As an example, in Ark, people use cementing paste as a currency. It's very time-intensive to make, stacks a lot, is not terribly heavy, and high-level crafting and building needs it in solar-mass-esque quantities.
That's the joke/trick, it's basically begging the question. You can out a cheater by asking a question of the form:
Which is true, (A and A->B) or (A and A->C)?
A cheater will fret over whether B or C is true, while someone who did the work will probably immediately identify that A is false and that the question is misleadingly worded.
I'll throw in my own anecdote. ZFS on root caused me a significant amount of headache when the proxmox node I was using it on just randomly decided it wasn't going to boot anymore. The ZFS pools were fine, no data was lost, but no amount of messing with it fixed the zfsonroot and it was quite difficult to find quality search results for.
And of course it was a weekend where my parents and siblings and in-laws were visiting, so I had the joy of going around messing with DNS settings wherever someone had a device that only paid attention to the first two DNS servers in the DHCP settings.
(I've since changed my DNS setup- now I only have a primary self-hosted one that's on an RPi in my networking cabinet, and the second entry is Google. I figure if I only get two servers that are respected for real, I'm making sure one of them is google.)
> I only have a primary self-hosted one that's on an RPi in my networking cabinet, and the second entry is Google.
I was under the impression that there was no such thing as primary and secondary for DNS, just ‘here is one’ and ‘here is another’, with someone going for a terrible naming system of ‘primary’ and secondary’.
I’m no expert and my knowledge come from messing about with Pihole and reading their documentation.
The first nameserver listed in resolv.conf is kind of a primary as it will always be consulted first, unless you add "options rotate". The next nameserver only come into play if the first doesn't respond (default 5 seconds, also tunable with options). They're not named primary/secondary in the file but could be considered that way.
I suspect that both BTFS and ZFS are currently good enough under most configurations that most users don't have a problem with whichever they choose, and it's only a tiny fraction that has a really good or bad experience and becomes a rabid advocate based on their anecdotes.
This is an obvious truism. Of course they appear to work correctly under ideal conditions.
The real question is how they behave under less than ideal conditions. It is these conditions where Btrfs has performed poorly, and where ZFS has performed very well. I lost several Btrfs filesystems due to its poorly-tested and broken error handling trashing the filesystem beyond recovery.
The selling point of both of these filesystems is their robustness, fault-tolerance and ability to self-heal. Only one of them actually delivers.
That's really a packaging issue, not a ZFS issue, but I feel your pain.
The best suggestion I can offer is to use a distribution that treats it like a first-class citizen, such as... well, the Ubuntu support is still beta level, so only NixOS for now.
"fairly painlessly" and "without significant work or downtime" doesn't sound like it lines up with btrfs's, which I would describe as "one command and zero downtime (just some io load if you rebalance immediately)" for both operations. btrfs is also mainline, which increases how painless it is to use.
BTRFS does have some scary stories from earlier in its development, and true raid5 seems like it's unlikely to be safe for quite a while, but raid1 and "normal" fs usage has been rock solid in my experience. The only time I've ever had an issue was probably 4 years ago at this point, and it was solved by just booting an Arch live iso and running a btrfs command that was basically "fix exactly the bug that your error message indicates". I don't remember exactly what it is, something about two sizes not matching, but googling the text it showed at boot led me directly to the command to fix it. Certainly dramatically less trouble than I've ever had when hardware RAID goes south.
I do agree that modern lvm does probably compete with btrfs, but again you're trading how dang simple btrfs raid1 is to manage for monkeying with partitions in lvm in exchange for ~some? performance.
IMO ZFS is in a weird spot where I don't know where I'd use it. It's too complicated/annoying to admin for me to want to run it in my basement for myself/my family, and for anything bigger or more professional I'd use ceph or a problem-domain-specific storage system (HDFS, clickhouse, aws, etc).
The first operations I mentioned (adding or removing a device from a vdev, or adding a new vdev) are one command with no downtime:
% zpool attach <pool> <vdev> <device> // add to a vdev
% zpool detach <pool> <vdev> <device> // remove from a vdev
% zpool add <pool> <vdev> <devices...> // add a new vdev
In the newest ZFS versions, you can also remove mirror and singleton vdevs (this does require some time -- because the data needs to be copied from the drives) but it's all done in the background:
% zpool remove <pool> <vdev>
Shrinking a pool "the old way" (which is still sometimes necessary depending on what you're doing) is definitely more involved -- you have to create a new pool with the layout you need and then do a zfs send/recv from your old pool to the new one. This does only take a handful of commands but I would definitely consider it to be a much more complicated affair than the operations I mentioned above.
I would not (nor did I) compare LVM (or md-raid) to btrfs or ZFS -- those technologies have fundamental limitations regarding the integrity of your data that ZFS (and btrfs) don't have. And don't get me wrong -- I don't have a problem with btrfs (I run btrfs on all of my machines except my home server -- which runs ZFS), I just disagree with GP's point that ease of use is an argument for btrfs over ZFS. There are many arguments for either technology.
> btrfs is also mainline, which increases how painless it is to use.
I agree that this is one argument to pick btrfs over ZFS (though on most distributions it isn't really that hard to install ZFS, the fact that btrfs requires zero extra work to use on Linux is a benefit).
I think the clothes-on-amazon thing is fair and a cost of doing business, though. If my only choices, as a customer, were "all sales are final"-buy-online or go in-store, I would 100% go in-store. I would never, ever buy what could be a brick in a box online if I wasn't allowed to return it if it turned out to be a brick in a box.
And clothes have another dimension (heh, literally) of size/fit/feel. I think it's totally reasonable to buy a shirt online, put it on, think "wow this material is awful" and return it. That's what you can do in-store, and it's not your fault that that loop is a lot more expensive for online retailers.
I take issue with #1. The rich have very large percentages of their wealth in vehicles that don't get inflated away. Stocks. Interest-bearing debt. Etc. I would argue that Somewhere in the middle class is probably the peak for "% of total net worth in fiat currency". People who have enough money to save, but not enough money that their emergency fund is a trivial % of their net worth. And even then, they probably don't have a ton of money in instruments that yield much more than inflation. It's a lot safer for a CEO to keep 80% of their net worth in stocks because they could live off 1-5% of their net worth for a lifetime (even if they need to scale back their lifestyle a bit - they won't be homeless).
I would much prefer every person on Earth be a philosopher than no-one. I think a lot of bad things exist today not because someone saw a good option and a bad option and chose the bad, but because someone saw two options and, being unable to tell which was which, chose arbitrarily.
The trick is generally to find yourself in a situation where you take home 300k because you made 3000k for your firm.
I'm not being facetious. With anything trading-related, a big part of having the ability to make three million dollars more-or-less "on your own" is to have tens of millions of dollars to sling around, plus a good idea of the manner in which to sling it. So a firm will give their people a couple million in buying power and then tell them to go make an X% return. Those that can do so are compensated.
The downside, as I have it, is that the "work-life balance" is, as you mentioned, non-existent and also immensely stressful. Plus, having that kind of money in your 20's can be a problem all on its own.
I'm under the impression that massive investment in DRM is more of a way to satisfy tech and (pirate) culture-illiterate humans while making deals for content. Even Steam needed to nominally do something and Gaben's position on piracy/drm is very well-known.
Just for the record, for the most part, it should be legal to sell CD's of most Linux distributions, assuming you honor the GPL and any other licenses for any software that's physically on the disk.
I'm a bit familiar with the sorts of commerce that the parent mentioned.
Back when broadband was uncommon there were shops where you could just order anything that could be found on the Internet and they would burn a CD-R for you. They would keep the most popular files cached locally, and for the really popular stuff they would have pre-burned CDs in small kits with a xeroxed manual and maybe a colored cover and the like. Support was a big thing too, and community: it was a place where people would hang out a bit and talk to other people, share recommendations, meet people who could fix equipment, etc.
So if you ordered a Linux distro they would prepare it for you just like any software, VCD, disk full of MP3s, etc. I know of people who were introduced to Linux via these shops.
There used to be an earlier version of this sort of shop where you could bring floppy disks and they would copy them for you. As far as I know all of this has just about disappeared. Piracy exists but it is nowhere near as popular as it used to be.
What those shops basically sold was bandwidth: it was a physical version of pirate BBSs and w4r3z websites, from a time when phone and Internet access was harder to have.
