Good riddance, Ballmer, and don't let the door hit your fat butt on your way out.
Also, I hope MS itself doesn't take too long to follow you out of History's door.
Psycho CEO of a dishonest company selling crappy products, no one will be sad to see any of you go (except perhaps the suckers that invested in your stock).
Mark my words, their next step will be to fire their sales staff and replace them with attractive females (that's not tongue in cheek, I'm quite serious).
I hope you are right, as that would be a great improvement on the current situation...
The article also reminds us that "NT's not ancient history, in spite of its age. The NT 'core' is what's inside Windows 8, Windows Server 2012, Windows Phone 8, Windows Azure and the Xbox One.
Indeed. No matter how structurally sound your operating system may be, UI developers (receiving messages from on high) can still make it look like trash.
Structurally sound? Are you nuts? NT (and all the crap MS did since they abandomned Xenix) is unsound structure with unsound UI on top of it...
Well, in fact I've worked for a few of them, back in the times before I started my own company.
While those things may be valuable to a small business, but unless you're one of the executives at a large business, a large business doesn't care about your views (so rhetoric is out) and they definitely do not like logic, because then you'll realize what utter morons the people in management are.
I agree that this is the way it works on most large corporations (heck, in small corporations too), but please notice above my observation about the OP doing it for himself and NOT to "pump up" his CV...
As someone who majored in CS and minored in Philosophy, I can tell you this is a horrible idea. Philosophy, like CS or (to to some degree) math, can be learned though self-teaching in your spare time.
I disagree that philosophy can really be learned on someone's spare time: without a good teacher, most of the serious and important works (take Kant's Critique of Pure Reason as an example) are almost impenetrable. Unless you have a real knack for it, the most you will be able to read (and really understand) would be introductory texts and the like.
Also, employers actually see it as a deterrent, to the point that I quit listing my minor on my resume.
I was under the impression that the Original Poster was, like me, looking more towards personal satisfaction and intellectual enrichment than to complement his CV towards current/future employers... in the former case, I maintain that philosophy is still a good course.
I'm quite a big fan of philosophy, but if you're looking for a degree to help your career (as the submitter is), then stay far, far away from the philosophy department.
I agree to that it can be detrimental in atechnical curriculum, given the widespread (and, in my opinion, wrong) view that philosophy is useless or that it has no relation to CS or business (see below).
On the other hand, I was under the impression that the Original Poster was, like me, looking more towards personal satisfaction than to complement his CV towards current/future employers... in the former case, I maintain that philosophy is still a good course.
The fact of the matter is that, while it's interesting, it doesn't teach any skills that a business finds worthwhile.
This is indeed the prevalent view, but (in my humble opinion) a wrong one : philosophy teaches a lot of concepts and techniques that help everyday business activities. Just look at:
- rhetorics (yes, a part of philosophy, see Aristotle's work if you don't believe me): if getting your views across and convincing someone else isn't a part of everyday business activity, I don't know what it is...
- epistemology: understanding Popper's falsificacionism has helped me a LOT in planning test cases for my programs, and in troubleshooting situations from misbehaving networks to false failure reports from users
who don't know any better.
So, to summarize: if the objective is to pump up a CV, indeed philosophy could be counter-productive. But, for personal satisfaction and a great collection of skills and tecniques that can help anyone, I think philosophy can't be beat.
... as I'm in a similar situation, and doing one myself. Far from being the waste of time its detractors try to frame it as, Philosophy gives everyone a new vision into the world that I find complements nicely the more "positivist" view we technical persons are most used to.
If just 1% of the Sahara Desert were covered in concentrating solar panels it would create enough energy to power the entire world
I was initially very skeptical about that assertive, so I went out and checked it.
Consider:
A - Total World Energy Comsumption: 15040000000000 watts [1]
B - Sahara desert total area: 9100000000000 m2 [2]
C - Concentrating Solar Panel Efficiency: 50% [3]
D - Total solar energy available per area: 1000 watts/m2 [4]
So, A/(B*C*D) gets us 0.00331 (0.331%), slightly less than one third of the number given above. That would account for the night period (when there's no sun and therefore no energy generation) with room to spare for the very rare cloudy weather and occasional sandstorm on that 1% slice of the Sahara's total area.
yes, rdisk is a character device I know I know, but for some reason os x io's a LOT faster o that than the block device. (double or better) No idea why.
In "traditional" UNIXes (Mac OS/X is little more than a pretty front-end on top of traditional died-in-the-wool BSD4.4 Unix, regardless of what Steve Jobs tells you), every block device has always a character device counterpart, and the character part is always much faster for block-sized/aligned I/O; the idea is that the block device will handle whatever size/alignment you throw at it, while the character device will insist on block-sized-and-aligned I/O or return an error (the "bs=1024000" you specified to dd does just that). The difference in speed comes (theoretically) from the fact that the block device must "cook" its I/O to satisfy align/size requirements (*perhaps* -- I've checked the sources, but it's been a long time -- reading the data first from the disk, then "merging" your output and only then writing it back), while the character device doesn't.
Contrarywise, Linux does not have 2 devices for each disk:you get/dev/sdX (or/dev/hdX if you have a PATA drive and your kernel isn't using LIBATA), and it works on both "modes" (very fast when you are doing block-sized/aligned I/O, and not so fast otherwise).
Just $0.02 from someone who has started fussing with UNIX back on the early 1980's on a PDP-11/70 running Bell Labs Unix v7 (you can't be much more traditional than that...:-))
Thanks! I was going to recompile SPECViewPerf so I could do the graphics stressing under Linux, but it will be much more practical to run PCWizard on the WindowsXP partition I keep for the games that still don't run well under Wine.
Let's hope BFG don't just close up shop a few months from now; If they can't make money on graphics cards, I'm not sure they will be able to make it on even thinner margin products like PCs, notebooks and power supplies.
As a side note, of course I *had* to buy one of their cards a few weeks ago... and of course my computer is now hanging randomly (I'm not positive it's the card's fault yet as I also upgraded other components, but it seems very probable).
Well, at least they *say* they are going to honor their lifetime warranties. Unfortunately I think I'm going to find out how well that's working Real Soon Now (tm).
My main desktop at home has been running Ubuntu Linux for the last 6+ years, and for the last 3 years I migrated the functions of my NAS (which used to run on a separate linux box) to it, so I have one box less to administer, to consume power, or to break down.
I have currently 10TB of total disk space using 5 2TB disks (8TB usable, when you account for the RAID5 redundancy overhead), but could easily migrate to 20TB on 10 2TB disks (16TB usable, and gaining extra redundancy by moving from RAID5 to RAID6). The result is:
- Very upgradeable (starting with 250GB disks back in 2004, I've migrated all the way to 2TB disks, and will continue doing so; the old disks are simply replaced with the newer/bigger ones and re-purposed as off-line storage, being plugged on a eSATA dock when I need them
- very fast (as the disks are on the machine itself, it's much faster than acessing the files on a NAS over the network);
- very usable (it's all mapped on a couple of ReiserFS filesystems, created on top of LVM volumes, directly accessible without needing to mount anything or configure anything over the network);
- very reliable (I'm protected against any one of the five disks failing, thanks to RAID5 configured on top of Linux MD, through for more disks RAID6 is really recommended, and ReiserFS in my experience is very reliable against crashes and power outages, at least *much* more reliable than EXT3 and XFS).
- very cheap: I've used the SATA controller already available on my motherboard, providing for 6 SATA disks, and apart from the disks I only had to spend money on a multi-disk internal rack: these are great, they fit 5 SATA disks on 3 x 5.25" bays on the front of your desktop, are very cheap (around $75) and give you hot-swapping and great ventilation (via a large, low-noise fan in the back) to boot. Just be sure to use a computer case that has no "rails" or other protuberances between each 5.25" bay, or else you won't be able to insert the rack as it spans 3 bays.
You could use a SATA RAID controller (or even SAS disks and a SAS controller), but I found that it's quite expensive, and unnecessary as the above setup gave me all the speed I needed, and them some.
In short, I'm very satisfied with my setup, and I recommend it to anyone who has large disk space requirement at home.
Some pointers to the hardware I'm using:
- Motherboard: Asus M4A78-EM which is reasonably cheap, very stable and has 6 SATA ports (5 internal and 1 external), fitting the bill perfectly;
- Disks: Seagate SATA 2TB 5900RPM Retail kits : The retail kit (instead of the bare OEM drive) gets you a disk with FIVE years of warranty (instead of just 3 years) and comes much better packaged (so reducing the chances of early death due to shocks during transportation).
- 5-disks-on-3-bays internal SATA enclosure: NORCO SS-500 : great little bay, as described above.
- External eSata dock: Startech SATADOCKU2E: with it, when I replace my old (smaller) disks with new big ones, I can re-purpose the old ones immediately as off-line storage,very efficiently (my motherboard already has an eSata connector) and very cheaply (I store the disks on plastic storage cases when they are not docked, very cheap and compact.
I use a belt pouch. It has room enough to carry my wallet, my keychain (with 13 keys on it -- just counted -- plus a Photon Microlight and a Leatherman Micra, both attached via quickreleases), my Nokia N800 palmtop, 2 pens and a pencil (all three are A.G. Spalding Minis, BTW), and some bills and spare change in a front pocket (so I don't need to pull out the wallet for small payments). I carry my cell phone in its own (smallish) belt pouch, so my belt has the main belt pouch on the right side of the belt buckle, and the cell pouch on the left side.
Some "fashion" people told me that this arrangement is not really fashionable (yes, Edilson, that means you!;-)), but I couldn't care less: it's practical, confortable, and enables me to carry all essentials on my person at all times with minimum risk of losing any of it).
... and it's open source, costs nothing, and runs on any computer with Linux or even Windows, or on any Nokia Maemo device if you want to have it on your pocket.
It's called Aard Dictionary
Maybe it's just another british tabloid weaving elaborate lies and exaggerations, like some posts pointed as the explanation for the "family monitoring" news?
Please, let it all be lies and exaggerations, because I can't believe that Goode Olde England has degraded that much...
Ditto with me. After spending a few thousand dollars with them over the last 10 years, Amazon screwed me when they sent me another item instead of the one I ordered and refused to grant me a proper refund.
After struggling for a few days with their "customer service" (a bunch of idiots someplace in Asia who can't even speak english), I took the matter to my credit card company and vowed NEVER TO HAVE ANYTHING with them again (I even refuse to follow links on Google searches that lead to Amazon's website).
Please note that I don't hold any grudge against them; I just hope they eat flaming death and die painfully.
Nope. An unpowered hard-drive has MUCH greater tolerance to temperature than a powered one. Unless you are planning on keeping them powered up in your closet, that is...:-)
1) memtest86 doesn't catch *all* errors, but if memtest86 reports any errors, you can bet they are real. I run memtest86 on all my machines for at least 24 hours before putting them on production, and I also run Dledford's Memtest script for 24 hours more right after installing linux on the machine.
2) A prerequisite (and an expensive and hard-to-find one) for ECC memory is having a motherboard/chipset that *supports* ECC memory. Usually this means a server-class motherboard, but Intel usually has at least one high-end desktop motherboard on their line-up with ECC capability.
3) I always buy machines with support for ECC memory on the motherboard/chipset (except notebooks, where it doesn't seem to be an option), and always used ECC memory on them.
My home server has reiserfs partitions on a 1TB LVM assembled with RAID5 over 3 500GB SATA disks, running Linux for more than 2 years (using Ubuntu 6.06, then 7.04 and finally 8.04) with NO issues whatsoever.
Prior to that, I had another server running RHEL4 (actually CentOS) on 3 250GB disks, also without any problems. This server is hit pretty hard, both with lots of I/O and with power-failure crashing (I live in a somewhat rural area in Brazil, and power fails unexpectedly at least once every week.
Let me repeat that: I use ReiserFS on big LVM partitions for more than 4 years in hostile environment and I have never lost ANY data.
But then, I don't skimp on hardware: ALL my machines use top-notch motherboards and disks (not enterprise-class, mind you; I build my own machines but try to user the best consumer-class components I can afford; for example, current mobo has a Intel 975 chipset, previous one had a 430HX chipset, and both ALWAYS used parity-checked/ECC-protected RAM) and I also try to use stable distributions and kernels (like Ubuntu/RHEL4).
On the other hand, I've seen firms with enterprise-class hardware (expensive HP server iron) with the same RHEL4 software but with the default ext3 filesystems, and lost data many times after power failures.
I also manage many servers on a few firms around here, always using RAID+LVM+ReiserFS, and the only time I had any trouble I traced it to a disk with firmware bugs from Seagate.
So, the parent poster problems maybe are ext3-related, or maybe hardware-related (a memory error at the wrong byte in a non-ECC-protected RAM stick can surely ruin your whole day),or even distro-related (Gentoo is great and I use its mini-install CD all the time for recovery, but I would not use it as the main OS in a machine with lots of data).
sounds like something I should model in the next version of this: http://www.democracygame.com/ What, no Linux version? Does it at least run well under Wine?
I'm also a fan of the Palm Reader since it was called Peanut Reader (published along a faily good selection of ebooks by then Peanut Press, which has been acquired by Palm Inc and then received a suitably more "corporate" name).
I use it not only on books I bought from their website (have more than 200 in my "virtual shelf" there), but I also purchased their eBook Studio program, which can convert anything you can paste into it to the Palm Reader format.
The only other ebook program I use is Plucker, and mainly for HTML content (which it handles much better than Palm Reader).
Slashdot Mirror
Good riddance, Ballmer, and don't let the door hit your fat butt on your way out.
Also, I hope MS itself doesn't take too long to follow you out of History's door.
Psycho CEO of a dishonest company selling crappy products, no one will be sad to see any of you go (except perhaps the suckers that invested in your stock).
Mark my words, their next step will be to fire their sales staff and replace them with attractive females (that's not tongue in cheek, I'm quite serious).
I hope you are right, as that would be a great improvement on the current situation...
Indeed. No matter how structurally sound your operating system may be, UI developers (receiving messages from on high) can still make it look like trash.
Structurally sound? Are you nuts? NT (and all the crap MS did since they abandomned Xenix) is unsound structure with unsound UI on top of it...
You've obviously never worked at a large company.
Well, in fact I've worked for a few of them, back in the times before I started my own company.
While those things may be valuable to a small business, but unless you're one of the executives at a large business, a large business doesn't care about your views (so rhetoric is out) and they definitely do not like logic, because then you'll realize what utter morons the people in management are.
I agree that this is the way it works on most large corporations (heck, in small corporations too), but please notice above my observation about the OP doing it for himself and NOT to "pump up" his CV...
As someone who majored in CS and minored in Philosophy, I can tell you this is a horrible idea. Philosophy, like CS or (to to some degree) math, can be learned though self-teaching in your spare time.
I disagree that philosophy can really be learned on someone's spare time: without a good teacher, most of the serious and important works (take Kant's Critique of Pure Reason as an example) are almost impenetrable. Unless you have a real knack for it, the most you will be able to read (and really understand) would be introductory texts and the like.
Also, employers actually see it as a deterrent, to the point that I quit listing my minor on my resume.
I was under the impression that the Original Poster was, like me, looking more towards personal satisfaction and intellectual enrichment than to complement his CV towards current/future employers... in the former case, I maintain that philosophy is still a good course.
I'm quite a big fan of philosophy, but if you're looking for a degree to help your career (as the submitter is), then stay far, far away from the philosophy department.
I agree to that it can be detrimental in atechnical curriculum, given the widespread (and, in my opinion, wrong) view that philosophy is useless or that it has no relation to CS or business (see below). On the other hand, I was under the impression that the Original Poster was, like me, looking more towards personal satisfaction than to complement his CV towards current/future employers... in the former case, I maintain that philosophy is still a good course.
The fact of the matter is that, while it's interesting, it doesn't teach any skills that a business finds worthwhile.
This is indeed the prevalent view, but (in my humble opinion) a wrong one : philosophy teaches a lot of concepts and techniques that help everyday business activities. Just look at:
- rhetorics (yes, a part of philosophy, see Aristotle's work if you don't believe me): if getting your views across and convincing someone else isn't a part of everyday business activity, I don't know what it is...
- epistemology: understanding Popper's falsificacionism has helped me a LOT in planning test cases for my programs, and in troubleshooting situations from misbehaving networks to false failure reports from users who don't know any better.
- Let's say nothing of Logic...
So, to summarize: if the objective is to pump up a CV, indeed philosophy could be counter-productive. But, for personal satisfaction and a great collection of skills and tecniques that can help anyone, I think philosophy can't be beat.
... as I'm in a similar situation, and doing one myself. Far from being the waste of time its detractors try to frame it as, Philosophy gives everyone a new vision into the world that I find complements nicely the more "positivist" view we technical persons are most used to.
If just 1% of the Sahara Desert were covered in concentrating solar panels it would create enough energy to power the entire world
I was initially very skeptical about that assertive, so I went out and checked it.
Consider:
A - Total World Energy Comsumption: 15040000000000 watts [1]
B - Sahara desert total area: 9100000000000 m2 [2]
C - Concentrating Solar Panel Efficiency: 50% [3]
D - Total solar energy available per area: 1000 watts/m2 [4]
So, A/(B*C*D) gets us 0.00331 (0.331%), slightly less than one third of the number given above. That would account for the night period (when there's no sun and therefore no energy generation) with room to spare for the very rare cloudy weather and occasional sandstorm on that 1% slice of the Sahara's total area.
In a single word: AMAZING...
References for the numbers used above:
[1] "The Sahara [...]At over 9,400,000square kilometres [...]"
[2] "In 2008, total worldwide energy consumption was [...] equivalent to an average power consumption rate of 15 terawatts (1.504×1013W)"
[3] "[...] Expected future efficiencies are nearly 50%"
[4] ""STC specifies [...] an irradiance of 1000 W/m2 [...]"
yes, rdisk is a character device I know I know, but for some reason os x io's a LOT faster o that than the block device. (double or better) No idea why.
In "traditional" UNIXes (Mac OS/X is little more than a pretty front-end on top of traditional died-in-the-wool BSD4.4 Unix, regardless of what Steve Jobs tells you), every block device has always a character device counterpart, and the character part is always much faster for block-sized/aligned I/O; the idea is that the block device will handle whatever size/alignment you throw at it, while the character device will insist on block-sized-and-aligned I/O or return an error (the "bs=1024000" you specified to dd does just that). The difference in speed comes (theoretically) from the fact that the block device must "cook" its I/O to satisfy align/size requirements (*perhaps* -- I've checked the sources, but it's been a long time -- reading the data first from the disk, then "merging" your output and only then writing it back), while the character device doesn't.
Contrarywise, Linux does not have 2 devices for each disk:you get /dev/sdX (or /dev/hdX if you have a PATA drive and your kernel isn't using LIBATA), and it works on both "modes" (very fast when you are doing block-sized/aligned I/O, and not so fast otherwise).
Just $0.02 from someone who has started fussing with UNIX back on the early 1980's on a PDP-11/70 running Bell Labs Unix v7 (you can't be much more traditional than that... :-))
Thanks! I was going to recompile SPECViewPerf so I could do the graphics stressing under Linux, but it will be much more practical to run PCWizard on the WindowsXP partition I keep for the games that still don't run well under Wine.
Let's hope BFG don't just close up shop a few months from now; If they can't make money on graphics cards, I'm not sure they will be able to make it on even thinner margin products like PCs, notebooks and power supplies.
As a side note, of course I *had* to buy one of their cards a few weeks ago... and of course my computer is now hanging randomly (I'm not positive it's the card's fault yet as I also upgraded other components, but it seems very probable).
Well, at least they *say* they are going to honor their lifetime warranties. Unfortunately I think I'm going to find out how well that's working Real Soon Now (tm).
My main desktop at home has been running Ubuntu Linux for the last 6+ years, and for the last 3 years I migrated the functions of my NAS (which used to run on a separate linux box) to it, so I have one box less to administer, to consume power, or to break down.
I have currently 10TB of total disk space using 5 2TB disks (8TB usable, when you account for the RAID5 redundancy overhead), but could easily migrate to 20TB on 10 2TB disks (16TB usable, and gaining extra redundancy by moving from RAID5 to RAID6). The result is:
- Very upgradeable (starting with 250GB disks back in 2004, I've migrated all the way to 2TB disks, and will continue doing so; the old disks are simply replaced with the newer/bigger ones and re-purposed as off-line storage, being plugged on a eSATA dock when I need them
- very fast (as the disks are on the machine itself, it's much faster than acessing the files on a NAS over the network);
- very usable (it's all mapped on a couple of ReiserFS filesystems, created on top of LVM volumes, directly accessible without needing to mount anything or configure anything over the network);
- very reliable (I'm protected against any one of the five disks failing, thanks to RAID5 configured on top of Linux MD, through for more disks RAID6 is really recommended, and ReiserFS in my experience is very reliable against crashes and power outages, at least *much* more reliable than EXT3 and XFS).
- very cheap: I've used the SATA controller already available on my motherboard, providing for 6 SATA disks, and apart from the disks I only had to spend money on a multi-disk internal rack: these are great, they fit 5 SATA disks on 3 x 5.25" bays on the front of your desktop, are very cheap (around $75) and give you hot-swapping and great ventilation (via a large, low-noise fan in the back) to boot. Just be sure to use a computer case that has no "rails" or other protuberances between each 5.25" bay, or else you won't be able to insert the rack as it spans 3 bays.
You could use a SATA RAID controller (or even SAS disks and a SAS controller), but I found that it's quite expensive, and unnecessary as the above setup gave me all the speed I needed, and them some.
In short, I'm very satisfied with my setup, and I recommend it to anyone who has large disk space requirement at home.
Some pointers to the hardware I'm using:
- Motherboard: Asus M4A78-EM which is reasonably cheap, very stable and has 6 SATA ports (5 internal and 1 external), fitting the bill perfectly;
- Disks: Seagate SATA 2TB 5900RPM Retail kits : The retail kit (instead of the bare OEM drive) gets you a disk with FIVE years of warranty (instead of just 3 years) and comes much better packaged (so reducing the chances of early death due to shocks during transportation).
- 5-disks-on-3-bays internal SATA enclosure: NORCO SS-500 : great little bay, as described above. - External eSata dock: Startech SATADOCKU2E: with it, when I replace my old (smaller) disks with new big ones, I can re-purpose the old ones immediately as off-line storage,very efficiently (my motherboard already has an eSata connector) and very cheaply (I store the disks on plastic storage cases when they are not docked, very cheap and compact.
Hope the above is of help.
Perhaps you have been using yours over the wrong body parts... I use mine in front... :-)
I use a belt pouch. It has room enough to carry my wallet, my keychain (with 13 keys on it -- just counted -- plus a Photon Microlight and a Leatherman Micra, both attached via quickreleases), my Nokia N800 palmtop, 2 pens and a pencil (all three are A.G. Spalding Minis, BTW), and some bills and spare change in a front pocket (so I don't need to pull out the wallet for small payments). I carry my cell phone in its own (smallish) belt pouch, so my belt has the main belt pouch on the right side of the belt buckle, and the cell pouch on the left side.
Some "fashion" people told me that this arrangement is not really fashionable (yes, Edilson, that means you! ;-)), but I couldn't care less: it's practical, confortable, and enables me to carry all essentials on my person at all times with minimum risk of losing any of it).
http://steeljawscribe.com/2010/03/24/the-problem-with-proliferation-cruise-missile-edition
... and it's open source, costs nothing, and runs on any computer with Linux or even Windows, or on any Nokia Maemo device if you want to have it on your pocket. It's called Aard Dictionary
Government seriously proposes monitoring people in their own homes (the motivation/excuse doesn't really matter).
The article also mentions "violent girl gangs". What? A little googling got me an article at another online UK newspaper . I can't believe it. A Clockwork Orange, anyone?
Maybe it's just another british tabloid weaving elaborate lies and exaggerations, like some posts pointed as the explanation for the "family monitoring" news?
Please, let it all be lies and exaggerations, because I can't believe that Goode Olde England has degraded that much...
After struggling for a few days with their "customer service" (a bunch of idiots someplace in Asia who can't even speak english), I took the matter to my credit card company and vowed NEVER TO HAVE ANYTHING with them again (I even refuse to follow links on Google searches that lead to Amazon's website).
Please note that I don't hold any grudge against them; I just hope they eat flaming death and die painfully.
make sure your closet doesn't overheat.
Nope. An unpowered hard-drive has MUCH greater tolerance to temperature than a powered one. Unless you are planning on keeping them powered up in your closet, that is... :-)
2) A prerequisite (and an expensive and hard-to-find one) for ECC memory is having a motherboard/chipset that *supports* ECC memory. Usually this means a server-class motherboard, but Intel usually has at least one high-end desktop motherboard on their line-up with ECC capability.
3) I always buy machines with support for ECC memory on the motherboard/chipset (except notebooks, where it doesn't seem to be an option), and always used ECC memory on them.
Not only because they both have the same family name, but because Michael clearly makes a case for Reviewing Products You Haven't Used...
My home server has reiserfs partitions on a 1TB LVM assembled with RAID5 over 3 500GB SATA disks, running Linux for more than 2 years (using Ubuntu 6.06, then 7.04 and finally 8.04) with NO issues whatsoever.
Prior to that, I had another server running RHEL4 (actually CentOS) on 3 250GB disks, also without any problems. This server is hit pretty hard, both with lots of I/O and with power-failure crashing (I live in a somewhat rural area in Brazil, and power fails unexpectedly at least once every week.
Let me repeat that: I use ReiserFS on big LVM partitions for more than 4 years in hostile environment and I have never lost ANY data.
But then, I don't skimp on hardware: ALL my machines use top-notch motherboards and disks
(not enterprise-class, mind you; I build my own machines but try to user the best consumer-class components I can afford; for example, current mobo has a Intel 975 chipset, previous one had a 430HX chipset, and both ALWAYS used parity-checked/ECC-protected RAM) and I also try to use stable distributions and kernels (like Ubuntu/RHEL4).
On the other hand, I've seen firms with enterprise-class hardware (expensive HP server iron) with the same RHEL4 software but with the default ext3 filesystems, and lost data many times after power failures.
I also manage many servers on a few firms around here, always using RAID+LVM+ReiserFS, and the only time I had any trouble I traced it to a disk with firmware bugs from Seagate.
So, the parent poster problems maybe are ext3-related, or maybe hardware-related (a memory error at the wrong byte in a non-ECC-protected RAM stick can surely ruin your whole day),or even distro-related (Gentoo is great and I use its mini-install CD all the time for recovery, but I would not use it as the main OS in a machine with lots of data).
Just my R$0.02 :-)
http://www.democracygame.com/
What, no Linux version? Does it at least run well under Wine?
This article cover the news better: http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/33926
It also contains a link to the original paper: http://arxiv.org/abs/0804.2202
I'm also a fan of the Palm Reader since it was called Peanut Reader (published along a faily good selection of ebooks by then Peanut Press, which has been acquired by Palm Inc and then received a suitably more "corporate" name).
I use it not only on books I bought from their website (have more than 200 in my "virtual shelf" there), but I also purchased their eBook Studio program, which can convert anything you can paste into it to the Palm Reader format.
The only other ebook program I use is Plucker, and mainly for HTML content (which it handles much better than Palm Reader).