I just gave someone at work this advice today, so I might as wellrepeat it here. We were bringing up a new machine, a nice dualprocessor server with a hardware RAID-1, and I suggested to him thatbefore he even thought about putting it into production he take theopportunity to yank one of the drives and see what happened.

There are occasions where you would do this to a machine inproduction, but not very many. New hardware (or idle hardware) isabout your only chance

People like to talk about reliability and availability, and throwaround terms like '5-nines availability' and so on. You may have heardthis from server salescritters (alongside their attempts to sell you redundant power supplies ).

At the same time, what the terms really imply is not intuitive andis often surprising, especially at the high end.

The following chart comes from my co-worker John Calvin:

One of the best things I've ever done to improve my web browsingexperience is very simple: I turned Javascript off almost from itsintroduction.

Turning Javascript off has a host of benefits, because Javascript onweb pages has always been primarily used either for evil or forflashy, distracting user interface elements. With it off I avoid allof that, including popups and links that hide where they're actuallygoing to. Among other advantages, this makes it much lessnerve-wracking to go to strange new

There's a lot of useful mailing lists out there; far too many toactively subscribe to, especially if they're all going to funnel intoyour inbox. And often you're not sure how interested you're going tobe in a particular mailing list, or it's only interesting some of thetime or for a few discussions. Plus, let's be honest here: most emailclients don't deal very well with lots of email messages.

Enter gmane.org , where