In base Pi, the last digit of Pi is 0. Easy.

I'm waiting for the day when some nutjob fashions a piece of doggie-poo looking substance out of brown-painted C4 with an embedded motion-sensitive detonator.

There, I've said it. Let everyone be scared of any stray pile of poop laying on a city sidewalk. Perhaps then, when we try to ban dogs completely, people may wake up and see that it's just not worth going through life terrified of everything.

Ugh.

While I found Russian Ark technically fascinating, it was otherwise very difficult to sit through because the viewer becomes aware early on that they are watching a visual gimmick unfold. Instead of paying attention to the plot, I was distracted by the single-shot nature of it, and how they were going to pull it off.

I'd liken this to experiments like Timecode which use similar gimmicks and long shots, but are otherwise slightly awkward to view.

No it's not, since it will eventually degenerate into an fully connected graph. Just find one on Wikipedia or Wolfram, and link to that picture instead.

Billy Joel has, since a very early time in his career, a registered trademark on his name for the purpose of music. I'm pretty sure he's not going around suing parents who have the audacity to name their kids William Joel, however.

Look at the album cover of "Billy Joel (R) Greatest Hits" for an example.

I seem to have had excellent luck with durability of the systems I integrate. Either that, or I'm hanging on to computers that are way too old... I've had to replace a CMOS backup battery button-cell in an old Gateway laptop and a Shuttle SFF system last year. My kids still use them to play old DOS games.

asplode: what your head looks like after going through an asplundh

If computers were considered "the revenge of the nerds", I'm curious what the next few years will be called.

Obviously, Revenge of the Nerds II - Nerds in Paradise.

This reminds me of an old joke about a retired Admiral who is responsible for sounding the morning cannon at the naval base, walking past a watchmaker's shop every morning and setting his pocketwatch to the correct time from a reliable old grandfather clock in the store window.

One day, on the walk in, he happens to see the watchmaker cleaning the store windows and mentions how he finds it amazing that the old grandfather clock keeps such flawless time.

"Oh, that old thing?" says the watchmaker. "It drifts horribly, and I have to reset it almost daily."

The Admiral then asks, "Since I've always noticed that it's reliable, from where do you get the time to set it?"

The watchmaker replied, "I use the report from the morning cannon at the naval base. It's always right on time."

The poll asked about running, not sleeping, processes. Most responses should be between 1-5, unless your load average right now is really insane and you're thrashing your system.

Actually, for mobile devices, the most important metric is performance per unit of power instead of just performance per unit time. After a certain speed/throughput has been reached, nobody cares how fast the CPU is, only how long the battery lasts.

For scientific purposes, back when Cray was building systems, you got charged by the second you had access to the computer. So you carefully composed the solution to your problem to make darned sure every whizz-bang aspect of the computer was doing something useful all the time. Today, you just want to play a game for a while, then make a voice call, and don't want the battery to fizzle out before you get home (and maybe have some juice left for watching a show during your train ride home.)

Mobile devices don't try to match the throughput of all parts of the system, because it's not in anybody's interest to keep the I/O subsystem saturated close to capacity 100% of the time you're using your Droid/iPhone... in fact, they turn them off (go into a low power state) and do aggressive power management that is coordinated system-wide.

I'm in the process of building a 5-bay SATA port-multiplier solution right now. What I've learned thus far is:
  * Most commodity motherboard chipsets don't support port multipliers. You'll need an expansion card.
  * If you have this much data, look into ZFS and RAIDZ2 for reliability. Avoid RAID5.
  * The bigger the disk, the longer it takes to rebuild a degraded array
  * FreeNAS is at an inflection point. If you're not scared, use PCBSD directly instead to serve your data.
  * You don't need "enterprise-class" storage speeds to serve up movies and media. Slow, green drives are fine.
  * Don't buy all of your drives from the same lot, all at once.
Cheers, and have fun in the process.

Bandwagon effect: n. The tendency to do (or believe) things because many other people do (or believe) the same. Related to Groupthink.

Bias blind spot: n. The tendency not to compensate for one's own cognitive biases.

Choice-supportive bias: n. The tendency to remember one's choices as better than they actually were.

Confirmation bias: n. The tendency to search for or interpret information in a way that confirms one's preconceptions.

Congruence bias: n. The tendency to test hypotheses exclusively through direct testing.

Contrast effect: n. The enhancement or diminishment of a weight or other measurement when compared with recently observed contrasting object.

Disconfirmation bias: n. The tendency for people to extend critical scrutiny to information which contradicts their prior beliefs and accept uncritically information that is congruent with their prior beliefs.

Endowment effect: n. The tendency for people to value something more as soon as they own it.

Focusing effect: n. Prediction bias occurring when people place too much importance on one aspect of an event; causes error in accurately predicting the utility of a future outcome.

Hyperbolic discounting: n. The tendency for people to have a stronger preference for more immediate payoffs relative to later payoffs, the closer to the present both payoffs are.

Illusion of control: n. The tendency for human beings to believe they can control or at least influence outcomes which they clearly cannot.

Impact bias: n. The tendency for people to overestimate the length or the intensity of the impact of future feeling states.

Information bias: n. The tendency to seek information even when it cannot affect action.

Loss aversion: n. The tendency for people to strongly prefer avoiding losses over acquiring gains.

Neglect of Probability: n. The tendency to completely disregard probability when making a decision under uncertainty.

Mere exposure effect: n. The tendency for people to express undue liking for things merely because they are familiar with them.

Color psychology: n. The tendency for cultural symbolism of certain colors to affect affective reasoning.

Omission Bias: n. The tendency to judge harmful actions as worse, or less moral than equally harmful omissions (inactions).

Outcome Bias: n. The tendency to judge a decision by its eventual outcome instead of based on the quality of the decision at the time it was made.

Planning fallacy: n. The tendency to underestimate task-completion times.

Post-purchase rationalization: n. The tendency to persuade oneself through rational argument that a purchase was good value.

Pseudocertainty effect: n. The tendency to make risk-averse choices if the expected outcome is positive, but risk-seeking choices to avoid negative outcomes.

Rosy retrospection: n. The tendency to rate past events more positively than they had actually rated them when the event occurred.

Selective perception: n. The tendency for expectations to affect perception.

Status quo bias: n. The tendency for people to like things to stay relatively the same.

Von Restorff effect: n. The tendency for an item that "stands out like a sore thumb" to be more likely to be remembered than other items.

Zeigarnik effect: n. The tendency for people to remember uncompleted or interrupted tasks better than completed ones.

Zero-risk bias: n. Preference for reducing a small risk to zero over a greater reduction in a larger risk.

Ambiguity effect: n. The avoidance of options for which missing information makes the probability seem "unknown".

Anchoring: n. The tendency to rely too heavily, or "anchor," on one trait or piece of information when making decisions.

Anthropic bias: n. The tendency for one's evidence to be biased by observation selection effects.

Attentional bias: n. Neglect of relevant data when making judgments of a correlation or association.

Availability error: n. The distortion of one's perceptions of reality, due to the tendency to remember one alternative outcome of a situation much more easily than another.

Belief bias: n. The tendency to base assessments on personal beliefs.

Belief Overkill: n. The tendency to bring beliefs and values together so that they all point to the same conclusion.

Clustering illusion: n. The tendency to see patterns where actually none exist.

Conjunction fallacy: n. The tendency to assume that specific conditions are more probable than general ones.

Gambler's fallacy: n. The tendency to assume that individual random events are influenced by previous random events: "the coin has a memory".

Hindsight bias: n. Sometimes called the "I-knew-it-all-along" effect, the inclination to see past events as being predictable.

Illusory correlation: n. Beliefs that inaccurately suppose a relationship between a certain type of action and an effect.

Myside bias: n. The tendency for people to fail to look for or to ignore evidence against what they already favor.

Neglect of prior base rates effect: n. The tendency to fail to incorporate prior known probabilities which are pertinent to the decision at hand.

Observer-expectancy effect: n. When a researcher expects a given result and therefore unconsciously manipulates an experiment or misinterprets data in order to find it.

Overconfidence effect: n. The tendency to overestimate one's own abilities.

Polarization effect: n. Increase in strength of belief on both sides of an issue after presentation of neutral or mixed evidence, resulting from biased assimilation of the evidence.

Positive outcome bias (prediction): n. A tendency in prediction to overestimate the probability of good things happening to them.

Recency effect: n. The tendency to weigh recent events more than earlier events.

Primacy effect: n. The tendency to weigh initial events more than subsequent events.

Subadditivity effect: n. The tendency to judge probability of the whole to be less than the probabilities of the parts.

Barnum effect: n. The tendency to attribute high accuracy to descriptions of their personality that supposedly are tailored specifically for them, but are in fact vague and general enough to apply to a wide range of people.

Egocentric bias: n. Occurs when people claim more responsibility for themselves for the results of a joint action than an outside observer would.

False consensus effect: n. The tendency for people to overestimate the degree to which others agree with them.

Fundamental attribution error: n. The tendency to favor personality-based explanations for behavior in others while understating the importance of situational influences on the same behavior.

Halo effect: n. The tendency for a person's positive or negative traits to "spill over" from one area of their personality to another in others' perceptions of them.

Illusion of asymmetic insight: n. People perceive their knowledge of their peers to surpass their peers' knowledge of them.

Ingroup bias: n. Preferential treatment people give to whom they perceive to be members of their own groups.

Just-world phenomenon: n. The tendency for people to believe the world is "just" and so therefore people "get what they deserve."

Lake Wobegon effect: n. The human tendency to report flattering beliefs about oneself and believe that one is above average.

Notational bias: n. A form of cultural bias in which a notation induces the appearance of a nonexistent natural law.

Outgroup homogeneity bias: n. Individuals see members of their own group as being relatively more varied than members of other groups.

Projection bias: n. The tendency to unconsciously assume that others share the same or similar thoughts, beliefs, values, or positions.

Self-serving bias: n. The tendency to claim more responsibility for successes than failures. It may also manifest itself as a tendency for people to evaluate ambiguous information in a way beneficial to their interests.

Trait ascription bias: n. The tendency for people to view themselves as relatively variable in terms of personality, behavior and mood while viewing others as much more predictable.

Self-fulfilling prophecy: n. The tendency to engage in behaviors that elicit results which will (consciously or subconsciously) confirm our beliefs.