Note that settings files are not overlaid by GoboLinux's virtualization tool. Runner only creates customized views of bin, lib, include, share, libexec, and sbin -- your typical /usr tree. So, unless somebody borrows this idea and apply it poorly on another distro, there is no chance this particular discussion will take place in 5 years from now. :-)

Flowblade is a nice Python-based movie editor for Linux. I have been using it mostly to compose small video clips from my GoPro camera (read: slicing, adding audio tracks, creating transitions, setting encoder options, etc.) Definitely worth taking a look.

There's a FUSE-based file system called LessFS capable of performing block-level deduplication. The project is actively maintained and looks like worth a shot. For more information, check its webpage at http://www.lessfs.com

In Brazil there's an agency called ECAD which already does that. However, the fees can get much higher than those mentioned in the article. Sometimes agents from ECAD show up at weddings and charge a fee based on the number of people attending it, or based on the physical size of the room, or as a percentage of the price paid for the rental of the place where the wedding is happening. It's common to see couples having to pau more than US$ 1k on that.

There are many cases of people who didn't have cash to pay when ECAD agents shown up on their wedding, and who were then ordered to stop the music and the event. They are very frequently sued, but yet they continue to charge that (and get richer).

Hopefully the same won't happen in Canada.

Sure thing they are not a replacement for hard disks, but it's just worth mentioning that nowadays they can be mounted as a regular file system and hold up to 1.5TB (not considering hardware compression).

IBM recently announced LTFS (Long Term File System), which allows one to operate LTO-5 tapes as if they were a normal file system.

That's a very exciting technology which allows for the standardization of tape formats -- its specs are freely available in the LTO Consortium website and the implementation has been released under the GNU LGPL (see the LTFS website for links).

Tapes are not dead, certainly!

I was quite amazed by the quality of this book, especially regarding how deep and pleasant all the CS foundations are presented to the reader. One of the best CS books I have here, definitely.