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Music By Natural Selection 164

maccallr writes "The DarwinTunes experiment needs you! Using an evolutionary algorithm and the ears of you the general public, we've been evolving a four bar loop that started out as pretty dismal primordial auditory soup and now after >27k ratings and 200 generations is sounding pretty good. Given that the only ingredients are sine waves, we're impressed. We got some coverage in the New Scientist CultureLab blog but now things have gone quiet and we'd really appreciate some Slashdotter idle time. We recently upped the maximum 'genome size' and we think that the music is already benefiting from the change."
Mozilla

Firefox 3.1 Beta 2 Adds Private Browsing 216

CWmike was one of several readers to point out the release of Firefox 3.1 Beta 2, the first version of its flagship browser to switch on the much faster TraceMonkey JavaScript engine and sport a working privacy mode dubbed "Private Browsing." An ancillary addition to Private Browsing is a new addition to the "Clear Recent History" dialog box allowing users selectively to erase the last hour, the last two hours, the last four hours, today's, or all browsing history — previously, the wipe was all or nothing. This beta includes support for "web worker threads," a developing specification that will let Web-based application developers run background processes to speed up their apps. One feature present in Beta 1 is gone in the new beta: Ctrl-Tab switching. According to the developer, the UI needs more work; the feature probably won't be in the final 3.1.

Comment Deduplication and compression (Score 1) 438

OK, my bad.

Diligent is not using the term compression AFAIK, but neither are they really deploying this approach yet outside of initial testbeds. Data Domain has been selling a product like this for years, has hundreds of happy customers using it and more than a thousand units in the field. And we came up with a brand, Global CompressionTM, in 2003 to mean the combination of finding long sequences and storing them uniquely across many TB's of stored data (see below) + traditional LZ-style compression.

We sell our system only as a target for backup data, which is extremely redundant. On a first full, we tend to see 2x-4x compression effect. Subsequent file incrementals, 6x-8x. Subsequent fulls, 50x-60x. Aggregate compression effect across a couple months of retention tends toward 20x in a weekly full / daily incremental policy. Exchange or Oracle fulls-daily can be 50x, short retention can be 10x. Mileage varies especially by backup policy, but also (within the 2x factor) by data type. And as mentioned in the postings, the challenge is to get it to go fast; our implementation does this. Early alternatives, such as the Venti filesystem in Plan 9, don't.

Should it be called compression? In lieu of a better term, at least compression is descriptive to a user -- the effect is to compress the backup data. In network equipment they call this technology Wide Dictionary Compression, but it has a half dozen other names. The mechanism of finding a sequence and referring to the original the next time it comes up is pretty much the same as traditional compression, it's just harder to put into silicon because of the size of the referencing window. But it wasn't anticipated by the seminal compression papers many years ago, so there's some debate. In storage, lately, it's starting to get called Deduplication, despite the existing use of that term in databases, and despite another half-dozen vendor terms. Examples of alternatives include capacity optimization, factoring, data coalescensce and sequence reduction. It's only starting to settle down.

Full disclosure: I was at VA Linux in the team that acquired Andover, thus Slashdot, back in the day. Hope that worked out OK.

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