Depending on the environment and the available assets to the IT Department.

As an example:

Assume you have VMWare ESXi 5 running on 3 hosts with a vCenter and a combined pool of say 192GB of RAM, 5TB of disk, 3x1Gbps for NAS/SAN/iSCSI and 3x1Gbps for Data/connectivity.

It would become unwise in such an environment (without funds to expand it) to run any system that causes a bottleneck on your environment and thus decrease performance for other systems. This can be:
- Systems with High Disk load such as heavy DB usage or SNMP Traps or Log collection or Backup Storage Servers;
- Systems with High Network usage such as SNMP, Streaming services or E-mail;
- Systems with High RAM usage.

For this example, any of the above utilizing say 15% of your total resources for a single instance server would ultimately become cheaper to run on physical hardware. That is, until your environment can bring that utilization number down to 5% or is warranted/needed/desired for some reason.

In my environment, we have a total of 15 ESXi v5 hosts on Cisco UCS Blades with 1TB of RAM and 30TB of Disk on 10GbE. We do however refrain from deploying:
- Media Streaming servers
- Backup Servers
- SNMP/Log Collection Servers

Hope this helps!

With an atmosphere consisting of over 95% carbon dioxide, wouldn't a few million of these "pods" help the Terra-forming efforts of mars' atmosphere? Sure, it'd take a few MILLION years, but think of the possibilities here!

On the note of the article, it sounds too good to be true really. I don't buy into the idea until a more scientific analysis has been done.

This just reminds me of the whole 1999-2000 debacle of Microsoft's continued use of FreeBSD + Apache for its 1997 acquisition of Hotmail.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotmail

Hotmail originally ran Solaris and FreeBSD in its infrastructure and even after acquisition by Microsoft in 1997, they continued using FreeBSD for much of it. That is, until someone found out about it and leaked it to the public. As I recall, no citations found though, Microsoft hurriedly ported it all to Windows 2000 Server and botched it up several times before getting it right (2002?).

We'd save more money dropping the penny than the dollar:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penny_debate_in_the_United_States

Have no fear, Oracle ala Larry Ellison will find some way to screw it up in the end.

Most people have ZERO faith in Oracle and there's a reason for that... OpenJDK or move to python or Scala or .NET/C#.

Almost sounds like this would require a lot of venture capital to pull off and should warrant far more than a 50k prize.

For large jobs, I can using air blowing conveyor belts to align and feed the scraps into a series of modified industrial sheet fed image scanners and allow a computer to itemize each of the images and convert them to OCR formatted files. Once completed, write a puzzle algorithm to piece them together electronically.

IBM Deskstar 75GXP was the main one, yes. However, I think all of their hard drives at the time had similar issues revolving around the BLUE GLUE used to seal the canister

We all survived the 18GB Deathstar and avoided Fujitsu's sudden death syndrome and it further proves most have had their fair share of failures at one time or another. The only ones I cannot recall any fault with were Quantum and later Maxtor drives. I loved my Fireball and Atlas drives!

SSD's must meet or surpass all of your mentioned categories and overall capacity limits before Magnetic HDD's are cast the way of the floppy disk drive. Even then, look at how long it took to get rid of the floppy disk drive:

Beginning of end for Floppy Disk Drive: 1998 with a CD-ROM drive but no floppy drive
End of the Floppy Disk Drive: 2009 Hewlett-Packard, the last supplier, stopped supplying Floppy Disk Drives on all systems

It could be stated that the HDD is more entwined in technology than the FDD was and so it may be more well more than 11 years before we see Magnetic HDD's disappear from the consumer marketplace.

OCZ's reliability record is in no way different to any other Data Storage Manufacturer past or present.

Seagate's recent 1TB woes: ST31000340AS
Western Digital's recent woes: Caviar Green EARS 1.0TB and 1.5TB SATA

Going further back, anyone who's been around in IT for a decade or longer recalls the old Micropolis 9GB drive failures that sent the company into bankruptcy. In any case, OCZ is a relatively good company and a notable innovator of SSD technology and I personally find most of their products to be just as reliable as any other in the same category.

This just harkens back to the old Apple+Motorola CPU days of "Mac does more with less" attitude.

Yes, these "features" appear to be rather annoying flare rather than actually increasing productivity and usefulness.

Then again, I'm still not a fan of anything touch capacitive and only marginally tolerate touch resistive displays... Even if it means getting a crappier device, I'll take physical buttons and a QWERTY keyboard on a phone any day as I just feel more productive and less error prone having them.

I've been using Daemon Tools Lite, Cygwin with CDrecord or Power ISO for the better part of this decade now to get me what seems to have always been native under *NIX. It'll be nice to have such a feature, but just has useful it'll be in comparison to these other tools remains to be seen.

When Microsoft hosed their search utility in Windows 7, it was programs like Agent Ransack that came to the rescue for people such as me who HATE the Microsoft Indexing Service and horrid search engine in Windows 7.

Citing this as an example, I am willing to bet that other tools, perhaps the revival of Windows/Total Commander level tools will emerge post Windows 8 that will assist us "geezers" to maintain a similar level of keyboard shortcuts without Point-Click to achieve the same objective.

Remember, Microsoft doesn't listen to the people who service or administrate said systems, they listen to the masses who bring them the most money, the consumer.

I think anything Gnome 3 will ever try to do will be too complicated for users... it'll never amount to anything but rubbish. Gnome 2.32.1 http://library.gnome.org/misc/release-notes/2.32/ was the last good version.