ZFS does nothing to protect integrity in memory, and especially in the dedup case, your data sits in memory a long time.
I wouldn't run dedup on a non-ECC mainboard. Had an experimental ZFS that suffered a failed memory stick (this array not run in dedup mode after a performance test following the initial build). The next scrub found inconsistencies on disk. Even after copying all the data to a new location on the same storage tank and deleting the old location, there were internal consistency errors. This didn't surprise me, but illustrates that memory-induced corruption will often kill the entire array. Keep plenty of offline backups.
Now if you just happen to have a fresh Opteron 3250 lying around on a mainboard populated with the right type of memory, with full server chip validation and background memory scrubbing, fill your boots with those old 30MB IDE drives.
I'm running my test array on three 500GB drives. Two are enterprise grade and the third was a Seagate warranty replacement (consumer grade refurb). I could have run with the consumer drive as an idle hot spare, but decided to run a three-way mirror, which keeps your hot spare silvered at all times. Note that the consumer drive limits my peak write bandwidth, as the enterprise drives have higher read/write performance. The reads seem to be distributed so that the hot silvered consumer drive works out to a net performance gain.
My scrub on 50GB of data takes just under 15m. Concurrent read traffic is not greatly impacted at home network levels.
You're telling me they wouldn't be able to understand the simple sentence, "this may have permanent future consequences?"
Absolutely not, any value of understanding worth having (the recitative norms of schooling being a prime example of a six foot pole vault).
Juvenile cognition is hugely compartmentalized. Why is this a surprise? Few adults are ruthlessly rationale. Even among scientists of godless intellectual meritocracy, completely loony views are maintained about what the general population is willing to sacrifice for the sake of the environment further down the road.
It turns out there are two levels of understanding the Middle Passage in a young child.
The problem is that children with responsible parents first of all have a view of adults as prudent care-givers. Black teenagers in America understand sooner than white urban teenagers that the strong nuclear force drops off at the fourth power.
They understand it, whether they pay attention to it or not is up to them and their parents.
Economists have a notion of expressed preference. If I explain the rules of a very abstract game to you and ask you to choose door A or door B, and your choice of door A results in your immediate execution (to which you fully consented as per the fine print), do we conclude that you A) wished to die, or B) would benefit from improved cognitive skills?
One view smacks of sociopathy, the other of socialism. This is why ideology makes for such a poor path-finding algorithm, and why brain preservation leads to superior life outcomes.
Simple: To have an imagination, you need a brain, and there's plenty of evidence that our government doesn't have one.
I can't stand any meme that's just an excuse for not thinking.
Absolutely without question, the stupidest collective in American politics is the electorate, but even there, the red half can almost see through Sarah Palin, who wasn't egregiously stupid by the standard of the typical person showing up at the ballot box. Palin was more ignorant than dumb--which explains her populist appeal, American style. Palin was plenty smart enough to run a government with no brain, and maybe she knew that. What she didn't get is that despite the government's populist reputation for having 17 copies of the short chromosome, Washington is full of people far too smart (and driven by greed) to govern over from such an extreme position of ignorance. Not even when your handlers who answer to real power are pulling your rectal strings on a minute by minute basis.
If you're running a terrorist organization, it might make sense to encrypt your files.
You must be American.
War is God(slashcode fuckup)s way of teaching Americans geography.
If Ambrose Bierce were alive today voicing a sentiment like that, he'd be viewed as left of Dr Pangloss. How about "America is God's way of driving the devil to drink." If he cared about those geography lessons, he'll be drinking the hard stuff already.
The "making sense" meme you're invoking--while apparently directing the majority of your blood supply to your Panthalassian abdominal fold--has an Enlightenment heritage, which post-dates the Abrahamic split by a year or three. It's esoteric lore, I know, but the Abrahamic split actually forms much of the basis of the present dispute.
Yet in your mind it's simple. You see, Osama, if only you had Enlightenment values, you could have taken the western world down a peg after all.
Why does no one ask about the relevance of the porn industry? OpenSSH was the biggest thing since Debbie does Dallas. Few have more than that to their credit.
Bearded fellow: Let he who is without sin throw the the first stone. Crazed villager [inspecting charismatic sinner]: Theo, is that you? Crazed villager's wife: Who does this bearded guy think he is?
Here's the thing about security. If you have to ask about relevance, you can't handle the truth.
It's a finite resource so it's simply a matter of time.
For piddling values of finite.
The mass of the Earth is approximately 5.98x10(slashcode fuckup)24 kg. It is composed mostly of iron (32.1%), oxygen (30.1%), silicon (15.1%), magnesium (13.9%), sulfur (2.9%), nickel (1.8%), calcium (1.5%), and aluminium (1.4%)
Nitrogen is not in short supply, nor is hydrogen and helium if you can handle the heat. I had no idea about magnesium.
More from the bathroom wall of all knowledge:
The relative abundance of magnesium is related to the fact that it is easily built up in supernova stars from a sequential addition of three helium nuclei to carbon (which in turn is made from three helium nuclei). Due to magnesium ion's high solubility in water, it is the third most abundant element dissolved in seawater.
I think in fact that the speed of light implies the universe is finite, if you mind your own light cone.
There are really two classes of resource: the ones you run out of while the party is cooking, and the ones where you either cook or suffocate under your waste stream. Fusion is limited in the latter sense. There's no pollution like heat pollution.
Canonical lost the war on failed communication. Yeah, it's nice they have a multiple monitor strategy a year or more after inflicting a multiple monitor abortion on the whole of their user community.
If they had kept Gnome2 operational until the multiple monitor strategy was implemented and working reasonably well, my venom quill wouldn't be painfully squeezing an empty sack like a tasered epileptic.
Christ, if they had just told us straight up: "Sorry, multiple monitor guys, you need to find alternate accommodations during renos." I might even have kept Canonical on my xmas list.
I personally distinguish irrelevant results from results not worth clicking on, which often provide a valuable zeitgeist. I'm most bugged by irrelevant results when a word has two distinct meanings, and I end up with a mixed result set.
The other problem is search junk. Just this afternoon I was trying to find out whether whey powder supplementation has any scientific validity if you're in it for reasons other than emulating the porn stars who have increasingly become the role models of sexual fulfillment for young men in the modern age of abundance.
Dear Siri: "Does whey powder supplementation have any scientific validity if you're in it for reasons other than emulating the porn stars who have increasingly become the role models of sexual fulfillment for young men in the modern age of abundance?"
Even with Google, the gentle reader can imagine I gathered more weeds than seeds. Google Scholar netted me one or two papers that weren't complete junk. Pretty much a dead bust. Thorium fuel cycles are a piece of cake (not without controversy) compared to anything nutritional. The internet is a weird place.
Siri to the rescue? Not a question one even dares to contemplate unless one's neuro-protective enzymes are raging.
If your encryption algorithm is secure then it's secure.
Your tautology would be more interesting if we had a single provable cipher. The best we manage is mapping a cipher contraption onto some other mathematical problem (such as factoring) which has been probed over centuries by the most brilliant minds. Yet even the hardness of factoring remains unproven so far as I've heard.
Also, since the vast majority of applications leak the session key in a public key exchange, there's an awful lot riding on the security of the public key exchange. Your public key is only as good as your randomness source. Have you audited your random number source lately? This is the kind of thing that's very hard to control with a test suite. If your randomness comes from a compromised black box (e.g. a built-in CPU randomness circuit involving NSA directives) the non-randomness of your random numbers could even be made crypto strong (only if you know the secret key can you discover the bits aren't really random).
There's so many screwdrivers crammed into the doorframe, proof couldn't squeeze in edgewise.
Absolutely true and should have been the story angle in the first place if slashdot wasn't trolling for page views. We're geeks. Why do we put up with this? Too often this place flirts with becoming People magazine or Entertainment Tonight, where the game is to scandalize the most banal information ever promulgated between living organisms.
So let me add my own story, circa 1986. I walk up to a Britannica booth in a local shopping mall and ask with the clarity of youth: "When is the CD version coming out?" The sales guy hisses at me like Voldemort. This is a decade before Encarta enters the picture. All you needed was a working brain to see that 600MB on a silver disc was a fatal illness. Britannica was cancering for a decade before Encarta metastasized.
I spent a day poking into his work around xmas time. I recall a long document with artistic illustrations on the nature of causality. One of those documents where every step seems almost too trivial to notice, until you discover you've reached the conclusion and haven't gaining any understanding. Well, some of those small points must be hiding more than they first appear. When the penny did finally drop, I felt his presentation was perhaps obscured by contrived simplicity.
In my own thinking since, I've realized that causality is not what we think it is. In a sufficiently complex system, causality as we wish to know it ceases to manifest itself. Stephen Jay Gould tried to get this point across in The Mismeasure of Man without entirely realizing it. You come away from that book mainly with a profound sense of how much he hates the Ascent of Man iconography at more of a gut level than a cerebral one.
The second fallacy is "ranking", which is the "propensity for ordering complex variation as a gradual ascending scale."
Implied in that ascending order is the human conceit of because-ness. When we tire of because-ness on the grand scale, we flit to worrying about the wings of butterflies. Both at the same time? Wow, your mind is more flexible than mine.
What I realized in my subsequent thinking (after my Pearl diving) is that randomness and causality share similar housing. Pseudo-random numbers are useful precisely because they are decorrelated (to at least modest algorithmic depth) with any unwitting sequence you are likely to stumble over (but not ones maliciously prepared; to combat that you need true randomness).
If you have a correlation between smoking and lung cancer, how do you show that smoking is causative? You need to perform some intervention which does not by itself explain the answer. Otherwise you might just as well conclude that the smoking of special "control" cigarettes prepared by men in white coats is a lung cancer cure, and apply to the FDA for treatment status. There is no such thing as a pure control (like pure randomness). All controls are pseudo-controls. Like pseudo-random numbers, some pseudo-controls are damn good enough for certain purposes.
In a really big system, such as the evolutionary history of life on earth, you'll never get a clean separation you entirely believe a priori. You'll always wonder if your exploratory manipulation itself is the smoking gun. How to prove otherwise? Well, the problem regresses. With a billion evolutionary simulators (with roughly the complexity of the local solar system) run a billion times on each of a trillion microscopic hypotheses, you might reach some stunning conclusions—if your methodology section doesn't trigger black hole formation. It's not so much that causality ceases to exist, it's more the case that you'll just never get there in reductive purity.
Recently there is the Taubes position on fructose (consumed in excess quantity) being a principle vector in metabolic syndrome. How do you prove this? Test diets with and without? Do they taste exactly the same? Are the digestive mechanics exactly the same? Can you slip the change in the lives of your subjects without them any the wiser? How did select a test group and maintain contact with it while none of them were any the wiser? Didn't half of them drift off to lives in new cities? And none of them heard about the fructose hypothesis on the radio and made subconscious life changes.
This is where gene knock-out experiments in mice are the bomb. We presume that mice really don't know about experimental protocol. Douglas Adams wants to know why. The Ascent of Man is always hiding in causality arguments somewhere, as any acute satirist realizes.
[snit]I'm pretty sure I spelled Pearl correctly (not Perle). If I succeeded, was the cause of this the Slashdot design where not even the title of the article I'm comment
In short-- there's no wisdom in crowds, only amplified ignorance.
You're the guy who would never have started the project in the first place. The truth about Wikipedia is that the process delivers a quality level that never previously existed. How one assesses its quality really depends on how one approaches it. When you arrive from a blank slate, it's a pretty good first meal. If you're trying to reach escape velocity to intellectual purity and enlightenment, well, endurance athletes classify three quarters of the human diet under poison: sugar, alcohol, cholesterol, additives, and on and on. So true. To an endurance egghead, Wikipedia is outright poison. To a starving African, it's a Swedish buffet.
We're on the familiar terrain here of purity narcissism. Not good enough for my fine brain. Definitely, Wikipedia is not ever going to get there. Out of the 4 million articles, there are maybe 5000 where I'm qualified to heap my scorn. For all the rest, amplified ignorance is vastly superior to no signal at all. In fact, amplified ignorance makes for a pretty good road map for charting the quickest route out of town to the lofty hilltops, if you've got a week to kill. Click. 5001.
Goody! I can have renewable energy, and all I have to do is make my fellow citizens pay for it!
The great thing about hating the government is never having to think. In many situations such as this one, where society needs to navigate a large infrastructure change, the early adopters provide a public good so that it becomes possible to achieve a Libertarian price point in the fat lump of the adoption curve sooner rather than later. You can argue that I'm wrong in this case, but it requires two orders of magnitude more mental input than your original comment.
My father installed a 1st generation heat-pump technology in the early 1980s. It was hardly painless. Mostly worked pretty good, but some components were failing every 18 months, until design problems were identified and resolved.
And that's nothing compared to what we pay bankers to fail on our behalf. If my father got a subsidy, it went right back out the door on expected unexpected maintenance costs. The bankers sent their subsidies straight to Switzerland.
There's some recent research suggesting that the primary harm from methylmercury is binding with selenium and preventing the formation of selenocysteine, which is an important amino acid in proteins that mop up oxidative graffiti artists and/or their handiwork.
In fish sources with a fair balance of MeHg and Se, the health outcomes of eating the fish outweigh toxicity. Fish sources such as Pilot whale with a lot of MeHg and almost no Se are really bad for your nervous system.
It might be time to downgrade the notion that Hg is a universal toxin. For thalidomide only the (S) enantiomer is teratogenic. What I didn't know until just now is that it's racemic in vivo (the enantiomers interconvert, but the en.wiki article didn't say how quickly or thoroughly).
As etiology advances, you need to keep an open mind. We should be more like the far right: Khamenei gives way to Saddam, then to Ossama, back to Saddam, and now Ahmadinejad. A nice passing play with assists all around.
I can't even bring myself to watch this, and I'm generally a compulsive bring-myselfer.
Dijkstra spins in his grave. Somewhere out there, Lamport is guzzling Guinness by the barrel and swinging his underwear around his head, while Knuth plays organ dirges.
The plural of anecdote is performance bonus. That was the VB business model in the late 1990s. This won't work twice. To obtain twice as many programmers at half the price there's now India and China. And they can do math.
This wasn't totally misleading. The G4 was slightly faster than equivalent Intel chips when it was launched and AltiVec was a lot better than SSE for a lot of things. More importantly, AltiVec was actually used, while a lot of x86 code was still compiled using scalar x87 floating point stuff.
This was totally misleading, for any informed definition of misleading.
Just as there are embarrassingly parallel algorithms, there are embarrassingly wide instruction mixes. In the P6 architecture there were a three uop/cycle retirement gate, with a fat queue in front. If your instruction mix had any kind of stall (dependency chain, memory access, branch mispredict) the retirement usually caught up before the queue was filled. In the rare case (Steve Jobs' favorite Photoshop filter) where the instruction mix could sustain a retirement rate of 4 instructions per cycle, x86 showed badly against PPC. Conversely, on bumpy instruction streams full of execution hazards, x86 compared favourably since it had superior OOO head-room.
CoreDuo rebalanced the architecture primarily by adding a fair amount of micro-op fusing, so that one retirement slot effectively retired two instructions (without increasing the amount of retirement dependency checking in that pipeline stage). In some ways, the maligned x86 architecture starts to shine when your implementation adds the fancy trick of micro-op fusion, since the RMW addressing mode is fused at the instruction level. In RISC these instructions are split up into separate read and write portions. That was an asset at many lithographic nodes. But not at the CoreDuo node, as history recounts. Now x86 has caught up on the retirement side, and PPC is panting for breath on the fetch stream (juggling two instructions where x86 encodes only one).
The multitasking agility of x86 was also heavily and happily used. It happens not to show up in pure Photoshop kernels. Admittedly, SSE was pretty pathetic in the early incarnations. Intel decided to add it to the instruction set, but implemented it double pumped (two dispatch cycles per SSE operation). Of course they knew that future devices would double the dispatch width, so this was a way to crack the chicken and egg problem. Yeah, it was an ugly slow iterative process.
The advantage of PPC was never better than horses for courses, and PPC was picky about the courses. It really liked a groomed track.
x86 hardly gave a damn about a groomed track. It had deep OOO resources all the way through the cache hierarchy to main memory and back. The P6 was the generation where how you handled erratic memory latency mattered for important workloads (ever heard of a server?) than the political correctness of your instruction encoding.
Apple never faltered in waving around groomed track benchmark numbers as if the average Mac user sat around and ran Photoshop blur filters 24 by 7. That was Apple's idea of a server workload.
mov eax, [esi] inc eax mov [esi], eax
That's a RISC program in x86 notation. Whether the first and second use of [esi] amounts to the same memory location as any other memory access that OOO might interleave is a big problem. That's a lot of hazard detection to do to maintain four-wide retirement.
Here is a CISC program in x86 notation. I can't show it to you in PPC notation, since PPC is a proper subset minus this feature.
inc [esi]
Clearly, with a clever implementation, you can arrange that the hazard check against potentially interleaved accesses to memory is performed once, not twice. It takes a lot of transistors to reach the blissful state of clever implementation. That's precisely the story of CoreDuo. It finally hit the bliss threshold (helped greatly that the Prescott people and their marketing overlords were busy walking the green plank).
Did Apple tell any of this story in vaguely the same way? Nooooo. It waved around one embarrassingly wide instruction stream that appealed to cool people until it turned blue in the face.
Cure for the blue face: make an about face.
Do I trust this new iPad 3 benchmark? Hahahahahaha. You know, I've never let out my inner six year old in 5000 posts, but it feels good.
People will see "20-minutes to midnight" and think OMFG!@!@!@!@!11111@@@@@
You completely missed the memo on ironic detachment. 90% of what passes for OMG over-reaction comes from bored (not frightened) Chicken Littles. "I'm bored. What should I do? I know, let's start a game of OMG! Tag, you're it."
The other 10% comes from an industrious soul with OCD paranoia who has misplaced his meds (if no two electrons can be distinguished, and an electron travels backwards and forward in time, Occam's razor decrees that there is only one very busy electron).
Clearly this group is targeting the rile factor, however insignificant the ignorant response.
I might actually give up Google for a search engine where I could search on queries such as "/OMG 911" or "/OMG nuclear" or "/OMG GM" or "/OMG paid to have sex". If you click "I'm feeling lucky" it comes back with an error page: "Code Blue: server hyperventilating". If you press your luck, it comes back with the actual query results.
For the humor impaired, this was an intentional parody of the moronic chain posts on Facebook, complete with [bodily fluids too grotesque to enumerate]...
Just for the record, do you also satirize the behaviour of five-year-olds in warm swimming pools with HD fidelity?
I don't wish to cultivate any emotion about Facebook. Here's a piece of satire I viewed yesterday as I finally got around to killing my local subversion: Hitler uses git. In the Voldemort aftermath, Linus pounded his fist on the table and declared he wouldn't touch the kernel again until he had a workable replacement. Some of us couldn't wait that long.
There's even a Facebook reference that was obvious to an old goat like me, for people who can't get the rest of the humour. I'm mildly amused by the movie about Facebook, which I'm eagerly awaiting to pop up in the discount rental racks. Any day now.
I think this whole article about petaflop gaming is a waste of electrons. The joy of petaflop gaming is that the game player can run their imagination at sub nano-Hertz clock cycles. Count me out.
The best thing might be to zip your lip and burn the laptop, and move on.
Smouldering laptops attract no attention at all, and now it really does look bad. Stop deluding yourself into thinking there's any reasonable escape from a witch-hunt gone sour.
The reasonable escape is to put the thumb screws to the witch-hunt itself. Social conservatives will never allow this because abortion might be next to enter a sane discussion. Whatever your political stripe, when values are hostage to tactics, you're part of the problem.
We spent thousands of years with no privacy whatsoever.
Rewrite history much? Which thousands? Ever since society reached the point where an individual could be condemned of thought-crime for possessing an artifact with the wrong symbol embossed upon it, people have jealously guarded their privacy, so much as circumstance permits. I do admire the suppleness of your resort to "none whatsoever". Not even a fig leaf to cover the public parts.
If the ship had made it to port a day ahead of time, the captain could have participated in an ebullient quarterly shareholders' call. No one wants to be late for a photo op.
The abnormally stratified air may also have disrupted signals sent by the Titanic by Morse Lamp to the California to no avail.
Let's boil that down: Abnormal air disrupted (signals sent to no avail). Tragic. Seems like not such a great resume item for a Senior Chair at the Academy of Five Whys.
And, for the 75% of simple spreadsheet tasks most users do today, Lucid-3D would still be fully capable...
Love how you've discovered power laws gazing upward at the belly of the beast. According to the 80-20 law, 20 percent of your usage requirements account for 80 of your system requirements.
Yes, if you're willing to lop off the tall poppies, life is good on ten year old platforms. If the demanding 20 percent emanates from your ADHD social network (e.g. document sharing) welcome to hermitville.
Who needs guns when you've got the genome? I know most/.ers have never had their genome hacked, but believe me it's not a subtle distinction.
Absent government enforcement of civil conduct, corporations would become scary as fast as you can throw money at the dark economy. Let me guess, in your special world, the dark economy doesn't have guns. We agree on one thing though. Most of the worst things in society result from behind the scenes influence of business on government.
The worst, though, is that.config/dconf/user file. One can haggle back and forth about esthetics, and argue that my judgment about what end-users want may be faulty. But burying my configuration inside an opaque binary blob â" that is unforgivably stupid and bad engineering. How did forty years of Unix heritage comes to this? Itâ(TM)s worse than the Windows registry, and perpetrated by people who have absolutely no excuse for not knowing better.
(Failure to properly support Unicode in 2012? You're soaking in it.) ESR longs for the era when when the Unix ethos bound us together. It ends in another bail-out, this time with a less dramatic letter.
Me? Iâ(TM)ve bailed out to KDE. And I may be bailing out of Ubuntu. I want control of my desktop back. I want an applet panel or dock I can edit, I want my focus-follows-mouse-with autoraise back, I want to be able to set my own wallpaper slideshow. Most of all what I want is a window manager that will add to my control of my desktop with each future release rather than subtracting from it.
Maybe the Unix brotherhood has finally jumped the shark. I'm not sure I believe in the political force ESR claims to represent. It feels more like he's writing the letter to convince himself.
Well, I have a leather jacket and a USB fob with Mint 12 to get on with the exorcism before the April EOL on 10.10. I didn't know the open source movement would degenerate into a lifetime occupation of oasis hopping. That was not my original dream.
In a world where governments are beholden to corporations with no loyalties, they are as likely to be working against you as they are for you.
You've smuggled self-fulfilling prophecy into the equation in ten words or less. Nicely done. I see the eye in the pyramid behind your vision of corporate unity.
In the modern world, the "beholden to" social graph is a complex beast. Where the selectorate is large, the sensible strategy is to produce public goods. Where the selectorate is small, the sensible strategy is to line the pockets of your favorite cronies. Almost every player in an industrial society is tugged upon at both ends. Even where the selectorate is small, often the beholdee faces incompatible demands. Corporaphobes suspect that all corporations are perfectly aligned in their pursuit of evil. This beats thinking. Look at it from the other side. Revolutionaries all want exactly the same thing: to break away and be crowned the next king. When you translate from relative pronouns to absolute pronouns, these turn out not to be blissfully compatible visions. As Tolkien explained: Stalin does not share. Yet in your world, Krupp and IG Farben hatch no petty rivalries.
Thus almost everyone adopts a mixed strategy and acts with restraint, even if they wish it otherwise, though they might seize on a main chance if one presents itself. Conversely, from time to time an alignment of interests occurs where the public good gains the upper hand. Almost universally, the wealthiest countries produce the most public good. This is no accident, but a natural political process.
Only in the hagiography is the restraint of circumstance translated into purity of the heart. A little more difficult to pull off in a world where secrets roam free.
In the year after the downing of flight 007 I attended a evangelic Baptist church with a religious friend one Sunday morning. In addition to demanding an eye for a eye, there was an interesting sideline, a statistic about the vast increase in the number of known diseases as proof that the apocalypse was upon us. In truth, the number of known diseases was expanding at a tremendous pace due to improvements in diagnostic acumen.
Without a microscope at hand, many conditions reduce to "bad air". I hardly think the world is more corrupt than it ever was, we're just a hell of a lot better now at perceiving the tangled tapestry.
That's like saying that if you bought a car from someone that they used to run over an old lady, somehow you're now responsible for her murder. It just doesn't work that way.
Stephen King cultivated a loyal readership among people who suspect that it doesn't actually not work that way.
Zyklon B is still in production in the Czech Republic in the factory Draslovka Kolin a.s. in the city of Kolin, under the tradename Uragan D2, and is sold for the purpose of eradicating insects and small animals.
If DOW continues to operate dangerous assets in the same way they were run under the previous administration, the purchase is nothing more than a name change.
Slashdot Mirror
ZFS does nothing to protect integrity in memory, and especially in the dedup case, your data sits in memory a long time.
I wouldn't run dedup on a non-ECC mainboard. Had an experimental ZFS that suffered a failed memory stick (this array not run in dedup mode after a performance test following the initial build). The next scrub found inconsistencies on disk. Even after copying all the data to a new location on the same storage tank and deleting the old location, there were internal consistency errors. This didn't surprise me, but illustrates that memory-induced corruption will often kill the entire array. Keep plenty of offline backups.
Now if you just happen to have a fresh Opteron 3250 lying around on a mainboard populated with the right type of memory, with full server chip validation and background memory scrubbing, fill your boots with those old 30MB IDE drives.
I'm running my test array on three 500GB drives. Two are enterprise grade and the third was a Seagate warranty replacement (consumer grade refurb). I could have run with the consumer drive as an idle hot spare, but decided to run a three-way mirror, which keeps your hot spare silvered at all times. Note that the consumer drive limits my peak write bandwidth, as the enterprise drives have higher read/write performance. The reads seem to be distributed so that the hot silvered consumer drive works out to a net performance gain.
My scrub on 50GB of data takes just under 15m. Concurrent read traffic is not greatly impacted at home network levels.
Absolutely not, any value of understanding worth having (the recitative norms of schooling being a prime example of a six foot pole vault).
Juvenile cognition is hugely compartmentalized. Why is this a surprise? Few adults are ruthlessly rationale. Even among scientists of godless intellectual meritocracy, completely loony views are maintained about what the general population is willing to sacrifice for the sake of the environment further down the road.
Brenda Brathwaite: Gaming for understanding
It turns out there are two levels of understanding the Middle Passage in a young child.
The problem is that children with responsible parents first of all have a view of adults as prudent care-givers. Black teenagers in America understand sooner than white urban teenagers that the strong nuclear force drops off at the fourth power.
Economists have a notion of expressed preference. If I explain the rules of a very abstract game to you and ask you to choose door A or door B, and your choice of door A results in your immediate execution (to which you fully consented as per the fine print), do we conclude that you A) wished to die, or B) would benefit from improved cognitive skills?
One view smacks of sociopathy, the other of socialism. This is why ideology makes for such a poor path-finding algorithm, and why brain preservation leads to superior life outcomes.
I can't stand any meme that's just an excuse for not thinking.
Absolutely without question, the stupidest collective in American politics is the electorate, but even there, the red half can almost see through Sarah Palin, who wasn't egregiously stupid by the standard of the typical person showing up at the ballot box. Palin was more ignorant than dumb--which explains her populist appeal, American style. Palin was plenty smart enough to run a government with no brain, and maybe she knew that. What she didn't get is that despite the government's populist reputation for having 17 copies of the short chromosome, Washington is full of people far too smart (and driven by greed) to govern over from such an extreme position of ignorance. Not even when your handlers who answer to real power are pulling your rectal strings on a minute by minute basis.
You must be American.
If Ambrose Bierce were alive today voicing a sentiment like that, he'd be viewed as left of Dr Pangloss. How about "America is God's way of driving the devil to drink." If he cared about those geography lessons, he'll be drinking the hard stuff already.
The "making sense" meme you're invoking--while apparently directing the majority of your blood supply to your Panthalassian abdominal fold--has an Enlightenment heritage, which post-dates the Abrahamic split by a year or three. It's esoteric lore, I know, but the Abrahamic split actually forms much of the basis of the present dispute.
Yet in your mind it's simple. You see, Osama, if only you had Enlightenment values, you could have taken the western world down a peg after all.
Why does no one ask about the relevance of the porn industry? OpenSSH was the biggest thing since Debbie does Dallas. Few have more than that to their credit.
Bearded fellow: Let he who is without sin throw the the first stone.
Crazed villager [inspecting charismatic sinner]: Theo, is that you?
Crazed villager's wife: Who does this bearded guy think he is?
Here's the thing about security. If you have to ask about relevance, you can't handle the truth.
For piddling values of finite.
Nitrogen is not in short supply, nor is hydrogen and helium if you can handle the heat. I had no idea about magnesium.
More from the bathroom wall of all knowledge:
I think in fact that the speed of light implies the universe is finite, if you mind your own light cone.
There are really two classes of resource: the ones you run out of while the party is cooking, and the ones where you either cook or suffocate under your waste stream. Fusion is limited in the latter sense. There's no pollution like heat pollution.
Canonical lost the war on failed communication. Yeah, it's nice they have a multiple monitor strategy a year or more after inflicting a multiple monitor abortion on the whole of their user community.
If they had kept Gnome2 operational until the multiple monitor strategy was implemented and working reasonably well, my venom quill wouldn't be painfully squeezing an empty sack like a tasered epileptic.
Christ, if they had just told us straight up: "Sorry, multiple monitor guys, you need to find alternate accommodations during renos." I might even have kept Canonical on my xmas list.
Slashdot is becoming the new Omni.
I personally distinguish irrelevant results from results not worth clicking on, which often provide a valuable zeitgeist. I'm most bugged by irrelevant results when a word has two distinct meanings, and I end up with a mixed result set.
The other problem is search junk. Just this afternoon I was trying to find out whether whey powder supplementation has any scientific validity if you're in it for reasons other than emulating the porn stars who have increasingly become the role models of sexual fulfillment for young men in the modern age of abundance.
Dear Siri: "Does whey powder supplementation have any scientific validity if you're in it for reasons other than emulating the porn stars who have increasingly become the role models of sexual fulfillment for young men in the modern age of abundance?"
Even with Google, the gentle reader can imagine I gathered more weeds than seeds. Google Scholar netted me one or two papers that weren't complete junk. Pretty much a dead bust. Thorium fuel cycles are a piece of cake (not without controversy) compared to anything nutritional. The internet is a weird place.
Siri to the rescue? Not a question one even dares to contemplate unless one's neuro-protective enzymes are raging.
Your tautology would be more interesting if we had a single provable cipher. The best we manage is mapping a cipher contraption onto some other mathematical problem (such as factoring) which has been probed over centuries by the most brilliant minds. Yet even the hardness of factoring remains unproven so far as I've heard.
Also, since the vast majority of applications leak the session key in a public key exchange, there's an awful lot riding on the security of the public key exchange. Your public key is only as good as your randomness source. Have you audited your random number source lately? This is the kind of thing that's very hard to control with a test suite. If your randomness comes from a compromised black box (e.g. a built-in CPU randomness circuit involving NSA directives) the non-randomness of your random numbers could even be made crypto strong (only if you know the secret key can you discover the bits aren't really random).
There's so many screwdrivers crammed into the doorframe, proof couldn't squeeze in edgewise.
Absolutely true and should have been the story angle in the first place if slashdot wasn't trolling for page views. We're geeks. Why do we put up with this? Too often this place flirts with becoming People magazine or Entertainment Tonight, where the game is to scandalize the most banal information ever promulgated between living organisms.
So let me add my own story, circa 1986. I walk up to a Britannica booth in a local shopping mall and ask with the clarity of youth: "When is the CD version coming out?" The sales guy hisses at me like Voldemort. This is a decade before Encarta enters the picture. All you needed was a working brain to see that 600MB on a silver disc was a fatal illness. Britannica was cancering for a decade before Encarta metastasized.
[x] Minor edit
[x] No insight bonus
I spent a day poking into his work around xmas time. I recall a long document with artistic illustrations on the nature of causality. One of those documents where every step seems almost too trivial to notice, until you discover you've reached the conclusion and haven't gaining any understanding. Well, some of those small points must be hiding more than they first appear. When the penny did finally drop, I felt his presentation was perhaps obscured by contrived simplicity.
In my own thinking since, I've realized that causality is not what we think it is. In a sufficiently complex system, causality as we wish to know it ceases to manifest itself. Stephen Jay Gould tried to get this point across in The Mismeasure of Man without entirely realizing it. You come away from that book mainly with a profound sense of how much he hates the Ascent of Man iconography at more of a gut level than a cerebral one.
Implied in that ascending order is the human conceit of because-ness. When we tire of because-ness on the grand scale, we flit to worrying about the wings of butterflies. Both at the same time? Wow, your mind is more flexible than mine.
What I realized in my subsequent thinking (after my Pearl diving) is that randomness and causality share similar housing. Pseudo-random numbers are useful precisely because they are decorrelated (to at least modest algorithmic depth) with any unwitting sequence you are likely to stumble over (but not ones maliciously prepared; to combat that you need true randomness).
If you have a correlation between smoking and lung cancer, how do you show that smoking is causative? You need to perform some intervention which does not by itself explain the answer. Otherwise you might just as well conclude that the smoking of special "control" cigarettes prepared by men in white coats is a lung cancer cure, and apply to the FDA for treatment status. There is no such thing as a pure control (like pure randomness). All controls are pseudo-controls. Like pseudo-random numbers, some pseudo-controls are damn good enough for certain purposes.
In a really big system, such as the evolutionary history of life on earth, you'll never get a clean separation you entirely believe a priori. You'll always wonder if your exploratory manipulation itself is the smoking gun. How to prove otherwise? Well, the problem regresses. With a billion evolutionary simulators (with roughly the complexity of the local solar system) run a billion times on each of a trillion microscopic hypotheses, you might reach some stunning conclusions—if your methodology section doesn't trigger black hole formation. It's not so much that causality ceases to exist, it's more the case that you'll just never get there in reductive purity.
Recently there is the Taubes position on fructose (consumed in excess quantity) being a principle vector in metabolic syndrome. How do you prove this? Test diets with and without? Do they taste exactly the same? Are the digestive mechanics exactly the same? Can you slip the change in the lives of your subjects without them any the wiser? How did select a test group and maintain contact with it while none of them were any the wiser? Didn't half of them drift off to lives in new cities? And none of them heard about the fructose hypothesis on the radio and made subconscious life changes.
This is where gene knock-out experiments in mice are the bomb. We presume that mice really don't know about experimental protocol. Douglas Adams wants to know why. The Ascent of Man is always hiding in causality arguments somewhere, as any acute satirist realizes.
[snit]I'm pretty sure I spelled Pearl correctly (not Perle). If I succeeded, was the cause of this the Slashdot design where not even the title of the article I'm comment
You're the guy who would never have started the project in the first place. The truth about Wikipedia is that the process delivers a quality level that never previously existed. How one assesses its quality really depends on how one approaches it. When you arrive from a blank slate, it's a pretty good first meal. If you're trying to reach escape velocity to intellectual purity and enlightenment, well, endurance athletes classify three quarters of the human diet under poison: sugar, alcohol, cholesterol, additives, and on and on. So true. To an endurance egghead, Wikipedia is outright poison. To a starving African, it's a Swedish buffet.
We're on the familiar terrain here of purity narcissism. Not good enough for my fine brain. Definitely, Wikipedia is not ever going to get there. Out of the 4 million articles, there are maybe 5000 where I'm qualified to heap my scorn. For all the rest, amplified ignorance is vastly superior to no signal at all. In fact, amplified ignorance makes for a pretty good road map for charting the quickest route out of town to the lofty hilltops, if you've got a week to kill. Click. 5001.
The great thing about hating the government is never having to think. In many situations such as this one, where society needs to navigate a large infrastructure change, the early adopters provide a public good so that it becomes possible to achieve a Libertarian price point in the fat lump of the adoption curve sooner rather than later. You can argue that I'm wrong in this case, but it requires two orders of magnitude more mental input than your original comment.
My father installed a 1st generation heat-pump technology in the early 1980s. It was hardly painless. Mostly worked pretty good, but some components were failing every 18 months, until design problems were identified and resolved.
And that's nothing compared to what we pay bankers to fail on our behalf. If my father got a subsidy, it went right back out the door on expected unexpected maintenance costs. The bankers sent their subsidies straight to Switzerland.
There's some recent research suggesting that the primary harm from methylmercury is binding with selenium and preventing the formation of selenocysteine, which is an important amino acid in proteins that mop up oxidative graffiti artists and/or their handiwork.
In fish sources with a fair balance of MeHg and Se, the health outcomes of eating the fish outweigh toxicity. Fish sources such as Pilot whale with a lot of MeHg and almost no Se are really bad for your nervous system.
It might be time to downgrade the notion that Hg is a universal toxin. For thalidomide only the (S) enantiomer is teratogenic. What I didn't know until just now is that it's racemic in vivo (the enantiomers interconvert, but the en.wiki article didn't say how quickly or thoroughly).
As etiology advances, you need to keep an open mind. We should be more like the far right: Khamenei gives way to Saddam, then to Ossama, back to Saddam, and now Ahmadinejad. A nice passing play with assists all around.
I can't even bring myself to watch this, and I'm generally a compulsive bring-myselfer.
Dijkstra spins in his grave. Somewhere out there, Lamport is guzzling Guinness by the barrel and swinging his underwear around his head, while Knuth plays organ dirges.
The plural of anecdote is performance bonus. That was the VB business model in the late 1990s. This won't work twice. To obtain twice as many programmers at half the price there's now India and China. And they can do math.
This was totally misleading, for any informed definition of misleading.
Just as there are embarrassingly parallel algorithms, there are embarrassingly wide instruction mixes. In the P6 architecture there were a three uop/cycle retirement gate, with a fat queue in front. If your instruction mix had any kind of stall (dependency chain, memory access, branch mispredict) the retirement usually caught up before the queue was filled. In the rare case (Steve Jobs' favorite Photoshop filter) where the instruction mix could sustain a retirement rate of 4 instructions per cycle, x86 showed badly against PPC. Conversely, on bumpy instruction streams full of execution hazards, x86 compared favourably since it had superior OOO head-room.
CoreDuo rebalanced the architecture primarily by adding a fair amount of micro-op fusing, so that one retirement slot effectively retired two instructions (without increasing the amount of retirement dependency checking in that pipeline stage). In some ways, the maligned x86 architecture starts to shine when your implementation adds the fancy trick of micro-op fusion, since the RMW addressing mode is fused at the instruction level. In RISC these instructions are split up into separate read and write portions. That was an asset at many lithographic nodes. But not at the CoreDuo node, as history recounts. Now x86 has caught up on the retirement side, and PPC is panting for breath on the fetch stream (juggling two instructions where x86 encodes only one).
The multitasking agility of x86 was also heavily and happily used. It happens not to show up in pure Photoshop kernels. Admittedly, SSE was pretty pathetic in the early incarnations. Intel decided to add it to the instruction set, but implemented it double pumped (two dispatch cycles per SSE operation). Of course they knew that future devices would double the dispatch width, so this was a way to crack the chicken and egg problem. Yeah, it was an ugly slow iterative process.
The advantage of PPC was never better than horses for courses, and PPC was picky about the courses. It really liked a groomed track.
x86 hardly gave a damn about a groomed track. It had deep OOO resources all the way through the cache hierarchy to main memory and back. The P6 was the generation where how you handled erratic memory latency mattered for important workloads (ever heard of a server?) than the political correctness of your instruction encoding.
Apple never faltered in waving around groomed track benchmark numbers as if the average Mac user sat around and ran Photoshop blur filters 24 by 7. That was Apple's idea of a server workload.
mov eax, [esi]
inc eax
mov [esi], eax
That's a RISC program in x86 notation. Whether the first and second use of [esi] amounts to the same memory location as any other memory access that OOO might interleave is a big problem. That's a lot of hazard detection to do to maintain four-wide retirement.
Here is a CISC program in x86 notation. I can't show it to you in PPC notation, since PPC is a proper subset minus this feature.
inc [esi]
Clearly, with a clever implementation, you can arrange that the hazard check against potentially interleaved accesses to memory is performed once, not twice. It takes a lot of transistors to reach the blissful state of clever implementation. That's precisely the story of CoreDuo. It finally hit the bliss threshold (helped greatly that the Prescott people and their marketing overlords were busy walking the green plank).
Did Apple tell any of this story in vaguely the same way? Nooooo. It waved around one embarrassingly wide instruction stream that appealed to cool people until it turned blue in the face.
Cure for the blue face: make an about face.
Do I trust this new iPad 3 benchmark? Hahahahahaha. You know, I've never let out my inner six year old in 5000 posts, but it feels good.
You completely missed the memo on ironic detachment. 90% of what passes for OMG over-reaction comes from bored (not frightened) Chicken Littles. "I'm bored. What should I do? I know, let's start a game of OMG! Tag, you're it."
The other 10% comes from an industrious soul with OCD paranoia who has misplaced his meds (if no two electrons can be distinguished, and an electron travels backwards and forward in time, Occam's razor decrees that there is only one very busy electron).
Clearly this group is targeting the rile factor, however insignificant the ignorant response.
I might actually give up Google for a search engine where I could search on queries such as "/OMG 911" or "/OMG nuclear" or "/OMG GM" or "/OMG paid to have sex". If you click "I'm feeling lucky" it comes back with an error page: "Code Blue: server hyperventilating". If you press your luck, it comes back with the actual query results.
Just for the record, do you also satirize the behaviour of five-year-olds in warm swimming pools with HD fidelity?
I don't wish to cultivate any emotion about Facebook. Here's a piece of satire I viewed yesterday as I finally got around to killing my local subversion: Hitler uses git. In the Voldemort aftermath, Linus pounded his fist on the table and declared he wouldn't touch the kernel again until he had a workable replacement. Some of us couldn't wait that long.
There's even a Facebook reference that was obvious to an old goat like me, for people who can't get the rest of the humour. I'm mildly amused by the movie about Facebook, which I'm eagerly awaiting to pop up in the discount rental racks. Any day now.
I think this whole article about petaflop gaming is a waste of electrons. The joy of petaflop gaming is that the game player can run their imagination at sub nano-Hertz clock cycles. Count me out.
Smouldering laptops attract no attention at all, and now it really does look bad. Stop deluding yourself into thinking there's any reasonable escape from a witch-hunt gone sour.
The reasonable escape is to put the thumb screws to the witch-hunt itself. Social conservatives will never allow this because abortion might be next to enter a sane discussion. Whatever your political stripe, when values are hostage to tactics, you're part of the problem.
Rewrite history much? Which thousands? Ever since society reached the point where an individual could be condemned of thought-crime for possessing an artifact with the wrong symbol embossed upon it, people have jealously guarded their privacy, so much as circumstance permits. I do admire the suppleness of your resort to "none whatsoever". Not even a fig leaf to cover the public parts.
If the ship had made it to port a day ahead of time, the captain could have participated in an ebullient quarterly shareholders' call. No one wants to be late for a photo op.
Let's boil that down: Abnormal air disrupted (signals sent to no avail). Tragic. Seems like not such a great resume item for a Senior Chair at the Academy of Five Whys.
Love how you've discovered power laws gazing upward at the belly of the beast. According to the 80-20 law, 20 percent of your usage requirements account for 80 of your system requirements.
Yes, if you're willing to lop off the tall poppies, life is good on ten year old platforms. If the demanding 20 percent emanates from your ADHD social network (e.g. document sharing) welcome to hermitville.
Who needs guns when you've got the genome? I know most /.ers have never had their genome hacked, but believe me it's not a subtle distinction.
Absent government enforcement of civil conduct, corporations would become scary as fast as you can throw money at the dark economy. Let me guess, in your special world, the dark economy doesn't have guns. We agree on one thing though. Most of the worst things in society result from behind the scenes influence of business on government.
This one I remember: ESR's goodbye note
This one I felt certain I would find: Ubuntu and GNOME jump the shark
(Failure to properly support Unicode in 2012? You're soaking in it.) ESR longs for the era when when the Unix ethos bound us together. It ends in another bail-out, this time with a less dramatic letter.
Maybe the Unix brotherhood has finally jumped the shark. I'm not sure I believe in the political force ESR claims to represent. It feels more like he's writing the letter to convince himself.
Jamie Zawinski was feeling the irritation back in 2003: Cascade of Attention-Deficit Teenagers. Personally I blame SMS.
Well, I have a leather jacket and a USB fob with Mint 12 to get on with the exorcism before the April EOL on 10.10. I didn't know the open source movement would degenerate into a lifetime occupation of oasis hopping. That was not my original dream.
You've smuggled self-fulfilling prophecy into the equation in ten words or less. Nicely done. I see the eye in the pyramid behind your vision of corporate unity.
In the modern world, the "beholden to" social graph is a complex beast. Where the selectorate is large, the sensible strategy is to produce public goods. Where the selectorate is small, the sensible strategy is to line the pockets of your favorite cronies. Almost every player in an industrial society is tugged upon at both ends. Even where the selectorate is small, often the beholdee faces incompatible demands. Corporaphobes suspect that all corporations are perfectly aligned in their pursuit of evil. This beats thinking. Look at it from the other side. Revolutionaries all want exactly the same thing: to break away and be crowned the next king. When you translate from relative pronouns to absolute pronouns, these turn out not to be blissfully compatible visions. As Tolkien explained: Stalin does not share. Yet in your world, Krupp and IG Farben hatch no petty rivalries.
Thus almost everyone adopts a mixed strategy and acts with restraint, even if they wish it otherwise, though they might seize on a main chance if one presents itself. Conversely, from time to time an alignment of interests occurs where the public good gains the upper hand. Almost universally, the wealthiest countries produce the most public good. This is no accident, but a natural political process.
Only in the hagiography is the restraint of circumstance translated into purity of the heart. A little more difficult to pull off in a world where secrets roam free.
In the year after the downing of flight 007 I attended a evangelic Baptist church with a religious friend one Sunday morning. In addition to demanding an eye for a eye, there was an interesting sideline, a statistic about the vast increase in the number of known diseases as proof that the apocalypse was upon us. In truth, the number of known diseases was expanding at a tremendous pace due to improvements in diagnostic acumen.
Without a microscope at hand, many conditions reduce to "bad air". I hardly think the world is more corrupt than it ever was, we're just a hell of a lot better now at perceiving the tangled tapestry.
Stephen King cultivated a loyal readership among people who suspect that it doesn't actually not work that way.
If DOW continues to operate dangerous assets in the same way they were run under the previous administration, the purchase is nothing more than a name change.