"(Norman Matloff is a professor of computer science at the University of California, Davis. The opinions expressed are his own.)"

Ya know, If I was a prof of CS at UCD, I'd probably think my upward mobility was limited too. I interview fresh college grads and senior professionals alike in my software company. I, personally, am equally likely to pick either. Age isn't as much of a metric for ability as ability is. 20somethings have lots of energy. 50somethings have lots of experience. A good team needs both.

Facebook is an experiment. It's unclear how successful they will be as a company. I do know people that work there and youth is a highly regarded trait.
MSFT is a failed experiment. A company like that is where talent goes to die, in my opinion.

It's ok to be frustrated. I know, I am. But muting people who have a different ideology from your own doesn't solve anything. In fact, the reverse happens- the people you disagree with become as frustrated as you.

The harder problem is getting them to, if not agree with, tolerate your ideology. What we've lost in this country is honest, unadulterated, innocent, discourse. We stopped having conversations where a different point of view doesn't dominate another. Too much of what is being said is predicated by various single-issue objectives and amplified by a blow horn of party loyalists.

Fox news is a blow horn. Would be interesting to see what will happen if the family behind the mouthpiece is ousted. For all anyone knows it may move even further away from the center.

Obv I have no idea how OCZ plans on doing this, but I can tell you what a standard journaling fs does.

Chances are this cache is transparent. The blocks translate to vblocks which map to physical blocks on the rotational media. A "dirty" block is a vblock which hasn't been committed to the physical block. However, this is transparent to the filesystem. When the system comes back up and the journal is replayed at say, some operation 10, and we find the relevant blocks for op 10 which happen to be vblocks in the SSD, the write is stable. It's a NOOP from the filesystem perspective.

This is the same as a single, non-tiered, drive dying. Same semantics- cache is dead is equivalent to the drive being dead. That is to say unless the journal and superblock live somewhere else. IIRC ext2/3 keeps the initial copy of the superblock in a few places on the drive. Depending on which you can recover, you'll get a version of the filesystem (likely the one when you first created the fs, i.e. an empty fs). In short, pay attention to your SMART data, and always (ALWAYS!) backup.

Most journals arent like NVRAM and don't follow the copy on write semantic. Journal replay is usually a data-loss event if all writes weren't stable before the replay. With that in mind, most volume managers (the original "VM"!) allow your fs to write to as many drives as the vm allows. This seems no different. But yeah, maybe they're doing something smarter here.

LTE and WiMax isn't 4G either. This means no 4G phones exist yet.

"Pre-4G technologies such as mobile WiMAX and first-release Long term evolution (LTE) have been on the market since 2006[2] and 2009[3][4][5] respectively, and are often branded as 4G in marketing materials. The current versions of these technologies provide downstream peak bitrates of 144 Mbit/s and 100 Mbit/s respectively, and do consequently not fulfill the original ITU-R requirements of data rates approximately up to 1 Gbit/s for 4G systems." [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4G]

What type of behavior? Stealing? Call it what you want and use whatever technical detail to obfuscate the fact that a subset of 23,000 people took something from someone else without paying for it.

And seriously. All that for a Stalone flick?

This is the MPAA going after (with almost 99.9% certainty, illegal) downloaders. Not Haliburton lobbying congress for a no bid contract to deploy security and infrastructure services in Iraq to the Army (which already has it's own security and infrastructure services). Or Morgan Stanley not claiming their debts to inflate their growth numbers so the gov't no longer has a say on executive bonuses.

I can attest to the same behavior. My default page is www.google.com/ig which aggregates a bunch of RSS feeds. Next I open a tab to Gmail, Engadget, Gizmodo, NY Times, and The Consumerist. I leave these tabs open. I then open a new window to my company's bugzilla (which is the default installation of bugzilla, the version escapes me, but I can get the version on monday if it's of importance), open maybe a half dozen bugs in different tabs, editing bugs as the day goes on, then flip back to the original window to see what i missed on each tab.

In this state, 2 windows, lots of tabs each, moderate refreshing as the day goes on, I have yet to last greater than 48hrs without FF dying taking both windows and all tabs with it.

It's the default install of FF with 64bit Ubuntu 10.4 with the Adblock and Adobe Flash plugins as of about 6 months ago. It's an 4 core i7 with 12gigs of ram. As you've mentioned, in this kind of usage, FF caches up to about a gig and eventually the kernel pages the cache out. Naturally when I switch contexts back to FF, things churn for a while which is highly inconvenient.

I've switched to Chrome since and have not seen anything remotely similar- things stay open for weeks sans restarts for updates. (This is not a dig. FF is wonderful when it works. Chrome simply provides the level of stability I can live with.)

Thanks for taking the time. I can give you more details on monday if it would help.

I'm a streamer! Mostly.

Most streaming sources (Comedy Central, ABC News) have really crappy quality. I end up going the old fashioned route for broadcast TV and go home at a certain time and flip on the rabbit ears. OTA HD is really amazing.

For everything else, Netflix, AppleTV, and PS3 fulfill my entertainment needs. The quality of their streams/content are usually very good.

I tried Boxee and most free streamed content just looks terrible on a large HD TV.

Cutting the cord is doable, but you have to keep your expectations low and have to be of the mind of someone who enjoys tinkering for the sake of tinkering. Often, you'll end up tinkering more than couch-potato'ing. If you have a 2-body problem (i.e. significant other), this is an unacceptable solution for the most part, and for good reason. It really shouldn't be that hard to watch what you want when you want it.

So it boils down to how much you watch tv vs how much time you want to spend hunting for content. It's never a free lunch, but if you have a significant-other/family then it's probably not worth the grief.

What is the probability you'd be in a situation professionally where you had enough time to boot up a laptop, install the relevant software, assume you already know how to use it, and do something productive with it and not get fired?

Solving simple differential equations or linear algebra in a pinch is exactly why I keep my calculator. The same calculator I used in school many moons ago. I've used Matlab and Mathematica, and can be moderately productive with them. But I'll always stick to my trust TI-89 for its utility and consistently error-free operation.

For me its the same thing as having a PC instead of a TV. Yeah, it works. But the startup cost (in time) and maintenance is non-negligible.

Have you tried watching accelerated 1080p video on a relatively new nVidia card? You'll soon find the hardware AVC decoder (Xvmc does not equal decoder) available in Windows is not available in Linux. GL works grand, but watching videos at any high resolution (native, not some upscaled Xvid or the like) is totally CPU bound in Linux while HW accelerated in windows.

It seems only the newest cards support HW video decoding. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VDPAU