This is like saying "sure the SATA drives are cheap, but a RAID boxes are quite expensive"

No one buys a tape drive or library for work with just one tape.

People who use tape, often have a lot more to backup that what fits on a 3TB USB drive. They probably use tape libraries connected to a storage area network, with tapes shipped to an off-site storage location.

Modern tape drives can be really fast, with transfer rates of above 100MB/s. The real bottleneck when restoring large amounts of data is often not the tape drive speed but the write performance of the storage array, specially if you're restoring lots of small files, or the networking, etc. Anyone who has moved things like user home directories between machines knows that. Remember than when you're backing up many machines, you don't always have the luxury of having the tape drive connected to each machine directly.

For consumer yes, but who is talking about consumers anywhere in the article?

We're talking about back ups, not making archives. The reliability doesn't seem that relevant for backup purposes. A typical organization probably wouldn't want to keep backups older than say a year.

OnePlus One is significant because it is now the go-to unlocked smartphone for the geeks. The OS story is mildly interesting. Another Android mod released...

I am not quite sure what you're talking about. The tracks and their skylines are beautiful, and there is always some close, often wheel to wheel, racing for the lead right until the end. The drivers are very accomplished open wheel racers. You can't compare them to the F1 top five or so, but overall they're just as good or better than a median F1 racers. In fact, many of them had a considerable amount of F1 seat time, either as a race or test driver.

And I am sorry, and I personally don't know the product is crap because of blah blah blah. Sounds like you have created a strawman argument to defend your elitist viewpoint here.

That's totally fine. You should realize that among the racing fans there are far more fans of pure racing than the nerds. This is why Formula 1 is far FAR more more popular than WEC will ever be, even though arguably WEC is more advanced tech-wise.

And so as a fan if racing, rather of the technological dick waving, I see a lot of potential in FE racing. The skylines are beautiful, the racers are the cream of crop open wheel racers, many with quite a bit of time in Formula 1 and GP2 seats, and there is always some good competition and wheel to wheel racing up to the end of race. The races are about one hour short which is perfect for our world of living a busy life and having a short attention span.

Clearly, you haven't watched any of Formula E races and in fact you have a very superficial understanding of F1 or other motorsports.

In the FE races I have seen so far, the skylines are beautiful, the drivers are the cream of crop open wheel racers, the cars go fast, and there was plenty of close wheel racing in the first five races so far. What else do you want?

On a really good year of Formula 1 racing, F1 may be more fun to watch than the first season of FE. But every other season, F1 is a major snooze fest that only die hard fans will watch. Case in point, the five years of Schumacher's continuous domination, and then four years of continuous RedBull Vettel domination, and specially years 2011 and 2013.

... , because the language has so many features that nobody but language experts understand all of them.

And I think that's fine. C++ is not an every day go-to programming language. Its use should be reserved for writing heavyweight applications (like the desktop environments, productivity apps, etc), servers, and numerical code. Considering the complexity of a typical c++ app codebase as well as the language itself, only the experts should touch it.

There are a lot of people who are still undecided, the swing voters. I think the use of private email will come up right in the middle of election campaign again.

and with $60 HDMI cables.

Yep. That's what I was talking about. "Linux" is an unwieldy mess of various "metoo" distributions, "metoo" desktop environments, unstable and always changing APIs (starting down at the kernel, whose developers refuse to support a stable API for binary drivers all the way to desktop APIs who break all APIs with each major release), etc. Why would a mainstream desktop user want to track this mess? Nothing has really changed in the Linux world since the 90s. It's a great OS for the tinkerers and tweakers. I you're one of them, just shut up and enjoy this great OS instead of trying to show it down the throats of the mainstream. It never worked and will never work.

To make this work, some big company, like google or Intel, would have to throw its weight behind this idea (basically, like what happened with Android).

I came to this conclusion back in the year 1999 or so, when I saw the emergence of two major GUI systems for Linux, Gnome and KDE. Since then, the Linux desktop was an always changing hydra consisting of numerous GUIs, fast changing APIs, etc. Linux distributions fill pretty nice the nice of a power desktop user's OS. The kinds you run into academia, engineering, etc. But I don't see how it could become a mainstream OS. The only way for Linux distro to become mainstream is to have some kind of benevolent dictator in the form of a large company (like google) to create a working GUI and make all hardware vendors to ship it (e.g. Android).