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After a few month of usage, SSD suffer from multiple writes (to same locations) and die. (See this.) Depending on algorithms, the lifespan of a SSD varies.
So it's already here, the difference is that a regular SSD fails randomly... (and you may be able to recover some data)

Actually I'm personally not so sure about SSDs when you consider they seem to work on the hot/crazy scale. Now sure they may figure out and fix the problems or they could just as easily have a real nasty bug show up like the infamous Jaz Drive "Click Of Death" and scare off the public. I know that after I had a couple of my gamer customers buy really nice SSDs and both failed in less than a year and a half I personally will be staying away from SSDs for at least another year. Sure hard drives fail but they nearly always give a warning first, these SSDs? Zip, just one day they flipped the switch and nothing, not even the BIOS/EFI would recognize them.

So if they can give me the speed of SSDs or better and the long life of HDDs? All for it, bring it on. But I think I'll let some other sucker test them first, thanks.

I'm sorry friend but you are mistaken, unless you call sliding a single slider in UAC as some complex action. Win 7 can autosandbox the browser (your choice of IE or any Chromium based) and run it in low rights mode which is actually SAFER than surfing in Linux where running a single program in a much lower set of permissions is far from simple, and then simply add one of several free AVs that also sandbox (My two favorites are Avast and Comodo Internet Security, both work well) and frankly the user need not know anything. The OS will autoupdate, autosandbox, scan ALL pages before load, hell my 71 year old dad is as clueless about tech as they come and his PC has been on the net 24/7/365 running Win 7 since Oct 09 and hasn't has a single problem or bug, the worst problem he has had is he didn't know how to update his browser (it kept telling him there was an update but he kept pushing the X instead of the update button) and that was it.

If you want to know the REAL reason why you see much more infected Windows? let me tell you a true story about the only person i ever threw out of my shop. He comes in, buys a PC from me, and wants me to install limewire. I tell him "I'm sorry but Limewire doesn't exist anymore, they got shutdown by the feds and anything calling itself Limewire now is just a virus pretending to be the real deal. There are several alternative such as Emule and BT if you wish me to install one of those" so what does he do? He promptly goes home with his new PC, Googles "New limewire" and when the AV naturally wouldn't let him install it first he tried to disable and then he removed the AV altogether! Why did he do that? Because the program told him to! When I finally threw him out of my shop (demanding I fix it for free after he broke it by refusing to listen to my instructions or call) he was yelling "It says right there that it IS Limewire so you make it work dammit!

So if you want to know why there are plenty of infected Windows machines its because of the dancing bunnies problem. It doesn't matter how simple or secure you make the OS if the user has install rights because all you have to do is wave the right cookie, be it porn, piracy, hell I've seen users infect their PCs for a CHANCE of winning some iShiny, then all can be bypassed. MSFT thinks they are gonna fix this by going the Apple way with an appstore but it won't work, as porn and piracy won't be offered in the appstore and that will be enough of a cookie to lure victims. Whether you choose to admit it or not to run Linux you HAVE TO have more than moderate PC skills or have a full time admin (such as yourself) willing to work for free simply because you have to know how to deal with updates breaking drivers and other Linux "quirks" one simply doesn't run into on OSX or Windows. Hell simply the fact you have to install it, know what partitions are and what sizes to make them, Google for drivers that aren't included and understand how to find out the exact make/model of said hardware to properly install Linux already puts you above a good 80% of the population. if you wish to argue that let me take away install rights for all my customers who would only be allowed to let me remote in and install approved software? Windows would never get bugs either.

But that argument simply doesn't hold water when the vast majority are on their own, without so much as a geek in the family to guide them. In fact I would argue that them getting Linux installed correctly and having it fully functional for even a year would probably be impossible, since they simply wouldn't have the skills required. Linux is only friendly IF everything works OOTB AND it works after every upgrade, two situations which at least in my experience are about as likely as Santa dropping me off a dozen porn stars for Xmas.

It's strange that an xkcd can be so misleading, but this time it is.

The "securer" password has a smaller character space, which means that it's 26 possible characters to the power of the length. The other, has a wider character space; 26 lower case letters, 26 upper case, 10 numbers and 32 symbols (at least directly accessible on a US keyboard layout). In this case the second password needs more combinations to be cracked just because it's longer, but if the same password would have had the character space of the first one, it would need ~9e13 times more combinations to test.

Crackers will always incrementally wide the character space, first all lower case, then start trying more possibilities. And they also use rainbow tables, and it's even easier if it puts dictionary words.
I personally find much more difficult to remember random words sequences.

Thanks, and the same to you. Fortunately I am not bitter. I only try to see the things as they are and describe them clearly. That can sound bitter, I know. I have a pretty nice job where recognizing and describing the truth is a major part of my work (well, in political language). I do only work hard on occasion. I even get to do the occasional bit of (applied) science, which is nice.

As to hard work, there are quite a few scientists that believe all science is incremental in small steps. Those are the hard workers that will never have a great idea, because they are doing it wrong. Hard work does not foster great ideas, it prevents them. True, once you had a good idea, hard work may be required, but before that idea, it is entirely the wrong approach. Hard work all the time is only for those of limited mental faculties. These cannot be good scientists, ever.

As to web-development, stay away. It is the bottom of the barrel for those that truly do not understand programming, algorithms, data-modeling, mathematics and technology. My impression is that there is a need for programmers that actually can get a job done well (see, e.g. http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2007/02/why-cant-programmers-program.html and http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/ThePerilsofJavaSchools.html). Maybe try to get into that? I think selecting the right employer is key here. Stay away from the financial sector as well, they pay well, but that is mostly compensation for being treated so badly.

As to Christopher McCandless, there are times when something like that looks attractive, but they pass. Maybe even do something like it, but for a limited time and with a reasonable exit strategy. Intelligent people that actually have the wisdom to see things as they are do not fit well in this world, they are too rare. Intelligent ones are already rare, but typically lack that wisdom. Still, there are niches out there. It just takes a bit longer to find them and may take a bit of luck. Just don't do anything conventional unless you can compensate strongly with something you like doing. It may kill you otherwise.

An eg blog is Coding Horror - and a good starting out post is: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2004/10/a-pragmatic-quick-reference.html

Exactly and its something we retailers have been doing for years. You want someone who is on the fence to purchase? throw in some cheap swag, like a wireless mouse. this makes the person feel good, like they are getting something "free" and it makes them more likely to buy. In this case they want the person to take fugly photos so you give them some carrot to take fugly photos and they are more likely to take fugly photos. Hell everybody does this, look at those "games' which are nothing more than mouse click fests like farmville or some of the MMOs. You make sure to dole out the rewards in just the right amount, not too much or they won't feel any accomplishment, not too little or they'll feel frustrated, hit the right amount and you'll get them clicking on that mouse like a hamster trying to get a pellet.

Hell even the malware guys figured this out ages ago which is why we have the dancing bunnies problem. You offer them the right reward, be it free songs or porn or some dumb match 3 games and even though they may feel its really not such a good idea they will go right through all those security measures and roadblocks you put in trying to protect them, all so they can have the bunny.

Sadly most humans are impulsive things and really not that hard to figure out, all you have to do is wave the right shiny in front of their face and they'll happily dance to your tune. Probably the easiest way for this guy to get those pics is make it like a contest, and each time you do what he wants you get another shot at the prize. i bet he'd have folks tripping over themselves to do what he wanted and it wouldn't even have to be huge prizes, one iPad, one netbook, and a dozen little wimp prizes like wireless mice and gift cards. Hell if he played it right he wouldn't even have to pay for the prizes as the corps would give him a little swag for the plugs.

Most failures in 'randomizing' data are not difficult to detect (once you look at it)

Two examples.

1 - http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2007/12/the-danger-of-naivete.html

2 - (this happened to me) program works on one compiler, in the other it gives strange results (this is a simulation of signal transmission over noise conditions). Turns out on compiler 'a' random() doesn't return a value from 0 to the maximum value of a long, but returns up to a value less than the maximum value

Hell you don't even have to give them ANYTHING to have them screw themselves, all you have to do is offer the illusion of giving them something. Its called the dancing bunnies problem and working PC sales and repair i've seen it more times than many here have had hot meals. People will give away their passwords, run ANY program, bypass ANY security, all you have to do is offer the right dancing bunny.

Sadly the only time i had to get ugly with a customer (I threw him out of the shop and told him I'd call the cops if he came back) was a customer that demanded that I repair his machine for free because he refused to listen and destroyed his system for a dancing bunny. Now with my little system I have for Win 7 I have had zero infected machines EXCEPT this guy, and I had told him before i ever sold him the machine when he asked about it "I can't give you that program because it doesn't exist anymore, the feds shut down limewire years ago and anything that says its limewire is just a virus" so what did he do? he Googled "The new limewire" the very second he got home and when both the AV AND the browser blocked him trying to get it he first uninstalled the browser then when he couldn't disable the AV he uninstalled it, all for the lure of a program that didn't exist. of course when he ran "the new limewire" what he got was over 100 malware infections and so many clickjackers that he couldn't even see the desktop for the constant stream of popups. when i finally threw him out the shop he was yelling "It says right there its the new limewire so make it work dammit!"

Linux won't save you, in fact there are websites that show you how to make a bug in 5 easy steps by using the dancing bunny, mac won't save you either as we saw with DNSChanger and MacDefender/Guardian, in the end security all comes to to the user. why would the user pay even 10c for their data to be secured when frankly they will hand over the keys to the kingdom for the offer of a dancing bunny? I had to come up with a free porn site just to keep the "Iz-not_Viruz_iz_codex" bugs from infecting guys, I've seen girls run strange programs offered them in chat sessions by strangers because it was supposed to be some match 3 or a "free' version of some popular game like Angry birds or Plants Vs Zombies, this is why I've had to spend so much time learning how to keep as many decisions OUT of the hands of the user as possible, because frankly the word security never even crosses their minds, not if you offer a dancing bunny.

Hell these websites could put "Not only are we gonna sell your data but we are gonna send a 600 pound silverback over to rape you while we film it for Youtube" and as long as they had some stupid thing to offer the user, some stupid game or chat or like FB a chance to blather on about themselves? they'd happily sign anything you want them to. Hell look at how many FB apps have been coming up with some truly insane demands, post as you, access to ALL of your data AND all the data of any friends, etc, and yet i get idiots I knew in HS and old GFs wanting me to use these crazy apps constantly. when i ask them 'Didn't you even read what it requires to use?" they are all "huh? what? but its cool!". Sadly while security takes real work blowing it all to hell takes only one dumbass a few minutes to crap all over it. if ugly is to the bone then dumbass must be to the molecule!

Acer os Asus? i got the EEE myself, wonderful little unit, maxed it out with 8Gb of RAM for just $33 and that much RAM with superfetch means the only time the SSD is gonna win is wake and sleep. While the SSDs are nice, don't get me wrong, I have too many media files and the hot/crazy scale with those frankly spooks me as I use my EEE for service calls and the last thing I need is to flip up the lid and have the SSD crap out.But as you've seen the Brazos platform is quite sweet, hell mine feels more like a CULV than a netbook and with an SSD I bet yours IS a CULV as far as performance goes, I just hope the SSD don't crap out when you need it.

Exactly, most of my customers simply made do with what they had until the price lowered like the one i just installed where the guy was simply tossing files off his 1Tb until the price hit $100 for a Tb again which is when he had me grab him another Tb to install. I'm just lucky that for once in my life i actually got in when prices were low thanks to Samsung being bought out. I've always preferred the Samsung EcoDrives because of the lower heat and rugged construction so when Newegg dropped the price to $35 for a 1Tb and $59 for a 2Tb i bought them up, ended up making a pretty penny as well as letting some of my preferred customers get drives at a decent price while everyone else was hurting and still managed to keep 6Tb for myself.

What to me is more telling is how quickly Newegg and Tiger dropped SSDs for HDDs in their barebone kits. I wonder if they got bit in the ass by the hot/crazy scale of SSDs and the return rates made it not worth including them because it seemed like it was barely 2 months that both were using SSDs in their kits before switching to Seagate 500gb HDDs instead. You'd think the increased performance and the lower than HDD prices would have made them hang onto the SSDs longer but if its like what I've seen and what many of my fellow system builders have told me the SSDs still have too high a failure rate for the masses. after all with HDDs being high Joe Blow wasn't buying any externals for backups and talking to other builders you pretty much have to constantly back up the SSDs in case you wake up one morning to find its crapped itself and died. I know my gamer customers bought top o' the line SSDs only to have the drives fail in less than a year and a half so they went back to raptors in RAID over dealing with worrying if the machine will fire today or not.

Or maybe beating a TRS-80 for large n. Don't forget the importance of efficient algorithms.

Most of us don't want to have to backup hourly because of the hot/crazy scale especially when a more modern OS can fix that even better than an SSD. Windows 7 has Superfetch which learns which applications you use and when you use them so if you have enough RAM to run CS 5 it will be waiting for you in memory and no SSD will ever beat even DDR 2 much less DDR 3 RAM for speed. I have several graphics customers and the combo of Win 7 X64 and 8Gb of RAM means they click on Photoshop and its there instantly.

As for TFA whomever invented splash screens should be shot. I already know what i launched, I fricking launched it! Get rid of your damned splash screen and if your program is THAT slow that you need a splash to let them know the app hasn't crashed and attempting to launch again? FIX YOUR CRAPPY CODE!!

The problem with SSDs is the hot/crazy scale where you get hot performance but crazy failure rates but for this tech to get the economies of scale needed to lower prices there simply can't be a hot/crazy scale as it needs to at LEAST be as reliable as the tech it wants to replace and right now its anything but. Sure a geek knows to "backup backup backup" but consumers don't and those are the ones getting burnt by SSDs. Hell notice how quickly Tiger and Newegg switched back to HDDs for their kits instead of using SSDs? Want to bet it was getting too many complaints about failures?

And to make matters worse they don't "fail gracefully" as the old spinning rust does. honestly i can't remember a HDD that failed without warning in the past....oh hell the last one was probably a Deathstar around 2000, no thanks to SMART you'll usually get SOME kind of indication, be it SMART or noise or weird errors, something, and then you can get your data off. My gamer customers went back to running raptors in RAID because they bought SSDs and lost data, just one day they flipped the switch and poof! No drive even in BIOS and no way for me to get a single byte of data back.

So no thanks, until and unless you can give me a drive that works 5 years without fail (And NO I don't give a crap about your warranty unless it covers data, does it? No? Then i don't care and neither will my customers as its not the drive we give a crap about, its our stuff) then me and my customers will stick with the spinning rust. Hell with Win 7 there is no need to boot, superfetch will load all your apps when you need them into RAM based on usage patterns, and with cameras and video sucking up ever more space what does SSD have to offer really? Maybe in servers where IOPS is king, but normal users already have machines MUCH faster than they are, SSD really offers them no benefits over spinning rust IMHO. Hell the new 2.5s even park the heads at the slightest movement so they don't fail like the bad old days. Better to simply use a super fast SDHC for readyboost in that laptop or get a hybrid than to risk losing all your stuff. At least in the hybrid if the NAND fails you still have a HDD that you can still get your stuff off of.

This pic shows a concise summary of what Google did right, and what Yahoo did wrong.

http://img361.imageshack.us/img361/443/yahoovsgoogle1996to2005ys4.png

About it...
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2006/03/in-pursuit-of-simplicity.html

--
Focus isn't about saying yes, but about saying no -- Steve Jobs

When did we accept that clicking on a link is a dangerous operation?

It's called cross site request forgery. Evil page just inserts a link like [a href="http://www.facebook.com/deleteMyAccount"] Free Pr0n! [/a] and when you click it, you execute the link with your cookie and your logged in level of permissions. Even an img tag could do it [img src="http://facebook.com/acceptFriendRequest?user=evilDude"/]. Your browser will load it with the page.

We accepted it all the way back when Netscape introduced cookies as a way to track session state. Some web frameworks have built in protection against this sort of attack. Apple's WebObjects, for instance, has component action urls that are generated server side and are unique to the session/page. There's absolutely no way to forge one, because the url is generated at runtime and stored with the code that it executes.

The problem with SSDs was nailed by the guys at coding horror and that is SSDs are still new enough tech it works on a "Hot/crazy" scale. Smoking hot speeds, crazy failure rates. A couple of my gamer customers have gone through like 4 of the things each in the past two years, and these ain't the cheap ones either, its whatever scored highest on the benches which is usually the top dollar stuff. They've already learned don't put anything on an SSD you give a shit about unless you have it backed up because unlike a HDD which will give you some warning the SSDs just go "poof" and that's it. No getting your data back, no tricks, just one day it works and the next its toast.

Agreed. If you're not testing coders for basic competence, you're just foolishly rolling the dice. When I was helping my company staff up development, I asked applicants to do little 15-minute (or less) methods inspired by FizzBuzz. Despite killing the phone screening and dazzling upper management, many applicants went pale and struggled to produce anything when asked to do simple coding tasks in the de facto IDE (pseudo-code was acceptable too). One dude was great on the phone and socially gifted, but strained to produce a basic looping structure. Management liked him. It took over four months and a few write-ups with HR before he left on his own (he wasn't stupid after all, just couldn't code), without producing anything useful.

Seems that the biggest headache here is the cross-platform UI development that is what the user sees, even though the application is much more than just the UI. That can be solved by using some cross-platform UI-kit but creating the UI separately for each platform and keeping the base application same for each platform. Simple, really: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2007/02/non-native-ui-sucks.html

I like your approach, though I would like to suggest also an option that goes along the lines of "How would you solve this problem" and get the candidate to sketch out, at a high level, what they think it would take to solve the problem. You could then, if you want, start introducing new constraints: "How would you change your approach in order to make it work if X?" I think this kind of questioning can be very telling of a programmer's actual skill. The idea may not take root, hoever, because it cannot be carried out by someone who knows nothing.

I am not opposed to a simple programming test as a shibboleth. Describe fizzbuzz and have them implement it in the language of choice. Get it roughly right and the interview continues. Get it grossly wrong, and you thank them for their time.

When I hire (web developers, specifically), I want to see code they've done, sure. But I'd rather see them write code live (yes, write). Simple live coding exercises only demonstrate how they approach simple problems, but they can also reveal good/bad programming habits.

Apart from that, I don't really do brain teasers, but I do ask questions that give me insight into creative thinking, problem solving, and hindsight/foresight.

There are a lot of textbook programmers that are pretty much useless in the real world, and there are a lot of "creative" coders that are so "out of the box" that they're impractical cowboys. A combination of live coding and conversation gives me more insight than a full library of supposedly authored code.

Basically, I draw a lot of inspiration from this old blog post I ran across a while back.

The biggest benefit to PHP is that it's easy, simple and just works. Most other platforms such as Ruby on Rails, ASP, and JSP derive from other languages such as C#, Visual Basic, Java, and Ruby that were not specifically designed for web development. PHP was designed from the ground up to build web sites.

Ruby on Rails was designed for rapid development, great if your manufacturing web sites. Java and C# can do anything, including web services but they are best suited for enterprise applications that are likely to integrate with other systems that are far more complex.

I think Steve McConnell said it best when comparing software solutions and how some projects are simple and can be built with simple tools. But if your designing and building a skyscraper you will use different tools and different expertise. http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2007/09/steve-mcconnell-in-the-doghouse.html

The disdain you sense in some circles is the contrast from the highly experienced software engineer vs the unfortunately common PHP coder who doesn't realize how ignorant they are. To play off Steve's analogy, it would be like one saying they can design a skyscraper because they did such a great job designing their dog's house.

I was one of those arrogant PHP coders and thought I could do anything. Then I got a clue and realized that I knew nothing, as said best by Socrates. If any PHP programmers are reading this and are offended then simply ask yourself if you can name five design patterns. If you can then you are not the ignorant PHP developer I'm talking about.

PHP is a very powerful language, especially when coupled with jQuery, Zend, Yii, Cake, or many of the other frameworks. Therefor if you are not sure what language you should use then you will want to use PHP.

You DO realize that they could pop up a message that has buried in the EULA "FYI we are gonna come by and bang your wife and sell your kids into slavery" and people would pick "Yes please give me the funny screensaver LOL!" don't you? ALL you are doing is adding an extra step, the same extra step that Windows has been adding since 07, the same extra step Linux has been adding for ages, and it still doesn't work because in the end you have to have a user that 1.-actually gives a shit, and 2.- has taken the time to actually understand what is being asked of him/her which we have seen is MAYBE 3% of the population, the rest will click on whatever pops up and be pissed AT YOU for making them have to click.

But please read this article as Atwood at coding horror lays out the problem better than I ever could. if you don't believe this is real and applies to the VAST MAJORITY you really should stop in your local mom & pop shop and ask them to tell you about stupid and or dangerous users, we have stories that would turn your hair white! For the first time in my history I had to be rude to a customer last year and tell him to take his business elsewhere because after I explicitly spelled out that the program he wanted had been shut down by court order and that anything calling itself "the new limewire" was a virus he promptly took his machine home, searched for "the new limewire" and when the AV wouldn't let him install it uninstalled the AV and promptly got infected to the tune of over 100 pieces of malware than had the gall to get pissy because i couldn't magically make this non existent software work!

Why did that happen? Because he LIKED Limewire, he WANTED Limewire, and every single thing that didn't involve him getting it went in one ear and out the other. Now I'm lucky in that I've "trained" for lack of a better word, my customers to "When it doubt call my guy and see what he says" and unlike some of the more scummy guys in the biz I do my damnedest to steer them away from the nasties. But if you think you can permission your way out of this again it all boils down to TWO choices, 1.- The user has the right to elevate permissions which means no matter how many roadblocks and passwords you put if the user wants to see the bunny they WILL install it, or 2.-You give the rights ONLY to the corporates which quickly turn it into "That against corporate interests" and then you get the horror stories like you read here constantly of being trapped having to do something back asswards because some BOFH decided that having common sense is against policy.

I really wish there was a door number three, i really do, but after doing this line of work since the days of Win 3.x and looking my ass off I sure as hell haven't found it.

It worked pretty well for Bill Gates, and didn't seem to have ruined his career.

The point about BASIC is that it's easy. Easy to write, easy to run. You don't need a boatload of compilers, linkers and an integrated developer environment. Write a small text file and run. To say that you can do so much more with e.g. python is missing the point entirely - that's like taking the crayons away from a two year old and give him a set of watercolors instead. He'll make a holy mess, cry and stay away from painting for a long time, if not forever.

And I would also claim that GOTO is a strength at this early learning stage. Because that's how the underlying machine works - there's absolute branching all the time.
Understanding the pitfalls this can create as well as when it's beneficial to cut a gordian knot is what separates good programmers from the sheep.
And someone who abhors absolute branching because he's been taught to will never become a low level embedded programmer.

Bad gotos are bad, but so are bad catch()es. It's not the tool, it's how you use it, and whether you understand it. And most "programmers" have no clue.

Bang. I think you hit it, right there. Solid-state drives solve all the performance and reliability challenges at once.

Ugh, no. The first generations of SSDs (and we're still in that region to some extent even now) had serious reliability issues, and unlike HDDs which tend to fail slowly over time, giving you at least some warning via SMART indicators, SSDs tend to fail in a very quantised manner, one day they work, the next day they're bricked. See for example Jeff Atwood's very readable writeup on this

.

They ran benches every time they added to the kit. Kinda pointless to run benches just because its Tuesday. Are you really this obtuse or are you just being pedantic for shits and giggles?

hell don't take MY word for it, read the article for yourself. note that even though atwood says the high failure rates is worth the speed remember this man spends $400+ just on a pair of headphones so having a half a dozen brand new SSDs as spares? NOT a problem for him. hey if you have that kind of money knock yourself out, me I got better things to spend it on.

Sorry but you are wrong, and here is why: Everyone and their dog has ever growing piles of media. Even those that don't keep movies on their drives (which more and more are, being able to have a media library on your netbook or use your desktop as an HTPC by streaming to your new net enabled TV is nice) I've found coming to me for HDD upgrades simply because they are running out of space on all those 200Gb and 300Gb hard drives. they have videos of their families, tons of pictures, software up the wazoo, that space goes damned quick my friend.

Lets be honest folks, the ONLY reason anyone is mentioning SSDs is because the HDD manufacturers put all their eggs in a single Bangkok basket and had the basket go floating down the street. Before the stupidity with the flood I was getting 1Tb drives for $36 and 2Tb drives for $56. i'm sorry but NO SSD comes even close to those numbers, not in any way shape or form. By the time you can get a 1Tb SSD for that price we'll have 10Gb HDDs (Seagate and WD have both written papers about quadrupling capacity with new nanotech) for $90.

Finally as I got to see first hand from some of my gamer customers whose data went "poof!" the ONLY reason SSDs are getting cheap is that they are abandoning SLC for MLC and thanks to the insane failure rates as Jeff Atwood pointed out MLC drives really have to be judged on a "hot/crazy" scale as the hot speed come with crazy failure rates. I had 4 gamer customers go SSD, the fastest drives, no expense spared, not a single one made it past the 2 year mark. Hell I have 20gb HDDs that still run fine, what I'll do with them I have no clue but the data is still there.

So if you have the money to have spares, don't give a shit about your data or have a REAL HDD to back up constantly then yes, SSDs can work. but dealing with everyday folks I can tell you backups? Is like pulling teeth with most folks and while I can often get the data off a failing HDD with a failed SSD you are SOL unless you happen to have an electron microscope handy. all it'll take is a few horror stories of Suzy losing their late mother's pictures to kill any desire for SSDs QUICK.

Hell you watch, the HDD manufacturers get their collective shit back together and you'll be seeing $200 barebones and $300 netbooks with huge drives again and nobody but geeks and benchmark addicts will give SSD a second thought. For the average Joe it is ALWAYS about the numbers and bigger is ALWAYS better.

I do not want a part of a drive to fail after one year (the seemingly life span of a SSD drive) when the other part still has two more years (what I'm finding to be the life span of SATA drives these days) left in it. Link courtesy of Hairyfeet.

While I love the speed the SSD (and the prices is hitting the "magic" $1/GB) you're forgetting the HUGE elephant in the room with SSD that almost no-one seems to notice ...

SSDs have a TERRIBLE failure rate.

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/05/the-hot-crazy-solid-state-drive-scale.html

He purchased eight SSDs over the last two years ⦠and all of them failed. The tale of the tape is frankly a little terrifying:

        Super Talent 32 GB SSD, failed after 137 days
        OCZ Vertex 1 250 GB SSD, failed after 512 days
        G.Skill 64 GB SSD, failed after 251 days
        G.Skill 64 GB SSD, failed after 276 days
        Crucial 64 GB SSD, failed after 350 days
        OCZ Agility 60 GB SSD, failed after 72 days
        Intel X25-M 80 GB SSD, failed after 15 days
        Intel X25-M 80 GB SSD, failed after 206 days

and ...

http://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_c?hl=en&ie=UTF8&prev=_t&rurl=translate.google.com&sl=fr&tl=en&twu=1&u=http://www.hardware.fr/articles/843-7/ssd.html&usg=ALkJrhjecZZv1F6d_oT-dr41FPFYOIkVCw

- Intel 0.1% (against 0.3%)
- Crucial 0.8% (against 1.9%)
- Corsair 2.9% (against 2.7%)
- OCZ 4.2% (against 3.5%)

Intel confirms its first place with a return rate of the most impressive. It is followed from Crucial, which significantly improves the rate but it must be said that the latter was heavily impacted by the M225 - the C300 is only reached 1%. The return rate for failure are up against Corsair and OCZ especially in the latter confirmed by far his last position. 8 SSDs are beyond the 5%:

- 9.14% 2 240 GB OCZ Vertex
- 8.61% 2 120 GB OCZ Agility
- 7.27% 40GB OCZ Agility 2
- 6.20% 60GB OCZ Agility 2
- 5.83% 80 GB Corsair Force
- 5.31% 90GB OCZ Agility 2
- 5.31% 2 100 GB OCZ Vertex
- 5.04% OCZ Agility 2 3.5 "120 GB

At the _current_ price point & abysmal failure raite, SSD sadly has a ways to go before it catches on with the main stream.

Oh Lord McGrew, bless your little optimistic heart! Ya know how long i been building boxes and selling PCs? Let me put it THIS way, remember Hot Dog stand? I used to sell the OS that theme came from! And I can tell you education will never work because in the end you have the dancing bunny problem where all the attacker has to do is go "Don't you want to see the bunny? Everyone else got to see the bunny, don't you want to see it too?" and they will throw common sense right in the shitter every. single. time.

Hell for the first time last year i actually told a customer to fuck off and take his business elsewhere and I had NEVER done that before. He was pissed because I refused to fix a PC he broke by doing what I said "DON'T DO THAT!" and apparently i'm supposed to make a PC that will tell him to go fuck himself without actually taking his right to be a dipshit away. What did I tell him not to do? I told him that Limewire was put out of business over 2 years ago and anything on the net claiming to be limewire was malware. So you guessed it he decided BT was "too hard" and went right out and downloaded "the new limewire" which was just a pile of malware with a gnucleus client attached. He even went so far as to UNINSTALL THE AV because it "wouldn't let him run his program". Well no shit, really? Bad AV, not letting him run malware like that!

We are both on the same page with browser bugs and XP though, that is why I don't allow Adobe PDF reader (use Sumatra instead) and have sandboxing in avast on if on XP and have them use Comodo Dragon with ABP on 7 to take advantage of Low rights mode. Since you ain't heard of it i'll break it down, its bloody brilliant and REALLY cuts down the risk of net based infections. sadly it doesn't work in Opera or FF ONLY on Chromium based like Dragon or IE. What it does is automatically put the browser at a LOWER permission than the user, even lower in some respects to the guest. it only gives the browser limited access to a handful of folders and even then on limited permissions. Sadly the only FF workaround posted basically crippled low rights mode and made it worthless. but I purposely went to some of those "loook at the hot lesboz!" topsites with a machine I was gonna wipe that I installed win 7, using both Dragon and FF. Avast popped up with nearly a dozen drivebys that FF tried to load, not a peep from Dragon because in low rights mode the code just couldn't run, the permissions were too low.

Believe me I used to work corp and ya know XP there? Not a threat. had a customer that only recently retired his Win2K boxes, not a single bug. you lock it down with GPOs and don't allow IE to even be on the machine? Cuts those infections right on off. What worries me are all those off lease and refurbs i'm gonna be getting pallet loads of with XP. I REALLY need to find someone who'll give me a decent price on Win 7 Starter. I tried every "user friendly" Linux out there and not a single one passed my 3 year update simulation without one or more drivers biting it so I really don't have a choice, Win 7 starter it is. with the ASUS hack for getting around the wallpaper thing it is actually a nice OS for those late P4s and early dual cores.

Oh and finally you ain't telling me shit about drivers, I've been having to teach my boys. I swear i carry BC powders in case i have a heart attack NOT from them learning how to drive, but from all the fucking morons driving 80 MPH while playing with their cell phone. First thing i taught them is college or not they talk on the cell while driving i'm taking the keys. i was proud as hell to be driving down the street the other day only to see the oldest ahead of me and pull into a lot so he could take a call.

But if you think education will EVER work i have a nice bridge you might be interested in. Working with consumers all day I can tell you that the clueless? out number the rest of us by about 100,000 to one.

The fact remains that a large majority of programmers today would do the world a service by changing careers. The industry is flooded with programmers who cannot program.

... will be eventually written in JavaScript. ~ Atwood's Law (circa 2007)

Nope, sorry, gotta disagree. before the flood dumb shit (who thought they would ALL be in the same damned place) I got 3Tb of HDDs for $93. Even the cheapest low rent SSDs would cost easily 20 times that to give me the same amount of space. Not to mention as a couple of my gamer customers found out SSDs currently really have to be judged by the hot/crazy scale as in smoking hot performance, crazy failure rates.

Maybe in a decade when they figure out how to make MLC as reliable as SLC and figure out all the controller bugs MAYBE, but even then i kinda doubt it. More likely what we will see is a next generation hybrid that will have 128Gb of SSD and 1 to 2Tb of HDD with the ability to turn off the HDD completely when in motion or not in use. With an aware OS you'd get the speed of SSD with the storage space of HDDs. Hell if you made the SSD module replaceable you wouldn't even have to give a shit about SSD failure, as the HDD could have a hidden partition with the OS backed up regularly and in the event of failure the HDD would boot from the hidden partition and tell you to have the SSD changed out.

As for TFA one thing I DO see flash replacing is DVD burners. i can easily see a day where you will have a single burner at home to whip off DVDs (I still say BD isn't gonna make it, they haven't been able to get the price per disc down low enough to make them suitable for small backups or handing out to friends) while all your other machines simply access the DVD burner through the network when they need it. I know i picked up a USB case for my DVD burner from my dead laptop when I switched to a netbook (they have them for like $7 on Amazon) but frankly i haven't needed it once. i just use my 16gb flash stick or the network for everything.

i just wish they'd come up with a cheap replacement for DVDs for archiving. what we need is something that backs up say 100Gb or 200Gb that is close to the price of blank DVDs, or hell even $2 a pop for that amount of space would probably sell. have it on the PCIe bus and you could probably move the data at a decent enough clip but for backing up data that is gonna sit for years you still really haven't seen anything come close to DVD. i have 1X DVDs i burned with my very first burner that are still just as easy to read as the day i bought them.

The problem with SSDs is that it looks like all but the enterprise "ZOMG look at the price!" drives are going MLC and as Atwood at CH points out those MLC drives really have to be judged on a hot/crazy scale because while the speed is smoking hot the failure rate is fucking crazy. I know after seeing a couple of my gamer customers shell out frankly insane money for the fastest drives and seeing both fail in less than a year that broke me of wanting to mess with them. sure they got replacement drives but so what? didn't get their data back.

At least with modern HDDs it has been years since I've had a drive "just go" on me. the always seem to give plenty of warning nowadays, you get SMART errors, delayed write errors, heat issues, something to let you know "Uh oh, time to get the data off" whereas with both SSDs it was 'flip switch, drive no go" and no getting squat back as far as data. While I agree it'd be nice, it doesn't look like they are gonna be cheap and reliable, just cheap.

I get where your coming from here too, but nobody said they liked chrome's versioning, so why follow it?

You incrememt your major version 4.x.x.x when you release new major features, an example would be ff sync,that's worth a +1, however bug fixes do not constitute a +1 on almost any model but chrome's. So a lot of the backlash your getting is from users who are used to following more standardized versioning schemes and aren't google lackies.

(Major version).(Minor version).(Revision number).(Build number)

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2007/02/whats-in-a-version-number-anyway.html

The article straight up states that there is no standard for versioning, however what they're providing is used by many many projects, possibly one can make the argument ALL projects BUT chrome and ff use something in this light. ff used this versioning I believe and then cut over to google causing mass confusing and misunderstanding, why???

Exactly ; they've done studies that prove this - not everyone can program a computer. Every time I see one of those GUI programming environments designed to enable users to program, I sigh. Real programmers detest them (unless they are a mile-high model overview and they fill in the gaps), and people who can't program still can't program, so implementing them is pointless and counter-productive.

If 30-60% of people who self-selected to go on a Computer Science course can't program, what's the percentage in the general population?

Well you should be quite happy with MSFT then, since all those corporate contracts and government jobs mean they can only get SO evil before they get their choke chain yanked. as I was telling one guy on the Linux forum who was freaking over Win 8 having secure boot (which they just ripped from ChromeOS BTW) there is NO WAY IN HELL they'll be able to stop other OSes from being installed simply because all those fat software assurance and MSDNs would be flushed down the shitter if the corps can't go back to older Windows. And if older Windows runs? Then Linux runs.

And you sir are a brave man if you are trusting all your data to an SSD, i really hope you got backups. I've found the hot/crazy scale is a little too far on the crazy side for me and my customers ATM, maybe in another 5 years when they get the bugs out. Frankly ATM I honestly don't see much point with win 7 anyway, it prefetches everything I run and has it waiting in RAM so the only time the HDD really comes into play is when I'm doing my multitrack editing or video transcoding and I sure as hell wouldn't want to waste THAT amount of space on an SSD with the prices above $1 a Gb. I'd look into one for my EEE netbook but frankly with the new hibernate it is so fast to start I honestly have it started before i can reach my mouse anyway, and what good would be faster than that? Sadly the machines get faster but my reaction time if anything gets slower, aging sucks.

As for what you've seen on windows? That is a PERFECT example of PEBKAC. the ONLY reason that exists is because of dumbasses. This is an actual conversation i had with a former customer "Me-Don't open that password protected zip file, its a virus! Velma-Oh you worry too much, its from my BFF Kim see? she wouldn't do anything bad!" can you guess what she did? if you guess boned the whole system, you get a cookie! That is why this face comes with the job.

But you will be happy to know that if you don't go around installing "free smilies" and other total dumbshit? Windows 7 is solid as a rock. mine has been running since Oct 09, been through two RAM upgrades, three HDD upgrades, and two GPU upgrades, and has just purred like a kitten. no reactivating or other bullshit, just keeps on humming. But your final answer just shows what I mean, how often is the 99% of the planet that buys PCs ever gonna need to spawn a thread? hell how many of them would even know what a thread is?

I do agree about Apple and mobile in general though, I find it troubling too. Maybe i'm spoiled but I've run BSD and OS/2, I've run win9x and was even tortured by WinME and Vista (Where is my apology and free Windows 7 license Ballmer? You sweaty bastard!) and through it all I HAD CHOICE. i could stay or go, i could send my data to and fro, in the end I was the one in control NOT the corp. what worries me about the cell phones is it looks like they could become the new laptop and if they do? your data ain't yours anymore, its theirs. And the way they can bribe congress for new laws it frankly wouldn't surprise me if we got some "network protection act" that made hacking phones a crime. Hell if they can make copyrights more than two lifetimes long anything is possible. like 'em or not MSFT and the clones made hardware nice and open so you can run what you want, the phones are more and more looking like black boxes with pretty screens and that is truly troubling. BTW did you hear they are talking about killing dumb phones? soon you won't even have a choice, it'll be that or nothing.

I was wondering how long this SSD will last in typical use. Let's take the 128 GB unit; thats 128Gx10000 write cycles.
Some numbers for my system: I've got 4 GB RAM, and at the moment it's using 1.5 GB of swap. Let's say the swap gets overwritten once a day. I hibernate 2x/day. New data: that won't be too much, Time Machine backs up maybe 1 GB in a week.
In total 10GB of writing per day. That's 120,000 days, not bad.

Worse case would be rewriting the entire SSD each day, that still 5000-10,000 days. Still good enough.

I wonder how those early failures happen? (see the Hot/Crazy scale and SSDs)

See these (their usages might match slashdotters more):
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/05/the-hot-crazy-solid-state-drive-scale.html

These rates are probably for "normal users" (as in normal users who buy SSDs ;) ):
http://www.behardware.com/articles/831-7/components-returns-rates.html
http://www.behardware.com/articles/810-6/components-returns-rates.html

Note the common failure modes are not very graceful, they're usually brutal and/or weird:
http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r25491097-Dell-Laptop-and-SSD-Time-warp-issue
http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/showthread.php?83778-Time-warp-drive-vanishing-after-3-days-data-gone-on-reboot...I-need-3-to-5-users-with-this-issue-to-help

http://www.techspot.com/news/44694-intel-confirms-8mb-bug-in-320-series-ssds-fix-available.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X25-M#Past_bugs

In contrast with most (not all of course) of the HDD failures I've seen you still can get a lot of data out.

SSD failure is predictable.

That's bullshit. You call the following predictable?
http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r25491097-Dell-Laptop-and-SSD-Time-warp-issue
http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/showthread.php?83778-Time-warp-drive-vanishing-after-3-days-data-gone-on-reboot...I-need-3-to-5-users-with-this-issue-to-help

http://www.techspot.com/news/44694-intel-confirms-8mb-bug-in-320-series-ssds-fix-available.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X25-M#Past_bugs

I might buy a Samsung SSD. The rest (except for Intel) don't have such a great track record even when compared to hard drive failure rates (and Intel's failures haven't been very confidence inspiring).

http://www.behardware.com/articles/831-7/components-returns-rates.html
http://www.behardware.com/articles/810-6/components-returns-rates.html

For some people the failure is predictable in that they can almost bet the drives will fail within a year! http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/05/the-hot-crazy-solid-state-drive-scale.html

But I don't regard that sort of predictability of failure as acceptable, unless the manufacturer is paying me to use their products and gives me plenty of spares.

Well according to this answer by a developer you CAN use an SSD for readyboost, its just isn't as straight forward and you can't use the whole drive. personally I've been avoiding SSDs until they get the bugs out as the experience from my gamer customers (who spent waaaay more than i would have for top o' the line SSDs) is that Jeff Atwood at coding horror is correct that SSDs should be judged on a hot/crazy scale as while they are crazy fast the fail crazy often.

To me it isn't THAT they fail it is HOW they fail that has me avoiding them. With HDDs I can't remember the last time I had an HDD that failed without plenty of clear warnings something was up. Windows delayed write fails, or SMART errors, temp going nuts, there was ALWAYS a clear warning that there was trouble in HDD town. With both of the gamers there was NO WARNING with the SSDs, they just flipped the switch and....nothing. With the HDDs I was always able to get the data off before they bought the farm, minus a few bad sectors of course, but with the SSDs it was like they didn't exist, it was just...nothing.

so while using it as a cache (as long as the cache is ALWAYS backed up like Readyboost) sounds fine i really can't see recommending an SSD until they get the bugs out. you would have to spend all your time running back ups or RAIDing the drive constantly to remove the risk, and that is just more trouble than its worth. Besides with Superfetch and Readyboost if you have a large amount of RAM (and what geek don't right? hell even my netbook is gonna have 6Gb on it) then everything you use often is already preloaded into RAM so unless you boot daily i doubt you'd see much difference, as nothing yet beats RAM speed.

You also dont have to worry about random failure in about 1.5 years because noone knows what the real-world MTBF is on these SSDs, but noone seems to want to think about that little issue.

Well, some people do.

Required reading to be minimally informed:

• GPL v3 faq
• tivoization
• GPL
• the tivo series 2 upgrade

The problem with SSDs are the failure rates on those are frankly insane, so bad that Atwood at Coding Horror thinks they should be judged on a hot/crazy scale as in how much are you willing to lose and how much money/downtime are you willing to put up with for the speed. He still recommends them but then again this is a guy that recommends spending over $400 on a pair of headphones with another couple of hundred on an amp to drive them.

This of course doesn't even figure in the facts that SSDs are frankly tiny little suckers and that one of any decent size would frankly be several orders of magnitude higher than the price increase on HDDs. Hell in my own case my basic WinXP/7 dual boot is taking up probably close to 200Gb simply because with 3Tb I never have to give a crap. I don't even want to know what an SSD big enough to hold that would cost, not to mention the 500Gb+ in movies, music, games, and audio projects I have on board.

No, frankly the answer is quite simple and something we should have been doing for a long time and would have been if it weren't for traitors in congress giving tax breaks to those that offshore so they have NO penalty for exporting vital industry. what we should do is fire the mines back up in NM and treat it as what it is, vital to our national interest. it should be nationalized (I believe We, The People already own the land) and Americans should be put to work mining that ore. Too many electronics require those metals to have our industry cut off at the knees by the Chinese, and Lord knows there are plenty of Americans that can use the work.

Buying an SSD was the single best upgrade I have ever bought for any computer - $220 for a huge increase in responsiveness and usability

SSD are really wonderful.
But I hope you keep daily backups in a safe place.

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/05/the-hot-crazy-solid-state-drive-scale.html

There, now read past the first line of my post and consider the point i was making about SSD failures spreadage Vs HDD failure spreadage and its effect on RAID strategies.

I agree but there should be an up side to this, in that we'll get some solid data to see if Atwood at coding horror is correct that SSDs need to be judged on a hot/crazy scale due to the insanely high SSD failure rates.

The reason I personally won't recommend SSDs to customers or carry them myself is after having my two "must have teh benchmarkz!" gamer customer buy top o' the line SSDs both of them had the SSD fail without warning which for me is unacceptable. Sure they got them replaced under warranty, but so what? That didn't cover their downtime, the cost of the 1Tb drives they had to pick up to hold them over while they waited on the RMA, or the data they lost between their last backup and the SSD failure. in the end they went dual Raptors in RAID 0 with the 1TB as backup and game storage.

The nice thing about HDDs is in my experience one gets plenty of warning before they go tits up. The drive gets noisy, you get Windows delayed write failures, the drive starts running hot, you get SMART warnings, something. with both of the SSDs it was just...poof. Dead drive. on one I was able to retrieve a little bit of the data, on the other it wouldn't even show up in BIOS.

That is why unless I have a customer where IOPS is all like in TFA or someone that lives on a heavily mobile laptop AND has the time for daily backups or stores all their important data in the cloud to just stay away until they get the kinks worked out. it is still too new and IMHO they haven't really got the tech down yet, hence all the failures. I tell my customers to have a fat HDD with plenty of cache along with giving Windows 7 plenty of RAM (4Gb minimum, 8Gb is better) to really use Superfetch and preload their apps into memory and they'll be happy. Yeah it doesn't boot with SSD speed, but who boots anymore?

Any thread on SSD failures should include a link to Jeff Atwood's blog entry on the topic:

I feel ethically and morally obligated to let you in on a dirty little secret I've discovered in the last two years of full time SSD ownership. Solid state hard drives fail. A lot. And not just any fail. I'm talking about catastrophic, oh-my-God-what-just-happened-to-all-my-data instant gigafail. It's not pretty.

Full post here: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/05/the-hot-crazy-solid-state-drive-scale.html

That isn't reliability, to me. That's durability. Reliability, to me, is if I sit an SSD and a spinning platter drive in a machine (or for testing purposes, a hundred of each) - which one has the longer life with less failures? In this regard, I have not heard it commonly claimed that SSDs are superior, as the article's initial premise starts from.

Instead, it has almost exclusively been claimed that reliability is poor and that the SSD failure rate is huge. As I mentioned, it seems largely anecdotal to me, these claims of "high failure rates". Here's an example of "oh noes, SSD skies are falling".

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/05/the-hot-crazy-solid-state-drive-scale.html
" I feel ethically and morally obligated to let you in on a dirty little secret I've discovered in the last two years of full time SSD ownership. Solid state hard drives fail. A lot. And not just any fail. I'm talking about catastrophic, oh-my-God-what-just-happened-to-all-my-data instant gigafail. It's not pretty. "

So, unlike what the blurb asserts, I would say the common position is not that "SSD is more reliable than spinning disks", but that "SSD has a super high failure rate".

Well considering that the failure rates are bad enough Atwood at Coding Horror says SSDs should be judged on a hot/crazy scale I'd say that is a pretty bad sign. Note that he still buys them even though they keep failing, but this is a guy that spends $400 on a pair of headphones.

My problem with SSDs and why I won't recommend them to anyone but a few edge use cases (those that doing a lot of traveling with their laptop, servers where IOPS is the #1 goal) is because when they DO fail in my experience there is no warning at all and that is simply unacceptable. I have a couple of "Must rule teh benchmarkz!" gamer customers and both went SSD. These guys ain't cheap and bought the baddest SSDs they could find, price be damned. With both guys both drives failed with NO warning, not even SMART. They just turned on their machines one day and poof! Bye bye SSD. One I was able to get a small amount of the data back, the other couldn't even be detected in BIOS. Sure they both had warranties but so what? it isn't like the warranties covered downtime or the HDDs they had to buy to replace it while they waited on the RMA. both ended up selling their SSDs and going with a pair of Raptors in RAID 0.

So until they fix this major flaw I will simply tell my customers to avoid them. With HDDs I don't think I can remember a time I've had a HDD fail without ample warning. Windows delayed write failures, SMART, noise and temp of the drive, in all cases you were given ample time to get your data off the failing drive. Not so with SSD, when it goes it just goes poof! Having that risk hanging like the sword of Damocles over your head just isn't worth the speed IMHO.