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Comment Re:Get the terms straight (Score 2) 195

"Triple Level" does not sound like three bits or eight levels.

You're assuming that "levels" means "voltage levels". It's more like levels of a fractal; each level divides the range of voltages in half, yielding one additional bit of storage. This corresponds to the way the cells are actually programmed, shifting the voltage by 1/2 step relative to the previous bit, e.g.:

111 = 0.5 -> 0.75 -> 0.825
101 = 0.5 -> 0.5 -> 0.625
011 = 0 -> 0.25 -> 0.375

You could also visualize each cell as a three-level binary tree with eight leaf nodes.

Comment Re:Still don't trust SSDs (Score 4, Informative) 144

Their website says 10 Years or 150TBW for the 256GB model and 10 Years or 300TBW for the 1TB model. TBW is "terabytes written". Which isn't the "2 petabytes to failure" marathon test that took 6 months to complete, but 0.3 petabytes written on a 1TB drive is still a lot and way beyond normal consumer usage. My unofficial opinion is that only about 128gb is "hot" and the rest of the storage on a 1TB drive is typically "cold". Even a professional video editor is going to have trouble topping out their warranty.
 
  http://www.samsung.com/global/business/semiconductor/minisite/SSD/global/html/support/warranty.html

Comment Re:Still don't trust SSDs (Score 4, Informative) 144

First and second gen SSDs were garbage, people are reporting 2 petabyte write lifecycles on them. Samsung just announced 10 year warranties on their consumer models. Intel has been offering 10 year warranties on their enterprise models for a few years now.
 
That said, if you bought anything other than Samsung prior to about 2013, the "old" OCZ in particular (the "new" OCZ is using the corpse of their brand name for Toshiba manufactured drives now) had failure rates in the 15-20% real world return rate numbers reported by retailers. Failure/return rates for all brands are below 5% for all manufacturers now. There was a dark period from 2011-2013 where a ton of terrible drivers and bad hardware shipped, but they're generally very reliable now. Everyone I know has moved to SSD for their primary drive, and are only using rotational drives for medium length local archival purposes.

Comment Re: Why do I get the funny feeling that (Score 3, Informative) 265

More specifically, Powershell is getting native SSH support. They didn't announce PS 5.0 will get it, but it's possible 5.1 or 6.0 will see it, version releases have been getting more frequent. A major change like full SSH support would warrant jumping a whole version number, I would think. Maybe released with the next version of Windows Server, sometime next year? That would be great news.

Comment Re:In short? (Score 0) 318

In my office "Working from home" is code for "I have more important things to do today, like open the door for the plumber to come fix my leaky faucet" and "I will answer email, in less than 30 minutes, but I don't expect to get anything worthwhile done today" and "Haha I don't have to take a PTO day for this! Genius!!"
 
Managers who are on multiple conference calls a day and spend most of their day talking and making decisions can actually be somewhat effective working from home, but unless you're doing "headphones on, cranking out brand new prototype code" I don't think working from home is particularly effective. Especially if you are on the maintenance/operations side of things. Those people/that mindset, their productivity is slightly above that of a corpse. At least a company doesn't have to pay for a corpse's health insurance.

Comment Re:Taxi licenses are crazy expensive (Score 1) 334

You miss the point, the state is the one guaranteeing the limited monopoly.

When did the State ever guarantee that they would maintain the medallion program and/or refrain from issuing new medallions? Scarcity of medallions is hardly a natural right, and laws instituting artificial scarcity are subject to change. If anyone over-payed for a medallion under the false assumption that the current state of artificial scarcity was guaranteed to last they have no one but themselves to blame. The only compensation owed here is to those who were unjustly prohibited from operating taxis due to the State's medallion requirements.

Comment Re:Efficient allocation of capital (Score 1) 230

If the amount of labor needed to produce one person's worth of goods and services is less than one person's worth of effort, then you are going to have people sitting around doing nothing.

Fortunately, there is no upper bound on "one person's worth of goods and services". If nothing else, leisure time (i.e. sitting around doing nothing, or at least nothing "productive") is a perfectly legitimate good and can expand to absorb any excess. Every time this has happened in the past, however, people managed to find other things to strive for—goods and services which were previously out of their reach, as well as new goods and services which they now have the leisure time to invent.

Comment Re:Security team (Score 1) 517

I think you grossly overestimate the power consumption of a modern desktop. Modern PCs only use a couple of watts at idle, under 20. In most cases the display backlight is using more power than the PC. You would have to raise electric taxes to incredible rates for companies to change their policies.Not to mention the fact that power overnight is off-peak generation which is effectively free.
 
If you look at US power consumption, it's been flat for the last 15 years. This is due to advances in power savings in all electronics. The days of a PC that burns up 100+ watts and people who leave their 250 watt 19" CRT monitors on all day and all night with the screensaver running are over.

Comment Re:Still too expensive (Score 1) 249

Jackies Brickhouse. I guess they're technically in Kemah but there's about 10 cities that wrap around Clear Lake. And yes technically it's not coastal, thanks for being a fucking pedant about that. I sail offshore a couple times a year I'm aware, but for 99% of america, as far as they know, Houston is a port city on the coast of Texas so I just roll with it. Sorry to get your panties in a wad.

Comment Re:Still too expensive (Score 2) 249

Slightly snarky but true: a lot of cities have special provisions for cars/vehicles that don't exceed 35mph and are banned from highways. They look like overgrown golf carts. There's a taxi service here in Dallas that operates a fleet of electric golf carts that seat between six and nine people, and a couple of bars in the Clear Lake (distant costal suburb of Houston) that operate a private (and free) electric car taxi service.
 
With a battery pack cosing about $7000 still, I don't think you can expect to make a highway legal chassis for $3000 with engine and tires. $10,000 is a nice round number but inflation is a thing so that number is probably closer to $12,000-15,000.

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