Who told you that? It's often very easy.

Except a lot of Audis weren't offered with a MT in the USA, so you have to buy a substantially different car. And new car, new problems.

It usually isn't much of a PITA at all, there are a number of such swaps that are very simple and commonplace, like Mustang or F-Series swaps. In the Audis, it's usually a simple matter of a recode, or replacement of a module with a relatively inexpensive used one. Going to an automatic is often a PITA, because of wiring issues. Unless, of course, you're installing a pre-electronics automatic with a VRV or similar.

They're not aiming to be there because they're already there. And it tends to be a lucrative market to be in, because those models attract people who will pay a lot for options.

Which Audi is it? I guess it's a pretty well solved problem (if spendy) to put a six speed into the A8

Guess what? It's not just Mercedes. I don't know where Mercedes gets their transmissions, but the automatics (tiptronic or not - actually, in some cars, it's a software and shifter issue only) that VAG gets from ZF seem to be quite crap. The A8Q I'm working on right now is on its second transmission, and the first one was replaced in about year two. As leaky as this car is, I wouldn't likely have bought it if it had been on the original slush box.

Germany was the watchword for quality up until the late eighties. But German cars are now, I am quite sorry to say, shit. My father once explained to me (repeating something a wise man must have said to him) that the Germans believed in using the best parts and the Japanese believed in doing the best design such that you could get away with the cheap parts. My experience is that these are in fact the design strategies employed by these nations. The problem with the German strategy today is that the companies making their parts are now making shit. Bosch is now turning out at least as many total turds as roses, for example, if not far more, and all of these German cars have Bosch ignition and traction control (etc.) systems — all the VAGs, all the Mercedes, and all the BMWs, as far as I can tell. These are both exquisitely expensive and poorly designed, vulnerable to water intrusion and for some reason these days typically mounted in the engine compartment. Except my LHD D2 A8, which puts the ABS control module in a really annoying place up under the dash instead of upside down in the E-box right under the PCM where they put it on the RHD vehicles, even more annoying.

Meanwhile, there are very few things that were annoying back in the W123, W126 Mercedes days in the 1980s. Turbo oil return on the diesel was crap. The engine mounts are a bit overcontrived to the point that you can't really torque all the bolts without a special tool, or taking off a bunch of stuff.

It's the economy, brother.

The last Mercedes built like that was the W126. I have a 1982 W126 300SD, with the OM617.951A... and with the 951B turbo from an '85. You wind up replacing suspension stuff about as much as any other car, but the control arms are actually quite inexpensive. I'm about to do them as soon as I get a spring compressor.

Saab never even came close to the cachet of Mercedes.

Mercedes is much more worried about Audi than they ever will be about Tesla. And not about EVs, either.

Mercedes is utterly capable of producing a complete EV. What they're trying to do is figure out how to sell it to the people who buy Mercedes.

Are we talking about the same Fukushima where one core is still missing and radioactive seawater is believed to be flowing out of the site on an ongoing basis?

If you're in the USA, that won't void the warranty so long as you use a compatible replacement SSD. For example, check to see what SSDs they actually offer in that model of laptop; you could definitely use any of those. But really, anything compliant (crucial? intel?) will not void your warranty.

Unless, of course, you have to break a warranty sticker to replace the HDD. But I haven't actually ever had that problem with a laptop...

Clogging the passing lane is rude. Flashing your lights makes much more sense than indicating a turn you can't make. If I saw someone indicating a turn they couldn't make behind someone driving too slow I'd assume I was looking at a couple of assholes, not one good driver stuck behind one asshole, because assholes leave their signal on all the time.

I really have little idea how this idea is seen around the world, however. I know that flash to pass is acceptable in the UK and Canada, and it's the standard in most US states including California, where there are the most people, the most vehicles, and the most vehicle miles traveled.

I don't know how his systems work but my PC works like this. I have a big disk with Linux and virtual machines. I have a SSD and a 2.5 HDD of the same capacity for Windows, and I periodically back up the SSD to the HDD. The backup is bootable and if the SSD fails I just get the HDD. All the data gets backed up to a disk on a pogoplug running Debian which is supposed to be on a separate UPS but isn't right now, at least it's not in the same machine. I don't store any big data on the Windows side, so that's only 160GB. The nearby disk is 3TB. I only get 10-18 MB/sec peak to/from that, depending on the client, which is a little poky for USB3 and GigE but within the acceptable range for most purposes. I had another disk hooked up directly to my PC which I mirrored to that network volume, but it died.

There's definitely a lot of people in this thread with no fucking empathy, and this is a technology-related site. Checkmate, Obama! Or something.

Well, I use my rotating and rolling chair all the time. Besides the value to sysadmins, which I have found to be significant, it's pretty much mandatory for anyone who has a filing cabinet right next to their desk. I also sweat in plastic chairs, maybe because I am fat. Still, it's true. Actually, I found this to be true way back when I was a child, when I was not fat. That didn't really happen until Jr. high.

The only office chair I know of which is worth one tenth of one shit is the Aeron. It's still one of the most ergonomic chairs around in spite of not actually having been designed to be particularly ergonomic. The goal was to create "the office chair of the future" and obviously in the future, your chair should be fully adjustable. As it turns out, there's many different body types and sizes of human, so full adjustability is what's needed for ergonomics. I literally sit down in this chair when my back hurts. The combination of good posture and good lumbar support is unbeatable. And I bought my Aeron used, so I didn't get completely mauled on the price. And it doesn't have cushions to stink up or make you sweat, either.

If you spend a lot of time sitting in an office chair, you want an Aeron. I don't care how much markup they have. Of all the shit that startups wasted their money on back in the dot-com bubble, the chairs were the least senseless.

RAID doesn't improve first access time, but good RAID improves non-sequential seek times.

Yes, for some workloads it is very important. But for many of those, there's prefetching.

Because intel has never figured out ARM. They tried once, and failed. But x86 chips are running on less and less power all the time.