What is Unix now?

As I read in Wikipedia, Unix started as a revolutionary operating system written mostly in C allowing it to be ported and used on different hardware. Descendants of Unix is mentioned next, mostly BSD. Clones of Unix, Minix/Linux are discussed as well.

Why are tar archive formats switching to xz compression to replace bzip2 and what about gzip?

More and more tar archives use the xz format based on LZMA2 for compression instead of the traditional bzip2(bz2) compression. In fact kernel.org made a late “Good-bye bzip2announcement, 27th Dec. 2013, indicating kernel sources would from this point on be released in both tar.gz and tar.xz format – and on the main page of the website what’s directly offered is in tar.xz.

Where did the “wheel” group get its name?

The wheel group on *nix computers typically refers to the group with some sort of root-like access. I’ve heard that on some *nixes it’s the group of users with the right to run su, but on Linux that seems to be anyone (although you need the root password, naturally). On Linux distributions I’ve used it seems to be the group that by default has the right to use sudo; there’s an entry in sudoers for them: