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The OpenAI Story of Bob.

0 Comments | This entry was posted on Dec 23 2022

The prompt:

Write me a short and inspiring story about Bob in I.T. who lost his job to a new form of Artificial Intelligence. Everything he used to do is now automated by an advanced form of AI. Tell the story of how Bob overcame getting fired from his job and became more successful than ever with a detailed explanation of his 5-step success plan.


Bob had been working in the IT industry for over a decade, and he had always prided himself on his technical skills and ability to solve complex problems. However, one day, everything changed.

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The Proprietary Plight of the Drobo

0 Comments | This entry was posted on Nov 27 2022

There’s something intensely alluring about tech like the Drobo. I am reminded of a time when solving a problem permanently was a primary goal. A time when devices had clear purposes and switches had a satisfying click to them. The Drobo has both a satisfying power switch and also some auto-on creative capabilities.

Drobo front panel with lights
The Drobo 5D Front LED Panel

The proprietary BeyondRAID filesystem scheme which cleverly makes use of multiple drives in a JBOD-like-manner but with redundancy is also, it turns out, is its greatest weakness, preventing the product from being dependable over the very long term. The reason for this is simple: relying on a proprietary filesystem requires having a backup for the Drobo device itself. Sure, the data is still intact, but unreadable on anything but a Drobo. Worse still, the Drobo 5D is not compatible with the Drobo 5N for some reason. So, swapping the drives in that way could easily destroy all of the data.

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Bitcasa and the “infinite storage” vision finally hits reality.

1 Comment | This entry was posted on Oct 24 2014

bitcasa fails at infinite storage

Reality has its way of creepin’ up on Silicon Valley every once in a while. On Thursday, October 23, 2014, the Tech Crunch “disruptor” Bitcasa finally ceded to reality, despite a pretty long run of unreliably providing “infinite” storage. Unreliable, you ask? Read on ~

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nothin’ new to see here

1 Comment | This entry was posted on Jul 21 2014

Something Old

1 Comment | This entry was posted on Sep 11 2013

aero glass iOS7

Something curious happened during Microsoft’s PDC in 2003 (See ‘geeks bearing gifts‘). They unveiled the then-exciting and anticipated Longhorn operating system that was powered in large part by the GPU. That is, each “window” of Windows would no longer be rendered in software. They would be rendered as full 3D planes using the GPU.

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Computing is Getting Worse

2 Comments | This entry was posted on Feb 05 2013

skydrive cannot be run using full administrator rights

The state of user interfaces has reached the point of diminishing returns. In retrospect, it is clear that many user interfaces reached their peak balance of ease and complexity in 2007. Since then, it seems that balancing new features has been a very difficult task for many companies. There’s a curious trend to hide functionality to an obsessive degree that inhibits average users from being able to find often rather obviously necessary features. The learning curve continues to grow tremendously despite the superficial trend towards “simplicity.”

 

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