addie

The problem is that the volume of slop available completely overwhelms all efforts at quality control. Zealotry only goes so far at turning back the tsunami of shite.

Considering the random branches of science that have gone into making better hard drives, I'd be willing to put money on 'understanding dark energy' => 'higher density data storage' as one benefit of the tech.

But yeah, we understand more things, we're in a better position to understand even more things, and some have applications you benefit from every day.

Here in the UK, we usually end up with Aldis and Lidls very near to each other. It makes sense, since they occupy the same kind of 'big warehouse locations in customer shopping estates', although it would be nice to have them a bit more spread out.

That does mean you can get the best of both very easily - Lidl for bread and cooked meat, Aldi for smoked mackerel and potato salad - and have two different 'middle of Lidl' selections of random goods. Absolute result..

Scottish: got the painters in.

Some things cross language boundaries.

Strictly, 'like to eat' and 'like eating' don't mean the same either. 'I (personally) like to eat' and 'I like eating (in general)'. Maybe you're a chef and you enjoy watching others eating? Admittedly, that makes more sense when talking about eg. swimming or cycling, when you may enjoy the sport but not doing the activity.

Nice observations on other ways that English is a mess, though - I'd not appreciated those before. You can make them worse by negating them - all those sentences need 'do' support, with different forms of 'to do' to agree with the rest of the sentence.

Indeed.

In some ways, this kind of thing is ideal for Rust. It's at it best when you've a good idea of what your data looks like, and you know where it's coming from and going to, and what you really want is a clean implementation that you know has no mistakes. Reimplementing 'core code' that hasn't changed much in twenty years to get rid of any foolish overflows or use-after-free bugs is perfect for it.

Using Rust for exploratory coding, or when the requirements keep changing? I think you've picked the wrong tool for the job. Invalidate a major assumption and have to rewrite the whole damn thing. And like you say; an important choice for big projects as choosing a tool that a lot of people will be able to use. And Window is very big.

They're smoking crack, anyway. A million lines per dev per month? When I'm doing major refactoring, a couple thousand lines per week in the same language, mostly moving existing stuff into a new home, is a substantial change. Three orders of magnitude more with a major language conversion? Get out of here.

Yeah yeah, I know RAID.

If OP can't afford the storage for 'just a bunch of disks', then paying twice as much for 100% redundancy in RAID10 is doubly unaffordable.

Also, consider what is being stored here. It's music files that we obtained from a torrent. We need sufficient raw performance to read a few megabytes per minute so we can listen to them. As a bonus, we may wish to upload the torrent again, and can use any spare capacity for that. What benefit are you going to obtain from your very expensive storage solution?

RAID6 can lose any two drives, but at most two. RAID-10 can lose only 1 drive with guaranteed no data loss. Losing two might lose the cluster, if you lose a drive and its mirror. Yes, if you're really lucky, you can lose up to half, but 'feeling lucky' isn't how we plan data storage. Doesn't matter, we've got a backup - download the torrent again ;-)

Looks like you can get refurbished 26TB drives for about £340, so 12 of those. PCIe -> 6x SATA adaptors run you about £40 each. Molex to SATA power adaptors about £5. So £4200 will let you store all that with a bit left over for postage and some duct tape to make a storage bay out of the boxes it all came in.

I'd probably want a few more drives for RAID6 and some hot spares, but if you go JBoD then at least you can just download the torrent again ;-)

The Centos "eight pointed star"?

Menu bar at the top at least makes some sense - it's easier to mouse to it, since you can't go too far. Having menus per-window like Linux, or like Windows used to before big ugly ribbons became the thing, is easier to overshoot. (Which is why I always open my menu bars by pressing 'alt' with my left thumb, and then using the keyboard shortcuts that are helpfully underlined. Window likes to hide those from you now since they're 'ugly', and also makes you mouse over the pretty icons to get the tooltip that tells you what they are, which is just a PITA. Pretty != usable.)

Mac OS has had the menu at the top since before it was a multitasking OS. They had them there on the first Mac I ever used, a Mac Classic 2 back in 1991 or so, and it was probably like that before then too. It's not like they've been 'innovating' that particular feature and annoying their users.

The actual fix is probably 'enable mixed ASCII / Windows-1252 calls to Windows UTF-16 functions', when some strings have different codepages to others', or something silly. But that fix sounds better.

A rising tide lifts all boats - every improvement is welcome

I had 32GB of RAM in my desktop as 4x8GB; one of the sticks failed a couple of years ago, and it was cheaper to replace it with 64GB = 4x16GB than it was to get a replacement 8GB.

That's convenient for work purposes (in fact, I could actually do with more) but massive pointless overkill for most games. Even games which do "big loads" - Witcher 3, say - aren't noticeably quicker from RAM cache than they are off of an NVMe drive.