As I understand it, the differences are mostly mechanical. It's worth noting that the weights of the Green, Red and Black drives are all identical (1.5kg for the 4TB), despite the latter being 7200rpm and the former two being "Intellipower" (5900rpm ?). This suggests they're all mechanically identical. The "Datacentre" drives are heavier (1.66kg @ 4TB), so they are definitely mechanically different. I haven't looked into the specs in depth, but I assume it's an extra platter. If it's not, it's probably a better motor. They're difficult to find these days, but those who have handled 15k 3.5" drives will know they are substantially heavier than 7.2k SATA drives (which I always attributed to better mechanicals). I think you will find the difference between the different consumer-level drives is entirely in firmware (things like TLER, idle head parking, etc).

I hope they weren't being charged by the gigabyte for using the hotel's WiFi.

But I'm fairly sure they don't continue running after the test.

Sounds like fun!

90 miles is frankly pathetic. That's a best case scenario 45 miles there and back; less with frequent starting and stopping. And 45 miles by road is probably not like 35 miles as the crow flies. Imagine a 35 mile radius around your home. You cannot get any further than that without recharging. And that's supposed to be good mileage? I wouldn't hesitate for a second betting a comfortable majority of drivers rarely, if ever, drive more than 90 miles in a day. Heck, I'd be pretty confident that a fairly large proportion (say, between 25% and 50%) rarely exceed 50 miles in a day.

Be aware that for a solar installation feeding power into the grid, you are generally required to have a control system which immediately shuts down your solar generation if the power grid fails. This is for safety reasons (chaps working on the line don't want to find there are still unexpected volts there after they've shut off the supply) and because your system will start to go blue in the face very quickly if it tries to power your entire neighbourhood.

You could have a more sophisticated control system which merely disconnected you from the grid and powered your local devices, but that would of course require some storage of power as well because your load would practically never match your generation. The vast majority of small solar installations do not do this.

OP here, way too late to matter, but still. It was poorly phrased. I missed the comma between high and six-figure. Where I come from, *any* 6-figure income would be considered high...

Simon.

I'm one of said H1B visas, now with a green card. Been here almost exactly 10 years now, after Apple bought my company. I came here for the money and the weather, not for anything else. Frankly I don't think the US society is as "free" as people here seem to believe.

I've mentioned this here before, and (understandably, no-one likes bad news) I tend to get down voted for it, but the simple honest truth of the matter is that the USA isn't geared for looking after people, it's geared towards controlling people. There's things I like about it (the job is great, the weather is excellent, the people (as individuals who I meet day-to-day) are generally wonderful unless driving, the money is still good, I like my house and I met my wife here - my son is dual American/British).

There's things I don't like too, (the militarisation of the police, the lack of any reasonable healthcare, the "I'm alright Jack, screw you" attitude of a *lot* of people - weirdly enough those who often really *aren't* alright, the schooling system, and for lack of any better term, the country's soul). As time passes, and I get older, these seem to be more important. I can't see myself retiring here, and in fact I can't see myself here in another 10 years. That's not the attitude I came to the US with, it's something I've developed while I've been here.

Let's be frank here, I'm not trying to boast, but I'm one of the 'have's - I have a million dollar house (which sounds a lot more impressive than it really is in this neighbourhood) which is almost paid off, I have a high six-figure income, and I've money in the bank. I'm not a "1%er" but I'm up there with the rest... however, even with all of this, I'm not happy with the way the country is going. There's little-to-no safety net for joe public, and seemingly (*both* houses Republican, seriously ?) no desire for that. I think the USA is far closer to oligarchy than democracy, and the long-term trend just looks like it gets worse from here on out.

[sigh]

Simon.

Some of us have a UPS for our cable (well, FTTC actually) modem and firewall, and another for the computer. I prefer things to just keep working.

I found a while back that GMail started flagging e-mails from my server as spam, even for a business customer who had explicitly white-listed my server in their configuration. Setting up DKIM message signing cured that.

Yahoo on the other hand are complete fuck-wits when it comes to spam detection. I've tried in the past to follow up random spam flagging, and they just give you the runaround. I filled in a complicated form with full details of the erroneous spam flagging, and they responded with a request to send all the same information again to an e-mail address, and then when I did the notification bounced because the e-mail address didn't exist.

The only thing you can do with people who use Yahoo for e-mail is teach them how to look in their spam folders. When they do they'll find lots of other non-spam there too. That's the moment to suggest they move to a proper e-mail provider.

Having checked a number of on-line news sites, the best real-time coverage seems to be on XKCD

I love the way the pages come with adverts for people selling CCTV cameras for the home!

And then everyone who visits Spain comments on how late they eat their evening meals.

In reality they don't - they have their evening meals at the same time as everyone else, it's just that their clocks are two hours fast.

Nice to see breakthrough research like this coming from a single-payer healthcare system like the UK. When people start saying that the only places that can afford groundbreaking medical research are the ones where the "customers" pay a fortune, it'll be good to be able to point them to things like this.

Simon

You consider this article positive? Troll logic astounds me!

Slashdot is the Fox News of the open source world. If you aren't blaming Microsoft for everything from Ebola to your dog's farts, you're a paid shill.