... absolutely no reason at all ...

So you're the guy we've all been warned about.

Those who do not know history's mistakes are doomed to repeat them.
          — George Santayana

* The 8086 was invented because a large amount of tooling already existed for the 8080.
* C++ was invented because a large amount of tooling already existed for C.
* Windows 3.0 was invented because a large amount of tooling already existed for MS-DOS.
* XML was invented because a large amount of sophisticated tooling already existed for SGML.

From that perspective, your XML parser for Windows written in C++ for Intel was a historical high-point in Tory pride. And it probably doesn't waste nearly as many cycles as you think it did.

Arseny Kapoulkine: Ten years of parsing XML — November 2016

The author has a more pertinent document, but the document is undated, and I don't link undated documents (and no, "last updated" does not count, and this document doesn't even have that). Other pages only show minor slowdowns for XML verses the alternatives. Because the speed of a sophisticated XML parser is the least of your complaints. And the main reason you want faster serialization over any of ten other virtues is probably because you're slumming in Python instead of C++, and so you really need all the speed you can get, where you can get it. I've actually examined the main interpreter loop of the Python interpreter in C. It's every CPUs worst pipeline-stall nightmare, all the way down to the last semicolon.

Meanwhile, at the other end of the spectrum, at roughly the same time during the same decade, riding exactly the same wave of benighted dotcom urgency, PHP came along, drawing lessons from precisely nowhere.

And how did that work out?

Exploits of a Mom

XML: annoying
PHP: priceless

By the way, I once wrote an unsolicited personal email to Tim Bray about an algorithm I had devised, and he kindly wrote back saying he didn't think that my idea was important enough to get much traction in the real world.

He was probably right, too.

The concept behind flattening the curve is to reduce the rate at which cases increase to the point where we can handle it.

That's only one possible conception, and there are many others also in circulation, with a fair range of views expressed depending on region and party.

This view is the functional minimum in most debates: at least if you do become seriously ill, you deserve the standard of care available before our medical system was overwhelmed. Some would trim some corners off this standard, and suggest that a streamlined Henry Ford version of the original standard of care would actually suffice here, in view of the economic cost to society. This could be roughly the same medical standard, but with twenty patients crowed into one room. Almost the same, and yet not the same, depending on your coefficient of dignity.

Or we could go the other direction, and increase the standard of care from that available before the pandemic, so that families can actually visit their loved ones on their death beds, which is actually what this amounts to in many instances. What we can "handle" on a standard of care where every patient is granted a private room is a quite a different number than the Henry Ford plaza arcade.

In addition to this bar, many also argue in favour of restarting the economy in such a way that the vulnerable can successfully avoid exposure long-term, to wait for the vaccination. This group would include everyone over the age of eighty, everyone over the age of seventy with a pre-existing condition of any severity at all, everyone who is battling a major illness such as cancer or lung disease, and everyone who is immunosuppressed due to an organ transplant or an auto-immune disease. It's a fair number of people, many of whom are in the prime of life, and not a particularly easy group of people to successfully isolate.

If we decide we can "handle" the upscaled Henry Ford plaza arcade model of sufficient hospital care, then the prevalence in greater society will be fairly substantial, making it that much harder to protect the vulnerable population.

Your version of "handle" might not include having a specific plan for that.

My standard of "handle" requires a highly detailed plan with constant oversight and regulation.

———

The Provincial Health Officer where I reside is Dr. Bonnie Henry, who largely holds the same view.

British Columbia has 540,000 ethnic Chinese (2016), mostly in the urban area of Vancouver, out of a total population of 5.1 million people (2019). That's more ethnic Chinese that the official total for the whole of Italy (60.4 million in 2019).

Official statistics indicate there are at least 321,000 Chinese citizens in Italy, although these figures do not account for former Chinese citizens who have acquired Italian nationality or Italian-born people of Chinese descent.

And yet, our current pandemic status: 77 currently hospitalized, 117 confirmed deaths.

British Columbia COVID-19 Dashboard

Under Dr Henry, BC jumped on contract tracing with a vengeance in the early stages. Then we ran short of test kits and had to scale back. But it turns out with an exponential pandemic, every contact chain you hunted down two weeks ago is worth ten contact-chains today. Now we have the test kits again, but we don't need to use them on the same scale, because our total medical load is roughly 800 active cases (160 active cases per million).

The only reason for our happy circumstance here is a raging case of government competence. How much contact do you suppose we have with China in a major port city on the Pacific Rim, where 10% of our total provincial population is ethnic Chinese? Vancouver plus Seattle/Tacoma (only 200 km apart, but sharing the same transit lane through the Salish Sea) almost exactly matches New York in thousands of TEUs annually (3400+3800 vs 7200).

Did we get especially lucky? Not really. We had an early case, almost as early as Washington State. And then we had 15,000 dentists and kind show up in Vancouver 5–7 March for the Pacific Dental Conference 2020, the largest dental conference in North America.

B.C. dentist who attended Vancouver conference dies of suspected COVID-19 complications

That could have been such a COVID-19 gong-show, but Dr Henry got on it like a dirty shirt.

———

Praise the Lord I don't have to stress out about that pompous idiot in Georgia.

Georgia Went First. And It Screwed Up. — 30 April 2020

The governor's decision came as a surprise to our mayors, who were not consulted or informed about his executive order in advance — and were barred by one of its clauses from issuing local orders more or less restrictive than his. Many felt the choice was the wrong one for their communities. Bo Dorough, a Democrat, is the mayor of Albany, Ga., which at one point in the pandemic had the most Covid-19 deaths per capita outside New York City. He pleaded with the governor to "recognize there are exceptions."

That means NO FISHING alone by yourself on a boat in the middle of nowhere! For your own safety!

You're exaggerating greatly.

It remains perfectly legal to fish by yourself in the middle of a giant lake if you have a US Department of Transportation certified personal transporter beam, as well as an active DOT/NC-17-01 license to use one.

The great thing about private-possession node-locked personal transporter beam is that:
* you can't pull into a gas station en route for gas or some smokes
* you can't stop at a bait store
* you can't pick up the hot chick hitch-hiking along the side of the road
* and you can't flick a cigarette butt out the window on some remote logging road to possibly start a forest fire, either.

Nor will you have to call a tow-truck if you truck breaks down (go directly to the Davy Jones locker of deep-hyperspace if your transporter fails mid-flight, expecting your next of kin to fill out paperwork on this for a near eternity—wise transpotaters carry Eternal Paperwork Indemnity Insurance, though many don't because it's not cheap).

It's such a clean solution to getting to and from the lake without putting any kind of social burden on the social structures around you, I really don't know why more people don't have these.

The training is really not that hard. No worse than flying a helicopter blindfolded with compass and straightedge. And the licensing fees and bimonthly mechanical endorsements (waived down to four months during the pandemic) are modest compared to the airport fees and gas consumption of taking your Cessna for a cross-state jaunt every day of the year.

So there you are. Transportater liberatus at your fingertips, for a low, low monthly fee.

If you've read The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires (2010) by Tim Wu, this is all a highly predictable end-game. Highly recommended.

The problem here is Sturgeon's Law: 90% of everything is garbage.

Caddyshack should rightfully charge $25 a ticket.

Caddyshack II should rightfully be priced like Alberta heavy-sour during a global pandemic, at negative $5 a bucket seat.

Yet we insist on a flat pricing model, regardless of the merits of the particular film (though some stupid technical gimmick like 3D can command a premium, at least until the artistic damage becomes old news).

———

Originally, the theatres bought only the films they thought their audiences wanted to see. These being mainly the good ones.

The first big innovation in film distribution was to kill this business model: to get Gone with the Wind even once, you had to sign up for the entire slate. This was pretty much an instant death-knell for many independent theatres that had curated a loyal audience by choosing only those films most of interest to its local audience.

Now every theatre showed the same films, and could only differentiate themselves on popcorn and upholstery. Gone was the vibrant, independent market for vibrant, independent film. All hail the studio system.

———

As soon as you have a viable long tail, a steaming turd like Shack II will hardly show on a single screen, before midnight. This could even work if the enthusiastic teenaged film-goers would pony up $50 a seat (in 1981 dollars) to see Raiders of the Lost Ark. But they won't. The actual economic model is babysitter bingo. $8 gets the kid safely out of the house for three hours. Any particular film may or may not be worth $8, but a film like Raiders or Apocalypse Now only needs to come to town once a year to cash out your bingo card on total value received.

Alternatively, the kids are left at home, and the adults pay for the privilege of private adult time. Only this is so expensive, that parents really do select only the very most appealing films. Fortunately, you have the young adults sandwiched in between with a lot of "discretionary" cash to throw at their assortative mating system—not nearly so discretionary when properly conceptualized—which served to float the whole system on true blockbuster attendance volumes. That's definitely how it worked back in the 1980s, when the theatrical distribution model reigned supreme. (Barely anybody had LaserDisc, and barely any titles were available.)

———

AMC's jack in the hole (at least it's an actual face card) are all those theatres in flyover country with terrible cable download speeds.

Universal wants to cream the urban markets with their streaming service, while relinquishing AMC to do the heavy, unprofitable lifting to deliver this content to the last mule^Wmile.

AMC says screw you. Universal is free to go to an urban model of broad streaming release, but in doing so, it will sacrifice mule country. Meanwhile, AMC can go back to the old fashioned model of screening films in mule country a la carte. There are lots of indy film makers who would love a shot at this market without having to compete with the likes of Universal. Abandoned to this cultural rut for long enough, Mule country might actually develop a taste for thoughtful film with artistic merit. And then what? Craft beer? Oh, puleeze.

The last thing Universal wants is the resurrection of an independent cultural yardstick of actual filmic merit, even if confined to a relentlessly dwindling Mule culture (the streaming modems are already here, they are just not uniformly distributed). And guess what. Seen any planes lately? They're not nearly so isolated as all that.

This is a very old dance. AMC does not hold good cards, but they don't hold worthless cards, either.

And the previous compromise wasn't even that bad. AMC gets exclusive rights for all of about four weeks for the theatrical cycle, then the streaming release follows hard upon. In what foreseeable world can the city-slickers fail to cope with a mere four-week delay (which they can bypass by attending an actual theatre)? Oh right, this world, with those damn pervasive phones and with social media rewiring our brains so that an hour has become the new dog-month.

———

The city-slickers do have one good point: the theatre experience is expensive, and then you don't always get a good product. Like the pooch you can't leave at home without enduring Wagger's entire Ring Cycle of loud, operatic separation anxiety, there's always someone who answers his damn phone inside a crowded theatre during the most dramatic moment.

Back in the medieval era, they had a cure for this: a 21-course buffet of glowing pokers and sharp spikes and gruesome hacksaws. But we seem to have meanwhile lost the recipe.

The only recipes we now possess are technological recipes. What, did we give up our former proficiency with hot jagged metal completely when we switched to mainly silicon? Seems like it. But oh well. This new silicon substrate is actually pretty versatile, though the solutions don't arrive all at once.

———

Here's the answer. People pay for the film with their phone (this has already arrived at a theatre near you). For the duration of the film, the theatre now receives a premium on any audio call of $1.50 for each ten second increment, or portion thereof. This is hardly out of line with the price they presently command for popcorn, so quit your bitching.

With an effective surcharge of $9/minute, 90% of phone calls received will amount to a whispered "Hello ... He did?! OMG, I'll get back to you after the film." Click.

90% of all two-minute calls will involve legitimate medical or legal emergencies, where $20 is neither here nor there in the grand scheme.

Your neighborhood drug king might be just fine with burning $90 on a ten-minute call while the film continues screening—if he was in the kind of business where you do business over a cellphone in the first place. So the only call he's going to take in a theatre of this duration is lady trouble. Sucks to be you, seated directly behind Paulie Walnuts on the very day his goomar reads him the riot act. But in reality, 90% of the people in the drug trade barely make ends meet. This last fly in the ointment is not a problematic scenario at scale.

Does the average Millennial even know his or her phone has two-party point-to-point audio capability? I'm not sure. "You want to surcharge what? Only if I use it? And I don't even know the feature exists? Well then, go ahead." Remember, this is the click-thru generation, so long as there's no immediate marginal cost.

All that's left is for the FCC and FTC to band together to force Apple and Android to make surcharge mode available as a universal public service and we'd have this whole mess sorted tomorrow.

Google Meet One-ups Zoom With Free 60-Minute Meetings For Consumers — 29 April 2020

On Alphabet's Q1 2020 earnings call yesterday, CEO Sundar Pichai revealed that Google Meet passed 100 million daily active users (DAUs) last week and is adding "roughly" 3 million new users every day. That's still a far cry from Zoom's 300 million DAUs, but at least it's on the same order of magnitude

I nearly took a swipe at that tripe yesterday, but it didn't seem worth the effort. A day later, different story. If any company can elect to report its DAUs straight up, it's probably Google. Does Zoom retain any real lead at all here, other than mindshare accruing to vociferous PR bullshit? There's really no way to know given the margin of slime involved in how these numbers are manufactured.

In any case, if Google really has been adding anywhere close to 3 million new users daily, Zoom is presently a state of frenzied catatonia, nearly shitting itself to death, under the stiffest of upper lips.

Tortoise throb. You can feel it half an ocean away. It's a real thing.

World's largest diesel engine makes 109,000 horsepower — 2011

With Zoom's highball tumblers walking themselves over the brink of their mahogany boardroom table—on the back of this subsonic vibrational jet-stream emanating from half a digital ocean away—all the hair on the back of the hare is now standing on end, for sure.

Catamaran

Stability: Catamarans rely primarily on form stability to resist heeling and capsize. Comparison of heeling stability of a rectangular-cross section monohull of beam, B, compared with two catamaran hulls of width B/2, separated by a distance, 2*B, determines that the catamaran has an initial resistance to heeling that is seven times that of the monohull.

The hare by a landslide.

Tradeoffs: Large merchant vessels have a FnV between one and zero, whereas higher-performance powered catamarans may approach 2.5—denoting a higher speed per unit volume for catamarans. Each type of vessel has a corresponding calm water transportation efficiency, with large transport ships being in the range of 100–1,000, compared with 11–18 for transport catamarans—denoting a higher efficiency per unit of payload for monohulls.

Tortoise throb, for the win.

Explain why people who willfully and knowingly violated the laws should be allowed to vote on people who make the laws.

If we're debating by fiat, let me return the favour: Explain why America venerates Jesus, who willfully and knowingly admonished "let he who is without sin cast the first stone". You pretty much know you're under redneck house rules when the question anchors itself from the outset around "the" law.

Have you checked out the legislative process at the municipal, state, or federal level lately? (Any time in the last 200 years will do just fine.) Have you checked out the messy British tradition of case law? Have you checked out how the sentencing process works in America?

Suspended sentence

In the United States, it is common practice for judges to hand down suspended sentences to first-time offenders who have committed a minor crime, and for prosecutors to recommend suspended sentences as part of a plea bargain. They are often given to mitigate the effect of penalties.

In some jurisdictions, the criminal record of the guilty party will still carry the offense, even after probation is adequately served. In other cases, the process of deferred adjudication prevents the conviction from appearing on a person's criminal record, once probation had been completed.

People who willfully and knowingly violated the law who receive a suspended sentence in certain U.S. jurisdictions are already allowed to vote, despite the lawbreaker sin on their personal rap sheet.

Have you noticed that whether the defendant receives a suspended sentence for a given infraction often depends on the economic circumstances of the person accused? Yes, Virginia, you can buy soft justice in the good ol' U.S. of A. What percentage of Americans do you suppose have willfully and knowingly fudged their annual tax returns at least once? 50%? 80%? 95%? Do I hear 96%? Have you noticed that granting this kind of coercive power to our legal authorities often results in long term systemic abuse?

Debtors' Prison in 21st-Century America — February 2016

For many people throughout the St. Louis region, the nightmare of debtors' prison is a recurring one: Each time a payment or court date is missed, the court issues another warrant, and the individual is subject to arrest, jail, and additional fines and court fees. Despite prior attempts on the federal level and across the country to prevent the profound injustice of locking people in cages because they are too poor to pay a debt, the practice persists every day. The racially segregated landscape of the St. Louis metropolitan area, and the prevalence of racially homogenous debtors' prisons within its borders, are not a coincidence.
...
This regional structure presents a major problem for city budgets dependent on tax revenue. Most cities pay for their agencies and city services with a mix of taxes, fees, and fines. In small, poor, mostly black cities like those that make up North St. Louis County, tax revenues collected from city residents are too meager to cover municipal expenses. What these cities lack in tax receipts, they collect through fines and fees stemming from minor municipal violations.
...
On one occasion in 2001, Williams called the police after being assaulted by an ex-boyfriend. According to her, when officers arrived, they asked her to step outside to identify the perpetrator. Once outside, she was arrested on an outstanding warrant stemming from parking tickets.

Man did those local cops ever have their eye on the prize, there.

Did you ever notice that Victor Hugo treated your question to a narrative disquisition of nearly 2800 pages?

After 19 years in prison (five for stealing bread for his sister's starving son and her family, and the rest for trying to escape), Jean Valjean, "prisoner 24601", is released on parole by the prison guard Javert. By law, Valjean must display a yellow ticket of leave, which identifies him as an ex-convict.

As a convict, Valjean is shunned wherever he goes and cannot find regular work with decent wages or lodging, but the Bishop of Digne offers him food and shelter. Desperate and embittered, Valjean steals the Bishop's silver, angering a farmer and other merchants as he flees. He is captured by the police, but rather than turn him in, the Bishop lies and tells the police that the silver was a gift, giving Valjean a pair of silver candlesticks in addition.

The Bishop tells Valjean that he must use the silver "to become an honest man" and that he has "bought Valjean's soul for God". Ashamed and humbled by the Bishop's kindness, Valjean resolves to redeem his sins. He tears up his yellow ticket, breaking his parole but giving himself a chance to start a new life free from the stigma of his criminal past.

Have you ever noticed that failure to forgive reinforces a permanent criminal underclass?

Scandinavian Jails: Why is Their Recidivism Rate So Much Better? — 27 April 2018

Norway's incarceration rate is 72 per every 100,000 people compared to America's 693 per 100,000 people. Norway also has the world's lowest recidivism rate at 20 percent, while America sees 75 percent of its prisoners re-offend within five years of release.

Have you ever noticed that the life of petty crime (and sometimes not so petty) doesn't pay well? And that most of the people involved in this lifestyle didn't feel like they had many better alternatives.

Have you ever noticed your strange bedfellows also slavering to run a black-and-white flag up the tough-on-crime flag pole?

Should Prostitution Be a Crime — 5 May 2016

The abolitionists wanted to erase the traditional legal distinction between forced and consensual prostitution by cracking down on all of it as trafficking. ... It was a striking effort to expand and stiffen criminal punishment, a strategy Elizabeth Bernstein, a Barnard sociologist who studies sex work and trafficking, termed "carceral feminism."

Abolitionists "have relied upon strategies of incarceration as their chief tool of 'justice,'â" she wrote in 2007. They lost the fight to define all prostitution as trafficking during the Clinton administration.

Should the teen-aged girl who runs away from a pedophile father and ends up having to support herself on the street at a young adult never vote again, should by some miracle she later crawls out of the gutter and obtains some semblance economic stability?

And then there's your entire supposition that people who have run afoul of the law are a worse judge of politicians than those who haven't yet run afoul of the law (or who are merely too sheltered and white bread to even have to worry about this, except in tax season)?

Helmuth von Moltke the Elder

No plan of operations extends with certainty beyond the first encounter with the enemy's main strength.

Now let's return to where we started from.

Explain why people who willfully and knowingly violated the laws should be allowed to vote on people who make the laws, given that actual contact with the world is not in scope.

The enemy's main strength is the broad and corrosive nature of human hypocrisy (Jesus) and pervasive self-dealing (the American Founding Fathers), which makes drawing these tight, clean circles about as useful as a twelve-year-old regimenting toy soldiers into a phalanx of rectitude.

Congratulations, you are now the proud owner of Slashdot comment #60000000.

I've generally enjoyed Michael Moore's pot-shot extravaganzas, even though long ago I correctly identified Moore as more of a flammaker than a filmmaker.

Who says they love something they have not used???

Exactly the same people who have heard the Grievance Studies rumour that the technologically inclined middle-aged white males who gifted Wikipedia to the world are actively harming society merely by continuing to exist.

These are more or less the same people—this time on the technological side of the fence—but likewise suckled in academia at the teat of C++ standing in for the antichrist.

I once knew C++'s sordid history almost inside out, and it's simply never been as bad a language as it's detractors wish to believe. There's always been a viable language in there, if you managed to find it. (Programming teams where the prevailing view of each other is more risk than reward rarely find it.)

I'm the first person to concede that C++ never ran away from the ugly side, and after forty years this really shows. As they say, eventually in middle age you get the face you deserve. The face of C++ is the indefatigable sergeant who contracted seven different plagues on seven different continents after long service—no terrain of ice or snow or sand or mud or swamp even once refused.

Rust on the other hand is the gonzo solid-jawed Navy Seal on the Navy Seal recruitment poster. Who wouldn't rather be that guy instead?

Intel's not behind on fab and process. They are behind in architecture and design. That's what makes AMD have better chips.

Intel has vast architectural coverage in the Xeon server space that no one product from AMD is going to cover overnight, no matter how much any one AMD product cleans up on its primary Intel competitor at the dead center of the datacenter sweet spot.

Intel retains immense architectural equity, but right at the moment, it's strangely absent from the center of the sweet spot.

Intel Expects to Reach Process Parity With 7 nm in 2021, Lead on 5 nm — 4 March 2020

Davis' comments are noteworthy for their overall assessment of Intel's 10 nm node and the company's willingness to be honest about that situation.

As we said back at our analyst day in May of 19: Look, this isn't just going to be the best node that Intel has ever had. It's going to be less productive than 14 nm, less productive than 22 nm ... the fact is that I wanted to be clear what was happening during the 10 nm generation. The fact is, it isn't going to be as strong a node as people would expect from 14 nm or what they'll see in 7 nm.

There seem to be some parallels between the troubles Intel is having on 10 nm and the knock-on effects on its products and some of the issues AMD had with fab production and node progression back over a decade ago, when it still owned its own fabs. ... Unlike AMD in the mid-to-late 2000s, Intel is making record quarterly profits — but new nodes often suffer from yield issues.

Moral of the Intel guidance story: if at first you don't succeed, cross your fingers and lather/rinse/repeat with EUV. Intel's luck might improve at the next node, or then again it might not. Pretending we know how this story is going to turn out is foolish speculation.

I count myself in the camp of regarding the Pentium IV as a crime again humanity, and that's far from Intel's only sin. Maybe one of the most Janus-faced companies in the history of high tech. Every so often a total sociopath in their marketing department manages to grab the corporate reins, and then follows a five-year outbreak of Belgian bowling as the hapless consumer spins round and round in a puddle of their own blood.

Belgian ministers send cyclists crashing — 27 May 2016

Health Minister Maggie De Block was the first to strike, Belgian media reported. Arriving at a meeting in Brussels, De Block opened her car door into a busy bicycle lane, sending a hapless cyclist crashing to the floor. The man was bruised in the fall, according to Belgian media, and De Block said she would look into the incident.

Moments later, it happened again. This time it was Deputy Prime Minister Alexander De Croo who wasn't paying attention, opening his car door and hitting a cyclist. The man received minor injuries.

Typographically, both are wrong. When I read the source code for TeX long ago, the algorithm for handling end-of-sentence space (as opposed to word space) was extremely sophisticated, and it works out to neither one word space, nor two word spaces.

Full stop

There have been a number of practices relating to the spacing after a full stop. Some examples are listed below:

* One word space ("French spacing"). This is the current convention in most countries that use the ISO basic Latin alphabet for published and final written work, as well as digital media.
* Two word spaces ("English spacing"). It is sometimes claimed that the two-space convention stems from the use of the monospaced font on typewriters, but in fact that convention replicates much earlier typography â" the intent was to provide a clear break between sentences. This spacing method was gradually replaced by the single space convention in published print, where space is at a premium, and continues in much digital media.
* One widened space (such as an em space). This spacing was seen in historical typesetting practices (until the early 20th century). It has also been used in other typesetting systems such as the Linotype machine and the TeX system. Modern computer-based digital fonts can adjust the spacing after terminal punctuation as well, creating a space slightly wider than a standard word space.

The real reason the TeX model didn't take the software world by storm is that end of sentence detection is a fairly hard problem: in part because the "." symbol in English text is highly overloaded; in part because sentences also end inside quotations; in part because sentences end with numerous different marks such as ? and ! and also ' and " and sometimes (effectively) : too; and finally, in part because there are many, many languages in the world, and it takes an awfully language toolkit to reliable detect end-of-sentence in all those languages (if their typesetting practice even cares).

On the other hand, you can just format everything in some disgusting, undersized hipster Helvetica, paying no attention to sentence-ending space adjustment, and be done with the entire issue.

That doesn't make it right, though. (Before the era of tiny, retina displays, horrible Helvetica also tended to solve display resolution problems, too. By the time we got those pixels back, Helvetica had acquired stylistic associations, so we remain fairly wedded to this).

So far as I'm concerned, Donald Knuth ended the word space debate once and for all in the early 1980s.

Then the world went "aw, shucks, Don, what about the rest of us ignorant mortals?" And Don answered back, if you can't or won't eat chocolate layer-cake, you can always try Helvetica.

One point I will make against Don is that full-justification makes little sense for most informal communications. Part of the reason why Don put so much effort in stretchable sentence space was to make formatting fully justified text less horrible.

It turns out that some English sentences can not be fully justified to certain line lengths without looking ugly (too dense, too thin, too much in contrast with the previous and next line). In his own books, Don actually rewrote every sentence that generated a over/under-full hbox error. (These typically occur early in paragraphs, before there's much degree of freedom to accommodate what comes next; TeX uses a fancy dynamic programming algorithm to take account of the whole paragraph all at once.)

Now there's a quality-control process that's not going to scale to your average website monkey if I've ever seen one.

Are you absolutely positive that these technical proposals aren't just stalking horses for what could end up evolving into exactly the kind of adverse scenario you depict as having emanating from the "fears of random people"?

China's "New IP" proposal to replace TCP/IP has a built in "shut up command" for censorship — 3 April 2020

Oxford Information Labs has prepared a research report for the NATO that does not look kindly on the "New IP" proposal or the breakneck pace at which it is being rushed through the approval process.

The report authors from Oxil spoke with and provided an advance copy of the NATO report to Infosecurity. Oxil summed up the problem with New IP concisely:

"New IP would centralize control over the network into the hands of telecoms operators, all of which are either state run or state-controlled in China. So, internet infrastructure would become an arm of the Chinese state."

None of these people are cowering randos: Our team

Another metaphor: covertly embedding SMR into a NAS drive is not that dissimilar to what Boeing did with their flight-control software.

You don't need to assemble a special work detail to listen to your customers to discover that the crowd who purchases Red drives for generic NAS applications (not to mention ZFS in particular) are going to lose their shit over covert SMR. You simply need to be in the disk drive business for more than a week, and pull you head out of your ass. Western Digital was founded in 1970. By my reckoning that's more than a week. This leaves only the other term ...

Inadvertently adding SMR to a RAIDZ vdev is equivalent to voluntarily swallowing a bouncing Betty laced with cyanide.

But have no fear—and pay no attention to the rank, insignia, colour of the uniform, or ostensible application category—if the Western Digital product monograph specifies a rotational rate of negative 500 RPM it may cause loss of life (and pool) if installed into a ZRAID vdev.

You see, you merely have to decipher a relatively primitive bootlace code when you read these product monographs, and then Bouncing Bob's your Uncle.

———

Just to be clear, the fundamental problem with SMR is not the compromised write performance under many workloads. It's not even messing around with data locality that you file system might have been carefully tuned to achieve. The fundamental problem is that SMR adds a complex firmware layer between ZFS and the underlying storage in the macroscopic time domain. Avoiding extra layers of complex firmware is why you configure any hardware RAID controller you might encounter as a plain JBOD.

Even if this complex firmware holds up the appearance of being a relatively normal drive under low-intensity workloads most of the time, it surely won't hold up to this illusion under a suddenly frantic resilver event. Or a double resilver event, because your first resilver is taking a month instead of the expected 48 hours.

With covert SMR (rhymes with "sneer"), you can't even be sure that two identical drives installed into the same mirror vdev will end up with remotely similar data layouts on platter. Maybe your drive-write performance test on one drive lasted 0.1 s longer on one drive than the other before you created the mirror vdev. Those two drives will never have the same layout ever again per the complex intervening firmware. Now when you do your weekly scrub, the iometer on both drives fluctuates wildly when attempting to scrub the same portion of the storage data content. Does this average out by the end, so that one drive doesn't end up being much slower than the other to complete a full scrub? Who the faff knows? And who the faff wants to even think about this scenario while non-SMR drives continue to exist in the marketplace?

I understand that SSD drives also have a complex firmware latency. But at least in the SSD case, that firmware is only concealing access latencies that differ in microseconds from block to block, rather than many milliseconds. Plus the scrubs and rebuilds are much fast relative to the underlying device failure rates, the capacities are far smaller making backup in depth far more convenient, and you fundamentally know what beast you're up against before someone taps you on the should and your career takes a sudden, ominous turn.

———

Minion #1: Hey, you know that resilver that began on Friday that we figured would be almost done today? Why is it now only 5% finished?

You: Ha ha ha. You're shitting me, right?

Minion #1: No, I'm not shitting you at all.

You: Oh, come on, these are good Red drives from Western Digital. They've been in the drive business almost as long as I've been alive.

Minion #1: [Looks at you like the old fossil you truly are.]

Minion #2: [Down the hall.] Ha ha ha ha ha. Hey, grandpa, get with the times—this isn't your father's Western Digital. No matter what you buy from Western Digital, what you get is Bertie Bott's Every Flavour Beans.

You: [To minion #1] Is your bubbling cauldron of mirth down the hall on crack, or what? NAS drives are NAS drives. End of story. There are better NAS drives and worse NAS drives, but no NAS drive on planet earth underperforms a good enterprise tape drive on random IO.

Minion #2: Ha ha ha ha ha. Someone get that old fart a set of steak knives, a rocking chair, and a nice lawn to lord over.

You: [To minion #1] Is she talking to me? When I grew up, we used to have a saying that no-one ever got fired for buying IBM. Gradually the world changed, and you could get fired for buying just about anything if you weren't paying attention to your application category. She thinks I'm going to get fired for purchasing a mainstream, branded NAS product from a $12 billion corporation with fifty years in the drive business for use in a NAS appliance?

Minion #2: [Still at the other end of the hall] Haven't you even heard of Slashdot, you old goat? Half of this year's Red product line was conceived by the WickeD Red Pirate Roberts.

Minion #1: [after quickly glancing down at phone] I just got a txt with the word "wicked" spelled the capital letters at both ends.

You: Ooh, I'm beginning to get a bad feeling about this.

Minion #1: [after another quick glance down at phone] Confirmed. Somehow we configured a 40 TB RAIDZ2 all with the same model number, and three of our drives appear to actually implement SMR under the hood.

You: Kaaaaaahn!

Minion #2: [Echoing back from the other end of the hall] I think you mean "Kaaaaaahned! you old goat.

Minion #1: She's right you know. It's probably not a good idea to swap out the other SMR drives until this resilver finishes ... and that could be next month on present data.

You: Don't be hasty. I've been around the block a time or two, kiddo. We just need to configure an external drive shelf on the external Thunderbolt connector, populate the entire shelf with drives from a drive vendor that doesn't suck ass, and then zfs send the whole pool.

Minion #2: Ha ha ha ha. Corporate revenues are down 70% during the coronavirus plague, you old goat. I doubt you could get a purchasing approval for a multi-colour Bic pen in under two weeks.

You: Not a problem. I'll procure a spare shelf off and some decent used drives off of eBay on my own card, and carry the debt myself until this ridiculous situation blows over.

Minion #1: You're going to put a bunch of used drives into a NAS shelf on a production server?

You: Can't be worse than the shite we're running now, can it? A large set of used HGST heliums from Backblaze and Bob's your Uncle.

Minion #2: Ha ha ha ha. Western Digital bought HGST back in 2012, you old goat.

Minion #1: Yeah, that would be quite the shelf, because pre-2012 HGST drives won't be large. Plus, I've heard Backblaze really beats their drives to shit before they swap them out.

You: Oh come on. Where's you spirit of adventure? Would you rather have a Toyota LandCruiser 70 from 1984 after hard service, or a fresh 2019 Range Rover with an outbreak of shingles on both hands and one foot?

Minion #1: Unfortunately, I don't have Mother Teresa on speed-dial, so that's a tough call.

You: Well I grew up on The Six Million Dollar Man and in my generation we believed in the maxim: "Gentlemen, we could have rebuilt him. We had the technology. We had the capability to make the world's first bionic man. Steve Austin could have been that man. Better than he was before. Better ... stronger ... faster."

Minion #1: Why are you remembering that in the pluperfect?

You: You've actually heard of the pluperfect?

Minion #1: We grew up on the pluperfect. It's the only kind of "perfect" we've ever known.

Minion #2: [Still down the hall] Except for the iPhone's round corners, you mewling, wet-eared, pointy-chinned beatnik Kiddo.

You: I always had a bad feeling about those rounded corners.

Minion #1: Everyone from your generation had a bad feeling about those rounded corners. That's what made them so damn cool.

You: And now those "rounded corners" have somehow made it onto my production ZFS server, despite my dutiful close-attention to the fine print on every data sheet authored by the WreD Pirate Roberts. How did that happen? How did I finally jump the shark in a New York millisecond? How, how, how ... ?

Minion #1: [climbs onto desk] It's been a privilege to serve with you, O Captain! My Captain![salutes]

Dead Poets Society: Neil Perry Death Scene

Minion #2: [still down the hall] Don't shoot yourself naked, none of us want to see that ...

You: [yelling back down the hall] Don't you worry, I've got a much better idea.

Hanging scene from The Ruling Class

[*] Note the symbolic red jacket.

You: And it will make for some great footage on Instagram.

Birdman gets his robe caught in a door

[*] Note the symbolic shift from a blue to red colour palette signifying loss of control and how quickly our hero ends up out in the streets almost buck naked.

Emma Stone, aka Minion #2, Strikes Back at Birdman's futile obsession with the way things were

Barbra Streisand — The Way We Were

He had been preparing to retire at some point in 2020 until an activist investor surfaced late last year challenging his strategy, so now he has decided to retire in June 2020 rather than some point in 2020.