Ok, I'm a middle class person, I have 50k invested in a 401k, said 401k goes up 20% this year... creating a gain of 10k and I get taxed at say 25%.. so I now need to sell $2500 in my retirement account to pay the tax... It gets even crazier if say I'm close to retirement and I have 500-600k or something in said account... now I have a $25000 tax bill on income I didn't make... and I have to sell investments just to pay the tax man... And next year the market could drop 20% and I'll just be out the 25k in taxes plus the 100k in investment losses...

I thought everyone was agreed we needed to simplify the tax code not make it insanely more complicated.

I knew they were doing some heavy lifting on the server side, cause obviously it doesn't work without a network connection.

However, I figured they would at least do an initial processing pass on the phone and pass up the data points to the server instead of the raw audio. That at least would make sense, and you'd be able to pass much smaller amounts of data. It would also explain the need to have better hardware on the phone. Sending the raw audio seems insane.

Other engineering disciplines are different I know, but in CS, I'd argue opportunity cost is a big factor. Myself and 2 of my classmates dropped out when after our sophomore years we were offered full time positions making real money (well... we were 20, 55k/yr sounded like a lot). This was in post bust 2001, and the three of us had conversations about it and all thought it was crazy to keep paying 10k/year for the next 2 years (or 3 depending on how courses were offered) when we could make 110 or 165k over the same time span... Since then 2 of us have completed our degrees (myself 8 years after dropping out), but I for one don't regret dropping out in the least. I got a lot of experience in those couple years, I learned way more about real software development than I was learning in college, and I've never spent a minute unemployed. My employer luckily has tuition reimbursement, so when I did finish my degree it didn't cost me anything.

Maybe I've been passed over for jobs/promotions over the years because of my lack of degree, but I've enjoyed my career so far, I love what I'm doing now, and I don't feel like I've been slighted in the least.

I didn't read the article... so I don't know, but the summary doesn't say anything about capturing the MRI data, the data is the data... They are using a new process to generate images from said data.

Now, in the summary, it says they do some up front processing, and then save the result of that, and use it for all subsequent image generation activities... because this processing used to be done on every image generation pass... well guess what, thats the definition of caching, and it has 0 to do with a new algorithm. They are still using the exact same *algorithm* to process the data, they are just storing the part that gets repeated over and over, and using it multiple times...

I use a Script I found on VMware forums that takes a snapshot and then backs up the snapshot... It's not fool proof but crash consistent at least. Yeah no live migrations...

I point out that my solution is affordable... How many nics are on your SAN? 15k rpm sas drives are more than twice as expensive as 7200rpm sata. It may well be that the iscsi hardware we were using didn't have the io ops to handle the load but it really felt like a bandwidth issue, Same iscsi San with 10gb vs 1 gb nics performed well enough..

Since when is caching a "new" algorithm? From the basic info in the summary it appears this is just a cache of some initial processing that is then reused for subsequent image generation passes...

If you're looking to have any kind of decent performance in your VMs this just won't work.
I've worked with VMs on all different kinds of storage (fiber channel SAN, local disk, iSCSI SAN (over 1Gb and 10Gb ethernet), Local hardware raid, NFS file shares, GFS2 (as in the RedHat cluster file system), and MooseFS and GlusterFS) All of these have been either in large test labs or in production cloud deployments. I've never had a cluster file system get close to passing muster as a storage medium for VM usage. IO is the number 1 bottleneck in virtualized environments, and these schemes just add completely unacceptable latency and bandwidth restrictions.

The only way to really run VMs is fiber channel SAN, local disk (or hardward raid), or iSCSI with 10GbE (on the storage server side). Even iSCSI with 2GbE (2x1GbE bonded) is not speedy enough to support more than 5-10 VMs running concurrently. You'll start to see problems at 5 VMs if the VMs are windows... For whatever reason Windows really likes to write to the disk. Currently I have 4 servers in my basement, a single storage server (6 2TB drives in a raid6, giving 8TB of usable disk) and 3 VM servers (2 2TB drives each, in hardward RAID1). I run the VMs locally and back them up to the storage machine over iSCSI nightly. I also have a shared volume on the storage system that all VMs and my household computers can access. I use openfiler for my storage system, if I had the money it would be nice to get a second storage server and replicate it (which openfiler supports), but I don't have that cash just sitting around right now

Backing up 8TB of data (ok, so I have about 5TB used), is basically impossible offsite, so we have a "special" folder on the shared drive that is backed up using crashplan, its about 600GB, and the first backup took nearly 3 months over a 5mbps upload.

The above setup is the only one I've found that is both a) somewhat affordable, and b) performs well enough to do actual work in the VMs. It provides for some mobility in the event of a hardware failure (if a VM server crashes, I can run the crashed VMs via iSCSI on another server (from the day old backup), If the storage server crashes, the only "important" data is the 600GB in the special folder... which would take 2 months to download over my home connection... But could be downloaded in stages, IE get the most important stuff immediately). If both a vm server and the storage server crash, I'm out the VMs that were running on the vm server, but again the important data is off-site, and the VMs can be rebuilt in a day or less.

I really doubt your claim of a 10 fold improvement in security. How many MBR rootkits have you cleaned up in the wild? How many lame malware infections have you seen/cleaned up in the wild (which secure boot won't help 1 iota)? For me those numbers are 0 to about 50,000 in the last 5 years.

Phishing and hacked websites that dump malware via browser bugs are the 2 biggest security threats I've seen in the last 5 years, and neither of these is even remotely addressed by secure boot, when someone comes up with a key signing scheme to stop phishing I'll listen to a "10 fold improvement" claim, not before.

The only problem I have with the brain teaser questions is, well I suck at them... I don't like to waste my time solving problems with 0 practical application, I don't have a passion for it... IE a recently posted google interview contained the question "You're shrunk down to 1" tall, and you are in a blender. The blender will turn on in 30 seconds, how do you escape?" Why would I expend any energy trying to solve such a bizarre problem?!? Ask me how I would try to solve the energy crisis, or clean water. At least my answers to those questions might have practical applications.

Another question which a friend of mine fielded recently in an interview "You have to multiply 10 million random numbers together, your programming language does not have a * operator, how do you do it?"

The "correct" answer was a ton of loops to duplicate multiplication with addition... Well.. I don't know if thats the fastest/best way to get multiplication, but I'd argue that being able to implement multiplication as addition is probably a completely useless skill, and anyone who immediately comes up with that answer probably doesn't like to use code libraries... Like some code I recently worked with where the developers didn't "trust" SQL so instead of writing joins in SQL, they wrote a bunch of nested loops to "join" tables in code, so they have things that could be accomplished in 1 line of good SQL, that take 20 lines of code and hundreds of hits to the database.