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Wozniak Accepts Post At a Storage Systems Start-Up
Hugh Pickens writes "Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak is going back to work as chief scientist at Fusion-io, a start-up company that tweaks computers to let them tap vast amounts of storage at very quick rates. In the early days of Apple, Wozniak stood out as one of Silicon Valley's most creative engineers, demonstrating a knack for elegant computer designs that made efficient use of components and combined many features into a cohesive package and Wozniak will do similar work at Fusion-io, although this time with larger server computers and storage systems rather than PCs. 'I have a pretty quiet life, and I like to watch technology evolve,' says Wozniak. 'In this case, I like the people and the product, and said I would like some greater involvement.'"
It's always good to stay busy, and doubly so if you can actually do something that helps grow the existing technology.
And if he can make some cash from this gig, even better!
Go Woz!
HA!
If the mere act of this man taking a job with a start up is enough to make front page Slashdot news... and you call that being a loser. I want to be upgraded to a loser! Where do I sign up?
Jobs = marketing guy
Wozniak = engineering geek
If you prefer Jobs over Woz, you're at the wrong website.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
phenomenal solid state drives
Combine the fast access of flash with the organization and optimizations I've seen in ext4, and you'll have an incredible system at the non-volatile storage level, which to me has always fallen behind other advancements like GPUs, processor speed/bus width, and RAM pricing/addressability (goes in hand with 64-bit processors).
:).
With this in mind, I eagerly look forward to my next system because of the long-awaited storage advancements over the last few years, mainly due to filesystem development (well, Linux filesystem development) and SSDs. The only gripe I have right now is the cost, which is falling steadily anyway (despite the economy) so that won't matter when its time to shop around
tweaks computers to let them tap vast amounts of storage at very quick rates
In other words, Yet Another Half-Baked Clustered/Distributed Filesystem we can add to the list of dozens of failed distributed/clustered filesystems.
Please help metamoderate.
It's a solid state hard drive that uses PCI Express instead of SATA. It looks pretty zippy. Decently large, too. Is there something else cool about their technology that I'm missing?
Sun many have other problems, but engineering talent is not one of them.
Doesn't matter if they can't afford to pay said engineers or if layoffs keep occurring at the present rate.
...yeah, it's the buzzword. It's the current growth area.
Let's consider what The Woz did for floppies Back In The Day. While the early floppy drives are to modern drives the way the Wright Brothers plane is comparable to the B2 Stealth Bomber.... the fact is, The Woz turned the industry on its head. While in one light his contributions can be viewed as an incremental improvement, in every other light, HOLY CRAP HE KICKED SO MUCH ASS when it came to primordial microcomputer disk controllers. He proved that the highest-tech, super-chip-count hyper-expensive controllers could be implemented with a handful of chips.
And he could - COULD! - do it again.
I'm totally behind some company - ANY company - throwing money at The Woz, betting on the off chance he gets another flash of insight and pushes storage technology 20 years further ahead in as many minutes.
Was Woz the Right Genius at the Right Time, or is he a straight-up Hacker's Hacker, who just needs the right operational conditions for his genius to manifest?
Time will tell.
But your base station need not be in your house. Your base station could be network-based storage.
You wouldn't feel too bad about dropping your PC in the toilet if you could get another one at CVS for the price of a couple packs of razor blades.
Such a PC won't be a game station, or scientific number-cruncher, but it could satisfy a rather large niche that is only just now being developed.
Frankly, though, I'm surprised no one has taken a palm, given it a dock that hooks up directly to a large (B&W) LCD monitor and keyboard, as a typewriting and email device.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Right... it must be marketing that makes my iMac and suite of iLife and iWork tools with the neato Unix underpinnings work so well together. Woz made stuff. Jobs made stuff work well. BOTH are important.
Knowledge is valuable. Ignorance is dangerous. Censorship is unacceptable. http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=10
to SSDs, and that is lifetime. It is my understanding that the memory cells they are using in SSDs today are rated in the neighborhood of 100,000 writes. I do know for sure that it is less than 1,000,000 writes.
Within reason (many millions of cycles), magnetic storage media does not care how many times a particular location is written. Flash memory does. So "good" flash memory uses a scheme whereby the cells that are written to are rotated.
100,000 cycles is not very many for a computer. I could easily write a routine that would read and write bits in such a way to wear out large portions of your SSD within a few days.
That is not good. And because of the rotation scheme, it is not often mentioned by the SSD manufacturers.
Raid 0 might start to become a lot more interesting if they can prove to be reliable.
This is the fundamental problem when trying to explain why SSDs are so absolutely magically fantastic.
SSDs negate RAID-0. We're talking about drive i/o that is measured in nanoseconds instead of milliseconds. Solid state drives essentially remove i/o from the equation (at least, on the disk). Stacking multiple drives that each have an access time of ~0 isn't going to do you any good.
Let's say Apple II and C64. In particular the floppy controller, which Woz was responsible for. The C64 drives were very slow and very expensive. They were connected via a serial bus and the drive itself had a cpu that you had to send a fast loader to if you wanted anything better than the glacial performance that the Commodore code would provide. This was the old way of doing things.
The floppy controller on the Apple II, well there really was none. There was a chip where GPIO pins were used for the IO and a countdown timer that was already there was reused. The drive itself was basically dumb, just some TTL stuff.
And the Apple drive was faster, much faster on typical C64, and still a smidge faster even if you had an Epyx Fast Loader cart in your C64.