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As correctly pointed out by cmot [1] my previous post about software RAID [2] made no mention of bus bandwidth.
I have measured the bus bottlenecks of a couple of desktop machines running IDE disks with my ZCAV [3] benchmark (part of the Bonnie++ suite). The results show that two typical desktop machines had significant [...]

Some years ago I worked on a project where software reliability should have been a priority (managing data that was sometimes needed by the police, the fire brigade, and the ambulance service). Unfortunately the project had been tainted by a large consulting company that was a subsidiary of an accounting firm (I would never [...]

Update: Due to the popularity of this post I have created a T-Shirt and put it on sale at http://www.cafepress.com/email_eula .
Update: Unlike most of my blog content I permit anyone to copy most or all of this post for commercial use (this includes blogs with google advertising) as long as they correctly identify me [...]

There is an interesting web site WorseThanFailure.com (with the slogan “Curious Perversions in Information Technology”) that documents amusingly failed projects. The name used to be TheDailyWTF.com but changed due to the idea that for some projects success (interpreted to mean limping along in production) is worse than failure (being scrapped and re-written). I’ve [...]

At this month’s meeting of the Linux Users of Victoria [1] I gave a talk titled Everyone Should Blog (unfortunately the title was missed in the meeting announcement). I’ve been meaning to write about this but was finally prodded into writing by a ProBlogger post about overcrowding in the blog market [2]. Darren [...]

When advogato.org was still cool I signed up to it. It was an interesting research project in skill metrics (determining the rating of people’s coding skills by the votes of others and weighting the votes by the rating of each person), and it was nice to be rated Master soon after I joined. [...]

If you live in a hotel for an extended period of time (which can provide significant career benefits - click on this link for details [1]) the issue of food price and availability is going to concern you.
If you are in a decent hotel you will have a fridge in your room that you can [...]

Recently a user has been asking about SE Linux support in MEPIS [1]. He seems to expect that as the distribution is based on Debian it should have the same SE Linux support as is in Debian.
The problem with derived distributions (which potentially applies to all variants of Debian, Fedora, and RHEL) is that [...]

Is it possible to secure Internet banking with SMS?
As secure tokens are too expensive ($10 or more in bulk) and considered to be too difficult to use by many (most?) customers banks have sought out other options. One option that has been implemented by the National Australia Bank and will soon be available from [...]

Should you use software or hardware RAID? Many people claim that Hardware RAID is needed for performance (which can be true) but then claim that it’s because of the CPU use of the RAID calculations.
Here is the data logged by the Linux kernel then the RAID-5 and RAID-6 drivers are loaded on a 1GHz [...]