Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
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
...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.