aristarchus's Friends

If minimum wage is so good...

Posted by khallow on Thursday May 28 2015, @03:27AM (#1255)
1 Comment

This story encapsulates the bullshit that surrounds current "living wage" proposals. A labor union leader fights hard to get a $15 per hour minimum wage implemented in Los Angeles and then turns around and seeks an exemption from the law for his labor union.

Aside from the enormous hypocrisy of this effort which indicates to me that maybe having a lower minimum wage is not that big a deal for certain supporters of the law, we have a demonstration here that someone thinks that being able to work for less is advantageous to the members of his labor union. If that is true, then shouldn't it also be true for those who don't have to comply with the law by virtue of living somewhere else or who can hire machines and robots instead of people? Why should we expect that high minimum wage laws won't cause high unemployment when even some of the supporters feel otherwise?

It'll also be interesting to see if this greed undermines the effort to increase minimum wages elsewhere in the region.

Yooman Rights

Posted by turgid on Monday May 11 2015, @08:23PM (#1213)
0 Comments

Yooman rights? Yooman rights! I don't need no yooman rights! I ain't foreign and I ain't done nuffink wrong.

Michael "Teachers are the Enemies of Promise" Gove is going to give us a nice British Bill of Rights instead. They did promise to stop their supporters voting for Nigel and the bigots. Nigel didn't resign after all.

And Gove is going to be working with Theresa May, who will be pushing through the Snoopers Charter.

And the kickings are about to begin.

General Election's a Comin'

Posted by turgid on Tuesday May 05 2015, @07:58PM (#1198)
2 Comments

Here in Blighty, we're having a General Election on Thursday 7th May.

This time around, the Official Monster Raving Loony Party has conceded that it will probably lose votes to UKIP.

Oh dear.

OLD DAYS

Posted by Jeremiah Cornelius on Saturday April 25 2015, @03:54PM (#1181)
2 Comments

Your friends

Irritable Duncan Syndrome

Posted by turgid on Monday March 30 2015, @09:16PM (#1120)
2 Comments

Irritable Duncan "Trust-me-I-know-what-I'm doing" Syndrome reckons that, when he and the rest of the Conservative Party are re-elected in this May's General Election, he'll make £12 billion (US$17.8 billion) of welfare cuts but he won't tell us before the election what these cuts will be, Allegedly, it's "Not relevant."

There aren't that many poor, sick, disabled and needy left un-kicked, but it's highly amusing that thousands of people in one of the world's most highly-developed countries are having to resort to food banks.

Goodness only knows how much worse it will get if the loony right UKIP get some seats. Anyone but an imbecile can see that they'd vote with the Conservatives on many issues or even form a coalition.

So hurry up and vote Tory to keep the hopeless, sneering socialists down.

God save the Queen etc.

Is Google now an arm of the U.S. State Department?

Posted by Jeremiah Cornelius on Wednesday March 18 2015, @09:22PM (#1089)
7 Comments

http://antiwar.com/blog/2015/03/18/google-disables-all-ads-on-antiwar-com/

This morning (3/18/15) we received a note from Google Adsense informing us that all ads for our site had been disabled. Why? Because of this page showing the horrific abuses committed by U.S. troops in Iraq at Abu Ghraib.

This page [Abu Ghraib photos] has been up for 11 years. During all that time Google Adsense has been running ads on our site – but as Washington gets ready to re-invade Iraq, and in bombing, killing, and abusing more civilians, they suddenly decide that their "anti-violence" policy, which prohibits "disturbing material," prohibits any depiction of violence committed by the U.S. government and paid for with your tax dollars. This page is the third-most-visited page in our history, getting over 2 million page views since it was posted.

To say this is an utter outrage would be an understatement: it is quite simply the kind of situation one might expect to encounter in an authoritarian country where state-owned or state-connected companies routinely censor material that displeases the government.

Is Google now an arm of the U.S. State Department?"

Poll follow-up: Oldest storage you currently USE?

Posted by drussell on Thursday March 12 2015, @08:28AM (#1073)
15 Comments

The recent poll topic and my current project got me thinking about what kinds of (perhaps to some, seemingly ancient) storage technologies people still actually USE, say, on a daily basis?

I'm currently rotating out some old SCSI disks from my servers as a matter of routine maintenance but, get this, replacing them with the same make and model of disk drive after more than a DECADE of operation. :)

About 17 years ago, I was already using SCSI disks for most of my important or high-performance personal and server duties. Some Quantum Atlas 2GB and a few Seagate 4GB and 9.1GB Barracudas were already in the "stable" of disks (remember, this was a time where SCSI disks were still extremely expensive and most of mine were bought second-hand) and I had the opportunity to purchase still-sealed 10-pack boxes of factory-refurbished Seagate ST19171WC for a reasonable price that were surplus EMC Corp. warranty-exchange disks, so I picked up four or five boxes.

I've been using these for all my important server system disks ever since. Since they were refurbished, I've always used Jörg Schilling's excellent (but certainly old-school) sformat utility to do my own LLF and a full 14-pass read/write verify (pattern test with C6DEC6DE/6DB6DB6D/00000000/FFFFFFFF/AAAAAAAA/55555555/4A536368) before I put them in operation. I've (knock-on-wood) yet to have a single one of them that passed that test fail in actual operation. I've had a few out of that lot NOT pass the test and be shelved, and a couple more that passed but made funny noises or something so never got used. Maybe three or four, perhaps five have been bad out of the box so far? I've also sold a few of these fully tested ones over the years to people for ciritical things like POS system server disks, etc. It looks like I still have two more un-opened boxes of them left. :)

That was, or is turning out to be, a lifetime-buy. I'm pretty sure I'm as stocked-up as I'll ever need to be on 9.1GB Seagate Barracuda 7200 RPM SCSI disks. :)

I just ran out of ones I had tested the last time I tested a batch, (in 2002 for goodness sakes,) so I pulled the last five out of the currently open box and they're just finishing up testing now (it takes the better part of a day, and these are disks that are so small you can read or write the whole disk in about 12 minutes). Each one gets put into a DEC Storageworks BA350 "canister", tested thoroughly using sformat, then labelled with the disk model number, sequence (these next three will be ST19171WC numbers 24-26,) and serial number then it's ready to be put into service.

Why am I still using such ancient disks, you ask? Because they're SO DAMN RELIABLE!

Check out this SMART data from one of the ones I'm rotating out of active service:

Device: SEAGATE SX19171W Version: 9D32 Serial number: LA504199 Device type: disk Local Time is: Thu Mar 12 00:15:45 2015 MDT Device supports SMART and is Enabled Temperature Warning Disabled or Not Supported SMART Health Status: OK Elements in grown defect list: 0 Vendor (Seagate) cache information Blocks sent to initiator = 663,190,551 Blocks received from initiator = 4,197,805,002 Blocks read from cache and sent to initiator = 74,883,847 Number of read and write commands whose size <= segment size = 427,411,568 Number of read and write commands whose size > segment size = 74,334 Vendor (Seagate/Hitachi) factory information number of hours powered up = 121,022.40 number of minutes until next internal SMART test = 80
Error counter log:
Errors corrected by ECC (fast): 42,800 (read); 0 (write)
Errors corrected by ECC (delayed): 65 (read); 0 (write)
Errors corrected by re-read/writes: 56 (read); 0 (write)
Total errors corrected: 42,921 (read); 714 (write)
Total correction algorithm invocations: 51,869 (read); 1,387(write)
Total uncorrected errors: 17 (read); 3 (write)
Gigabytes processed: 3,124,939.477 (read); 2,149.276 (write)
Non-medium error count: 0
Device does not support Self Test logging

Yes, you read that right.... 121,022.40h of pretty much contunuous operation (!) AND still going strong... AND this is in a server!

This drive only had a few thousand hours on it when I got it and it was a fairly early one to be put into operation, so almost 14 years of continuous operation!

Now, in my humble opinion, that's downright impressive. :)

That drive was even one that was moved with the system powered on and running from one server room in one building to another server room in another building when we moved offices so I wouldn't ruin my >1000 day server uptime... It was only offline from the internet for about 20 minutes. :)

At about 3am, those (I think there were three) servers and StorageWorks disk racks were un-racked, loaded onto a trolley cart, along with a big UPS then unplugged from the internet, wheeled to the elevator, down to the van, loaded up, driven over to the new office, unloaded onto the trolley, wheeled to the elevator, up to the new server room, plugged into the waiting switch port and the command run to re-route those IPs to that leased line from the other. Only then were they re-racked at the new location... All with the power applied, though I think I did spin down all except the running system disks for the actual van ride but this one is one of the system boot disks.

Ahh, the fun we self-administered-network System Operators have when we go to ridiculous lengths to out-do even ourselves. :)

THAT'S why all my important boxen still have an old Adaptec, Tekram or QLogic SCSI card in them, even if it's in the lone PCI slot they still put on a motherboard these days, and a good ol' DEC StorageWorks disk rack attached to them (where I can easily plug in one of my tape drives, etc. too, very handy, those old StorageWorks BA350 beasts.) They may be alongside 12 x 2.0TB SATA drives in RAID arrays providing most of the actual storage, but the boot disks, the logs, the home directories, my personal files and important stuff? Still somewhere on some spinning rust on an "obsolete" parallel-SCSI disk. They're awfully slow by today's standards but still plenty quick for many applications, especially when you stripe across several disks.

The majority of them are those 9.1GB Barracudas but I'm also still running some 72.8GB Cheetahs, some 36.4GB Fujitsu 10Ks and a few really old 4GB, 2GB and I even just noticed I still have a vintage DEC RZ26L with the FreeBSD ports tree and /usr/obj on it in one of the racks for one of the backup mail servers. LOL, that one is a 1GB, probably a Quantum drive assembly and FAR too old to have SMART capabilities so I have no idea of the number of hours on it. LOTS! It deserves to be retired and put on a shelf with all my <GB CDC WRENs and 2-3GB Seagate Elites (5.25" Full-Height SCSI space-heaters for those of you who don't know what those are,) or perhaps encased in lucite and enshrined or something.

Well, these next three disks are on pass 13 of 14 in the verify cycle so I'll conclude this session of Vintage-Tech-Memory-Lane and get ready to move some disks.

If you have similar stories of ancient storage technology still in regular use, please share below!

eBayed - Omidyar's Top 10

Posted by Jeremiah Cornelius on Tuesday March 03 2015, @06:49PM (#1052)
1 Comment

10 Things Every Fearless Adversarial Investigative Reporter Should Know About Pierre Omidyar

1. Pierre Omidyar, his wife, and his top Omidyar Network director have logged in over a dozen visits to the Obama White House to visit senior officials and members of Obama’s National Security Council.

2. Between 2011-2013, Omidyar Network co-funded with USAID regime-change groups in Ukraine that organized the 2014 Maidan revolution. In India, the head of Omidyar Network’s operation, Jayant Sinha, concurrently worked for the far-right BJP Party leader Narendra Modi helping him take power in 2014, after which Modi appointed the Omidyar Network partner as his junior finance minister.

3. Pierre Omidyar is a free-market libertarian loon who told Nobel Prize winner Mohammed Younus he refused to donate to the poor unless he could personally profit off of it. A few years later, hundreds of poor rural Indians committed suicide to avoid debt collectors working for one of Omidyar’s for-profit microfinance lenders.

4. Omidyar is the chairman of eBay/PayPal, which boasts of its own private global police force that works “hand in glove with law enforcement agencies,” including the DEA, to whom eBay provides user data “on a silver platter” without subpoenas. Omidyar’s eBay executives boast of arranging thousands of arrests around the world.

5. Although Omidyar allegedly does not interfere in his journalists’ editorial, he does control all hiring and firing, budgets, approval of expenses for taxi rides and cocktails, snuffed months worth of investigative stories from leading investigative journalists, forces editorial staff to attend countless meetings, imposes task-management software on editorial, and “writes more internal messaging than anyone else.” But he does not interfere in editorial.

6. Omidyar believes that journalists should help police arrest sources who leak stolen information from private for-profit companies. Omidyar supported the persecution of the PayPal 14 because he believes that free speech rights should be subordinate to the rights of private enterprise’s mission to maximize profits for shareholders.

7. Omidyar is a committed prepper whose fear of pandemics and epidemics is so great, he has invested large sums into ensuring his own personal food supply, and has buried several months’ worth of food in storage facilities in properties around the world, from Hawaii to Montana, Nevada, and an island off the coast of France. Omidyar keeps a private French jet, and pays a private security detail made up of former Secret Service and State Department officials to help him survive his apocalyptic fantasies.

8. In 2007, Omidyar invested in Maui Land & Pineapple, which was subsequently accused of being part of the largest human trafficking operation ever busted by US federal officials.

9. Omidyar loved Second Life so much he invested in Linden Lab and communicated with its CEO through his Second Life character, “Kitto Mandala,” a tattooed black man who rode a Segway and wore a T-shirt that read “KISS ME I’M LAWFUL EVIL.”

10. Omidyar was investigated by Congress and sued for secretly “spinning stocks” — insider trading on IPOs — with Goldman Sachs. Omidyar was also accused by Craigslist and a Delaware judge of stealing the “secret sauce of Craigslist’s success” and passing those secrets to eBay in violation of contracts, fiduciary duties and securities laws.

Bonus: Pierre Omidyar arranged an interview with two “fiercely independent” journalists on Omidyar’s payroll at The Intercept, in which he revealed to them what tea he drinks in the morning. When asked to list his daily reading habits, The Intercept came in at number five, lower down on his reading list than the New York Times.

Money? It's a Hit.

Posted by Jeremiah Cornelius on Tuesday March 03 2015, @06:20PM (#1051)
0 Comments

Don't give me that do-good, good bullshit.

You can't possibly wrap your mind around how much damage US Defense (sic) and the Pentangle Church of Death is doing to the world and humanity, but you can get a handle on how much it's costing every American taxpayer.
There are 100,000 bank branches in the USA, more or less, and the average bank robbery is $10,000. So if every branch of every bank across the USA was robbed, every day, that would be $1 BILLION a day, or $260 BILLION a year, if every bank branch in every State across the US was robbed, every single work day.
$260 BILLION, keep that in your head.
Don Rumsfeld 'lost track of' $2,300 BILLION during his two terms at Defense (sic) and Panetta 'went missing' $1,000 BILLION during his one term, or about $250 BILLION a year goes running out the bank vault doors of the Pentagon, AWOL, over the razor wire, every single year since the Hanging Chad Coup of 2000!
The equivalent of every bank branch across the US being robbed, every work day, forever.

Thank You Falletinme

Posted by Jeremiah Cornelius on Wednesday February 25 2015, @09:54PM (#1040)
1 Comment

Someone nicely gifted me a subscription to Soylent, in the last day or so. I just noticed, so sorry if there's a delay in ack.

Thanks!

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