I also object to getting bombarded with annoying and often intrusive ad banners begging for money for extended periods of time when a site with the traffic of Wikipedia could probably get as much money with real ad banners in an order of magnitude less time.

I'd wager they'd get more money with one day a year of real ads than they do with their current weeks of begging.

Just because people can't write in fancy cursive script doesn't mean they can't write normally. If you don't teach kids that useless skill, then it won't suddenly mean that they can't jot things down in normal writing when they need to.

Then how about ZFS? No GPL virus there, while simultaneously being much farther along than btrfs and having a good kernel-level Linux port.

The question is, will we get to a point where it won't matter? There will be a point where solid state drives will be cheap enough that you'll be able to get enough storage at a low enough price that people generally won't care. For example, if $50 got you a 500GB SSD or a 2TB hard disk, how many people would pick the hard disk? Even then, those who want more storage might just pony up the extra cash.

Supplementary storage will be the last to go, so perhaps your timeline is more accurate there, but I think we'll see hard disks almost completely disappear from new computers long before then. It's already starting to happen: many notebooks use SSDs now, from the really cheap Chromebooks to the really expensive retina macbooks.

6TB for $300 is $50 per terabyte, while current pricing is around $400 per terabyte. That's a factor of 8, not 16. I based my math on 18 month doubling, but that's for performance rather than density, so I was admittedly off. Still, that should take you to roughly 3 * 24 = 6 years, not far off my original figures.

In terms of the applicability of Moore's Law to SSD pricing, prices for SSDs have been dropping far faster than Moore's law since the first practical SSDs hit the market. My first consumer SSD was purchased in 2009 at $8750 per TB. Prices today are at about $400 per TB. That's a factor of 22 price drop in roughly five years.

Sandforce controllers also do encryption, and certain controllers with certain operating systems can leverage this to integrate the controller-level encryption with the OS-level encryption, at which point the drive compression is done on the raw data before encryption happens.

The price per GB on SSDs has been below $0.50 for some time now.

SSDs will likely get there in 3-5 years by Moore's law. The question is where hard drives will be by then.

Those percentages are out of date. The percentages from the latest update are:

It's not achievable in the near future, because the speed at which the batteries can absorb energy isn't the sole limiting factor. Charging an 85 kWh battery pack in 5 minutes requires a charging cable/port that is dumping slightly more than a megawatt into the car, which isn't practical. The limitations are things like the cable, the connector, the power grid, etc.

A far more likely scenario is that charging will get a little bit faster, and battery swaps will be used when more speed is required.

There's enough in that comment that is verifiable bullshit that it makes me question the parts of it that don't seem ridiculous at first glance.

Yet another development stack? Some of us have been using it for more than a decade. When .NET was released, most of today's popular Linux distros (Ubuntu, Gentoo, Fedora, CentOS, Arch, OpenSUSE, or any of the popular mobile Linux distros like Android or ChromeOS) didn't even exist. I realize that many of those distros are forks of previous distros, but the point is that .NET isn't exactly the new kid on the block.

The C# version is using Linq. Which, as a C# developer, I've never really been able to wrap my head around. Now, that might be due to lack of trying, in that I've never really been forced to deal with Linq in a manner where I couldn't just work around it, and I've never put any serious effort into training on it, but an awful lot of it seems to be of the non-obvious-way-to-do-things variety. The entire X => X.Something syntax seems confusing and illogical to me. Where does the type of X come from? Where are the properties coming from? What's with the X => bit? If "IsCar" is a property of the members of the myVehicles array, why can't I do something like "myVehicles.where(IsCar).select(LegRoom).sort().foreach(display)?

Perhaps my aversion to Linq is because my exposure to it has been having very complex use of it randomly thrown at me in large projects without having learned it first, and then having to make changes in that Linq code without having been given the time to properly understand it in the first place.

Microsoft is opensourcing the vast majority of the .NET framework, but if they're focusing on the server-side stuff, there may be some client-side bits that aren't, such as Windows.Forms. So Mono might not so much go away as it could end up just focusing on the bits that Microsoft hasn't opensourced.

They're opensourcing the entire server stack... which happens to contain nearly the entirety of the client-side stack. You'll miss Windows.Forms and WPF, sure, but Windows.Forms already has opensource implementations courtesy of Mono (which I would imagine should run on Microsoft's implementation of .NET), and WPF never really took off, leaving Windows.Forms still more popular. The reason that Mono never implemented WPF was apparently due to lack of interest and resources... Well, Microsoft may have just removed the necessity for Mono to do work on anything *but* the client-side bits, so those resources may now be available.

That said, I believe that there is far more software out there written using server-side .NET than client-side.