I have serious doubt we even need hardware RAID anymore with current CPU speeds.
At some point in time I believed the same thing. I did a test a few years ago to see if it's still worth it to bother with hardware RAID and configured an system with linux and software RAID.
This was for a fileserver in a high performance cluster so speed mattered. I don't have the exact figures here right now, but from what I remember two years ago the software RAID solution was between 7 and 15% slower. Once you start hitting the performance limit your processes hit I/O wait and your performance goes down. When I added LVM to that back then performance got shot to hell.
Now, it's not as bad as it seems, you still get decent performance (especially considering that your setup suddenly costs a lot less and can be done on commodity hardware), and with a fair bit of tinkering with blockdev and your read-ahead buffer (provided you have enough RAM, and your usage fits that particular pattern) you can still get some very nice performance.
The reason that we went with hardware RAID in the end was because hardware RAID isn't all that expensive, and the performance gains were noticeable especially on systems that have to run 24/7 at maximum throughput.
Again, for consumer systems and services where performance isn't a primary concern software RAID is an attractive option, especially if you're on a budget.
As for overhead with encryption: it would make a nice experiment but I think 1% overhead is very optimistic especially on a busy system. The only way to be sure is to compare your performance now to the performance when you encrypt the entire disk. The only time I tested truecrypt I got a throughput of 80MByte/s, while unencrypted I got 120MByte/s, and it's been a while since I tested this. Those truecrypt tests weren't finetuned either, it was basicly a test to see if it was easy to implement.
Anything I mention here has to be taken with a grain of salt since a lot of time has passed and a lot has changed since those tests.
If policy dictates that you have to setup X, the best way to become an exception to this policy is to prove that that policy is detrimental to your project and might end up costing a lot of money. Policy doesn't care about performance, but it cares greatly about money and lost time. Do your tests, do the math, add a pricetag and talk with your manager.
It probably is, but then again I own the game and I've gotten more than my moneys worth of fun out of it. It's a genre I really enjoy, decent graphics, decent gameplay... It was money well spent.
I haven't checked out the contents to the micro-expansion yet, but I probably will when it gets released. It'll depend on the content and the price most likely if I buy it, but I haven't been disappointed by the Stardock titles I liked yet.
I suspect the only way these micro expansions will work out is if they also come with a micro price.
Most likely. If the price is too high they'll probably have a lot of people waiting for all of the micro-expansions to be available at a discount. That, or they just won't sell a lot.
The micro-expansion model of selling content seems to be picking up momentum, and it could be a good thing just as well as a bad thing. Personally I'd refuse to pay for something like a map-pack, and I'm pretty sure most people feel the same way, but if it adds value to gameplay or extends the storyline I'm pretty sure a lot of people would be interested if the price is right.
If it's somewhere between $10 and $15, I'd personally consider it a good price.
On a complete other note, I've recently been discovering Indie games to be quite entertaining from time to time. Indie games can be quite fun for a while and often are cheap (eg Audiosurf is just $10, and Defcon is $15). Sure, they're not as fancy as a million dollar budget game, but some of them are quite original in gameplay mechanics and can be damned fun as well.
NOW the wikipedia article states that the Mini DisplayPort is a bi-product of Kraft Velveeta cheese.
That's funny, only a minute ago it said that the Mini DisplayPort was a product of one of Jobs orifices. It seemed a bit odd to produce a correct video connector for that, although slightly less odd than Velveeta cheese.
the civilized parts of the world where the government takes care of their elderly and disabled this will have huge benefits for all.
Living in a "civilized" part of the world with social healthcare with a disabled family member, let me reassure you that that the government would laugh at you in the face if you ask them for $2200 a month for this. They will happily provide you with a mint-condition wheelchair until the technology becomes affordable (as in not $2200 a month).
I think there are a lot more useful applications for healthcare money (eg. help pay for life saving surgery, help pay for medication for the chronically ill, etc) than something as frivolous as robot-assisted-legs for an old man who can't walk up the stairs anymore.
Don't get me wrong, I think it's great (hell, it's in fact AWESOME) that this technology exists and is available, but it would be a waste of taxpayer money to allocate healthcare funds to this while more serious cases can benefit more and probably cheaper.
Also, in before flamewar containing the words "socialism", "hypocrisy" and "scam".
Multi-core is the future and multi-threaded apps are exactly what's needed to fully utilize its potential.
For each application you name that is benefited by threading, someone else will be able to name one that isn't. Some processes simply are not parallelizable in a meaningful way, where meaningful is defined as in speed of execution not as in the interactive extravaganza of "looky how I can clicky the button while it's still doing hard maths".
There's a good bit of reading about the subject, although much of it is boring and is often difficult to apply to real-world situations. Amdahl's law in many situations can predict if it's worth bothering with multithreading (or other forms of parallelizing) quite easily.
A tool like cat or grep has no benefit of being threaded since it's a simple sequential task. Suppose you were to multithread "cat" into one thread that reads from disk, and another that displays a line of text on the screen. Thread 1 will spend most of its time waiting for I/O, and thread 2 will spend most of its time waiting for thread 1 to pass data. Except now, your multithreaded cat has a somewhat complicated synchronization mechanism on top of it that makes it a bit harder to debug and probably eats some extra cycles as well.
While the previous example is overly simple, there are plenty of tasks that are a lot more complicated but simply have no benefit of being threaded, because they spend more time waiting for I/O than actually calculating or because the algorithm is simply not worth parallelizing because there is no benefit in speed.
Another example would be an application divided in 3 steps. Step A and B can be executed at the same time independently of each other, while step C depends on step A and B. Both step A and B can be written to use two threads, and if they'd use two threads they'd run in half the time of their non-threaded equivalent. On a dual core machine (or 2 CPU machine) running step A multi-threaded and then step B multi-threaded takes 1 hour. In the other case, running step A and at the same time (on the other core/CPU) running step B single threaded also takes 1 hour. At this point you gain nothing by threading. Of course here I assume that I/O by both processes at the same time doesn't create some sort of delay. But if you're working with large enough data sets (more than you can keep in memory) this becomes less and less of an issue since the I/O overhead will already be there anyway.
If you add to that the fact that threading (especially synchronization) is a subject that is not well understood by everyone (in the "find me out of 200 programmers fresh from school, 10 who can write a program that benefits from multi-threading and actually works" sense), threading suddenly becomes less appealing if there aren't any clear benefits for the application you're working on.
The reason I mention that last part is that because so many schools give kids the "make two threads count to 100 then exit" exercise but fail completely at getting the message across of the fact that most of the time the threads actually need to synchronize with each other. They'll give this long lecture about the dining philosophers problem without actually SHOWING them what that means.
In conclusion: it depends on a lot of factors (size of your dataset, how well your algorithm can be split up in parallel tasks,...) if your process benefits from threading or not, and you should evaluate at design time using Amdahl's law if there's an advantage or not. If your results in a multithreaded environment are only marginally better, the economical factor of cost of development time suddenly weighs in very heavily.
Having said that: if you're a programmer, have fun with threads at least once. Write something silly in your spare time, it can be an amazing amount of fun and often offers an interesting way of approaching future problems.
Average Americans used to be restricted to a very small subset of the information and culture that exists.
Pardon my ignorance, but I fail to see how the last season of Battlestar Galactica was deprived from the American people when they simply had to turn on their TVs to watch it, should it not have been available at the nearest convenient torrent tracker near you. The same goes for the latest CD of Metalica (sigh) which is probably being broadcast to death on radio, should it not have been posted to usenet with degoratory subject lines.
I don't see how "pirating" (violating copyright, yarrrr, stealing, stickin' it to the man, or whatever is the "politically correct" term on slashdot these days) has enlarged your access to information, other than perhaps made a few applications or videogames available to you for free.
Heavens forbid we should actually walk to the library to borrow a book or CD, a videorental store for a DVD, or something like that. Yes, we actually never had any opportunity before internet piracy to expand our cultural interests.
Therefore, rampant piracy has improved the average persons quality of life.
Yes, it's definatly improved my quality of life. I can sit in this here chair reading the latest Hairy Potter book (heavens forbid) in eyestrain-o-vision on a computer screen, watch the latest episode of whatever show I want without having to change the channel on my wide-screen tv which I was just using to play a videogame I didn't have to surf to amazon for and pre-order. Did I mention I just forked over an enormous amount of cash for my wide-screen TV with digital surround system and blue-ray player, which I could've spent buying a book or DVD?
Let's not kid ourselves, we've all pirated something at some point, probably more than once, and I'm guessing half of the people here have over a TB of movies/music/whatever on their machine or on DVD-Rs. And while I don't really care if someone pirates their goodies or buys them, I think that saying that piracy is contributing to your quality of life and enforcing copyright would culturally impoverish you is just a tad far fetched.
the victims of the American War on Piracy are... the American people.
Cool slogan, but try something more catchy like "If piracy is outlawed, only outlaws will have piracy" or something like that.
What you spend your money on is between you and your wallet (or if you're married between your wife and your wallet), but access to modern culture is relatively cheap (and increasingly convenient). It might not be on your terms (in which case you're probably going to download it anyway), but it's still there.
I'm sorry if this entire post sounds only a bit cynical, it was intended as bitter cynicism from a person who actually culturally enriched himself for what used to be 0.50€ a year at the library at some point in time.
A fairly small gang of newbies can drop a 3 year player with a multi-billion ISK ship if they use good tactics.
As someone who played eve for about 6 months, I can attest to this. A bunch of newbies with basic skills and a bit of guidance from someone with experience can do a lot of harm. As long as you make sure that everyone in a group is on the same page, you're bound to cost someone a lot of ISK.
The customers want their instant gratification.
Eve's skill system is nice because your skills continue to level even when you're not playing, but consequently there's less of a reward factor for actually playing the game especially at the very beginning. Eve also has an enormously steep learning curve, especially the economical aspects. Most people only start realizing there's a lot of ISK to be made simply by playing the market once they're a few months in.
This graph accurately describes the learning curve.
It really depends on what you're planning on doing with the machine:
If you're using XFS on large volumes (eg 10TB on a fileserver), you'll need a lot of swap for xfs_check.
If it's a desktop, you probably don't want to start swapping too much, so you want lots of RAM. I usually add as much swap as I have RAM. I gave up on the "twice the amount of RAM" rule years ago. If you're swapping that badly on a desktop you won't have a comfortable "desktop experience" anyway.
It really depends on what you're doing. A simple firewalling machine will never need to swap. Low trafic websites and mailservers will probably hardly ever need it.
Also, you can always add swap later if you resize another partition. It really isn't that much of an issue, so pick a value and adjust according to your needs.
Slashdot Mirror
I have serious doubt we even need hardware RAID anymore with current CPU speeds.
At some point in time I believed the same thing. I did a test a few years ago to see if it's still worth it to bother with hardware RAID and configured an system with linux and software RAID.
This was for a fileserver in a high performance cluster so speed mattered. I don't have the exact figures here right now, but from what I remember two years ago the software RAID solution was between 7 and 15% slower. Once you start hitting the performance limit your processes hit I/O wait and your performance goes down. When I added LVM to that back then performance got shot to hell.
Now, it's not as bad as it seems, you still get decent performance (especially considering that your setup suddenly costs a lot less and can be done on commodity hardware), and with a fair bit of tinkering with blockdev and your read-ahead buffer (provided you have enough RAM, and your usage fits that particular pattern) you can still get some very nice performance.
The reason that we went with hardware RAID in the end was because hardware RAID isn't all that expensive, and the performance gains were noticeable especially on systems that have to run 24/7 at maximum throughput.
Again, for consumer systems and services where performance isn't a primary concern software RAID is an attractive option, especially if you're on a budget.
As for overhead with encryption: it would make a nice experiment but I think 1% overhead is very optimistic especially on a busy system. The only way to be sure is to compare your performance now to the performance when you encrypt the entire disk. The only time I tested truecrypt I got a throughput of 80MByte/s, while unencrypted I got 120MByte/s, and it's been a while since I tested this. Those truecrypt tests weren't finetuned either, it was basicly a test to see if it was easy to implement.
Anything I mention here has to be taken with a grain of salt since a lot of time has passed and a lot has changed since those tests.
If policy dictates that you have to setup X, the best way to become an exception to this policy is to prove that that policy is detrimental to your project and might end up costing a lot of money. Policy doesn't care about performance, but it cares greatly about money and lost time. Do your tests, do the math, add a pricetag and talk with your manager.
Oh noes, my e-properties. I invested so much time in gathering virtual wealth and upping numbers in the database.
In all seriousness though, does anyone actually play this?
This one is so simple that it should be in the FAQ.
Actually, it's in "Asscovering 101 : A guide to sleeping comfortably at night".
Nobody's going to include a free blowjob in the box.
Ah, goddamnit. Ripped off again.
Sounds like an attempt to milk the cash cow to me
It probably is, but then again I own the game and I've gotten more than my moneys worth of fun out of it. It's a genre I really enjoy, decent graphics, decent gameplay... It was money well spent.
I haven't checked out the contents to the micro-expansion yet, but I probably will when it gets released. It'll depend on the content and the price most likely if I buy it, but I haven't been disappointed by the Stardock titles I liked yet.
I suspect the only way these micro expansions will work out is if they also come with a micro price.
Most likely. If the price is too high they'll probably have a lot of people waiting for all of the micro-expansions to be available at a discount. That, or they just won't sell a lot.
The micro-expansion model of selling content seems to be picking up momentum, and it could be a good thing just as well as a bad thing. Personally I'd refuse to pay for something like a map-pack, and I'm pretty sure most people feel the same way, but if it adds value to gameplay or extends the storyline I'm pretty sure a lot of people would be interested if the price is right.
If it's somewhere between $10 and $15, I'd personally consider it a good price.
On a complete other note, I've recently been discovering Indie games to be quite entertaining from time to time. Indie games can be quite fun for a while and often are cheap (eg Audiosurf is just $10, and Defcon is $15). Sure, they're not as fancy as a million dollar budget game, but some of them are quite original in gameplay mechanics and can be damned fun as well.
Police harassment will not bring you greater safety.
Score:0, Insightful
User moderation at it's finest hour. :-(
7TB filesystem means you need 7GB of RAM to fsck it
7GB of swap will do, it doesn't need to be RAM. And yes, 32-bit is a no go.
Buddha says I should forgive you and remind you that two wrongs don't make a right.
But three lefts do make a right.
cuddle guntoting lawyer whose penis has Alzheimer
That's what you get for sleeping with all those blue chicks.
5. If you're worried about this, just wait until you guys see the Storage APIs [whatwg.org] in HTML5. You're going to freak.
Oh great, more cruft to clog up browsers... I didn't know about this yet, thanks. This should prove to be some interesting reading.
NOW the wikipedia article states that the Mini DisplayPort is a bi-product of Kraft Velveeta cheese.
That's funny, only a minute ago it said that the Mini DisplayPort was a product of one of Jobs orifices. It seemed a bit odd to produce a correct video connector for that, although slightly less odd than Velveeta cheese.
Because speech != beer?
...and yet for me at parties, beer = speech.
We have quite a mathematical conundrum on our hands.
For sufficient quantities of beer this equality you mention becomes ambiguous. If only we had a way to statistically model this phenomenon...
mini-USS Enterprises
...
They don't have a captain that wants to sleep with the blue chick?
the civilized parts of the world where the government takes care of their elderly and disabled this will have huge benefits for all.
Living in a "civilized" part of the world with social healthcare with a disabled family member, let me reassure you that that the government would laugh at you in the face if you ask them for $2200 a month for this. They will happily provide you with a mint-condition wheelchair until the technology becomes affordable (as in not $2200 a month).
I think there are a lot more useful applications for healthcare money (eg. help pay for life saving surgery, help pay for medication for the chronically ill, etc) than something as frivolous as robot-assisted-legs for an old man who can't walk up the stairs anymore.
Don't get me wrong, I think it's great (hell, it's in fact AWESOME) that this technology exists and is available, but it would be a waste of taxpayer money to allocate healthcare funds to this while more serious cases can benefit more and probably cheaper.
Also, in before flamewar containing the words "socialism", "hypocrisy" and "scam".
A blowout in heavy traffic would no longer result in nine car pileups.
Someone with an LED and malicious intent will do that for you now.
if you're doing "enterprise" development it's best to avoid using them and let the application server do its black magic for you
Finally, confirmation!!!! I always suspected all those acronyms to be some form of arcane hex.
Multi-core is the future and multi-threaded apps are exactly what's needed to fully utilize its potential.
For each application you name that is benefited by threading, someone else will be able to name one that isn't. Some processes simply are not parallelizable in a meaningful way, where meaningful is defined as in speed of execution not as in the interactive extravaganza of "looky how I can clicky the button while it's still doing hard maths".
There's a good bit of reading about the subject, although much of it is boring and is often difficult to apply to real-world situations. Amdahl's law in many situations can predict if it's worth bothering with multithreading (or other forms of parallelizing) quite easily.
A tool like cat or grep has no benefit of being threaded since it's a simple sequential task. Suppose you were to multithread "cat" into one thread that reads from disk, and another that displays a line of text on the screen. Thread 1 will spend most of its time waiting for I/O, and thread 2 will spend most of its time waiting for thread 1 to pass data. Except now, your multithreaded cat has a somewhat complicated synchronization mechanism on top of it that makes it a bit harder to debug and probably eats some extra cycles as well.
While the previous example is overly simple, there are plenty of tasks that are a lot more complicated but simply have no benefit of being threaded, because they spend more time waiting for I/O than actually calculating or because the algorithm is simply not worth parallelizing because there is no benefit in speed.
Another example would be an application divided in 3 steps. Step A and B can be executed at the same time independently of each other, while step C depends on step A and B. Both step A and B can be written to use two threads, and if they'd use two threads they'd run in half the time of their non-threaded equivalent. On a dual core machine (or 2 CPU machine) running step A multi-threaded and then step B multi-threaded takes 1 hour. In the other case, running step A and at the same time (on the other core/CPU) running step B single threaded also takes 1 hour. At this point you gain nothing by threading. Of course here I assume that I/O by both processes at the same time doesn't create some sort of delay. But if you're working with large enough data sets (more than you can keep in memory) this becomes less and less of an issue since the I/O overhead will already be there anyway.
If you add to that the fact that threading (especially synchronization) is a subject that is not well understood by everyone (in the "find me out of 200 programmers fresh from school, 10 who can write a program that benefits from multi-threading and actually works" sense), threading suddenly becomes less appealing if there aren't any clear benefits for the application you're working on.
The reason I mention that last part is that because so many schools give kids the "make two threads count to 100 then exit" exercise but fail completely at getting the message across of the fact that most of the time the threads actually need to synchronize with each other. They'll give this long lecture about the dining philosophers problem without actually SHOWING them what that means.
In conclusion: it depends on a lot of factors (size of your dataset, how well your algorithm can be split up in parallel tasks, ...) if your process benefits from threading or not, and you should evaluate at design time using Amdahl's law if there's an advantage or not. If your results in a multithreaded environment are only marginally better, the economical factor of cost of development time suddenly weighs in very heavily.
Having said that: if you're a programmer, have fun with threads at least once. Write something silly in your spare time, it can be an amazing amount of fun and often offers an interesting way of approaching future problems.
Do not click that link! Jesus Christ but that's one freaky looking fuckweed!
I did, and JESUS CHRIST!!! The man has muscles in his receding hairline!!!
If you fear people like Osama Bin Laden more than you fear people like Henry Merritt "Hank" Paulson Jr., IMO you're brain dead stupid.
Yes, his receding hairline may be a danger to the entire nation. There should be a law against that.
Whenever goatse would actually be on topic, the goatse guy is never around. Psychological reverse trolling, perhaps?
Great, now I've got the expression "Pulling those facts out of his ass" associated with that image. Thanks... Really... Thanks
Another one to scratch off of the "frequently used expressions" list.
Average Americans used to be restricted to a very small subset of the information and culture that exists.
Pardon my ignorance, but I fail to see how the last season of Battlestar Galactica was deprived from the American people when they simply had to turn on their TVs to watch it, should it not have been available at the nearest convenient torrent tracker near you. The same goes for the latest CD of Metalica (sigh) which is probably being broadcast to death on radio, should it not have been posted to usenet with degoratory subject lines.
I don't see how "pirating" (violating copyright, yarrrr, stealing, stickin' it to the man, or whatever is the "politically correct" term on slashdot these days) has enlarged your access to information, other than perhaps made a few applications or videogames available to you for free.
Heavens forbid we should actually walk to the library to borrow a book or CD, a videorental store for a DVD, or something like that. Yes, we actually never had any opportunity before internet piracy to expand our cultural interests.
Therefore, rampant piracy has improved the average persons quality of life.
Yes, it's definatly improved my quality of life. I can sit in this here chair reading the latest Hairy Potter book (heavens forbid) in eyestrain-o-vision on a computer screen, watch the latest episode of whatever show I want without having to change the channel on my wide-screen tv which I was just using to play a videogame I didn't have to surf to amazon for and pre-order. Did I mention I just forked over an enormous amount of cash for my wide-screen TV with digital surround system and blue-ray player, which I could've spent buying a book or DVD?
Let's not kid ourselves, we've all pirated something at some point, probably more than once, and I'm guessing half of the people here have over a TB of movies/music/whatever on their machine or on DVD-Rs. And while I don't really care if someone pirates their goodies or buys them, I think that saying that piracy is contributing to your quality of life and enforcing copyright would culturally impoverish you is just a tad far fetched.
the victims of the American War on Piracy are... the American people.
Cool slogan, but try something more catchy like "If piracy is outlawed, only outlaws will have piracy" or something like that.
What you spend your money on is between you and your wallet (or if you're married between your wife and your wallet), but access to modern culture is relatively cheap (and increasingly convenient). It might not be on your terms (in which case you're probably going to download it anyway), but it's still there.
I'm sorry if this entire post sounds only a bit cynical, it was intended as bitter cynicism from a person who actually culturally enriched himself for what used to be 0.50€ a year at the library at some point in time.
A fairly small gang of newbies can drop a 3 year player with a multi-billion ISK ship if they use good tactics.
As someone who played eve for about 6 months, I can attest to this. A bunch of newbies with basic skills and a bit of guidance from someone with experience can do a lot of harm. As long as you make sure that everyone in a group is on the same page, you're bound to cost someone a lot of ISK.
The customers want their instant gratification.
Eve's skill system is nice because your skills continue to level even when you're not playing, but consequently there's less of a reward factor for actually playing the game especially at the very beginning. Eve also has an enormously steep learning curve, especially the economical aspects. Most people only start realizing there's a lot of ISK to be made simply by playing the market once they're a few months in.
This graph accurately describes the learning curve.
How big should my swap be?
It really depends on what you're planning on doing with the machine:
It really depends on what you're doing. A simple firewalling machine will never need to swap. Low trafic websites and mailservers will probably hardly ever need it.
Also, you can always add swap later if you resize another partition. It really isn't that much of an issue, so pick a value and adjust according to your needs.
not refreshing the page to communicate to the server
Web 3.0 will be all about the revolutionary concept of refreshing the page and not communicating with the server.
It'll be awesome. Websites will get no traffic at all and still make meeeellions on the marketing buzz alone.
The good news is that nobody's forcing you to program in it.
Or the "middlers" declare the genius a heretic and have him marginalized or killed.
Right, you get the torch, I'll get my pitchfork and we'll have ourselves a good old fashioned angry mob.