I've never seen a consumer hard drive last even 3 years
Maybe you're doing something wrong in that case, because all but one of the five consumer drives in my Windows PC are over three years old and it's still working about as well as a Windows PC ever does.
And personally I've never bought a drive which failed in less than three years (for that matter I've only ever bought one drive which failed before I swapped it out because it had become too small).
Essentially: I expect my next PC to have an SSD for important program files and data, and HDD(s) for big data files which don't need fast random access (e.g. video files). Or I'll offload them to an OpenSolaris server with a bunch of HDDs in a RAIDZ.
The idea that cheaper SSDs will kill HDD is silly when most peoples' storage needs expand to meet whatever they can afford to buy. Certainly they are likely to kill HDDs in simple home and office systems, but for everything else HDDs will continue to be vastly cheaper for at least the next decade or so.
When the latest game I installed on my PC wanted 20GB of disk space, a $100 200GB SSD won't last long.
The ambulance will only take you to the hospital. If the trip was deemed unnecessary and avoidable (or under false pretences), then you'll receive a sizeable invoice in the mail.
Since when? I lived in the UK for years and never ever heard of a case where someone was billed for using a 'free' ambulance for spurious reasons.
Just because you don't become forever crushed by unrecoverable debt doesn't mean it's a free-for-all wanton orgy of people abusing the system.
So why do the actual paramedics who operate the actual ambulances have so many stories of people abusing the system in that way and putting lives at risk by diverting them from important work?
Do the ambulances in England have an option to refuse to come in an acute, emergency situation? involving major fractures? dislocations?
It's called rationing, which is what happens when you have 'free' socialist healthcare and don't charge people who call for an ambulance because they're drunk and don't want to walk home.
And yet, the 'rationed' socialist healthcare here in Britain is still a metric fuckton better than what you get in the US
How strange. When I was living in the UK there always seemed to be some kid on TV looking for money to pay for them to fly to America to get treatment which they couldn't get under the rationed socialist NHS.
If its not a life critical, time sensitive emergency, don't call 9-1-1, or 9-9-9 or whatever the emergency number might be!
Sadly, you're assuming at least a semblance of rationality in a country where people will call 9-9-9 for an ambulance because they're too lazy to walk across the road to the hospital, or because they're drunk and want a ride home (read some of the British paramedics' blogs for even better stories).
That's what happens when you promise everyone 'free' healthcare... if it's free, why would you bother to walk or pay for a taxi?
I remember a few years ago that an update to the compulsory antivirus software on some of our PCs at work went ahead and deleted some important Windows system files if you had it configured to auto-scan the disk; mine wasn't so I was able to disable it before losing the files, but anyone who let it run overnight came into work to find a dead PC waiting for them.
I actually remember nearly ten years ago sitting about fifty feet away from Bill Gates while he was holding up his wonderful new tablet PC and telling us that it was going to be the future of computing; I wondered what kind of crack he was smoking at the time (well, we were in LA after all), and I still wonder today.
I can certainly see cases where a tablet would be far more useful than a laptop or netbook, but for general computing it's a non-starter.
And I would add that while I was half-joking in my original response, this is actually a serious issue. My old gaming PC is seriously outdated now and I have thought about getting a replacement... but then I think, well, if I buy it now with Windows 7, then Windows 8 will probably be out sometime next year, so why bother when I could wait for that instead? But then I'd have to wait for Windows 8 SP1 before it would be worth using, and by that point I wouldn't have to wait long for Windows 9... so why bother? But then...
Consequently Microsoft's biannual Windows tax plans are one of the main issues preventing me from buying a new Windows PC.
Your "why buy x when you can buy x + 1" argument is a strawman, because that argument assumes that our theoretical user is looking to buy anyway.
Maybe you could try reading the actual thread, which was about (as you might understand if you even looked at the title of this message) sensible users waiting for SP2 to fix SP1 bugs before buying a new version of Windows. If Windows 8 is released to bring in the biannual Windows tax before Windows 7 SP2, then why would such a user buy Windows 7 instead of Windows 8, unless Windows 8 sucks ass?
Yes, a bit like how when Windows 7 was released, MS dropped support for Windows Vista, or how when 2008 R2 was released, they dropped support for 2008?
Why would anyone buy Vista now that Windows 7 is out? And why would anyone buy Windows 7 after Windows 8 is out? Assuming it's actually an improvement and not Vista ME.
You don't have to be a troll to feel that being pushed into paying to upgrade Windows every two years is a seriously retrograde step after XP's long lifespan. Fortunately I only use Windows for games and video editing these days so all my other PCs run free operating systems without the biannual Microsoft tax.
The problem is that with Microsoft's new biannual upgrade tax, Windows 8 will be released instead of Windows 7 SP2. So if you intend to always wait for SP2 you'll never be able to use Windows again.
Ah, OK, I guess that's not such a bad thing after all.
Driver error, much like the Audi "unexplained acceleration" problem.
The problem with your theory is that it doesn't fit the facts in this case; as far as I'm aware there's no evidence that the drivers were pressing the gas pedal instead of the brake, and plenty of evidence that the cars were accelerating without the gas pedal being pressed.
As for the clutch, how long do you think it will be before car companies decide to remove the direct link from the clutch pedal to the clutch and replace it with electronic control to improve reliability and shifting?
My only point, is that people love to bash AMD, when you could argue that a significant portion of Intel's key features were either developed in parallel with AMD (Virtualization technologies for example) or were developed by AMD first (x64, on-die memory controller, elimination of north bridge, etc, etc)...
On-die memory controller like the Intel 4004, you mean? And I don't believe the 4004 had a north bridge equivalent, since it could talk to memory directly.
AMD certainly deserve kudos for developing x86-64, but claiming that an on-die memory controller was some huge innovation when microprocessors have had on-die memory controllers since the stone age of computing is just silly. If there was a huge advance it was separating the memory from the CPU by attaching it to the north bridge so you could use any compatible CPU with any type of RAM that the north bridge supported... the reason we went back in the other direction was because latency became more important than compatibility.
People buying those boards and CPUs might not even notice and will be s.o.l. after the very next generation.
How many computer buyers ever actually upgrade their CPU? 1%?
AMD's platform is the one with the sane upgrade path. And it's cheaper.
And it would cripple a 6-core or 8-core CPU with limited memory bandwidth on a motherboard originally designed for older CPUs with 2 or 4 cores. It also means that new AMD CPUs have to support both DDR2 and DDR3, which apparently limits their memory bandwidth even further (from what I've read, the DDR2 support in the memory controller prevents it from running at optimum performance with DDR3).
Seriously, I've never understood this 'but I can run AMD's top end new CPU on my six year old motherboard' stuff: sure, you can do it, but why bother?
Bullshit. You just make it harder for them to do their job.
The only time the police have an easy job is in a police state.
If you're not a criminal, victim or witness then you have no reason to talk to the police about a crime, and if you are a criminal then you have no reason to talk to the police without a lawyer. So there are very, very few cases where talking to the police is actually beneficial, and many where it's going to get you in a world of hurt... even police themselves will admit that.
Remember, these are the people who recently shot an innocent guy in the head eight times for 'suspicion of looking a bit muslim' and walked away with no consequences. Britain is rapidly approaching a police state if it isn't already there, which is precisely why I left a couple of years ago.
You are aware that Windows has no 64-bit Flash plugin at all, right? So you can't download it from Adobe to install on your 64-bit web browser for your 64-bit Windows?
And that on Windows you have to manually download the Flash plugin to install every time Adobe finds yet another critical security bug whereas on Linux (well, at least Ubuntu) it's automatically updated by the update manager? Well, unless you trust Adobe to install Yet-Another-Updater on your PC to do it for you.
Any "sane" company worries about employee output, not how said employees go about producing it.
So, why would that company worry about whether those employees can access youtube? You think the CEO will be complaining to the IT staff because Accountant #23 can't access fart videos on youtube?
This includes many government institutions in the western world.
As I said, they deserve everything they get as a result. But you're right, I guess government employees spend a lot more time at work watching Youtube and posting pictures of their cat to Facebook than the average company employee does.
Why are corporate employees watching Youtube at work? Obviously there may be some useful technical talks and the like, but in most companies very few people have a legitimate reason for doing so.
And any company which locks their employees into using IE probably deserves everything they get.
This is exactly why the country has become so polarized as of late: rather than simply disagreeing with the viewpoints of others and then discussing ways to find common ground
As far as I can see, the reason why America has become so polarized is that conservatives have finally realised that if you compromise with liberals they just come back with the same demands for greater state control a few years later and continue until you've compromised yourself into giving them everything they originally wanted.
When your opponent sees compromise as a sign of weakness, no compromise is the only rational solution.
Then there are those conservatives who only know how to attack anybody who disagrees with them. They do not concede that anybody can honestly and intelligently hold contrary views: people with opinions they don't like are liars, stupid, or both.
You appear to be confusing conservatives with liberals.
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This will completely gut the market for hard drives and R&D into them will cease. All money will move to SSDs and they will improve even more rapidly.
Indeed: no-one will ever need more than 200GB of storage.
I've never seen a consumer hard drive last even 3 years
Maybe you're doing something wrong in that case, because all but one of the five consumer drives in my Windows PC are over three years old and it's still working about as well as a Windows PC ever does.
And personally I've never bought a drive which failed in less than three years (for that matter I've only ever bought one drive which failed before I swapped it out because it had become too small).
Essentially: I expect my next PC to have an SSD for important program files and data, and HDD(s) for big data files which don't need fast random access (e.g. video files). Or I'll offload them to an OpenSolaris server with a bunch of HDDs in a RAIDZ.
The idea that cheaper SSDs will kill HDD is silly when most peoples' storage needs expand to meet whatever they can afford to buy. Certainly they are likely to kill HDDs in simple home and office systems, but for everything else HDDs will continue to be vastly cheaper for at least the next decade or so.
When the latest game I installed on my PC wanted 20GB of disk space, a $100 200GB SSD won't last long.
The ambulance will only take you to the hospital. If the trip was deemed unnecessary and avoidable (or under false pretences), then you'll receive a sizeable invoice in the mail.
Since when? I lived in the UK for years and never ever heard of a case where someone was billed for using a 'free' ambulance for spurious reasons.
Just because you don't become forever crushed by unrecoverable debt doesn't mean it's a free-for-all wanton orgy of people abusing the system.
So why do the actual paramedics who operate the actual ambulances have so many stories of people abusing the system in that way and putting lives at risk by diverting them from important work?
Do the ambulances in England have an option to refuse to come in an acute, emergency situation? involving major fractures? dislocations?
It's called rationing, which is what happens when you have 'free' socialist healthcare and don't charge people who call for an ambulance because they're drunk and don't want to walk home.
And yet, the 'rationed' socialist healthcare here in Britain is still a metric fuckton better than what you get in the US
How strange. When I was living in the UK there always seemed to be some kid on TV looking for money to pay for them to fly to America to get treatment which they couldn't get under the rationed socialist NHS.
If its not a life critical, time sensitive emergency, don't call 9-1-1, or 9-9-9 or whatever the emergency number might be!
Sadly, you're assuming at least a semblance of rationality in a country where people will call 9-9-9 for an ambulance because they're too lazy to walk across the road to the hospital, or because they're drunk and want a ride home (read some of the British paramedics' blogs for even better stories).
That's what happens when you promise everyone 'free' healthcare... if it's free, why would you bother to walk or pay for a taxi?
I remember a few years ago that an update to the compulsory antivirus software on some of our PCs at work went ahead and deleted some important Windows system files if you had it configured to auto-scan the disk; mine wasn't so I was able to disable it before losing the files, but anyone who let it run overnight came into work to find a dead PC waiting for them.
I actually remember nearly ten years ago sitting about fifty feet away from Bill Gates while he was holding up his wonderful new tablet PC and telling us that it was going to be the future of computing; I wondered what kind of crack he was smoking at the time (well, we were in LA after all), and I still wonder today.
I can certainly see cases where a tablet would be far more useful than a laptop or netbook, but for general computing it's a non-starter.
And I would add that while I was half-joking in my original response, this is actually a serious issue. My old gaming PC is seriously outdated now and I have thought about getting a replacement... but then I think, well, if I buy it now with Windows 7, then Windows 8 will probably be out sometime next year, so why bother when I could wait for that instead? But then I'd have to wait for Windows 8 SP1 before it would be worth using, and by that point I wouldn't have to wait long for Windows 9... so why bother? But then...
Consequently Microsoft's biannual Windows tax plans are one of the main issues preventing me from buying a new Windows PC.
Your "why buy x when you can buy x + 1" argument is a strawman, because that argument assumes that our theoretical user is looking to buy anyway.
Maybe you could try reading the actual thread, which was about (as you might understand if you even looked at the title of this message) sensible users waiting for SP2 to fix SP1 bugs before buying a new version of Windows. If Windows 8 is released to bring in the biannual Windows tax before Windows 7 SP2, then why would such a user buy Windows 7 instead of Windows 8, unless Windows 8 sucks ass?
Yes, a bit like how when Windows 7 was released, MS dropped support for Windows Vista, or how when 2008 R2 was released, they dropped support for 2008?
Why would anyone buy Vista now that Windows 7 is out? And why would anyone buy Windows 7 after Windows 8 is out? Assuming it's actually an improvement and not Vista ME.
You don't have to be a troll to feel that being pushed into paying to upgrade Windows every two years is a seriously retrograde step after XP's long lifespan. Fortunately I only use Windows for games and video editing these days so all my other PCs run free operating systems without the biannual Microsoft tax.
The problem is that with Microsoft's new biannual upgrade tax, Windows 8 will be released instead of Windows 7 SP2. So if you intend to always wait for SP2 you'll never be able to use Windows again.
Ah, OK, I guess that's not such a bad thing after all.
I know very little about that level of hardware, but why aren't we incorporating these types of things into CPUs?
Because most people don't want their CPU consuming 300W of power when idle?
Driver error, much like the Audi "unexplained acceleration" problem.
The problem with your theory is that it doesn't fit the facts in this case; as far as I'm aware there's no evidence that the drivers were pressing the gas pedal instead of the brake, and plenty of evidence that the cars were accelerating without the gas pedal being pressed.
As for the clutch, how long do you think it will be before car companies decide to remove the direct link from the clutch pedal to the clutch and replace it with electronic control to improve reliability and shifting?
My only point, is that people love to bash AMD, when you could argue that a significant portion of Intel's key features were either developed in parallel with AMD (Virtualization technologies for example) or were developed by AMD first (x64, on-die memory controller, elimination of north bridge, etc, etc)...
On-die memory controller like the Intel 4004, you mean? And I don't believe the 4004 had a north bridge equivalent, since it could talk to memory directly.
AMD certainly deserve kudos for developing x86-64, but claiming that an on-die memory controller was some huge innovation when microprocessors have had on-die memory controllers since the stone age of computing is just silly. If there was a huge advance it was separating the memory from the CPU by attaching it to the north bridge so you could use any compatible CPU with any type of RAM that the north bridge supported... the reason we went back in the other direction was because latency became more important than compatibility.
People buying those boards and CPUs might not even notice and will be s.o.l. after the very next generation.
How many computer buyers ever actually upgrade their CPU? 1%?
AMD's platform is the one with the sane upgrade path. And it's cheaper.
And it would cripple a 6-core or 8-core CPU with limited memory bandwidth on a motherboard originally designed for older CPUs with 2 or 4 cores. It also means that new AMD CPUs have to support both DDR2 and DDR3, which apparently limits their memory bandwidth even further (from what I've read, the DDR2 support in the memory controller prevents it from running at optimum performance with DDR3).
Seriously, I've never understood this 'but I can run AMD's top end new CPU on my six year old motherboard' stuff: sure, you can do it, but why bother?
Some people think they know what spaghetti code is, but unless they've written code with line numbers, they probably don't.
And the good old days of 'LET A = NOT PI' to save three bytes of RAM :).
(ex-Sinclair BASIC programmers will understand why such arcane constructs were beneficial when you were low on RAM)
Better than that, with a properly multi-threaded web browser we'll be able to display sixteen animated Flash ads simultaneously with no slowdown!
Bullshit. You just make it harder for them to do their job.
The only time the police have an easy job is in a police state.
If you're not a criminal, victim or witness then you have no reason to talk to the police about a crime, and if you are a criminal then you have no reason to talk to the police without a lawyer. So there are very, very few cases where talking to the police is actually beneficial, and many where it's going to get you in a world of hurt... even police themselves will admit that.
Remember, these are the people who recently shot an innocent guy in the head eight times for 'suspicion of looking a bit muslim' and walked away with no consequences. Britain is rapidly approaching a police state if it isn't already there, which is precisely why I left a couple of years ago.
You are aware that Windows has no 64-bit Flash plugin at all, right? So you can't download it from Adobe to install on your 64-bit web browser for your 64-bit Windows?
And that on Windows you have to manually download the Flash plugin to install every time Adobe finds yet another critical security bug whereas on Linux (well, at least Ubuntu) it's automatically updated by the update manager? Well, unless you trust Adobe to install Yet-Another-Updater on your PC to do it for you.
Any "sane" company worries about employee output, not how said employees go about producing it.
So, why would that company worry about whether those employees can access youtube? You think the CEO will be complaining to the IT staff because Accountant #23 can't access fart videos on youtube?
This includes many government institutions in the western world.
As I said, they deserve everything they get as a result. But you're right, I guess government employees spend a lot more time at work watching Youtube and posting pictures of their cat to Facebook than the average company employee does.
Why are corporate employees watching Youtube at work? Obviously there may be some useful technical talks and the like, but in most companies very few people have a legitimate reason for doing so.
And any company which locks their employees into using IE probably deserves everything they get.
This is exactly why the country has become so polarized as of late: rather than simply disagreeing with the viewpoints of others and then discussing ways to find common ground
As far as I can see, the reason why America has become so polarized is that conservatives have finally realised that if you compromise with liberals they just come back with the same demands for greater state control a few years later and continue until you've compromised yourself into giving them everything they originally wanted.
When your opponent sees compromise as a sign of weakness, no compromise is the only rational solution.
Then there are those conservatives who only know how to attack anybody who disagrees with them. They do not concede that anybody can honestly and intelligently hold contrary views: people with opinions they don't like are liars, stupid, or both.
You appear to be confusing conservatives with liberals.