Author: Justin Sherrill

Here’s two articles for your persual: First, this Guardian Unlimited article attacks one of those ‘well-known facts’ that Betamax failed despite being better than VHS. The title says it explicitly: Why VHS was better than Betamax. The author even manages to mention the Windows vs. Unix idea that is an offshoot of this.

Second, a New Yorker article for those who care about patents and copyright: The “Piracy Paradox” describes how a lack of copyright in fashion design had led to better business – perhaps this could apply to software design too?

Both links via things magazine. So, do you all (the readers) like when I go off the beaten path for related material like this?

Hasso Tepper updated the root servers list to accomodate an IP change.  The interesting part of this is Hasso linking to something I didn’t know existed: the ICANN blog.

Matthew Dillon posted a note about HAMMER, his distributed file system.  This post notes he’s accomplished the most difficult part, and a working system is on track for the end of the year.  He’s made a pile of commits to match, too.

Jun-ichiro “itojun” Itoh Hagino died on October 29th – a surprise and shock to many. Itojun was a major force behind IPv6 support in all the BSDs, and well-known for his patience and skill. Notes are showing up with more information here, here, and here. (Thanks, Hasso.)

A recent PDF of an “About FreeBSD 7” presentation by Kris Kennaway includes DragonFly 1.8 results in some of its graphs. The graphs show results with sysbench and MySQL/PostgresSQL – unfortunately, DragonFly performance is still comparable to FreeBSD 4 because of the presence of the Giant Lock. (Thanks, Pieter Dumon)

MeetBSD is happening in about a month in Warsaw, Poland – registration is open now. (Via.)  There’s already a good slate of speakers lined up.

BSDTalk has a 10-minute spot on AsiaBSDCon 2008 with Hiroki Sato and George Neville-Neil.