Unicode is very big these days, and there are a lot of people who willtell you that Unicode is simple once you take the effort to understandit and that you're a parochial spud if your new program doesn't supportit. Unfortunately, only simple Unicode is easy.

The simple vision of Unicode is that once you have your data inUnicode, you're just dealing with characters and your program canjust do stuff with them as normal. Okay, case and collation is hard , but there

I once quite liked SGI and have been following its slow decline witha certain regret. But I did not expect to see this day come; SGI hasbecome a spammer.

Not directly, of course. Large corporations (which SGI still is, sortof) don't spam people directly. Instead they hire specialized placesto do this for them, like the well known (one could say 'infamous')Responsys Interact.

SGI might argue that we have previously been an SGI customer so theycould spam us

If you're doing performance analysis of a RAID-1 setup, one of theinteresting questions is 'which drive gets read from when?'

(Measuring how balanced the current IO load is is useful, but it doesn'ttell you how a changed load will affect the balance.)

Since seeks are the expensive thing on modern drives, you want yourRAID-1 system to deal in requests, not in individual blocks, and to senda sequence of sequential reads off to the same disk. If

Today I got to run into an interesting performance impact of having aRAID-1 mirror resync running on a big partition of a live system.

An important system was having performance problems today, so we werepoking around it. When we watched the disk statistics, we noticed thatonly the first disk was seeing read traffic; the second disk was loafingalong with just occasional bursts of writes. Looking more closely wenoticed that a RAID-1 resync of a big partition was in progress; becausethe system was loaded