There actually isn't any debate over properly mastered vinyl vs. properly mastered digital...digital wins every time in a double blind test for accurate reproduction. For people who like vinyl (and analog amplifiers) because the sound is "warmer", etc., that's fine for their personal taste, but it's not an accurate reproduction.

In the same vein, with many current digital recordings having extremely limited dynamic range, vinyl of the same music with correct range is a much more accurate representation of the original music. This is one of the big reasons that vinyl is having a resurgence among people who want accurate reproduction of their music.

The mouse lag on a 24 or 30Hz display will drive you nuts when you are trying to select a block of text.

If you are a keyboard-only editor, it's not as bad, but even highlighting text or trying to page down quickly will likely send you back to a high-speed multi-monitor setup.

I agree. Unfortunately, no Intel desktop CPU/chipset supports ECC, and many AMD desktop chipsets are castrated by the board manufacturer to not allow ECC.

When RAM was slow and 4GB was huge and expensive, this wasn't as big a deal, but now that 8GB is the reasonable starting point and 32GB is quite affordable, Intel especially needs to step up and add ECC support to their desktop CPUs/chipsets.

Google, et.al., keep their data because they can monetize it. Comcast will have to keep this data despite the fact that it not only won't make them money, but will cost them money since they will have to have people to search it for the legal requests.

Plus, I can generate thousands of connections per second and Comcast will have to log them all. If my both my neighbor and I have Comcast, I might just set up a box to do nothing but flood his WiFi with connections, just to cost Comcast money.

Why didn't you just refer to the LHC web page and imply that you are writing at that same data rate to a single SSD...it would have exactly the same value as an argument.

It's also why the Prius would get about 40mpg even if it had no hybrid features. If Toyota sold that car, they'd really corner the market, as it would have a better ROI than the hybrid Prius, and wouldn't have any risk about battery replacement (which isn't always covered by warranty).

If you don't use ECC memory, you will have memory corruption. Even if you do use ECC memory, you might have corruption, and it might even go unnoticed, but the odds are far less likely.

"Corruption" in this sense doesn't mean that whole DIMMs are broken...it just means that one bit has changed in a way that the user/OS/CPU didn't want it to. In many cases, this can be completely harmless (e.g., graphical data used in-memory only has one bit wrong...you might not even notice a color shift if it's the LSB), a little annoying (e.g., unexpected program termination), or very annoying (e.g., BSOD). But, if this happens in memory used for disk write buffers, then you get the issue that the GP had you Google for.

Even better, as now all the WiFi users appear to come from a single IP as far as the MPAA/RIAA is concerned, which means the only way they can get more info is if Comcast keeps insanely detailed records about every one of these connections. Keeping normal accounting information won't be enough to identify a copyright infringer...Comcast would also have to keep the IP/port connection logs from the NAT device.

Cray CS series.

The one assumption you make here is that the credit card user is on the ball, and swipes either before the final total is rung or immediately after. I have seen many customers stand there until the cashier tells them the total, then reach into their wallet/purse and hunt the credit card, swipe it the wrong way, finally get it right, then hit "debit" on a card that is credit only.

Granted, these same people would likely take even longer to pay with cash, but I can see why some people think that cash is faster, based on anecdotes.

It's a completely separate segment of the private IP space, but once it heads through the router, every other device on the Internet (including the MPAA/RIAA scanners) will see the exact same public IP as the customer is given.

I'm assuming that Comcast doesn't have 50,000 spare routable IP addresses, but that's not a bad assumption.

This problem is easily solved by not turning on WiFi unless you know you are going to connect.

For me, I use an app on Android that keeps WiFi off unless I am in a location where I have already said I want to auto-connect to a specific network. It uses cell tower IDs and GPS to determine where I am.

At this point, you can get a "supercomputer" in a rack for around US$500K, and it uses about 20kW of power.

Sure, it's not going to set any records, but with 500-1000 cores and 5-10TB of RAM, it's a lot more than most users will ever see. Heck, we have 40-core systems with over 2TB of RAM that fit in 2U. Again, not a supercomputer, but certainly a lot more power than in most single systems.

Based on TFA, I suspect the "cost" of $150K was what the time on the computer might sell for if somebody outside the project wanted to use it, not actual cost of electricity used. Most of these projects (like where I work) have computer resources that are free to use for all researches directly associated with the project, but could have a charge back for others. And, as others have stated, general purpose computers are pretty bad at mining, so it might have taken a lot of CPU-hours, and that's what the accountants are looking at. Here, we do have systems that would do fairly well at bitcoin mining (8 nVidia GPUs per 2U box), but they (like the other systems) are so busy doing actual work that nobody could possibly get enough idle cycles to do anything. That's why I put "cost" in quotes...if a system that is supposed to be used for research isn't doing enough that somebody could find that much idle time, then the system was either overbuilt or under-advertised.

For spinning disks, maybe not, but for SSDs, Samsung is king, especially their new M.2 XP941 model with 4 PCIe lanes.

Not according to real world testing.

Those are 240-256GB drives that have all had 600TB written to them, and many haven't even started to dip into the protected sectors. That's already up to 2400 P/E cycles on drives with 3000 or less on their specs. To put it into real-world terms, that's the equivalent of completely erasing the drive every day for 6.5 years. I think they'll last the same 7 to 8 years as your hard drives when used more realistically.