I don't get this, though - or at least, I'd think those heuristics could be improved. If recent I/O usage is very light (typical desktop?), why not flush immediately? Delaying enables better throughput (via batching/reordering, I guess?), but if write rate is very low we don't care about throughput anyway, so there's no issue.

Yeah, that could be relevent, actually; if they wanted to kill the high-end Ultrasparcs (which seems likely?), a really good translator could let them make Solaris available on, say, a 32-socket Power6 p595.

Yes, but there are a lot of legacy Solaris apps that are complied for Sparc. You wouldn't think recompiling them would be a massive hardship, but...

IBM also recently bought Transitive, the leading CPU-soft-emulation company. They produce the Power emulator that Apple ships in every Intel Mac, and also have products to emulate Mainframe on x86 and Sparc on x86 or Power.

I had assumed they bought the company just to kill the Mainframe-on-x86 product, but this could actually provide a reasonable path forward; keep Solaris but migrate it to x86 or Power6.

Given the price of launching things to space, you could use scotch whiskey instead and it wouldn't affect the cost or feasibility of this plan.

They didn't give them the money, they loaned them the money at 5% interest, escalating to 9% after three years, with the government having priority over equity holders in the event of a default.

And, in fact, they haven't spent that money at all; that's what Congress was flaming about in the hearing the other day. (Alutthough buying distressed companies would fulfull the purpose, assuming the buyer were strong enough...)

But maybe you haven't been paying attention, or are you just not letting a few facts keep you from getting a good hate on?

$27/L is pretty expensive for a fuel with about the same energy content as gasoline.

Several of the stories (and amazon.com) indicate that, yes, the new version will charge via USB.

False.

I know that's become a big talking point, but if you go look at the actual "statistic" at the beginning of that game of telephone, it's actually something like "50% of bankruptcies had some medical expenses in the previous six months".

By and large, bankruptcies are caused by unanticipated job loss.

It's worse than you think. Even if you have a place to back it up, the I/O rates on modern HDs aren't increasing nearly as fast as capacity. Reading at top speed, it would take almost 7 hours to pull all the data off this drive, even if you have someplace to put it. Similarly, if you're using it as part of a RAID set, it'll take that long to rebuild if you have a failure.

Pretty soon the MTBF on these drives will be a significant fraction of (capacity)/(read rate); that will make for fun all around.

On the other hand, MIT has excellent shooting and fencing teams. We'll just see whose athletic program is superior when the zombie horde overruns Cambridge!

Of course that is hurting not just our AE efforts, but also Iran and Venezuela. I am not sure that the Saud's care one way or another about these 2 countries.

I don't know about Venezuela, but I'm pretty sure the Saud's would be quite happy to see the Iranian government (which as you say, really needs oil prices > $80/barrel) weakened or worse...

Maybe, maybe not. It's also the case that a battery (like in the current Tesla) has mostly constant power and voltage output over its whole discharge range, whereas a capacitor outputs power more and more slowly as it runs down. I'm not sure that would be acceptable in a sportscar... or maybe the discharge rate in the capacitor is plenty high to begin with? In either event you have to deal with variable voltage output from the capacitor system, which may make the electronics a lot nastier...