Sho Fukamachi Online

Supremely annoying John “Hans” Gruber, of Daring Fireball “fame”, has just linked to an even more annoying article, wisely anonymous, posted by some pompous asshole on MacJournal.com, taking to task AppleInsider for their very welcome recent scoop that Apple has enabled read/write access in dev builds of its ZFS implementation. The fool at MacJournal seems personally offended by the news, personally offended by ZFS in general, and in fact just very offended at everything he can think of – I’m sure you know the type. And you’ll quickly recognise the same type in Mr Gruber, a sickeningly egotistical blogger worshipped by the exact kind of self-righteous fanboy that long-time Mac users like me can’t stand.

Anyway. Let’s cut and paste from the offending article. I’ll just pick a few quotes.

Ah. The first paragraph should have ended with the text “…by people who leak pre-release code and know nothing about ZFS.” AppleInsider apologizes for the misunderstanding.

You fucking moron, it’s a rumour site. There was no misunderstanding. AppleInsider does one thing, does it very well, and has done it since before you could drive – report rumours and leaked information about Apple products. This is another in that series, a very welcome one, and you’re a fucking idiot for not recognising it as such.

“…where by ‘destruct,’ we mean ‘destroy,’ or would if we knew anything about ZFS. Write capabilities are no big secret, since the entire file system is open source, but it sounds a lot better if we portray it as something mystical.”

You’re a nit-picking retard. And while I wouldn’t call it the best style of English, this is far from the first use of “destruct” as a verb I’ve seen. And I don’t see why choice of words has anything to do with AI’s knowledge of ZFS.

“This claim [that ZFS will eventuall replace HFS+ - Sho], by the way, is widely believed by Johnathan Schwartz, cultists who assume that Apple’s advanced file system must be bad but Sun’s must be good, and people who know so little about HFS Plus and ZFS that they can’t do more than recite Sun’s marketing propaganda. For those keeping score at home, we at AppleInsider fall into the latter group.”

It’s ardently hoped by anyone familiar with the crusty, unreliable piece of shit that is HFS+ that ZFS will replace it. Do you have any idea at all what you’re talking about? Why *wouldn’t* you want to replace HFS+? Hell, NTFS is better. Much better.

“… or, at least, that’s what Sun’s marketing department tells us, and we’re far too ignorant to figure out that using significantly more disk space and processor time to store the same data is not ‘fundamentally new.’”

Maybe using more disk and processing time isn’t “fundamentally new”, but if the adoption of ZFS as the default filesystem in MacOSX led to MacOSX being no longer highly susceptible to FS corruption, that would certainly be “fundamentally new”.

“We don’t find HFS Plus administration to be complex, and we can’t tell you what those other things mean, but they sound really cool, and therefore we want them. On the magic unlocked iPhone. For free.”

You’re an idiot. No-one mentioned iPhones.

“We like how this somehow implies that hard disks can suddenly read and write for multiple clients at once, but we apparently aren’t aware that this is not true, and you’re still limited to the speed of your bus (or RAID controller) and your devices. Plus, ZFS can be a lot slower because it imposes tons of overhead on the kind of tiny files that Mac OS X uses by the thousands, but maybe magic hard disks will fix that, as far as we know.”

I read the paragraph several times and couldn’t see any implication that ZFS somehow manages to circumvent physical hardware speed limitations. What the hell are you talking about?

And I’d love to see the data to back up your “much slower” claim about the “thousands of small files” that MacOSX is apparently creating and destroying every second of the day. Oh, no data? Guess you’re talking shit, then.

“… but can only correct them if you’re using ZFS’s RAID-like capability to store duplicate copies of information, in which case a standard RAID system could fix the error too. Oops.”

Yes, they should have perhaps mentioned that this highly useful feature is only available to someone using RAID-Z across a number of disks. But to imply that a standard RAID system is just as good is disingenuous, because RAID-Z needs no special hardware, and if ZFS support is built into the OS, no special drivers. This is a major step forward to the current state of things, especially considering the dearth of decent RAID options for Mac. Or, as some would say, the complete lack of any good RAID options for the Mac that aren’t $10,000 XRaids.

“It can only correct the error if you’re using RAID and have a good copy of the bad data, but leaving that out makes you want ZFS a lot more. So does leaving out its battery-chomping, disk-eating storage hog nature that makes it fantastic for 20TB disk arrays and entirely, completely unsuitable for a Mac OS X startup disk, now or in the foreseeable future.”

Well excuse me, Mr Mac Journals, but I’ll take a bit of extra CPU activity over a corrupt filesystem any day. Your comment that ZFS is “completely unsuitable” for MacOSX’s root filesystem is ludicrous and indefensible. One is left with the strong impression that your constant mocking of AppleInsider’s supposed lack of knowledge about ZFS is nothing but a ploy to distract readers from your own obvious ignorance of ZFS, HFS, filesystems in general, and filesystems on the Mac in particular.

“It didn’t make us understand anything, but it repeats all these same phrases so it’ll make you think we know what we’re talking about, even though we don’t.”

Funny, I was thinking the exact same thing about you. But you claim to know something, so that’s worse.

I’d call you “Jackass of the week” but, since I’m not a pretentious twerp like Gruber who’s too scared to type swear words lest he damage his worthless “reputation”, I think I’ll just call you a fuckhead.

Hans “Sexy” Gruber, living proof that people with curly hair are bad news