mmf

Also known for woodgears.ca Matthias is an international treasure. Any googlers around please help him.

If you get a chance check out his recounting of RIM rise and fall.

Edit: it seems he got it back :)

I think the main reason they did not expose lower level semantics is that the wanted a drop in replacement for hdds. The second is liability: unfettered access ti arbitrary location erases (and writes) can let you kill (wear out) a flash device in a really short time.

“Eutectic alloys are also notable because they often have the lowest melting point”. Isn’t the very definition of eutectic the mix proportion that has _the lowest_ melting point?

Optical computation will never become relevant at scale. There are fundamental reasons for this: first, particle size. A photon at usable wavelengths is extremely large, much larger of any modern electron based _devices_ This makes it imossible to scale to usable density. Second, optic-optic (as opposed to electro-optic) non linear effects are based on interaction with electrons, in particular with electron decay from an energy state to another which is tipically extremely slow.

If you feel that something is trivial and potentially wasting other people's time by means of wasting pixels, I think it's fine to speak up. (Explaining why something is trivial may not be that effective, in general).

I was clearly wrong in that many people disagreed and found this to be an interesting and nontrivial subject.

Ok, I guess I could have provided more info. Do this if you own a bicycle: hold it by the saddle perfectly straight, front of the bike forward. Make it lean on the left (no forward movement). Look at the handle, it steers left. When you're moving this means that when you lean left there will be a torque, due to your circular path you'll be following, that will try to make the bike lean right.

Bend left -> torque to the right, bend right -> torque to the left. Here you have the basic ingredient for stability: the one torqueless angle is the bike going straight perfectly vertical wrt the ground, while any perturbation leads to a torque in the opposite direction.

I felt it was basic stuff maybe it's not?

How complex can it be? If you have a bare minimum background in basic physics and control theory, and a bicycle in your hands, the qualitative reasons for balance and stability will jump at you in under 10 minutes...

I absolutely agree, all those negative comments sound like rants from grumpy old guys. I have worked in HPC distributed storage and the problems the CoreOS people are trying to solve is a valid and present one: deploying flexible distributed storage today is an absolute pain.

Plus all the arguments about local storage failure being hard are moot because this is a distributed solution and the hardship of local storage reliability can be abstracted away almost completely.

That's great news but: 900MBps != 5GB/3sec. Plus last time I checked (2 years ago) write power for flash was about 10W/GBps and growing over time. So I expect these speeds not to be sustainable for extended periods of time.

This effectively makes forgetting one's password a crime with a lifetime jail sentence... Not bad, not bad

And will they share the data they collect so that everybody has a shot at making discoveries?

Little known implies that if you ask 100 randomly selected people if they know if it exists, what it is and what it does, a small number, say less than 10 or so (little) will know.

Did you take your educated guess at that fraction?

I do not think he was implying that he did not fit because he's old. He implied that he did not fit because he's mature...