Very deterministic. Thus, easy to screw with. Just populate sample points with that worst case pivot value and voilà. Well... it needs to be done for all consecutive rounds so it's not completely trivial but doable.

If the algorithm is made very unlucky with selection of the pivot, then it will need one stack frame per each 2 data elements. So yeah, I think it's doable (if pivot selection is stupid in some predictable way)

WTF?! We're talking about general recursion, not some stupid, easily avoidable cases. Even in the case of qsort - you need to make 2 (not one) recursive calls one for left and one for right, and you need to keep the midpoint somewhere on the stack... Basically it's easier to roll your own, totally heap based accounting than try to be clever with stack frames. Plus GP explicitly said that there is recursion and your c compiler does not do tail recursion anyway (or you can't count on it)

Recursion makes for elegant code, but in production code should be avoided. At least when you have no control of the input data. The reason is that there is a fairly tight restriction on stack size (you have to explicitly tell your OS that you need large stack). As a result you will coredump if your input is the right kind of nasty.

At least with ECC you'll get _some_ feedback (it's random so it will pop from time to time) indicating that something fishy is going on. With regular ram all corruptions are silent so you'll get random crashes that will drive you crazy...

I seriously doubt that difference in load is due to drive speed, at least not directly. Their pods are connected by slow (1Gb?) Ethernet. My guess is that there is a sort of interference effect between disk rotation speed, network data rate, buffer sizes, tcp window size etc.

Oups. Yes, I meant ZFS.

Actually, as somebody pointed out, if you put any modern copy-on-write file system (xfs, btrfs etc.) on that puppy, SMR disk will work just like any other hard drive.

My guess, is that due to the way they write data onto platter, this drive is pretty much useless for random writes (even more so than a regular hard drive). It's good only for huge sequential writes i.e. just bulk storage. Knowing this, they, allegedly, added some long term reliability features and slapped "archival" moniker.

It makes 6TB WD Green way overpriced. Will be fun to watch price action on newegg.

These drives are targeting more or less the same market. And judging by the number of complains, WD's 4 and 6TB drives are not much better in reliability department (although I might be wrong in that regard)

The real reason is that google has failed to penetrate russian market.

They are cutting their losses, that's all. And considering that there are no prospects for business, there are no reasons to invest into infrastructure.

We're not talking about evolutionary change but revolutionary. Drop in parts number is so drastic that it allows for more competitors to sprung up (hence Tesla). The risk for established players is in going from oligopoly and into a commoditized market. And that hurts. Badly.

I'm fully aware that particular situation with NSA would not be resolved by republicans.

The point was: how to remind democrats that they have to actually listen to us. Or else...

for non-techie types

Basically, if democrats refuse to listen to us - this is what they'll get.

I'm as liberal as people get, but that NSA thing pissed me off so bad that I consider voting Republican.

For those, who say that Republicans will not act on NSA either, I say this: Listen, elections is what in game theory considered a repeat game. In such situations it's often advantageous to enforce beneficial cooperation by employing fear of retaliation. And we're not bluffing this time...

"No Country for Old Men" tactics if you wish.

Where is that "Strong AI" notion is coming from?

You do not need an AI capable to operate in the real/physical world to wreak havoc in it. All you need is some super smart out of control worm capable of penetrating a highly automated military defense system (e.g. "dead hand")