One of the things that's started to help the program energy efficiencyissue on Linux is the developmentand popularization of programs like iotop and powertop . For thefirst time, people could conveniently get a simple overview of what wasgoing on with IO and power on their system and, not surprisingly, peoplereacted to what they saw.

This provides a handy illustration of the importance of making anissue or a behavior visible to people, both to users and especially toprogrammers. By and large, if things run well

I think it's clear that Sun initially intended NFS filehandles to serve as capabilities , ieopaque tokens that could be used to grant access to useful thingslike your files. Unfortunately, pretty soon it was clear that this didn't work and NFS filehandlesactually made pretty terrible access capabilities.

(I may be mis-using the term 'access capabilities' here. As I learnedit, it refers to opaque (to the user) tokens or identifiers that youcan present to services to get access to some

I've held forth before on things that boil downto 'it would be really nice if my favorite Linux distribution had liverelease upgrades'.

One might think that this is an easy feature to add. After all, in amodern Linux an upgrade from one release to the next mostly consistsof updating a huge number of packages, and everyone has excellent,very well tested support for doing that. So, just change things to getpackages from the new release's repository and do a regular packageupdate