference between 5 and 20 concurrent threads can be several orders of magnitude.

You are simply wrong

At least they aren't going after the Russians who created the most hardcore online PVP game (mod), Fallout Online. Unfortunately, the English server sucks unless you like building stuff constantly and resource gathering. :( http://fonline2238.blogspot.com/

CLR performance seems to be comparable to Java's VM. Are any major programs written in .Net? http://dotneverland.blogspot.com/2008/07/yet-another-benchmark-of-clr-vs-jvm.html

What? You're showing me some random blog by a linux/java advocate comparing a bubblesort across platforms? What does this have to do with writing applications? All you've got here is the efficiency of the JIT compilers when doing exactly the same irrelevant task. This is esoteric and abstract when compared to an application development task, where native functionality needs to be called (windowing, media, databases, etc) .NET is not really targeted at major applications. Its a rapid development environment for windows customers, in the same way that large parts of Solaris aren't written in Java and large parts of Mac OS X aren't written in Cocoa.

.Net/Windows creates thread pools per process, which is exactly what all older thread pools do. GCD uses a system-wide thread pooling system which brings the cost of creating threads down to a few instructions.

I am almost positive that .NET's threading pool is at least .NET-wide.

Windows Vista has an aggressive thread pooling API

.Net/Windows creates thread pools per process, which is exactly what all older thread pools do. GCD uses a system-wide thread pooling system which brings the cost of creating threads down to a few instructions.

If you've never heard anyone champion the performance potential of .NET, then you're clearly spending too much time around Apple people.

CLR performance seems to be comparable to Java's VM. Are any major programs written in .Net? http://dotneverland.blogspot.com/2008/07/yet-another-benchmark-of-clr-vs-jvm.html

Wait... Is that .2 cents or .2 dollars?

Please take anything that Monty has to say about the matter with a grain of salt. His motives are far from pure.

BTW, I am not Kirk Wylie. I don't even know him. But I do know Monty, having worked for him for a number of years, and I do know that Wylie has him dead to rights.

The article you're probably thinking of is State of Sound in Linux Not So Sorry After All.

Good article, but I've got to point out one really bad piece of misinformation this damn fool made...

"If users need remote sound (and few do), one should just be easily able to map /dev/dsp over NFS, and output everything to OSS that way, achieving network transparency on the file level as UNIX was designed for (everything is a file), instead of all these non UNIX hacks in place today in regards to sound."

<sigh> OK, let's break this down. First, you can't export a character device over the network via NFS. Or rather, you can export the character device file - but if you then attempted to write to a remote machine's /dev/dsp this way, you'd instead wind up writing to the local sound card.

Second, a naive approach like that doesn't do anything to manage the timing issues inherent with audio over the network. In some cases you don't care about latency but you do care about having the sound play uninterrupted - for instance, a "shuffle" sound in a solitaire game. /dev/dsp accessed over a network filesystem wouldn't do that for you - it would play part of the file as soon as it got it, and then, if too much time passed before it received the rest of the sound, there'd be dead silence in there. And then, consider the case of a video player: if a packet or two is lost along the way it's not a big deal, but what you care about is that packets are played in the order that they're intended. You need to strike a balance between latency and packet loss. /dev/dsp over the network isn't going to do anything like this for you, as all the packets are likely to go via TCP.

It's true that most people probably don't need network-transparent audio anyway (I don't) - but suggesting shipping out /dev/dsp over NFS is just brain-dead...

Look at how death numbers increased after 2002. I remember tasers being used in the 80's, therefore there must be something different in the way they are used. Or maybe most new trigger happy cops are recruited among Iraq vets with some serious issues in their head.

There are lot's of people taking him seriously, a fuckton of people if I may say so. See http://linuxhaters.blogspot.com/ thats' where he got that.

There was an article a few weeks ago about swedish artist Magnus Uggla, who apparently is mad as hell about Spotify and isn't going to take it any longer.

Magnus Ugglas anger wasent against Spotify, as the media wanted it to be. If you read Ugglas blogpost (swedish) you'll understand that he's mad at his record label: Sony.
As you say, Uggla thinks Sony lets Spotify get their artist on the cheap.

Uggla himself writes in his blog (translated from swedish):

And one thing's for sure. I would rather get raped by Pirate Bay then assfucked by Hasse Breitholtz and Sony Music and will therefore remove my music from Spotify waiting for a honest internetservice.

But honestly, Ugglas problem isnt that Sony lets Spotify play his songs cheap. His problem is that there isnt anyone who wants to listen to them.
As Peter Sunde (from The Pirate Bay crew) wrote (swedish) to Uggla:

There isnt even 15 persons who share your music on the largest filesharing site in the world. That's a more important indicator to your financial situation (and popularity) then how much every played song on Spotify give you

this comparison Is more fair (IMO) as it shows that the same performance can be got by a well written program in many languages. p.s your own graph shows perl as having the potential to be better than python if its written well.

about 50 times slower than C++

At doing what? once you get to large applications that do more than pure maths/simple tasks, the performance of the language becomes negligible compared to the performance of what you are writing. For something as large and being updated as often as facebook, C++ (or any compiled language is out of the question), and if you've got the hardware to support it your much better of going with a language that results in less code (see my link) and easier maintenance (even I can read python code and know what's going on, and i could before i knew python too!)

Said Leader Technology attorneys, of course, would keep all of the gigabytes of Facebook source code completely safe and secure.

NTFS-3G works just fine on Mac OS X with MacFUSE.

I just format my external disks as ext3, reserving a small partition (maybe 2-3GB out of 1TB) as a FAT32 partition.

Throw the installers for Ext2FSD, an "Open source ext2/ext3 file system driver for Windows (NT/2K/XP/VISTA, X86/AMD64)" on the FAT32 partition. This allows you to bootstrap any Windows machines you come across to access the EXT partition(s).

There are some instructions for ext3 access on OSX on various sites online, but I haven't tried any out myself.

It seems like the best solution would be to have external drive enclosures be able to act like disks or like little servers. If you want them to just be a disk, then they can have direct access, but if you're trying to access an ext3 disk on a Vista or OSX machine that doesn't have support for that file system, the hardware could just run a little ftp or sftp server and the host machine could just access it over ip.

The article you're probably thinking of is State of Sound in Linux Not So Sorry After All.