I whole-heartedly agree that any connection that I pay for
You pay for Amtrak's WiFi — the cost is included in your ticket.
It would be unusable if [...]
That's a perfectly valid argument, yes. My point is, an equally valid argument can be made for filtering this or that in such and such circumstances. Letting the government decide, which argument is reasonable and which is not is tyranny — it gives the bureaucrats undue powers over private enterprises.
The only reliable fount of service quality rising and prices lowering is competition. If one ISP blocks something unreasonably, another would attract those customers, who disagree. Switching is much easier and faster than petitioning the FCC — especially, when the ISP's CEO plays golf with the President and otherwise lobbies the regulators.
If San Francisco were to make conservative speech illegal
They would be in violation of the First Amendment.
linking to your own (bad) calculation is not proof
It is proof, unless an error is identified. Math has this nice property about it, that it is not subject to opinion. What is bad about them?
This calculator explains it much better than I can
Because you do not understand the Math...
there is no situation where RAID5 does any better using real world numbers than RAID6 or RAID10.
I never claimed, that RAID5 does better. My claim is, it is perfectly sufficient and that the higher redundancy does not improve reliability by high enough margin to warrant sacrificing storage capacity. RAID5 guards against random failures. I argue, that trying to guard against correlated ones is futile and your own anecdotes confirm that.
I've seen failures of a Seagate and a Hitachi in the same array in the same night
Could happen too — for example, when ventilation fails, etc.
Do note, that the multiple levels of redundancy did not save you. I'm sure, you dealt with the multiple simultaneous failures somehow and point out, those fall-back mechanisms are what saved you, not the extra redundancy. It buys you vanishingly little...
I see trends where groups of drives will fail around the 1y, 3y and 5y mark but that's a correlation of age, not by manufacturer
Whatever the source of correlation, having additional redundancy is not helpful — when drives fail together, it is due to external factor(s) and you still need other mechanisms in place to deal with that.
Correlated failure is a figment of your imagination.
Dude, you've enumerated several anecdotes confirming correlated failures being real.
you'll see the same cluster around age of the drive being much more an indicator for failure
Wish you'd included the link... But, hey, that may be because makers source components (like motors) from common suppliers...
Even a single anecdote would disprove your theory of 'thousands of years'.
It is not a "theory", I offer a mathematical proof. You, on the other hand, would not offer even an anecdote.
There is no such thing as 'thousands of years' of runtime on a drive,
Not on a drive, but for an array — a RAID5 with disks failing randomly will survive for millennia before two unrelated failures happen within the period of replace/rebuild-time of each other.
I'm sure you won't understand the content of this article
Ah, how insulting... I don't think, you understood it:) They take their fancy charts from a NetApp's "study":
The NetApp comparison is not specific about the bit error rates of the devices tested, the reliability of the drives themselves, or the length of the period over which the probability of data loss is calculated; therefore, we did not attempt to reproduce these specific results. The important point to observe in figure 1 is the stark measured difference in the probability of data loss between RAID-5 and RAID-6.
That's a rather uncritical acceptance of data supplied by the vendor of storage solutions obviously interested in selling bigger boxes and more of them.
And, no doubt, they too populated their boxes with identical drives leading to correlated failures. Do not do that.
For decades the USDA and local governments not only promoted low-fat diets, but threatened people over use of butter — because when Stastists dislike something, they do not simply avoid it themselves, they seek to ban it for all others...
Now we are getting the opposite guidance and very convincing evidence, the earlier imploring and coercion were harmful.
Who will be punished for causing the harm, when, and how?
The larger the count, the bigger the risk, yes. And yet, if the drives are all different, it will still do fine for thousands of years. No, I will not just "trust you". You may have some personal anecdote to "prove" it, but the math I referred to speaks for itself.
RAID with at least 2 parity drives is the minimum requirement
Wasteful bullshit. All too common among Infrastructure people (who never even studied Statistics, much less got a decent grade), but still bullshit.
In all likelihood, you are populating your SAN-enclosures with identical disks taken from the same box. That is what you ought to stop or no amount of mirroring will help.
Do you think a totalitarian government that will use the data provided by these vendors as a means of culling the population as an impossible thing?
It is possible, but improbable...
You're ignoring the last 200 years of history, then.
If you aren't wearing a bullet-proof armor 24x7, then you are ignoring 200 years of history of people shot by strangers and relatives alike...
Point is, there is risk to everything... You need to show, the risk is big enough to justify sacrificing conveniences — and even rights — to alleviate it...
Hot spare drives DO help, as long as you don't leave them spinning when they are in standby. It allows you to restore redundancy on a detectable failure and return your system to a "dual failure required for data loss" condition.
Having a hot spare will cut your drive-replacement time by no more than a few hours. That's usually no more than a fraction of the actual rebuild time and, as my graph shows, that does not perceptibly affect the RAID's total MTTF. Moreover, if you monitor the drives — as you rightly suggest everybody should — then you can schedule the replacement of an about-to-fail one ahead of time, eliminating the difference between a hot and a cold spare entirely.
You'd be better off using the slot occupied by the hot spare to increase the RAID's total capacity. Do have a cold spare — on the shelf — for the operator to slide in when needed, but a hot spare is simply not warranted.
No disagreement on the importance of monitoring and backup-up...
For a single drive, go with the most reliable model. For a RAID, however, be sure to mix different manufacturers, models, and batches to avoid correlated failures...
But if the drives are all the same, they may all — after spending the same time in the same enclosure under the same load — fail for the same reason at the same time. Having hot-spares or multiple redundancy will not help you...
markets optimize for the desires of the customers with the money, not for overall social good
There is no difference between the two. If somebody wants to dine in a Whites-only restaurant, it is — should be — up to the owner, whether he wants the business of the racists or that of the Blacks (and those joining them in a boycott).
Merely rolling back the laws would not have affected the intent of the southern states to suppress and oppress blacks.
How do you know?
There were many others which also had to be shut down.
Nope. The official discrimination had to be abolished. Everything else amounts to prosecuting thought crimes — things made illegal by the accused's alleged thoughts. We surrendered substantial personal freedoms — such as the freedom of (not) association and even that of speech — in the hope of racial harmony. 50 years later we still have neither the freedoms nor the harmony. Do we deserve either?
It has already proven pointless and I argue, that it was not merely that, but also harmful. The recent housing crises was due to that and have the grossly unfair admission policies in various universities, which openly discriminate against Whites and Asians. Similar discrimination is encouraged in the work-place — Uber is seeking not just a good CEO, but one who'd make it less likely, the company will be prosecuted for "discrimination" of women.
It is stupid, unfair, and inefficient — just like everything a government does...
You certainly implied it, when you claimed that "any evenhanded analysis" agreed with you.
If you have reference to good analysis that finds otherwise, cite it.
For someone, who offers no citations of his own, it is a tad too rich to demand that of others.
Your conclusion does not follow from your observations, mostly because your observations are very shallow. Also, you are engaging in a blindingly blatant false equivalency.
Whatever.
The system didn't suddenly become fair and evenhanded,
Life itself is neither fair nor evenhanded. The point was, the government's intervention in the fates of minorities did not achieve its results. It was and remains a failure.
And how in the world can you possibly equate the dissatisfaction we see today with the open, bald-faced oppression that existed in Jim Crow? That's mind-boggling.
I'm comparing what we have today with what we would have had, had we simply let the market forces sort things out.
And, yes, the "Jim Crow" laws should've been declared simply unconstitutional — unfortunately for all, the Federal government's intervention went much further than that...
Nice. So, any analysis that disagrees is automatically not evenhanded... One would've thought, this method for pre-emptively disarming a dissenter was mocked out of existence by Hans Christian Andersen in the 19th century, but no, evidently, the "sophisticated" debaters continue to employ it with smug self-satisfaction...
else we'd never have needed the Civil Rights Act and related legislation.
Given how many issues Uber has had with sexism and the "bro culture"
Whether they have such issues or not is none of our business. Do they deliver good service at a good price is what should concern us. How they choose to treat various groups of employees is entirely up to them — so long as nobody is forced to work there. And no one is — not in this country, not since early 1860-ies...
You can look at them in the eyes but no drooling, no touching, and no mansplaining.
Well, that's one way to solve the global warming and the overpopulation problems... And the endangered species one too — except for the one species, which has grown so smart as to consider sex wrong.
Except that Iran learnt that lesson and distributed it all over the country.
Except that may be enough of a countermeasure for something to remain after an Israeli attack. But nothing will remain, if America's airforce does it...
they have underground facilities that could even be MOAB resistant. Not an easy thing to do.
It does not have to be "easy", it has to be possible — and we know how.
The recent attack on Syrian airbase (and smaller-scale bombings of Hezbollah by Israel) have shown, that Russian radar and other air-defenses are useless against today planes and missiles we have. We know, where those Iranian facilities are and, after destroying Iranian radars and SAM-installations, we can keep bombing them with impunity — until we either destroy them all, or Iran cries "uncle".
At any rate, the main point was, "giving diplomacy a chance" was wrong — and so obviously wrong, given the fresh example of North Korea, one would be justified suspecting, Obama (who not only lifted sanctions, but gave Iranians nearly two billions in cash) did it deliberately — such as out of some perverse sense of "fairness" to put Israel in check.
For years the fans of Iran have attacked people like myself on two fronts:
Iranians are peaceful and do not seek nuclear weapons;
Iranians are fully entitled to nuclear weapons because Israel.
It always made me smile, how the two groups never argued with each other... And now we have the third argument: yeah, they probably are seeking nuclear weapons, but there is nothing we can do about it...
Thank you for being a clueless little NAZI sympathizer
Interesting. So, my claiming Communism is worse than Nazism makes me a Nazi? Are you a Communist?
Fascism is ultra-nationalism
No, it is not. Franco's Spain, for example, was not especially nationalistic. It did not attack other countries either.
typically married to religion
Another falsehood — Hitler was not religious and his Programme is indifferent about it: you could practice whatever as long as it did not threaten the State...
For the same reason as did Stalin and other Statists, historical and contemporary alike — because they view God to be in direct competition with the State in the subjects' minds. Mussolini was not religious either — reportedly, his parents didn't even Baptize him. Though he did have to seek the Church's approval, that was because it was already (and remains today) a very powerful institution in Italy. He too would've rather the citizenry adored him than any supernatural being. (Which is exactly the motivation of contemporary Statists too, BTW.)
The popular "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs," is the level playing field
It is complete and utter bullshit. The term "level playing field" means equal rights — not the equal results, that the Communists/Socialists demand.
not to conflate the philosophy of communism with the actions of Stalin
And Mao. And Pol Pot. And Kims. And Castro... Wherever attempted in earnest Communism failed spectacularly — with millions of dead and the survivors left with neither economic wealth nor human rights.
History gave us several "clean" experiments, where pairs of nearly identical peoples with very similar climate, lands, and history lived under different regimes for decades. Compare:
Western German vs. Eastern Germany
South Korea vs. North Korea
Finland vs. Estonia
In all cases Communism loses — and devastates the countries affected. Like I said — the most murderous school of thought known to humanity — though still popular among ill-mannered and miseducated punks.
Thank you for volunteering to be an example of the unfortunate phenomenon I was talking about. Despite killing about 100 million people and setting entire civilizations back by decades (if not centuries), Communism is viewed more favorably than its far less murderous sibling.
An influential website linked to violence at the Group of 20 summit meeting in Hamburg last month has been ordered to shut down, in the first such move against left-wing extremists in the country (alternative source)
Iran and North Korea are not comparable in this instance.
The distinctions you are outlying make no difference to the point: that countries intent on obtaining nuclear weapons will not give up that ambition in exchange for improved economic ties/lifting of sanctions. Worse, they will use the improved economy to hasten the nuclear program. In this Iran and North Korea are perfectly comparable.
there is little that anyone can do to stop them
Not true — their bomb-making facilities can be bombed. The same way Israel did to Iraq's in 1981.
Slashdot Mirror
You pay for Amtrak's WiFi — the cost is included in your ticket.
That's a perfectly valid argument, yes. My point is, an equally valid argument can be made for filtering this or that in such and such circumstances. Letting the government decide, which argument is reasonable and which is not is tyranny — it gives the bureaucrats undue powers over private enterprises.
The only reliable fount of service quality rising and prices lowering is competition. If one ISP blocks something unreasonably, another would attract those customers, who disagree. Switching is much easier and faster than petitioning the FCC — especially, when the ISP's CEO plays golf with the President and otherwise lobbies the regulators.
They would be in violation of the First Amendment.
Try updating apps on your iOS device while using Amtrak's WiFi. Somehow net-neutrality does not apply to government's own institutions.
For those wondering, the research is sponsored by tax-dollars.
Such control of private enterprises by government officials is Crony Capitalism if one wishes to be charitable, and Fascism in other cases.
It is proof, unless an error is identified. Math has this nice property about it, that it is not subject to opinion. What is bad about them?
Because you do not understand the Math...
I never claimed, that RAID5 does better. My claim is, it is perfectly sufficient and that the higher redundancy does not improve reliability by high enough margin to warrant sacrificing storage capacity. RAID5 guards against random failures. I argue, that trying to guard against correlated ones is futile and your own anecdotes confirm that.
Could happen too — for example, when ventilation fails, etc.
Do note, that the multiple levels of redundancy did not save you. I'm sure, you dealt with the multiple simultaneous failures somehow and point out, those fall-back mechanisms are what saved you, not the extra redundancy. It buys you vanishingly little...
Whatever the source of correlation, having additional redundancy is not helpful — when drives fail together, it is due to external factor(s) and you still need other mechanisms in place to deal with that.
Dude, you've enumerated several anecdotes confirming correlated failures being real.
Wish you'd included the link... But, hey, that may be because makers source components (like motors) from common suppliers...
It is not a "theory", I offer a mathematical proof. You, on the other hand, would not offer even an anecdote.
Not on a drive, but for an array — a RAID5 with disks failing randomly will survive for millennia before two unrelated failures happen within the period of replace/rebuild-time of each other.
Ah, how insulting... I don't think, you understood it :) They take their fancy charts from a NetApp's "study":
That's a rather uncritical acceptance of data supplied by the vendor of storage solutions obviously interested in selling bigger boxes and more of them.
And, no doubt, they too populated their boxes with identical drives leading to correlated failures. Do not do that.
For decades the USDA and local governments not only promoted low-fat diets, but threatened people over use of butter — because when Stastists dislike something, they do not simply avoid it themselves, they seek to ban it for all others...
Now we are getting the opposite guidance and very convincing evidence, the earlier imploring and coercion were harmful.
Who will be punished for causing the harm, when, and how?
All of them from anti-Math racist haters, of course. Smash them and dox them.
The larger the count, the bigger the risk, yes. And yet, if the drives are all different, it will still do fine for thousands of years. No, I will not just "trust you". You may have some personal anecdote to "prove" it, but the math I referred to speaks for itself.
Wasteful bullshit. All too common among Infrastructure people (who never even studied Statistics, much less got a decent grade), but still bullshit.
In all likelihood, you are populating your SAN-enclosures with identical disks taken from the same box. That is what you ought to stop or no amount of mirroring will help.
then yeah, you may as well put the spare drive into the otherwise empty slot instead of on the shelf.
It is possible, but improbable...
If you aren't wearing a bullet-proof armor 24x7, then you are ignoring 200 years of history of people shot by strangers and relatives alike...
Point is, there is risk to everything... You need to show, the risk is big enough to justify sacrificing conveniences — and even rights — to alleviate it...
Having a hot spare will cut your drive-replacement time by no more than a few hours. That's usually no more than a fraction of the actual rebuild time and, as my graph shows, that does not perceptibly affect the RAID's total MTTF. Moreover, if you monitor the drives — as you rightly suggest everybody should — then you can schedule the replacement of an about-to-fail one ahead of time, eliminating the difference between a hot and a cold spare entirely.
You'd be better off using the slot occupied by the hot spare to increase the RAID's total capacity. Do have a cold spare — on the shelf — for the operator to slide in when needed, but a hot spare is simply not warranted.
No disagreement on the importance of monitoring and backup-up...
Frankly, I do not see, how this is automatically wrong.
As long as I'm not prosecuted for visiting certain cites or posting certain comments...
For a single drive, go with the most reliable model. For a RAID, however, be sure to mix different manufacturers, models, and batches to avoid correlated failures...
Because, if the failures are random, your mirror or even a large-count RAID5 will do fine for millennia, assuming you replace the failing ones in a reasonable time.
But if the drives are all the same, they may all — after spending the same time in the same enclosure under the same load — fail for the same reason at the same time. Having hot-spares or multiple redundancy will not help you...
There is no difference between the two. If somebody wants to dine in a Whites-only restaurant, it is — should be — up to the owner, whether he wants the business of the racists or that of the Blacks (and those joining them in a boycott).
How do you know?
Nope. The official discrimination had to be abolished. Everything else amounts to prosecuting thought crimes — things made illegal by the accused's alleged thoughts. We surrendered substantial personal freedoms — such as the freedom of (not) association and even that of speech — in the hope of racial harmony. 50 years later we still have neither the freedoms nor the harmony. Do we deserve either?
It has already proven pointless and I argue, that it was not merely that, but also harmful. The recent housing crises was due to that and have the grossly unfair admission policies in various universities, which openly discriminate against Whites and Asians. Similar discrimination is encouraged in the work-place — Uber is seeking not just a good CEO, but one who'd make it less likely, the company will be prosecuted for "discrimination" of women.
It is stupid, unfair, and inefficient — just like everything a government does...
You certainly implied it, when you claimed that "any evenhanded analysis" agreed with you.
For someone, who offers no citations of his own, it is a tad too rich to demand that of others.
Whatever.
Life itself is neither fair nor evenhanded. The point was, the government's intervention in the fates of minorities did not achieve its results. It was and remains a failure.
I'm comparing what we have today with what we would have had, had we simply let the market forces sort things out.
And, yes, the "Jim Crow" laws should've been declared simply unconstitutional — unfortunately for all, the Federal government's intervention went much further than that...
Nice. So, any analysis that disagrees is automatically not evenhanded... One would've thought, this method for pre-emptively disarming a dissenter was mocked out of existence by Hans Christian Andersen in the 19th century, but no, evidently, the "sophisticated" debaters continue to employ it with smug self-satisfaction...
If anything, that legislation has proven itself a remarkable failure 50 years later. For all the "reverse" racist laws and policies, for all the self-flagellation of the Whites, the dissatisfaction among Blacks is still remarkably high — indeed higher now after the first Black President, than it was before.
Should have left it to the market-forces.
Whether they have such issues or not is none of our business. Do they deliver good service at a good price is what should concern us. How they choose to treat various groups of employees is entirely up to them — so long as nobody is forced to work there. And no one is — not in this country, not since early 1860-ies...
Go for Seamonkey. Especially, if you use Thunderbird too — you'll save lots of RAM and some diskspace...
Well, that's one way to solve the global warming and the overpopulation problems... And the endangered species one too — except for the one species, which has grown so smart as to consider sex wrong.
So much for the fabulous promise of "routing around damage"...
Except that may be enough of a countermeasure for something to remain after an Israeli attack. But nothing will remain, if America's airforce does it...
It does not have to be "easy", it has to be possible — and we know how.
The recent attack on Syrian airbase (and smaller-scale bombings of Hezbollah by Israel) have shown, that Russian radar and other air-defenses are useless against today planes and missiles we have. We know, where those Iranian facilities are and, after destroying Iranian radars and SAM-installations, we can keep bombing them with impunity — until we either destroy them all, or Iran cries "uncle".
At any rate, the main point was, "giving diplomacy a chance" was wrong — and so obviously wrong, given the fresh example of North Korea, one would be justified suspecting, Obama (who not only lifted sanctions, but gave Iranians nearly two billions in cash) did it deliberately — such as out of some perverse sense of "fairness" to put Israel in check.
For years the fans of Iran have attacked people like myself on two fronts:
It always made me smile, how the two groups never argued with each other... And now we have the third argument: yeah, they probably are seeking nuclear weapons, but there is nothing we can do about it...
Interesting. So, my claiming Communism is worse than Nazism makes me a Nazi? Are you a Communist?
No, it is not. Franco's Spain, for example, was not especially nationalistic. It did not attack other countries either.
Another falsehood — Hitler was not religious and his Programme is indifferent about it: you could practice whatever as long as it did not threaten the State...
For the same reason as did Stalin and other Statists, historical and contemporary alike — because they view God to be in direct competition with the State in the subjects' minds. Mussolini was not religious either — reportedly, his parents didn't even Baptize him. Though he did have to seek the Church's approval, that was because it was already (and remains today) a very powerful institution in Italy. He too would've rather the citizenry adored him than any supernatural being. (Which is exactly the motivation of contemporary Statists too, BTW.)
It is complete and utter bullshit. The term "level playing field" means equal rights — not the equal results, that the Communists/Socialists demand.
And Mao. And Pol Pot. And Kims. And Castro... Wherever attempted in earnest Communism failed spectacularly — with millions of dead and the survivors left with neither economic wealth nor human rights.
History gave us several "clean" experiments, where pairs of nearly identical peoples with very similar climate, lands, and history lived under different regimes for decades. Compare:
In all cases Communism loses — and devastates the countries affected. Like I said — the most murderous school of thought known to humanity — though still popular among ill-mannered and miseducated punks.
Thank you for volunteering to be an example of the unfortunate phenomenon I was talking about. Despite killing about 100 million people and setting entire civilizations back by decades (if not centuries), Communism is viewed more favorably than its far less murderous sibling.
Appalled as I am by any move to suppress speech, I'm happy the most murderous school of thought known to humanity so far is finally the target. A T-shirt with Che Guevara is — ought to be — far more offensive than one with Hitler.
The distinctions you are outlying make no difference to the point: that countries intent on obtaining nuclear weapons will not give up that ambition in exchange for improved economic ties/lifting of sanctions. Worse, they will use the improved economy to hasten the nuclear program. In this Iran and North Korea are perfectly comparable.
Not true — their bomb-making facilities can be bombed. The same way Israel did to Iraq's in 1981.