The Office Open XML format (ending in .docx for word documents) is supported by Microsoft Office 2007 (released in 2006) and newer, as well as OpenOffice. In order to find a release of Office that doesn't support it, you'd have to go back to Office 2003.

Unfortunately, as of a little over a year ago, Office 2003 was still in use by ~28% of businesses. Of course, there's overlap, so 85% also used Office 2010.

Notably, OpenOffice's marketshare has crashed. The same statistics show that it was at 13% usage in 2011, and 5% usage in 2013. It seems to have been largely replaced by cloud solutions, since things like Google Docs has the primary feature that most people used OpenOffice for: the price.

Proprietary formats can't be universally judged as good or bad. There are plenty of counter-examples in both directions. For example, the lack of DRM in the Atari 2600 killed the videogame industry by allowing a huge flood of low quality games to flood the market, and the presence of DRM in the NES revived it by allowing Nintendo to act as a gatekeeper to stop that from happening.

It has landing legs. When it hits at a 45 degree angle (that's a lot more than "slightly wrong"), the legs on that side break and the engine assembly smashes into the landing pad.

SpaceX is putting six Orbcomm G2 satellites in orbit per F9 launch, and they're putting ten Iridium NEXT satellites in orbit per F9 launch. Neither set of launches seem to be anywhere close to mass limited, which would indicate possible cost saving measures when building the satellites (you can build them a bit heavier if it saves money or increases on-orbit endurance).

What the actual limit per launch is, I don't know, but it's demonstrably much higher than two satellites. I suspect it would be more limited by the number of times the second stage can reliably relight, or how much delta v each satellite is capable of after release.

They just announced today that the rocket that will be putting these things up will cost $10 million and have a LEO payload capacity of 225 kg... making it one of the most expensive launchers in the world, nearly ten times the cost per kilo of SpaceX. How they expect this to work with such insanely high costs is beyond me.

They had only dug a little more than a quarter of the ring when it was cancelled.

Tesla's comparable car isn't the Model S, it's the Model 3. It does not promise double the range, and it will also only be out in two years.

I don't pretend to know much about the American tax system, but I use TurboTax for my taxes in Quebec (where I have the privilege of basically doing my tax twice because the provincial and federal government each have complete sets of tax forms to fill out, but only in Quebec). TurboTax standard costs $18 and is what around 82% of people use (based on the number of reviews for each version). But if I didn't want to use TurboTax, there are something like 20 other tax programs out there, many of them cheaper, some of them free.

So, what's the big deal? Don't like what TurboTax charges, use something else.

RAM that doesn't get wiped when I lose power? Well, modern operating systems basically simulate that anyhow. Who actually turns off a laptop instead of just closing the lid to sleep it? And even when you do turn something like Windows off, these days it actually just goes to sleep or hibernates in the background. There are also diminishing returns for throwing more RAM at problems, so going from the current, say, 16GB to 1TB isn't going to change much. Loading games, for example, still would take time, because the system still has to decompress stuff. Going from SSDs that can do 100MB/s to SSDs that can do 500MB/s didn't reduce load times by 80%.

Two points to make:

1) per-byte accessing doesn't matter for secondary storage, because your filesystem is still going to want to write things in blocks. You'll still want to have logical chunks of data to have checksums for and such.

2) Modern SSDs already do the whole hybrid approach, mixing SLC and MLC/TLC. And I'm not talking enterprise drives, I'm talking the cheapest budget drives. Samsung, for example, calls this "TurboWrite", and they include it in their "EVO" drives, which are some of the lowest cost-per-gig drives on the market. They allocate a small portion of each TLC drive as SLC, and all the writes hit the SLC first. This provides both a nice speed boost (since SLC erases so much faster), and a nice reduction in write amplification (since SLC has an effectively unlimited lifespan from a practical standpoint).

So, replacing that SLC with RRAM would certainly provide a performance improvement, but it wouldn't be a huge difference.

10 years ago? Sure, that's in the ballpark of when consumer SSDs started to become a thing. Intel getting into the game 7 years ago blew it open, but they weren't the first. So ten years ago, you wouldn't have been crazy for following Moore's Law and making a prediction that flash-based storage arrays would eventually make sense.

In terms of legacy disks being as dead in 10 years as tape is today, there are a few problems with that. First is that tape isn't dead, it's still in widespread use in enterprise (it's still the best medium for corporate backups), and second is that there are enough new developments in the works for keep magnetic discs competitive with flash for years.

I'm not saying that it'll be the case forever, but saying that legacy HDDs will be dead in 10 years sounds like a radical prediction.

His original point is kind of solid, though. There was about the same amount of time, give or take a few months, between Windows XP and 8.1 as there was between Windows 2.1 and XP. Yes, windows TWO point one.

That's kind of my point, though. If people are skeptical that Tesla can hit $35k, then why would Chevy's $30k claims for the same range be any more believable?

The Tesla Model 3 is scheduled for release in 2017. The Chevrolet Bolt is scheduled for release in 2017. I'm not seeing the problem here, I'm comparing the projected costs of two 2017 models.

Tesla would seemingly need the battery cost reductions from their "GigaFactory" to get the cost of their 200-mile electric car down to $35,000, and Chevy is going to sell a 200-mile EV for $30,000 without those cost reductions?

Something's gotta give to pull that off.