Hybrid drives, and even all of the hybrid RAID controllers I've looked at, only use the SSD for read acceleration. They aren't used for writes, from what I could tell from their specs. So you're almost certainly better off upgrading your system to the next larger amount of RAM rather than getting a hybrid drive.

Personally, I looked at my storage usage and realized that if I didn't keep *EVERYTHING* on my laptop (every photo I'd taken for 10+ years, 4 or 5 Linux ISOs, etc) and instead put those on a server at home, I could go from a 500GB spinning disc to an 80GB SSD. So I did and there's been no looking back. The first gen Intel X-25M drives had some performance issues, but since then I've been happy with the performance of them.

That sounds very plausible. A friend of mine dropped her kindle onto the concrete. There's no physical sign of the damage (she doesn't know exactly which way it landed), but when she tried to turn it on the display was totally messed up. It also gets hot right in the middle between the screen and the keyboard. But looking at it, there is no obvious sign that it was dropped.

This sure seems like a bad idea, are there really people who are complaining about this? Seems like it could lead to a backlash of unity-proportions. :-) I'd be ok with if it if looked exact like the current file-system, but without littering my home directory with empty "Videos", "Pictures", "Documents", "Webcam", "Music", "Desktop", "Downloads", "Public", "Templates" directories...

The bigger issue, which is still relevant, is that /bin and /sbin were tools that were necessary to bring the system up to the point where it could get to the network and mount the bulk of their file-systems from resources on the network (NFS, iSCSI). Though these days, that's as likely to be tools that are in the initrd...

The problem with magnetic stickers is... Corvettes have fiberglass body panels. :-)

I once ran timing, here are my thoughts:

Personally, I don't think that transponders are expensive, and I think they'd be a great solution which would absolutely fail because of politics. "You mean I have to buy a $100 device (or rent for $5/event) to mount to my $40,000 car that has $2,000 rims and $1,400 tires?!? What do you think I am, made of money?!?"

I suspect you won't be able to do good detection except if the cars stop at the end. That's something you'll have to play with though, maybe you can set up a zone past the end where they have to stop to get recognized, or *MAYBE* the camera can deal with them if they stick to the recommended speed off the track. Cameras are very bad at getting sharp shots of sideways motion though. It'll also depend on the conditions out.

I imagine you will need to use a hardware timing device that runs in real-time and then you can pull the time off in the non-realtime OS. That or you'll need to run real-time OS extensions. Maybe you can get something reasonable out of a hardware interrupt like a serial/parallel port line change. The normal x86 Linux clock is 1ms resolution, and plenty of jitter, so just expecting to use the clock under Linux is probably unrealistic.

These people are as serious as a heart attack about this hobby. Saying "Accurate to within a few thou is probably good enough" is a good way to see exactly how good your insurance plan is. :-)

You're going to have to deal with things like a car leaving the starting line with "185" on it's side and crossing the finish with "85", "18", or even "1 5" on it. :-)

The "Predator" OpenCV system sounds like it would be awesome to try in this situation.

Consider setting up a place where the cars can go to get recognized and their number entered, maybe at the starting line, but maybe a dedicated area. Predator/OpenCV may be able to detect things like the letter that fell off during the run, but it may also mis-detect in some cases. You'll probably need someone eye-balling the start and finish anyway.

Good luck with that. I tried writing up some documentation for how to run the system I at our Autocross after they trained me on it, and I had my ass handed to me...

I've made somewhat extensive use of D-Link gear, using it to provide Internet for a 600+ people at a conference, and it performed very well. We had around 20 of their $130-ish 2.4+5.2GHz APs from 3 or 4 years ago. These were not 802.11n though, this pre-dated n. Sean

The best program to learn from is the one that you have some idea for improving, something you use and can make better. The first patch I made to open source software was for bash. At the time I was use HP-UX at work and Linux and HP-UX at home. The KSH under HP-UX would do "tab expansion" with Esc-Esc, and it was killing me going between Esc-Esc and Tab (neither worked on the other). I first tried making a macro for it, but found that I had to change the C code to make it work.

So, don't look for the prettiest code to just read -- get in the game and poke at something you use. :-)

I have run the networking at several 600-1200 attendee conferences, and have a few things you might want to try...

If any of your devices can use 5.2GHz, make sure you deploy APs for that. 5.2GHz has way more spectrum, and in my experience it tends to work where 2.4GHz is pretty spotty. Try deploying with fairly narrow beam antennas like 90 degrees, so you are just covering your booth, ideally mount it up high looking down. Run at the lowest power setting you can. Use 802.11n equipment, which often seems to have better antennas.

In the end though, 2.4GHz at conferences can be very tough... There just isn't enough spectrum there. My primary recommendation to attendees at the conference I run the wireless for is: Use 5.2GHz.

The summary makes it sound like "squeezing" 1TB into a laptop drive is impressive, but with 600GB SSDs in the same form-factor (admittedly at almost 10x the price), I'm just not overwhelmed... Especially with the recent stories about optical discs storing 500GB RSN. And the SSD is going to be able to survive being dropped without losing all that data...

And as far as performance, the summary says at 5400RPM it bests the 7200RPM competitors... That's really only true for raw streaming, say video or audio production work. People seem to be blinded by the MB/sec rate and forgetting the average access latency -- which IMHO is the most important factor in almost all cases. I had a client who was pushing back on the 15K RPM discs I recommended for their database several years ago, because the 7.2K RPM discs had a higher MB/sec number. Not for their database, they don't...

Access latency is what, in most cases, makes a computer feel slow.

My comment was, of course, fairly tongue in cheek, but this issue also seemed like a fairly amateur mistake to make. Especially for Google, who seems to in general work pretty hard to avoid making mistakes. I will agree that the Google+ roll-out has been pretty smooth for going from 10K users to 10M users in a week or two.

Especially odd is that this happened while the service was being throttled on the invitations. Seems like the first thing you'd do before opening up more invitations would be to check the capacity numbers from the previous round of invitations, and make adjustments to quotas.

Seems like there were quite a few failures:

• Monitoring that didn't detect the impending resource exhaustion soon enough for action to be taken.
• The application didn't throttle itself when resources were exhausted.
• Invitations were opened back up when capacity was was not there to handle it.
• Quotas were probably provisioned too tightly.

This reminds me of a conversation I was having with a google engineer where he was expressing dismay at my mention that we had drastically overprovissioned one of our services. He didn't seem to understand that in my environment a few orders of magnitude overprovisioning was the minimum I could do and still get the level of service resiliancy I needed. He also didn't seem to "get" that I was talking about overprovisioning versus average use (because I was making a point about that), versus potential peak use.

Google is very interested in right-sizing their capacity, not surprisingly. However, when you're deploying a service that's meant to replace facebook, and your capacity planning is known to not be able to handle new services, you probably need to think about switching out of "rightsizing" mode and into "spending money like a drunken sailor" mode.

If this happened with the invitation system, it could have happened to the posting or plus 1 systems as well, I imagine, and in that cause the bad publicity from it could have meant the difference between Google+ being taken seriously and it being a joke.

Anyway, I'm sure Google is learning from this experience. I know I am, it's given me a great idea for modifying our monitoring to prevent a similar problem, even for newly deployed services without much capacity analysis history.

There's another service that is easier and more convenient than downloading DVD rips: Stop consuming their product.

You see, if you download the content off BitTorrent, the content companies see all this demand for their products and they look for a way to get revenue from that demand.

If, instead, you stop consuming their goods, they see dropping prices and offering new distribution mechanisms as increasing revenue.

So, by downloading this content, you're actually making the problems of pricing and distribution worse, for yourself and for everyone.

I like to imagine that if all the people who are downloading content off BitTorrent instead just stopped consuming their content entirely, the content providers would get a big, giant wake-up call and start paying attention to people.

One day soon, our best and brightest scientists will create a way to alert operations staff about discs reaching 90% capacity so action can be taken before they reach 100%. In that utopia, this sort of thing won't happen.

The best Linux distribution to try as a beginner is the one that your friends and family use, because they'll likely be the ones providing your tech support. Try one that has a "Live CD" so you can try it without installing it to make sure it supports the devices in your computer.