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A widely cited unofficial rule on the Internet is known as Godwin's Law [1]. In it’s original form this rule states that “As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one“. Mike Godwin noted that “overuse of Nazi and Hitler comparisons should be avoided, because it robs the valid comparisons of their impact“. The purpose of noting and publicising this is to reduce such false comparisons. It’s often used as a rule for conduct in various fora where it’s regarded that if you compare your opponent in a debate to Hitler or unjustly call them a Nazi then the debate is over and you have lost.
In more recent times due to successful application of Godwin’s Rule the frequency of inappropriate comparisons has dramatically decreased. This combined with the small number of people on the net who are interested in discussing historical events that happened ~60 years ago (and the even smaller number of people who are interested in learning about them) means that the possibility of robbing valid comparisons of their impact is small. Now a large part of the use of Godwin’s rule is because it’s regarded as an ad-hominem attack that distracts everyone from serious discussion more than most such attacks. To see examples of this you merely have to do a Google search for “Bill Gates” and “Hitler” (currently 597,000 web pages have both those terms).
Note that the original reason for avoiding such false comparisons is given to sustain the impact of legitimate comparisons. It is quite legitimate to use the term Nazi when describing anyone who wants to implement mass-murder and slavery on a national scale (or any of the other awful things that the Nazis did), or the propaganda and other mechanisms that the NSDAP used to gain power. It is also legitimate to make historical comparisons, comparing Stalin to Hitler is historically valid (both were awful tyrants that committed a similar range of crimes) – I’m not going to compare them in this post but I merely note that such a comparison is valid (and is the subject of much debate by people who are interested in history).
I’ve just had a religious zealot named Elder Dave accuse me of breaching some new version of Godwin’s Law. I believe that my mention of the fact that his religious group (which wants to deny homosexuals the same legal rights as all other people) has some beliefs in common with the Westboro Baptist Church [2] is valid. The Westboro Baptist Church seems to be the leading organisation in the English-speaking world for demanding legislation to discriminate against homosexuals. Anyone else who demands such legislation IS trying to achieve similar aims and should expect this to be noted by everyone who has any knowledge of what is happening in the world.
Religious groups are given a lot of freedom to discriminate internally (EG “Priest” is one of the few jobs that can be denied to a qualified woman without any legal recourse). Also I think that most people will agree that it’s acceptable for them to advocate self-repression (EG the book What Some of You Were [3]). But when they try and get legislation enacted to institutionalise such discrimination I believe that they are going too far.
As for why the 95% of us who aren’t gay should be bothered about this issue, there’s the famous poem by Martin Niemöller which is known by the line “First they came for the Jews” [4] (actually there are a few versions of the poem some of which don’t mention Jews – check the link for details). Here’s another Wikipedia link for the same poem [5].
Today I released new versions of my Bonnie++ [1] benchmark. The main new feature (in both the stable 1.03b version and the experimental 1.93d version) is the ability of zcav to write to devices. The feature in question was originally written at the request of some people who had strange performance results when testing SATA disks [2].
Now I plan to focus entirely on the 1.9x branch. I have uploaded 1.03b to Debian/unstable but shortly I plan to upgrade a 1.9x version and to have Lenny include Bonnie++ 2.0x.
One thing to note is that Bonnie++ in the 1.9x branch is multi-threaded which does mean that lower performance will be achieved with some combinations of OS and libc. I think that this is valid as many applications that you will care about (EG MySQL and probably all other modern database servers) will only support a threaded mode of operation (at least for the default configuration) and many other applications (EG Apache) will have a threaded option which can give performance benefits.
In any case the purpose of a benchmark is not to give a high number that you can boast about, but to identify areas of performance that need improvement. So doing things that your OS might not be best optimised for is a feature!
While on this topic, I will never add support for undocumented APIs to the main Bonnie++ and ZCAV programs. The 1.9x branch of Bonnie++ includes a program named getc_putc which is specifically written to test various ways of writing a byte at a time, among other things it uses getc_unlocked() and putc_unlocked() – both of which were undocumented at the time I started using them. Bonnie++ will continue using the locking versions of those functions, last time I tested it meant that the per-char IO tests in Bonnie++ on Linux gave significantly less performance than on Solaris (to the degree that it obviously wasn’t hardware). I think this is fine, everyone knows that IO one character at a time is not optimal anyway so whether your program sucks a little or a lot because of doing such things probably makes little difference.
At the moment it seems that about half the USB flash devices on sale are listed as “Vista ReadyBoost Ready“. I recently bought an 8G USB device that I returned because it could only sustain 4MB/s writes (not much fun for backing up 4G+ of data). So I’ve been wondering whether I should get a ReadyBoostReady device.
ReadyBoostReady only means that it is faster than other devices in some ways, it has no inherent feature difference. After some searching I found a FAQ about ReadyBoost [1] which explains what it requires.
It seems that ReadyBoost needs “2.5MB/sec throughput for 4K random reads and 1.75MB/sec throughput for 512K random writes“, which isn’t really a lot. About 5-6 years ago I was running some machines with 4 disk RAID-5 arrays that could sustain 3MB/s writes for significantly smaller block sizes (maybe 12K), given that random access is something that disks are really bad at (physical movement of the heads is required) and something that flash is good at) it gives an indication of how low the performance bar is for ReadyBoost.
I’m sure that a device which meets the minimum specs would do some good if you have a single disk that’s not overly fast. But if you have a decent RAID array for swap then I doubt that the minimum requirements for ReadyBoost would give a benefit.
As for doing bulk transfers, it seems that while ReadyBoost Ready devices will have consistent good performance across all their storage (apparently some devices perform better for the first blocks so that people who use FAT based filesystems can get good performance from their FAT) they won’t necessarily have particularly good performance for bulk IO (1.75MB/s is pitiful when you want to copy DVD images).
There are some USB flash devices that are marketted as having high performance and which are supposed to sustain >20MB/s, but I’m unlikely to find them going cheap at my local electronics store. I had hoped that ReadyBoost would be demanding enough that the ReadyBoostReady devices (which aren’t the cheapest flash devices on sale but often aren’t too expensive) would satisfy my requirements.
Shintaro wrote an interesting post about Rakugo (a form of story-telling) and Mottainai (a particular form of gratitude that is now becoming an English word in reference to environmentalism) [1]. My definitions of the two words are poor, I encourage interested readers to read Shintaro’s post for the links.
Recently I had been considering which jobs are most like a senior programmer position in terms of skills and the work environment. It occurred to me that a chess-master has a job that bears some similarities to that of a senior programmer. A chess master might play a Simul [2] which compares to a programmer or sys-admin fixing lots of small bugs at the same time. In a serious chess tournament up to seven hours may be on the time clocks – not an uncommon amount of time taken to find a subtle bug in a program. For quick chess games as little as three minutes may be on the clock for all your moves – similar to the situation where the network goes down and the CEO is watching you fix it. The intellectual abilities for playing chess and programming have many obvious similarities, memorising significant patterns to avoid re-calculation, having a large mental register set to allow considering complex situations or multiple possibilities at the same time, and being able to spend many hours thinking about a problem.
With that in mind one thing that particularly interested me in Shintaro’s post was the reference to a Japanese apprentice system where “They are trained at his masters house from early years maybe after junior-high, living and caring his boss every day life, like Go or Shogi players“. I wonder how this could be used in other cultures and career paths (such as English-speaking countries and computer programming). Probably the “every day life” part wouldn’t be well accepted.
When comparing with the high-school experiences that seem typical of people in the computer industry an apprentice program has a lot to offer. A small amount of pay (as opposed to school-fees) and an environment where laws apply (IE almost no bullying) are both significant benefits.
Anyone who is reasonably intelligent is most likely to find that they can’t learn anything from the teachers in the final years of high-school because most teachers don’t know much about the subjects that they teach and in the instances where the teacher does know more the class environment doesn’t permit teaching more advanced material.
Someone of average intelligence who has worked for 5+ years in an industry can always teach a beginner some useful things so there is some obvious potential to learn.
There is a meme that apprentice programs only apply to trades not intellectual work. This meme is probably correct when applied to many categories of office work but seems obviously wrong when applied to computer work. My observation is that at most places where I have worked there has been a significant amount of time from the most productive, skilled, and highly paid people spent on tasks that are way below their skill level – and often requiring skills that they don’t have. One example is when I was working for an ISP in a senior sys-admin position, when things really went wrong on the network I was usually the person to fix them – but I spent moderate amounts of time fixing hardware problems with desktop PCs and some time fixing Windows networking issues (of which I know little). Some of the problems I fixed could have been fixed by a 16yo apprentice who would probably have taken less time to fix them while also having a much lower hourly rate – and in some cases may have done a better job).
I’m not sure that having an apprentice assigned to an individual programmer would work well, but having one per team should.
I have previously written about how to get the benefits of a university education without attending university [3] so I don’t think that the inability of such apprentices to attend university would necessarily be a problem.
Cory Doctorow wrote an interesting article about social networking [1]. One of his points is “Imagine how creepy it would be to wander into a co-worker’s cubicle and discover the wall covered with tiny photos of everyone in the office, ranked by “friend” and “foe,” with the top eight friends elevated to a small shrine decorated with Post-It roses and hearts“, another concerns the issue of forced “friends” where colleagues and casual acquaintances demand to be added to a friends list.
He speculates that the reason for social networking systems to be a fad is that once too many people you don’t really like force themselves into your friends list then you will feel compelled to join a different service.
I believe that the practice of ranking friends is simply a bad idea and wonder whether anyone who has completed high-school has ever used it seriously. If you publicly rank your friends then you will alienate other friends (particularly any who might have ranked you more highly than you ranked them). Everyone who has used social networking systems has discovered the pressure to avoid alienating people that you don’t actually like. It seems obvious that alienating people who you do like is even more of a problem.
In my previous post about Better Social Networking [2] I suggested having multiple lists on your social networking server that are published to different people. That would allow segregating the lists as a way of dealing with some demands to be listed. People who are associated with work (colleagues, managers, and in an example Cory used students at a school where a teacher worked) would be on a work list. The work list would point to the work profiles of other people which would match whatever the standards are for the industry in question (which would still allow quite a range, the standards for sys-admins of ISPs differ significantly from those for primary school teachers). I’m sure that someone who worked for an ISP in Amsterdam would understand that a work-based friend request made to someone who teaches primary school in a part of the world that is religiously conservative would understand why that request would be declined (but the same person might add them to a personal friends list).
Another way of alleviating such problems is to not require that listing be bi-directional. Current social networking systems involve one party making a friend request to another which is listed as pending in the GUI for both parties. The options are to either leave it in that state (which is an annoyance) or reject it (which may cause offence). With a uni-directional listing one party would add the other and hope for the best. If they aren’t obsessive about such things they may not even notice that the other party didn’t reciprocate. Also it would allow for famous people receiving links from many people to their public profile without any expectation of reciprocation. Of course a distributed social networking system such as I suggest would inherently have uni-directional links as there would be no central repository to force them to be all bi-directional.
The web site www.CheatNeutral.com offers cheaters the possibility of paying single or monogamous people to offset their cheating. It’s an interesting spin on the carbon trading schemes that are on offer.
www.greenmaven.com – a Google search site for Green related information. www.greenerbuildings.com – information on designing buildings to be “Green”.
Binary adding machine using marbles and wood-work [1]. I’ve just been reading Accelerando by Charles Stross [2], in that book he describes the Pentagon using Babbage machines to avoid the potential of electronic surveillance.
Alan Robertson has just started a blog [3]. He is a lead developer in the Linux-HA (Heartbeat) [4] project (which incidentally lists SGI as a friend due to the work that Anibal and I did [5]).
Here is an interesting article about light pollution [6]. It covers the issues of observing the stars, saving energy, and reducing crime through effective lighting.
I recently was giving away some old P3 and P4 machines and was surprised by the level of interest in P4 machines. As you can see from my page on computer power use [1] the power use from a P4 system is significantly greater than that of a P3. The conventional wisdom is that the P4 takes 1.5 times as many clock cycles to perform an instruction as a P3, the old SPEC CPU2000 results [2] seem to indicate that a 1.5GHz P4 will be about 20% faster than a 1GHz P3, but as the P4 has significantly higher memory bandwidth the benefit may be significantly greater for memory intensive applications.
But generally as a rule of thumb I would not expect a low-end P4 desktop system (EG 1.5GHz) to give much benefit over a high-end P3 desktop system (1GHz for a desktop), and a 2GHz P4 server system probably won’t give any real benefit over a 1.4GHz P3 server system. So in terms of CPU use a P4 doesn’t really offer much.
One significant limitation of many P3 systems (and most name-brand P3 desktop systems) is the fact that the Intel chipsets limited the system to 512M of RAM. This really causes problems when you want to run Xen or similar technologies. I have a few P4 1.5GHz systems that have three PC-133 DIMM sockets allowing up to 768M of RAM (it seems that PC-133 DIMMs only go up to 256M in size – at least the ones that cost less than the value of the machine). Another issue is USB 2.0 which seems to be supported on most of the early P4 systems but none of the P3 systems.
512M of RAM is plenty for light desktop use and small servers, my Thinkpad (my main machine) had only 768M of RAM until very recently and it was only Xen that compelled me to upgrade. The extra power use of a P4 is significant, my 1.5GHz P4 desktop systems use significantly more power than a Celeron 2.4GHz (which is a much faster machine and supports more RAM etc). Low-end P4 systems have little going for them except for 50% more RAM (maybe – depends on how many sockets are on the motherboard) and USB 2.0.
So it seems strange that people want to upgrade from a P3 system to a P4.
Serious server rooms have large (and expensive) air-conditioning and filtering systems. Most “server rooms” however are not like that, often it’s just some space in a store-room, sometimes near printers (which are a source of air pollution [1]).
The servers that are stored in serious server rooms have air filters as a standard feature. For small server installations it’s often a desktop PC used as a server which has no filters (and often lacking other server features such as ECC RAM). Recently Dell in Australia started selling low-end PowerEdge servers for $450 plus delivery (similar machines to the $800 Dell servers I previously blogged about [2]). Also refurbished machines from HP and IBM can often be purchased at auction for similar prices.
Even if you have a proper server with filters on all air inlets it’s still a benefit to have reasonably clean air in the server area. A few years ago I bought four Sunbeam HEPA [3] air filters for my home to alleviate allergy problems. I’ve had one running 24*7 in my main computer area for most of the time since then. As well as wanting to keep my machines free of dust I have the extra issue of machines that I buy at auction which often are filled with dust – the process of cleaning them frees some dust in the air and it’s good to have a filter running to remove it.
Excessive dust in the air can prevent cooling fans from operating and cause damage to hardware and loss of data. Of course the really good servers have fan speed sensors that allow the CPU to be throttled or the machine to be halted in case of severe problems. But for desktop machines you often only have the temperature control mechanisms that are built in to the CPU and sometimes machines just start having memory errors when the fan malfunctions and the machine gets hot.
As one of the biggest problems facing server rooms is heat dissipation I decided to measure my air filters and see how much electricity they use (it seems reasonably to assume that all their energy eventually gets converted to heat). I’ve now got a blog page about power use of items related to computers [4]. My air filters take 114W when on the highest speed and 13.9W when on the lowest. Initially I was a little surprised at the figure for the high speed, but then I recalled that the energy required to move air is proportional to the speed cubed. I’ll just have to make sure I don’t leave an air filter on overnight in summer…
I’m now going to recommend such filters to some of my clients. Spending $400 on an air filter is nothing compared to the amount of money that a server failure costs (when you have expensive down-time and pay people like me to fix it).
I am a member of the Greens. The main reason for joining them is that they have principles. The Greens Charter [1] guides everything, policy must comply with the charter and candidates agree to uphold the policies which have been ratified if they get elected. There are no “non-core promises“.
The policies of the Greens are all positive. The major parties have some mean-spirited policies that aim to help Australians by making things worse for people in other countries. Unfortunately for them the world is very inter-connected at the moment, so it’s difficult to harm other countries without harming yourself in the process.
As you might expect the Greens are very positive towards the environment. Anyone who expects to live for more than 30 years (or who has children) should be very concerned about this. Currently even the most cautious estimates of the scope of the climate change problem by reputable scientists suggest that there will be serious problems in the next few decades. If you are young or have children then you should vote for the Greens (that covers most people).
Many religious groups have determined that God wants them to help the environment, for example the Australian Anglican Church General Synod 2007 resolved that “the Anglican Communion’s 5th mark of mission to safeguard the integrity of creation and sustain and renew the life of the earth; and recognises that human activity contributing to Climate change is one of the most pressing ethical issues of our time”. Anglicans and believers in other religions that have similar ideas should vote for the Greens.
The Greens have policies that are very positive towards minority groups. If you are not a straight-white-Christian then this is a strong reason for voting for the Greens. If you are a straight-white-Christian but have compassion for others (as advocated in the Bible) then again voting for the Greens is the right thing to do.
The Greens policies are humane towards people in unfortunate situations, including drug addicts, the mentally ill, and the unemployed. When considering who to vote for keep in mind that at some future time you or a close friend or relative may fall into one of those categories.
Finally the Howard government’s industrial relations legislation is very bad for the majority of workers. If the Greens get the balance of power in the Senate then they will be able to get such laws significantly changed or removed.
The Greens election web site is here [2].
As an aside, I never liked Paul Keating (our last Prime Minister) until I read his op-ed piece in The Age about John Howard [3].
Also here is an interesting article on preferences and why the major parties want people to misunderstand the Australian electoral system [4]. In summary if you vote for the Greens as your first preference and they don’t win, then your second preference gets counted, and if that party doesn’t win then the third preference counts, etc. So if you have the two major parties in last and second-last position then your second-last preference may make an impact on the result! Putting Greens in the #1 position does not “waste” your vote. Parties get government funding based on the number of #1 votes, vote for the Greens as your first preference and you effectively give them $2 for their next campaign. Finally when a party wins an election they immediately look at where the #1 votes went and often adjust their policies to please the people. Vote #1 for the Greens and if Labour wins they will have more of an incentive to adopt policies that are similar to those of the Greens.
As mentioned in my previous post [1] the government is using our money to advertise its policies. I previously covered the “Internet as a threat to children” issue, the other big one is drugs.
The first significant message in the “Talking with your kids about drugs” document concerns the criminal penalties for drug use. That could largely be removed if the penalties were dramatically decreased and if hard drugs were administered to registered addicts for a nominal fee. Forcing addicts to commit crimes or work as prostitutes to pay for their addiction just doesn’t work, economically or socially.
The next message is that parents should be involved in their children’s lives and be trusted enough that their children will accept advice. A large part of this would be related to the amount of time spent with children which is determined to a large degree by the amount of time not spent working. As I mentioned in my previous post it seems that the actions of the Howard government over the last 10 years has made things significantly worse in this regard by forcing more parents to spend large amounts of their time working (including situations where both parents work full-time) just to pay for a home.
One notable omission from the document was any mention of alcohol problems (apart from when mixed with illegal drugs). By many metrics alcohol causes more harm than all the illegal drugs combined. The US attempted to prohibit alcohol and failed dismally, and alcohol is legal in most countries. The government doesn’t want to adopt a harm-minimisation approach to drugs (which bears some similarities to the approach taken to alcohol) and therefore is stuck trying to claim that one somewhat addictive mind-altering substance is somehow inherently different to all other mind-altering substances.
The document provided no information at all on harm minimisation. The idea seems to be that it’s better for some children to die of overdoses than for other children to potentially be less scared of the consequences of drug use. The problem is that children are very bad at assessing personal risk so they simply won’t be scared off. It’s best to provide equipment for testing drug purity etc to reduce the harm.
The list of reasons for young people to try drugs starts with “availability and acceptability of the drug“, Parmesan cheese is more available and acceptable than any drug but I’ve been avoiding it at every opportunity since I was very young. :-#
More serious reasons in the list include “rebellion“, “depression“, “as a way to relax or cope with stress, boredom or pain“, and “to feel OK, at least temporarily (self-medication)“. But predictably there was nothing in the document about why children might consider that their life sucks to badly that they want to rebel in that way, be depressed, stressed, bored, or in pain to a degree that drugs seem like the solution. It seems unreasonable to believe that the school system isn’t a significant part of the cause of teenage problems. Flag poles for flying the Australian Flag [2] seems to be John Howard’s idea of a solution to school problems. I believe that the solution to school problems (both in terms of education and protection of children) is smaller classes, better supervision, an active program to eradicate bullying, and better salaries for teachers. I’ve written about related issues in my school category. I believe that the best thing for individual families to do is to home-school their children from the age of 12 instead of sending them to a high-school (which is much more damaging than a primary school).
Another significant issue is drug pushers. They are usually drug users who try to finance their own drug use by selling to others. As most drug users get the same idea there is a lot of competition for sales and therefore they try to encourage more people to use drugs to get more customers. In the Netherlands, Coffee Shops sell a range of the milder drugs at reasonable prices which removes the street market and therefore the pushers. When drugs are produced commercially the quality is standardised which dramatically reduces the risk of infection and overdoses. When drugs are sold by legal companies they are not sold to children (a typical pusher can be expected to sell to anyone).
The document has 3.5 pages of information about some of the illegal drugs (out of 23 pages total). They include all the most severe symptoms that most users don’t encounter. If someone reads that information and then talks to a drug user they will be laughed at. They also group drugs in an unreasonable way, for example listing “marijuana” and “hashish” as synonyms and list problems that are caused indirectly. If alcohol was included in that list it would include beer and methylated spirits (ethanol mixed with methanol to supposedly make it undrinkable – rumoured to be consumed by homeless people) in the same section and imply that blindness and other bad results of drinking “metho” apply to beer. It would also say that alcohol kills many people through drunk-driving and is responsible for rapes, wife-beating, and any other crime which can statistically shown to be more likely to be committed by a drunk person.
A final issue with the document is that it advises parents to be “informed, up-front and honest” when talking to their children about drugs. Unfortunately the document itself doesn’t demonstrate such qualities. By omitting all information on harm minimisation it is not being up-front at all, and by not mentioning alcohol it’s simply being dishonest. Anyone who tries to convince someone else to not use illegal drugs can expect to hear “but you drink alcohol” as the immediate response from the drug user, it’s necessary to have sensible answers to that issue if you want to be effective in discouraging drug use.
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