Eric Sink has an interesting piece about MeWare, ThemWare, and UsWare. The basic idea is that one way of categorising software is by who uses it:

• MeWare: only the developer
• UsWare: the developer, among others
• ThemWare: people other than the developer

I think most programmers can see what Eric’s getting at there. If you’ve ever worked on, say, a piece of software used exclusively by people in a different department of the company you work for, you know how hard it can be to ensure that the software actually meets those people’s needs.

However, I took issue with one particular thing Eric says.

In the context of a discussion about the Y2.038K problem, Craig Berry surmised that the 32-bit Unix time_t type originated on 16-bit machines. That’s entirely true; for those with too much time on their hands, here’s a short history of Unix time handling.

There’s been a minor furore lately about ZFS and Mac OS and laptops.

First, AppleInsider reported that ZFS would play a larger role in future versions of Mac OS X. MWJ took that article to task, contending (once you ignore the snarky asides) that ZFS is inappropriate for laptops. Drew Thaler, previously a filesystem engineer for Apple, chimed in to extol the good qualities of ZFS.

Then MWJ responded, explaining their position in more depth. Which is all well and good, except that some of the things they said made no sense at all.