Ever notice that the only things they ever cut are the services, never the wasted people who do nothing useful? It's blackmail, pure and simple for keeping the status quo that benefits useless paper pushers.

Mod parents up. Gee, no one wants a ride in space either, if it costs the GDP of a small country.

I've had no failures yet, but I did as the OP - I put all the high write frequency stuff someplace else, be it a ram drive or a spinner. I only use the (intel) SSDs for write-only or write-mostly stuff, and they seem fine being used for that - put the write-pounding stuff someplace else. Linux makes that fairly easy to do, though I have had issues where it boots so fast off the SSD that some of the places it wants to write - on a spinner - haven't spun up yet and it takes some interesting sysadmin work to get a workaround for that. Ok, it's only 5 or so machines, of varying ages, but...so far, so good - and one is the main house server.

Pure electrics really aren't for road trips. If that's what you're into, and don't want to sacrifice luxury - get a Volt. Fallback to hybrid mode is seamless.

My campus (4 buildings) is fully off-grid solar, and has been for a few decades. It easily charges my Chevy Volt, which is my daily driver.

This is what the Chevy Volt does. Separate cooling/heating system for the batteries, very complex as it regulates each small group of cells. Super cold, the range does still go down a bit, since Chevy is just protecting long term battery life with this, not keeping the temperature in the "ideal" range - since that is a losing game. These batteries don't seem to generate a ton of heat in normal driving - low ESR. Not sure what the Tesla design does, but I own a Volt and so looked into it all carefully for that car. And oh, I love my electric car. These things are just cool. I charge mine off my solar array. Goodbye ga$oline, and good riddance.

Mod parent up.

I don't think mine sucks. I love it. Chevy Volt. Has a fanboy webpage, not GM sponsored. gmvolt.com. We talk about the others, many of us either wish we had a Tesla - or DO. Funny thing - the least little thing wrong with any of our cars gets discussed. And we here almost nothing bad about Tesla, even though we're not his fan-group. What cold hard facts? People who, unlike this reporter, have some brains, and enough money to buy an electric almost universally love them. I prefer the mixed-hybrid Volt, as it can be an only car even if you do like to take long trips, and don't want to wait for even a super-charger to fill it back up. Guess what Bob Lutz (the guy who influenced GM to make the Volt) says? They'd never have made this great car if Elon hadn't prodded them in the ass with his.

I drive a Chevy Volt - same deal, that heater is a pig. I'm not fully informed of the design of the Tesla, but the Volt also will use its own battery power, to an extent, to keep the battery warm enough to function reliably. The obvious, and owner's manual workaround, is to leave the car plugged in when not driving it - then any energy it needs to keep the battery warm comes from the plug. Further, at least for the Volt, you can "start" the car while it's plugged in, and so heat the cabin and battery before unplugging. In my case, that will usually leave me with winter (all electric) range only slightly shorter than summer - about 15% less when it's truly cold.

I love my Volt. I wish for a Tesla, but I'll have to wait for two things:

More money.

When I can just pick one up, instead of putting down money upfront and hoping they last long enough to deliver mine.

Or not - this is small potatoes. I want to see banksters hung - they stole a lot more.

Well, I believe you can still be into responsibility and readiness without being an outright enemy of the government. At least you can in my eyes. Theirs? Dunno. You can become a suspect for merely having a lot of food stashed. Almost all the old-time farmers/gardeners are therefore now "terrorists" by that definition. WTF? Most of 'em have guns too - handy tool when varmints are messing with your stuff (4 legged kind). So now we have the DHS saying that the safest, salt of the earth people, on whom we all depend to eat - fairly important - share considerable characteristics with "terrorists"? This is not the country I grew up in. It WAS the land of the free, the home of the brave. We are obviously no longer free, and evidently no one is brave enough to stop this developing tyranny in its tracks. Clearly, Dorner is at least half a nut-case. Does that justify hurting all these truly innocents, now and from now on? Ever seen the government give back a power, ever in your life? Not me, and I'm no spring chicken.

Perhaps he has no need at all for the mailing list they think is worth all the money, and simply wants to unbundle. Fierce negotiation about things like that is the norm in business deals. You want to sell me the entire album, I just want the single. Who is being a hypocrite? Who needs a political mailing list post-retirement?

Even since PII and PIII, we'd been speccing an above-average graphics card on our dev machines in a software shop to get better performance per buck - and not just on games.

To run some older Protel CAD tools. The very old (and used to be free) pcb editor now costs in the tens of thousands of dollars, and for my use case, isn't even as good. The old one runs fine on freedos, is fast as crap on new hardware, and gets my job done. And, the graphics are great.

Mod parent up. And hey guys, as an old fart developer who does it all, I love perl for where it fits - which turns out to be a surprisingly large number of places. Use the right tool for the job - that's the rule. You want windows-only blinding-fast, static linked, self installing GUI apps? Use C++/MFC, screw .net for almost anything, it's a wannabe language. You gotta go really fast and do funny things to tons of numbers - you might dip into assembly. You wanna write your own hard-deadline realtime opsys? You're going to wind up with asm and C. You want fast cgi that is reliable and catches all the edge cases? Perl, no question at all there. Ducktape? Perl. Cross platform gui apps? Perl + gtk, with the xml for the gui after the __END__ tag, all in one file.

You need a small time script to collect data from your USB device (it's code was in C), then plot it in 4 dimensions in gnuplot? Perl. There are certain advantages to having the interpreter written together with the language, which is why perl kicks java around the block, speedwise, but not everything has to be super fast. At least perl doesn't go off on demented errands of its own at unpredictable times like java does. I'd guess most of us older guys thought that java was a joke - since it seemed bad C programmers couldn't stop leaking memory or using dangling pointers, java makes it all a reference. If you don't get that joke, you're not a real programmer.

Example 4d plot - this code is only a few very readable pages (and it's free to download on my site) since you can code in perl to make it look very C like and readable. It took entire hours to write, most of that figuring out gnuplot's strangenesses. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJe0YBAXwPw The gui, not shown in this movie is pretty simple, but allows you to put in perl code (presets are saved) into edit boxes for axis mapping - you can paste an entire program in there if you want to do something really complex. And it managed to run on that much data in a fraction of a second while using the slow eval string 4 times per loop iteration on the raw input.

This would have taken a week in C (to write)...PHP? Does it do hardware, like finding USB stuff by-id?