Except you can decode the salt trivially if you took a cab ride that happens to be in the data set and you recorded the license and medallion number. At which point the salt is useless.

-Matt

Remember when we had a Debian system on the biosciences mission? They scrubbed the whole mission after they were already in space due to a fuel-cell issue that I think turned out to be a faulty sensor, and flew the entire mission a second time.

And... that's it? What did SMART say? Did you actually wear the SSDs out as-per the wear indicator? Or did you hit a bug in the samsung controller before the wear-indicator maxed out?

To be fair, the precise situation you describe, particularly if you did not retune the RAID-6 setup or the mysql server, and if the server was fsync()ing on every transaction (instead of e.g. syncing on a fixed time-frame as postgres can be programmed to do)... that could result in el-cheapo samsungs not being able to do any write-combining and cause a 256:1 write-amplication of the data.

With proper tuning the write-amplication could easily be reduced to 4:1 and you would probably be able to run the server with SSDs. Maybe use Intel or Crucial though, and not Samsung. It isn't just the controller that matters... just using stock firmware doesn't really net you a good, robust SSD and there aren't too many real vendors who work on the firmware vs just OEM whatever was supplied with the controller. Intel is probably one of the better ones. They actually fix bugs, as does Crucial. Samsung... I dunno.

-Matt

Yes, but it's a well-known problem. Pretty much the only thing that will write inefficiently to a SSD (i.e. cause a huge amount of write amplification) is going to be a database whos records are updated (effectively) randomly. And that's pretty much it. Nearly all other access patterns through a modern filesystem will be relatively SSD-efficient. (keyword: modern filesystem).

In the past various issues could cause excessive write amplification. For example, filesystems in partitions that weren't 4K-aligned, filesystems using a too-small a block size, less efficient write-combining algorithms in earlier SSD firmwares. All of those issues, on a modern system, have basically been solved.

-Matt

I have around 30 ranging from 40G to 512G, all of them are still intact including the original Intel 40G SSDs I bought way at the beginning of the SSD era. Nominal linux/bsd use cases, workstation-level paging, some modest-but-well-managed SSD-as-a-HDD-cache use cases. So far wearout rate is far lower than originally anticipated.

I'm not surprised that some people complain about wear-out problems, it depends heavily on the environment and use cases and people who are heavy users who are not cognizant of how they are using their SSDs could easily get into trouble.

For the typical consumer however, the SSD will easily outlast the machine. Even for a pro-sumer doing heavy video editing. Which, strangely enough, means that fewer PCs get sold because many consumers use failed or failing HDDs as an excuse to buy a new machine, and that is no longer the case if a SSD has been stuffed into it.

A more pertinent question is what the unpowered shelf-life for typical SSDs is. I don't know anyone who's done good tests (storing a SSD in a hot area unpowered to simulate a longer shelf time). Flash has historically been rated for 10-years data retention but as the technology gets better it should presumably be possible to retrieve the data after a long period on a freshly written (only a few erase cycles) SSD. HDDs which have been operational for a time have horrible unpowered shelf lives... a bit unclear why, but any HDD I've ever put on the shelf (for 6-12 months) that I try to put back into a machine will typically spin-up, but then fail within a few months after that.

-Matt

Consider yourself lucky, then, and pray that it lasts. The people around you are not made of such strong stuff, and I can't be sure that you are either.

It actually is a bit different for the Republicans, in that they are caught in an internal party schism of a scale we've not seen on either side since desegregation, if even then. It's difficult for the less right to look good to the more right, undirected pushing against the Democrats is one of the few ways they have to do it.

Do not forget that ObamaCare was rammed through without a single Republican vote in the House or Senate.

It's the unfortunate case that Republicans don't generally support Democratic bills. Witness the recent student loan bill. There is not much question that a better educated populance means a better economy and a stronger nation. It's a truism that we could just pay for college education in a number of fields and reap economic benefits of many times the spending. Indeed, we used to do more of that and the country was stronger when we did.

You meant "you wouldn't approve" rather than "you wouldn't understand".

Positioned correctly, it isn't all that socially reprehensible to state the sentiment that you don't believe you should pay for people who drive their motorcycle without helmets, people who self-administer addictive and destructive drugs, people who engage in unprotected sex with prostitutes or unprotected casual sex with strangers, and people who go climbing without using all of the safety equipment they could.

You don't really even need to get into whether you hold human life sacred, etc., to get that argument across. It's mostly just an economic argument, you believe yourself to be sensible and don't want to pay for people who aren't.

The ironic thing about this is that it translates to "I don't want to pay for the self-inflicted downfall of the people who exercise the libertarian rights I deeply believe they should have."

OK, not a bad position as far as it goes. Now, tell me how we should judge each case, once these people present themselves for medical care, and what we should do if they don't meet the standard.

Citation needed.

I just looked for a minute and found This NIMH study. If you look at the percentages per year they are astonishingly high. 9% of people in any particular year just for mood disorders, and that's just the first on the list. Then they go down the list of other disorders. The implication is that everyone suffers some incident of mental illness in their lives. And given the number of psychiatrists, psychologists, and lay practitioners in practice, it seems like much of the population try to get help at times, if only from their priest or school guidance counselor.

You are not a rock. Can you honestly tell me that you haven't ever suffeed a moment of irrationality?

I'm curious what his stance is on most martial arts practitioners.

I've never heard of one invading a school and karate-chopping a dozen young kids to death. Have you?

Yes, seeing a doctor really is a human right.

Does that mean we should bear the burden of your bad lifestyle choices? Well, we do today. Either those folks are in our emergency rooms, or they are lying on our streets. Either way, we all pay a cost.

It's not clear to me what you propose to do with them. Perhaps you should explain that a bit more clearly.

Hi AC

One would hope that a real scientific study would shed light on the situation. Unfortunately, this isn't it. It's a paper published by a Harvard student club and written by a gun industry lobbyist and a gun enthusiast. No balanced perspective that could lead to a real scientific paper here. The first refutation I found of the paper is certainly not peer reviewed and published in a scientific journal either, but makes a pretty good case that the statistics are cooked. It's here.

Please find a real scientific paper from a researcher without bias and then we can discuss it. This one doesn't quite meet the standard.

I'm sort of surprised at the amount of vitriol toward Eric that comes up unprompted (at least by me) just because I'm interviewed on Slashdot. I'm going to take the high road and not participate in it.

Actually, we would have had a much less expensive plan, but we couldn't get it by the conservatives. It's called single-payer, and I've used it in Canada. It has also been available to me in a dozen other countries that I've worked in, but fortunately I never needed it there. It works pretty well. So well indeed that most civilized countries have it.

I'm sorry that you didn't understand my presentation. Or that you understood it and can't accept it. I've thought about it for a very long time and I'm pretty sure of it.