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Comment Re:Summary of the video clip (Score 1) 645

I clearly don't understand the audience that video is supposed to be for.

If it was scare the western world, it's only going to give the leaders better arguments for making a moral case against these barbaric sociopaths.
If it was scare the muslim world... From what I've seen on reliable news sources, those countries that were on the fence or were somewhat ambivalent about ISIS are now in the "Let's obliterate those crazies before they attack us and/or we get lumped in with them!" camp
If this was to somehow garner credit in the jihadist world and show that they're the most jihadist of the jihadists, I don't think that worked for them either. You have to admit, that even when Al Qaeda is calling you crazy, that says something. I'm sure they'll pull over the fringe players who don't think Al Qaeda is violent enough, but not enough to offset the massive casualties they're taking at the hands of US air power.

The only thing that I could see this as a ploy towards is to try to drive a wedge in and alienate moderate muslims from the western world. Something along the lines of "See the crazy thing we're doing, we'll we're muslim, and since you're neighbor is muslim you should think of them as being as crazy as we are!!!"

My only problem with that is that these people just don't seem that well planned. It seems like they're making it up as they go along and not doing a particularly good job of it. Killing the pilot, let alone in as grizzly manner as they did, got them nothing and only hurt them unilaterally. Holding on to him and trading him for prisoners would have demonstrated that they were people that could at least been negotiated with. Strategically this was a dumb move.

Comment Re:Not for new users of FreeBSD (Score 1) 75

He could have simply made the book 260 pages instead of 240 and put in a 20 page chapter on ZFS right after RAID. The first couple of pages would be about the design philosophy of ZFS. Next introduce the concepts of vdevs, pools and pool types (in relation to what the reader just learned about RAID), sub file systems, snapshots and file system attributes. Next layout some scenarios using 8 disks in a JBOD. Create a raidZ, raidZ2 and a raid10. Next talk about tacking on another 8 disks and what the options would be for expanding a raidZ, raidZ2, raid10 set. Next talk about the pros and cons of read caches and ZIL's and ways to tune ZFS to be more performant. Lastly, talk about scrubbing and replacing failed devices.

I'll stand by my original argument... ZFS is essential to building scaleable networked storage devices with FreeBSD/Solaris and likely soon Linux. Yes, you could write the end all book on ZFS. Yes, someone like me would likely buy such a book. However, for your average sysadmin who knows nothing about ZFS this chapter plus google would give them a good starting foundation for building a storage device.

Comment Re:Not for new users of FreeBSD (Score 2) 75

Naming a book "Storage Essentials" and then not talking about ZFS was a mistake. If you're going to be building any type of NAS, you're going to want to use ZFS for it's scalability, reliability and stability. While you might get away with UFS for a couple of terabytes, you're going to have a bad time of it when you've got 40TB worth of storage space to manage.

Comment Re:trial and error (Score 1) 248

SpaceX has modeled the hell out of it. It's just really really hard. Honestly, I'd rather they fail in spectacular fashion and explore all the dark corners of their design before they stick people on the top of it. What's great about this is it's all gravy at this point. Once they work all the kinks out, it's going to eviscerate the competition when it comes to cost to orbit per ton. I can only imagine every other commercial launch company must look at SpaceX with a mix of horror and amazement.

Comment WSJ - Not a respected news source (Score 1) 556

I've read both the offending article and the response from Krauss and frankly Krauss is right on the money. The article is so painfully full of woo and so devoid of fact I can only come to the conclusion that the editors at the WSJ are a bunch of biased religious pandering idiots. What's even more enjoyable is how the refused to print his rebuttal because in doing so it would have show how painfully shotty their editorial process is.

Dr. Krauss has done us a service by clearly demonstrating the WSJ is good for nothing more than lining the bottoms of bird cages where it can get treated with the respect it fully deserves.

Comment Re:Buy two... (Score 1) 190

Recreating my machine from install media isn't that gruesome either. However, I'd rather do it on my terms then have to suddenly deal with it. Murphy's law dictates it'll happen two days before a deadline or in the middle of something critical.

All the stuff I care about I make incremental offsite backups.

Comment Re:Buy two... (Score 1) 190

We've now conflated two important distinctions into a single subject here. Functional resilience and long term data integrity.
I solve the long term data integrity problem by doing nightly snapshot delta's of my whole machine and my wife's machine (to a rasp pi with an external drive at a buddies house). Granted that's a single point of failure, but it's out of house in case my house {burns down, get's robbed, etc}

However, that doesn't fix the near term issue of me busily working away on a project when boom, my drive fails and suddenly I'm sitting there looking at a paper weight. That sucks. Having that happen to me once was enough for me to say screw it, I'm buying two drives and mirroring them using the motherboard raid software (which md supports) and it's a non problem. This solves my functional resilience.

raid is not a backup, what is gives me is resilience. Would you rather spend tomorrow recreating your machine from install media and backups, or simply swapping the drive out and suffering a background sync?

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