Nope, I was referring to this page that I saw last Spring.
Using still images to compare video codec quality makes as much sense as using 0.03-second samples of a song to compare audio quality.
How about this test, which clearly shows VP8 requiring 50% more bitrate to achieve the same objective quality metric.
As far as subjective quality goes, I manage video for an online training site, and we have been evaluating WebM extensively. Even with the most recent 0.9.5 releases, quality at normal web bitrates (say 750kbps for SD) is very inferior to the best H.264 encoders (x264 and Ateme). We did an internal subjective quality survey with our non-technical staff (secretaries, salespeople, etc.) and H.264 won hands-down. We're not interested in increasing our bandwidth bills by 50% to achieve the same quality as H.264, as the licensing fees are very small. Not to mention the browser and device support hassles that currently exist. Oh, and the current WebM toolchain sucks compared with the H.264 ecosystem, but that should improve over time.
By the way, those of you who comare WebM to H.264 using video encoded by Apple's or Adobe's H.264 encoders and say "WebM is almost as good as H.264!" are fooling themselves. The Aplle and Adobe encoders are two of the worst-looking H.264 encoders available.
So you encode an mp4/m4v file, then add a softlink that ends in ".flv".
You don't even need to do that. Flash 9.0.3 and newer, which covers more than 95% of my visitors, handles H.264 video in the MP4 container just fine. Even if it has a ".mp4" or ".m4v" file extension. Adobe recommneds using an ".F4V" file extension, but that's non-standard and stupid if you want to support non-flash uses of the same video file (HTML5 video with MP4 in IE9, Safari, or current versions of Chrome).
If you need to alias.MP4 files to.FLV to make them play properly in Flash, I suspect you need to adjust the mime-types settings on your web server.
Let me clarify -- why is this allowed? Colleges have shitloads of government funding and regulation behind them, why are they allowed to engage in business that is clearly at odds with their primary purpose? And if sports are OK then why not, say, strip clubs?
Money. Just like everything else.
Football brings in multiple tens of millions of dollars per year in income (after expenses) at traditional football powers. A total of over $1 billion this year amongst all schools.
Strip clubs, not so much cash, and worse yet, they might turn off alumni donors.
Also football is NOT "clearly at odds with the primary purpose" of a university. It's an entertainment function for students and alumni, and there are careers in the industry for which the university is preparing students. If you ban football, you better kick out all the Drama majors, Fine Arts majors, literature majors, and fuck just about everything else that wasn't hard science, business, or engineering. You could call it... Purdue.
if you can cut off the funding to the spammers (from the owners of the spamvertised domains) you will see spam finally whither and die
If only it were so easy. First, finding the owner of a just-registered-with-a-stolen-card domain isn't exactly trivial and costs time and money. Secondly, a spamming business can always claim to be the victim of a "Joe Job" by their competition. Unless the actual money changing hands between spamvertiser and spammer is nailed down by law enforcement, there's really no way to prove spamming. Since law enforcement most likely can't get a warrant based soley on the contents of an unauthenticated SMTP message, there's no way to subpoena those records.
The way to "solve" email spam is to replace SMTP entirely with a system where the sender is authenticated and "pays" for the message with their own network/storage/compute resources. But SMTP is too entrenched for that to happen in any time-frame shorter than decades. Facebook, Twitter, and other messaging formats may ultimately challenge the ubiquity of SMTP, but they have other problems (centralized infrastructure in private hands being a major one). Protocols such as IM2000 and DomainKeys have seen basically zero adoption, even 10 years after introduction. SPF is in use, but has done little to stem the tide.
In short, because of an understandable lack of foresight on the part of a few engineers during the 1970s, we're screwed for a long while, and dealing with SPAM will be part of your daily life.
Apparently you missed my Vorbis/MP3 comparison. MP3 was "dead in the water" on free software platforms, too. But that didn't matter at all, and Vorbis never seriously threatened MP3 as the de-facto audio file format standard.
What will continue to happen is that free software users will download open source H.264 software as they already do, and not pay any licensing fees (even if they are required to in their jurisdiction). This is the same situation as with MP3 and audio, except the "free" video solution is far worse in terms of technical quality compared with the patented solution. So there is even less incentive to use the unencumbered solution. So H.264 will still dominate.
Unless there is a VP9 or something that leapfrogs H.264 in quality, this will not change. The MPEG-LA is smart enough to know that keeping reasonably low fees will prevent other solutions from taking hold in the marketplace. For example, they made it free to transmit H.264 to end-users who aren't paying, and have caps so that the costs for big players aren't a concern.
...specifically to prevent license/royalty issues with proprietary codecs to let the little guys compete, I'm rooting for Google.
The problem is, Google brought a knife to a gun fight. The latest VP8 encoder still needs at least 50% more bits than the best H.264 encoders to achieve the same quality. I don't know of too many content producers willing to increase their CDN bill by 50% each month to save on H.264 license fees. H.264 is an open standard, widely deployed, has hardware support, and is technically superior to VP8. It will always be better, as i don't expect a 50% improvement feom VP8 encoders as they evolve. That's tough to overcome. Vorbis could not overcome the popularity of MP3 even though it was at least as good at a technical level.
What isn't on Netflix or Hulu can be found elsewhere
Not live sports. Some of us went to engineering schools that had football teams.
There is no reasonable HD online source for live sports. Microsoft's Smooth Streaming demo/broadcast of the 2010 Winter Olympics is the only truly HD-and-live sporting event I can recall being available at any sort of scale. (Quality for the downhill was fantastic on a 10 Mbps link, thanks to LimeLight I suppose). ESPN3 quality and selection sucks.
Right now just about every TOS type document has "we reserve the right to alter this agreement without notice at any time" clauses. It is time to test that, though. Just because you were arbitrarily forced to agree to something to use a service, doesn't mean it will stand up in court.
Such a clause should never exist in a business-to-business contract. It's the first thing we negotiate away, fixing the terms of the deal into the document itself. Including copies of the AUP in effect at the time of contract signing.
We're a small company, and even our major vendors know that the "we can change terms whenever" thing doesn't fly in B2B contracts. Our contracts with Microsoft, Rackspace, and Adobe all have fixed terms.
Now, if SimpleCDN had a fixed-terms contract with their datacenter vendors in force, then they're getting screwed and should sue those vendors. If they didn't have a fixed-trerms contract, they're still getting screwed, but should sue their own lawyers for negligence instead.
Do you have a copy of the contract that SimpleCDN and their providers?
Well that is clearly the problem. SimpleCDN had no such contract, other than un-negotiated, one-sided, "we can change this at any time" terms of service you get with cheap-ass hosting accounts.
Honestly, that's no way to run a business. Even if you had a fuckton of redundancy, and used three separate cheap-ass hosting providers for each of your POPs, you're still running a huge amount of risk having no contract with your primary suppliers, especially when they merge with each other and shoot your redundancy all to hell.
SimpleCDN was basically an arbitrage operation, reselling under-priced bandwidth. They started a game of musical chairs, and they lost, just like the options traders who were long on GM's stock or mortgage-backed securities a few years ago.
That sort of depends. In most fields you need a basic knowledge of "what stuff is" before you can learn the "how to do something". 100-level and 200-level classes need to focus on "what stuff is" in most cases.
No other open source, commercial, or web mail client from the late-2002 era had full-text indexing/search features either as far as I can recall. Gmail didn't exist yet. Thunderbird was far from a 0.1 release. Lotus Notes was and still is a piece of shit.
If you were stuck on Lotus Notes 6.0 or Netscape Mail 4.5 you'd be even more pissed.
PowerPoint. Excel. Word. Exchange. Even Access. SQL Server. All innovative because they improved greatly on what was already the de-facto leader in their market space, and all quite successful as a result. Innovation doesn't just mean "something nobody else has done before", it can mean "doing a thing better, cheaper, or easier than anyone else has done before". People forget that Microsoft was once a tiny company who made an awkward little joke of an OS, and then the hired some really talented people and created products that were really just better in some way than what came before.
But on the other hand, with FOSS you don't have the "tens of thousands of dollars" spent for each upgrade
Yes you do, it's just that the costs are staff (sysadmin, developer, testing) time rather than software licenses + staff time. Open source software is 'free as in beer' only if your time has no value. In general, we've found that we trade increased overall staff time for license fees with most FOSS solutions. Sometimes this turns out to be a good trade: we use nginx and Tomcat heavily. Sometimes not so much: dealing with Samba is far more expensive in terms of staff time than just buying Windows Server licenses.
You're just plain wrong. Outlook 2007 and 2010 have Instant Search, which integrates with the Microsoft desktop search service, availble for XP and installed by default on Vista and Win7. I search for "bunny", and it finds all emails with "bunny" and "bunnies" in the headers, content, or even inside most file attachments. Operators like "from:", "subject:", etc. are also available.
Sounds good, until you have that old application running on an old OS that doesn't work with any of your new management frameworks, procedures, new clients apps, etc. Then you're really screwed and a migration is much more painful and costly than it needs to be.
Actually, I believe the FOSS world is much WORSE than Microsoft in this area. Microsoft is a slave to backwards compatibility. With many FOSS applicaitons/frameworks/whatever, if you're not running a very current release, you're basically hosed when it comes to security patches, interoperability, community support, etc. One only has to visit the forums of any popular FOSS software solution to see this in action:
Q: I'm seeing this bug on version 2.3.34 of foozywhatzit. Anybody know of a workaround?
A: 2.3.34? That's ancient. It was released more than three months ago! Download the latest source tree, apply these seventeen patches found in random places all over the internet, hand-edit makefiles to allow compilation on Tuesdays on systems with SATA hard disks, and then recompile, and then fix the install scripts for your environment, and then run make install. Noob.
In reality, it's a lot cheaper to stay on the upgrade path for both commercial and FOSS software, skipping a version here or there but not falling more than two years or so behind.
Re:Backroom deals killed Linux on the Desktop.
on
Desktop Linux Is Dead
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· Score: 1
Why did Dell despite pretty decent figures refuse to sell their Linux desktops in the open?
As I recall they showed up right next to the windows boxes in the little grid thingy. How is that hidden?
Why was it only avaliable in a very limited amount of countries?
Because they were testing the market. You don't spend millions launching a product line worldwide without a very good idea it will succeed.
Why did a computer with Linux cost more than one without an OS or FreeDos, or Windows?
Clearly because Dell believed they would cost more to support than Windows boxes. Probably because of driver issues, returns from clueless cheapskates, and separate low-volume licensing deals for the non-free bits they had to add to make a usable Linux desktop (e.g. DVD/MPEG stuff).
Because multicast suck for anything but live streaming media in a controlled network. It's true that Bittorrent emulates some of the properties of IP multicast, but it also offers more than multicast, especially time-shifting. What if you PC wasn't online for the srart of the multicast?
Also, multicast has no economic model that will ever see it deployed in the public internet. Who pays for all that traffic amplification? The sender? How can you bill for it across networks? How do you prevent Multicast being used by anyone as a DDoS tool?
with few exceptions, white males can *socially* live wherever they want, if they can afford it
I don't think those exceptions are so few. I'd say about 40% of Chicago is "socially" off-limits to white guys, and I imagine the same is true in Detroit, DC, New York, and LA. In a lot of neighborhoods in Chicago, a white dude can find himself in serious trouble simply because of his lack of melanin. Unless you look like a cop, which is why I've grown a sweet Ditka mustache and wear mirrored Ray-Bans.
Surely parity RAID is a function of the MD layer, and replication is a function of LVM?
Only if you're stuck in the LVM-on-Linux mindset, which frankly sucks. There are many reasons why; any of Jeff Bonwick's writings will explain these ZFS design choices. It's also one of the main reasons well-heeled shops run Linux volumes from SANs instead of just using LVM.
For example, LVM snapshots require space reservations, and copy a block to every snapshot with every write. This is extraordinarily slow, and gets worse with each additional snapshot. This makes LVM snapshots effectively unusable for high-volume server systems, where they are needed most.
Instead, btrfs, hammer, etc were developed -- much better, much cleaner file systems.
How can filesystems that don't exist in stable release form yet be "better" than ZFS?
ZFS is far ahead of btrfs, both in terms of stability, features, and usability. Btrfs doesn't have parity RAID, dedupe, or replication yet. These are critical features for large-scale systems. In short, it isn't even close to ZFS. ZFS is also "cleaner" in my opinion, in both design and UI. Oracle funding most btrfs development also raises a question of btrfs momentum now that they own ZFS and Solaris.
No, it isn't. It is unethical, but perfectly legal.
And anyway, the Democratic party has the biggest paid shill operation in history, far exceeding anything the GOP does with a few bloggers. It's called Hollywood.
Slashdot Mirror
...except ISPs are not Common Carriers in the USA. Please stop talking out of your ass.
Nope, I was referring to this page that I saw last Spring.
Using still images to compare video codec quality makes as much sense as using 0.03-second samples of a song to compare audio quality.
How about this test, which clearly shows VP8 requiring 50% more bitrate to achieve the same objective quality metric.
As far as subjective quality goes, I manage video for an online training site, and we have been evaluating WebM extensively. Even with the most recent 0.9.5 releases, quality at normal web bitrates (say 750kbps for SD) is very inferior to the best H.264 encoders (x264 and Ateme). We did an internal subjective quality survey with our non-technical staff (secretaries, salespeople, etc.) and H.264 won hands-down. We're not interested in increasing our bandwidth bills by 50% to achieve the same quality as H.264, as the licensing fees are very small. Not to mention the browser and device support hassles that currently exist. Oh, and the current WebM toolchain sucks compared with the H.264 ecosystem, but that should improve over time.
By the way, those of you who comare WebM to H.264 using video encoded by Apple's or Adobe's H.264 encoders and say "WebM is almost as good as H.264!" are fooling themselves. The Aplle and Adobe encoders are two of the worst-looking H.264 encoders available.
So you encode an mp4/m4v file, then add a softlink that ends in ".flv".
You don't even need to do that. Flash 9.0.3 and newer, which covers more than 95% of my visitors, handles H.264 video in the MP4 container just fine. Even if it has a ".mp4" or ".m4v" file extension. Adobe recommneds using an ".F4V" file extension, but that's non-standard and stupid if you want to support non-flash uses of the same video file (HTML5 video with MP4 in IE9, Safari, or current versions of Chrome).
If you need to alias .MP4 files to .FLV to make them play properly in Flash, I suspect you need to adjust the mime-types settings on your web server.
How many "nines" did Microsoft promise with their supposed reliability?
Zero for non-paid accounts. There is no SLA for free accounts, same as with gmail.
Anyway, this was not a technology failure, but the result of a Hotmail's inactivity policy. Which is clearly described on their site.
The ability to press Ctl-A, Ctl-C, switch to a text editor, and press Ctl-V does not qualify you as a "hacker".
Let me clarify -- why is this allowed? Colleges have shitloads of government funding and regulation behind them, why are they allowed to engage in business that is clearly at odds with their primary purpose? And if sports are OK then why not, say, strip clubs?
Money. Just like everything else.
Football brings in multiple tens of millions of dollars per year in income (after expenses) at traditional football powers. A total of over $1 billion this year amongst all schools.
Strip clubs, not so much cash, and worse yet, they might turn off alumni donors.
Also football is NOT "clearly at odds with the primary purpose" of a university. It's an entertainment function for students and alumni, and there are careers in the industry for which the university is preparing students. If you ban football, you better kick out all the Drama majors, Fine Arts majors, literature majors, and fuck just about everything else that wasn't hard science, business, or engineering. You could call it... Purdue.
if you can cut off the funding to the spammers (from the owners of the spamvertised domains) you will see spam finally whither and die
If only it were so easy. First, finding the owner of a just-registered-with-a-stolen-card domain isn't exactly trivial and costs time and money. Secondly, a spamming business can always claim to be the victim of a "Joe Job" by their competition. Unless the actual money changing hands between spamvertiser and spammer is nailed down by law enforcement, there's really no way to prove spamming. Since law enforcement most likely can't get a warrant based soley on the contents of an unauthenticated SMTP message, there's no way to subpoena those records.
The way to "solve" email spam is to replace SMTP entirely with a system where the sender is authenticated and "pays" for the message with their own network/storage/compute resources. But SMTP is too entrenched for that to happen in any time-frame shorter than decades. Facebook, Twitter, and other messaging formats may ultimately challenge the ubiquity of SMTP, but they have other problems (centralized infrastructure in private hands being a major one). Protocols such as IM2000 and DomainKeys have seen basically zero adoption, even 10 years after introduction. SPF is in use, but has done little to stem the tide.
In short, because of an understandable lack of foresight on the part of a few engineers during the 1970s, we're screwed for a long while, and dealing with SPAM will be part of your daily life.
Apparently you missed my Vorbis/MP3 comparison. MP3 was "dead in the water" on free software platforms, too. But that didn't matter at all, and Vorbis never seriously threatened MP3 as the de-facto audio file format standard.
What will continue to happen is that free software users will download open source H.264 software as they already do, and not pay any licensing fees (even if they are required to in their jurisdiction). This is the same situation as with MP3 and audio, except the "free" video solution is far worse in terms of technical quality compared with the patented solution. So there is even less incentive to use the unencumbered solution. So H.264 will still dominate.
Unless there is a VP9 or something that leapfrogs H.264 in quality, this will not change. The MPEG-LA is smart enough to know that keeping reasonably low fees will prevent other solutions from taking hold in the marketplace. For example, they made it free to transmit H.264 to end-users who aren't paying, and have caps so that the costs for big players aren't a concern.
...specifically to prevent license/royalty issues with proprietary codecs to let the little guys compete, I'm rooting for Google.
The problem is, Google brought a knife to a gun fight. The latest VP8 encoder still needs at least 50% more bits than the best H.264 encoders to achieve the same quality. I don't know of too many content producers willing to increase their CDN bill by 50% each month to save on H.264 license fees. H.264 is an open standard, widely deployed, has hardware support, and is technically superior to VP8. It will always be better, as i don't expect a 50% improvement feom VP8 encoders as they evolve. That's tough to overcome. Vorbis could not overcome the popularity of MP3 even though it was at least as good at a technical level.
What isn't on Netflix or Hulu can be found elsewhere
Not live sports. Some of us went to engineering schools that had football teams.
There is no reasonable HD online source for live sports. Microsoft's Smooth Streaming demo/broadcast of the 2010 Winter Olympics is the only truly HD-and-live sporting event I can recall being available at any sort of scale. (Quality for the downhill was fantastic on a 10 Mbps link, thanks to LimeLight I suppose). ESPN3 quality and selection sucks.
Right now just about every TOS type document has "we reserve the right to alter this agreement without notice at any time" clauses. It is time to test that, though. Just because you were arbitrarily forced to agree to something to use a service, doesn't mean it will stand up in court.
Such a clause should never exist in a business-to-business contract. It's the first thing we negotiate away, fixing the terms of the deal into the document itself. Including copies of the AUP in effect at the time of contract signing.
We're a small company, and even our major vendors know that the "we can change terms whenever" thing doesn't fly in B2B contracts. Our contracts with Microsoft, Rackspace, and Adobe all have fixed terms.
Now, if SimpleCDN had a fixed-terms contract with their datacenter vendors in force, then they're getting screwed and should sue those vendors. If they didn't have a fixed-trerms contract, they're still getting screwed, but should sue their own lawyers for negligence instead.
Do you have a copy of the contract that SimpleCDN and their providers?
Well that is clearly the problem. SimpleCDN had no such contract, other than un-negotiated, one-sided, "we can change this at any time" terms of service you get with cheap-ass hosting accounts.
Honestly, that's no way to run a business. Even if you had a fuckton of redundancy, and used three separate cheap-ass hosting providers for each of your POPs, you're still running a huge amount of risk having no contract with your primary suppliers, especially when they merge with each other and shoot your redundancy all to hell.
SimpleCDN was basically an arbitrage operation, reselling under-priced bandwidth. They started a game of musical chairs, and they lost, just like the options traders who were long on GM's stock or mortgage-backed securities a few years ago.
That sort of depends. In most fields you need a basic knowledge of "what stuff is" before you can learn the "how to do something". 100-level and 200-level classes need to focus on "what stuff is" in most cases.
No other open source, commercial, or web mail client from the late-2002 era had full-text indexing/search features either as far as I can recall. Gmail didn't exist yet. Thunderbird was far from a 0.1 release. Lotus Notes was and still is a piece of shit.
If you were stuck on Lotus Notes 6.0 or Netscape Mail 4.5 you'd be even more pissed.
PowerPoint. Excel. Word. Exchange. Even Access. SQL Server. All innovative because they improved greatly on what was already the de-facto leader in their market space, and all quite successful as a result. Innovation doesn't just mean "something nobody else has done before", it can mean "doing a thing better, cheaper, or easier than anyone else has done before". People forget that Microsoft was once a tiny company who made an awkward little joke of an OS, and then the hired some really talented people and created products that were really just better in some way than what came before.
But on the other hand, with FOSS you don't have the "tens of thousands of dollars" spent for each upgrade
Yes you do, it's just that the costs are staff (sysadmin, developer, testing) time rather than software licenses + staff time. Open source software is 'free as in beer' only if your time has no value. In general, we've found that we trade increased overall staff time for license fees with most FOSS solutions. Sometimes this turns out to be a good trade: we use nginx and Tomcat heavily. Sometimes not so much: dealing with Samba is far more expensive in terms of staff time than just buying Windows Server licenses.
You're just plain wrong. Outlook 2007 and 2010 have Instant Search, which integrates with the Microsoft desktop search service, availble for XP and installed by default on Vista and Win7. I search for "bunny", and it finds all emails with "bunny" and "bunnies" in the headers, content, or even inside most file attachments. Operators like "from:", "subject:", etc. are also available.
Sounds good, until you have that old application running on an old OS that doesn't work with any of your new management frameworks, procedures, new clients apps, etc. Then you're really screwed and a migration is much more painful and costly than it needs to be.
Actually, I believe the FOSS world is much WORSE than Microsoft in this area. Microsoft is a slave to backwards compatibility. With many FOSS applicaitons/frameworks/whatever, if you're not running a very current release, you're basically hosed when it comes to security patches, interoperability, community support, etc. One only has to visit the forums of any popular FOSS software solution to see this in action:
Q: I'm seeing this bug on version 2.3.34 of foozywhatzit. Anybody know of a workaround?
A: 2.3.34? That's ancient. It was released more than three months ago! Download the latest source tree, apply these seventeen patches found in random places all over the internet, hand-edit makefiles to allow compilation on Tuesdays on systems with SATA hard disks, and then recompile, and then fix the install scripts for your environment, and then run make install. Noob.
In reality, it's a lot cheaper to stay on the upgrade path for both commercial and FOSS software, skipping a version here or there but not falling more than two years or so behind.
Why did Dell despite pretty decent figures refuse to sell their Linux desktops in the open?
As I recall they showed up right next to the windows boxes in the little grid thingy. How is that hidden?
Why was it only avaliable in a very limited amount of countries?
Because they were testing the market. You don't spend millions launching a product line worldwide without a very good idea it will succeed.
Why did a computer with Linux cost more than one without an OS or FreeDos, or Windows?
Clearly because Dell believed they would cost more to support than Windows boxes. Probably because of driver issues, returns from clueless cheapskates, and separate low-volume licensing deals for the non-free bits they had to add to make a usable Linux desktop (e.g. DVD/MPEG stuff).
solar cells will drop in price as demand increases
You didn't do very well in high-school Economics, did you?
Because multicast suck for anything but live streaming media in a controlled network. It's true that Bittorrent emulates some of the properties of IP multicast, but it also offers more than multicast, especially time-shifting. What if you PC wasn't online for the srart of the multicast?
Also, multicast has no economic model that will ever see it deployed in the public internet. Who pays for all that traffic amplification? The sender? How can you bill for it across networks? How do you prevent Multicast being used by anyone as a DDoS tool?
with few exceptions, white males can *socially* live wherever they want, if they can afford it
I don't think those exceptions are so few. I'd say about 40% of Chicago is "socially" off-limits to white guys, and I imagine the same is true in Detroit, DC, New York, and LA. In a lot of neighborhoods in Chicago, a white dude can find himself in serious trouble simply because of his lack of melanin. Unless you look like a cop, which is why I've grown a sweet Ditka mustache and wear mirrored Ray-Bans.
Surely parity RAID is a function of the MD layer, and replication is a function of LVM?
Only if you're stuck in the LVM-on-Linux mindset, which frankly sucks. There are many reasons why; any of Jeff Bonwick's writings will explain these ZFS design choices. It's also one of the main reasons well-heeled shops run Linux volumes from SANs instead of just using LVM.
For example, LVM snapshots require space reservations, and copy a block to every snapshot with every write. This is extraordinarily slow, and gets worse with each additional snapshot. This makes LVM snapshots effectively unusable for high-volume server systems, where they are needed most.
Instead, btrfs, hammer, etc were developed -- much better, much cleaner file systems.
How can filesystems that don't exist in stable release form yet be "better" than ZFS?
ZFS is far ahead of btrfs, both in terms of stability, features, and usability. Btrfs doesn't have parity RAID, dedupe, or replication yet. These are critical features for large-scale systems. In short, it isn't even close to ZFS. ZFS is also "cleaner" in my opinion, in both design and UI. Oracle funding most btrfs development also raises a question of btrfs momentum now that they own ZFS and Solaris.
Bribing bloggers is illegal.
No, it isn't. It is unethical, but perfectly legal.
And anyway, the Democratic party has the biggest paid shill operation in history, far exceeding anything the GOP does with a few bloggers. It's called Hollywood.