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  1. Re:XFS for huge mailqueues, otherwise EXT3 or EXT4 on Ask Slashdot: Best File System For Web Hosting? · · Score: 3, Interesting

    From memory (I've been out of that business for 6 months) CPanel stores mail as maildirs. If you have gazillions of small files (that's a lot of email) then XFS handles it a lot better than ext3 - I've never benchmarked XFS against ext4. Back in the day, it also dealt with quotas more efficiently than ext2/3, but I really doubt that is a problem nowadays.

    If you aren't handling gazillions of files, I'd be tempted to stick to ext3 or ext4 - just because it's more common and well known, not because it is necessarily the most efficient. When your server goes down, you'll quickly find advice on how to restore ext3 filesystems because gazillions of people have done it before. You will find less info about xfs (although it may be higher quality), just because it isn't as common.

    XFS is probably better for large maildirs, but ext3 in recent kernels has much better performance on large directories starting in the late 2.6 kernels. It doesn't provide for infinite # of files per directory, but it doesn't take a huge hit listing e.g. 4k files in a directory anymore.

  2. Re:is it shipping to customers ? on Red Hat Developer Demands Competitor's Source Code · · Score: 1

    The comment would be purely theoretical problem.

    Unless it can be seen in the binary, RTS will tell anyone involved: 'No, you cannot see our source. You've made a serious public accusation. Do you own your house? Any other assets? What was your net worth prior to today?'

    If I understand your comment, you're stating that, if I may paraphrase, "of course they're not going to say they infringe. anyone would say that and since they only ship a binary they can keep the source to themselves while threatening legal action".

    Again, if I understood you correctly, then you're also expressing that in your view they are guilty until proven innocent. I'm commenting since that's not the case. If I write some code and then release it under the GPL, then as Nick says in his comments, it is any other user who is responsible for abiding by the GPL. I, however, can chose to release my code in any form I chose under any other license I chose subsequently unless/until I assign the rights to another party (this is what the FSF asks for when you work on their projects - this prevents software that they advocate from being dual-licensed and allows them to unambiguously pursue infringement).

  3. Re:Ever heard of CompuServe? on Why Didn't the Internet Take Off In 1983? · · Score: 3, Informative

    True, that. In '92 compuserve was established, but its greatest value for geeks was that they had a usenet feed and a mail gateway (which was probably a uucp connection to uunet/alternet, but mail flowed!), and so you could communicate with the rest of the world. It's still sad that they kept denying that this was their future until they couldn't stop hemorrhaging users.

  4. Re:Why? It sucked. on Why Didn't the Internet Take Off In 1983? · · Score: 2

    Yes, the cell carriers will have a disruptive change hit them at some point, though. Their pricing is exorbitant and can't be sustained.

  5. Re:Defaults still insane? on Apache 2.4 Takes Direct Aim At Nginx · · Score: 2

    My point is that those "bunch of tiny servers" vastly outnumber the "real enterprise applications".

    Shouldn't your hosting provider be doing this for you, or shouldn't you be doing this on install? This thread has been going on and on over a handful of config options. So you need configuration management. The apache config is flexible enough and unlike sendmail completely readable and comprehensible.

  6. Re:ZFS v31+ at last? on Solaris 11 Released · · Score: 1

    > I don't see that Oracle has anything to lose here by staying open with that component, filesystems benefit a lot from widespread use and lots of testing, but, well, it is Oracle.

    I believe netapp still believes, somehow, that zfs is wafl, and that they should be paid damages for distribution of their IP.

    I know that Daniel Philips has claimed at conferences way back when that he has seen prior art on WAFLs patents, but he still stopped working on Tux2 instead of fighting it. I don't know if Larry and the big O have a patent portfolio that can shut up netapp.

  7. Re:Nothing to see here on Solaris 11 Released · · Score: 0

    ZFS has been riddled with bugs in practice. Production crashes, re-silvering that fails constantly, magic voodoo incantations to get all pools up and running (I don't mean commands, I mean "well, sometimes the third time we reboot it works"). Uggh. Now that bugs aren't being fixed in opensolaris, I don't know how paying customers can convince solaris support to patch bugs. I used to point out that we wouldn't be paying for a patch that someone had integrated into opensolaris a year prior. I am so happy I don't touch this any more.

  8. Re:Zones on Solaris 11 Released · · Score: 1, Insightful

    They're OK... until you try to manage different (commercial) applications on them. When app 1 requires a kernel patch, well there's no real virtualization there - the zones still run the same kernel, so when app 2 requires a different, incompatible patch, you get the throw up your hands and become the IT that says "no".

    These are old issues, but trying to sell zones as the end-all be-all, or as even much more interesting than a BSD jail, is bogus.

    Let's get to real issues that this doesn't change: patch management is a nightmare on solaris. 11 hasn't changed this. The OS is waaaay overpriced vs. the competition, and very unsophisticated processes monitoring via smf (I honestly think they should have cut their losses and just used runit - most of the benefits, none of the academically-inspired and simply stupid limitations in compiling the graph at boot time vs run time vs build time.... ugh).

  9. Re:Don't mix the vendor networking gear? on Book Review: Scalability Rules · · Score: 1

    Sorry, but no. I've been in the industry for over 10 years, and it's rare to experience these types of problems. Consumer-grade equipment is notorious for this type of thing, but it's much less common with a major vendor with a reputation to protect. Single vendor rarely means best of breed.

    It may be rare, but when you're in a conf. call with Juniper and Cisco and F5 because you're finding that multicast is dropping packets, you can be pretty sure that the one that fixes it is the one who has a proposal to replace all of the others' equipment with their own.

  10. Re:Easier way to learn it on Ask Slashdot: Math Curriculum To Understand General Relativity? · · Score: 1

    A big part of Feynman's genius was his ability to explain. There are few people who could explain concepts like him, and so it's hard to get the education he gave in his books.

  11. Re:Cost? on DOE Announces Philips As L Prize Winner · · Score: 1

    That is the hardest part to figure out. Current-generation LEDs have a tendency to flake out because of heat is my understanding.

  12. Re: The Spec on Unified NoSQL Query Language Launched · · Score: 1

    This is a soft-sell way to get nosql databases into traditional IT situations, where familiarity with SQL will let current support and DBAs say "oh, it's like SQL, but it doesn't have joins. I can do that".

    I always did like the sqlite docs, specifically the diagrams of the state machine for each statement.

  13. Re:Can't they tie them down? on Studying the Impact of Lost Shipping Containers · · Score: 1

    Making the signal public after a week or so lost (to give the owner/shipper a chance to pick it up), and adding in the fact that there are rights to salvage in the open sea, and you'd probably have a great business opportunity.

  14. And you download it from where? on Firefox 4 Beta 12 Released; Fixes Over 650 Bugs · · Score: 2

    Firefox has always had the most frustrating UI for their info pages. They'll send you to pages and pages of info, but there's never a standard sidebar to actually download the available versions. The page this article links to has a link to the mobile beta of 4, which is exactly not the platform I'm browsing from. Fail.

  15. Re:Goldtouch on Ergonomic Mechanical-Switch Keyboard? · · Score: 1

    I've used these for a number of years now, and they're more durable that e.g. the M$ keyboards (more than one accidental water spill on my goldtouches, and they work fine after drying out. The M$ ergo keyboards die. I'd rather not admit that this has happened so often, but sometimes it does).

    My only complaint is that the hinge/ball-joint mechanism on the goldtouch seems to have gotten less sturdy in the last 3-4 years, and I've had 2 break on me. My older model, at home, has never broken.

    They also have a smaller keyboard that may be the next one I buy, hoping that the ball-joint is better.

    Here's the manufacturer's site for their keyboards: http://www.goldtouch.com/c-2-adjustable-keyboards-numeric-keypads.aspx

  16. Re:Great question on Consumer Webcams With High-Quality Sensors? · · Score: 3, Informative

    From what I remember, the eye-fi doesn't delete content locally, it just uploads. so you'd have to play around with some way of having the modified firmware delete the oldest N photos or something.

    Ahh... it seems that the newest cards will auto-delete: http://www.dpreview.com/news/1001/10010501eyefiprox2.asp

    -Peter

  17. Re:Beware the key term there: on Memory Management Technique Speeds Apps By 20% · · Score: 2, Interesting

    One of the goals was to *not* require a rewrite of applications, and they succeeded on that goal.

    This is interesting stuff, but if the goal is to not have to change source, isn't this sub-par? Hasn't the Boehm collector been tested as faster than using malloc/free forever? See http://www.drdobbs.com/cpp/184401632;jsessionid=IRGXEUGCDWGBJQE1GHOSKH4ATMY32JVN for a trivial example (a paper at ftp.cs.boulder.edu is offline, I guess with the server for now).

    -Peter

  18. Re:Its not rocket surgery... on Staying In Shape vs. a Busy IT Job Schedule? · · Score: 2, Interesting

    At my office we've been having some fun by trying to get to 100 pushups using the schedule at the site hundredpushups.com. I haven't gotten to 100, but I've gotten as far as 83, which from 35 6 weeks ago is still huge.

    These sorts of programs work out much better with peers so that you can encourage each other. It's something you can do at your desk if you have 2 or 3 co-workers who want to join you and it's really invigorating. You get to see what kind of people you're working with, too.

    -Peter

  19. Re:Ram drives suddenly new again? on Sun To Include SSDs On Server Motherboards · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Sun's using hardware that amounts to pluggable disks on a range of hardware. The same module they're putting into other devices will go into this motherboard, so it's sort of a commodity. A huge benefit of this tech is that if you can put your OS on it, you get faster swap, faster access to data on these devices, and much less electricity per rack. If they wanted to they could probably produce blades that were teeny tiny but still had on-board storage. RLX could have used this.

    -Peter

  20. Re:huh? on Outliers, The Story Of Success · · Score: 1

    And the north had pizza.

    -Peter

  21. Re:Rice paddy paradox on Outliers, The Story Of Success · · Score: 1

    Wow, some people don't have any sense of history. Hello? decimation (or more) of the population of west africa due to slavery and natural resource exploitation over the last 5 centuries ring any bells?

    -Peter

  22. Re:snow days on One Broken Router Takes Out Half the Internet? · · Score: 1

    If you have a business, you can't *depend* on the internet working. You are *hoping* that the internet will work when you need it. Anyone "depending" on the internet working is in for some serious disappointment over the long haul. If you need to depend on something, you have to buy redundant private lines from different providers and verify that it runs point-to-point, and even then you're not going to get 5 nine's.

    Doesn't anyone on /. remember MAE-East in the 90's? Back in the day, it was like people were trying to prove that the entire internet can go down for a day because of someone's dumb redistribution of RIP-over-BGP.

    The fundamental issue that "best effort" delivery of packets is misleading isn't going to be addressed any time soon. "Best effort" really means "look, your link will be up, and we'll shove it out one of our interfaces, but where it goes from there is anyone's guess".

    -Peter

  23. Re:Internetworking with TCP/IP on Your Favorite Tech / Eng. / CS Books? · · Score: 1

    Oh, agreed! I got this used and it was such a good reference!

    -Peter

  24. Re:Speaking of C on Your Favorite Tech / Eng. / CS Books? · · Score: 1

    I've never found van der Lindens book of any use. I think that his focus on puns and asides detracts a lot from the content. I recall that topics that were about 80% explained, but needed an extra 15% to be clear, would instead receive a closing anecdote that had nothing to do with the topic.

    I found that "Pointers on C" by Kenneth Reek was a far better book. More thorough and careful in explaining details, and with fewer distractions.

    -Peter

  25. Re:"Crafty chick" on Solar Cells — Made In a Pizza Oven · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Maybe not being an a-hole, but history shows that if something is truly DIY, the patent system doesn't impose a barrier to doing it yourself, just to doing it and selling it. See the history of the cotton gin for what I'm talking about.

    I suspect that they see the business as making the varnish/dye/ink being used, and kits, which does make sense if selling that is economical, and in a few decades the original patent expires, though I'm sure there will be updates.

    -Peter