Init is the parent of all processes.

Listening to an increasing number of people babbling about “that amazing Drobo thingy“ is really starting to piss me off. It’s an expensive toy with a simple set of features that any CS major should be able to reproduce in a number of different (and cheaper) ways.

Now, I like numbers (as in facts, not that boring TV series) and having access to a Drobo, I ran a couple of tests. The Drobo is using four 1TB drives, connected to a Debian box, with the data being accessed through a CIFS share (mounted with ‘nounix’ because otherwise it is sloooooow(er)).

There was actually another (reader) process accessing the share in the background and that slowed things down a little bit. The same test with a single connection gives us an astonishing 9.7MB/s (writing) or 13.8MB/s (reading).
And just in case you are curious, the same ‘dd’ commands with 10 concurrent reading connections result on speeds of 2.3kB/s-2.6kB/s. I think it’s faster than a 3.5” floppy, but I’m not sure.

Someone told me “That’s the price to pay for redundancy”. If this is how you feel, please go and kill yourself.

The good news is: it would completely replace my old copy of Sedra and Smith’s “Microelectronics” as a paper weight on the flatbed scanner.

Well, I guess they leave a pretty bad first impression, but then…. they kind of grow on you (I already tried to use C-d on the WordPress text editor 3-4 times by now).

I just found this web page with quite a detailed explanation on the reason behind the “C-x M-c M-butterfly” combos , and thought it was worth sharing with the world.

The link at the bottom, to a page on modernizing Emacs, also raises a few interesting questions (although I happen to like the “*scratch*” buffer).