Interesting Links for 10-03-2013

• How the discovery of a microscopic world shook the foundations of theology and created modern demons
  (tags: religion history belief life microsocopy science )
• Apartments So Small They Can Only Be Photographed From Above
  (tags: housing HongKong )
• The Cage-dwellers of Hong Kong
  (tags: housing HongKong )
• What do people think of the new Pope?
  (tags: catholicism video pope )
• How to Finish Your PhD
  (tags: phd advice )
• Stop criticising women for being feminine.
  (tags: feminism women )
• Shatner, Takei, Nimoy, Wheaton, Hadfield and Aldrin chat. Over Twitter. Best Thing Ever.
  (tags: twitter awesome StarTrek space )
• Jedi vs Mormons!
  (tags: religion funny french video starwars )
• Why fixing the NHS is such a massive problem.
  (tags: management nhs )
• Porn stars before and after makeup. (clothes on) Goes to show that nobody looks like that in real life.
  Imgur is used to share photos with social networks and online communities, and has the funniest pictures from all over the Internet.
  (tags: photos pornography viaJennieRigg makeup )

File copying: Still stupidly slow

I'm currently grabbing a backup of all of Julie's important files from her PC before I reinstall Windows from scratch.

And the varying file copying speeds tell me that something brain dead is going on.

Copying a single large file brings transfer speeds up to 50MB/s (400Mbit/s). Copying lots of small files brings this down to 1MB/s, and occasionally down to 300kB/s when dealing with multiple tiny files.

So either there's a massive overhead in setup/teardown of individual network connections for each transfer (which would be dumb), there's a massive overhead of updating the file-system for each file (which would be dumb) or at the end of each file it's pausing and flushing all the buffers before going on to the next one (which would be dumb).

In any case, there's _something_ dumb going on.