> Flash isn't an archival medium.

Anything can be an archival medium, it's just a question of if it's good at it. Fash has been in large-scale use for 20 years now. It became the primary way computers stored their BIOS back in 95 so I think we have a fairly good understanding of it's long-term storage characteristics. Optical won't die today, and I expect the market to stay strong for 5 or 10 years, but in 20, it will be all but gone.

Optical has had a good run, but I'm betting that in 2037, optical will be dying or dead.

There's a lot of theoretical improvements left in optical disk technology, but they're unlikely to become common or cheap. I see possibly one generation after Blu-ray before the consumer standards stop and the access to cheap technology to drive advancements in optical storage disappears. Spinning disk is largely thought of as the primary competitor, but what's going to give optical the biggest headache is flash.

Flash storage's non-existent power requirements, extremely high density, naturally long read-only lifespan, re-usability, and flexible expansion options make it poised to take over the world of archival storage if it can come anywhere near cost-parity. My bet is that it will make it.

Nuclear is the most dangerous way to generate power.. except all the other ways.

People get all freaked out about how dangerous nuclear power generation can be, and ignore how dangerous all the other forms of power generation *actually are*. They get upset at the potential for long-term damage to the environment but ignore the massive ecological devastation that coal and oil and natural gas are constantly doing to the world. Look at Deepwater Horizon for example. Oil will be fouling and poisoning the gulf for an extremely long time, and the chemicals used in the cleanup will likely reduce the lifespan of the people who helped in the cleanup dramatically. When you look at the damage caused to people and to the environment of power generation objectively, nuclear is by far the safest and least damaging option, even factoring Fukishima and Chernobyl which represent risks that are unlikely to cause problems in the future.

Compared to every other way I have of watching movies like:
Netflix
Amazon prime
The Pirate Bay

DVD quality is terrible. I don't have a blu-ray player. I may never.

I find it hard to believe that anti-competitive collusion between competitors is ever "perfectly legal". There's a lot of laws out there dealing with this type of thing, there must be at least one that makes this illegal. Of course, laws that aren't enforced effectively don't exist.

I can't believe there wouldn't be a law somewhere on the books that would make it illegal for all your competitors to gang up together and buy patents to try and lock you out of the market. I'm assuming the laws exist, but they figure they've got enough legal mojo to fend off weak government anti-trust regulators.

I think World of Warcraft is probably the most couple friendly online game. You can group together and level, run instances, figure out gear, fight other people. I played with my wife for a while, and I ran into a lot of couples in WoW who played together. It lets you be brave, and protective and helpful and accomplish goals together. There's stories and fantastical places which make it interesting to just about anyone.

IMO, wherever hard links aren't, inodes should be inlined into the directory entries and read and stored in cache whenever the directory entry is read. Hard links make up a small percentage of files, especially in typical large-scale storage systems. Inlining inodes should solve a lot of unixy performance issues, but retrofitting arbitrary placement of inodes into filesystem code is prohibitively difficult because unix expects inodes to be accessible independant from a directory entry. A nice middle ground might be making inlining inodes a filesystem creation option which disables hardlinking on that filesystem. This is obviously doable since NTFS can be mounted on Linux.

Another nice option might be to add a separate piece of metadata which would be changed whenever an inode or the file it's attached to change that's attached to the directory entry. This way, a scan of a filesystem for changes could be quickly thorough. Essentially a directory stored mtime.

Stating the files on filesystems that require that is usually orders of magnitude more time consuming than the actual directory reading. IMO, filesystems should store mtime in the directory entry and readdir calls should return it.

> I have always wondered why I pay for a ton of cable channels when all I am really doing it watching commercials.

Because, half the cost of the programming you are watching comes from commercials. The average TV watcher watches about $80 worth of adds per month. (That's assuming about $0.02 per commercial watched, 30 commercials per hour, and 130 hours of TV watched per month which, as far as I know, are roughly accurate averages.) Would you pay $80 more for all that content without the commercials?

I both work and play on computers. I sit in the same chair averaging about 14 to 16 hours a day. I've been sitting this long every day for about 15 years and the trouble it causes is no-longer subtle. I even bought a really nice (BodyBilt) chair to try and help my back but after a few years it hasn't helped all that much.

One of the main ways I've been able to get relief is by alternating between sitting at a desktop, and using a laptop in bed propped up with my elbows. This position tends to reverse the bulging disk issues that sitting causes, but it is a hard position to maintain for more than a few minutes without getting a stiff neck.

I began thinking out of the box recently and I've built myself a new "chair" based on maintaining the position of using a laptop in bed more comfortably, and at my desktop workstation. I have a prototype I use built out of lumber and spare parts I had around (I'm actually using it now). It keeps me at a slight incline and supports my feet to help keep the spine compressed which helps keep the bulging disks in check, and it works quite well. My arms rest on my normal desk and use my normal keyboard and mouse. I'm still working on a way to support the head comfortably, but any company looking to productize such a device would probably have an easy time with that problem. I'd really like to see some work in this area, since I suspect this is ergonomically far superior to sitting, but I fear it's too radical for companies to embrace.

The other option I'm exploring is a treadmill desk (I ordered one a few days ago). I have a standing desk, but standing still is just too uncomfortable for me to do for any appreciable amount of time. I'm hoping the motion of a treadmill desk will allow me to work longer without pain, as well as giving me some exercise.

Another thing I can recommend to anyone who has occasional back trouble is a Nada Chair Back-up. It's a simple little device for pulling your spine into position by strapping it to your knees. It definitely helps reverse the uneven pressure on your spine caused by sitting, and it has rescued me from back trouble many times. It's a cheap simple device, and I find it helps a lot when things get bad, but it's hard to wear it enough to keep things from getting bad in the first place.

I think you are right that Kendrick got this wrong. I've been surprised by people's willingness to jump on the iPad bandwagon. The tablet computer is an old concept, and doing a respectable job of it has been within our grasp for some time now. In retrospect, I think the fuel behind the iPad's success was a huge pent up frustration with computers that constantly broke and while they had tons of power, couldn't do anything because software was hard to buy, expensive, and the security was so bad that computers rapidly and easily deteriorate into expensive useless crap.

Apple brought the combination of a way to distribute apps cheaply while ensuring quality and safety, and a general purpose easy to use computing device into this pool of pent-up demand and people went wild, despite the fact that when you look at it as just another computer platform, it doesn't compare all that well. The new for factor put it in a class by itself, and without comparisons it was hard to see how overpriced and weak the machines were. I think the i world will always have it's fans, but the newer generation of Android devices will cut it's market share dramatically. I have a Kindle fire, and just got a Nexus 7, and while with the Fire, I could see the appeal of an iPad, but with the Nexus it's gone.

The heavily Objective C based ecosystem of the i world seems like a natural deal-breaker for so many things that I think in the long run, many mobile apps will end up Android-only. The Android platform has figured out how to bridge the gap between programmer friendly java and resource efficiency to deliver the best of both worlds and with that they gain a much larger potential developer base, including many established corporate teams with existing code bases. The big advantage Apple has left is the closed hardware platform that limits the amount of testing and support needed by software vendors and ensures all devices in the ecosystem are high quality. That advantage comes saddled with some pretty heavy baggage that gets heavier as the number of units sold decreases though so as Android cuts into it's market, things start looking a lot worse for the iPad.

I have a linux box setup right now that spins up a few drives once a week to do a backup, then powers them down again when it's done. This is a feature that manufacturers should make into a consumer electronics device configured through a web interface, that sits idle on the network until it's backup time, then reaches out over the network and backs things up that it's configured to. A single drive solution would work for most people. Mine is an 8 drive raid 5 array, but I'm just cool like that.

End the wars and tax the rich for sure, but it's not just this.

We have an economy that is managed to maximize profits and investment returns, even when the tradeoff is economic health, jobs, and the rights of the people. At the behest of Wall Street, we've continually lowered trade barriers which has allowed corporations to make use of extremely inexpensive labor and make larger profits, but now 1/4 or Americans are unemployed or underemployed. We've allowed companies that should be competing with each other and forcing each other's prices and profits down, to merge and gouge their customers. We allowed Exxon and Mobile to merge, and now they've posted record profits and we're paying record high gas prices. Now they're trying to merge AT&T and T-Mobile, which will drive choice and competition down, prices up, and inevitably lead to a large number of layoffs. It's bad for everyone except stockholders. We need our government to serve *our* interests and to run the economy for *our* benefit, not for the 1% who win when jobs are lost but profits go up.

This is what they are fighting for. For capitalism, real capitalism that rewards hard work by skilled people who are serving customers needs, not this rigged system we have that exclusively rewards owning things and cheating the market.