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Strange, according to their report last year only 46% of hires were non-white and non-male: http://www.intel.co.uk/content...

Shame you didn't manage to record being told flat out that you were the wrong colour, or you could be rich by now from the proceeds of your discrimination lawsuit.

More cores?

Sorry, I was looking at E7 Xeons, 8-10 cores for the 4-5 year old contemporaries of the E3s. Up to 24 cores for the current E7s.

When did I mention 4-5 year old Xeons?

The E3 series, the most recent versions released in mid 2012. Use the link you provided and select View All E3. Notice the 2011-12 launch dates.

And that is how airplanes occasionally crash. Its usually not one flaw or problem, its multiple problems/flaws occurring at the same time

Right, because they have safety systems that cover the typical cases. Apple lack those, so it's not just the convoluted multiple problems piling up that will take out their products, it's simple common ones as well.

There is quite a difference between corrupting the inode info / timestamp info and corrupting the **contents of a file**, its user data. That is what is unique about ZFS. File data being **read** is at risk due to automatic repairs of **user data**.

ZFS repairs using redundant copies of data which don't exist on single-disk configurations. All ZFS will do in such a situation is tell you there's an error in a file it can't correct and suggest you restore it from backup. If it's a transient memory or IO error causing the checksum to fail, a second attempt at reading it should work.

Yes, server grade CPUs support server grade RAM. And judging from Intel's data sheets the current generation Xeons are slower (clock rate, more cores though) and generate more heat

More cores?

And the 4-5 year old Xeons you mention

When did I mention 4-5 year old Xeons? Current prices here:

i7 Skylake, £258-£290 for 2.4-4GHz.

E3 Skylake, £162-£508 for 2.9-3.7GHz. If you forgo 4GHz the Xeons are actually cheaper.

"In JESD218, SSD endurance for data center applications is specified as the total amount of host data that can be written to an SSD , guaranteeing no greater than a specified error rate (1E - 16) and data retention of no less than three months at 40 C when the SSD is powered off."

If you only write infrequently (use for image editing) and then backup storage - how many years would the SSD maintain values?

If the drive is powered down, I wouldn't bet on it lasting the year. Intel only seem to guarantee up to 3 months without power for their drives: http://www.intel.co.uk/content...

Note also that the retention is said to go downwards as P/E cycles are used up. For me, I think they make great system drives, but I don't use them for anything precious.

Does anyone know whether the failure count for cells picks up along a nice smooth curve or is like running into a cliff? Intel seem to be suggesting in their spec sheets that the 20% over-provisioning on some of their SSDs (I'm assuming for bad-block remapping when failure is detected) can increase the expected write volume of a drive by substantial amounts:

http://www.intel.co.uk/content/www/us/en/solid-state-drives/solid-state-drives-710-series.html

This seems to go against the anecdotal evidence of sudden total SSD failures being attributed to cell wear - something else must be failing in those, most likely the normal expected allotment of mis-manufactured units.

It clearly shows a single gigabit NIC. I'll bet there are models with and without.

What do you want to bet that serious and well-planned out crimes won't include:

Goldman Sachs UK (where to start)
Paypal UK (seizure of users' money without refund)
Microsoft UK (organized monopoly abuse)
Intel UK (organized monopoly abuse)
and anyone else who's a paymaster?

There are other organisations for that, such as the Competition Commission. Though organisations of that size are more likely to be referred to the EU Competition Commission, who have (very widely reported) successful antitrust cases against Microsoft and Intel in the last few years.

SOCA on the other hand is more like the US Drug Enforcement Agency, a largely intelligence-led agency dealing with mainly criminal gangs - particularily "class A drugs, people smuggling and human trafficking, major gun crime, fraud, computer crime and money laundering", usually teaming up with other specialised agencies. For example, if you make a formal report under the anti-money laundering regulations it goes to SOCA, who make initial investigations then often pass it on to a more specific agency. Since they deal with money laundering, I wouldn't be at all surprised if they were round at Goldman Sachs and especially Paypal quite often, albeit investigating customers rather than the company.

What do you want to bet that serious and well-planned out crimes won't include:

Goldman Sachs UK (where to start)
Paypal UK (seizure of users' money without refund)
Microsoft UK (organized monopoly abuse)
Intel UK (organized monopoly abuse)
and anyone else who's a paymaster?

If the marketing folks don't change everything every few years, they start to look idle.

Marketing: The ability to spout nonsense, have management steer the company based on the nonsense, and draw a healthy paycheck for all this.

So you're absolutely right. The marketing people were starting to look idle and unnecessary, so they stepped up the "We need to make a gigantic change for no reason" nonsense until management bit.

In related news, this marketing construct makes it out that if you only buy Itanium 2 servers and Centrino laptops, you only need one person in your IT staff, and that person is idle most of the time. Coincedence? I think not.

It's clear that the marketing people are gunning for the IT people, so I hereby call for a preemptive strike.