4. We are infact collectively having the pschotc episode.

Dear Shuttleworth,

Don't think I don't know what you are doing. It was clever of you to have invested $1M in Inktank to support Ceph. That got you a lot of hits on ceph.com. It may take me all year, but through the power of science I will eventually beat your record of who can drive more traffic to our website. Like a master ninja I will blind you with my amazing insights. Just look at my analysis of Ceph's write performance on different disk controllers. Yeah it didn't get as many hits as your little investment announcement, but this is just the beginning. So my questions is, do you want to just give up now?

Mark

(Nelson, not Shuttleworth!)

Yeah, I still remember how I switched. I was trying to get Windows 95 to back up some files on my hard drive to tape using their goofy backup software. To make a long story short, Windows 95 ultimately ended up corrupting my hard drive and the backup. It was at that point that I switched to OS/2 for a while, then slackware, then redhat, then debian. I stuck with debian for a while, then switched to ubuntu and have been mostly ubuntu since. For a while I had a windows or OSX partition for games, but in the last year or so I haven't bothered since wine+native has been good enough. I haven't looked back.

I actually rebuilt the theme I used previous from gnome2 and my gnome3 fallback desktop pretty much looks exactly like my gnome2 desktop did. I even got the panel looking right which took some effort.

I use it, and have been using it since I switched from gnome 2. I even ported the theme I used so my desktop is pretty much exactly the same as it was before. The gnome devs don't owe me a thing, but that doesn't mean that I'm not going to be pissed off at them for wasting their potential.

I think what's scary is that it seems like there are a significant number of people that care more about their relative status in society more than they care about the baseline. IE they would rather have more than their neighbor even if it meant both standards of living were lower than they would be otherwise. I think this is what fuels some very bad decisions that our society makes.

One of the things I have noticed over the years is that while there are still many comments for political or flame inducing articles, the number of comments for deep or technical articles has decreased pretty dramatically. I can only conclude that many of the highly technical people have left. Those of us that remain do so out of some combination of routine/tradition.

The Cynic in me says that you don't get to into the Top 5 by spending all of your budget on memory. :)

Practically speaking there are a lot of research codes out there that are using 1GB or less of memory per core. Our systems at MSI typically had somewhere between 2-3GB of memory per core and often were only using half of their memory or less. There's a good chance that TACC has looked at the kinds of computations that would happen on the machine and determined that they don't need more.

We had another much smaller cluster that had significantly more memory per node where we tried to push big memory people to use. They of course don't like it because they want to run on the big fancy glorious machine that gets mentioned in all of the press articles even though they aren't well suited to use it. Such is the way Academia works though.

Sadly it's a tragedy that seems all too common these days. The IT admins, software engineers and hardware engineers think they know how to do each other's jobs better than they do. Instead of working together, they try to build their own little power bases to control each other. If you've found a place to work where that's not the case, cherish it. In my experience it's not as common as one would hope.

There are a lot of places like that. There are other places where nearly every individual thinks they know everything because they know a thing or two about a given subject (be it computers, physics, law, etc). I'm about 10 years older than you. After working at a couple of different places my take away has been:

1) Try new things and don't be afraid to fail.
2) Don't be afraid to stop and re-evaluate if you are doing it wrong.
3) Be humble.

To answer your questions:

1) Probably somewhere around 35.
2) Very easily (Maybe sometimes too easily.)
3) Some people (and some companies) are more like that than others.

You might want to work for a startup if you want a more hands-on culture.

I was an enlightenment junkie back then myself...

^ This.