Submitted by “Most applications do not deal with disks directly, instead storing their data in files in a file system, which protects us from those scoundrel disks. After all, a key task of the file system is to ensure that the file system can always be recovered to a consistent state after an unplanned system crash (for example, a power failure). While a good file system will be able to beat the disks into submission, the required effort can be great and the reduced performance annoying. This article examines the shortcuts that disks take and the hoops that file systems must jump through to get the desired reliability.”
Very interesting and solid article. Of course it is only of an introductionary level but I can’t imagine which systems administrator couldn’t benefit from a read-through. Thank you for bringing it to my attention.
Well, Its interesting to me to understand the crappy code and config options in server applications that are designed around rotating disks. We only use flash pci-e cards for performance reasons. The real challenge is to then figure out how these options based on rotating disks affect flash that’s still using a traditional file system that also has tweaks and options for rotating disks.
Author is Marshall Kirk McKusic, well known for his work on BSD/FreeBSD and the UFS filesystem. Someone worth listening to.
The linked article is good. I saw it two days ago.
Now… When will Thom Holwerda leave and someone take OSNews back to the good old days of interesting, original, non-dutchy, non-linky, non-bloggy news items and in-depth interviews?
I’m just asking, as the current state is “hey, look ma’, I don’t have time for anything else, so let’s make another lame news syndication web site”
Sad.
Edited 2012-09-09 17:10 UTC
Hi,
It is my fault (not Thom’s), because I haven’t contributed an article to OSnews. Unfortunately I’m not the only person who hasn’t contributed an article to OSnews – it’s a widespread problem.
I just want to thank you Peteo, for all of the well written articles that you have contributed in the past. I can understand how someone like you, who has contributed so many articles, might be a little upset at everyone else who hasn’t.
– Brendan
I’ve submitted ten articles, which makes your sarcasm look really silly (no, not submitted as peteo, since the overlord didn’t like critisism and banned my original account.)
Edited 2012-09-09 17:53 UTC
Hi,
Heh – I took a gamble, and I lost.
In any case, I don’t think it’s fair to blame Thom and only Thom.
Edit: for the content I mean – I have no idea about the “banned original account” thing.
– Brendan
Edited 2012-09-09 17:58 UTC
I tend to blame editors for editorial problems.
Producing original insightful articles, interesting interviews, etc, requires a pretty huge amount of effort.
In practice, the effort our “editor” is willing to put in is that of linking to articles and occasionally making (to me, pretty nonsensical) comments on them.
That’s not an edited news site. It’s a blog.
If Thom called OSNews his personal (stolen) blog, then fine. Then that’s what it is.
I don’t think we should hang Thom until there is a replacement and I don’t see one in the near future.
He may hate my favorite brand, but he has my vote to stay on.
Thom probably doesn’t have much time, but compared to the other OSNews members he spends by far the most time on this site. Without Thom there would be no OSNews.
My guess is this site has a few thousand active readers. Anyone can write or submit an article, most don’t. I don’t think it’s fair to almost demand more effort from Thom. This is his hobby, not a paid job.
I’ve put in some effort to submit links to articles that are more interesting, more technical, more educational and less Apple/pattent related and a number did get linked (by Thom). If more people did this Thom has more choice to pick really good ones.
The problem imo is that the editors expect a higher quality from submitters than what they write themselves.
This make it very daunting to contribute since you get extremely scrutinized by someone with a degree in journalism and language.
This is not all the time every time, but it is true to some extent of the submissions.
Edited 2012-09-10 06:55 UTC
Maybe Thom can shed some light on how many articles get submitted and how many get rejected.
I can imagine most will be written by amateurs, because professionals will have their own media to publish their works. But I think amateur articles, even if written very badly, should get accepted. It will give them a chance to learn and improve and it’s nice to see what people who aren’t skilled in writing think. The opinion of a child can be more valuable than the one of an expert.
It seems a number of OSNews readers have a personal blog were they write stuff, maybe they should submit links to those articles.
But apart from all the Apple stuff I’m quite pleased with the rest of the linked articles. Only it seems Thom is the only active member of an otherwise idle team. There isn’t a page where they are all listed, but you can find a few on http://www.osnews.com/contact
Viewing this page yesterday I learned of someone called Smith Johnson, who is an undercover reporter, who doesn’t seem to be reporting anything. The rest doesn’t seem very active either. Most activity seemed to have stopped in 2011.
If just a few more people would at least link submitted linked articles it would make it same more like a team effort. Now it’s “Linked by Thom Holwerda” everywhere, giving him a bad imagine of a cheap linker.
Over the last two years i did email a few times.
I also bitched a few times about articles not being submitted. Look at my submissions and you see the extent of it. (It only show the last 50).
My conclusion after it all is that this really is a hobby site, though a very serious hobby site.
Tom probably would love to write more stuff. Probably love to guide people in writing to his required level of standard, but you rarely hear anything from him. The man is just very busy from what i gather, running two businesses. I can only imagine the mental fatigue of a translator as well.
David would probably like to contribute more, but it does take lots of time, and from what i gather he has a few business keeping him very busy as well.
Funny the other day i read Gruber makes $500000 a year from his Daring Fireball blog.
With that kind of income you can pretty much only concentrate on writing.
Edited 2012-09-10 07:46 UTC
$500.000??? He doesn’t get paid for every letter, that’s for sure. I’ve visited his page a few times, because it got mentioned somewhere, but his articles are often very short. Most of the times he reacts to something someone else wrote, so his articles are basically forum replies. Maybe he writes longer stuff too, just not when I visit.
OSNews is indeed of the hobby level, that’s why I like it. But I also value the comments crowd a lot. The comments section is often a place where you can get different insights and viewpoints. A number of people is pretty smart and skilled.
I think most people don’t know how busy Thom is. It’s easy to think he sits behind his computer all day working on OSNews. Recently he revealed he also gets hate mail and death threats, which I can imagine don’t help to motivate him to write stuff for this site.
Because of this I think it’s even more important OSNews gets more active staff so it’s not just Thom’s name everywhere and he doesn’t get the blame each time someone is fed up by something.
The linking of submitted linked articles doesn’t seem too difficult or tasking, it’s something that can easily be done by someone else, freeing up time for Thom.
It’s true.
http://www.sfgate.com/technology/businessinsider/article/This-Apple…
“Daring Fireball is a must-read blog for Apple shareholders, employees, and the many, many “fans” of the company.”
I’m an Apple fan, but I don’t read his site unless I end up there via another way. Still, if he makes so much money than good for him and he should keep doing what he’s doing.
It does give the impression he’s the militant wing of Apple’s PR department.
I can’t help noticing the unnecessary(?) quotation in that description…
( http://kyon.pl/img/21683,suspicious,sign,scare_quotes,.html )
I tried writing, but it did not made the cut.
I though it was ok, but it seems i am not the write stuff. Maybe it’s true.
I have a much greater chance of having a quoted link accepted than otherwise.
But frankly these days i am much more interested in applications than operating systems. It’s fun news yes, but the evolution and toolbox we actually use on a OS is more fascinating to me.
Edited 2012-09-10 08:06 UTC
You’re a smart guy, so what you write can’t be that bad.
If it doesn’t get published there is no way to know if it’s good or bad and when it’s bad how to improve.
Bad writers can only improve and when they do there is a good chance of having them stick around here. Good writers don’t go for OSNews, they have their own blog or try to wiggle in to a popular one, that’s where the money and fame is.
There are so many professional writers on so many sites out there I think a mediocre or even a bad one would be refreshing. It’s not like OSNews has so much to lose.
Speaking from personal experience (tried and failed to do a good OSnews editor job in early 2011), it’s fairly easy to join the OSnews editorial team, but I wouldn’t recommend doing it unless one really has lots of spare time on his hands.
One hour per day or so is sufficient to sort out, format and publish submissions that simply link to another website, especially considering that the daily publishing rate is capped by the amount of news that can be displayed at the same time on the right column. But high-quality originals, which we are missing most right now, take much longer to write.
Edited 2012-09-10 12:04 UTC
You don’t seem to be doing much right now, so I guess it’s safe to assume that one hour per day isn’t compulsory to save the site and the world. If you add a few more men/women then someone’s bound to have some time on any given day.
I read Neolanders blog and found him to be a excellent technical writer. His Phd studies and from what i gather fatigue might be the straw that break the camels back.
Aye, he’s very clever (for a Frenchman). Let’s hope he’ll be less busy one day.
There are indeed various issues that prevent me from regularly spending time on my hobbies, instead operating in bursts of activity, but that’s not what made me quit working on OSnews.
As I struggled to get some spare time in 2011, I found out that I did not have what it takes to simultaneously work on two tech blogs and a kernel codebase. That I wanted to do too much at once. This became especially apparent when I could not get myself to finish an article series on OSnews on the bada operating system, while my personal blog continued to operate at a relatively slow rate.
So I had to choose and, well, I chose TOSP.
EDIT : Perhaps one thing which I could do would be to submit some of my best blog articles to OSnews, though. But I fear that it would do nothing to help against the “OSnews is just a bunch of links” angry opinion. Furthermore, it could just sound like me trying to get some free advertising, and annoy editors. In the end, I only do it when I really need people’s attention (e.g. with the surveys on multimonitor usage and IRQs on non-x86 architectures, and the RFC on my RPC design)
I would prefer it if people who read my blog submitted my articles to OSnews themselves when they find them interesting, sounds more balanced. So far, no one has done it, though, which gives fuel to my impression that they may not belong here.
Edited 2012-09-10 19:14 UTC
Writing the articles take a long time.
Lesser so if you have the privilege of gonzo journalism. Turning a three paragraph into a 5-6 one without much research while in fact being more entertaining.
I think it is why people like to read Thom’s stuff.
On the subject of linking the landscape is becoming more complicated. Germany has passed laws where a linker must royalties to the OP and the same law is proposed in France.
DE seriously did that? I have a hard time believing that… it would essentially break the very concept of hypertext.
(and would be even more sad with FR, considering that’s where the first website and web server were)
“The German cabinet backed a draft law requiring Google and other news aggregators to pay for summarized information they display before linking to a source – a move that has outraged the Internet giant, politicians and bloggers alike.
The move, backed by publishing giants like the Axel Springer group, was originally proposed by the Federation of German News Publishers – who were very upset with lost advertising revenue.”
http://rt.com/news/germany-law-google-copyright-973/
It still in draft though.
Oh… well, it’s not _so_ bad – not strictly about linking, more about snippets/quoting.
While there probably should be some ~fair use rules regarding the latter, I guess one could live (and the web will continue to function more or less as Tim Berners-Lee intended) without it…
[Off topic warning…]
You don’t even have kids yet…just you wait! Kids are so lovable, but it’s absolutely true what they say about not having time for anything else. Just pray yours sleeps well, because otherwise you won’t even have time to sleep. For the first year of our child’s life we had to struggle with fatigue because it regularly took two hours to get her sleep around by 10PM, then she’d wake up at 2AM and we’d have to repeat it. This every single night for a year. I lost my job over lost productivity. My wife had felt guilty about letting our daughter cry at night, but eventually gave in to letting her learn to sooth herself when she cried. She still wakes up now but it’s much easier to put her back to sleep.
I have a survey related to this:
How many let their kids “cry it out” versus soothing their cries no matter what? Child care professionals have sharply divided opinions over this.
Heh, reminds me of a mail exchange between us that I still have to answer to someday
I’m not really keeping track, that’ll be quite a surprise, haha.
But does he ACTUALLY pick any of those articles, or does he just ignore those that don’t match his mindset?
I ask this with all honesty because i used to submit a lot of articles on /. but quit when the old guard editors quit and the new guys were all groupthink central. All articles had to be either serious flamebait or follow the groupthink, it didn’t matter how poorly or badly it was written. there was also one editor who if he liked your submission would change a couple of words and put his name on it.
So you can’t just say “We should contribute more” because a site has to have conditions where submissions are encouraged, otherwise most will do like me and just not bother. If Thom actually encourages submissions i have waay too much time waiting on Windows installs at the shop and spend that time spinning through geeky RSS feeds and site headline grabbers so i’d be happy to throw some geeky stuff up if anybody is interested.
Well, he ignores most of what I submit, but I did submit a lot of them.
I guess if more and more people would submit stuff even more and more won’t make it, but the ones that do should be rather good one… I assume.
But finding articles to link isn’t so difficult, original content is. I.e. articles written by OSNews readers. Why not publish bad ones? At least it might motivate others to think they can do better or give bad writers the chance to learn and improve.