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Diskeeper Accused of Scientology Indoctrination
touretzky writes "Two ex-employees have sued Diskeeper Corporation in Los Angeles Superior Court after being fired, alleging that the company makes Scientology training a mandatory condition of employment (complaint, PDF). Diskeeper founder and CEO Craig Jensen is a high-level, publicly avowed Scientologist who has given millions to his Church. Diskeeper's surprising response to the lawsuit (PDF) appears to be that religious instruction in a place of employment is protected by the First Amendment." The blogger at RealityBasedCommunity.net believes that the legal mechanism that Diskeeper is using to advance this argument ("motion to strike") is inappropriate and will be disallowed, but that the company will eventually be permitted to present its novel legal theory.
They can fire you, at will, for any LEGAL reason.
Discrimination based upon religious preference is NOT a legal reason.
Otherwise I can recommend this one.
Under title VII, they will lose. Unless the Supreme Court declares Title VII unconstitutional with respect to the 1st Amendment, of course, which they might since the new ones are a bunch of religious fundamentalists. The 1st Amendment does not give anyone a right to impose their religion on others as a condition of employment. http://www.eeoc.gov/types/religion.html
Here's the EEOC's official position-
http://www.eeoc.gov/policy/docs/religion.html#_Toc203359505
That's less than 2 minutes googling. But somehow I still think hundreds of thousands of dollars will be spent figuring that out...
.... Wikipedia has a list of software that defragments disks. Take out Diskeeper and you have a bunch of options. Nothing changes behaviour like the loss of sales.
This is my opinion. To make sure you don't steal it, it's covered by the DMCA.
It's a cut-down version of Diskeeper. The scientology / Diskeeper / Windows connection has caused problems in the past. Here's one link.
Otherwise I can recommend this one.
Note that JkDefrag uses the Windows defrag API, so it should be as safe to use as the original defrag. Also, Windows occasionally runs a boot optimizing defrag while your screen saver is on, which tends to mess up JkDefrag's logic. You might want to disable it, if you intend to run JkDefrag.
The article you quote contradicts your statement:
"While it is true that ext3 is more resistant to file fragmentation than FAT, and NTFS filesystems, nonetheless ext3 filesystems can and do get fragmented over time.[14] Consequently the successor to the ext3 filesystem, ext4, includes a filesystem defragmentation utility and support for extents (contiguous file regions)."
14: "We found heavily fragmented free areas on an intensively used IMAP server which stores all its emails in individual files - although more than 900 GB of the total disk space of 1.4 TB were still available." http://www.heise-online.co.uk/open/Tuning-the-Linux-file-system-Ext3--/features/110398/3
Advertising that I'm a girl on Slashdot since 2008.
Mirror of lawsuit documents:
http://www.xenu-directory.net/documents/200810-godelman-leshay-v-diskeeper.html
Link to access official Los Angeles Superior Court Documents:
http://www.lasuperiorcourt.org/civilCaseSummary/index.asp?CaseType=Civil
Ex Scientologist Message Board Discussion:
http://forum.exscn.net/showthread.php?t=9154
Operation Clambake Discussion:
http://ocmb.xenu.net/ocmb/viewtopic.php?t=29787
Why We Protest
IANAL, but if I had to guess...
Diskeeper is probably arguing from Corporation of Presiding Bishop v. Amos. A gym open to the public but affiliated with the Church of Latter Day Saints fired a janitor who wasn't a Mormon. The janitor sued, arguing the exemption for religious organizations from Title VII of the Civil Rights Act (prohibiting religious discrimination in employment) violated the establishment clause of the 1st amendment. IIRC, the Church argued that this exemption was a permissible accommodation of the Church's free exercise rights under the 1st amendment. The Supreme Court agreed with the Church.
The problem is, Diskeeper isn't a religious organization, so they don't qualify for the statutory exemption in Title VII. While religious instruction in the workplace may or may not be lawful, making continued employment dependent on religious instruction in a particular faith almost certainly is unlawful.
Hopefully Diskeeper goes down at the summary judgment stage, if not on a motion to dismiss.
All you need to demonstrate fragmentation is multiple parallel streaming writes, which you can demonstrate on any UNIX-like system easily enough with two dd(1) commands.
There is a clear tradeoff between fragmentation during writing due to writing out interleaved series of blocks (which incurs a read penalty) and avoiding fragmentation on a sufficiently empty filesystem by doing lots of track-to-track head motion to write contiguous blocks for each file. The latter is an approximation anyway in modern individual drives anyway, and becomes difficult to analyse in multi-drive arrays.
Almost no modern filesystem will opt for a potentially huge write-time seek penalty in order to improve read times. The general consensus is that whatever is doing the streaming writing may be highly time-sensitive (you don't want to drop frames if capturing live video, for example), and is likely to be somewhat time-sensitive (when will this damn copy finish?).
The downside is that the trade-offs in contiguous-block-quantums is not so clear; it probably ought to be timed in milliseconds, but generally is some power of two number of logical 512-octet blocks (it can be tuned in some cases -- tunefs(8) for example, or at file system creation time; some APIs allow for tuning with a per-filedescriptor ioctl(2) call).
Finally, busy filesystems that create and delete lots of files will end up with the free space scattered into lots of individual regions, which will also incur a large write time penalty as the free space fragmentation decreases, which is likely as the disk fills.
Consequently, Apple introduced (boot-volume-only) automatic small-file "sliding". When the system opens a file that is less than about 20MBytes and it has more than 8 fragments, the entire file will be consolidated by the operating system into a single fragment-free file in a way which heuristically decreases the free space fragmentation. (One heuristic involves sliding "hot" files, the most frequently accessed files, to a region near the start of the volume, and sliding cooled-off files out of that region into a best fit, rather than first fit, part of free space; the assumption is that cooled-off files are likely to stay relatively cool so a relatively slow best-fit search can be done with little worry).
Other very un-UNIX-like operating systems have similar approaches to automatic background file and free space defragmentation. Most of the free space defragmentation in practice in such OSes is much more aggressive than what has been done in Mac OS X to date, partly because it is less clear to the Apple developers (and the Darwin open source community) that free space fragmentation has a likely penalty when there is more than 5% of a volume free. Free space defragmentation takes real energy (lots of i/o and lots of compute power, and the maintenance of state to deal with crashes/power failures that occur during the process), and where large files must be "slid" this can interfere with a system that is actually trying to be put to use by a time-sensitive user.
Most other open-source UNIX-like OSes do *no* automatic defragmentation of files or free space at all. Mac OS X doesn't either, on non-boot volumes.