Many banks are now offshoring to Shanghai instead of India. The one I work for has several thousand developers and engineers out there.

Um, no. TRIM relies on the OS sending information to the drive about which blocks can be erased, every time files are deleted. Sitting on a BIOS screen won't generate those messages, because the BIOS knows nothing about the file system on the drive.

I think you've responded to a point I didn't make...

We agree insofar as TRIM just marks a block as no longer in use, but doesn't do anything to the underlying data except tell the SSD that, at its convenience, it can take that block back.

The "take that block back" part happens... During garbage collection.
Which you can get to run on an otherwise busy system... by booting to the BIOS screen and leaving it there overnight.
That point prompted my original response to you.

As for RAID support, that depends solely on the RAID controller, not on any limitation of the drives or the OS; SoftRAID, for example, works just fine with TRIM, and Intel's RST has supported RAID (yes, including 0) with TRIM for six months now.

It used to be possible to install maps on a TomTom from Linux - http://www.penguinpowered.org/documentation/tomtom_maps.html

However, they've even made that impossible now.

Due to someone blowing up our storage, I worked 15 hours on Saturday and 17 on Sunday. Then I was in and at my desk by 09:00 today to deal with the fallout.

Why would anyone sane want to do that? Regardless of gender ?

Would anyone who has other options in life live this life? I know I wouldn't ...

TRIM needs idle time in which to do its housekeeping [...snip...] and does not work on RAID.

Actually, the the solution to both those problems comes right in from "SSD best practices 101" - Once a week or so, boot to your bios setup screen, and leave the computer there overnight. Bam, TRIM does its thing, even on RAID drives.

That said, I agree with you - Know your use, and tailor your system to that. Personally, I'd worry more about their failure rate than anything else.

People here only wish it was like that with the smelters. The last smelter (and more significantly, its associated dam at Kárahnjúkar, the largest in Europe) drove people mad. Approval was rushed through without much public discussion, an environmental impact statement (which proved completely inaccurate, as in "the largest lake in eastern Iceland completely changed color" inaccurate) was approved with little review, and construction (the main source of jobs) was done with workers brought in on a temporary basis, mainly from Poland. Most of the people working there now (much smaller than the construction times) are also immigrants**. Honestly, it was so egregious that I think it helped galvanize people here to pay more attention and resist things like that more.

Interesting to see your insights on construction. :) Thanks!

** -- Not that I have much ground to stand on in regards to that objection, as I myself immigrated to Iceland... although because I love the place, not because I make more money here (just the opposite).

Can I buy a piece of tech that was not assembled by an Asian Worker making considerably less than his American Union Factory Worker counterpart?

Can I buy a piece of American tech guaranteed as "union free", such that no overpriced $30/hr loading dock workers or longshoremen or even office workers, had anything to do with it?

No? Okay then. Chinese children will suffice.


More seriously, TFA has a major failure in one of its assumptions - That most people care enough to feel bad. Yes, I would rather buy from someone making a living wage in my own country, and might pay a bit more for it; No, I won't pay 3x as much for it. And no, that doesn't really bother me.

Fertilizer production isn't big up here. I don't know why. It's aluminum, and to a lesser extent, ferrosilicon, and there's lots of datacenter plans, too. And actually, the smelters aren't that big of employers. Aluminum is almost as much of our exports as fish, but it's a much smaller chunk of the employment picture.

I think it's a strange notion that on one hand, it seems that you're saying that the cable is going to take a ton of maintenance, but on the other, that there won't be many maintenance jobs. Which is it? This isn't my field, so I'm simply asking you, but it clearly can't be both ways! :) Or, I hope you're not trying to say that Icelanders aren't skilled enough to maintain a cable... And also in the jobs picture on our side is the power exploration, development, and production, which is no small factor.

I think you're overplaying losses. I read a thing from Seimens before which quoted the losses on one HVDC system they were working on at 3% per 1000km (I don't know the details like voltage, conductor thickness, etc). Reykjavík to London is under 1900km. Even if you double the losses from that figure, you're still not talking about that huge of losses.

Concerning your comment about electrical power transmission being more mature... actually I know enough about this field to register a strong disagreement. The surge in HVDC transmission is specifically due to the rapid advance of increasingly affordable, increasingly high power switching electronics in recent years (which has also fuelled a boom in increasingly small, increasingly high power AC induction motors, which is what made vehicles like the Tesla Roadster possible). This advance is, of course, a huge boon not just to long distance power transmission in general, but also specifically to undersea cables, since AC losses on a cable in saltwater are huge.

Sorry for the "press puff pieces", it was just a quick google search to get you some breadcrumbs so you could see that this is actually being seriously discussed, including official visits between government officials.

Again, though, the difficulty of constructing and maintaining such a cable? Not my field. It seems strange, though, that it would be considered so much more difficult than undersea data cables, given that all of the problems you quoted apply to them as well (scouring, currents, shifting, depth, weather, etc). And we've got several already running to Iceland. I mean, you're dealing with a much fatter line for power, but I'd think that would only help, not hurt. Could you elaborate on why power cables are so much more difficult?

The sections of ship are designed to be isolable from each other. Close a door, shut some duct work to isolate air, and you're fat dumb and happy back in the engine room!

Uh, except commenters and Wikipedia both say that's not true - that the Los Angeles class has only 1-2 bulkhead doors and they most likely had cables and plumbing passed through, making them impossible to seal.

I guess you're just full of shit, then, and lying about serving on one of these subs. Nobody knows you're a dog on the internet, huh?

I've worked at 3 Fortune 500 companies and each of these has had over 1000 Linux machines involved.

You're speaking bullshit.