Well, here I have mostly CFL's everywhere with some 'experimental' LEDs here and there too.

When they were on sale I bought 4 of these : http://www.usa.ecat.lighting.philips.com/l/professional-lamps/led-lamps-and-systems/led-lamps/a-shape-led/929000201804_na/
I replaced 2 21W CFL's with 1 of the above and the general 'complaint' was that the new light is way too bright. In reality it probably is less bright but it ramps up to 100% pretty much instantaneously while the CFL's would take some warming up thus giving your eyes time to adjust and hence being subjectively dimmer. I very much doubt the energy savings will ever make up for its price (I paid 35 euro) but given its location it's quite useful that they are full power right-away because people usually only light it for about 2 minutes and then are out again. AND I'm hoping they'll last (a lot) longer than the CFL's which I've had to replace too often in that location; probably because of the fact they get lit quite frequently but only for a short while which is deadly for that technology. I know LEDs don't mind switching on and off but off course I have no clue about the electronics that drive them.... time will tell.

I guess it depends on the subjects you're interested in. Given the size of SO (well, we should probably consider the entire Stack Exchange group, no ?) there's bound to be sub-cultures. Personally I rather occasionally browse the SQL related tags and while there are quite a bit of 'Please do my homework' kind of questions, those often don't get the answer they're looking for (that is: the worked out solution) but rather get pointers into 'the right direction'. Luckily there also are also quite a few of interesting questions that spark discussions and often-times indirectly gives me some insight into something I hadn't ever thought about before. I find that valuable. Feel free to look up my userid and you'll notice that hardly have any reputation points behind my name; in fact I have 'worked' just enough to be able to post/edit comments etc; otherwise I really don't care.

A long, long time ago I used to spend quite a bit of time on ExpertsExchange. Although I enjoyed helping out others at first it became quite frustrating after a while to see how a few people would throw a quick & dirty solution only seconds (?!?!) after it was posted. By the time I had written a fleshed out answer the original poster would already have accepted the (imho) downright terrible advice and there was no way to undo the situation except for adding a comment along the lines: please don' t do it like this for reasons x, y and z. I had no clue why (or how) these quick-posters would do this as their reputation already was sky-high until I noticed that the site had leader-boards that would nominate their 'best' people on a monthly/yearly basis. After that I gave up.

At least on SO you can down-vote a prematurely accepted answer and vote up one that makes a lot more sense. Maybe the original poster won't care to come back, but at least when someone comes around googling for an answer he'll be presented with the 'better' answer first AND the Q&D poster actually gets 'punished' by the down-votes. (As are the people who down-vote, so it's 'harder' to game the system). I'm sure SO has something like 'greatest contributors' too, and yes, there is all the badges and reputation stuff; but it seems to me there is a lot less attention given to it.

Seems like a fun challenge for any (serious) keylogger author out there. Probably will add a couple of hours of the more fun kind of coding to his 'job'.

I'm not saying it's a bad idea, but it will only help out against the very basic keyloggers. Then again, it WILL protect against hardware keyloggers that sit between the keyboard and the computer as those have no access to the clipboard. But in that situation simple auto-typing or simple copy-pasting would be sufficient.

75 kg/m2 per year
three crops annually as in : harvesting 3 times / year.
Thus, per crop = each harvest = 75kg/m2 divided by 3 = 25kg/m2

Like I said, it might differ by region, but most 'modern' houses around here that I know of have concrete floors/ceilings (**) except perhaps for the top-floor and the attic/roof that indeed most often is built around a wood-frame. I somehow associate wooden floors with pre-1960 tech but I might be biassed =)

(**: pre-tensioned hollow concrete slabs, not a clue what the correct word might be in English, https://www.google.com/search?q=welfsel&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ei=V213UqqKF4SZ0QWk2YGgDQ&ved=0CEYQsAQ&biw=1920&bih=840 )

If by 'those houses' you mean European houses then I beg to differ. Although it might be region specific off course. Around here (Belgium) there is a minority of houses built by means of a wooden frame that then gets 'bricked in' (although they more often go for plastering or another type of siding in my experience); but most houses are constructed using bricks & mortar only. Well, that and concrete and steel and glass etc... off course. AFAIK it's always been like that.

If the house I'm sitting in right now would be set on fire somehow it'd be mostly the furniture and stuff that would go ablaze. I wonder if it would even get sufficiently hot to actually ruin the structure. Oh, and if the fire would reach the roof that would be total-loss indeed, as it rests on a wooden frame.

Meaning we'll all have a micro- mobile swimming killer bio reactor in 10 years then, yay for progress!

Off course these disks do not know anything about the filesystem at all; all they do is look at the raw throughput. There is something to be said about the OS knowing which files are worth caching and which not; but in the end the cache on the SSHD will come to the same conclusion as it simply keeps track about which blocks of data are most often requested. Plus, having an SSHD doesn't magically sabotage your system cache.

Like I said, you may find all sorts of reasons to not like it, in practice the thing delivers on its promise. It's far from perfect and it can be fooled into taking the wrong decisions but that's not a terrible thing to happen as it will 'heal' over time.

Example : my laptop used to have a Momentus XT and although the older model has only 4Gb cache, it booted faster, had Visual Studio open in A LOT less time, could bring Excel up in 2 seconds, same for SSMS, Firefox would load faster, etc ... I very much doubt all of those programs fit in those 4Gb but still it managed to find out which were most 'important' as the loading times of ALL those programs (os) were remarkably lower ALL THE TIME vs my colleagues' machines that were pretty much exact copies safe for the fact they had the original 'ordinary "black" whatever disks". At a certain point in time I had to run a virtual machine for a while and -not entirely unexpected- after a couple of ''virtual reboots' said machine also started up remarkably faster, programs inside it got faster to load too etc... but all of this came at the expense of slower loading of eg. VS when started 'locally'. After the VM-project was finished it took a couple of days for everything to turn back to normal and I guess if I had kept the virtual machine and started it up again then it would have been its original 'slow' again.

Currently I have Samsung EVO Pro + that WD Scorpio Black in the media-bay. The SSD feels 100x faster than did the SSHD but I noticed that having the XT as data-disk (used pretty much only for backups & multimedia) didn't really make much of a difference vs a normal disk as the access patterns were simply not appropriate for it. So I put it in my little file/media-server at home where it makes more sense.

The major difference is that the cache from the SSHD is persistent while your RAM isn't. For your OS to buffer a certain file it still needs to read it a first time from the disk. E.g. when starting up or rebooting this helps you nothing at all. The SSHD (might) have said file in cache and hence can serve it much faster.

I'm not sure how you come to the conclusion that your system cache "knows a lot more about access patterns and files than the on-drive logic can possibly gather.".
Given the way HD's work these days the OS knows nothing about what is actually happening on the disk. Do you really believe that the block-addressing used by the OS is actually related to how the data is spread out on the disk ?

It's not because the OS file-sectors get swapped out and get replaced by the torrent-files (that are obviously more often accessed and hence better served from the cache) that they are now SLOWER than as if there was no flash-cache at all. If some bytes are not cached they are simply read from disk like it would be with a 'normal' drive.

It probably would be possible to add something to the I/O protocol alike TRIM that would tell the SSHD to not-cache certain reads, but I don't know if they have enough momentum [haha] for that yet ...

Oh come on, the Stig would know better, the first thing everyone bought was the FAST-ram expansion.
(although, looking it up on wikipedia it now turns out the trapdoor expansion actually contained "slow ram"... wtf ?! Even though it's been 25 years, I feel cheated now =)

Come to think about it, my A4000 had 18Mb's of ram [**] a gigantic luxury at the time. Although I had no VMM (68030) and thus no virtual-memory I hardly ever ran out of ram. Amazing how the need for memory has gone through the roof... My laptop currently has 3.23 Gb in use, who would have believed that at the time)

(**: fun fact about that was that I had bought the ram many months before I actually got to order the A4000 (from a failing Compaq-store); plugging it in was a tense moment, but luckily it worked without a hitch =)

Wouldn't creating a game-backup from within Steam; sharing it over the network (or sneakernet) and restore it for each pc be faster ?
That way you only need to download it once, and frankly, chances are already at least one person will have it installed... with a bit of luck even already backed up to a share or external medium like an usb-stick or drive.

Going by the fact that pretty much all (non-lowest-budget) phones come with fairly similar hardware it I'd say we can safely assume that the 520's experience is BECAUSE of the OS. Put Android on it and you're likely to be disappointed. IMHO Android is going the same direction as pretty much all other software: it gets bigger, more bloated and more demanding on the hardware with each new incarnation.

PS: Same might happen to WP off course, maybe they're just not far enough into the version-list to notice (yet).

Me personally, I'm looking forward to what will happen in the next years... imho competition is a good thing,

Well, you try to install XnView on Ubuntu then (or FastStone).
There are a lot of things available in the package-mgr, but definitely not all of it is.

And what Apple does is something that gets on peoples nerves too here on /.. Too lazy to look them up, but there have been plenty of stories here about the vetting process being 'far from optimal'.

I have no first-hand experience with it, but if Apple is able to retract an app because some company issued a complaint against it ["We have copyrighted the yellow circle, please remove all pacman clones" (**)] is reason enough for me to take a detour around their shops.

(**: yes, it's an exaggerated example but who knows how long it takes for it to become reality... for crying out loud they've (Tm)-ed magenta !?]

The 'reason' I 'd call it religious is because people tend to be black&white about it, as in "there can only be one".

I started out with my Amiga as the first 'real' OS, 'had' to switch to windows; have been dabbling with Linux on and off and only know about Apple indirectly.
=> I actually was anti-MS-DOS/Windows up to Windows 2000, as from there the OS became stable & usable IMHO.

At the time, my job involved MS products (and it still does) so the choice between Wintel and Apple as alternatives to my Amiga was quite simple. On top of that, Apple is/was way too expensive anyway. Linux was too much niche at the time and slackware looked impressive but couldn't convince me at the time. BeOS seemed fun but I never got around getting one.

=> By now I know Windows 'pretty well', in each case a lot better than Linux. I'm sure I can complain about a lot of things that are 'wrong' in linux that someone with finer understandings about the OS would be able to fix in minutes. Experience shows the opposite is true too.

in fact, over the years, I've suggested and installed Ubuntu on several machines of friends that only use them for basic web & office stuff. They always start out with wanting Windows because that's what everybody has -- so yes, it probably IS a cultural thing -- then again they always assume Windows is free and 'know a guy'. I've stopped supporting those installations as they're a death-trap because Windows Update refuses to serve them updates and frankly, I can't blame MS. People spend 1000$ on the latest hardware but refuse to shell out a single cent for the OS, sigh. Anyway, when return them their machine with Ubuntu on it they hardly realise they're using something different because in the end it all looks and feels alike. (even with the default settings.. disclaimer, that was before Unity so far everybody seems to be happily churning along with their 'old' versions... it's not only XP that still works).

Anyway, please don't dismiss me as a Windows-nut, I am not... but I do hate it when people come by and start bashing on Windows because of things that are quite in the past. You don't hear me complaining how Linux has lousy driver support although yes, I've spent plenty a night getting things right only to have the next update mess it up again.

PS: another reason why I'd risk calling these discussions religious is because people tend to bring in words like 'Evil'. MS isn't evil, it's just a big company that tries to make (more) money. Same goes for Apple & Google & ... well, all of them I guess. And that includes RedHat and Agile and ... it's capitalism at work. It may start out with a couple of guys having a good idea, but it always ends with highly overpaid 'executives' that simply try to squeeze the most out of the client-base.

All in all, maybe (probably) Windows *IS* more susceptible to viruses than the other OS's. Personally, I think not although it does require some common sense from the user, true. These OS's (and software in general) are way too complex with way too many variables interfering which each other. Maybe we'll get there someday and have some kind of background AI that warns us against potential threats [Clippy: it looks like you;re trying to install a screensaver] but I very much doubt I'll live to see it. That said, it obviously gets more difficult over time so there IS hope; but as people expect new features with each never new version released there's bound to be some new vulnerability being introduced. I'm pretty sure Pown2Own is only the tip of the iceberg and there are plenty of smart people around that know how to circumvent the safety mechanisms.. In way that's a waste of talent but I guess everyone has bills to pay so who am I to judge.