>Certainly, the learning curve is much steep for Unix > utilities than, say, Python.
Now what makes you think that? UNIX shell tools have a very consistent interface which is really pretty simple (pipes in, pipes out,) they are well documented, and they're interactive and easy to play around with no zero setup.
Also, the UNIX shell has been around for 30 years now and isn't going anywhere. So what's the best investment? Python will change more in the next five years.
So much of this is still useful and relevant. Kind of amazing how much the web relies upon these ancient (by our standards) tools. UNIX is one of the most incredible technology stories ever.
This article should be titled, “The latest findings on IQ” because IQ score and “intelligence” in a general sense are very different things. Plenty has been published on the inherent cultural and gender biases in IQ testing.
Statements like “when babies from poor families are adopted into wealthy families, their IQ goes up” are almost devoid of information because the IQ test itself favors the type of “intelligence” valued by the educated, wealthy class.
I think this is super-interesting, not because I have any real desire to couch surf (or squat in an abandoned building), but because it gives more perspective on the scope of what's possible. Personally, I'm working 60hrs/week at a job that pays very well but the commute and hours suck up all of my energy and is filled with people that suck even more. I don't see myself becoming a dumpster-diver, but what I really want is employment that occupies a limited space in my life -- and still pays the bills. So this piece is inspiring in that it shows that you can create the life you want, if you're willing to do things differently and take risks.
A strong work ethic may make a lot of sense if you're primarily working for yourself and your family. The author of the How To Drop Out document seems to be more concerned with the great majority of the public who slaves away to make ends meet while the boss gets richer (often, obscenely richer) -- which is of course inherent in the capitalist system. I would argue that a work ethic under these conditions is not decent at all, and looking at the big picture may even be immoral because the worker is not rewarded proportionally to their work.
NetApp and Data Domain are both enterprise-level dedupe vendors who use similar hash functions to find unique strings of bits. Check out their whitepapers. Short answer: not in a million years (and there are further checks in case the hash alg somehow failed.)
It's block-level dedupe, not file-level. This is similar to how Data Domain (www.datadomain.com, recently acquired by EMC for $2.2B) does it. In their customer base, mostly medium to large storage operations, the average customer compression is more than 20x. For a small (one-disk) system your mileage will obviously vary, but even a compression factor of 3-4x saves a lot of bits.
Now what makes you think that? UNIX shell tools have a very consistent interface which is really pretty simple (pipes in, pipes out,) they are well documented, and they're interactive and easy to play around with no zero setup.
Also, the UNIX shell has been around for 30 years now and isn't going anywhere. So what's the best investment? Python will change more in the next five years.