ZFS does this much more simply with no ugly hacks. You can have mismatched drives when you build a mirror (the mirror is the size of the smallest drive in the mirror set), and then you stripe across the mirrors. As the older, smaller drives fail, replace them with newer, bigger drives and the pool magically gets bigger. 100GB + 500GB mirrored (100GB usable). 100GB dies, swap in a 750GB drive and now this pool is automatically resized to 500GB. Get 2 more drives? Mirror them and add them to the pool and your pool expands with no one the wiser.

Seriously, if you haven't played with ZFS before, download FreeNAS and give it a whirl. When I was a Solaris admin, ZFS was the most fun thing to work with by far.

Ya'll do realize that audio rack equipment also measures 19" across, and is 1/2 to 1/3 of the price of equivalent server room rack gear, right??

This is the plan that I'm on and I love it. This month is my 20th month and my last phone payment. It's going to be nice to see my bill drop by $25 next month and know that I'm not beholden to them for anything, I can leave any time I want. The upside of that for them is that their service in my area is so good that I have no intention of leaving. They also aren't pressuring me to switch to a contract plan. They've called me once over the last 20 months and the guy tried to sell me the same plan but under a contract, and he was very friendly when I told him that I was happy with what I have. Haven't heard from them since.

I have a regular non-prepaid, no-contract plan with T-Mobile, and I also have a non-subsidized phone (Samsung Galaxy S 4G). I don't have any early termination fee.

If I remember correctly, there was a change at the end of the 90's that changed the way that the oil market was traded, and it decoupled the price of oil from the actual supply and demand model to a speculative model. The reason oil prices jump dramatically whenever Iran sneezes is not because the actual supply changes, but because speculators think it will change. The oil market is very happy when the price goes up now but the supply doesn't actually decrease, because in that window between the 2 events they make a crap-ton more money.

I wish I could "Like" this post. Summed it up perfectly. I stopped after book ten and I have have no intention of ever giving these books another thought.

Yeah, get those kids off my lawn!

No, it is "panty waist", and it refers to the old-fashioned shirt/jacket thing that little kids wore that buttoned all the way around the top of their pants. Little kids wore them and the older kids referred to someone as a "panty waist", meaning they were weak like a little baby.

I doubt anyone really wants to deprive law enforcement of any tools used to truly catch criminals, but we want to make sure the there is judicial oversight involved. If you don't have enough probable cause to get a warrant, then all you are doing is fishing. Once you invest the human time and effort into obtaining probable cause and a warrant, then use GPS to your heart's content!

I watched it on streaming just last week....

Oh, I forget to mention, there are only 2 ways for a government to "create" jobs:

1. Spend money and expand existing programs.

2. Spend money and create new government programs.

They can also encourage the private sector to create new jobs by using incentives, but those aren't guaranteed to work. We saw how a lot of those programs have worked over the years.

Gov: hey, you get a break on your taxes if you promise to hire people.

CEO: Thanks, we'll sure try to! We really really promise to try!

Gov: Pinky swear??

CEO: Sure!! ...time passes....

Gov: Umm, you didn't hire anyone....

CEO: I said I'd try, not that I would actually do it!!! BTW, have you seen the size of my bonus this year? Coincidentally enough, it's the same amount that you gave us last year to hire people!

Yeah, I've thought the same thing for a long while. From 1995 to 2007 we had an Republican majority in both houses of Congress, a largely Republican SCOTUS, and for 6 of those years a Republican President. They set us up for failure with deregulation of the banking and housing industries and they went to war with no plan at all to pay for it (Every other war in US history was paid for by raising taxes and every war was followed by a recession).

Why would people trust them to get us out of this mess? Why are they worried about fiscal policy when

Am I the only one who is still relatively happy with Netflix? When I can't watch a show or movie on streaming, I just watch one of the other hundreds of items in my queue. I find myself not caring if something is "recent" or not. I pretty much only watch 2-3 movies a year in the theater, rent about 1 or 2 every couple of months on Redbox, and wait for the rest to hit Netflix DVD or Streaming.

Really, no movie or TV show is so mind blowing that I can't wait a while to watch it....

They probably mean simpler in that the sheer volume of data makes a rat model easier to work with than a human model, even for a supercomputer. I worked on a project about 15 years ago where the scientists who were studying the effects of certain types of microwave radiation used a low resolution (5mm) rat model for their daily test runs, a higher resolution (1mm) rat model for more complex runs (2-3 days), and a low-res human model for certain runs. The low-res human runs took weeks on a seriously-beefy-for-the-time system, but would usually crash at some point, and the high-res model would have taken months to finish.

We set them up with a 12-node beowulf cluster and helped them parallelize their computations, and then they were able to finally complete their runs without them crashing and within acceptable amounts of time.

Torchlight isn't open source but it is a damn fine dungeon crawl.