I bookmarked their FreeBSD donation page so I could watch the thermometer go up(and hopefully reach the top). I made a donation too since I use FreeNAS and I'm going to solicit a friend to donate since he uses FreeNAS as well.

I haven't read the article yet. I'm about to .. but let me guess what the whole story summed up will say:

"You need to look at cost for the unit and the expected lifespan of the device as well as the expected load and and cost of the electricity to determine if you can save any money by purchasing a more efficient power supply."

I've had some machines that it makes sense to upgrade, and others that it doesn't.

Of course, if you are all about saving the planet then you'll buy the most power efficient power supply on the market regardless of price because you think its saving the planet. Of course, it may not be doing such thing since you expended more resource materials to manufacture the power supply, etc. Not to mention it might cost you more in the long run than the less expensive less efficient power supplies.

I wouldn't bet on that.

My guess is there's no laws that protect from this kind of BS because the gov't wouldn't acknowledge they are possible of that kind of stupidity. Not to mention if it goes to court do you expect a jury to actually find someone guilty because the FBI issued a warrant to do it? If I were on a jury I'd not only disregard that "evidence" but I'd start looking REALLY deeply at the evidence presented and start questioning the FBI's entire case.

So there may be no protections because it's expect that no situation would arise where this would benefit anyone. Except because of how screwed up our laws are now the FBI doesn't have to get a guilty verdict. They just have to keep it tied up in the courts long enough to screw with everything related to the name "Megauploads".

You have a serious lack of understanding of what "quad core" means. And even more of a lack of understanding of what "hyperthreading" does and how it works.

In your context, "quad core" means that you should be able to run 4 different threads at FULL speed. Not ClockSpeed/4, not ClockSpeed*4, ClockSpeed. In theory, if optimized to 100% efficiency, you SHOULD be able to do almost as much work as a 12Ghz CPU(if it is a quad core CPU without HT) and maybe a little more than a 12Ghz CPU. But the reality is that very few processes can be optimized to 100%, but you will NEVER run any program at less than 3Ghz(excluding power saving features).

Hyperthreading decreases the penalty associated with cache misses and minimizes idle CPU time.

It sure is a crappy job, but hey, for $450k salary for LIFE, wouldn't you do a crappy job for 4 years? I sure as hell would. I'd even lie and tell everyone how awesome it was for that kind of pay! I don't know too many people that wouldn't be dishonest for 4 years for that kind of money, and that's the crappy reality of it.

As much as I'd like to think I'm an honest and trustworthy person who would do the right thing, I think Presidents try to do the right thing. But at the same time there's limits(especially on your time).

We as Americans need to actually realize that the President is more of a figurehead than anything and start holding the Congress responsible.

Exactly. That tells me that the politicians know the grass is greener where they are. Let's face it, they get a lot of amazing perks just for being a politician. I'm pretty confident those perks are more substantial than you and I think and those perks make working as a career politician far more lucrative than the "measly" job you and I have. And if you knew those perks were for the rest of your life, wouldn't you be willing to lie to a few people, maybe bend or break some rules, to enjoy those perks?

Yep.. those politicians know the secret sauce to success in this life.

How about devices using iOS? I think this is a great analogy since Microsoft got smacked for Windows with internet browsers(basically an app with the operating system), and Apple could potentially get smacked for iOS with mapping applications(again, an app with an operating system).

I have a few friends that have considered going into Bitcoin. I always make the same comment the parent mentions. All your government has to do is pass a law making it illegal and suddenly its worthless, unless you don't mind breaking the law.

The real question is "How many readers would have known that even 10 reactors were in the path of the hurricane had it not been for the sensationalist article"?

Exactly...

Same here. Used to buy CFLs, but switched to LEDs because they never burn out. Now I have a single circuit in my whole house with a single UPS(300W) for lighting. If I lose power all the lights stay on for about 10 minutes. Very useful at times. Not to mention they never burn out. I have yet to have an LED fail me and my whole house has been LED since 2009.

Do I think I'll make my money back someday? Maybe, maybe not. But I'm glad to have given money to a technology that needs to become more common and get cheaper, so why not invest in it? If everyone is buying LEDs for their homes in 5 years then I'm glad to have done my very meager but useful part to help make LEDs a daily reality.

I'd love to see real data on SSD lifetimes. Here's mine:

2x OCZ Summit 64GB (circa 2009) - See note below for issues I had.
2x Intel X25M G2 160GB - Installed in March 2010 - Both have worked flawlessly and both show 99% of drive life available by SMART E8 entry. One is my main desktop and one my main laptop. Never had an issue with either. Both have estimated EOL of November 2020 and Dec 2021 by SSDLife.
1x Intel X25M G2 120GB - Installed in April 2010 - 99% drive life availabe by SMART. It is the boot drive for Server 2008 R2 and is only a file server. Not much to do there so I'm expecting a very very long life. Estimated EOL Nov 2027 by SSDLife.
1x Crucial C300 128GB - Installed Nov 2010(was boot drive for 2 months by now used for games only) - 86% of life remaining and EOL is Nov 2020.

I don't go too far out of my way to minimize writes. I always disable hibernation and pagefile in Windows for all of my machines. I never use hibernation and my RAM is always 16GB or more. I use the drive like I normally would without regard for the "limited lifespan". If I was going to do something like copy a blu-ray or reencode a video I used to do it using only local drives and then copy it to the server. Now I just do it over the network shares. Otherwise I use my drive just like I always would. Run BOINC on it, etc.

I've gotten a few friends into Intel SSDs, and none of us have had any kind of failure at all ... yet. Everyone's drives are listed as having EOL of 2020 or later. If these drives REALLY do last that long, I expect we'll be throwing them away before 2020 because a 128GB drive will be too small for the OS and a few common programs(Office, etc). I used to tell people to go big because they can take the drive from machine to machine over the next 10 years. It really just doesn't matter though, they're dropping in price so fast you should just buy what you will want for the computer you are using.

One friend bought an OCZ drive because it was really cheap at the time after rebates. He has had to RMA it 4 times in less than 12 months. He's the only person I know personally that hasn't bought Intel, and he is the only one to have any problems.

Personally, I swear by Intels. My experience has been phenomenal with them. I have yet to see an SSD failure personally, and it seems that lots of people have heard stories of Intel drives failing, but I haven't met anyone personally. My experience is that Intel SSDs, reliability-wise, are far superior to rotating rust. I am a little concerned now that Intel is getting away from using their in-house controller and going to Sandforce. After seeing what OCZ drives do and the fact that they use Sandforce I'm a little hesitant to expect a long lifespan from them.

I'm wondering if Intel switched to the cheaper Sandforce despite the lower reliability only because they want to be competitive for the price. Who REALLY buys an SSD expecting a 2020 EOL? Allegedly the newer Intels will have a SMART failure message when you have 1% of the drive left. Intel says that for most users that should be about 2 months of regular use since 1% is not really 1/100th of the drive life remaining. If this is true and I can expect to own the drive for 3-5 years and the drive will give me a SMART error when it is nearing EOL, what more could you ask for? That's nirvana for me!

I will say this. Putting SSDs in every computer I own makes them MUCH more responsive. I've always upgraded every time a new Intel CPU design came out. Right now my desktop is using an Intel i7-920! That's circa Nov 2008. I've NEVER had a computer more than 2 years. Thanks to SSDs the machine still works great 4 years later. I'm thinking of upgrading with the next Intel CPU generation only because the machine is getting old and as a geek I need to be able to justify my geekiness. It's hard to call myself a geek if everyone else is buying $500 Dell machines with more power than my machines. A friend bought a hybrid hard drive. There's just no comparison when it comes to booting up and actually USING the machine.. not looking at benchmarks but actually using it.

* - My Summit drives are used as boot drives for my HTPCs. Both had sudden BSODs while using them. Hit the reset button on the computers and all I would get was "No Operating System Found". I tried to recover from backups, but they wouldn't work(write error). Then tried reinstalling Windows 7. It would give a write error too. I decided to try a secure erase using a Parted Magic disk. After the secure erase the drives have worked perfectly. Ran some read and write tests and could never find any problems. Finally I recovered from backups with no problems. Drives have been working fine for about a year now.

My understanding is that if you are traveling at any velocity up to the speed of light and you measured the speed of light it would always be the same. However, I think weird things would happen if you were traveling at or greater than the speed of light and shone a flashlight in front of you.

You are awesome! I just learned something today. I was confused as to the difference between softlinks and hardlinks. Hardlinks are my new best friend! It's like a super-shortcut :)

Google helped a little bit, but you definitely verified what I realized while googling it. I'll admit, I'm a windoze user, but recently started playing with FreeBSD and Linux and I first heard about soft/hard links a few weeks ago.

But if I'm trying to organize my stuff and I move the original with the 10 hardlinks, those hardlinks will no longer work. To me hardlinks are a good first step to downsize the amount of data you have. Then you have to organize it.

I like this idea (I'm running your program as I write this..) but I'm also thinking that this could backfire. I'm rather new to hardlinks, so this may not be a problem at all.

Is there an easy way to "go back" and have something delete the hard link and copy the original files back?

Let's say I have a folder of random mp3s and an organized folder of albums with all of the tracks. Let's assume that your program just replaced my albums with hardlinks to the songs in the random mp3s folder. As soon as I find my album folders I'll realize I want the original files moved/copied to someplace else and I'll want the original files and not the hardlinks. How do I "undo" the hardlinks and restore the original files?