Right now, thin clients are doomed for the same reason that they've beendoomed before: users want too much. I believe that watching YouTubevideos and plugging in their USB keys are pretty much the minimum levelof features that users will expect and accept; if they can't do both,they're operating in a fundamentally crippled computing environment,which is not the way to make them happy. And unhappy users sooner orlater push back.

(YouTube is not merely desirable by itself, it'

We've recently been having a problem where one specific clientexperiences really slow IO to one specific NFS mounted filesystem,especially for things like file creation. (Other clients can use thefilesystem at full speed, and this client can use other filesystems atfull speed.)

We immediately thought 'per-filesystem concurrency limits'and soon turned up the Solaris 8 NFS kernel tunable nfs3_max_threads , which the fine documentation helpfullydescribes as:

This symbol controls the maximum number of async threads started perfile

One of the few things that keeps me running while I am only ondialup is ' yum localupdate '. With a combination of' yum check-update ' and ' yum localupdate ' I can get a list ofwhat RPMs I need to update, pull down copies of those RPMs atwork, dump them onto a USB key ,take them home, and then update them locally.

In theory.

In practice, ' yum localupdate ' seems to sometimes ignore RPMsthat I've supplied on the command line if

Dear Xine: since various modern sound systems are amply equipped toplay multiple audio sources at once, your 'mute' button should muteonly your audio, not the entire audio chain. That way I can turn downthe Internet music stream I'm listening to in the background in favourof something of more immediate interest, like YouTube videos, withouthaving to quit out of you entirely.

While we're here, it would be nice if you didn't block purely audiostreams just because you can'