What iTunes and similar online services are really selling isconvenience and guilt-avoidance, with a small side order of helpingout the artists. They're manifestly not selling the music itself (orvideos or etc), since you can find them online yourself if you look hardenough.

The 'helping out the artists' bit is currently only a small side orderbecause most everyone understands at some level how little of the moneyinvolved actually makes it to the artists.

The guilt-avoidance is not a good long

Dear vendors:

When I am visiting your fine web pages, I am often most trying to findwhich of your products have a particular feature that I need. Makingme carefully check through all of your products, examining their modelnumbers (if I am lucky) or each of their detailed feature pages (if I amnot) is not productive and does not make me very happy.

(It does make me thankful for Firefox's tabs.)

So what I would really like to see is a product feature

IRON File Systems [PDF] is apaper from the 2005 ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles.To quote from the abstract:

Commodity file systems trust disks to either work or fail completely,yet modern disks exhibit more complex failure modes. We suggest a newfail-partial failure model for disks, which incorporates realisticlocalized faults such as latent sector errors and block corruption.We then develop and apply a novel failure-policy fingerprintingframework, to investigate how commodity file systems react to a rangeof more