T/N (or more properly (1/N)T is the probability of any given drive failing. EG, if you have a drives 1..4, the probabilty that drive #2 will die is (1/4)T. In raid-0 you have to factor that out among ALL the drives, because a failure of any ond drive effectively kills the other N-1.
Or if you've got a sofa tied to a pickup truck, you don't want to go very fast. etc
If you've hauling cargo in an open-bed vehicle, you have NO FUCKING BUSINESS WHATSOEVER being on the goddamn highway. Take back roads. If your load is too big to safely haul in your vehicle at the posted speed, rent or borrow a bigger one. Don't be a cheap-assed fuckhead and strap a queen-size mattress to the roof of your little riceburner.
Raid 0 is no different to having a single disk for most practical purposes.
WRONG. RAID-0 dramatically INCREASES the likelihood that you WILL have problems. Instead of having one physical mechanism to worry about failing, you have two or more. In a given time span, the probability of 2-drive RAID-0 array failing is FOUR times that of single drive; a 4-drive RAID-0 array is SIXTEEN times as likely to fail as a single drive. It's an inverse square relationship (1/N^2) because the failure of one drive kills the whole array.
If you expect 36 months of reliable operation from a single drive, you can only count on 9 months of reliable operation from a 2-drive RAID-0 array built from those same drives. Hope you enjoy restoring from backups, because you're going to be doing it at least four times as often.
While parent said it in a joking manner, he's right: RAID-0 is not appropriate for general desktop use. You use it in applications which are disk-bound. The classic examples of this are databases and video editing. If you're not disk-bound, the risks and disadvantages of RAID-0 seriously outweigh the small performance boost you see.
A disk-bound application is one where the application's performance is directly proportional to disk speed. EG, a disk-bound app's performance will improve by 10% if you improve your disk I/O by 10%.
Remember with RAID-0 you are not halving your MTBF (mean time between failures), you're reducing it by the inverse of number of drives squared. If the MTBF for a single drive is T, then for an N-drive RAID-0 array it's (1/N^2)T, not T/N as you might assume. Put another way for the math-impared, a 2-drive RAID-0 array is four times as likely to die as a single drive; a 4-drive RAID-0 array is SIXTEEN times as likely to fail.
Congress should leave the damn thing alone and let us take care of it
Half right. Congress should empower us to take care of it ourselves. Namely, allow spamees to sue spammers in small claims court -- specifily in the SPAMEES' local small claims court, with a provision to keep them from escalating it to federal court unless there are special circumstances. $200 damages isn't much, but when you're being sued in 3500 jurisdictions simultaneously, it adds up fast. Remember that typically, in small claims court, if you don't show up for the trial you get a default judgement against you.
speeders are real criminals. they endanger other people's lives
So do the nitwits who drive 15MPH slower than the flow of traffic. I don't give a fuck if the sign on the side of the road says 55, if the average flow of traffic is going 70, then if you are driving 55 you are JUST AS DANGEROUS as someone driving 85, if not more so.
If you want to talk about the real dangerous drivers, let's talk about the assholes who yap on their cell phones the whole trip, or the dumbasses who spend all their time fucking with the radio or talking to their passenger instead of watching the road, or the shitheads who can't figure out how to use a fucking turn signal, or (my pet peeve) the fuckwads who can't maintain a safe following distance.
What part of "well regulated" is so hard to understand?
It's easy to understand: when speaking of a body of troops, "regulated" means "trained, equipped, and disciplined". What, you thought it meant "buried under bureaucratic regulations"? Guess again. Common usage of the English language has changed a bit since 1789. Read the Federalist Papers and the founding fathers' intent will be clear. In Federalist #29, the definitive explanation of the nature of the militia, the phrase "well-regulated" is used interchangably and synonomously with the phrase "well-trained". Indeed, Federalist 29 speaks directly to the dangers of over-regulation:
The project of disciplining all the militia of the United States is as futile as it would be injurious, if it were capable of being carried into execution. A tolerable expertness in military movements is a business that requires time and practice. It is not a day, or even a week, that will suffice for the attainment of it.
To oblige the great body of the yeomanry, and of the other classes of the citizens, to be under arms for the purpose of going through military exercises and evolutions, as often as might be necessary to acquire the degree of perfection which would entitle them to the character of a well-regulated militia, would be a real grievance to the people, and a serious public inconvenience and loss. It would form an annual deduction from the productive labor of the country, to an amount which, calculating upon the present numbers of the people, would not fall far short of the whole expense of the civil establishments of all the States. To attempt a thing which would abridge the mass of labor and industry to so considerable an extent, would be unwise: and the experiment, if made, could not succeed, because it would not long be endured. Little more can reasonably be aimed at, with respect to the people at large, than to have them properly armed and equipped; and in order to see that this be not neglected, it will be necessary to assemble them once or twice in the course of a year.
The intent and meaning and intent of the Second Amendment is crystal clear. No amount of revisionist history will change the fact that the intent of the founding fathers was that every citizen who was capable of defending the country should, at his own expense, obtain the skills and equipment necessary to do so. It is not only the right of a citizen to arm and equip himself, it is his civic duty to do so.
Except for the last 15 minutes, I thought the SciFi BG pilot/miniseries was decent -- not great, but still better than Enterprise. I have high hopes for the new series. At least they've got some decent talent -- Edward James Olmos and Mary McDonnell are good performers.
Even more exciting is the fact that SciFi is bringing back Farscape!!! That just ROCKS. That might even make up for Stargate: The Explotative Spin-off.
You make a number of valid points, but you missed that I was talking only about the immediate tactical level. The issues you bring up are strategic ones.
At the tactical level, you're only concerned about winning (or surviving) THIS engagement. At the strategic level, your concern is about winning SUBSEQUENT engagements.
At the tactical level, all you really care about is getting the other guy to stop shooting at you. It it really doesn't matter if he dies, is incapacitated, surrenders, runs out of ammo, or retreats -- what matters is that he stops offering resistance to you achiving your objective.
Stock price is based on a company's PERCEIVED value, not it's ACTUAL value. Sometimes perception is in line with reality; sometimes they're so far apart it's not even funny.
Perception is a function of human psychology; understand that and you'll have a better understanding of how people will react in a given situation.
A 15% improvement in stock price overnight is hardly insignificant. Granted, compared to their price 2-3 years ago, the rally is minor, but for someone doing short-term trading this could give a nice return.
For someone interested in shorting SCOX, a temporary bubble like this is a great opportunity -- as soon as the enthusiasm dissipates and everyone catches on that this is smoke & mirrors, the price will drop down to it's previous levels (if not further)
Using penguin's logic, by publishing a book with a tile that is a web address owned by someone else, that gives you the right to intimdate the legitimate owner into "donating" their property to you. Cool. I want to know the lawyer's home address, so I can publish a book called "123 Maple Street" (or whatever it actually is). That way, using his own logic, I can demand that he "donate" his house to me.
Yeah, traffic analysis can yield intel even if the content is unknown. However, it's also pretty easy to defeat. A simple cron job is all it takes -- all you need to do is send messages of a fixed size (or of random size within a given range) on a regular schedule. If you want to get fancy, you send it to a bunch of decoy addresses as well as the intended recipients.
If you have real data to send, it gets encrypted and goes out in the next scheduled transmission. If not, you encrypt and send some worthless data (eg a couple pages of text from project guetenberg) If you have a small message it gets padded out with garbage until it's the standard size.
You could even camoflage it as spam if you want even more protection -- if you use steganography to hide your message in an image which you spam to tens of thousands of addresses, you've given your dozen intended recipients a huge dose of plausible deniability, and you've given the opposition a massive number of decoys to investigate.
The Iraqi opposition just didn't have the firepower to reliably pierce body armor at 100m
Don't you think that the simplest explanation for that be more a function of the fact that US body armor was specifically designed to defeat the 7.62x29mm round? (not suprising, considering that a) it's the most common calibre rifle cartidge in the world and b) it's used by virtually every opponent we're likely to go up against).
AFIK, there are very few military organizations outide of NATO where body armor is general issue for all personnel. When the opposition starts wearing body armor on a regular basis, doctrine will have to change. Given the current threat environment, that's not likely to happen anytime soon.
Tactically speaking, however, I'm still not sure if this really changes anything. If the guys getting hit are shrugging it off and staying in the fight, that really changes the tactical equasion. However, if they're taking out of the fight it's still more or less tactically equivilent regardless of if they die in the hospital or if they live -- for the purpose of the immediate engagement, they're still neutralized. It really doesn't matter if the other guy is dead or alive -- what matters is that he isn't shooting back (and, preferably, that a few of his buddies aren't shooting back either)
WWII brought the US out of the Great Depression by kick-starting the industrial sector. Pre WWII, there were a LOT of factories sitting idle or running at a fraction of capacity. War production opened those factories back up, and forced them to modernize quickly.
One of the main reason we won WWII was because our factories never got bombed. This allowed us to out-produce the Germans and Japanese -- we were producing ships, tanks, and planes faster than they could blow them up.
This manufacturing capacity and lack of a need to rebuild bombed-out cities directly led to the US's post-war prosperity, and subsequent rise of consumer culture. The two world wars forced the US to become a global power and destroyed the century old attitude of isolationism as embodied by the Monroe Doctrine.
First, outside of the sniper role, a high-power round like.30-06 (or even 7.62 NATO) is overkill;
Tell that to all the Iraqi fighters who scored perfect center-of-mass hits with AK-47s and still killed less than 10% of targets
What kind of armor were the targets wearing? What range were these "perfect center-of-mass hits" taken from? What kind of ammo were they using -- was it high quality mil-spec ammo of recent manufacture, or some shoddy garbage that's been sitting in 120 degree heat for the last 25 years? What's the source for your data? Back up your claims.
Who can tell what power a machine gun will develop in 2020
Not much more than current models. The technology is pretty mature, considering that machine guns are over a century old.
Actually the trend in small arms for the past 50 years has been steadily downward -- shorter range and less powerful rounds. There are two interrelated reasons for this.
First, outside of the sniper role, a high-power round like.30-06 (or even 7.62 NATO) is overkill; in most situations an infantryman isn't going to be doing aimed fire past 200 - 300 meters, so small arms that are effective out to 600 - 1000 meters just aren't needed. Current doctrine says that anything more than 200 meters away is engaged with heavy weapons (heavy machine gun, rocket launcher, artillery, air strike, etc). If you have soldiers with exoskeletons, this will let you take your heavy weapons off of the HMMV and have them hand-carried by your exos instead. Other than that, tactical doctrine doesn't change much if at all.
Second, if each round is smaller and weighs less, the soldier can either carry more ammo for his weapon or can carry parts & ammo for a squad-level heavy weapon. Having exos doesn't change this -- you're still going to want to keep pretty much the same distribution of weapons in a squad as you have now. The only difference will be that your troops will be able to carry a lot more equipment -- more ammo for their personal weapon and the squad weapon, more food & water, heavier armor, etc.
It's important to remember that infantry combat is a team sport. Each soldier's gear is tailored to maximize the entier team's effectiveness, not necessarily his individual effectiveness. This means that the gear which is appropriate for a member of an infantry squad in a combined arms unit isn't necessarily going to be ideal for individual survival or for use by irregular forces (partisans/militia).
It may well be worth $85M, but how much would it cost IBM to maintain it? Besides, it would only be worth that much if they could find a buyer, and it's pretty unlikely that they'd find someone to buy it at that price.
An $85M "asset" isn't worth much if you have to spend $16M a year maintaining and supporting it. Also, remember that IBM has several other database products this would be competing against. The fact that they released it as Open Source is a very good thing for everyone, considering that they could have just abandoned the code and kept it locked away. This way they get good publicity, reduce their maintenance costs, and get a nice tax break.
Another point that IBM really isn't in the business of selling either software or hardware anymore -- they sell SOLUTIONS. Nowadays, most of Big Blue's revenue comes from sending consultants out to tell customers what hardware and software they need to run their business, and then putting all the pieces together for them so the whole thing works. While they'd prefer to sell you IBM hardware and IBM software, they're pretty agnostic in that regard. Having their own pet OSS database allows them to offer an IBM-backed solution for lower-end projects which don't have the money for a DB2 license.
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If you expect 36 months of reliable operation from a single drive, you can only count on 9 months of reliable operation from a 2-drive RAID-0 array built from those same drives. Hope you enjoy restoring from backups, because you're going to be doing it at least four times as often.
A disk-bound application is one where the application's performance is directly proportional to disk speed. EG, a disk-bound app's performance will improve by 10% if you improve your disk I/O by 10%.
Remember with RAID-0 you are not halving your MTBF (mean time between failures), you're reducing it by the inverse of number of drives squared. If the MTBF for a single drive is T, then for an N-drive RAID-0 array it's (1/N^2)T, not T/N as you might assume. Put another way for the math-impared, a 2-drive RAID-0 array is four times as likely to die as a single drive; a 4-drive RAID-0 array is SIXTEEN times as likely to fail.
If you want to talk about the real dangerous drivers, let's talk about the assholes who yap on their cell phones the whole trip, or the dumbasses who spend all their time fucking with the radio or talking to their passenger instead of watching the road, or the shitheads who can't figure out how to use a fucking turn signal, or (my pet peeve) the fuckwads who can't maintain a safe following distance.
I was hoping for the coveted +5, Troll rating :)
L-O-O-S-E is the antonym of TIGHT. EG: Your mamma is looser than a crack whore.
L-O-S-E is the antonym of WIN. EG: You are a total loser.
Even more exciting is the fact that SciFi is bringing back Farscape!!! That just ROCKS. That might even make up for Stargate: The Explotative Spin-off.
At the tactical level, you're only concerned about winning (or surviving) THIS engagement. At the strategic level, your concern is about winning SUBSEQUENT engagements.
At the tactical level, all you really care about is getting the other guy to stop shooting at you. It it really doesn't matter if he dies, is incapacitated, surrenders, runs out of ammo, or retreats -- what matters is that he stops offering resistance to you achiving your objective.
Stock price is based on a company's PERCEIVED value, not it's ACTUAL value. Sometimes perception is in line with reality; sometimes they're so far apart it's not even funny.
Perception is a function of human psychology; understand that and you'll have a better understanding of how people will react in a given situation.
For someone interested in shorting SCOX, a temporary bubble like this is a great opportunity -- as soon as the enthusiasm dissipates and everyone catches on that this is smoke & mirrors, the price will drop down to it's previous levels (if not further)
Using penguin's logic, by publishing a book with a tile that is a web address owned by someone else, that gives you the right to intimdate the legitimate owner into "donating" their property to you. Cool. I want to know the lawyer's home address, so I can publish a book called "123 Maple Street" (or whatever it actually is). That way, using his own logic, I can demand that he "donate" his house to me.
If you have real data to send, it gets encrypted and goes out in the next scheduled transmission. If not, you encrypt and send some worthless data (eg a couple pages of text from project guetenberg) If you have a small message it gets padded out with garbage until it's the standard size.
You could even camoflage it as spam if you want even more protection -- if you use steganography to hide your message in an image which you spam to tens of thousands of addresses, you've given your dozen intended recipients a huge dose of plausible deniability, and you've given the opposition a massive number of decoys to investigate.
Tactically speaking, however, I'm still not sure if this really changes anything. If the guys getting hit are shrugging it off and staying in the fight, that really changes the tactical equasion. However, if they're taking out of the fight it's still more or less tactically equivilent regardless of if they die in the hospital or if they live -- for the purpose of the immediate engagement, they're still neutralized. It really doesn't matter if the other guy is dead or alive -- what matters is that he isn't shooting back (and, preferably, that a few of his buddies aren't shooting back either)
One of the main reason we won WWII was because our factories never got bombed. This allowed us to out-produce the Germans and Japanese -- we were producing ships, tanks, and planes faster than they could blow them up.
This manufacturing capacity and lack of a need to rebuild bombed-out cities directly led to the US's post-war prosperity, and subsequent rise of consumer culture. The two world wars forced the US to become a global power and destroyed the century old attitude of isolationism as embodied by the Monroe Doctrine.
Based on my experience, the military is already Java Powered. MMMM Army coffee... as thick as motor oil and black as a whore's heart.
Actually the trend in small arms for the past 50 years has been steadily downward -- shorter range and less powerful rounds. There are two interrelated reasons for this.
First, outside of the sniper role, a high-power round like .30-06 (or even 7.62 NATO) is overkill; in most situations an infantryman isn't going to be doing aimed fire past 200 - 300 meters, so small arms that are effective out to 600 - 1000 meters just aren't needed. Current doctrine says that anything more than 200 meters away is engaged with heavy weapons (heavy machine gun, rocket launcher, artillery, air strike, etc). If you have soldiers with exoskeletons, this will let you take your heavy weapons off of the HMMV and have them hand-carried by your exos instead. Other than that, tactical doctrine doesn't change much if at all.
Second, if each round is smaller and weighs less, the soldier can either carry more ammo for his weapon or can carry parts & ammo for a squad-level heavy weapon. Having exos doesn't change this -- you're still going to want to keep pretty much the same distribution of weapons in a squad as you have now. The only difference will be that your troops will be able to carry a lot more equipment -- more ammo for their personal weapon and the squad weapon, more food & water, heavier armor, etc.
It's important to remember that infantry combat is a team sport. Each soldier's gear is tailored to maximize the entier team's effectiveness, not necessarily his individual effectiveness. This means that the gear which is appropriate for a member of an infantry squad in a combined arms unit isn't necessarily going to be ideal for individual survival or for use by irregular forces (partisans/militia).
An $85M "asset" isn't worth much if you have to spend $16M a year maintaining and supporting it. Also, remember that IBM has several other database products this would be competing against. The fact that they released it as Open Source is a very good thing for everyone, considering that they could have just abandoned the code and kept it locked away. This way they get good publicity, reduce their maintenance costs, and get a nice tax break.
Another point that IBM really isn't in the business of selling either software or hardware anymore -- they sell SOLUTIONS. Nowadays, most of Big Blue's revenue comes from sending consultants out to tell customers what hardware and software they need to run their business, and then putting all the pieces together for them so the whole thing works. While they'd prefer to sell you IBM hardware and IBM software, they're pretty agnostic in that regard. Having their own pet OSS database allows them to offer an IBM-backed solution for lower-end projects which don't have the money for a DB2 license.