That isn't to say that turning down work makes you successful, of course. Once you get to where you're turning away work, it means you can be selective. Also, you can start charging more.
BTW, if you're already doing 60-hour work weeks, you had better be making some really really good money (*), because the alternative is that you're already losing the game. What if one of you comes down with a flu that puts you on your back for 3 weeks? The other two gonna work 90-hour weeks? Doubtful. 60-hour weeks are for once-a-quarter crunch time. Right now, you're eating your seed corn.
(*) Even if you're making good money, it's probably wrong. The way to riches in computing is to identify an essential niche you are talented in, and raise your rates. 60-hour weeks make you 50% more dollars. Matching your talents to the right customers makes you 3x as many dollars.
This service could be extremely useful as a render farm for 3D graphics. It would be wonderful to be able to call up 1000 CPUs for a couple days or weeks at a time, without paying for them when not in use.
The problem is that movies output at something like 10M per frame (4000 pixels wide by 2000 pixels high by 48 bits per pixel div 8 bits per byte div 4 lossless compression factor), so you'd be talking about nearly a gigabyte for 4 seconds of footage (and my compression factor may be way off). So you can spin up 1000 CPUs for a half hour to generate five minutes of footage, and wait for weeks for your data to download over your T4 link. You could decide you just want to use this for proofs and cut the resolution in half on each dimension, cut to 24 bits per pixel, allow lossy compression, which cuts down the space by a factor of 16, but... now you only need 50 or 60 CPUs, so it starts to look more reasonable to just have them on-site.
Yeah, I've wondered about this exact issue in the past. I work at a place which specializes in building amazing giant clusters, and I have friends at Pixar and Dreamworks. But this one is going to be hard to carry. Movie houses keep their render farms hot for 6 months at a time, or if they're like Pixar, pretty much continuously. When ILM moved from Santa Rosa to Presidio, they basically installed a 10gbit fiber link (*) between to help with the transition period (when the render farm was in a different location from the workstations). Amazon isn't going to install a 10gbit fiber link for you:-).
Uh... no, if they wanted outside verification, they'd just plain go out and get some.
Or, you know, just hook up to the grid and start selling power. Admittedly, it would be easier to get tens of millions of dollars and jumpstart things, but... you hook it up to the grid, and start generating revenue at a couple cents per kilowatthour, round the clock. Since it's "free", your revenue is operating profit, and should add up FAST. After a couple months you build another unit, and another, and pretty soon you've bootstrapped yourself into a real company.
Well, unless your current prototype doesn't, you know, really provide free power. It will only do _that_ after you've built the $10M version, of course.
The government that brought us the Tuskeegee experiment, non consentual testing of psychotropic drugs or exposing retarded children to radiation is capable of damned near anything.
Except they appear incapable of keeping such things secret forever, eh?
2) I want options when I graduate to move to where I need to or whatever. I don't want to live in my parents' basement till I am 35.
So, you know, get a job. If you don't have a job, then you shouldn't waste your savings just to move out of your parent's basement. The goal isn't to move out of your parent's basement, the goal is to be a contributing member of society. Manage that and moving out of the basement should follow. The shame is in living in your parent's basement because you blow all your income on booze and night clubs and shit, or because you can't be bothered to find (and go to) work. If you've landed a job and are working hard and simply cannot afford to move out, or if you're in an economically depressed area and there simply aren't any jobs... well, that's certainly sad, but it's not shameful.
I count 40 women who have spent time in space. You know what? That is pretty damned incredible, when you think about it. I mean, I still haven't gotten to go into space, yet, and that's pretty frustrating, but, still, this is an amazing thing. While I don't totally agree with throwing good money after bad on the shuttle program, I'll be really sad if, in 30 years, we'll look back on the shuttle program like we currently look back on Apollo.
It would be cheaper to start with a fresh design than to make use of the original.
Only if they frickin' try to design a cheap system, instead of larding all sorts of crap into it. The shuttle is really really amazing, state-of-the-art for its time, but many people suspect we wouldn be better off with a not-quite-state-of-the-art system which we could send up once a week instead of once a year.
On reflection, that's pretty scary: a nav system capable of a rendezvous on-orbit is also capable of rendezvous with other similarly sized objects such as the White House.
Not really. A Whitehouse-sized object orbiting in near-vacuum will allow you to gradually match velocities and rendezvous. When targetting the real Whitehouse, you'll have to inject into a pretty precise ballistic trajectory, and be able to make course corrections significantly in advance of your final destination to compensate for wind and other factors. Really, it's the difference between hitting a particular object at 1 mph versus hitting the same object at 1000 mph (sorry, I have no idea what terminal velocity for a cone-shaped metallic object).
Austin, Texas, is known as the Silicon Hills because it has reproduced Silicon Valley, albeit on a smaller scale.
I'm sure it's known as Silicon Hills because it wants everyone to *think* it has reproduced Silicon Valley. Just like Silicon Alley and Silicon Gulch and...
You'll know you've succeeded when people from Silicon Valley who aren't interested in leaving suggest that you've succeeded. [People who are interested in leaving are trying to find reasons to buttress their decision to move somewhere cheaper, people who haven't been don't necessarily know in the first place.]
The above surely sounds snobbish. Years ago, I convinced my wife to move out here because I figured I was missing out, and, indeed, I was. But, you know when I realized what Silicon Valley *really* was, how deep it *really* went? When I started at a year-old startup, and I realized that we had three potential future competitors in the same office park! And it wasn't anything special in terms of office parks, maybe 500,000 square feet, probably less. The potential number of 10-person startups in the Bay Area at any given time is simply *staggering*. They're just all over the place, and I mean _all_ over the place.
Another Silicon Place might be able to somewhat replicate the breadth using tax incentives and the like - but the depth? That's going to be tough.
The very fact you consent we're in a "time where we need some kind of safety net" means brainwashing worked.
The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.
This doesn't really look like a "hate campaign" to me.
I agree. After ten seconds looking at the site, it's clear to me that it's older-office-worker-just-putting-in-his-time against twenty-something-loser-who-needs-to-move-out-of-hi s-mom's-basement. Ought to be quite the tussle.
I'm a BA in CS, and I barely stuck that out, and have been undeservedly successful, but... while I agree that a smart+motivated person doesn't _need_ an advanced degree to make it, I disagree that getting an advanced degree is a bad idea. I bin a lot of people with advanced degrees, but one thing I do notice is that the more advanced your degree, the more you are at least aware that you need to think of things at a meta level. Lots of low/no-degree candidates get tied up on very basic questions, simply because they don't have the terminology, they don't have the mindset. And I don't mean esoteric stuff - everyone needs to be able to tell you how hashtables work and why you'd use them, compare trees to hashtables to lists, that sort of thing. You wouldn't think an MD was trustworthy if they asked you how that thingy on the end of your arm felt!
Basically, there is a small small set of people who are true enthusiasts, who soak this stuff up through their skin because they live, drink, eat, and sleep CS. For them, it hardly matters _what_ route they take. But for regular people who are doing this as a job rather than an obsession, you can either put in your 4/6/8 years in school to learn stuff in a format designed for learning, or you can spend 2x that learning it on-the-job. If you learn it on-the-job, it will be much more authentic knowledge - you will not only know things, you'll know why they're important to know. But you have to be hella motivated to go that route.
Better URL (fake) http://com.walmart.electronics/ lends to a better way to list a web address. broad to narrow, just like the way we think.
Sorry, for that address, I'm either thinking of walmart or electronics first, and com is definitely last.
Search is a better match for how we think. Which is to say that we don't think in an hierarchy like "Hmm, a company... aha, Walmart... aha, electronics... ok, television". We _organize_ things in hierarchies, we just don't _think_ in hierarchies (unless we're programmers). We think "I wonder what televisions Walmart has?" You elide the "electronics" and "company" part, you just think "television" and "walmart". So, pop them into a search, and you find a site to buy a television from walmart. [Well, no, you don't, you find a bunch of porn and an offer to buy a fishing rod.] In any case, what you really want to do is tag the hell out of everything and then combine the tags in interesting ways.
And now the browser can't figure out which server to contact to get the content without recursing down the tree asking stupid questions. And you can't contact the subsidiary sites if the top-level site is down.
I'm a software engineer, so my opinion might not be directly on-topic, but...
I'm a last year IT student and I'm wondering, how much should I jump ship?
That's completely the wrong question. Basically, you should stay in a job so long as you're learning new things and the job has potential to challenge you. Jobs are like oil wells, initially new stuff is gushing out almost faster than you can handle them, but after a year or so, you have to start actively searching for new/interesting stuff, and after three years or so, you're either able to squeeze a sustainable level of interesting stuff out, or you're not. If you find that you're sitting in one place not taking risks, then question the situation - if it's _you_ who aren't taking risks, then moving to a new position isn't going to help much (you should start taking risks in your current position first), if the job is not allowing you to take risks, then moving to a new position might make all the difference.
The above paragraph assumes a proactive employee who hustles to keep on top of things and make themselves useful when in a particular position, and who doesn't just jump to the first thing available when switching positions. For instance, don't pick jobs based on how well you can do them, pick jobs based on how much they are likely to improve your capabilities.
A graduate advisor I once had said that if you weren't coming up with one new idea a month, you shouldn't be in academia.
Wow, if that had been to going impression of academia way back when, maybe I would have stuck with it instead of taking my degree and going off to write software commercially, and, uh... no, wait, that wouldn't have been a good idea at all! I work with a bunch of PhDs on a daily basis, and one of the really common themes is that they felt quite stifled in academia.
I used RAID1 exactly as you suggested for four or five years, then one day after doing something stupid, I realized that the main danger to my data was me, not my hardware, and that by throwing hardware at the problem, I was making it _more_ likely that I'd have a hardware failure, not less, and that every hardware failure was another opportunity for me to make a really bad mistake. Additionally, I was getting tired of every year or two having to scramble to either find a piece of matching hardware to replace a dead drive, or rebuild the array onto a matched pair of bigger drives.
I immediately scrounged enough hardware to build a backup server with a big-enough hard drive, and started running rsnapshot to back things up. This box does ONLY backup work. No servers, no file server (except for backup access), no nothing, so it's reasonably safe from me asking it to nuke itself. Rather than do RAID1 on this box, I got 2 external drives which I use to snapshot the backup once a month. Those drives rotate between home and work, so at all times I have the original data, a very fresh onsite online backup, a less fresh onsite offline backup, and a somewhat stale offsite offline backup.
This was no more expensive than RAID to setup, but I've found it to be a LOT more useful in the real world. Upgrading machines is much more enjoyable now, because of the netapp-like snapshotting that rsnapshot does. I used to do an intricate dance of replacing a mirror so that I'd have a trustworthy backup, then do the upgrade, then be afraid to reconnect the disconnected drive to check how something changed. Having tested rebuilds a couple times with the new system, I just build the OS and copy over stuff from the backup server as needed. If I need to check on a configuration mistake I made in July, I can just compare the pre-July copy to the post-July copy.
This all happened about a year-and-a-half ago. It quickly became apparent that this was _the_ way to go. Now I've got it reduced to a SFF case that sits off in the corner doing its job, and I don't touch it.
While if you hook up a flash memory to the USB 1 spec, it will be painfully slow, even with a connection to a high-speed USB 2.0 hub, you'll still run into slowdowns. Why? Because most flash (which is most, if not all non-disk related MP3 players) write speeds are averaging around 5-10MB/sec. And even then, that's being generous.
Individual RAM chips are also slow. That's why they access them all in parallel, even though these days you can access multiple bits in parallel within a single chip. If you were going to use flash for system storage, you'd most likely pull the controller at least partially offchip, and start managing them as something similar to a RAID0 array. Writing 512 bytes will be slow, but writing 16x512 bytes won't be any slower, something like that.
I've heard a lot of people say that a lot of (presumably other) people hang on Steve Jobs' every word. But somehow I've never met anyone who actually did seem to hang on the words of Steve Jobs.
You've obviously not met the right people. I can't recall if I've actually met Jobs (he certainly wouldn't know me), but I once sat two places down from him at a lunch with a small group, and have been in some relatively small audiences when he spoke, and some relatively large audiences of course. I'm generally a very negative person, I nit-pick movies to death and am a really unfortunate person to sit next to in an audience. That said, Jobs definitely has that reality-distortion field. When you hear him talk, you believe. In a smaller group, you believe even more. It's really amazing, and it's something I've not really experienced with any other famous speaker.
Often enough, though, a half hour later you're out in the lobby talking to your colleagues, and you're wondering what the heck that was all about. When he manages to combine the Jedi Mind Trick with actual substance, it's really amazing to behold. He manages this often enough to keep Apple going. There are enough great hits that it keeps a certain segment of people coming back time and again, hoping that this hit will be the one.
[Personally, though I sometimes flirt with going back into the fold, I've been ex-NeXT/Apple for 7 years and counting. I eventually got sick of the manipulation.]
And don't kid yourself that he's just a pretty face for the company: Jobs makes things happen. Some of them are good things, some of them are bad things, but he motivates people to get stuff done, and that's why it all works.
So long as you're going bizarre, you could also make ordering relevant, which gets rid of your factor of two, and lets you get away with 13 keys.
Though, really, three simultaneous gets you down to 7 keys, 9 if you use unordered chords, which is less than 10 fingers so you might as well not continue. As long as you're calling them chords, maybe you could play it like a guitar.
But partly, it was simply because the war was coming early and they didn't have time to train them further.
Um, you do realize that the ships which fought the war decades were sent off decades in the past. They weren't getting there early, or later, or otherwise. The more distant battles came later, were closer to the hive's core planet, and were fought with older ships. They used younger kids because the additional years of training just weren't relevant, if raw talent plus ruthlessness weren't going to win, then raw talent plus ruthlessness plus practice wasn't going to win, especially when the practice essentially destroyed the practicer.
Slashdot Mirror
That isn't to say that turning down work makes you successful, of course. Once you get to where you're turning away work, it means you can be selective. Also, you can start charging more.
BTW, if you're already doing 60-hour work weeks, you had better be making some really really good money (*), because the alternative is that you're already losing the game. What if one of you comes down with a flu that puts you on your back for 3 weeks? The other two gonna work 90-hour weeks? Doubtful. 60-hour weeks are for once-a-quarter crunch time. Right now, you're eating your seed corn.
(*) Even if you're making good money, it's probably wrong. The way to riches in computing is to identify an essential niche you are talented in, and raise your rates. 60-hour weeks make you 50% more dollars. Matching your talents to the right customers makes you 3x as many dollars.
This service could be extremely useful as a render farm for 3D graphics. It would be wonderful to be able to call up 1000 CPUs for a couple days or weeks at a time, without paying for them when not in use.
... now you only need 50 or 60 CPUs, so it starts to look more reasonable to just have them on-site.
:-).
g e/story/0,10801,105052,00.html
The problem is that movies output at something like 10M per frame (4000 pixels wide by 2000 pixels high by 48 bits per pixel div 8 bits per byte div 4 lossless compression factor), so you'd be talking about nearly a gigabyte for 4 seconds of footage (and my compression factor may be way off). So you can spin up 1000 CPUs for a half hour to generate five minutes of footage, and wait for weeks for your data to download over your T4 link. You could decide you just want to use this for proofs and cut the resolution in half on each dimension, cut to 24 bits per pixel, allow lossy compression, which cuts down the space by a factor of 16, but
Yeah, I've wondered about this exact issue in the past. I work at a place which specializes in building amazing giant clusters, and I have friends at Pixar and Dreamworks. But this one is going to be hard to carry. Movie houses keep their render farms hot for 6 months at a time, or if they're like Pixar, pretty much continuously. When ILM moved from Santa Rosa to Presidio, they basically installed a 10gbit fiber link (*) between to help with the transition period (when the render farm was in a different location from the workstations). Amazon isn't going to install a 10gbit fiber link for you
-scott
(*) http://www.computerworld.com/hardwaretopics/stora
Uh... no, if they wanted outside verification, they'd just plain go out and get some.
... you hook it up to the grid, and start generating revenue at a couple cents per kilowatthour, round the clock. Since it's "free", your revenue is operating profit, and should add up FAST. After a couple months you build another unit, and another, and pretty soon you've bootstrapped yourself into a real company.
Or, you know, just hook up to the grid and start selling power. Admittedly, it would be easier to get tens of millions of dollars and jumpstart things, but
Well, unless your current prototype doesn't, you know, really provide free power. It will only do _that_ after you've built the $10M version, of course.
-scott
The government that brought us the Tuskeegee experiment, non consentual testing of psychotropic drugs or exposing retarded children to radiation is capable of damned near anything.
Except they appear incapable of keeping such things secret forever, eh?
-scott
2) I want options when I graduate to move to where I need to or whatever. I don't want to live in my parents' basement till I am 35.
... well, that's certainly sad, but it's not shameful.
So, you know, get a job. If you don't have a job, then you shouldn't waste your savings just to move out of your parent's basement. The goal isn't to move out of your parent's basement, the goal is to be a contributing member of society. Manage that and moving out of the basement should follow. The shame is in living in your parent's basement because you blow all your income on booze and night clubs and shit, or because you can't be bothered to find (and go to) work. If you've landed a job and are working hard and simply cannot afford to move out, or if you're in an economically depressed area and there simply aren't any jobs
-scott
I count 40 women who have spent time in space. You know what? That is pretty damned incredible, when you think about it. I mean, I still haven't gotten to go into space, yet, and that's pretty frustrating, but, still, this is an amazing thing. While I don't totally agree with throwing good money after bad on the shuttle program, I'll be really sad if, in 30 years, we'll look back on the shuttle program like we currently look back on Apollo.
-scott
It would be cheaper to start with a fresh design than to make use of the original.
Only if they frickin' try to design a cheap system, instead of larding all sorts of crap into it. The shuttle is really really amazing, state-of-the-art for its time, but many people suspect we wouldn be better off with a not-quite-state-of-the-art system which we could send up once a week instead of once a year.
-scott
On reflection, that's pretty scary: a nav system capable of a rendezvous on-orbit is also capable of rendezvous with other similarly sized objects such as the White House.
Not really. A Whitehouse-sized object orbiting in near-vacuum will allow you to gradually match velocities and rendezvous. When targetting the real Whitehouse, you'll have to inject into a pretty precise ballistic trajectory, and be able to make course corrections significantly in advance of your final destination to compensate for wind and other factors. Really, it's the difference between hitting a particular object at 1 mph versus hitting the same object at 1000 mph (sorry, I have no idea what terminal velocity for a cone-shaped metallic object).
-scott
Austin, Texas, is known as the Silicon Hills because it has reproduced Silicon Valley, albeit on a smaller scale.
...
I'm sure it's known as Silicon Hills because it wants everyone to *think* it has reproduced Silicon Valley. Just like Silicon Alley and Silicon Gulch and
You'll know you've succeeded when people from Silicon Valley who aren't interested in leaving suggest that you've succeeded. [People who are interested in leaving are trying to find reasons to buttress their decision to move somewhere cheaper, people who haven't been don't necessarily know in the first place.]
The above surely sounds snobbish. Years ago, I convinced my wife to move out here because I figured I was missing out, and, indeed, I was. But, you know when I realized what Silicon Valley *really* was, how deep it *really* went? When I started at a year-old startup, and I realized that we had three potential future competitors in the same office park! And it wasn't anything special in terms of office parks, maybe 500,000 square feet, probably less. The potential number of 10-person startups in the Bay Area at any given time is simply *staggering*. They're just all over the place, and I mean _all_ over the place.
Another Silicon Place might be able to somewhat replicate the breadth using tax incentives and the like - but the depth? That's going to be tough.
-scott
The very fact you consent we're in a "time where we need some kind of safety net" means brainwashing worked.
The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.
H. L. Mencken
This doesn't really look like a "hate campaign" to me.
i s-mom's-basement. Ought to be quite the tussle.
I agree. After ten seconds looking at the site, it's clear to me that it's older-office-worker-just-putting-in-his-time against twenty-something-loser-who-needs-to-move-out-of-h
-scott
If you look at the price for 4GB Compact Flash cards, it's already well above the price of the 4GB Nano (about $350 for a SanDisk 4GB Ultra II card).
You're kidding, right? buy.com has them for $174, Amazon $185, etc.
I'm a BA in CS, and I barely stuck that out, and have been undeservedly successful, but ... while I agree that a smart+motivated person doesn't _need_ an advanced degree to make it, I disagree that getting an advanced degree is a bad idea. I bin a lot of people with advanced degrees, but one thing I do notice is that the more advanced your degree, the more you are at least aware that you need to think of things at a meta level. Lots of low/no-degree candidates get tied up on very basic questions, simply because they don't have the terminology, they don't have the mindset. And I don't mean esoteric stuff - everyone needs to be able to tell you how hashtables work and why you'd use them, compare trees to hashtables to lists, that sort of thing. You wouldn't think an MD was trustworthy if they asked you how that thingy on the end of your arm felt!
Basically, there is a small small set of people who are true enthusiasts, who soak this stuff up through their skin because they live, drink, eat, and sleep CS. For them, it hardly matters _what_ route they take. But for regular people who are doing this as a job rather than an obsession, you can either put in your 4/6/8 years in school to learn stuff in a format designed for learning, or you can spend 2x that learning it on-the-job. If you learn it on-the-job, it will be much more authentic knowledge - you will not only know things, you'll know why they're important to know. But you have to be hella motivated to go that route.
-scott
Better URL (fake) http://com.walmart.electronics/ lends to a better way to list a web address. broad to narrow, just like the way we think.
... aha, Walmart ... aha, electronics ... ok, television". We _organize_ things in hierarchies, we just don't _think_ in hierarchies (unless we're programmers). We think "I wonder what televisions Walmart has?" You elide the "electronics" and "company" part, you just think "television" and "walmart". So, pop them into a search, and you find a site to buy a television from walmart. [Well, no, you don't, you find a bunch of porn and an offer to buy a fishing rod.] In any case, what you really want to do is tag the hell out of everything and then combine the tags in interesting ways.
Sorry, for that address, I'm either thinking of walmart or electronics first, and com is definitely last.
Search is a better match for how we think. Which is to say that we don't think in an hierarchy like "Hmm, a company
-scott
and now everything is a hierarchical pathname
And now the browser can't figure out which server to contact to get the content without recursing down the tree asking stupid questions. And you can't contact the subsidiary sites if the top-level site is down.
-scott
I'm a software engineer, so my opinion might not be directly on-topic, but...
I'm a last year IT student and I'm wondering, how much should I jump ship?
That's completely the wrong question. Basically, you should stay in a job so long as you're learning new things and the job has potential to challenge you. Jobs are like oil wells, initially new stuff is gushing out almost faster than you can handle them, but after a year or so, you have to start actively searching for new/interesting stuff, and after three years or so, you're either able to squeeze a sustainable level of interesting stuff out, or you're not. If you find that you're sitting in one place not taking risks, then question the situation - if it's _you_ who aren't taking risks, then moving to a new position isn't going to help much (you should start taking risks in your current position first), if the job is not allowing you to take risks, then moving to a new position might make all the difference.
The above paragraph assumes a proactive employee who hustles to keep on top of things and make themselves useful when in a particular position, and who doesn't just jump to the first thing available when switching positions. For instance, don't pick jobs based on how well you can do them, pick jobs based on how much they are likely to improve your capabilities.
-scott
A graduate advisor I once had said that if you weren't coming up with one new idea a month, you shouldn't be in academia.
... no, wait, that wouldn't have been a good idea at all! I work with a bunch of PhDs on a daily basis, and one of the really common themes is that they felt quite stifled in academia.
Wow, if that had been to going impression of academia way back when, maybe I would have stuck with it instead of taking my degree and going off to write software commercially, and, uh
-scott
I'd be interested in hearing other examples of "really smart engineers working there but the results that outsiders see are mediocre".
Google.
I used RAID1 exactly as you suggested for four or five years, then one day after doing something stupid, I realized that the main danger to my data was me, not my hardware, and that by throwing hardware at the problem, I was making it _more_ likely that I'd have a hardware failure, not less, and that every hardware failure was another opportunity for me to make a really bad mistake. Additionally, I was getting tired of every year or two having to scramble to either find a piece of matching hardware to replace a dead drive, or rebuild the array onto a matched pair of bigger drives.
I immediately scrounged enough hardware to build a backup server with a big-enough hard drive, and started running rsnapshot to back things up. This box does ONLY backup work. No servers, no file server (except for backup access), no nothing, so it's reasonably safe from me asking it to nuke itself. Rather than do RAID1 on this box, I got 2 external drives which I use to snapshot the backup once a month. Those drives rotate between home and work, so at all times I have the original data, a very fresh onsite online backup, a less fresh onsite offline backup, and a somewhat stale offsite offline backup.
This was no more expensive than RAID to setup, but I've found it to be a LOT more useful in the real world. Upgrading machines is much more enjoyable now, because of the netapp-like snapshotting that rsnapshot does. I used to do an intricate dance of replacing a mirror so that I'd have a trustworthy backup, then do the upgrade, then be afraid to reconnect the disconnected drive to check how something changed. Having tested rebuilds a couple times with the new system, I just build the OS and copy over stuff from the backup server as needed. If I need to check on a configuration mistake I made in July, I can just compare the pre-July copy to the post-July copy.
This all happened about a year-and-a-half ago. It quickly became apparent that this was _the_ way to go. Now I've got it reduced to a SFF case that sits off in the corner doing its job, and I don't touch it.
While if you hook up a flash memory to the USB 1 spec, it will be painfully slow, even with a connection to a high-speed USB 2.0 hub, you'll still run into slowdowns. Why? Because most flash (which is most, if not all non-disk related MP3 players) write speeds are averaging around 5-10MB/sec. And even then, that's being generous.
Individual RAM chips are also slow. That's why they access them all in parallel, even though these days you can access multiple bits in parallel within a single chip. If you were going to use flash for system storage, you'd most likely pull the controller at least partially offchip, and start managing them as something similar to a RAID0 array. Writing 512 bytes will be slow, but writing 16x512 bytes won't be any slower, something like that.
-scott
I've heard a lot of people say that a lot of (presumably other) people hang on Steve Jobs' every word. But somehow I've never met anyone who actually did seem to hang on the words of Steve Jobs.
You've obviously not met the right people. I can't recall if I've actually met Jobs (he certainly wouldn't know me), but I once sat two places down from him at a lunch with a small group, and have been in some relatively small audiences when he spoke, and some relatively large audiences of course. I'm generally a very negative person, I nit-pick movies to death and am a really unfortunate person to sit next to in an audience. That said, Jobs definitely has that reality-distortion field. When you hear him talk, you believe. In a smaller group, you believe even more. It's really amazing, and it's something I've not really experienced with any other famous speaker.
Often enough, though, a half hour later you're out in the lobby talking to your colleagues, and you're wondering what the heck that was all about. When he manages to combine the Jedi Mind Trick with actual substance, it's really amazing to behold. He manages this often enough to keep Apple going. There are enough great hits that it keeps a certain segment of people coming back time and again, hoping that this hit will be the one.
[Personally, though I sometimes flirt with going back into the fold, I've been ex-NeXT/Apple for 7 years and counting. I eventually got sick of the manipulation.]
And don't kid yourself that he's just a pretty face for the company: Jobs makes things happen. Some of them are good things, some of them are bad things, but he motivates people to get stuff done, and that's why it all works.
So long as you're going bizarre, you could also make ordering relevant, which gets rid of your factor of two, and lets you get away with 13 keys.
Though, really, three simultaneous gets you down to 7 keys, 9 if you use unordered chords, which is less than 10 fingers so you might as well not continue. As long as you're calling them chords, maybe you could play it like a guitar.
John Varley wrote the screenplay for Millennium and turned a classic short story into the worst film made by anybody, anywhere.
Did you never see Battlefield Earth?
Oh, wait a minute - that was based on a story that was neither classic nor short. You're forgiven.
eom
But partly, it was simply because the war was coming early and they didn't have time to train them further.
Um, you do realize that the ships which fought the war decades were sent off decades in the past. They weren't getting there early, or later, or otherwise. The more distant battles came later, were closer to the hive's core planet, and were fought with older ships. They used younger kids because the additional years of training just weren't relevant, if raw talent plus ruthlessness weren't going to win, then raw talent plus ruthlessness plus practice wasn't going to win, especially when the practice essentially destroyed the practicer.
-scott