A lot of the wins from Perl6 have already been backported to Perl5. At this point I'm in no rush to switch to Perl6 even if it does come out.

How complicated are you making these menus? Is it more than Entree Name, Description, and Price? Seems like exactly the sort of thing that you could whip up in 10 minutes with a little HTML generation and a style sheet. You can add some graphics and play with the fonts to pretty it up, but ultimately a menu is just a tabulated list--something HTML was designed from the start to display.

It's outside the FBI's jurisdiction. piratebay.se They did have a lot of their previous domains seized however.

Depending on your definition, you could do that on Earth. In fact it is probably easier on Earth because you don't have 200kph winds gusting up to 400kph.

This sounds like a great way to make a Mercury type planet, but I'm not so sure it will be so great at making a place you would want to live.

Have you ever tried to use WiFi in a crowded apartment building? Do you want the same experience with cellphones? It works for WiFi and Bluetooth only because their ranges are so short that you usually don't get much interference. That solution obviously won't work for cell phones. Nobody wants to have to find the nearest cell tower and drive over to it to use their phone.

There is a famine going on right now in North Korea.

I read a claim that there has not been a famine in 400 years that was not politically created. This sound crazy when you first hear it, but when you start diving into the specifics it is scary.

One could argue that the Government didn't create the monopolies here, physics did. There's only so much spectrum and it doesn't work if multiple people are trying to use the same frequencies at the same time in the same area.

Unless you can find the political will to separate highly regulated tower operators and the phone carriers (so airtime would be a utility and there would be competition with the carriers), then it's always going to be like this. It could be worse, at least there is some competition in the wireless space. It's not wireline broadband.

This was on Windows with Firefox and the Adobe plugin. I don't have the built-in plugin because I like popping out PDFs and because the built-in viewer is slow as balls on nontrivial PDFs.

100,000 hours is 4,167 days which is ~11.4 years. That sounds pretty reasonable to me, since I've run plenty of disks for over a decade.

The spares should be warm spares. Not spinning until the RAID controller detects a failure and replaces the failed drive. So they won't take any appreciable amount of power. The concern I have is space. That many idle drives eating up rack space is going to be expensive.

They only had availability data for 4 years of drive life. This is largely a math study. I'm not familiar with any implementations of their 2D parity system, although it is outside of my area of expertise. Their assumption that the service calls would always be more expensive seemed a little suspect to me. Rack space isn't free and when you have basically 100% redundancy or more in spare drives you're going to eat up a lot of space. Putting 54 spare drives in a rack that already has 11 parity disks and only 55 primary disks just doesn't seem efficient. Is all of that space really cheaper than a single service call during the life of the machine to replace 20 failed drives all at once (when the rack drops below say 6 spares of the original 26--saving you half of the space the spares would have taken up).

I have also seen enough buggy RAID controllers in my day to make me very wary of that 2D raid arrangement in the paper.

All in all this smells like a mathematicians solution to the problem, largely unbounded by real life concerns.

So I tried to view the PDF, and it says "can't use the plugin, it causes problems on our server". So I figured I'd just download the file with wget instead. Nope, 403 forbidden.

Looks like fetch works though. If anybody else has trouble getting the file, try my local mirror.

My favorite part is where the updater tells you that a new update is ready, but it won't install it automatically because Adobe needs another ad impression or something and you have to download and install it yourself. This is why I don't have Flash or Java installed anymore. I especially like when they try to sideload some crapware toolbar with their security update too. I can kind of understand this sort of behavior from a sketchy freeware app being hosted by J. Random Guy, but Oracle and Adobe are multimillion dollar corporations. Do they really care so little about their brand?

I guess we'll be well prepared for nuclear war then. Lets get right on that. Or maybe not.