What makes you think this wouldn't be expensive? SSD's are inherently expensive.
Anyway, I have little sympathy with users who don't have a clue how to work a computer properly. Either they should clue up, or be happy to pay through the nose when stuff goes wrong which they don't know how to fix. That's the harsh reality of life.
I couldn't fix my car myself, so I'd have to pay out to get it sorted by a professional (or even a non-pro who knew enough to get the job done).
Sure, OEM's are taking liberties by charging stupidly high amounts for retrospective supply of recovery disks, but they're only charging what people are willing to pay.
They're exceptionally rugged machines. You can pull An Amiga 1200 apart whilst it's running and it won't crash unless you do something daft like unplug the accelerator board.
I'd worry, using a PC (or Mac, or Linux box) in any live-show environment. They're so damn fragile and sensitive to their environment. An Amiga 1200 will happily run in environments a Panasonic Toughbook would balk at.
The lack of memory protection never really was a big problem during the heights of the Amiga's reign. The Amiga was successful despite never coming as standard with a CPU equipped with an MMU, a feature which is an absolute necessity, these days.
*Developing* software on an MMU-equipped Amiga was a bonus. You were able to run 'enforcer' in the background to catch calls to uninitialised pointers. You could also see other people's programs misbehaving (e.g. MaxsBBS, anyone remember that?).
The greatest thing the Amiga had was a really elegant set of API's coupled with extensive documentation. Can you imagine how different the computing scene would be today if Nvidia and ATI routinely pushed out comprehensive hardware docs?
Imagine as well how much speed we would be able to eke out of software if we were able to dump (most of) the OS and hit the hardware, or at least drop into a single-tasking mode?
Since none of this is ever likely to happen, we will just have to live with OS overhead, unpredictable CPU-cache states and a reliance on closed-source hardware drivers.
Re:IBM PCs compared extremely poorly with Amigas
on
The Amiga Turns 25
·
· Score: 1
VGA was introduced in 1987, the same year Commodore released the A500. By the time the A1200 was released in 1992, VGA as a video interface was well established.
What-if futures are the dreams of many ex-Amiga owners. Personally, I consider the issue entirely moot. We have Cray supercomputer performance from mobile phones, these days. Any amount of progress, whether it stemmed from our timeline of IBM-PC clones winning out as the dominating force, or the alternate timeline of Amiga OS based computing being the leader, we would still be in a mostly similar position today.
The only real difference is the GUI. Hardware would have been the same, though maybe Power CPU's instead of Intel may dominate. Graphics cards would be the same, hard drives, RAM, motherboards... the whole top-to-bottom of the PC tech industry would be doing very similar things, no matter what. Convergent evolution.
We would still have our Java's, our Flash, our legacy features still present in our CPU's and BIOS. Malware would still exploit the same weaknesses and the internet would still use the same protocols and run at the same speeds.
The question you should really ask is: What would things be like today if Amiga coding ethic was now the main driving focus of software development?
I call bullshit. Even some of the most simple Flash games would be impossible to re-create on a (then) mid-range Amiga.
The Amiga would struggle even with a 'match-3' game where any case arose that the grid full of symbols all had to fall down at the same time. You've got to remember that the Amiga didn't have enough graphical horsepower to move even a 16-colour 320x256 screen full of objects around at 50 or 60fps. Oh, it could move the entire screen around as one object, but the Blitter couldn't shift actual pixels around that fast.
Now try doing Warzone Tower Defense, or *any* of the physics-based games where graphic objects undergo rotation. The Amiga had no built-in support for rotating graphics. It could be kludged but it was usually limited to demoscene stuff. Brian The Lion was the only commercial game to implement full-speed rotating graphics. Well, Turrican 3 I think might have (on small objects), but I may be mis-remembering.
The game Rotox was based entirely on a top-down rotating vector playfield, but framerate was fairly poor.
The only area the PC falls down when dealing with 2D gaming is that there is absolutely no hardware support for detecting per-pixel collisions between objects. You either iterate through the objects pixel-by-pixel using the CPU, or you do bounding-box, bounding-circle or ever more complex bounding-polygon stuff.
Re:IBM PCs compared extremely poorly with Amigas
on
The Amiga Turns 25
·
· Score: 1
Whilst I agree with everything you say, the Amiga OS was also an insecure hell. OK, as coders we got absolute control over everything, but had the Amiga 'won', the whole OS would have had to go through a total re-write to implement a whole lot of protection in order to prevent a gross malware bloom.
The Amiga died just around the time I developed an almost complete knowledge of its hardware and became fluent in 680x0 assembly. A state of coding Nirvana I have never been able to achieve on the PC, much to my dismay.
Re:IBM PCs compared extremely poorly with Amigas
on
The Amiga Turns 25
·
· Score: 1
You're talking about differences between monitors and TV's. I bought a monitor for my Amiga and it made a huge difference. I may not still have my Amiga, but I have the Amiga->VGA monitor adapter still in my cable collection.
Your reply has nothing to do with basing a purchasing decision on a value-for-money process.
*any* card can be a lemon. Top-end, low-end, mid-range.
I get your point that top-end cards go through rigorous QA and thus are less likely to be defective, but to base a purchasing decision on this criteria alone is pure madness. Top-end cards are enormously overpriced, however you want to measure it ($ per fps, FLOPS per $). This is because supply is limited and the market will bear it. Everyone expects to pay a premium for the kudos of having the fastest card. The law of diminishing returns is vividly evident in the graphics card marketplace.
Sensible people will offset the incredibly small risk of purchasing a lemon against the real and immediate lower purchase cost of a mid-range (or just not top-end) card.
Absolute rubbish advice. If a card doesn't work right through defective manufacturing or design, you're due a free repair, replacement or full refund.
Nobody likes getting a lemon, but that's no reason to spend stupid amounts of money on a flagship card from *any* generation.
Getting a previous generation flagship is as dumb an idea. Not only will technological advances be entirely missed (DX11 features, maybe), energy usage will be woefully inefficient compared to a low or mid-range card from the current generation.
If you want an 'always' rule, always buy the card in the very middle of the current generation, or the one below that if your budget doesn't permit. This would mean a 465 from Nvidia (though this is likely due to be dropped, or price dropped very soon).
I speak from experience. I'd never paid more than 100GBP for a graphics card until I decided to buy a 256MB 7800GTX some years ago, when it was the fastest card available. >300GBP and I've got a card which is an OK performer (Half-Life 2 at 1920x1200 with decent quality), but nowhere near as capable as a 100GBP card of today. I should have just spent 100GBP at the time and then upgraded twice more between then and now.
I was thinking of putting an ATI 5670 into a new computer, this year. For various reasons, I want a single-slot card. I'm somewhat hoping that at least one OEM can create a single-slot cooling solution for Nvidia's 460, because it's a much better proposition, performance-wise.
This comes down to your graphics drivers. Modern cards, together with a modern version of Adobe Flash, provide GPU hardware acceleration. Your graphics drivers split video decoding between the GPU and CPU.
If one CPU core is pegged, your graphics driver is not doing a good job.
Having looked at some of the YouTube sample clips, 4k video presented me with a few issues: -
1. My CPU, GPU and drivers combination were not capable of sustaining full rate playback.* 2. One clip suffered corruption every few seconds. 3. Whilst I have plenty of constant, uncontended bandwidth, YouTube does not.** 4. I don't have a 4k display.
OK, the last one is pretty obvious. Mind you, you need HDMI1.4 to transport 4k video from your computer to your 4k screen. Even then, HDMI1.4 supports that resolution at a maximum 24fps (i.e., not really suitable for your Windows desktop).
I don't think 100Mbps is needed for 4k video at the consumer level. Current encoders can squeeze 1080p24Hz into, e.g. 5.1Mbps average over the length of a movie with very good quality. 4k video contains 4.2667 times as many pixels as 1080p. Very unscientifically, this means less than 22Mbps to transport a high quality 4k video stream.
Of course, consumers are happy with shitty quality digital video, as witnessed by the many cable-TV channels using low bitrate encoding which nobody seems to complain about (at least, not enough for cable companies to worry).
YouTube is not exactly cable-TV quality, so I'm sure they would get away with 5Mbps for 4k video.
1920x1080 is not the absolute last word on things. 1920x1080 is *not* enough for everybody. More screen-space is always welcome.
My old phone had a 640x360 display. New phones are available with 800x480. The iPhone 4 has a 960x640 resolution screen and that's only a 3.5" display!
I would like to enjoy as many pixels per square centimeter on my TV and laptop as I do on my phone. Consider old laptops had 800x600 displays, then we had technological advances through 1024x768, 1280x1024... then widescreen from 1280x800 now up to a maximum of 1920x1200 for laptop displays, 2560x1440 and 2560x1600 for very expensive external monitors. Technological advances now seem to apply solely to mobile devices. In fact, we're going backwards ever so slightly because 2560x1600 was last year's top resolution. Same monitor family this year sports 2560x1440 at the top of the range. Pixels per square centimeter is still nto great, because to go more than 1920x1200 means a 27" screen, minimum.
Perhaps there is no market demand? 1920x1200 is a nice resolution on a laptop. Still considered luxury, for the most part. People even seem happy with 1024x600 on their netbooks.
1920x1080 seems to be the new 1920x1200 for laptop displays and external monitors from anywhere just short of 23" all the way up to 27". If we're going to stick with 16:9 as our ratio, I'd like to see us progress from 1920x1080 to 2560x1440, 3200x1800 and then 4000x2250.
Imagine that on your 17" laptop. Heck, why not go crazy and have 6000x3375? We could do away with horrible, blurry, anti-aliased text on our displays.
Sadly I think progress will come in the form of OLED (or a variant). That will at least get rid of refresh lag, which really sucks but everyone kinda just ignores it because those of us who remember (or still use) CRT's know that LCD's clarity outweighs CRT's short-persistence phosphory blur.
*When* a *digital* *download* game *from* Steam *gets* corrupted (read: *Never*)*,* you click "repair cache" and it *repairs* itself. You console dudes are idiots *[no comma]* and this *is* why you buy consoles. You have zero *intelligence*.
Seriously, if you're going to bash an entire collection of people by calling them stupid, don't fuck up your post in stupid ways.
Steam is good because it's more convenient and is a better overall experience than downloading pirate copies.
I have no love for DRM or systems which use it, but Steam is absolutely the best way for me to reward developers for a job well done. If some of that money also goes to Valve, then that's cool too. I really like Valve games.
I don't know if the devs get more or less reward than if I'd bought a copy of their game from a retail store, but I don't care. Store-bought games mean I have to deal with these crappy, outdated and overly-fragile things called DVD's. Plus, if I can't at least have a really nice box and manual... forget it. Little DVD cases and a PDF of the manual really doesn't get my impulse-purchase juices flowing.
If Steam dies tomorrow and I can no longer play the games I've paid for. Well, that's why I also support piracy as a distribution mechanism.
Wow, if you consider McLean and MacLean the same, I suggest you never visit Scotland.
The Mc's and the Mac's consider the correct usage as a matter of extreme pride. You could end up with one or more bruises if you get it wrong and then insist that "well, they're the same anyway".
Some LCD's are utter rubbish for watching video, but that doesn't mean people won't buy them as an upgrade to an existing CRT.
The majority of consumers will rather buy a 52" plasma with a 1024x768 resolution than a high-end, full HD, 37" LCD/LED TV at the same price. Bigger is not better, but it does impress their friends.
The/. crowd are (hopefully) an exception, in that I'd rather buy an expensive 32" TV than a cheap 42" TV because it will be better quality.
Heck, this is why I've (still) got a 24" Dell LCD monitor which set me back a month's pay.
People just don't want CRT's. I've got a CRT monitor from many years ago and it's a source of eyestrain if I try to use it for a primary display. It serves purpose as a secondary display on my PC and it's absolutely perfect for displaying the output of old arcade and home computer emulators.
With LCD and plasma displays as cheap as they are, even poor people are able to afford them.
1: I bloody hope so. There's many a computer system with no mouse attached. Rack servers, for instance. My PC occasionally as well. 2: If you're mucking about with 'this can make your computer not boot properly' settings, I welcome a requirement to go find a keyboard first. 3: I doubt it. 4: Look... maybe these BIOS replacements will include their own display settings, but... I fairly doubt it. 5: See #3.
I'm with you all the way on this, but you have to admit that this new iPhone is not only going to be enormously popular, but is also a really good device. It's just a different 'good' than your Nexus One.
Personally, I want whatever follows the Nexus One or the Nokia N900. My next phone... I want to be able to write tools for it, without messing about with licensing. That iPhone though... *sigh* I'd quite like to have it as a second phone.
As an SLC part, the wearing out bit of your argument falls down.
However, what should be a slight concern is the issue of having two points of failure in one device. If either the flash or the spinning disk dies, the whole drive is screwed. It will create nightmares for anyone sending a failed drive off for data recovery.
If Seagate have posted an MTBF figure for the drive, I'll be surprised if it's accurate.
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What makes you think this wouldn't be expensive? SSD's are inherently expensive.
Anyway, I have little sympathy with users who don't have a clue how to work a computer properly. Either they should clue up, or be happy to pay through the nose when stuff goes wrong which they don't know how to fix. That's the harsh reality of life.
I couldn't fix my car myself, so I'd have to pay out to get it sorted by a professional (or even a non-pro who knew enough to get the job done).
Sure, OEM's are taking liberties by charging stupidly high amounts for retrospective supply of recovery disks, but they're only charging what people are willing to pay.
I bet you were popular!
They're exceptionally rugged machines. You can pull An Amiga 1200 apart whilst it's running and it won't crash unless you do something daft like unplug the accelerator board.
I'd worry, using a PC (or Mac, or Linux box) in any live-show environment. They're so damn fragile and sensitive to their environment. An Amiga 1200 will happily run in environments a Panasonic Toughbook would balk at.
The lack of memory protection never really was a big problem during the heights of the Amiga's reign. The Amiga was successful despite never coming as standard with a CPU equipped with an MMU, a feature which is an absolute necessity, these days.
*Developing* software on an MMU-equipped Amiga was a bonus. You were able to run 'enforcer' in the background to catch calls to uninitialised pointers. You could also see other people's programs misbehaving (e.g. MaxsBBS, anyone remember that?).
The greatest thing the Amiga had was a really elegant set of API's coupled with extensive documentation. Can you imagine how different the computing scene would be today if Nvidia and ATI routinely pushed out comprehensive hardware docs?
Imagine as well how much speed we would be able to eke out of software if we were able to dump (most of) the OS and hit the hardware, or at least drop into a single-tasking mode?
Since none of this is ever likely to happen, we will just have to live with OS overhead, unpredictable CPU-cache states and a reliance on closed-source hardware drivers.
VGA was introduced in 1987, the same year Commodore released the A500. By the time the A1200 was released in 1992, VGA as a video interface was well established.
What-if futures are the dreams of many ex-Amiga owners. Personally, I consider the issue entirely moot. We have Cray supercomputer performance from mobile phones, these days. Any amount of progress, whether it stemmed from our timeline of IBM-PC clones winning out as the dominating force, or the alternate timeline of Amiga OS based computing being the leader, we would still be in a mostly similar position today.
The only real difference is the GUI. Hardware would have been the same, though maybe Power CPU's instead of Intel may dominate. Graphics cards would be the same, hard drives, RAM, motherboards... the whole top-to-bottom of the PC tech industry would be doing very similar things, no matter what. Convergent evolution.
We would still have our Java's, our Flash, our legacy features still present in our CPU's and BIOS. Malware would still exploit the same weaknesses and the internet would still use the same protocols and run at the same speeds.
The question you should really ask is: What would things be like today if Amiga coding ethic was now the main driving focus of software development?
I call bullshit. Even some of the most simple Flash games would be impossible to re-create on a (then) mid-range Amiga.
The Amiga would struggle even with a 'match-3' game where any case arose that the grid full of symbols all had to fall down at the same time. You've got to remember that the Amiga didn't have enough graphical horsepower to move even a 16-colour 320x256 screen full of objects around at 50 or 60fps. Oh, it could move the entire screen around as one object, but the Blitter couldn't shift actual pixels around that fast.
Now try doing Warzone Tower Defense, or *any* of the physics-based games where graphic objects undergo rotation. The Amiga had no built-in support for rotating graphics. It could be kludged but it was usually limited to demoscene stuff. Brian The Lion was the only commercial game to implement full-speed rotating graphics. Well, Turrican 3 I think might have (on small objects), but I may be mis-remembering.
The game Rotox was based entirely on a top-down rotating vector playfield, but framerate was fairly poor.
The only area the PC falls down when dealing with 2D gaming is that there is absolutely no hardware support for detecting per-pixel collisions between objects. You either iterate through the objects pixel-by-pixel using the CPU, or you do bounding-box, bounding-circle or ever more complex bounding-polygon stuff.
Whilst I agree with everything you say, the Amiga OS was also an insecure hell. OK, as coders we got absolute control over everything, but had the Amiga 'won', the whole OS would have had to go through a total re-write to implement a whole lot of protection in order to prevent a gross malware bloom.
The Amiga died just around the time I developed an almost complete knowledge of its hardware and became fluent in 680x0 assembly. A state of coding Nirvana I have never been able to achieve on the PC, much to my dismay.
You're talking about differences between monitors and TV's. I bought a monitor for my Amiga and it made a huge difference. I may not still have my Amiga, but I have the Amiga->VGA monitor adapter still in my cable collection.
Your reply has nothing to do with basing a purchasing decision on a value-for-money process.
*any* card can be a lemon. Top-end, low-end, mid-range.
I get your point that top-end cards go through rigorous QA and thus are less likely to be defective, but to base a purchasing decision on this criteria alone is pure madness. Top-end cards are enormously overpriced, however you want to measure it ($ per fps, FLOPS per $). This is because supply is limited and the market will bear it. Everyone expects to pay a premium for the kudos of having the fastest card. The law of diminishing returns is vividly evident in the graphics card marketplace.
Sensible people will offset the incredibly small risk of purchasing a lemon against the real and immediate lower purchase cost of a mid-range (or just not top-end) card.
Absolute rubbish advice. If a card doesn't work right through defective manufacturing or design, you're due a free repair, replacement or full refund.
Nobody likes getting a lemon, but that's no reason to spend stupid amounts of money on a flagship card from *any* generation.
Getting a previous generation flagship is as dumb an idea. Not only will technological advances be entirely missed (DX11 features, maybe), energy usage will be woefully inefficient compared to a low or mid-range card from the current generation.
If you want an 'always' rule, always buy the card in the very middle of the current generation, or the one below that if your budget doesn't permit. This would mean a 465 from Nvidia (though this is likely due to be dropped, or price dropped very soon).
I speak from experience. I'd never paid more than 100GBP for a graphics card until I decided to buy a 256MB 7800GTX some years ago, when it was the fastest card available. >300GBP and I've got a card which is an OK performer (Half-Life 2 at 1920x1200 with decent quality), but nowhere near as capable as a 100GBP card of today. I should have just spent 100GBP at the time and then upgraded twice more between then and now.
I was thinking of putting an ATI 5670 into a new computer, this year. For various reasons, I want a single-slot card. I'm somewhat hoping that at least one OEM can create a single-slot cooling solution for Nvidia's 460, because it's a much better proposition, performance-wise.
This comes down to your graphics drivers. Modern cards, together with a modern version of Adobe Flash, provide GPU hardware acceleration. Your graphics drivers split video decoding between the GPU and CPU.
If one CPU core is pegged, your graphics driver is not doing a good job.
Having looked at some of the YouTube sample clips, 4k video presented me with a few issues: -
1. My CPU, GPU and drivers combination were not capable of sustaining full rate playback.*
2. One clip suffered corruption every few seconds.
3. Whilst I have plenty of constant, uncontended bandwidth, YouTube does not.**
4. I don't have a 4k display.
OK, the last one is pretty obvious. Mind you, you need HDMI1.4 to transport 4k video from your computer to your 4k screen. Even then, HDMI1.4 supports that resolution at a maximum 24fps (i.e., not really suitable for your Windows desktop).
I don't think 100Mbps is needed for 4k video at the consumer level. Current encoders can squeeze 1080p24Hz into, e.g. 5.1Mbps average over the length of a movie with very good quality. 4k video contains 4.2667 times as many pixels as 1080p. Very unscientifically, this means less than 22Mbps to transport a high quality 4k video stream.
Of course, consumers are happy with shitty quality digital video, as witnessed by the many cable-TV channels using low bitrate encoding which nobody seems to complain about (at least, not enough for cable companies to worry).
YouTube is not exactly cable-TV quality, so I'm sure they would get away with 5Mbps for 4k video.
*2.2GHz Core2Duo, Nvidia 8700M GT, latest drivers.
**I have 20Mbps internet, one of the 4k test videos constantly paused during playback due to buffer underruns.
1920x1080 is not the absolute last word on things. 1920x1080 is *not* enough for everybody. More screen-space is always welcome.
My old phone had a 640x360 display. New phones are available with 800x480. The iPhone 4 has a 960x640 resolution screen and that's only a 3.5" display!
I would like to enjoy as many pixels per square centimeter on my TV and laptop as I do on my phone. Consider old laptops had 800x600 displays, then we had technological advances through 1024x768, 1280x1024... then widescreen from 1280x800 now up to a maximum of 1920x1200 for laptop displays, 2560x1440 and 2560x1600 for very expensive external monitors. Technological advances now seem to apply solely to mobile devices. In fact, we're going backwards ever so slightly because 2560x1600 was last year's top resolution. Same monitor family this year sports 2560x1440 at the top of the range. Pixels per square centimeter is still nto great, because to go more than 1920x1200 means a 27" screen, minimum.
Perhaps there is no market demand? 1920x1200 is a nice resolution on a laptop. Still considered luxury, for the most part. People even seem happy with 1024x600 on their netbooks.
1920x1080 seems to be the new 1920x1200 for laptop displays and external monitors from anywhere just short of 23" all the way up to 27". If we're going to stick with 16:9 as our ratio, I'd like to see us progress from 1920x1080 to 2560x1440, 3200x1800 and then 4000x2250.
Imagine that on your 17" laptop. Heck, why not go crazy and have 6000x3375? We could do away with horrible, blurry, anti-aliased text on our displays.
Sadly I think progress will come in the form of OLED (or a variant). That will at least get rid of refresh lag, which really sucks but everyone kinda just ignores it because those of us who remember (or still use) CRT's know that LCD's clarity outweighs CRT's short-persistence phosphory blur.
*When* a *digital* *download* game *from* Steam *gets* corrupted (read: *Never*)*,* you click "repair cache" and it *repairs* itself. You console dudes are idiots *[no comma]* and this *is* why you buy consoles. You have zero *intelligence*.
Seriously, if you're going to bash an entire collection of people by calling them stupid, don't fuck up your post in stupid ways.
You can at least back up your iTunes music, but yes, it's a very bad system.
Steam is good because it's more convenient and is a better overall experience than downloading pirate copies.
I have no love for DRM or systems which use it, but Steam is absolutely the best way for me to reward developers for a job well done. If some of that money also goes to Valve, then that's cool too. I really like Valve games.
I don't know if the devs get more or less reward than if I'd bought a copy of their game from a retail store, but I don't care. Store-bought games mean I have to deal with these crappy, outdated and overly-fragile things called DVD's. Plus, if I can't at least have a really nice box and manual... forget it. Little DVD cases and a PDF of the manual really doesn't get my impulse-purchase juices flowing.
If Steam dies tomorrow and I can no longer play the games I've paid for. Well, that's why I also support piracy as a distribution mechanism.
Remember that many databases sit upon a Microsoft SQL server. Microsoft SQL doesn't understand UTF-8 or UTF-16. It only knows UCS-2.
Great fun for database programmers.
Wow, if you consider McLean and MacLean the same, I suggest you never visit Scotland.
The Mc's and the Mac's consider the correct usage as a matter of extreme pride. You could end up with one or more bruises if you get it wrong and then insist that "well, they're the same anyway".
Some LCD's are utter rubbish for watching video, but that doesn't mean people won't buy them as an upgrade to an existing CRT.
/. crowd are (hopefully) an exception, in that I'd rather buy an expensive 32" TV than a cheap 42" TV because it will be better quality.
The majority of consumers will rather buy a 52" plasma with a 1024x768 resolution than a high-end, full HD, 37" LCD/LED TV at the same price. Bigger is not better, but it does impress their friends.
The
Heck, this is why I've (still) got a 24" Dell LCD monitor which set me back a month's pay.
People just don't want CRT's. I've got a CRT monitor from many years ago and it's a source of eyestrain if I try to use it for a primary display. It serves purpose as a secondary display on my PC and it's absolutely perfect for displaying the output of old arcade and home computer emulators.
With LCD and plasma displays as cheap as they are, even poor people are able to afford them.
or replace the boot CD with... an HD.
*sigh*
1: I bloody hope so. There's many a computer system with no mouse attached. Rack servers, for instance. My PC occasionally as well.
2: If you're mucking about with 'this can make your computer not boot properly' settings, I welcome a requirement to go find a keyboard first.
3: I doubt it.
4: Look... maybe these BIOS replacements will include their own display settings, but... I fairly doubt it.
5: See #3.
I'm with you all the way on this, but you have to admit that this new iPhone is not only going to be enormously popular, but is also a really good device. It's just a different 'good' than your Nexus One.
Personally, I want whatever follows the Nexus One or the Nokia N900. My next phone... I want to be able to write tools for it, without messing about with licensing. That iPhone though... *sigh* I'd quite like to have it as a second phone.
As an SLC part, the wearing out bit of your argument falls down.
However, what should be a slight concern is the issue of having two points of failure in one device. If either the flash or the spinning disk dies, the whole drive is screwed. It will create nightmares for anyone sending a failed drive off for data recovery.
If Seagate have posted an MTBF figure for the drive, I'll be surprised if it's accurate.