So I think we'll do Iggy Pop next time. Sorry. All right, so it's a thin crowd today. I guess it's nice outside. People have noticed that. So today, hopefully, last time, we sort of got to the point where I tried to convince you that there are still exciting things that will probably happen in the future of technology in your lifetime. Today, we'll talk a little bit about how to approach research papers, and then we'll talk about rate, which is pretty fun. No announcements today. Simon, 3 part 2 is due a week from today. At some point, I think Scott's going to post the back end targets today, or at some point over the weekend. So keep an eye out for those. If you guys are done and want to submit, hit the top of the leaderboard. The, what was I going to say? At some point, we're going to have performance targets up there too. We'll get to that for the people that want to go above and beyond. All right, any questions about LFS or about technology trends? We'll ask you, some of you guys. So in your lifetime, assuming you're going to live like, I don't know, at least 50, 60 years, what do you guys expect to happen? What's the thing that you're the most excited about? It's going to change in the world of technology. Yeah. Asteroid mining? Cool, I don't know what that is, but it sounds exciting. Well, I guess as you go to an asteroid and you drill into it, OK, got it. Yeah, Steve. OK. I like this retro computing. Like floppy disk, looks like a floppy disk stores, I don't know, like four terabytes of data. That's cool. Like that. What else? What else? Yeah, Steve. Oh, interesting. Quantum computing, interesting. That would be, yeah. So what is quantum computing promise to make possible? What's exciting about quantum computing or sort of scary? I know like this much about it, but yeah. Yeah, you can factor. Uh-oh. If you can factor, I'm moving to another planet because there's going to be chaos here. Everything, everyone will know everything about everyone else. All secrets will be revealed. All bank accounts will be available to everybody. Again, I don't know. Buy your cabin in the woods right now. Prepare for that. There we go, OK. What else? Future. Let's hope, let's assume we can't factor, so there is a future. What's that? Cloning. OK, yeah. It's more like biomedical. What about tech? What's exciting about tech? Yeah. Self-driving cars. I have to say, in like the next 10 years, that is, I am ready, man, just sign me up. I'm ready for my self-driving car, yeah. Time travel, hmm. Interesting. Forward or backward? OK.  Yeah, run. However, something should be done just because we can do it. Oh, we're already having that conversation, I think. There was a woman who was here like two weeks ago, gave a distinguished talk to anyone, go. Yeah, so the talk was on deceptive speech. So I don't know. I mean, a lot of it was lost on me. But basically, it sounds like what she wants to be able to do is to listen to you and to be able to tell if you're lying or not. I don't know if I want that to be possible, because that would be interesting. Yeah, OK, I didn't know what that means. Yeah, so OK, well, let's put it this way. At some point in the future, you will just be walking around with some sort of implant or something that will record everything about your life continuously. I don't know who says it's time to watch all that stuff. That sounds pretty boring. But there'll be some highlights. I don't know. That'll be interesting. Yeah, imagine being able to relive any moment in your life, at least on some level. OK, this is good stuff. I mean, who knows? So I would just encourage you guys as technologists. I mean, to some degree, what you might do on a day-to-day level might be a little bit mundane. But think about the future.  It's an interesting exercise. OK, so let's talk about research papers. So research papers, to some degree, are about the future. They may not be like the wild and crazy time travel to asteroids that we're going to mine, or our clones will mine on those asteroids, because we're going to stay at home where we can factor. So they may not be that far out, but the research projects that you read about are things that might happen in the future. There are things that people are talking about, considering new ideas, new ways of building systems, new capabilities of existing systems that are fun to think about. If you want to read papers, and at some point, and reading papers may be a good way to think about it, is this is a way to connect you to the future. This is a way to connect you to the cutting edge of systems design. If you want to read papers, read good papers. There's a lot of crappy papers out there. There's an axiom in academia which says that any paper can be published somewhere. So you can take that and expand on it, and assume that a lot of the papers you find are any paper. You don't want to read any paper. You want to read good papers. And we'll look at some excellent papers over the next month or so. Don't worry about understanding the details unless you really care. A lot of systems papers include a certain amount of implementation detail. It doesn't really matter. What's the big idea in the paper if there is one? Or what's the main contribution? That's what you're going to remember in 10 minutes, or certainly in 10 days. So unless you're really curious about it, don't worry about getting bogged down and exactly how people did things. Look for the whys. Try to figure out how this fits into a bigger picture. So we'll talk about this in a second. There's nothing natural about how academics communicate with each other, but there is a system, which you can describe. And papers tend to typically fall into categories. So let me come back to these. And we'll come back to all of these. So where do papers get published? So if you go out, if you wanted to read papers about operating systems or systems, I would tell you there's a workshop called Hot Topics in Operating Systems, literally, Hot Topics. Now, how hot those topics are is debatable, but there are certainly some hot papers at Hot OS every couple of years. And here's an example of workshop papers. So workshop papers tend to be short. They're trying to be provocative. Again, hot topics, hot in operating systems. They don't always succeed, but this was a paper that Margot and her group published at, when was this, I think this was maybe a decade ago. So it's not super hot anymore. But this is interesting. I mean, the premise here is that hierarchical file systems or hierarchical namespaces, which you guys have just learned about, are dead. And this was a paper that talked about search-based file systems, none of the things. So this is making a design argument. We're not going to build these kinds of systems anymore. In the future, we'll build systems differently. Longer versions of papers get published in what are called conferences. These have a more complete evaluation. They have more results, blah, blah, blah. I mean, this is expected to present a full system in a way that's convincing hot topics or workshop papers are smaller and just kind of intended to give you an idea of something that people are working on. They're more to get feedback. So here's an example. This is another paper that we may look at that has to do with fundamental limits on concurrency that are created by operating system interfaces. So this is a pretty cool paper, too. I think there was an exam question about this paper a few years ago. And then journal papers just ignore them. It's like all the stuff that people cut out of the conference paper that was not interesting enough to make it into the conference paper. So if you want to read that stuff, go for it. The rest of us have other things to do. And so I would stick to the shorter paper. In a lot of cases, the workshop paper is the most fun to read because it's the most provocative. All right, so here's when you start reading the paper, and we'll do this today when we look at the original raid paper, one of the first things is to try to figure out what kind of paper are you reading. And this can be hard without some context. There are idea papers or sometimes big idea papers. These are papers that spawn entire industries, change fields, reveal some fundamental fact about systems that people hadn't understood before, hadn't noticed. When you read a paper like this, frequently you feel a combination of, wow, that's a great idea. And almost immediately afterward, I'll just warn you about this, it will seem totally obvious. So that's a warning about new ideas. Ideas that seem obvious in retrospect tend to be really, really good ideas. So don't let it fool you. If you think, oh, well, of course. You're like, well, of course, why didn't you know it a moment before? Problem papers are intended to try to get people to care about a certain thing. They try to claim that a certain thing is wrong or broken or we're doing things in the wrong way. They're trying to open up people's ideas and thoughts about a new area of systems. Data papers tend to be about analyzing problems. So they bring a data set into the picture. They analyze it, and they try to glean some insights about how systems work based on that. New technology papers. So I like these. These are kind of like there's this new hardware device. And systems and software people write these papers all the time because we don't tend to create the hardware device. Someone comes along and says, here's a new piece of hardware that has this interesting feature. We're like, ooh, that's interesting. How would I integrate this into a system? A good example of this kind of paper is there was a paper at the hot topics in operating systems maybe, again, a decade ago talking about. Imagine you had a storage substrate that was as durable as flash but as fast as memory. And there's research into these types of memory technologies that's going on right now. So right now, we have these things. Flash has these trade-offs, and it's slower than memory, and disks are even slower. But imagine you had a device that just had a huge chunk of memory that was persistent. How would you design systems around it? It turns out there's some really interesting things to think about. And then wrong way papers are usually, and this is my taxonomy. Who knows? I mean, this isn't some official list. But you read papers that are trying to claim that we're doing something wrong. The community is doing something wrong. We've built something in the wrong way. The way that it used to work doesn't work anymore or whatever. And we should try some things. And we'll look at examples of some of these papers. I won't promise all of them, but we'll certainly look at a couple. All right, so a quick breakdown. So when you sit down with a research paper and look at it, what are the parts of the paper? Abstract, read it. It's short, what an abstract is. It's sort of an overview of the paper's content. Introduction, again, usually a longer version of the abstract. Usually worth reading. Usually has some of the bigger ideas in the paper in it. So if you're only going to read a couple parts of the paper, this is what you would read. And these are kind of some types of things that you can be in the introduction. These are the kind of things you'll find. Sometimes there's a motivation section that will continue to try to convince you that this is interesting or important. Then they'll talk about sort of what we did. And some papers have this section and some don't, because in some cases it's just an idea. Like a workshop paper might just be all about motivation and this is the wrong way or this is how to do something and we actually haven't built anything. We just want to convince you that this is the right way to do something. But if you're talking about a paper that's about a real system, there's usually a design section that says here's how the system is designed. A lot of times you try to stay away from actually describing how the system is implemented because the point is, this is like the design document for the system, gives you high level principles, goals, things we were trying to accomplish. The implementation part will give you more of the GUI details about how things actually worked. And a lot of times that's not particularly interesting. The design section has more of the high level ideas. People talk about related work. The goal here is to show you that I'm doing something new and then results. And these are kind of important. If you're writing a paper that's about analysis, the results might be the whole paper. All I'm doing is analyzing a data set that's interesting and drawing some conclusions from it. If I'm building a real system, the results section will have evidence in it or it should have evidence in it that this system is an improvement on what has gone before. If it doesn't, you should be suspicious. If it does, you should still be suspicious because clearly when you build something a certain way, a lot of times you're trying to make an argument that this is the right way to do things. And intentionally or unintentionally, you might be blind to certain aspects of the system or certain things that don't work well or whatever. I mean, you guys heard a little bit about this when we talked about LFS. Certainly the LFS papers tried to put its performance in the best light, but when people went back later and looked at it, they found some problems. Okay. And then, I guess I was talking about the evaluation. This is sort of like, does it work? So any questions about this? Not particularly, probably. It was good to do this on the same day we do RAID because this is boring and RAID is not boring. All right, so let's talk about RAID. Any questions right off the bat? How many people have ever used RAID? Set up a RAID device? Okay, okay, so you guys have some idea. What, like if you think about RAID, so this is 1988, I think, maybe earlier, I think it's 88. What kind of research paper is this? How would you describe the RAID paper? 1988. Eh, not exactly. There's no new technology here. No? What's that? Okay, just like, I just asked you to raise your hand and some of you guys had actually used this technology that was proposed in a paper in 1988. So what kind of paper is this? In the, with the long view of history, right? I mean, RAID became a new technology, so that's a hint, right? But at the time, there was no RAID, there were just disks. So RAID comes along. This is a huge idea paper, right? I mean, when your paper gives birth to a multi-billion dollar industry, you can put this tag on it, right? You guys are, now we're all, ah, RAID, whatever, okay? But there was a point at which RAID didn't exist. There was somebody who came up with the idea. This is the paper that started, you know, a huge industry and an approach to solving problems that goes far beyond disks. So yeah, so and, so what's the big idea behind this paper? You can boil it down, yeah. Okay, so there's ideas about duplication and redundancy here, but what's the, yeah? No, but take it out of data, right? Try to generalize the idea as much as possible. Because once you do that, you see this idea everywhere today. Yeah, exactly. I mean, these are things that RAID accomplishes in the context of storage, but what's radical about what they're doing here? What did they propose? Yeah, you know, yeah, so that's like that, I would say here is the key idea. I can use a couple of cheap things to build a system that outperforms a single expensive thing. Does that make sense? So where else do you see this idea play out? Give me another example of someone. Yeah, so originally, now this is not true anymore, right? But when Google got started, Google bought commodity PCs. Google stocked their data center with Dell PCs. They would buy like a thousand of them in a time. They would get them, you know, and they had, there were reasons for this. The PCs were kind of exactly what they wanted. They had big disks, they had certain features, but they didn't buy expensive servers. Now they do, right? Now if you look at Google's data centers, they've got custom made servers because they've got like a million of them or something like that, right? But when they started out, they said, look, we're gonna build this really reliable, efficient search engine, but we're not gonna do it by buying a bunch of expensive servers.  And they got a great, I mean, you can imagine if you buy the old Dell's at like 10,000 at a time, you get a pretty good disk app, right? So, you know, multi-core processors is another example of this. Here we had some fundamental limits that we hit. But at some point, getting more speed and more computation out of hardware required that we start replacing, you know, the cores that replace the P4 were at some level a little simpler, they were just more of them. And actually, I think as we see the future of computation and silicon, you're gonna see this even more in certain ways. Google crowd sourcing, you know? I mean, using, trying to gather lots of unreliable inputs from a large group of people and combine them together to create a reliable result. It is, you know, I could measure a certain thing with a really expensive sensor or I could try to combine a bunch of measurements from cheap sensors into an equally reliable data point. Okay? All right, so what's the problem? I mean, the rate paper starts off by pointing out a problem with current disk technologies. Again, 1988. So many of you guys were probably not born. But if anyone looked at the paper like the first couple pages, it's always a good test to see if anyone read the paper because this is like very, very early on. And I think the sentence starts with the problem is, so it's not hard. They didn't hide it behind fancy language. Computer CPUs are getting faster, computer memory is getting faster and hard drives aren't keeping up. So they have this second part of the paper that's like the IO crisis or something, the current IO crisis. And they try to convince you in the paper that this is a fundamental problem. And I think they're right. And it didn't, they do a little bit of math and it's kind of, it gets a little weird for a minute, but you kind of agree with them. I mean, look, this is 1988. It's almost 30 years later. We know that this happened. Now we're living in the future. We know that they were right, but they were quite precedent. So we need innovation to avoid this IO crisis. And so now, if you apply the, I just gave away the answer, but if you apply the RAID approach to things, there's this fundamental trade-off here that they're making, which is the expensive hard drive, you can argue would be more reliable. Should be more reliable. I paid more money for it. I get more hours out of it. So the cheap things fail more often. And so RAID is both an argument about performance, meaning I can get more performance if I merge things together. But as people pointed out, it's also an argument about fault tolerance. How does this play out in Google's data centers? I mean, clearly Google has been online the whole time we've been here. What goes on there? Yeah, I don't even, it's probably at least a couple of hard drives, entire machines in Google have failed since we started class. Just, I mean, you could just do the math. You can say, okay, they have a million machines, this many hard drives, hard drives last on average this long. And so they're gonna have failures, maybe a couple failures an hour. So once you have enough machines, they're just constantly dying. They're constantly crashing. Some robot is going into the data center and like taking the disk out, sticking another one in. Maybe the whole machine is gone. Maybe some other thing failed. So once you have these big computer systems, stuff is failing constantly. And yet you never notice. I mean, has anybody ever noticed some consequence of this? Using like a big cloud provider? I mean, maybe Gmail goes down for like two seconds or something, but I've never noticed this, right? Certainly haven't lost data or whatever. So, we've gotten to the point now where it's well understood and well accepted that a great way to, it's possible to build these reliable systems that have great uptime on this very shifting foundation of machines that are constantly crashing and failing and dying and stuff like that. So it's kind of interesting. So we need a plan, right? We need a way to handle these failures. And Raid was one of the first. So here's the paper. We're not gonna look at it in detail. Oh, I think my pointer gets stuck when this happens. So let me go over here and free it. All right. So let's talk about the different Raid levels. Because this is kind of interesting. So a normal disk, I've got a certain amount of data. And one of the things that's actually really fun about this paper is the way that they build up an approach in this very incremental fashion. So what's the first way to create a more reliable and more performant disk array? So I'm gonna use cheap disks.  But what's the easiest way to do this? What's the, or what's the Raid one way to do it? How does Raid one work? There is a slide up there that explains it. It's not that complicated. Yeah. Yeah. So with Raid one, I duplicate everything on both drives. And so to help understand Raid, I brought a prop today. So imagine I have a piece of data, like some question on the exam. And you guys are interested in that piece of data. And you wanna make sure that I store it reliably. But failures represent me shooting one of these guys with the Nerf gun, right? So what I can do is I can tell both of them the same thing, right? And then, you know, if I happen to shoot one of them, that's not working very well. What's that? I think they're helping me to debug my prop. We haven't used these for a while in the lab. It's too bad. Ah, there we go, okay. There we go. So I just, Vicky has failed, right? So do we still know the information? Who are you gonna ask at this point? Yeah, so we still know. That's good. So this is Raid one. It's not complicated. But on some level, Vicky and Matt also have a limit to how much I can tell them, right? They're not gonna remember an infinite amount of information. So if I always am telling them the same things, how much data can I store on this pair of disks? So remember, I started with one disk worth of data. Now I bought two copies of that same disk. How much, what's the capacity of the Raid one array? Yeah, so I'm, the efficiency of the array is essentially half. It's because every byte is literally being written twice. Does that make sense? Now, if I want, now imagine every time I ask one of them a question, it takes them a minute to respond. Because they both know the same information, what's the overall throughput I can get out of both of them? How does that change? Because remember, disks are physical devices. They've got a seek and stuff like that. So if I wanna ask them a bunch of questions all in a row, how do I do that to get the most throughput? Yeah, I split them up. So I ask one of them one question and while they're remembering it, I ask the other one and I go back and forth. And so the read capacity here is, sorry, the read bandwidth is actually better than a single disk because you can imagine I have two sets of heads and so I can send requests to either disk. What about the write capacity? What about the write throughput? Can I do the same thing with writes? Yeah, so it's either the same or a little bit worse. Why would it be worse? Why would write slow down a little bit? Yeah, not even a question of seeking slower, it just means that I get the worst of both seek times. So when I make a write to a raid one array, I have to wait until both disks store the information. So depending on where they're positioned, you can imagine that I'm essentially taking two random numbers drawn from a distribution and taking the larger one every time because I have to wait until both writes complete to know that there's data on the drive. All right, so this makes sense? Yeah, not on a raid one array, right? The goal on raid one is that the two copies are identical and you could imagine if I have some failure, I can reconstruct the array by, if I find a block that's mismatched, I kind of choose one of them, right? I just keep them in sync, yeah. But raid one array, the goal is I always keep them in sync and so when I write to them, I have to write to both of them synchronously and wait for both writes to finish before the data is done. Yeah, good question. All right, so there's a couple of problems here. The main problem here is capacity. I've lost quite a bit of space. But there's another problem, okay, so the performance here is better reads capacity is the same as one drive, but I bought two. So I'm not super happy about that. Okay, the second thing they think about in raid two, now there's only a couple of these raid levels that are really alive anymore. Does anyone know what they are? There's five original raid levels. How many are still in use? Zero is not true raid. Zero is I wanna lose all my data raid. We'll come back to raid zero in a minute. Raid one and five. Raid 10 is also after this paper, right? So yeah, raid one and five are still around. The other interstitial levels are pretty much gone. They're just not used. So here's the problem. What happens if one of these two guys tells, let's say I ask them both a question and they give me different answers. So one of the disks is corrupt. It's been, the data on it has been broken or something like that, all right? Told it to store a certain amount of information. It's stored the wrong information. So what we do in raid two is we say, not only am I gonna store the data, but I'm gonna store extra information. I'm actually gonna store a hamming code with the data that's gonna allow me to recover from a certain number of failures. And if you've talked to a tree or take courses on coding theory, I can design these codes to survive sort of an arbitrary number of failures. So imagine here I've got six disks. What this array allows me to do, now you can see I'm writing four bits and then I have these three extra bits I have to write. What those three extra bits allow me to do is to reconstruct the original values even if any of those disks starts to lie to me. It tells me the wrong information. I store a zero and it returns a one. So this is raid two. What's the capacity here compared with raid one? How much extra information am I storing? So raid one I wrote everything twice. Here when I write four bits I store how many extra bits? Three. This is better. I'm being a little bit more clever. I'm using coding theory to reduce the amount of extra information I have to store. That makes sense. And the capacity is a little bit better for that reason. I'm storing a little bit less redundant information. However, when I read or write to any one of these values it still requires most of the disks because if I change, for example, if I change this value, I have to change a bunch of the other values. I have to change the Hamming code values to make sure they still match.  And when I read values, I have to read all of them. So I have to read all of the individual values and then check the extra codes to make sure that they're all consistent. So what's an, yeah, sorry. Yeah, it turns out you only need three in this case. To handle one failure, you only need three, right? And you can sort of, and maybe this actually even handles two failures, I can't remember. You can convince yourself of this pretty easily if you look up coding theory, right? When I'm duplicating information, I'm actually storing more information than I need to recover stuff. Okay, so this model, rate two assumes that disks have this funny property which is I can write one value and then read a different value from the same disk. Is that how disks tend to fail? I mean, I know you guys weren't around in 1988, but based on your understanding, is this how disks, do you think this is how disks fail? No, so, sorry. On rate three, what they start to assume is that the disk itself can tell when it's failed.  So here I'm assuming that there's some disk level controller that can detect failures and so I don't need to worry about a disk telling me the wrong value. The disk will never return an incorrect value. Instead, what will happen is the disk will lose the value. It'll say I'm not sure or it won't return a result. You can imagine this is equivalent of just taking an array and yanking a disk out of it. The disk is gone. The array knows it's gone. The disk is not powered on anymore. So if I send a command to that disk, I'm not gonna get incorrect data. I'm gonna get no data. So now the nice thing is if I make that assumption, I can reduce the amount of extra information I need to one, to a much smaller amount. So for any number of, so if I wanna be able to correct an error and a certain number of bits, I store one extra bit. That means that if any of those bits is missing, I use the extra bit to determine the parity and I can correct it. Does this make sense? Rate two, the way that I do the coding here is a lot more in common with the way I do coding for things like wireless signals, where they actually can get corrupted. This is a feature that's much more akin to things that fail. So if I tell you guys five different values, five different one or zero values, I compute the parity bit by summing them all up and determining whether it's odd or even. And that's the extra bit that I store. That way, if one of you guys fails, I use the parity bit to determine whether or not the failure was a zero or one. Does that make sense? That's confusing. Hopefully you guys understand this. So here, compared with rate two, I made even more improvements in capacity because I'm storing less redundant information. I'm only storing, you know, I only need one bit of redundant information rather than three for that four bit sequence. And to some degree, the rest of the system is unchanged. Yeah, Ron. Ah, okay, this is a great question. So what happens here if two drives fail? Data loss, exactly. Yeah. And so if you look at the paper, remember, they have all these calculations about the probability of that happening. It turns out, in a lot of cases, if you have a rate or rate that can tolerate one disk failure, what happens when that disk fails? What does the array stop doing? Like I have a rate array, I've got five disks in it. One of the disk dies and the array can tell that. If I've configured it to handle one failure, what will the array stop doing? Yeah. Yeah, maybe, maybe stop reads too, just stop working, right? Usually, you're right.  So what's your job at that point? Replace the disk. Yeah, exactly. Again, this is like the same design principle that everybody uses to build everything now. When one of the computers, if you took half of the computers in Google's data centers and could get them to all fail at the same time, you know what would happen? Data loss, right? Who knows what it would be, like your old emails, pictures, I don't know, whatever, YouTube videos are gone, but it would happen, I guarantee it. Nobody can survive that kind of outage. I mean, Google probably has plans to survive like one or two of their data centers being down or hit by a nuclear strike or something like that. But if I could take half of their computers and crash them and destroy the drives, they would lose data. Probably, right? I doubt that their failure margin's at that high. But as individual machines and disks fail, they replace them and the replaced disks are reloaded with additional information and the whole system just continues to go. So as long as I have small numbers of failures and the system is built around it, I can replace the components in time to keep it operational. But if I can wipe out a bunch of things all at once, then you're in trouble. This is why people say, you know, if you really want to save, if you really want your data to be really secure, why is it not sufficient to put it on a radar? You really, this is like super important data. It has to like survive the potential extinction of our current human civilization, right? Like aliens ain't be able to find this when they make their way to our planet, like 100,000 years. Why is it not okay to put it on one radar? It's not secure. Why not? What's that? Well, no, I mean, I'm gonna argue, well, if one drive fails, I'll replace the drive and you keep maintaining that array. No, why is it not safe? Sorry, no, what is it? If your building burns out. Yeah, exactly. Like what if I hit your, oh, I hit your building with a missile, right? You're in trouble. The data's gone. So you gotta have one copy here and one copy, you know, halfway around the world and another copy that's been buried at the bottom of a mine and blah, blah, blah, right? If you really want to keep things safe. Yeah, you just duplicate stuff, right? But you can certainly move the disks around, right? Just don't have stuff physically co-located. It's interesting, it turns out, you guys may not know this, I found this really fascinating. Insurance companies handle claims differently if a missile hits your house during a war or during not a war, right? So you can file a claim if a missile hits your house, but not if the area that you're in is actually officially being part of a war. I guess that makes sense, but I thought it was interesting. There's a lot of fine print in those insurance policies. What's that? No, I just heard this on the radio. It was pretty interesting. It has, but to some degree it's related because it has to do with correlated risk. Insurance companies don't want to ensure things where a bunch of things would go wrong at the same time. That's why it's so expensive to get flood insurance because a flood will destroy a whole bunch of houses all at once, all in the same place. Okay, and that would also destroy your radar. So raid four, so the difference between raid three and raid four is essentially boils down to in raid three I'm storing small bits of information on each disk and then like you could imagine that I have one bit, two bit, three bits, check bit, four bit, five bit, six bit, check bit. It would be probably better to have five disks in this example because then I could store nibbles of four bits, but you get the point. And so the problem here is that if I wanna read like a byte, how many disks do I have to contact here? All of them, okay. It turns out that's kinda dumb because I can do the check sums on a much higher granularity. So I can take a whole 256 bytes and produce check sums for all of the parts of it. And so what we do in raid four is we use a much larger stripe size. I store larger blocks of data. And so in this array, let's say that the block size is like 256 bytes or something like that, how many disks do I have to contact to read or write one byte? Just two, right? Whatever byte it's on and disk three, which is the check disk. So on this system, I've got, these are my data blocks and this is the check block that's stored on the fourth disk. This makes sense. So this is improving my throughput because I can use more of the disks in parallel. What's the last problem here? It's kind of alluded to on the slides. There's one thing I can do a little bit better.  So we said that reading or writing bytes to this array, particularly writing bytes, but certainly reading requires two disks. So if the byte is here, which disks do I have to access? Zero and three. What about if the byte is here? What about the byte is here? What do all three of those have in common? Disk three. So the check disk in this raid four scenario becomes a bottleneck. Every operation on the array requires the check disk. So what's a natural way to fix this? Yeah, so what I do here is I stripe the parity information across all the disks. And this is raid five. This is still around. People still use this. Here you can see that disk one has data blocks for A, B, C, and a check block for D. Disk one has data blocks for these two check blocks here. So if I want to modify a byte here in C, I have to talk to disk zero and disk one. If I want to modify a byte here in B, I talk to disk one and disk two. So now I've distributed the load for all the check sums across the disks equally. Does it make sense? Yeah, Steve. Well, remember, I don't want check bits next to the data because the check bit has to be somewhere where the data can fail and the check bits are alive. So it's always required that data and the check sums live on different disks, right? That's what, so for example, here, let's say that disk two fails. I lose this guy but I can reconstruct it using this check one. I use this, I lose this guy and I can reconstruct it using this check block. I lose A3 which I can reconstruct. What about B? I've lost a check bit. What do I do? I reconstruct it using the data blocks, right? I use the data blocks to generate the check sum anyway. So I can definitely reconstruct the check sum. So this is what would happen if I took a disk out of this array. So this improves write performance because now when I write, I'm not writing to that one disk over and over again where all the check sums are located. Okay, so here's rate zero. I have a rate zero array but it's because it stores things I don't care about, right? Like your midterm exams. So like the scans of them, which I don't really care about. The rates, do you even know what rate zero is? Can anyone describe rate zero? Fake rate, non-rate, bogus rate, what do I do? Yeah. Yeah, I essentially take a file system and I just put half the blocks on one drive and half the blocks on the other drive. So how much redundancy do I have? Zero hole, rate zero. No, there is no rate level here. The performance is fantastic though because half the IO goes to one drive and half the IO goes to the other and so you have twice the bandwidth over the disk interfaces and you have twice the performance of the disk. So the performance is great. There's no redundancy here whatsoever. And the capacity is also great. There's no, because there's no check information anywhere. I just hope things go right. No redundancy. All right. So the original rate proposal was that I could tolerate the failure of one drive. Has anyone had set up like a more modern rate system? Like using what? ZFS. ZFS, yeah, that's a good example. If you want file system features, check out ZFS. ZFS has a crapload of features. One of the features that ZFS has is the ability to use multiple disks and you can parametrize the fault tolerance. So on ZFS you can say things and on other rates that you can, you can imagine generalizing these ideas. So if I wanna survive two failures at the same time, then I just have to have some more check information. I just, it increases the amount of redundant information I have to store. I have to think about striping things but I can certainly build a rate array that survives an arbitrary number of failures. And you know, you can have a case. The nice thing about this is that the rate array continues to work even when one drive is missing. So if one drive goes down, you imagine somebody gets an email saying, by the way, you need to buy a new drive. While I'm out at the store doing that, the array is still working. If I lose two drives, then it says forget it. I can't go on. But one drive, that gives me time to go replace it without the array being down. On rate zero? Typically, yeah, that's what's fun about rate zero. Like you're living on the edge. Because imagine like half of your file system data structures are on one. So normally when you build a rate zero array, the file system doesn't really know about it. So the file system just thinks, wow, that's a really big disk you have there. So the file system puts some of its data structures there. And so imagine I took a file system and I killed off half the blocks. Would it continue to work? Probably not. That's again, that's just a large number of, you'd hit I-nodes, you'd tell us it's important. It's just very unlikely. But yeah, so if you want to live on the edge and get great performance, go rate zero. So it actually turns out from a redundancy perspective, rate zero is worse than a single disk. Why? Yeah, exactly. So imagine I've got two disks and every time I buy a disk, that disk is going to work for a certain period of time or a certain number of writes. With a normal file system, it works until the disk fails. With rate zero, it's like before, I get to pick two random numbers from a distribution and I get the shortest one. That's when my file system dies. So that's a little sad. Okay. Yeah, so this is what happens. So when you put a disk and now rebuilding the array, that seems like a sort of trivial. How long do you think that takes? Big rate array, disk goes down, I throw a disk in and it's just sweet, ready to go. This is actually another interesting sort of part of RAID. The story doesn't end when I put the new disk in. Why not? Yeah, I mean it basically has to rebuild that drive. It has to remember to go back to RAID five. If I lose this disk, I have to replace all the data on it. And that takes a long time. Particularly if you have a big rate array that's like multiple terabytes or something like that, you lose a disk, it can take days for it to be rebuilt. Unfortunately, while the array is being rebuilt, it's still vulnerable to data loss because if that drive goes out and another drive fails, I still don't have, that drive is up at full capacity. So if that drive fails, then I'm a trouble. All right. Any questions about RAID or redundancy in the real world? Yeah. Yeah, I mean there are actually companies where, I don't know, I'm assuming this is going to take off at some point.  But there are companies where they will send you like a storage device that you put in your house. And let's say that has four terabytes of storage. You get some percentage of that, right? And it networks itself with all of these other devices all over the place and builds a redundant sort of data system out of them. And so pieces of your data information that would be required to rebuild some of your information is stored all over the place. So you can certainly do that. I mean if you think about companies that run big data centers, one of the reasons why they geo-distribute them is performance, obviously, because they're closer to people that are using them, but it's also fault tolerance, right? If a whole, because look, I mean, if a hurricane hits Florida, it's possible it's going to take out a few data centers. I don't think people build data centers in Florida, it's too hot. And there's hurricanes, right? But you don't want to have a single point of failure. And so geo-distributing things is something that big companies do and certainly I think something that you'll see people start to do as well. That's what I would love, I don't know. When we looked into this those solutions just weren't very mature yet. Maybe it's time to take another look. Any other questions? All right, so next week we're going to do a couple of lectures on OS design. So how do I organize the operating system itself? Where do I put things? What are the implications of that? We'll start that up on Monday. I'll see you then.


This video is brought to you by our user-supported Vitamix blog, Life is No Yoke. Go to LifeIsNoYoke.com to learn more. Oh, these? These are the new Vitamix Propell series. The Propell 750 and the Propell 510. And here's five things I really like about them. Maybe even love. First of all, performance. We put these machines through the test. We made our green juice, whole food green juice, fruit green seeds, lemon, ginger, ice on top. Similar exercise to make a smoothie. For this, we used the smoothie program. We made our queso, testing the hot soup function. Cold ingredients, friction to get everything hot and smooth. Get that steam. Fabulous. We did a coarse chop, making our detox salad. This is a pretty easy exercise, but worth showing. And then we made ice cream. Frozen bananas, frozen strawberries, tamper. No liquid at all to help. And it performed great. I mean, this thing, I was impressed. Impressed because it made all these things that, like I expected them to. Like we come to expect with our Vitamix because Vitamix models are made. So blend quality stays the same. We show this graph all the time. As you pay more, you're just paying for more features. So we expected the performance to be great. But what I was surprised about, and this is number two, is it just seemed to work really efficiently.  Well, now we have machines that are 5,000 times more powerful and they fit in our pocket. I was actually surprised at how light these Propel series machines are relative to some of the older legacy models. But that didn't affect performance. It just felt like these machines were really tight and just powerful. I mean, I really put it to the taps with the ice cream that I painted. It was not friendly to it. The third thing I love about the Propel series is just, it's kind of like a best of. It pulled the dial from the 7500, the switches from the Pro 750. You got the blue on and off switch in the front with the LED light. And just that classic look, that classic what was known for a while is the G series, sometimes the C series. It kind of just looks like the basis they look like a Pro 750 or a 7500. Number four, look at the 510. What I love about it is what it brings for one to two person homes. Before this, you kind of had your pretty good option. Your E310 for one to two person homes has that small 48 ounce narrow-bodied container. And that's at a very entry level price, but it's a pretty basic machine. There aren't a whole lot of features. On the very other end of the spectrum, you have the E3500 with stainless steel 48 ounce container. That's pretty much double the price. All the bells and whistles. And there wasn't really that in between. The Propel 510 is that in between. It's not good. It's not best. It's better. It has some automation three programs. It has that 48 ounce narrow-bodied container. Good for making those smaller batches of the thick blend, like ice cream, hummus, nut butters. And then the Propel 750. It's a lot like a professional series 750, the Pro 750. The specs are nearly identical. Five pre-program settings, seven year warranty, pulse. I just love that we have this now. For the day when the day comes, when the professional series 750, the Pro 750 is retired and it's no longer available. The Propel 750 is going to be a great pick. For the people that want an analog machine, something without digital or touchscreen, but premium performance, some premium features. And with that kind of best of build, and this is the sixth thing I love about the Propel series, it doesn't feel like there are kinks to iron out. You look at the Ascent series from 2016, it took a little while for production to iterate to make things better. Talk about when cars are made, people that work on the assembly line at car production facilities, they say buy a late year model and model. Because they get better at building them as they go, continuous improvement. This feels like with the Propel series, they've already gotten to that point. Sure, they're going to get better, but it doesn't feel like there are many kinks to iron out with the Propel series. So at the right price, and you'll know when it is the right price. It makes machines go on sale periodically throughout the year. If you're on our deals list, we'll send you an update. lifeisnoyok.com slash keep me updated. There's going to be a time when both of these are an absolute no brainer. And finally, number seven, I just love how simple this is going to make things. Explorian Propel Ascent. Good, better, best. In the short term, it's going to make things a little confusing. That middle area is now even more crowded with the professional series, with the 5200, with the offshoots that were rebranded for retailers. But when the time comes and you want to replace a vintage Vitamix, or you're ready to just jump into the Vitamix family, the Propel series is going to be a great fit. Thanks so much for watching. Life is No Yo. If I missed anything, you know where to find me. Lifeisnoyok.com. Cheers.


John Reese and I'm running the campaign here in London. We've got a spectacularly good panel for you this evening and we're running it in a slightly different format. We've adopted the Lightning Talks format. Our guests will give you five minutes each of their thoughts on the Julian Assange case and what should happen next. You're welcome to comment on that in the chat function if you'd like and then we're out and we can continue this discussion in other forum. Just to update those who haven't been following this, Julian Assange is still in Belmarsh Prison. The 11th of April will mark two years that he's been detained in that maximum security facility. That's despite the fact that earlier this year, the magistrates court in London decided that he shouldn't face extradition. They turned down the United States request for him to be extradited on the basis that he would be at risk to his health, indeed a suicide risk, if he were put into the American prison system. The United States are appealing that decision and at the moment we're waiting for Julian's lawyers to submit their final defense arguments before the judge makes up her mind after the April the 6th, whether or not there will be an appeal and when an appeal will be. So that's where we are in the case. I won't detain you any longer. As I say, we've got a terrific panel and the first person who's going to talk to you is Claire Daly. She's a member of the European Parliament for the Dublin constituency. She recently made an absolutely spectacular intervention in the European Parliament in defence of Julian Assange and she's going to talk to us now. On April 11th, Julian will be two years in prison. April 5th is the 11th anniversary of WikiLeaks' release of the collateral murder video exposing war crimes. There are plenty of anniversaries to keep in mind. Later this year, the so-called War on Terror will turn 20 years old. The War on Terror was a lie. It exploited the thousands of tragic deaths on 9-11 to justify Bush and Blair's criminal enterprise of war abroad and to attack and dismantle civil liberties and human rights at home. Only a few days ago, it was the 18th anniversary of the beginning of the Iraq War. Those of us who saw Western governments launch the Iraq War also saw the establishment press and the broadcasters cheer them on and viciously attack the majority of people who knew that it was wrong. None of the ringleaders ever went to prison for the deaths of over a million people, the torture, suffering and chaos that came about because of their actions. We watched them get away with it and the fact that they got away with it damaged the fabric of our societies is undermined the rule of law. It harmed democracy. We saw people at the highest level of power to criminal acts despite everyone opposing them and suffer no consequences. It made us feel powerless and our societies feel broken and corrupt. So when WikiLeaks came along in 2010, it wasn't just any old scandal in the press. The press had failed to expose this scandal. This was bigger than that. It was a huge democratic event. It was an example of someone using journalism to try and put all of that right again, to address injustice. It was very powerful and it made us feel powerful because it provided the cold heart evidence for what everybody already knew that there was something filthy and rotten and criminal at the very top of our societies. And when that happened, it was obvious that there would be a crackdown. 10 years on that crackdown is in full swing made possible because of Bush and Blair's attack on civil liberties. Tony Blair's extradition treaty was designed to remove safeguards for people accused of terrorism. Now those safeguards are gone and it's being used to extradite a journalist for doing journalism. The ongoing detention of Julian Assange is obviously cruel and punitive. He has suffered enough and should not be facing these legal difficulties. But even allowing that he has to deal with them, he doesn't need to be imprisoned. He should at least be able to face this from his home with the support of the people who love him. But it's not just that Julian is being punished personally. We also have to consider the public effects of this spectacle. Remember how inspiring WikiLeaks publications were? The charges against Julian are intended to be a counter example to that. We talk about the chilling effect of this case as if it's something in the future if Julian doesn't win. But that's not true. The chilling effect is now. For two years now, the most famous journalist in the world has been imprisoned in the UK. It might have been possible during the seven years he was arbitrarily detained in the embassy for people to pretend that it wasn't about his journalism, but that's simply not possible anymore. The most famous journalist in the world is in prison, not in Saudi Arabia, not in Russia, not in China, but in Britain. And the message is clear. If you follow Julian's example, you're finished. Our governments have lost interest in the so-called war on terror. Their new obsession is reviving the Cold War for a new century. Here in Brussels, the escalation against China and Russia is being used to drive billions of euros into weapons spending. The same is going on all over the West. And of course, just like the weapons, propaganda and lies are proliferating too. 10 years ago, at an anti-war rally in Trafalgar Square, Julian said to the crowd, if wars can be started with lies, peace can be started with truth. At a time like this, we need journalists like Julian Assange more than ever. We need brave, principled people who are ready to stand up to lies, to tell the truth to the public and to oppose the mad rush to war. We need those people not to be scared that they face several lifetimes in prison for criticizing the powerful, but rather emboldened by the knowledge that they live in a society where telling the truth will always be protected. That's why this is so important for everyone, that Julian wins this case once and for all. That's why Julian's victory in the courtroom in January is such a beacon of hope. And that's why all of us, as his supporters, should take hope on that victory and renew our campaign to set him free again. Well, that was Claire Daly. Terrific contribution from her. My thanks to her for sending that over to us. Now I'm gonna move on to our next guest. It's been my pleasure to introduce John Kuriyaku before on DEA broadcast. And I can assure you for those who haven't heard him, that he is an authoritative and informative voice on this question. He was a former CIA operative and the man who exposed torture and waterboarding by the agency. John, it's great pleasure to have you with us. You have five minutes and you have the floor now. Thank you so much for having me. It's a pleasure to be here because it's so important for us to educate the public on the challenges that Julian faces, especially here in the United States. Maybe challenges is the wrong word because the situation here is grim in the US prison system. The US prison system is divided into four levels of security, minimum security work camps, low security prisons, medium security prisons and maximum security penitentiaries. Because of Julian's fame or infamy, depending on your point of view, he would likely be placed in a maximum security penitentiary. Even if he's not, he would then be placed in a medium security prison but in something called a special administrative management unit, a SAM unit. SAM units mean that the person has access to the media, which believe me, to the US Justice Department is a very dangerous thing. So the challenges that Julian would face would be primarily solitary confinement. Solitary confinement and a lack of any access to the outside world. And I mean a lack of access to his own attorneys, a lack of access to his family and friends. He would have no contact with the outside world. Worse than that though is solitary confinement. In May of 2016, the New York Times published an expose on solitary confinement in the US prison system. And they found that it's a gross violation of the guidelines issued by the United Nations. The situation is so desperate that some prisoners have taken to doing things like smashing windows and eating glass just so they can be taken to a hospital on the outside and have human contact for the first time in sometimes years. The United Nations says that any stay in solitary confinement more than 15 consecutive days is a form of torture. It's a form of cruel and unusual punishment. Here in the United States, we have prisoners in solitary confinement for as long as 44 years. 44 years with no human contact. Now imagine being in a two by three meter concrete cell with a steel bed, a steel sink and toilet and that's it. You're allowed to shower twice a week. If you're lucky, and I think Julian wouldn't be in the United States, you're allowed to make one phone call a month but only to your attorney. And in the event that you have mail, there is a screen mounted to the ceiling in your cell out of reach so you can't damage it. You receive a letter and they'll put the text of the letter on the screen. You have five minutes to read it and then they take it down and it's gone forever.  There's a small slit in the steel door. The guards will open it, slide in a cardboard tray with some food on it and then close it. And even those guards won't speak to you. A Bureau of Prisons psychologist once told me that 85% of US federal prisoners have some sort of mental or emotional disability. Usually it's antisocial personality disorder. Couple that with year upon year of solitary confinement and it is absolutely impossible for even a sane person to maintain his sanity. Now, the thing that we have going for us right now is that the judge as bad as the text of her decision otherwise was acknowledged the fact that the US prison system has these issues, that they have, that there's a serious issue with the use of solitary confinement as a form of punishment. And there's a precedent in both the UK courts and in the European Court of Human Rights to not send prisoners to the United States simply because of solitary confinement. The Federal Bureau of Prisons will never promise anybody that it won't put Julian in solitary confinement. This is what we have to go for us. It's what we have for Julian and we have to keep up the fight. Thank you very much for having me. John, that was a remarkable testimony and I thank you for it. I think it's very, very important that the audience in this country and globally knows exactly what Julian would face worry extradited into the American prison system and you've given us a five minute account which I personally found chilling and I hope that others will understand the severity and difficulty that Julian would face worry extradited. So thank you very much for that. Thank you so much for having me. Our next guest is Peter Obon. Peter is a long standing journalist who's worked for the Daily Telegraph and has political editor of The Spectator. He's got a new book out called The Assault on Truth which looks at the culture of deceit that's epitomized by Donald Trump and Boris Johnson. Peter, I hope the book's going well. Thank you for your courage in standing up and talking about these issues. The floor is yours. Yeah, I'm just very struck by that quote of Julian Assange's that we were being reminded of by Claire Daly that we'll start with lies and peace can begin with truth. It's so applicable and it's so much a reminder of why everybody here, we're all here tonight. I mean, two, by the way, two phenomenal contributions. John Kiriaki, what an insight into the US what awaits Julian Assange if he goes to the United States. And that's for Claire Daly. Can we have her as T-shirt called President of Ireland? Actually, can we have her here? Can we have her in British five minutes, please? She was glorious, absolutely phenomenal.  It's absolutely grotesque in these degraded conditions and the injustice of it stinks. The British government, I'm a political correspondent and if you pay attention, day after day after day, the British Foreign Office tells you how much they support journalism and free journalism, how much they support human rights. This is what Britain does. It's a new campaign actually saying how much we're going about the place making the world a better place. And there are various examples of the stinking hypocrisy of this. One of them very contemporary and of the moment is of course the British complicity in the ghastly horror of Yemen. But another one is the case of Julian Assange who has done so much to bring to public notice to reveal the dark secrets of the war on terror. He's broken more stories of great importance than every other journalist in the world put together in the last 10, 15 years, where he leads half. Stories about the terrible crimes committed by Western governments. Stories which we all need about things which we all need to confront not just as governments but as individuals and as versus because we're all morally involved in these things which have been, these acts which have been carried out on our behalf. And I want to speak briefly now as a British journalist. And journalism is supposed to be a noble trade which holds government to account, holds power to account, exposes wrongdoing. And on that basis, Mr. Assange has performed remarkably well. I think he gets, we can all say that he gets 11 out of 10 for journalism when you look at the noble principles which underlie our profession. And I find that I can count on the fingers of one hand, mainstream British journalists who have actually bothered to stand up for him and realize what is at stake. If Mr. Assange is extradited. In fact, this is an attack on truth. It's an attack on journalism. He's been basically the only one you boil it down. He's in jail for journalism. He's charged with the crime of real journalism rather than the creation of fabrications and complicity with government lies which is the way so many of my colleagues see their daily role. I'm going to end on a note of hope. I think it's not just what John Kariakko was saying which gives us grounds for help. IE that they won't send him to the United States when in the current circumstances. I actually think that if you look at the trial as it was conducted at the start of this year, there were so many abuses. And I'm saying this in hope but also I do have a residual faith in British justice. There were so many abuses of the legal system of due process. So many instances of terrible unfanness in the reporting. Sorry, in the way that trial that was it was it was hearing. I think it was technically wasn't it? That hearing was carried out that I don't think that when it gets to the Supreme Court, it can hold. I don't mean simply about the judgment. I mean the judgments about journalism about the rejection of all the defense arguments were so were based on such bad law. I don't say this because I'm a legal expert because but I have spoken to legal experts who followed the case. I do recommend people read James Dolman's accounts of the court reporter or Craig Murray's sort of literary genius really accounts of the court case. And I but I'm hopeful that the British Supreme Court will actually do something rather wonderful. And Mr. Assange, Julian Assange will be able to walk away a free man and he can't. Something has gone terribly wrong with this country. Peter, thank you very, very much for that contribution. Really do appreciate it. Moving on though, Sammy Ramadani is an old colleague of mine. It's a great pleasure to have him here speaking out for Julian Assange. He's an author. He's an academic. He's a member of Iraqi Democrats against the occupation part of the anti-war movement. And indeed he's a veteran of the anti-war movement and there's no one better placed to speak about what the effect of WikiLeaks, especially the material relating to the Iraq war, which is at the center of the American case for extradition. What exactly that means? So Sammy Ramadani, the floor is yours for five minutes. Thank you very much, John, for that introduction. I'll start by saying that it is really, really ironic that Julian Assange is languishing in jail for telling the truth, for exposing war crimes, while the war criminals themselves who committed those same crimes are walking the streets, free to walk the streets. And not only that, but they are fated and honored on our TV stations and media as great statesmen. I'm talking about the likes of Bush and Blair and other Western leaders who had a hand in the war of aggression on Iraq. While Julian Assange is in there practically being tortured according to the United Nations human rights reporter, on human rights, and he is being made an example for exposing those war crimes. No journalist is supposed to expose the truth or to expose powerful people's crimes. And as far as Iraq and the Iraqi people are concerned, there is definitely a debt of honor to pay to Julian Assange. Obviously, as John said, we were part of the anti-war movement and the anti-war movement did its best to expose those crimes and listen to the Iraqi people and communicated Iraqi people's opinions of those war crimes firsthand sometimes, but the larger media, the mass media were not exposing the truth and they were doing as much as possible to suppress what the anti-war movement was saying and telling the world about those crimes until Julian Assange exposed those crimes in a big way. It played a big role in making those truths that the Iraqi people were saying that the anti-war movement here in Britain and across the world were saying. It provided the solid proof, the evidence that the Western media cannot deny. There was footage, video footage showing the murder of Reuter journalists of innocent Iraqis. That was a seminal moment in trying to get the world to see clearly without any shadow of doubt that what was happening in Iraq was a war crime of major proportions that hundreds of thousands of people eventually died in Iraq.  It was a major crime of the 21st century, the biggest crime so far at least. They have the dishonor of having that title of committing it. And they have a great dishonor in keeping Assange in jail. And it's the duty of all honorable journalists to defend Assange. If they don't stand by Assange, they are betraying their own profession. It means they have no pride in it. It means they have no dignity in working day in, day out and calling themselves journalists if they don't stand up for the truth. Because that's all what Assange has done is telling the truth. It might have been the greatest scoops of journalism in this century, but still it was exposing simple facts. They were simple in the way they were told, in the way they were communicated and they were published, but they were of great historic importance, that they were truths that had to be told. And journalists, especially here in Britain, in the United States, in Australia, in Spain, in all those countries that sanctioned that war, journalists in those countries, especially in the United States and here in Britain, and in Australia because he's an Australian citizen should be using all their waking hours to defend this honorable man, to defend him and to release him from jail so that he goes free to publish more truths. This is the honor of being a journalist and not to do that, not to defend Assange, not to call for his freedom is really a betrayal of their profession. And we should press on and accelerate our work and increase its volume until Assange is free. Sammy, thank you so much for that contribution. And I think it's interesting now that, and Julian always makes this point to me when I was able to visit him before the lockdown, that the tide is turning in this case and that very many of the mainstream media who ignored it for a long period of time are now taking a different view. It seems to have occurred to them a little bit too late, perhaps, but occurred to them nevertheless that there's something very, very serious for all journalists at stake here. So we now find the Times, Telegraph, Daily Mail, Guardian, all running editorials or important opinion pieces backing Assange. But that wouldn't have happened unless people had campaigned for long before that. And unless on social media, journalists had taken to the tools that they had available to them to make sure that this case was heard as broadly as possible. And that's why it's a great pleasure to welcome as our final lightning speaker, Taylor Hoodak. She's a journalist and an editor who's reported extensively on the Assange case from the beginning for the German based media team at Activism TV. Taylor, I see you every single time. There's a hearing the case. Congratulations for your coverage. You have the floor. Thank you, John. And I want to thank the DEA campaign for hosting these events. And it's a pleasure to be here speaking with you all. I do want to begin by reiterating a very important point that WikiLeaks editor-in-chief, Kristin Rafferensen addressed a year ago. This was just days before the first part of the extradition hearings began. And that is that whatever one's passion is or cause is, whether that's animal rights, privacy and anti-censorship or anti-war, your ability to fight for the cause that means so much to you will be impacted by the outcome of this case. Now, fast forward to several months later in September of 2020, we're about halfway through the extradition proceedings. And I was speaking with Kristin Rafferensen. Once again, I was interviewing him and he made the same points, but he put it in simpler terms. And he said, all of our fundamental rights are at stake here. And while we all of course know that and have known that for some time now, after hearing the testimony for so many weeks, you really, really felt that, I can tell you. And the truth is that Julian Assange's fate will have serious impacts on journalism for years to come. And it will also impact the public's right to know. Now, being that this is the most consequential press freedom case of our modern era, ironically, journalists and NGO observers had an extremely difficult time covering this case. This has been discussed before. Now, the majority of us were granted permission to cover the case via a video link. There were of course technical difficulties with that. Only a few individuals could be physically present in the courtroom. So we did have to rely on this video link. And at times I could tell you, it was very difficult to hear witnesses and to really cover this case maybe as best as we would like to just because it was so difficult to connect and to hear what was being said in the courtroom. But what's more is the fact that professional NGO observers whose job it is to defend and to promote freedom of information and freedom of the press and to protect vulnerable journalists, they were prevented from even being given access to the video link or be present in the courtroom. They really had to fight to get their way in and to cover and monitor this case. And in fact, RSFS Rebecca Vincent who has been monitoring this case for some time now, she said that she has never experienced this level of difficulty monitoring a case anywhere. And we are talking about the Western world we are talking about in the UK. So we must ask ourselves, why is this happening? And why is the UK judiciary trying to keep a dark shadow over this case? The public has a right to oversee what is happening in the court. And we heard very powerful testimony from a number of defense witnesses about how WikiLeaks publications and revelations were used in cases of torture and even show to the world the true gravity of the wars that the US has waged in the Middle East. It is also important to remember too that this work has earned Julian Assange numerous journalism awards. Kristin Raffertyn also said that in 2010 which of course was the year of the publication of the war logs and collateral murder. This was a watershed moment in journalism history, yet it is this very reason that Julian Assange is sitting in one of the worst prisons in the UK right now. And again, we must ask ourselves, what does this say about what we value in our culture? Assange's situation is of course extremely serious not only because of the broader press implications here, but also because of the personal aspect and the things that have been personally done to him. And not many people can truly understand what he is experiencing right now. But one individual who can is Lori Love, a British citizen who successfully fought extradition from the UK to the United States. Following the conclusion of the extradition hearings I interviewed Lori and he said something to me that really stood out and I will never forget. He said that the process can be the punishment. And that is precisely what we are seeing happening here. That has been made especially clear with the judge's recent decision to not grant Assange bail despite the fact that she blocked the extradition request. Now, before I do give my final statement I also want to raise awareness of another case. And that is a former UK ambassador turned writer and historian Craig Murray who was a defender of WikiLeaks and Julian Assange and also a friend of Julian Assange. Craig is facing a possible two years in prison in Scotland for his reporting and articles that he posted to his personal website.  Craig has done tremendous service to the public and has stood up for human rights and it's now our time that we stand up for him and we support him. I want to end with a message that came from Edward Snowden. This is a series of statements that he gave at an activism Munich event back in 2017. He said that we cannot just only rely on elected leaders to solve our problems. Real change begins with you. It begins with me. It begins with everyone at this panel. It begins with the founders of the DEA campaign and those hosting this event. It begins with all of us. And lastly, we must remember that the actions we choose to take today can impact Julian Assange's tomorrow. And if we do keep that in mind and if we do collectively work together we can impact Julian Assange's situation.  Thank you. Taylor, thank you very, very much for that overview the salient and important points that are at stake in the Assange case. And let me just reinforce those remarks about Craig Murray. Craig Murray has done extraordinary work in reporting the Assange case. He's been there throughout for us and we very much encourage you to be there for him as well. Well, we've hit the half hour mark. The lightning had struck not once but five times. So congratulations to my panelists tonight. That was a very, very powerful overview of the issues involved in the Assange case. So let me just remind you you can follow all of the panelists tonight on their Twitter feed. I do encourage you to do that to follow the work of Claire Daly, the member of the European Parliament for Dublin of John Kiriaku, who has himself, of course, suffered a two year prison sentence for revealing the truth about waterboarding and torture in the CIA. Peter O'Born, as I said, has a new book out. You could do yourself a favor by getting a copy of the Assault on Truth and Peter's writing is very often found on the Middle East Eye website. So they would give that a look. Sammy Ramadani frequently writes for the Stop the War Coalition and Taylor Hoodac can be found at Activism TV. My thanks to you all. Do follow the DEA Twitter and Facebook feeds. Have a look at the website. That's where you'll find the most up to date and authoritative news about the Assange case and also critically what you can do about making sure that the most important civil liberties case of the 21st century ends up the right way. Thank you all for being here and thanks to my panelists once again. We'll be having lightning talks again in the future in which we hope that those of you watching will also be part of the contributors to the lightning talks. Thanks very much and good evening.


Failing at something is better than doing nothing. Today, we're going to talk about how to get more sh** done. And we're going to talk about how to live your life one step at a time. Because all too often, I see so many people out there and let me know if this is you. Say yes in your head if this is you. Where you want to create an amazing life. You want to do all of these beautiful things. You want to do some amazing things for the world, for yourself, for your family, make a ton of money. But you overthink too much and you're paralyzed by all of the things that you have to do in order to get there. So we can see this entire life that we want to create that's 5, 10, 15, 20 years down the road. The amazing things we want to do, the money we want to make, all of this stuff. But then we start thinking about every single step that we have to take to get there and it's paralyzing. Is that you? Have you ever done that before? It's called paralysis by analysis. Have you ever had paralysis by analysis? If you have, this episode is definitely going to help you because all too often, we think about all those things that we need to do and because there's so many things over the next 10 or 20 years that we need to do, it makes us do absolutely nothing. So instead of taking a step in the right direction of the future that we want to create, what do we do? We do nothing. And I'm going to give you a real quick example before I start giving you some tips on this. Imagine that you sit down for a really nice dinner.   You look at it and it's an entire plate of all this amazing food, your favorite food in the world. You don't take that entire plate and try to force the entire plate into your mouth at one time, do you? Wouldn't that be awkward if you sat down and someone tried to put their entire plate of food in their mouth at one moment? You don't get anxiety about how many bites you need to take in order to eat that plate, do you? No, of course not. Why? Because you've sat down for dinner before. You realize what it takes. You don't focus and get anxiety around how many bites you need to take. You don't get anxiety about how many chews you need to chew.  A thousand, a couple thousand? That's a lot of chews. What if you thought about every single one of them? No, you don't do that because you've done this so many times. You've eaten so many plates of food in your life. You understand that in order to finish a plate, you've got to take one bite. You pick up one piece of food.   And eventually, if you do this for a little while, what happens? You're done. It's that simple.  Of course, because literally the same way that you eat food is the exact same way that you should work towards the life that you want.  You've got to go one bite at a time, one chew at a time once you get into those bites. That's exactly how your life is as well. Why is it any different? There's a couple of reasons why it's different. Number one, people tend to look at the life that they want and they make it out to be way bigger than it actually is, like not the life that they want, but the actual steps that it takes to get there. We think it is way too big for us to process all of the things that we need to do. And so we decide, you know what? I'd rather just do nothing because thinking about all of the things and all of the processes and all of the things that have to be in place is just way too stressful, right? So we make it to be way more steps than it is. We make it to be way more stressful than it is. It doesn't need to be as stressful as it is. We act like we have to struggle our way to success and in reality, you don't have to. The first reason why, and the second reason why is because a lot of us have never done it. A lot of people out here that are listening to me right now, you haven't created the life that you want. You haven't made the money that you want. You haven't impacted the lives that you want. And because of the fact that you haven't done it, there is fear around all of the stuff that you need to do.  I'll give you another really quick example before I dive into it, but here's here's really what it is.  I live in Austin, Texas right now. I have a really good friend, Mike, that lives in Houston, Texas. This is a true story I deal. When I get in my car, let's say it's 8 p.m. at night. I want to drive to Mike's house. It takes about two and a half hours to get to his place, right? When I get in my car at night, I can't physically see Mike's house in Houston. I can't see 5 miles ahead of me. I can't see 10 miles ahead of me. I can't see all of the steps that I can't see every single car that I need to pass, every single house I need to pass, every single gas station that goes by every single mile. I can't see all of those things. When you get into your car at night, you can't see the entire destination, but what do you do? You get into your car. Let's say it's a place that you don't really know how to get to. You put in the GPS in your phone and your phone goes, okay, Rob is in Austin, Texas right now. He's trying to get to Houston, Texas. The GPS is going to tell you every single step that you need to take in order to get to the where you need to be. That's kind of how your goals are. Your goals are like the GPS. I know where I am now. I know where I'm trying to get to, right? I know where I am now. I know I'm trying to get to. Here's all of the routes to get there. Now, could there be a possibility that on your way from Austin, Texas to Houston, I don't know that there could be a crash, that there could be construction. That could be some form of detour. Absolutely. But when that happens, you don't get stressed out about the detour. You don't get stressed out about the crash.  Well, I guess I'm just going to have to go another route. And then what do you do? You tell Google Maps. You tell Waze, Hey, take me a different way. Let's find a detour. Let's find a different route. Are there going to be detours on the way? Possibly. Yeah. When I sit down and I plan out my perfect life. Excuse me. I plan out my perfect life of everything that I want. It's kind of like going, I'm in Austin, Texas. Now I'm trying to get to Houston. Houston is my goal. That's what I'm trying to create my life to be. Okay. Now I'm going to go from here to here. And this is what the next 10 years might look like. But if I get into year three, is there a chance that there could be some form of a detour? Yeah. Is there a chance that there could be some crash? There could be something that happens ahead of me that I'm not necessarily anticipating. Yes. Absolutely. But once again, if we go back to the getting in my car at night, the way that I want you to live your life is the same way that you drive a car at night. When I get in my car and I turn my lights on, the only thing that I can see is the next 50 feet in front of me. I can't really see that far past that, right? My headlights are maybe lighting up a little bit more than 50 feet. But let's just say it's 50. I can only see the next 50 feet in front of me. So what do I do? I drive my truck the best that I possibly can in the lanes on the destination or on the way to the destination in the direction of that destination and I focus on those 50 feet. Then what do I do? Once I get past those 50 feet, my headlights are now lighting up a new 50 feet in front of me and I focus on how I can drive my car the best that I possibly can the next 50 feet. And then I drive the next 50 feet and the next 50 feet. And if I do this over and over and over and over again, eventually two and a half hours later, I'm going to end up in my friend's house in Houston because I followed my GPS and I focus on the next 50 feet in front of me. So that's how you should live your life. You want to have goals of where you're going, what you're trying to create. Of course. Then you want to put a little bit of process in there and hopefully it's going to go that way but I guarantee you it's going to change. There's going to be crashes, there's going to be detours. All of that stuff is going to happen. But then you go, okay, now what do I do? I can only see the next 50 feet in front of me which means today. You can only focus on today. In fact, you can only focus on this one present moment which is the next 50 feet in front of you. The next 15 minutes. What do I do the next 15 minutes to drive me closer to my goal? It's that simple. You have to live your lives like you're living your life in the headlights. That's it. Same way that you eat food. One bite at a time. One chew at a time. Same way that you drive your car. 50 feet at a time. 50 feet at a time. So why do we make our lives, the success, the money, the happiness, the joy, the peace everything that we want in our life so freaking difficult? I don't know. Possibly because of the fact that we're so afraid to get out of our comfort zones that we just make up a bunch of B.S. along the way so that we stay inside of our comfort zone. You can only focus on today. You can only focus on the next 15 minutes. The journey of 1,000 miles begins with a single step but you can't focus on step number 4,715 until you take step number one. In fact, you can't even take step number two until you've taken the first step. And so your job is to look down at your feet and to go, okay, what's the next step? The worst thing that I could do is nothing. The best thing that I could do is go and do something. Even if I fail, failing at something is better than doing nothing.  And so if you're listening to this, I want you to ask yourself, be really real with yourself.  Have you been thinking too far in the future? All you have to do is sit down and say, what do I need to do with the next 15 minutes of my life to get me closer to my goals? A couple episodes ago, you heard Dean and I say it, is what I'm doing right now, getting me closer to or further from my goals. Simple, journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. What is your next step that you need to take? Just focus on what is the next best step that is in line with the direction you're trying to go in your life. And here's the thing that might be stressful as well. So many people are so stressed out about just making sure they get it right. So they don't take a step because they're not sure if it's the right step and they don't want to miss step. No, I would rather you fall on your face trying to take that step versus not taking the step. One of my managers used to always say this to us. I don't think I'll ever forget it. You always say you're either green and growing or brown and dying. If you're moving in the direction of the goals of the life that you want, you are green and growing. If you're not doing anything, you're brown and dying. The way I always think of it is like a stagnant pond. If I'm not moving and doing something and working towards the life that I want, even if it's just working towards the piece that I want, which means more meditation in my life, I am like a stagnant. And I use the word stagnant on purpose because if I think of a stagnant pond, I think of how gross a stagnant pond is. It's just a pond that's not moving. That's dirty. It's got the film over top of it.  It smells bad. I don't want to see my life as stagnant like that stagnant pond because I'm either green and growing or brown and dying. I'm either moving in the direction of my dreams and my goals or I'm staying paralyzed. Here's the thing that's interesting about it. No matter what you do, time will pass anyways. Right? No matter what you do, time will pass. There's nothing you can do about it. You can't stop time. That's one thing that I do know. We will eventually age to whatever our final ages that we're going to get to a UNI. We might as well take the time that we are aging and do something that we love, working towards the goals that we want, working towards the dreams that we want, but you'll never get it all right. If you're not taking a step forward because you're trying to get it perfect, you're never going to get it perfect. There's absolutely no such thing as perfection in this world.  You are. Do you want to know why? Because perfectionism doesn't exist. Perfectionism, we all think we're perfectionists just so you know. But really what perfectionism is is a mask that you're wearing to cover some fear or insecurity. Let me say that again. The perfectionism that you're hiding behind is a mask of some sort of fear or insecurity that you don't want to come in contact with, right? So let's say I'm an artist and I'm painting and I make all of these beautiful paintings but I never put it on Instagram. I never try to sell it. I never try to create a show for people to see it because it's not quote unquote perfect. It's not perfect yet. How many amazing artists or amazing people do you know that haven't put their work out into the world because it's not perfect yet? It will never be perfect. What they're really afraid of. If I was an artist and I didn't put my art out for people to see in this world, I would actually be really afraid of judgment. That's the fear or insecurity that's hiding that behind that mask. Let me give you an example. The reason why I don't want to put my art out is because I don't want someone to say, Oh, that's ugly. Why don't want someone to say, Oh my gosh, she's charging $2,000 for that. I wouldn't pay $50 for that. Well, I don't want someone to buy it and then return it because they hated it, right? So that perfectionism that I keep telling myself is the real reason why I haven't put my art into the world, whether it's my art, whether it's my music, whether it's my book, whether it's my podcast, whether it's my motivational videos, whether it's my Instagram I'm trying to go, my blog, my vlog, whatever it is that you're trying to grow is because we're afraid that it's not perfect yet and it never will truly be perfect. So we hold ourselves back from the life that we want because we're thinking too much about what if somebody judges me or what if I mess up along the way or what if I take the wrong route and in reality, it doesn't matter. What really matters is that we should be sitting back and going, what is the direction I want my life to be going in? What is it? And I need to take a step towards that every single day and I need to live my life every freaking day as if I'm just living in the headlights. I can't see the entire path. I'll never see the entire path. I'm probably going to mess up along the way. I'm probably going to fall on my face. I'm probably going to take a wrong turn but eventually I will get to my destination. So the way that you need to live your life is consciously remind yourself. The journey of 1,000 miles begins with a single step. What's the next best step for you? You need to live your life in the headlights.  You have to check just the next 50 feet and those 50 feet are right now, this present moment and what are you going to do in the next 15 minutes to get you closer to your goals and then reassess yourself every hour, every 30 minutes whatever you need to do and by asking yourself this question is what I'm doing right now getting me closer to or further from my goals. If it's getting you closer to your goals, continue on that path. If it's getting you further from your goals, stop right now, readjust, take a detour and start going back back towards the route that's going to take you to the life that you want. Hey, thanks so much for watching this video. If you want to learn even more about Master Your Mind, click right here and watch this video as well.  I lost all of my money.  Like this isn't what my life is going to be. I need to create something of myself.