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Comment Re:People eat grass? (Score 1) 47

It doesn't matter how much land it takes to create animal protein, not per se, not in relation to sustainability.

The Great Plains once has giant herds of bison roaming across them. Humans could eat those bison sustainably as long as they didn't take enough bison to disturb the equilibrium between bison and grass. Taking one bison out of the equation would simply cause the equilibrium to produce one more bison. Reducing the buffalo herd from 25 million to 600 on the other hand is a different matter.

What matters for sustainability is the disruption of natural systems, not the acreage.

Comment Re:How about transfer rate and reliability? (Score 1) 215

my SSD (OCZ) is still kicking even if it spent half its life in a XP machine without any TRIM support

OCZ? That's probably why it survived.

Last summer I dismantled a whole bunch of HDDs for recycling, and you can see modern drives are cheaply built (no dessicant cartridge, less filtering and other stuff). That's the price to pay for the capacity race.

So were those all consumer-level drives, or were any of them sold as "enterprise"?

Comment Re:Cheap laptops (Score 1) 215

I haven't laptop-shopped in a long while, I'm kind of awash in them right now, but last time I looked even most fairly low-end laptops were offered either with a small SSD or a larger HDD; say, 40/250, 80/400, 120/500, something like that. The very-lowest-end machines (netbooks) were coming with as little as 4GB flash, but up to 16 or rarely 32GB as you say. It was however often on a module that you could upgrade if it wasn't already a 32GB.

Comment Re:How about transfer rate and reliability? (Score 1) 215

But at least when a drive is getting ready to donate its' magets to the fridge door, it usually makes noises, clicks, squeals, etc. That gives time to back it up.

I've only had one 3.5" drive warn me with scary noises before the noises were so scary that they frightened it out of giving me any data. In fact, the first 3.5" drive I had fail did so silently but with the smell of smoke — turned out that it (a Seagate half-height RLL drive whose ST- number shall remain forgotten if I am lucky, I could use that space for phone numbers) had experienced stiction and then burned the stepper power trace off the board. By the time a jumper wire had been soldered across the trace, the drive cooled down and it spun up and functioned again. The next time it stuck hard and burned the trace off again, so I just popped the case lid off without damaging the foam gasket, reached in and spun the spindle with my thumbs and then popped the lid back on after giving it a quick puff to blow any dust off the top platter, soldered on another jumper, and it worked faithfully until I retired it. I believe that was a 40MB with at least three platters, if you could see 'em you could've about counted the cylinders. It never made a bad noise through the whole experience, and it was basically an antique by modern standards.

I did have one 2.5 inch drive develop massive bearing whine before failure, but I've had two fail silently.

Comment Re:How about transfer rate and reliability? (Score 1) 215

I have my swap on a ramdisk (ducks)

don't you? I do. It's compressed, too. And what's more, you can have this on your phone. Most of the alternate Android kernels I've tried have come with zRam support, but it was also [relatively] recently added to Ubuntu as a default feature.

actual swap is so 1990s. even in the last decade I was mostly disabling it. in fact, I don't have any swap enabled on any computers, from 128MB RAM (the least of anything I've got, now — and they're pogoplug v4s and a dockstar) up to 8GB. This only caused me problems in Windows 7, where Java shits itself when trying to use 3GB out of 8GB (yes, it's 64-bit) even when I have no other foreground applications whatsoever. But then, Windows is what it is, incredibly polished in some areas, an incredible turd in others. Kind of like Linux. All I want is video from my firewire camera (which is working fine, actually, in spite of being literally one of the earliest examples, an iBot) in V4L applications. Is that really too much to ask? Apparently yes, yes it is. And sadly, it used to work, I've done it before. v4l2-loopback doesn't work and vloopback doesn't build, I haven't yet figured if the right diddling can make that happen or if the interfaces it needs are gone.

Comment Re:Bugs are DRM (Score 1) 171

The obvious solution to this kind of problem is to store old games as virtual machine snapshots.

Bah, humbug. If you want to replay the game in the future, download the cracked version that doesn't authenticate to anything. Then you can install it to a virtual machine with working drivers. Just buy it first, and make sure to buy the same SKU that the cracked version is based upon. That might not be an airtight legal defense, but at least it'll be clear that you were trying to do the Right^WLegal Thing(tm)

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