So? It's still pretty good.

This. I don't understand why people shun optical media so much. When a good burner and a good disc is used, it's still a great archival medium.

I can confirm this. In Finland you get premium electricity in most places. On the other hand, the amount of "sick" buildings is cropping up: there's moisture in structures, improperly configured ventilation, poor heating, and whatnot. :( But hey, you get proper power to read Slashdot.

I know, it's amazing. :)

Actually that story seems to still continue with two of the disks approaching 1.5 PB written.

The problem is that the SSD cache of a hybrid disk is quite small; you can approach the same amount with your file system cache in the RAM, and it's faster anyway.

I already wonder that when I see my system sitting 99% time in iowait if a modern CPU is paired with any mechanical HDD. It's an almost unacceptable bottleneck.

True. In the same way that it is hard to increase the rotational speed, getting past the average 12 ms seek time is tricky.

Not in meaningful amounts.

You must be joking. Mechanical hard disks do not have wear leveling. They only have some extra space to remap some individual failed sectors. The media of a mechanical HDD does not really wear out anyway.

So what? A meteor could crash on your computer too. RAID still offers extra protection against loss of data.

That has nothing to do with using RAID or not. Even normal backups wouldn't survive that, unless they are in a fireproof container or stored off-site.

Hah hah! That is no guarantee. Very often the "response" is just crickets chirping. The actual benefit of Linux is that you can hire your own engineers to write code to the kernel or other open source components.

A content-aware firewall made of rubber is the professional solution.

As far as I know, it's a Windows-only malware. There's some technical details in F-Secure's blog. Of course a Linux or FreeBSD version could also be created, as there is plenty of vulnerabilities in those operating systems too.

Newer codecs would still have inflated the hardware requirements. H.264 takes more crunch than MPEG-2. However, as you point out, the main problem is that the YUV overlay is not used in web browser video players. One can see the difference when he downloads a video from YouTube with youtube-dl or plays it via MiniTube: the CPU usage is much lower.