I grew up in Northern Ireland... my "high school" was the Boys Model Secondary School in Belfast. I live in the USA these days...
Anyway, my formalized education in IT at school was all on BBC Micros during the mid to late 80's; a beneficiary of the BBC Computer Literacy Project. It was on these that I encountered my first network with the Beeb's Econet... we had a BBC Master that acted as our "server" in the computer lab... it all worked pretty well. I did learn some stuff on these machines, and I still have a serious soft spot for the old Beeb; it was a great computer for the time. Not much of a games machine, but a great computer in general and dead easy to work with.
Now, my REAL education in computers, systems and programming was outside of school. I was part of the "Demoscene" on both the Amiga and Atari ST during this time, too. I was a member of a couple of groups at a time, back when we didn't have email to trade our code back and forth. We shared code by floppy disks in the mail... did that all the time and was an active member of groups in Sweden (which was sort of Demoscene Mecca) and one in London. I learned a lot more about computers doing this than I did at school, and by the time I was in my last couple of years of school computer labs I was bored out of my skull because the stuff I was doing at school was so far behind what I was doing in my spare time at home that I just couldn't muster the interest. I mean seriously; we were coding stuff in Pascal to display a menu, store data and stuff... meanwhile I was busy pushing the limits of the computers I had at home and doing stuff that the manufacturers said couldn't be done. Ahhh... good times:)
I have a 12 year old son in school in the USA today and am constantly appalled at the level of computer teaching in middle school. I am pretty close to putting him in private school because public school here just sucks.
To understand the reasons, I suggest reading When the Lights Go Out by Maggie Koerth Baker. This is an excellent book that details the reason the electric generation and transmission infrastructure in the USA (and most of the world) is a trainwreck waiting to happen.
I fully anticipate that the two parties will now settle the Apple/Samsung lawsuit out of court by announcing a cross-licensing deal. Basically, as I suggested before the whole lawsuit was so that Apple could validate its position to strongarm Samsung into basically creating a "free licensing" deal for Apple to use the LTE tech in the iPhone 5. Welcome to the world of business lock-in by patent.
Good grief; the stats if you read the actual survey tell you everything you need to know. 51% of the survey participants think that the cloud is affected by the weather... but 54% don't even know what it is.
And this is news? When did Oprah start talking about "The Cloud"? I am not kidding either; the average person doesn't know about it because the average person doesn't care. Also, believe it or not the average person doesn't NEED to care. "The Cloud" is an industry buzzword that happens to be one in the industry that most Slashdotters work. I am in San Francisco this week at VMworld, and when people ask what I'm doing in town and I reply I'd say that probably 1 in 4 actually know about the conference (at least once you get a couple of miles from Moscone), and fewer than that actually have any idea what VMware is or what virtualization is. And they don't need to care; that's our job. It doesn't matter that more than likely almost all of them use VMware indirectly in most of their dealing with their bank or some other web site every day. They only care that they can get to the information that matters to them, they don't care about how that data gets there any more than they care about how the electricity to run their lights gets there so long as it does when they flip the switch. And believe me, I doubt many people here have any REAL clue how that happens either because it's FAR more complex than you might think. I didn't know until I started reading about it and it's fascinating.
So what's the real story here? That most people don't know what "The Cloud" is? Yeah, not exactly news to me and I'm actually surprised that the number was as low as it is. I'd also bet the survey would be vastly different based upon where they ran it; San Francisco might have a very different ratio of people who know than Topeka.
Truly, spoken like one who doesn't actually keep up with market trends or the news. I wish you all the best as you sit in the garden; they're already building the wall but you're obviously far too focused on your own navel to notice.
Seriously? You think Windows 95 was the first version of Windows? Not by a long stretch... and obviously you're missing the point that compared to anything else around at the time it WAS a huge step forward. Windows prior to Windows 95 was a train wreck... I was an OS/2 user because of it. Mac OS at the time was beginning to creak under its own weight, and Linux for a desktop was pretty much a nonentity. Oh and OS/2 was a fine OS except for the lack of application support and the feeling that IBM was doing it as a hobby. I also contend that 98 SE can't be considered an OS in its own right because in many ways it was a bug fix and feature release for Windows 98... much the way that I consider Windows 7 to be "Vista SE".
Near Field Communication is a buzzword? And here I thought that unlike "cloud", NFC referred to an actual technology with very specific implementation and use cases.
I will join the choir here wondering why the technical knowledge of editors and submitters seems to be dropping precipitously.
Because storage vendors sell their gear to CxO's with unformatted, RAID0 storage capacities... and leave it to the storage admin to explain to said CxO why his 110TB SAN is full with about 50TB of data (once formatted and RAID'ed). And quite often these purchases are made without any real knowledge or often consulting the storage admin to explain why the salesman for EMC is completely batshit crazy.
Simple fact is; RAID 5 maximizes the storage capacity while allowing some semblance of redundancy. Is it a good solution? Oh hell no... I'd love to build everything RAID10 but until someone who has actually been a storage admin elevates to that level and knows to ask the awkward questions it just isn't going to happen. We are going through this right now with a storage refresh where I work... and yes, I'm the storage guy. The thing is; the people writing the checks are going to be the ones who dictate usage of RAID 5 because the sales rep oversold the capacity and my job is to make it work. I have worked for a number of different companies and they all have varying degrees of the same problem (I've also been the storage engineer on the other side). And the sad thing is, no matter how many times you go through this with your management they never quite seem to understand.
Then you have the problem of explaining to them why your storage costs 10 times per gigabyte what a hard disk from Best Buy will cost.
RAID 5 has its place until the storage vendors start getting honest and selling their gear as FORMATTED, RAID'ed capacity. Not going to happen because they all think that bigger is better.
Except planes have to file flight plans and its a bit more obvious doing that sort of thing at a controlled airport than doing it in a garage then just wheeling your flying car outside and taking off.
Patently false. About 90% of all private flights are without flight plans; flying under VFR or visual flight rules does not require a flight plan and that's how all pilots start out. You CAN file a flight plan if you like, but few do. Also, about 80% of all airports are uncontrolled, as in no tower. They have planes sitting out on the tarmac and all you need is a key (or the ability to hotwire) to get them flying. Trust me; taking a small aircraft is dead easy.
However, if you knew anything about aviation you'd also know that with a single pilot and full fuel, you'd barely be able to get enough explosives on board to make a dent in a building. Have you seen what happens when a light aircraft hits a building? It's akin to hitting a deer in your car; it'll cause some damage but the odds that even one person is going to die is pretty slim. The odds that the pilot/deer will die is pretty damned close to 100%. A Cessna 172 (which I learned to fly in) with full fuel (50 Gallons) and a pilot (175lbs) has about 200lbs of available capacity before running afoul of not actually being able to control the plane any more. And the more heavily loaded the plane, the tougher it is to control... and thus aiming for a building becomes extremely difficult.
Do you know how much good explosive weighs? 200lbs of explosive will make a decent bang but no way enough to take down a building. And what about timing and detonation? Do you know how complex that is? You need a mechanism to detonate the explosive at exactly the right moment to cause damage... too early and you hit the building with just a lot of small bits of aeroplane... too late and you probably destroy the mechanism on impact thus preventing detonation. Don't believe the movies; most explosive don't spontaneously erupt.
And don't start on the 50 gallons of fuel either; it's 100 octane which means that it resists ignition even more than the stuff you put in your car. It's VERY hard to light and gasoline needs to be a vapour in order to actually cause an explosion. Otherwise it's a fire... and a fire from 50 gallons of AvGas will take the average building sprinkler system and fire department about 30 minutes to bring under control.
You're confusing your semantics here. This is about the difference between "open" and "closed", not "open-source" and "closed-source". The two are not synonymous.
The article writer's point is about open systems, and he's using the term correctly to refer to systems on which you are free to install any software you like without a curator telling you that you can, or sandboxing. By those terms, Windows is an open system as is Android and even Mac OSX (though I fear this may be changing for the worse, soon). The only curated and sandboxed environment that has been commercially successful to the masses is iOS, and he likes it because of this.
I agree with GP; the author is an idiot.
The app steals your contact data and uploads it to a remote server before sending spam SMS messages to all your contacts, but the messages look like they are coming from you.
I think my iPhone has had this virus for a while. It also randomly changes all your contact's email addresses and is particularly nasty. It's called "Facebook"
And no car will get me to my mum's because I live in a different country. It's all a matter of perspective... and they have these wonderful things called phones and now "Skype" which means you don't need to visit as often...
Well, combined with other circumstantial evidence it does seem likely that this is a decent place to look if it's something one is passionate about. Certainly when combined with other physical evidence (documentation of a body found under a tree just a few years after the crash, a zipper manufactured in Pennsylvania, remains of a bottle of what may have been a "freckle ointment", remains of a pocket knife etc) I think there's decent reason to figure that this is possibly where the Electra went down. Probable? Hmm... that's a stretch I think but I for one am quite happy to see this one particular mystery given a bit more time. She was a pioneer and became a model for many young women both during her time and after to step out of the shadows of men... something that became much more prevalent many years after her death with the women's rights movement (really, plural) that literally changed the way Western civilization functions. For that, well I think some closure would be nice.
There's even some good circumstantial evidence that this might be the place... though granted it's a little flimsy. One that I liked particularly though was the S.O.S. painted on the side of the Norwich City, where the crew abandoning her had no real reason or probably time to paint that. Creepy and cool:) And yes, I know the discussion is linked from the same people who are investigating this... but they seem to have a trove of circumstantial evidence that no-one else seems to talk about or has on-line.
Personally, I find it fascinating and will be following with great interest.
Since I have some experience with this from my ex wife (yeah, I'm actually being honest and not just throwing accusations), this could actually be sociopathy. Typical sociopaths attempt to garner pity and make themselves seem the victim so that they can manipulate others, usually loudly and obnoxiously. And the more desperate they are for that pity the louder and less coherent they become.
My ex was not a violent sociopath until she suffered minor brain damage in a car accident and gradually lost her ability to govern her behaviors leading eventually to violent outbursts... hence the reason she's my ex wife. She was diagnosed with various degrees of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder (mutually exclusive diagnoses under typical circumstances) until historical data (diary entries, online postings etc) were used as part of the diagnosis and she was eventually diagnosed as a clinical sociopath by several doctors. That's because sociopaths are quite adept at manipulating people and will tend to lead an examination of their mental state to create an excuse.
Anyway, I digress; seriously the blog post quoted about reminds me so much of postings from my ex that it's almost frightening. The same sentence structure, the same aggrandized language and the same repeated accusations of persecution. At first I wondered if this was actually written by her for that reason.
I'm really glad that she lives 200 miles away now under the watchful eye of the state...
Oh yeah, and for bonus points if you have an OCD admin who is allergic to the command line, you can easily put Napp-It on your OpenIndiana server to allow them some visibility into the stats or even create their own filesystems. Simplifies my job as I can give them a zpool to play with and let them build ZFS shares or ZVOLs to their heart's content. Now whether they actually understand the statistics... well that's a different matter but at least you can tell your boss you're giving them the tools they need:)
Because a filesystem isn't an operating system. You are asking why people don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Ah, but the implementation under the various operating systems can have a lot of effects that are relatively unknown until you hit them. Yes, the ZFS Kernel Module programmers are excellent about reponsiveness, but that doesn't help much when you've got a ZPOOL that's suddenly dropped offline and because the other ZPOOLS are still running you can't take an outage to reboot.
I've played with ZFS under Ubuntu 10.04, BSD and OpenSolaris (and recently OpenIndiana) and there are "quirks" to each implementation that you either end up abandoning one implementation or working around them. None of them are perfect, but my personal preference these days is the OpenIndiana implementation. The kernel is pretty much written from the ground up to support ZFS instead of having it being a plug-in. Now there are plenty of things I don't like about OI but for my uses it works just fine.
Congrats... this is a good summary on getting these working under Ubuntu. I did the ZFS install "naked" (without a summary as good as this) with a 10.04 box about a year ago and it has run great guns. Now, having said that it's good for what I use it for which is a temporary location to dump my SQL backups to from a large email archive using dedupe prior to running it off to tape... and another zpool mounted as an archive VMFS volume through NFS to our VMware farm so we can archive decommissioned virtual machines for 30 days prior to deletion per our policy. I am not 100% convinced I would use it for anything production though; supportability is still an issue with this and as such I remain a little dubious whereas with most of our system I can call a vendor and have them fix it. As the storage admin I find this a great way to keep up with the demands for storage while having a relatively transparent way (for my admins) to put stuff into a place where it doesn't take up so much space.
Now having said that there are some caveats; as the zpool gets really large the ability to delete files becomes slower and slower when it's deduped. This is because a lot of database transactions take place to remove the files particularly when there's a lot of deduplicated blocks... and this problem is a lot worse under Ubuntu than it was under OpenSolaris (which is where I first played with ZFS). There are times also that when reading the SQL backups to dump them to tape it can make both storage pools unresponsive enough that VMware drops the NFS datastore and I have to manually remount them. Far less than perfect... but good enough for what we use it for.
I have recently taken a decommissioned physical server (a DL380 G5 with two processors and 16GB of RAM) and put OpenIndiana on it to play with ZFS some more and it is working fantastically well. In my tests though it still has the slowdown issues, high utilization in one pool won't cause the other pool to grind to a halt when both are deduped. Also, it's been nice to (at least in test) create a ZVOL on my ZFS and present it through fiber-channel to my VMware hosts as a potential replacement for the NFS volume on Linux (I have only Emulex cards, and I have yet to see a properly working Emulex target mode under Linux). So far my testing has gone marvelously and I have found dedupe rates to be about the same as the NFS mounted volume... though slightly lower. I suspect that's probably because the data isn't really block aligned all that well but it still saves me a bunch of storage when we have 30 almost identical virtual machines being archived! On the bright side there I have not yet seen utilization get so high on the OI box that it causes any significant issues or dropouts that cause VMware to complain; so far it's been rock solid. I may migrate my ZFS stuff to the OI box and get it off my Ubuntu box... but at the moment they're both working great and I have no complaints.
Slashdot Mirror
Anyway, my formalized education in IT at school was all on BBC Micros during the mid to late 80's; a beneficiary of the BBC Computer Literacy Project. It was on these that I encountered my first network with the Beeb's Econet... we had a BBC Master that acted as our "server" in the computer lab... it all worked pretty well. I did learn some stuff on these machines, and I still have a serious soft spot for the old Beeb; it was a great computer for the time. Not much of a games machine, but a great computer in general and dead easy to work with.
Now, my REAL education in computers, systems and programming was outside of school. I was part of the "Demoscene" on both the Amiga and Atari ST during this time, too. I was a member of a couple of groups at a time, back when we didn't have email to trade our code back and forth. We shared code by floppy disks in the mail... did that all the time and was an active member of groups in Sweden (which was sort of Demoscene Mecca) and one in London. I learned a lot more about computers doing this than I did at school, and by the time I was in my last couple of years of school computer labs I was bored out of my skull because the stuff I was doing at school was so far behind what I was doing in my spare time at home that I just couldn't muster the interest. I mean seriously; we were coding stuff in Pascal to display a menu, store data and stuff... meanwhile I was busy pushing the limits of the computers I had at home and doing stuff that the manufacturers said couldn't be done. Ahhh... good times :)
I have a 12 year old son in school in the USA today and am constantly appalled at the level of computer teaching in middle school. I am pretty close to putting him in private school because public school here just sucks.
To understand the reasons, I suggest reading When the Lights Go Out by Maggie Koerth Baker. This is an excellent book that details the reason the electric generation and transmission infrastructure in the USA (and most of the world) is a trainwreck waiting to happen.
I fully anticipate that the two parties will now settle the Apple/Samsung lawsuit out of court by announcing a cross-licensing deal. Basically, as I suggested before the whole lawsuit was so that Apple could validate its position to strongarm Samsung into basically creating a "free licensing" deal for Apple to use the LTE tech in the iPhone 5. Welcome to the world of business lock-in by patent.
Good grief; the stats if you read the actual survey tell you everything you need to know. 51% of the survey participants think that the cloud is affected by the weather... but 54% don't even know what it is.
And this is news? When did Oprah start talking about "The Cloud"? I am not kidding either; the average person doesn't know about it because the average person doesn't care. Also, believe it or not the average person doesn't NEED to care. "The Cloud" is an industry buzzword that happens to be one in the industry that most Slashdotters work. I am in San Francisco this week at VMworld, and when people ask what I'm doing in town and I reply I'd say that probably 1 in 4 actually know about the conference (at least once you get a couple of miles from Moscone), and fewer than that actually have any idea what VMware is or what virtualization is. And they don't need to care; that's our job. It doesn't matter that more than likely almost all of them use VMware indirectly in most of their dealing with their bank or some other web site every day. They only care that they can get to the information that matters to them, they don't care about how that data gets there any more than they care about how the electricity to run their lights gets there so long as it does when they flip the switch. And believe me, I doubt many people here have any REAL clue how that happens either because it's FAR more complex than you might think. I didn't know until I started reading about it and it's fascinating.
So what's the real story here? That most people don't know what "The Cloud" is? Yeah, not exactly news to me and I'm actually surprised that the number was as low as it is. I'd also bet the survey would be vastly different based upon where they ran it; San Francisco might have a very different ratio of people who know than Topeka.
Truly, spoken like one who doesn't actually keep up with market trends or the news. I wish you all the best as you sit in the garden; they're already building the wall but you're obviously far too focused on your own navel to notice.
Seriously? You think Windows 95 was the first version of Windows? Not by a long stretch... and obviously you're missing the point that compared to anything else around at the time it WAS a huge step forward. Windows prior to Windows 95 was a train wreck... I was an OS/2 user because of it. Mac OS at the time was beginning to creak under its own weight, and Linux for a desktop was pretty much a nonentity. Oh and OS/2 was a fine OS except for the lack of application support and the feeling that IBM was doing it as a hobby. I also contend that 98 SE can't be considered an OS in its own right because in many ways it was a bug fix and feature release for Windows 98... much the way that I consider Windows 7 to be "Vista SE".
And the walled garden issue doesn't apply here. .Apple doesn't control third-party OS X software the way it does for iOS,
Wait.
For the record, I'm currently a Mac user (13" Macbook Pro) but suspect this will be my last Mac because I believe it's only a matter of time.
One of the major challenges of apt-get is not typing get-apt. :)
echo 'alias sudo="sudo "' >> ~/.bash_aliases (the space after sudo is important!)
:)
echo 'alias ag="apt-get"' >> ~/.bash_aliases
exit
Log back in and voila; you have a short-hand for apt-get that works with sudo. You're welcome
Mythbusters is to science as pro wrestling is to sport.
But it also encourages scientific thinking in children who are watching it. For that alone, I applaud them even if their methodologies are flawed.
Near Field Communication is a buzzword? And here I thought that unlike "cloud", NFC referred to an actual technology with very specific implementation and use cases. I will join the choir here wondering why the technical knowledge of editors and submitters seems to be dropping precipitously.
Simplemobile is a T-Mobile MVNO... so if your coverage sucks now it'll suck just as bad with them.
Then you have the problem of explaining to them why your storage costs 10 times per gigabyte what a hard disk from Best Buy will cost.
RAID 5 has its place until the storage vendors start getting honest and selling their gear as FORMATTED, RAID'ed capacity. Not going to happen because they all think that bigger is better.
Ah... but a business jet requires a flightplan since they all fly IFR...
Except planes have to file flight plans and its a bit more obvious doing that sort of thing at a controlled airport than doing it in a garage then just wheeling your flying car outside and taking off.
Patently false. About 90% of all private flights are without flight plans; flying under VFR or visual flight rules does not require a flight plan and that's how all pilots start out. You CAN file a flight plan if you like, but few do. Also, about 80% of all airports are uncontrolled, as in no tower. They have planes sitting out on the tarmac and all you need is a key (or the ability to hotwire) to get them flying. Trust me; taking a small aircraft is dead easy.
However, if you knew anything about aviation you'd also know that with a single pilot and full fuel, you'd barely be able to get enough explosives on board to make a dent in a building. Have you seen what happens when a light aircraft hits a building? It's akin to hitting a deer in your car; it'll cause some damage but the odds that even one person is going to die is pretty slim. The odds that the pilot/deer will die is pretty damned close to 100%. A Cessna 172 (which I learned to fly in) with full fuel (50 Gallons) and a pilot (175lbs) has about 200lbs of available capacity before running afoul of not actually being able to control the plane any more. And the more heavily loaded the plane, the tougher it is to control... and thus aiming for a building becomes extremely difficult.
Do you know how much good explosive weighs? 200lbs of explosive will make a decent bang but no way enough to take down a building. And what about timing and detonation? Do you know how complex that is? You need a mechanism to detonate the explosive at exactly the right moment to cause damage... too early and you hit the building with just a lot of small bits of aeroplane... too late and you probably destroy the mechanism on impact thus preventing detonation. Don't believe the movies; most explosive don't spontaneously erupt.
And don't start on the 50 gallons of fuel either; it's 100 octane which means that it resists ignition even more than the stuff you put in your car. It's VERY hard to light and gasoline needs to be a vapour in order to actually cause an explosion. Otherwise it's a fire... and a fire from 50 gallons of AvGas will take the average building sprinkler system and fire department about 30 minutes to bring under control.
So... paranoid much?
Well, unless you have a big rocket to launch your creation, you can't do much beyind having it drive around LA anyway.
On the bright side, we can at least then start to explore if there's any intelligent life in LA.
Can't ask for the Moon. If you do the NASA will sue you because it has some items on the Moon that belong to them. =)
Well then they can damned well go and get their stuff back before I win my lawsuit. Damned messy apes...
You're confusing your semantics here. This is about the difference between "open" and "closed", not "open-source" and "closed-source". The two are not synonymous. The article writer's point is about open systems, and he's using the term correctly to refer to systems on which you are free to install any software you like without a curator telling you that you can, or sandboxing. By those terms, Windows is an open system as is Android and even Mac OSX (though I fear this may be changing for the worse, soon). The only curated and sandboxed environment that has been commercially successful to the masses is iOS, and he likes it because of this. I agree with GP; the author is an idiot.
The app steals your contact data and uploads it to a remote server before sending spam SMS messages to all your contacts, but the messages look like they are coming from you.
I think my iPhone has had this virus for a while. It also randomly changes all your contact's email addresses and is particularly nasty. It's called "Facebook"
And no car will get me to my mum's because I live in a different country. It's all a matter of perspective... and they have these wonderful things called phones and now "Skype" which means you don't need to visit as often...
Well, combined with other circumstantial evidence it does seem likely that this is a decent place to look if it's something one is passionate about. Certainly when combined with other physical evidence (documentation of a body found under a tree just a few years after the crash, a zipper manufactured in Pennsylvania, remains of a bottle of what may have been a "freckle ointment", remains of a pocket knife etc) I think there's decent reason to figure that this is possibly where the Electra went down. Probable? Hmm... that's a stretch I think but I for one am quite happy to see this one particular mystery given a bit more time. She was a pioneer and became a model for many young women both during her time and after to step out of the shadows of men... something that became much more prevalent many years after her death with the women's rights movement (really, plural) that literally changed the way Western civilization functions. For that, well I think some closure would be nice.
There's even some good circumstantial evidence that this might be the place... though granted it's a little flimsy. One that I liked particularly though was the S.O.S. painted on the side of the Norwich City, where the crew abandoning her had no real reason or probably time to paint that. Creepy and cool :) And yes, I know the discussion is linked from the same people who are investigating this... but they seem to have a trove of circumstantial evidence that no-one else seems to talk about or has on-line.
Personally, I find it fascinating and will be following with great interest.
Maybe pilots know of her, but I and many others had never heard of her before.
I first heard of hear in the pilot for the TV series "Misfits of Science" (Deep Freeze). But yeah... I'm a pilot, too :)
OK... I'm old.
Since I have some experience with this from my ex wife (yeah, I'm actually being honest and not just throwing accusations), this could actually be sociopathy. Typical sociopaths attempt to garner pity and make themselves seem the victim so that they can manipulate others, usually loudly and obnoxiously. And the more desperate they are for that pity the louder and less coherent they become.
My ex was not a violent sociopath until she suffered minor brain damage in a car accident and gradually lost her ability to govern her behaviors leading eventually to violent outbursts... hence the reason she's my ex wife. She was diagnosed with various degrees of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder (mutually exclusive diagnoses under typical circumstances) until historical data (diary entries, online postings etc) were used as part of the diagnosis and she was eventually diagnosed as a clinical sociopath by several doctors. That's because sociopaths are quite adept at manipulating people and will tend to lead an examination of their mental state to create an excuse.
Anyway, I digress; seriously the blog post quoted about reminds me so much of postings from my ex that it's almost frightening. The same sentence structure, the same aggrandized language and the same repeated accusations of persecution. At first I wondered if this was actually written by her for that reason.
I'm really glad that she lives 200 miles away now under the watchful eye of the state...
Oh yeah, and for bonus points if you have an OCD admin who is allergic to the command line, you can easily put Napp-It on your OpenIndiana server to allow them some visibility into the stats or even create their own filesystems. Simplifies my job as I can give them a zpool to play with and let them build ZFS shares or ZVOLs to their heart's content. Now whether they actually understand the statistics... well that's a different matter but at least you can tell your boss you're giving them the tools they need :)
Because a filesystem isn't an operating system. You are asking why people don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Ah, but the implementation under the various operating systems can have a lot of effects that are relatively unknown until you hit them. Yes, the ZFS Kernel Module programmers are excellent about reponsiveness, but that doesn't help much when you've got a ZPOOL that's suddenly dropped offline and because the other ZPOOLS are still running you can't take an outage to reboot.
I've played with ZFS under Ubuntu 10.04, BSD and OpenSolaris (and recently OpenIndiana) and there are "quirks" to each implementation that you either end up abandoning one implementation or working around them. None of them are perfect, but my personal preference these days is the OpenIndiana implementation. The kernel is pretty much written from the ground up to support ZFS instead of having it being a plug-in. Now there are plenty of things I don't like about OI but for my uses it works just fine.
Congrats... this is a good summary on getting these working under Ubuntu. I did the ZFS install "naked" (without a summary as good as this) with a 10.04 box about a year ago and it has run great guns. Now, having said that it's good for what I use it for which is a temporary location to dump my SQL backups to from a large email archive using dedupe prior to running it off to tape... and another zpool mounted as an archive VMFS volume through NFS to our VMware farm so we can archive decommissioned virtual machines for 30 days prior to deletion per our policy. I am not 100% convinced I would use it for anything production though; supportability is still an issue with this and as such I remain a little dubious whereas with most of our system I can call a vendor and have them fix it. As the storage admin I find this a great way to keep up with the demands for storage while having a relatively transparent way (for my admins) to put stuff into a place where it doesn't take up so much space.
Now having said that there are some caveats; as the zpool gets really large the ability to delete files becomes slower and slower when it's deduped. This is because a lot of database transactions take place to remove the files particularly when there's a lot of deduplicated blocks... and this problem is a lot worse under Ubuntu than it was under OpenSolaris (which is where I first played with ZFS). There are times also that when reading the SQL backups to dump them to tape it can make both storage pools unresponsive enough that VMware drops the NFS datastore and I have to manually remount them. Far less than perfect... but good enough for what we use it for.
I have recently taken a decommissioned physical server (a DL380 G5 with two processors and 16GB of RAM) and put OpenIndiana on it to play with ZFS some more and it is working fantastically well. In my tests though it still has the slowdown issues, high utilization in one pool won't cause the other pool to grind to a halt when both are deduped. Also, it's been nice to (at least in test) create a ZVOL on my ZFS and present it through fiber-channel to my VMware hosts as a potential replacement for the NFS volume on Linux (I have only Emulex cards, and I have yet to see a properly working Emulex target mode under Linux). So far my testing has gone marvelously and I have found dedupe rates to be about the same as the NFS mounted volume... though slightly lower. I suspect that's probably because the data isn't really block aligned all that well but it still saves me a bunch of storage when we have 30 almost identical virtual machines being archived! On the bright side there I have not yet seen utilization get so high on the OI box that it causes any significant issues or dropouts that cause VMware to complain; so far it's been rock solid. I may migrate my ZFS stuff to the OI box and get it off my Ubuntu box... but at the moment they're both working great and I have no complaints.