Author: Dag-Erling Smørgrav

Dereliction of duty

I started on Lois McMaster Bujold‘s Vorkosigan Saga this weekend. Quite a good read; unlike many other books in the genre—say, David Weber‘s Honorverse—the societies she describes and their politics are not too far-fetched or caricatured, nor is the heroine too much of a Mary Sue.

One thing that did make me groan, though, was that the entire plot of the first four chapters of the first book hinges on no fewer than three starship commanders leaving their ships to lead what Trekkies would call the away team1. In any real military organization, this is the gravest sin a commander can commit and would be grounds for court-martial; heck, that almost happened to John Kerry when he jumped ashore for a few minutes in the heat of combat to save his ship and crew (they ended up giving him a Silver Star instead).

To add insult to injury, a few chapters later, in what is probably the linchpin of the entire novel, one of those very same commanders accuses a superior officer of dereliction of duty for doing the exact same thing.

Oh, and there are several instances of characters using a light pen to control a computer, or fiddling with it while thinking or talking. In the author’s defense, unlike light pens, touch screens weren’t all that common in 1986 :)

1 Most of TOS and a large percentage of TNG is about the Enterprise‘s entire wardroom leaving the ship to lead the away team, then returning sans about half of it.

Pot, kettle, black

The key to being a religious zealot is to criticize (real or made-up) characteristics of other religions while ignoring the very same characteristics in your own:

The earliest writings that are known to exist about the Prophet Mohammad were recorded 120 years after his death. All of the Islamic writings (the Koran and the Hadith, the biographies, the traditions and histories) are confused, contradictory and inconsistent. Maybe Mohammad never existed. We have no conclusive account about what he said or did. Yet Moslems follow the destructive teachings of Islam without question.

You could say the exact same thing about Jesus of Nazareth and the gospels. Muhammad’s existence is corroborated by contemporary non-Muslim sources and is just as much a historical fact as that of Jesus of Nazareth.

Islamic Law is totalitarian in nature. There is no separation of church and state. It is irrational. It is supposedly immutable and cannot be changed. It must be accepted without criticism.

The separation of church and state is a modern concept that dates back to the late eighteenth century. As for totalitarianism, irrationality and immutability: Have you actually read Exodus and Leviticus?

A Muslim does not have the right to change his religion. Apostasy is punishable by death.

Christianity is not known for its kind treatment of apostates and heretics.

Off by one

I made a small modification to phybs to verify the function of jumpers 7-8 on the WD Advanced Format drives (see here and here). It is supposed to cause the disk to internally shift every write by one sector, so that a write to sector 63 (where the first partition on a PC normally starts) actually goes to sector 64, which coincides with the beginning of a physical 4,096-byte sector. These numbers confirm this:

   count    size  offset    step        msec     tps    kBps
   32768    4096       0   16384       78631      34    1666
   32768    4096     512   16384       79880      33    1640
   32768    4096    1024   16384       73164      36    1791
   32768    4096    1536   16384       77727      34    1686
   32768    4096    2048   16384       76975      35    1702
   32768    4096    2560   16384       74970      36    1748
   32768    4096    3072   16384       79379      34    1651
   32768    4096    3584   16384       28094      96    4665

The firmware on the disk shifts everything forward by 512 bytes, so all these passes are unaligned except the last one, because 3,584 + 512 = 4,096.

Disks and equipment

Here is a quick overview of the disks used in my tests:

Brand Model Capacity Speed Interface Notes
Western Digital WD4000AAKS 400 GB 7,200 rpm SATA 3 Gbps  
Western Digital WD10EARS 1 TB > 5,400 rpm SATA 3 Gbps 1
Western Digital WD20EARS 2 TB > 5,400 rpm SATA 3 Gbps 2
Western Digital WD20EADS 2 TB > 5,400 rpm SATA 3 Gbps 3
Hitachi HDS722020ALA330 2 TB 7,200 rpm SATA 3 Gbps 3

The computer runs FreeBSD 9 on an Intel E6600 with an ICH9 chipset and 4 GB RAM. For convenience, the disks were tested in an Akasa Duo Dock connected by eSATA cable to one of the ICH9 SATA ports.

1 Kindly provided by Alastair Hogge

2 Kindly provided by GetOnline Ltd.

3 Kindly provided by Dansk Scanning AS