Specifically, Apple may have wanted a “private license” from Sun Microsystems, and Sun simply did not want to play ball. Neither side could agree on suitable terms, so support was removed. [OpenSolaris Mailing List via Daring Fireball]

A message on MacOS Forge tersely states,

The ZFS project has been discontinued. The mailing list and repository will also be removed shortly.

There have been multiple explanations as to why Apple dropped ZFS support in Snow Leopard, and now there’s more speculation to add into the mix. This time the story goes that when Oracle bought Sun, Oracle didn’t want continue development on ZFS because they already had their own filesystem (BTRFS) in the oven.

ZFS was also apparently facing patent suits at the time. It all sounds like a complicated legal and political mess, which is probably why Apple just dropped it.

Whatever the true causes behind ZFS’ sudden fall from grace may be, it’s disappointing that we’ll have to wait longer for a true filesystem upgrade in OS X. [AppleInsider]

The Power pouch from Latestbuy is a solar panel-packing pouch that incorporates a portable battery and a million different little plugs. You can plug your gadget directly into the sunlight scraping juice pack and charge using the sun, or you can plug your gadget into the included battery, which you conveniently didn’t forget to charge using the solar panel back when it was sunny.

If you do happen to forget to charge the battery though, it can be charged via USB as well.

Included in the charging adapters are:

Mobile phone adaptors for: LG, Motorola, Nokia (thin & standard plug), Samsung, Sony Ericsson (wide & standard plug) and iPhone.

4 mm straight jack for: Sony PSP, Tom Tom GPS, digital cameras, PDAs and two-way radios.

USB female socket for: iPods, MP3 players, PDAs and GPS systems.

Mini-B USB male plug for: charging the portable battery via USB and for connecting other devices that also use a Mini-B USB connection.

And the best part is that unlike the Powertraveller, which offers the same sort of functionality, this thing is cheap. Like $50 cheap. But considering all the free juice you’ll get, that’s a bargain and a half, right?

[Latestbuy]

The latter report is the more interesting of the two, for the glimpse it gives into Foxconn’s corporate culture: When Foxconn security manager Gu Qinming interviewed Sun, he says that Sun initially blamed the missing phone on a female colleague, provoking Gu to poke him in the shoulder and ask, “Are you a man?”

According to Gu, it was Sun who suggested that Foxconn search his house, to prove his innocence. Which almost sounds reasonable, insofar as Gu thought Sun was both incompetent and a liar—what else could Sun have done?

Granted, this is coming from the guy who interrogated and may have tortured Sun Danyong before his death and works for a company so secretive it might have driven a man to suicide over a phone. [The New Yorker]

After 18 years of operation, NASA has switched off Ulysses, the space probe designed to study the properties of solar wind, the heliosphere magnetic field, and the solar radio bursts that can greatly affect our gadgets, telecommunications, and every electronic system here on planet Earth. It was the first object to see and study our Sun’s poles.

But Ulysses it’s not dead yet, at least in spirit. If it gets lucky, it may depart to reach other stars: According to NASA, if it gets close enough to a Jovian moon, Ulysses will jump into a new course that will lead the brave probe into deep space. That certainly would be the perfect destination for a spacecraft that has provided with such an amazing amount of data about our home star. So long, Ulysses, and please say hello to Aphrodite if you see her riding her crimson shell. [NASA]

The Kinesis K3 power generator updates their previous K2 unit with a new power source: In addition to its windmill and solar cells, it can now charge its internal battery with external electricity sources.

Sounds a bit weird and anti-green, but for some reason now you can charge its 4,000 mAh battery using a USB adaptor or a car cigarette lighter. Why would you like to do a single charge with an external power source when you can just leave it by the window to have it fully charged is beyond me.

According to the company, one hour of sun and wind will provide you with 30 minutes of talk time in a mobile phone. Fully charged, the K3 can load the battery cells for an average mobile phone five times, or an MP3 player more than ten times.

At $US100 it is a bit on the expensive, but if their specs are correct, it looks pretty useful for emergencies. [CNET]

How do you store three petabytes (that’s 3,145,728 GB) of web pages for the Internet Archive? You put them in a datacenter housed in a shipping container.

Each container packs in 60 of the company’s Sun Fire X4500 Open Storage Systems and is constantly monitored for potential threats. It’s actually a pretty elegant, modular solution to an archive that grows by nearly 100TBs every month. So rest assured folks, your precious GeoCities page from the 90’s is safe and secure. [Sun via GigaOM via Slashgear]

Sun—once a bright star in the technology universe, who even wanted to buy Apple—is about to get swallowed by IBM for $US7 billion, say New York Times’ sources. [NYT]

In the future, sunglasses will need to do more than just make you look cool or prevent costly eye conditions. They’ll need to power your gadgets, according to at least one pair of designers.

The “Self-Energy Converting Sunglasses” concept uses a dye solar cell combined with unspecified nanotech to generate electricity while, presumably, still allowing you to see. The electricity passes through the frames to a port in the back of the glasses. Then a cord runs down your neck to your gadget of choice.

Hopefully by the time someone creates a working production model, we’ll be beyond such desperate attempts to charge our portable technology. Or maybe the glasses will at least hide a halfway decent HUD inside. [Yanko]