Did you ever see the video about how Google disposes of/recycles their hard drives? (Video Google 'google data center')

I'm quite sure they have a protocal for how they recycle all of their hardware.

Grin.

I think the reason would be that most laptops only have the one hard drive port. So if someone wanted the benifits that using a SSD plust some storage space they would have to get a big one.

Of course his particular issue seems like it screams for a nice big USB drive solution but shrug.

Sounds like the old option when installing from CDs. Where the game would leave some parts of the data, like movies and sound, on the CD.

Now the question is the SSD market saturation high enough to warrent game makers to program that type of option into the game. My gut says no but it is indeed an intresting idea.

That is the thing with anecdotal evidence it is not factual. And as such when people bash Seagate/WD/Intel/AMD/Ford/Chevy whatever unless they back it up with fact it has no weight.

For some reason it is popular to bash Seagate, I see this all the time on the hardware forums. But it is important to take that for what it is. Nothing.

As I get closer and closer to building a HTPC I have been looking at remotes and while spending $100 for a remote is not even topping out how much you could spend, there are options that are a fair bit less too. The Loftk Rii Portable Remote for example.

I agree that your overall point is valid but do you really think MS is going to 'audit' home users anytime soon?

Don't get me wrong, MS is evil but they are not stupid...well not that stupid.

While there is no doubt that Apple has a plan and that they have done quite well in earning profit what you say is rather silly.

If there is a market that has X amount of dollars to earn from as well as market Y and Z and you only focus on X then you are missing out on the true 'big money' because the real 'big money' is to earn profit from X, Y, AND Z.

If anything I think they have tried to at least move in that direction over the years while still keeping the flavor of the show in tact.

In that they include the 'plausable' verdict in their summary now when I think all they did orignally was busted or confermed.

While I agree that a clearer scientific distinction could be given when they analyze the results of their experements. They do have no problem with revisiting and reforming their opinion as new facts, objections, etc arise.

If anything while their symantics are poor their methods are damn good for a freaking TV show.

I'm old enough to have used real 'floppy' disks and as such also used the 3.5" disks plenty as well. And while some times any disk would fail they were not 'notoriously unreliable' as you say. Hell AOL send them though the freakin mail for a long time and they would survive that and then you could use them as a free disk!

What I do remember was that there could be bad/cheap media. I remember sitting around many times and formatting disks and noting which ones were full formats, which ones you could do extended formats on, and which ones were old/bad/cheap that you would have to have FAT mark bad sectors on.

The question in my mind is did anyone in the FOSS world come up with a 'clean room' implimentation of the FAT Long Filename Extention code at any point? (Much like the old BIOS case.)

And even if it was never done, why would someone at Google set aside a small task force to do it now? Thus removing any legs MS has to stand on at least on that point. Or am I missing something about software patents these days and they have gotten even more evil?

Well it was not as cut and dry as that. This is from Wikipedia so it does not have a lot of the details but just want to show that it was not all everyone playing pattycakes:

The first successful commercial GUI product was the Apple Macintosh, which was heavily inspired by PARC's work; Xerox was allowed to buy pre-IPO stock from Apple, in exchange for engineer visits and an understanding that Apple would create a GUI product. Much later, in the midst of the Apple v. Microsoft lawsuit in which Apple accused Microsoft of violating its copyright by appropriating the use of the "look and feel" of the Macintosh GUI, Xerox also sued Apple on the same grounds. The lawsuit was dismissed because the presiding judge ruled "that Xerox's complaints were inappropriate for a variety of legal reasons," although it is commonly believed that Xerox simply waited too long to file suit, and the statute of limitations had expired.

While I think your point is valid we do need to recognize its scope.

Now when home PCs are looking like this, and not in the way OSS distros do with repositories, then we can start to freak out a bit.

What are these huge bugs that I've seen a few people here bring up? I've been using some variation of OO/LO for years now and have yet to see any real bugs. I've further had other end users use it as an alternative to MSO and have yet to hear of them reporting any sort of bugs.

I'm still not sure I've forgiven Bryan for leaving X3 to some hack just so he could direct sub-par Superman flick. I'm sure in the circles he's in that being able to say, "Yeah, and I directed a Superman movie too," scores him points. But still, X3 was bad. Really bad Bryan. A prequal does not really make it up in my book given how good X3 could have been.