Comment Re:Never consumer ready (Score 1) 229
Amazon buys them by the truckload and ends up paying a tiny fraction of that. It turns out that when you order BDXL discs in bulk quantities, the costs go way down.
Amazon buys them by the truckload and ends up paying a tiny fraction of that. It turns out that when you order BDXL discs in bulk quantities, the costs go way down.
Depends on what type of disc you're using. A 5TB drive would require as few as ~39 discs.
Unless you buy them in massive bulk, like Amazon did, and then they become cheaper than all other alternatives. And swapping isn't a problem when you're massively automated.
Because it's marketed as being very slow, with response times measured in hours? It's a very cheap offline storage solution that uses BD-R discs and robots.
If one of your consumer drives fail, you've got a new one in seconds without any physical activity, because the massive cost savings allows you to keep lots of spare drives on-site as hot or cold spares. Any company that has zero spare drives and must wait for an RMA to get their RAID array back in operation is doing it wrong.
Enterprises still use lots of tape backups. It's still much cheaper and more durable when it comes to backup up servers and physically shipping the data to IronMountain or the like. Iron Mountain's advertising trumpets that 94% of Fortune 1000 companies use their service, so that's a pretty clear indication that tape is alive and well.
Battery University is years out of date. They're citing a cost for Li-ion of $1,000/kWh when in reality prices have dropped to as little as a quarter of that. Tesla, for their part, is currently charging $141/kWh for replacement batteries, no doubt on the assumption that their GigaFactory will get prices that low by the time Tesla batteries need replacing.
Some utilities do that, run the meter backwards. Others measure what you use and what you take out of the grid and put back in separately, bill you for what you used from the grid, and pay you a much smaller amount per kWh for what you put back in.
The problem is that many utilities pay far less per kWh than they charge you. As a result, you're generating most of your power when you don't need it (during the day when you're at work), getting almost nothing for it, and then you're consuming most of your power when you're not generating it, paying full price for it.
The result? You end up saving very little.
It starts to make sense to have batteries to let you use the power you generated, giving you a much greater return. The only issue here is the cost of the batteries... which Tesla is trying to drive down as much as they can.
Amazon wants automated deliveries with minimal human intervention. The FAA's exemptions still require that the drones be operated by a human, with a pilots license, and only within visual line of site of the pilot.
Looks like Amazon is going to have to keep testing their drones in Canada, where they can test what they actually want to do.
XP and later are the NT series too. Win2K was the first version of NT that saw any significant consumer use. It was originally intended to replace both NT4 and 98 (unifying the two streams like XP eventually did), but they later changed their mind and released 98SE and ME. Still, 2K was far more consumer-friendly than NT4 was, and lots of technically oriented users like myself followed the upgrade path of 98 -> 2K -> XP.
Canada Post, Fedex, and UPS all have freight divisions or subsidiaries who would be happy to ship a pallet of dirt for you.
Because Amazon Canada's selection is pretty terrible compared to Amazon USA. Best Buy sells the ROG Swift monitor for $900, with free shipping or local pickup. Amazon doesn't sell the monitor directly, has it for $1000, and doesn't offer free shipping at all (due to them not selling it directly).
I never had that problem. In fact, they seemed to consider it a special case where they'd beat each other's prices immediately without any hassle because they didn't want to be called out on being the same store.
What was once Radio Shack in Canada is still operating today. They're called "The Source" today, and they're just as bad as Radio Shack ever was, with terrible selection and insane prices. I never see anybody in the stores, so I don't really understand how they're still operating. I'd say they were a mob front (my normal explanation when a store or restaurant stays open despite having no customers) except they're owned by Bell Canada these days.
What is algebra, exactly? Is it one of those three-cornered things? -- J.M. Barrie