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)

I agree with this. It was unlikely the apocalypse would have occurred due to Y2K, but it would be naive to think there wasn't the possibility for quite significant impact to a very technologically reliant civilization such as ours. I have read plenty of reports of Y2K bugs that DID cause minor problems (power outages, ticketing systems unable to create tickets and so on) but precisely because of the herculean effort to fix things they were the exceptions rather than the rule. The thought of a near global power outage would have been very impactful on our civilization. An inconvenience at the end of the day because people WILL tend to adapt... but many people with electric heat could have died. We are so reliant on technology that while the hand-waving about the end of the world was a bit much, it did help to bring some attention to the matter.

Right, because most of the companies that did nothing to prepare were running off-the-shelf software that had already been patched.

As a general rule, Y2K was mitigated as much by Microsoft, IBM et al as it was by the actual end user corporations that put effort into fixing their issues. I was a consultant during the 1996-2003 timeframe, and Y2K definitely gave my business a boost because we did Y2K analysis. Believe me, there WERE problems and there WERE pieces of code that would bring the system to its knees when tested. Yes, we actually tested on systems that were isolated, had the software and applications installed and had the date changed on boot to sometime in 2000. They broke... almost without exception. Some of them just ended up with weird data bugs that were primarily visual... but many of the programs that had good data integrity checks would crash horribly... in some instances taking entire databases with them.

Believe me, from someone who was in the trenches at the time Y2K could have been a much bigger deal. And even if Joe Blow's Carpet Cleaning didn't do anything to prepare for Y2K, their upgrading their software to Office 98, Windows 98 (or 2000 if they were really radical) fixed a large number of Y2K bugs. And yes, there was code in NT 3.5 (and 4 as I recall) that would have broken on Y2K day... a lot of it API's that other applications used. Many of these were patched later, but they were there.

This is a cool demo and all, but I find it highly unlikely any travelers will ever set foot on a plane where the pilot isn't also on-board. Simply put; radio tech is not perfect and in the event of a systems failure of some description you need a decision-making human being to make the final decision about a resolution. There's also the point of "accepted risk", where the pilot has just as much "skin in the game" as you do as a traveler.

The worst flight I have ever been on was one where the pilot made a pretty lousy decision to proceed into a line of thunderstorms... to the extent that after a forced return to St. Louis due to the stresses the plane had encountered, it was grounded. I don't know how bad it actually was, but I swear the plane was sideways a few times. Anyway, the only thing that kept my mind focused on something other than the potential for a rather untimely demise was the thought that the pilot had as little desire to die as I did and would be doing every damned thing he could to put the plane down in as close to one piece as possible... even if rather hard.

Had I been in the same situation in a plane with no on-board pilot you'd better believe that they'd need to hose out the seat before using it again.

And believe me, the hilarity that ensues from reading some of these transcriptions is better than paying to go to a comedy club once a week. Some of this stuff is absolute gold!

So get your company to pay for unlimited texts... that's what I did. And if they don't, then refuse to receive SMS message on your personal device. If they then say they'll give you a company device, point out that it'd be a lot cheaper for them to just pay for the SMS messages. Again, what I did.

I wouldn't be so sure of that. Inbound and outbound calls, frequency and to whom are a great way to gather data about your relationships with people. They connect this with your profile and use that data to add to their database-of-creepiness so that they can effectively target ads much better at you. If you ONLY use GVoice then no, it's not something they can monetize, but if you use a web browser to read your messages, or log into GMail... whatever.... that data becomes "you".

And this is from someone who's used GVoice for over a year now as my primary voice and messaging service. While it's imperfect (no MMS) and as I said adds to the "creepybase" I like it. Privacy be damned...

Nope, the Tesla Model S's battery pretty much is the entire bottom of the car (with a metal shell over it). This will be an automated system because the battery pack is one single unit. This article is old but has a good picture of the battery pack giving you an idea of the size of the thing. It also weighs a lot... so you won't be doing any wrenching yourself.

Basically the way this will work is that you'll drive up onto a ramp and then a robot will drop the battery pack out and swap it for a new one from underneath. You won't even need to get out of the car.

It takes an awfully long time to go from prototype to production... particularly since anything using this tech in a car would have to go through the NHTSA hoopla.

Actually, they tend to break even or even make a profit over relatively short periods of time. Maintenance is rather low, typically... and the solar panels on the roof feed back into the grid. Even if they build it and no-one comes, the cost of putting it up will pay for itself in less than 10 years just by standing there and gathering solar power.

They're really rather cheaply built; they're big concrete covered parking with solar panels all over the roof. Sounds like a good idea to me :)