Here's a thought. TRY ONE! You don't see the use but you've never tried it so how the heck would you know if it works?

I tried it and guess what happened. The boot times on my computer dropped significantly. From several minutes to "end of churn" to around 30 seconds. My apps launch faster, game levels load faster (after the first load), and there's almost no churn during normal use. Works great for me on two laptops and a gaming computer. My gaming computer has an 8-port RAID controller built in and I was sorely tempted to put in 8 SSDs in RAID0 for ultimate performance. I can easily afford it. But the $140 hybrid drive was plenty fast. Dropping boot times from 30 seconds to 12 seconds isn't nearly as much of a boost as going from 220 seconds to 30 seconds. My game levels are already loading faster than the cut scenes. There's no practical benefit [for me] in having faster access times.

Your ideas of "simple drive management" are not simple. Most people wouldn't have a clue what you're talking about or how to go about accomplishing it. Hybrid drives are faster without the user having to understand the technical details of how to make it work. Not everyone wants to become a tech god and squeeze every possible bit of performance out of their system. Most people want to check a box on the order form and have it just work. "Add hybrid drive (faster performance): [X] - $39.00"

What comments? I also don't see any ads. *Pets his adblock and noscript extensions*

Show me where Apple have crossed the ethical lines ? You may disagree with their case, but I don't recall anyone claiming their lawyers were unethical in prosecuting that case ...

As for Samsung, they're just scumbags who don't respect the law of any land...

(Taken from Fortune ...)

• July 7, 2004: Jury advised of adverse interference when Samsung allowed emails to be automatically deleted even after it was told to retain relevant emails. After Samsung's appeal, Judge William Martini found "Samsung's actions go far beyond mere negligence, demonstrating knowing and intentional conduct."
• October 17, 2005: The U.S. Department of Justice fined Samsung nearly $300M for memory price fixing within the U.S.
• Feb. 7, 2007: U.S. government fined Samsung for $90M for memory chip price fixing for violations in 2006.
• Jan.15, 2008: Samsung's offices in Korea were raided after evidence showed that a slush fund was used to bribe government officials and other business leaders.
• July 16 2008, Samsung chairman, Lee Kun-He was found guilty in Seoul of financial wrongdoing and tax evasion. Despite prosecutor request of seven years in prison, sentence was reduced to three years followed by a pardon by the South Korean Government in 2009 to allow him to help with its successful bid to host the 2018 Winter Olympics. He is now a member of the International Olympic Committee and this 'pardoned criminal' returned as Samsung's Chairman in March 2010.
• May 19, 2010: The EU Commission fined Samsung for being part of a cartel that shared confidential information and fixed memory chip prices (along with eight other firms).
• Nov. 1, 2011: The Korean Fair Trade Commission fined Samsung for being part of a cartel that fixed prices and reduced output for TFT-LCD screens between 2001 and 2006.
• March 15, 2012: The Korean Fair Trade Commission fined Samsung for a mobile phone price fixing scheme and consumer fraud whereby consumers would be paying more than what the discounted prices advertised.
• July 25, 2012: Magistrate Grewal informs the jury that they could take into account that "spoliation" of evidence occurred when Samsung destroyed evidence that could have been used in the Apple lawsuit; Samsung had a policy of automatically deleting emails that were two weeks old and should have suspended that policy between August 2010 (when Apple informed Samsung of patent infringement) and April 2011 (when Apple initiated the lawsuit).
• August 24, 2012 a jury returned a verdict finding Samsung had willfully infringed on Apple's design and utility patents and had also diluted Apple's trade dresses related to the iPhone. But Samsung continues to fight the ruling, and continues in their copying behavior.
• Dec 2012: EU issued a Statement of Objections (SO) against Samsung for abusing its Standard-Essential Patents in not providing FRAND rates. Samsung withdrew all SEP-based injunction requests against Apple in Europe days before the SO was issued, but to no avail.
• April. 2013, Samsung is accused of and admits hiring people in several countries to falsify reports of HTC phones "constantly crashing" and posting fake benchmark reviews.
• October 2013 Samsung in confirmed reports from independent and objective testing, found to be intentionally falsifying performance benchmarks of its flagship products: the Galaxy S4 and Note 3.

If Apple tried to pull that shit, all hell would break loose. And rightfully so. For me personally, it's enough that I don't buy anything with a Samsung brand on the outside any more. They're the only company for which that's the case.

Simon.

There is a file containing a list of all the common benchmarking apps, and everything in the list is a benchmarking app - nothing else. When one of those packages is run, the phone locks the frequency of all cores to fMax and also seems to fiddle with the GPU.

The result is a battery-nightmare, but a boost of 20% to *only* benchmark apps. This is despicable - plain and simple.

See http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/10/galaxy-note-3s-benchmarking-adjustments-inflate-scores-by-up-to-20/

Simon.

That's fair comment on the original post, but let's narrow it down a bit...

"If someone is surprised that a manufacturer with a track-record of fudging benchmarks is willing to cheat, rip off, etc to get ahead... well you haven't really been paying attention"

Not all humans are morally and ethically bankrupt. Samsung (as a corporate entity) is though.

Simon

Citation required, because all I can find is: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/06/25/apple_denies_fiddling_g5_xeon/ ... which seems to be refuting the claim...

Simon.

To steal the post from someone who responded: No, I'm saying that they all think they built the log-cabin in which they were born.

Fuck, just lost my entire comment. I'll just summarize the main points now.

The Declaration of Independence is a powerful speech that outlines some fairly new ideas for the role of government. However, it is not a policy document, not a legal document, and not even a philosophical treatise. For one, it does not say what the full list of inalienable rights are, nor what the government can do to secure them. As a result, it is useless in this discussion.

Regarding the platform, it ranges from hoping for change to tarring-and-feathering-worthy.

Points 6-8: I won't argue with your assessment of them. I don't agree 100%, but it's close enough for now.

Point 9: earmarks are at a historic low. Interestingly enough, some political scientists have been arguing for a long time now that it is earmarks that grease the wheel of Congress.

Point 10: your assessment is the fundamental problem of the point. Reducing taxes without a plan of what's important to fund or without regard to general revenue is nothing but pandering to your base.

Points 1-4 are complete fantasies in that will either accomplish exactly, exacerbate the problem they're supposed to solve or are trying to address a point that even a few years ago used to be conservative or free-market solutions. They're utterly laughable, especially since one of them is being implemented in California, and everyone there hates it.

That brings me to the most egregious point in their platform: point 5. The mentioning of a "blue-ribbon panel" is cute, but is nothing short of a fig-leaf for a concept that goes against the core of the US government, the basic principles that the Founding Fathers were working with, and is guaranteed to lead to a complete kleptocracy. Why? It basically removes the authority of the president to execute laws, the authority of the courts to rule on whether laws have been broken, and merges them all under the authority of the Congress. In other words, it does away with the three branches of government, and will lead to the worst excesses of any Banana republic.

It's that point especially that cements my notion that the Tea Party doesn't have a fucking clue about economics, politics, civics, or even the goddamn history of the US.

So excuse me while I give them the benefit of the doubt and label them merely insane, and do not think that they are some very clever sociopaths who are bent on destroying the core foundation of the US government.

On Wikipedia, this would be tagged as "weaselwords".

Let's make sure we know what educated means in this context: more degrees than a similar population of average Americans would have. To some extent, this matches my experience: tea partiers - or those who espouse the libertarian aspect of the Tea Party - have more money than average, and have at least a Bachelor Degree, if not a Master. No PhDs among the ones I know though.

However, there's one area where they are spectacularly ignorant, to the point where I'm starting to think that there's some specific cognitive effect at work: they all think that they made it on their own in the world, think that Government should be run like a business and think that the purpose of Society is to make their life better. Keep in mind though that they the vast majority come from wealthy families, have businesses that fail, are full of cronies and family members, experience how shoddy and shady businesses can be, and live in one of the most stable environments in the world.

Even the mainstream Tea Partiers that I know - or at least those who profess no ideological attachment, but pretty much recite Tea Party and Republican political platforms verbatim - indulge in a massive misunderstanding of how society operates, what the role of government is or even what made their own success possible. Top that off with a complete lack of understanding what the debt ceiling is (a badly set up part of the budget process), and even the "moderate" Tea Partiers can come across as complete lunatics. For my friends who are part of this group, I treat them like the crazy uncle - they're always welcome, but certain topics are forbidden, unless everyone consents to "lively" debates until 4 AM.

That's about the time I helped develop a "how to use the internet" class for my department at UCSB. In preparation, we rolled out a bunch of clients to our Mac workstations for usenet, gopher, talk, ftp, http (Mosaic, of course), etc. After the class, everyone went straight to Mosaic. I was pretty impressed that someone had found a bunch of Elvis sound clips and figured out how to play them within minutes. Then I was concerned for the amount of bandwidth they must have been sucking up. I believe our part of campus was sharing a T1 at the time...

If you read the "Summary for Policymakers" PDF document linked in the summary, there is no talk of "total quantity of emissions tolerated" or any of this trillionth ton idea. Instead it appears to be talking about . In fact, it appears to reside solely in that New York Times article that very clearly says:

(emphasis mine) So to answer your question: The trillion tons is an estimate of what we would need to burn in order to hit an internationally agreed limit that would likely produce the worst effects of climate change. The number of tons we burn is even an estimate. It's all estimates because we don't have parallel Earths where we can keep controls and change one variable to see what happens. If you don't accept the ability of making estimates with levels of certainty, there is no way to make any statements about the effects of putting carbon into our atmosphere on a global scale.

I suppose it would appear that way if you only get your information from The New York Times and throw away everything they're actually saying.

I haven't worked in over two years so, when I don't have to be synced with other people, I go to sleep when I get tired and get up when I'm done sleeping. When I get going on an interesting project, I might chug away for 30+ hours straight then sleep for 10-12 hours. Or I'll get in a cycle where I'm down for 3-4, up for 10-12. When I'm just chugging along, I'm usually up for 18-20 hours and sleep for 8-9 hours and I chase that around the solar cycle. Being able to go for months without setting an alarm and having electric lights and a DVR really let me step out of the traditional daily rhythm.

Tho I expect that I'll be negated by my current nomadic phase where I'm wandering around looking for a new place to settle down. If I want to explore a community, I can't really do that at 3am on a Thursday.

By definition, a monopoly does not exist anymore when multiple people engage in the same activity. In this case, the monopoly is being broken by copyright infringers.

I think you might also want to think very carefully about actual ownership and how it relates to representations of ideas. Specifically, you might want to think about the origin of the phrase "You only truly own what you can carry in both hands while running at full tilt."

I think the more important point is that there are many, many significant legal and philosophical differences between copyright infringement and theft. Using piracy for it tends to muddle the distinction and imply theft. For those who missed the boat, here's a partial list of the differences:
1) Theft requires an object. Copyright deals with a representation.
2) Theft deprives the victim of the object. Copyright infringement deprives the victim of the government-granted monopoly over their representations.
3) Theft moves objects around. Copyright infringement increases the amount of representations available.

These are just a few of the primary ones.