In 1993 I'd just bought a Thinkpad 700 laptop with a 80 MB hard drive. The company I was working at sent me to help model test a new ship at the DTRC (the biggest US Navy tow tank). About my third day there, there were a bunch of washing machine-sized plastic and metal boxes piled up haphazardly near the entrance. I asked one of the DTRC employees who was helping us what they were.

"Hard drives."
Bemused, I asked what their capacity was.
"Oh, about 10 MB."
"Damn, how old are they?"
"1970s, maybe 1960s.
"So you guys just shoved them in the warehouse and are finally getting around to throwing them away now?"
"Oh no, we were still using them up until yesterday. The budget requisition for new hard drives finally came through."
"..."

Still, it makes me wonder if modern hard drives could last ~20 years in a research/industrial environment.

However, the idea that the WinRT / Modern App platform needs to go away in a future Windows version is also misguided. What you refer to as "Metro" fills a useful function that isn't otherwise served on Windows, which is enabling touch screen use, and it does a very nice job of that.

If that were all it did, I wouldn't have a problem with it. But the only way to sell a Metro app is through Microsoft's Store. And they take a 30% cut of anything sold in the store (introductory 20% deals notwithstanding).

Metro apps are Microsoft's attempt to convert the Windows software market into an iOS App Store-like walled garden, where Microsoft is the gatekeeper who collects a 30% toll on everything sold. As long as that remains true, it needs to go away.

And no Google's Play store is not the same. Google doesn't restrict app installation to the Play store. Toggle one setting ("allow installation from unknown sources") and you can install anything you want. You can install apps bought from other stores (Amazon being the most notable alternative). You can side-load apps via USB, microSD card, or cloud storage. Heck, you can download an app over any website.

Imagine if you wanted an Apple computer you had to buy it through Best Buy or Radio Shack, and dealing with their personnel. The companies that do business this way are maddening.

Questionable analogy. Apple's laptops are actually made by Quanta. Almost no laptop manufacturer actually makes their own laptops. The vast majority are made by a handful of Taiwanese ODMs (original design manufacturers) who do both the design and manufacturing (as opposed to an OEM who only does the manufacturing). In essence, Apple, HP, Dell, etc are the "dealers" who handle sales and aftermarket service. Quanta, Wistron, Compal, Pegatron are the "automakers."

'No one could possibly fail to understand my simple user interface.'

One of my first website coding projects was a simple survey. I modeled it after the numerous like/dislike surveys you see everywhere, both on the web and on paper. "Dislike" at one end, 5 radio buttons in the midde, and "Like" at the other end. Totally obvious how to use it, right?

About a third of the testers sent me email asking me what they were supposed to do.

And the area of a unit circle is pi, not tau.

we will NEVER get a cellphone that is perfect for "geeks" not in the sense of a tiny pocket device.

The problem isn't that nobody is willing to make a "perfect" cellphone for geeks. The problem is that when you design something for a limited market, its design cost has to be amortized over fewer sales. Consequently it costs a lot more.

Unfortunately the same geeks who clamor for these features also demand rock-bottom pricing. They look at your expensive "geek" phone, complain why it's priced so high compared to "consumer" phones, and refuse to buy. The geek phone maker then goes bankrupt, causing the geeks to complain that nobody makes phones that suit their needs. The industries where the limited markets do not have this cost bias - the customers are willing to fork over the extra money - are all doing well (performance car enthusiasts, off-roaders, PC gaming enthusiasts, audiophiles, "prosumer" amateur photographers, etc).

Wall Stree with its immoral eye on profits at any cost ends up calling the shots.

Profit is what the economy translates improved economic efficiency into. So if you improve the efficiency of a useful mechanism or process, the economy converts it into profit for you. Calling it immoral is equivalent to calling all technological progress immoral.

The problem is things other than improved efficiency can also translate into profit (e.g. a scam or con job). Those things deservedly need to be labeled as immoral. But it's also immoral to not even attempt to distinguish between the two. Like calling all men rapists just because they've used their penis.

It may be my eyes, the angle at which I use my screen, the brightness and contrast I prefer, or something else, but the background color has always been almost undetectable to me.

Google's background is white - 255, 255, 255 (RGB). The old sponsored links background was 254, 247, 221 (RGB). Our eyes are pretty bad at detecting differences in blue, so it didn't take much of a bad monitor or settings to clip the colors to where you couldn't distinguish the two backgrounds. This mostly happens on poor quality low-gamut screens (laptops!) where the colors are so pale, the manufacturer or user pushes the saturation to try to make them stand out more. So 0 => 0, 100 => 125, 200 => 250, and anything 205-255 is clipped and the same shade since that's the most saturated color the screen is capable of displaying.

The new "Ad" icon is 234, 176, 53 (RGB). If you can't see it, you either need to replace your monitor (and marvel at all the wonderful pictures on the web you've been missing out), or get your eyes checked.

And they opt for a small yellowish graphical element that is barely different from the background color?

I just pulled the new layout into Photoshop. The background is 255, 255, 255 (RGB). The yellow "Ad" label is 234, 176, 53 (RGB), or since we're talking about a white background, 0%, 32%, 92%, 0% in CMYK. If that is "barely different from the background color," you need to throw away your monitor and buy a new one. No don't try to sell it used; it'd be a crime to inflict such a poor screen onto anyone.

They've recently made some changes that (deliberately?) broke support on xbmc, so we don't stream from Amazon at home anymore. For some reason, there is no way to stream to Android phones, even though their Kindle Fire is Android based.

It's not just that. Most of their content is SD if you stream to a PC. They'll only give you the HD version if you stream to a Kindle or a DVD/Blu-ray player. They are really shooting themselves in the foot with these limitations.

Equally troubling is that most cockpit voice recorders only record about 30 min to 2 hours. If they did continue flying for 4-5 hours, even if/when we find the wreckage and the black boxes, we may never figure out exactly why they turned off their transponder and changed course because that audio data from when that happened would have long been overwritten. The CVR may contain nothing more than 2 hours of some guy humming to himself (a deranged hijacker after he shot and killed the crew, then locked himself in the cockpit).

To be honest, my biggest Amazon Prime purchases are around the holidays or events like birthdays/weddings/baby showers etc. It is so much easier to just order something and have it shipped -- the sheer convenience of it all makes it worthwhile.

While I may order a 3-4 orders a month for most of the year, I end up ordering at least three times that during the holidays.

I try and make sure that my local bookstore gets my business -- but sometimes, I just don't have the time or the energy to look for a book, only to find that they don't have it yet. Especially when they're written by authors who aren't particularly mainstream. So, I can pre-order some of these books by my favorite authors, which is a huge perk.

There's also something to be said about impulsive shopping -- for instance, I just saw a book that looked quite interesting, and it was under $10. Normally, shipping would have been expensive relative to the cost of book, but given that I have Prime, I just ordered the book. A few weeks ago, it was a sandwich maker.

Prime Membership also provides you with "subscribe and save" offerings that I take advantage of (whey protein for my workouts, diapers etc).

So, yeah. Personally, I think that even at $99, it is definitely worth the money.

Khaaaaaaaan!

You *can* plug in an external drive, it's called a complete hardware duplicate of your array

You don't even need to duplicate the array hardware. 20 TB is still within the range of a RAID enclosure. Basically a box where you plug in drives, and it gloms them together into a RAID 0/1/5/10. You then plug it into your computer with eSATA or USB 3, and your computer sees it as a single drive up to 32 TB in size (8x4TB with current drives). Do your backup, then unplug it and turn it off until your next scheduled backup.

Incidentally, TFS is a perfect example of why RAID is not a backup. Yes RAID is kinda like storing two copies. But the "two copies" are linked both virtually and physically. If you accidentally delete one copy, the other gets deleted simultaneously. If you physically damage the array, you lose both copies.

RAID is not a backup. RAID is for redundancy. If your business will lose hundreds of dollars per hour or more while the file server is down, you put the file server on a RAID array so it will continue to operate even if there's a single (or double) drive failure. i.e. It only protects against your file server going offline. You still need a separate backup.

Now, if you want to justify real-time transmission, check out the amount of (incidentally not paid for by the airline) search gear that has been diverted from Malaysian, Chinese, and other sources to looking for the debris. Whole bunch of ships, airplane and helicopter overflights, diversion of what, 10 satellites? That starts to make the $100k look like savings.

Well, the cost is $100k if you know ahead of time exactly which plane is going to go missing and outfit the device on just that single plane.

Obviously the real world doesn't work like that. You don't know ahead of time which plane will go missing, so you have to outfit all of them with this device. The best estimates I could find on Google were that there are about 15,000 commercial airliners in operation globally, so you're looking at a total cost of $1.5 billion.

Suddenly all the ships, airplane and helicopter overflight, diversion of 10 satellites seems like an absolute bargain. For reference, the multi-year search for AF447 and recovery cost about $40 million.