Month: June 2021

Enlarge / Tim Berners-Lee showing off the early World Wide Web at CERN. (credit: Courtesy Sotheby's)

Next week, Sir Tim Berners-Lee will auction an NFT of the original source code he used to create the World Wide Web.

The centerpiece of the digital collectible will be 9,555 lines of time-stamped source code split among files created by Berners-Lee between October 3, 1990, and August 24, 1991. That code, mostly written in Objective-C, served as the early foundation for much of the modern Internet, including this very site. The files cover implementations of HTML, HTTP, and URIs, along with the original HTML documents that Berners-Lee wrote as a sort of “read me” for the early web.

The NFT will also include a letter recently written by Berners-Lee containing his musings on the original Web code. The letter is written in Markdown, making it Github-ready. The NFT will also come with an animated 30-minute black-and-white visualization of the code being written. Lastly, the lucky winner will receive an SVG “poster” of Berners-Lee’s code, which the man himself made using a Python script. The poster also includes his vectorized signature in the lower right.

Enlarge / OpenZFS supports many complex disk topologies, but "spiral stack sitting on a desk" still isn't one of them. (credit: Jim Salter)

OpenZFS founding developer Matthew Ahrens merged one of the most sought-after features in ZFS history—RAIDz expansion—into master last week. The new feature allows a ZFS user to expand the size of a single RAIDz vdev. For example, you can use the new feature to turn a three-disk RAIDz1 into a four, five, or six RAIDz1.

OpenZFS is a complex filesystem, and things are necessarily going to get a bit chewy explaining how the feature works. So if you're a ZFS newbie, you may want to refer back to our comprehensive ZFS 101 introduction.

Expanding storage in ZFS

In addition to being a filesystem, ZFS is a storage array and volume manager, meaning that you can feed it a whole pile of disk devices, not just one. The heart of a ZFS storage system is thezpool—this is the most fundamental level of ZFS storage. The zpool in turn contains vdevs, and vdevs contain actual disks within them. Writes are split into units called records or blocks, which are then distributed semi-evenly among the vdevs.

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  Watch that last step—it's a doozy!

Nintendo has revealed the first gameplay footage from the highly anticipated sequel to The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild today, two years after the game was first revealed in a story-teasing trailer at E3 2019.

Zelda Producer Eiji Aonuma said that "development has been steadily progressing" on the game, which is now targeting a 2022 release window. This time around, the "setting has been expanded to include the skies above Hyrule," a move highlighted by Link falling through the clouds to an island below at the trailer's introduction (in a scene that brings Skyward Sword to mind a bit).

The brief trailer teases a few new and upgraded abilities, including a scene of Link phasing through solid rock to rise up through the bottom of a floating island and freezing a giant spiked cement ball to roll it back at the enemies that sent it. The trailer concludes with scenes of a castle being violently ripped from the ground and suspended mid-air in a field of wispy red miasma.

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  This is the battery electric 2022 BMW i4 eDrive40, which goes into production in early 2022. [credit: Jonathan Gitlin ]

Remember when the BMW 3 Series was the byword for a sporty-slash-luxurious sedan? With an image bolstered by halo cars like the M3, the small BMW four-door was the car to have, particularly if you enjoyed driving. But for the last few years, it has felt like BMW has been missing some of its mojo. The German company built up early expertise in electrification but failed to capitalize on it, ceding a lot of ground to Tesla's Model 3 electric sedan as BMW instead built a bewildering array of crossovers with ever-larger kidney grilles.

BMW got a new CEO and an order to amp up the electrification effort in 2019, and now the results of that project are right around the corner. Obviously, a lot will depend on how the car drives, but BMW just brought one of its new electric i4s to Washington, DC, and after having a good poke around, I can say that Bavarian Motor Works has its groove back.

My thesis can be boiled down pretty simply: the car looks good, the specs look good, and the price looks good.

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  Samus Aran is back in a 2D adventure. [credit: Nintendo ]

This year, Nintendo's long-running Metroid series is getting an entirely new sequel—and not the previously announced Metroid Prime 4 first-person shooter.

Instead, we're getting Metroid Dread, apparently dubbed Metroid 5 in its debut trailer, launching October 8 exclusively for Nintendo Switch. The funky game title has been hinted to in prior 2D games, and years later, Nintendo itself confirmed it was the name of an in-development 2D game that was eventually canceled. Thus, Dread's return today as an official game name makes it a particularly juicy Easter egg for anyone who's been following the lore of space bounty hunter Samus Aran in her journey to eradicate the Metroid scourge.

As a fully 2D Metroid game, Metroid Dread resembles 2017's Metroid: Samus Returns, a modern 2D remake of the Game Boy classic Return of Samus. Not just in perspective or aesthetics, either: This year's new Metroid sequel includes that 2017 game's melee-swipe ability—and in kind, Nintendo has confirmed that the 2017 game's developers at MercurySteam are involved this time, as well. Unsurprisingly, as a Metroid series sequel, it also includes new and trippy abilities like a cloak shield—and a few entirely new alien foes.