If you are placing the ZIL on a ram disk you are most definitely DOING IT WRONG. Look up what the ZIL is actually for before posting such bad advice.

If all you do is facebook or email or other minial data tasks, then sure. If you actually deal with large data sets, SSD is most definitely a benefit for storing data on to work with. Couldn't give a shit if my PC spends a minute to reboot once a fortnight/month if my data is accessible quickly. Conversely, booting in 10 seconds is pointless if all my data is slow.

... it's more to do with the fact that Windows XP extended support (for security updates) ends in April. Which is just over 6 months away.

Contrary to what some believe, the enterprise is not stupid. If XP performs the functions required (and for many, it does) and is supported for security fixes (it currently is) and there is no compelling financial reason to encourage migration to another platform, guess what? The platform stays.

Whilst I agree IOPs are what counts - storage is not free. I gather you are referring to cloud provided storage, which has its own non-$ cost associated with it.

Of course. Not disputing that. I am however disputing the article's premise that SSD is more reliable than hard drive storage. If you compare like for like in terms of the amount of data stored, SSD has a long way to go. If you compare like for like in terms of data stored plus cost, it's not even close. Of course performance is better. That is not in dispute.

OK assuming you really are an expert in this field how do you recommend people use something like RdRand to help generate random numbers assuming that it might be tampered with under the influence of someone like the NSA?

Directly? Not at all (as per the petition)? Or as a contributing source of randomness? If the last please do provide additional info on how you'd do it to maintain security.

What about Corsair Force Series F115 (115 GB; CSSD-F115GB2-BRKT-A)? :P

Which SSDs are they using? How slow are the slowest Samsung, Plextor, Intel, Crucial, Corsair SSDs being sold today? Which of their SSDs can't do more than 10k IOPs? 10K is still 100 times more IOPs.

One "problem" I had recently was I couldn't use my SSD equipped laptop to test some DB optimization (e.g. what indexes to drop/create, which query would be better) - stuff that was slow in production was acceptably fast on my laptop (10-20x faster).

Don't put so much weight on warranty lengths.

You might want to factor in that OCZ's stuff are often even crappier than HDDs:
http://www.behardware.com/articles/881-7/components-returns-rates-7.html
http://www.hardware.fr/articles/893-7/ssd.html

Either OCZ sell defective hardware or OCZ users are many times more likely to return stuff for no good reason. I'm more inclined to believe the former.

And desktops started having many more cores than disks.

As I said, for far less money you can get redundant storage in the multi terabyte range. My point is this: if i need to store x amount of data in a reliable way, the money i save vs. SSD on buying a spinning disk means I could buy several of them to mitigate the increased failure rate vs. SSD and far exceed the reliability of an SSD for the same money.

Not only that, if you add enough SSDs to store the same amount of bytes as a 4TB hard drive you either need to RAID them or you will have cumulative failure rate far higher than the HD failure rate, which you could mirror (or hell, RAID6 it) for way less money.

... if i need to store x TB of data, i can set up a RAID1 mirror and have fault tolerance for way less than the cost of SSD based storage to hold it in a non-fault tolerant manner.

Internet "experts" poo poo the announcement, because it doesn't cure cancer and settle mars. Claim apple is "done" and how you should sell. Device then goes on to break all previous sales records. The 5, 4s and from memory 3g-s launches were all met with "meh" as far as i can remember.

I predict that, yet again, the 5s/5c will break previous records. I've spent the last few days (going to keep it for a week) using a HTC one. Sure on paper its better than my 4s. In actual use, it's a pain in the arse - buggy and unpolished (yes i'm now running android 4.2.2 on it), this morning for example, the timer i set for 6 minutes reverted back to the previous timer setting of 1:30 and went off at 1:30. Yes, i verified thjat it was counting down from 6 minutes before i opened another app. Cant even get basic stuff right.

Really? The thing that they did that blew my mind was the retina display, and after using one, it was hard to go back to old displays (fortunately android got there when it was time to upgrade).