Unfortunately, I have backups.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 02:40 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Via Debbye of Being American in T.O. and Kate of Small Dead Animals comes the news that Andrew Coyne is being sued for libel by the Chief of Staff of the Canadian Prime Minister, apparently over this or related items. Robot Guy has more.

A commenter at Small Dead Animals points out that the very first sentence in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms is this:

The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees the rights and freedoms set out in it subject only to such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society.

Mind you, Australia doesn't even have such a charter. Fortunately, our Liberal government is actually liberal, in the classical sense.

Glenn Reynolds seems to have stickied a post regarding the FEC's proposal to regulate bloggers under the Campaign Finance "Reform" Laws. Don't think it can't happen here. Um, there. Wherever.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:20 AM | Comments (8) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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You scored as Materialist. Materialism stresses the essence of fundamental particles. Everything that exists is purely physical matter and there is no special force that holds life together. You believe that anything can be explained by breaking it up into its pieces. i.e. the big picture can be understood by its smaller elements. Materialist 100% Existentialist 75% Modernist 63% Postmodernist 38% Cultural Creative 25% Fundamentalist 25% Idealist 13% Romanticist 0% What is Your World View? (corrected...again) created with QuizFarm.com

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:18 AM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Its rules are simple and cynical. Presume the U.S. government is lying -- particularly when the president is a Republican. Presume the worst about the U.S. military -- even when the president is a Democrat. Add multicultural icing -- allegations by "Third World victims" get revered status, while U.S. statements are met with arrogant contempt. (Yes, it's the myth of the Noble Savage recast.)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 09:56 AM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Wretchard of Belmont Club has a post up discussing exactly this problem.

And Blackavar at Silflay Hraka has an insightful analysis of what went wrong at Bagram.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 09:00 AM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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To venture into the Arab world, as I did recently over four weeks in Qatar, Kuwait, Jordan and Iraq, is to travel into Bush Country. I was to encounter people from practically all Arab lands, to listen in on a great debate about the possibility of freedom and liberty. I met Lebanese giddy with the Cedar Revolution that liberated their country from the Syrian prison that had seemed an unalterable curse. They were under no illusions about the change that had come their way. They knew that this new history was the gift of an American president who had put the Syrian rulers on notice. The speed with which Syria quit Lebanon was astonishing, a race to the border to forestall an American strike that the regime could not discount. I met Syrians in the know who admitted that the fear of American power, and the example of American forces flushing Saddam Hussein out of his spider hole, now drive Syrian policy. They hang on George Bush's words in Damascus, I was told: the rulers wondering if Iraq was a crystal ball in which they could glimpse their future.

(via Roger L. Simon)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:59 AM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Way to straddle the fence:

Your Political Profile

Overall: 70% Conservative, 30% Liberal

Social Issues: 50% Conservative, 50% Liberal

Personal Responsibility: 50% Conservative, 50% Liberal

Fiscal Issues: 100% Conservative, 0% Liberal

Ethics: 50% Conservative, 50% Liberal

Defense and Crime: 100% Conservative, 0% Liberal

How Liberal / Conservative Are You?

(Thanks to Boudicca)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:19 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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avg-cpu:  %user   %nice    %sys %iowait   %idle

           0.42    0.00   60.42   39.16    0.00

Device:            tps    kB_read/s    kB_wrtn/s    kB_read    kB_wrtn

sda            1080.00     69093.05         2.53     328192         12

sdb            1090.53     69793.68         0.00     331520          0

sdc            1110.32     71060.21         0.00     337536          0

sdd            1099.37     70359.58         0.00     334208          0

sde             661.89     42361.26         0.00     201216          0

sdf             647.58     41458.53         0.00     196928          0

sdg             277.68     17771.79         0.00      84416          0

sdh             279.16     17866.11         0.00      84864          0

Thats 400MB/sec of I/O, limited by the PCI connection to the second SATA controller. I have two PCI Express x1 slots, each of which can provide double that bandwidth, assuming I could find a cheap PCI Express SATA card (hah!) which would push my bandwidth up to 500MB/sec, which is as fast as the disks can go.

This isn't a fancy server motherboard either, just an ordinary desktop one. Albeit a nice desktop board.

This is my old system:

avg-cpu:  %user   %nice    %sys %iowait   %idle

           0.40    0.00   43.40   56.00    0.20

Device:            tps    kB_read/s    kB_wrtn/s    kB_read    kB_wrtn

hdc             666.60     42611.20         8.00     213056         40

hdd             673.40     43046.40         8.00     215232         40

hde             445.00     28480.00         0.00     142400          0

hdf             445.00     28480.00         0.00     142400          0

hdg             503.60     32243.20         0.00     161216          0

hdh             503.80     32230.40         0.00     161152          0

Which isn't bad - about 200MB/s - but not in the same class. Here the fault is partly PCI, partly IDE, partly the previous generation disk drives.

My old 120GB IDE drives get around 45MB/s maximum transfer rate. The newer 200GB SATA drives reach 55MB/s, and the brand new 250GB drives can reach 70MB/s.

One interesting thing: The next major advance in hard disk technology is perpendicular recording, where the magnetic domains that hold the data are oriented vertically into the disk rather than longitudinally along the track. If you think of current bits like dominoes lying flat, perpendicular recording makes them stand on end, allowing them to be packed much closer together, up to ten times.

Most previous advances have come by making the overall area of the domains smaller, by making them shorter and packing the tracks closer together. Since the rotational speed of disk drives has increased only slowly, this meant that as the number of tracks increased, the time taken to read an entire disk also increased, climbing from minutes to an hour or more.

Perpendicular recording will increase transfer rates in direct proportion to the size of the disk, avoiding this problem. However, if we do achieve a ten-fold increase in capacity, transfer rates will far exceed even SATA-II's 300MB/s per channel.

Well, darn.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:20 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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avg-cpu:  %user   %nice    %sys %iowait   %idle

           0.00    0.00   27.45   72.55    0.00

Device:            tps    kB_read/s    kB_wrtn/s    kB_read    kB_wrtn

sda               0.00         0.00         0.00          0          0

sdb               0.00         0.00         0.00          0          0

sdc               0.00         0.00         0.00          0          0

sdd               0.00         0.00         0.00          0          0

sde             670.14     42901.80         0.00     214080          0

sdf             662.12     42375.95         0.00     211456          0

sdg             266.73     17070.94         0.00      85184          0

sdh             268.74     17199.20         0.00      85824          0

Two bad things going on here. First, the Sil3114 that provides the four SATA-I ports on my new motherboard is a PCI device, giving a maximum throughput of 133MB/sec (theoretical). It's getting 119MB/sec here, which is actually very good for PCI.

Second, although I'm running the exact same test on all four drives, the first two are giving two-and-a-half times the performance, presumably due to some sort of interrupt or DMA prioritisation.

So far this time it hasn't actually crapped out on me with a flood of spurious errors. We'll see how long that lasts.

Oh yes. I now have eight SATA drives in my new computer, a total of 1.8 terabytes of storage. This wasn't the original plan, and in fact is making things rather difficult, but I couldn't get things to work reliably in the old system.

Meh.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:21 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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They are, unfortunately, pure evil.

I know that the Linux developers are still adding patches to the kernel to work around problems with Silicon Image controllers. And maybe one day they will succeed. Until then, I wouldn't trust them at all. Well, maybe with one disk, if it didn't contain data I cared about, and I had backups of everything.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 04:33 AM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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