I mean, bandwidth, at their scale, has got to be pretty cheap, and raising prices on existing customers? always pisses people off.

Personally, though, this is okay for me; I use the DVDs and I don't stream, so a small discount is welcome.

yeah, the advantage of bcache is that it will automatically cache the stuff you use often (which yes, can be a disadvantage, too) - I'm just thinking for something like a database server (not that I'd use bcache in a prod database server until it was more stable and until it supported mirroring the SSD) you have large files where parts of the file need caching and other parts of the file don't. A block cache helps with that more than manually symlinking files.

with your own hard drive and your own SSD. It'd probably cost less, too. http://bcache.evilpiepirate.org/

Probably the best programmer I know outright states that he can't productively code for more than four hours a day; but he gets more done in those four hours than most people can do in a week.

If you outright tell people to work for 10-11 hours a day, first your good programmers will all leave. Next, those who can't immediately get better jobs will take long lunches, show up a little late and leave a little early. If you enforce time in-seat somehow, you will have more and more people spending time on slashdot or facebook.

it doesn't do much for I/O. ionice, a much newer program does something similar to what 'nice' does for CPU for I/O intensive tasks. It's pretty good, not as good as nice is for cpu-bound tasks, but eh.

If you are doing something non-interactive that uses a lot of I/O, use IOnice. experiment, but I find

  ionice -p [pid] -c 2 -n 7

to produce reasonable results.

is that while my co-author and I split 15% of the wholesale price (about half the cover price) on physical books, we get something closer to 50% of any ebook sales... and, I think, if the ebook was bought direct from the publisher, that's 50% of what was paid. So even though e-book sales are a pretty small portion of total book sales, on the last statement I got from my publisher, ebook sales comprised a rather large portion of the money actually paid to me.

I've you've ever been to the sf bay area during rush hour, most commuters would give their left nut for the ability to drive in HOV lanes. This will be /huge/ - the volt, with it's integrated range extending gas engine seems like a better idea than the all-electric leaf, but the market value of a HOV sticker, even without the rebates has got to be five or ten grand.

yeah, uh, honestly, if I were a cellphone retailer, I'd advertise it as a feature, right next to battery life (though I imagine there is an inverse correlation between battery life and transmitter power)