Most new products are upgrades of old ones. I don't mean in the senseof upgrade sales (although that too), but in terms of the code they'rebuilt from; they are revisions of existing codebases, not freshlywritten from scratch.

This has extremely rational economic and developmentreasons, as articulated by Joel Spolsky amongothers; there is a lot of money and value in existing codebases. Butignoring all the arguments about cost and captured knowledge and soon, there's another big reason

Recently, we had an interesting fire drill that actually winds up beingthe first decent argument for periodically rebooting good servers thatI've seen.

We have a number of very important servers, the kind of importantservers that are active all the time and that have their downtimescarefully scheduled well in advance. Recently, we (and by this I mean 'aco-worker') had to patch the OS on a couple of them in the pack. Thiswent fine.

As part of patching the OS,

The SMTP listener crashed and was restarted around Wednesday at 2am,so some of the statistics are short this week. That said, this weekwe:

• got 12,378 messages from 234 different IP addresses.
• handled 17,251 sessions from 822 different IP addresses.
• received 87,872 connections from at least 29,223 different IPaddresses since Wednesday at 2am.
• hit a highwater of 6 connections being checked at once, since

One of the under-appreciated areas of writing systems documentation istesting it. And I don't mean proofreading it (although that's necessarytoo); I mean making sure that it is things like comprehensible, clear,correct, and complete.

Testing is vital, because documentation that is incomplete or incorrectis often worse than no documentation at all. Documentation createsconfidence, which means that bad documentation lets people go wrongwith confidence, turning a small mess into a much bigger one. ('Butthe

In another nutshell :

# apt-get install fvwm...Suggested packages:  fvwm-themes m4 menu wm-icons imlib-progsRecommended packages:  fvwm-icons imlib11...

So I abort the apt-get when offered the chance, because I wantthe useful bits too.

# apt-get install fvwm fvwm-icons imlib11 fvwm-themes m4 menu wm-iconsimlib-progs
[...]
Package fvwm-themes is not available, but is referred

The idealist sees events as the result of grand strategies and grandmovements, while the realist sees events as the result of local,lower-level tactical decisions.

Most conspiracy theories are necessarily idealist. Theaphorism 'never attribute to malice that which is adequatelyexplained by stupidity' (sometimes called Hanlon's Razor ) is a realist position.

This says nothing about who is right; sometimes there are conspiracies,but sometimes there are not. (And sometimes there are both local tacticalreasons for things and grand plans;

We got asked this in email recently, so I am going to throwmy answer up here: the quick secret of making bootable USB keys is to know that USB keys are hard drives.

The person who asked the question described what they'd done as:

In short, I've copied the files from the isolinux directory on theinstallation CD to the USB drive, renamed isolinux.cfg to syslinux.cfg,erased isolinux.bin, unmounted the USB drive, and runsyslinux /dev/sda1

As computers (and disk space, and memory, and etc etc) get larger, thequantities that we deal with routinely get bigger too. And when they getbigger, fun things start happening.

Today's fun thing was that I doing some measurements of disk IO speed ona machine with 2 gigabytes of memory. My usual rule of thumb is to workon at least twice the amount of main memory to crush cache effects, whichmeant I was telling my benchmarking program to read and write 4 GB.

Here's a good argument-starting question: which is faster and/orbetter, hardware RAID or software RAID?

A lot of conventional wisdom says hardware RAID, but I mostly disagree.Let's ask the inverse question: how (or when) can hardware RAID befaster than software RAID?

If you're doing RAID-5, the hardware could do XOR faster than your CPUcan. But in modern systems XOR performance is pretty much constrainedby the memory bandwidth, not CPU power. It