gdickie's comments

I drive a Ford Focus Electric. All of the non-drivetrain parts are standard focus stuff, and are fine. The same mostly-physical-controls UI that non-electric focus has. The usual wear parts wear out just like an ICE car, but the brakes need done a little less often.

And the car is responsive and fun to drive.

The new parts of the design have some rough edges; hopefully these are solved with the newer generation of EVs intended for mass production and making a profit:

- Just like a Tesla, there is a traditional 12V battery that runs accessories when the car is off. This can be drained by rogue modules not shutting down properly. See https://www.myfocuselectric.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=4302 . I've had this happen several times. It's really annoying to need jump start when the main battery is at 100%.

- This year after 5 years and 50K miles something went wrong with the main battery. Replaced under warranty and apparently uncommon.

The federal tax incentive is a refundable tax credit. So it doesn't interact with deductions.

It's regressive in the sense that you need to be buying a new car to get it. But it passes to used car owners in the form of a lower residual value for the car. A one year old plug-in hybrid lease-return can be a great deal.

When you have a long list of numbered filenames with no padding, pipe the list through "sort -V" for "version number" ordering.

Edit: Glitchmr has a better solution below, "ls -v".

For flash devices, power consumption / thermal dissipation is usually a small constant for the control logic, plus a very small amount per read, plus a small amount per (page) write.

If you are limited to the write rate allowed by the SSD interface, then that will serve to limit the heat dissipation as well.

The last time I was looking for work, LinkedIn was useful. I heard of a company that sounded like a good match. LinkedIn found a 2nd-level connection working there, and an interview resulted.

I prefer the correlary, as motivation:

"Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced"

This is the paragraph where the research is described as a significant step in fighting terror, curing cancer, or solving world hunger.

Very pretty, fun to play with.

The rollovers are getting chopped off for most of the right side of the map -- they run off the right edge of the page. Can they be pulled in?

At least initially, I was leery of clicking -- but it turned out to stay on the same page, and doesn't have the same problem as the rollovers.

Nice job.

At the lowest level, you don't need to double-up, you can use an error correcting code. If the memories and registers on a chip use a multiple-error correcting code, then the underlying error rate could be quite high without making any difference in the user-visible error rate.

Similarly you could use noisy-network protocols for on-chip wires, so that each signal path doesn't need to be perfect. Again you don't need to double-up. Instead you lose a small percent to overhead, and a delay in order to encode / decode.

The Netezza database appliance essentially works like this -- each disk is paired with an FPGA and a CPU core. The disk-local CPU takes care of caching directory information for the disk, decides what order to process disk pages in, and manages a disk cache with full awareness of the application. After a disk read the FPGA cuts away unwanted data before the CPU has to look at it. This has been shipping for several years.

To the extent that your problem is embarrassingly parallel and can be executed near the disk, you speed up linearly with the number of disks.

(I am currently employed by Netezza)

I will often do this when I am drawing a blank. Write psuedo-code, or code that is how you would like it to be, if your language / macros / libraries supported it. Then you can worry later about making your language support what you just wrote. This eliminates a whole set of mental blocks to writing code.

Gatto uncovers the underlying intention for public schools to produce docile factory workers. Once you make your goals clear and explicit, much of the argument over how to educate becomes moot or even silly.

Sudbury Valley School in Massachusets (and other offshoot Sudbury-model schools) are one answer to the "ok, what then?" that comes after reading Gatto. If you set a goal of producing thoughtful, self-directed citizens of a democracy, you end up with a school which is democratic and self-directed.