He certainly is a mysterious character.

Roland Piquepaille.

If we look at the article, the computer was taught only the specific algorithms to create a jigsaw puzzle arrangement or shuffle a deck of cards. Then the program just ran the data through it to create various optimal results. It didn't have capabilities to expand the concept of the trick, for example.

I think he can't contact you. As far as I know, there is no private message feature in Slashdot, and you don't disclose your e-mail address in your profile either. Just sayin'. :)

This is true. The blacklist is contained in drivers/ata/libata-core.c for anyone who wants to take a look at it.

To find it, in that file search for: static const struct ata_blacklist_entry ata_device_blacklist []

For SSDs with (queued) TRIM problems, that list seems to contain only Crucial/Micron M500/M550. There is a lot of other devices blacklisted for various reasons. Of course they aren't blacklisted completely but just some features are disabled in them.

Well, as you said, Slashdot is a job board, so just use it: http://slashdot.org/job_board.pl

Same reason as why Microsoft is still the king of the OS market with their crusty software: for new companies the barrier of entry to the field is too high.

3 months ago there was a Facebook job application which sought for people having the skills to improve Linux's network stack to match the performance of FreeBSD's.

Sure. You can download big archives of offline content. In Visual Studio, go to Help -> Add and Remove Help Content. You get the window shown in this picture.

You can probably infer whether the chip is working hard or not, and possibly hear it stepping clock frequencies. Maybe if the frame rate is locked to v-sync, you could also hear a beat frequency synchronous to fps. I don't think you can find out anything more specific than those kind of things. There's a lot of power filtering going on and the chip architecture is extremely complex.

That would mean 1 / 100,000 users complain. I think more users care. 99.99% or even 99.9% might be a closer value to the amount of users that don't care.

Of course I'm just nitpicking and past your point, but there's a surprisingly big difference into how many 9s you slap there. :)

No, no, don't do it that way. If you overwrite an SD card starting from the beginning, you will overwrite the Protected Area of the card. Also happens if you use the "format disk" function of an operating system on the card.

The SD Association has a special formatter which avoids this problem.

Maybe try reading the card instead of writing, to test for those cards which have missing flash. Or carefully skip the Protected Area with dd when writing.

Sadly, I don't. Although that's still not a reason to pirate. Piracy gives always the wrong message: that you don't want to pay anyone anything.