I write a lot more to my SSDs than most do because of lost of application installs, playing with audio, etc, etc. 6TB to date, drive was purchased about 20 months ago. Ok well assuming I maintain that rate of writing (3.6TB/year) it would be 13 years before I'd hit 50 TB of writes, on a 512GB drive which can probably take 1PB or more.

Even if you hit it harder than the norm, you still don't hit it that hard. It really has to be used for something like database access or a file server or the like before endurance becomes an issue.

Meaning the money a company takes in. The difference between revenues and profits is vast, and varies by company and company type. Some companies take in a lot of revenues to make very little profits. Target would be an example. They took in 73 Billion dollars in revenues the last 12 months. However on that, they only made about 1.5 Billion in actual profit, or 2% when put another way. Retail doesn't make a lot of money, particularly discount retail. So once you add up all their costs (buying the merchandise, payroll, buildings, taxes, power, insurance, etc) there isn't a huge percentage left over.

Compare that to Apple. Not only do they make more money, but they have a much higher profit margin. They took in 182 Billion, and made 39 Billion on it, a 25% margin. Because of the nature of their business, they make more profits per dollar of sales than a place like Target.

This is, of course, only talking about profitable businesses. There are plenty that don't make money. My parents ran a small quilt shop for a number of years. Did about $750,000 in sales per year, yet never made a profit. After they'd paid rent, taxes, insurance, salaries, replenished merchandise, and so on there was not only nothing left over, there was a deficit they had to cover.

Hence why they'd pay so much. Not because it is worth that much, you could have a gold medal made much cheaper, but because it has historical significance and they wish to have that.

I have better shit to do with my time. When I'm off work, it's my time. I have other things I want to do rather than work. I enjoy my job, but it isn't fun as a hobby. I value a life-work balance.

Or maybe life is just an inevitable outcome when the right conditions are met? Why science has such a hardon for panspermia is beyond me.

No, it doesn't. HardOCP did a test with the new Haswell E series, as well as normal Haswell and Ivy Bridge chips, and then the AMD FX-9590. In every case, the AMD chip lost. Sandra Drystone, Sandra memory bandwidth, Hyper PI, Cinebench, POV Ray, Handbrake, LAME, WinRAR, and games, in call cases it scored below the Haswell chip. In most cases it scored below the Ivy Bridge chip, sometimes substantially. For example in Cinebench the Haswell-E 8 core scored 19.31, the normal Haswell 4 core scored 9.93, the AMD scored 7.93. Also the AMD chip was clocked 500 MHz higher than the Intel chips (all were OC'd, HardOCP is a performance site).

Also please remember that normal Haswell has a TDP of around 90 watts.

Right now, AMD chips just are not a very good showing in terms of power per watt. Intel also is able to be price competitive because their more midrange chips compete with AMD's higher end. The Bulldozer architecture has not proven to be efficient, and Intel also gets to lean on their lead in lithography. All Intel's lines are on 22nm these days and they are rolling out 14nm chips for sale now. AMD is still using a 32nm process.

http://www.hardocp.com/article...

AMD chips need a lot of juice for a given level of performance. Their Vishera chips that competes with Intel's high end desktop i5s in price and in some cases performance (depends on the benchmark, it is as fast in some, woefully slower in others) needs 220 watts to get that level of performance.

If you desire a power economical processor, Intel are your guys. AMD's architecture and lithography are just not up to Intel's level at the moment.

You also have to remember, with regards to lithography, Intel is WAY ahead of anyone else. AMD's chips are still 32nm, these new Broadwell chips are 14nm.

I know only what you chose to write and you said you are "now my life is betting on it." If that's hyperbole, then that's kinda silly and dial it back. If it is literal, then my point stands.

Also sounds like it may be much cheaper, which would be nice. I have repetitive strain injury from computer use and while it is manageable, I'd like a way to be able to not use the mouse when possible. An eye mouse would work well, but they are too much money. However this sounds like it might be in the range of something I could afford, and use as alternate input.

Now why they changed I dunno, but that can change things. Also there was supposedly physical evidence that contradicted witness statements.

However if you are interested, it sounds like the unusual step of opening up the grand jury records will be taken in this case. So, keep up with it and read the transcript when it is available, and then see what you conclude.

But that we are so far from any kind of AI that worrying about what form it might take is stupid. Yes, there are lots of things that might happen in the far future. Until they are closer, worrying about them is silly. There have been stories from people who are all paranoid about AI and think we need to start making with the rules. No we don't, we are so far away we don't even know how far away we are. We also have no idea what form it'll take. May turn out that self awareness is a uniquely biological trait and we never make computers that are truly strong AI.

Also if you are betting your life (regardless of if this means an actual bet, singular investment of all assets, etc) on something far off, you are a moron. You have no idea when a technology will happen, if it'll even be possible, and if it is if it'll even be marketable. Want a great example? SED, surface-conduction electron-emitter display. Reasonably chance you've never even heard of it. Was a new tech from Canon, basically a flat, large, hig rez take on CRT. Offered extremely high refresh rates (and thus low blur) great contrast ratio, wide viewing angle, etc. Very exciting display technology lots of people looked forward to as an LCD alternative. Wouldn't displace LCD, but would be a better technology for many uses. It was real too, actual working sets were shown at CES in 2006.

What happened? Well as a result of litigation, the financial downturn, and the general market, they decided to pack it in and stop development. They shut down and liquidated that division in 2010, and there's been no further development. So despite it being real and doable, it didn't happen and almost certainly never will happen.

Now compare that to the concept of strong AI, which we have no idea if it even can exist, if it does what form it will take, and if so what technology will be required. Maybe not the best thing to be betting the farm on.

The bigger it is, the wider that is useful. Basically you find that you need a certain amount of vertical real estate to work effectively. So on a small screen like a laptop, a 4:3, or even more square, monitor can be of use. However when you start getting large desktop displays, wide is very nice. Personally I like 16:10 displays for the desktop, in part because I find them aesthetically pleasing (likely because they are near the golden ratio) but also because for the large sizes I like (30" currently) it provides a good amount of vertical real estate, but plenty of horizontal to fill my field of view and allow for multiple things to be displayed at once.

For TV, heck I could go even more than 16:9 if such a thing were standard. I was always partial to 1.85:1 3 perf and 2:1 Superscope for movies myself.

However the problem is that it can presumably notify security that you've done that. Given that they'll have full video of it, and know where the unit was, the chances of you getting caught are pretty high.

These aren't the kind of thing that would work well on their own out in the middle of nowhere but on a campus like MS's with human backup I imagine they are pretty effective. Rolling security cameras basically.

The generic MS drivers know how to see if the drive supports TRIM and send the commands if it does. That's the point of TRIM: It is an ATA standard command, so special software isn't needed.

In fact, in Windows all you use is the generic drivers. I mean you may install drivers for your SATA controller, but not for your drive. My laptop has a Samsung 840 Pro in it, with Samsung's Magician installed. However the drivers in use are disk.sys, partmgr.sys (both Microsoft files) and iastorf.sys (Intel's file). No Samsung provided drivers. Magician can directly send commands to optimize the drive if needed if the OS can't, but the OS sends TRIM commands no problem.