As I wrote here: http://slashdot.org/comments.p... I used Seagates exclusively, because they never failed on me, and every time a client came in with a bad hard drive, it was either a WD or Hitachi. It's also worth mentioning that Seagate were the *only* ones for a while to offer a 5 year warranty on their drives. If they sucked so badly, why stand behind them for so long? In short, your experience and mine agree, and I used a *lot* of Seagate drives...

I'd like to know who you deal with then... IBM lied about their DeskStars WD lied about their (ancient, admittedly) 6.4 MB drives that had near 100% failure rates Maxtor lied about their 100 gig drives Hitachi bought out the DeskStars and initially, made no changes whatsoever, causing the trend to continue. So I ask you, who is left to buy from?

15 years ago, nobody "needed" broadband. Dialup was, "good enough."

Today, try doing anything other than text-only email over 56Kb dialup.

Broadband uptake enabled a new class of Internet sites and services. Google is betting that history will repeat itself by kicking speeds up by two orders of magnitude. It also has the beneficial side-effect of lighting a fire under AT&T's slothful ass.

Also keep in mind that GFiber offerings are symmetric. That means you get to upload your photos and videos at 1Gb/sec as well, and not through the 768Kb straw that DSL and cable providers decided was "good enough" for consumer-class Internet.

Or as I mentioned in my last line, YMMV, I've had *great* luck with Seagates, from 1999 until I changed careers 11 years later, and I had large numbers of people come in with failing drives (typically WD and Hitachi DeathStars) that I replaced with Seagates and no one ever complained. Seagate were at one time the only company with a 5 year warranty on their drives. Says something about their product to stand behind it for that long.

For the past 11 years, I used nothing but Seagate drives in my builds for clients. Over those past 11 years, I built something like 20 systems a month (on average) with occasional large scale orders of 200. The number of failed Seagates I could count *on one hand* YMMV clearly, but I stand behind Seagates.

I couldn't tell you why, but I haven't (yet) observed the described behavior on my XP system. The auto-updater ususally settles down in a matter of minutes.

No. In my case, it's trying to apply the .NET updates that completely murders my system. Apparently MS wants a gigabyte or so of free disk space on C:\ (and nowhere else) or the update will fail miserably. As it happens, my system partition has about 200MB free space, so the update disappears down a rabbit hole and never completes.

I used to think it was because it needed a bunch of temporary disk space, so last night I changed the TMP and TEMP environment variables to point to a volume with tons of free space, rebooted (because, you know, it's Windows), set just one of the several .NET updates running, then went off to see The Hobbit. When I returned some three hours later, the update had hung, the disk was idle, C:\ had zero bytes free, and the system log was corrupted.

Honestly, I don't know why anyone continues to be surprised by Redmond's rank incompetence...

Schwab

I've heard it, but I disagree with your outcome.
For starters, as the other poster made mention of, the bank bailouts add a whole lot more to this.
But let's just stick with my example for the time being.
50k will buy you a LOT of options:
Job re-training via an education
Re-location to a place with a better job market (I think this was mentioned elsewhere)
Paying off debts, allowing you to live on a reduced income.
I'm sure there are more options.
I object to the US gov't propping up failing businesses, esp ones with shoddy products. If they can't compete, off they go. Someone will come in and fill the vacuum.

'To Western eyes, it may seem rather inappropriate to launch space programs in sub-Saharan Africa, where nearly 70% of the population still lives on less $2 a day

And he would be correct all around. I think Africa has larger issues to deal with first, before sending someone into space...but that's just my viewpoint

FreeNAS and ZFS are indeed awesome. But before y'all go installing FreeNAS on some spare hardware and think your problem is solved, you need to be aware that ZFS is not a panacea. You can't just drop it on Any Old Box with default settings and expect it to magically keep your data safe unto perpetuity. You need to pay attention to what you're doing.

Some highlights:

• ZFS's design requires RAM to be perfectly reliable, or at least report imperfections. Undetected bitrot in RAM can and will destroy your entire ZFS pool. Thus, a machine with ECC RAM installed is a requirement.
• As if that weren't enough, ZFS eats huge amounts of RAM. The current guideline is 1 GiB of RAM per TB of disk spindles, with 8 GiB as a practical minimum.
• ZFS assumes it has perfect knowledge of disk writes in-flight, and as such doesn't play well with RAID controllers, which can silently re-order writes. If your machine has a RAID controller, the RAID features should be turned off. Don't worry, ZFS has its own RAID features. However:
• Because drive densities are now approaching drive error rates (10**13 bits of storage, with manufacturers quoting uncorrectable errors every 10**14 bits read), ZFS RAID-Z1 is no longer considered sufficient to ensure storage integrity, and you should plan for RAID-Z2 (two parity drives).
• For the same reason as turning off RAID, a "production" FreeNAS/ZFS installation should not be run in a virtual machine. It's okay if you're just test-driving it to get a sense of what it can do, but a live system should run on actual hardware.
• Using ZFS's de-duplication feature is officially discouraged. It may seem like a great idea, but it will gobble all your RAM and return very little benefit. On average, you're better off using compression.

When ZFS dies, it dies in a big and fairly comprehensive way, and ZFS will die if you under-provide it. In any event, you should RTFM before contemplating a build, and know the trade-offs you're getting in to.

Schwab

the numbers of correct, the US could have let GM collapse and give ever person directly affected (1 million people) 50,000$ in a lump sum and we (the people) would probably still have come out ahead.

Something to think about...

I don't have time to correct all the errors in the parent post. So very briefly:

• The 6502 had three 8-bit registers: A, X, and Y. A was the accumulator, and received the result of all arithmetic operations. X and Y could hold temporary data, arithmetic operands, and be used as index registers for memory load/store. There was also an 8-bit stack pointer register, SP, hard-mapped to the range 0x0100 - 0x01FF.
• The 8080 had the 8-bit registers A, B, C, D, E, H, L, and a 16-bit stack pointer. In addition, the registers B & C, D & E, and H & L could be used to hold 16-bit quantities for some instructions.
• The Z80 had all the registers of the 8080, plus a shadow copy of the registers for quick use by interrupt service routines.
• The 6502's zero page (0x0000 - 0x00FF) got special treatment by the CPU, using only a single byte to address a location. As such, zero page usually got treated by software as a pile of "slow registers."
• No instruction on the 6502 executed in fewer than two clock cycles. The fastest 6502 I ever saw was 2 MHz.
• By contrast, 4 Mhz Z80 chips were widespread.
• The Z80 helped popularize dynamic RAMs by containing a very basic DRAM refresh counter. The 6502 had no such thing; DRAM refresh was usually provided by custom logic, usually part of the video controller.
• S-100 machines had huge power supplies because they had huge numbers of slots (eight or more being common), and had to have enough reserve power for all of them.
• There was nothing special about the 6502's memory access patterns, and 6502 would get starved out like any other CPU if another device held the bus. On the C-64 in particular, every eight video lines, the VIC would grab the bus for 40 uSecs to fetch the next row of character cells, holding off the 6502 the whole time. This led to all kinds of problems with timing-sensitive operations, and was directly responsible for transfers to/from the 1541 floppy drive to be glacially slow.

Schwab

NASA will be launching another rocket, a Minotaur, from Wallops Island: http://www.nasa.gov/content/air-force-minotaur-rocket-launching-from-virginia-november-19/ I will be photographing the night launch and should have some good pics up. Check my journal for them, there may also be Air Force interviews after the launch, I'll see if I can get some words in as well

It's good for the gov't, and good for the corps too!

Shame We the People get screwed when they use it

and I admit to not reading the many links, but taking the article at face value (dangerous I know)
BUT
if all of it is true and accurate, it sounds like Mr. Z is a world-class asshole and is trying to bring back the dark days of robber barons building their wealth on the backs/lives of indentured servants...

Yet one more reason (like you needed another really) not to use Facebook

Agreed. I have a Z61t that is seriously starting to show its age. But the last ThinkPad I will seriously consider buying is the T420, which is no longer made. The current xx30 models (T430, X230, etc.) gratuitously changed the keyboard.

Seriously, Lenovo? You fscked with the ThinkPad keyboard?? The keyboard by which all other laptop keyboards were judged for well over ten years? You just threw that away?

I've been idly looking at "white box" laptops as a possible upgrade avenue, but I have no idea what's going to replace my Z61t. Hell, if I could upgrade its guts to something modern, I'd do it...