Ultimately we are to blame.

Customers are willing to pay for buggy software.
Thus management recognizes that above a certain level of shittiness, the faster you ship the better.

Until customers get the ability to easily refund software or choose not to buy it, we won't see any changes.

A company cannot fight for right-to-work laws, then be upset when employees exercise their right to not work.

it's not economical to go past 4-5 platters these days, and the manufacturing sweet spot will likely be a 2-platter 4-head drive for a long time

don't forget prop 13 and your unsustainably low property taxes

i'm guessing about half the homeowners in california cannot afford to move within the same county

SSDs are better than HDDs for GB/cm3 already, but consumers for the most part don't want to buy $8000 SSDs. (Large companies/data centers are already buying them as fast as they can be built).

Laptop (2.5") drives are limited to about 2TB, and they're 15mm thick. SSDs are hitting 2TB using a 7mm Z-height..

Really, the only play for HDDs is $/GB, which already has nearly evaporated at the low end when you consider all the other contributors to cost in a system.

So, you throw an engineer into an obviously hostile work environment that is pre-judging their abilities negatively, and you wonder why they have trouble executing?

Furthermore, studies have been done proving that black-sounding names get 50% fewer callbacks than white sounding names, when the only thing different is the name on otherwise identical resumes.

http://www.nber.org/digest/sep03/w9873.html
http://www.forbes.com/sites/ruchikatulshyan/2014/06/13/have-a-foreign-sounding-name-change-it-to-get-a-job/
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/06/weekinreview/06Luo.html?_r=0

237,000,000 google hits for "white sounding names get more job interviews"

If it's out of their control, why do you think minorities aren't pursuing careers in computer science? You don't think it could possibly be the rich, white, entitled brogrammer work environments that most of silicon valley brags about?

feature only? The only feature that possibly matters is select fire, which is already federally regulated.

Memory processes in FPGAs aren't very good. You'd have to really be desperate for a few hundred megabytes of extra memory.

I was answering why they don't just invalidate the patents and copy a modern CPU, and the answer is that the patents aren't the reason they're hard to copy. Intel (and others) don't patent their most critical secrets.

I completely agree they have the technology to build older designs, which is just fine. They can then decide whether the investment to upgrade is worth it to them or not.

Plus, they don't have to compete outside of Russia and other ITAR countries.

They only have to be more trustworthy than what can be imported, and "good enough" for the job at hand.

Except that a modern CPU is too difficult to manufacture. Copying the transistors in a CAD program is the easy part, building it with a usable yield is the hard part.

The chance is the same AFR of the rest of the product, but yes, it's very small.

Your worst case is that you cycle your SSD to 100% of its capability (which basically no user does anyway) inside a freezer, then put it on your dashboard as you park your black-on-black sports car in death valley for a 6 month hiking trip.

If you're not doing all 3 of those things simultaneously I wouldn't worry.

one hole per package of NAND will be sufficient