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They've offered the free "express" version lately, but it has always been kind of demo version, or for students. You have always had to buy the full version to do some serious development.
Bollocks. I've done 'serious development' of open source Windows software in the 'express' version of Visual Studio.
You had to manually download and install SDKs, but nothing prevented you from building complex code.
The mother of one of my ex-girlfriends was a child psychologist, and the girlfriend turned out to be a complete psycho. I'm sure it's not unrelated.
Hundreds of millions of Chinese are buying the exact same stuff as you, only they have an economy that creates real, material wealth with which to fund their consumption.
But those Chinese workers are selling those products to Westerners who are borrowing the money back from China to fund their economies.
If the West goes bust, so does much of the Chinese economy.
In three years, 128GB will just about be enough to install Windows and a couple of new games.
The people who do need all this storage, I'm sad to say, are probably torrenting a lot, because that's the only way a consumer accumulates that much data that they don't have a read-only media copy of already.
I have 4TB of video storage on my MythTV box because my girlfriend complains if it's deleted the CSI episode she didn't watch from six months ago.
Usage expands to fill the available space.
You do realize that if it wasn't for a government endeavour, there would be no space station for the dragon capsule to dock with?
Until it starts flying to Bigelow's space stations.
Rotational media is only going to stick around because it's CHEAP.
Well, duh.
And HDDs are $150 for 3,000GB.
They value ENERGY EFFICIENCY over everything. If you come out with a SSD technology that uses 20% less energy, but runs at 1/4th the capacity of our current SSDs, it will find itself in almost every laptop.
My laptop consumes around 20W for normal desktop use. The HDD is rated at something like 1.5W. Cutting 20% off that 1.5W will have a negligible impact on battery life.
Meanwhile the 750GB drive can't hold all my Steam games so I'm going to have to stick a 1TB in there soon.
Oh, and we put an SSD into the netbook because we regularly boot it up, do some stuff and shut it down again so knocking 60-70% off the boot time was a good investment.
Really, "most articles" in the 80's? Hyperbole or bullshit; you decide!
I'm pretty sure every mass-market article I read mentioning bubble memory in the 80s said that it was going to replace rotational storage in a few years.
Whatever happened to bubble memory anyway?
This is a "transistors are crappy now vs vacuum tubes working great" argument.
No, it's a 'flash is running into fundamental laws of physics' argument.
I suspect another SSD technology will come along to replace it, but flash probably can't go much further unless you add a large oversupply of cells to replace those which die.
Given that hard drive technology is still having breakthroughs, it will be some time before SSDs can catch up in overall capacity, nevermind price per GB/TB.
Given the rapid decline in the number of write cycles at smaller process sizes, that may never happen with current flash technology.
berthing is *harder* than docking.
The failed Soyuz docking attempts of the past, including a collision with Mir which caused substantial damage to the space station, would like to disagree with you.
Grabbing it with the robot arm and attaching it to the docking port has to be substantially easier than building a robust and reliable automatic docking system or docking it manually under remote control.
Kudos to them of course - and they may even end up making money - but without that sort of motivation the private sector would, at most, look at ways of making a risk-free buck by launching comms satellites rather than trying to put people into space.
I don't know whether it's true, but I've read that SpaceX is already profitable. And they have a ton of comm sats lined up on the launch manifest on their web site.
Putting people into space is a much bigger market in the long term.
If I remember correctly, Sean Connery recorded the voice-over at the beginning of Highlander in his toilet.
The only thing worse than X Windows: (X Windows) - X