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Comment Indepently repeated trials (Score 4, Insightful) 84

And this, ladies and gentlement, is why real science is done by not only performing the experiement and recording the results, but by writing up your method with sufficient clarity that your results can be replicated by independent researchers.

Once that has been done sufficient times, if your method itself is sound, then the results are valid.

Linux

Submission + - ntpd timebomb on modern linuxes (serverfault.com)

Bronster writes: "On recent linux kernels, ntpd prepares the kernel for the upcoming insertion of a leapsecond — which under some circumstances can trigger a livelock. At least Redhat and Debian users are confirmed to be at risk on busy servers."

Comment Re:Political Correctness? (Score 1) 317

"The American Third Position Party believes that government policy in the United States discriminates against white Americans, the majority population, and that white Americans need their own political party to fight this discrimination."

Your signature says that you're a racist fuckwad, regardless of your "no discrimination" claim.

Comment Re:Quality (Score 1) 340

US Govt? Surely you mean those crazy russians.

I've written a couple of patches for nginx. It's a giant state machine. The code is amazingly different from anything I've worked on before. I can't believe someone manually types that shit - but it all makes sense.

Comment Re:Sendmail not at fault...Poor design is. (Score 1) 179

They already have a Cyrus murder cluster - no need to do the LDAP routing. And they already have multiple backends. The IO issues are purely one SAN, and everything striped to spread load out so evenly that there's no spare capacity anywhere online when it runs out.

It's certainly cheapest to run that way, but running everything at 100% utilisation means no capacity to adapt to change. It's not just computer systems either - if you work all your staff at 100% utilisation all the time just to do current tasks, you're unable to adapt to change, because nobody has time to do anything else. It's the flip side of perfect efficiency - total ridigity in the face of change.

But yeah, SPOF. Most horror stories start with one of those.

Comment Re:Hate Being First .... (Score 3, Interesting) 179

As a mail administrator for a big system, I completely agree with you.

The biggest problem was that they had everything on a single SAN, so when they ran out of IOPs, there was no spare capacity anywhere, and nowhere to mitigate it to. I've had people try to sell me on putting all our systems on a SAN too "it's so simple to administrate. It has plenty of IOPs, see, look at these shiny numbers". Fine when it's empty and you're only hitting the battery backed cache.

Which is why we have hundreds of separate little disk sets managed with templated configurations rather than any single points of failure. I'm really glad to be there!

Comment Re:Linus Torvalds is... (Score 2) 330

He's personally responded to a couple of emails I've written to the list about issues, one a change that wasn't compatible with our usage and one an actual nasty corruption bug. In both cases he responded very quickly with a very precise description of what was going on, and took charge of making sure it got fixed (in one case guiding me to make a patch for the usage I needed)

He's managed to keep a large project putting out regular releases and not regressing badly in any way. That's a bigger accomplishment than you realise until you've managed a large project with an ever growing number of participants, all with their own styles of doing things.

It's not all about shiny new features, it's about doing the current things better or supporting new hardware - and what do you care about the number he chooses. He didn't do it to make you happy, he did it to celebrate a birthday.

As others have said, what have you contributed to the world recently? I guess haters just gotta hate.

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I tell them to turn to the study of mathematics, for it is only there that they might escape the lusts of the flesh. -- Thomas Mann, "The Magic Mountain"

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