Wake me when the bounty is $ 9009.13

Of course this isn't enough sample of cases to definitely say this, but every error I have heard was an over charge, not a undercharge. Even though it would be cheaper to have Verizon to call our family and friends, I and my wife dumped them because we would get over charge by at least $50 about 4 times within a year. I hate seeing the bill in mail because I know I would probably be calling customer support to dispute charges we could not possibly have made. At lest the bills were never over $150 dollars. A coworker of mine got a $14,000 bill from Verizon, he didn't even have a smart phone. The explanation was that voice bandwith got charged as data, but it was also from someone eles phone. What kind of crap code is in their billing software. I wouldn't be suprised that it randomly overcharges a small percentage of people, just because it can always be attribitued as a innocent mistake. In reality enough people miss or it don't bother to dispute it that it pads their bottom line. I know about 5 other people that have been overcharged. I'm sure most of people I know would either do the honest thing and correct an undercharge, or they would brag about the money they saved. I never heard of anyone being undercharged.

I think many people don't see the future, because there is only one drive right that is showing what I'm pretty certain is the future of Laptop/Desktop drives. Dedicated SSDs will continue to sell to enthusiasts and companies building fast tiered SAN's, but fully Hybrid drives like th Seagate Momentus XT will be what OEMS put into the laptops and desktops for the next several years. The Momentus XT only has 4 GB of SLC (very long life) Flash, but inmagine when you put 30 GB of speedy flash in like a 2 TB hard drive. Your OS and apps will all run like their on a SSD and your data files like pictures and movies will sit in the slower magnetic drive portion. And this will all be done without needing complicated tweaks or OS support. At first it will come on the higher end models were people will pay more for the nice speed boost. You will see, I'm right. Now if only I could predict what marketing buzz words will be invented to sell this. Maybe "Hyperboost Drives" ;P

I work for IT that supports all of the County Goverment's various departments and agencies, about 500 computers. We build most of the computers. It has worked out as big cost savor. Fortunately we setup our volume licence to be transferable because we have used Windows XP and won't transition away from it a department at a time for another year or two. Probally won't compleatly stop using XP until 2014 or 2015. 12+ years for one OS purchase isn't bad. We don't save much up front, but in the long term to cost are great. Many of the parts have 3 to 5 year warranties. The companies we buy parts have a easy RMA process. We do have a 100 Dells, and I hate jumping through their support idiot's hoops when I have just to replace a dead part. Dells non-stadard parts make it expensive to repair when out of warranty. More than half of the computers I support are 5 years old or over. There are still a few 8 year old computers! I had to put a 3 year old Dell out of service, because it would cost $200 to just buy the motherboard on a computer half way though it's life cycle. If it was a custom computer, it would cost $50. I wish we would go all custom computers, but we still buy prebuilt computers for Library Public access computers, for a few reasons. We couldn't build 20+ computers very timley with our small staff already loaded with other tasks, it is harder to put custom built computers into the State and Bill and Melinda Grants paperwork, and the smaller size works better on the Public access desks (Though I guess we could build mini-ITX machines)

I would go for it, if you think it will help make management happy about your very large IT dept. What the heck you doing with so many personnel? Do you maintain your own software? I thought we had to do regular horse and pony shows to management to justify our large IT dept, 10 people, 3 helpdesk for 450. We would need less personnel if wasn't one or two unique quirky apps for each of our 10 departments on top of the usual IT stuff, that you have to do ritual dances and prayers to the Vendor gods to keep operational.

I knew they were taking over as a major bank in New York. I missed the episode of "How I met your mother" were they branch into netbooks.

As someone experienced in data recovery, I side with him that doing more than a zero write is unnecessary for 99.999% of the population. And if you needed more security, you would physically destroy the drive. There is the possibility of having relocated sectors with data that drive firmware hacking could allow you to access. In theory a drive written over once could have remnant magnetic fields that could be recovered with a electron microscope. That would require a clean room with multimillon dollar microscope and possibly months of expert labor. If an organization can do this they are not talking about it. Maybe a intelligence agency would do it if was important enough and they exhausted many other means to get the intel first.