it's easy to fool someone with a blackbox and a claim.
Oh, yes. In the late 80's there was a revolutionary video compression engine, in a black box, which attracted some significant investment, and was a complete fraud. Sorry I can't remember names.
But to say it is impossible is to step beyond the limitations of science.
I didn't say it was impossible. Neither did the article referred to. All I implied was that so far all claimed examples of cold fusion demonstrably fall into 2 buckets: 1) poorly-designed experiments which have been discredited by the attempts to reproduce them, 2) outright frauds.
Further, it is pretty clear that Rossi's falls into the category of outright fraud. His results were "reproduced" by people with a history of working with him, left the possibility of faking the amount of energy input, did not properly measure the energy output, and involved him putting the "fuel" in at the beginning and removing it at the end. Add it all up, and the claim that his e-Cat has been independently tested is outright laughable.
If it were valid, it would be reproducible.
When I looked into ZFS on OS X as a way to do an ultra-fault-tolerant RAID...
Yep. Like you I had looked at it some time ago, and passed on it as not yet ready for prime time. Just this summer took another look when I outgrew my Synology NAS, and discovered things had much improved. Bought an inexpensive 10-bay dumb eSATA box, hooked it up to an unused PC, installed CentOS + ZFS, and am happy with the result.
I was having a hard time figuring out why the Republican candidate for Colorado governor was promising to roll back marijuana legalization. I mean why would a politician go against a law that got 55% approval on the ballot?
(Note. The above is sarcasm. He's not such a cheap sell-out. He's just an ass-backward troglodyte throwback.)
But wouldn't a TB or even USB 3.0 HD be fast enough for mirroring these days? I mean, I doubt you'd be running an airline reservation or stock-brokerage on it; so what's a few milliseconds between friends?
USB 3 is faster than any single disk drive you can buy anyway, so yes it would fast enough. Just offensively less elegant
(I've tested throughput on an older mini's USB 3, and it is actually true that in USB 3 there's significantly less protocol overhead, so it is actually faster than 10x USB 2, very different than the USB 1.1 to USB 2 change.)
But I thought that ZFS won't boot on any system. And that Apple was done with its fling with ZFS. Did I miss the memo?
Solaris (and its open-source derivatives) would always boot from it. FreeBSD and Linux now boot from it, after a bit of configuration voodoo.
The memo you missed is that after some fracturing among the various open versions, they got together and formed the OpenZFS group, which does some sharing of plans and code as updates are made. Since that time, the open-source versions have matured from promising curiosities into really great implementations. The older open-source version for OS X has died, and been replaced by a derivative of the Linux version, which is a strong piece of work.
They did it on the Pentium Pro which had ~1/1000th of the transistors modern processors have today. Even though the instruction set has grown a few times in size, it's certainly entirely irrelevant when it comes to total transistor count today. But keep on spouting nonsense.
High-end Xeon, ~900 times as many transistors. Quad-core i7, only ~300. What makes you so certain that the instruction decode has not grown significantly in size since that first very minimal implementation on the Pentium Pro?
Well, depending on your application (and I'm assuming here it's not too demanding if you're using a mini as a server), you could always stick an external HDD and schedule Carbon Copy Cloner to dupe the boot drive over every now and then and the data portion rather more often. That'll give you a bootable volume in case of primary failure. It's not a raid 1 but for home or small office purposes it would probably do the trick just fine.
The load is not demanding, but RAID-1 (at least) on the boot device is required, because it's remotely managed, so the "warm standby" approach is not acceptable for the boot disk.
It has Thunderbolt. Attach as many drives as you like.
Yeah, but ZFS with 2-disk parity does me no good for the system disk, since OS X will not boot from it. (And proprietary hardware "RAID-in-a-box" is something that I will not accept anymore.)
Aside from the Mac Pro, the Mini was the only Mac that you could easily change the hard drive and memory yourself. I just had a quick look at the specs of the new mini and I can't tell if you can still do that.
Memory, yes. But changing the hard disk was not a task for ordinary mortals. (Been there, done that.)
What concerns me is the lack of any mention of dual-drive configurations. If I can't mirror the boot drive, then it just became much less useful as a small server.
The cisc architecture is bad because it doesn't let compilers do good register allocation.
That's true, and it's also worth noting that all the complex addressing modes of CISC limit how many registers you can have. (Because you use bits for the addressing modes which could otherwise be used for register numbers.) So limited numbers of registers is not just a historical accident of CISC which can be easily fixed; for a given instruction size, a CISC design can address fewer registers than a RISC design.
But it's not even the whole story. Once you go superscalar and start dispatching multiple instructions per clock, it becomes really import to have fixed-length instructions, so that's another big problem with CISC.
No x86 chip from the last 20 years runs CISC instructions internally, it's split into micro-ops and AMD/Intel has spent the last 20 years optimizing their decoder and internal instruction set for this one task.
And yet, they still have to deal with variable-length instructions, which means they still have to decode multiple possible instructions in parallel and throw some out, which still imposes a significant overhead in terms of transistor count. Intel won the CPU wars in spite of the x86 architecture, not because of it--they outdid everybody else on process.
The answer is, "nothing." There is absolutely never any excuse whatsoever to vote "straight ticket" anything, except coincidentally because you independently evaluated the candidates for each office and your favorite candidates in each case happened to all be from the same party.
Yes, there most certainly is a reason to do so--to affect the balance of power between the parties.
Prior to 2012, I always evaluated candidates individually. The last two elections, no. The last two elections, I felt it was more important to try to send a message to the Republican party about continuing to nominate idiots obsessed with irrelevant outdated right-wing religious beliefs.
Do you live in Florida by chance?
No, smartypants, a couple of hours west of there...
You knew the job was dangerous when you took it, Fred. -- Superchicken
