Our Dell shelves (billing servers and store customer account info) have hot spares already spinning inside the shelves. NetApp Filers do this also. If a drive fails, the storage system begins IMMEDIATELY transitioning to the spare. So I agree with you wholeheartedly there. Backblaze uses RAID6 for the customer backup storage where we group 15 drives into a RAID group with 2 parity drives. So we can lose any 2 drives out of 15 and the data is still 100% intact. I really, REALLY cannot recommend RAID5 to anybody. Having a lone hard drive is fine for some applications (my laptop), and having RAID6 with 2 parity drives is fine for some applications. I cannot imagine why you would have RAID because you care about your uptime, but not care enough to use more than RAID5.

At our company the "billing servers" have to be high performance do not have to be very large (a few terabytes) , and we keep trying to justify SSDs but always end up back with Dell drive shelves with 15k rpm old fashion drives for less money. Each time we do the analysis I hope to move over to SSDs, and ONE OF THESE YEARS it will be cheaper to go with SSDs. Just not yet. :-(

Are you saying that the enterprise drives last longer? Or just that they are replaced for free when they die at the same or higher rates? If you want to save money, I think the answer is *NOT* buy the warranty (so buy consumer drives) because the warranty costs more than just replacing the failed drives?

If drives fail at 2 percent per year, your warranty should probably not cost you more than 2 percent additional money, right? Otherwise you might as well just stock spare drives and skip the part about including HP. How much does your enterprise drive warranty cost?

Disclaimer: Backblaze engineer here. I don't think all "commercial storage systems" get exactly the same "hammering". Some commercial systems are used to store data quietly for a long time (let's say online backup or shutterfly storage of photos), some commercial systems are hammered constantly (google's homepage search). I reject the concept that "enterprise" or "commercial" is a thing. You MUST look at the specific application. Some consumers use their hard drives quite a bit, some don't. Some corporations are hammering away at their drives, some are not.

Here is a funny outtake video. The "lighter fluid" container Cara (the woman) is holding actually contains water. There is a small plate hidden on the laptop keyboard with a thimbleful of unleaded gasoline waiting to be lit. This was an outtake where the plate got warm and the result was too tall of a flame: http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=g4JRtX9Wljc

Toss a match into a plate holding a thimbleful of gas - the stuff LIGHTS UP sooooooo easily. We used it as a cheap special effect for a promotional video. After a few "takes", the plate got warmer and evaporated a little more gas faster, the flames would leap about 3 feet vertically from the plate with the gas.

I think you misunderstand how people use electric cars. You don't take electric cars somewhere to fill them with electricity, you charge them at home, at night, in your own garage. Putting the electrical hookup in your garage is trivial, it's like having an electrician put in an outlet for an electric clothes dryer.

In a pinch, you can plug a Tesla into every one of the existing 6 billion regular 110V outlets in Texas. It's just an electrical appliance like a toaster, you don't need any new infrastructure in Texas to support Tesla owners.

This is a pet peeve of mine. The scroll bars disappearing violates several fundamental and profound user interface design guidelines. The first problem is you need to know a magic "gesture" to get them to appear. Apple's very own user interface design guidelines FOR DECADES stated controls should not appear and disappear. Instead, they should gray out if disabled, but stay visible so the user knows they exist and knows by some action they can be made to be grayed in and made useful.

To me, one of the most empowering things about a "graphical" user interface was to get away from memorizing cryptic commands before a beginner could use a computer or a particular program. For example, the "edit" menu was always there, and a beginner could wander over with the mouse and see the word "Copy" was grayed out. The user then highlights some text and now the word "Copy" is grayed in, the user can select it. After doing this 10 times, the user sees a keyboard shortcut written to the right of the word "Copy" and starts using that instead of the menu. THE GREAT MISTAKE of Microsoft and Apple's recent UI directions is they did a survey and noticed the vast majority of people use the keyboard equivalent and SO THEY REMOVED THE MENU!! They just lost the smooth and easy and harmless tutorial steps!! New users must leap that gap by reading manuals now and learning cryptic commands. Most Slashdot readers love that it is hard to use and involves memorization and mystic knowledge, but it is a great disservice to new users.

Now, with tiny phone screens you just HAVE to sacrifice something, so trade offs are made like having scroll bars fade out to reclaim those 16 pixels makes sense. But brain damaging my 30" desktop monitor GUI with this tradeoff is nonsensical, the screen size constraint is not there.

Why wouldn't they just ask Gates how he feels about Balmer getting the boot? Invite Gates to coffee and ask for help.

This has gone way, WAY too far, it's no longer an open question whether Microsoft has a clear plan, everybody knows they are now the underdog, slipping further and further away from any chance of dominating the market like before.

Thank Lucifer we have Apple to fall back to. I'm no fanboy, but it's better than nothing for a few years.

Hello, nice to meet you. Now you do know somebody who uses the start menu. I'm typing this on a Windows 7 64 bit system, and I use the "Start" menu all the time. Personally I keep a list of the top 10 applications I launch (Chrome, Visual Studio, a screen capture utility, etc) right at the very top level of the "Start" menu so I can get to them quickly, but the shortcuts disappear (when I release the mouse button) and don't clutter my view all the time.

I work at a company that does both Mac and Windows apps deployed to customer's desktops. So we *HAVE* to stay current and support all the new Microsoft and Apple OS releases. Windows 8 is the future, it's just that the future really sucks. The only thing keeping my spirits up for now is the hope that Microsoft comes to its senses and makes Windows 8.5 or Windows 9 suck less. Honestly I don't have much hope left, they are still pushing the tool ribbon and pretending it is a success. Microsoft doesn't like to admit it made a mistake, even when the evidence is overwhelming.

I did the Atkins diet once for fun, it really helped me drop weight. Amusing factoid: Atkins wants you to avoid bacon (and ham) especially during the initial stage. Not because of the fat content, but because bacon is often cured with sugar or injected with sugary water! I just thought that was amusing...

Around the time of my first job (1990-ish), most large employers understood this catch-22 issue and would loan you the money to relocate, sometimes the loan was "forgiven" if you lasted a year at the new job. I don't know if this is still commonplace? Seriously, what would a relocate cost? First and last months rent, plus a moving van... Let's say $5,000. If I just hired an energetic 22 year old for $50,000 per year and they explained the situation I would easily front them the money.

Several posters have mentioned "oil subsidies" in this thread. Can somebody be specific? I'm not denying it or anything, but I thought it was exactly the opposite - I thought every gallon of gas I buy at the pump had a HUGE amount of taxes included, way more than say a loaf of bread I buy. Which is it - do we tax gasoline or subsidize it?