Changing Gears
About half an hour ago I was repeating the same motions that I’ve been going through for the past week: hit all the job sites and look for something matching my qualifications. There’s not much out there for unproven Mac sysadmins though, with Active Directory and MS Exchange being far more ubiquitous in job listings. The best course of action at this point would be to panic, but instead I somehow got this crazy idea into my head:
You know what, why not? Beating Macs into submission for a living means limited exposure to the command line, and if you want to be really good at what you do, it means embracing it. Unfortunately, saying that you like Mac OS X’s BSD implementation isn’t the same as having the college credentials. Maybe my plan is still to walk into the first great job I find, or maybe it’s to find a just enough temporary employment to last until the fall semester. There would be a great irony in returning to school for computer studies, but that’s another story.
Decisions, decisions…
Formula 1 in your Phone
Here’s something cool. Racetrack memory is one of those technologies that promises to do everything, right down to being bundled with rainbows and unicorns. We’re told that it will be fast, spacious, and cheap (R&D costs not included). To give you an idea of how far the conventional spinning platter hard drive lag behind newer memory technologies in terms of speed, it’s worth considering that memory access times were measured by nanoseconds even in the 80s, whereas today’s spinning platter hard drives are still measured in milliseconds.
It may not seem like big deal, but your operating system is made up of tens of thousands of files, and indexing those thousands of small files takes far longer than indexing a few large ones, even if those large files take up more room that the group of small files. Seek time adds up. This actually one of the lesser-known bottleneck for the average user, because seek time has only improved from 20ms in the late 80s to 5-15ms today, a 4x improvement at best. This is such a gradual improvement that most of us actually don’t know what we’re missing.
In truth it’s not actually end-of-the-world dire; better buffering, smarter file systems, and RAID mean that our hard drives are still a huge improvement from the past (not to mention larger and smaller at the same time), but it doesn’t hold a candle to semiconductor improvements. CPU speeds have improved from a modest 8MHz in 1984 to today’s 4.7GHz monsters, a figure which will probably be out of date before I even finish typing this. The 4x improvement pales a little compared to 587.5x, and that’s not even taking into account improvements the accompanying chipsets and the ubiquity of multi-core processors.
This is old news though. Flash-based solid state drives have already slain this dragon apart from a few missteps, and while there’s the usual rogue’s gallery of bar graphs to support the claim of victory, even the anecdotal accounts agree that solid state is a winner. Racetrack though, somehow unsatisfied, wants to take wicked-fast and give it a jetpack. It’s exciting stuff, and the cherry on top is that it will probably be even more energy efficient than conventional memory, so the dolphins win too.
