Thing is; it's valid. There are cars that have been built in my lifetime (I'm 41) for which you have to buy new wheels if you want to put tires on them because the tire sizes, materials and rim requirements have changed so much. Yeah, I happen to also hang around with a lot of car guys because a lot of them are fun... it's interesting how much of the parts we take for granted to repair our cars now have to be worked around or even fabricated for cars built as late as the mid 80's.
There's almost zero indication of the size of the rock in question. The background is clouds and there's no absolute way to tell how close that rock is to the camera lens. Could be 20 feet, could be 2 inches.
I'll side with you a bit. I do technical remote support for a couple of small companies near me. While I have actually paid for the paid version of TeamViewer for supporting their PC's, I do use SSH -L when I'm doing server-side work more often than not. I don't like putting remote access solutions onto my servers, and having an SSH connection available is really handy... though not on port 22!:)
Honestly, your solution is just fine for the technical... and if you're a little lazy there's nothing stopping you from creating a set of shell scripts for frequent connections. I do this all the time.
Of course, the advantage of a solution like LogMeIn or TeamViewer is simply that you don't need static IP's for it... or even for RDP to be turned on (it isn't at most of the companies I do business with except for servers).
Yeah, I've been running TeamViewer for a while. I have my two home servers (one Linux, one Windows) and my two personal laptops (Linux and a Mac) connected to my account. While I'm at work it's sometimes really handy to dial into any one of these and do some stuff (use Windows at work)... particularly when doing online banking or stuff like that.
The only gotcha I've found is versioning; quite often with the Linux client when they update the Windows client the backward compatibility with the Linux client isn't terribly good. It usually works fine for one major version back on Mac, but when they update the major version number you probably need to upgrade your Linux clients first. It's a minor maintenance issue in my opinion, and I just add it to my workflow when I do system updates on the Linux boxes to check for a new version of TeamViewer.
Even free, it's really handy for helping out with technical problems for friends and relatives, too. Just two weeks ago my son had a problem with his laptop and I was able to connect in while I was out of town in Denver and fix his problems. Even if they don't have TeamViewer installed there's a standalone executable version that you can talk someone through downloading through an emailed link or even on the phone. Now obviously if they are having network or Internet problems that's not going to work... but neither is any other solution short of an on-site visit.
As many have already pointed out, it's irrelevant. Different tools do different jobs better, and that's just the way it's always been. I find managing my email in a GUI a hell of a lot easier than a command line for example, but when it comes to managing the Brocade switches at work (I'm at least partly a storage admin) it's a hell of a lot quicker for me to SSH in and type a few commands. Of course, it doesn't help that the Brocade GUI is probably one of the worst out there but my point still stands. Managing the SANs I manage is actually easier with a well designed GUI (primarily Compellent at the moment) because I don't have to use my own brain-cycles to visualize it; I can see it on the screen. But yes, if I'm doing bulk stuff then dropping to a command line is key. Similarly, I also manage vSphere... for day to day management the GUI is pretty good but when doing a lot of repetitive stuff I use PowerCLI which is VMware's PowerShell extensions... they work fantastically well and make me look like a hero.
Now having said that I do see the point of the article a little. My personal feeling is that as a parent it falls to me to make sure my son is familiar with the command line and sees the value in it as well as the GUI. I decided to put my money where my mouth is and bought him a Fuze for Christmas. I was concerned he would hate it because he is used to having a Windows-based laptop and is well familiar with the GUI tools there. But he has really taken to it, learning BASIC programming and fiddling with the command line with a few things I've taught him. In fact this morning I was having a hard time getting out the door and heading to work because he wanted to show off the program he'd written to flash a set of LED's in the breadboard in sequence. I was incredibly proud of him for it and wanted to show my enthusiasm. I was late for work and didn't care.
Honestly the way I see it; my 13 year old boy if he continues on this path will be programming and working with the hardware that goes into satellites, space probes and the like where a BSOD cannot be tolerated. He will have work for life because there will be even more need for the microcontroller programmers in the electronic, wearable and increasingly digital world he will grow up in. Meanwhile his peers will compete to administer Windows computers and maybe write apps for the iPhone 26... and may even struggle to make ends meet as they convince themselves that their app will make them a billionaire. So long as my son continues what he's doing and learning even as I write this, he'll find himself comfortable and in-demand until he retires. Just like his old man (hopefully!)
Despite my working as an administrator of systems, I have a background in programming. The command line taught me how to pipe, how to use variables and so on. I write a surprising number of scripts in a number of languages because they make my job easier and make me look like a hero. I find myself occasionally competing with new kids coming into the workplace with their "Mad GUI Skillz" and their macros. If they go toe-to-toe with me they can rarely compete. The ones who know command line stuff and scripting we tend to keep... the ones who don't, tend not to last.
Glance on my Pebble Smartwatch does this. I think a smartwatch is a much better place for a true "panic button". I mean, in a truly difficult situation you're going to have problems entering a passcode or pattern if you have your device locked... which you should, by the way.
In Glance there's a function that allows me to set a button long press to send an emergency text to the contact of my choice including my longitude and latitude (obviously only as precise as the smartphone itself can manage). Quite a nice feature in my opinion. And it's a lot easier to do a long press on a button on your wrist than fish your phone out of your pocket or purse, enter a passcode, find and launch an app and hit a button on the screen.
A physical panic button is the best solution. If you're in dire need (heart attack, accident etc) then you may not be in a position to use the app on the phone. The old "really dumb phones" like the Firefly had it right.
Even as an Asimov fan, I liked the movie. It stayed true particularly to later Asimov books that delved into the fundamental flaws of the "Three Laws" and how interpretation would win out with a sufficiently intelligent machine.
No, it wasn't I, Robot... but it was a decently good science fiction romp that I rather enjoyed. I could've done without the ridiculous product placement, but it also didn't really detract from the story to me... just gave me a few eye-rolling moments.
I'm not quite sure where you're getting the impression that you need to take off and land from an airport in the USA. While I've never done it I have seen a helicopter land and take off from the parking lot of a business here in St. Louis on more than one occasion. With an appropriately equipped plane you can also take off and land in fields without anyone batting an eyelid... so long as you have the permission of the land owner or own the land yourself.
Can you cite a FAR that shows that you can't fly from anywhere but an airport?
I might be asking a silly question here (from the UK), but don't they have trains where you live?
Not a silly question at all except if you've been to the US! Amtrak is the only real option here and the passenger rail plays second fiddle to the cargo rail 100% of the time. If you have a 3 mile long cargo train in front of you, you'll be going about the same speed. It also means the rails themselves are beaten to hell and back by the weight of the cargo trains.
I have taken the Amtrak a few times and it's pretty bad. I grew up in the UK and I honestly never thought I'd miss British Rail quite that much...
Honestly, good science rarely makes good entertainment. Have you watched the NASA channel? While I did watch it back when I had cable, I found it tedious and boring... and that's actually pretty much what space is really like. Tedious, boring and procedural. And that's really how you want it to be; if you have "exciting" stuff happen in space then you're quite likely going to die.
I enjoyed the hell out of Gravity. While it was definitely Hollywood, it was less Hollywood than most movies these days. And the story while linear and mostly predictable pretty much had me on the edge of my seat all the way through. There were certainly a few moments where I found the science to be abominable; hell in the first 5 minutes I could pick out at least 5 major oversights and flaws... and that was even before the debris cloud. But the story was good enough and the acting was good enough that I overlooked it and just enjoyed the hell out of the movie.
And while much of it was hinted to be in "our universe", much of it was really "alternate universe" in that the space shuttle program continued and had new ones built... the Tiangong is more than just two or three Soyuz and Salyut rip-offs strung together in LEO... new advances in the MMU-style program have produced a jetpack that's more capable and has a LOT more fuel than the MMU etc. There was little that was really glaringly bad in my opinion and I could point at them as niggles rather than out and out hanging offences!
Let me put it this way; if you enjoyed The Right Stuff (which I did and still do, immensely) then you'll probably enjoy Gravity. They are both about as scientifically and historically accurate as each other!
Because they were rotating (look at the stars in the background). While I'm not going to claim it was scientifically accurate at all, once I realized that the scene made an acceptable amount of sense.
I admit it bugged me at first for a few seconds wondering "WTF?" before I noticed the background. It's not explicit... and not spelled out. This movie really does require a bit more analytical a viewpoint than most. And I believe at least two viewings! I plan to take my girlfriend to see it this week after she gets back from her business trip:)
I have a NUC (the i7 version) running on my TV at home. I run Windows 8 on it with the Hulu Plus, NetFlix and XBox Video clients... takes care of all of my entertainment needs. Works like a champ actually. I use a combo mini-keyboard/airmouse that's the same size as an iPhone 3G and also have an IR remote attached to it. A 128GB mSATA disk and the damned thing boots in about 15 seconds from cold to Metro. Pretty damned impressive little box and has worked solidly since I got it.
The Minnowboard just really doesn't interest me at all. And this from someone who spent the better part of a year and a half hacking on the original BeagleBoard (which I just recently lost in a move)
I hope that they someday find a solution for batteries in Nordic climes, so it's a viable car here as well. After all, we already use the grid to keep our cars warm and start-able in the winter.
Got to wonder; if they put solar panels on the roof and attached them to battery warmers, would that work for at least daytime parking? I know it's just the sitting time that's a problem. Even on a cloudy day, solar panels can still produce SOME power... maybe not quite as much but it might be just enough to stop the cold battery problem. Once the car's moving, I know the batteries generate enough heat in themselves that keeping them warm while running isn't a problem.
Night-time parking... well I expect that'd be much the same as the engine warmers you use now.
Yeah, this was a bad idea. Unfortunately choosing to make such a public statement on this will basically give the highly vocal Conservatives some more ammunition to use against him, basically in their eyes invalidating the stuff she leaked. While we all know that it's got absolutely nothing to do with anything, that's never stopped the highly vocal Conservative minority from making a big deal of this stuff.
The same people who were screaming for him to be hanged will now feel smug in their self-righteousness and will start finding a way to correlate this gender change with an ability and desire to fabricate the leaked information. This will then invalidate this entire process in the eyes of these people... and believe me they make a lot of noise.
But their failure modes are awful. I've had SSD's fail and they go from blinding performance to "Operating System Not Found" in precisely zero seconds. Well... zero seconds plus the time taken to realize there's a problem, hard-reboot the system and POST. Hard drives still tend to corrupt first and fail later. You usually have decent warning of a failure.
Though I agree; SSD's get a bad rap for failures when they really don't fail often. Heat will kill them rapidly though!
I've actually had a first-generation hybrid drive (Momentus XT 500GB) where the SSD failed. It's not a critical failure, but it does cause a lot of oddities. I had issues with reads sometimes taking longer off the local disk than it did off a network share... in Durban. And yes, we have servers in Durban:) Anyway, yes the failure makes the operating system almost unusable (Windows) but I was easily able to recover to a new 2nd gen 750GB Momentus XT which has been rock solid reliable ever since.
Note that the SSD is a read cache only, though I believe some of the more recent ones actually have write caching as well... I'd be a bit dubious of them myself.
I'm not completely sold on Seagate's position here though. I think that they're right that an SSD cache in front of a spinning disk is a great compromise. Yes, my laptop is actually quite acceptable speed though nowhere close to my Intel NUC with a 128GB mSATA SSD in boot speed... but actually running I only occasionally have times where I'm sitting waiting for my system to catch up with me. As a general rule I'm highly productive... and for those games I play on my laptop with Steam the launch and disk access performance is good enough.
I do definitely notice a bit of a "performance ramp" in that when I first got the drive installed and got my applications installed there was a definite timeframe when things were a little slower and I noticed speed up... but these days since I have pretty set work routines I don't have any noticeable difference in performance from day to day. As a general rule, it's the very occasional app launch that seems to take forever that really stands out. Again, though I have to say that in general my laptop launches frequently used apps noticeably faster than my colleague's laptops. I'm currently the only person in the company testing hybrid disks.
Yes, a straight SSD is a lot faster, but you're right in that the failure modes of an SSD are pretty binary... one moment they work and the next moment it's "Operating system not found" on boot. Believe me... I've been down that road and as much as I love the speed of SSD I won't commit my critical data to it. Of course, I also live by the philosophy that data doesn't exist until there are at least two copies (one on my drive, the other on my backup). And all my actual data is stored on a GIT-based Dropbox-alike so I have a local cache and a copy backed up and versioned to my server!
And Psion had the Organizer II in 1984... and the Series III in 1991. While not tablets in the modern sense, they were no less tablets than the Newton.
I was going to say that there were a few memorable RTD-helmed episodes... but looking back I think they were all written by other writers (even not Moff). "Dalek" was a fantastic episode in my opinion. OK... not Tennant, and not RTD-written either but an example of some of the quality you can find in episodes outside of the normally recognized Moff eps. The Impossible Planet and The Satan Pit were also pretty damned good. Also enjoyed Family of Blood and Human Nature.
In fairness to RTD, I don't think "Tooth and Claw" was that bad, but if that's about the only one during his run that I give the time of day that's not all that promising.
I do this. With T-Mobile. And it works like a champ. Granted, I'm usually in a place that has decent service (I travel a lot on business, but usually to the larger cities) but even when I don't it's usually when I don't care. Besides, using Google Voice for my service means if I can find a WiFi hotspot (easier than you might think) I can fire up Talkatone and make calls with VoIP all day long. Hell, I've worked an entire day from a McDonalds in the butt end of Kansas with a laptop and my phone on VoIP on conference calls.
Now, having said that there are downsides; no MMS on GVoice for example... but if you're willing to put up with those minor downsides or just have no need of those services then quite frankly the entire service works better. Visual voicemail, transcribed (sometimes amusingly) voicemails... and again, no ties to any particular carrier.
Oh... the one time I ended up without good service for T-Mobile when I really needed it, I stopped by a Radio Shack (too small a town for a Best Buy apparently) and got a pay-as-you-go SIM which worked fantastically well even with tethering. I am not under contract to T-Mob... but it works well for me in general and since I've basically made myself carrier-independent, I can use anything I like. Oh and yeah; this is on a Nexus (the Samsung Galaxy Nexus to be precise... nothing has compelled me to upgrade to the 4)
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Thing is; it's valid. There are cars that have been built in my lifetime (I'm 41) for which you have to buy new wheels if you want to put tires on them because the tire sizes, materials and rim requirements have changed so much. Yeah, I happen to also hang around with a lot of car guys because a lot of them are fun... it's interesting how much of the parts we take for granted to repair our cars now have to be worked around or even fabricated for cars built as late as the mid 80's.
Accelerating?
There's almost zero indication of the size of the rock in question. The background is clouds and there's no absolute way to tell how close that rock is to the camera lens. Could be 20 feet, could be 2 inches.
I'll side with you a bit. I do technical remote support for a couple of small companies near me. While I have actually paid for the paid version of TeamViewer for supporting their PC's, I do use SSH -L when I'm doing server-side work more often than not. I don't like putting remote access solutions onto my servers, and having an SSH connection available is really handy... though not on port 22! :)
Honestly, your solution is just fine for the technical... and if you're a little lazy there's nothing stopping you from creating a set of shell scripts for frequent connections. I do this all the time.
Of course, the advantage of a solution like LogMeIn or TeamViewer is simply that you don't need static IP's for it... or even for RDP to be turned on (it isn't at most of the companies I do business with except for servers).
Welcome to the future :)
Yeah, I've been running TeamViewer for a while. I have my two home servers (one Linux, one Windows) and my two personal laptops (Linux and a Mac) connected to my account. While I'm at work it's sometimes really handy to dial into any one of these and do some stuff (use Windows at work)... particularly when doing online banking or stuff like that.
The only gotcha I've found is versioning; quite often with the Linux client when they update the Windows client the backward compatibility with the Linux client isn't terribly good. It usually works fine for one major version back on Mac, but when they update the major version number you probably need to upgrade your Linux clients first. It's a minor maintenance issue in my opinion, and I just add it to my workflow when I do system updates on the Linux boxes to check for a new version of TeamViewer.
Even free, it's really handy for helping out with technical problems for friends and relatives, too. Just two weeks ago my son had a problem with his laptop and I was able to connect in while I was out of town in Denver and fix his problems. Even if they don't have TeamViewer installed there's a standalone executable version that you can talk someone through downloading through an emailed link or even on the phone. Now obviously if they are having network or Internet problems that's not going to work... but neither is any other solution short of an on-site visit.
As many have already pointed out, it's irrelevant. Different tools do different jobs better, and that's just the way it's always been. I find managing my email in a GUI a hell of a lot easier than a command line for example, but when it comes to managing the Brocade switches at work (I'm at least partly a storage admin) it's a hell of a lot quicker for me to SSH in and type a few commands. Of course, it doesn't help that the Brocade GUI is probably one of the worst out there but my point still stands. Managing the SANs I manage is actually easier with a well designed GUI (primarily Compellent at the moment) because I don't have to use my own brain-cycles to visualize it; I can see it on the screen. But yes, if I'm doing bulk stuff then dropping to a command line is key. Similarly, I also manage vSphere... for day to day management the GUI is pretty good but when doing a lot of repetitive stuff I use PowerCLI which is VMware's PowerShell extensions... they work fantastically well and make me look like a hero.
Now having said that I do see the point of the article a little. My personal feeling is that as a parent it falls to me to make sure my son is familiar with the command line and sees the value in it as well as the GUI. I decided to put my money where my mouth is and bought him a Fuze for Christmas. I was concerned he would hate it because he is used to having a Windows-based laptop and is well familiar with the GUI tools there. But he has really taken to it, learning BASIC programming and fiddling with the command line with a few things I've taught him. In fact this morning I was having a hard time getting out the door and heading to work because he wanted to show off the program he'd written to flash a set of LED's in the breadboard in sequence. I was incredibly proud of him for it and wanted to show my enthusiasm. I was late for work and didn't care.
Honestly the way I see it; my 13 year old boy if he continues on this path will be programming and working with the hardware that goes into satellites, space probes and the like where a BSOD cannot be tolerated. He will have work for life because there will be even more need for the microcontroller programmers in the electronic, wearable and increasingly digital world he will grow up in. Meanwhile his peers will compete to administer Windows computers and maybe write apps for the iPhone 26... and may even struggle to make ends meet as they convince themselves that their app will make them a billionaire. So long as my son continues what he's doing and learning even as I write this, he'll find himself comfortable and in-demand until he retires. Just like his old man (hopefully!)
Despite my working as an administrator of systems, I have a background in programming. The command line taught me how to pipe, how to use variables and so on. I write a surprising number of scripts in a number of languages because they make my job easier and make me look like a hero. I find myself occasionally competing with new kids coming into the workplace with their "Mad GUI Skillz" and their macros. If they go toe-to-toe with me they can rarely compete. The ones who know command line stuff and scripting we tend to keep... the ones who don't, tend not to last.
Glance on my Pebble Smartwatch does this. I think a smartwatch is a much better place for a true "panic button". I mean, in a truly difficult situation you're going to have problems entering a passcode or pattern if you have your device locked... which you should, by the way.
In Glance there's a function that allows me to set a button long press to send an emergency text to the contact of my choice including my longitude and latitude (obviously only as precise as the smartphone itself can manage). Quite a nice feature in my opinion. And it's a lot easier to do a long press on a button on your wrist than fish your phone out of your pocket or purse, enter a passcode, find and launch an app and hit a button on the screen.
A physical panic button is the best solution. If you're in dire need (heart attack, accident etc) then you may not be in a position to use the app on the phone. The old "really dumb phones" like the Firefly had it right.
I don't mind soldered-in RAM so much... but only 4GB of it? Ouch.
Even as an Asimov fan, I liked the movie. It stayed true particularly to later Asimov books that delved into the fundamental flaws of the "Three Laws" and how interpretation would win out with a sufficiently intelligent machine.
No, it wasn't I, Robot... but it was a decently good science fiction romp that I rather enjoyed. I could've done without the ridiculous product placement, but it also didn't really detract from the story to me... just gave me a few eye-rolling moments.
So what you're saying is that bread is fear? or circuses are fear, and bread is consumption? Or that nothing is something, which has changed?
Circuses have CLOWNS, man!!! Of course they're fear!
I'm not quite sure where you're getting the impression that you need to take off and land from an airport in the USA. While I've never done it I have seen a helicopter land and take off from the parking lot of a business here in St. Louis on more than one occasion. With an appropriately equipped plane you can also take off and land in fields without anyone batting an eyelid... so long as you have the permission of the land owner or own the land yourself.
Can you cite a FAR that shows that you can't fly from anywhere but an airport?
Which part of a car is the "break"?
My experience says that if it's an Jaguar, pretty much all of it.
He didn't have a choice. If he didn't then Microsoft would've become irrelevant in no time flat.
I might be asking a silly question here (from the UK), but don't they have trains where you live?
Not a silly question at all except if you've been to the US! Amtrak is the only real option here and the passenger rail plays second fiddle to the cargo rail 100% of the time. If you have a 3 mile long cargo train in front of you, you'll be going about the same speed. It also means the rails themselves are beaten to hell and back by the weight of the cargo trains.
I have taken the Amtrak a few times and it's pretty bad. I grew up in the UK and I honestly never thought I'd miss British Rail quite that much...
Honestly, good science rarely makes good entertainment. Have you watched the NASA channel? While I did watch it back when I had cable, I found it tedious and boring... and that's actually pretty much what space is really like. Tedious, boring and procedural. And that's really how you want it to be; if you have "exciting" stuff happen in space then you're quite likely going to die.
I enjoyed the hell out of Gravity. While it was definitely Hollywood, it was less Hollywood than most movies these days. And the story while linear and mostly predictable pretty much had me on the edge of my seat all the way through. There were certainly a few moments where I found the science to be abominable; hell in the first 5 minutes I could pick out at least 5 major oversights and flaws... and that was even before the debris cloud. But the story was good enough and the acting was good enough that I overlooked it and just enjoyed the hell out of the movie.
And while much of it was hinted to be in "our universe", much of it was really "alternate universe" in that the space shuttle program continued and had new ones built... the Tiangong is more than just two or three Soyuz and Salyut rip-offs strung together in LEO... new advances in the MMU-style program have produced a jetpack that's more capable and has a LOT more fuel than the MMU etc. There was little that was really glaringly bad in my opinion and I could point at them as niggles rather than out and out hanging offences!
Let me put it this way; if you enjoyed The Right Stuff (which I did and still do, immensely) then you'll probably enjoy Gravity. They are both about as scientifically and historically accurate as each other!
Because they were rotating (look at the stars in the background). While I'm not going to claim it was scientifically accurate at all, once I realized that the scene made an acceptable amount of sense.
I admit it bugged me at first for a few seconds wondering "WTF?" before I noticed the background. It's not explicit... and not spelled out. This movie really does require a bit more analytical a viewpoint than most. And I believe at least two viewings! I plan to take my girlfriend to see it this week after she gets back from her business trip :)
This is exactly how I felt when watching that abhorrent Will Smith movie "After Earth". So many stupid choices that didn't need to be made....
... like, for example; the movie itself.
I have a NUC (the i7 version) running on my TV at home. I run Windows 8 on it with the Hulu Plus, NetFlix and XBox Video clients... takes care of all of my entertainment needs. Works like a champ actually. I use a combo mini-keyboard/airmouse that's the same size as an iPhone 3G and also have an IR remote attached to it. A 128GB mSATA disk and the damned thing boots in about 15 seconds from cold to Metro. Pretty damned impressive little box and has worked solidly since I got it.
The Minnowboard just really doesn't interest me at all. And this from someone who spent the better part of a year and a half hacking on the original BeagleBoard (which I just recently lost in a move)
I hope that they someday find a solution for batteries in Nordic climes, so it's a viable car here as well. After all, we already use the grid to keep our cars warm and start-able in the winter.
Got to wonder; if they put solar panels on the roof and attached them to battery warmers, would that work for at least daytime parking? I know it's just the sitting time that's a problem. Even on a cloudy day, solar panels can still produce SOME power... maybe not quite as much but it might be just enough to stop the cold battery problem. Once the car's moving, I know the batteries generate enough heat in themselves that keeping them warm while running isn't a problem.
Night-time parking... well I expect that'd be much the same as the engine warmers you use now.
Yeah, this was a bad idea. Unfortunately choosing to make such a public statement on this will basically give the highly vocal Conservatives some more ammunition to use against him, basically in their eyes invalidating the stuff she leaked. While we all know that it's got absolutely nothing to do with anything, that's never stopped the highly vocal Conservative minority from making a big deal of this stuff.
The same people who were screaming for him to be hanged will now feel smug in their self-righteousness and will start finding a way to correlate this gender change with an ability and desire to fabricate the leaked information. This will then invalidate this entire process in the eyes of these people... and believe me they make a lot of noise.
But their failure modes are awful. I've had SSD's fail and they go from blinding performance to "Operating System Not Found" in precisely zero seconds. Well... zero seconds plus the time taken to realize there's a problem, hard-reboot the system and POST. Hard drives still tend to corrupt first and fail later. You usually have decent warning of a failure.
Though I agree; SSD's get a bad rap for failures when they really don't fail often. Heat will kill them rapidly though!
I've actually had a first-generation hybrid drive (Momentus XT 500GB) where the SSD failed. It's not a critical failure, but it does cause a lot of oddities. I had issues with reads sometimes taking longer off the local disk than it did off a network share... in Durban. And yes, we have servers in Durban :) Anyway, yes the failure makes the operating system almost unusable (Windows) but I was easily able to recover to a new 2nd gen 750GB Momentus XT which has been rock solid reliable ever since.
Note that the SSD is a read cache only, though I believe some of the more recent ones actually have write caching as well... I'd be a bit dubious of them myself.
I'm not completely sold on Seagate's position here though. I think that they're right that an SSD cache in front of a spinning disk is a great compromise. Yes, my laptop is actually quite acceptable speed though nowhere close to my Intel NUC with a 128GB mSATA SSD in boot speed... but actually running I only occasionally have times where I'm sitting waiting for my system to catch up with me. As a general rule I'm highly productive... and for those games I play on my laptop with Steam the launch and disk access performance is good enough.
I do definitely notice a bit of a "performance ramp" in that when I first got the drive installed and got my applications installed there was a definite timeframe when things were a little slower and I noticed speed up... but these days since I have pretty set work routines I don't have any noticeable difference in performance from day to day. As a general rule, it's the very occasional app launch that seems to take forever that really stands out. Again, though I have to say that in general my laptop launches frequently used apps noticeably faster than my colleague's laptops. I'm currently the only person in the company testing hybrid disks.
Yes, a straight SSD is a lot faster, but you're right in that the failure modes of an SSD are pretty binary... one moment they work and the next moment it's "Operating system not found" on boot. Believe me... I've been down that road and as much as I love the speed of SSD I won't commit my critical data to it. Of course, I also live by the philosophy that data doesn't exist until there are at least two copies (one on my drive, the other on my backup). And all my actual data is stored on a GIT-based Dropbox-alike so I have a local cache and a copy backed up and versioned to my server!
Apple launched the Newton MessagePad in 1993.
And Psion had the Organizer II in 1984... and the Series III in 1991. While not tablets in the modern sense, they were no less tablets than the Newton.
I was going to say that there were a few memorable RTD-helmed episodes... but looking back I think they were all written by other writers (even not Moff). "Dalek" was a fantastic episode in my opinion. OK... not Tennant, and not RTD-written either but an example of some of the quality you can find in episodes outside of the normally recognized Moff eps. The Impossible Planet and The Satan Pit were also pretty damned good. Also enjoyed Family of Blood and Human Nature.
In fairness to RTD, I don't think "Tooth and Claw" was that bad, but if that's about the only one during his run that I give the time of day that's not all that promising.
I do this. With T-Mobile. And it works like a champ. Granted, I'm usually in a place that has decent service (I travel a lot on business, but usually to the larger cities) but even when I don't it's usually when I don't care. Besides, using Google Voice for my service means if I can find a WiFi hotspot (easier than you might think) I can fire up Talkatone and make calls with VoIP all day long. Hell, I've worked an entire day from a McDonalds in the butt end of Kansas with a laptop and my phone on VoIP on conference calls.
Now, having said that there are downsides; no MMS on GVoice for example... but if you're willing to put up with those minor downsides or just have no need of those services then quite frankly the entire service works better. Visual voicemail, transcribed (sometimes amusingly) voicemails... and again, no ties to any particular carrier.
Oh... the one time I ended up without good service for T-Mobile when I really needed it, I stopped by a Radio Shack (too small a town for a Best Buy apparently) and got a pay-as-you-go SIM which worked fantastically well even with tethering. I am not under contract to T-Mob... but it works well for me in general and since I've basically made myself carrier-independent, I can use anything I like. Oh and yeah; this is on a Nexus (the Samsung Galaxy Nexus to be precise... nothing has compelled me to upgrade to the 4)