I used it all the way up until about 6 months ago when the rendering problems finally got the best of me. It's unfortunate, because it has the best UI customisation bar none. I had my back gesture bound to a small history drop-down menu, so I could jump back to any point in the tab's history. And the way I could group tabs together into collapsible bundles was amazing.

It was things like that that made me start using it, like, 10 years ago. I'm sad that the new version is so non-functional by comparison. Sure, the rendering is good now, but the UI isn't any better than anything else. It was easier to just switch to Chrome and be done with it.

As I posted before, this study had included non-enterprise drives which any thoughtful enterprise data preservation expert would not have ever used for enterprise data storage.

They patented it, so they get to use it. Whether or not that's a valid patent is a completely different matter. The system is internally consistent, and Apple is playing by those rules very well. The fact that the system is broken is a different matter.

I visited part of Bletchley Park in the late 2000s and it was a ruin. The guard at the gate house said they are very much in need of money. The buildings were falling down.

Sure, it is a site of historical importance, but even the Enigma-cracking computers like the esteemed Alan Turing's bombe were dismantled and scrapped decades ago, and the hundreds of subsequent generations which won the war of the Atlantic are all over the world in both their original form, as replicas, and as computer emulations.

Sorry, I have a hard time feeling any particular outrage for Jobs over everyone else here.

He didn't say, "If you don't agree, I'm going to sink you," he said, "if you don't agree, I'm going to send recruiters over to poach workers, the way that the honest system works."

So he's a crook here, but he was threatening Adobe in a way that only mattered if Adobe's CEO was ALSO a crook. This doesn't work if there's an honest person in the ring--it's crooks all the way down.

I just toileted three Seagate Barracuda drives of varying vintage, from three to five years old. I don't understand why my Western Digital, Samsung, Hitachi, and Toshiba drives don't crap out so soon.

In particular, Samsung F1 drives just flat out refuse to die, so why isn't any of that rubbing off on new owner Seagate?

I'm not saying there aren't solutions, but the simplistic method that we use is obviously critically flawed. :)

It's slightly easier to bag on you because of the differences in our electoral systems. ~65-70% of the people that voted didn't vote for the current Conservative government. The Parliamentary system coupled with first-past-the-post voting means that highly contested ridings can go to someone that only got 30-40% of the vote.

But being lumped together isn't any fun, I'll grant you. Good luck.

The quota for sick days is low because there's not much respect for working people by people that are getting rich off of them. It gets better the higher up the payscale you go (particularly in an office environment, where they've finally figured out that one person coming in sick means having dozens of people sick and underperforming for weeks on end while the infection runs its course) but it's still a problem that needs to be managed.

People work better when they're healthy and well rested, and people that are healthy and well rested tend to stay that way.

I don't know many people that call in sick for vacation days; we don't actually have an allotment of days at my office. You're just expected to tell people that you're sick so the work can be taken care of, take care of yourself, and come back as soon as is reasonable. But I'm a Canadian in Canada. It's been like this more or less my entire professional life.

It's a matter of active debate whether or not a virus is alive or not. While generally we accept that they're not alive, it's not as black and white as that.

The common claim that viruses aren't alive because they can't reproduce on their own is true of literally all parasites--things that reproduce in my gut can't reproduce outside of my gut. They need me to reproduce. Without my environment and machinery, they die. Figs and wasps are so tightly intertwined that they literally can't exist without one another, but there's no hesitation in calling either one 'alive'.

Anyway, it's a colloquial usage and isn't really germane (ha ha) to the topic at hand; your pedantry isn't obviously correct or useful. :)

I do both. I use pharmaceuticals to make it easier to sleep, and then I'll spend up to 20 hours out of a 24 hour day asleep. I almost can't help it; now that I'm in my mid-30s, being sick means falling asleep almost at random if I've got a cold or the flu.

The times where I can get in a full day of sleeping are definitely the times where I recover best. Wake up, eat like it's going out of style, then back to bed when you can. It's the only way you can convince your body to devote its resources to healing itself.

Was this a Seagate scandal or actually a MiniScribe scandal (acquired by Maxtor, acquired by Seagate)?

Yes. The IBM "Pixie Dust" technology wasn't quite ready or understood well enough to be manufactured in a repeatable, reliable way.

Though sometimes quoted that this was the reason IBM exited the hard drive manufacturing business, it was a minor factor at best. IBM had been seeking a buyer for that business unit well before Pixie Dust spawned the annoying DeskStar "DeathStar" jokes.

Maxtor bought MiniScribe and their warehouse full of actual bricks in hard drive boxes.

This study is interesting, but consumer-grade hard drives are exactly not supposed to be used in this way. I worked on server-grade hard drives (also 3.5") that were going seven years old without spinning down and getting slammed hard all day, every day. The failure rate was less than 1% for all brands in seven years' time in an array that filled two server racks. The 2.5" drives are even better.

Vibrations causing failure? Brother label makers? Isn't this the online storage vendor that was bragging about shucking portable hard drives to get around a soft embargo imposed during the Indonesian flood crisis?