10/27   "40 Under 40 - Business's hottest rising stars"
        http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/40under40/2009
        I'm 39 and a code monkey making $120K/yr.  This article makes me very
        depressed.
        \_ Are any of these not born to millionaire parents?
           \_ where can I get stats on their parents' income? I can't seem
              to find that information on Wolfram Alpha
           \_ Was Tiger Woods' dad a millionaire? Also, Sergey Brin's bio
              said his parents were a professor and a scientist while Larry
              Page's parents are both CS professors.
              \_ rising stars usually get much more help from a nice family
                 than those that came from the slums. Do you think Bill Gates
                 was born in the slums? Hell no, his family was pretty well
                 off already and that gave him a lot of freedom to do what
                 he loved doing instead of trying to work at a stinky
                 $120k/year job that can barely support a family in
                 Silicon Valley.
                 \_ Bill Gates was a trust fund kiddie. So was Donald Trump.
                    I would argue that Larry&Sergey and Tiger (certainly)
                    were not. If you hate your job and your salary then
                    do something about it. Go to medical school or go get
                    an MBA and work for Goldman Sachs or get good at golf.
                    Things could be a lot worse than making $120K before
                    age 40. That's in the top 10% of incomes. $160K puts
                    you in the top 5%.
                    \_ Maybe not trust fund kiddies, but still started on
                       second base. You are telling me that a bunch of
                       kids who were raised in upper middle class families
                       and went to Stanfurd are underprivileged? You have
                       a very distorted view of the real world.
                       \_ Did I say underprivileged? More like middle
                          class, which is a far cry from being born to
                          millionaire parents.
                          \_ Two college profeesors are either millionaires
                             or really bad with their money. I am sure they
                             consider themselves "middle class" just like
                             most millionaires, but they are clearly quite
                             privileged. The best way to be succesful
                             in America is to be born to money.
                             \_ but most wealth disappears by the 3rd
                                generation! Why do you hate rich
                                people?                         -Republican
                                \_ I don't hate them, I just recognize that
                                   if I had been given that level of
                                   opportunity, I might be there, too. I don't
                                   beat myself up for not being in newsweek.
                                   Considering how I have done so far, I still
                                   might make it by the time I am 50 or
                                   something.
              \_ 2 X CS profs = what, $1/4M/yr in annual income? Maybe they
                 are "only" single digit millionaries. Evan Williams is
                 probably from modest means (though still solidly middle
                 class).

10/26   End of $5.29 Big Mac:
        Yahoo! Finance: http://www.csua.org/u/pdu

10/28   I am a perfect man and I am never wrong. I tried to read the following
        color blindness test and I cannot read it even though people around
        me claim that they can read it. I think this is impossible because
        I am a perfect person and I don't have color blindness and I find
        it impossible that people can read it. How does it work? How much
        time did you guys spend to "get it"? This is an impossible test.
        I call it shenanaigans.
        http://www.archimedes-lab.org/images8/reverse_ishihara.gif
        \_ My color blind friend couldn't read it. He got mad at me when I
           accused him of faking being color blind. Maybe you need to be a
           certain kind of color blind.
        \_ I see big and small circles of different colors.  What am I supposed
           to read?
           \_ I see a n3kk3d gurl, you don't?
              \_ Damn, http://www.archimedes-lab.org/colorblindnesstest.html
                 actually says only color blind people can read it.  No wonder
                 I can't.  But what's strange is that even after I convert it
                 to B&W by using "Desaturate" in Photostop, I still can't read
                 to B&W by using "Desaturate" in Photoshop, I still can't read
                 it.  -- PP
                 \_ Color blindness doesn't work that way. It's more like
                    color blind people cannot distinguish between two different
                    specific hues.
        \_ 30? A trick question? Oh I can see it with my glasses off and
           halway across the room from the monitor. Pretty funny.
           \_ Somewhere back in the 90s, a pretty well known guy in networking
              got his kid a summer job with LBL network operations. Part of
              his job was making custom ethernet cables and such ... but
              for some reason, the cables he made never seemed to work ...
              which was awkward because his supervisor didnt want to tell
              the dad that his was incompetent at cable punching. Eventually
              they discovered he was colorblind and couldnt read the colored
              wiring map or see the wires correctly, so nothing was connected
              correctly.
              \_ the kid says the whole thing is shinanigan because his
                 girlfriend can't do the job either. Since he and his
                 girlfriend are perfectly normal people, it's impossible,
                 or at best improbable. he calls it shinanigans!

10/27   I just read an article that Facebook had moved their database
        to all SSD to speed throughput, but now I can't find it. Has
        anyone else seen this? Any experience with doing this? -ausman
        \_ I hope you're not running mission critical data:
           http://ask.slashdot.org/story/09/10/27/1559248/Reliability-of-PC-Flash-SSDs?from=rss
        \_ Do you have any idea how much storage space is used by Facebook,
           and what the cost implication would be to move *ALL* the data
           to SSD? I believe they may have experimented with using SSD
           as a 3rd tier cache layer between RAM and disk but the cost
           of *ALL* data is simply prohibitive.                 -kchang
           \_ SSD is $3k/TB now, I doubt that Facebook has more than 1PB of
              total data, so that would only be $3M. They probably spend more
              than that on electricity every year.
        \_ Are you thinking of MySpace, perhaps?
           http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/10/14/myspace_fusionio
           It's not clear from that article whether they're using flash for
           all their storage, or just for caches.
           \_ Yes, that is it, thanks. -ausman
           \_ SSD doesn't make any sense in terms of $ for stuff like video
              and music and pictures. It does make sense for frequently used
              metadata. The question one should ask is, what is the infrastructure
              of MySpace like, is it using sharded MySQL or something else?
           \- our 12x or 16x RAID is faster than our SSD [high $$$ SSD, medium
              quality RAID. These are generally large seq reads, not small
              random ones.].
              \_ How fast is each?
        \_ Just because SSD r/w is 4X faster, doesn't mean your system will
           run in 1/4 the time. You gotta take in account of request overhead,
           and processing time (complex MySQL join is particularly expensive).
           My friends in the SSD industry said basically that speed-up wasn't as
           mind-blowing as they originally anticipated, and that if the
           application isn't SSD tuned, you may not get the amazing speed-up
           that you thought you would get.
           \_ I know that some FS are not well designed to take advantage of
              SSD, what other tuning to I need to be aware of?
              \- our biggest speedup was buying a lot of memory [+100gb]
                 and judicious use of compression ... with lots of cores
                 but limited bus IO, this is generally a big win even using
                 gzip style compression, although there are some faster
                 compression systems which dont compress as much in space
                 but are like 4x faster than gzip. BTW, does anybody other
                 than GOOG use "zippy"? Are there any tools/filesystems which
                 use zippy, or is that GOOG intenal. (we didnt spend much time
                 researching this ... we want to throw money and a little time
                 and the problems to mitigate it ... at some point we'll start
                 indexing, which is what will get us to the orders-of-mag
                 improvements).
                 \_ I think Zippy is fine tuned for Bigtable data, which is
                    basically value-key-time. Since they know their input
                    well, you don't need an all purpose gzip, hence the
                    10X encode rate and 3X decode rate over gzip. By the way
                    if you find Zippy implementation, let us know!
                    http://feedblog.org/2008/10/12/google-bigtable-compression-zippy-and-bmdiff

10/27   http://www.maxgames.com/play/flash-mind-reader.html
        how does this work?
        \_ sh -c 'for ((i=0;i<10;i++)); do for ((j=0;j<10;j++)); do echo "$i$j-(\
$i+$j)" | bc; done ; done' | uniq
        \_ bash -c 'for ((i=0;i<10;i++)); do for ((j=0;j<10;j++)); do echo "$i$j\
-($i+$j)" | bc; done ; done' | uniq
        \_ ksh -c 'for ((i=0;i<10;i++)); do for ((j=0;j<10;j++)); do echo "$i$j-\
($i+$j)" | bc; done ; done' | uniq
           \_ fixd.  above script only works if your sh is really bash.
              -Solaris Geek
              \_ sorry, I somehow lost the k.  Also, works if your sh is ksh93
                 in opensolaris, etc.  Not sure that putback has made it into
                 s10u*
        \- i thought that was pretty clever presentation. thanks for sharing
           the link.