A long time ago, I wrote about the power that grant funding givespeople at universities . But there's a flip side togrant funding, and it is that people with grant funding often don'treally have money as the business world thinks of it.

From the outside, it looks like people with grant funding are rolling incash; they get hundreds of thousands of dollars, or even million dollargrants. From the inside, though, that money is almost entirely tied downfor very specific things.

Every so often, I just want to read a file (or a bunch of files) withoutdoing anything to them. I have all sorts of reasons for this; sometimesI want to prime the OS's disk cache, or I want to time the file readspeed, or I want to put some IO load on the system, or any number ofother reasons (the worst is to just update the file atimes). The commonelement is that I don't care what happens to the file