ub[3]rgeek.net

Today, at 90,039 miles my RX-7 received an oil change, coolant flush and fill, rear end gear lube change, plugs and wires.

I’m pleased to say that everything went swimmingly and the car runs quite a bit happier now. The old plugs came out and were the picture perfect brown flecked with black.

…driving myself into a corperate grave.

Is it too much to ask for people in this country to stop asking who’s going to take care of them and take care of themselves. These god-awful GM commercials touting OnStar as some wonderful fix-all safty feature for the mentally and spiritually weak make me want to vomit.

Thank the Lord Almighty that I do not, nor ever plan to own any American made automobiles.

I am not….ever….going to pay someone to have the ability to trace my every move with a 10 meter or less resolution.

Onto other things, I did see Nine Inch Nails at Koolhaus in Toronto earlier this year. I didn’t write anything about it until now because a) I’m too frelling lazy to update this and b) a Nine Inch Nails show in Toronto, with about 3000 people in attendance shouldn’t really need any kind of a write up to explain it’s sheer splendor.

I’ll be 24 soon.

I _love_ my RX-7.

So.. One would think that even in “Hard Drive Marketing Speak” 250GB (250 * 10^9) would == 250,000,000,000 bytes, which while substantially (18,435,356,000 bytes) smaller than 250GiB (250 * 2^30 == 268,435,456,000) would be common for all drives carrying the capacity statement of 250GB.
(See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gigabyte for more on Metric vs Binary units)

Ah, but this is indeed not so. No, not even close.

Maxtor’s 250GB drives have an LBA of 490,234,752 sectors. Now sectors are 512 bytes in size, so a simple division brings us to a capacity of 245,117,376 GiB (roughly 5GiB from 250… which is acceptable loss in the metric to binary unit conversion)

Western Digital, however in their infinite wisdom gives us an LBA of 488,397,168 which gives us a capacity of 244,198,584 GiB.
Some more simple math shows us that Western Digital is actually shorting us 918,792 MiB vs the Maxtor drive.

Of course most people won’t care, I mean hell Windows XP needs almost that much space to install, but those of us trying to resynch a RAID-5 array are going to be very upset.