Name one this century, or last.

I'm afraid I won't be able to limit myself to just one. Remember, we're talking absolute monarchs, otherwise what I said makes no sense. Here's a quote about the Empress Dowager Cixi, who was the supreme ruler of China until 1908:

"During Cixi's time, she used her power to accumulate vast quantities of money, bullion, antiques and jewelry, using the revenues of the state as her own. By the end of her reign she had amassed a huge personal fortune, stashing away some eight and a half million pounds sterling in London banks. The lavish palaces, gardens and lakes built by Cixi were hugely extravagant at a time when China was verging on bankruptcy."

If you want a more contemporary example, do some reading on the only absolute monarch left: His Royal Highness, King Mswati III of Swaziland.

If we go further back in history, when absolute monarchs were more common, the examples come a'tumblin'. Under Phillip II, Spain went bankrupt multiple times. Louis XIV drained the treasury of France: "Some estimates suggest that by the end of Louis' reign half of France's annual revenue went to maintaining Versailles." The Emperors of Russia and Austria bankrupted their respective empires - and ultimately lost their empires - by entering WWI. I'm sure if I knew more history, I could dredge up more examples. If you want, I'll make the attempt.

This quote bugs me every time it's trotted out. Why? Because it doesn't consider the alternative forms of government. An absolute monarchy? Monarchs are notorious for voting themselves largess from the public treasury that bankrupts the rest of the country, and subsequently losing most of their power to aristocrats. Then the aristocrats do the same thing. Military dictatorships pump money into the military and bankrupt the country. Oligopolies are no different. The list of governments who've bankrupted their countries and themselves is very, very long. As soon as a person or a group of people realize they have their hands on the levers of power and thus the nation's funds, they'll milk it for all it's worth.

Try out the timeline view. It's pretty cool.

Then try to input a search query that makes the timeline go back further than 4500BC.

You can't do it, can you?

We reason thusly:

1. Google knows everything.
2. Google says nothing happened before 4500BC, which is very close to the date calculated for creation in the Bible.
3. Therefore, the universe must have been created by God about 6000 years ago.

QED.

(Did I do better or worse than an ID troll?)

Making a marriage work requires three things:

Communication, communication and communication.

The dude at the Love Lab disagrees. In his research - which is more serious and rigorous than I'm making it out to be - he's found three marriage styles that last, and in which the partners are satisfied. One of the lasting marriage styles involves two partners who desire low communication levels. They have to respect each other for the marriage to last, but they don't have to communicate, communicate, communicate.

Diff'rent strokes for diff'rent folks.

That laptop you kept dropping is exactly where you could've used the increased reliability of an SSD.

Just sayin'...

Fair enough; RAID was, indeed, developed to deal with (as Wikipedia puts it) "low-cost and less reliable PC-class disk-drive components" rather than any and all rotating media.

However, even with more expensive rotating media, it now enjoys near-universal use whenever data is critical. Notice the common thread: Rotating media. RAID is hardly used outside of rotating media, and almost universally used with it whenever two or more are gathered together in the name of storing data.

And I salute you for making a grammar correction without making a mistake of your own. You still won't get me to be a fuddy-duddy and use "media" with a plural verb, though.

I've had to build more than one server from consumer-class components when money was tight. Once these are down to 70 cents or so a gigabyte with 500GB+ capacities - let's say in two years, if prices keep dropping as they have been - I'll be putting them in servers at first opportunity. With their random read performance, they blow away even the best server-class rotating hard drives.

I can hardly wait. Really. Rotating media is the bane of my existence.

Ah. My experience is mostly as a sysadmin storing other people's data. It's no wonder we have very different views on hard drive reliability.

You may not be extremely lucky to get a regular HDD to the 5 year mark, but you are moderately lucky. Lucky enough that I would recommend regular backups rather than depend on your luck with the hard drive.

Wouldn't you?

If you can get a regular hard drive to the five year mark running perfectly well with no data loss, you can consider yourself moderately lucky. Rotating media is what RAID was invented for.

All you'd need to do to demonstrate to me the greater reliability of an SSD is drop it and a regular hard drive onto the table a couple of times while they're running and see which one keeps running. That would be enough to get me impressed by increased reliability. Regular hard drives are delicate beasts.

You're all thinking about this the wrong way. Clearly, we need more terrorists to make the math easier to understand. Then we wouldn't have all this confusion! The boys at the TSA would be very grateful.

Exactly. If I had mod points, I'd give them to you.

You might be interested in this whitepaper from Intel. What they find is that the Windows CIFS client write pattern creates serious fragmentation problems for ext3. The problems are mitigated (though probably not completely solved) in XFS precisely by what you mention - delayed allocation.

The infamous XFS binary NULLs problem was fixed in 2007.

It *was* a problem, despite the XFS developers saying before 2007 exactly what the ext4 developers are saying now: "We're following spec, so it's your problem if you lose data."

Sooner or later, ext4 will be fixed, just like XFS was, once the developers realize that "omg my data is gone" is filesystem publicity death, no matter how on-spec they are.

In fairness to XFS, they finally accepted that binary NULLs were a problem and fixed it in the spring of 2007.