From a clinical / experimental standpoint there's very little difference between 4,8,16 hours. It's all essentially 'next day' right now because common practice is to send the sample off to a genomics core and they drop the data on a server for you after they've run it through their pipeline. Many experiments require their own library construction but clinical pipelines generally don't and again, the machine prep time is not the bottleneck it's deciding what to include and how to lay things out. From what I understand 454 accommodates the longest read lengths right now but this seems to change month to month, also from what I understand 454 has a lot of trouble with short length libraries.
One point worth mentioning. Ion Torrent is one of several companies that develops high-throughput or 'nextgen' sequencing platforms 454 and Illumina being the other big players right now. Each technology has a few important nuances that make them better or worse for a particular project. Some of the major things one looks at are cost of the device and library construction, error rates due to PCR amplification steps or nucleotide calling, library sizes, and maximum read length but there are many more. In addition, pore technologies will definitely become important in the near future because they enable single molecule experiments which are currently impossible without amplification using the above platforms.
It's unfortunate the author was not able to manage the drug properly. Adderall is a potent substance that, when used in the correct fashion, can be an effective aid for those who need it. It's also highly addictive so must be combined with a healthy lifestyle and coupled to good habits in order to be kept in check. I would highly recommend that anyone who feels themselves falling into a routine similar to that described seek a therapist as well as focus hard on improving their sleep, diet, and exercise routine.
point of clarification: quasicrystals are by definition non-periodic, most known examples of which are metamaterials. the first sentence incorrectly ignores a very interesting class of engineered compounds.
It's unfortunate that they restrict the number of cores according to license tier. I was excited about R integration, which is where I do a lot of parallel computations, until I realized this.