The reports of their data loss.

Perhaps competitive prices coupled with perceived quality (and good experience on other platforms) led to these drives being selected by more knowledgeable or performance oriented people.

These drives then got pushed harder or in ways more likely to expose the bugs, leading to a perception that they were unreliable under Linux.

All the HVAC techs I've ever talked to have told me that it's better to have the compressor run continuously than it is to short cycle it.

I had new AC put in about 10 years ago and if cleaning the A coil is something that's supposed to get done, they sure don't do the sheet metal like its something that's supposed to be done.

My A coil failed (I think they used a non-R134a coil) after two years and the guy had to do a lot of sheet metal surgery to get the new coil in.

Same problem, only spun around.

I'll buy whatever fits my job requirements. Prior to this discovery, that certainly wouldn't have been Samsung. Now? They get to be considered along with all the other vendors.

It'd be interesting to know what Sharp plans for the power input. I would suspect the market starts to shrink dramatically for input voltages over 48V because pretty much all battery arrays are 48V or lower and AFAIK (which isn't very far) only the newest solar installs run at high DC voltages.

I'd guess that this would be a 24-48V system (highest common DC voltage in battery arrays) and lets say you have 6 hours runtime after dark (pure battery load), you're burning 4000 watt hours of power or 80+ amps @ 48V and 160+ amps at 24v.

The daily use PowerWall is only 7kw and I'd guess a summer of that kind of use would put a serious dent in its lifespan.

The only thing I can think of is that the Sharp DC A/C is designed for sucking direct from larger solar panel installs during the sunny days and really isn't practical to use for night cooling without some kind of other prime energy source (generator, grid, etc).

Is this not just a change in power input but a substantially more energy efficient air conditioner, too?

I've seen small A/C systems for cars and marine applications that can run off DC power, but they're usually pretty small which helps cut the overall power consumption. In marine applications they also have the advantage of being able to use sea water to move the heat versus a fan and coils in open air.

One of Sharp's smallest split system units has 8500 BTU of cooling with an EER of 13 which is roughly 650 watts. That's about 14 amps @ 48v, 27 @ 24, and a battery sucking 54 amps at 12v (run with welding cable).

8500 BTU might cool a room reasonably well, but its not going to provide whole-house cooling, either, and would require a pretty large battery array to run off battery. It might make sense for some kind of supplemental cooling setup where it ran direct off solar panels.

....what they're watching on TV in those amateur porn movies.

Honestly, I don't know how they can go at it like that with the TV droning on in the background. It makes me nuts that I can't tell what they're watching, too.

Whaddya bet that the variation in video formats got left in as some kind of poor DRM to act as a last-chance method to stop people from viewing videos from other regions?

He is right though, "boxen" is idiot-speak.

"Reasonable discussion" usually just means "my ideas are reasonable, and yours aren't, and as long as you're disagreeing with my ideas, you're being unreasonable."

You answered your own question in two sentences

At a shotgun range I've been to, they have a duck tower about 150 yards behind the clubhouse. It's surrounded by a fairly thick stand of tall trees, but a couple of the stations result in shooters shot trajectory going through the "hole" in the trees and raining down on the front porch of the clubhouse.

I've been standing there and gotten "hit" -- it actually feels no different than if you through a handful of coarse sand into the air and let it fall on you, actually less since you really only feel a small number of pellets because of dispersion.

Shooters are restricted to target loads of #7.5 shot or smaller, so its very light shot. So light that on their "hard" sporting clays course it's very difficult to hit the distant crossing and away clays in any wind. The #7.5 shot has so little inertia that it just gets blown off target.

Many pheasant hunters I've known have stories about getting hit with shot from people on the other side of a field or road hunting on roads adjacent to the field they were hunting on. It's like coarse sand, and pheasant hunting uses much heavier shot than target shot.

The "N" versions are for the EU and they don't feature Windows Media Player. The EU forced this for anticompetitive reasons.

The "KN" versions are for Korea and they don't have Windows Media Player or Windows Messenger (the IM client) to appease the Korean government (not sure if North or South)

However, since MSN Messenger has been discontinued I'm not sure what the point of the KN edition is any more.

Just skip N or KN.

I might expect some cost reductions because the increased durability will lessen the amount of excess memories needed for remapping when cells go bad. And don't larger drives use NAND chips in parallel for speed? If you can simplify packaging by using a single chip you might cut costs there, too.

If its as supercalifragilisticexpialidocious as they say it is, you might also expect enterprise adoption to increase, lowering the cost of NAND by cutting demand or resulting in more reliable NAND.

It's also hard to know what kind of process improvements may take place over time.

Either way, I think cheap, durable and fast-or-faster-than-flash storage is pretty exciting, so I guess I'm willing to be optimistic. Storage is so expensive and so relatively slow that something that pushes the envelope on speed and cost just seems to have a lot of potential.

One huge trend in work over the last century or so has been towards automation. We need fewer people, or can do more with the same number of people, by automating some or all of peoples' jobs.

We don't need everyone to "build software" as you may think of it. However, we do need a substantial part of the workforce to automate their own jobs. Think about it. For most typical jobs, the ability to automate your work makes you more productive, more valuable, and can make you feel better about your life.

Automation, of course, means instructing machines.