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My new laptop at work (ZBook 15 G3) has USB-C. It's everything USB should have been since the beginning.

The very fact that HP has to publish this chart for your laptop and other HP devices shows that it is not "everything USB should have been since the beginning." It's a confusing mishmash of functions potentially provided through the same mechanical interface, with no guarantee that anything is supported except for USB 2.0 signalling.

It's a confusing jumble of inconsistencies and it's potentially dangerous with the plethora of bad cables there, EVEN from previously reputable sellers.
The spec requires a resistor (??) or something mildly fancy in it, instead of just a raw cable.
Look at this.
http://blog.fosketts.net/2016/...
It's a really good idea which needs some cleanup work, right now I'm avoiding it like the plague until it's 'final'

I've never understood the British use of the word 'mains' when talking about household wiring; it seems to imply there was / is 'secondary' or 'auxilliary' wiring.

See, you did understand, all along. There was/is a British thing called a shaver plug which was/is indeed secondary wiring. Most English homes I've been in have had a shaver plug, but I'm told many new homes are being built without them now.

And the same can be said about DropBox. They promised end-to-end encryption, but instead they were "de-duping" files to save storage, which means that entirely contrary to what they told their customers, they actually had direct access to your raw files. Sure, they fixed that (so they say), and said "Sorry, we won't do it again." But how much can you trust them, considering that they blatantly lied to you before?

Deduping should never actually work if the files were store with unique encryption keys. On personal stuff, multiple files that are bit-for-bit identical (such as THIS GUY's Experiment you can see where it might be possible, but perfectly innocent. After all he sent the exact same file with just a different name.

But de-duping encrypted files seems unlikely to have much of a payout.

Microsoft Research spent 2 years experimenting with algorithms to find the “cheapest” in terms of overhead. They select a chunk size for each data set. This is typically between 32 KB and 128 KB, but smaller chunks can be created as well. Microsoft claims that most real-world use cases are about 80 KB. The system processes all the data looking for “fingerprints” of split points and selects the “best” on the fly for each file.

After data is de-duplicated, Microsoft compresses the chunks and stores them in a special “chunk store” within NTFS. This is actually part of the System Volume store in the root of the volume, so dedupe is volume-level. The entire setup is self describing, so a deduplication NTFS volume can be read by another server without any external data.

There is some redundancy in the system as well. Any chunk that is referenced more than x times (100 by default) will be kept in a second location. All data in the filesystem is checksummed and will be proactively repaired. The same is done for the metadata. The deduplication service includes a scrubbing job as well as a file system optimization task to keep everything running smoothly.

Windows 8 deduplication cooperates with other elements of the operating system. The Windows caching layer is dedupe-aware, and this will greatly accelerate overall performance. Windows 8 also includes a new “express” library that makes compression “20 times faster”. Compressed files are not re-compressed based on filetype, so zip files, Office 2007+ files, etc will be skipped and just deduped.

New writes are not deduped – this is a post-process technology. The data deduplication service can be scheduled or can run in “background mode” and wait for idle time. Therefore, I/O impact is between “none and 2x” depending on type. Opening a file is less than 3% greater I/O and can be faster if it’s cached. Copying a large file can make some difference (e.g. 10 GB VHD) since it adds additional disk seeks, but multiple concurrent copies that share data can actually improve performance.

The most interesting thing is that Microsoft Research says it doesn't affect performance almost at all. So when are we going to see Linux equivalents? Because Linux is getting behind on the new technologies.

I don't know about the first model(s), but the latest MacBook Air uses SSD modules, it's not built into the motherboard.

ah this was what I was looking for: Drobo, XP Users: Beware of 4K “Advanced Format” Drives!

Article states that not only will XP have problems but so will many other devices like media centers, USB drives, game consoles, and anything else that uses a hard drive. USB drives will be the worse though since 4k drives formatted for XP won't work with Windows 7 and vise versa. Honestly I think this is too soon, put it off another 10 years, by then we'll have OS's that would have supported 4k for 10+ yrs already and all devices should be compatible by then.

It's called ActiveSync, call your mail admin, it may not be enabled.

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I don't use an iphone myself (AT&T sucks!) but I did check it out when I got my blackberry.