Sun's sun.com website makes a truly terrible advertisement for theirhardware and software. And I'm not talking about things like theirunderwhelming search functionality, or how many pages you have to gothrough to get things; I'm talking about how slow and flaky it is. Idon't want to add up how much time I've already spent trying to get acurrent Solaris 10 x86_64 DVD image from Sun; it's depressing.

(Also,

Our problem with USB keyboards on Dell 2950s neatly illustrates why I remain deeply dubious about USB keyboards.It isn't that something broke; it's that it illustrates how complexUSB is.

Specifically, USB keyboards require a pile of sometimes fragile code tobring them up natively, or trusting a large amount of magic BIOS codebeing run behind your back. However, I really want my console keyboardto be simple ; the simpler it is, the less likely it is for somethinggoing wrong

Courtesy of a pointer from the linux-kernel mailing list to the Gentoowiki entry ,here's two useful (relatively) new software RAID features:

• Normally, if a RAID array goes out of sync the kernel assumes everythingon the out of date drive(s) has to be rewritten. With write-intent bitmapsthe kernel keeps track of what areas actually got written to and onlyresyncs them.

  (This brings Linux up to more or less parity with an equivalent SolarisDiskSuite feature.)

• 'data scrubbing