That's curious. Almost all of the drive failures I've seen can be attributed to head damage from repeated parking prior to spin-down, whereas all the drives that I've kept spinning continuously have kept working essentially forever. And drives left spun down too long had a tendency to refuse to spin up.

I've had exactly one drive that had problems from spinning too much, and that was just an acoustic failure (I had the drive replaced because it was too darn noisy). With that said, that was an older, pre-fluid-bearing drive. I've never experienced even a partial bearing failure with newer drives.

It seems odd that their conclusions recommended precisely the opposite of what I've seen work in practice. I realize that the plural of anecdote is not data, and that my sample size is much smaller than Google's sample size, so it is possible that the failures I've seen are a fluke, but the differences are so striking that it leads me to suspect other differences. For example, Google might be using enterprise-class drives that lack a park ramp....

I think you missed the all-electric part.

What makes electric cars great is that they are incredibly simple. They aren't loaded down with ten thousand dollars worth of emissions control parts that fail every time someone sneezes. They don't have vacuum lines that get clogged with carbon deposits because some Ford engineer put a hole in a metal baffle, causing the EGR hose to suck oil straight up out of the valve cover and into the intake manifold. And so on.

Hybrids, by contrast, are unnecessarily complex systems that combine all of the reliability drawbacks of an internal combustion engine design with nearly all of the drawbacks of an all-electric design with the sole exception of the range limitation.

Thanks, but no thanks.

I'll be interested in a hybrid the minute the ICE becomes a replaceable, standardized, outboard component. If Tesla sold a $500 "Tesla Pod" that hangs an off-the-shelf AC/DC electrical generator from your back bumper for when you want extended range, that might be interesting. As long as the ICE is an integral part of the vehicle, it's a maintenance headache that I'd much rather do without. And if I'm going to have the maintenance headaches of a built-in ICE, I expect to also get the benefits of an ICE, like all that extra torque from a V6.

Too bad folks haven't done the whole mass shotgun extinction trick with the European starlings. You've never seen such a mess as when a flock of those things descends on your yard. There's something inherently wrong about looking out at your yard and seeing nothing but black where the grass should be, because they've completely blotted out the ground. And the next morning, your sidewalk is practically solid white with bird crap. Just disgusting. I don't think "invasive species" quite covers it. :-)

Question: Is pulling over for 30 seconds to reprogram your toy really that big a deal?

When you're driving along an interstate and are trying to figure out what exit has food, yes. Yes, it is. There's no valid reason not to allow a passenger to change the destination while the vehicle is in motion. It's an unnecessary safety misfeature that reduces usability while providing no benefit whatsoever. (The in-dash GPS is pretty much useless for the driver anyway, because it isn't readily visible, and there's no way that any driver could feasibly program it while driving, so if somebody is reprogramming it while the vehicle is in motion, it is almost guaranteed to be a passenger, not the driver.)

There are still plenty of effects in real pianos that are not emulated properly. Two examples: resonances in the other strings of the piano when you strike a string, and striking a key, leaving it half-pressed, and striking again. The piano pedals are also not easy to emulate, I understand, but I don't know the details.

No question about it. There are things I can do on a grand that I can't do on any synth that I've tried. One trick I like to do is bell tones, where you give it just enough sustain pedal to get a little bit of ring and then play semi-staccato. That falls pretty soundly under "extended techniques", of course. In principle, it shouldn't be hard to make a software synth that can emulate that behavior, just by using a volume pedal instead of an on-off switch for the sustain pedal, and writing the software to model the instrument's behavior sufficiently. AFAIK, nobody has done it, though.

For that matter, I have yet to hear one that emulates the extra richness you get from a piano when you push the sustain pedal, but I haven't used any recent piano VIs, so I'd imagine somebody has done it by now, given how trivial it should be to emulate.

Either way, digital simulations of pianos are good enough to be generally usable. That's more than can be said for any digital brass I've heard to date. For example, consider the Garritan family of trombone sounds. Despite the fact that pretty much any normal tenor trombone played by any professional (and most high school and college students, statistically) has an F rotor, none of their trombone sounds go down below an E except the bass trombone stop, which makes them all almost completely and utterly useless for real-world use, where non-bass trombone parts routinely drop into that range.

The bass trombone stop has the range, but unfortunately, it has a very slow attack (which is somewhat realistic for larger bore trombones, mind you). To sound correct, the player should compensate for the slow attack and should play slightly ahead of the beat like a real trombone player does. Unfortunately, it doesn't, and as a result, in fast music, it ends up playing a quarter beat behind the rest of the ensemble, and it sounds like utter crap.

And those are just the problems that are bad enough that even the most tone-deaf person would notice them if you didn't work around them. Compared to that, getting a "mostly good enough" piano sound is easy. :-)

True, and it also depends a lot on how thick the orchestration is. In the middle of a dense mix, I'd be hard-pressed to tell the difference between the real thing and a virtual instrument. In a solo passage over thin orchestration, the difference is usually glaringly obvious, at least to people who have spent any significant amount of time listening to the real thing.

BTW, what does a cimbasso sound like? I'm guessing it's a lot like a bass trombone, just judging by the shape of the tubing. No?

Even during a deep traversal, AFAIK, it is just using modification information in the filesystem, not reading the entire file. Otherwise, a deep traversal would take as long as a full backup (days) instead of a tiny fraction of that time.

Now if the length of the file changes because of filesystem corruption, that's another matter.

I suppose it depends on the ensemble as to who says no. Either way, the problem is that someone says no. :-)

None of those things qualify as "extended techniques" except the pitch bends, multiphonics, and lip slurs. Everything else is stuff we instrumentalists do every day, in pretty much every piece, sometimes because the director says, "Could we make that a bit brighter/more brassy," but more often, intuitively, based on what's happening in other parts, without any notation to guide us.

That's why it is always almost immediately obvious whether a brass recording was done with real instruments or synths, even with really good sample sets. The sample sets just can't reproduce the richness of a real-world performance.

Okay, maybe not for trumpet punctuation in a pop song, but....

Only files modified by a vnode write operation.

Even in art music this is a noticeable trend. I'm active in classical music fora and filesharing circles, and I'm amazed at how many fans with many hundreds or thousands of CDs have no interest in going to the concert hall, because they are more comfortable in how classical music sounds off a CD or FLAC download (for example, a solo violin or cello in a concerto will likely be mixed louder on a disc than it sounds in live performance).

Don't blame the CD. Blame the soloist who refuses to be miked during the live gig.

Remember when drum machines threatened to put all drummers out of work?

And now, a rather large percentage of modern music uses at least some sampled drums. Mind you, it is often triggered by an actual drummer, though not always.

This.

And the reality of the matter is that digital instruments do a good job of replicating piano, organ and other keyboard instruments. They can also do a halfway decent job with mallet-based percussion. However, it really isn't feasible to digitally replicate the sound of non-percussive instruments like brass and woodwinds, because there are simply too many different things that a real instrument player can do to change the quality of the sound. For example, when playing a brass instrument, you can:

• Vary the position and tightness of the lips and jaw to change the tone to be brighter or more mellow
• Start and stop notes with anything from crisp tonguing all the way down to "lip tonguing", resulting in radically different attacks and cutoffs
• Lip slur between notes instead of tonguing
• Vary the volume of a single note arbitrarily while you're playing it
• Vary the pitch while you're playing it
• Sing while you play a note (multiphonics)

And so on. There's simply no feasible way for software to simulate all those different variables without modeling the entire instrument, and even if you did that, you'd have to have a much more complex input controller than keyboards or wind controllers or any other MIDI input device that currently exists. By the time you've learned to play something as complex as that, you'll probably find that it's easier to learn to play the actual instrument. :-)

Depends on the backup methodology. If your backup works the way Apple's backups do, e.g. only modified files get pushed into a giant tree of hard links, then there's a good chance the corrupted data won't ever make it into a backup, because the modification wasn't explicit. Of course, the downside is that if the file never gets modified, you only have one copy of it, so if the backup gets corrupted, you have no backup.

So yes, in an ideal world, the right answer is proper block checksumming. It's a shame that neither of the two main consumer operating systems currently supports automatic checksumming in the default filesystem.